Discursive Objectification

The politics of discursive objectification refers here to the ways in which a discursive object - the Palestinian family - is produced, reproduced, and circulates within and beyond the occupied territories.

Johnson and Moors (2004) suggest that the family has been a key target for different governmental projects in Palestine, whether colonial or national. The role of the hamula has been particularly important in this regard. An important part of Ottoman era economic and social life in the Levant, hamula identification was reinforced and reinvigorated between 1948 and 1967 by the Jordanian and Egyptian regimes that controlled the West Bank and Gaza Strip, respectively, as a means of suppressing Palestinian nationalism (Hilal 2006). Israel had a similar goal in mind when it intensified these practices following its invasion of what became the occupied territories in 1967. The village league system (1978-1987), which invested limited forms of power in male heads of particular hamula, was the most visible manifestation of this broader aim (Gordon 2008). Subsequently, when discussing family reunification as part of broader negotiations leading to the Oslo Accords in 1993, Israeli officials constructed the Palestinian family as nuclear, in contrast to a Palestinian focus on the hamula (Zureik 2001: 219). Following the Oslo Accords, the then newly established Palestinian Authority used the hamula as a means of seeking legitimacy to govern, through the establishment of a presidential office for clan affairs (Johnson and Moors 2004).

Closely connected with governmental projects, statistical data, particularly census data, have been one of the key means through which the Palestinian family has been discursively constructed by colonial and other forms of governance. As Rieker et al. (2004) note, methods of data collection have been closely tied to colonial and modernizing projects since the British Mandate. Since 1948, the Palestinian family has increasingly been framed as a threat: a demographic “time bomb.” Such data- driven discourses, which began in Israel and Jordan, were initially echoed by the head of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics when this institution was created in 1995 (Rieker et al. 2004: 189). While this discourse disappeared within the occupied territories during the second intifada, as the survival of a Palestinian national polity once again became an existential issue (Ibid), it may yet be making a resurgence following the (relative) lull in militaristic forms of violence (see Taraki 2008).

Data collection, and its roots in particular colonial and modernist epistemes, has also been partially responsible for the discursive elision of family with household. Since the Ottoman era, households rather than families have been enumerated in censuses and surveys (Rieker et al. 2004: 192-193). This practice, continued by the British, identified a male “head of household” to enumerate household mem­bers and thus reiterated and reinforced patriarchal social relations. Furthermore, the focus on household composition ensured that wider notions of family and kinship were lost in data sets. “Families” were counted, measured, profiled, and thus produced in ways disconnected from their everyday, lived realities but closely connected with a more geographically extensive modern (colonial) nuclear family ideal (Ibid: 195-196).

Law and education have also played their part. The relations between law and family in the occupied territories are complex and cannot be adequately outlined here (see Johnson and Moors 2004). However, it is worth briefly noting that Shari’a law, while not prescribing a normative nuclear family itself, does provide a strong material form to the conjugal tie, since women are entitled to a “house” (room) of their own when married (Rieker et al. 2004: 201). Education, closely intertwined with colonial, national, and modernization projects that have taken place in the occupied territories, has also played its part in the construction of the Palestinian family. For example, Ibrahim et al. (2004) note that after Israel invaded the occupied territories (Palestinian), nationalist sentiment in textbooks was quite literally trans­lated into familial sentiment: “‘Our unity will frighten the enemy’ was replaced by ‘Our success will please our parents’” (Ibid: 77). After 1948, education became a form of highly desirable social capital, and in some contexts the family became a key enabler of education, as older siblings would work to support the education of younger siblings.

Moors (2004) notes that discursive constructions of a homogenous Palestinian family are in tension with divergent everyday practices of different family relations, forms, and practices. Nevertheless, the Palestinian family as discursive object is also coconstituted through everyday practices, including a range of symbols, appear­ances, and styles of dress. Such everyday performances of family have become closely connected with mass media discourses of family. This sphere of discursive production spans national, regional, and global space and is one of the ways in which ideas of the “Arab family” are circulated (El Shakry and Moors 2004). While different discourses of family may be discerned within various forms of media, El Shakry and Moors (2004) suggest that the full complexity of these relations has yet to be fully examined.

In summary, the Palestinian family is a discursive object that has been constituted in a variety of different and often interconnected ways. While the Palestinian family as a patriarchal heterosexual norm is often interpreted through orientalist tropes of tradition, timelessness, and backwardness - all of which promote a certain kind of naturalism - it is a thoroughly contemporary production, firmly routed through and rooted in colonial violence. The family as discursive object works as a frame, or way in which a particular world is made known. Examining the production of this frame exposes the ways in which “the Palestinian family” is enmeshed in patriarchal, state, and colonial forms of power and violence and thus offers a platform for (political) opposition to such family practices and discourses as forms of violence in them­selves. This is particularly important for understanding the diverse lives of Palestin­ian children who coconstitute these families, as the chapters by Bree Akesson and David Marshall and Cindy Sousa in this volume show. However, to only envision Palestinian families through the frame of colonialism ignores practices through which Palestinian families have enacted political resistance or provided the basis for other forms of response to colonialism and violence.

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