Endurance
Studies of getting married during the second intifada, which focus on one way in which Palestinians in the occupied territories have attempted to maintain an “ordinary” life amid extraordinary conditions (Kelly 2008; Johnson et al.
2009), reveal a third form of political practice that is not entirely subsumed within either discursive productions of the Palestinian family or various enactments of resistance to colonial and state power. This type of political practice is termed endurance. Endurance describes practices of persistence and adaptation through which people who experience multiple forms of violence create alternative worlds for themselves (Allen 2008; Povinelli 2011). Endurance is similar to what Bayat (2010: 19-20) terms “the quiet encroachment of the ordinary,” whereby the actions of uncoordinated actors work collectively to enact change in practical and pragmatic ways. This is not a politics of protest, targeted at a perceived external source of power, but a politics of redress that seeks to directly change things on the ground (Ibid). In the context of the occupied territories, a politics of endurance is one that currently takes place amid the Israeli occupation, but doesn’t take the occupation, or resistance to the occupation, as its start or end point (see Harker 2011).One example of this politics in relation to families is Palestinian men who built Israeli settlement colonies during the second intifada (Kelly 2008). While such labor contradicted broader Palestinian nationalist politics and forms of anticolonial resistance, these men did this work in order to feed their families. While acts such as this may be interpreted as forms of acquiescence to the colonial regime, Kelly (2008) argues that they can be understood as efforts to live an “ordinary” life in conditions of extraordinary violence and economic hardship.
Slightly less ambiguous politics of endurance are evident in the practices and spaces of mobility during the second intifada. This includes checkpoint economies through which commerce and public space are articulated despite barriers to movement (Hammami 2004) and journeys around the West Bank that maintain familial relations (Harker 2009). Post-Oslo movement restrictions and the fragmentation of Palestinian space in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which intensified after 2000, also produced new forms of localism that in turn reinvigorated the importance of the spatially copresent family (Johnson2006). Migration beyond the West Bank provides families with another way of enduring the occupation (Hilal 2006; Harker 2010), even as such migrant practices have historical roots stretching far beyond the Israeli occupation.
Studies conducted in and around Ramallah (Taraki 2008; Abourahme 2009; Harker 2010) have also highlighted how refiguring the family as nuclear (aila) enables forms of intergenerational endurance through interconnected investments in education, consumption, and transnational mobility. While this transformation is decidedly middle class, analogous processes have been reported in refugee camps, where refugees refigure the physical and symbolic spaces of the camp while maintaining the political right to return (Abourahme and Hilal 2009).
These practices of endurance, many of which are familial in motivation or method, expose another response to violence. While they do not constitute an orchestrated or organized politics of protest, they have enabled meaningful forms of change as families deal with the violence of occupation and war. Practices of endurance enable a reduction in exposure to heightened vulnerability, and in the case of the movement/migration, such political strategies are explicitly geographical. However, these political changes are often unremarkable and unremarked upon because they are “ordinary” (i.e., part of the practice of everyday life) and “quiet” (i.e., emerging from disparate and nonunified sources). Practices of endurance, like resistance, disrupt the discursive objectification (frame) of the Palestinian family.
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