Political Geographies of Palestinian Families
Palestinian families are a heterogeneous analytical phenomena. Johnson and Abu Nahleh (2004) argue that despite commonly held assumptions about the importance of family in Palestinian society, there is actually little scholarly research on the topic.
The reasons for this, they suggest, are tied to the Palestinian condition after the Palestinian nakba (catastrophe) in 1948, when Mandatory Palestine was wiped off the map through the creation of the State of Israel, and an estimated 700,000 Palestinians became refugees. The enforced dispersion of Palestinian families into a variety of different contexts subsequently constituted a diversity of family practices, relations, and spacings. This increasing heterogeneity became hard to subsume under the singular analytical framework of the Palestinian family (Johnson and Abu Nahleh 2004). Furthermore, after 1948 there was no longer a “Palestine” (i.e., a recognized nation-state) to anchor studies of Palestinian families. Other Arab nationstates often discouraged research on the Palestinian communities within their midst (likely because such research would expose the severe neglect of Palestinian refugees and reflect poorly on the host nation). The research that was done with Palestinian communities overwhelmingly focused on historical and political narratives as part of a broader Palestinian nationalist politics (Johnson and Abu Nahleh 2004). Nevertheless, in recent years this lack of scholarly interest has begun to be addressed, in large part by the Arab Families Working Group (Joseph and Rieker 2008). Since 2001, researchers working under the auspices of this project have traced family relations and formations across Palestinian, Lebanese, Egyptian, and transnational space. Much of this work will be drawn upon in what follows.The Palestinian family is also an ambiguous subject because even when focusing on one spatial context, such as the West Bank, “family” is understood and practiced in a number of different, although interrelated, ways.
Family relations and spaces may include aila, the nuclear or “small” family; hamula, the extended or “big” family; qaraba, or “closeness,” which can refer not only to kinship ties but also Active kin articulated through class, location, religion, political affiliation (Johnson et al. 2009); and dar/beit, the household or home (Jean-Klein 2003). As Johnson (2006) notes, these shifting understandings of family are far from uniform within the occupied territories and also differ in spatial and political contexts beyond the West Bank and Gaza Strip.Palestinian families are also Arab families. In other words, they are partially constituted by discourses about (the importance of) the family that span the Arab world, a regional space that in turn is (re)created and modified by the mobility of families and familial discourses. Palestinian and Arab families overlap in a number of different ways, not least through the lives and family practices of Palestinians living in a number of Arab states (usually as refugees). However, Palestinian families are differentiated from other Arab families through their various ties to the Palestinian nakba (catastrophe) and dispossession that began in 1948. Thinking about the ways in which Palestinian families are more broadly Arab families opens up a series of intellectual resources, albeit ones that must be carefully modified to the specific context in which they are being used. For example, Joseph and Rieker (2008: 3) argue that it is vital to understand Arab families in relation to states, and particularly “the failure of Arab state-building projects and the contradictory deployment of family structures, within those processes, in the crises of modernity.” This statement holds true for Palestinian families. However, in contrast to other “Arab” families, most Palestinian families have been at the behest of state forms that are not their own, whether this is the British, Israeli, and United Nations regimes in Mandatory Palestine and the occupied Palestinian territories, or other Arab governments in spaces of exile (i.e., Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria).
To a great extent this remains the case in the present day occupied territories, since Palestinian Authority governance has been severely limited by Israel’s continued colonial sovereignty.Given the variety of different Palestinian family relations and spaces found in different nation-state contexts, this chapter focuses mainly on Palestinians living in the occupied territories. Within this particular context, there are three family geographies that will be explored because of the ways in which they intersect forms of colonial violence. These geographies will be outlined through the concepts of discursive objectification, resistance, and endurance. These political geographic practices are closely interrelated and hard to separate empirically. However, the conceptual separation of these practices illustrates different ways in which Palestinian families have been politically entangled and the ways in which familial geographies constitute, resist, and/or endure heightened experiences of vulnerability due to colonization, war, and violence.
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More on the topic Political Geographies of Palestinian Families:
- Political Geographies of Palestinian Families
- References
- References
- Conclusion: Directions for Future Research on the Geographies of Palestinian Children
- Geography and Family
- Strengths and Gaps in the Current Scholarship
- Harker C., Horschelmann K. (Eds.). Conflict, Violence and Peace. Springer,2017. — 456 p., 2017
- Conclusion
- Contents
- References