Resistance
While the Palestinian family as a discursive object is one that has been iteratively produced by a range of colonial and modernization projects, actual family practices have often been a means of responding to prolonged crises (Sayigh 1981).
In other words, family practices have enabled and enacted forms of anticolonial and antipatriarchal resistance. Particularly in relation to Israeli colonization, some commentators suggest that Palestinian families have been the central source of Palestinian survival and national identity (Johnson and Abu Nahleh 2004: 308). Since 1948, most Palestinian families have lived in nation-state contexts where they have no formal political representation. In such circumstances, the family has become a key protector and form of social authority (Giacaman and Johnson 1989). This remains the case even in the present day occupied territories, where the Palestinian Authority wields “prosthetic sovereignty” only (Weizman 2007). The Palestinian family must therefore be thought about not only as a form of oppression but also, simultaneously, a form of solidarity. This becomes most easily discernible when focusing on the two most explicitly visible moments of anticolonial resistance in the occupied territories, the two intifadas (uprisings).During the first Palestinian intifada, a broad-based and largely nonviolent uprising that began in 1987, familial responsibilities such as nurture, defense, and assistance were extended to the entire community (Giacaman and Johnson 1989). For example, many women sought to protect young men from beatings by Israeli soldiers, through the claim “he is my son” (Ibid.: 161), regardless of kinship affiliation. This transformation involved the expansion and enlargement of existing roles and spaces - particularly women’s roles in relation to the space of home - rather than creating new social-spatial subjects altogether.
As family relations and spaces became a key platform for practices of political resistance, relations within families changed, for example, restrictions on women’s movement relaxed. Popular committees, the purportedly “new” political forms through which much of the anticolonial resistance was organized, were framed by both external and internal discourses as “democratic,” in opposition to the “traditional” (and by extension repressive) kinship sociality of the Palestinian family. However, these committees in fact emerged from, overlapped with, and often refreshed and remade existing familial relations (Jean-Klein 2003). In particular, the first intifada transformed intergenerational relations, as young men usurped the power of their father, and mothering as maternal sacrifice was used to demand equal rights for women (see Johnson and Abu Nahleh 2004: 313-316 for fuller discussion).The second Palestinian intifada, a more militarized uprising beginning in 2000, was conducted by a small subset of the population - groups of armed young men. This second uprising created a crisis in masculinity that affected familial relations (as a new generation of young men supplanted the authority of older men who had participated in the first intifada) and caused various forms of stress at the level of the household and the community. However, many families were largely audience to, rather than participant in, this anticolonial struggle. Johnson et al.’s (2009) study of weddings illustrates the different roles families played in the first and second intifadas. They note that while marriages were simple and inexpensive during the first uprising, reflecting a broader culture of austerity that all Palestinians participated in, ceremonies during the second uprising involved much more conspicuous consumption. Reflecting the lack of popular engagement in the second intifada, violence was seen as an external threat to the ceremonies and “ordinary life” more generally (see also Kelly 2008).
Hence in the context of the second intifada, particular types of familial practices, such as getting married, became a form of resistance to violence. Unlike the first intifada, this was not only resistance to colonial violence but also to the militarized anticolonial violence practiced in response to the Israeli occupation. Jad (2009) nevertheless notes that the rise of group weddings during the second intifada was a means through which the dominant Palestinian political parties in the occupied territories promoted factional politics. She also notes that group weddings (re)produced socially conservative beliefs and practices, particularly with regards to gender dynamics within families.In addition to family as a mode of resistance during the intifadas in the occupied territories, it is also useful to briefly examine family as a form of resistance in spaces of exile and refuge. Kuttab (2004: 154) notes that the Palestinian diaspora is characterized by families and kinship moving and seeking refuge together (unlike migrants who tend to be individuals). While other Palestinian spaces and institutions of belonging and identity were destroyed in 1948, the family was a durable and portable relational form; hence Sayigh (1981) asserts that the Palestinian family is a response to a crisis, not a cultural remnant. The expansion of family relations, by marrying into host communities, has been a means of surviving exile (Kuttab 2004). Family relations have also enabled “return” to the spaces of Mandatory Palestine, now Israel, through marriage (Ibid) or prior to 2000, family reunification (Zureik 2001). While such processes have not necessarily challenged the heteronormative patriarchal family - Kuttab (2004) suggests that women remain the “shock absorbers” within refugee families - they have been a means through which colonialism and inhospitable state regimes have been resisted.
In each of these contexts (i.e., first intifada, second intifada, refuge), family relations and practices have been an important means through which war, colonial oppression, and exile have been resisted by Palestinians.
Furthermore, in each context, families as forms of resistance have different relations with the patriarchal heteronormative family ideal. As Jean-Klein (2003) illustrates, during the first intifada popular committees, enabled by family relations and spaces, transformed those families by challenging some patriarchal relationships and the practices associated with them. In the contexts of refuge studied by Kuttab (2004), changing family compositions did not transform gender relations within families. In the second intifada, some family practices that resisted violence (re)produced socially conservative beliefs and practices with regards to gender relations within families (Jad 2009). Palestinian families are thus potent forms of political resistance in each of these three contexts, but the relationship between family and violence differs in each instance. Taken together, these family practices therefore offer an alternative frame through which Palestinian families might be known, which disrupts the discursive objectification (or framing) of the Palestinian family described earlier. The next section also explores family practices that disrupt the frame of the Palestinian family, albeit through a different means of being political.8