Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Transnational movements and discourses
- 3 Palestinian lives and local institutions in the camps of Lebanon
- 4 Forms of commemoration
- 5 Contents of commemoration: narratives of heroism, suffering, and sumud
- 6 Guerrillas and martyrs: the evolution of national “heroes”
- 7 Between battles and massacres: commemorating violent events
- 8 Commemoration in the Occupied Palestinian Territories
- 9 Conclusions
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Middle East Studies 27
1 - Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Transnational movements and discourses
- 3 Palestinian lives and local institutions in the camps of Lebanon
- 4 Forms of commemoration
- 5 Contents of commemoration: narratives of heroism, suffering, and sumud
- 6 Guerrillas and martyrs: the evolution of national “heroes”
- 7 Between battles and massacres: commemorating violent events
- 8 Commemoration in the Occupied Palestinian Territories
- 9 Conclusions
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Middle East Studies 27
Summary
In a situation like that of the Palestinians and Israelis, hardly anyone can be expected to drop the quest for national identity and go straight to a history-transcending universal rationalism. Each of the two communities, misled though both may be, is interested in its origins, its history of suffering, its need to survive. To recognize these imperatives, as components of national identity, and to try to reconcile them, rather than dismiss them as so much non-factual ideology, strikes me as the task in hand.
Edward Said, “Permission to Narrate”Discursive practices are not purely and simply ways of producing discourse. They are embodied in technical processes, in institutions, in patterns for general behaviour, in forms for transmission and diffusion, and in pedagogical forms which, at once, impose and maintain them.
Michel Foucault, “History of Systems of Thought”By now, we know the images that flicker across the television screens during CNN or BBC or al-Jazeera news broadcasts about Palestinians: mournful or angry funerals of martyrs; walls papered with images of young dead men and, now and again, women; poignant or proud commemorations of collective death spoken in the idiom of battles and massacres; pasts that seem to linger; exile that is not forgotten; histories of suffering that are declared and compared. We hear about a surfeit of memory. Some claim that this mnemonic abundance is the final bulwark against capitulation – or compromise, depending on where you stand politically.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Heroes and Martyrs of PalestineThe Politics of National Commemoration, pp. 1 - 10Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007