Remembering Palestine: a Multi-Media Ethnography of Generational Memories Among Diaspora Palestinians
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Remembering Palestine: A multi-media ethnography of generational memories among diaspora Palestinians By Dominika Blachnicka-Ciacek Sociology Goldsmiths College University of London Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) 2015 I hereby declare that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Wherever contributions of others are involved, these are clearly acknowledged. Dominika Blachnicka-Ciacek 2 Abstract This thesis is a qualitative investigation of memories of Palestine among exiled Palestinians and their descendants in Poland and in the UK. Taking the continuous character of Palestinian dispossession as a point of departure, it examines their modes of remembering, imagining and relating to Palestine. The thesis seeks to contribute to the sociology of diaspora by shedding light on the multiplicity of situated trajectories that shape diasporic Palestinians’ relationships with their ‘ancestral’ homeland. It delineates three generations of Palestinians in diaspora: those exiled in the 1948 and their descendants born in refugee camps; those who left as a direct or indirect result of the occupation; and those born as ‘second generation migrants’ in their parent’s countries of exile. It argues that while the continuing erasure of Palestine informs all of their experiences, each generation produces memories of ancestral homeland in relation to different geographies, temporalities and set of imaginings. Tracing these differences, I am concerned with how the plurality of diasporic memories allows generations of Palestinians to endure and constantly re-create their relationships with the Palestine despite more than six decades of continuous uprooting. The research is based on oral history interviews with 33 Palestinians in Poland and the UK, followed by an ethnographic audio-visual exploration of some of the research participants’ sites of memory. The audio-visual engagements have moved back and forth between stories narrated in Poland and in the UK and site-specific field visits within today’s Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The five ethnographic études that accompany the written part of this thesis strive to restore, at least partially, access to context that was lost with the participants’ uprooting and to explore the texture and materiality of their dispossession. This approach contributes to the development of a multi-sensory methodology that seeks to understand diasporic and exilic experiences by placing the relationship between memory, time and place at the heart of sociological enquiry. 3 Acknowledgements The past five years have been a challenging time spent commuting between Warsaw, London and Jerusalem. It’s been a laborious journey of lonely days and nights spent in libraries. But it has also been a journey of enormous privilege to be able to pursue this study and meet my research participants, from whom I have learned so much about the hardship of dispossession and the strength of individual and collective resilience. It is to them - both in Poland and in the UK - that I owe the deepest gratitude. Thank you for taking time to talk to me and for your readiness to share experiences and memories, which often must have been so difficult to talk about. Your stories sustained me throughout the process and it is an honour to be able to carry them in the form of this thesis. Special thanks go to Antoine and Joseph Raffoul, Omar Faris, Yakoub Ikkrawish, In’am and Azooz Aqtash, Wael Sheawish and Alina and Krystian Palichleb who accepted me into their lives with a video camera. I am especially grateful to my supervisors, Nirmal Puwar and Yasmin Gunaratnam, for offering rigorous intellectual and emotional support throughout this journey, for constantly fuelling my sociological imagination and pushing me to make this thesis better. I am grateful to the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths for providing a thought-provoking atmosphere and for believing that we sociologists should engage with more than just words and academia. Thank you to the Graduate School at Goldsmiths for supporting my audio-visual ethnography in Palestine and Israel in 2013 with a research grant. In London, I also thank my dear friends, Aallaa Al-Shamahi and Voichta Judele, for making it feel like home, as well as Vikram Jayanti and his team at UCL for teaching me how to think about ethnographic films and how to do them in a DOI manner. Thank you to Khaled Ziada at SOAS for being there to offer insight and support. At Goldsmiths, I thank Emily Nicholls and Felipe Palma for being the best PhD buddies and all the colleagues and staff in the Sociology Department for creating such a friendly and productive work environment. I remain indebted to the indispensible Margarita Aragon, for proofreading my endless drafts and for posing brilliant questions that helped me to clarify and crystalize my analysis and my writing. I will always be grateful to people whom I met and worked with in East Jerusalem and in the West Bank during my time as a human rights observer with the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI) in 2012 and on my subsequent trips to Palestine and Israel. In particular, I thank Pauline Nunu and Judeh Abu Sa’d, the entire Muna family, 4 Khaleel Arquob and his family, Firas Saleh, and Wassim Ghantous and his friends at Kafr Bir’im for their generosity and friendship and my entire EAPPI team in East Jerusalem. On the other side of the Green Line, I remain indebted to my Israeli family for accepting the surprise visit of a non-Jewish cousin from distant Poland one Friday night a few years ago, which evoked so many painful and happy moments and memories of our grandmothers. Thank for your warmth and for respecting what I was doing, despite our fierce and difficult political disagreements. I cannot express how much I would love my uncle Yossi to be still around to read this thesis and watch the films. Thank you to my colleagues at Zochrot for organizing such an inspiring conference on the return of Palestinian refugees in the autumn of 2013, and as well to my friends Ronny Perlman from Machsom Watch, whom I met at the Qalandia Checkpoint, and Lilach Rubin from Shraga in Jerusalem. In Poland, I thank my parents, Bogusław and Joanna; my Dad, for instilling me with a sense of curiosity about the world and my Mum for her love and tremendous support (including making the last minute bibliography changes for this thesis!). A big thank you to my extended family in Jablunkow and Long Island, whose experiences made me attentive to notions of boundaries, place and belonging. And to my friends in Krakow and Warsaw, especially Przemek Wielgosz and Konrad Pędziwiatr, for showing interest in my work and engaging in Palestinian human rights education in Poland. To Ania El-Fara, my Arabic teacher, for her enthusiasm and patience. Finally, this journey would not have been be possible without my husband, Paweł, whose quiet understanding and unremitting sense of trust and support allowed us to survive these bumpy years of travelling and my long physical and emotional absences. Paweł has also been my closest companion on this journey, sharing my interest in the region and my hopes for a peaceful and just future for Palestinians and Israelis. Paweł, I could not have done without you. Now, I’m coming back home. London and Warsaw: December 2015 5 Table of Contents Introduction 5 Part I. Researching Palestinian Diaspora 24 Chapter 2. Diaspora and Memory 24 2.1. Overview 24 2.2. Literature and context 24 2.3. Palestinians and diaspora 26 2.4. Diaspora as problematic 30 2.5. Remembering the ancestral homeland 39 2.6. Conclusion 52 Chapter 3. Researching diaspora memories of Palestine 53 3.1. Overview 53 3.2. Designing the fieldwork as a ‘travel practice’ 53 3.3. Research journey: access, sample and methods 59 3.4. Conclusion. Shifting perspectives and ethical responsibilities 80 Part II. Generations ‘Out of Palestine’ 87 Chapter 4. The Exiles. Postmemory and beyond 92 4.1. Overview 92 4.2. Those who came after and the ‘unfinishedness’ of the Nakba 92 4.3. The emergence, crystallization and canonization of the postmemory 99 4.4. In the shadow of the Nakba - growing up in the refugee camp 106 4.5. ‘The world was with us’. Beyond postmemory? 111 4.6. Conclusion 116 Chapter 5. ‘Occupied from Within’. Memory, body and place 117 5.1. Overview 117 5.2. Generation of the occupation 117 5.3. Embodied occupation 120 5.4. Spatialized memories of Palestine 124 5.5. Spatialized memories of resistance 130 5.6. Conclusion 139 Chapter 6. Children of the Idea of Palestine: Making sense of the inherited pasts, creating connections with Palestine 141 6.1. Overview 141 6.2. Children of the ‘Idea of Palestine’ – connecting with the ancestral homeland 142 6.3. Complex modes of memory transmission 144 6.4. Re–working the inherited pasts 151 6.5. Re-claiming 'roots', reinventing routes? Limits and transformations of the ancestral return 159 6.6. Conclusion 165 Part III. Oral histories and Audio-Visual Etnography. 168 Conclusion 185 Bibliography 193 6 Table of Figures Figure 3.1. Overview of the methods employed in the research 55 Figure 3.2. Map of the fieldwork sample in Poland in the UK 57 Figure 3.4. Stones from the no longer existing village of Al-Zaghariyya in Upper Galilee, which I carried back to Omar in Krakow, Poland 59 Figure 3.3. Stages of the fieldwork 60 Figure 3.5. Still image from the ‘Bar Betlejem’ in Warsaw. 71 Figure 3.7. Map of filming locations 74 Figure 3.8. Map of Palestine 1946 75 Figure 3.9. Avis Map of Israel 2012 75 Figure 3.10.