Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca Dipartimento di Scienze Umane per la Formazione “Riccardo Massa” École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales Dottorato di Ricerca in Antropologia della Contemporaneità: Etnografia delle Diversità e delle Convergenze Culturali Doctorat en Anthropologie Sociale et Ethnologie CHIARA PILOTTO At the Borders of Friendship: Work, Morality and Survival in a colonial Israeli-Palestinian space A dissertation jointly supervised by: Prof. Mauro Ivo Van Aken and Prof. Didier Fassin 16 March 2016 Pré-rapporteurs: Paola Sacchi, Università degli Studi di Torino Ilana Feldman, George Washington University, IAS, Princeton Examination Committee: Mauro Ivo Van Aken, Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca Didier Fassin, Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, EHESS, Paris Paola Sacchi, Università degli Studi di Torino Stéphanie Latte Abdallah, CNRS-Ifpo Table of contents Acknowledgments .............................................................................................................. 3 Notes on transliteration ..................................................................................................... 7 INTRODUCTION.............................................................................................................. 9 Personal trajectories, methodological choices and ethical concerns ........................... 21 Thesis plan ........................................................................................................................ 31 1. FROM REFUGEES TO FELLAḤÎN ....................................................................... 35 1.1. Which border? ...................................................................................................... 35 1.1.1. Domesticity and conflict: positioning al-Bab ................................................. 35 1.1.2. The past in front of us: talking lands and peasants’ memory .......................... 44 1.1.3. The prison-present: fellāḥīn without land ....................................................... 58 1.2. Re-signifying Palestinian peasants...................................................................... 72 1.2.1. Agriculture and ṣumūd: the politics of staying ............................................... 72 1.2.2. Israeli mobilizations around Palestinian agriculture: politicizing ‘nature’ ..... 83 2. WORK AND DEPENDENCE ................................................................................... 99 2.1. Work and social reproduction ............................................................................ 99 2.1.1. Work and personal dependence ...................................................................... 99 2.1.2. Unemployment and social reproduction ....................................................... 109 2.1.3. Masculinities and futures .............................................................................. 117 2.2. Work as an apparatus ........................................................................................ 128 2.2.1. From “freedom” to institutionalized dependence ......................................... 128 2.2.2. Palestinian institutions after Oslo ................................................................. 138 2.2.3. The legal-illegal continuum: models and experiences .................................. 154 2.2.4. Vulnerability and renewed hierarchies among Palestinians ......................... 167 2.3. Work as a moral discourse ................................................................................ 179 2.3.1. Humanity at work: unavailability and friendship in work relations ............. 179 2.3.2. Which worker (‘āmil) is not a collaborator (‘amīl)? Legitimate work and Palestinians’ subsistence .......................................................................................... 191 3. FRIENDSHIP/S: FROM THE PERSONAL TO THE POLITICAL .................. 209 3.1. The social language of friendship ..................................................................... 209 3.1.1. Practicing friendship ..................................................................................... 216 3.1.2. Ṣuḥba and ṣadāqa: multiple friendships ....................................................... 221 3.1.3. Secrets and affects ......................................................................................... 231 1 3.2. Friendship and personal relationships with Israelis ....................................... 238 3.2.1. Rida and Dina: morality beyond work .......................................................... 245 3.2.2. Walid and Talia: friendship in and out of politics ........................................ 253 3.2.3. Abu Mustafa and Amos: a political friendship ............................................. 266 3.3. Fīsh ṣuḥba hūn! The denial of friendship in the Palestinian society ............. 285 3.3.1. Labor, friendship and the question of “normalization” ................................. 293 4. FORMS AND POLITICS OF LIFE ........................................................................ 305 4.1. Conceptions of life under the Israeli security regime ..................................... 308 4.2. Normalizing Palestinian deaths ........................................................................ 318 4.3. For a respectable life: individual struggles for dignity ................................... 330 CONCLUSIONS ............................................................................................................ 343 References ....................................................................................................................... 357 List of figures .................................................................................................................. 364 List of Illustrations ......................................................................................................... 371 2 Acknowledgments I want to express my gratitude to my supervisors Mauro Van Aken and Didier Fassin, who have nourished this work through their insights and comments in the different phases of my research. I thank Mauro Van Aken especially for the possibility to share fieldwork experiences and reflections while walking together on the Palestinian hills. I am grateful to Didier Fassin for his constant availability in reading and discussing my ethnographic outputs, and for his precious observations and critiques. I also thank all the professors of the Ph.D. program in Anthropology at the University of Milano Bicocca and of EHESS Doctoral School in Paris for offering their comments on my work in different occasions. In Milan I especially thank Ugo Fabietti for his support from the very beginning of my Ph.D., and Benoît de l’Estoile in Paris for the interest he demonstrated in discussing the plan of this writing. I am thankful to the Centre de recherche français à Jérusalem, through which I was granted with a mobility scholarship from October 2013 to June 2014. I especially thank Olivier Tourny and all the researchers who helped me to clarify and redirect my research steps while conducting my fieldwork. I also thank the administrative staff for their work and support. At Birzeit University I thank Moslih Kanaaneh for his help and hospitality. Stéphanie Latte Abdallah and Véronique Bontemps offered me their precious insights during and after my fieldwork. Nicola Perugini, together with Farah Saleh, helped me in very different ways before and during the time of my fieldwork. I also thank Ruba Saleh for introducing me to al-Bab. I am grateful to Setrag Manoukian, Valeria Ribeiro Corossacz and Fabio Viti for their suggestions and support, which started a long time before I began my Ph.D research. My Ph.D. colleagues and young researchers in different countries were a fundamental presence with whom to share discussions, passions, and the personal implications that ethnographic research has in our lives: I thank Giovanna Cavatorta, Luca Nevola, Anastasia Martino, Giovanna Santanera, Laura Petracchi, Laura Menin, Giuseppe Bolotta, Yasmine Bouagga, Mariangela Gasparotto, Julie Ethioux, Francesco Staro. I also remember our colleague Giulio Regeni. This work was made possible thanks to the support of many people whom I prefer not to name here. I hope to have shown through this work how silence becomes a form of 3 protection for lives lived under a never-ending military occupation, where not so many interlocutors exist beyond Israeli soldiers. I thank all the Palestinian people who welcomed me in their lives for their love and care, whose intensity and gratuitousness are so rare in other places that I should consider as “home”. My deeper gratitude goes to the families who offered me their material support while living in very precarious conditions, especially Dar Abu Hammad and Dar Abu Tha’r. I want to express my infinite gratitude to my large family in al-Bab for their generosity, affection and comprehension in sharing also some difficult moments of my life. “We apologize if one of us did something that hurt you and did not realize it”: like one of my hosts pointed out to me the first time I was leaving for Italy, I also apologize because I certainly wrote something that hurts. I thank all the people who trusted me and talked to me even when silence would have been an easier answer. I hope not to have betrayed the depth of their thoughts and feelings. I thank Dar Abu Nidal, where I experienced how freedom is first of all a state of mind. Most of the people I met during my fieldwork have contributed in