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"... constitutes an important and much needed intervention on the themes of memory and violence in Middle East studies." —Lisa Hajjar, University of California, Santa Barbara
The Middle East and North Africa form a region united by a common history of armed conflict and repeated international efforts at producing a lasting peace. This interdisciplinary collection explores the connections between memories of past violence and the violence of present memories, the context for all contemporary efforts at conflict resolution and reconciliation. The contributors examine the 1954–1962 Franco-Algerian war, the 1975–1991 Lebanese civil war, and the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict as interconnected struggles that outline national polities, infranational fractures, and transnational political connections. Insofar as national unity has been constructed on the contested claims of sacrifice and martyrdom, the legacy of violence has remained inscribed at the heart of political identity. The case studies point to the failure of current attempts to officially forget past conflicts, at the same time indicating local successes in commemorative actions that forge at least partial peaces between individuals and groups.
| Introduction : memory and violence in the Middle East and North Africa | 1 | |
| 1 | A death revisited : solidarity and dissonance in a Muslim-Christian Palestinian community | 27 |
| 2 | Martyrdom and destiny : the inscription and imagination of Algerian history | 50 |
| 3 | Patriotic sacrifice and the burden of memory in Israeli secular national Hebrew culture | 73 |
| 4 | Commemoration under fire : Palestinian responses to the 1956 Kafr Qasim massacre | 103 |
| 5 | The making and unmaking of memories : the case of a multi-confessional village in Lebanon | 133 |
| 6 | The Algerian War in French memory : vengeful memory's violence | 151 |
| 7 | Can the subaltern remember? : a pessimistic view of the victims of Zionism | 177 |
| 8 | Beirut, a city without history? | 201 |
| 9 | Archaeology, nationhood, and settlement | 215 |
Anonymous
Posted February 12, 2007
This book gives the astute reader rare insight into the current strength and weakness of modern Middle East scholarship by juxtaposing not one but two pairs of sometimes disparate themes: scholarship/ politics and Lebanon/ Palestine. Start with the latter: while one co-author (Silverstein) is a specialist on North Africa, Ussama Makdisi is a Lebanese scholar and someone who clearly loves his country, as the selected papers about Lebanon show. They illuminate the role of memory, violence and reconciliation within the context of multiple Lebanese narratives - Druze, Maronite, Sunni, etc. Reconciliation (i.e., peace) in troubled Lebanon is explored from several paradigms, ranging from the Japanese 'peace of the victors' model to the South African 'peace and reconciliation' model, to the current 'reconciliation through amnesia' stalemate extant in Lebanon. And yet when discussing the Israel/ Palestine dilemma, the same intellectual subtlety and astuteness becomes blunted, collapsing to the recital of one 'truth' and a description of the forces that conspire to hide that truth. Hence wonderful multi-faceted insights about Lebanon ('...the civil war in Lebanon...indicates more than one narrative that explains the emergence and elaboration of memory and violence') give way to tired old Manichean views of the Palestinian/ Israeli tragedy ('...the Arab-Israeli conflict is obviously derivative from ... Zionist colonialism...'), often in the same sentence! Similarly, there are nuggets of high scholarship clearly present in this volume, sandwiched between purely political diatribes. One of the best is Glenn Bowman's paper on the 'two deaths' of the Christian Palestinian Basem Rishmawi. The discovery of his horribly mutilated body in 1981 galvanized his mixed Christian-Muslim West Bank town into political awareness and solidarity, resulting among other things in tax strikes and community cohesiveness as never before. This all came crashing down after the PA took control in 1995, when it was discovered that in fact Rishmawi's death had been a 'grudge' killing by a Muslim Palestinian from the same village. Makdisi and Silverstein missed a wonderful opportunity to leverage this 'controlled experiment' to explore the role that the common Israeli enemy plays in Palestinian cohesiveness, and the challenge that this reality presents for true reconciliation in the region. Specifically, are there any 'out of the box' substitutes for the common Israeli enemy that will allow reconciliation and Palestinian cohesiveness to coexist? I can think of a few. The other great paper was by Anja Peleikis, who showed with sensitivity and brilliance why it is not possible to turn back the clock in South Lebanon and return Christian refugees to their mixed Christian-Shiite villages, even when all parties are agreeable. If resettlement of same-generation refugees in Lebanon is a non-starter, then are we all wasting our time arguing about resettlement of 4 million multi-generational Palestinian refugees into Israel? If not, why not? Again, the authors missed a wonderful opportunity to explore the obvious connection between Peleikis's wonderful paper and the efficacy of the Palestinian law of return, all within the context of the book's theme of memory and violence. Sandwiched between these two and a few other worthwhile papers are several highly politicized ones, such as the tellingly-titled 'A pessimistic view of the victims of Zionism'. As I said at the beginning, this book juxtaposes dissonance as nothing else, both in quality of scholarship and in its inability to get beyond politics to courageously analyze difficult questions, both historical and going-forward. Would I recommend buying it? I'm glad I read it for the two or three excellent papers it contains and for the insight I am sharing here, but perhaps there are other books more worth your time and money.
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Overview
"... constitutes an important and much needed intervention on the themes of memory and violence in Middle East studies." —Lisa Hajjar, University of California, Santa Barbara
The Middle East and North Africa form a region united by a common history of armed conflict and repeated international efforts at producing a lasting peace. This interdisciplinary collection explores the connections between memories of past violence and the violence of present memories, the context for all contemporary efforts at conflict ...