The two deaths of basem rishmawi: Identity constructions and reconstructions in a muslim‐christian palestinian community

This article illuminates political transformations in a West Bank Palestinian town over the past decade by examining the ways stories of a killing which took place in 1981 produced radically different conceptions of community during the period of intensive intifada mobilization and subsequently as the Palestinian National Authority established its rule in the wake of the Israeli‐Palestinian Oslo Agreements. The paper examines how political arrangements between the Israeli state and the Palestinian administration forced the local community to negotiate intra‐communal conflicts in the terms of an archaic and divisive idiom of tribal law that in turn accelerated the disintegration of the nationalist solidarity that had characterized intifada‐period social life. The paper contends that shared perceptions of antagonistic violence are central to processes of collective identity formation, and shows that discursive shifts can, in certain contexts, give rise to new formations of identity antipathetic to those that preceded them.

Key words:

• Antagonism
• Nationalism
• intifada
• Feud
• Narrative

Notes

This paper is based on fieldwork carried out over the past decade. An earlier version of the paper was published by Aarhus University Press in the proceedings of a conference organized by Ton Otto and Henk Driessen entitled Perplexities of Identification: Anthropological Studies in Cultural Differentiation and the Use of Resources. In an earlier article—"Nationalizing the Sacred: Shrines and Shifting Identities in the Israeli‐occupied Territories” (Bowman 1993)—I discuss intifada‐period responses to Basem Rishmawi's killing. A more extensive ethnography of Beit Sahour is forthcoming in my The House Before the Dawn: Identity and Politics in a Palestinian Community (Bowman 2001).