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ABSTRACT
Displaced Palestinians are faced with an array of “enemies” and a degraded, disappointing political leadership. They are offered few road-maps for a way out of these conditions. Drawing on long-term research with Palestinian refugees across the Middle East, this essay explores how they confront the future from a depleted present. It considers two instances of future encounters, to explore different modes of confrontation: reaction, experimentation, and refusal. These modes of encounter reveal the different temporalities and geographies that are key to the experience of the future.
Acknowledgements
This essay was first presented at a workshop on “Precarious Futures? Hoping, moving and waiting in times of uncertainty”, in Tisvildeleje, Denmark. I thank the organizers, Nauja Kleist, Dorte Thorsen, and Ida Vammen, for the invitation and all the participants for thoughtful engagement. Thanks to Nauja and Stef Jansen for then inviting me to develop the paper for this special issue. I completed this article while a Friends of the Institute for Advanced Study Member in the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. I thank the Institute, and especially Didier Fassin, for enabling me to work in such excellent conditions. Many thanks as well to the members of the Borders and Boundaries seminar at IAS for very helpful comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. The RAND Corporation Palestine Initiative is a good example of such planning by external actors. http://www.rand.org/palestine.html.
2. Chatterjee also describes such conflicts in the context of postcolonial planning.
3. Daniel Knight describes the “temporal vertigo” that Greeks living through economic crisis experience as they feel “trapped in the present” (Citation2016, 36) between “pasts of poverty and destitution and promised but hopeless futures” (37).
4. Rebecca Bryant distinguishes anticipation from expectation, suggesting that the former is an orientation toward the future that “may requires our own action” (Citation2012, 339).
5. According to a needs assessment carried out in 2009, the largest gathering in Lebanon has a population of 2380 and the smallest 101, with the total population living in gatherings identified as 40,000 (NRC & PU Citation2009).
6. Stewart’s setting is the United States – mostly people and places who have not quite managed to have a comfortable position in the neoliberal American dream. Her focus is not on the structures that have shaped these results (though she is acutely aware of them), but on the lives people lead in their midst.
7. For some Hamas or Islamic Jihad partisans this statement would not be correct, but for most people I talked with it is.
8. “Hundreds Rally in Beirut for Palestinian U.N. Bid,” Naharnet 20 September 2011. http://www.naharnet.com/stories/en/15448. Accessed 10 April 2016. For photos from demonstrations in camps in Lebanon (and elsewhere around the world), see: https://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com/2011/09/21/the-world-rallies-for-palestine-in-pictures/.
9. In this sense, my questions provided a further opportunity for people to reflect on their reactions, but the reactions were already in circulation.
10. All names in part one of this essay are pseudonyms. Part two engages texts with identified authors, so I use their names.
11. In the end the recognition was granted (after a circuitous path) and other international acknowledgments of Palestine (by UNESCO, by the International Criminal Court) have followed. Nonetheless Palestinian lives even more exposed and precarious, in Lebanon and elsewhere.
12. The appellation '48 is also used to describe the parts of Palestine that became Israel in 1948 and the portion of the Palestinian population that remained in that territory.
13. Annie Slemrod, “Interview: Refugees will not be citizens of new state,” Daily Star 15 September 2011. http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Politics/2011/Sep-15/148791-interview-refugees-will-not-be-citizens-of-new-state.ashx. Accessed 10 April 2016.
14. As is always the case, some people and segments of the population have benefitted from these conditions. The NGO economy provides opportunity for a professional class, even as its constricts their professional choices. Even in a constrained economy, some people have gotten very rich. Revelations from the “panama papers” implicate Abu Mazen’s son, who was reported to have $1 million in an account (“Panama Papers: Leaks Reveal Abbas’ Son’s $1m Holding in Company With Ties to Palestinian Authority,” Haaretz 7 April 2016. http://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/1.713347. Accessed 10 April 2016).
15. Dheisheh camp is distinguished among Palestinian refugee camps in general, and within the West Bank, by its degree of organization and activism (Rosenfeld Citation2004). Located within the Bethelehm municipality, even if administratively distinguished from it, camp residents exert influence over local politics.
16. On the multiplicity of meanings attached to camps and the complex ways people live in them, see also: Sanyal Citation2011; Peteet Citation2005; Sayigh Citation2005.