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Abstract
This article applies our earlier proposed theoretical framework on everyday resistance in the case of Palestinian Sumūd (steadfastness) in relation to the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories and the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Our original framework rests on the dimensions of: (I) repertoires of everyday resistance; (II) relationships of agents; as well as the (III) spatialization and (IV) temporalization of everyday resistance. The already existing complex theoretical debates as well as the rich body of empirical work regarding the Israel/Palestine conflict give us an opportunity to illustrate and explore the possibilities as well as the limits of the proposed framework. Our hope is that in this way, we encourage more systematic research on and a more nuanced understanding of everyday resistance.
Acknowledgments
Vinthagen gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Swedish Research Council, which has awarded funding to undertake research on a project entitled Globalization of Resistance: Influences on Democracy Advocators in Civil Society in the South from 2011 to 2015 (project No. 2010-2298). We also want to thank Åsa Boholm and Michael Schulz at University of Gothenburg, Mark Haugaard and the two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.
Notes
1. Collected by Sumūd Story House September 2009. Submitted by Arab Educational Institute 30.09.2009. Palestinian Family net.
2. Palestinian resistance against the Israeli occupation is usually understood within the framework of two major ‘uprisings’: the first (1987–1991) and second (2001–2003) ‘Intifada’.
3. The 1948–1949 Arab–Israeli War resulted in the displacement of more than 750,000 Palestine refugees (Bohman Citation1991) By 2005, this population had grown to more than 4.4 million. During the 1967 war, Israel occupied the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip (occupied Palestinian territory – OPT).
4. The concept sumūd was coined at an Arab conference in 1978 as a fund was set up to support those who were steadfast in Palestine (Van Teeffelen Citation2006).
5. Sayigh (Citation2012) finds that in her research among Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, the category of ‘refugee’ has an ambivalent significance. Some Palestinians reject the term refugee altogether as humiliating, but others argue that it signifies that they belong in Palestine and not in Lebanon.
6. The concept of ‘intersectionality’ has been acknowledged as one of the most important contributions to feminist scholarship and has become the ‘buzzword’ for feminist theory and research (Davies Citation2008). The concept has been described as ‘cross roads’, ‘axes of difference’, or ‘the point of contact made between elements, lines or categories’. Intersectionality is thus a particular way of understanding social location in terms of criss-cross systems of oppression. The basic idea is that power is plural, i.e. powers, which have combinatory effects.
7. The definition of sovereign power that is in use and is discussed today is highly influenced by the Italian philosopher Agamben (Citation1998, Citation2005).
8. Disciplinary power trains, shapes, and controls individuals through institutions, punishments, awards, and scientific discourses. It shapes ‘docile bodies’ through careful observation. Discipline enables bodies to function productively within forms of economic, political, and military organizations that emerged in the modern age and are continuously restructured (Foucault Citation1991, Lilja and Vinthagen Citation2014).
9. One of the most influential – and in our view – clarifying definitions of the concept of biopower is the one by Rabinow and Rose (Citation2006, p. 195): ‘Biopower, we suggest, entails one or more truth discourses about the “vital” character of living human beings; an array of authorities considered competent to speak that truth; strategies for intervention upon collective existence in the name of life and health; and modes of subjectification, in which individuals work on themselves in the name of individual or collective life or health’.
10. Lilja and Vinthagen (Citation2014) discuss how resistance needs to relate differently to different kinds of power.
11. Here, we disregard the fact that the ‘target’, in its immediate meaning, does not always have to be a person, group, or organization, but perhaps a discourse, symbol, etc. Importantly, for our argument, a symbol will also have its proponents. Thus, any target of importance will mobilize its defenders and, therefore, indirectly, the ‘target’ will, indeed, include humans, its (power) actors.
12. The total number of UNRWA registered refugees in the West Bank is around 727,000 and about a quarter live in one of the 19 official camps.
13. Place of origin in Palestine has been for long a strong marker of belonging through particular traditions of food preparation, accent, customs, camp residence, and local memories.
14. Such as e.g. PFLP, Fatha, Hamas, which have widely different ideas on the liberation struggle.
15. In Lebanon, Christian Palestinians, for example, were divided from Muslims through separate camps.
16. An interesting and relevant example showing the complexity of relations between agents of power and resistance within the refugee camps in Lebanon is found in a report from the Daily Star. In May 2013, a group of Palestinian refugees residing in the Ain al-Hilweh camp in southern Lebanon set fire to boxes of humanitarian aid donated by Hezbollah. Their decision to burn the boxes was explained on banners that carried messages such as ‘We don’t want assistance soaked in the blood of the Syrian people’. The tensions rose as Palestinians who had fled the fighting in Syria saw the flags of Hezbollah and the Syrian regime on the trucks delivering the aid. However, the camp’s Popular Committees decided to accept the donations and stored them in a warehouse. See http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Local-News/2013/May-31/218980-palestinian-refugees-burn-hezbollah-aid.ashx#axzz3Grw9nTnJ.
17. The generation of those who experienced the Nakba (as young adolescents or children) call themselves jeel al-nakba (the Nakba generation), while the subsequent generation, given the prominent role of the PLO and the Resistance from the 60s to the 80s, is often referred to as jeel al-thawra (the generation of the Revolution), particularly in Lebanon. In the West Bank, those who were active as youth and young adults in the first Intifada, are often called jeel al-intifada (the Intifada generation) (Richter-Devroe Citation2012).
18. According to Rose (Citation1993) one needs to view the boundaries between real and non-real space, material and symbolic space as fluid and blurred.
19. This spatiality of power is also central to Deleuze’s notion of the societies of control (Citation1992/2011), in which power is characterized by being absent yet always present. It is dispersive; varied and ready to be deployed when needed, when system ‘security’ is threatened.