Identity and Religion in Palestine: The Struggle between Islamism and Secularism in the Occupied Territories by Loren D. Lybarger

From the Publisher

This remarkable book examines how the Islamist movement and its competition with secular-nationalist factions have transformed the identities of ordinary Palestinians since the first Palestinian uprising, or intifada, of the late 1980s. Drawing upon his years living in the region and more than eighty in-depth interviews, Loren Lybarger offers a riveting account of how activists within a society divided by religion, politics, class, age, and region have forged new identities in response to shifting conditions of occupation, peace negotiations, and the fragmentation of Palestinian life.

Lybarger personally witnessed the tragic days of the first intifada, the subsequent Oslo Peace Process and its failures, and the new escalation of violence with the second intifada in 2000. He rejects the simplistic notion that Palestinians inevitably fall into one of two camps: pragmatists who are willing to accept territorial compromise, and extremists who reject compromise in favor of armed struggle. Listening carefully to Palestinians themselves, he reveals that the conflicts evident among the Islamists and secular nationalists are mirrored by the internal struggles and divided loyalties of individual Palestinians.

Identity and Religion in Palestine is the first book of its kind in English to capture so faithfully the rich diversity of voices from this troubled part of the world. Lybarger provides vital insights into the complex social dynamics through which Islamism has reshaped what it means to be Palestinian.

Product Details

• ISBN: 0691127298
  
• ISBN-13: 9780691127293
• Format: Hardcover, 296pp
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Pub. Date: March 2007
• Sales Rank: 375,194
• Series: Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics

• Table of Contents
• Read a Sample Chapter

Table of Contents

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Identity and Religion in Palestine

Princeton University Press

Chapter One

During the past two and a half decades, Palestinian political identities have undergone significant changes in response to war, occupation, uprising, and a failed peace process. These massively destabilizing events have created profound uncertainties that have weakened once dominant forms of secular nationalism and opened up paths for new collective identities, especially resurgent Islamic, or "Islamist," ones. In this book, I use the terms "secular nationalism," "secular nationalist," and "secularist" to refer to a type of political orientation that envisions the national collective as sharing a common language (Arabic), a set of key historical experiences (e.g., the 1948 and 1967 wars, among other significant events), and a territorially bounded space demarcated by the borders of the former British Mandate in Palestine, what is today the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Israel (see map, fig. 1). For secular nationalists, the nation includes adherents of multiple religions: Muslims and Christians, primarily, but even Jews. Secular nationalism, or secularism, in this sense, bases itself not so much on the repression or restriction of religion, though some left-secularists would demand this, but rather on its integration within amulticonfessional framework. Secular nationalists, generally, seek a nonreligious democratic state, even if this state will make various concessions to the customary legal practices of the different religious communities. This state is seen to encompass members of diverse constituencies, religious and otherwise, who possess the same rights under a single constitution. The Arabic term most commonly used by Palestinians to refer to secularist orientations is 'almani (secular). It is often applied to adherents of the leftist/Marxist factions. Those in the mainstream Fatah movement, which constitutes the core of what I have termed the secular-nationalist sphere, would be careful to distinguish between a strict 'almani secularism that insists on the privatizing or abandoning of religious practices (the leftist variant) and a soft secularism that integrates religion as part of a multiconfessional national identity (the Fathawi alternative).

By "Islamist," conversely, I mean activists and movements whose orientations align with the ideology of politically resurgent Islam. Such orientations, referred to in the Palestinian setting as al-tayyar al-islami (the Islamic [political] tendency), draw on key symbols, discourses, and narratives of the Islamic religion-such as the notions of jihad (the "effort" to lead a pious life, establish a society based on the precepts of shari'a, the "religious law," and defend and expand the boundaries of Islam, militarily), umma (worldwide Islamic community), and khilafa (caliphate), among others-to reinterpret the meaning and goals of national political resistance and solidarity. The objective of Islamists is some form of shari'a-based state and society within the boundaries of what is now Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip in their entirety. As Islamists have moved into the political mainstream, by becoming elected representatives on town councils and, in January 2006, gaining an overwhelming majority in the Palestinian Legislative Council, for example, they have modified their objectives, proposing the idea of a long-term hudna, or truce, with provisional borders between the yet-to-be-established Palestinian state and present-day Israel as delimited by the 1948 armistice lines. Because ending occupation and achieving a territorially bounded state are its primary objectives, Islamism, in the Palestinian setting, becomes a type of religious-nationalism. By using the term "Islamist," this book distinguishes between those for whom Islam has come to mean a specific type of religio-political identity and those for whom Islam may instead be a personal religious (Islamic) orientation or practice existing alongside, or integrated within, a type of multiconfessional secular nationalism.

The principal struggle within Palestinian society lies between what I am calling the Islamist milieu-at the center of which is the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, literally meaning "Zeal," the acronym for harakat al-muqawama al-islamiyya (the Islamic Resistance Movement), principally, but also the much smaller Islamic Jihad movement-and the secular-nationalist milieu anchored primarily by Fatah, meaning "Opening" or "Conquest," the reverse acronym for harakat al-tahrir al-filastini (the Palestinian Liberation Movement), the dominant faction in the Palestine Liberation Organization. Vying to define and control the collective Palestinian fate, these movements and their associated sociopolitical milieus have so far proven incapable of overtaking or absorbing one another. The consequent competition and division have created the conditions for a multidirectional reformulation and reorganization of political identities. Activists who came of age under these conditions have fashioned new conceptions of collective belonging that selectively integrate elements from both sides of the cultural-political divide. This book documents these new forms of political identity and explores the social processes that have given rise to them.

SITUATING SECULAR NATIONALISM AND ISLAMISM IN THE PALESTINIAN SETTING

The tension between secular nationalism and Islamism among Palestinians has attracted sustained scrutiny among journalists and scholars specializing in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the politics of the Middle East, generally. Among journalists, the close-to-the-ground perspectives that have typified the work of Graham Usher and Amira Hass have been particularly influential in shaping the analyses of this book. Drawing on extensive interviewing and long experience of living in Gaza and the West Bank, both authors use rich, multilayered analyses to situate the Islamist-secularist dialectic within the vicissitudes of the broader Palestinian struggle against the occupation. In similar fashion, this book utilizes life-history interviews and direct observation to place Islamist-secularist competition within the wider context of Palestinian nationalism, the Israeli occupation, and the self-rule arrangements of the Oslo period. To comprehend Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, one must understand Fatah and the secular-nationalist milieu that it anchors as well as the general dynamics of repression and resistance that have so profoundly shaped Palestinian life under Israeli domination. With Usher and Hass, thus, I argue that Islamism, while it emerges from a very particular cultural-political milieu within Palestinian society, nevertheless must be understood as a dimension of Palestinian nationalism. What distinguishes this book from journalistic accounts such as those of Usher and Hass is its sustained interpretation of the Palestinian situation as an instance of broader processes-particularly, those of generational change-that shape individual and collective political identities in chronically destabilized societies.

Alongside journalistic accounts, several academic studies have explored the history, ideology, organizational structure, and social setting of Islamism and its relationship to Palestinian nationalism. These works have documented the historical background of Islamism, beginning with Muslim Brotherhood political activism in the 1930s and 1940s; the retrenchment and "culturalist" reorientation of Brotherhood structures during the era of secular pan-Arabism and P.L.O. nationalism in the 1950s through the early 1980s; and the revitalization of a more activist Islamism toward the end of the 1970s and into the 1980s and 1990s. They have also focused on the formation of Islamist networks in the mosques and universities in response to similar mobilization processes in the secular-nationalist milieu. A number of other studies have looked at the ideology of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, its connections to the broader Islamist intellectual currents in the region, and its implications for decision-making processes within the Islamist movements and for Palestinian state- building, in general, during the period of the now defunct Oslo Peace Process. These studies have emphasized the range of ideological tendencies within Hamas, particularly, noting that movement leaders demonstrated an ability to think and act pragmatically when confronted by the prospect that Oslo might succeed. From yet another perspective, there is nearly a decade of survey research on public attitudes toward the various political factions. These valuable data show, not surprisingly, that support for Fatah/P.L.O. relative to Hamas/Jihad fluctuated in accordance with public sentiments toward the peace process and the prospects for achieving meaningful statehood and basic personal and collective security. In periods when the Oslo Process appeared capable of succeeding, especially at the time of the 1996 presidential and Legislative Council elections, support for Fatah tended to increase while that of Hamas remained constant or declined. Conversely, when the Oslo Process began to implode in the late 1990s, collapsing finally under the weight of new violence at the end of 2000, the situation became reversed, with Hamas/Jihad gaining in popularity and the P.L.O. factions, especially Fatah, remaining steady or even losing support.

Several key assumptions, some of which I share, underlie these diverse studies. First, Islamism is presumed to comprise a separate sphere with its own unique history and ethos stretching back to the 1930s. Second, the collective commitment to resistance forged during the first Intifada ultimately impelled Islamists to shed their culturalist activism and embrace a more militant, antioccupation posture. The acceptance of Islamism beyond its core constituencies, as the argument goes, resulted from the perception that Islamists were finally contributing to the general national struggle against Israel. Third, as Abu-Amr states: "While Islamic groups have had their own appeal, activities, and followings, setbacks of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) have translated into additional influence for these Islamic groups." This latter supposition grounds the sociological and survey analyses that view the changes in the fortunes of Hamas/Jihad as oscillating inversely with those of Fatah. The same presupposition informs the literature on the history of the P.L.O. These works, generally, have interpreted Islamist successes, instrumentally, as the consequence of P.L.O. failures to articulate a coherent positive ideology beyond the lowest-common-denominator commitment to armed struggle and national liberation. The P.L.O.'s extensive use of patronage to co-opt support from diverse constituencies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, moreover, worked against building a collective purpose that went beyond the interests of clan, status group, religion, and region. The Islamists filled the gap with a comprehensive ideology dedicated to a transcendent ideal.

This book offers a different vantage point. Drawing on extensive interviews with activists from across the political and social spectrum, I argue that Islamism and P.L.O. nationalism ("secular nationalism"), while analyzable as separate spheres with distinguishable institutions, symbols, and styles of discourse, practice, and sociability, have in reality undergone significant long-term transmutations as individuals across the political continuum have crossed over milieu boundaries and selectively drawn from both types of orientation to articulate new forms of political-cultural solidarity. These changes reflect a deeper, intrinsic reworking of inherited attitudes in response to the persisting destabilization of political life. With the weakening of the P.L.O. and the rise of the Islamist movements, the collective Palestinian narrative has become unraveled into multiple threads. As a metaphor for the current Palestinian plight, "unraveling" suggests not a neat splitting into opposing blocs but rather a complex process of unwinding and rewinding of narratives into new patterns with new strands of experience.

Palestinian society, as reflected in the perspectives of my interlocutors, does not fall neatly into two camps, Islamist or secular nationalist. This is not to say that these two blocs do not exist as real, competing formations within society; they do exist, and the findings of this book will build on, and deepen, the helpful work of already existing studies that document the history and ethos of the Islamist and secular-nationalist milieus. At the same time, however, what has remained unexamined is how diversely situated individuals at the ground level have negotiated the competing ideological claims of these formations. This missing ethnographic perspective reveals a far more complex picture, one in which individuals adapt and creatively recombine overlapping orientations into novel expressions of collective belonging. Thus, while this book employs the standard categories of "Islamist" and "secular nationalist," its results point beyond these rubrics toward new trajectories of political identity. The consequent payoff is a much more complex and grounded understanding of the multiple directions in which Palestinian politics are presently moving.

PALESTINIAN ISLAMIST MOBILIZATION IN REGIONAL PERSPECTIVE

The Palestinian case, as described in this book, also yields new and contrasting perspective at the regional level. Islamic religious revitalization in other parts of the contemporary Middle East occurs not as part of a general national liberation struggle in search of statehood but rather as an expression of a countercultural identity and corresponding politics of protest within already established nation-states. Much like conservative evangelical Christians in the United States, or Jewish fundamentalist movements in Israel, Islamism in these other settings identifies a perceived crisis of values within the nation and attempts to address this crisis through a retrieval of a more "authentic" religious past that is felt to have been elided both by the established bearers of religion (the scholars, or 'ulama') and contemporary secularized society, generally. This retrieval occurs through, among other ways, creation of parallel institutions (separate schools, social service agencies, etc.), deployment of alternative symbols of legitimacy ("Islamic" styles of dress and comportment, Qur'anic references in slogans and discourse, banners colored in green, the Prophet Muhammad's color, and so on), and direct action through party-political activism. When repressed by the state, as occurred, for instance, in Iran before 1979, in Egypt, and in Algeria, Islamists have often waged violent campaigns against governments. The purported goal of these struggles has been to reorient state and society toward a more thoroughgoing "pietymindedness," that is to say, a more profound sense of Islamic identity rooted in the reformation of cultural practices, legal structures, and governing institutions according to the religio-legal ethic of the shari'a.

(Continues...)

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