Tag Archives: displacement

Blog, Features, Staying-With Palestine. Making and Remaking Postcolonial Worlds

Arpan Roy: Introduction: Staying-With Palestine. Making and Remaking Postcolonial Worlds

Image 1: Palestine is not alone (2020), by Vishal V. Shenoy

Extrajudicial arrest, termination from employment, suspension of university enrollment, being declared persona non-grata (Karl 2025), police violence at demonstrations, harassment at airports, online doxxing, and, in the case of six-year old Wadea al-Fayoume, a martyrdom in a strange land—these are some of the ways in which solidarity with Palestine has, since October 2023, been rebuked in the Global North in unprecedented ways. We do not yet know the longue durée of how the annihilation of Gaza and the genocide of its people will recalibrate the way in which the world relates to Palestine. In the darker continents, and especially in the lands immediately surrounding Palestine—lands with which Palestine has historically been organically linked and nurtured—punishment for resisting injustice has been more damning. Al-Hudaydah Port in Yemen has been repeatedly targeted by American and Israeli weapons of mass destruction in retribution for the country’s military operations against Israel, and entire towns and villages in Lebanon have been wiped off the map, and thousands of its people martyred. Regardless of how one evaluates the political efficacy of Hezbollah’s involvement in the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation, it is difficult to argue that any people on earth have paid a higher price for standing with Palestine than the Lebanese. Elsewhere, for much of the last half-century, Palestine solidarity at the level of state policy has been neutralized by economic sanctions and has sometimes been engineered toward permanent instability through regime change wars, bringing poverty and civil conflict upon millions of people, particularly the Arab and Iranian people. Indeed, in the weeks during which I began writing these words, Iran fought for its survival, perhaps its survival at the level of civilization, in the face of an unprecedented Israeli aggression coordinated with much of the Global North.

This forum is an inquiry into what it means to stand with Palestine. It is an exploration of how Palestine has stayed-with “local” political contexts, and how it has survived setbacks and tribulations, and ultimately inspired a commitment. The five essays in this forum explore disparate contexts, each with its own geopolitical history and postcolonial trajectory, that has negotiated its commitment to Palestine in spite of this principled position having invited hardships and at times catastrophic consequences. Moreover, the essays are penned by scholars—a literary scholar, a historian, an anthropologist, and a philosopher—whose respective research is outside the geographic boundaries of Palestine, but which intersects in irretractable ways with Palestine. What to make of this irretractibility?

Inspired by the anthropologist Nazan Üstündağ’s (2023) remarkable recent ethnography of the Kurdish Movement, I term the affective and political committing to Palestine as a mode of “camaraderie.” Üstündağ translates the Kurdish hevalti, the semantic equivalent of the Arabic rifqa, as “friendship,” but, for reasons I will elaborate on shortly, it may be more accurate to expand its semantic range also to “companionship;” a richness of meaning most succinctly captured by “camaraderie.” Indeed, in leftist movements in Kurdish, Arab, and Anglophone worlds, a partner in revolution is, respectively, heval, rafiq, or comrade.

Üstündağ sees hevalti as designating a “position in a particular revolutionary grammar,” and the revolutionary movement as an “organization of relationships.” Camaraderie emerges from an “accumulated perspective and knowledge of the ways in which these relationships will be molded.” (Üstündağ 2023:142) I find this semantic sketch of camaraderie as a useful reference for how to think through committing to Palestine, particularly in the world’s leftist movements—historically the natural home of camaraderie with Palestine—in the sense that a commitment to the Palestinian cause organizes one’s more immediate political life in all kinds of practical ways. As Omid Mehgran writes in this forum, Palestine is a “mode of relating to the politics of material conditions of life that touches all forms of politicization in the globalized ecologies of war and of remnants of life today.”

The essays in this forum may very well evoke a certain melancholy. A hundred years of the Palestinian cause, and the support that it has received from various actors from various stages, has not resulted in the liberation of Palestine. Yet, Palestine has accompanied these actors and stages, as a comrade that becomes a part of one’s own life and politics, but without resolution. It is in part because of this (among other reasons) that I find the paradigm of “solidarity” to be useful but incomplete in theorizing state-level affects with Palestine as a world-leftist issue. This paradigm has been closely examined in scholarship in recent years, often focusing on the 1968-1982 period as the zeitgeist of a globalizing Palestine solidarity (Thompson & Olsen 2023, Randall 2023, Harrison 2016, Haugbolle & Olsen 2023), and also appears in the essays in this forum, particularly that by Olivia Harrison. At the same time, solidarity as a symbol of a mythologized world-leftist revolutionary moment—now gone—now appears often in a romantic lens conditioned by temporal distancing (see Abu Hatoum, & Assali 2024). While not negating the importance nor the veracity of the solidarity framework, the essays in this forum search for deeper epistemologies, placing emphasis on Palestine as a tragedy that inflicts its pain also onto other stages and contexts. It is also a creative and generative force; a point of inspiration for political mobilization (leftist, Arab nationalist, Islamist) for over half a century, lending its companionship to debates, impasses, countermovements, and a negotiating of local paradigms. It is in this sense a camaraderie, a companionship or a staying-with.

This forum mostly concentrates on “other” worlds—known by various names: postcolonial, Third World, Global South—because those are the ones whose entanglements with Palestine have been more direct and, in some cases, devastating. However, as the essays by Olivia Harrison and Nico Putz show, these worlds are not bounded, and interact in dynamic and complex ways with European and North American metropoles. Harrison traces discourses around decolonization in Algeria (the “Mecca of revolutionaries”) to anti-immigrant fervor in contemporary France, where “yesterday’s indigène has been transformed into an immigrant, and the settler of old has become a native.” In these discursive transformations from indigenous-immigrant and settler-native, it is Palestine that links the two ends of this transformation, saturating the time in between through its camaraderie with revolutionary cultural production by North African intellectuals. Putz, in his essay, shows how contemporary German leftist politics has been informed by a trajectory in which its ethical self-making has been in close dialectic with events in the postcolonial/Third world—Iraq, Yugoslavia, and above all Palestine—particularly in the reactionary Anti-Deutsche movement. Beginning as a communist-tinged leftist movement but the self-proclaimed vanguard of the politics of antisemitism, the Anti-Deutsche is a compelling case of how the Palestine question continues to interrupt and disorient European political life. Although ostensibly exiled from mainstream German politics, Putz shows how the exaggerated police repression of Palestine demonstrations in Germany since October 2023 is an embodiment of a decades-long German political trajectory in which Anti-Deutsche has found an unconscious place.

Discussing the multi-layered interplay between class, sectarianism, and the Palestinian Revolution during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), Aaron Eldridge reviews a major work by the iconic Lebanese leftist intellectual Mahdi Amil, who theorized the infestation of sectarianism in Lebanon, and all the mythic violence that it entailed, to be a metonymic expansion of class ideology. For Amil, the Civil War, if the reader allows my simplification of Eldridge’s complex and close reading of Amil, was a confrontation between the “dominant class,” composed of the Lebanese bourgeoisie dominated by those with material interests to protect, and the “revolutionary class,” the wretched of the Earth composed of the Palestinian revolutionaries and their allies. Materialist analysis of this kind, a long-held position by Lebanese (and generally Arab) leftists, locates the Palestinian cause embedded into the broader class politics of Lebanon and the region. Here, Palestine is not a site of “solidarity” between two struggles, but, rather, an index that organizes the politics of a given place, accompanying it at every step. Around 150,000 Lebanese were killed during the Civil War, and another 6,000 in the Israeli war campaigns since 2006. If one is to take Amil’s analysis seriously, to abandon the Palestinian cause in the Lebanese context would mean to abandon the materialist basis of society itself—an impossibility that Israel and the wider West is unwilling or unable to understand.

The fourth essay in this forum, by Omid Mehrgan, overviews the Palestinian cause as a central tenet of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and Palestine’s staying-with in Iranian politics as a principled commitment often to the detriment of the Revolution’s standing even to its own public. Mehrgan does not give cover to the many repressive policies of the Revolutionary government (nor do I), but he makes a lucid case linking a detachment from the Palestinian cause on the part of many anti-government activists in Iran since at least 2009 to a certain “apolitical radicalization;” a certain worldlessness that I think is perhaps best shorthanded by Alain Badiou’s (2009) critique of politics sometimes becoming mere “bodies and languages” without a militant commitment to a revolutionary Idea.

The final essay is a commentary on the forum by Laura Adwan. Commenting on the points discussed in the essays (as well as on this introduction), by exploring the case of Iraq since 2003 Adwan argues that Palestine does not only stay-with local contexts but also but also stands-in-for them, showing how echoes of Palestine ring out from Iraq since the American invasion. But these echoes do not only reverberate between bodies. As Adwan claims, the pain of Iraq is the pain of Palestine severed from what was once a possible singular political community. As such, the fragments of Palestine explored in the previous four essays are also fragments of a dismembered region, of which Iraq and Palestine are victims of a closely related human geography.

This forum was conceived in exceptional times. On the one hand, these essays are a response to the longevity and inextricability of the Palestinian question in a time in which Palestine is, in a very literal sense, undergoing destruction on an unprecedented scale. Of course, they do not come close to comprehensively surveying the entirety of the world scene, but they do illuminate the entanglements of the Palestinian question into other world-political questions. As Edward Said (1979) noted, a “question,” as a strictly political term, is something that is long-standing, intractable, and insistent, and, as such, it is something that stays-with us. This forum is also a friendly rejoinder to our comrades in the Global North, newly under duress in the bosom of Empire, to take stock of the global scene: a dismemberment of the political and social bodies nearest to Palestine—Lebanon and Syria—an unforgivable Gulf betrayal, and a late-stage Zionist colonialism making a desperate grasp for hegemony between the Nile and the Euphrates. Decolonization, to borrow again from Üstündağ (2025: 143), means “transforming life and death into offerings, thereby initiating new communications.” The task of committing to the emergency of the Palestinian cause, it seems to me, is to withstand the present ruptures. The five essays in this forum are invitations, albeit difficult, to old and new possibilities.

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Ahmad Moradi and Aaron Eldridge, conversations with whom inspired this forum.

Arpan Roy is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. He is the author of Relative Strangers: Romani Kinship and Palestinian Difference (University of Toronto Press, 2024) and the co-editor of Naseej: Life-Weavings of Palestine (Pluto Press, 2025).

References

Abu Hatoum, Nayrouz. & Assali, Hadeel (2024). Becoming Al-Mulatham/a: Fedayee Art, Abu Oubaida, and Palestinian TikTok. In D. Matar & H. Tawil-Souri (Eds.), Producing Palestine: The Creative Production of Palestine Through Contemporary Media (pp.51-62). Bloomsbury.

Badiou, Alain (2009). Logic of Worlds: Being and Event 2. Continuum.

Harrison, Olivia (2016). Transcolonial Cartographies: Kateb Yacine and Mohamed Rouabhi Stage Palestine in France-Algeria. In Singh, J. & Kim, D. (Eds.), The Postcolonial World (pp. 243-259). Routledge.

Haugbolle, Sune. & Olsen, Pelle (2023). Emergence of Palestine as a Global Cause. Middle East Critique *32* (1), 129-148.

Karl, Rebecca E. (2025). What Does It Mean to Be Declared Persona Non Grata by My University? Journal of Palestine Studies 54 (1), 77-81.

Randall, Jeremy (2023). Global Revolution Starts with Palestine: The Japanese Red Army’s Alliance with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East *43* (3), 358-369.

Said, Edward (1979). The Question of Palestine. Vintage.

Thomson, Sorcha & Olsen, Pelle (Eds.). (2023). Palestine in the World: International Solidarity with the Palestinian Liberation Movement. Bloomsbury.

Üstündağ, Nazan (2023). The Mother, the Politician, and the Guerrilla: Women‘s Political imagination in the Kurdish Movement. Fordham University Press.

Cite as: Roy, Arpan 2025. “Introduction: Staying-With Palestine. Making and Remaking Postcolonial Worlds” Focaalblog September 26. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/09/26/arpan-roy-introduction-staying-with-palestine-making-and-remaking-postcolonial-worlds/

Blog, Features, Taxonomies of Difference in Global Humanitarianism

Anne-Meike Fechter and Eileen May: Taxonomies of Difference and Inclusion: Notes From ‘Other’ Humanitarianisms

Items donated to people fleeing from fights on the border of Thailand, Kayin State, photo by Jacqueline Hpway

The call for looking at taxonomies of difference in global humanitarianism is a powerful reminder to consider how differences—as well as, we argue, affinities—shape humanitarian practices. Prompted by research with people displaced by violent conflict in the Myanmar borderlands near Thailand, we propose alternative perspectives. First, we suggest that the lens of ‘taxonomies of difference’ can be applied productively to humanitarianism itself. Beyond invoking a singular global humanitarianism, we are calling attention to what is often presented as an un-questioned standard. This is humanitarianism in its highly institutionalised form, often led by organisations from the Global North. This version of humanitarianism offers insights on how taxonomies such as of race, whiteness and more specifically antiblackness, materialise. While such inquiries are overdue, here we suggest that taxonomies of humanitarianisms which forefront such singular form, deserve questioning themselves.

Based on the findings from a larger research project specifically engaging with displacement-affected communities in Myanmar, it emerged that in geographical areas that were harder to reach for international organisations, for practical and political reasons, or where these had recently vacated a humanitarian space, a range of other humanitarian practices became visible. These include locally based civil society groups who step in to support internally displaced people (IDPs) through fundraising, donations, and providing emergency supplies. More broadly, it became clear that due to decades-long conflict, in several locations there were groups of people who had been displaced in earlier periods who were now, to some extent, providing short-term as well as longer-term resources to others including land, or setting up education centres for children and young people. There was thus not necessarily a clear division between those who were considered settled and those who were displaced. At the same time, there was not a hard line between beneficiaries or recipients on the one hand, and those supplying short-term aid on the other. While not all those who experienced displacement in the past support others, there is a fluidity between having been in need oneself, and, once in a more stable position, donating resources to new arrivals. One might understand such practices as vernacular, local, or everyday humanitarianism (Fechter, 2023). Irrespective of nomenclature, they unsettle a taxonomy of humanitarianism which centres the global North-dominated as a default form.

Such vernacular or everyday forms, beyond their ethnographic or empirical significance, hold the possibility of revisiting which taxonomies of difference matter in other humanitarianisms. As outlined in the other contributions, taxonomies centred on anti-Blackness, for example, define categories of exclusion, in stark contrast to what is sometimes presented as the impartiality and all-encompassing ‘humanity’ of global humanitarianism. Among displaced communities, we found that taxonomies of difference certainly matter. This can be in terms of ethnic as well as faith groups. The latter can constitute axes of exclusion, as in the case of one resettlement site which strongly favoured Buddhist faith groups, as opposed to Muslim ones. At the same time, some of these also create of grounds for inclusion. Indeed, a strong driver for humanitarian activity and resource-sharing evolved around taxonomies of affinity, perceived or constructed similarity, and shared biographies. For example, among ethnic Karen groups, Christian church networks, within Myanmar, across the border with Thailand, and further afield, became a significant source of donations. This was especially prominent during festive periods such as Christmas, or Karen New Year. Further, sharing food and resources among displaced people of common geographical origin mattered, as well as on grounds of shared ethnicity. The latter was formalised through ethnic armed organisations, their social welfare units and humanitarian efforts—aimed at, but not exclusively so, fellow ethnic community members. Similarly, substantial humanitarian support is being raised and facilitated through well-documented diaspora networks.

In sum, thinking through taxonomies of difference offers a much-needed opportunity to consider what shapes humanitarian practices, acknowledging that such re-assessment includes taxonomies of humanitarianism itself, as well as how people select, ignore, include or support others according to matrices of difference as well as affinity.

Anne-Meike Fechter is Professor of Anthropology and International Development in the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, UK. She currently works on informal aid among displaced people in Myanmar. Her most recent book is Everyday Humanitarianism in Cambodia (Manchester University Press, 2023).

Eileen May is a research fellow at the Covenant Development Institute in Myanmar and is a PhD student in Human Rights and Peace Studies at Mahidol University in Thailand.

References

Fechter, A.-M. 2023. Everyday Humanitarianism in Cambodia: Challenging Scales and Making Relations. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Cite as: Fechter, Anne-Meike & May, Eileen 2024. “Taxonomies of Difference and Inclusion: Notes From ‘Other’ Humanitarianisms” Focaalblog 28 October. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/10/28/anne-meike-fechter-and-eileen-may-taxonomies-of-difference-and-inclusion-notes-from-other-humanitarianisms/

Blog

Susann Kassem: Israel’s Looming Threat: Death, War and Displacement in Lebanon




Israel’s wall and de facto border with southeast Lebanon. Writing reads: “All resistance for the sake of Jerusalem.” Photo taken by author in summer 2023 near Adaysseh, Lebanon. 

“I cannot listen to the sound of the warplanes anymore, it sounds like they are flying over our roofs,” as a resident of a south Lebanese border village described the situation in South Lebanon on October 8. She, her family, and her extended family evacuated their villages of Mais el Jabal and Blida shortly afterwards. Since October 7, Hezbollah and Israel have been steadily increasing hostilities on Lebanon’s southern border, fueling fears among its inhabitants and raising the prospect of a full-on war between the two, which would be devastating for the region. It is imperative that the history of Israel’s bombardments, occupation, invasions of Lebanon, and the repeated forced displacement of its residents, is put at the forefront of our understanding of why the Lebanese front remains an active battleground.

The politics of displacement in South Lebanon

Not long after Hamas’ October 7 attacks, Israel deployed military vehicles northward, and reinforced the militarization of their northern border. War planes were constantly flying over South Lebanon and flare bombs were fired over the villages during the first few nights already. Hezbollah officially entered the battle on October 8, by targeting three Israeli military positions in the occupied Shebaa farms. Israel responded to this incident, and the violence has been increasing ever since. Since the beginning of the war on Gaza and as of January 19, Israel has launched at least 3,600 strikes on South Lebanon. In comparison, there have so far been about 920 strikes launched from Lebanon, mainly by Hezbollah. Most of Israel’s attacks have been focused on the area about 5-10 kilometers from the Israeli border; as a result more than 88,000 residents of this area have vacated their homes in the largest escalation of hostilities between Israel and Lebanon since the end of the 2006 war. As events unfolded, Israel moved its inhabitants of the northern border into shelters in other areas of the country.

Since the beginning of the hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel on October 8, nearly 200 people have been killed in South Lebanon by Israeli strikes. At least 40 of those killed are civilians and one Lebanese army soldier—the others, at least 144, are mostly Hezbollah members or fighters. Israel has targeted villages and towns throughout the south Lebanese border area. Israel has targeted Hezbollah, Lebanon’s most powerful armed political movement, but their attacks have also struck a wide range of civilians and state infrastructure. Over 34 attacks have been recorded against the Lebanese army, killing one soldier. Israel has attacked and killed civilians, explicitly and repeatedly targeted journalists, and struck houses and residential areas, public roads, mosques, churches, schools as well as a hospital, and health centers.

It is often the most vulnerable segments of the population that are forced to stay behind. The elderly, poor, and disabled are those who are physically unable to flee their homes, and therefore become victims of Israeli shelling and bombs. This is a tragedy all-too-well demonstrated in Aitarun, a village in the southeastern tip of Lebanon, where three young children and their grandmother were killed by an Israeli airstrike as they were evacuating. Their mother survived with critical injuries. Human Rights Watch called this attack an “apparent war crime.” On December 20, a civilian whose car broke down in the Marjayoun district was killed by an Israeli sniper, and a 70-year-old civilian was killed by an Israeli strike.

The economic and human tolls of the war

While aid organizations and individuals are providing some immediate relief, especially for those in shelters, the overall public awareness of the difficulties of the displaced is slim. The Lebanese government’s emergency plan is inadequate to say the least; it has not helped with evacuating or finding housing for its displaced. It has made some temporary shelters available for only a little over a thousand IDPs. The proportion of IDPs in collective shelters—mostly sections of still operating schools, or unfinished buildings—accounts for only 2 percent. The majority of the displaced are staying with close and extended relatives throughout Lebanon while others are renting a place independently, among other options. The needs of the displaced are less visible to the public. The ones who are renting housing are exposed to exorbitant rents without any oversight. If help is available, it is not advertised properly to people eligible to access it. This situation affects more than just Lebanese citizens: Syrians, both residents and refugees, many of whom have already been forcibly displaced multiple times and have fewer relatives in Lebanon that could host or support them.

The financial, physical, and psychological hardship on the displaced in the midst of Lebanon’s most severe economic crisis cannot be overstated. A great proportion of the southern Lebanese inhabitants are farmers and day laborers. They depend on their land for sustenance. Many find themselves traveling back and forth to the south, amidst heightened danger, especially for work. Some farmers who hold livestock have to stay or visit their property on an almost daily basis to care for their animals, despite ongoing attacks. The current conflict hit in the midst of the olive harvest season, on which many depend for at least part of their livelihoods. Villagers’ careful preparation of their muneh (preserved goods) is what traditionally gets them through the winter. This year, many villagers missed out on harvesting, preserving, and pressing their olives during this time, as well as preparing other kinds of preserves. Israel’s indiscriminate use of white phosphorus bombs in the fields throughout South Lebanonis further taking a vast environmental toll that will likely take years to recover from. Furthermore, December and January mark the season in which tobacco farmers sell their dried and packed up tobacco.

In addition to the war’s economic impact on South Lebanon, 52 schools had to close in the area, many since October 8. Seventeen of these are public schools whose closure impacts more than 6,000 children. An emergency plan by the caretaker Lebanese government to allow public school students to attend schools in their area of displacement, has only accommodated about 1,000 children.

The social impact of the war and displacement

This is not the first time South Lebanon had to face such scenarios, and its plight has still been misunderstood and downplayed by parts of the Lebanese public. The Israel Defense Forces has established a heavy military presence along the Lebanese border, and given the decades-long history of wars, invasions, occupations, and covert military action, the threat of another conflict had always loomed for people living in the area. Even in more “peaceful” times, including before October 7, the Israeli air force had conducted near daily incursions into Lebanese airspace, illegal under international law, sometimes deep into Lebanese territory. A report found that between 2006 and 2021, the Israeli military violated Lebanese airspace over 22,000 times. It used Lebanese airspace to strike Syria, such as on Christmas eve 2020 when fighter jets flew at low altitude over Beirut terrifying residents still reeling from the Beirut port explosion. Israel’s regular military exercises, sometimes conducted during key political moments, such as right before the Lebanese elections in 2009, are another form of intimidation and harassment.

The frequent and loud sound of cluster bombs being demined by the Lebanese army and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) further adds to the sound of the threat across the border. Israel dropped an estimated 4 million cluster munitions on Lebanon during the 2006 war, 90 percent of them in just the last three days of the conflict. It is estimated that one fourth of those bombs did not explode. Many farmers risk their lives working in fields contaminated with unexploded bombs.

Decades of continuous displacement

This current war and resulting displacement is yet another episode of wars the inhabitants of the border areas on the Lebanese side have been exposed to since Israel’s creation in 1948, known as “Nakba” or “catastrophe” in the Arab world. During Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, several Lebanese border villages were occupied alongside Palestinian villages and their residents displaced. Thirteen of these villages were returned with the signing of the Lebanese Israeli armistice agreement in 1949. Houses and historic and cultural sites were destroyed during this period and people had to rebuild their homes for the first of many times. For example, in Blida, one of the border villages under attack today, parts of the Ottoman mosque and several houses of people were destroyed in 1948. Residents in this border area have also lost large parts of their agricultural farmlands at the time. After 1948, a period of emigration to Beirut began, as the southern border villages lost their vital economic, social, and kinship ties to Palestine, disrupting social, economic, and trade relationships.

A gradual displacement of border inhabitants also occurred from the late 1960s onward. From 1967, the presence of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Lebanese groups fighting against Israel in South Lebanon began to grow. Israel responded to this mobilization by stepping up its attacks on Lebanese territory. Going beyond military targets, Israel attacked public infrastructure, including the Beirut airport, as well as civilian homes and fields, making livelihoods difficult in the south.

This most significantly culminated in Israel invading South Lebanon in 1978, in an attempt to destroy the PLO and its supporters. The consequences of this war were yet another major displacement of about 200,000 of southern Lebanese residents. In this campaign, Israel killed 1,000 to 2,000 Lebanese and Palestinians and leveled several towns and Palestinian refugee camps. Israel occupied South Lebanon from 1978 until 2000, during which many inhabitants of this border area lived through daily insecurity and indignity.

Between 1982-1985, the Israeli army occupied about half of the country reaching up to Beirut, laying siege to the capital in the summer of 1982. Israel is estimated to have killed more than 19,000 people that year alone. After this siege, many southern families living in Beirut returned to their villages, since the brunt of Israeli force was focused on the capital.

There were several additional Israeli military operations during the occupation of South Lebanon, such as Israel’s “Operation Accountability,” known in Lebanon as the 1993 Seven Day War. In this conflict, Israel killed about 120 Lebanese civilians and injured nearly 500 in what Human Rights Watch referred it as “a ferocious Israeli assault on population centers in southern Lebanon […] which also temporarily displaced some 300,000 Lebanese villagers and Palestinian refugees.” Operation “Grapes of Wrath” in 1996, known by the Lebanese as the “April Aggression,” displaced up to half a million residents in the south, and killed about 150 civilians, through the targeting of hospitals and UN shelters like during the Qana massacre on April 18.

Israel finally withdrew from most of South Lebanon in 2000, after attacks by local resistance groups, eventually led by Hezbollah, made its continued presence in Lebanon untenable. For much of the following six years, a fleeting period of stability reigned, in stark contrast to what preceded it.

During the 33-day 2006 war, residents of the southern border area as well as those in Beirut’s southern suburbs, were displaced—about one million in total. About 1,200 Lebanese, mostly civilians, and 160 Israelis, mostly soldiers, were killed. Israel severely damaged Lebanese infrastructure across the country and destroyed many homes in the targeted areas. Israel’s aim in the 2006 war was to substantially weaken or destroy Hezbollah, in which it was decisively unsuccessful. The war ended with the implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, which foresees the full respect of the Blue line, a temporary boundary demarcation in the absence of a peace agreement between Lebanon and Israel. It also calls for the Lebanese government to deploy its troops along the Lebanese border to replace Hezbollah’s presence, which was left to the government that is highly divided on the matter.

War and displacement in 2023

Since the 2006 war, there had been mutual deterrence between Hezbollah and Israel. Unlike previous wars where it felt unrestrained to strike with impunity, in the current war, Israel is calculating its strikes more carefully. Hezbollah’s stated rationale is to impose a cost on Israel for its assault on Gaza, and to keep part of Israel’s military forces tied down in the north. There is a tit for tat response for Israeli attacks by Hezbollah. Over the past few weeks, however, the attacks from both sides have become more intense, with Israel seemingly leading the scope of the attacks to which Hezbollah responds. So far however, Hezbollah, has reiterated that it is not interested in an escalation into a full scale war, but is prepared for such an event.

The current genocidal war on Gaza, sets an alarming precedent for what Israel’s military operations can get away with without being held accountable and for the nature of armed conflict in future. The current war between Lebanon and Israel seems to be only a teaser of what could potentially happen in the region if the war on Gaza continues. Several Israeli ministers have continuously threatened to turn Lebanon into Gaza. As this war of attrition continues, South Lebanon has been enduring daily strikes at an increased pace, with Israel striking villages further north, going deeper into the territory and targeting new places and villages by the day. Before long, it may reach the point of no return.

A longer version of this text was first published by the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy and it is republished here with the permission of the author and publisher. 

Susann Kassem is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, the University of Oxford. Her current research project explores the formation of political subjectivities during the multiple reorganizations of everyday life and forced migrations under the shifting borders and systems of rule in south Lebanese frontier villages.

Cite as: Kassem, Susann. 2024. “Israel’s Looming Threat: Death, War and Displacement in Lebanon” Focaalblog 22 February. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/02/22/susann-kassem-israels-looming-threat-death-war-and-displacement-in-lebanon/

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Céline Cantat: The reception spectacle: on Ukrainian displacement and selective empathy at Europe’s borders

Since the beginning of the Russian offensive on Ukraine on February 24th, over 5 million people have registered for temporary protection programmes and other schemes across Europe. By and large, Ukrainians have been granted access to assistance, and extended legal statuses allowing them to enter and settle in EU Member States. While this unusual generosity on the part of European States should be applauded, it has given rise to a range of questions about the differentiated treatment of Ukrainians as compared to other displaced groups. A result of this configuration, the many issues surrounding the engagement with Ukrainian displacement have been mainly framed in comparative terms: How have Ukrainians been received in comparison to refugees who arrived in 2015? Why have Ukrainians been allowed to settle in Europe when there are thousands stuck at the Belarus-Polish border? Why have non-Ukrainians fleeing Ukraine been treated differently? Consequently, the public debate has been largely dominated by calls for the inclusion of Ukrainians, suddenly considered to be Europe’s own, flanked by denunciations of the EU’s selective indignation as hypocritical and racist.

Image 1: Direction sign for Ukrainians Welcome Center at Paris-Beauvais Airport (France), photo by author

Beyond official responses by states and their institutions, civilian and grassroots reactions have also been polarised across such lines. When, in early March 2022, I visited Budapest’s train stations, where a range of NGOs and networks of residents were gathering to welcome people fleeing Ukraine, the question of the specific qualities and perceived features of people arriving were central to conversations. A volunteer with a Hungarian Church NGO, pointing in the direction of a woman and her three children, stated: “Look, they are tired, they are vulnerable women and children: they are the real refugees”. He went on to explain that he also came out to help people passing through Budapest in the summer 2015 even though, according to him, many at the time were not refugees but, “migrants or Islamic terrorists”. When I highlighted that, to my knowledge, what legally identified a refugee was the conflict or persecution they were fleeing from, rather than undefined notions of worth connected to their perceived gender, age, or religion, he emphasized that some people deserved asylum while others did not. 

Clearly, the discourse reiterated by some of the volunteers in Budapest went beyond their personal feelings: it built on categories produced by the European border and asylum regime over the last three to four decades. A cornerstone of that is the meticulous construction of a separation between (deserving) refugees and (undesirable) migrants. Within the category of refugees there is a further hierarchisation of deservedness, with different types of assistance (e.g., resettlement to the EU versus humanitarian aid abroad) being extended based on racialised profiling of their capacity for integration into the imagined community of Europe. In the volatile context of the “migration crisis” declared in the region in 2015, this discourse has gained centrality in Hungary and other Central and Eastern European countries. Injunctions to distinguish between “bad migrants” and “good refugees” became articulated with local regimes of social valuation and their racialised, gendered, class- and religion-based hierarchies in the context of regional capitalist transitions. This is closely connected to their own paths of ‘Europeanisation’: former Eastern bloc countries were unequally included into its regional divisions of labour, and have themselves been subjected to, and productive of, racializing dynamics. ‘Becoming European’ has involved claims to superiority, modernity, and whiteness, which have led to the renewed marginalisation’s of various groups – both domestic and non-domestic – and has given rise to articulate forms of racism.

In other words, unequal treatment of different displaced groups is not new and does not happen in a vacuum: even if the refugee as a legal construction claims to be a universal figure, it is in reality always embedded in local social relations. Quite the opposite, a longue durée examination of the relation between states and displacement shows that it has always been a story of selective engagement: systematically, the way states engage with certain groups teaches us more about their projects and political architectures than about the displaced individuals themselves. It is therefore important to go beyond moralised assessments of Europe’s current response to Ukrainian displacement, and to reflect on how states interpellate people moving across borders in relation to specific moral and political economies, which are themselves underpinned by broader projects such as nation-building and capital accumulation. From this perspective, the questions raised by the Ukrainian displacement in Europe become: under which circumstances do states welcome or reject displaced people? How is refugee reception shaped by larger historical processes and their legacy, including state-building, capital expansion and related projects such as colonial domination? How do moral hierarchies and constructions of race, gender, class, and religion, in the receiving states and nations, structure responses to displacement? 

Statecraft and the reception spectacle

As I have argued elsewhere (Cantat 2015), the refugee as a category and a figure is shaped and made in ways that are congenial to furthering states’ aims. My point is not that formal frames overdetermine responses to displacement. Yet informal initiatives still respond to dominant discursive and political reception regimes: the space for creative responses remains moulded by their opposition and denunciation of overarching power structures. To further reflect on the parallels and contrasts between current responses to Ukrainian displacement and engagement with previous episodes of forced mobility, I will reflect on specific displacement episodes and assess how the figure of the refugee has been built historically. This historicization will help us understand the differences and similarities in states’ mechanisms of interpellation of different groups, both over time and across categories.

A classic example in recent history of how the category of the refugee has been shaped by states’ circumstances can be found in the Geneva Convention itself. Presented as a text with universal validity in order to protect people fleeing persecution, the definition of the refugee in fact (re)produces a very specific figure: that of a man fleeing the USSR in the context of the Cold War aiming to join the capitalist West. The restrictive criteria outlined in the Convention regarding refugee status constantly prove to be inadequate for providing appropriate protection to people fleeing a range of violent situations. First, of course, those fleeing economic violence and devastation, considered outside the scope of asylum. But also, those fleeing different configurations of political and social persecution that do not abide by the vision of the world underpinning the Convention.

Going back into past displacements, something which, as noted by Philip Marfleet (2007), neither historians nor refugee scholars are particularly good at for different reasons, allows us to assert yet more clearly that histories of exiles are always underpinned by states’ demands for hospitality or hostility to different groups. Besides, neither hospitality nor rejection are homogeneous circumstances, and states may often be ready to accommodate refugees without actually welcoming them, for instance by allowing people to integrate within labour markets while at the same encouraging discourses of exclusion or refusing them legal statuses and protections. Discursive constructions of displaced populations intersect both with the valuation regimes and social hierarchies that structure host states’ bio–political architectures, by which I mean regimes of race/gender/class (etc.) as articulated with the geopolitics and interstate relations of the moment.

An important example of this can be found in the stories of Huguenot displacements in the 16th and 17th centuries. The flight of 200 000 Huguenots to Geneva, Holland, and England, as they feared persecution from the French absolutist Catholic authorities of the time, is often seen as one of the earliest episodes of contemporary refuge, not because Huguenots were the first group to flee a territory due to violence, but because they were chased away by a state project and received by other states defining themselves against that. It is understood that the word “refugee” entered vernacular language for the first time during this episode. The emerging English and Dutch states promoted openness to those refugees, who came from relatively wealthy commercial backgrounds, including the slave trade, and spectacularized their welcoming attitude as a proof of their attachment to liberalism and religious freedom. This self-presentation was central to their opposition to the French absolutist state. In England, while historical sources show widespread popular hostility towards the Huguenots, the state engaged in a mass sympathy campaign, explaining to people that welcoming Huguenots was a matter of national pride and of, indeed, upholding values of tolerance.

The discourse of brotherhood was also framed in terms of religious proximity. But such categories of belonging are not static. They are insufficient for understanding reception attitudes: we need to recognize racialization, legitimization, and differentiation as dynamic and contingent processes that evolve across time and according to political circumstances. In fact, 50 years later, the Palatines, another group of Protestants fleeing Germany, was seeking refuge in England. Coming from a formally allied and Protestant state, they were received with great hostility. Many were placed in what are believed to be the first refugee camps of contemporary England, along the Thames, before being resettled to Ireland and British America. A highly polarised political debate with similar arguments as those that we now hear regarding the merits of migration and the (im)possibility of integration emerged in England at the time. This underlines that there is nothing new or specific about the unequal treatment of different displaced groups. It also shows that selective empathy tells us very little – perhaps nothing – about groups per se, their circumstances, needs or characteristics: it would be misleading to try to identify reasons for this differentiated treatment in specific qualities of individuals. What is at stake, always, in the relation between state authorities and displaced people is various forms of statecraft and state power.

The famous notion of “border spectacle”, which Nicholas de Genova (2013) has usefully mobilised to examine how exclusion is staged at the border to showcase the state as the protector of a national public that is simultaneously coalesced, has already taught us a lot about how the nation/state/citizen triad is produced in relation to displacement, exile, and borders. Similar observations can be drawn from other episodes where welcoming and hospitality become spectacularized by state authorities. Questions we must ask ourselves to understand selective empathy are never about whether people deserve a better treatment or not, but always about how their inclusion or rejection promote specific state projects at any given moment.

Ukrainian displacement and European belonging

In the case of Ukrainian displacement, discourses about Europe, whiteness, and European belonging have secured people access to reasonable reception conditions. In this context, grassroots reception practices have also been numerous, diverse, and consistent. They have been able to assert themselves publicly in ways that have been altogether forbidden and impossible in other displacement episodes, which were often characterised by the criminalisation of informal aid. This, together with the adoption of legal frameworks allowing Ukrainians fleeing Ukraine (but no other groups!) to cross EU national borders and choose where to settle, can be applauded as not only a uniquely welcoming set of policies but in fact the first properly coherent approach that the EU has ever adopted in relation to displacement. This is a welcome shift from the securitizing response usually reserved to those seeking asylum, which is not just chaotic but also, on many occasions, lethal.

There already are, however, serious issues to consider when we look at the way Ukrainians are being received in Europe. First, the activation of temporary protection schemes, has not meant access to regular (and more protective) asylum regimes. Second, across Europe, the bulk of reception work has been delegated to civilian networks and small-scale organisations. This is the result of decades of neoliberal sub-contracting of public responsibilities to private actors. This continued delegation of responsibility has meant the revival of aid networks formed in 2015: the flexibility and responsiveness of these loser structures, easily reactivated via social networks, was crucial for the execution of reception activities in the first weeks of the conflict. However, as everywhere, the capacity of civil society to fill gaps left by withdrawing states has its obvious limits. We are already seeing how the tide is turning, with volunteers becoming less willing to host the displaced in their homes and tiring from daily assistance activities. In the absence of a coordinated state response this can only deteriorate.

As we have seen in Greece for example, there is no more efficient way to turn popular sympathy into hostility than letting a situation worsen without states providing adequate support to both exiles and host communities. Importantly, while grassroots support activities do not always reproduce government categories developed by states and institutions, they always produce and navigate a sense that practising solidarity is a messy business in contexts of limited resources (Cantat 2018, 2020, 2021). Distributive dilemmas always involve representations, typologies, and moral economies, where (consciously or not) people’s deservingness is assessed by those who have to decide whom and how to help in specific contexts.

In fact, there is nothing inherently progressive to grassroots assistance as compared to state support or the formal aid sector: such initiatives follow their own politics and ethics, build specific socialities and respond to different circumstances. Often, when those circumstances are not clarified, e.g., when people are moved to help by unexamined desires to do good, informal support can fuel extremely unbalanced and unequal power relations. Those may be even more difficult to contest as they take place outside a formalised aid relation where roles are clearly defined and distributed: they might come together with powerful discourses that neutralise criticism, be it religious charity, claims to horizontality, or demands for gratitude. Even when relations are clarified, it is hard to escape combination and hybridization in solidarity practices: doing good and progressive politics usually exist together and this can make people who are the object of help very vulnerable.

This vulnerability is made more problematic because citizens of host countries have been moved into assisting Ukrainians in the name of moral imperatives, rather than because it is considered a public service that states ought to provide to people based on their statuses. If Ukrainians are now being supported in the name of some unstable construction of European belonging, then it begs the question: how long will Ukrainians remain so white? Europeanness is not a homogeneous and stable condition: the EU has produced shades of European belonging where Eastern Europe has always been seen as less belonging, less European, and somehow less legitimate – even for those countries who have become member states. The example of the Brexit campaign is just another reminder of how strong intra-European racism remains.

In the current context of the EU’s mobilisation against Russia, Ukrainians’ Europeanness is strongly asserted, but it could just as well be tempered, questioned, or sacrificed when geopolitics evolve. If so, the lack of deployment of proper state support and the overreliance on popular assistance will become highly problematic. We already see processes of differentiated inclusion unfolding with questions around the type of access that Ukrainians get to different social spheres: for instance, in Hungary, work permits are not needed for certain types of jobs where there are shortages – mostly manual, in the agrarian sector and catering, but also in IT. This in fact reiterates previous labour migration patterns whereby racialised Ukrainian labour has been allowed in the country in order to serve specific industries.

The direction in which Ukrainian instrumentality to the EU’s ideological and economic structures will evolve is far from obvious. Above all, the situation demands that we insist on the continuity of solidarity on the ground of a real grassroots internationalism and that we keep demanding public support for all displaced groups.

Céline Cantat is Visiting Lecturer in Migration Studies and Academic Director for the Masters in Environmental Policy and in Energy Transitions at the Paris School of International Affairs, Sciences Po.

This text was developed as part of the EASA fundraising webinar Humanitarian responses to the 2022 Russian war on Ukraine: anthropological perspectives, 07/06/2022, convened by Ela Drazkiewicz and Mariya Ivancheva, and co-sponsored by SIEF and AAA’s SOYUZ, Society for the Anthropology of Europe.

References

Cantat, Céline (2021) “Refugee Solidarity Along the Balkan Route”, Journal of Refugee Studies, 34 (2), 1348–1369.

Cantat, Céline (2020) “The Rise and Fall of Migration Solidarity in Belgrade”, movements. Journal for Critical Migration and Border Regime Studies, 5 (1), http://movements-journal.org/issues/08.balkanroute/05.cantat–the-rise-and-fall-of-migration-solidarity-in-belgrade.html.

Cantat, Céline (2015) “Contesting Europeanism: Discourses and Practices of Pro-Migrant Groups in the European Union”. PhD Thesis, roar.uel.ac.uk/4618/  

Cantat, Céline (2018) “The politics of refugee solidarity in Greece: Bordered identities and political mobilization”, MigSol Working Paper, 2018/1, https://cps.ceu.edu/sites/cps.ceu.edu/files/attachment/publication/2986/cps-working-paper-migsol-d3.1-2018.pdf

De Genova, Nicholas (2013) “Spectacles of migrant ‘illegality’: the scene of exclusion, the obscene of inclusion”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36 (7), 1180-1198,

Marfleet, Philip (2007) “Refugees and History: Why We Must Address the Past”, Refugee Survey Quarterly, 26 (3), 136–148.

Cite as: Cantat, Céline. 2022. “The reception spectacle: on Ukrainian displacement and selective empathy at Europe’s borders.” Focaalblog, 28 June. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/06/28/celine-cantat-the-reception-spectacle-on-ukrainian-displacement-and-selective-empathy-at-europes-borders/