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Life Lived in Relief: Humanitarian Predicaments and Palestinian Refugee Politics
Palestinian refugees’ experience of protracted displacement is among the lengthiest in history. In her breathtaking new book, Ilana Feldman explores this community’s engagement with humanitarian assistance over a seventy-year period and their persistent efforts to alter their present and future conditions. Based on extensive archival and ethnographic field research, Life Lived in Relief offers a comprehensive account of the Palestinian refugee experience living with humanitarian assistance in many spaces and across multiple generations. By exploring the complex world constituted through humanitarianism, and how that world is experienced by the many people who inhabit it, Feldman asks pressing questions about what it means for a temporary status to become chronic. How do people in these conditions assert the value of their lives? What does the Palestinian situation tell us about the world? Life Lived in Relief is essential reading for anyone interested in the history and practice of humanitarianism today.
- GenresNonfictionAnthropology
337 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 30, 2018
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August 24, 2021
2.5 stars. I've thought a lot about this book and how I want to talk about it -- I am not an academic, I am not an anthropologist, and I have no humanitarian aid background, so I am very much not the target audience. I am just someone who was interested in the topic and picked it up because I wanted to know more.
I'm going to start with the positives, because I do want to be fair to this book. The author clearly did tons of research and fieldwork, and that shows through. I am thinking about the world differently than I was before I picked it up. Apparently, from reading academic reviews of the book, her generational approach to refugee feeling is new and exciting and, while I didn't pick up on that, I did like the generational approach, and that she talked to and quoted multiple generations and went over the generational differences of experience, with the context of what aid was available when in the camps she was talking about. The conflict between aid and politics was a through-line I thought she handled well -- the reason for the tension is obvious and was clearly laid out.
The bad -- the writing is clumsy and frequently impenetrable on a prose level. For example: "Nonetheless, until the signing of the Oslo accords, the complete PLO refocus upon the occupied territories, and the entrance of the World Bank and its "Washington consensus" into the Palestinian economic landscape, Samed continued to declare a "revolutionary responsibility." (page 206)
The choice of structure, split into the humanitarian condition (prolonged), vs humanitarian situation (acute crises) worked better conceptually than in actuality. It would have been easier and clearer if presented chronologically. The whole thing was so repetitive that with a solid edit, it could probably have been cut in half. I can, however, deal with dry or clumsy writing and bad structure. The worst part, to me, was the bias.
The author's persistent anti-Israel bias undermined the entire book to me. One of the more dramatic examples is talking about Hamas as a humanitarian agency (page 133, footnote 12: "Both the PLO and Hamas -- at the moment, the two main institutional actors on the Palestinian political scene -- negotiate with humanitarian agencies, discourses, and law, as well as engaging in humanitarian work themselves"), and not mentioning once, in the entire book, Hamas' rocket launches or suicide bombings, or that Hamas provides more support to the families of those killed attacking Israel. Instead, there's the vague "armed action." (p133)
In her timeline of the Middle East, at the end of the book, the Yom Kippur War is not mentioned, though Israeli aggression in 1972 and 74 are. When there is conflict between Palestinian refugees and host countries, she twists herself into knots in order to reduce Palestinian actions that may have escalated tensions. This sort of talking around uncomfortable facts is all over the book. For example, Samed featured heavily in chapter 7 as an alternative type of humanitarianism, and Feldman used the word "revolutionary" a lot of times without talking about what they actually did -- when I googled, it turns out that for many years, they handled the cash compensation for martyrs killed attacking Israel.
On a milder level, the framing was always deeply anti-Israel, and really, anti-Jews in the Middle East. For example, from page 24: "[Palestinian displacement] began before 1948, as Zionist settlers in Palestine colonized territory and removed the previous inhabitants from their land," with the footnote, "Some wealthy Palestinian landowners sold land to Zionist settlers.... but the numbers were small. By 1948 only about 6 percent of the country's land was under Jewish ownership."
Throughout the book, the author's framing came across as if Palestinians could never be responsible for tensions or violence, which I find infantilizing, and feel that it reduces the agency of the refugees. Given that there are multiple chapters spent on the efforts of refugees to regain and claim agency, this infantilization feels.... not great. Israel has certainly been the aggressor in many situations, and the occupation of the West Bank is atrocious. I don't want to overcompensate in the other direction, just because I'm feeling contrary -- what I want is for the book to portray historical events accurately. If she believes that PLO/Hamas/other group violence is justified, I would like for her to say that, instead of pretending it never happened.
Overall -- I certainly learned a lot about the humanitarian aid apparatus, so I guess the author accomplished what she set out to in that respect. Unfortunately, I found the actual reading to be incredibly unpleasant, and it's left a bad taste in my mouth.
I'm going to start with the positives, because I do want to be fair to this book. The author clearly did tons of research and fieldwork, and that shows through. I am thinking about the world differently than I was before I picked it up. Apparently, from reading academic reviews of the book, her generational approach to refugee feeling is new and exciting and, while I didn't pick up on that, I did like the generational approach, and that she talked to and quoted multiple generations and went over the generational differences of experience, with the context of what aid was available when in the camps she was talking about. The conflict between aid and politics was a through-line I thought she handled well -- the reason for the tension is obvious and was clearly laid out.
The bad -- the writing is clumsy and frequently impenetrable on a prose level. For example: "Nonetheless, until the signing of the Oslo accords, the complete PLO refocus upon the occupied territories, and the entrance of the World Bank and its "Washington consensus" into the Palestinian economic landscape, Samed continued to declare a "revolutionary responsibility." (page 206)
The choice of structure, split into the humanitarian condition (prolonged), vs humanitarian situation (acute crises) worked better conceptually than in actuality. It would have been easier and clearer if presented chronologically. The whole thing was so repetitive that with a solid edit, it could probably have been cut in half. I can, however, deal with dry or clumsy writing and bad structure. The worst part, to me, was the bias.
The author's persistent anti-Israel bias undermined the entire book to me. One of the more dramatic examples is talking about Hamas as a humanitarian agency (page 133, footnote 12: "Both the PLO and Hamas -- at the moment, the two main institutional actors on the Palestinian political scene -- negotiate with humanitarian agencies, discourses, and law, as well as engaging in humanitarian work themselves"), and not mentioning once, in the entire book, Hamas' rocket launches or suicide bombings, or that Hamas provides more support to the families of those killed attacking Israel. Instead, there's the vague "armed action." (p133)
In her timeline of the Middle East, at the end of the book, the Yom Kippur War is not mentioned, though Israeli aggression in 1972 and 74 are. When there is conflict between Palestinian refugees and host countries, she twists herself into knots in order to reduce Palestinian actions that may have escalated tensions. This sort of talking around uncomfortable facts is all over the book. For example, Samed featured heavily in chapter 7 as an alternative type of humanitarianism, and Feldman used the word "revolutionary" a lot of times without talking about what they actually did -- when I googled, it turns out that for many years, they handled the cash compensation for martyrs killed attacking Israel.
On a milder level, the framing was always deeply anti-Israel, and really, anti-Jews in the Middle East. For example, from page 24: "[Palestinian displacement] began before 1948, as Zionist settlers in Palestine colonized territory and removed the previous inhabitants from their land," with the footnote, "Some wealthy Palestinian landowners sold land to Zionist settlers.... but the numbers were small. By 1948 only about 6 percent of the country's land was under Jewish ownership."
Throughout the book, the author's framing came across as if Palestinians could never be responsible for tensions or violence, which I find infantilizing, and feel that it reduces the agency of the refugees. Given that there are multiple chapters spent on the efforts of refugees to regain and claim agency, this infantilization feels.... not great. Israel has certainly been the aggressor in many situations, and the occupation of the West Bank is atrocious. I don't want to overcompensate in the other direction, just because I'm feeling contrary -- what I want is for the book to portray historical events accurately. If she believes that PLO/Hamas/other group violence is justified, I would like for her to say that, instead of pretending it never happened.
Overall -- I certainly learned a lot about the humanitarian aid apparatus, so I guess the author accomplished what she set out to in that respect. Unfortunately, I found the actual reading to be incredibly unpleasant, and it's left a bad taste in my mouth.
Displaying 1 of 1 review