Palestinians in Syria: Nakba Memories of Shattered Communities By Anaheed al-Hardan

Abstract

Palestinians in Syria is an exceptional and extremely timely work. Through her stunning ethnographic and sociological research, Professor Al-Hardan, herself a third-generation refugee, takes us into the once thriving—but now largely (for the second time) displaced and devastated—Palestinian community in Syria, about which little has been written. Most of her research took place before the Syrian civil war, which allowed Al-Hardan access to a community and way of life that no longer exist as they did for over 60 years. In this way, among others, Palestinians in Syria is invaluable as an historical and political document, and a singularly important and substantive contribution to the literature on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the Nakba, and refugee studies among other more general areas of study. The author addresses a range of interconnected and powerfully articulated issues; among them: the intellectual origins of the Nakba, ‘a historically and politically contingent signifier’ (p. 187) in Arab nationalist discourse and its political appropriation by the Palestinian national movement; the different (and sometimes divergent and contradictory) ways in which the Nakba and its narratives are understood, memorialized and mobilized by three generations of Palestinians in Syria, which al-Hardan makes clear is not without controversy and pain; the transmission of loss, the role of memory and the (re)creation of ‘place’ among a people who, at the time of the research, had been displaced for six decades; and the meaning of identity, dispossession and exile among first-, second-, and third-generation Palestinians in Syria and its translation—or not—into differing expressions of political awareness and activism.