Part Five: The Politics of Memory and Commemoration

Abstract

To round out the discussion, Part Five addresses the politics of memory and commemoration—personal loss, public commemoration. The culture of commemoration created by Palestinian society during the second Intifada has imparted a unique national-group character to the loss of Palestinian children. The memorialization of the shaheeds is part of a covert mission to raise the level of awareness around the death of the children for a national political purpose of the first order. In this chapter, I try to show how the act of commemoration establishes a collective national identity in Palestinian society and transforms the personal sacrifice of Palestinian parents into a sacrifice for the collective and the homeland. I address the connection between memory, gender and culture, and the reciprocal interaction among them in relation to loss and trauma in Palestinian society. I concentrate on the question of how these interrelationships have led to the shaping of a national awareness and a national identity in relation to loss and trauma in Palestinian society, and how this is manifest in the Palestinian private and public space. I scrutinize the connection between commemoration, memory and gender, in an attempt to understand how the gender component manifests itself in Palestinian commemorative space and how the social power dynamics translate into the act of memorialization and influence its nature and content.