On the Exclusion of the Palestinian Nakba from the “Trauma Genre”

Author(s): Rosemary Sayigh

Source: Journal of Palestine Studies , Vol. 43, No. 1 (Autumn 2013), pp. 51-60
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Institute for Palestine
Studies
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jps.2013.43.1.51

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 On the Exclusion of the Palestinian
Nakba from the “Trauma Genre”

ROSEMARY SAYIGH
The extensive literature on trauma, social suffering, memory and loss has so far
excluded consideration of the Palestinian Nakba, in spite of its place in world
politics, its many similarities to other cases of social suffering, and the unusual
feature of its continuation and escalation more than sixty years after the
expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland. This paper examines this exclusion
through reviewing the genealogy, theoretical orientations, and institutional
supports of the “trauma genre,” from its crystallization in the early 1990s, through
its expansion up to today. The idea of the way the communication of suffering
is facilitated within “moral communities” is invoked as one kind of explanation
of the trauma genre’s failure to consider the Nakba.

Introduction

A Palestinian woman, twice displaced, first from Palestine in 1948, and then from Syria in 2012,
gave the following testimony:
I was six and a half when we left [Palestine]. We were in Wadi Salama near Bint Jbeil, between two
mountains, staying under the olive trees. People were harvesting the wheat. My mother covered
us with wheat stalks. Israeli planes came and bombed the olive trees and the cactus. They bombed
everything. My uncle was killed. Where could we go? We slept on the road [cries]. . . . I was crying,
“Mama, I want to drink.” There was a Lebanese policeman. The pool was as large as this sitting
room. It had a tap. I said “Uncle, uncle! Give me some water.” I still remember. I was six and a
half. He said, “I can’t give you water until the sergeant comes.”

My family stayed here [in ‘Ayn al-Hilwa], I married someone from Syria. . . . To Yarmuk!
Yarmuk! We were fine in Yarmuk. But where is it now? Now people are scattered, some
here, some there. Those who had money left, those who had a car left, but the poor—where can
they go?

Journal of Palestine Studies Vol. XLIII, No. 1 (Autumn 2013), p. 51, ISSN: 0377-919X; electronic ISSN: 1533-8614. © 2014 by the Institute for Palestine
Studies. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California
Press’s Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/jps.2013.43.1.51.

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The Nakba’s Exclusion from the “Trauma Genre”

The war started . . . problems . . . bullets. We weren’t afraid. They attacked the camp for two or
three days. The young men of the quarter stood at every entry; they didn’t let them come in to
the houses. There were bullets near our house. We weren’t afraid. The airplane came and hit its
target. We weren’t afraid. Then mortars started coming down, in front, behind, all round us.
Houses collapsed. The doors flew; the windows went. We left under the shelling. We went to
Khan al-Sheikh, me, my daughter-in-law, her children, and my children. There wasn’t time to
take clothes, just the kids. As we were leaving, a mortar came down between us and the pharmacy.

We stayed a month in Khan al-Sheeh, and then we came here. We didn’t want to leave
Syria—does anyone want to leave their home? My husband is still there. My daughter is
there, she is married and has five children. [cries] There! In Damascus! And my other
daughter. Everybody is somewhere. Here, there’s no work, no food [cries]. My other son
stayed there in his house, under the shelling. Yesterday, there was fighting [in Yarmuk].

Someone asks: Do you expect to go back to Yarmuk?

The speaker begins to cry:
What can I tell you? Before we left my husband gave me the key and said, “Take the key in case
you don’t find me when you get back.”
At least, let us go back to Palestine!1

The Trauma Genre: A Critique

Against this elderly Palestinian woman’s narrative, I present an analysis of a field of studies called
the “trauma genre.” The trauma genre, which began in the early 1990s with studies that focused on
the Holocaust by Caruth, as well as Felman and Laub,2 assembles a mass of case studies, experiences,
and discourses on suffering worldwide that make an implicit claim to universality and inclusiveness.
Yet one must ask whether the trauma genre does not itself set up “cultural frames of reference”
that delimit what it recognizes as suffering. Have the witnesses whose writing constitutes the
trauma genre—psychologists, literary scholars, film makers, social scientists—selectively focused
on particular cases of social suffering, highlighting some and excluding others?
The interview quoted above conveys the immensity of the Nakba and its continuation as an
ongoing source of suffering for the Palestinian people. The Nakba is the historical circumstance
which caused the displacement of the Palestinians, and continues today to disconnect them from
their homeland, their communities, and their history. The loss of recognition of their rights to
people- and state-hood created by the Nakba has led to an exceptional vulnerability to violence, as
their desperate current situation in Syria shows. However, even as the trauma genre has expanded
over the years to include work on memory, mourning, and postcolonial trauma, the Palestinian
Nakba remains glaringly absent from the field. Suffering is a phenomenon that cannot be
measured, and therefore discourses on suffering become a matter of the personal outlook and
biases of scholars, editors and publishers within the genre. In this paper, I review the origins and
expansion of the trauma genre, as well as the way that Palestinians are framed in the few instances

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 The Nakba’s Exclusion from the “Trauma Genre”

they are taken as objects of study. By taking into account the powerful sponsors of research and
publishing in the field of “trauma,” I raise questions about the extent to which racism and Western
ethnocentrism have entered into the genre’s orientations.
Though the trauma genre began with the Holocaust studies of Caruth and Felman and Laub, it
is the three volumes edited by Arthur Kleinmann, Veena Das, and others—Social Suffering (1997),
Violence and Subjectivity (2000), and Remaking a World (2001)—which are generally recognized
as the foundational references of the trauma genre. In his celebrated work on “humanitarian
governance,” Didier Fassin notes their “marked influence on the scientific field and beyond,”
extending to policy makers and the lay public.3 These three volumes, which I shall refer to for the
sake of brevity by the names of Kleinmann and Das, introduce the perspectives towards world
suffering that justify use of the term “genre” in spite of variation in thematic emphasis. Social
suffering, they say in the introduction to the first volume:
. . . brings into a single space an assemblage of human problems that have their origins and
consequences in the devastating injuries that social force can inflict on human experience. Social
suffering results from what political, economic, and institutional power does to people and, recip-
rocally, from how these forms of power themselves influence responses to social problems.4

On a theoretical level, Kleinmann and Das propose a new language, one of “dismay,
disappointment, bereavement, and alarm” rather than “the usual terminology of policy and
programs.”5 In this respect, the purpose appears to be to sensitize and mobilize public opinion to
stand in for the failure of states to prevent or limit violence. Scholars of the trauma genre
introduce historical and existential crises to become a defining element of the trauma genre, and
with it, the central role of the witness who both elicits testimonies of trauma and conveys them to
the outside world. The witness remains a polyvalent figure throughout the trauma genre, bringing
forth testimonies, making them text, and conveying them to the public, who must be mobilized to
prevent such catastrophes, because habitual mechanisms such as governments and international
law have failed and are likely to fail again in the future.
The first of the three Kleinmann and Das volumes, Social Suffering, deals with “sources and
major forms of social adversity, with an emphasis on political violence.”6 The second, Violence and
Subjectivity, “examines the processes through which violence is actualized.”7 Finally, the third,
Remaking a World, looks at how “communities ‘cope’ with—read, endure, work through, break
apart under, and transcend traumatic violence and other, more insidious forms of social suffering.” 8
The Holocaust remains a basic reference of exceptional violence in the Kleinmann and Das series,
but whereas Felman, Laub, and Caruth were solely concerned with European history and literature,
the Kleinmann and Das series moves out into the non-Western world, adopting ethnography as the
preferred lens for studying suffering universally. It is precisely this step that exposes the trauma
genre to the charge of lack of critical self-reflection, undertaken without theorizing either the
relationship between the West and the non-West, or how ethnography itself has served to create and
sustain this dichotomy both ideologically and politically.
Later examples of the genre adopt both literary and ethnographic models, sometimes
emphasizing aesthetic expressions of trauma,9 while at others leaning towards ethnographic studies

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The Nakba’s Exclusion from the “Trauma Genre”

of suffering in Western and non-Western worlds.10 Even in these extensions, however, trauma genre
scholars never theorize the field in terms of global power asymmetry or ethnography’s origins as
a Western method of studying the non-Western world. Nor do Kleinmann and Das clarify
how suffering in the non-Western world may differ from European modes in its causes,
local understandings, forms of expression, and techniques of treatment. They begin from a
commonsense notion of universality, cleansed of the histories that have produced, and continue
to reproduce, global inequality.
Kleinman and Das’s inclusion of several Holocaust studies together with numerous cases of civil
conflict suggest that war trauma is a major concern. But which wars? Here we find a shortening
of historical perspective that specifically excludes “(h)istorical memories of suffering—e.g., slavery,
the destruction of aboriginal communities, wars, genocides, imperialistic and post-imperialistic
oppression.”11 Indeed, Kleinman and Das view such memories as potential causes of violence,
noting that “they have present uses . . . to authorize nationalism or class or ethnic resistance.”12
The reader may ask why racial, regional, national, class, and ethnic struggles for justice should be
presented as causes rather than as results of violence. Though Kleinmann and Das express a
concern with “the workings of power in social life,” their work pays little attention to colonialism
as a cause of world suffering.
Given this historical perspective, it is not surprising that Talal Asad is the only contributor to
Social Suffering to remind readers of colonialism. Asad highlights how discourses on torture and
human rights deflect attention from causes of suffering such as wars, which result in massive
impositions of pain and suffering on whole populations. This criticism applies to Kleinmann and
Das, who reproduce a geo-temporal-political boundary between regions that have historically
generated violence through a near-monopoly over the means of force, and regions where violence
develops through conflict for scarce resources, or hatreds exacerbated by colonialist control.
Kleinmann and Das illustrate this point most forcefully by disregarding colonialism as cause of
suffering in the present. The ethnographic method plays into this foreshortening of historical
perspective through its limited temporality and local focus.13
In the introduction to their second volume, Violence and Subjectivity, Kleinmann and Das write:
A new political geography of the world has emerged in the last two decades, in which whole areas
are marked off as “violence-prone areas,” suggesting that the more traditional spatial divisions,
comprising metropolitan centers and peripheral colonies, or superpowers and satellite states, are
now linguistically obsolete.14

This marking off of certain areas as “violence-prone” disconnects violence in those areas from
historic centers of international military, political, and economic power. The focus of trauma
genre case studies on civil conflicts within postcolonial states such as India, Ireland, Sri Lanka,
Guatemala, and South Africa, veils the colonial histories that have been, and often still are, major
contributors to such conflicts. Here, it is important to discriminate between two uses of the term
postcolonial: one that intends the meaning that colonialism has ended, and the other that sees
colonialism as manifesting itself today in different ways than from in the past, through indirect
rather than direct forms of control.15 The neglect of colonialism encapsulated in Kleinmann and

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 The Nakba’s Exclusion from the “Trauma Genre”

Das’s phrase “violence-prone areas” is reproduced throughout the trauma genre in the form of
micro-level and, for the most part, ahistorical case studies.
Since Kleinmann and Das, the trauma genre has rapidly proliferated, branching out into studies
of memory, mourning and melancholy, the politics of witness, sexual abuse, racism, homophobia,
and postcoloniality. Expansion has brought an ever greater number of case studies into view, so
that by now, beside the Holocaust, we find the partition of India, Hiroshima, the Armenian aghed
(catastrophe), apartheid South Africa, civil wars in the Balkans, Ireland, Sri Lanka, Guatemala,
Nigeria, lynchings in the southern United States, death through AIDS, and the sexual abuse of
children. Yet we search in vain through this vast literature for the Palestinian Nakba.

EXCISION OF A HISTORY
The Nakba of 1948 not only severed Palestinians’ connection with a territory named Palestine,
but also with their history and identity. Almost overnight, they became known internationally as
“the Arab refugees” or “the Arab minority in Israel.”16 This severing of the Palestinians from their
past and their territory was not a simple result of war, but rather, the outcome of political and
diplomatic investments on the part of the US and the UK as major architects of post-Nakba
arrangements.17 Indications of this severance can be found not only in the trauma genre’s
exclusion of the Nakba, but also in its dehistoricization of the Palestinians in the genre’s few studies
that mention them. Carol Bardenstein’s 1999 article “Trees, Forests, and the Shaping of Palestinian
and Israeli Collective Memory,” for example, compares Palestinian and Israeli symbolization of
trees and forests. Bardenstein comes close to acknowledging Palestinian suffering by quoting poetry
that expresses bereavement; yet, at no point does she identify the Nakba as the origin of Palestinian
poetry of loss. Though she refers to “people-land” bonds, she presents this bond as applying
equally to both Israelis and to Palestinians, thus erasing the colonialist nature of the Israeli state.
Bardenstein even reproduces a photo from the Jewish National Fund archive, together with its
original caption “Transforming the bare landscape.”18 At first sight, the rolling hills indeed look
“bare.” However, closer examination reveals them to be covered to the distant horizon with a dense
network of terracing, the product of unacknowledged Palestinian labor. Bardenstein’s reproduction
tel quel of an apparent absence of cultivation in pre-Zionist Palestine subtly justifies Zionist
appropriation, and blunts the mourning of loss in the Palestinian poetry she quotes.
In line with its focus on children and violence, Robben and Suarez-Orozko’s Cultures Under Siege
includes a report by Roberta Apfel and Bennett Simon on psychological testing of Israeli and
Palestinian children’s attitudes to war and violence.19 The lives of Israeli and Palestinian children
are not contextualized in an occupier/occupied framework, and there is no historical introduction
explaining how these different groups appear to be sharing geopolitical space. Furthermore, the
timing of the interviews during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1991 puts Israeli and Palestinian
children equally under threat from Iraqi Scud missiles. The authors profess interest in the
“intergenerational transmission of trauma,” but the interviews as conducted appear unrelated to
this theme. The absence of their questionnaire in the report underlines the study’s incoherence, a
quality that is most strikingly illustrated by the inclusion of a section unrelated to the authors’
own research, where they cite an unpublished study carried out by other researchers in Gaza to

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The Nakba’s Exclusion from the “Trauma Genre”

suggest that Palestinian children are being bred as suicide bombers.20 Omission of any mention of
the Nakba here appears to underwrite a move to frame Palestinians—and perhaps even other
Arabs—as inherently violent.
A paper in Postcolonial Disorders, Michael Fischer’s “Living with What Would Otherwise be
Unendurable, II: Caught in the Borderlands of Palestine/Israel” illustrates a more sophisticated
level of Nakba exclusion.21 Fischer approaches the Palestinians through two texts, one a segment
from a speech made by a Palestinian psychiatrist at Tel Aviv University in 2003, and the other a
student dissertation on Israeli and Palestinian joint patrols during the 1990s. Again, the context
and historical background to what is clearly a situation of military occupation are absent.
His choice of psychological texts appears to be based on opposition to “direct first-person
testimonials.” This elision of what might have been Palestinian trauma narratives is justified by the
claim that “[s]ubjectivity . . . is not usefully located merely in the enunciative function, particularly
where traumatized subjects can mainly articulate laments.”22 His title, taken from Deleuze, also
appears to refer to the trials of social scientists at work amid the sharp antagonisms of the Middle
East rather than to a people subjected to an unending military occupation.
All three papers demonstrate constraints on the way Palestinians are represented in books
published by elite Western university presses. First, Palestinians are always paired with Israelis,
never presented as independently linked to Palestine. Second, there is no reference to power
asymmetry and Israeli military occupation. Third and most crucially, history in general, and the
Nakba in particular, is excised by scholars. It is a question for inquiry whether these “rules” are
openly discussed between trauma book editors and contributors, or if they are due to an unspoken
self-censorship.

THE ONGOING NAKBA

It has often been asserted that the Nakba cannot be compared with other world catastrophes
because the Palestinian death toll in 1948 may or may not have been remarkable.23 For example,
Gilbert Achcar contrasts Palestinian casualties with the far greater ones of the Algerians during
their war of independence, and adds that “the Palestinians cannot . . . advisedly and legitimately
apply to their own case the superlatives appropriate to the Jewish genocide.”24 But to frame a
comparison between disasters in terms of numbers killed introduces a misleading perspective,
since suffering cannot be reduced to quantitative measurement. Moreover, suffering caused by the
Nakba has to be understood in terms of a continuing state of rightlessness, with all the varieties of
abuse and violence that rightlessness exposes people to.
Unlike most of the disasters dealt with by the trauma genre, the Nakba is ever newly present. The
Nakba is not merely a traumatic memory, but continually generates new disasters, voiding the
present of any sense of security, and blacking out the future altogether. The Palestinian coinage
“ongoing Nakba” (al-nakba al-mustamirrah) expresses this specific temporal feature. Joe Sacco
captures it well in the introduction to his investigation into a forgotten massacre in Khan Yunis
and Rafah, carried out during the Israeli invasion of Gaza in 1956–57:25
Palestinians never have the luxury of digesting one tragedy before the next one is upon them.
When I was in Gaza, younger people often viewed my research into the events of 1956 with

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 The Nakba’s Exclusion from the “Trauma Genre”

bemusement.26 What good would tending to history do them when they were under attack
and their homes were being demolished now? But the past and the present cannot be so easily
disentangled; they are part of a remorseless continuum, a historical blur.27

The “remorseless continuum” of which Sacco speaks can be illustrated by listening to Palestinian
testimonials recorded anywhere in their diaspora, whether in those parts of Palestine under Israeli
control, in the Arab host countries, or, as above, among Palestinian refugees in and from Syria.
The indifference of the “international community” to their suffering also needs to be factored into
any effort to understand it. As Lila Abu-Lughod and Ahmad Sa’di put it, “The debilitating factor
in the ability to tell their stories and make public their memories is that the powerful nations have
not wanted to listen.”28

Moral Communities

How does it happen that trauma genre scholars have not paid attention to the Nakba nor rated
it as traumatic? Literary scholar David Morris proposes a theoretical framework through which
concern for some sufferings and indifference to others may be explained.29 He points out that
cultural traditions form genres through which suffering is made recognizable: “What literature has
to tell us about suffering . . . depends on basic decisions about what counts as literature and whose
suffering matters;”30 and adds that “those to whose suffering we remain blind are those who are
not part of our ‘moral communities’.”31 This critical question—whose suffering matters—links us
to Morris’s main explanatory concept of “moral community.” Since writers work “within a
specific social landscape,” history and culture form boundaries. Stories of suffering do not easily
pass through cultural barriers; suffering is not “a raw datum . . . that we can identify or measure
but a social status that we extend or withhold. . . . We do not acknowledge the destruction of
beings outside our moral community as suffering.”—an Iraqi truck-driver killed by US air attack
“will play on American television as proof of superior United States technology.”32 Contemporary
US drone attacks probably rouse the same reaction among mainstream Americans. Judith Butler
trenchantly sets such myopia in the framework of racism: “Forms of racism instituted and active
at the level of perception tend to produce iconic versions of populations who are eminently
grievable, and others whose loss is no loss, and who remain ungrievable.”33
Both Morris’s theory of moral communities and Butler’s grievable and ungrievable people offer
us a handle through which to explore boundaries to the communication of suffering between
predominantly Muslim peoples and predominantly Christian ones. The scholar Norman Daniels
traces the beginning of European hostility towards Islam to early Christian texts soon after the
birth of Christianity, citing the poet Dante as placing the prophet Muhammad in the eighth circle
of Hell, with seducers and schismatics.34 European anti-Islamism powered the Crusades,
missionary work, and colonialist penetration. If the extension of the trauma genre into the non-
Western world shows little tendency to include the Nakba, we may attribute this in part to an
ideological cartography akin to Orientalism. The ideological power vested in Western research and
publishing institutions has enabled the labeling of Palestinians as quintessential “terrorists,” and as

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The Nakba’s Exclusion from the “Trauma Genre”

an impediment to the integration of Israel in the Middle East to which Western governments are
deeply committed for material reasons, as well as to exculpate themselves from the historic guilt of
anti-Semitism. While vaunting their independence, academic institutions are not immune to the
influence of official policy. In many Western academic circles today, anti-Palestinianism is a
permissible form of racism, one that underwrites a continuing politics of exclusion.

Conclusion

What theories of trauma would not consider the quotation with which I began this paper an
expression of suffering as intense as any to be found among the trauma genre’s testimonials? Is
there reasonable doubt that the suffering of Palestinian refugees in and from Syria today find their
initial cause in a condition of statelessness brought about by the Nakba? Presented with this or
similar expressions of suffering, what arguments would editors of trauma volumes, or organizers
of trauma conferences, resort to as reasons to exclude them? In effect, there are no arguments,
because exclusion takes place in a domain outside that of rational debate, one of deep-seated
cultural bias, and the fear of the stigma of anti-Semitism. Norman Finkelstein’s loss of his post at
Hunter College and tenure denial at DePaul University is only the best known of numberless cases
of dismissal, suspension, and delays in the appointment of junior faculty who have ventured into
the forbidden realm of Palestinian studies.
The trauma genre is but one illustration of a broader cultural and political myopia where
Palestine and Palestinians are concerned; however, it has a special interest because its focus on
suffering should have brought the Nakba into view, along with other historic catastrophes. Any
argument that the Nakba was minor because it did not involve—at the time—as great a loss of life
as Hiroshima, the Holocaust, or the Armenian aghed is invalidated, first by the proliferation of
Palestinian suffering since 1948, and second by the absence of rational hope that their suffering
will end in a just settlement.
The absence of the Nakba from the trauma genre both reflects and reinforces the marginalization
of Palestinian claims to justice and the recognition of the Nakba in world politics, and thereby, it
contributes to the continuing failure to reach an equitable settlement. Can we doubt that there is a
connection between academic studies and real world politics, particularly when the studies dealt
with in this paper emanate from centers of ideological power? Sponsorship of the trauma genre has
come from the Social Science Research Councils of the U.S. and UK, as well as leading universities
such as Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, University of California at Berkeley, Cambridge, and
Oxford. We may ask—why have these universities not sponsored research into the suffering of
refugees from war in Afghanistan and Iraq, as they have sought sanctuary and been rejected in
Britain? Or the suffering of the Chagos Islanders evicted from San Diego Island by Britain to allow
its leasing for an American base? Or the suffering of Iraqi or Gazan mothers of children with
congenital birth defects caused by depleted uranium? Or the suffering of American Indians exposed
to hate crimes? Such questions are legitimated by the trauma genre’s extension over time and into
global space, and by its elevation of social suffering into a topos in its own right that even in some
renditions claims the potential to offer solutions.

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 The Nakba’s Exclusion from the “Trauma Genre”

About the Author

Rosemary Sayigh is an anthropologist and oral historian who currently teaches at the American
University of Beirut. She is the author of Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries, A People’s
History, and Too Many Enemies: The Palestinian Experience in Lebanon.

ENDNOTES
1 Um Hashem, interview by author, 6 March 2013, ‘Ayn al-Hilwa camp, Lebanon.
2 Shoshona Felman and Dori Laub’s Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and
History (New York: Routledge, 1992) was based on their experience teaching the Holocaust in
university and on clinical work with Holocaust survivors. Cathy Caruth’s Trauma: Explorations in
Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995) and Unclaimed Experience: Trauma,
Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) brought literature
together with clinical studies to stimulate thinking about historical traumas such as the Holocaust.
3 Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2012), p. 6.
4 Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock, eds., Social Suffering (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1997), iv.
5 Kleinman et al., Social Suffering, xi.
6 Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman “Introduction” in Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and
Recovery, ed. Veena Das et al. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), p. 2.
7 Das and Kleinman, “Introduction,” p. 2.
8 Das and Kleinman, “Introduction,” p. 3.
9 An example of the aesthetic approach initiated by Caruth is Jonathan Crewe, Leo Spitzer, eds., Acts of
Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999).
10 The medical anthropological approach is exemplified by Mary-Jo Delvecchio Good, Sandra Teresa
Hyde, Sarah Pinto, Byron J. Good, eds., Postcolonial Disorders (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 2008).
11 Kleinman et al., Social Suffering, xi.
12 Kleinman et al., Social Suffering, xi.
13 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1983).
14 Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Mamphela Ramphele, Pamela Reynolds, eds., Violence and Subjectivity
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), p. 1 (my italics).
15 In its contemporary form, colonialism depends on control over technology, time and space, and
labels and meanings rather than over territory, and is reproduced ideologically as well as
militarily, as in Israeli suppression of the Palestinians and U.S. attacks against Afghanistan and
Iraq. See Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 28.
16 Stephanie Latte Abdallah “La part des absents en creux des réfugiés palestiniens” in Images aux
frontières: représentations et constructions sociales et politiques: Palestine, Jordanie 1948–2000.
(Beirut: Institut francais du Proche-Orient, 2005).
17 In Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948–51 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988), Ilan Pappe
shows how British support for the Greater Jordan idea in 1947–48 dissolved Palestinian
“peoplehood” and rights to a state, and how the UK and U.S. jointly “economized” the refugee
problem (pp. 11–16, 124–5).
18 Carol B. Bardenstein, “Trees, Forests, and the Shaping of Palestinian and Israeli Collective Memory,”
Acts of Memory, ed. Crewe et al. (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999), p. 160.

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The Nakba’s Exclusion from the “Trauma Genre”

19 Roberta J. Apfel and Bennett Simon, “Mitigating Discontents with Children in War: An Ongoing
Psychoanalytic Inquiry,” in Cultures Under Siege, ed. Antonius Robben et al. (Cambridge University
Press, 2000).
20 Eventually published as The Road to Martyrs’ Square (Oxford University Press 2005), this “study” is
described by Lori Allen as “an extended anti-Palestinian rant dressed up as colorful travelogue
written in the style of a bad thriller.” Lori Allen, “Suicide as Political Violence,” review of The Road
to Martyrs’ Square: A Journey into the World of the Suicide Bomber, by Anne-Marie Oliver and Paul
F. Steinberg, Journal of Palestine Studies 35, no. 2, p. 113.
21 Mary-Jo Delvecchio Good, et al., Postcolonial Disorders (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2008).
22 Michael M. J. Fischer, “To Live with What Would Otherwise be Unendurable, II,” in Postcolonial
Disorders, ed. Good et al. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), pp. 260–261.
23 Scholars such as Salman Abu Sitta would contest this point on the grounds that, first, the Nakba was
not limited to 1948 but extended from 1947 to 1956, and second, that many massacres carried out
during 1948 have still not been counted into the death toll.
24 Gilbert Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust: the Arab-Israeli War of Narratives (New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2010), pp. 31–32.
25 This was in the context of the Suez War, when the UK, France, and Israel attacked Egypt after Abdel
Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal.
26 This was in 2002 at the height of the second intifada.
27 Joe Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza: A Graphic Novel (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), xi.
28 Lila Abu-Lughod and Ahmad H. Sa’di, “Introduction,” in Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of
Memory, Sa’di and Abu-Lughod, eds. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 11.
29 David Morris, “About Suffering: Voice, Genre, and Moral Community,” in Social Suffering, ed.
Kleinman et al. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997).
30 Morris, “About Suffering,” p. 25. (my italics)
31 Morris, “About Suffering,” p. 39.
32 Morris, “About Suffering,” p. 40.
33 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), p. 24.
34 Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (Edinburgh: Cambridge University Press,
1960) p. 192.

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