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In Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine, Laleh Khalili traces a portentous transformation in Palestinian national narratives of commemoration, which first were oriented around heroism and then around suffering. She attributes this transformation to both regional institutional changes and international political developments. Especially for scholars of nationalism, Palestinians, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), human rights, or liberation movements, this book offers a vital and incisive analysis of the high stakes of transnational humanitarian institutions and their discourses for local politics. This volume also constitutes a major contribution regarding the conceptualization of Palestinian martyrdom in the context of both international and local politics.
The book focuses on the thawra in the Palestinian camps of Lebanon (1969-82) and its long, more amorphous aftermath. The thawra involved the mobilization of dispossessed refugees into guerrilla soldiers--a symbolic transformation that forged a sense of heroism for Palestinians in the face of practical defeats. Khalili demonstrates that after 1982, Palestinian refugees of Lebanon felt increasingly isolated and marginalized, as resistance was refocused in the occupied territories during the first intifada and then, critically, as the Oslo agreements yielded a statist Palestinian Authority unconcerned with Palestinian refugees outside of the occupied territories. The single chapter on the occupied territories is intriguing because it suggests that due to the different relationship...