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Life Lived in Relief: Humanitarian Predicaments and Palestinian Refugee Politics

Online ISBN:
9780520971288
Print ISBN:
9780520299627
Publisher:
University of California Press
Book

Life Lived in Relief: Humanitarian Predicaments and Palestinian Refugee Politics

Ilana Feldman
Ilana Feldman
George Washington University
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Published online:
23 May 2019
Published in print:
30 October 2018
Online ISBN:
9780520971288
Print ISBN:
9780520299627
Publisher:
University of California Press

Abstract

Palestinian refugees’ experience of displacement is among the lengthiest in history. Life Lived in Relief explores this community’s engagement with humanitarian assistance over a seventy-year period and their persistent efforts over this long time span to alter their present and future conditions. Even as humanitarian intervention is conceived as crisis-driven and focused on survival, protracted displacement is a common circumstance, necessitating long-term humanitarian presence. The book describes the operational challenges of oscillating between chronic conditions and repeating emergency situations as “punctuated humanitarianism.” Punctuated humanitarianism also means that people move through different relationships with the humanitarian apparatus. Palestinian refugee politics is buffeted between near and far futures, close and distant geographies, and immediate needs and existential claims. This politics is expressed not only in the register of suffering but also as aspiration, existence, and refusal. These multiplicities are often discordant, but they persist together. The “politics of living” in and against humanitarianism is central to what it has meant to be Palestinian since 1948. It also provides new insights into the possibilities of political life in precarious conditions. The story of Palestinians and humanitarianism is illustrative of life and relief in the many circumstances of protracted displacement across the globe.

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