George Souvlis: Your first study, Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine, deals with the ways which dispossessed Palestinians have commemorated their past. Could you tell us how about how this has informed the Palestinian nationalist movement? Why it was so crucial? In which ways it influenced the political struggles of the Palestinian people?

Laleh Khalili: I started off by wanting to do some sort of banal doctoral research project on “coping mechanism” of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon or some other such anaemic liberal claptrap. After arriving in the refugee camp that so generously hosted me, it became clear to me that history and memory were resources that were not only instrumentally used by the camp (and local and national) leadership but one which structured the way ordinary refugees told the story of themselves as political subjects. And it seemed to me that these narratives fit within particular narrative genres that were influenced by broader political attachments and structures of the time. When I was conducting my fieldwork, in the early 2000s, Palestinians were in a liminal moment. Oslo’s spectacular failure (so lucidly foretold by Edward Said) was somewhat irrelevant to the refugees in Lebanon who saw the whole process as a kind of betrayal of their right of return. The narrative structure of commemoration was tragic. The prevalent mood of the stories they told, they way my interlocutors framed stories of the past, was of defeat, even if people still celebrated the efficacy of self-sacrifice and the resilience of sumud (or steadfastness). By contrast, in the heady days of the 1960s and 1970s when Palestinian armed struggle had been ascendant, the genre of the commemoration was heroic, and both official and popular narratives celebrated resistance and struggle on and off the battlefield. For me the stark difference had to do not only with the crushing devastation of Palestinian political organizations in the Lebanese civil war but also with a global shift from the era of Third Worldist struggle and solidarity to one in which NGOisation had become the prevalent mode of advancing claims. This global shift from political to a decidedly depoliticizing ethos echoes also in the transformation of the genres of memory from epic to tragic.

Logistics, Counterinsurgency and the War on Terror: An Interview with Laleh Khalili (Salvage, 16 March 2017)