Palestinians Born in Exile Diaspora and the Search for a Homeland by Juliane Hammer (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. 271 pages.)

Abstract

There is a striking lack of studies on the Palestinian diaspora. Undoubtedly
the pioneering work of Edward Said (“Reflections on Exile,” in Out There:
Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, eds. Russell Ferguson [The
MIT Press: 1990]) on exile and Rashid Khalidi (Palestinian Identity: The
Construction of Modern National Consciousness [Columbia University
Press: 1997]) both touch on many of the related issues of collective memory,
cultural identity, and the relationship between the “center” (the homeland)
and the diasporic communities and how these issues manifested
themselves in the Palestinian case. More recently, Abbas Shiblak (Reflections
on Palestinian Diaspora in Europe [2000]), Sari Hanafi (Here and
There: Analyses of the Relationship between Diaspora and the Centre [2001:
in Arabic]), and Helena Schulz and Juliane Hammer (The Palestinian Diaspora:
Formation of Identities and Politics of Homeland [Routledge: 2003])
explore different aspects of the Palestinian diaspora.
Juliane Hammer’s new study examines young Palestinian returnees as
part of a larger social, historical, political, and cultural framework (p. 114).
She conducted her research in the mid-1990s, a crucial period between two
phases: one of peace and hope following the signing of the Declaration of
Principles in 1993, and another one that started in 1997 with the deterioration
and breakdown of the peace talks, and, consequently, with the eruption of the
second Intifada in 2000. For her survey, she chose a sample of two main categories
of young returnees: those of the Palestinian Authority strata (a`idin)
and the children of Palestinian expatriates who live in the West but mainly in
the United States (Amerikans). The interviewees were mainly adolescent or
young men and women from and around Ramalla and Jerusalem.
The return process has been described chronologically, as a series of
five steps or stages ranging from the decision to return to plans for the near
future. As the study argues, this return entails a process of the returnees’
rewriting aspects of their identities. Hammer does not see, however, that the
chronological approach is the only way of looking at the process of return.
She sees the transformation (what she calls the “rewriting of identities”) also
by dividing “identity” into different aspects, and then investigating how the
respondents remembered these aspects from their childhood and youth in the ...