The Politics of Gaza Beach: at the Edge of the Two Intifadas

Third Text ISSN: 0952-8822 (Print) 1475-5297 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ctte20 The Politics of Gaza Beach Laura Junka To cite this article: Laura Junka (2006) The Politics of Gaza Beach, Third Text, 20:3-4, 417-428, DOI: 10.1080/09528820600855428 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09528820600855428 Published online: 24 Jan 2007. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 203 View related articles Citing articles: 3 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ctte20 CTTE_A_185474.fm Page 417 Thursday, September 14, 2006 9:58 AM Third Text, Vol. 20, Issue 3/4, May/July, 2006, 417–428 The Politics of Gaza Beach At the Edge of the Two Intifadas Laura Junka The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is talked about every day. But to what extent can the Palestinian speak? In the late 1980s, Palestinians engaged themselves in the first Intifada (1987–93), a loud popular struggle against the Israeli occupation. Yet, almost two decades later the Israeli army still holds increasingly harsh and impenetrable control over Palestinian lives and living space, relatively unchallenged by the outside world. The apparent failure by Palestinians to overcome Israeli occupation through popular struggle has, during the ongoing second uprising, the Al-Aqsa Intifada (2000–), been coupled with the emergence of increasingly polarised imaginaries of the Palestinians’ struggle. The first Intifada articulated clear and compelling Palestinian demands for national selfdetermination. Central to it were heroic images of Palestinian nationalism in which teenagers confronted Israeli tanks with only stones in their hands. These images located the struggle firmly within the wider framework of earlier anti-colonial and national liberation movements and generated growing international support for Palestinians in both the West and the Arab world. During the second Intifada, understandings of Palestinian subjectivity have become more polarised and problematic. Instead of popular demonstrations and national unity, the second intifada is often associated with the rise of Islamic militancy, a crisis of the Palestinian national movement and a process of political fragmentation. Images of masked gunmen and suicide bombers rather than stone-throwing teenagers have seized centre stage as symbols of Palestinian resistance. Alternatively, in representations sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, images of heroism have to a large extent been superseded by representations of Palestinian victimhood, which tend to reduce the status of Palestinians to passive victims of Israeli occupation. This article examines these vast differences between the two Intifadas by looking at the shifting ways in which Palestinians have resisted and negotiated the occupation in one of the most unrepresented spaces of Palestinian everyday life, the beach in Gaza. The specific aim here is to Taylor Third 10.1080/09528820600855428 CTTE_A_185474.sgm Original junkala@yahoo.com; LauraJunka 0952-8822 2006 000000May/July 3-4 20 Text and &Article Francis (print)/1475-5297 Francis 2006 Ltdu0527625@uel.ac.uk (online) Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online © Third Text (2006) http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09528820600855428 CTTE_A_185474.fm Page 418 Thursday, September 14, 2006 9:58 AM 418 explore the reasons behind this process of polarisation and to create space for understandings of Palestinian subjectivity beyond the narrow parameters of militancy and victimhood. THE APORIA OF GAZA BEACH 1 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, Macmillan Education, London, 1988, pp 271–313 In her controversial essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, Gayatri Spivak argues that representation is less about utterances than about discourses against which utterances are (or are not) interpreted and given meaning.1 Spivak illustrates her argument with a story of a young Indian woman, Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri, whose suicide, despite her painstaking effort to articulate a different subject position, was nevertheless appropriated by gendered, dominant systems of representation. Bhuvaneswari had been secretly involved in the armed struggle for Indian independence and hanged herself after she had been entrusted with a political assassination she felt unable to confront. In order to rule out that her suicide be diagnosed as an outcome of an illicit pregnancy, as well as to re-write the social text of sati, which has provided a sanctioned interpretive framework for female suicide in the Indian society, Bhuvaneswari waited for the onset of her menstruation before killing herself. But the explicit point she made to dislocate hegemonic interpretations never registered. Bhuvaneswari was inscribed in family history among dominant systems of signification as a hapless old maid and a victim of illegitimate love. The story exemplifies how the articulation of subaltern subject positions is barred and eroded by ‘epistemic violence’, by the absence of available interpretive fields and systems of representation. In the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, it invites considerations on the ways in which discourses on war and conflict themselves limit the articulation of different forms of agency and experience. Such discourses are central sites of contestation among oppositional groups and therefore inherently polarising. Further, they tend to devalue the importance of everyday life and experiences of oppression amidst ‘ordinariness’, privileging instead sites of spectacular violence and elite politics. These discourses exclude a multitude of ways in which Palestinians experience, negotiate and contest the occupation in their day-to-day lives and block out more complex and ambivalent Palestinian voices. Spivak’s argument – that the subaltern cannot speak – is based on a claim that representation is by definition involved in the production of subalternity. But she introduces deconstruction as a means by which to reduce the space of subalternity. Deconstruction can undermine the authority of hegemonic systems of signification and bring forth a condition of aporia in which pre-existing systems of interpretation begin to disappear and from which alternative knowledge and subaltern subject positions may emerge. For Spivak, the task of deconstruction is not an end in itself but provides new openings and a starting point for the articulation of concrete, everyday struggles of subaltern communities. With this in mind, this article shifts attention from taken-forgranted sites of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict to one of the most unrepresented spaces of Palestinian everyday life, the beach in Gaza. CTTE_A_185474.fm Page 419 Thursday, September 14, 2006 9:58 AM 419 Gaza Beach during the Al-Aqsa Intifada, August 2005. Photo: Laura Junka The beach is a space of aporia where meaning remains open to other aspects of Palestinian subjectivity. Sandy and unstable, it is also predisposed to what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘smooth spaces’ that ‘do not have a dimension higher than that which moves through it or is inscribed in it’ and where subaltern hopes and desires are as pronounced as they are in tune with shifting relations of power.2 This point is important, for, as Michel Foucault has argued, desires, hopes and subject positions are assigned by power relations, not chosen in freedom. The beach is therefore ideal for exploring not only Palestinian struggles beyond the prevailing discourses on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict but also the changing conditions within which the two Intifadas have been grounded. Gaza Beach during the Al-Aqsa Intifada , August 2005. Photo: Laura Junka CAMPING IN GAZA 2 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Athlone Press, London, 1999, p 300 The beach is the only place where the 1.4 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, situated on the Mediterranean coast, can go camping and spend time outdoors. During the summer a multitude of Palestinians, literally fenced inside the densely built and overcrowded Gaza, jam the beach with their colourful tents and makeshift shelters, turning it into a vibrant camping zone. Scents of roasting chicken and fish, strong tea and apple-flavoured hookahs fill the air amidst sounds of laughter and dashing waves. Countless swimmers seek relief in the sea from the hot sun; others enjoy themselves in tent-like beach cafés and rentable bungalows, which private entrepreneurs pitch on the beach every summer. Some people have even built small summer houses a short distance from the beach. At night the holidaymakers are enveloped by the vibrant music of flashy wedding parties that take place in hotels and clubs at the fringes of the beach and the dark sea. However, few Palestinians can afford to patronise hotels, restaurants CTTE_A_185474.fm Page 420 Thursday, September 14, 2006 9:58 AM 420 Friday evening crowd. Gaza Beach, July 2005. Photo Laura Junka and bungalows. Most bring their own tents, food and cooking facilities. Camping on the beach for a day or two can be an affordable way of enjoying a summer in Gaza. But nothing in Gaza can escape the order of the occupation. Until the summer of 2005, more than one-third of the 40-kilometre-long coastline in Gaza was occupied by Israeli settlements and many Palestinians were not able to access the beach at all due to Israeli roadblocks. Beaches near the settlements were extremely dangerous and a number of Palestinian civilians, mistaken for militants by the Israeli army, have been killed by gunfire and shelling. Today the settlements are gone, but Israel still controls the sea, preventing all Palestinian boats from travelling more than a few kilometres from the coastline and imposing a constant threat to Palestinian beach-goers. Many go to the beach to camp in large UN or Red Crescent refugee tents furnished to many families during the ongoing Intifada after the Israeli military had demolished their homes. These tents draw clear lines of continuity between the Palestinian past and the current conditions in Gaza. For the Qasir family, whose home was demolished in the spring of 2003, the tent represents a second affirmation of their condition as refugees. In 1948, the Qasirs were forced to flee their home in what is now recognised as Israel and begin life as refugees in Gaza. In 2003, they lost their home again when the Israeli military demolished their house after a member of their family killed four settlers and became a martyr. Their grandmother was also killed, as she refused to leave her home during the demolition. And yet, leaning back in the shadow of the Qasirs’ large refugee tent, drinking tea and watching the blue sea where children play and laugh, it is almost possible to forget that Gaza is occupied and practically in a state of war. On the beach the refugee tent, a symbol of Palestinian homelessness, despair and exile, is used for joy and leisure. Friday evening crowd. Gaza Beach , July 2005. Photo Laura Junka CTTE_A_185474.fm Page 421 Thursday, September 14, 2006 9:58 AM 421 The Qasir Family, camping in a refugee tent. Gaza Beach, August 2003. Photo: Laura Junka A SPACE OF RESISTANCE The Qasir Family, camping in a refugee tent. Gaza Beach , August 2003. Photo: Laura Junka 3 ‘Israel bombards Gaza nogo zone’, BBC News, Wednesday 28 December 2006, http:// www.news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/ world/middle_east/ 4564876.stm 4 Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture, 15/1, 2003, pp 11–40 Despite Israel’s disengagement from Gaza, life there continues to be conditioned by military occupation. Gaza is sealed off from the outside world by electric fences and sniper towers and frequently assaulted by the Israeli military. Tellingly, by December 2005, a few months after the disengagement, Israel had already resumed control over some of the former settlement areas by declaring them ‘no-go zones’ enforced until further notice by air strikes and shelling.3 For good reason, then, Gaza’s nickname continues to be al-cijon, meaning prison. These prison-like conditions have informed Achille Mbembe’s suggestion that, unlike earlier forms of colonialism, the late-modern colonial occupation that confronts Palestinians is virtually incontestable and leaves little space for resistance.4 Israel today is able to employ such a complex constellation of different forms of power and hi-tech superiority that it has secured an absolute domination over the space as well as the lives of the Palestinians, turning their status into that of ‘living dead’ and their daily experience into an institutionalised state of total siege. Under these conditions, Mbembe argues, the lines between Palestinian resistance and suicide are blurred and the exercise of control over one’s own death, that is, the act of martyrdom and suicide bombing, is turned into a meaningful form of agency. Against this background, the joyful atmosphere on the beach comes across as a surprising break. How does the beach relate to the wider context of the conflict? One obvious way of looking at the phenomena of the beach is to draw from theorization of everyday life within which such aesthetics of hybridity and subversion are most often afforded a status of resistance. While resistance and political agency have traditionally been defined as a strategic, organised and intentional form of collective action, work within this area of scholarship has problematised these definitions and argued that they erode those forms of agency that are CTTE_A_185474.fm Page 422 Thursday, September 14, 2006 9:58 AM 422 5 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkeley–Los Angeles, 1984, p 36 6 Ibid, p 36 7 Lila Abu-Lughod, ‘The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power Through Bedouin Women’, in Beyond The Second Sex, eds Peggy Reeves and R G Goodenough, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1990, pp 314–37 8 Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, in Michel Foucault, The Essential Works, Vol 3: Power, ed Faubion James, Penguin, London, 1994, pp 326–48 and the following quote, p 329 open to and employed by subaltern subjects. Distinguishing between ‘tactics’ and ‘strategies’, Michel de Certeau has argued that implicated in the very concept of strategy is an assumption of a position of power, an ability by a clearly defined subject with the will and power to postulate ‘a place that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base’.5 This is the very capacity that subaltern subjects are by definition lacking. Hence he suggests that the concept of ‘tactics’, which designates actions that ‘operate in spaces of the other’ and turn them to other ends, is more appropriate for subaltern forms of agency.6 It is easy to see ways in which the Palestinians camping on the beach are involved in exactly such forms of ‘tactical’ everyday resistance. Palestinians actively subvert the occupation by transforming the prison-like spaces left to them into spaces of joy and hope. The beach not only defies representations that reduce Palestinians to passive victims but also exposes a blind spot in Mbembe’s account. His claim that the status of ‘living dead’ limits the space of Palestinian resistance to that of martyrdom clearly does not exhaust the ways in which they do in fact resist. If what is at stake in Palestine today is the very possibility of life itself and the ability of Palestinians to exercise control over their colonised bodies and spaces of everyday life, then the affirmation not only of death but also of life and pleasure becomes a meaningful aspect of the Palestinian struggle. The problem with this interpretation, however, is that the complexity of meanings and the wider historical, political and social framework within which camping on the beach takes place might be lost from sight. These concerns are summarised by Lila Abu-Lughod who has criticised some studies of subaltern resistance for ‘romanticising resistance’, for a tendency to read ‘all forms of subaltern agency as signs of the ineffectiveness of the systems of power’. She insists that these forms of agency should be studied as indicative of the wider matrix of power relations within which subaltern subjects are constituted.7 This is exactly what Foucault had in mind when he argued that ‘in order to understand what power relations are about, perhaps we should investigate the forms of resistance and attempts to dissociate these relations’.8 Foucault is primarily interested in the modes in which human beings are made subjects and sees that the constitution of human subjectivities takes place in complex power relations. He argues that it is through the empirical study of the effects of power that the process of subjectification must be understood. A relationship of power is always one in which individual or collective subjects are, despite their condition of subjection, ‘faced with a field of possibilities in which several kinds of conduct, several ways of reacting and modes of behaviour are available’. These possibilities constitute the conditions of political subjectivity, or the space of resistance, which is inherently limited yet not determined by the relationship of power. Accordingly, it is especially the differences between ways in which Palestinians have approached the beach during the two Intifadas that merit attention. Palestinians have not always taken advantage of the beach as a camping zone. The first Intifada saw beach cafés close down more or less overnight and all life on the beach put on ice until the end of the Intifada several years later. Practically nobody went to the beach, and never for the purposes of holidaymaking. The evacuation of the CTTE_A_185474.fm Page 423 Thursday, September 14, 2006 9:58 AM 423 9 Iris Jean-Klein, ‘Nationalism and Resistance: The Two Faces of Everyday Activism in Palestine During the Intifada’, Cultural Anthropology, 16/1, 2001, pp 83–126 10 Laetitia Boucaille, Growing Up Palestinian, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ–Oxford, 2002, pp 21–2 beach can be partly explained by Israeli security measures. During the first Intifada, the IDF imposed a permanent curfew on Gaza between 9 pm and 5 am, and Palestinians could not camp overnight on the beach. A more profound explanation of why the beach was also empty during the daytime is found in the particular ways in which Palestinians affirmed their political subjectivity during the first Intifada. It was characterised by popular mass-participation and a resolutely innovative constellation of civil disobedience alongside the more hierarchic structures of armed resistance. A central part of the grass-roots struggle was what Iris Jean-Klein has glossed as ‘the suspension of everyday life’ whereby Palestinians collectively rejected those forms of amusement not considered explicitly nationalist, such as flamboyant wedding parties, picnics, daytrips and nocturnal family visits.9 Instead of spending time amusing themselves, they chose to focus on the national struggle. The ideology behind the suspension saw these pleasures contribute to ‘forgetting’ the politics of the occupation and dissipating valuable energy on activities other than political revolution. The collective suspension of everyday life offered a way in which Palestinians could affirm their national identities, show their respect to the dead of the Intifada and demonstrate their own commitment to resistance. Hence, writes JeanKlein, a formulaic reply to an invitation for a daytrip to the beach was ‘For Palestinians, there are no holidays and picnics now!’, followed by an affirmation that only once an independent Palestinian state existed would there be time for leisure. Jean-Klein maintains that the suspension of everyday life was part of a practice of ‘self-nationalisation’. Instead of being simple subjects of power or elite manipulation, ‘the ordinary Palestinians’ themselves were involved in the production of collective identities, tactics of resistance and social and cultural codes that reached a hegemonic status in Palestinian society. Less emphasised in her analysis, however, is a critical discussion of the ways in which the suspension of everyday life was also enforced and policed by the tightly knit Palestinian community itself, as well as by Islamist and Nationalist resistance movements, which sought to purify and restructure Palestinian society around national and religious values. Laetitia Boucaille points out that where it did not happen by conviction, the Spartan life of the Intifada was imposed by obligation.10 Anyone breaking the strict discipline was considered lacking in determination, an easy prey to the enemy and susceptible to collaboration with Israel. Those who went picnicking on the beach, for example, risked denunciation, accusations of collaboration and even confrontations with militants. For the organisers of resistance movements, Boucaille argues, Palestinian society had to cleanse itself before it could confront the enemy. Accordingly, lack of attention to the internal politics among Palestinians risks simplifying the complexity of power relations within which these expressions of Palestinian subjectivity took place. Apart from constituting a strategy of resistance against Israeli occupation, suspension of everyday life was also involved in a struggle over ‘right’ forms of Palestinian identity. Hence, neither camping on the beach today nor the first Intifada’s suspension of everyday life can be interpreted simply in terms of resistance. They must be understood instead as indicative of the changing matrix of power relations within which Palestinian subjectivity is constituted. If CTTE_A_185474.fm Page 424 Thursday, September 14, 2006 9:58 AM 424 control over the most intimate aspects of everyday life is one of the few realms over which subaltern subjects can exercise meaningful control, then the important question is why this space of manoeuvre translated into the suspension of everyday life during the first Intifada and into its affirmation during the second. GEOGRAPHIES OF OCCUPATION 11 Ghassan Andoni, ‘A Comparative Study of Intifada 1987 and Intifada 2000’, in The New Intifada: Resisting Israel’s Apartheid, ed Roane Carey, Verso, London–New York, 2001, pp 208–18 Ghassan Andoni observes that the differences in Palestinian resistance during the two Intifadas, especially the lack of mass protests during the present one, can partly be explained by the shifting geography of the occupation.11 The formal division of land into territories under Israeli and Palestinian sovereignty during the Oslo interim arrangements complicated the colonial relationship between Israel and the Palestinians. Israel during the second Intifada has been able to portray the conflict in an international context as a state of war between two equal sides and to mobilise its full military arsenal against Palestinians, which was unthinkable during the first Intifada. Moreover, back then, encounters between Palestinians and the Israeli military were dispersed on every street and across a dense topology of Palestinian refugee camps and cities; today they are more confined to specific areas and at the borders of sovereignty zones where Palestinians are targets exposed to Israeli snipers. This has led to horrendous casualty tolls among the demonstrators, turning relatively non-violent mass protests into increasingly impracticable means of resistance. Andoni’s account illustrates well how some central spaces of resistance that were previously open to Palestinians are no longer viable. He points out that space and shifting geographies of the occupation have not only been the objectives of power and resistance in Gaza but also constitutive of them. This attention to the relationships between space, power and resistance is especially helpful for attempts to make sense of the different circumstances in which the suspension of everyday life on one hand, and the affirmation of it on the other, took place. Until the beginning of the first Intifada, Israel’s main policy in the occupied territories was their partial integration and subjection to high levels of political, social and economic dependency on Israel. Israeli civil and military apparatuses in Gaza assumed control and responsibility not only over civil order and economic administration but also over Gaza’s social and educational infrastructure. All expressions of Palestinian national identity, such as displaying the Palestinian flag and teaching Palestinian history in schools, were criminalised by the occupier whose one objective was to prevent the formation of collective political identity among Palestinians. This implied that the struggle for a national identity was a central aspect of resistance during the first Intifada. The intensity of these struggles was further escalated by daily encounters with the occupier, and hence activities such as graffiti, suspension of everyday life and other displays of nationalism and political determination constituted both effective and meaningful ways of confronting, challenging and ridiculing the occupation at its heart. The policy of integration rendered Israel vulnerable to Palestinian protests also on other fronts and terrains. For instance, a campaign of strikes and boycotts of Israeli goods and CTTE_A_185474.fm Page 425 Thursday, September 14, 2006 9:58 AM 425 12 Many thanks to Haim Bresheeth for bringing this point to my attention. 13 Personal communication, July 2005. Name of the interviewee unknown. 14 Andoni, op cit, p 213 taxes was orchestrated by Palestinians who wished to dissociate the West Bank and Gaza from Israel. Although these campaigns were problematic to the extent that they actually weakened the Palestinian economy, they inflicted great economic damage and pressure on Israel and demonstrated that the Israeli policy of economic dependency could work both ways.12 In the Al-Aqsa Intifada, these conditions have been nearly reversed. The formal transfer of power to the Palestinian Authorities (PA) has implied that the Palestinian nation has been officially acknowledged by Israel. A mere display of Palestinian identity can no longer constitute a central aspect of the struggle. Moreover, spatial separation has also meant that actual encounters between Israelis and Palestinians have become fewer and more depersonalised. Today, instead of a permanent face-to-face presence on every Palestinian street, the Israeli military governs Palestinian territories through high-tech surveillance, roadblocks, settlements, sniper towers, fences, violent military offences and air strikes. The affirmation of national identity no longer possesses the same symbolic value as it did during the first Intifada when Palestinian nationalism was criminalised. In addition, the capacity of subaltern subjects to deliver a message of collective determination and defiance to the coloniser through the suspension of everyday life and other grassroots activities has been reduced, as, for Israeli soldiers, the everyday life of Palestinians has become increasingly invisible, distant and alien. Further, Palestinians’ ability to exercise direct pressure on Israeli society through means other than armed resistance has been radically reduced. In Gaza, the policy of separation included the erection of an electric fence, which sealed it off from the outside world. This closure impedes Palestinian movement and travel, fetters trade and subjects it to Israeli control and has clamped down on the number of Palestinians allowed to work in Israel. Economic dependency – but this time for Palestinians only. The closure has caused a deepening economic crisis and skyrocketing unemployment in Gaza. It has also generated a powerful weapon of recolonisation of the Palestinian mind, as today only those with no background in political activity, or alternatively those with a record of collaboration with Israel, are eligible for a precious work permit in Israel. This point was brought home to the author by a taxi driver in Gaza in July 2005. A penniless man and father of a newborn, he told me proudly that he was not interested in politics, nor did he want to participate in resistance of any kind. All he wanted was for time to pass quickly so that he would turn thirty-six. Why? That is when he will be allowed, under current regulations, to apply for a hard-to-get permit to work in Israel.13 Moreover, the uniform Palestinian subjectivities manifested by the suspension of everyday life during the first Intifada took place in a discursive space that corresponded to other twentieth century anticolonial liberation struggles for which problems posed by state power were not yet an issue. As Andoni explains: ‘The earlier uprising never had to meet the challenges posed by shared authority, internal borders, negotiations and security partnership between the PA and Israel.’14 The Al-Aqsa Intifada, in contrast, erupted not only in opposition to Israeli occupation but also as a protest against the PA, which had during the Oslo years become associated on the Palestinian street with corruption, CTTE_A_185474.fm Page 426 Thursday, September 14, 2006 9:58 AM 426 elitism and subservience to Israel. The Al-Aqsa Intifada has to deal not only with the concerns, aims and desires of earlier anti-colonial liberation movements but also with questions of political agency and legitimacy usually associated with societies that have already achieved formal national independence. It is not surprising therefore that, instead of collective unity, a hybridisation of Palestinian subjectivities embodied in the controversial production of the beach as a camping zone has taken place. HOPE AND POLITICAL AGENCY Decisions to suspend everyday life were embedded in the newly found optimism and confidence that young generations in the occupied territories felt as liberators of Palestine. Until the 1980s, Palestinians had largely pitched their hopes of freedom on the Palestinian Diaspora or on external intervention by neighbouring Arab states. The defeat of the PLO stronghold in Lebanon during the Israeli invasion in 1982 put the effectiveness of the Diaspora into question and forced Palestinians in the occupied territories to reclaim responsibility for national independence. The focus of Palestinian resistance shifted from the outside to inside the Palestinian territories and ultimately to the political subjectivity and identity of the inhabitants of Gaza and the West Bank. Common among young Palestinians then was a belief that it was because of a presumed inertia and lack of political consciousness among older generations that the occupation had been sustainable at all. Once Palestinian society were cleansed along national lines and a new political consciousness created, they felt, independence would be easy to achieve. The ideal of selfpurification became widely endorsed as a meaningful and effective means of resistance. Today, some twenty years later, Palestinians are still under occupation and everyday life in Gaza has become increasingly difficult. Instead of improvements, the first Intifada was followed by an experience of more hardship and siege, which has only intensified during the Al-Aqsa Intifada. The hopes that once animated the suspension of everyday life in the first Intifada seem no longer available to Palestinians in Gaza. It appears almost as if the beach itself, a smooth space of joy and escape condensed between the sea and the overcrowded, impoverished and assaulted Palestinian cities and refugee camps, has become one of the last few spaces still open to Palestinians and worth defending. Hence, disenchanted with earlier narratives of national liberation, countless Palestinians have abandoned the strict discipline of the first Intifada and returned to the beach, focusing on the affirmation of life in the immanent present rather than in a future that for many Palestinians appears indefinitely delayed. Even national resistance movements in Gaza have adapted their strategies of political mobilisation to the Palestinian desire for life. All major political groups in Gaza have their own public tents on the beach, which are used mainly for leisure activities such as organising summer camps for children and adolescents. Today those on Gaza beach can choose whether to play volleyball with Hamas, go swimming with the Islamic Jihad or fly kites with Fatah. Many children who attend these free summer camps choose them all. CTTE_A_185474.fm Page 427 Thursday, September 14, 2006 9:58 AM 427 A Hamas summer camp, Gaza Beach, August 2005. Photo: Laura Junka CONCLUSIONS A Hamas summer camp, Gaza Beach , August 2005. Photo Laura Junka What, then, can the beach tell us about the differences between the two Intifadas and about the politics of their representation? It is commonly held that a characteristic of the Al-Aqsa Intifada has been the radicalisation of Palestinian society, the emergence of increasingly violent forms of Palestinian agency and a proliferation of Islamic militancy and martyrdom as the central aesthetics of resistance. What Gaza Beach indicates is that parallel with this shift has been a process of hybridisation of Palestinian political subjectivities and the emergence of an aesthetics of life and pleasure in the immanent present. By camping on the beach, Palestinians affirm their right to everyday life and place against both the sovereign occupier and against regimes of national liberation based on demands for austere discipline and uniform collective identities. In the wider body of postcolonial and poststructuralist theorization, such forms of hybridisation and subversion have often been understood as a locus of subaltern resistance per se and as a privileged condition of subaltern empowerment. Yet, what has been argued here is that instead of signalling an expanding field of options available for Palestinians, the hybridization of Palestinian political subjectivities appears indicative of disempowerment. Faced with an increasingly pervasive regime of colonial occupation and disillusioned with earlier narratives of national liberation, options available for Palestinian agency have become ever narrower. As such, the beach stands as a sign of the slow defeat of the resisting subaltern rather than for his or her celebration. Here, distinctions between resistance, hope and escape begin to blur and articulations of Palestinian agency take on forms that are increasingly unrepresentable as well as unrecognisable within hegemonic discourses on conflict. Hopes that are projected on the beach today carry no strategy of final liberation, no belief in the need for self-purification and no trust in CTTE_A_185474.fm Page 428 Thursday, September 14, 2006 9:58 AM 428 future independence. And yet, perhaps it is exactly in this non-strategic, non-teleological hoping subject that a space for Palestinian agency and its representation beyond the narrow parameters of suicide and victimhood remains open. It is against this background that the differences between the two Intifadas must be located and understood. If expressions of Palestinian resistance in terms of control over death and the aesthetics of martyrdom generate little understanding of the Palestinian cause, other indispensable and more hopeful forms of Palestinian agency and subjectivity have been pushed to the margins of political discourses where no systems of political representation are available to them. Today, against late modern colonial occupation, Palestine goes camping. My greatest gratitude is to Julian Reid for invaluable inspiration and support. Thanks also to Haim Bresheeth, Mark Laffey and Louiza Odysseos for insightful comments. Finally, thank you to Abdellrahman Abdoullah, his family, and the Qasir family for inviting me to the beach: this article is dedicated to them.