Anja Kublitz

Exploring generational changes and continuities among Palestinian families in Denmark, this article investigates why the children of the fidāᵓīn (fighters) and many of the fidāᵓīn themselves have turned their backs on secular politics and embraced Islam. The Palestinians who arrived in Denmark from Lebanon in the wake of the Lebanese Civil War were members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and were known as the generation of the revolution (jīl al-thawra). Extending Karl Mannheim's approach to generations, I argue that in order to explain the transition among Palestinians in Denmark from revolutionaries to Muslims we can rely on neither genealogy nor historical context alone, but need to pay equal attention to the structural continuities that crosscut generations. I suggest that rather than conceive of revolutionaries and Muslims as oppositions, we should think of them as substitutions, as liminal becomings that are actualized across historical generations.

The majority of Palestinians in Denmark have followed a route from villages in Palestine via camps in Lebanon to housing projects in Denmark. Whereas it is well known that the camps were modelled after the villages, it is less well known that the housing projects are referred to and enacted as camps. Based on fieldwork among Palestinians in the Danish camps, this article explores why my interlocutors describe their current lives as a catastrophe. Al-Nakba literally means the catastrophe and, in Palestinian national discourse, it is used to designate the event of 1948, when the Palestinians were expelled from their homeland. However, according to my interlocutors, al-Nakba never stopped, but continues in the present. To understand this phenomenon, I suggest that it is conducive to think of al-Nakba as a reverse national myth, a figure of un-becoming, which is replicated in the present. I argue that, unlike the spectacular catastrophes in Palestine and later in Lebanon, life in the Danish camps is characterized by minor mundane catastrophes that are each so small that they barely register or elicit a moral response, but nevertheless erode the lives of my interlocutors.