My Impossible Ethnography: Gaza’s March of Return
By Amahl Bishara | July 2023
A protest on Nakba Day in Al-Walaja, 2014. Photo credit: Amahl Bishara.
What do Nakba commemorations mean across so many different Palestinian places, and what do they do these dozens of years after Palestinians’ mass dispossession? I spent several springs attending as many Nakba Day commemorations as possible in cities, towns, and refugee camps. The multiplicity of sites of commemoration became a focus for me. Even though Palestinians cannot gather in one place due to Israeli restrictions on movement, and despite the many differences in their political statuses and everyday circumstances, Palestinians insist on commemorating the Nakba of 1948 and the many ongoing Nakbas of dispossession. Coming together in so many different places, Palestinians learn about the specificities of loss and struggle.
I go to commemorations of the Nakba in Boston, where I live, too. In 2018, we’d gathered to make dozens of signs naming some of the plethora of sites of the ongoing Nakba. The morning of the protest, we woke up to horrific news of the Israeli army’s killing of at least 60 Palestinians at Gaza’s brave Great March of Return. This was a protest that had begun on Land Day, March 30, 2018, and that had been sustained those weeks from March 30 to May 15. That day in Boston, stunned and outraged, we read a statement from Ahmed Abu Artema, one of the organizers of the Great March of Return.
After this terrifying massacre, the protesters persevered for more than a year. I saw in photographs that protesters in Gaza had been wearing the same t-shirts that activists in the West Bank had designed. This seemed to me to be a way of gathering together despite Israel’s decades-long policy of separating Gaza and the West Bank, an especially harsh and inflexible element of Israel’s larger closure policy. I wondered what it meant that the Great March of Return had almost the same name as the Marches of Return organized each year by ADRID, the Association for the Defense of the Rights of the Internally Displaced, inside Israel’s 1948 territories. The Gaza march reasserted the possibility of mass protest in a territory that had been besieged and isolated for more than a dozen years. The organizing principles declared that the march to be “a sustained and cumulative struggle, not a seasonal or a one-day event.” As someone interested in the dynamics of protest by Palestinian citizens of Israel as opposed to under military occupation in the West Bank, I could only wonder what it entailed to protest while under blockade. How did they conceive the mechanisms of confrontation and communication? What Palestinian, Israeli, or global audiences did they want to reach? As much as I read about it or glimpsed on social media hints of what was going on at the march in Gaza, nothing would replace having been there, or even being able to speak at length face to face to people who participated in it: to understand how people came together despite Israel’s fences and tanks and guns, and to take in moments of confrontation, anger, grief, and hope.
Even with my double settler colonial citizenships, I cannot go to Gaza. This, then, is my impossible ethnography: To study Nakba commemorations across historic Palestine, including in Gaza. Israel’s blockade of Gaza has devastated the economy. It has denied crucial health care and derailed scholarships. Over the same time, Israel’s many assaults on Gaza have damaged and destroyed homes, schools, and health care facilities. From this perspective the impact on anthropological research might seem quite modest. Yet, these infringements on Palestinian society are interconnected. Our Palestinian anthropology today is of struggle and, humbly, in struggle. We continue in the hope that one day we will write, with wonder, joy, and a continued spirit of loving critique, the ethnography of liberated Palestinians.
Amahl Bishara is associate professor of Anthropology at Tufts University and author of Crossing a Line: Laws, Violence, and Roadblocks to Palestinian Political Expression.