Refugees Together and Citizens Apart

Grounded in long-term ethnography, Refugees Together and Citizens Apart examines how dispossessed Palestinians experience and seek to resist Israeli coercive differentiation through the study of two areas with intertwined histories of forced displacement: the segregated Palestinian districts of Lyd (renamed Lod), and the Jalazone refugee camp in the West Bank. This book brings together the securitized policing that Palestinians experience today in Lyd and the layers of militarism, humanitarianism, and Palestinian Authority rule that Palestinians are forced to negotiate in Jalazone. Melding Palestine Studies and Bourdieusian sociology of settler colonialism, the book connects coercive control, collective emotions, and political life, and argues that how coercive control is exercised, by whom, and against whom matters for how dispossessed Palestinians strive to (re)build affective and political worlds locally and globally. Refugees Together and Citizens Apart compares the emotional climate of fear, distrust, stigma, and frustration at communal frailty in Lyd's segregated Palestinian districts with the defiant defensive togetherness in Jalazone, examining how these two emotional climates are conducive to different forms of political life. The book supplements the comparative lens with a cross-border perspective attentive not only to the historical but also familial and social ties between the two localities. Crossing Israeli borders of coercive control, this book highlights the role of legal status, place, and class in structures, experiences, and refusals of coercive differentiation. Along the way, it illuminates how the violent dismemberment of the Palestinian body politic is reproduced and the collective struggle for liberation articulated at the Palestinian margins.