Palestinians Born in Exile: Diaspora and the Search for a Homeland (review)

Palestinians Born in Exile: Diaspora and the Search for a Homeland, by Juliane Hammer. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. 271 pp. $22.95. If you are interested in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, chances are you have an opinion on the issue of Palestinians' "right to return"-and most likely, a strong opinion. In that case, the book reviewed here may answer some of your questions about returnees, including what actually happens to them when they "return" to Palestine, how they are received by those who never left, and where they actually feel most at home. Juliane Hammer sets out to study the experiences of a small group of young Palestinian returnees to the West Bank in the years following the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords. The study is revealing for what it shows us about the nature of these returnees' experiences, including the variability of their experiences, their emotional and intellectual discomfort with the realities they found "on the ground," and their negotiated integration into Palestinian society in some instances, and, in others, their decisions to leave for homelands in other places. By revealing the complexities and uncertainties surrounding these returnees' experiences, Hammer effectively demonstrates the "disconnect" for many Palestinian returnees between imagined homelands and real returns, as well as between professed nationalism and self-interested individualism. Throughout the book, a central focus is on the tension between two groups of returnees whom Hammer refers to as "Amrikan" and "Aideen." The former are returnees from North America and Europe. The latter are returnees from Arab countries, many of whose fathers typically worked for the PLO in diaspora. Many of the Aideens' fathers returned to Palestine in order to work for the Palestinian Authority. Many Aideen, Hammer tells us, had to cope with "the negative perceptions of local Palestinians" (p. 106) who felt that the PA was a "synonym for corruption, privilege, and the takeover of political power" (p. 140). Throughout the study Hammer compares the two groups (and their inevitable subgroupings). While this serves to highlight a key source of the diversity of experience among Palestinian returnees, it also inevitably sells one group's experiences short and minimizes other key differences (such as religion and class). Amrikans, for example, demonstrate various "acts of resistance" to assimilating to the requirements of life in Palestine, such as refusing to improve their Arabic. The Aideen, on the other hand, are more involved in political issues than the Amrikan. I argue that these assertions by Hammer may be more connected to small sample size than to the social reality of her informants' experiences. While it may be possible to propose certain generalizations based on the influence of the two groups' diaspora experiences, in-depth interviews of more informants and a closer look at the ethnographic data already at hand could have served to bolster her assertions or have led her to different conclusions. …