Identity and Religion in Palestine

The rise of the Islamist tendency in Palestinian politics and society has attracted considerable attention, both academic and journalistic, during the last fifteen years. The literature on the topic has examined the ideology and structure of Palestinian Islamist organizations, and even their foreign relations. Loren Lybarger has taken a different approach to understanding the Islamist ascendancy in Palestine by examining the discourses within and between secular nationalist and Islamist political tendencies. In doing so, he has produced a nuanced, revealing, and important book. The focus of Identity and Religion in Palestine is on the generation of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza strip who came to political maturity during the first Intifada. Lybarger spent six years (discontinuously) in the occupied territories, the first two of them during that uprising. His final year concluded at the beginning of the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada. During his time in Palestine, he developed contacts, working relationships, and personal friendships that permitted him to conduct an exceptionally intimate example of ethnographic fieldwork. His research relies especially on taped interviews that he conducted from 1999–2000 with individual young men and women, and with small groups. He has also drawn on his notes from informal interactions with Palestinians, from his observations of the physical environment in which they conduct their lives, and occasionally from the material culture that they have produced. Lybarger has framed his research with broad questions, asking, What transformations took place in Palestinian society at the end of the 1980s and 1990s, and what were the consequences of these changes for his ‘friends and neighbours’? Why had some Palestinians shifted their affiliation from the PLO to the Islamist organizations during the first Intifada? What were the sources of friction between the PLO and Islamist movements, and what would be their ‘ultimate impact?’ (p. xii)

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