February 10,2026
Nadya Hajj
Associate Professor of Peace and Justice Studies, Wellesley College
Faculty Affiliate, Middle East Institute at Harvard Kennedy School
Nadya Hajj is an Associate Professor of Peace and Justice Studies at Wellesley College and a faculty affiliate of the Middle East Institute at Harvard Kennedy School. Her work examines how marginalized communities—especially Palestinian refugees—build systems of support in politically unstable environments. She is the author of Protection Amid Chaos (Columbia University Press, 2016) and Networked Refugees (University of California Press, 2021).
Arabic version
Introduction
Since 2023, social media and international news sites have broadcast, in real time, the death and funerals of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza. Of course, these images and videos play an important role in motivating people outside the Palestinian community to “bear witness” or observe the suffering of Palestinians, and hopefully, motivate calls for a just peace. In such desperate, violent, and anomic conditions Palestinians have sought to endear their community to ever expanding circles of everyday (non-Palestinian) people all over the world that also endeavor to exhibit their care through the re-sharing of Palestinian narratives and transfer of financial contributions otherwise known as financial remittances. Indeed, one can witness the widening of mutual aid and remittance networks beyond Palestinian community Facebook pages to crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter that have garnered support from all over the globe.
Beyond their use in procuring financial remittances to support the Palestinian community, in what other ways do transnational Palestinians experience the live-streaming of funerary traditions? I maintain that for the transnational Palestinian community, because of their on-going stateless status, the digital transmission of the janaiz or Islamic funerary rights act as a form of social remittances, or the transmission of a common history, narrative, and set of communal norms or ‘adat wa taqlid, such that the community may still connect to ‘home’ and one another, even as the violence of their dispossession continuously unfolds today.
Palestinian connections to ‘home’ for those living in refugee camps, in places of third, fourth, fifth (and beyond!) settlement are complex. All but those very few Palestinians still living in their pre-1948 villages and homes exist in transitional liminal spaces outside of their ancestral (home)land. In these liminal spaces, Yezid Sayigh remarks that the ghettoization of Palestinian refugees in host states and in places of (re)settlement, “reinforced the tendency of Palestinian peasants to conduct as much of their lives as possible within their [pre-1948] villages, not replaced by camps, in which UNRWA, rather than national government, provided virtually all the basic services and jobs.”
In such catastrophic conditions, the community has adopted social structures and modes of connections that sustain its survival. Ahl and hamula or family and clan-tribe kinship networks, mapped onto digital spaces, are crucial for surviving and thriving amidst the ongoing Nakba. Indeed, family and village remain primary organizing units within the refugee camp and reconstruct dynamic ideas of a “home” village. For example, pre-1948 village and family neighbors remain proximate neighbors inside the refugee camps. These kinship structures and geospatial neighborhood connections are reproduced, even when Palestinians migrate to other countries after the refugee camps. The Palestinian community living in liminal transitional spaces, is shaped, according to one observer, by the “crucible of globalization with its attendant mass migration, dislocation culture, and technological advances that allow people to remain connected to multiple places.”
This process is less about Palestinians figuring out how to negotiate between ‘home’ and ‘disapora’ cultures than about how they have developed discourses and practices of belonging across transnational social fields. Thea Abu el-Haj asserts that even before “Skype and Facebook were commonplace, these [diaspora Palestinian] families were in constant contact with relatives ‘back home’ and . . . often remarked how quickly news of their activities, especially rumors about impending engagements, reached their relatives in the bilad.” Studies have shown that Palestinians in American diaspora communities worked daily to cultivate a sense of their Palestinian “home” connections while living in exile. This connection to “home” should not be taken for granted or assumed. The sense of being Palestinian is not an “essential” condition of the community: rather, it reflects “everyday, ongoing work that produces” a diasporic culture that affirms the centrality of ahl and hamula.
Digital Spaces for Transnational Palestinian Connection: Live- Streaming Jana’iz
One of the most visible places to witness the craft of maintaining the transnational Palestinian community is in village and family community Facebook pages where the jana’iz are live-streamed. For Palestinians, ahl and hamula bonds contextualize individuals’ place in the world and maintain community ties even in a scattered transitional space. Palestinians strategically deployed pre-1948 community practices for maintaining cohesion in a changing political and economic landscape. A survey of Facebook pages for Palestinian villages and a cross-referencing of the digital Palestinian directory, “Palestine Remembered,” which manages village statistics for every single pre-1948 village, reveals that more than half of Palestinian villages or family networks maintain active Facebook pages. The Facebook pages act like digital town halls where community members from the same pre-1948 village scattered around the world may post information, advertise services, solicit help- financial and otherwise, and engage in conversation.
Even before the internet era, Palestinians used patrilineal kinship ties to reimagine the Palestinian community amidst the ongoing Nakba. These ties are exemplified in the village history books they crafted shortly after 1948. The books recorded the pre-1948 history of life in Palestinian villages through written and oral recollections by a village member and then bound into a book. They provided a way for displaced people to connect to their home and portrayed Palestinians values and ways of life as a dynamic pool of memories, ideas, and understandings that may be adapted to meet contemporary challenges. According to Davis, the authors of Palestinian village history books are explicit in considering the books as a resource or marja’, for children of today and the future. The books call on Palestinian young people to struggle against their dispossession by focusing on the collective values of “honor, generosity, and cooperation,” collectively understood as the ‘adat wa taqlid, and to place the well-being of the village collectivity, al awna, above all else.
Today, Palestinians in the diaspora have engaged in additional forms of world-making by crafting catalogs in communal Facebook groups that serve as dynamic digital versions of the analog village history books that Rochelle Davis described. In these village Facebook pages, community pleas for crowdfunding surgeries, scholarships, or capital are common. Though there is an extensive remittances literature that maps the flow of financial resources to impoverished receiving communities, the Palestinian case indicates that the exchange of remittances is not purely an economic commodity transfer, but an instrument for what Claude Levi-Strauss called “realities of another order” like power, status, and connections within the community. Critically, the transfer of remittances is not just about giving money to someone in need but serves as an ‘experience vehicle’ for affirming and (re)animating the community’s (re)connection in anomic conditions.
The case of Nahr al-Bared Refugee Camp
Nahr al-Bared refugee camp offers a microcosm in which to examine the processes of dispossession, atomization, and Palestinian community efforts to (re)build transnational networks via social remittances. Nahr al-Bared was built in 1951 roughly sixteen kilometers from the port of Tripoli in Lebanon, on the Mediterranean Sea. On May 15, 2007, the camp was destroyed. Roughly twenty-seven thousand of the thirty thousand people then resident in the camp were forced to relocate. As of 2020, only 54% of camp residents were projected to have returned to Nahr al-Bared.
In the context of multiple dislocations and dispossession, a young Palestinian boy was gravely injured playing near his father’s garage in Nahr al Bared refugee camp in 2019. His injuries and the family’s pleas for help were broadcasted on the Samoie village Facebook page. Unfortunately, despite receiving the best medical care that Samoie’s transnational villagers could afford using financial remittance payments; the boy died from his burn injuries by 2020. This marked yet another moment when the community called upon those living outside the camp for funds to afford the the washing and burial of the body. The cost of washing and enshrouding bodies, two of the main components of the Muslim jana’iz, are prohibitively expensive for many people in Nahr al-Bared, especially since host states, aid agencies, and nationalist parties provide little to no financial support for funerary rites of the average person, like the young boy who died from burn injuries.
The jana’iz are a rather simple set of guidelines for burial. The body is wrapped in a shroud, normally of plain white linen. Sometimes a green Islamic banner is draped over the coffin, but simple shrouds are usually preferred, both to defray costs and to emphasize the egalitarian nature of Islam. Many Palestinians can barely afford the shroud, the burial process, and the tradition of feeding mourners. Additionally, Islamic tradition places great urgency on a timely burial, usually before sunset on the day of death, if at all possible. The combined grief, urgency, and prohibitive cost surrounding the essential components of a dignified burial, often creates distress and embarrassment at a time when the family and village is already suffering. The young boy’s family put out an urgent plea on Facebook and WhatsApp for other Samoie villagers to support his funeral arrangements. Unsurprisingly, the response to his tragic death was swift with funds flowing within hours. Indeed, the young boy was buried by sundown on the day of his death.
Though the traditional story of remittance flows and the digital performance of human suffering might end here because diaspora migrants sent money to the camp and the collective need for proper burial aid was met at ‘home,’ the example also evidences the multidirectional digital exchange of resources and values that aid in the survival and (re)connection of a transnational Palestinian refugee community. Upon the boy’s death, his parents made the choice to live-stream his funeral in the camp on Facebook so that Samoie family members and villagers everywhere could bear witness and offer condolences.
Beyond honoring the dead, Lucia Volk contends that praying and gathering at a cemetery is “world making” because the community projects and affirms its deep abiding ties that may not be easily shrugged off, even in death. There is a common Palestinian communal value enacted and performed when funerals are digitally projected, “il farah lil kul, wa il hazan lil kul,” or “happiness for all and sadness for all.” The community chooses to collectively rejoice and collectively bear the burden of grief. Funeral posts are extremely common for Palestinians, making up more than 20% of activity on the Samoie village Facebook page. The Facebook page provides a space where recipients of financial flows may also ‘give’ by affirming village membership, personal expression, and revitalization of the ahl and hamula network. The streaming of the burial linked the transnational Palestinian community.
Conclusion
Like the village-history books before, the digitally transmitted funeral is explicitly considered as a legacy resource, or ‘marja, for Palestinians of today and in the future. The community inside the camp shares digitally projected images and stories to help cement the watcher’s role and status within the ahl and hamula framework and (re)connect the community regardless of where they live. Whereas non-Palestinian audiences may watch a lives streamed Palestinian funeral and bear witness to suffering and offer financial remittances, the Palestinian audience receives these ritual performances of janaiz differently. As one transnational Samoie villager living in Boston observed regarding her live-streamed viewing of the boy’s funeral, “watching, and receiving news and stories from the camp” made her feel she was “a Palestinian woman connected to my roots” in a world that actively seeks to de-humanize and dispossess her and her community.