The two deaths of Basem Rishmawi: Identity constructions and reconstructions in a Muslim-Christian Palestinian community

This article illuminates political transformations in a West Bank Palestinian town over the past decade by examining the ways stories of a killing which took place in 1981 produced radically different conceptions of community during the period of intensive intifada mobilization and subsequently as the Palestinian National Authority established its rule in the wake of the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Agreements. The paper examines how political arrangements between the Israeli state and the Palestinian administration forced the local community to negotiate in tra-communal conflicts in the terms of an archaic and divisive idiom of tribal law that in turn accelerated the disintegration of the nationalist solidarity that had characterized intifada-period social life. The paper contends that shared perceptions of antagonistic violence are central to processes of collective identity formation, and shows that discursive shifts can, in certain contexts, give rise to nerv formations of identity antipathetic to those that preceded them.