Everyday Jihad ; Everyday Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam among Palestinians in Lebanon

International audience ; In a book that drew on my doctoral dissertation in political science – le Jihad au quotidien (PUF, 2004) eventually translated into English as Everyday Jihad (Harvard University Press, 2007) – I tried to show how a jihadist milieu was constituted in the “city” of Aïn el-Héloué, the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, in what is, in effect, a slum inhabited by 40,000 people in the midst of a population of 400,000 refugees. In post-war Lebanon, mention of the Palestinians stirred up a mix of rancor (among those who blamed them for the 1975 war), guilty conscience (on the part of former allies), fear (by those dreading the demographic impact of a permanent presence) and revenge (among those remembering the outrages committed). The majority therefore acquiesced in the strategic choice by the Syrians to maintain the status quo on the question – in the form of economic and social exclusion – while waiting for a resumption of peace negotiations thought to be imminent at the time.Locked into this context, religious actors within and outside the camp recast the causes of Palestinian and Arab misfortune in religious terms, metamorphosing it by their rhetoric into a metonymy of Muslim misfortune. With numerous instruments of socialization at their disposal, they sought to enlist the young generations in a religious symbolism in which the global geography of jihad surreptitiously supplanted Palestinian national history. Despite the geographic proximity of Palestine (less than fifty kilometers distant), certain segments of the camp’s population internalized this dreamed-up jihadism. The most determined ones among them set out to destroy the system of territorial and nationalist references. My research at the time consisted of analyzing the mechanisms with whose help this new group was fashioned, how it was used to undermine the national and institutional memberships forged by the PLO starting in the 1960s, and the resistances that this transformation succeeded in stirring up. The camp ceased ...