A former French protectorate that came to independence in 1956, unlike its often imposing Algerian and Libyan neighbors, Tunisia is both geographically and economically of modest size, although offshore oil discoveries have made important contributions to what was otherwise a largely agriculturally based economy. Whether because of the unpredictability of Libya, which has on occasion expelled Tunisian workers, or the potential spillover of civil war from Algeria, Tunis has pursued policies aimed at insulating itself from the vagaries of regional politics and economics. From independence until the 1980s, a single party, the Parti socialiste destourien (PSD), and the state were led by the country's most prominent independence figure, Habib Bourguiba, a French-trained lawyer who had ideas not unlike those of Turkey's Atatürk regarding modernization and state-building.

In terms of population movement, until the end of the First World War, Tunisia was a region of immigration, attracting those seeking wealth, welcome or asylum from other parts of the Mediterranean basin. It began to export labor to France about the same time Morocco did, but the flows did not become important until several years after independence, when unemployment levels began to rise. Unlike Rabat, Tunis took a more interventionist approach from the beginning, in keeping with the developmentalist leanings of its leadership. While not always meeting targets or expectations, the Tunisian state did establish offices to address placement and programs to provide training.

It was during a quiet Saturday afternoon in Los Angeles that a program on Arab-American television triggered my initial interest in the state and emigration. This particular day, the program featured an interview with Talal Arslan, the Lebanese Minister of Expatriates. Listening to the interview, I realized that I had not been aware that a ministry devoted to nationals abroad existed, in Lebanon or elsewhere in the Arab world. In the weeks that followed, I learned that in fact a number of Arab (and other) countries had similar institutions, but that little research had been done on them, and the idea for this research was born.

The subsequent development of the project, however, was far from what I had initially envisaged. First, heavy administrative duties as a center director, then the tremendous demands on my time placed by the aftermath of September 11 meant halting progress at best. By the time a sabbatical finally enabled me to focus fully on the research abroad, war drums had begun beating inside the Beltway. In spring 2003, the period I had set aside for the major drafting of the book, Washington launched its invasion of Iraq and, living in Beirut at the time, my attention turned from book writing to war protesting.

Since the invasion, there have been many times when the intellectual call of this project sadly paled in comparison with the need to devote time to speaking out against the Bush administration's domestic and foreign policy record.

While scholars remain divided as to whether population movement in the post 1945 period in fact surpasses the magnitudes of earlier periods, the issues of who, why, when, how, and to what effect people move from farm to city, town to town, or country to country have received increasing scholarly and policy attention in recent years. Researchers across disciplines have sought to answer these and related questions, focusing on a variety of levels and units of analysis, and drawing upon myriad theoretical frameworks and empirical tools. While some have looked at the micro-level questions of individual decisions to migrate and their impact, often emphasizing economic cost–benefit calculations or push-pull factors, others have posed community or societal-level questions, as they have sought to understand the cultural impact of immigration, various historical aspects of the immigrant experience, or the possibilities for integration or assimilation in the new host country. In the fields of political science and international relations, explanations have often been sought for governmental response to immigration, with some analysts locating their explanations at the level of the state, others in the international political economy, and still others in changes in international norms.

If migration or immigration studies have been remarkable in terms of the diversity of treatment and disciplinary interest noted above, they have, conversely, been, in their majority, surprisingly limited geographically: most of the work that has been done on the question of the permeability of borders, border controls, citizenship and migration or immigration (as opposed to work solely on citizenship) has dealt with Western Europe and the United States.

The now voluminous literatures on globalization and the new security agenda intersect in their discussion of whether the state is waning in importance or manifesting forms of resistance in the face of contemporary challenges. There is no question that many issues formerly understood as being under the control of the state or falling within its sovereign realm can no longer be accurately portrayed in such a way. Environmental threats in the oceans and the air admit no boundaries; developments in military technology have rendered national boundaries vulnerable in an unprecedented way; economic restructuring in response to neoliberal dictates has reconfigured the role of the state in the domestic economy and opened the way to broader and deeper foreign investment that is less controlled by national authorities; and the speed and development of communications have rendered virtually impossible tight governmental control of information flows across borders. In the realm of population movement, the evolution of the global economy has led employers to seek low-cost (often illegal) labor, thus rendering increasingly difficult the prevention of undocumented flows. Moreover, despite state efforts to stem the tide, the numbers of refugees, displaced and asylum seekers have been steadily rising.

In addition, some argue that state power is waning owing to the growth in numbers and importance of a variety of transnational actors – some of them of a supranational sort, others sub-national in origin – which engage in coordination and advocacy work on such issues as human rights, the environment, indigenous culture and women's rights, supported by like-minded activist groups abroad.

Of the four countries covered in this work, Morocco's history as a distinct entity (as traced through its Alaouite monarchy) is the longest and its experience with outside intervention the shortest. Unlike Tunisia, Lebanon and Jordan, it was never a part of the Ottoman Empire, and it was the last of the three to come under external control, succumbing for economic and political reasons to the imposition of a protectorate with French, Spanish and international zones in 1912. It secured formal independence in 1956 following an independence struggle that produced the bases of one of the few multiparty political systems in the region, just as it transformed Mohammed V, the grandfather of Mohammed VI, into a beloved national hero. A strong sense of national identity – at least among the elite and the city-dwellers – notwithstanding, Morocco entered the community of nations with a significant divide between rural and urban which coincided to a certain extent with that between Berbers and Arabs.

Hassan II succeeded his father Mohammed V in 1962 and ruled until his death in 1999 using a governing formula that combined the traditional authority of religion (the royal family's claims to be from the line of the Prophet Muhammad), the power of the state apparatus with its attendant patron–client relations (called the makhzen), and at times brutal coercion. It was a formula that preserved the monarchy, but which did little to promote socio-economic development.

Of the cases covered in this book, Lebanon's migration is the oldest and its communities the most widespread. Beginning with waves directed principally toward the Western Hemisphere in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, significant diaspora communities subsequently developed in Africa and then in the oil states of the Persian Gulf. With the outbreak of civil war in 1975, new groups left; some changed the confessional composition of existing communities, while others began to shape the development of largely new groupings in Canada, Europe and Australia. The long and varied Lebanese emigrant experience has also given rise to more diverse terminology for those who have left than one finds in other cases. In Lebanese discussions of the topic, the most common term for those abroad is mughtarib (“expatriate”), although in recent years al-intishar (a word akin to diaspora) has gained increasing currency, just as one finds the terms mutahaddir (“descendant,” referring to the second, third and fourth generations) and muhajir (“one who has emigrated/fled”).

Like Morocco and Tunisia, Lebanon witnessed the beginnings of significant emigration during the pre-independence period. However, unlike the Maghrebi cases, Lebanese emigration was undertaken on individual initiative, not on a colonial government-organized work-contract basis. At the beginning of the migration, the territory was part of the Ottoman Empire, and what was finally delineated as the Lebanese state did not coincide with the historical boundaries of Mt. Lebanon.

Limited resources, successive waves of Palestinian refugees, and proximity to the Gulf oil-producing region all played key roles in Jordan's development into a labor-exporting state. While British financial support during the Mandate and into the independence period established the bases for structural characteristics that contributed to the emergence of outmigration, it was the 1947–49 Palestine War that introduced the problems and possibilities of unanticipated human resources. First, as a result of the war that dismembered Palestine, some 70,000 Palestinians took refuge directly on the East Bank of the Jordan. More important, however, were the territorial changes that followed the war. At the time of the cease-fire, the Arab Legion (Jordan's British-commanded Army) was in occupation of the rump of Eastern Palestine, subsequently known as the West Bank. Through a series of legal and administrative measures, by 1950 this area was annexed by the Hashemite Kingdom. Jordan's King ʿAbdallah had long sought a realm larger than that given him by the British, and his incorporation of the territory and subsequent enfranchisement of the population of the West Bank (some 800,000 at the time) was in keeping with those aspirations.

Whatever dynastic ambitions may have been thereby fulfilled, the post-war period was one of economic crisis for both banks of the expanded kingdom. Nearly half of ʿAbdallah's new subjects were refugees, many of them destitute.

A focus on the sending states, and not just the societies, of the global South has a great deal to contribute to our understanding of the multi-faceted phenomenon of international migration. The traditional European/US bias of political science studies of border controls and immigration policy, combined with the civil-society and network emphasis of much of the transnationalism literature, leaves significant parts of the migration story untold. First, because the majority of migration is South–South, not South–North; and second because the state plays a preeminent role in shaping employment and investment, as well as identity and security policy, all of which have been shown to contribute to the nature and magnitude of emigration as well as the subsequent management of communities of nationals abroad.

In attempting to discern the forces behind the establishment of state institutions involved in expatriate affairs, this work first derived a general proposition from the transnationalism literature that such structures could be understood as the product of a particular stage of capitalist development, that of the late twentieth – early twenty-first centuries. While there has certainly been a recent proliferation of these institutions, a close examination of the historical record of our four case countries demonstrated that such structures are not new. Indeed, the initial initiatives by the Tunisian, Lebanese and Moroccan states appear to have been driven by decolonization, not more recent economic globalization.

Another juncture of profound importance in the history of some of these institutions was the 1973 oil crisis.

Great humiliation never ends, said Auschwitz inmate Primo Levi, an authoritative witness to the subject, in The Reawakening. The memory of the offense engenders evil and hatred, which break the body and the spirit and mark both survivors and oppressors. This insight is, in a way, Primo Levi's legacy, expressed after his liberation from the death camp. The nature, effects, and functions of traumatic memory, especially memory of an immense human catastrophe such as the Holocaust, and more specifically the impact of this memory on the Israeli–Arab conflict, will be at the heart of this chapter. It deals with the mobilization of the memory of the Holocaust in the service of Israeli politics, beginning with the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1960–1962. A line is drawn from this event, and the specific Holocaust discourse it generated, to the Six Day War (June 1967) with its own existential Holocaust discourse.

Hence the cryptic title of the chapter which delineates its time frame: the People's Hall (in Hebrew, Bet Ha'am) was the site in Jerusalem where Israel held the trial of the Nazi criminal. The Wailing Wall (or Western Wall) of the title, which is considered a remnant of the outer wall of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, has become a national symbol and a major Jewish religious site.

The survivor of a man-made catastrophe is one of the signifiers and definers of the twentieth century, the icon of an era of mass horrors. A survivor or survivant is one who has lived through and beyond; beyond the threshold, beyond the border of life, who went on living after an event which was meant to end his life, after the annihilation of a mass of human beings, of whom he was part. In this sense, the survivor is a remnant from another world, someone who was at the core of the catastrophe, and came back, but left a very significant part of himself behind. The survivor or survivant is alive therefore, vivant in his own specific relation to both the dead and the living; he maintains an intense relationship – defined by an extreme situation and an ultimate trial – with the dead, as well as with ordinary, living human beings, from whom he is set apart because of his bond with the dead and with that event which the dead, unlike him, did not survive.

Survivorship, survival, being a remnant, are extreme situations, whose rarity and improbability define them. Life after a catastrophe is considered an act of grace, a gift, but this grace is two-edged, very often it is poisoned, and sometimes it can turn into a curse.

Few are the texts which mold a generation's thinking and discourse instantly and lastingly, and create conceptual breakthroughs. If the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem elevated talk of the Holocaust to the public sphere and granted it the legitimacy and circulation it had not previously had, then the report of the trial by Hannah Arendt in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) transformed this speech and revolutionized its language and meanings. Thus the two events, the trial and the book, and subsequently the fierce controversy around the book as well, became inextricably connected and of one piece. Not only did the trial take on mythological dimensions as a restorative and expiatory event, summing up a historical chapter and, as it were, “rendering justice” to the victims of the Holocaust, the Jewish people, and the State of Israel, as if justice could be rendered; Arendt's book itself, which endeavored to deconstruct the redemptive mythical discourse of the trial – and the maelstrom which engulfed the book and its author – also assumed mythical dimensions. It is therefore no longer possible to discuss the Eichmann trial and its significance separately from Arendt's analysis of it; or to discuss the meaning of the book without referring to its reception and perception.