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.

The Jewish catastrophe in World War II, and the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees it left in its wake, rendered more urgent than ever the Jewish need for a homeland. The vision of that homeland was whole-heartedly supported even by as critical a Jewish philosopher as Hannah Arendt. The post-Holocaust world provided, she said, a rare opportunity for Jewish rehabilitation. However, while she had welcomed the foundation of a Jewish homeland, Arendt remained critical of many aspects of this vision, as conceived by the Zionist leadership, as well as the national myths at the basis of this vision, particularly those that were, in her eyes, thwarting the possibility of peaceful coexistence with the Palestinians and the Arab world. The most powerful myth, according to Arendt, was that throughout history the Jews, in contrast to all other nations, “were not history-makers but history-sufferers, preserving a kind of eternal identity of goodness whose monotony was disturbed only by the equally monotonous chronicle of persecutions and pogroms.” Arendt believed that this view was an attempt to discharge the victim of responsibility, and that it extracted problems of Jewish identity and suffering from history, from their very historicity by essentializing Jewish victimhood. Such a view, Arendt said, cut off Jewish history from European and world history, and created a state of mind that she defined as “worldlessness.”

Involvement, responsibility, and historicity are key concepts in Arendt's political thought.

Where memory and national identity meet, there is a grave, there lies death. The killing fields of national ethnic conflicts, the graves of the fallen, are the building blocks of which modern nations are made, out of which the fabric of national sentiment grows. The moment of death for one's country, consecrated and rendered a moment of salvation, along with the unending ritual return to that moment and to its living-dead victim, fuse together the community of death, the national victim-community. In this community, the living appropriate the dead, immortalize them, assign meaning to their deaths as they, the living, see fit, and thereby create the “common city,” constituted, according to Jules Michelet, out of the dead and the living, in which the dead serve as the highest authority for the deeds of the living. Ancient graves thus generate processes that create fresh graves. Old death is both the motive and the seal of approval for new death in the service of the nation, and death with death shall hold communion. Defeat in battles, those all too effective wholesale manufacturers of death on the altar of the nation, are a vital component in the creation of national identity, and their stories are threaded through national sagas from end to end, becoming in the process tales of triumph and valor, held up for the instruction of the nation's children-soldiers-victims, who learn from these images and imaginings to want to die.

“From … remorselessly accumulating cemeteries,” writes Benedict Anderson at the closure of his book Imagined Communities, “the nation's biography snatches exemplary suicides, poignant martyrdoms, assassinations, executions, wars and holocausts. But to serve the narrative purpose, these violent deaths must be remembered/forgotten as ‘our own’.” These words reverberate deep within the present book, which deals with the way the Israeli-Zionist nation's biography in the course of the twentieth century gathered its catastrophes, wars, and victims, embraced them, remembered and forgot them, told their stories in its own way, endowed them with meaning, bequeathed them to its children, shaped its own image through them, viewing itself in them as if it were all these. This is a book about Israeli nation-ness and nationalism, about death in its national public sphere, and the fatal connection between them: about the memory of death and culture of death and the politics of death in the service of the nation. To the same degree, it is a book about collective memory, about memory as an agent of culture, shaping consciousness and identity and shaped by them in a constant reciprocal process; about the way in which Israel's collective memory of death and trauma was created and produced, and how it has been processed, coded, and put to use in Israel's public space, particularly in the half-century which has lapsed since the destruction of European Jewry.

The formal institutions that incumbents create to structure government–opposition relations also influence their choices of informal mechanisms through which they manage individual opposition groups. Authoritarian elites treat opponents differentially. They can allow some opponents to organize more openly, thus gaining political strength, while simultaneously repressing others. They also influence the choices of entrepreneurs by opening some political spaces while simultaneously closing others. This chapter examines how incumbent elites attempt to minimize the challenges that they face by influencing the strength and weakness of opposition groups with different political preferences.

As we shall see, although the strategies of manipulation are equally available to all incumbents, the creation of unified or divided SoCs has important implications for which strategies they choose. In unified SoCs, incumbents attempt to limit challenges by strengthening moderates with competing ideological preferences. Furthermore, they want to strengthen moderates and co-opt radicals in order to keep the oppositions' demands close to the status quo. In divided SoCs, incumbents try to control the opposition by strengthening radical groups, but they do not co-opt these opponents.

OPPOSITION PREFERENCES, GOVERNMENT STRATEGIES, AND SoCs

Incumbents choose between two strategies to manage their opposition. They may try to fragment and moderate political opposition groups, promoting a balanced set of opposition forces with moderate, but diametrically opposed, political demands. Alternatively, they may try to reduce the threats to their regime by strengthening ideologically radical political opponents.

Divided SoCs foster very different dynamics of opposition during prolonged crises than do unified SoCs. In the divided system, legal opposition groups commit themselves to maintaining the stability of the regime, and incumbents punish them severely if they break this agreement. Thus, legal opposition groups are given an opportunity to express their political demands, but they are penalized if they mobilize “unruly” demonstrations. Thus, for them, the costs of joint conflict with excluded opponents are greater than those of isolated conflict. By contrast, as discussed in Chapter 3, illegal groups face lower sanctions if they mobilize in conjunction with legal opponents than they do if they act independently.

Consequently, the level and nature of the opposition to the regime varies over the course of prolonged crises. Because legal opponents have organizational structures and government acceptance that lower the costs of mobilizing an isolated protest, they are often able to exploit the early stages of crises to press their demands. As the crises continue, however, the more radical, excluded opponents gain strength. Initially, this makes radical elites more likely to join an ongoing protest even if they are unwilling to mobilize independently. This, however, threatens the moderates – who face greater repression for destabilizing the system. As the crisis mounts and popular dissatisfaction increases, legal parties often choose to sit it out, reducing their challenges against the regime.