The uprooting of Palestinians in 1948 was an experience that threatened to destroy the entire fabric of Palestinian life (Nazzal “The Palestinian Exodus”; Morris, “The Birth”). By the end of that year, Palestinian society had become geographically dispersed and fragmented. This paper uses data collected from open-ended interviews with Palestinian community members and focuses on two social groups that immigrated to Kuwait between 1948 and the early 1950s—the intelligentsia and the peasantry. Specifically, I analyze the role of family and personal networks as functional units of economic, political, national, and social survival (Barakat, “The Arab Family”; Abu-Lughod, “Migrant Adjustment”; Eickelman, “The Middle East”; Geertz, “The Meaning of Family Ties”; Epstein, “The Network and Urban”). The process that transformed Palestinian families and networks into a cross-national entity is explained. These family and personal networks became a force in reconstructing Palestinian life in diaspora. In addition to rebuilding itself, this Palestinian community in diaspora contributed immensely to the evolution and development of Kuwait over the next four decades. Palestinians found themselves in the midst of a unique duality: Kuwait became their new home, but at the same time they experienced a yearning to return to their Palestinian homeland. The occupation of Kuwait in 1990 shook the Palestinian community living there. In 1991, almost 400,000 Palestinians (of which the overwhelming majority had no role in the politics of the Iraqi occupation) were displaced. More than 50 percent were displaced by Saddam’s occupation; the rest were displaced upon the return of the legitimate authority of the State of Kuwait. The community was colored by the positions of the PLO during the invasion, which opposed western intervention and preferred an Arab solution (Salem, “Conflict Resolution”) As this paper will demonstrate, the displacement of Palestinians in 1991 from Kuwait was a major loss for both Kuwaitis and Palestinians. Much of Kuwait’s institutional memory was lost since the most active working group in the country was suddenly gone. As a result, many services in the fields of education, medicine, municipality, and infrastructural development suffered. On the other hand, Palestinians lost the place they had considered a second home, as well as the community they had worked so hard to build in diaspora. To conclude, I consider what opportunities were missed for Kuwaitis and Palestinians due to these events and what the region might learn about conflict resolution from Kuwait’s experience.

In Ghassan Kanafani’s short story “Letter from Gaza,” the narrator describes his life in Kuwait as follows: “My life there had a gluey, vacuous quality as though I were a small oyster, lost in oppressive loneliness, slowly struggling with a future as dark as the beginning of the night, caught in a rotten routine, a spewed-out combat with time” (87). Like the narrator of his epistolary story, Kanafani moved to Kuwait as a teacher under contract with the Ministry of Education in 1955. He began to publish his short stories during his six-year stay. The trope of Kuwait looms large in many of Kanafani’s stories, including Men in the Sun. Seen by desperate refugees as paradise, Kuwait, in Kanafani’s nuanced depictions, never quite lives up to expectation. As it turns out, Kuwait can provide no viable solution to Palestinian woes. At best, it is a stopgap, at worst, a death trap. Barbara Harlow has demonstrated how textual and practical examples set by revolutionaries such as Kanafani constitute their “after lives” (7). Part of the project of critical inquiry is to read textual remains and to assess the possibilities they may set forth. Gilles Deleuze argues that writers, like doctors, are “astonishing diagnosticians or symptomatologists” (Logic 237). As he explains, “Clinicians who are able to renew a symptomatological table produce a work of art; conversely, artists are clinicians, not with respect to their own case, or even with respect to a case in general; rather they are clinicians of civilization” (237). One role of the critic is to trace symptoms organized by artists in order to assess what might be done with their diagnoses. Building on Harlow’s notion of the after lives of writers and texts and using Deleuze’s clinical methodology, this paper reads Kanafani’s “Kuwait stories” symptomatically in order to consider what the legacy of both him and his writing might be to contemporary Kuwait. His clinical diagnosis of the fraught relationship between Kuwait and Palestinians in the 1940s and 50s can provoke a reconsideration of that early history, especially in light of the devastating aftermath of the Iraqi invasion. I will also consider how Kanafani’s actual presence in Kuwait in the second half of the 1950s represents an early promise of Kuwait as a tolerant and cosmopolitan place soon betrayed and, since the turn of the millennium (and to the detriment of the present), mostly forgotten.

Edward Said states, “A beginning is what I think scholarship should see itself as, for in that light scholarship or criticism revitalizes itself...[A] beginning methodologically unites a practical need with a theory, an intention with a method” (Beginnings 380). In this sense, he argues that “‘beginning’ is an eminently renewable subject” (380). This paper explores the various “beginnings” in Kuwait’s educational evolution. First, I examine two features commonly identified as the historical beginning of formal education in Kuwait: the 1936 Education Council and the Palestinian mission. The Palestinian teachers that arrived to teach in Kuwait by way of this mission contributed several additions to the curriculum, including what may be described as Kuwait’s earliest form of citizenship education: courses on civility and morality (Shahab). In the following decades, Palestinians played a significant role in the content and quality of Kuwait’s educational system, as this paper will demonstrate. In the 1970s and 80s, however, government policies limited the number of Palestinian teachers in state schools. “Kuwaitization” halved the number of Palestinian teachers by the mid-70s while tripling the number of Kuwaiti teachers (Lesch). After 1991, Palestinian teachers who had continued to teach during the Iraqi occupation faced Kuwaiti resentment; Egyptian teachers were recruited to replace Palestinians as a form of “collective punishment” (Lesch 50). These decades comprise what I term the beginning of the end: the second, often repressed “beginning” in Kuwait’s educational evolution. As Said points out, “Even when it is repressed, the beginning is always a first step from which...something follows” (xvi). What has followed in Kuwait’s educational system is yet another—not to say “new” or “better”— “beginning.” This current “beginning” is a project uncomfortably shared between the government and Islamists in parliament, both of whom seek control. It is characterized by a static nationalism and a pervasive Islamic orientation within the curriculum, and is carried through mainly by Kuwaiti teachers. This paper will present data from curriculum and policy analysis as well as open-ended interviews with Palestinian and Kuwaiti teachers and students in order to explore Kuwait’s three identified “beginnings” and the presence and absence of the Palestinians within each. Particular attention will be paid to Palestinian contributions in the fields of secular and citizenship education. These will then be contrasted with the highly nationalistic and religious education system prevalent today, highlighting the loss of the “intentions” and “methods” of that promising “beginning” in the 1930s.

In 1946, Kuwait embarked on an enormous urbanization project steered by oil and conceived by British planners. Since Kuwaitis did not possess the skills to implement these complex plans, Palestinians filled the necessary posts in the Municipality and Public Works Department. Early Palestinian migrants played a central role in shaping Kuwait’s built environment in the first decades of its modernization. The most substantial contributor to Kuwait’s early spatial development was Palestinian-American Saba George Shiber. As Kuwait’s chief architect and planning adviser from 1960 to 1968, Shiber represented what Henri Lefebvre calls the “planning of men of good will.” Such planners “associate themselves to an old classical and liberal humanism. This is not without a good dose of nostalgia” (Writings on Cities 83). Disappointed by the failures and missed opportunities of the 1950s, Shiber championed Arab city planning over the intrusion of British “experts” he felt had destroyed Kuwait’s landscape. The next few years under his direction represented Kuwait’s most coherent, successful, and indeed “humanist” era of city planning. After 1968 the state reverted back to the destructive “abstract” planning both Shiber and Lefebvre abhorred. This paper examines Shiber’s redesign of the Central Business District, the “historical and sentimental” urban core where Kuwait was first settled that after 1950 grew to be "the thorniest and most unwieldy area” (Kuwait Urbanization 161-162). His design plan transformed the area into the city's most spatially organized and architecturally dynamic district. Based on Shiber’s writings and on interviews with users of his spaces then and now, this paper examines the significance of this district to Kuwaiti urbanism in the 1960s and revisits Shiber’s urban legacy today. Fifty years on, the buildings in this district run the risk of demolition. In the last five years, however, young Kuwaiti entrepreneurs have renovated and revitalized one block where they have opened new homegrown shops and restaurants. This strip has become a symbol of national pride—a spatial reflection of young Kuwaitis’ newfound creativity in what has become a franchise-culture. This rare case of bottom-up regeneration has saved the area from demolition and has thereby safeguarded Shiber’s legacy. Yet, as this paper shows, none who occupy or frequent these lively businesses know that the space was his creation. The absence of recognition of Shiber’s work in this area reinvented as a space of Kuwaiti innovation erases this distinctly Palestinian legacy to Kuwait’s urbanism.