‘The People are Missing’: Palestinians in Kuwait

Abstract

This paper explores the effects of the Iraqi invasion on the Palestinian community in Kuwait. Specifically, it considers Gilles Deleuze's notion of the ‘missing people’ in relation both to the Palestinians deported after the 1991 Gulf War and to the majority of Kuwaitis who have not acknowledged the effects of this disappearance on either the Palestinians or themselves. The first section revisits the circumstances surrounding the deportation of approximately 380,000 Palestinians from Kuwait, while the second considers what was lost as a result. The final section proposes an ‘ethics of the missing’ as a possible means to engage and transform some of the ensuing problems.

Palestine in Deleuze

“…Indeed, while the contemporary and ongoing canonization of Deleuze's thought has been extensive iii , in very few of these studies are his writings on Palestine broached or explored in any depth, nor is the connection 4 between Deleuze and prominent Palestinian intellectuals and activists, such as Elias Sanbar and Mahmoud Darwish iv , examined. Importantly, this is not to ignore or erase the wide range of scholarship that has applied Deleuzian conceptsnomadology, war machine, rhizome, assemblage, line of flight -to the study of Israeli settler colonialism (see for example Svirsky, 2010Svirsky, , 2015Svirsky, , 2017Al-Nakib, 2014;Al-Zobaidi, 2009;Shihade, 2015;May, 2008). Rather, it is to point to the specific lack of attention and critical engagement that Deleuze's writings on Palestine have been met with.…”