‘The one still surviving and viable institution’

Introduction In the summer of 2008, Jam’iyyat In’ash al-Usra (The Society for Family Rejuvenation), an important women’s non-governmental organization (NGO) founded in 1965 and based in Al-Bireh, West Bank, commissioned to Sharif Kanana, the living spiritual father of Palestinian anthropology, the organization of a conference on ‘the role and the future of the Palestinian family’. The conference program is noticeable for its robust language: the rhetoric is of one of speaking the truth in an hour of emergency. After noting matter-of-factly that Palestinians have witnessed over the last hundred years ‘the virtual destruction of their society’, the planning committee propounds that ‘the family is the one still surviving and viable institution among them’. It then goes on to express ‘the need for a critical evaluation of the nature of the Palestinian family and the role it has played in their struggle for survival’.1