ABSTRACT

The Palestinian tented camp was established by irregular migrants and activists from the alternative house Blitz, an informal grouping associated with punk culture and anarchism. Ethnographic research on irregular migrants often emphasizes the migrants’ limited freedom of action owing to the severity of state control, the inactive time spent waiting, the fear of deportation and the lack of meaning felt by people who find themselves in this liminal situation. The political mobilization instigated by the irregular Palestinians must be understood on the basis of both their irregularity and their statelessness, as often pointed out by the residents of the camp. The transition from indeterminate, empty waiting time to focused, activity-driven waiting time presupposed a range of activities, such as organizing a music festival, inviting politicians to the camp and interviews with the media. Liminality, a temporal concept cunningly merging individual transformation and social continuity in its initial usage, was originally used to make sense of rites of passage.