Untimely Optimism: International Attention, Palestinian Disappointment, and the Persistence of Commitment

Abstract

ABSTRACT:This article considers the simultaneous experience and expression of disappointment and belief, and of exhaustion and commitment, in Palestinian engagement with the international community and international institutions in the years since 1948. This problem is not just a Palestinian one. Drawing from archival and ethnographic research on Palestine conducted over, and about, many years and locations, the article proposes untimely optimism as a concept to elucidate how people can sustain commitments to institutions whose failures they know well. The concept also reveals what may be accomplished through maintaining such commitment, even within a general context of failure and betrayal. Untimeliness does not always generate optimism—it frequently does not—but it may nonetheless be a prerequisite for optimism "at the end of the world."