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Thinking about events and dates that Palestinians commemorate, one hundred years after the fateful Balfour Declaration of 1917, reveals a political timeline on which the story of contemporary Palestinian history hangs. Commemoration, as an act, tends to lionize certain events and persons, especially when it is officially created or sponsored. Because Palestinians have long been without an official political entity in Palestine that can produce official commemorative actions, Palestinian commemorations reflect both individual and collective actions that develop and change over time. This essay analyzes those actions and the different spaces and actors behind them to explicate the politics of commemoration. It posits that the metanarratives of Palestinian history that have developed give primacy to the powers and forces that undermined Palestinian aspirations and actions. As metanarratives, they create frames for understanding history within a political and national discourse of struggle, dispossession, and suffering. And yet, these metanarratives miss the embodied practices of commemoration that define Palestinian life within this struggle. Detailing Palestinians' commemorations reveals the robust culture that ties commemorations of the past with activism, awareness, and education for the present and the future.

The U.S. Military's turn to culture in the 21st century occurred largely because of its inability to achieve its stated objectives in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through conventional military force. Building on a long history of military strategies concerned with the cultural differences of others, the U.S. military crafted a warfighting strategy in 2006 based on a counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine of using cultural knowledge to battle the enemy. Charting how and why culture was embraced as a 21st-century "weapons system" shows us how technopolitical systems inside the military-industrial complex are envisioned, built, and then dismantled. Close tracking of these changing 21st-century strategies of war reveals, deep within the counterterrorism discourse, a fundamental belief in American exceptionalism. The principle that emerged from this ideological environment is that the enemies to be fought are not only terrorists or the ideologues of al-Qaʿida but also the countries and cultures that produced them. The implementation of this principle, despite its obvious failures, reveals the ideological underpinning that has justified the incredible destruction and securitized implementation of warfighting.

"Im Rahmen des vierten 'Kulturgipfels' des US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) im April 2010 schlug Generalmajor David Hogg, Leiter der Adviser Forces in Afghanistan, vor, dass das US-Militär 'Kultur als Waffensystem# denken solle. Hogg verwies darauf, dass das Militär die Kultur der Länder, in denen es im Einsatz sei, verstehen müsse und dass es lernen müsse, neben konventionelleren Waffensystemen auch dieses Wissen im Kampf gegen die Feinde einzusetzen. Diese konzeptionelle und vielleicht buchstäbliche 'Umwandlung von Kultur zur Waffe' setzt eine Entwicklung fort, die mit den Einmärschen der USA in Afghanistan und dem Irak begann. Auf allerhöchster Kommandoebene von General David Petraeus unterstützt, entstand die Idee von Kultur als Waffensystem aus dem 'weicheren Ansatz', den die US-Armee nach dem Rücktritt von Verteidigungsminister Donald Rumsfeld in Bezug auf die US-amerikanischer Kriege nach 9/ 11 verfolgte." (Autorenreferat)