Into committees, out of the house? Familiar forms in the organization of Palestinian committee activism during the first intifada

The ethnographic subject of this article is Palestinian political committees and their heuristic importance as a means of rendering Palestinians in the first intifada. Drawing on fieldwork among politically active Palestinians from diverse walks of life, I show that, contrary to the prevalent view in the scholarly literature and in political displays, Palestinians who joined committees did not "leave the house." Concentrating analysis on forms in which Palestinians' interest in committees was actually expressed, one finds an aesthetic likeness as well as a substantive intertwinement between the socialities of committee movements and of houses.