The Question of Palestine, page 22
This passage is one of the numerous scenes into which the work is divided. In almost every one the present, temporally speaking, is unstable and seems subject to echoes from the past, to synesthesia as sight gives way to sound or smell and as one sense interweaves with another, to a combination of defensiveness against the harsh present and the protection of some particularly cherished fragment of the past. Even in Kanafani’s style (which seems clumsy in my translation, but I thought it important to render the complex sentence structure as exactly as I could), one is unsure of the points in time to which the center of consciousness (one of the three men) refers. In the passage I have quoted, “every time” blends into “since that first time,” which also seems to include, obscurely, “there on the land he had left ten years ago.” Those three clauses are dominated figuratively by the image of tearing a road out of darkness toward the light. Later, during the main part of the novella, we will remark that much of the action takes place in the dusty street of an Iraqi town where the three men, independently of one another, petition, plead, bargain with “specialists” to take them across the border. The main conflict in the book turns about that contest in the present; impelled by exile and dislocation, the Palestinian must carve a path for himself in existence, which is by no means a “given” or stable reality for him, even among fraternal Arabs. Like the land he left, his past seems broken off at the moment just before it could bring forth fruit; yet the man has family, responsibilities, life itself to answer to, in the present. For not only is his future uncertain; even his present situation increases in difficulty as he barely manages to maintain his balance in the swirling traffic of the dusty street. Day, sun, the present—those are at once there, hostile, and goads to him to move on out of the sometimes misty, sometimes hardened protection of memory and fantasy. When the men finally move out of their spiritual desert into the present, toward the future, they reluctantly but necessarily choose, they will die—invisibly, anonymously, killed in the sun, in the same present that has summoned them out of their past and taunted them with their helplessness and inactivity.
Thus Kanafani comments on the rudimentary struggles facing the Palestinian in the early days of his dispossession. The Palestinian must make the present since the present is not an imaginative luxury but a literal, existential necessity. A scene barely accommodates him and becomes a provocation: The paradox of contemporaneity for the Palestinian is very sharp indeed. If the present cannot be “given” simply (that is, if time will not allow him either to differentiate clearly between his past and his present or to connect them because the 1948 disaster, unmentioned except as an episode hidden within episodes, prevents continuity), it is intelligible only as an achievement. Only if the men can manage to pull themselves out of limbo into Kuwait, can they be in any sense more than mere biological duration, in which earth and sky are an uncertain confirmation of general life. Because they must live—in order ultimately to die—the present prods them into action, which in turn will provide writer and reader with the material for “fiction.”
In this connection, I must mention the other really first-rate Palestinian fiction, Emile Habibi’s Al Waqa’ il Ghareeba Fi Ikhtifa’ Said Abi Nahs Al-Mutasha’il (Strange Truths Concerning the Disappearance of Said Abi Nahs Mutasha’il). Habibi is a resident of Haifa, was a Knesset member for over twenty years, and is one of the leading Palestinian voices inside Israel. His epistolary novel is unique in Arabic literature in that it is consistently ironic, exploiting a marvelously controlled energetic style to depict the peculiarly “outstanding” and “invisible” condition of Palestinians inside Israel. Along with Kanafani’s work, Habibi sketches the complete picture of Palestinian identity as no purely political tract can. Both writers record the Kafkaesque alternation between being and not-being there for Palestinians, whether inside Israel or in the Arab world. (For a brilliant account of much contemporary Palestinian literature, see Hanan Mikhail Ashrawi, Contemporary Palestinian Literature Under Occupation, Birzeit University Publications, Birzeit, West Bank, 1976.)
I have spoken about Palestinian writing here at length because, I think, it accurately and poignantly dramatizes the precise nature of Palestinian survival in the Arab/Islamic setting. As the symbol of Arab defeat in 1948 and 1967, the Palestinian represents a form of political memory which is not easy to dismiss. In his wanderings, in his ubiquitous presence, above all in his own self-conscious awareness that he and his writing are the theme of much modern Arab culture, he is a figure of a worrying, a displacing sort of urgency. When he can be accommodated to the emphasis of Arab independence, all is well. As things begin to go badly, he is considered to be a threat to the stabilities—whether of states, parties, governments, or sects—that exist alongside him, despite his extraterritorial homelessness. In the years since 1967 his involvement in the going enterprise of rhetorical Arab/Islamic pluralism has always reminded the other Arabs that such a pluralism cannot have a real meaning unless he, the Palestinian, the victim of virulent exclusivism, can be reintegrated into and reunited with his natal soil. Thus in time the Palestinian has become at once a representative Arab and an outcast.
Since 1967 the ironic tension between the Palestinian and the other Arabs has increased, as is reflected in such oddities as the diplomatic prestige of the PLO, a tremendous “rediscovery” of the Palestinians, and a relative subsidence of interest in the general Arab picture. Similarly, Palestinian institutions contain and indeed typify the paradox of Palestinian autonomy, while Arab state support for the Palestinian cause does not seem to be diminished by the periodic explusions of Palestinians from one or another Arab state. For despite everything, the Palestinian does not construct his life outside Palestine; he cannot free himself from the scandal of his total exile; all his institutions repeat the fact of his exile. This is manifestly true also among the Palestinian Arabs now subject on the West Bank and in Gaza to Israeli domination and to those who reside in Israel. Every Palestinian achievement is flawed by this paradoxical truth, that any survival outside Palestine is ruined in a sense by its impermanence, its groundlessness, its lack of a specifically Palestinian sovereign will over the future of the Palestinian, despite the extraordinary symbolic successes of the PLO. Every achievement therefore risks the loss of its identity, risks the danger of being swallowed up in the generality of the Arab community, as indeed the freedom of the PLO is impinged upon continuously by the Arab states. Conversely, every Palestinian achievement can be interpreted as a specific criticism of the general Arab community, which has learned to live with the consequences of defeat, except the major consequences of defeat, in this case the Palestinians.
As a consequence, much of what Palestinians do, and much of what they think about, concerns Palestinian identity. I am hesitant to call this introspection, because it has not been exclusively a matter of self-examination, but largely a political question of the first moment. On the other hand, the specific travail and the concrete hardships of being Palestinian have exercised the talents of all of our writers, so much so that Arabic literature (which does not have an ample secular tradition of autobiographical or confessional writing) now boasts a genre of Palestinian, so-called “resistance” writing, which means a writing of self-assertion and of resistance to anonymity, political oppression, and so on. If there is anything written by a Palestinian that can be called a national poem, it would have to be Mahmoud Darwish’s short work “Bitaqit Hawia” (“Identity Card”). The curious power of this little poem is that at the time it appeared in the late sixties, it did not represent as much as embody the Palestinian, whose political identity in the world had been pretty much reduced to a name on an identity card. Darwish took this fact and in a sense read it off the card, amplified it, gave it a voice—without being able to do much more than that. The entire poem is governed by the imperative Sajill—Record!—which is repeated periodically, as if to an Israeli police clerk who can only be addressed in the impoverished framework provided by an identity card, but who must be reminded that the card’s language doesn’t do full justice to the reality it supposedly contains. The irony is crucial to Darwish’s poem. It opens as follows:
Record!
I am an Arab
And my Identity Card
is number fifty thousand
I have eight children
and the ninth
is coming in midsummer
Will you be angry?
Two stanzas later, he says:
Record!
I am an Arab
without a name—without title
patient in a country
with people enraged
The middle part of the poem is taken up with recording the narrator’s private genealogy, a litany of misfortunes and losses, but the poem ends with what will become the standard motif in much literature by and about Palestinians during the seventies: the Palestinian emergence.
Therefore!
Record on top of the first page:
I do not hate man
Nor do I encroach
But if I become hungry
The usurper’s flesh will be my food
Beware—beware—of my hunger
and my anger!
In “Identity Card” a Palestinian emergence is threatened; a few years later it would be the most constantly reiterated actuality in Arab political life, not as a threat but as a presence and, most of the time, as a hope. Significantly, the leading novelist in the Arab world, Nagib Mahfouz, whose novels had always been profoundly Egyptian in their every detail, made the Palestinian emergence the climax of his 1973 novel of no-war, no-peace Egypt, Hub taht al Mattar (Love in the Rain). The last scene introduces us to Palestinian guerrilla Abu’l Nasr al Kabir (Father of Great Victory), whose views on the most recent “American initiative,” which beguiles and confuses the nervous Egyptian protagonists, are that one must take a long view of events happening now. An unregenerate ironist, Mahfouz was remarking two things simultaneously: how armed Palestinians had suddenly acquired the role of revolutionary spokesman for Arabs, and how revolutionary promises and rhetoric had already become parodies of themselves. The father of victory was still only a father in potens, although Mahfouz did not try to minimize (nor could his readers) the fact that any political reckoning now would have to include the Palestinians.
Another irony in Mahfouz’s novel, no less than in the Arab world of the early seventies, is that so far as everyone was concerned, Palestinian identity seemed to have sprung up assertively outside Palestine. Abu’l Nasr, Mahfouz’s Palestine guerrilla, lives in Cairo, not Nazareth or Nablus. And so far as anyone knew, Darwish’s identity-card existence inside Israel was as unsatisfactory and unhappy as before. Until 1975 or 1976 the Israeli Palestinian Arabs lost out to the glamour of the exiles. And their emergence was as important for its essential irony as for its record of concrete achievements; let us consider them now.
III
The PLO Rises to Prominence
So far as I know there is no completely satisfactory analytic explanation, no entirely logical step-by-step report of how, from being refugees, the exiled Palestinians became a political force of estimable significance. But this is true of all popular movements that seem to be much more than the mathematical sum of their elements. The narrative sequence of this Palestinian transformation is, I think, misleadingly simple. Al-Fateh began its existence in 1965 with a small raid into Israel. Thereafter the number of militant Palestinian organizations increased, as did the set of militarily important clashes with (and inside) Israel. Until March 1968, however, the Palestinian effort is best seen as enclosed by the general Arab (specifically Nasserist or Baathist) national development. In March 1968, more particularly after the June War of 1967, the Palestinian movement acquired a new suit which politically and symbolically set it apart from the Arab setting. The importance of the date is that it marked the first post-1967 and post-1948 battle between regular Israeli forces, which had crossed the Jordan River to raid a Palestinian town called Karameh inside Jordan, and Palestinian irregular forces. The Palestinian fighters were backed up later in the day-long battle by Jordanian army regulars, but (the Palestinian account goes) the brunt of the fighting was Israeli-Palestinian. Not only did the Karameh defenders stay and fight; they inflicted much damage and many casualties on the Israeli armored columns, who until that time had been accustomed (e.g. in the West Bank village of as-Sammu) to amble in with impunity, destroy property, kill Arabs, and leave pretty much unscathed.
Karameh was the beginning of the phase of the quickest Palestinian growth; volunteers poured in from all parts of the Arab world, and within a year Palestinian fedayeen were the force to be reckoned with in Jordan. But during this period there took form what was to be, as I alluded to it earlier, the besetting Palestinian—or more properly, the besetting PLO—vacillation between a revolutionary direction (liberation) and one that seemed to transform the structures of Palestinian power into those of an Arab state (national independence). Both are necessary results of the paradoxical Palestinian “situation” I have been describing in this book. These two possibilities need not in theory be opposed, yet within the whole problem of Palestinian identity they were in conflict with each other. Even when a clear choice was made, the problems the two alternatives raised did not end. Because they acquired a great deal of arms and began rapidly to organize themselves into political and military groupings, and of course because this always took place not in Palestine, but in a fraternal Arab state, the new militant Palestinians appeared to be a challenge to the central state authority. Even as in time it became clear that Palestinian self-determination had compromised on the original goal of a state on part of Palestine, the PLO in the meantime ran a quasi state for Palestinians inside a host Arab state. And this state, first in Jordan and later in Lebanon, came into collision with the larger one. On the other hand, the great political and ideological strength of the Palestinian movement was, first, its ability to attract almost every element in the region that was avant-garde. “Palestinian” in a certain sense was synonymous with novelty in the best sense of the word.
It is also synonymous with politics. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that every significant political movement or current of ideas or debate in the Arab world since 1948 has in some way been dominated by the question of Palestine. How much more so this is true of Palestinian debate, discussion, organization, is immediately obvious. The net result is rich indeed. In recent years, Palestinian politics have been conducted in terms of organizations—of which the most prominent are those grouped together in the PLO, namely, Fateh, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (an offshoot of the PFLP), Saiqa (a Syrian-sponsored grouping), and a slew of considerably smaller units—and in terms of philosophies, tendencies, actual paid-for loyalties that connect the specific Palestinian issues with Arab politics, Third World politics, and other assorted interests. At times, Palestinian politics are dizzyingly incoherent—for reasons that I will discuss in a moment—at times bloody, at other times perfectly clear. Yet there is surprising unanimity always on the necessity for Palestinian self-determination and independence with, even more remarkable, a completely unbroken record of refusal to sell out, to give up the struggle, to accept tutelage or occupation without protest.
The largest Palestinian grouping is Fateh, which is dominated by Yasir Arafat and a set of cadres whose lines of strength, influence, and political thinking involve by far the largest number of Palestinians in exile and in the Gaza-West Bank region. Fateh’s (and indeed Arafat’s) models are basically Nasserite, although unlike Nasser, Fateh and Arafat have made it a practical matter not to get too involved in the local politics of any one Arab state (Lebanon and Jordan being the two costly—but in a sense inevitable—exceptions). By Nasserite politics I mean not only that there is an always visible symbol of authority—the za’im, Arafat, also known as “the old man,” whose mere continuous presence guarantees the existence of the Palestinian cause—but that there is basically a centrist nationalist philosophy guiding the movement. This is a drawback in one sense, because it has meant that political organization is kept to a minimum except where fighting Zionism is concerned, and thus Arafat and Fateh as a whole can be identified readily only as Arab and Palestinian. In another sense it is good because it has meant (a) that Fateh tacitly encourages a real democracy in political idea and style, and (b) that no one has ever been able to prove that despite Fateh’s connections, say, with Saudi Arabia, Libya, the Soviet Union, or the German Democratic Republic, it is not independent of them, and hence above all, Palestinian. Most important, Fateh represents the bottom-line fact of being an oppressed Palestinian, without necessarily involving every Palestinian in a theory of people’s war or class analysis.
