The Question of Palestine, page 4
Yet, as the intifada progressed, two other actualities entered Palestinian life, weakening it and imposing new burdens. One, of course, was the Gulf crisis, which, although it summoned Palestinian mediation efforts, also embroiled the whole nation in a ghastly morass. Today, the Palestinian communities of the Gulf are orphaned; many Palestinians are again homeless, their assets gone, their futures radically uncertain. As has been pointed out by Walid Khalidi and others, there were deep failures of principle and leadership, some Palestinian (who could least afford it), some Arab, some American. The result is today an international and, to some degree, Arab isolation of the PLO, and a general blow to the entire Palestinian nation, from which recovery is uncertain and, when it occurs, will be long in coming.
The second actuality is the enormous number of Russian (and, to a much lesser extent, Ethiopian) Jews now immigrating to Israel. Here we must note that an understanding in 1989 between Mikhail Gorbachev and the United States set very limiting exit quotas for Russian Jews to any place but Israel. This entailed, therefore, the sudden presence of many thousands of Russian Jews as landed immigrants in Israel at the very moment that the alienation and disenfranchisement of the Palestinians were at their most glaring. Vociferous cries rose asserting the prerogatives of Greater Israel, while many urgent appeals were directed at the U.S. and the wealthier Jewish Diaspora groups for financial support. That this meant that the demographic balance dramatically disfavored the Palestinians, that it placed more pressure (along with the answering and warlike compliance of the ever-obliging General Sharon) to implant additional illegal settlements on the West Bank, that it made the time factor singularly punishing to the Palestinians, all this was plain to see.
Suddenly, it seemed that a belated, messianic impulse coursed through Zionism, and with it the attendant woes it brought to the already long-suffering Palestinians. Now, however, it was 1991 and not 1947 or 1948. It no longer seemed to matter to the zealots of Gush Emunim that, since the intifada had begun, international public opinion had rendered the Israelis as sullen and brutal killers, their “vision” nothing more than cruel punishment administered to defenseless civilians. What mattered more was the supervening force and power of the settlement drive, the continuing diplomatic quagmire, the painful disarray and demoralization not only in Palestinian but also in Arab ranks after the Gulf War. In short, there has been no deterring or containing the influx of, perhaps, 750,000 to one million Jews, and, as ever, Palestinians will pay the price.
However, neither Israelis nor Palestinians have a military option against the other; this fact is as striking now as it was when I wrote The Question of Palestine thirteen years ago. The task for the Palestinian people is still to assure its presence on the land, and, by a variety of means, to persuade the Israelis that only a political settlement can relieve the mutual siege, the anguish and insecurity of both peoples. There is no other acceptable secular—that is, real—alternative.
Introduction
Although most of this book was written during 1977 and the early part of 1978, its frame of reference is by no means confined to that very important period in modern Near Eastern history. On the contrary, my aim has been to write a book putting before the Western reader a broadly representative Palestinian position, something not very well known and certainly not well appreciated even now, when there is so much talk of the Palestinians and of the Palestinian problem. In formulating this position, I have relied mainly on what I think can justly be called the Palestinian experience, which to all intents and purposes became a self-conscious experience when the first wave of Zionist colonialists reached the shores of Palestine in the early 1880s. Thereafter, Palestinian history takes a course peculiar to it, and quite different from Arab history. There are, of course, many connections between what Palestinians did and what other Arabs did in this century, but the defining characteristic of Palestinian history—its traumatic national encounter with Zionism—is unique to the region.
This uniqueness has guided both my aim and my performance (however flawed both may be) in this book. As a Palestinian myself, I have always tried to be aware of our weaknesses and failings as a people. By some standards we are perhaps an unexceptional people; our national history testifies to a failing contest with a basically European and ambitious ideology (as well as practice); we have been unable to interest the West very much in the justice of our cause. Nevertheless we have begun, I think, to construct a political identity and will of our own; we have developed a remarkable resilience and an even more remarkable national resurgence; we have gained the support of all the peoples of the Third World; above all, despite the fact that we are geographically dispersed and fragmented, despite the fact that we are without a territory of our own, we have been united as a people largely because the Palestinian idea (which we have articulated out of our own experience of dispossession and exlusionary oppression) has a coherence to which we have all responded with positive enthusiasm. It is the full spectrum of Palestinian failure and subsequent return in their lived details that I have tried to describe in this book.
Yet I suppose that to many of my readers the Palestinian problem immediately calls forth the idea of “terrorism,” and it is partly because of this invidious association that I do not spend much time on terrorism in this book. To have done so would have been to argue defensively, either by saying that such as it has been our “terrorism” is justified, or by taking the position that there is no such thing as Palestinian terrorism as such. The facts are considerably more complex, however, and some of them at least bear some rehearsal here. In sheer numerical terms, in brute numbers of bodies and property destroyed, there is absolutely nothing to compare between what Zionism has done to Palestinians and what, in retaliation, Palestinians have done to Zionists. The almost constant Israeli assault on Palestinian civilian refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan for the last twenty years is only one index of these completely asymmetrical records of destruction. What is much worse, in my opinion, is the hypocrisy of Western (and certainly liberal Zionist) journalism and intellectual discourse, which have barely had anything to say about Zionist terror.1 Could anything be less honest than the rhetoric of outrage used in reporting “Arab” terror against “Israeli civilians” or “towns” and “villages” or “schoolchildren,” and the rhetoric of neutrality employed to describe “Israeli” attacks against “Palestinian positions,” by which no one could know that Palestinian refugee camps in South Lebanon are being named? (I quote now from reports of recent incidents during late December 1978.) Since 1967, with Israel in occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, there has been no letup in the daily outrage of Israeli occupation, and yet nothing galvanizes the Western press (and the Israeli information media) as much as a bomb in a Jerusalem market. With sentiments bordering on pure disgust, I must note here that not a single U.S. newspaper carried the following interview with General Gur, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Army:
Q—Is it true [during the March 1978 Israeli invasion of Lebanon] that you bombarded agglomerations [of people] without distinction?
A—I am not one of those people who have a selective memory. Do you think that I pretend not to know what we have done all these years? What did we do the entire length of the Suez Canal? A million and a half refugees! Really: where do you live?…We bombarded Ismailia, Suez, Port Said, and Port Fuad. A million and a half refugees…Since when has the population of South Lebanon become so sacred? They knew perfectly well what the terrorists were doing. After the massacre at Avivim, I had four villages in South Lebanon bombed without authorization.
Q—Without making distinctions between civilians and noncivilians?
A—What distinction? What had the inhabitants of Irbid [a large town in northern Jordan, principally Palestinian in population] done to deserve bombing by us?
Q—But military communiqués always spoke of returning fire and of counterstrikes against terrorist objectives.
A—Please be serious. Did you not know that the entire valley of the Jordan had been emptied of its inhabitants as a result of the war of attrition?
Q—Then you claim that the population ought to be punished?
A—Of course, and I have never had any doubt about that. When I authorized Yanouch [diminutive name of the commander of the northern front, responsible for the Lebanese operation] to use aviation, artillery and tanks [in the invasion], I knew exactly what I was doing. It has now been thirty years, from the time of our Independence War until now, that we have been fighting against the civilian [Arab] population which inhabited the villages and towns, and every time that we do it, the same question gets asked: should we or should we not strike at civilians? [Al-Hamishmar, May 10, 1978]
Thus one thing about “terrorism” is the imbalance in its perception, and the imbalance in its perpetration. One could mention, for example, that in every instance when Israeli hostages were used to try to gain the release of Palestinians held in Israeli jails, it was always the Israeli forces who offered fire first, knowingly causing a bloodbath. But even to cite figures and make explanations is not enough—for the record of hostility between Jew and Arab, between Palestinians and Zionist Jews, between Palestinians and the rest of mankind (or so it would seem), between Jews and the West, is a chilling one. As a Palestinian, I resent and deplore the ways in which the whole grisly matter is stripped of all its resonances and its often morally confusing detail, and compressed simply, comfortably, inevitably under the rubric of “Palestinian terror.” Yet as someone who has been touched by the issue in all sorts of ways, I must also say that—speaking now only as one Palestinian—I have been horrified at the hijacking of planes, the suicidal missions, the assassinations, the bombing of schools and hotels; horrified both at the terror visited upon its victims, and horrified by the terror in Palestinian men and women who were driven to do such things. Since I do not pretend to write as a detached observer, I have believed that rather than trying to deal frontally with the terror itself, I would do better if I attempted to convey to my readers some sense of the larger Palestinian story from which all these things came. And if in the end the story does not—as it cannot—mitigate the tragedies of waste and unhappiness, it would at least present what has long been missing before such a reader, the reality of a collective national trauma contained for every Palestinian in the question of Palestine.
One of the features of a small non-European people is that it is not wealthy in documents, nor in histories, autobiographies, chronicles, and the like. This is true of the Palestinians, and it accounts for the lack of a major authoritative text on Palestinian history. I have not tried to supply this lack here, for plainly evident reasons. What I have tried to do is to show that the Palestinian experience is an important and concrete part of history, a part that has largely been ignored both by the Zionists who wished it had never been there, and by the Europeans and Americans who have not really known what to do with it. I have tried to show that the Muslim and Christian Palestinians who lived in Palestine for hundreds of years until they were driven out in 1948, were unhappy victims of the same movement whose whole aim had been to end the victimization of Jews by Christian Europe. Yet it is precisely because Zionism was so admirably successful in bringing Jews to Palestine and constructing a nation for them, that the world has not been concerned with what the enterprise meant in loss, dispersion, and catastrophe for the Palestinian natives. Something like an ironic double vision is therefore necessary now in order to see both the very well-known success and the far less known disaster which Hannah Arendt has portrayed as follows:
After the [Second World] war it turned out that the Jewish question, which was considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved—namely, by means of a colonized and then conquered territory—but this solved neither the problem of minorities nor the stateless. On the contrary, like virtually all other events of our century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of the stateless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people.2
As I say throughout the book, whereas Israel and its history have been celebrated without interruption, the actuality of Palestinians, with lives being led, small histories endured, aspirations felt, has only recently been conceded an existence. Yet all of a sudden, the Palestinian question now seeks an answer: World opinion has demanded that this hitherto slighted crux of the Near East impasse be given its due. But, alas, the possibility of an adequate debate now, much less a cogent solution, is dim. The terms of debate are impoverished, for (as I said above) Palestinians have been known only as refugees, or as extremists, or as terrorists. A sizeable corps of Middle East “experts” has tended to monopolize discussion, principally by using social science jargon and ideological chichés masked as knowledge. Most of all, I think, there is the entrenched cultural attitude toward Palestinians deriving from age-old Western prejudices about Islam, the Arabs, and the Orient. This attitude, from which in its turn Zionism drew for its view of the Palestinians, dehumanized us, reduced us to the barely tolerated status of a nuisance.
It would perhaps be too sweeping a statement to say that most academic political science studies of the Middle East and of the Palestinians continue this tradition. But it is true, I think, that they tend to. Insofar as most of them derive from and in most important ways unquestionably accept the framework that has legitimized Zionism as against Palestinian rights, they have very little to contribute to an understanding of the real situation in the Middle East. For it is a fact that almost every serious study of the modern Middle East produced in this country since World War II cannot prepare anyone for what has been taking place in the region: This is as patently true of the recent events in Iran as it is of the Lebanese civil war, of the Palestinian resistance, of the Arab performance during the 1973 war. I certainly do not intend this book as a polemic against what has rightly been called the ideological bent of social science work that pretends to scientific objectivity, particularly since the advent of the Cold War. But I do intend consciously to avoid its “value-free” pitfalls. Those include accounts of political reality that focus on superpower rivalry, that claim as desirable anything associated with the West and its modernizing mission in the Third World, that ignore popular movements while praising and valorizing a battery of undistinguished and oppressive client regimes, that dismiss as ahistorical anything that cannot be easily made to fit a particular telos or a particular methodology whose goals are “rational,” “empirical,” and “pragmatic.” The glaring shortcomings of such notions have been held publicly to blame for “our” loss of Iran and “our” failure to forecast the “resurgence of Islam,” without at the same time allowing for any examination of the premises of these notions. So, in fact, they get reasserted, and once again political scientists with a great role to play in decision making advise the same shortsighted things, and once again U.S. foreign policy is risked on what to nonexpert eyes (such as mine) are obvious losing causes, regressive historical visions. Even as I write these lines, the serious defects of Camp David seem to be proving my point.
Until 1976, however, I do not think it is wrong to say that even Palestinians concurred in their own derogation, and hence in their unimportance as construed by Zionists and experts. Then we discovered ourselves, we discovered the world, and it discovered us. I try to describe our night and our slow awakening, without at the same time neglecting the setting of our life on the land, in the region, in world politics, and so forth. But throughout our experience is the strand formed by Zionism. This is no theoretical issue, nor a matter of name-calling. To us, Zionism has meant as much, albeit differently, as it has to Jews. What we need to inform the world about is how it meant certain concrete things to us, things of which we collectively bear the living traces.
I have called my book a political essay because it tries to put our matter before the Western reader, not as something watertight and finished, but as something to be thought through, tried out, engaged with—in short, as a subject to be dealt with politically. For too long we have been outside history, and certainly outside discussion; in its own modest way this book attempts to make the question of Palestine a subject for discussion and political understanding. The reader will quickly discover, I hope, that what is proposed in this book is not an “expert” view nor, for that matter, personal testimony. Rather, it is a series of experienced realities, grounded in a sense of human rights and the contradictions of social experience, couched as much as possible in the language of everyday reality.
A certain number of basic premises inform the book’s argument. One is the continuing existence of a Palestinian Arab people. Another is that an understanding of their experience is necessary to an understanding of the impasse between Zionism and the Arab world. Still another is that Israel itself, as well as its supporters, has tried to efface the Palestinian in words and actions because the Jewish state in many (but not all) ways is built on negation of Palestine and the Palestinians. Until today, it is a striking fact that merely to mention the Palestinians or Palestine in Israel, or to a convinced Zionist, is to name the unnameable, so powerfully does our bare existence serve to accuse Israel of what it did to us. Finally, I take it for granted morally that human beings individually and selectively are entitled to fundamental rights, of which self-determination is one. By this I mean that no human being should be threatened with “transfer” out of his or her home or land; no human being should be discriminated against because he or she is not of an X or a Y religion; no human being should be stripped of his or her land, national identity, or culture, no matter the cause.
