PALESTINE LIVES
Fatah Calendar (1977) by Burhan Aldin Karkotli
Onbekend maakt onbemind, het middel dat steeds werkt. Juist de daders en medeschuldigen aan de Shoah hebben hier volop aan meegewerkt. En weer werd een volk geslachtofferd in naam van het Vrije Westen.
Mohammed Bamyeh
INTRODUCTION: WHY PALESTINE?
Why is there conflict in Palestine? Why after decades of analysis, negotiation, and attempts at resolution do the tensions only seem to escalate? Why have negotiators returned again and again to the bargaining table to discuss the same terms in similar parameters, yet failed?
The tragedy of modern Palestine may be familiar to many. Palestinians lost their homeland to settler colonialism on the eve of the global epoch of decolonization. Instead of the emancipation that all colonized people had expected then, the Palestinians were made into refugees and saw their historical homeland being designated a homeland for the Jews, with the support of the West. In that process the moral bankruptcy of the Western powers was clear: in order to make amends for the Holocaust, they victimized another colonized people. The West thought simply it could resolve one great crime against humanity by committing another, against a people not involved in the original crime, a people who had the misfortune of both being weak and residing in a strategic world location.
For Israelis, 1948 is the year of ‘‘independence’’; for Palestinians, it is the year of Al-Nakba, or the ‘‘great calamity.’’ While the different significances of 1948 suggest fully the irreconcilable visions of history, what is more important is that 1948 marks the loss of the Palestinian homeland, the beginning of a deracination, a disempowerment, and the structural, state-sponsored violence against the Palestinians. The great calamity of the Palestinians is a historical fact, not simply a state of mind or an instance of political rhetoric. It represents an unambiguous, uncomplicated argument: the Palestinians have a moral, legitimate, and legal claim to their historical homeland, one denied by the founding of the Israeli state. But it also means far more. Not just for Palestinians but for all humanity, the question of Palestine represents an ultimate knot of modernity. In an unacceptable present, a present that announces a series of historic, competing pasts and gestures toward further violence and strife in the future, there seems to be no possibility of moving backward or forward until we unpack, precisely in Palestine, issues that are central to our epoch: How does national identity (whether Israeli or Palestinian) serve alternately as a means of liberation and oppression? Can we imagine new forms of collective identity that would take us beyond the national impasse? Does the fact that we all live now in a globally interactive world suggest that Palestine/Israel, like other nations, should ideally become a zone of open traffic, flexible citizenship, and weakened sovereignties? What is the meaning of states and their ‘‘rights’’ in the present time? How are we finally to dispense with the impositions of colonialism? What more persuasive vigor is required to establish the obvious fact that a long-enduring conflict such as this one tends to give rise to fanatic visions? How does one develop, out of the hopelessness, nihilism, and resilience that coexist so intransigently, a vision of political life not based on the calculus of historical myth, domination, and terror? Why is it so vital, in all parts of the globe, from America to the Middle East to Europe, to address the impacted histories of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict? What are the costs of avoiding such a critical engagement?
In comparison to many major causes that progressive and liberal forces in the United States have historically confronted, the question of Palestine has always maintained a uniquely divisive character. It was relatively easy by comparison, for example, to forge consensus among progressives and many liberals on the conflict-ridden questions of apartheid in South Africa, on the U.S. role in the wars of Central America, or on the need for global nuclear disarmament. More recently, it was still relatively easy to forge common attitudes, if not common platforms, toward such large processes as globalization, women’s rights, multiculturalism, the environment, and other minority issues. Palestine, however, has rarely, if ever, enjoyed a comparable consensus. Those active on university campuses, and in the media, political parties, and citizen groups are well aware that the question of Palestine remains unanswered. In spite of its great modern tragedy (and precisely because it is not always understood as such), Palestine hardly serves as a framework of broad-based solidarity, or even as the object of a clear, principled policy of a mass movement.
There are many possible explanations for this state of affairs. One is widespread ignorance: the sheer complexity of the issue is not made any easier by the seeming difficulty of mastering the general resources supposedly required for better judgment, such as language skills or simply travel to the region. Another reason may be the perceived moral ambiguity of the question of Palestine—that is, the notion that unlike in South Africa, what we have in Palestine are ‘‘legitimate’’ national and historical claims by both the Israelis and the Palestinians—and morally ambiguous issues, as is well known, are not good candidates for consensus politics. They are more likely to produce ideological cleavages that are otherwise more easily disguised. Other obvious reasons include the preponderance of pro-Israel perspectives reported in U.S. media, from CNN to the New York Times to the tabloid press to Christian radio stations, leaving Palestinians with a muted public voice; and the power wielded by groups such as the Israeli lobby (AIPAC), which tolerates no neutrality about the issue of Israel and the Palestinians. These entrenched partisan loyalties make no room for rational discussion of the Palestinian experience.
However, under all of these explanations there lingers a deeper one: a widespread style of ethical judgment typified by a ‘‘zero-sum’’ logic—that is, sympathy for the suffering of the Palestinians, or a regard for their cause as just, must in some way come at the expense of sympathy for Jewish suffering in modern history. Many who approach the question of Palestine in good faith assume that to be pro-Palestinian means that one must also be an anti-Semite. This absurd but all-too-disabling logic emerges out of a misguided quest for ethical clarity, similar to what one sees in popular films and also in contemporary political positions, like President Bush’s assertion that ‘‘either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.’’ Yet the question of Palestine challenges this easy and customary formulation, since it requires both ethical clarity and complexity. Here is what is clear: The Palestinians have suffered a great historical injustice. That injustice must be remedied or, as is all too clear, the violence will continue unabated. Their claim to their historical homeland is legal, moral, and legitimate in every respect. Here is what is complex but no less necessary: The Jews have suffered their own great calamity. It happened in Europe, not Palestine, but the calculations of the great powers and the vested interest of the Zionist movement displaced the consequences of that tragedy so that its effects are felt far more in Palestine than in Europe. And the ethical complexity here concerns a crime of such a genocidal magnitude, the Holocaust, that it does not lend itself to redemption simply through the punishment of the perpetrators. Out of this sense of need for greater redemption, grandiose but single-minded schemes of historical deliverance, such as creating a homeland for the victims at someone else’s expense, were proposed and enacted. This state of mind is certainly not conducive to ethical complexity. Rather, the sense here is that one experience of suffering is so paramount that if its deliverance must come at the expense of someone else who is innocent, so be it. In the process, other tragedies unlinked to the initial one are set in catastrophic motion. If one does not acknowledge the ethical complexity of this situation in order to counterbalance this feeling of unique victimization, the result is the situation in Palestine/Israel today: brutal repression, terror, high walls, fanaticism, the prospect of a hundred years of war, and no prospect of anything else.
On the other hand, the question of Palestine illustrates the simple human imperative that it is the nature of grievances to persist until addressed, in the face of repeated defeat, overwhelming repression, and formidable adversity. There is probably no more remarkable testimony to the just nature of the Palestinian cause than the fact that it refuses to disappear, even when all odds are set so squarely against it. The persistence of the question exemplifies subjectivity as a force that, because it must, defies the impossible strictures of an objective world. Certainly Palestine confronts us with the most difficult of contemporary political and ethical questions: How do we establish both complexity and clarity in our ethical judgment? How do we forge radical outlines with human concerns? How do we overcome the dead-end of nationalist politics? How do we end the horrors attendant to politicized religion and politicized mythology? There is no way around these questions, except through direct engagement: the willed confrontation with historical difficulty. For Palestinians and non-Palestinians alike, the question of Palestine presents us not only the opportunity but also the imperative to answer such questions.
It is to this concern, what one might think of as the ‘‘inequity of representation,’’ that this special issue of SAQ addresses itself. Palestine America is an attempt to provide a critique of the current situation in the Middle East from a largely unregarded position. This special issue represents the claiming of voice, the right to address this question of Palestine in all its complexity in a historical moment when such space is all too unavailable to those critical of the Israeli state’s violence against Palestinians, the violence of the second intifada, the belligerence of the Sharon government or the incompetence of Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, the as-yet undefined role of Mahmoud Abbas, or the complicity of successive U.S. governments through its unquestioned support of Israel, when these criticisms are too easily silenced by Israel’s allies in the United States.
Any resolution to the question of Palestine will derive from as well as enhance our own humanity. Combining complexity and clarity of ethical judgment, which in this case are necessary in equal measures, means that we learn the kind of ‘‘balance’’ that is not simply based on languid liberalism—that is, acknowledging ‘‘both’’ sides, but then having no idea how to proceed. Sufferings do not necessarily require being compared and contrasted. Rather, they require a rigor of analysis that differentiates the various types and intensities of suffering, and places them all in proper historical, territorial, political, or intellectual contexts. Similarly, it is impossible to progress any further in Palestine without combining radical and humane visions, also in equal measures. Radical, because all else has failed, including diplomatic games, state politics, repression, and even state-sanctioned violence and murder. Humane, because when the radicalism of vision is energized by vast frustration, it will be destructive to the self as well as to others if it is not anchored in a clear and consistent emphasis on a loftier humanity, unforgotten in the blinding dust of battle. Students of modern history, whether in Russia, China, Cambodia, or a great many other places, know well that such forgetfulness has been the disastrous propensity of abstract radicalism, whenever it was not solidly wedded to earthly visions that modulated its energy.
Another lesson that Palestine, and Israel, will eventually teach humanity is that nationalism—forged in various imaginaries, imagined in many ways—may prove to be the most inhuman, genocidal, and pitiless ideology of solidarity in the entirety of human history. The body count from nationalist wars in the twentieth century alone justifies this statement, but in the case of Palestine there is even more reason for dread, because the body count is still rising with no end in sight and, given current or conceivable realities, the likelihood of ethnic cleansing, even genocide, is clearly discernible. In fact, these possible outcomes are now often discussed openly. If peace is conceived of as a condition of mutual openness—that is, of trade, ideas, people, cultures, capital, and so on—rather than as a condition of mutual exclusion—that is, of high walls, cold treaties, restricted movement, opposed educational curricula, ongoing rancor and trap-setting—it is difficult to see how it could be accomplished without formulas that transcend the nationalist paradigm.
A final lesson from the question of Palestine can be gleaned from the role of religion and myth. If nationalism has only wrought catastrophes upon us, politicized religion is certainly not the alternative, even though it is currently presenting itself as such. Among the Israelis, politicized religion has been sitting in the government for decades and determining policy, and it has an even longer history of appropriation by secular Zionism, too often purported as the only viable ideological reaction. Certainly we see it among the Palestinians as a reaction; it is not in official power yet but is a rising social movement, promising to take up a national struggle in which the secular forces are increasingly perceived to have failed. A movement like Hamas presents itself as responding to the state of Israel only in kind. Neither politicized religiosity is a pleasant option. It will be impossible to resolve the conflict without removing from it all trappings of religiously based myth, myth that not only serves to justify exclusive claims upon the land, but moreover entrusts such claims to authoritarian and intolerant forces. Religion enhances humanity, but only to the extent that it lives away from state and power, and resides more in civil society and in the spiritual realm of everyday relations.
The articles in this special issue of SAQ attempt to untie the knot of Palestine, examining questions of identity and speech; agency, specifically the agency of women and the uses of gender within a larger cosmos of struggle; the fanaticism attendant to the question of Palestine; and finally, the possibilities of a radical vision, both in terms of resolution as well as activist strategies. And all of the contributors, whether analyzing literature or sharing personal stories or examining the current political scene, are committed to a just resolution of the conflict.
Roane Carey’s thoughtful reflections show Zionism’s clear affinity for the
ideology of manifest destiny, which, because it is implicated in American
history, appears more as a justifiable extension of that history into other
parts of the world than as a colonialist project.
John Michael uses the question of Palestine as the central organizing
principle of his tightly woven reflections on larger questions of our times,
such as the representation of Arabs in popular culture, multicultural soci-
eties, and the uses and abuses of shared identity. In his framework, it seems
that something like Palestinian identity encapsulates potentials of multi-
lateral, internationalist expression, and because of that there inheres in it
the potentials, of which we have yet to fully avail ourselves, of a better and
more flexible model of global citizenship than what we are used to.
Lisa Majaj’s reflective essay offers a lively human narrative, in which she
renders her visits to Jerusalem with sensitivity and emotional complexity.
While suggesting the hopelessness of the position of the spectator, she
shows at the same time how the distress of occupation and Israel’s poli-
cies of control and ethnic cleansing could be the object of sober meditation,
calm resistance, unarmed prayer, all of which defy the occupation no less
determinedly than do stones, daggers, bullets, and bombs.
Casting a wide literary net, Amal Amireh reveals the possibilities of as
well as the restrictions imposed on the language of gender emancipation by
its various uses in national literature.
Melani McAlister focuses on the Left Behind series, a U.S. Christian fun-
damentalist set of novels that depicts a chilling phenomenon in our culture
in which global conflicts, central to which are the Middle East and Palestine
in particular, seem to embody the Christian God’s plan for the end of the
world. These novels are significant because of their popularity, indicative of
a widespread pattern of thinking that currently exercises influence on the
U.S. political process and thus foreign policy.
Thomas Lockwood’s provocative photo-essay bears witness to the plight
of the innocents, Palestinians and other Arabs, whose anguish was and is a
direct result of the establishment of Israel.
Brinda Mehta focuses on the Palestinian writer Liana Badr’s novel set
in Tal Ezza’tar refugee camp in Lebanon, which collapsed to the Lebanese
right forces in 1976 after a lengthy siege. She shows how the literary work
appropriates women as agents not only in their own liberation, but also for a
different style of feminism that is indigenously rooted and continuous with
larger social and national struggles.
These various lines of emphasis, all of which serve to reveal the sad rich-
ness of the question of Palestine, compel us to reflect on what could be done.
Mohammed Bamyeh outlines why the obvious solutions have not worked,
and how nonstate-, nondiplomacy-centered solutions might work when all
else has failed.
As mentioned earlier in this introduction, conflicts of a long-enduring
nature tend to give rise to fanatic visions. Ammiel Alcalay’s poetic medita-
tion gives us an image of force with no reason. It also shows how so much of
the effervescent patterns of preconflict life, typified by multiple and flexible
identities, is lost to increasingly rigid, lifeless postures, which are produced
by the conflict but in their own way sustain it as well.
Andrew Rubin joins this series of reflections with an essay on Edward
Said. He elaborates Said’s method and approach, and explores how ‘‘travel-
ing theory’’ reveals an appropriately fluid, dialectic approach to the world
in which we live and engenders defensible commitments. The basis of
such an approach transcends accidents of belonging, and guides both the
general logic of intellectual discernment as well as the articulation of its
responsibilities.
Saree Makdisi addresses the most practical of the radical dimensions of
the struggle for Palestine in the American scene today, namely that repre-
sented by the ongoing divestment campaign.
Finally, in his afterword to this special issue, Ken Surin provides a sharp,
incisive overview that at once historicizes the conflict and locates the role
and place of these essays in that debate.
There is little in the very essence of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that is not centrally lodged in the very logic of our modernity. Consequently there is no way to proceed beyond Palestine, it seems, without clearly appraising the scene and recognizing, amid the cynicism and the carnage, the possibilities not only of Palestine but, within that question, of all humanity in a global age. This issue reflects on such possibilities as it ponders the past and the present.
AUTEUR
Mohammed Bamyeh
BRON
South Atlantic Quarterly – 2003
Uitgelichte afbeelding: bron
