[News] Palestine Versus the Palestinians?

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Palestine Versus the Palestinians? The Iron Laws and Ironies of a People Denied
by Beshara Doumani; 
<http://palestine-studies.org/final/en/journals/content.php?aid=9611&jid=1&iid=144&vid=XXXVI&vol=203>Journal 
of Palestine Studies; October 30, 2007

http://palestine-studies.org/final/en/journals/content.php?aid=9611&jid=1&iid=144&vid=XXXVI&vol=203

An iron law of the conflict over Palestine has 
been the refusal by the Zionist movement and its 
backers, first Great Britain and then the United 
States, to make room for the existence of 
Palestinians as a political community. This 
non-recognition is rooted in historical forces 
that predate the existence of the Zionist 
movement and the Palestinians as a people. 
Consequently, there is a tension between identity 
and territory, with obvious repercussions for the 
following questions: Who are the Palestinians? 
What do they want? And who speaks for them? This 
essay calls for a critical reappraisal of the 
relationship between the concepts “Palestine” and 
“Palestinians,” as well as of the state-centered 
project of successive phases of the Palestinian national movement.

The emergence in 2007 of two Palestinian 
“authorities” in two geographical areas­Hamas in 
Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank­has given new 
urgency to several perennial questions: Who are 
the Palestinians? In what sense do they 
constitute a political community? What do they 
want? Who speaks for them? The nearly 
century-long persistence of these questions 
highlights some of the iron laws and ironies of 
modern Palestinian history that merit 
consideration in discussions about the causes and 
consequences of the current predicament and about 
how to come up with creative strategies for 
achieving freedom, peace, and justice. By “iron 
laws” I mean the formative historical forces 
produced by the overwhelming asymmetry of power 
relations that have imprisoned Palestinians in 
what Rashid Khalidi has termed an iron cage.[1] 
By “ironies” I mean the paradoxes of history that 
subvert nationalist narratives about the past. I 
argue that iron laws and ironies point to the 
need for a critical reappraisal of the 
relationship between “Palestine” and 
“Palestinians” as concepts, and of the 
state-centered project of successive phases of 
the Palestinian national movement.

Of Ironies and Iron Laws

The central dynamic or iron law of the conflict 
over Palestine, since it began in the late 
nineteenth century, has been the adamant refusal 
by the most powerful forces in this conflict­the 
Zionist movement (later the Israeli government) 
and its key supporters (first Great Britain, 
later the United States)­either to recognize or 
to make room for the existence of Palestinians as 
a political community. This nonrecognition has 
made it possible for the twin engines of the 
conflict­territorial appropriation and 
demographic displacement of Palestinians from 
their ancestral lands­to continue operating 
largely unabated, as they have for over a 
century. It also explains, incidentally, Israel’s 
central public relations message, which is (as 
these things usually are) the reverse projection 
of reality: namely, that what needs to be 
recognized is Israel’s right to exist.

In this sense, the boycott of the Palestinian 
Authority by Israel, the United States, and, to a 
lesser degree, the European Union following 
Hamas’s electoral victory in January 2006 is not 
a rupture but a continuation of a fundamental 
pattern in the history of the conflict. This 
pattern has a long pedigree stretching from the 
late nineteenth-century Zionist slogan of “a land 
without people for a people without a land,” to 
the careful political erasure of the indigenous 
inhabitants in the wording of the 1922 League of 
Nations Mandate Charter for Palestine, to the 
brazen denial of their existence as a political 
community after 1948, as epitomized in Israeli 
prime minister Golda Meir’s infamous 1969 
statement, “The Palestinian people do not 
exist.”[2] And the pattern has continued into the 
more recent phase, with the iron-clad “no 
negotiations with the terrorist Palestine 
Liberation Organization (PLO)” line of successive 
Israeli governments (and, with fleeting 
exceptions, U.S. administrations) from the 1967 
war until Oslo in 1993; to the “we will not 
negotiate with Arafat” mantra of the post-Oslo 
era; and to the “Mahmud Abbas is too weak to talk 
with” trope that circulated prior to the 2006 
elections. Dov Weisglass, political advisor to 
former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, summed up this pattern as follows:

With the proper management, we succeeded in 
removing the issue of the political process from 
the agenda. And we educated the world to 
understand that there is no one to talk to. And 
we received a no-one-to-talk-to certificate . . . 
The certificate will be revoked only when 
this-and-this happens­when Palestine becomes Finland.[3]

In other words, never­at least not until the 
fundamental dynamics of land expropriation and 
demographic displacement have run their course to 
the satisfaction of the Israeli ruling elite, 
thus allowing Israel to finally declare its 
borders. Paradoxically, the stubborn 
nonrecognition or erasure of Palestinians as a 
political community is the product of discursive 
and material forces that predate the existence of 
the Palestinians as a people in the modern sense 
of the word: that is to say, as a collectivity 
whose members assume a natural and neat fit 
between identity and territory, the inevitable 
expression of which is state sovereignty. This 
does not mean that those who today call 
themselves Palestinians are not the indigenous 
inhabitants of the territories that became 
Mandatory Palestine in 1922. Rather, it means 
that instead of a natural fit, there has been and 
continues to be an “out of phase” tension between 
Palestine and the Palestinians, as if one could 
exist only at the expense of the other. A feature 
of this situation is a temporal lag whereby the 
Palestinians are continuously one or two steps 
behind in their approach to events at hand, and, 
consequently, systematically unable to frame the 
rules of the conflict. Well before it would have 
been possible for the Palestinians to attain 
them, the rules demanded a nationalist 
consciousness in every mind and a land deed 
backed by cadastral surveys in every hand as 
prerequisites for the rights to claim the land, 
to speak, and to be recognized as a political 
community. For the Palestinians, to accept these 
prerequisites was to enter a race they could 
never win; to refuse them was to be cast outside 
the official political process (hence leaving “no one to speak to”).

There is no end to the ironies produced by this 
“out of phase” tension. Four such ironies deserve 
special attention, for each marks a watershed 
moment of both erasure and birth of either 
identity or territory (but not of both 
simultaneously). The first irony is that the 
establishment of a state called Palestine 
represented a devastating defeat of the political 
aspirations of those who would later become the 
Palestinian people. Up until 1920, the creation 
of a separate political entity in southern Syria 
was by far the least-favored option among those 
who articulated specific political opinions 
(admittedly a minority) during the last decades of Ottoman rule.[4]

The second irony is that the very creation of a 
Palestinian state by the British through the 
League of Nations was predicated upon the 
carefully crafted denial of the existence of 
Palestinians as a political community. Thus, the 
long negotiations between the British government 
and leaders of the Zionist movement preceding the 
Balfour Declaration (1917) on the status of 
“non-Jews” (over 90 percent of the population) 
resulted in a formula whereby they were allowed 
only civil and religious rights, while Jews were 
explicitly recognized as having political rights. 
This formula was inserted verbatim into the 
Mandate Charter, where the word “Arab” is never 
mentioned and the word “Palestinian” appears only 
once (ironically, in reference to facilitating 
“Palestinian citizenship” for Jews). Rashid 
Khalidi argues persuasively that the nascent 
Palestinian political organizations did not come 
to terms with the implications of these 
developments­the formation of a Palestinian state 
and their simultaneous erasure­until well into 
the Mandate period. By then it was too late, and 
the Palestinians became the only exception to the 
pattern of decolonization of Arab lands after 
World War II. While it is not clear what “too 
late” means in historical time if linearity is 
not assumed, Britain’s active refusal to allow 
the Palestinians to form the very institutions 
that the Mandate was charged with developing, 
combined with the inability of the local leaders 
to adapt a political culture honed by centuries 
of Ottoman imperial rule in ways that could 
effectively counter British rule and the Zionist 
project, underscore the tension between identity 
and territory that has dogged Palestinians since 
the beginning of the conflict. This tension is 
likely to continue as long as the Palestinian 
national movement remains within the conceptual 
terrain laid out by the Zionist movement and the 
imperial powers that established the modern state system in the Middle East.

A third inversion rich with historical irony is 
that the very destruction of Palestine as a state 
in 1948 marked the pivotal moment in the 
formation of the Palestinians as a people. Of 
course, the privileging of a Palestinian national 
identity over other existing forms of 
identification had been gaining momentum since 
the creation of a Palestinian state after World 
War I, and there is no doubt that the Great 
Revolt of 1936–39 against British rule made that 
process irreversible. Nevertheless, the shared 
memories of the traumatic uprooting of their 
society and the experiences of being 
dispossessed, displaced, and stateless are what 
have come to define “Palestinian-ness.” They are 
also what energized the second phase of the 
Palestinian national movement, which eventually 
led the international concert of nations, through 
the United Nations (minus Israel and the United 
States), to recognize the Palestinians as a 
political community and the PLO as its “sole legitimate representative.”

The fourth irony has not yet occurred, but very 
well may in the near future: The Palestinians in 
the occupied territories are being force-fed a 
state (or two) against their will after many 
decades of demanding one. I say “against their 
will” because it is difficult to imagine 
Palestinians willingly signing off on a deal that 
gives up their right of return, all of East 
Jerusalem, and half the West Bank in exchange for 
a state with no defined borders, no territorial 
contiguity, no sovereignty, no economic 
viability, no means of self-defense, and no 
control over resources. In short, the formation 
of a Palestinian state as repeatedly called for 
by U.S. President George W. Bush and Israeli 
prime minister Ehud Olmert has become the vehicle 
for preempting, rather than delivering, 
self-determination for the Palestinian people.

Can the Palestinians Speak?

The tension between land and people that 
permeates these ironies predates the modern era. 
In a general sense, this is partly due to the 
fact that those who call themselves Palestinians 
have the (mis)fortune of being indigenous to a 
rather small and economically marginal landscape 
that is holy to the world’s three major 
monotheistic religions and is a strategic land 
bridge connecting the African and Asian 
continents. Consequently, the inhabitants who 
tilled the fields, built the terraces, and ran 
the neighborhood shops have a Janus-faced 
relationship to the place they call home.

On the one hand, they have woven over the 
centuries a thick web of specific and intimate 
relations to the land that informs the entire 
range of their existence, from subsistence to 
self-worth. Without it, they would be, according 
to a phrase given new resonance by Edward Said, 
“out of place.” In rural areas, to give but a 
small example, every noticeable geological 
marker­whether a boulder, hillside, or spring­and 
every significant manifestation of human labor on 
the land­whether a garden, terrace, or olive 
grove­possessed a name that was passed down the 
generations. These named markers are sites of 
memories that anchor durable, discrete, and 
interlinked social spaces (especially in the hill 
areas) where individuals and communities are 
constituted; hence the strong regional identities 
that have easily survived the nationalist turn 
and remain a strong presence in Palestinian culture.[5]

On the other hand, this holy and strategic 
landscape is vulnerable to the ideological 
abstractions and desires­hence, appropriation in 
the name of God and civilization­of forces more 
powerful than its inhabitants. Apart from the 
Crusades, the penultimate moment of European 
appropriation of this landscape (minus people) 
was the nineteenth-century transformation of a 
collection of districts situated in two Ottoman 
provinces into a European-dominated Holy Land.[6] 
Through a variety of scholarly and religious 
enterprises that involved a great deal of 
walking, surveying, digging, and building, the 
land was secured and redeemed. (The passionate 
pursuit of the same activities by the Zionist 
movement and the Israeli state is but a 
continuation of this pattern.) In this manner, 
abstractions and desires were transformed into a 
competing web of specific relations to the land 
at the expense of the already-existing networks. 
For example, biblical geographers, a new breed of 
academics, diligently traced the footsteps of 
Jesus Christ, remapping the terrain along the 
way, and ultimately shaped the borders of Mandate 
Palestine. Like the archaeologists, pilgrims, and 
other Europeans that populated the landscape in 
increasing numbers, biblical geographers usually 
ignored the inhabitants altogether, or else 
represented them either as unsightly and 
irritating obstacles to modernity to be swept 
away or as pristine remnants of a passing 
traditional society whose days were numbered. 
Thus, the making of the Holy Land laid the 
discursive and material foundations for the 
denial of the Palestinians’ right to exist even 
before they became a people, and ensured the 
success of the Zionist movement well before that movement was articulated.

What it means to belong to a Palestinian 
political community, and how others perceive that 
belonging, became more complicated after the 
disappearance of Palestine in 1948. Because the 
massive territorial conquest and demographic 
displacement of that catastrophe were but links 
in a chain of erasures, it is not surprising that 
the Israeli government and the international 
community succeeded, at least for a while, in 
transforming the Palestinian struggle for 
independence and self-determination into a 
de-politicized humanitarian “refugee problem.”[7] 
Thus, and as a community denied, the Palestinians 
discovered that the closer they came to finding 
their own voice, the more they were perceived as 
a destabilizing force. This is why, for example, 
Arab regime politics became characterized by a 
policy of sacralization of Palestine in rhetoric 
and oppression of Palestinians in practice, thus 
reinforcing the already-existing tension between 
land and people.[8] The two iconic moments in 
this regard were, first, the annexation of the 
West Bank (1950) accompanied by the imposition of 
Jordanian citizenship on its inhabitants 
(effectively criminalizing Palestinian 
nationalist speech), and second, the founding of 
the PLO in 1964 by the Arab League at the behest 
of Egypt’s Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasir for the precise 
purpose of preempting a rising Palestinian 
national movement from speaking for the Palestinians.

The takeover of the PLO by the Palestinian 
Resistance Movement soon after the 1967 war and 
the historic “Gun and Olive Branch” speech of 
Yasir Arafat at the UN in 1974­both of which 
solidified the recognition of the PLO as the 
“sole legitimate representative of the 
Palestinian people”­mark the moment when the 
Palestinians came closest to speaking for 
themselves. I hasten to add that as a national 
movement defined by exile, the PLO never paid 
much attention to the Palestinians who remained 
in what became Israel; neither did they develop 
an institutional presence among them. Indeed, and 
in an ironic twist, these Palestinians were 
shunned and ignored in the Arab world for having 
stayed on their lands as citizens of an enemy 
state. As for the Palestinians living under 
Israeli occupation after 1967, the 
Fatah-dominated PLO leadership was interested in 
agents, not partners. This being the case, it 
made concerted efforts to prevent the rise of 
autonomous national political institutions in the 
occupied territories, especially following the 
1976 elections and the first intifada (1987–91). 
Thus, the PLO, despite the strong popular support 
it enjoyed in the territories, did not invest 
significant resources in political mobilization 
and institution-building there until well after 
Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

Nevertheless, PLO leaders, especially Arafat, 
deserve credit for reconstituting the Palestinian 
national movement and giving it a voice. It is 
precisely this achievement, however, that was 
abandoned with the signing of the Oslo Accord on 
the White House lawn in September 1993. In yet 
another moment pregnant with irony, the 
Declaration of Principles­which ostensibly 
recognized both the PLO as an organization that 
represents the Palestinian people and the 
principle of land for peace­directly led to the 
virtual demise of the PLO and to the creation of 
new realities on the ground that make a viable Palestinian state impossible.

It is true that by the time the Oslo Accord was 
signed, the PLO was in a very weakened state. 
Arafat’s success in the 1970s in pushing the 
Palestinian national movement toward accepting a 
politically negotiated settlement based on a 
two-state solution had prompted Israel to launch 
its 1982 invasion of Lebanon with the specific 
aim of physically destroying the movement’s 
infrastructure and easing the de-facto annexation 
of the occupied territories. This goal was 
largely achieved a decade later as the 
institutions of the PLO, abandoned in Lebanon and 
hollowed out in Tunisian exile, were dealt a 
deadly blow as a result of Arafat’s decision to 
support Saddam Hussein in 1990: Arab and 
international financial and political support 
were cut off, and the large, wealthy, and 
politically active Palestinian community in 
Kuwait, a key pillar of the PLO, was forcibly 
uprooted and dispersed. In any case, the 
desperate Oslo gamble did not pay off. Almost 
fifteen years into the “peace process,” it is 
clear that the Palestinians have failed, despite 
great sacrifices, to give rise to a 
representative and effective leadership capable 
of moving them toward statehood, to say nothing 
of the right of return, equality, or prosperity.

Opportunity or Disaster?

Three recent watershed events­the removal of 
Israeli settlements in Gaza (completed September 
2005), the sweeping electoral victory of Hamas 
(January 2006), and the failure of Israel’s 
invasion of Lebanon (July–August 2006)­ mark the 
beginning of a new stage in the history of the 
Palestinians’ struggle for national 
self-determination. When set against the 
background of the U.S. military intervention in 
Iraq and Afghanistan, the escalating U.S. 
campaign for the isolation and possible invasion 
of Iran, and the recodification of political 
language along sectarian and ethnic lines 
(especially the Sunni/Shi‘i binary), these events 
pose an unprecedented challenge to the state 
system in the Middle East that emerged after 
World War I, as well as to some of the national 
identities consolidated over the course of the 
twentieth century. Ironically, a Palestinian 
state might come into being at a moment when this 
system seems to be on the verge of imminent collapse.

The first watershed event is Israel’s unilateral 
and accelerated imposition of its “end game,” or 
what it perceives as the final status 
arrangements, including borders. The evacuation 
of the Gaza settlements signals the beginning of 
the end of a century-long process of demographic 
displacement and land expropriation, the latest 
phase of which kicked into high gear following 
the signing of the Oslo Accords. For the first 
time, it is now fairly certain that some 
Palestinian lands will not become part of Israel, 
and that roughly half the Palestinian people will 
remain within the boundaries of Mandatory 
Palestine. True, land is still being appropriated 
in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and tens of 
thousands of Palestinians have been forced under 
the pressures of military occupation and 
settlement building to leave their homes since 
the outbreak of the second intifada in 2000.[9] 
True, Gaza is still under occupation, for the 
redeployment merely turned it from a multi-room 
to a single warehouse-size prison. And true, the 
unilateral withdrawal did not bolster a 
two-state, land-for-peace trajectory. Rather, its 
aim was to cement Israel’s annexation of East 
Jerusalem and roughly half the West Bank, thereby 
preventing the establishment of a viable 
Palestinian state.[10] Still, and partly as a 
result of dogged resistance and demographic 
realities in Gaza (1.5 million Palestinians 
facing 7,000 settlers), one can say with some 
confidence that the long-standing debate within 
the Zionist movement between land maximalists and 
demographic maximalists is almost settled. The 
political manifestation of this compromise is the 
formation of the new Kadima Party, which as a 
result of Israel’s March 2006 elections eclipsed 
the two major political tendencies­Labor and 
Likud­that have dominated the politics of the 
Yishuv (the pre-1948 Jewish community in 
Palestine) and Israel since the early twentieth 
century. The demographic and territorial 
manifestation of this compromise is the doubling 
of the settler population in the West Bank over 
the past decade and its consolidation into five 
major blocs. The logistical manifestation is the 
construction of the multi-billion dollar barrier, 
bypass, and movement-control system that 
facilitates the integration of Jewish settlements 
in the occupied territories into Israel, 
primarily by turning Palestinian population centers into open-air prisons.[11]

The second watershed event is the sweeping 
victory of Hamas in the Palestinian parliamentary 
elections held on 25 January 2006. This victory 
marks both the official end of a half century in 
which the Palestinian national movement was 
dominated by a secular political culture, and the 
beginning of a new phase of unknown duration in 
which an Islamist political culture will be an 
integral, if not dominant, part of the movement. 
The election was not in itself a major turning 
point. Rather, it was another milestone in the 
ongoing slow-motion collapse since the 1990s of 
the post-1948 phase of the Palestinian national 
movement. Other milestones include the demise of 
the PLO as a viable institution after Oslo; the 
suspicious death on 10 November 2004 of Arafat 
(who can be considered an institution in human 
form); and the implosion of his Fatah movement 
after four decades of dominating the Palestinian 
national scene. Indeed, the internal corrosion 
and lack of vitality of Fatah in its current 
configuration were such that Hamas itself was 
surprised at the magnitude of its electoral 
victory in January 2006, as well as by its rapid 
military takeover of Gaza in mid-June 2007.[12]

On the regional level, Hamas’s victory is part of 
the larger trend of political Islam’s ascendance 
through the iconic vehicle of the secular liberal 
political order of the Enlightenment: the ballot 
box. The incredible scenes of women supporters of 
Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood scaling walls to reach 
polling stations sealed off by police in the 
November 2005 parliamentary elections reveal a 
great deal about the determination of Islamist 
parties, which have swept to victories in many 
countries, most recently Turkey, to translate 
decades of grassroots organizing into political power.

It is ironic that the most ruthless regime of 
political and economic sanctions in recent 
history was imposed, in the wake of the Hamas 
victory, on the occupied and not the occupier, 
and­of all things­for the sin of following the 
very path of peaceful and democratic change they 
had been urged to pursue. The unwillingness to 
accept the results of free and open elections 
dealt a fresh blow to the credibility of the 
international community in the eyes of most 
Palestinians; it also killed any hopes for a new 
political horizon raised by Hamas’s decision to 
enter the political arena created by the Oslo 
Accord. The sanctions buttressed an ever-tighter 
Israeli military siege calculated to slowly 
fragment Palestinian society and to starve the 
population into political capitulation. (Dov 
Weisglass described this policy in the following 
way: “It’s like an appointment with a dietician. 
The Palestinians will get a lot thinner, but 
won’t die.”[13]) Consequently, the daily life of 
Palestinians in the occupied territories, already 
on the verge of a humanitarian disaster in Gaza, 
deteriorated at an alarming pace.[14] The most 
frequently asked question in the five-star hotel 
lobbies and conference rooms where international 
financial and human rights organizations meet has 
become: When (not if) will Palestinian society 
collapse? And what will be the long-term consequences?[15]

The rise of political Islam in the Palestinian 
context has led to mixed reactions. Those 
interested solely in anti-imperialist credentials 
tend to see Hamas as the Palestinians’ last great 
hope: an ideologically tight and disciplined 
organization that has steadfastly opposed the 
Oslo Accord and refused to disavow armed struggle 
in return for the kinds of privileges and special 
treatment from Israel that the Fatah leadership 
enjoys. Hamas also has a different mix of 
territoriality and identity than Fatah. It 
stresses Arab and Muslim elements as much as, if 
not more than, Palestinian ones, and it has not 
clearly committed itself to a two-state solution 
along the lines of UN Resolution 242. To many, 
especially to the overwhelmingly refugee 
population of the Gaza Strip, Hamas is seen as 
less likely to bargain away the right of return or give up claims to Jerusalem.

It is important to remember, however, that 
historically, Fatah fighters have carried out the 
vast majority of attacks on Israeli military 
targets up to the second intifada, and roughly 50 
percent of such attacks since then; Hamas, 
meanwhile, has concentrated more on bombing 
civilian targets, carrying out twice as many such 
attacks as Fatah. Hamas also has strong ties to 
and receives aid from Arab regimes such as Saudi 
Arabia, which in turn have strong ties to the 
United States. And although this is no longer the 
case, there was for a while a convergence of 
interests and a significant degree of 
collaboration (during the 1970s and 1980s) 
between Israel and the Muslim Brotherhood (later 
Hamas) in opposing the PLO. Finally, while it is 
difficult to imagine what Hamas could have done 
to escape the sanctions trap or to dissuade 
powerful elements within Fatah from working 
closely with Israel and the United States to 
sabotage their new government, there is no doubt 
that Hamas made a strategic blunder by attempting 
to play by two different sets of rules at the 
same time: as both the government within the 
framework of the Oslo Accord, and as the opposition to that very framework.[16]

In any case, there is more to Palestinian 
self-determination than an anti-imperialist 
agenda. There is the question of what kind of 
society Palestinians aspire to build, a question 
that involves weighty economic, social, and 
cultural issues. Here Hamas faces a dilemma. On 
the one hand, it has allowed many Palestinians to 
transcend helplessness and deprivation by 
combining social, moral, and political agendas in 
one political language and by providing the 
infrastructure for realizing these agendas at the 
neighborhood level. On the other hand, although 
Hamas won partly because it is the most effective 
organizer of grassroots civil society and 
self-help institutions in Palestine, its 
worldview and tactics pose a major problem for 
most international solidarity and civil society 
movements (labor, feminist, human rights, and so 
on), which are grounded in the principles of 
secular humanism and nonviolence.[17] Since the 
Palestinians cannot possibly achieve freedom and 
self-determination by themselves, it is 
imperative that they come to grips with the 
following two questions. First, how can they 
realize the progressive potential of 
international law and human rights principles 
without subscribing uncritically to the 
underlying epistemological foundations of these 
principles (which, as we know from recent 
history, have also anchored racism, imperial 
expansion, colonial exploitation, ethnic 
cleansing, and genocide)? And second, how can the 
Palestinians acknowledge and mine the progressive 
potential of the cultural and religious 
traditions to which they are heirs without 
ossifying them into defensive shields that reinforce internal stratifications?

The third watershed event was Israel’s defeat by 
Hizballah in the July 2006 war, albeit at a very 
high price for Lebanon as a whole. If 1967 marks 
the peak of Israeli military power in the region, 
2006 marks its lowest ebb. The process of decline 
began with the war of attrition with Egypt after 
1967 and has continued, despite apparent 
successes, through the 1973 war, the 1982 
invasion of Lebanon, the forced withdrawal from 
south Lebanon in 2000, and the reoccupation of 
Area A of the occupied territories in April 2002. 
All these events point to a simple truth: The use 
of violence to impose new realities on the ground 
is yielding fewer and fewer dividends. In Iraq 
and Afghanistan, as in Palestine and Lebanon, the 
cost to the United States and Israel of 
sustaining a high level of coercion is becoming 
more and more formidable. This can be seen not 
only in the increasing resistance and 
radicalization in the Middle East and the Islamic 
world as a whole, but also in the economic 
hemorrhage and, more importantly, in the severe 
social and economic disparities that are causing 
serious domestic discontent in these regions. The 
terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 made 
possible the marriage between neo-liberalism and 
military adventure, but that honeymoon is nearing 
an end. Sooner or later­probably later, and 
probably after a series of horrors that will make 
the hyper-violence of recent years look tame in 
comparison, for U.S. and Israeli leaders still 
seem to be in denial about the consequences of 
their failed policies of coercion­a process of 
political negotiations will take root. The most 
important long-term political commitment 
Palestinians can make at this point is to figure 
out new and creative ways of preparing for and 
framing these negotiations so as not to repeat the mistakes of Oslo.

Active vs. Passive Strategies

Shortly before he died, Arafat made yet another 
of his “We are not Red Indians” remarks:

We have made the Palestinian case the biggest 
problem in the world. Look at the Hague ruling on 
the wall. One hundred and thirty countries 
supported us at the General Assembly. One hundred 
and seven years after the [founding Zionist] 
Basel Conference, 90 years after the Sykes-Picot 
Agreement, Israel has failed to wipe us out. We 
are here, in Palestine, facing them. We are not Red Indians.[18]

It is true. To this date, all settler societies 
that did not manage to (mostly) wipe out or 
ethnically cleanse their native populations have 
failed to maintain ethnic supremacy. It is also 
true that Palestinians now constitute roughly 
half the population within the borders of Mandate 
Palestine. But there is no guarantee that this 
historical pattern will hold true for the 
Palestinians, and in any case, waiting for 
historical laws to work themselves out in the 
fullness of time is a passive approach that 
glorifies tactics and disdains strategy. It 
assumes that time is on the Palestinians’ side; 
that the higher Palestinian birthrate will hasten 
a demographic solution; and that meanwhile, 
steadfastness and refusal to accept defeat are 
sufficient courses of action. This passive 
approach is a recipe for failure, and it has failed.

It is easy to understand the temptations of this 
recipe, for its primary ingredient is faith in 
truth and progress, and its primary consequence 
is avoiding the thankless busy-bee life of 
patient institution-building. Many of us would 
like to believe that international law counts for 
something and will eventually be adhered to. We 
would like to believe that achieving 
self-determination in the age of decolonization 
is as inevitable for Palestinians as it was for 
other peoples and that justice will prevail. 
These beliefs, however, are not iron laws or even 
necessarily realistic expectations. They are 
merely the products of a positivist 
epistemological orientation and/or a moral stance 
that guides action. We may have already seen the 
best there is to see; there is no inevitability 
in the salvation of the Palestinians. If the 
post-colonial era is any indication, the success 
of anti-colonial struggles in achieving real 
independence or economic development­or even in 
warding off future colonial occupations­has been fleeting.

Passive strategy is also tempting for reasons 
having to do with the convenient reluctance to 
abandon the primacy of the purely political, and 
hence to embark upon painful reevaluations. 
Foregrounding the political sidesteps the complex 
and sensitive task of integrating social and 
cultural issues into the national agenda on the 
pretext that there will be time enough to do so 
later, a stance that has the effect of 
maintaining an internally repressive and 
exploitative status quo.[19] It also makes it 
possible to avoid the burden of having to 
understand global cultural dynamics in general 
(and those of Israeli and U.S. societies in 
particular) and of having to formulate fine-tuned 
strategies for dealing with them. The reluctance 
to engage with these crucial issues is partly due 
to the enormous pressures, restrictions, and 
fast-paced changes that most Palestinians are 
subjected to. Through mutual help and inventive 
strategies for daily survival­primarily, though 
by no means exclusively, at the family, 
neighborhood/village, and regional levels­they 
have managed to endure and resist far longer than 
most observers thought possible. But this 
all-consuming effort comes at a price, insofar as 
it fosters a strong provincial, cynical, and 
self-absorbed current in Palestinian political 
culture that shuns the urgent need to look both 
inward and outward. Thus, the Palestinians, 
though the weakest party in the conflict, have 
tolerated successive leaderships that have been 
largely co-opted, that have committed strategic 
blunders, and that have acquiesced in rules 
specifically designed to preempt substantive 
self-determination. Simply put, there can be no 
freedom or justice without a broader definition 
of what constitutes the “political” in a way that 
accords as much attention to Palestinians as to 
Palestine, or without building coalitions across 
international and psychological boundaries in 
ways that inevitably involve a rethinking of what 
self-determination and sovereignty mean.

Beyond the Identity/Territory/Sovereignty Matrix

I am aware that a postnationalist analysis of the 
modern history of a people who have yet to 
achieve their national aspirations is tortuous 
conceptual terrain, if not a political minefield. 
Questioning the territorial dimension of 
peoplehood and the meaning of sovereignty while 
the conflict is still “hot” could be understood 
by some as challenging the very right of 
Palestinians to Palestine, as well as undermining 
the political language of self-determination that 
lies at the heart of the Palestinian national 
struggle. These are not trivial concerns. Israeli 
revisionist historians can afford to dismantle 
Zionist nationalist mythology precisely because 
there is a well-developed official Israeli 
historical narrative that can be targeted, and 
because Israel is the superpower of the Middle 
East, possessing a high level of self-confidence 
and achievement. The Palestinians, by contrast, 
are by far the weaker party in an ongoing 
conflict. Their material and cultural patrimony, 
from places to place names, has been and 
continues to be subject to a systematic process 
of physical erasure and discursive silencing.

This, along with the absence of national 
institutions and a succession of severe ruptures 
starting with the 1948 war, is why Palestinian 
national narratives are fragmented and revolve 
for the most part around two binaries: 
erasure/affirmation and colonization/resistance. 
The first is obsessed with identity politics and 
often assumes things that ought to be explained, 
such as how the Palestinians became a people and 
what their relationship is to place. The latter 
is absorbed by the political confrontation with 
Zionism and often perches on the moral high 
ground of victimhood while turning a blind eye to 
internal contradictions.[20] For these reasons, 
neither narrative genre can lay the foundation 
for a new mobilizing political language informed 
by sensitivity to social and cultural practices 
that produce and transform what it means to be a 
Palestinian. These practices both reflect and 
transcend the incredibly diverse contexts in 
which Palestinians live: whether under foreign 
military occupation, as putative citizens of a 
country built on the ashes of their history, or as refugees in a hostile world.

The above provisional reflections on the changing 
nature of the Palestinian political community 
emphasize a long-term perspective, foreground the 
power of discursive formations, and seek to 
promote a critical discussion of the 
identity/territory/sovereignty matrix in the hope 
that this exercise can point toward new political 
horizons.[21] The motivation is as obvious as it 
is fraught with danger: We are at the cusp of a 
watershed moment filled with potential 
opportunities and very real dangers for the 
Palestinians. If the Palestinians do not manage, 
sooner rather than later, to become a united 
political community on the basis of a clear 
agenda and effective strategies, their suffering 
as a dispossessed and oppressed people will 
continue into the foreseeable future, with severe 
consequences for themselves and for the region as a whole.

If history is any guide, there is room for agency 
and for an active strategy even in the direst of 
circumstances. There are already numerous calls 
for the revitalization and reconfiguration of the 
PLO or for a new representative body­ a crucial 
first step. But there is little discussion of how 
the new or reconfigured body will differ from the 
old PLO in terms of institutional structure, 
goals, and program.[22] Three brief comments, by 
way of conclusion, may be useful.

First, such a body should speak for the 
Palestinians, not just for Palestine, and needs 
to be far more democratic and demographically 
representative than its predecessor. It should be 
grounded in all three major segments of the 
Palestinian people today: the five million or so 
in the Diaspora, who constitute one of the 
largest and oldest refugee populations in modern 
times; the roughly 3.8 million in East Jerusalem, 
the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, who have been 
living for over four decades under a brutal 
military occupation; and the (usually forgotten) 
1.2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, who 
constitute almost 20 percent of that country’s 
population. Mechanisms have to be developed to 
allow the voices of all these Palestinians, 
especially those of the dispersed Palestinian 
refugees, to be articulated and debated.[23] 
Reconstituted along these lines, the new entity 
would be more accurately called the Organization 
for the Liberation of Palestinians, not the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Such a body should also be more politically 
inclusive. The integration of Hamas and of the 
political tendencies of the Palestinian citizens 
of Israel is the most pressing task. The 
combination of a political and territorial split 
between Fatah and Hamas, and the likelihood that 
it will only deepen in the foreseeable future, 
have greatly raised the stock of a one-state 
solution and made obvious the fact that change 
within Israel is key. Palestinian citizens of 
Israel are well placed to contribute to the 
formulation of effective strategies addressing 
these two issues.[24] As to Hamas, it is by far 
the strongest and most cohesive force in the 
occupied territories. It can be ignored only at 
the expense of fragmenting the Palestinian body 
politic, with negative long-term consequences.

Second, the new entity needs to implement 
creative long-term strategies that rewrite the 
rules of the game and break iron laws. It is 
important to pursue, link, and synergize three 
parallel goals that do not have to conflict with 
one another: to free Palestinians in the West 
Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem from military 
occupation; to secure the right of Palestinian 
refugee communities to return or to receive 
compensation; and to promote equality and 
cultural autonomy for the Palestinian citizens of 
Israel. While it is almost impossible to imagine 
how Palestinians can make progress on these 
fronts without the institutional infrastructure 
of a sovereign state on Palestinian land, given 
the unlikelihood of such a state in the 
foreseeable future, ways have to be found.

Third, Palestinians cannot afford to give up the 
moral high ground by resorting to tactics and 
strategies that allow for indiscriminate 
violence. Palestinians do have the right under 
international law to use violence to end an 
illegal foreign military occupation. They also 
have the legal and moral right to defend 
themselves against those using violence to take 
their lands or their lives. But this is a far cry 
from glorifying armed struggle and deliberately 
targeting civilians for political ends. What kind 
of society can be built on such actions? How can 
grassroots mobilization take place if attention 
and resources are focused on militias, especially 
when these militias, unable to confront the 
Israeli military, have turned on each other and 
on their own society? And what are the costs of 
such actions in terms of how Palestinians are 
perceived by world public opinion, especially in 
the two important arenas of Israel and the United States?

All of the above calls for a rethinking of the 
identity/territory/sovereignty matrix, beginning 
with the obvious facts that Israelis now 
constitute a nation in Palestine and that the 
Palestinian-Israeli conflict is not just a 
Palestinian or Israeli concern. The conflict has 
been an international concern from the League of 
Nations Mandate Charter in 1922 and the UN 
Partition Resolution in 1947 all the way through 
the International Court of Justice ruling on the 
illegality of the Apartheid Wall in 2004. 
Whatever the strategy, internationalization is 
bound to take place, at least as a transitional 
phase. There is also no doubt that 
internationalization requires compromises on the 
territorial dimension of peoplehood and on 
sovereignty in the classical sense for both 
Palestinians and Israelis. The questions are: 
What kind of internationalization? And to whose 
benefit? Besides, it may well be that by the time 
the Palestinians are strong enough, statehood 
might not be the only or even best form of 
self-determination in an increasingly global and 
interdependent world, just as nationalism may not 
be the most fruitful form of realizing justice, 
equality, and freedom for communities bound by a single identity.

For a variety of reasons, the world has paid more 
attention to this conflict than to any other in 
modern history. This attention can turn the 
weaknesses of Palestinians into sources of 
strength, and it can transform the “out of phase” 
tension between identity and territory into a 
beacon for new political horizons. The iron law 
and ironies of their history have made the 
Palestinians a potent symbol of the dark side of 
modernity, and the cause of Palestine has become 
a conspicuous element in progressive movements 
across the globe. All those who have experienced 
modernity not as progress and prosperity or as 
self-determination and redemption, but as 
colonial occupation, territorial partition, and 
demographic displacement, can potentially see 
themselves in the Palestinian experience. But 
harnessing the tremendous political energy of 
Palestinian communities and their supporters 
worldwide requires the establishment of a 
representative entity that can clearly articulate 
what the Palestinians want and why, and can 
define the parameters for strategic action. 
Coming up with different strategies and the means 
to realize them involves, in turn, the ability to 
imagine different futures and to move toward a 
political culture that can see beyond the 
identity/territory/sovereignty matrix.

Beshara Doumani is professor of history at the 
University of California at Berkeley. He wishes 
to acknowledge the detailed comments by George 
Bisharat and Osamah Khalil that prompted many 
changes to an earlier draft. He would also like 
to thank Nadia Hijab, Rosemary Sayigh, Salim 
Tamari, and Issam Nassar for their helpful 
comments. Due to space constraints, this is an 
abridged version of a longer essay.





Notes



[1] Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of 
the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Boston: 
Beacon Press, 2006). In this and earlier works, 
especially his book of essays on Palestinian 
identity [Palestinian Identity: The Construction 
of Modern National Consciousness (New York: 
Columbia University Press, 1997)], Khalidi has 
produced the dominant narrative framework on the 
history of modern Palestinian nationalism and national movements.

[2] Sunday Times (London), 15 June 1969, p. 12.

[3] Interview with Ari Shavit, Ha’Aretz, 8 
October 2004. Reprinted in Journal of Palestine 
Studies 36, no. 2 (Winter 2005), Doc. C.

[4] Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, chap. 7.

[5] For a discussion of social space and the 
specific material and cultural networks that 
define them, see Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering 
Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal 
Nablus, 1700–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

[6] This argument is elaborated in Doumani, 
“Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine: Writing 
Palestinians into History,” Journal of Palestine 
Studies 21, no. 2 (Winter 1992), pp. 5–28.

[7] Gabi Piterberg addresses this issue in his 
essay “Can the Subaltern Remember? A Pessimistic 
View of the Victims of Zionism” in Ussama Makdisi 
and Paul A. Silverstein, eds., Memory and 
Violence in the Middle East and North Africa 
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), pp. 177–200.

[8] Another way to express this tension is to say 
that the Palestinian question as a whole became 
feminized. Arab regimes, media, and, to a certain 
extent, popular culture bowed at the feet of 
Palestine the She-Goddess but blamed the 
Palestinians for “losing” Palestine and 
ruthlessly disciplined them for “overstepping” or 
“misbehaving,” using the same language and tone 
as a patriarch dealing with a female member of 
the family or a troublemaking child. I thank 
Aftim Saba for a spirited discussion of this issue with me (July 2007).

[9] Unofficial estimates put that number at 10 percent of the population.

[10] According to Dov Weisglass, Sharon’s chief 
of staff, the plan “supplies the amount of 
formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not 
be a political process with the Palestinians.” He 
continues: “When you freeze [the peace] process, 
you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian 
state, and you prevent a discussion on the 
[Palestinian] refugees, the borders and 
Jerusalem.” BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middleeast/3720176.stm

[11] From this perspective, the recurrent 
invasions of Gaza, such as those of the summer of 
2006 which led to the death of hundreds of 
civilians and destruction of Gaza’s only 
electrical station (not to mention bridges, 
agricultural areas, and other infrastructure) is 
not a failure of this unilateral policy of fixing 
borders, but a structural feature of a system of 
long-term confinement that requires periodic reoccupation of the prison space.

[12] It is possible that Fatah, as a movement 
encompassing a variety of political ideologies 
and factions, could reemerge invigorated. The 
often-stated desire of most of its members, 
especially those in the middle ranks, for reform 
and a new leadership led to the creation of two 
Fatah lists in the 2006 elections.

[13] Quoted by Gideon Levy, Ha’Aretz, 19 February 2006.

[14] The most damaging consequence of this 
isolation was the drying up of funds needed to 
pay the salaries of civil service employees, 
whose income is the backbone of the Palestinians’ struggle for daily survival.

[15] The excellent Web site of the Institute for 
Middle East Understanding includes a detailed 
list of and links to major reports issued by 
international and other organizations: 
http://imeu.net/news/documentsreports.shtml. See, 
for example, Report 2007: Israel and the Occupied 
Territories, released on 4 June 2007 by Amnesty 
International; and the Report of the Special 
Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in 
the Palestinian Territories Occupied Since 1967, 
John Dugard, released on 22 February 2007.

[16] For example, instead of living up to its 
election slogan (“change and reform”) by 
reconfiguring how the PA operates, Hamas made an 
enormous number of political appointments to the 
civil service in a short period of time, making 
it difficult for most Palestinians to distinguish 
Hamas’s motivations on the local level from those of Fatah operatives.

[17] For example, see the press release by MADRE, 
an international women’s human rights 
organization: “Palestine in the Age of Hamas: The 
Challenge of Progressive Solidarity,” issued on 
10 July 2007. 
http://www.madre.org/articles/me/ageofhamas07.html. 
The press release contests neither the legitimacy 
of Hamas’s leadership of the government after its 
electoral victory nor its anti-imperialist 
credentials, and it calls for challenging Israel 
and U.S. foreign policy. At the same time, MADRE 
has this to say about Hamas: “Let’s be clear: 
Hamas’s long-term social vision is repressive. 
Hamas is a movement driven by militarism and 
nationalism. It aims to institutionalize 
reactionary ideas about gender and sexuality, and 
it uses religion as a smokescreen to pursue its 
agenda.” No doubt each one of these claims can be 
contested and qualified, but each is worthy of 
discussion and should not be ignored, for the 
mobilizing language of contemporary politics 
shapes the lives of future generations.

[18] Interview with Graham Usher, Al-Ahram Weekly 
Online, no. 715 (4–10 November 2004). 
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/715/re17.htm.

[19] This is an old debate within national 
liberation movements. The most heated discussions 
in the 1970s and 1980s concerned the status of 
women and the problem of prioritizing and linking 
the political, social, and cultural issues around 
which they should be mobilized.

[20] These binaries are discussed in some detail 
in Doumani, “Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine.”

[21] I do not intend to instrumentalize these 
reflections for the purpose of arguing for or 
against either the one-state or two-state 
solution. Neither is even a remote possibility 
for the foreseeable future. Taking an “agnostic 
stand” on the final shape of a political 
settlement allows one to foreground important 
issues otherwise buried by the internal logic of 
this or that position. I thank George Bisharat 
for the phrase and the insight. This was the 
basis for the special section we co-edited: “Open 
Forum: Strategizing Palestine,” Journal of 
Palestine Studies 35, no. 3 (Spring 2006), pp. 37–82.

[22] It is ironic that the leaders of Fatah 
(Arafat, then Abbas), who had discarded the PLO 
in favor the PA as the body that speaks for 
Palestinians (in effect leaving out half the 
population from the political process), 
rediscovered the PLO only after the January 2006 
electoral victory put Hamas (not a member of the PLO) in charge of the PA.

[23] The issues involved are addressed in detail 
by The Civitas Project, directed by Karma 
Nabulsi. See Palestinians Register: Laying 
Foundations and Setting Directions (Oxford: Nuffield College, 2006).

[24] There is no reason, for example, why a 
Palestinian citizen of Israel cannot become the 
leader of a reconfigured PLO.









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