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http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n20/karma-nabulsi/diary/print

<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n20/contents>Vol. 32 
No. 20 · 21 October <http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n20/contents>2010


<http://www.lrb.co.uk/>
London Review of Books



Diary




Karma Nabulsi

Nowadays, when Palestinian activists in their 
twenties and thirties meet up with veterans of 
the Palestinian struggle, they show an unexpected 
thoughtfulness towards the older, revolutionary 
generation, to which I belong. This is nothing 
like the courtesy extended as a matter of course 
to older people in our part of the world: it is 
more intimate and more poignant. What brings us 
together is always the need to discuss the 
options before us, and to see if a plan can be 
made. Everyone argues, laughs, shouts and tells 
black jokes. But whenever a proper discussion 
begins, the suddenly lowered voices of our 
frustrated young people, many of them at the 
heart of the fierce protests on university 
campuses and in rights campaigns elsewhere, have 
the same tone I used to hear in the voices of our 
young ambulance workers in Lebanon in the 1970s 
and 1980s: an elegiac gentleness towards the 
hopelessly wounded, towards those who were already beyond repair.

The way Palestinians see things, the 
fragmentation of the body politic – externally 
engineered, and increasingly internally driven – 
has now been achieved. This summer, even the 
liberal Israeli press began to notice that the 
key people in Ramallah, the Palestinian 
Authority’s capital in the West Bank, no longer 
discuss strategies of liberation but rather the 
huge business deals that prey on the public 
imagination. Every institution or overarching 
structure that once united Palestinians has now 
crumbled and been swept away. The gulf between 
Gaza and the West Bank, between Hamas and Fatah, 
between Palestinians inside Palestine and the 
millions of refugees outside it, between city and 
village, town and refugee camp, now seems 
unbridgeable. The elites are tiny and the numbers 
of the dispossessed and the disenfranchised 
increase every day. There is, at this moment, no 
single body able to claim legitimately to 
represent all Palestinians; no body able to set 
out a collective policy or national programme of liberation. There is no plan.

The feeling of paralysis doesn’t only affect the 
Palestinians. It is found too among the hundreds 
of international institutions and less formal 
groups involved in the thriving carpet-bagging 
industry of the Middle East Peace Process. The 
US, the UN, the EU, their special envoys and 
fact-finding commissions, their human rights 
monitors, lawyers and NGOs, the policy think 
tanks, the growing legion of international 
humanitarian agencies, the dialogue groups and 
peace groups, all came to the same conclusion 
shortly after the start of the second Intifada in 
the autumn of 2000. Over the last decade, these 
bodies have produced thousands of institutional 
memos, governmental reports, official démarches, 
human rights briefings, summaries, analyses, 
legal inquiries into war crimes and human rights 
abuses, academic books and articles. And they 
have pretty much nailed it: Palestinians are 
enduring the entrenched effects not only of a 
military occupation, but of a colonial regime that practises apartheid.

The predicament is understood and widely 
accepted, yet Palestinians and non-Palestinians 
appear equally baffled. Protest and denunciation 
have achieved very little. How are we to respond 
in a way that will allow us to prevail? The 
vocabulary required to form a policy is entirely 
absent both nationally and internationally. 
Palestinians are currently trapped in a 
historical moment that – as the contemporary 
world sees it – belongs to the past. The language 
the situation demands had life only inside an 
ideology which has now disappeared.

Everyone else has moved on. In a world whose 
intellectual framework is derived from university 
courses in postcolonial or cultural studies, from 
the discourse of post-nationalism, or human 
rights, or global governance, from post-conflict 
and security literature, the Palestinians are 
stuck fast in historical amber. They can’t move 
on, and the language that could assist them to do 
so is as extinct as Aramaic. No one cares any 
longer for talk of liberation: in fact, people 
flinch at the sound of it – it is unfashionable, 
embarrassing, reactionary even to speak of 
revolution today. Twenty-first-century eyes read 
revolutionary engagement as the first stage on 
the road to the guillotine or the Gulag. Advanced 
now well beyond the epic and heroic stages of its 
history, the West views its own revolutionary 
roots through the decadent backward gaze of Carl 
Schmitt. Seen through that prism, Palestinians 
remain stubbornly – one could almost say, 
wilfully – in the anti-colonial, revolutionary phase of their history.

So the questions debated by Palestinians are the 
same now as they ever were: how to organise, how 
to mobilise, how to unify? There remains a 
constant sense of emergency, but Palestinians 
with long memories agree that we are at a nadir 
in our history of resistance. The only sign of 
forward movement lies in the tide of revulsion at 
Israel’s belligerent policies, which Palestinian 
civil society organisations have channelled into 
a vivid and well-organised campaign of solidarity 
through boycotts, divestment and sanctions.

Exactly 50 years ago, Palestinians were at a 
similar stage of social and political 
fragmentation brought about by defeat and 
dispossession and the anomie that followed the 
Nakba of 1948. Without a country or the 
protection of a sovereign state, they were 
confronting, on the one hand, Israel, and on the 
other, sundry Arab regimes: between them they 
controlled every aspect of Palestinians’ social 
and civic lives as well as their physical space. 
They lived deep in the dust and disease of tent 
cities, without personal papers or property. In 
1955, a young Palestinian writer, Ghassan 
Kanafani, moved to Kuwait from Syria, where he 
had been a teacher at a school set up for 
refugees by the UN, after himself being expelled 
from Palestine with his family in 1948. One of 
his people’s most perceptive chroniclers, he 
described their mood in his diary: ‘The only 
thing we know is that tomorrow will be no better 
than today, and that we are waiting on the shore, 
yearning, for a boat that will not come. We are 
sentenced to be separated from everything – except from our own destruction.’

But what appeared to Kanafani to be the 
collective end was in fact its extraordinary 
beginning. By the end of the decade, the 
revolution had found a language and a form. For 
the first time in a century of rebellions and 
uprisings against foreign rule, Palestinians 
could mount a collective challenge to 
international, Israeli and Arab coercion, and 
unify sufficiently to represent themselves. Even 
a cursory study of the history of revolutions 
over the last 300 years reveals three elements 
essential to their origins. First, a plethora of 
revolutionary pamphlets, declarations and 
discussions issuing from different factions 
together begin to shape a shared understanding of 
the injustices that have to be overturned. A call 
to arms requires a convincing appraisal of the 
balance of forces if enough people are to be 
persuaded to embark on such a risky enterprise. 
The history of Palestinian attempts to achieve 
freedom would give anyone pause: two generations 
who tried lie buried in the cemeteries of more than two dozen countries.

Second, it is revolutionaries who make 
revolutions, and not the other way around. During 
the national mobilisation of the 1960s and 1970s, 
some joined the party, others the movement, but 
most simply joined the Palestinian revolution. It 
was taken for granted that one belonged to one of 
the parties, which were themselves embedded in 
the broader national liberation movement under 
the umbrella of the Palestine Liberation 
Organisation, a formal institution set up in 1964 
by Arab states, which was captured from the 
Palestinian elite by the resistance groups a few 
years later. Empowered by becoming part of a 
fast-moving popular revolution, Palestinians – 
exiled, scattered and defeated as they were – 
achieved the two elusive things they have 
constantly sought: representation and unity.

If you raise the painful subject of this earlier 
time among Palestinians today, the usual effect 
is to revive the over-theoretical debate about 
when exactly the revolution died. (A discussion 
of its strengths and weaknesses would be more 
useful.) Some say it ended after Black September 
in Jordan in 1970; others that it ended in 1975 
at the start of the Lebanese civil war. The 
majority see Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 
1982, which brought about the comprehensive 
destruction of the PLO’s infrastructure, as 
having killed it off. The communiqués and 
declarations issued during the first Intifada, 
which took place in the occupied Palestinian 
territories between 1987 and 1993, were expressed 
in the language of revolution, but everyone 
agrees that it was all over by 1991, when the 
Madrid peace process was accepted on such unequal 
terms. That entire period of Palestinian history 
has fallen into disrepute for a number of reasons 
– not least having to watch its ghoulish remains 
driving around in official cars in Ramallah or 
posing at the White House – so the benefits are 
never assessed, or potentially useful lessons drawn.

Unity and representation are the common goods 
Palestinians must realise in order to advance 
their cause, and these clearly can’t be achieved 
via any of the options currently being suggested 
to us: not the distribution of the PA’s power 
between Hamas and Fatah (since the only 
representative institutional structure for all 
Palestinians is the Palestinian National Council, 
the parliament-in-exile of the PLO); not a 
US-sponsored peace process; and not the plan for 
Palestinian statehood proposed by the prime 
minister, Salam Fayyad, according to which the 
institutions of an independent state will be 
built in the face of a still expanding military 
occupation. Already by the 1970s, thanks to its 
fluid institutional architecture, the revolution 
was able to overcome national borders, protect 
its independence from the Arab regimes and convey 
its demands to the solidarity movements who 
supported it and exerted pressure on its behalf. 
Other national liberation movements of the 1960s 
and 1970s – the FLN, ANC, Swapo, the Sandinistas 
– had to operate with their leaders underground 
and in exile, developing their strategy outside 
the country while the population remained rooted 
in the land they hoped to liberate. For 
Palestinians, whose national politics were undone 
in an instant over a single year in 1948, it took 
the concerted actions of tens of thousands of 
cadres across the region to hold the people 
together while at the same time putting 
sufficient pressure on those governments, both 
Western and Arab, that would have preferred to 
see us capitulate to Israel. The mood of that 
short period, as I remember it, was profoundly 
popular and democratic: pluralist, multi-party, 
universalist, secular and highly progressive. 
Palestinians who dared not join in – businessmen, 
academics, the money-grubbing classes – were 
carried along in its wake, and obeyed its 
mandate. Today we could not be further from that 
fleeting moment of unity the revolution once afforded.

The experience of revolutionary life is difficult 
to describe. It is as much metaphysical as 
imaginative, combining urgency, purposefulness, 
seriousness and hard work, with a near 
celebratory sense of adventure and overriding 
optimism – a sort of carnival atmosphere of 
citizens’ rule. Key to its success is that this 
heightened state is consciously and collectively 
maintained by tens of thousands of people at the 
same time. If you get tired for a few hours or 
days, you know others are holding the ring.

The third, counterintuitive feature of 
revolutions is that they are usually launched by 
astonishingly small groups of individuals. The 
Palestinian revolution was no exception. Young 
Palestinians today, caught in the grind of their 
daily struggle, feel unable to make contact with 
their own past: its stories are like fairytales, 
out of their reach. The appropriate model for the 
emergence of the Palestinian movement of the 
1960s and 1970s isn’t the Leninist vanguard party 
but the revolutions that established democracies 
in 19th-century Europe, where the acts of a few 
were matched, and then rapidly overtaken, by an 
entire nation, all of whose members considered 
themselves leaders. No one here waits around for instructions.

What usually goes unmentioned in the history 
books is the dangerous and seemingly interminable 
slog that is required to build up to any 
revolution’s launch: it may take years, even 
decades, once the match is lit, for it to ignite 
a mobilisation large enough to create a truly national initiative.

One of the individuals who still keeps the 
revolutionary spirit alive in these bleak times 
phoned me this week, and this time I rang him 
back. (Often I can’t face talking to him because 
his situation is so terrible.) Ziyad was a key 
activist in the first Intifada when he was a 
student at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank, 
and for the last 20 years he has dedicated his 
life in Gaza to what is commonly known as 
‘mobilising from below’. Ziyad is, or was, head 
of the Rafah refugee camp’s popular committee, 
the local elected body, legendary now for its 
history of civic resistance to Israeli rule. 
Ziyad is like an artist, restlessly exploring 
ways to preserve people’s humanity amid the 
oppression and misery of southern Gaza. His cool 
eye and steady nerve, together with a seemingly 
inexhaustible affection for others, have kept him 
from turning away in despair at the things he has 
seen. At the height of the war on Gaza, he 
managed to create and sustain the only committee 
that included all the factions, with Fatah 
members working alongside Hamas, or vice versa. 
Members of other committees that had previously 
tried this (including his own) had been kneecapped for their pains.

Ziyad spent much of last year in prison in Gaza, 
and, as it turned out when I returned his call, 
some of this year’s Ramadan as well. ‘Oh no!’ I 
said, ‘What happened this time?’ He said that 
he’d been trying to organise in the elementary 
schools. This struck me as one of the funniest 
things I had heard in a long time: Ziyad laughed, 
too, when he began telling me about it. He had 
tried to organise a prize-giving in the camp for 
some of the students, but the current 
administration in Gaza didn’t like the idea at 
all. ‘I am not selecting children from Hamas 
families or Fatah families,’ he said, ‘just those 
who had done well in school. I had to try something!’

What the administration in Gaza does not like, 
Ziyad said, is the idea of movement, of freedom, 
of opening things up from below, of bringing 
people together for any common purpose at all. I 
told him I had spoken to Adnan in Beirut only 
that morning, and that the story was no different 
there: Adnan has been forced to stay at home for 
months now, unable to move. Until last year, he 
had worked closely with another old friend of 
mine, Kamal Medhat, a child of the revolution who 
was not so different from Ziyad in his 
determination to go it alone while carrying everyone with him.

Just over a year ago Kamal was assassinated by a 
car bomb in south Lebanon. He had been trying to 
urge people forward towards national unity, and 
to attack the political corruption then 
entrenched in the refugee camps: these two 
objectives, it soon became clear, were 
intertwined. He was making a very successful job 
of it, for he brought formidable experience to 
the task. Already a legend as a young man, Kamal 
was responsible for, among many other things, the 
security of the leadership when the revolution 
was centred in Beirut, and attempts against it 
took place on an almost daily basis. An obituary 
in the Arab press noted that ‘he constantly 
criticised Arafat, who would laugh.’ This was 
true: Kamal could be brutally honest, but he made 
everyone in the room feel happy, taking and 
giving endless orders, joking, and being 
especially encouraging to young cadres, though 
also quite tough. I witnessed at least a dozen 
acts of bravery by Kamal in the 1970s and early 
1980s. After the PLO leadership was evacuated to 
Tunis in 1982, he returned to Lebanon to help 
lift the military siege of the Palestinian 
refugee camps by the Syrians and their proxies. 
In the 1990s, in disagreement with the 
leadership’s negotiating strategy, he absented 
himself from public life, studying for a 
doctorate in international law, staying very 
quiet. We lost track of each other until a few 
years ago, when he burst back onto the scene in 
Lebanon, unchanged and undefeated, now the second 
in command at the PLO embassy that had finally been re-established there.

I went to his funeral; we all walked the familiar 
path to the Palestinian cemetery, accompanied by 
thousands of refugees, clapping and singing and 
shouting revolutionary slogans. After the 40 days 
of mourning I returned to Beirut, where the 
traditional memorial meeting was convened at the 
Unesco palace. The hall was packed with 
Palestinians from the refugee camps across 
Lebanon, and black and white images of the 
handsome Kamal at different stages of his life 
succeeded one another on a screen behind the 
stage. Most of the Palestinian leaders were at an 
urgent meeting in Amman, and couldn’t attend. The 
eerie pockets of silence at various moments 
throughout the ceremony were bound up, it seemed 
to me, with the implications of his death (don’t 
organise, don’t push, don’t try to change things 
for the better). Something felt as if it was about to give.

His family, with whom I was staying, had asked me 
to speak about him, as Kamal had been an early 
teacher of mine. Afterwards, in the foyer, a 
stream of young people came up to me. They wanted 
me to know exactly what he had meant to them: 
‘Kamal was the only one who spoke up for us’; 
‘Kamal listened to us, he stood with us’; ‘He 
fought for us’; ‘He encouraged us.’ One after 
another, they told me stories of what he did. 
Each had recognised his revolutionary spirit, I 
thought, as I watched them wander away afterwards into the streets of Beirut.

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<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n20/contents>Vol. 32 
No. 20 · 21 October 2010 » 
<http://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/karma-nabulsi>Karma 
Nabulsi » 
<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n20/karma-nabulsi/diary>Diary (print version)
pages 34-35 | 3017 words

ISSN 0260-9592 
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