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<dd><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=5>Palestine Versus the
Palestinians? The Iron Laws and Ironies of a People Denied<br>
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<dd><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=2>by Beshara Doumani;
<a href="http://palestine-studies.org/final/en/journals/content.php?aid=9611&jid=1&iid=144&vid=XXXVI&vol=203">
Journal of Palestine Studies</a>; October 30, 2007</b> <br><br>
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<a href="http://palestine-studies.org/final/en/journals/content.php?aid=9611&jid=1&iid=144&vid=XXXVI&vol=203" eudora="autourl">
http://palestine-studies.org/final/en/journals/content.php?aid=9611&jid=1&iid=144&vid=XXXVI&vol=203<br>
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<dd><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=2>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.<br><br>
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<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>Of Ironies and Iron Laws<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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:<br><br>
<dd>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]<br><br>
<dd>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”).<br><br>
<dd>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]<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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.”<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>Can the Palestinians Speak?<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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]<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>Opportunity or Disaster?<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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]<br><br>
<dd>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]<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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]<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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]<br><br>
<dd>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?<br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>Active vs. Passive Strategies<br><br>
<dd>Shortly before he died, Arafat made yet another of his “We are not
Red Indians” remarks:<br><br>
<dd>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]<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>Beyond the Identity/Territory/Sovereignty Matrix<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>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?<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
</i>
<dd> <br><br>
<dd> <br><br>
<dd>Notes<br><br>
<dd> <br><br>
<dd>[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.<br><br>
<dd>[2] Sunday Times (London), 15 June 1969, p. 12.<br><br>
<dd>[3] Interview with Ari Shavit, Ha’Aretz, 8 October 2004. Reprinted in
Journal of Palestine Studies 36, no. 2 (Winter 2005), Doc. C.<br><br>
<dd>[4] Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, chap. 7.<br><br>
<dd>[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).<br><br>
<dd>[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.<br><br>
<dd>[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.<br><br>
<dd>[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).<br><br>
<dd>[9] Unofficial estimates put that number at 10 percent of the
population.<br><br>
<dd>[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,
<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middleeast/3720176.stm" eudora="autourl">
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middleeast/3720176.stm<br><br>
</a>
<dd>[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.<br><br>
<dd>[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.<br><br>
<dd>[13] Quoted by Gideon Levy, Ha’Aretz, 19 February 2006.<br><br>
<dd>[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.<br><br>
<dd>[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:
<a href="http://imeu.net/news/documentsreports.shtml" eudora="autourl">
http://imeu.net/news/documentsreports.shtml</a>. 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.<br><br>
<dd>[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.<br><br>
<dd>[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.
<a href="http://www.madre.org/articles/me/ageofhamas07.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.madre.org/articles/me/ageofhamas07.html</a>. 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.<br><br>
<dd>[18] Interview with Graham Usher, Al-Ahram Weekly Online, no. 715
(4–10 November 2004).
<a href="http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/715/re17.htm" eudora="autourl">
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/715/re17.htm</a>.<br><br>
<dd>[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.<br><br>
<dd>[20] These binaries are discussed in some detail in Doumani,
“Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine.”<br><br>
<dd>[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.<br><br>
<dd>[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.<br><br>
<dd>[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).<br><br>
<dd>[24] There is no reason, for example, why a Palestinian citizen of
Israel cannot become the leader of a reconfigured PLO.
<br><br>
<dd> <br><br>
<dd> <br><br>
<br><br>
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