Edward William Said

The Question of Palestine

Edward W. Said

Still a basic and indespensible account of the Palestinian question, updated to include the most recent developments in the Middle East- from the intifada to the Gulf war to the historic peace conference in Madrid.

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As far as I am concerned, the Palestinian mission is a mission of peace. I am sure that this is true for the vast majority of our people. We are not just a population of exiles seeking restitution and national se!f-determinaiion; we have recreated ourselves as a people out of the destruction of our national existence, and our national organization, (he Palestine Liberation Organization has symbolized both the loneliness of our vision and the wonderful power of our faith in it. 

The West was instructed systematically in equating the struggle for those rights with terrorism, genocide, anti-Semitism. This is not only nonsense; it is also license to extend a century of violence against Palestinians for another long period of time, and to refuse more or less indefinitely to settle with history and with truth. 

I have the strongest belief that the historical and moral sufficiency of the Palestinian cause will finally outlast and outstrip any attempts to misrepresent it.

With no territory underneath one's feet it is patently hard to know with certainty what, in an abstract sense, is the best course to steer. Then there is the often hopeless amalgam of political loyalties and affiliations which, like a tangle of half-loose umbilical cords, connects Palestinians to each other and to the countries in which they are resident.

For them, the criticisms arc ideological, organizational, strate gical. What exactly arc the supposed links between the PLO and Saudi Arabia or Syria to be? How do we conduct ourselves with Jordan, which dcmographically has a Palestinian majority? Why and with what specific ends in mind were meetings held in the fall of 1976 between members of the PLO and certain Israeli public figures? Why was there no blanket condemnation of Sadat after his trip to Jerusalem? What is the Fateh vision of the future Palestinian society? Why is there no clear Fateh determination on the problems of imperialism, a determination, that eliminates once and for all every kind of flirtation with the United States and its allies? Above all, how long can Palestinian politics led by Fateh continue to get away with a little bit here, a little bit there, one leader saying X, the other saying Y, bureaucracy and slogans doing the work of revolutionary organization and consciousness-raising, patron age as a substitute for getting work done, follow-the-leader instead of serious accountability? At times these debates consume more energy than fighting Zionism.

It has probably always been true that human beings view their differences from one another as matters of interpretation. 

Each Palestinian community must struggle to maintain its identity on at least two levels: first, as Palestinian with regard to the historical encounter with Zionism and the precipitous loss of a homeland; second, as Palestinian in the existential setting of day-to-day life, responding to the pressure in the state of residence. Every Palestinian has no state as a Palesti nian even though he is “of,” without belonging to, a state in which at present he resides. There are Lebanese Palestinians and American Palestinians, just as there are Jordanian, Syrian, and West Bank Palestinians; their numbers increase propor tionately higher than those of Israeli Jews or other Arabs, as if the multiplication of complications extends even into the multiplication of bodies. 

The net effect in unrestrained Israeli militarism is accurately indicated by a Ha'aretz article (March 24. (978) celebrating the Lebanese adventure in the following terms: What has happened last week, has shown to everyone who has eyes in his head, that the Israeli defense force is today an American Army both in the quantity and quality of its equipment: the rifles, the troop-earners, the F- 15’s, and even the KFIR planes with their American motors, are a testimony that will convince everybody.

It seems as if God has covered the soil of Palestine with rocks and marshes and sand, so that its beauty can only be brought out by those who love it and will devote their lives to healing its wounds.

Imperialism was the theory, colonialism the practice of changing the uselessly unoccupied territories of the world into useful new versions of the European metropolitan society. 

Israel is not only seen as exempt from blame or responsibility (according to President Carter for one, who similarly absolved the United States of responsibility for the devastation of Indochina), Israel (like the United States) is praised for its humanity. We are told that the Palestinians were an "exchange” for the Jews who left the Arab countries to come to Israel; that they left in spite of Haganah urgings that they not leave; that those who stayed are better off than their brethren in surrounding Arab countries; that there is only one haven for Jews and there arc twenty-odd for Arabs, and why can’t Arabs be like Jews and take in their own refugees; that the occupation of more Palestinian territory in 1967 produced in fact a “binational” existence between Arab and Jew; that the West Bank occupation is a fulfillment of biblical prophecies; that there is a Palestine.

On this collective representation of the Arabs and Islam, Zionism, like its Western ideological parents, drew. How it drew and where it stood when it drew deserve attention here, because it is a perfect instance of how propaganda, politicized scholarship, and ideological information have power, imple ment policy, and, at the same time, can appear to be “objective truth.”

But it is more likely that there will remain the inverse resistance which has characterized Zionism and Israel since the beginning: the refusal to admit, and the consequent denial of, the existence of Palestinian Arabs who are there not simply as an inconvenient nuisance, but as a population with an indissoluble bond with the land.

A considerable majority of the literature on the Middle East, at least until 1968, gives one the impression that the essence of what goes on in the Middle East is a series of unending wars between a group of Arab countries and Israel. That there had been such an entity as Palestine until 1948, or that Israel’s existence—its “indepen dence,” as the phrase goes—was the result of the eradication of Palestine: of these truths beyond dispute most people who follow events in the Middle East are more or less ignorant, or unaware.

We were on the land called Palestine; were our dispossession and our effacement, by which almost a million of us were made to leave Palestine and our society made nonexistent, justified even to save the remnant of European Jews that had survived Nazism? By what moral or political standard are we expected to lay aside our claims to our national existence, our land, our human rights? In what world is there no argument when an entire people is told that it is juridically absent, even as armies are led against it, campaigns conducted against even its name, history changed so as to “prove” its nonexistence?

Thus one thing about “terrorism” is the imbalance in its perception, and the imbalance in its perpetration. One could mention, for example, that in every instance when Israeli hostages were used to try to gain the release of Palestinians held in Israeli jails, it was always the Israeli forces who offered fire first, knowingly causing a bloodbath.

Selin Igten

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The Question of Palestine

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