The Question of Palestine Read online

  EDWARD W. SAID

  Edward W. Said was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He was the author of more than twenty books, including Orientalism, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Culture and Imperialism; Representations of the Intellectual; The End of the Peace Process; Power, Politics, and Culture; and Out of Place: A Memoir. His books have been published in thirty-six languages. He died in 2003.

  BOOKS BY EDWARD W. SAID

  Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography

  Beginnings: Intention and Method

  Orientalism

  The Question of Palestine

  Covering Islam

  Literature and Society (editor)

  The World, the Text, and the Critic

  After the Last Sky (with Jean Mohr)

  Blaming the Victims (editor)

  Musical Elaborations

  Culture and Imperialism

  The Politics of Dispossession

  Representations of the Intellectual

  Peace and Its Discontents

  The Pen and the Sword

  Entre guerre et paix

  Henry James: Complete Stories, 1884–1891 (editor)

  Out of Place: A Memoir

  The End of the Peace Process

  The Edward Said Reader

  Reflections of Exile and Other Essays

  Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said

  Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (with Daniel Barenboim)

  Humanism and Democratic Criticism

  From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map

  On Late Style

  Vintage Books Edition, April 1992

  Copyright © 1979, 1992 by Edward W. Said

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover, in somewhat different form, by Times Books, a division of Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., Inc., New York, in 1979.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Said, Edward W.

  The question of Palestine/Edward W. Said.—Vintage Books ed.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: New York: Times Books, © 1979. With new introduction and epilogue.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 0-679-73988-2

  1. Jewish-Arab relations.  2. Palestinian Arabs.  I. Title.

  DS119.7.S333 1992

  327.5694017′4927–dc20     91-50707

  eBook ISBN 9781101971604

  CIP

  v4.1

  a

  In memoriam

  Farid Haddad

  Rashid Hussein

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Books by Edward W. Said

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface to the 1992 Edition

  Introduction

  1

  The Question of Palestine

  I Palestine and the Palestinians

  II Palestine and the Liberal West

  III The Issue of Representation

  IV Palestinian Rights

  2

  Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims

  I Zionism and the Attitudes of European Colonialism

  II Zionist Population, Palestinian Depopulation

  3

  Toward Palestinian Self-Determination

  I The Remnants, Those in Exile, Those Under Occupation

  II The Emergence of a Palestinian Consciousness

  III The PLO Rises to Prominence

  IV The Palestinians Still in Question

  4

  The Palestinian Question after Camp David

  I Terms of Reference: Rhetoric and Power

  II Egypt, Israel, and the United States: What Else the Treaty Involved

  III Palestinian and Regional Actualities

  IV Uncertain Future

  Epilogue

  Bibliographical Note

  Chapter Notes

  (Map of the Israeli Settlements on the West Bank appears on this page.)

  Preface to the 1992 Edition

  This book was written in 1977–78 and published in 1979. An enormous amount has ensued since then, including the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the onset of the continuing intifada in December 1987, the Gulf crisis and war of 1990 and 1991, and the convening of a Middle East peace conference in late October and early November 1991. With the addition to this extraordinary mix of events of such things as the massive changes in Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the freeing of Nelson Mandela, independence for Namibia, the end of the Afghanistan war, and regionally, of course, the Iranian revolution and its aftermath, we are in a new, but no less perilous and complex, world. And yet, strangely and unhappily, the question of Palestine remains—unresolved, seemingly intractable, undomesticated.

  Two decades after Black September (1970), the main aspects of Palestinian life remain dispossession, exile, dispersion, disenfranchisement (under Israeli military occupation), and, by no means least, an extraordinarily widespread and stubborn resistance to these travails. Thousands of lives lost and many more irreparably damaged seem not to have diminished the spirit of resilience characterizing a national movement that, despite its many gains in achieving legitimacy, visibility, and enormous sustenance for its people against staggering odds, has not discovered a method for stopping or containing the relentless Israeli attempt to take over more and more Palestinian (as well as other Arab) territory. But the discrepancy between important political, moral, and cultural gains on the one hand, and, on the other, a droning ground bass of land alienation, is at the heart of the Palestinian dilemma today. To speak of this discrepancy, in aesthetic terms, as an ironic one is by no means to reduce or trivialize its force. On the contrary: what to many Palestinians is either an incomprehensible cruelty of fate or a measure of how appalling are the prospects for settling their claims can be clarified by seeing irony as a constitutive factor in their lives.

  Paradox and Irony: The PLO and Its Environment

  In the aftermath of the Gulf War, United States Secretary of State James Baker completed a series of eight trips to the region and successfully set out the main lines of a peace conference, its aim the settling of the Arab-Israeli conflict in general and that conflict’s Palestinian-Israeli component in particular. In the Arab states he visited, he was reportedly told by every senior official with whom he spoke that no improvement in the Arab states’ essentially nonexistent relationships with Israel could be expected until the question of Palestine was seriously addressed. Yet, at the same time, the PLO was snubbed throughout the Arab states of the coalition, Palestinians in the Occupied Territories continued to experience even greater hardship because of the disruption of funds from the Gulf, and the situation of Palestinians resident in the Gulf states was precarious. Most dramatically, the entire Palestinian community in Kuwait underwent severe tribulations, with torture, deportation, arbitrary arrests, and summary killings the order of the day. Leaving aside the immeasurable material losses to this community and its dependents in the Occupied Territories, there is the additional fact that the restored Kuwaiti authorities announced that those Palestinian residents who left Kuwait during the Iraqi occupation would not be allowed back, leaving hundreds of thousands of refugees in a Jordan already severely overburdened. Those who remained face astringent measures—among them further deportation and imprisonment—against them.


  Thus the averred moral and political centrality of the Palestinian issue to official Arab discourse is scandalized by the actual relationship between the Palestinians as a real people, political community, and nation on the one hand, and the Arab states on the other. This particular contradiction takes us back to 1967, for the emergence of the Palestinian movement after the June War was fueled by a wish to compensate for the appalling performance of the Arab armies against Israel. In an important sense, then, the critical, almost abrasive relationship between Palestinian activity and the Arab state system is structural, not incidental. With the rise of the PLO in the late sixties came such things as a daring frankness, an unusual new cosmopolitanism in which figures such as Fanon, Mao, and Guevara entered the Arab political idiom, and the audacity (perhaps even brashness) attendant upon a political movement proposing itself as capable of doing better than many of its benefactors and patrons.

  Yet we should not mistake this structurally critical relationship and speak about it only as an antithetical one. True, when we think of the conflict between the Jordanian army and the Palestinian guerrilla groups in 1970–71, or the various duels between the PLO and the Lebanese army in the early seventies, or the dreadful Sabra and Shatila massacres of 1982, or the current antagonism between the PLO, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and, of course, Syria, the implicit tensions do seem to have taken dramatically unpleasant forms. But there is a whole other dimension that needs to be recalled as well. All Palestinians know that their principal constituency is Arab and that their struggle exists in an overwhelmingly Arab and Islamic environment. No less important in this critical relationship, therefore, is the symbiosis and sympathy between Arab and Palestinian causes, the way in which, for example, Palestine has come to symbolize what is best and most vital in the pan-Arab tradition of cooperation, dramatic energy, and spirit.

  But here, too, paradox and irony are evident. Doubtless the post-Shukairy PLO that has come to be dominated for two decades by Yasir Arafat initially saw itself as Arabist in the Nasserist sense. But, early on, the organization involved itself in at least three, and perhaps even four or five, other circles of influence, or realms, regionally and internationally, not all of them congruent with one another, not all of them basically similar. First was the Persian Gulf, which since 1948 has been central to the economics and demographics of the Palestinian march forward. This brought not only the largely conservative political outlook of many of the rulers of the Gulf countries into a rapprochement with the PLO that lasted for years, but two other factors, each of which imparted an ideological inflection of significant note: money and Sunni Islam. Second was the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the immediate bond struck between the Khomeini regime and the PLO. This brought in important state support for Palestine from a non-Arab branch of Shia Islam associated with an extremely volatile quasi-millenarianism that would be startlingly reflected in sections of the PLO membership. And if the Iranian convergence was not enough, there remained a third element, the organic link between the Palestinian struggle and most of the progressive, oppositional movements within the Arab world, from Egyptian Marxists, Nasserists, and Muslim groups to a whole variety of large as well as small parties, personalities, and currents in the Gulf region, the Fertile Crescent, and North Africa.

  Fourth, and particularly striking, is the world of independence and liberation movements. Some day the history of exchange and support between the PLO and such groups as the African National Congress (ANC), the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), the Sandinistas, as well as the anti-Shah revolutionary Iranian groups will describe an extraordinary chapter in the twentieth-century struggle against various forms of tyranny and injustice. No wonder that Nelson Mandela, for example, averred publicly that opposition to apartheid and adherence to the Palestinian cause were essentially a common effort, and no wonder that by the end of the seventies there was not a progressive political cause that did not identify with the Palestinian movement. Moreover, by the time of the Lebanese invasion and the intifada, Israel had lost virtually all the political high ground it had once occupied; now it was Palestine and its people that had gained the moral upper hand.

  The point about all these often bewildering confluences is not that they worked badly or well, but that they worked at all, given the tremendous number of extremely unsettling forces latent in the relationships between the Palestinians and a number of Arab states. Still, as I argue in this book, large patches of history since 1970 can be interpreted as deriving from conjunctures that are held to, then put aside with animosity and recrimination, then sometimes resumed. The Palestinian-Jordanian relationship in the early seventies was deeply antagonistic, with great loss of life and property; a decade or so later it had become, while admittedly guarded, cordial, with a Jordanian-Palestinian entente sufficiently mutual to permit an Amman meeting in 1984 of the Palestinian National Council (PNC), the idea of a joint Palestinian-Jordanian UN delegation, and even confederation and a joint delegation to the peace talks of 1991–92. Syria’s presence in the movement has been equally oscillatory, if not always as forgiving—several PNC meetings were held in Damascus, and in the early days of the Lebanese Civil War there was a military alliance, but since things went sour in the early 1980s it has not been restored. With Egypt and Iraq there was never armed conflict, but there have been severe ups and downs, the most recent of which has put the PLO and Cairo at odds, partly over the PLO’s alliance with Iraq, which began well before August 2, 1991, and was occasioned by the drift away from support for Palestine in the major Arab states during the mid-eighties. As for Lebanon, there the story is a truly tangled one in which surrogates of the Arab states, Iran, or Israel, in addition to local militias and parties, waltzed with or actively fought the Palestinians, who were formally driven out in 1982 and (as I write) are now back, albeit adjusting uneasily to a post-Taif Lebanon effectively administered by the Syrian army.

  Two themes emerge from this shifting story of an extremely uncertain, but inevitably involving, environment. First is the absence of a strategic ally of Palestinian nationalism. The second is a sort of obverse to the first, namely, the undoubted presence over the decades of a relatively independent Palestinian political will. And, indeed, the immensely convoluted road travelled by the Palestinian national movement suggests that this will was wrested from the environment. Thus, at the 1974 Rabat Summit just after the October War, the PLO was named “the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.” At the 1984 PNC meeting held in Jordan, the idea being celebrated was that, after the ghastly Palestinian engagement with the Syrian army in North Lebanon, Palestinians could hold a National Council meeting despite Syria’s proximity and its leader’s claims to hegemony over regional strategy. But the most striking example of the Palestinian exercise of independence was the 1988 PNC meeting in Algiers, during which a historical compromise was enacted by Palestinians, who now saw their fight for self-determination located in a partitioned Palestine; at the same time, a Palestinian state guided by a set of enlightened constitutional and wholly secular principles was also declared in Algiers.

  Changes and Transformations

  We should not, I think, scant the impressive generosity of vision, the audacity of leaps, the daring of certain formulations that stand out as the Palestinian will has been slowly forged. In other words, it has not just been a matter of Palestinian accommodations to reality, but often a matter of either actually anticipating or transforming that reality. By the same token, it would be wrong to deny the schooling effects of the international environment on the character of Palestinian politics.

  The most noticeable result of these international effects was, of course, the transformation of a liberation movement into a national independence movement, already implicit in the 1974 PNC notion of a state and national authority. But there were other important changes, such as acceptance of United Nations Resolutions 242 and 338 (unnecessarily stigmatized as evil incarnate by Palestinian orators for almost a generation), a pe
riod of realignment with Egypt after Camp David, and the acceptance of the Baker Plan in 1989–90. When these accommodations are contrasted with the history of stubborn refusals that preceded them, one is surprised at how, given the intensely-lived background of Palestinian loss and suffering, these Palestinian declarations and leniencies stand out for their qualitative distinction and the genuine hope they carry for reconciliation with the Jewish state. They contain a longstanding project for political, rather than military, settlement with a difficult enemy, given the realization made along the way that neither Israelis nor Palestinians really have a military option against the other. But what also stands out is the implacability of the Israeli refusal to acknowledge, deal with, or come to any sort of understanding with Palestinian nationalism.

  This point needs emphasis. Even though one would have wished that Palestinian acceptance of Resolution 242 might have taken place a decade earlier, at the time this book was first published in 1979–80, or that there had been a less strident tone to Palestinian rhetoric about “armed struggle” during the seventies and eighties, or that Palestinians would have seen their role as in fact bringing the Arab world together rather than driving it further apart (especially during the Gulf crisis), there is no question that the overall thrust of Palestinian policy has been moderating, rather than escalating, in its demands and dreams. The fact is that, under Arafat, Palestinian politics have worked their way in from the peripheries to the center of an international consensus on coexistence with Israel, as well as on statehood and self-determination; at the same time, the Israeli position has gone in the opposite direction, moving from the crafty apparent moderation of Labor governments to the hardening maximalist extremism of successive Likud-dominated governments after 1977. Today, for example, far-right Greater Israel zealots and ideologists like Shamir, Sharon, and Arens appear to be almost centrists in a cabinet that includes Yuval Neeman and a representative of the Moledet Party, which openly subscribes to the mass “transfer” of Palestinians out of Palestinian territory. Thus the presence of Arafat has steadied the course of Palestinian politics, domesticated it, some would say, whereas exactly the reverse has occurred inside Israel since Menachem Begin’s government took power in 1977. And one should not fail to note that when we speak here of Palestinian politics under Arafat we are referring to not just a handful of peace activists or oppositional sports, but to the Palestinian mainstream, formalized and coalesced in the declarations of the PNC, which represents the Palestinian nation at its highest legislative and political level.