The Question of Palestine Read online

  Along with this change there has also been a reversal of roles on the discursive and symbolic level, about which I shall have more to say presently. Ever since its founding in 1948, Israel has enjoyed an astonishing dominance in matters of scholarship, political discourse, international presence, and valorization. Israel was taken to represent the best in the Western and Biblical traditions. Its citizens were soldiers, yes, but also farmers, scientists, and artists; its miraculous transformation of an “arid and empty land” gained universal admiration, and so on and on. In all this, Palestinians were either “Arabs,” or anonymous creatures of the sort that could only disrupt and disfigure a wonderfully idyllic narrative. Still more important, Israel represented (if it did not always play the role of) a nation in search of peace, while the Arabs were warlike, bloodthirsty, bent on extermination, and prey to irrational violence, more or less forever. By the end of the eighties, the images were brought into closer correspondence with reality through a combination of aggressive counteractivity, excellent scholarship and research, political resistance of the kind that the intifada raised to a very high level, and, of course, the increased brutality and political vacancy and negativism offered by official Israel. Although most of this was due to Palestinian activity, it is of great importance here to note the signal contribution of many Jewish, and even Zionist, groups and individuals, inside as well as outside of Israel, who, through revisionist scholarship, courageous speaking out for human rights, and active campaigning against Israeli militarism, helped to make the change possible.

  Another factor must be added to this survey of change: the extraordinary paramountcy achieved by the United States of America. One way of looking at how the selective presence of the U.S. role in the early seventies was metamorphosed into what is without doubt the most massive institutional presence of any outside power in modern Middle East history is to compare Henry Kissinger’s role in the Nixon era, on the one hand, with the cementing of a strategic alliance between Israel and the U.S. during the Reagan years, on the other. Kissinger conducted shuttle diplomacy and statesmanship with noisy fanfare. He did help to negotiate the end of the 1973 war, and he did bring about Sinai II, as it was called in 1975, and he did lay the groundwork for the Camp David accords. Yet, even though the U.S. offered Israel a massive battlefield resupply in 1973, and even though there were associations and all sorts of joint efforts between the two countries, the presence of the Soviet Union, as well as U.S. interests actively pursued in some of the Arab states, prevented anything like an institutional connection between the two countries. So, while Richard Nixon was embroiled with Watergate and Kissinger’s self-promotions and peregrinations were tireless, Israel was not the principal focus of U.S. attention during the seventies; levels of aid were high but not yet astronomical; the competition between Egypt and Israel was still absorbing; the Cold War, Latin America, and Vietnam were still high priorities.

  By the end of the period that had brought Ronald Reagan to office in 1980, things were very different. Egypt and Israel were bracketed together so far as foreign aid legislation and, to some extent, public perception were concerned. Alexander Haig had given Israel a green light in Lebanon (contrast this with Jimmy Carter’s stern admonishment to the Begin government during its 1978 Lebanese incursion that the Israeli army had to quit, which it immediately did). By the time George Shultz took office as Secretary of State in the summer of 1982, the groundwork had been laid for the largest single foreign aid, military assistance, and almost unconditional political support deal to be struck between the United States and any foreign government. And this while Israel’s expropriation of Palestinian land continued apace, while thousands of Palestinians lost their lives to Israeli violence, and while Israel’s lawless disregard of UN resolutions, the Geneva and Hague conventions, and international human rights norms continued undeterred. Although the practice had begun when Daniel Moynihan was America’s UN ambassador, the United States now stood alone with Israel in this world organization, often defying common sense and humanity with outrageous positions. During the summer of 1982, with the Israeli siege of Beirut continuing, with literally hundreds of air sorties flown unchecked and the city cut off from electrical, water, food, and medical supplies, a UN Security Council resolution calling on Israel to let pass humanitarian supplies was vetoed by the U.S. on the grounds that it was “unbalanced.”

  The best American indices of how close the two countries had become were, first, the proclamation by the head of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) that during the Reagan period the U.S. Congress had become the most pro-Israel in history (and the one in which members were most subject to sanction if they did not comply with the prevailing attitude, as was the case with Representative Paul Findley and Senator Charles Percy, both of Illinois) and, second, that U.S. aid had risen geometrically from $70 million per year in the late sixties to over $5.1 billion per year fifteen years later. The estimated total for aid given to Israel between 1967 and 1991 is a staggering $77 billion. These figures say nothing about such matters as intelligence sharing (which Jonathan Pollard’s arrest in 1986 seems to have done very little to limit or subject to further control), military strategic planning, and all sorts of joint activities with the less savory regimes of the Third World (as documented by researchers Jane Hunter and Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi).

  The extraordinary interventionary powers of the U.S. in the Middle East had even more dramatic, more highlighted visibility in such episodes as, for instance, President Carter’s successful negotiation of the Camp David Accords, with the subsequent return of Sinai to Egypt and a treaty of quasi-normality between Israel and Egypt, and, of course, U.S. armed military intervention in the Gulf region in August 1991, following Iraq’s invasion and illegal annexation of Kuwait. Never before had so many U.S. troops been brought to the area (the 1958 and 1982–83 Lebanon incursions pale in comparison), and never since the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century had such devastation been wrought upon a sovereign Arab state by an outside power. Thus, for better or for worse, and like a fact of nature, the United States stands unopposed by any significant state power in the Middle East. Its enormous interest in Gulf oil, the political (and mostly frozen) status of the area, and its favorable geo-strategic leverage over any and all—none of these are now seriously in jeopardy. Only the seething discontent of various disadvantaged or alienated groups—most prominently, of course, the Islamic associations—still has the potential of nudging things somewhat and, less likely, of overturning them completely, as in Algeria and Sudan. Only in its scandalous complicity with Israel, in violation of UN resolutions, does the U.S.’s juggling of double standards keep it (before even its staunchest allies, Saudi Arabia and Egypt) embarrassed and perpetually disaffected.

  The Palestinians and Western Discourse

  As far as Western awareness of Palestinian rights is concerned, it is noticeable that things began to change for the better from the moment the PLO emerged as the authentic leadership of the Palestinian people. Expert commentators, such as Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times, have argued that the Palestinians owe their new relative prominence in Western consciousness to the fact that their opponents were Israeli Jews, but the fact is that the shift came about because of what Palestinians did constructively to change their status, and because of what was done in reaction by Israeli Jews. For the first time, Palestinians were treated by the media as independent from the collective “Arabs”; this was one of the first results of the 1968–70 period, when Amman was at the center of the storm. Thereafter, it was Beirut that attracted attention to the Palestinians. The climax of this period was the Israeli siege of Beirut, lasting from June until September 1982, with its grisly outcome: the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp massacres of mid-September, just after the main body of PLO combatants had been forced to leave the country. But it was not only that Palestinians fought back, which they did, it was also that they projected a vision, if not always a clear program, and in their own lives e
mbodied a nation in exile rather than a loose collection of individuals and small-scale groups living here and there.

  There is also the considerable importance of the Palestinians’ extraordinary success in having their cause adopted by others, intelligently exploiting the multiple levels of significance affiliated with Palestine, no ordinary geographical spot. Here it is expedient simply to list the places, both cultural and political, upon which Palestine was projected by the mobilized and coordinated work of Palestinians and the PLO. By the early seventies, Palestine and the PLO were central to the Arab League and, of course, to the UN. By 1980, the European Economic Community (EEC) had declared Palestinian self-determination to be one of the main planks of its Middle East policy, though there did remain differences between countries like France, the Scandinavian states, Spain, Italy, Greece, Ireland, and Austria on the one hand, and Germany, Holland, and, above all, the Reagan-dominated United Kingdom on the other. Meanwhile, transnational organizations like the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the Islamic Conference, the Socialist International, and UNESCO, as well as the Vatican, various international church organizations, and an innumerable host of nongovernmental organizations all registered the cause of Palestinian self-determination with noticeable emphasis, many for the first time. Whereas some of these groups were able to extend their support into counterpart or branch American groups, there was always, in my view, a serious lag between what happened outside the U.S. and what occurred in it, between the frank support for Palestinian self-determination that occurred in Europe and the gingerly acceptance of Palestinian rights in the counterpart American position, which was reformulated so jesuitically as to elude the censorious thought police of the Israeli lobby.

  Thus it is still the case in the United States that certain television producers consult with the Israeli consul on possible pro-Palestinian participants for their programs; note, however, that it is a relatively new thing to have Palestinians at all. It is still the case that pro-Israeli lobbyists organize protests when Palestinians speak, have published enemies lists, and have tried to prevent the broadcast of television programs. It is also the case that, under pressure, prominent artists like Vanessa Redgrave are punished for their positions, and that a whole slew of publications refuse to publish anything even mildly critical of Israel, or any Arab or Muslim voice that has not openly identified itself as anti-Arab and anti-Muslim. What I am trying to suggest, therefore, is the still-depressed nature of public discourse in the U.S., which lags dramatically behind its counterparts in most of Western Europe and, of course, in the Third World. The symbolism of Palestine is still so potent as to enlist amongst its enemies total denial and occlusion, as when theater performances are canceled because they either show Palestinians sympathetically or portray Zionism critically (Hakawati, by New York’s Public Theater, or Jim Allen’s play Perdition at London’s Royal Court Theatre), when books are published arguing that the Palestinians do not really exist (Joan Peters’s From Time Immemorial, with its mangled quotations and dubious statistics), or when crude attacks are mounted to portray Palestinians as the inheritors of Nazi anti-Semitism.

  As part of the campaign against Palestinians there has been a vicious semiotic warfare conducted against the PLO as representative of the Palestinians. Suffice it to say that the Israeli position, too often echoed by the U.S., is that the PLO is not a fit interlocutor because it is “only a terror organization.” In fact, Israel will not negotiate with nor recognize the PLO precisely because it does represent the Palestinians. Thus (as even Abba Eban has acknowledged) for the first time in the history of conflict, one party to the conflict arrogates to itself the right to choose both negotiating teams. That such arrant nonsense has been tolerated by Israel’s friends is incredible. It has had the unilateral effect of allowing Israel to hold up negotiations for years, and has also allowed some governments (some of them Arab!) to play the international shellgame of looking for suitable, or alternative, or acceptable, or moderate, or proper Palestinian representatives.

  The intricacies of what is or is not tolerable in representations of the Palestinians in American and European civil society need not detain us further. The main point is that, because the Palestinian struggle for self-determination became so noticeable and was conducted on so unmistakably national a scale, it entered U.S. discourse, from which it had been absent for a long time.

  One other major point has to be elucidated. Terrorism has been the watchword here, that invidious association between individual and organized actions of Palestinian political terror and the whole of the Palestinian national movement. I would put it this way. To date, the principal and quite justified Palestinian fear is of the negation that can quite easily become our fate. Certainly, the destruction of Palestine in 1948, the years of subsequent anonymity, the painful reconstruction of an exiled Palestinian identity, the efforts of many Palestinian political workers, fighters, poets, artists, and historians to sustain Palestinian identity—all of these have teetered alongside the confounding fear of disappearance, given the grim determination of official Israel to hasten the process to reduce, minimize, and ensure the absence of Palestinians as a political and human presence in the Middle Eastern equation. To this, the Palestinian responses that began in the late sixties and early seventies have included airplane hijackings, assassinations (as at the Munich Olympics, Maalot, and, later, the Rome and Vienna airport massacres by the renegade and anti-PLO Abu Nidal group in 1985), and other such misadventures, of which two of the most stupid were the Abul Abbas 1985 Achille Lauro killing of Leon Klinghoffer and the 1990 Tel Aviv beach assault. That these can openly be condemned by Arabs and Palestinians today is an indication of how far beyond them a justifiably anxious community has travelled in political maturity and morality. Yet, that they occurred at all is not surprising; they are written, so to speak, into the scripts of every national movement (especially the Zionist one) trying to galvanize its people, attract attention, and impress itself on an inured world consciousness.

  However much one laments and even wishes somehow to atone for the loss of life and suffering visited upon innocents because of Palestinian violence, there is still the need, I think, also to say that no national movement has been so unfairly penalized, defamed, and subjected to disproportionate retaliation for its sins as has the Palestinian. The Israeli policy of punitive counterattacks (or state terrorism) seems to be to try to kill anywhere from 50 to 100 Arabs for every Jewish fatality. The devastation of Lebanese refugee camps, hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, and orphanages; the summary arrests, deportations, house destructions, maimings, and torture of Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza; the use of poisonous, dehumanizing rhetoric by senior Israeli politicians, soldiers, diplomats, and intellectuals to characterize all Palestinian acts of resistance as terrorist and Palestinians as nonhuman (“cockroaches,” “grasshoppers,” “two-legged vermin,” etc.); these, and the number of Palestinian fatalities, the scale of material loss, the physical, political, and psychological deprivations, have tremendously exceeded the damage done by Palestinians to Israelis. And, I must add, the remarkable disparity, or asymmetry, between, on the one hand, the position of the Palestinians as an aggrieved, dispossessed, and sinned-against people and, on the other, Israel as “the state of the Jewish people” and the direct instrument of Palestinian suffering, is both great and greatly unadmitted.

  Here, then, is another complex irony: how the classic victims of years of anti-Semitic persecution and the Holocaust have in their new nation become the victimizers of another people, who have become, therefore, the victims of the victims. That so many Israeli and Western intellectuals, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, have not faced this dilemma courageously and directly is, I believe, a trahison des clercs of massive proportions, especially in that their silence, indifference, or pleas of ignorance and non-involvement perpetuate the sufferings of a people who have not deserved such a long agony. Surely, if no one can come forth and say, frankly, Yes, the Palestinians actua
lly do deserve to expiate for the historical crimes committed against the Jews in Europe, it must also be true that not to say, No, the Palestinians must not be allowed to go through these ordeals any longer, is an act of complicity and moral cowardice of singular dimension.

  But that is the reality. How many ex-politicians or actively engaged intellectuals still say privately that they are horrified by Israeli military policy and political arrogance, or that they believe the occupation, creeping annexation, and settlement of the territories is inexcusable, and yet say little or nothing in public, where their words might have some effect? And how cynical, even sadistic, is the performance of American presidents who celebrate the bravery of Chinese, Russian, East European, and Afghani dissidents fighting for freedom and yet utter not a word of acknowledgment that Palestinians have been fighting the same battle, at least as bravely and resourcefully? For that is the essence of the many-decades-long Palestinian effort—the struggle to have the Palestinian drama recognized for what it is, a political narrative of unusual and even unprecedented difficulty, valiantly engaged in by an entire people. No other movement in history has had so difficult an opponent: a people recognized as the classical victim of history. And no other liberation or independence movement in the post-war period has had so unreliable, and at times murderous, a set of natural allies, so volatile an environment, so grudging a super-power interlocutor in the U.S., and so absent a superpower ally (ever since the USSR, before its demise, effectively abandoned the Palestinian cause in deference to the U.S. and Israel). And all this is experienced by the Palestinians without any territorial sovereignty, anywhere; with dispersion and dispossession remaining the lot of the entire nation; subject to punitive laws in Israel and the Arab countries, discriminating legislation, and unilateral (and unappealable) edicts that run the gamut from deportation and shoot-on-site orders to airport harassment and verbal abuse in the press.