The Next President
The candidacy of comedian Steven Colbert for the Presidency of the United States, and more importantly the reaction to it, clarifies the political system in the United States as fairly irrelevant to the needs, opinions, and attitudes of its people.
Before discussing that, however, it is interesting noticing the reactions to it by those with a good degree of wealth and power and for whom the government works. Discussions have been quite passionate against him for his nerve and gall to mock our fine officials. He only filed in one state, one of the Carolinas, and intended to file as both a Democrat and a Republican. Why not? Well, the fee for the Democratic Party was, I seem to recall, $1,500 and for the Republicans it was about $26,000. His show only gave him $5,000 in expenses for such things, so he didn’t apply as a Republican. The Democrats met and decided to reject his status since he was a comedian (an intentional comedian as opposed to such unintentional comedians as Gulliani and Richardson). This could not be tolerated.
The campaign is not without precedent. In 1968, comedian Pat Paulson ran without filing and received about three million votes. The next time, he actually got on the ballot, so he was kicked off the air. Out of fear, I suppose. All of this simply indicates that that the majority of voters have little or no interest in the election, being unable to tell the difference between the parties.
I can tell the difference, usually. I can no longer affiliate myself with either of them, but originally I did vote for a peace candidate (LBJ). I am now over such folly.
The question now becomes, laughingly, why so few people do not vote. Well, because the candidates suck, that’s why. It is one of the job requirements. It is why Ralph Nader is still suing for the actions of the Democratic Party to keep him off the ballot in 2000.
Here is a news article from one of the few newspapers left in the “free world”. It describes the anti-Arab lobby and some of its recent activities. Norman Finklestein is involved.
*ZNet | Repression*
*Intellectual Terrorism*
*by Ghada Karmi; The Guardian; October 30, 2007*
The newest and least attractive import from America, following
on behind Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and Friends, is the pro-Israel
lobby. The latest target of this US-style campaign is the august
Oxford Union.
This week, two Israeli colleagues and I were due to appear at
the union to participate in an important debate on the one-state
solution in Israel-Palestine. Also invited was the American
Jewish scholar and outspoken critic of Israel, Norman
Finkelstein. At the last minute, however, the union withdrew its
invitation to him, apparently intimidated by threats from
various pro-Israel groups.
The Harvard Jewish lawyer and indefatigable defender of Israel,
Alan Dershowitz, attacked the topic of the debate as well as the
Oxford Union itself. In an article headlined “Oxford Union is
dead”, he accused it of having become “a propaganda platform for
extremist views”, and castigated its choice of what he termed
anti-Israel and anti-Semitic speakers.
Yet Dershowitz could have restored the balance as he saw it; he
was the first person invited by the Oxford Union to oppose the
motion but he declined due, as he put it, to “the terms of the
debate and my proposed teammates”.
Dershowitz’s article attacking the Oxford Union appeared in the
Jerusalem Post in Israel and Frontpage magazine in the US.
[Because of British defamation laws Cif has been advised not to
provide a link - Ed.] [See http://tinyurl.com/yte4st]
Dershowitz and Finkelstein were protagonists in a
much-publicised academic row in the US, though it is unclear
whether this has any relevance to the Oxford Union spat.
In solidarity with Finkelstein and to oppose this gross
interference in British democratic life, the three of us on the
“one state” side - myself, Avi Shlaim, of St Anthony’s College,
Oxford, and the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe - decided to
withdraw from the debate. This was not an easy decision, since
the topic was timely and necessary given the current impasse in
the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, where innovative
solutions are in short supply.
Dershowitz and the other pro-Israel activists may rejoice at
their success in derailing an important discussion. But it is of
little comfort to those of us who care about freedom of speech
in this country. Last May, Dershowitz interfered in British
academic life when the University and College Union voted
overwhelmingly to debate the merits of boycotting Israeli
institutions. He teamed up with a British Jewish lawyer, Anthony
Julius, and others, threatening to “devastate and bankrupt”
anyone acting against Israeli universities.
In another example of these bullying tactics, the Royal Society
of Medicine, one of Britain’s most venerable medical
institutions, came under an attack this month, unprecedented in
its 200 year history. It had invited Dr Derek Summerfield, a
psychiatrist (who has also documented Israel’s medical abuses
against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories), to its
conference on Religion, Spirituality and Mental Health. The RSM
was immediately bombarded with threats from pro-Israel doctors
demanding Dr Summerfield’s removal on the grounds that he was
and biased, and that the RSM’s charitable status would be
challenged if he remained. Intimidated, the RSM asked Dr
Summerfield to withdraw, although they later reinstated him.
The power of the Israel lobby in America is legendary. It
demonstrates its influence at many levels. Campus Watch is a
network that monitors alleged anti-Israel activity in US
academic institutions. The difficulties of promotion in the US
for scholars deemed anti-Israeli are notorious. The notable
Palestinian academic, Edward Said, was subjected to an
unrelenting campaign by pro-Israel groups at Columbia University
with threats on his life. His successor, Rashid Khalidi, is the
current object of the same campaign of vilification and attack.
Finkelstein himself has been denied tenure at his university and
everywhere else. The authors of a recent study of the Israel
lobby’s influence on US foreign policy have been called
anti-Semites and white supremacists. Former president Jimmy
Carter’s book, Palestine: peace not apartheid, has earned him
the label of “Jew-hater” and Nazi sympathiser. The British
publisher, Pluto Press, is likely to be dropped by its American
distributors, t! he University of Michigan Press, because
pro-Israel groups accuse it of including “anti-Semitic” (ie
pro-Palestinian/critical of Israel) books on its list.
Such activities are familiar in the US. People there are
hardened or resigned to having their freedom of expression
limited by the pro-Israel lobby, and the threats of Dershowitz
would cause no surprise to anyone. But Britain is different,
naively innocent in the face of US-style assaults on its
scholars and institutions. No wonder that those who have been
attacked give in so quickly, nervous of something they do not
understand. The UCU leadership, shocked and intimidated by the
ferocious reaction to the boycott motion from pro-Israel groups,
resorted to legal advice to extricate itself and announced in
September that a call to boycott Israeli institutions would be
“unlawful”. The Oxford Union jettisoned one of its participants
rather than stand up to the threats of its critics. The RSM
tried to distance the offending speaker from its conference to
protect itself from abuse.
All this is understandable, but it is exactly the wrong
response. Appeasing bullies like Dershowitz will not stop them.
It will rather encourage them to go further. The question is, do
we in this country want a McCarthyite witch hunt? If not, then
we must confront the bullies and expose them for the
intellectual terrorists they are, bent on destroying the values
of a free society. To do otherwise will invite the fate of all
repressed people, cowed and intimidated, hating their
tormentors, but too afraid to say so.
This is a scholarly article, with footnotes in it, but don’t let than deter you.
*ZNet | Israel/Palestine*
*Palestine Versus the Palestinians? The Iron Laws and Ironies of a
People Denied*
*by Beshara Doumani; Journal of Palestine Studies
<http://palestine-studies.org/final/en/journals/content.php?aid=9611&jid=1&iid=144&vid=XXXVI&vol=203>;
October 30, 2007*
/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./
The emergence in 2007 of two Palestinian “authorities” in two
geographical areas—Hamas in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank—has
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.
Of Ironies and Iron Laws
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 conflict—the
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 conflict—territorial
appropriation and demographic displacement of Palestinians from
their ancestral lands—to 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.
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:
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 happens—when Palestine
becomes Finland.[3]
In other words, never—at 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”).
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]
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 developments—the formation of a
Palestinian state and their simultaneous erasure—until 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.
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.”
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.
Can the Palestinians Speak?
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.
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
marker—whether a boulder, hillside, or spring—and every
significant manifestation of human labor on the land—whether a
garden, terrace, or olive grove—possessed 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]
On the other hand, this holy and strategic landscape is
vulnerable to the ideological abstractions and desires—hence,
appropriation in the name of God and civilization—of 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.
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.
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 1974—both 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.
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 Principles—which ostensibly recognized
both the PLO as an organization that represents the Palestinian
people and the principle of land for peace—directly 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.
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.
Opportunity or Disaster?
Three recent watershed events—the 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.
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
tendencies—Labor and Likud—that 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]
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]
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.
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, and—of
all things—for 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]
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.
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]
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?
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 later—probably 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 coercion—a 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.
Active vs. Passive Strategies
Shortly before he died, Arafat made yet another of his “We are
not Red
Indians” remarks:
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]
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.
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 development—or even in warding off
future colonial occupations—has been fleeting.
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 survival—primarily, though by no means exclusively, at the
family, neighborhood/village, and regional levels—they 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.
Beyond the Identity/Territory/Sovereignty Matrix
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
/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./
Notes
[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.
[2] Sunday Times (London), 15 June 1969, p. 12.
[3] Interview with Ari Shavit, Ha’Aretz, 8 October 2004.
Reprinted in Journal of Palestine Studies 36, no. 2 (Winter
2005), Doc. C.
[4] Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, chap. 7.
[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).
[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.
[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.
[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).
[9] Unofficial estimates put that number at 10 percent of the
population.
[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,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middleeast/3720176.stm
[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.
[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.
[13] Quoted by Gideon Levy, Ha’Aretz, 19 February 2006.
[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.
[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:
http://imeu.net/news/documentsreports.shtml. 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.
[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.
[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.
http://www.madre.org/articles/me/ageofhamas07.html. 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.
[18] Interview with Graham Usher, Al-Ahram Weekly Online, no.
715 (4–10 November 2004).
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/715/re17.htm.
[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.
[20] These binaries are discussed in some detail in Doumani,
“Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine.”
[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.
[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.
[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).
[24] There is no reason, for example, why a Palestinian citizen
of Israel cannot become the leader of a reconfigured PLO.
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