“The Palestine Question” is sometimes called, “The Question of Palestine.” Word order choices aside, at its heart is:
The contest between an affirmation and a denial.
Source: “The Question of Palestine” (PDF).
It was once labelled “The Palestine Problem” but that fell out of fashion following the 1979 publication of Edward Wadie Saïd’s, “The Question of Palestine.”
The question of Palestine is the contest between an affirmation and a denial, and it is this prior contest, dating back over a hundred years, which animates and makes sense of the current impasse between the Arab states and Israel, The contest has been almost comically uneven from the beginning. Certainly, so far as the West is concerned, Palestine has been a place where a relatively advanced (because European) incoming population of Jews has performed miracles of construction and civilizing and has fought brilliantly successful technical wars against what was always portrayed as a dumb, essentially repellent population of uncivilized Arab natives. There is no doubt that the contest in Palestine has been between an advanced (and advancing) culture and a relatively backward, more or less traditional one. But we need to try to understand what the instruments of this contest were, and how they shaped subsequent history so that this history now appears to confirm the validity of the Zionist claims to Palestine, thereby denigrating the Palestinian claims.
— Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (1979, p. 8).
Extracts
Introduction
Although most of this book was written during 1977 and the early part of 1978, its frame of reference is by no means confined to that very important period in modern Near Eastern history. On the contrary, my aim has been to write a book putting before the American reader a broadly representative Palestinian position, something not very well known and certainly not well appreciated even now, when there is so much talk of the Palestinians and of the Palestinian problem. In formulating this position, I have relied mainly on what I think can justly be called the Palestinian experience, which to all intents and purposes became a self-conscious experience when the first wave of Zionist colonialists reached the shores of Palestine in the early 1880s, Thereafter, Palestinian history takes a course peculiar to it, and quite different from Arab history. There are, of course, many connections between what Palestinians did and what other Arabs did in this century, but the defining characteristic of Palestinian history—its traumatic national encounter with Zionism—is unique to the region.
This uniqueness has guided both my aim and my performance (however flawed both may be) in this book. As a Palestinian myself, I have always tried to be aware of our weaknesses and failings as a people. By some standards we are perhaps an unexceptional people; our national history testifies to a failing contest with a basically European and ambitious ideology (as well as practice); we have been unable to interest the West very much in the justice of our cause. Nevertheless we have begun, I think, to construct a political identity and will of our own; we have developed a remarkable resilience and an even more remarkable national resurgence; we have gained the support of all the peoples of the Third World; above all, despite the fact that we are geographically dispersed and fragmented, despite the fact that we are without a territory of our own, we have been united as a people largely because the Palestinian idea (which we have articulated out of our own experience of dispossession and exclusionary oppression) has a coherence to which we have all responded with positive enthusiasm. It is the full spectrum of Palestinian failure and subsequent return in their lived details that I have tried to describe in this book.
Yet I suppose that to many of my readers the Palestinian problem immediately calls forth the idea of “terrorism,” and it is partly because of this invidious association that I do not spend much time on terrorism in this book. To have done so would have been to argue defensively, either by saying that such as it has been our “ terrorism” is justified, or by taking the position that there is no such thing as Palestinian terrorism as such. The facts are considerably more complex, however, and some of them at least bear some rehearsal here. In sheer numerical terms, in brute numbers of bodies and property destroyed, there is absolutely nothing to compare between what Zionism has done to Palestinians and what, in retaliation. Palestinians have done to Zionists, The almost constant Israeli assault on Palestinian civilian refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan for the last twenty years is only one index of these completely asymmetrical records of destruction. What is much worse, in my opinion, is the hypocrisy of Western (and certainly liberal Zionist) journalism and intellectual discourse, which have barely had anything to say about Zionist terror.[1] Could anything be less honest than the rhetoric of outrage used in reporting “ Arab” terror against “ Israeli civilians” or “towns” and “villages” or “schoolchildren,” and the rhetoric of neutrality employed to describe “ Israeli” attacks against “Palestinian positions,” by which no one could know that Palestinian refugee camps in South Lebanon are being named?
(I quote now from reports of recent incidents during late December 1978.) Since 1967, with Israel in occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, there has been no let-up in the daily outrage of Israeli occupation, and yet nothing galvanises the Western press (and the Israeli information media) as much as a bomb in a Jerusalem market. With sentiments bordering on pure disgust, I must note here that not a single U.S. newspaper carried the following interview with General Gur, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Army:
- Question (Q): Is it true [during the March 1978 Israeli invasion of Lebanon] that you bombarded agglomerations [of people] without distinction?
- Answer (A): I am not one of those people who have a selective memory. Do you think that I pretend not to know what we have done all these years? What did we do the entire length of the Suez Canal? A million and a half refugees! Really: where do you live? … We bombarded Ismailia, Suez, Port Said, and Port Fuad. A million and a half refugees … Since when has the population of South Lebanon become so sacred? They knew perfectly well what the terrorists were doing. After the massacre at Avivim, I had four villages in South Lebanon bombed without authorisation.
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Q: Without making distinctions between civilians and noncivilians?
A: What distinction? What had the inhabitants of Jrbid [a large town in northern Jordan, principally Palestinian in population] done 10 deserve bombing by us?
Q: But military communiques always spoke of returning fire and of counterstrikes against terrorist objectives.
A: Please be serious. Did you not know that the entire valley of the Jordan had been emptied of its inhabitants as a result of the war of attrition?
Q: Then you claim that the population ought to be punished?
A: Of course, and I have never had any doubt about that. When I authorised Yanouch [diminutive name of the commander of the northern front, responsible for the Lebanese operation] to use aviation, artillery and tanks [in the invasion], I knew exactly what I was doing. It has now been thirty years, from the time of our Independence War until now, that we have been fighting against the civilian [Arab] population which inhabited the villages and towns, and every time that we do it, the same question gets asked: should we or should we not strike at civilians?
[Al-Hamishmar[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_HaMishmar]], May 10, 1978]
Thus, one thing about “terrorism” is the imbalance in its perception, and the imbalance in its perpetration. One could mention, for example, that in every instance when Israeli hostages were used to try to gain the release of Palestinians held in Israeli jails, it was always the Israeli forces who offered fire first, knowingly causing a bloodbath. But even to cite figures and make explanations is not enough—for the record of hostility between Jew and Arab, between Palestinians and Zionist Jews, between Palestinians and the rest of mankind (or so it would seem), between Jews and the West, is a chilling one. As a Palestinian, I resent and deplore the ways in which the whole grisly matter is stripped of all its resonances and its often morally confusing detail, and compressed simply, comfortably, inevitably under the rubric of “Palestinian terror.” Yet as someone who has been touched by the issue in all sorts of ways, I must also say that— speaking now only as one Palestinian—I have been horrified at the hijacking of planes, the suicidal missions, the assassinations, the bombing of schools and hotels; horrified both at the terror visited upon its victims and horrified by the terror in Palestinian men and women who were driven to do such things. Since I do not pretend to write as a detached observer, I have believed that rather than trying to deal frontally with the terror itself, I would do better if I attempted to convey to my readers some sense of the larger Palestinian story from which all these things came. And if in the end the story does not—as it cannot—mitigate the tragedies of waste and unhappiness, it would at least present what has long been missing before such a reader, the reality of a collective national trauma contained for every Palestinian in the question of Palestine.
One of the features of a small non-European people is that it is not wealthy in documents, nor in histories, autobiographies, chronicles, and the like. This is true of the Palestinians, and it accounts for the lack of a major authoritative text on Palestinian history. I have not tried to supply this lack here, for plainly evident reasons. What I have tried to do is to show that the Palestinian experience is an important and concrete part of history, a part that has largely been ignored both by the Zionists who wished it had never been there, and by the Europeans and Americans who have not really known what to do with it. I have tried to show that the Muslim and Christian Palestinians who lived in Palestine for hundreds of years until they were driven out in 1948, were unhappy victims of the same movement whose whole aim had been to end the victimisation of Jews by Christian Europe. Yet it is precisely
because Zionism was so admirably successful in bringing Jews to Palestine and constructing a nation for them, that the world has not been concerned with what the enterprise meant in loss, dispersion, and catastrophe for the Palestinian natives. Something like an ironic double vision is therefore necessary now in order to see both the very well-known success and the far less known disaster which Hannah Arendt has portrayed as follows:
After the [Second World] war it turned out that the Jewish question, which was considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved—namely, by means of a colonised and then conquered territory—but this solved neither the problem of minorities nor the stateless. On the contrary, like virtually all other events of our century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of the stateless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people.[2]
As I say throughout the book, whereas Israel and its history have been celebrated without interruption, the actuality of Palestinians, with lives being led, small histories endured, aspirations felt, has only recently been conceded an existence. Yet all of a sudden, the Palestinian question now seeks an answer; World opinion has demanded that this hitherto slighted crux of the Near East impasse be given its due. But, alas, the possibility of an adequate debate now, much less a cogent solution, is dim. The terms of debate are impoverished, for (as I said above) Palestinians have been known only as refugees, or as extremists, or as terrorists. A sizeable corps of Middle East “experts” has tended to monopolise discussion, principally by using social science jargon and ideological cliches masked as knowledge. Most of all, I think, there is the entrenched cultural attitude toward Palestinians deriving from age-old Western prejudices about Islam, the Arabs, and the Orient. This attitude, from which in its turn Zionism drew for its view of the Palestinians, dehumanised us, reduced us to the barely tolerated status of a nuisance.
It would perhaps be too sweeping a statement to say that most academic political science studies of the Middle East and of the Palestinians continue this tradition. But it is true, I think, that they tend to. Insofar as most of them derive from and in most important ways unquestionably accept the framework that has legitimised Zionism as against Palestinian rights, they have very little to contribute to an understanding of the real situation in the Middle East. For it is a fact that almost every serious study of the modern Middle East produced in this country since World War II cannot prepare anyone for what has been taking place in the region: This is as patently true of the recent events in Iran as it is of the Lebanese civil war, of the Palestinian resistance, of the Arab performance during the 1973 war. I certainly do not intend this book as a polemic against what has rightly been called the ideological bent of social science work that pretends to scientific objectivity, particularly since the advent of the Cold War. But I do intend consciously to avoid its “ value-free” pitfalls. Those include accounts of political reality that focus on superpower rivalry, that claim as desirable anything associated with the West and its modernising mission in the Third World, that ignore popular movements while praising and valorising a battery of undistinguished and oppressive client regimes, that dismiss as ahistorical anything that cannot be easily made to fit a particular telos or a particular methodology whose goals are “rational,” “empirical,” and “pragmatic.” The glaring shortcomings of such notions have been held publicly to blame for “our” loss of Iran and “our” failure to forecast the “resurgence of Islam,” without at the same time allowing for any examination of the premises of these notions. So, in fact, they get reasserted, and once again political scientists with a great role to play in decision making advise the same shortsighted things, and once again U.S. foreign policy is risked on what to nonexpert eyes (such as mine) are obvious losing causes, regressive historical visions. Even as I write these lines, the serious defects of Camp David seem to be proving my point.
Until 1976, however, I do not think it is wrong to say that even Palestinians concurred in their own derogation, and hence in their unimportance as construed by Zionists and experts. Then we discovered ourselves, we discovered the world, and it discovered us. I try to describe our night and our slow awakening; without at the same time neglecting the setting of our life on the land, in the region, in world politics, and so forth. But throughout our experience is the strand formed by Zionism. This is no theoretical issue, nor a matter of name-calling. To us, Zionism has meant as much, albeit differently, as it has to Jews. What we need to inform the world about is how it meant certain concrete things to us, things of which we collectively bear the living traces.
I have called my book a political essay because it tries to put our matter before the American reader, not as something watertight and finished, but as something to’ be thought
through, tried out, engaged with—in short, as a subject to be dealt with politically. For too long we have been outside history, and certainly outside discussion; in its own modest way this book attempts to make the question of Palestine a subject for discussion and political understanding. The reader will quickly discover, I hope, that what is proposed in this book is not an “expert” view nor, for that matter, personal testimony. Rather, it is a series of experienced realities, grounded in a sense of human rights and the contradictions of social experience, couched as much as possible in the language of everyday reality.
A certain number of basic premises inform the book’s argument. One is the continuing existence of a Palestinian Arab people. Another is that an understanding of their experience is necessary to an understanding of the impasse between Zionism and the Arab world. Still another is that Israel itseif, as well as its supporters, has tried to efface the Palestinian in words and actions because the Jewish state in many (but not all) ways is built on negation of Palestine and the Palestinians, Until today, it is a striking fact that merely to mention the Palestinians or Palestine in Israel, or to a convinced Zionist, is to name the unnameable, so powerfully does our bare existence serve to accuse Israel of what it did to us. Finally, I take it for granted morally that human beings individually and selectively are entitled to fundamental rights, of which self-determination is one. By this I mean that no human being should be threatened with “ transfer” out of his or her home or land; no human being should be discriminated against bccause he or she is not of an X or a Y religion; no human being should be stripped of his or her land, national identity, or culture, no matter the cause.
At bottom I suppose that in this book I am asking the question, “What is Israel, what is the United States, and what are the Arabs going to do about the Palestinians?” Given the realities of the Palestinian experience, I do not at all believe, as President Anwar al-Sadat and his various supporters would have it, that 99 percent of the cards are in U.S. hands, nor do I think that they are mainly in Israel’s or the Arab states’ hands; the whole point—indeed, what makes this book possible—is that there arc Palestinian hands, so to speak, and that they play an active role in determining Palestinian aspirations, political struggles, and achievements, as well as setbacks. And yet I do not deny that there is an important place in the question of Palestine for what Jews and Americans now think and do. It is this place to which my book addresses itself. I mention what is perhaps an obvious thing in order to underline the existential bedrock on which, I think, our experience as a people depends. We were on the land called Palestine; were our dispossession and our effacement, by which almost a million of us were made to leave Palestine and our society made nonexistent, justified even to save the remnant of European Jews that had survived Nazism? By what moral or political standard are we expected to lay aside our claims to our national existence, our land, our human rights? In what world is there no argument when an entire people is told that it is juridically absent, even as armies are led against it, campaigns conducted against even its name, history changed so as to “prove” its nonexistence? For even though all the issues surrounding the Palestinians are complex and involve Great Power politics, regional disputes, class conflict, ideological tension, the animating power of the Palestinian movement is its awareness of these simple, but enormously consequential, questions.
The Palestinians are not alone, however, in being either misunderstood or ignored by the United States as it attempts to construct a foreign policy in Asia and Africa. Certainly, the Iranian opposition which brought down the Shah in January 1979 is a case in point, but not for want of information (despite President Carter’s disingenuous accusations against the “intelligence community” for its failure on Iran). If it is true of individuals that they prefer tidy, simple solutions to complex, untidy realities, then it ought to be patently untrue of institutions and governments; but with regard to the Palestinian problem, it is true of the U.S. government. The present Administration came to office proclaiming itself in favour of a comprehensive Middle East peace, which was supposed to include a just solution of the Palestinian problem “in all its aspects,” yet since Camp David, it has been powerless either to see the problem whole or in any way seriously to deal with it. Why it supposes that four million people should be content with less (autonomy, so-called) than what every other national group has accepted, why it supposes that treaties can be signed in the absence of the main party to a dispute, why it supposes that foreign policy can be conducted without ever coming face to face with the main actor in a region, why it supposes that powerful oppositional groups can simply be wished away, why it supposes that Palestinians, any more than any other people, ought to accept permanent colonialisation by Israel, or why it supposes that Palestinians are not going to fight indefinitely to regain their denied, usurped, or crushed national rights (as they have been fighting in every Middle East crisis)—these are questions that this book attempts to pose, and answer, given the almost astonishingly turbulent changes at present occurring in the Middle East. I would hope, too, that in my concluding chapter the reader will find discussed a fair analysis of those immediate political issues governing the present post-Camp David Middle East, U.S. policy, Arab and regional politics, and Palestinian positions and attitudes.
I have not found this book easy to write. A great deal of it derives from study of and reflection on the meaning of modern Palestinian history. A lot of this book, however, arises from an active participation in the often discouraging quest for Palestinian self-determination, a quest (in my case, at least) led while in exile. Inevitably J have been strongly put upon by daily events, by news and sudden changes, by chance discussions, and even more by erratic illumination. I doubt that I have escaped the influence of these things, which it would be wrong in any case to escape completely. But I have been conscious of trying to present more than a summary of recent history, or a prediction of tomorrow’s developments. My hope is to have made clear the Palestinian interpretation of Palestinian experience, and to have shown the relevance of both to the contemporary political scene. To explain one’s sense of oneself as a Palestinian in this way is to feel embattled. To the West, which is where I live, to be a Palestinian is in political terms to be an outlaw of sorts, or at any rate very much an outsider. But that is a reality, and I mention it only as a way of indicating the peculiar loneliness of my undertaking in this book.
On the two individuals this book was dedicated to
The two friends whose names are memorialised on the dedicatory page could have had no idea that their lives so deeply moved and influenced me. Both were Palestinians, both lived the strange, obsessed lives of exiles; both died bitterly unhappy and unfortunate deaths; both in my opinion were completely good men. Farid Haddad was a doctor who lived and died in an Arab country, where for a number of years I knew him well. More than anyone I have known, he had the keenest sense not only of what human injustice was all about, but also of what could be done about it. Thoroughly idealistic and selfless, he was tortured to death in prison in 1961, although at the time he died (so far as I have ever been able to tell), he did what he did as a human being and as a political militant, not necessarily as a Palestinian. Rashid Hussein was an ironic Palestinian poet, who left Israel in 1966 and lived until his death in the United States. From him I learned whatever I know about life in Palestinian villages after 1948, a life which informs the question of Palestine with unique strength. His generosity of spirit, openness, and political honesty were his gifts to everyone he met. When he died a particularly wasteful death in 1977, he had already suffered too much for what he was, an independent, genuinely radical Palestinian. Between them, Farid Haddad and Rashid Hussein have illuminated for me the Palestinian cause, to which, along with so many of our compatriots in many places, they gave their lives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashid_Hussein
[1] For an analogous kind of censorship, see Noam Chomsky.
[2] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), p. 290.
