Fifty years of dispossession
By Edward Said
Al-Ahram Weekly On-line
7 - 13 May, 1998
Issue No.376
In the United States, celebrations of Israel's fifty years as a
state have tried to project an image of the country that went out of
fashion since the Palestinian Intifada (1987-92): a pioneering state,
full of hope and promise for the survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, a
haven of enlightened liberalism in a sea of Arab fanaticism and
reaction. On 15 April, for instance, CBS broadcast a two hour
prime-time program from Hollywood hosted by Michael Douglas and Kevin
Costner, featuring movie stars such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kathy
Bates (who recited passages from Golda Meir minus, of course, her
most celebrated remark that there were no Palestinians) and Winona
Ryder. None of these luminaries are particularly known for their
Middle Eastern expertise or enthusiasm, although all of them in one
way or another praised Israel's greatness and enduring achievements.
There was even time for a cameo appearance by President Bill Clinton,
who provided perhaps the least edifying, most atavistic note of the
evening by complimenting Israel, "a small oasis," for "making a once
barren desert bloom," and for " building a thriving democracy in
hostile terrain."
Ironically enough, no such encomia were intoned on Israeli
television, which has been broadcasting a 22-part series, Tkuma, on
the country's history. This series has a decidedly more complicated
content. Episodes on the l948 War, for instance, made use of archival
sources unearthed by the new historians (Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe,
Avi Schlaim, Tom Segev, et al) to demonstrate that the indigenous
Palestinians were forcibly expelled, their villages destroyed, their
land taken, their society eradicated. It was as if Israeli audiences
had no need of all the palliatives provided for diasporic and
international viewers, who still needed to be told that Israel was a
cause for uncomplicated rejoicing and not, as it has been for
Palestinians, the cause of a protracted, and still continuing
dispossession of the country's indigenous people.
That the American celebration simply omitted any mention of the
Palestinians indicated also how remorselessly an ideological mind-set
can hold on, despite the facts, despite years of news and headlines,
despite an extraordinary, if ultimately unsuccessful, effort to keep
effacing Palestinians from the picture of Israel's untroubled
sublimity. If they're not mentioned, therefore they don't exist. Even
after fifty years of living the Palestinian exile I still find myself
astonished at the lengths to which official Israel and its supporters
will go to suppress the fact that a half century has gone by without
Israeli restitution, recognition, or acknowledgment of Palestinian
human rights and without, as the facts undoubtedly show, connecting
that suspension of rights to Israel's official policies. Even when
there is a vague buried awareness of the facts, as is the case with a
front page New York Times story on April 23 by one Ethan Bronner, the
Palestinian Nakba is characterized as a semi-fictional event (dutiful
inverted commas around the word "catastrophe" for instance) caused by
no one in particular. When Bronner quotes an uprooted Palestinian who
describes his miseries, the man's testimony is qualified by "for most
Israelis, the idea of Mr Shikaki staking claim to victimhood is
chilling," a reaction made plausible as Bronner blithely leapfrogs
over the man's uprooting and systematic deprivations and immediately
tells us how his "rage" (for years the approved word for dealing with
Palestinian history) has impelled his sons into joining Hamas and
Islamic Jihad. Ergo, Palestinians are violent terrorists, whereas
Israel can go on being a "vibrant and democratic regional superpower
established on the ashes of Nazi genocide." But not on the ashes of
Palestine, an obliteration that lingers on in measures taken by
Israel to block Palestinian rights, domestically as well as in
territories occupied in l967.
Take land and citizenship for instance. Approximately 750,000
Palestinians were expelled in 1948: they are now more than 4 million.
Left behind were 120,000 (now one million) who subsequently became
Israelis, a minority constituting about 18 per cent of the state's
population, but not fully-fledged citizens in anything more than
name. In addition there are now some 2.5 million Palestinians without
sovereignty on the West Bank and Gaza. Israel is the only state in
the world which is not the state of its actual citizens, but of the
whole Jewish people who consequently have rights that non-Jews do
not. Without a constitution, Israel is governed by Basic Laws of
which one in particular, the Law of Return, makes it possible for any
Jew anywhere to emigrate to Israel and become a citizen, at the same
time that native-born Palestinians do not have the same right. 93 per
cent of the land of the state is characterised as Jewish land,
meaning that no non-Jew is allowed to lease, sell or buy it. Before
1948, the Jewish community in Palestine owned a little over 6 per
cent of the land. A recent case in which a Palestinian Israeli, Adel
Kaadan, wished to buy land but was refused because he was a non-Jew
has become something of a cause célèbre in Israel, and
has even made it to the Supreme Court which is supposed to but would
prefer not to rule on it. Kaadan's lawyer has said that "as a Jew in
Israel, I think that if a Jew somewhere else in the world was
prohibited from buying state land, public land, owned by the federal
government, because they're Jews, I believe there would have been an
outcry in Israel." (New York Times, 1 March, l998). This anomaly
about Israeli democracy, not well known and rarely cited, is
compounded by the fact that, as I said above Israel's land in the
first place was owned by Palestinians expelled in l948; since their
forced exodus their property was legally turned into Jewish land by
The Absentees' Property Law, the Law of the State's Property, and the
Land Ordinance (the Acquisition of Land for Public Purposes). Now
only Jewish citizens have access to that land, a fact that does not
corroborate The Economist's extraordinarily sweeping statement on
"Israel at 50" (25 April-1 May l998) that since the state's founding
Palestinians "have enjoyed full political rights.
What makes it specially galling for Palestinians is that they have
been forced to watch the transformation of their own homeland into a
Western state, one of whose express purposes is to provide for Jews
and not for non-Jews. Between l948 and l966 Palestinian Israelis were
ruled by military ordinance. After that, as the state regularised its
policies on education, legal practice, religion, social, economic and
political participation, a regime evolved to keep the Palestinian
minority disadvantaged, segregated and constantly discriminated
against. There is an eye-opening account of this shabby history which
is rarely cited and, when it is, elided or explained away by the
euphemism (familiar from South African apartheid) that "they" have
their own system: it is the Report of March l998 entitled "Legal
Violations of Arab Minority Rights in Israel," published by Adalah
(the Arabic word for justice), an Arab-Jewish organization within
Israel. Especially telling is the section on the "discriminatory
approach of Israeli courts", routinely praised by supporters of
Israel for their impartiality and fairness. In fact, the report notes
that the courts having delivered progressive and decent-minded
decisions on the rights of women, homosexuals, the disabled, etc.
have "since l948 dismissed all cases dealing with equal rights for
Arab citizens, and have never included a declamatory statement in
decisions regarding the protection of Arab group rights." This is
borne out by a survey of criminal and civil cases in which Arabs get
no help from the courts and are far more likely to be indicted than
Jews in similar circumstances.
It is only in the past year or two that investigations of Israel's
political makeup, hitherto assumed to be socialist, egalitarian,
pioneering, forward-looking, have turned up a rather unattractive
picture. Zeev Sternhell's book The Founding Myths of Israel
(Princeton l998) is the work of an Israeli historian of twentieth
century right-wing European mass-movements who finds a disturbing
congruence between those movements and Israel's own brand of what
Sternhell rightly calls "nationalist socialism". Far from being
socialist, Israel's founders and subsequently the polity they
established were profoundly anti-socialist, bent almost entirely upon
"conquest of the land" and the creation of "self-realisation" and a
new sense of organic peoplehood that moved steadily to the right
during the pre-l948 years. "Neither the Zionist movement abroad,"
Sternhell says, "nor the pioneers who were beginning to settle the
country could frame a policy toward the Palestinian national
movement. The real reason for this was not a lack of understanding of
the problem but a clear recognition of the insurmountable
contradiction between the basic objectives of the two sides." (p.43).
After l948, policy towards the Palestinians clearly envisioned that
community's disappearance or its political nullity, since it was
clear that the contradiction between the two sides would always
remain insurmountable. Israel, in short, could not become a secular
liberal state, despite the efforts of two generations of publicists
to make it so.
After l967 the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza produced a
military and civil regime for Palestinians whose aim was Palestinian
submission and Israeli dominance, an extension of the model on which
Israel proper functioned. Settlements were established in the late
summer of l967 (and Jerusalem annexed) not by right-wing parties but
by the Labour Party, a member, interestingly enough, of the Socialist
International. The promulgation of literally hundreds of "occupiers'
laws" directly contravened not only the tenets of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights but the Geneva Conventions as well. These
violations ran the gamut from administrative detention, to mass land
expropriations, house demolition, forced movement of populations,
torture, uprooting of trees, assassination, book banning, closure of
schools and universities. Always, however, the illegal settlements
were being expanded as more and more Arab land was ethnically
cleansed so that Jewish populations from Russia, Ethiopia, Canada and
the United States, among other places, could be accommodated.
After the Oslo Accords were signed in September l993 conditions
for Palestinians steadily worsened. It became impossible for
Palestinians to travel freely between one place and another,
Jerusalem was declared off limits, and massive building projects
transformed the country's geography. In everything, the distinction
between Jew and non-Jew is scrupulously preserved. The most
perspicacious analysis of the legal situation obtaining after Oslo is
Raja Shehadeh's in his book From Occupation to Interim Accords:
Israel and the Palestinian Territories (Kluwer, 1997), an important
work that demonstrates the carefully preserved continuity between
Israeli negotiating strategy during the Oslo process and its land
occupation policy established in the Occupied Territories from the
early 1970s. In addition Shehadeh demonstrates the tragic lack of
preparation and understanding in the PLO's strategy during the peace
process, with the result that much of the sympathy gained
internationally for the Palestinians against Israeli settlement
policy and its dismal human rights record was frittered away, unused
and unexploited. "All the support and sympathy," he says, "which it
took years for Palestinians to rally, returned home, so to speak,
with the mistaken belief that the struggle was over. The
Palestinians, as much as the Israelis, helped in giving the false
impression through, among other things, the highly publicised media
image of the Arafat-Rabin handshake, that the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict was resolved. No serious attempt was made to remind the
world that one of the main causes of the conflict after 1967, the
Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territory, remained
intact. This is not to speak of the other basic unresolved questions
of the return of refugees, compensation, and the issue of Jerusalem"
(p.131).
Unquestionably the moral dilemma faced by anyone trying to come to
terms with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a deep one. Israeli
Jews are not white settlers of the stripe that colonised Algeria or
South Africa, though similar methods have been used. They are
correctly seen as victims of a long history of Western, largely
Christian anti-Semitic persecution that culminated in the scarcely
comprehensible horrors of the Nazi holocaust. To Palestinians,
however, their role is that of victims of the victims. This is why
Western liberals who openly espoused the anti-apartheid movement, or
that of the Nicaraguan Sandanistas, or Bosnia, or East Timor, or
American civil rights, or Armenian commemoration of the Turkish
genocide, or many other political causes of that kind, have shied
away from openly endorsing Palestinian self-determination. As for
Israel's nuclear policy, or its legally underwritten campaign of
torture, or of using civilians as hostages, or of refusing to give
Palestinians permits to build on their own land in the West Bank --
the case is never made in the liberal public sphere, partly out of
fear, partly out of guilt.
An even greater challenge is the difficulty of separating between
Palestinian and Israeli-Jewish populations who are now inextricably
linked in all sorts of ways, despite the immense chasm that divides
them. Those of us who for years have argued for a Palestinian state
have come to the realization that if such a "state" (the inverted
commas here are definitely required) is going to appear out of the
shambles of Oslo it will be weak, economically dependent on Israel,
without real sovereignty or power. Above all, as the present map of
the West Bank amply shows, the Palestinian autonomy zones will be
non-contiguous (they now account for only 3 per cent of the West
Bank; Netanyahu's government has balked at giving up an additional 13
per cent) and effectively divided into Bantustans controlled from the
outside by Israel. The only reasonable course therefore is to
recommend that Palestinians and their supporters renew the struggle
against the fundamental principle that relegates "non-Jews" to
subservience on the land of historical Palestine. This, it seems to
me, is what is entailed by any principled campaign on behalf of
justice for Palestinians, and certainly not the enfeebled separatism
that movements like Peace Now have fitfully embraced and quickly
abandoned. There can be no concept of human rights, no matter how
elastic, that accommodates the strictures of Israeli state practice
against "non-Jewish" Palestinians in favour of Jewish citizens. Only
if the inherent contradiction is faced between what in effect is a
theocratic and ethnic exclusivism on the one hand and genuine
democracy on the other, can there be any hope for reconciliation and
peace in Israel/Palestine. Fudging, waffling, looking the other way,
avoiding the issue entirely, or accepting pabulum definitions of
"peace" will bring Palestinians and, in the long run Israelis,
nothing but hardship and insecurity.
