The Question of Palestine

Imperialism, of course, cannot be blamed on science, but what needs to be seen is the relative ease with which science could be deformed into a rationalization for imperial domination.

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

The long-run goal is, I think, the same for every human being, that politically he or she may be allowed to live free from fear, insecurity, terror, and oppression, free also from the possibility of exercising unequal or unjust domination over others.

It was not thought too unusual during the 1973 war for the army to issue a booklet (with a preface by General Yona Efrati of the central command) written by the central command’s rabbi, Abraham Avidan, containing the following key passage: When our forces encounter civilians during the war or in the course of a pursuit or a raid, the encountered civilians may, and by Halachic standards even must be killed, whenever it cannot be ascertained that they are incapable of hitting us back. Under no circumstances should an Arab be trusted, even if he gives the impression of being civilized.

There are the chastening examples of John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx (both of whom I have discussed in Orientalism), two thinkers known doctrinally to be opponents of injustice and oppression. Yet both of them seemed to have believed that such ideas as liberty, representative government and individual happiness must not be applied in the orient for reasons that today we would call racist.

...I have the strongest belief that the historical and moral sufficiency of the Palestinian cause will finally outlast and outstrip any attempts to misrepresent it.

most liberation struggles in the Third World have produced undistinguished regimes, dominated by state worship, unproductive bureaucracies, and repressive police forces.

he was realistic, he saw facts and dealt with them, he knew the value of truth.

getting international legitimization for its own accomplishments, thereby making the Palestinian cost of these accomplishments seem to be irrelevant.

(this is the role Gramsci assigned to traditional intellectuals, that of being “experts in legitimation”),

It is too often forgotten that the modern Middle East has almost unquestioningly inherited a terribly divisive political legacy from nineteenth-century colonialism.

Yet the whole point of rational discussion, in which I strongly believe, is to attempt to change the terms and the perspectives in which insoluble-appearing problems are understood—

not as they are hidden (no evidence I cite here and elsewhere is arcane or obscure; most of it is to be found in easily available documents), but as they are ignored or denied.

the ethos of a European mission civilisatrice—nineteenth-century, colonialist, racist even—built on notions about the inequality of men, races, and civilizations, an inequality allowing the most extreme forms of self-aggrandizing projections, and the most extreme forms of punitive discipline toward the unfortunate natives whose existence, paradoxically, was denied.

In a very literal way the Palestinian predicament since 1948 is that to be a Palestinian at all has been to live in a utopia, a nonplace, of some sort. In an equally literal way, therefore, the Palestinian struggle today is profoundly topical, and it illustrates what I shall say later about the change in Palestinian politics, from fantasy to effectiveness. One redeeming feature of the cubistic form of Palestinian life is that it is focused on the goal of getting a place, a territory, on which to be located nationally. The mere retrospective fact of having been in such a place once, or the contemporary fact of being nonpersons in that place now, no longer supply Palestinians with righteousness or wrath enough to go on fighting. The 1967 war and, ironically, the additional acquisition of Palestinian territory by Zionism put the exiled and dispersed Palestinians in touch with their place. From an esoteric policy of dealing with Palestinians as if they were not there, utopian beings whose brutish presence could be distributed and made to disappear in a maze of regulations forbidding their national presence

The question of Palestine is therefore 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

there are at present three types of Arab Palestinians: those inside pre-1967 Israel, plus those inside the Occupied Territories, plus those elsewhere outside former Palestine. There has never been a plebiscite conducted among Palestinians as to their wishes

It was perfectly apparent to Western supporters of Zionism like Balfour that the colonization of Palestine was to be made a goal for the Western powers from the very beginning of Zionist planning: Herzl used the idea, Weizmann used it, every leading Israeli since has used it.

For the first time the idea of an Arab Palestine underwent historical acculturation. For the first time in the region’s modern history—and this is what I find of immense value—an attempt was made to grapple with the human and political material for which in the past imported, absolutist philosophies (like Zionism and Arabism) had served. With almost no exceptions at all, political commentators in the West have not grasped the meaning of this change.

discussion of the Arab world in general, and of the Palestinians in particular, is so confused and unfairly slanted in the West that a great effort has to be made to see things as, for better or worse, they actually are for Palestinians and for Arabs

Il sionismo, dalle prime fasi della sua evoluzione moderna sino alla creazione dello stato d'Israele, fece sempre appello a un'opinione pubblica europea, per la quale la classificazione dei territori d'oltremare e degli indigeni in classi inferiori era giusta e “naturale”. Ecco perché oggi ogni singolo stato o movimento di liberazione nelle ex colonie dell'Africa o dell'Asia comprende, si identifica e sostiene la lotta palestinese. In molti casi c'è un'indiscutibile coincidenza tra l'esperienza degli arabi palestinesi sotto il dominio sionista e la storia di quelle persone dalla pelle nera, gialla o scura che venivano descritte dagli imperialisti del XIX secolo come esseri inferiori e non propriamente umani.