The Palestinian people have traveled a seemingly endless journey on a boat that rocks from side to side with contradiction across a sea whose waves swell with their tears. Dispersion and fragmentation, however, gave all Palestinian-Arabs a common experience; something greater than what separated them physically.
Years later Palestinian Journalist Antoine Shalhat gave voice to that elusive bond that holds Palestinians together. “Usually a man lives in a certain place in the world,” he wrote, “but for the Palestinian the place lives in the man.”
No longer a land, Palestine remained an idea in the collective consciousness of its people. Regardless of where they ended up, or what life they lead, Palestinians whose “place” was only a matter of imagination began living their ‘out of place’ lives.
So what is Palestine? Is the identity of its inhabitants located in a physical space? The 1948 exodus and the subsequent need of displaced people to articulate an identity for themselves underscored the role of land as an important element in Palestinian culture. Palestinian identity became tied to the land both as a symbolic and an empirical entity.
While most of those displaced after the Nakba became refugees living outside of Israel, others remained within the new state to become internal refugees, forbidden from returning to their homes after the war had ended and forced to resettle existing villages and towns. The latter took on the oxymoronic label of present-absentees.
The establishment of a Jewish country on existing Palestinians cities relied not only on acts of terrorism committed by the Haganah and other radical Zionist groups, but on the systematic denial of a substantial Arab presence in Palestine. In a speech published in Haaretz on April 4, 1969 then Israeli Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan summarized the process and its implications:
“Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.”
To supplement this destruction, the diffusion of the truth of Zionism also involved a constructive component. On the one hand, the discursive and literal effacement of the Palestinian population took place in Palestine; on the other, the construction of an ideological edifice for Zionism took place largely outside of Palestine. The diffusion of the “truth” of Zionism in the West constituted an epistemological achievement.
This schizophrenic identity of the Jewish homeland pivoted on the distinction between East and West by aligning Zionism with Western ideas about society and man, and characterizing obstacles to Zionism as nefarious and morally indecent.
If this was the past, what then of the future?
The challenge lies not in the question of how to reconcile the divorced elements of Western Zionism and Eastern, Palestinian, realities, but rather in finding a solution that does justice to the Palestinians.
Israel and Zionism are a fact, so a solution must look to the re-establishment of the brutalized Palestinian realities. For example, to provide a peace plan that will not betray the Palestinian independence and right of return. What has always been needed is not a new peace plan, but an agreement that will accommodate and allow for the rights of the Palestinian people.
Both the Oslo Accords and the Road Map failed to provide the components necessary to ensure the future survival to the Palestinian people. The reality is that Palestinians in the lands of Historic Palestine depend on Israel, at least for now, for every aspect of their lives. Israel’s economy and natural resources provide Palestinians everything from water and electricity to trade, employment opportunities, and food. A peace plan must take this into account.
Both the Road Map and Oslo did not address three extremely important issues for Palestinians: a solution to the right of return, the return of Palestinians to East Jerusalem, and an Israeli pullout to the border of 1967.
Dated peace processes, such as the Road Map and Oslo, did not provide the basic components for the survival of the Palestinian people. What they did look forward to what I shall call an “unknown plan.”
The undertext of both Oslo and the Road Map was the systematic segregation of Palestinians and their eventual extension. Ehud Olmert, right now the interim Prime Minister of Israel, intimated his intentions to disengage from the West Bank (after taking half of its land) but also stressed denial of the Palestinian right of return and the question of East Jerusalem.
Olmert and any subsequent Israeli leader must know, however, that the Palestinian people will not surrender to an extremist act such as Oslo or the Road Map, exemplified by the building of the Wall in Palestine. Nor they will capitulate to the denial and violation of United Nations Resolutions by Israel.
A more realistic approach to the paradoxes that have determined the criterion of peace and that have sustained contradictions and controversially vague ambitions may yield a more reliable peace process that will address current issue of human equality and rights.
Where is that place? What Road Map will lead the Palestinians back to their land? What peace process will allow them to return to live in the land that, for now, can only live in them?
*Published by MA'AN NEWS AGENCY on November 7, 2008. Rami Khader is the Wellness Center manager at Dar al-Kalima Health and Wellness Center and a Psychology Instructor at Bethlehem University. |
