En om jullıe ondertussen bezıg te houden: een lang artıkel van Rashid Khalidi: Palestine: Liberation Deferred
\n This article appeared in the May 26, 2008 edition of The Nation.
\n<\/p>\n
The “Palestine Question” has been with us for sixty years. During this
\ntime it has become a running sore, its solution appearing ever more
\ndistant. Whether the events sixty years ago that created this question
\nsolved the previously perennial “Jewish Question” is once again open to
\ndebate. This is the case after many years when the apparent triumph of
\nZionism stilled doubts and drowned out the protests of those who argued
\nthat what purported to be the solution to one problem had created an
\nentirely different one.<\/p>\n
It is considered by some to be a slur on Israel and Zionism, and
\nindeed even tantamount to anti-Semitism, to suggest that these events
\nsixty years ago should be the subject of anything but unmitigated joy.
\nCommemoration, or even analysis, of what Palestinians call their
\nnational catastrophe, al-Nakba–the expulsion, flight and loss of their
\nhomes by a majority of their people sixty years ago–is thus considered
\nnot in terms of this seminal event’s meaning to at least 8 million
\nPalestinians today (some estimates are over 10 million) but only
\nbecause it is directly related to the founding of Israel. Palestinians
\npresumably do not have the right to recall, much less mourn, their
\nnational disaster if this would rain on the parade of celebrating
\nZionists everywhere. The fact that the 1948 war that created Israel
\nalso created the largest refugee problem in the Middle East (until the
\nUS occupation of Iraq turned 4 million people into refugees) must
\ntherefore be swept under the rug. Also disregarded is the obvious fact
\nthat it would have been impossible to create a Jewish state in a land
\nnearly two-thirds of whose population was Arab without some form of
\nethnic cleansing.<\/p>\n
It is ironic and tragic that the resolution, if indeed it was a
\nresolution, of a Jewish question should have created a Palestine
\nquestion. It is even more ironic that the former should have been
\nresolved not where it arose in its most acute form, in the West, or at
\nthe West’s expense, but rather in Palestine, and to the detriment of
\nPalestine’s people. This was in large part the result of the efforts of
\na West stricken by a (fully justified) sense of guilt for centuries of
\nsuffering inflicted on European Jews, culminating in the Holocaust, a
\nWest that compounded its sins by helping to inflict further suffering,
\nthis time on Palestinians. It is also tragic that beyond the harm that
\nwas done to the Palestinians by the growth of Zionism and the
\nestablishment of Israel, these same developments should have led to the
\nuprooting of the world’s oldest and most secure Jewish communities,
\nwhich had found in the Arab lands a tolerance that, albeit imperfect,
\nwas nonexistent in the often genocidal, Jew-hating Christian West.<\/p>\n
A few things seem clear sixty years after 1948. One is that if the
\nJewish question has lost its saliency, perhaps more as a consequence of
\nthe enormity of the atrocities of the Nazis than for any other reason,
\nthe creation of Israel has raised different questions and problems for
\nits supporters and others. To the extent that Zionism has succeeded in
\nwinning acceptance of its assertion that all Jews are part of a
\nnational body whose nation-state is Israel, it has linked the status
\nand circumstances of Jews everywhere not only to the fate of that state
\nbut to every facet of that state’s policies and actions. Insofar as
\nsome of those policies and actions may be unacceptable, their very
\nexistence must be denied or elided, and reality bent to suit the tender
\nsensibilities of supporters of Israel: for example, the rank
\ndiscrimination against the 1.4 million Arab citizens of Israel who are
\nnot part of the Jewish ethnicity in whose name and for whose interests
\nthe state was created and exists; or the collective punishment
\ninflicted on the 1.5 million people of the Gaza Strip imprisoned for
\nmonths on end; or the systematic torture and humiliation inflicted on
\nthe hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have passed through the
\nIsraeli prison system. We see the results of this bending of reality in
\nthe travesty that passes for news coverage of Israel and Palestine in
\nthe American media.<\/p>\n
Where reality cannot be bent and such violations of basic human rights
\nand dignity cannot be denied or elided, they are justified as necessary
\nfor the “security” of the Jewish state. This argument carries weight
\nafter centuries of profound Jewish insecurities, but it masks the fact
\nthat these oppressive and unjust policies and actions sow resentment
\nthat guarantees Israel’s eternal insecurity. Even worse, some of
\nIsrael’s supporters in the United States and elsewhere apparently feel
\nobliged to become general partisans of discrimination and racial
\nprofiling, or collective punishment, or torture, or imprisonment
\nwithout due process, or all of the above. Thus, if the Jewish question
\nis resolved through the establishment by force of a Jewish state in
\nwhat was an Arab land, then the maintenance of this state in the face
\nof the natural, understandable resentment of those harmed in the
\nprocess involves its supporters not only in justifying the
\nunjustifiable in Israel and Palestine but by logical extension also in
\njustifying it in the United States, in Guant\u00e1namo, and in Iraq and
\nAfghanistan. This is a sad result not only for those who have sought a
\nremedy for an age-old problem but also for those dismayed at the new
\nproblems this solution has created and the ripple effect of this
\nsolution far from Israel or Palestine.<\/p>\n
Another thing has become clearer and clearer over these sixty years: a
\njust resolution of the Palestine question will be far from simple, if
\nit is indeed possible at all; and if it is ever to be resolved, this
\nwill depend in large measure on the Palestinians themselves, whose
\ncurrent status is perhaps as desperate as it has been since 1948. Such
\na resolution will not be simple, because the now universally applauded
\ntwo-state solution faces the juggernaut of Israel’s actions in the
\noccupied territories over more than forty years, actions that have been
\nexpressly designed to make its realization in any meaningful form
\nimpossible. This is true whether those actions involve the unending
\nprocess of the meticulously planned and state-supported colonization
\nand effective annexation of slice after slice of the West Bank, the
\nisolation of Arab East Jerusalem from its hinterland in the West Bank,
\nthe systematic confinement of more than 2 million Palestinians living
\nthere in smaller and smaller and ever more hermetically sealed cantons,
\nor the cancerous growth of what might be called an Israeli
\nprison-industrial complex. This military, security, state and private
\napparatus controls most of the important decisions in the lives of the
\nnearly 4 million Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, who are
\nabout to enter their forty-second year of military occupation, and it
\nhas harbored a Palestinian prison population of about 10,000 since
\n2000.<\/p>\n
In principle this juggernaut is, of course, not unstoppable. There is,
\nhowever, no sign that its momentum has slowed in the past seventeen
\nyears (since the Madrid conference) of the cruelly misnamed “peace
\nprocess,” let alone recognition of its vast power, or a willingness to
\nconfront and reverse it, on the part of most Israeli, American or other
\ndecision-makers. The deceitful, feeble silence of US policy under three
\nadministrations about this juggernaut, and the mass media’s attitude
\nthat the emperor’s clothes look just splendid, would be nauseating if
\none was not already accustomed to this sort of feckless, insouciant
\nirresponsibility on the part of Washington, and of the American media’s
\ncomplicity with it.<\/p>\n
While the two-state solution is thus deeply flawed–if it has not
\nbecome unrealizable–there are also flaws in the alternatives, grouped
\nunder the rubric of the one-state solution. How can most Israelis and
\nPalestinians be persuaded to forgo their aspirations for a state of
\ntheir own, and to overcome their dislike of each other such that they
\ncan contemplate living together in one state, whether binational,
\nfederal, cantonal or unitary? How would it be possible to reverse the
\nideological triumph of Zionism, which convinced Israelis and others
\nthat the main lesson of the Holocaust is that there must be a Jewish
\nstate (while in the same breath they are told that this state will have
\nto fight for its existence against an environment rendered permanently
\nhostile by the conditions of its establishment and maintenance)? How
\nwould it be possible to reverse the process whereby all Palestinian
\npolitical formations of any consequence have gradually become wedded to
\nthe idea that the establishment of a Palestinian state in 22 percent of
\nhistoric Palestine–via the reversal of forty-one years of Israeli
\noccupation practices carried out with the acquiescence of the United
\nStates and that render the creation of such a state virtually
\nimpossible–would be an acceptable solution to the question of
\nPalestine? This was true first of Fatah, and then of more radical
\nPalestinian groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of
\nPalestine, and is now true even of Hamas.<\/p>\n
Moving toward a two-state, or a one-state, solution or toward any
\nother resolution of the Palestine question–that is, getting the
\nPalestinians out of the parlous state they are currently in–is
\ndependent on a reversal in the dynamic of the Palestinian polity. For
\nseveral years, this has been spiraling downward, and it now seems to be
\nnearly in free-fall. Only when the Palestinians were united, when they
\nhad some sense of what their national strategy was, and when they chose
\ntactics appropriate to that strategy, did they have any success at all,
\nminimal though it has been, over the past forty-one years, the past
\nsixty years–indeed, over the past ninety years. The Palestinians were
\nmost emphatically not united around a clear strategy and appropriate
\ntactics during the British Mandate until 1948 or during the two decades
\nafterward, nor have they been for the past decade or so, both periods
\nthat have been disastrous for them. Even during the era from the heyday
\nof the PLO in the late 1960s through the first intifada of 1987-91,
\nwhen the Palestinians gained broad international legitimacy and
\nsympathy, and grudging recognition from Israel, this unity and
\nstrategic clarity were flawed in many ways.<\/p>\n
In particular, Palestinians lacked clarity about the moral, legal and
\npolitical disadvantages in the use of violence against an Israeli
\npolity able to mobilize in defense of its actions, however unspeakable,
\nthe most powerful tropes of victimhood in modern Western culture. This
\nconfusion among some Palestinians exists although farsighted thinkers
\nlike Edward Said and Eqbal Ahmad understood decades ago that nonviolent
\nresistance was integral to Palestinian success; although the greatest
\nsuccesses of the Palestinians were won by the unarmed popular protests
\nof the first intifada; and despite widespread (but underreported)
\npeaceful joint Palestinian-Israeli protest movements against Israel’s
\nillegal wall inside the West Bank. Many Palestinians understandably
\ncling to the legitimate right of any people under occupation to resist
\ntheir oppressors. They see only the extensive, continuous violence
\ndirected by Israel against the Palestinians, much of it structural and
\nintegral to the maintenance of the occupation. They cannot understand
\nthat because of Israel’s cloak of permanent victimhood, its massive
\nviolence remains either invisible or justified in the West, while every
\nIsraeli casualty seems to be mourned there with infinite sadness and is
\ntaken as another sign of the inherent barbarity of the Palestinians.<\/p>\n
Today we are witness to the spectacle of two feeble and clueless
\nPalestinian political movements, both lacking strategic vision and
\nbereft of the selfless patriotism that would lead them to bury their
\npetty differences, fighting like two cocks on a garbage heap, as the
\nArabic expression has it. They do so although overwhelming majorities
\nof Palestinians have consistently demanded that they compromise with
\neach other in the interest of national unity. The Fatah-dominated
\nPalestinian Authority has abandoned any idea of popular mobilization,
\nany last shred of an ethos of service to the people, any sense of the
\nvital importance of national unity if even minimal Palestinian
\nobjectives are to be achieved, any respect for the democratic process
\nthat brought its rivals in Hamas into power in January 2006, and any
\nsense of the danger of hitching the Palestinians to the bankrupt
\npolicies of a lame-duck American President who heads the most
\npro-Israeli Administration in US history.<\/p>\n
The blindness of Hamas is as bad: neither able to fight nor to
\nnegotiate effectively, neither able to compromise with Fatah nor to
\ngovern on its own, and no more able to break free of the clutches of
\nits external backers than is Fatah vis-\u00e0-vis its own foreign backers,
\nHamas has lurched from disaster to disaster since its unexpected
\nvictory in the 2006 elections. Undermined by the refusal of the United
\nStates and Israel even to attempt to negotiate with a Hamas-dominated
\ngovernment, last summer it made the fatal mistake of taking over the
\nGaza Strip in response to preparations for a US-supported coup by Fatah
\nstrongman Muhammad Dahlan. Hamas reached a low point in April, when a
\npoll showed that it enjoyed the support of less than 18 percent of
\nPalestinians (versus 32 percent for Fatah, whose leader, Mahmoud Abbas,
\nhowever, is even more unpopular than Ismail Haniya of Hamas: 11.7
\npercent to 13.3 percent). The ideological bankruptcy and the degree of
\npopular rejection of both of the formations that dominate Palestinian
\npolitics are illustrated by the fact that together they enjoy the
\nsupport of barely 50 percent of Palestinians.<\/p>\n
If there is to be a resolution of the Palestine problem, it depends on
\nthe Palestinians’ understanding the massive disadvantages they labor
\nunder in fighting a struggle for liberation against the heirs of the
\nvictims of the Holocaust, in the growing shadow of worldwide
\nIslamophobia. It depends on their unity and on their adopting the
\nappropriate strategy and tactics for this difficult task, in mobilizing
\nthe powerful moral force of their cause and the remarkable strengths of
\nPalestinians under occupation and in the diaspora who have withstood
\nextreme pressures but have neither submitted nor despaired. These
\nstrengths must be deployed not just for a defensive steadfastness but
\nfor a positive goal of liberation, peace and justice, one that can
\nchange the terms of the conflict and the way it is understood, and win
\nover enough of their opponents and enough of the outside world to
\nchange the unfavorable balance of forces that today keeps them
\nscattered, dispersed, confined and imprisoned sixty years after the
\ndestruction of Arab Palestine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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