2008

The Palestinian question by Edward Said (*)

Danilo Zolo

'The Question of Palestine' by Edward W. Said is a good and useful book, not less than 'Orientalism', the work that made this US professor of Palestinian descent - who taught comparative literature at Columbia University - famous. It is one of few 'Palestinian views' of the history of Palestine available to Western culture.

Written about twenty years ago, the book still provides remarkable and topical points deserving consideration. It allows us to catch in depth the historical grounds of what happens in Palestine nowadays: the definite failing of the Oslo process and US mediation, the outbreak of the second Intifada whose objective is now the independence of the whole Palestinian people, the devastation of what remains of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem after forty years of military occupation, the dismantling of the Palestinian National Authority, the endless massacre of innocent Jews and, above all, Palestinians.

In my opinion, what makes Said's contribution valuable is the attempt to restore the 'question of Palestine' according to a Palestinian standpoint - not a generically Arab or Islamic one - and starting from the beginning of the events: the birth of the Zionist movement, the establishment of its ideology within the context of European colonialist culture at the end of 19^th century, the triggering of emigration toward Palestine. At the same time Said outlines of the history of the Palestinian people, tracing a thorough profile of their demographic and sociological features.

We have to start from these elements, Said says, if we want 'to understand' the question of Palestine. Adhering to this methodological suggestion, 'to understand' means to enlighten the historical and ideological continuity which links a large number of events to each other in a long chain: the first waves of Zionist emigration toward Palestine, the foundation of the State of Israel, its increasing territorial expansion, the violent scattering of the Palestinian people in 1948, the denial (by Israelis, and Arabs as well) of their collective identity, the military occupation of all their own lands, the first and the second Intifada, the suicide terrorism expressing the most radical Palestinian nationalism.

There is a crucial issue on which Said insists, by piling up a wide documentation and interpreting it with philological rigour. During the decades between the 19^th and the 20^th century, while the European powers - England first - were deciding the destiny of Palestine and encouraging the Zionist movement to occupy it, Palestine was not a desert. On the contrary, it was a country inhabited by a political and civil community of more than 600,000 people, which had been legitimately occupying it for centuries.

Palestinians spoke Arabic and were mainly Sunni Muslims, together with Christian, Druzi and Shiite minorities who also used Arabic. Thanks to its high level of education, the Palestinian middle class was regarded as an élite within the Middle East: Palestinian intellectuals, entrepreneurs and bankers held key positions within the Arab polity, state administrations and industry. That's what the social and demographic situation of Palestine was in the first decades of the 20th century, and it remained like that up to few weeks before the institution of the State of Israel in the spring of 1948: at that time, there was in Palestine an autochthonous population of about 1,500,000 people (while the Jews, non withstanding the impressive flow of migrants of the postwar period, were slightly more than 500,000).

The whole story of the Zionist invasion of Palestine and the self-proclamation of the State of Israel then revolves around an ideological construction which will be later embodied in a methodical political strategy: the denial of the existence of the Palestinian people. In the statements of the main Zionist leaders - ranging from Theodor Herzl to Moses Hess, Menachem Begin, Chaim Weizman - the native population is completely neglected, or otherwise discredited as barbarian, indolent, mercenary, loose. To this widespread colonial stereotype is closely connected the idea that the duty of Jews was to seize a backward and quasi-deserted territory in order to rebuild it by the foundations, and 'modernize' it. And according to a radical view of the 'civilizing mission' of Europe and its 'reconstructive colonialism', the new Israeli political and economic organization had to rule out any cooperation with the indigenous population, if not on an exclusively subordinate and servile level (while the Israeli State would have been open to all the Jews of the world, and to Jews only).

It is no accident that the first great struggle that Palestinians have been forced to engage in, after the foundation of the State of Israel, has been the one against their complete historical deletion. Their primary objective has been to claim - against Israel as well as Arab countries like Egypt, Jordan, and Syria - their collective identity and their right to self-determination. Only later on, not before 1974, the United Nations will record formally the existence of an international actor called Palestine, while recognizing Yasser Arafat as its legitimate representative.

The denial of the presence of a people in the land where the Jewish state was planned to be established is the colonial and racist stigma which characterizes the Zionist movement since its origins as a movement closely connected to the European colonial powers, and supported by them in several ways. After having planned for a long time to make Argentina, South Africa or Cyprus the seat of the Jewish state, the choice of the Zionist movement focused on Palestine not so much because of religious grounds, but because it was widely believed, as Israel Zangwill said, that Palestine was 'a land without a people for a people without a land'.

It is in the name of this colonial logic that the forced exile of great numbers of Palestinians began - not less than 700,000 - thanks mostly to the terrorism practised by Zionist organisations like the Stern Gang, led by Yitzhak Shamir, and the Irgun Zwai Leumi, whose commander was Menachem Begin, infamous for having been responsible for the slaughter of the inhabitants - more than 250 - of the village of Deir Yassin.

Later on, at the end of the first Arab-Israeli War, the area occupied by the Israelis further extends, increasing from the 56% of the territories of Mandate Palestine, granted by the recommendation of the UN General Assembly, up to 78% of them, including the entire Galilee and most of Jerusalem. Finally, at the end of 1967 Six-Day War, as everybody knows, Israel seizes even the last 22 percent, unlawfully annexing East Jerusalem and imposing a harsh regime of military occupation to the two million and plus inhabitants of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. All of this has been accompanied by the methodical expropriation of lands, by the demolition of thousands of Palestinian houses, by the deletion of entire villages, by the intrusion of large urban structures in the Arab part of Jerusalem, as well as of Nazareth.

However, it is especially the issue of the colonial settlements within the occupied territories of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank to provide the most convincing evidence of the sound foundation of the 'colonialist' view of the events suggested by Edward Said. If not, how else could we explain that the State of Israel, after having conquered 78% of the territory of Palestine, after having annexed East Jerusalem and having settled there at least 180,000 Jewish citizens, engaged in a progressive colonization of even that scant 22 left to the Palestinians, and already subject to military occupation? As everybody knows, since 1968, on the initiative of labour as well as right-wing governments, Israel has confiscated about 52% of the West Bank, establishing more than 200 settlements, while in the densely populated and extremely poor Gaza Strip it has confiscated about 32% of the land, establishing more than 30 settlements. Altogether, at least 450,000 settlers live today in the Occupied Territories, in militarily armoured houses, connected each other and to the Israeli territory by a network of roads (the ill-famed "by-pass roads") which are forbidden to Palestinians and further break up and tear what remains of their homeland.

We can then conclude, together with Said, that the 'original sin' of the State of Israel lies in its intrinsically Zionist nature: its refusal to live peacefully with the Palestinian people, and worse, its failure to manage its own hegemony without resorting to repressive, colonial and essentially racist practices. All that the Zionist ideology could obtain - undoubtedly helped by the anti-Semitic persecution and the Holocaust tragedy - has been the progressive conquest of Palestine 'on the inside'. It provided and still provides the world - not only the West - with the idea that the indigenous element is the Jewish one, and that the foreigners are the Palestinians. The core of the drama which hit the Palestinian people, the main reason for the innumerable defeats it suffered lies in this anomaly: Zionism has been much more than a usual form of conquest and colonial ruling 'from the outside'. It achieved widespread success and broad support by European governments and public, as never happened for other colonial ventures.

But here is the serious mistake made by the Israeli political élite and by the powerful US Jewish élite who have always agreed with its political and military choices. There was a Palestinian people in Palestine before the foundation of the State of Israel, it is still there in spite of the State of Israel, and it steadily intends to survive to the State of Israel, regardless of all the defeats, the humiliations, the bloody destruction of its goods and values.

*. From il Manifesto, April 10, 2002.