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The Question of Palestine (1979)
The Question of Palestine has been described, by Said himself as well as by some of his commentators, as part of a trilogy of books, of which Orientalism was the first and Covering Islam (1981) the last. To the extent that all three books concern themselves with representations of the Orient, Palestine, and Islam, this is an accurate description. But The Question of Palestine is much more than simply a narrowing of the focus of Orientalism down to reference to one smaller country, region, or historical issue. It remains the most substantial openly ‘political’ book that Said ever wrote, though, again, it is crucial to realise that Said argued throughout his career for the relationship of even the most recondite texts with wider social and political contexts and movements. Furthermore, if Orientalism has been criticised for concentrating on the discourse of the West about the Orient, then it is important to see that The Question of Palestine itself embodies a ‘speaking back’, a countermanding of Orientalist discourse. It exemplifies resistance to a discourse of domination. This is dramatised most clearly and potently in the brilliant second chapter of the book, ‘Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims’. This long essay seeks to offer an analysis of Zionism from an angle or position that for a long time was occluded in accounts of that historical movement.
Said's point is that Zionism is most usually described as a movement and a history that culminated in the successful foundation of the State of Israel in May 1948. This is an example of what historians call ‘Whig history’: an historical narrative that seeks to explain the past as an ineluctable movement towards the present dispensation. The problem with this form of historiography is that it tends to see this movement as having been inevitable, progressive, and as justifying or legitimating the present. In the pursuit of this justifying aim, it tends to stress similarities between past and present, and in stressing the inevitability of its narrative, it tends to locate causation there too.
The purpose of ‘Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims’ is precisely to answer back to such a narrative but also to critique it. The emphasis on narrative is one that Said would return to, in other writings on Palestine and Israel. It is useful also in that it reminds us once again of Said's theorisation of narrative in Beginnings: the interplay between authority and molestation. It is not too crude to suggest that Said is arguing that the Palestinians stand as a kind of molestation of the authorising Zionist narrative. This view could be applied to Said's own efforts, as well. How does he characterise this work?
Said starts by arguing for the locatedness of Zionism, as a system of ideas. Every idea or system
of ideas exists somewhere, he says, and is therefore ‘worldly’, intermixed with its circumstances, both historical and geographical.67 Yet ‘self-serving idealism’ – idealism being the philosophical doctrine that reality is of the nature of thought – insists that ideas are never muddied or coarsened by reality. Said argues that this thinking is most attractive to people for whom a particular idea attains perfection, untainted by will or desire:
Thus it is frequently argued that such an idea as Zionism, for all its political tribulations and the struggles on its behalf, is at bottom an unchanging idea that expresses the yearning for Jewish political and religious self-determination – for Jewish national selfhood – to be exercised on the promised land. Because Zionism seems to have culminated in the creation of the state of Israel, it is also argued that the historical realization of the idea confirms its unchanging essence, and, no less important, the means used for its realization.68
Said, in giving this account of Zionism, is describing here precisely the Whig attitude to history mentioned above. But, as he says, this kind of description of Zionism says very little about what the idea of Zionism, or the historical realisation of the idea, has entailed for non-Jews. Yet, ‘[T]o the Palestinian, for whom Zionism was somebody else's idea imported into Palestine and for which in a very concrete way he or she was made to suffer’, this is the crucial matter.69
Said's approach is to suggest that powerful political ideas such as Zionism should be investigated in two ways. Firstly, ‘genealogically in order that their provenance, their kinship and descent, their affiliation both with other ideas and with political institutions may be demonstrated’. Secondly, ‘as practical systems for accumulation (of power, land, ideological legitimacy) and displacement (of people, other ideas, prior legitimacy)’.70 As was the case in Orientalism, Said here puts ideas developed originally in Beginnings to work in a more openly socio-historical context. Zionism, after all, has not merely been a practical political movement and effort; it is also a massive network of texts. What is necessary, he is saying, is a study of Zionism and its authority. Out of what history, circumstances, and network of relationships did Zionism emerge? By what means has it constructed its authority or legitimacy? What other or previous authority did it contest or displace? What are the factors that may molest that authority yet?
One of the primary difficulties in arriving at a proper critique of Zionism, especially for a figure of the intellectual Left like Said, is the way that it has become an article of faith for Western liberals – precisely the constituency that oppressed Palestinians would wish to address. It has attained this unique position because it has successfully occluded or made disappear ‘the literal historical ground of its growth’, its political, economic, cultural, and existential costs for Palestinians, and the militant distinctions it makes between Jews and non-Jews.71
The other great difficulty that must be confronted is the issue of anti-Semitism, and the relationship of Palestinian nationalism to the other Arab states. About the latter, Said is clear that pointing out the sufferings of the Palestinian people does not mean identifying with or legitimating conservative or authoritarian Arab regimes. Yet the general interdiction in the West on alluding to the victims of the Jews, in the era of genocidal assaults on Jews, operates to make it easy for liberal intellectuals to criticise oppressive regimes such as those of Cuba or Burma, while ignoring Zionist discrimination against non-Jews in Israel. But for Said, the ‘task of criticism, or, to put it another way, the role of the critical consciousness in such cases is to be able to make distinctions, to produce differences where at present there are none’.72
Simultaneously, the critical intellectual must acknowledge the power and appeal of Zionism as an idea for Jews, and the richness of Zionism's fractious and complex internal debates. Mere blanket dismissal would preclude a proper understanding of Zionism's effectiveness, its ability to become hegemonic among both Israeli and diaspora Jews, and among Israel's supporters and admirers in the West. Said points out that he personally inhabits, in an amphibious manner, both the culture of the West, as an almost exclusively Western-educated person, and that of Palestine, as an exile. This enables him to understand and focus on the history of European anti-Semitism and the ‘intertwined terror and exultation out of which Zionism has been nourished’, while also drawing attention to Zionism's ‘other aspects’.73
To illustrate the liberal view of Zionism and Palestine, Said chooses the great English nineteenthcentury novelist George Eliot. In Daniel Deronda (1876), Eliot works out her ‘general interest in idealism and spiritual yearning’, but in the context of Zionism.74 Said suggests that Eliot sees Zionism as one of various potential projects aiming to create a secular religious community. Such a community would replace organised religion, which was reckoned to be waning in its influence. In her masterpiece, Middlemarch (1872), Eliot's heroine, Dorothea Brooke, is portrayed as imbued initially with yearning for a spiritually and intellectually fulfilled married life. The novel witnesses her aspirations being gradually tamed and domesticated, so that by its end Dorothea contents herself with a relatively ordinary life. But in Daniel Deronda, Eliot discerns in the Zionist project what Said calls ‘a genuinely hopeful socioreligious project in which individual energies can be merged and identified with a collective national vision, the whole emanating out of Judaism’.75
Said notes that most of the characters in the novel – both Jewish and English – are portrayed as
‘homeless’, or alienated. But the Jews have retained a powerful yearning for their ‘original’ home in Zion, as well as a strong sense of loss at being cut off from that home. In this way, they embody a criticism of Europeans with their abandonment of any communal belief. The hero of the novel, Daniel, gradually learns about and embraces his Jewish identity, and ‘when he becomes the spiritual discipline of Mordecai Ezra Cohen, his Jewish destiny’.76 At the end of the novel, Mordecai dies, but Daniel marries his sister, Mirah, and pledges himself to working out his mentor's projects in and for Palestine. Said is particularly interested in two elements of this story. Firstly, in spite of her interest in the development in the East of projects of human socio-spiritual enlightenment, Eliot never refers in any detail to the actual inhabitants of the East generally or Palestine specifically. ‘They are irrelevant both to the Zionists in Daniel Deronda, and to the English characters.’ Further, ‘[B]rightness, freedom, redemption – key matters for Eliot – are to be restricted to Europeans and the Jews, who are themselves European prototypes so far as colonizing the East is concerned’.77
Secondly, in Said's reading, Eliot was only one of a number of famous nineteenth-century liberals or radicals, such as John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, who abandoned their liberal or radical tenets when it came to lands and peoples outside of the West. But even more, ‘Eliot's account of Zionism in Daniel Deronda was intended as a sort of assenting Gentile response to prevalent Jewish-Zionist currents.’ Therefore, for Said, the novel indicates the degree to which Zionism acquired authority by means of its relationship with Gentile European thought.78 In particular, Gentile and Jewish Zionisms agreed that there were no inhabitants of Palestine, or, more specifically, none of any political significance: ‘their status as sovereign and human inhabitants was systematically denied’.79
What Said therefore takes from reading a liberal European thinker such as George Eliot is a set of ideas about Palestine and Zionism; namely, that
Zionism is to be carried out by the Jews with the assistance of major European powers; that Zionism will restore a ‘lost fatherland’, and in so doing mediate between the various civilizations; that present-day Palestine was in need of cultivation, civilization, reconstitution; that Zionism would finally bring enlightenment and progress where at present there was neither.80
Said's wider point is that Zionism conformed as well as it did with advanced European thought in the later nineteenth century because of the attitudes to overseas territories and peoples both tendencies shared.
European Zionism made its bid for Palestine in the context of the greatest phase of European territorial acquisition overseas in history. Said points out that Zionism never at this time described itself simply as a Jewish liberation movement, but rather as a Jewish movement for colonial settlement in the Orient. Following from this, and crucially:
[T]o those Palestinian victims that Zionism displaced, it cannot have meant anything by way of sufficient cause that Jews were victims of European anti-Semitism and, given Israel's continued oppression of Palestinians, few Palestinians are able to see beyond their reality, namely, that once victims themselves, Occidental Jews in Israel have become oppressors (of Palestinians and Oriental Jews).81
This is the ethical core of Said's argument. The oppression and genocide of European Jews does not justify their oppression of Palestinian Arabs. Palestinian Arabs should not be made to pay part of the price of European crimes of anti-Semitism. Palestinian Arabs have experienced the arrival in Palestine of large numbers of European Jews not as liberation, but as displacement, oppression and, in 1948–9, ethnic cleansing.
Said moves on to reinforce his argument about the affiliation of Zionist thought with European imperialist thought at the end of the nineteenth century. He suggests that for Theodor Herzl, the intellectual father of Zionism, even as the Dreyfus Affair brought him to full consciousness of the horrors of anti-Semitism, at roughly the same time the idea of Jewish colonisation overseas occurred to him as the solution to anti-Semitism. Herzl considered territories other than Palestine (in Latin America and Africa). In his diaries, Herzl argued that the natives of Palestine would have to be expropriated, and ‘both the expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly’. Furthermore, ‘we must spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country’.82
Said's argument is very similar to that he would develop in Culture and Imperialism, fully thirteen years after The Question of Palestine. He suggests that Zionism can be genealogically understood only within the context of imperialism. The latter, he says, depends as much on ideas and attitudes as on political and military power.
Gaining and holding an imperium means gaining and holding a domain, which includes a variety of operations, among them constituting an area, accumulating its inhabitants, having power over its ideas, people, and of course, its land, converting people, land, ideas to the purposes and for the use of a hegemonic imperial design; all this as a result of being able to treat reality appropriatively.83
Said is suggesting that there is little analytical virtue in separating theory and practice in the area of nineteenth-century imperialism: ‘Laying claim to an idea and laying claim to a territory…were considered to be different sides to the same, essentially constitutive activity, which had the force, the prestige, and the authority of science.’84 Said points out the parallel between modernising attitudes in science and those in imperialism: the result was that both focussed on the sovereign European will and its ability to ‘change confusing or useless realities into an orderly, disciplined new set of classifications useful to Europe’.85 This issued in the production of taxonomies of territories, languages, and peoples, hierarchies of which the European was always the summit and the centre. European countries were reckoned to have developed faster and further than others, because of ‘natural advantages’. European languages were superior to Semitic or African languages. Non-white races were significant insofar as they became objects of Western study, expertise, and knowledge, or as they were put into service providing labour-power for Europeans, or as they were moved around so as to suit European purposes.
Said provides many examples of how European travellers to Palestine viewed it through these lenses, even while it was a territory of the Ottoman Empire, and well before Zionism emerged as a movement and discourse. Repeatedly, Europeans refer to the degraded culture and barbarism, the stupidity and deceitfulness of the Palestinian natives, and their inferiority not only to Europeans but also to the Jewish population of Palestine. He concludes that Zionism saw Palestine ‘as the European imperialist did, as an empty territory paradoxically “filled” with ignoble even dispensable natives’.86
Reading the texts of important Zionist leaders and thinkers, notably Chaim Weizmann, Said detects a number of patterns. Firstly, he suggests that Weizmann and others always saw the Zionist project not simply as creating a new Jewish society in Palestine (there was a Jewish population in Palestine in the late nineteenth century, but it was very small), but as a regeneration, a repetition, a return, a renewal. The land itself was to be redeemed, by Jewish labour and care. To achieve this regeneration and repetition, of the land, and of the Jewish community by itself,
it was necessary to visualize and then to implement a scheme for creating a network of realities – a language, a grid of colonies, a series of organizations – for converting Palestine from its present state of ‘neglect’ into a Jewish state.
Furthermore, a particular sense of time, or temporality, was important to this project:
The colonization of Palestine proceeded always as a fact of repetition: The Jews were not supplanting, destroying, breaking up a native society. That society was itself the oddity that had broken the pattern of a sixty-year Jewish sovereignty over Palestine which had lapsed for two millennia. In Jewish hearts, however, Israel had always been there. Zionism therefore reclaimed, redeemed, repeated, replanted, realized Palestine, and Jewish hegemony over it.87
So, Zionism has presented two faces. It has presented to the world its beneficence for Jews: it has provided an identity, a nationality, a culture, even a language, and a set of structures to make them possible. But to Palestinians, it has presented ‘the other, dialectically opposite component…an equally firm and intelligent boundary between benefits for Jews, and none (later, punishment) for non-
Jews in Palestine’.88
The result of this is that Zionism has been seen, by the Palestinians specifically but also in the Arab world more generally, as a purely negative phenomenon. What Said calls the ‘internal solidity and cohesion of Israel’ has been invisible to Arabs. Partly as a result of this, most of the Arab states have become quasi-totalitarian ‘security states’, where a multitude of inhuman and anti-democratic policies are justified in the rhetoric of guarding against ‘the Zionist entity’. Equally, this bifurcation of Zionism has also had negative effects for Israel. Institutions that pride themselves on their egalitarianism and humanism – the kibbutz, the Law of Return for Jews, the facilities for immigrants – are precisely exclusionary, discriminatory, and inhuman for the Palestinian Arab.
Said stresses that Zionism was and is not merely a general way of conceptualising Palestine as the home of the Jews. On the contrary, it is what he calls a ‘discipline of detail’. To illustrate this, he refers to a document produced by Weizmann and other Zionist leaders in 1917, ‘Outline of Program for the Jewish Resettlement of Palestine in Accordance with the Aspirations of the Zionist Movement’. Said discerns in this document the ambition not merely to colonise Palestine with Jews, but to produce a Jewish Palestine. He sees in the document a ‘vision of a matrix of organizations whose functioning duplicates that of an army’. The document speaks of ‘opening’ the country to ‘suitable’ Jews. For Said, this recalls a Foucauldian disciplinary apparatus. It is an army, after all, that ‘opens’ territory and prepares it for settlement, that supports immigration, shipping, and supply, and, most important of all, that converts mere citizens to ‘suitable’ disciplined agents whose job it is to establish a presence on the land and to invest it with their structures, organisations, and institutions.
For Said,
Just as an army assimilates ordinary citizens to its purposes – by dressing them in uniforms, by exercising them in tactics and maneuvers, by disciplining everyone to its purposes – so too did Zionism dress the Jewish colonists in the system of Jewish labour and Jewish land, whose uniform required that only Jews were acceptable. The power of the Zionist army did not reside in its leader, nor in the arms it collected for its conquests and defence, but rather in the functioning of a whole system, a series of positions taken and held, as Weizmann says, in agriculture, culture, commerce, and industry.89
Said is offering us here a powerful example of Zionism's ability to effect what he called in Orientalism ‘a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts’. Hence we can now understand Zionism in the way we understand the discourse of Orientalism: ‘[I]t is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different…world’.90 For Said, this amounts to the marshalling of the civil society of the Yishuv – the Jewish community in Palestine – into the elaboration of essentially military directive ideas. This is a particularly dramatic example of the capacity of Zionism to accumulate authority, land, and people, and to displace other or prior authority, people, and territory.
Said continues by outlining the emergence and workings of various Jewish organs charged with the production of a Jewish Palestine, and a nascent Jewish state in Palestine. Chief among these was and is the Jewish National Fund, which was created in 1901 with the purpose of acquiring land in Palestine and holding it ‘in trust’ for ‘the Jewish people’. This foreshadows the Law of Return, promulgated after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, which guarantees citizenship of Israel to all Jews, everywhere. The point is that such thought and such institutions were and are extraterritorial: the state that was born in May 1948 was not the state of its citizens, but the state of the Jewish people. This instantly made the non-Jewish citizens of the state second-class persons, but it also conferred on the Zionist state extraterritorial powers. After the state was born, very large tracts of Arab-owned land (whose owners had fled during the fighting of 1947–9) were assimilated legally to the state, and those Arab owners were declared ‘absentee landlords’, ensuring that their lands could never be returned to them by the JNF. What this amounts to is a highly successful effort to Judaicise and de-Arabise land.
We cannot deal in detail here with the complex, violent, and controversial history of the birth of Israel and the flight of the Palestinian refugees in 1947–9. What is interesting for us is that Said focusses on the need felt by Zionist leaders such as Joseph Weitz, director of the Land Department of the JNF, for ‘transfer’ of Palestinians out of Palestine, in order for the Jewish state to be demographically, politically, and socially viable. Again, there is heated controversy among historians as to whether or not Zionist forces put a coherent and detailed blueprint for ‘transfer’ into action in 1947–9, but Said's point is that such thinking reveals how Zionism envisaged the land and its prior inhabitants. Those inhabitants were reckoned to be insignificant, to have a tenuous relationship to the land. Initially, during the phase of Jewish migration to Palestine before 1948, they were largely ignored. When approximately 780,000 Palestinians fled during the fighting of 1947–9, efforts were made to make sure they could never return, both legally and also practically – hundreds of Palestinian
Arab villages were bulldozed after the war. In Said's words,
Zionism came fully into its own by actively destroying as many Arab traces as it could. From a nonentity in theory to a nonentity in legal fact, the Palestinian Arab lived through the terrible modulation from one sorry condition to the other…First he was an inconsequential native; then he became an absent one; then inside Israel after 1948 he acquired the juridical status of a less real person than any individual person belonging to the ‘Jewish people’, whether that person was present in Israel or not.91
Said argues that Israeli governmental policies since 1948 – such as the efforts to ‘Judaize’ the Galilee – have continued the subjugation of Palestinians within Israel – so-called ‘Israeli Arabs’. In the divisions and differences between Palestinian ‘Old’ Nazareth and Jewish ‘New’ Nazareth, for example, the Zionist-instigated separation between Jew and non-Jew is worked out in geographical and demographic terms.
Said's overall point is that a vast array of Israeli policies have been directed towards ‘a maximum future for Jews and a minimal one for non-Jews’.92 He discerns a strong continuity in attitudes to the Palestinians between the projections of early Zionist leaders such as Weizmann and the approach of contemporary Israeli soldiers and bureaucrats: to each, the Palestinians are negligible. They can be ignored, or, where not ignored, manipulated by social and military engineering. Legally, nationally, their existence is either nugatory or nonexistent.
Zionism has been so overwhelming a movement and idea for Palestinians that to struggle against it is very difficult. In 1984, Said published a long review essay in the London Review of Books, under the title ‘Permission to Narrate’.93 This was a lengthy consideration of a number of books arising out of the Lebanon war and the camp massacres. Underpinning Said's reading and analysis, however, was the linkage of narrative and authority, which we recognise from Beginnings. The American philosopher of history Hayden White, Said points out, argues that ‘narrative in general, from the folk tale to the novel, from annals to the fully realized “history”, has to do with the topics of law, legality, legitimacy, or, more generally, authority’. White notes also that, conventionally, the proper subject of historical narrative has been, following Hegel, the state.94 Said is interested in his essay to note the competition and intertwining of the Israeli and Palestinian narratives, and his point is that the Israeli narrative had successfully interdicted the Palestinian one at the point of his writing because the Israeli narrative was underpinned by the authority conferred by the possession of a state. Said argues that the target of the invasion of Lebanon was the ‘coherent narrative direction towards self-determination’ of the Palestinian people with their history, actuality, and aspirations.95 Competing against the Zionist narrative of Jewish in-gathering and return and redemption there has been the Palestinian narrative of dispersion, fragmentation, alienation, struggle, and hoped-for return. The Palestinian narrative, Said says, ‘has never been officially admitted to Israeli history, except as that of “non-Jews”, whose inert presence in Palestine was a nuisance to be ignored or expelled’.96 With the military destruction of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1982, the narrative of the transformation of Palestinians from peasants to refugees to revolutionaries ‘has…come to an abrupt stop, curling about itself violently’.97
A crucial issue here for Said is the discourse of ‘terrorism’, which is capable of both absorbing and de-legitimating a narrative such as that of the Palestinians:
Terrorism signifies…in relation to ‘us’, the alien and gratuitously hostile force. It is destructive, systematic, and controlled. It is a web, a network, a conspiracy run from Moscow…it can be used retrospectively…or prospectively…to justify everything ‘we’ do, and de-legitimize as well as dehumanize everything ‘they’ do. The very indiscriminateness of terrorism, actual and described, its tautological and circular character, is anti-narrative. Sequence, the logic of cause and effect as between oppressors and victims, opposing pressures – all these vanish inside an enveloping cloud called ‘terrorism’.98
The point here is that societies, nations, and oppressed groups need to achieve a kind of narrative coherence in order to obtain socio-political prominence and legitimacy. The most powerful mechanism yet devised for instituting or institutionalising this narrative is the state. Thus Zionism struggled to create a state in Palestine, and the Palestinians struggle to create a rival state-in-exile, or a state-in-waiting, or, under the severely compromised Oslo Process, a ‘state-in-Jericho-first’.
Further, the established states have the power to regulate narratives, this power at its most extreme being that of designating groups or ideas that fall outside of the coercive or representational capacity of the state as ‘terrorist’ in the manner Said describes. If there is a linkage between states and narrative, then an important weapon in the arsenal of a state is the capacity to block rival narratives. Decades after Said wrote ‘Permission to Narrate’, we can still say that Israel successfully blocks and disrupts the Palestinian narrative.
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