3 October
2011The Palestine
Center
Washington,
DC
Dr. Saree Makdisi:
Thank you all for
coming. It’s of course an honor for me to
present this year’s Palestine Center lecture in
honor of the memory of Edward Said, whose
presence in the past few years many of us have
missed never more urgently, I think, than now
when the Palestinian people and cause seem to
have entered a critical juncture. In
moments of crisis such as the present, he
always seemed to know best how to cut through
the smokescreen of empty platitudes and
misleading discourses and keep his and our eyes
focused on the realities and aspirations that
those discourses often successfully
obscured. Even if it will undoubtedly
fall short of the standard Edward established,
the lecture I would like to offer you today is
very much in his spirit; in every sense of that
term. His work on Palestine was so distinctive
from the work of conventional political
analysts—and was as a result so vitally
important to so many people around the
world—because it operated at two different
levels at once: on the one hand addressing with
crystalline clarity and clinical precision the
urgent questions confronting us in the stark
naked reality of the present, while, on the
other hand, always deriving its energy and its
sense of purpose from the plenitude kept alive
in the realm of ideas, aspirations, rights and
universal concepts such as justice – the realm
to which we might refer as the imaginative and
even the literary, notions to which I will
return a little later on today. Let me
just anticipate my conclusion by saying that
what made Edward’s work so valuable to so many
people around the world was the simple fact
that he refused to relinquish his attachment to
the realm of ideas and ideals, to which more
conventional analysts rarely pay the proper—or
even sometimes any—attention. And he did so not
simply because he was a literary man through
and through, although he was, but because he
understood so well that it is at our peril that
we give up on the vital role that the
imagination plays in any political
struggle.
That the
realm of ideas and imagination is of such vital
importance was illustrated most recently by, of
all people, and personally I’m very surprised
by this myself, Mahmoud Abbas, in the speech he
gave recently at the United Nations General
Assembly. Even many of us who have long
been critical of Mr. Abbas had to admit that
the speech was, at many levels, a stirring
event. And the element that made it stand
out, it seems to me, was precisely its
inclusion of that imaginative and compassionate
register usually totally absent from Abbas’s
speeches. As for example, most notably
probably, when he spoke of the Nakba of 1948
and recalled so vividly to our imaginations the
experiences of those, like himself, who were,
to use his words, “forced to leave their homes
and their towns and villages, carrying only
some of our belongings and our grief and our
memories and the keys of our homes to the camps
of exile and the diaspora.” The standing
ovations which Mr. Abbas received were not for
him really, but really for the extent to which
he conveyed the story of Palestine—and I want
to emphasize that it is a story that he was
conveying—to the single most important global
audience ever, the General Assembly of the
United Nations.
What made Abbas’s
speech so convincing is that it articulated all
the main themes of the Palestinian narrative:
the destruction and dispersal of 1948; the
inalienable right of those expelled in that
year to return to their homes and land; the
right of the Palestinian people to freedom from
military occupation and to freedom from
institutionalized apartheid both in pre-1967
Israel and in the territories occupied and
colonized in that year, and, in general, to
self-determination in their native
land.
What was important about the
Palestinian bid at the UN, then, was its
reassertion of Palestinian autonomy and agency,
an insistence not only on the right to narrate
the story of Palestine and the Palestinians to
a global audience but also on the right to
wrest the question of Palestine itself back
from what it had been reduced to, namely,
merely a tactical device in Israeli and hence
by extension U.S. strategy. As many
commentators have pointed out, the UN bid not
only sidelined but showed the political
bankruptcy of the U.S. insofar as it has
pledged itself to the unending and
unquestioning support of Israel even at the
expense of its own vital national interests in
the Middle East. The more the Palestinian
leadership insisted on its right to seek global
recognition of Palestinian statehood along the
very lines articulated so recently, within a
year, by [U.S.] President [Barack] Obama
himself, the more cornered the United States
seemed to become. The more the United
States refused to countenance recognizing the
legitimate rights of the Palestinian people,
the more it shrank to irrelevance in the eyes
of 360 million Arabs, who are today among the
world’s most politically mobilized
peoples. The more President Obama, with
his eye on the 2012 elections here, pledged his
support for and encouragement of Israel, the
more isolated America seemed to become to the
rest of the world—an isolation illustrated so
poignantly by the fact that the only person
sharing the sullen silence of the Israeli
ambassador in the UN during the otherwise
unanimous standing ovation offered to Mr. Abbas
by the world community was the equally sullen
and stone-faced American ambassador to the
UN.
So far, so good. But it would
be a mistake, of course, to praise the
Palestinian bid at the UN without also
recognizing and taking into account its flaws
and pitfalls, however disguised they may have
been by the emotional and imaginative register
successfully addressed in Mr. Abbas’s
speech. The point I want to make here is
quite simple: the UN bid, and the speech
itself, and its reception in the General
Assembly and around the world, revealed the
vast potential—but I want to be precise as a
scholar and use the accurate word, the vast
power—of the Palestinian narrative and cause.
It also revealed the extreme reluctance or
inability of Mr. Abbas and his associates to
actually take full advantage of that power and
use it to its fullest extent. Let’s put
it this way: Mr. Abbas was channeling, he was
deploying, he was holding in his hands almost
literally, a form of power that he
simultaneously seemed to be unwilling or
unprepared to actually use; as though he felt
surprised or uncomfortable or embarrassed to
discover that he actually has any autonomous
power of his own, as derived from his people’s
actual cause, rather than as being assigned to
him by Israeli or American dictates from
above.
For alongside Mr. Abbas’s
depiction of Israel as a criminal state
manifestly engaged in the
internationally-prohibited crimes of
colonialism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing
there was a recurring insistence in the speech
not on calling Israel to account and holding it
responsible for the criminal activities that he
was amply enumerating—which would be the
logical culmination of where you’re going in
that kind of argument—but, on the contrary, a
hapless, downplaying, almost pleading
insistence that he does not seek to isolate
Israel or to question its legitimacy, as though
he ought to feel sorry or apologize for
delineating the crimes committed against his
people, rather than pressing them home.
Similarly, buried within the fine and stirring
outlines of the Palestinian narrative in the
speech there was a series of positive
references also to the same tired old peace
process and its empty vocabulary of vacuous
gestural proceedings—Oslo [Accords] and the
Road Map and the Quartet, and final status
negotiations—whose demise the speech itself was
also supposed to mark.
Dig a
little beneath the surface, in other words, and
you find an event riven with contradictions,
running alternately backwards and forwards, hot
and cold, forthright and defensive. And as with
the speech, so with the letter of application
to the Secretary-General of the UN
itself. On the one hand, Abbas’s letter
of application for recognition of statehood
claims to base itself on UN General Assembly
Resolution 181 of 1947, the Partition Plan of
course, and General Assembly Resolution 194 of
1948, which, in addition to more famously
seeking recognize the Right of Return and
compensation of Palestinians expelled during
the ethnic cleansing of 1948, also demanded
access to and international administration of
holy places throughout historic
Palestine. On the other hand, the letter
also based its claim in reference to Security
Council Resolutions 242 and 338, which address
only the parts of Palestine occupied in
1967.
Just on this one point
there is a huge difference: insofar as Israel
has international legitimacy and recognition,
it is actually in terms of Resolutions 181 and
194, on the basis of which explicitly it was
admitted to UN membership, with roughly half of
historical Palestine. And we should recall of
course that Israel has never declared its
borders and asked other states to recognize
them. So if the Palestinian letter wants
to refer to Resolution 181, why does it not do
so fully and claim at least the other half of
Palestine as the territory of the state it is
seeking to have recognized, an argument for
which there is a very sound basis in
international law? Why limit itself to
the territories occupied in 1967, which amount
to just over a fifth of historic
Palestine? If the letter wants to refer
to Resolution 194, why does it not follow
through with a reminder that that document also
resolved to place the Holy places—including
Nazareth, now inside Israel—under international
administration so that access to holy sites
would be protected? Why does it not point
out Israel’s sweeping failure to fulfill the
demands of Resolution 194, again on the basis
of which it was admitted to membership in the
UN, by refusing to allow the return of the
refugees, by refusing to protect religious
sites not just in the territories occupied in
1967 but throughout historical Palestine,
where, from Acca to Yafa and Beer al-Sabe' to
Jerusalem, it has turned mosques into
discotheques, shrines into barns, and ancient
cemeteries into parks and sites for museums,
most famously the absurd museum of tolerance—so
called—in Jerusalem on the oldest Muslim
cemetery in the city? Why does it not
reiterate the fact that Resolution 194
explicitly says that the whole area of
Jerusalem, from Shuafat in the north to Abu Dis
in the east to Bethlehem in the south, should
not be under Israeli control?
There are other contradictions as
well. In invoking Resolution 194, the
letter of application invokes the single most
important Palestinian claim, namely, the Right
of Return of those expelled during 1948, and
their right to be compensated for their losses
as well. On the other hand, the letter
also claims the authority of the Oslo
agreements, the Road Map, the pronouncements of
the Quartet, all of which disastrously depleted
and diluted the full rights and claims of the
Palestinian people. Why, then, in aiming
to move beyond the road block represented by
the architecture of the so-called peace
process, does the letter of application still
circle round to re-invoke all over again the
very thing it is trying to get around?
What does it mean to appeal, on the one hand,
to the full spectrum of Palestinian rights
already historically recognized by the United
Nations, and, on the other hand, to the pale
shadow of those rights as embodied in the key
documents of the so-called peace process?
Which is it? Hot or cold? New or
old? Assertive or apologetic? Passive or
aggressive?
All of these
contradictions—and there are many more other
than the ones I have touched on—suggest that
Mr. Abbas’s speech, his letter of application
for UN membership, and indeed the whole
political theater at the UN is just that,
political theater, and not really intended to
address or secure the rights of all
Palestinians, but rather to reassert the
failing political fortunes of Mr. Abbas himself
and to tactically reframe rather than
strategically transforming the pointless
negotiations game that he and his associates
have been embarked on for two decades now, with
little to show in return for their efforts
other than an almost tripling of the number of
Jewish colonists settling ever more deeply into
the occupied territories and of course the
simultaneous deeper immobilization and
immiseration of the Palestinian people.
Moreover, as people have pointed out,
the statehood gambit at the UN carries enormous
political risks for the entire Palestinian
people that Mr. Abbas and his associates have
entered into without even consulting
them. As many legal scholars, including
Guy Goodwin-Gill, and more recently a team of
Palestinian legal scholars whose declaration
was circulated by the Maan News [Agency]
recently, have pointed out, there is a pointed
danger that if the place of the [Palestine
Liberation Organization] PLO as the sole
legitimate representative of the entire
Palestinian people is taken at the UN by a
putative Palestinian state representing only
that minority of Palestinians who actually live
in the occupied territories, the majority of
Palestinians might find themselves excluded
from the representation at the world body for
which they struggled so valiantly in the 1960s
and 1970s. There is also the attendant
danger that if Palestinian rights are rewritten
in the UN system on the basis of the much
narrower set of claims concerning statehood in
the territories of 1967, the exercise of the
Right of Return of the refugees and their
descendants as well as the civil and political
and indeed the human rights of the Palestinian
citizens of Israel might be placed in
jeopardy.
And is it really necessary to
ask whether Mr. Abbas and his associates are
prepared to accept the sacrifice of the rights
of the majority of Palestinians in return for
being “given” a state in parts of the West
Bank? If there were any lingering doubts
around this question, surely they should have
been put to rest by the so-called Palestine
Papers leaked to Al Jazeera and the Guardian
earlier this year, which documented in minute
and painful detail the extent to which Abbas
and the disgraced Saeb Erekat–who seems to have
come back, by the way—were willing to go on
pursuing their quest for an illusory
statehood. This is not to mention that,
even as Mr. Abbas was presenting his stirring
speech at the UN, his Israel-armed and
American-trained security forces were busily
cracking down on any sign of dissent in the
towns and refugee camps of the West Bank just
as, it should be pointed out of course, Hamas
forces were cracking down on celebrations of
the event in Gaza. “Security co-operation with
the Palestinians is excellent at the moment and
we do not want to jeopardize that,” a senior
Israeli military official told the British
newspaper The
Independent just the other day, which
alone should lift any doubts about the extent
to which the Palestinian Authority or PA has
become what it was always intended it to be: a
full-blown collaborationist apparatus whose
main function is to facilitate the occupation
and colonization of the West Bank, not to
challenge it or end it.
I raise
these by now familiar criticisms in order to
make the point that Mr. Abbas and his
associates seem not to have noticed the
resurgence of popular democratic activism in
the intifadas sweeping across the
Arab world from Maghreb to Mashreq. For
all the claims to transparency and
accountability and institutional development
claimed by the PA—they published this very
shiny book that you may have seen going around.
It says we’re all clean and shiny and World
Bank certified and all this other stuff—for all
that, in actual fact it remains a profoundly
undemocratic institution. Earlier
suggestions of the PA’s financial corruption
have been mitigated to a certain extent and
replaced by the much more serious charge of its
out and out collaboration with the Israeli
occupation. The unelected—and I emphasize
that in the context of the Arab
Spring—leadership in Ramallah which, having
been swept from office in popular elections in
2006, was brought back to office almost
literally on the turret of an Israeli tank,
remains completely uninterested in any
accounting for the scandal of the Palestine
Papers or anything else for that matter.
Mr. Abbas and his associates have made zero
effort to reach out and explain to their people
in any detail their vision and strategy, much
less to actually try to secure popular
legitimacy for the high-stakes poker game they
are playing at the UN, in which all
Palestinians, not merely an unrepresentative
and unelected clique of middle-aged men, have a
stake.
As they have done
since entering into this series of negotiations
at Oslo in 1993, they keep only their own
counsels, and make no effort to engage the
prominent and global body of Palestinian
expertise in water rights, geography,
international law, negotiating strategy,
refugee rights, demographics and so
forth. Above all they still cling to the
empty carapace of precisely the same hopeless
program and the same meaningless jargon of
“final status negotiations”—a phrase you can
tell I dislike intensely—and road maps and
quartets, and the same failed two-state
strategy, to which they have been committed for
two decades with, as I’ve said before, nothing
to show for their effort. In the age of
the Arab Spring, these guys look like the
left-behind and even—if that is possible—lesser
versions of [Yemeni President] Ali Abdallah
Saleh and [former Egyptian President] Hosni
Mubarak and [former Tunisian President] Zein
al-Abidine Ben Ali.
Let me put it this
way: the idea that the rights of some
Palestinians can be addressed in a two-state
solution that ignores or actually undermines
the rights of the majority of Palestinians is
doomed to failure. It should never have
been embarked upon in the first place.
The mere fact that the loudest champions of the
creation of a Palestinian state in parts of the
West Bank are Israelis running the gamut from
softcore liberal Zionists to seasoned and canny
politicians like Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni
should be the clearest warning necessary that
there is something profoundly flawed with this
idea from a Palestinian perspective. “The
Palestinian declaration of independence,” wrote
Sefi Rachlevsky in the Israeli paper Yedioth
Ahronoth the other day, “practically
constitutes a victory for Israel’s declaration
of independence, and this is why Israelis must
celebrate in the streets and be the first to
recognize Palestinian independence,
calling on the world to follow suit.” The point
being made here is that if Palestinians
officially declare that what they seek is only
a state in the West Bank and nothing else, that
relieves Israel of the challenge of democratic
and equal rights for all citizens, including
returned refugees, which constitutes of course
the nightmare facing the Israelis.
Let us be absolutely clear about
this. Palestinians living inside Israel
today face a mounting set of ideological,
legal, religious, political and material forms
of repression unlike anything they have ever
faced in their past, including when they lived
under martial law for two decades. A new
wave of explicitly racist laws targets them as
a reviled non-Jewish minority, and strips them
of their right to land, to family unification,
to education, to housing and even to historical
memory. There’s a law that bans you from
commemorating the Nakba of 1948.
Nowhere is the repression of Israel’s
Palestinians more starkly evident than in the
Naqab desert in the south, where Palestinian
Bedouin have been subjected recently to a form
of relentless victimization that seems to
recapitulate again and again, week after week,
almost day after day, the experience of the
Nakba—in fact, to remind us that the Nakba
began but did not end in 1948. Every
single structure in the village of Al-Araqib,
for example, in the Naqab has been demolished
by Israeli bulldozers not once or twice or
three times or ten times but twenty times in
the past year alone. Twenty times. They
demolished an entire village and the people
rebuilt it again. Twenty times in one
year. Just last month, the Israeli government
prepared new plans to transfer—yes, that word,
transfer—30,000 Palestinian Bedouin in the
Naqab from their ancestral lands to new
concentration points, as Israelis call them, in
order to safeguard the nakedly racist Zionist
vision of a Negev free of Arabs.
What
would a Palestinian state in the West Bank do
for the residents of Al-Araqib and the other
1.5 million Palestinians inside Israel, other
than condemn them all the more to their status
as reviled and degraded non-Jews cluttering up
the space of a supposedly Jewish
state?
Meanwhile, the Palestinian
refugees, the single largest component of the
Palestinian people, continue to languish in the
exile to which they have been condemned for
over six decades, living not only in
disgraceful circumstances in refugee camps in
Lebanon, Syria and Jordan but also ever more
subject to the political violence sweeping
across the Arab world, as we are reminded by
the total obliteration of the Nahr el-Bared
refugee camp in north Lebanon a couple of years
ago, or the more recent bombardment of
Palestinian refugee camps in Syria.
What would a state in the West Bank do
for the residents of Sabra or Shatila or Nahr
el-Bared, other than confirm their condemnation
to a fate of being left to their own devices as
a permanent human flotsam and jetsam, the
detritus of a catastrophe whose making we are
to believe can be taken off the table of
history?
How are we to forget the
catastrophe of 1948 in all that it represents
in human terms today? Here we are,
clearly, on the familiar terrain of the
argument between the dwindling number of
Palestinians still espousing a two-state
solution and the growing number advocating a
one-state solution, an issue I don’t intend to
dwell on at great length because I have in
numerous other contexts documented my own
position in that debate, which is that the
Palestinians are one people, who share one
cause, and the only path to a just peace is to
address the rights of all Palestinians, not
just the minority who have suffered under
occupation since 1967. I do, however,
have one or two things I want to add about this
debate in view of the ongoing uprisings
sweeping across the Arab world and also UN
statehood bid.
And I want to do
so by pointing out something I couldn’t help
noticing in the text of the letter applying for
UN membership for Palestine to the UN.
For there are actually two contradictory lines
to the signature in the letter [Slide]; one
identifying Mr. Abbas as the President of the
State of Palestine; and the other identifying
him as the Chairman of the PLO. The
question that this contradiction raised in my
mind—this could be because I’m a literary kind
of guy and this is the kind of thing that
interests me in my scholarship—is not the one
about whether Mr. Abbas really can claim to be
President of the State of Palestine, because
the state doesn’t really actually exist and
anyway he was never elected to be president of
Palestine and his term as President of the PA
expired almost three years ago, now. I
don’t want to talk about that. What I’ve been
wondering about, in looking at this signature,
is the relationship between the “Palestine”
referred to in the line, “State of Palestine,”
and the “Palestine” referred to in the line,
“Palestine Liberation Organization.” Is
the “Palestine” that the Palestine Liberation
Organization aims to liberate the same
“Palestine” as the “Palestine” whose
independence and statehood Mr. Abbas is
asserting? If not, what happened, and
what happens, to that other wider and more
inclusive vision of Palestine? Are we
really to accept that the newly redefined
“Palestine” Lite or Palestine 2.0 should take
the place of the original Palestine? Can
we accept that the West Bank can become
“Palestine” in the way that my arm or leg could
become me, in some strange sense? Or is
there something still vitally important about
the Palestinian insistence that Palestine—the
original and only Palestine—is their ancestral
homeland in which they demand the realization
of their inalienable rights as a people; those
who are presently refugees, who have the right
to return to homes and land from which they
were wrongfully expelled in 1948; those who are
the survivors of of 1948 and are now living in
Haifa and Acca and al-Nasra and Shefa Amr and
Yafa and Al-Araqib, who have the right to live
as free and equal citizens in their own land;
and those suffering under occupation in Khan
Yunis and Bethlehem and al-Khalil and Nablus
who have the same right?
It
is true that the one-state solution, which I
personally advocate, is not the only way to
address and guarantee the rights of all
Palestinians. In principle, there could
be a two-state solution that also guaranteed
the Right of Return of refugees, including the
refugees of Gaza, by the way, to their homes
inside what is today Israel, and guarantee the
rights of present-day Palestinian citizens of
Israel. But that is not the two-state
solution that we are now—or have ever been
talking about—because the Israelis have made it
abundantly clear that they will never accept a
state in which Jews would be outnumbered by
non-Jews.
Precisely on this
point—about what the Israelis say they will or
won’t accept—that a few words are in order
about the terms we often hear about in these
kinds of discussions: realism, pragmatism and
expectations, a set of terms that often comes
up in the one-state / two-state debate.
The worst habit it seems to me of the
advocating a two-state solution is that they
never stop congratulating themselves on how
pragmatic and realistic they are, as opposed to
those supposedly dreamy and unrealistic, if not
downright romantic one-staters. One
reason they congratulate themselves is that
they say a two-state solution is more realistic
because the Israelis will never accept a
one-state solution; and therefore, they say, we
have to be pragmatic and accept this as
fact. But as I just said, the Israelis
are no more willing to accept a two-state
solution that recognizes and embraces the Right
of Return and the equal rights of present
Palestinian citizens of Israel than they are
willing to accept a one-state solution that
treats all citizens as equals. What,
then, is a partial two-state solution worth, if
it leaves the majority of Palestinians high and
dry?
Is it really realistic and
pragmatic to expect Palestinians to determine
their rights and articulate their aspirations
on the basis of what Israelis deem to be
acceptable? Is it really realistic to say
that what the Palestinians can achieve depends
on what the Israelis are willing to have them
address? I think not. Those who
claim to be so realistic and pragmatic seem not
to have ever a passing knowledge with
documented empirical reality of historical
experience, which teaches us over and over
again that no privileged group in the history
of the world has ever voluntarily renounced its
privileges; not King Charles I of England, who
was executed by his people in 1649; not the
British aristocracy in the nineteenth century,
who faced a popular challenge to transform an
aristocratic country into a democratic one; not
the slave-owning classes of the American south;
not the white elites of the U.S. in the civil
rights era of the 1960s; and not the white
beneficiaries of apartheid in South Africa in
the 1970s and 1980s.
History—and by this I mean real, hard
history—teaches us that privileged groups
relinquish their privileges only when they have
no other choice—and that, historically
speaking, such abandonments of privilege have
been brought about nonviolently at least as
often as they have been brought about
violently. If we want to be realistic and
pragmatic and look to history for our examples,
we have to begin by realizing that the Israelis
will never countenance a relinquishing of their
privileges until they are compelled to do so,
preferably, as far as I’m concerned, by
nonviolent means. And it is at least as
realistic to seek to compel them to accept the
parameters of a single democratic and secular
state, a state that guarantees the rights of
all minorities, as it is to compel them to
accept a cobbled together a two-state solution
that properly addresses Palestinian rights by
having an Israel with a Jewish minority, which
totally obviates the need to have two separate
states to begin with.
So much for the
realism of our expectations. A couple of
more points before I wrap up in what I want to
say today. And I want to talk about the
other claims to realism made by the advocates
of a partial two-state solution. Citing
[UN] Resolutions 242 and 338, they continually
repeat the claim that their vision is more
realistic than the one-state vision because it
has a basis in international law and in an
international consensus. This again is
facile, it seems to me, because there is an
equally strong basis in international law for
the one-state solution, namely, [UN] Resolution
194 and the wide range of international legal
covenants prohibiting the forms of racial
discrimination and apartheid on which the very
notion of an exclusively Jewish state depends
for its existence, at least insofar as it is
created in a historically not exclusively
Jewish land. As for this international
consensus about which we hear so often, it
would be folly for the advocates of Palestinian
rights to forget that this so-called consensus
was not something that the family of nations
agreed to and presented to the Palestinians: it
is something that Palestinians themselves
maintained an earnest and dedicated struggle
not merely to put it on, but to force it on the
world’s agenda, in the 1960s, 1970s and
1980s.
Have people seriously
forgotten the moment, a mere 20 years ago, when
the very idea of a Palestinian state and even a
two-state solution seemed laughable? Do
people really think that a Palestinian state as
recognized, for all its flaws, by an
overwhelming majority of the countries and
populations of the world, was simply dropped
out of the sky by a passing alien sky
ship? The very talk of a
Palestinian state is something happening today
that the Palestinian people made happen,
against the established global powers of the
time, in the face of entrenched Israeli and
American opposition and the indifference of the
Europeans, through their sheer determination,
sacrifice and force of will. The only
thing stopping the Palestinians from demanding
the full spectrum of their rights are the
Palestinians themselves, or, rather, the
completely outmoded and worn-out leaderships in
both Ramallah and Gaza, whose political
projects have now, we can safely say, run their
course.
Let me clarify what
I am trying to say here by going back to the
standing ovation that Mr. Abbas received at the
United Nations. On that day, the
representatives of the vast majority of the
human race stood and celebrated for the people
of Palestine and the Palestinian cause in a way
that is almost unimaginable for almost any
other people or cause. What do you call,
I might ask, the ability, without any other
inducement—there’s no army, there’s no
superpower, there’s no money, there’s no IMF
[International Monetary Fund], there’s no
nothing—than an appeal to the imagination, to
move hundreds and hundreds of millions of
people around the entire world, who have over
and over again, for six decades, steadfastly
demonstrated their support and solidarity with
the Palestinian people and their cause?
What do you call that capacity, that
potential?
In a word, you call it
power. That’s what it is. To move
millions and millions of people; it’s power.
It’s a form of power.
My point here is
really quite simple: the Palestinian people
have far, far more power than they sometimes
allow themselves to think or to believe;
certainly, and demonstrably, far more power
than Mr. Abbas felt comfortable wielding at the
UN, as I was trying to suggest earlier.
However, the Palestinians’ power does not
function—in fact, it’s totally disabled. It
becomes a liability even—at the polite
diplomatic negotiating table, or on the
battlefield.
Switch the terrain,
however, from the negotiating table between
totally unequal parties backed by, we all know,
an even more unequal party, the U.S., and the
battlefield to the realm of ideas and of the
imagination, and ask yourselves in all
seriousness who has the upper hand there in the
realm, in that domain, on that plane of
existence: the Israelis, who are engaged in a
hopeless defense of a brittle, racist,
ethno-religious colonial state project that is
like a fish out of water in the twenty-first
century? Or the Palestinians, who have
over and over again demonstrated their ability
to instantly reach out and touch the hearts and
minds and imaginations of a global audience of
hundreds of millions of people? From the
first intifada of the 1980s to the current
nonviolent protests along the apartheid wall in
the West Bank, a struggle that engages and
activates a global imaginary realm from
Hollywood films to the work of the London
street artist Banksy, the Palestinians have
repeatedly made clear that at the level of
symbols and the imagination, the Israelis, for
all their vast and paid armies of hasbara
agents, web crawlers, Wikipedia writers—they
have an army of people writing on Wikipedia all
the time—Facebook propagandists, people who
tweet, the agitators on campuses, they can’t
touch the Palestinians at this level; the level
of the imaginary and the symbolic. When
is the last time an Israeli won a public debate
against a Palestinian? I don’t think I’ve
ever seen it happen, personally.
My point here is that it is not just
pointless but an altogether doomed strategy for
the Palestinians to try to achieve their rights
in the domains and registers—including state
diplomacy—in which they hold no cards and in
which in fact the deck is stacked against them,
when they could be operating at the level of
the imaginary, where they completely outclass
their opponents.
Let me just add
one or two further details before wrapping
up.
In shifting their struggle
from the plane of state diplomacy to the plane
of the symbolic and the imaginary, the
Palestinians must make it absolutely clear, in
the simplest and most straightforward and
easily digestible form, what it is that they
demand. A strong message needs clarity,
focus, precision. Here, the one-state
solution is far, far more readily transmissible
and understandable than any other formulation
of what a just and lasting peace would look
like from a Palestinian perspective.
Indeed from an Israeli perspective, I should
add. It simply and neatly, in capsule
form, outlines and expresses a vision of
rights—rights for all Palestinians: those
inside Israel, and also embracing and
encompassing the rights of Jewish Israelis—that
is not only unimpeachable but also
irrepressible, irresistible.
On
that point, don’t just take my word for it. In
a talk I gave in this very room three, four
years ago, I quoted then Prime Minister [Ehud]
Olmert who was speaking in November 2003, and
explaining his vision of the future and the
possible alternatives towards a peace
settlement. And I’m quoting Olmert here,
not my favorite person in the entire world, as
you can imagine. He
says:
“There is no
doubt in my mind that very soon the government
of Israel is going to have to address the
demographic issue with the utmost seriousness
and resolve. This issue above all others
will dictate the solution that we must adopt. .
. . We don’t have unlimited time.
More and more Palestinians are uninterested in
a negotiated, two-state solution, because they
want to change the essence of the conflict from
an Algerian paradigm [of armed resistance to
occupation] to a South African one. From
a struggle against ‘occupation,’ in their
parlance, to a struggle for
one-man-one-vote. That is, of course, a
much cleaner struggle, a much more popular
struggle—and ultimately a much more powerful
one.”
That’s Ehud Olmert himself;
hardly a sympathetic man when it comes to
Palestinian rights. This is an argument
that he reiterated in 2003, 2004, 2006,
2007. He said it over and over and over
again and, of course, he’s perfectly
right.
So my question is, what
are the Palestinians waiting for? Why
should they continue to play along in the
self-mutilating role assigned to them by an
Israeli narrative of domination when they are
in a position to throw that narrative into
total disarray, and turn it on its head and
move it to a position which even their
opponents acknowledge it’s impossible for them
to resist.
One last point.
When I speak of the Palestinian struggle
embarking in this new direction, I am speaking
not about a future condition but a present
one. The regular nonviolent
protests involving also Israeli and
international participation along the Wall in
the West Bank, for example; the global campaign
for BDS, boycotts, divestments and sanctions,
modeled on the campaign that was successful in
ending apartheid in South Africa. The BDS
movement is very interesting. My favorite
example of the BDS movement remains the 2010
Davis Cup tennis match in Sweden. The
match was supposed to be played in
Stockholm. At the last minute, fearing
protests, the Swedish authorities moved the
match from Stockholm to Malmo. The
Israeli and Swedish tennis players played
tennis in a totally empty stadium while outside
there was still a huge protest. It’s
amazing to consider that spectacle, especially
when you see it in photographic form [Slide].
This is a protest that, by the way, they
weren’t even expecting because they moved it at
the last minute. These guys are playing tennis
in a completely empty stadium. There are
other movements as well, other than BDS.
The Gaza Youth Break Out, for example, a new
generation of Palestinian activists, fluent and
comfortable speaking in English to a global
audience in a way that their parents never
were, savvy in new media and social media such
as Facebook and Twitter, in the realm of
music—hip hop bands like DAM—cinema. Think of
what a historic accomplishment it is for Hani
Abu Asad to have won the Golden Globe for
“Paradise Now”. A Golden Globe for a
Palestinian film about suicide bombing? That’s
stunning, if you think about it. Think
about what that means, what the
represents? These people are
already leading the way in charting the future
of the Palestinian struggle, taking it to the
terrain of language, symbols and the
imagination where Palestinians are a force to
be reckoned with.
I would like to
conclude by taking us back to where I began
today, that is, an explicit engagement with the
role of the imagination in political
struggle. I want to do so because I want
to make it absolutely clear to any lingering
realists in the room that appealing to the
imagination and to hope itself is not merely,
as it is often dismissed by realists, a dreamy
and visionary gesture that does not translate
into political capital, but, on the contrary,
that any political struggle forsakes a claim to
the imagination and to hope at its peril.
Let me put it somewhat differently: there can
be no political transformation without
hope. In fact, of all people, Barack
Obama demonstrated that to us a couple of years
ago. Hope, in other words, is not
something that exists in the future; hope is
something that makes the future
happen.
To clarify this point, I want to
shift finally away from an immediate focus on
Palestine to a domain that is quite different
but nevertheless very relevant, a domain in
which, incidentally, Edward Said found both
solace and inspiration—namely, the
literary. I could proceed here by talking
about the role of literature in the Palestinian
struggle—the significance of musicians or poets
from Mahmoud Darwish to Tamim Barghouti—but
instead I want to underline what I think is the
broader significance of this point by invoking
the field of study which Edward completely
revolutionized, namely, English
literature. The two examples I have in
mind are the two great English poets, of whom
I’m personally very interested in, [William]
Blake and [Percy] Shelley. Blake, first
of all, who wrote in the last year of his life
that “the history of all times and places is
nothing else but improbabilities,
impossibilities. What we should say was
impossible if we did not see it always before
our eyes.” It’s an astonishing line because
what it captures is precisely that sense that
we have to always hang on to what we are always
told is impossible and dream because it’s
always happening anyway. You can never
relinquish the impossible. You should
always hang on to the potential of the
impossible. That’s one of Blake’s great
messages.
Finally, I want to end
with a very short sonnet by the great English
poet Percy Shelley. It’s a poem that he
wrote in 1819, in fact it’s called “England in
1819.” And I want to say one or two things
very, very quickly by way of context.
Shelley was a famous advocate of democratic
rights for the people of English.
Remember, England in the nineteenth century was
not a democratic country. It was a very,
very oppressive aristocratic regime. Most
people had no rights. Two percent, 3
percent of people had the right to vote.
There was a large democratic struggle for the
people’s rights which took 200 years to
accomplish but Shelley was an ardent proponent
of these rights. He wrote the poem I’m
about to show you and talk about in the single
darkest moment of that entire struggle for
democracy in England after a group of
demonstrators in the city of Manchester was
massacred by the constabulary. They were
peacefully protesting, demanding the right to
vote, annual parliaments and universal suffrage
and this kind of thing. The police force
massacred them. It was called the
Peterloo Massacre in 1819. In the darkest
moment of the struggle, Percy Shelley wrote the
poem that I want to talk about and I’ll read it
to you. Of course, it’s referring to the
King of England, George III, who was then
dying, about to be replaced by the Prince
Regent, George IV. Let me read it to
you.
An old, mad, blind,
despised, and dying king,--
Princes, the
dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through
public scorn,--mud from a muddy
spring,--
Rulers who neither see, nor feel,
nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting
country cling,
Till they drop, blind in
blood, without a blow,--
A people starved
and stabbed in the untilled field,--
An
army, which liberticide and prey
Makes as a
two-edged sword to all who wield,--
Golden
and sanguine laws which tempt and
slay;
Religion Christless, Godless--a book
sealed;
A Senate,--Time's worst statute
unrepealed,--
Are graves, from which a
glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our
tempestous day.
What you see in Shelley
writing this in the darkest possible moment in
English history, one of the darkest moments in
English history, in the very darkness itself is
the vision of light and hope. Shelley, of
course, is a great poet and, of course, I’m a
scholar of British romanticism so it’s not a
coincidence that I like Shelley but his role
just wasn’t as a poet read by professors of
English literature. He was also always
read by the people engaged in democratic
protest. There were illegal, pirated
copies of Shelley’s poetry circulating among
people demonstrating and protesting. The
people in Peterloo had copies of Shelley’s
poetry. He’s somebody whose poetry
animated and moved people to protest. The
poetry of Shelley, including this poem, helped
bring about the very hope that he’s
articulating. It took two or three more
decades but finally did accomplish their rights
through nonviolent protest, by the way, against
all the forces of an established order, an
armed monarchy. They did it because they
had hope. So what I want to say to the
Palestinians is hope is the key to political
struggle. It’s not something you should
ever let go. Thank you.
Dr. Saree
Makdisi is a Professor of English and
Comparative Literature at UCLA, and the author
of Romantic
Imperialism (Cambridge University Press,
1998), William Blake and the Impossible
History of the 1790s (University of
Chicago Press, 2003), and Palestine Inside
Out: An Everyday Occupation (WW Norton,
2008; revised and updated, with a new foreword
by Alice Walker,
2010).
This
transcript may be used without permission but
with proper attribution
to The Palestine Center. The speakers' views do
not necessarily reflect
the views of The Jerusalem
Fund. 
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