-Caveat Lector-
>From http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/1999/453/op2.htm
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By birth or by choice?
By Edward Said
One of the most frequently cited phrases uttered by John F. Kennedy was "Ich
bin ein berliner," on the occasion of his 1961 visit to the city which had been
recently divided by an East German wall. "I am a Berliner," he said to the
tumultuous acclaim of his audience there, as well as in the whole world. An act
of solidarity and perhaps even of courage was imparted to him, that a man so
removed from the difficulties of living in a tortured city should say that he
too felt that he shared its citizens' agonised fate. No one questioned his
right to do that, or to say that he hadn't lived in Germany long enough.
Similarly, when the rebellious Paris students in 1968 proclaimed loudly that
"nous sommes tous des juifs," (we are all Jews) as a way of expressing their
solidarity with the Jews who had been deported and exterminated by the Nazis,
no one that I remember argued with their right to do so, or criticised them for
taking on another identity for the moral purpose of accepting and assuming the
sufferings of fellow-humans.
So it has been with many people throughout the world -- including those in Arab
countries -- whose feelings of compassion and moral solidarity with Israel's
Palestinian victims has caused them in effect to choose to become Palestinian.
The late Eqbal Ahmad, Indian by birth, Pakistani by nationality, always
referred to himself as one of "us", a Palestinian by choice if not by birth.
Yet so distorted and reprehensible has public discourse become about the Middle
East, so influenced by Western Zionists, that even to admit to being a
Palestinian by birth has long carried the stigma of delinquency and even
criminality. I recall quite clearly in my own case that, when I had completed
my first university degree and had begun to study for my PhD, when asked I
would identify myself as an Arab quite consciously, that is, purposely avoiding
the problems of explaining that I was really Palestinian, from Jerusalem, and
so on. It is, I willingly concede, to the everlasting credit of the PLO in the
years between 1968 and 1982 that its emergence made it possible for all
Palestinians to identify themselves as belonging to one people, in effect a
nation, albeit one in exile and dispossessed. And during the Intifada that
sense of proudly belonging to an identity bravely fighting for its own
preservation against efforts made to extinguish or deny it spread everywhere.
In Prague, resistance to one-party rule was often visibly in evidence on the
Intifada T-shirts worn by young demonstrators. That was also true in South
Africa during the last days of apartheid in 1990-'91: to be a Palestinian in
revolt against Israeli occupation soldiers was in effect to give greater depth
and meaning to the struggle against racial discrimination.
It is surely one of the ironies of history that the Palestinian people's
greatest historical enemy -- the Zionist movement and its more militant
ideologists -- was energised precisely by the same idea: that one can strongly
assume one's identity as a Jew rather than quietly submit to assimilation as a
Polish, Russian, American or British citizen. Most histories of Zionism show
that for the movement's organisers the greatest problem was to persuade Jews in
the diaspora that their identity as Jews by birth was not enough: they had to
take on the additional national identity of Jews "returning" to Zion for their
natal origins to fulfill themselves. And so it has been recently with
Palestinians who for years after 1948 were subsumed (willingly as well as
unwillingly) into the melting-pot of whatever country they resided in, until,
given an opportunity to take on the choice of being a Palestinian for purposes
of political struggle, they did so in the years since 1970. This does not
contradict Rashid Khalidi's thesis in his recent book on Palestinian identity,
where he argues that one can discern a distinct national Palestinian identity
that goes well back in history through the culture, civil society, and
political rhetoric. The point to be made in addition is that identity by choice
is a political commitment to be Palestinian, as an active commitment not just
to the establishment of a separate state, but to the more significant cause of
ending injustice and liberating Palestinians into a new secular identity able
to take its place within contemporary history.
The pressures against making that choice today are increasing on an hourly
basis. One of the principal objectives of the Oslo process so eagerly embraced
by the US and Israel is a paradoxical one since it implicitly accepts (and then
annuls) the notion that Palestinian identity is in principle an identity based
on more than narrow nationalist grounds. To look back at recent history is to
note that throughout the '70s and '80s being Palestinian meant being in the
forefront of several liberationist struggles, not the least of which were those
that went far beyond the Arab world, in places like South Africa, Latin
America, Ireland and elsewhere in Europe, as well as Asia. I can testify to
this in a recent encounter with a Maori intellectual from New Zealand, who came
up to me after a lecture and proceeded to inform me in detail how much the
struggle for Palestinian rights has meant for the Maori movement for at least
three decades. I have encountered the same enthusiasm in places like India,
Korea and Ireland, by no means among extremists but rather in the writings and
practice of civil libertarians, secularists, women's groups, for whom the very
idea of Palestinian identity signified far more than a simple ethnic
nationalism. It meant acting against the forces of religious obscurantism,
gender discrimination, economic inequality and the like. Clearly the potency of
this Palestinian identity was behind the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon,
during which Ariel Sharon's aim was scarcely as limited as just destroying the
PLO's negligible military threat. Recall how one of the first things his troops
did when they entered West Beirut in September of that year was to steal the
PLO Research Centre's archives, a symbol of what in effect Palestinian identity
had become in terms of sheer intellectual and moral potency.
Oslo was designed in part to break the back of this larger notion of identity,
to drive Palestinians back into their Gaza and West Bank towns, villages, clans
where they could be encircled, confined, cut down to size both by Israel and
the US on the one hand and, most lamentably, by their own national authority.
That effort and aspect of Oslo has succeeded, but the centre of attention has
now shifted to the 4.5 million Palestinians who still remain in exile, and
whose persistent stubbornness in expressing their identity by choice is
symbolised by the right of return they continue to maintain. This is not merely
a geographical wish or demand. It is at least five things more. It is the right
to have one's own abode. It is the right to remain there. It is the right to
repatriation. It is the right to compensation and restitution. It is the
collective right of association (we want to be Palestinian where we want to be)
and of residence. It is the right to coexist on an equal footing with Israeli
Jews.
Quite clearly, the Palestinian Authority symbolises the defeat and abridgement
of most of these rights. The burden for the rest of us -- and here, I do not
speak only of Palestinians by birth -- is to resist the attempt to cut us and
our ideas down merely to matters of birth and actual residence whose final
arbiter is Israel. Thus current "international" plans to resettle the vast
majority of refugees include sending them to places like Iraq, Canada, the US,
even Jordan, as well as pressuring countries that have large Palestinian
communities (e.g., Lebanon) into giving Palestinians citizenship and residence
where they already live. Although official Palestinian rhetoric today insists
on the right of return, the Authority's past performances on matters of stated
principle does not provide a convincing precedent. Besides, Israel's position
since its inception in 1948 has been flatly to deny Palestinians anything like
a right of return while insisting on the absolute right of any Jew anywhere
both to "return" and to unconditional Israeli citizenship.
In such a situation, then, to choose Palestinian identity means in effect to
resist what the final status Oslo negotiations will have to offer. This is not
just a negative thing. It means insisting on the national and political rights
that have been denied us as a people by the British (one mustn't forget that
the Balfour Declaration of 1917 offered Jews political rights as a nation,
whereas it promised Palestinians only religious and civil rights) and later by
Israel and the US (and, it would seem, most of the Arab states). It also means
that we stand firm on the matter of identity as something more significant and
politically democratic than mere residence and subservience to what Israel
offers us. What we ask for as Palestinians is the right to be citizens and not
just numbers in the ultimately losing game being played by the Oslo
participants. It is worth pointing out moreover that Israelis will also be the
losers if they accept the narrow-minded and ungenerous definition of the
Palestinians as a subject people confined to a "homeland" being manipulated by
their government. In a decade, there will be demographic parity between Jews
and Arabs in historical Palestine. Better that we accommodate to each other
sooner rather than later as full members of a binational secular state than to
go on fighting what has been demeaningly called a shepherd's war between
feuding tribes. To choose that identity is to make history. Not to choose is to
disappear.
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