-Caveat Lector-
From http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/1999/453/op2.htm
{{Begin}}
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
