By Edward Said I was last in Palestine during February and March of this year, making my BBC film -- In Search of Palestine -- which, alas, after having been shown on BBC2 in May and then on BBC-World in late June, has more or less disappeared. Although it has been screened here and there on college campuses, in people's homes, in one or two public places in Palestine and Israel, the BBC was totally unsuccessful in getting it on US television, which is where it might have done something to rectify the ludicrously misleading and even stupid picture most Americans now have of the Palestinian people and "the peace process". So far as I know, BBC marketing was scarcely more successful with European and Arab television services. What we were especially conscious of as we filmed in places like Hebron, Bethlehem and Jerusalem was the mostly unpleasant quality of everyday life for the average Palestinian, whose capacity to earn money or travel has been severely curtailed since Oslo, whose land and homes are constantly threatened or being lost, and whose life under Chairman Arafat's dreadful Authority (buttressed by CIA and Mossad support) has become a nightmare. At least it had been possible to render in images the tiny bit of territory -- about three per cent -- that the Authority controlled -- controlled, that is, except for exits and entrances, water resources, and security, all of which Israel still holds on to. The film's last scene put things very starkly: land was being expropriated on a daily basis, with no one, certainly no one official, able to stop the dreaded Israeli bulldozers with troops who descend on unprotected villagers and immediately begin their destructive, ruthlessly efficient work. This time -- for the eight days I was there in mid-November -- the Wye Plantation agreement was still fresh in memory, but just as quickly dismissed by everyone I spoke to. I had the impression that, somewhere off the main stage, there were teams of Israeli and Palestinian researchers making sense of the agreement. There is now an amazing network of institutes and thinktanks throughout the Palestinian territories, most of them funded by the Europeans, singly or in groups, many of which work together with Israeli counterparts. Since I am neither a professional expert, nor a policy-maker, nor a journalist, nor a candidate for a job, I became aware of this rather sizable enterprise, which employs many PhDs, out of my rear-view mirror, so to speak, rarely in full frontal view. Undoubtedly a great deal is invested in this peace agreement/process. Preparations were already under way for the opening of the Gaza Airport -- Shyam Bhatia, the Guardian correspondent, almost persuaded me to go down to Gaza just to see the place, into which over $65 million had already been poured, a staggering contrast with the hundreds of thousands of poor refugees eking out a miserable living all through the Strip -- and for the upcoming meeting of the National Council, which is supposed to be addressed by Bill Clinton while it tears up or modifies the legendary Covenant for the fourth time. Repetition is a constant theme wherever I go. The same questions are asked. The same things are said (e.g. Arafat's promise to declare a state on 4 May l999; a state was already declared in l988). The Covenant is to be changed, yet again. And still the Israeli settlers are everywhere to be found, more villages threatened, more roads built, more lands taken. Abu Mazen, Arafat's number two, says that Ariel Sharon is no longer the same man who invaded Lebanon, laid siege to Beirut for two months, bombed the city indiscriminately in l982, was responsible for Sabra and Shatila. I was surprised that he didn't also defend General Pinochet on the same grounds. Azmi Bishara, the charismatic Palestinian Knesset member, had set up a public meeting for me in Nazareth where I was to encounter Palestinian Israelis for the first time in such a forum. A friend, Mouin Rabbani, who works in a twinning venture with Dutch and Palestinian Municipal Councils, drove me from the last lunch during Bir Zeit's University's exhilarating conference on landscape in Palestine, to Nazareth via Nablus, Jenin and Afula, a three-hour drive. Just outside Nablus, we picked up a young hitch-hiker who was going to Zabbabdeh, a Christian village about ten kilometres from Jenin in the northern West Bank. During our conversation it transpired that our passenger was a croupier-in-training at the new Palestinian casino just opened in Jericho. "Do you travel this way every day?" we asked him, the inconvenience and length of the route uppermost in our minds. "No, just until the training is over. As it is, I only have to be there for a few hours a day while the casino runs on a part-time schedule. Once our training is over and the casino runs 24 hours a day, we'll live in dormitories next to it; the Austrian manager lives in one of the nearby Israeli settlements, as do all the foreign staff." Not being a casino habitué myself, I tried to find out what exactly he was being trained for. Blackjack, he said in English, which as it turned out I knew how to play (unlike poker, baccarat, or craps, in which he was next to be schooled, whose rules had always eluded me). He seemed tickled by this admission. As we entered Zabbabdeh I said something about it seeming to be a prosperous town. "We have everything here," the young man said. "Even Fee-agra." I didn't get that last one, until he explained what he had meant. Viagra. Uneven development, to say the least. In Nazareth, Azmi had rented Frank Sinatra Hall for the evening. Yes, Frank Sinatra, a longtime supporter of Israel, who had apparently donated the money for a sports facility to be used by Jews and Arabs (Nazareth being the largest Arab town in Israel proper); later the facility was converted into a meeting centre for the Histadrut, and when we arrived there it was explained to me that it was always available to rent for meetings -- "even for me", I thought to myself. I was flattered that quite a large audience (for a Sunday night) had fetched up to see and listen to me, all of them Israeli Palestinian citizens whose number in the aggregate is about one million people, about 20 per cent of Israel's population. Azmi represents the new breed of l948 Palestinians, as they are called: he is terrifyingly fluent (quadri-lingual in Arabic, Hebrew, English and German), and has an in-your-face style with Israelis that comes from familiarity and knowledge and a total lack of fear. Above all he is a brilliant man much admired by his constituents, who see him neither as a lackey of one of the large Israeli parties, nor of Arafat's PLO, but as an intellectual who speaks for self-determination via citizenship and equality for everyone, Jew and Arab. As such, therefore, he is as much a threat to the established Arab order as he is to Israel; much courted by the media everywhere in Israel and the Arab world, he is always willing to speak his mind, and ends up by creating much debate and controversy in his wake. In Nazareth that night, he introduced me warmly to the cordial but inquisitive crowd and then asked me to relate the development of my political ideas right up to my critique of Arafat, Oslo and the Israeli system. That done, the floor was opened to questions, and for about an hour and a half I responded to all sorts of things, including criticisms of Orientalism that had been made by a Syrian Marxist in the early '80s. I mentioned at some point that the event was something of a homecoming for me, since my mother had been born and was brought up in Nazareth, where her father had built and was the pastor of the Baptist Church. The occasion also gave me the opportunity to say how lacking my political formation had been in any knowledge about Israeli Palestinians who had been regarded in the Arab world as little short of traitors for remaining as non-Jewish citizens of Israel. It now struck me, I said, that Israeli Palestinians had become crucial for our future as a people since, given their circumstances as non-Jews in a Jewish state, they dramatised the anomalies of nationalism and theocracy throughout the Middle East. Nationalism had become the dead end of our political life, demanding endless sacrifices and the abrogation of democracy for the sake of national security. This was true both in Israel and in every Arab country. In countries like Lebanon, where large concentrations of Palestinian refugees have been totally forgotten by the Oslo process, I could see a parallel with the plight of Israeli Palestinians, except of course that the latter were not homeless, only without political rights. They are allowed to vote, but not to buy, lease or sell land, 92 per cent of which is held in trust for "the Jewish people"; like all Palestinians, including myself, they do not have immigration rights and are not covered by the Law of Return. Thus there has emerged a campaign on behalf of full citizenship, which was the basis of new political struggle inside Israel (among both Jews and Palestinians) and established a secular order as the platform around which we could rally, Arabs as well as Jews. I recalled that in West Jerusalem last March, Daniel Barenboim and I had met with an Israeli Jewish group who were also concerned with secularism, constitutional rights and citizenship within the entirely Jewish context of modern Israel; for that group, secularism was an imperative that saved politics from the clutches of the religious extremists. The next day, at the invitation of a young woman, Lina Jayussi, who ran a research group on "Knowledge, Secularism and Society" at the Van Leer Institute in West Jerusalem, a few metres from the house in which I was born and which has now become the offices of the appallingly fundamentalist International Christian Embassy, I addressed about 30 Palestinian and Jewish Israelis. It hadn't been clear to me what I was supposed to speak about, I was exhausted, and I found myself perplexed by the swirling currents of ideology and passion all round me in the country. I stammered out a few critical words on the politics of identity, the need for new visions of inclusion, and so on, and soon had provoked a series of really interesting interventions from the assembled group, all of them young, all academic, all fluent in English. I had said something about the importance of geographical thought (as opposed to the temporal variety) to my work on culture and empire -- the Bir Zeit landscape conference still fresh in my mind -- and this brought forth a remarkable set of responses. For the first time in about six years of intellectual exchange with both Arabs and Jews on the politics of Palestine and Israel, I felt suddenly exhilarated that we had somehow gone beyond the rhetorical salvos and barricades that were always present, and had entered a relatively new territory of common interest to both Israeli Jews and Palestinians. Azmi Bishara later joined this group and, although I cannot quite recollect what some of the main points were being made, I recall vividly that I felt a sense of shared secular assumptions about politics, history and the future. No one defended actually existing Zionism. Near the end of our discussion, which lasted for almost two hours, it quickly dawned on me that this was an Israeli institution I was speaking in, despite the presence of Palestinians, and that I felt justified in being able to speak openly and in an unrestrained way about the moral responsibility borne by Israel for the Palestinian Nakba, or catastrophe. I came away from this short sojourn with a newly strengthened resolve that it was important for us as Palestinian intellectuals, committed to our self-determination as a people, determined not to give up fighting against the injustice meted out to us by Israeli-Zionist policy, that we take our message into Israel, Israeli universities, Israeli institutions, etc. I recall mentioning this to several of my Palestinian friends the next day, and then the day after, when I was in Egypt for a student's viva at the University of Tanta. A brilliant young man, he had worked with me on Conrad for a couple of years in New York; the event itself was memorable as much for the enthusiasm of students and teachers, as for the vivacity of the discussion. Anyway, when I brought up my Jerusalem and Nazareth experiences with Egyptian friends of unimpeachable nationalist credentials, I was immediately warned against "normalisation", that is, having relationships with Israelis, especially on an institutional level. Even though Egypt has formally been at peace with Israel for almost 20 years, no Egyptian intellectual, artist, or writer of note has visited Israel, engaged in dialogue with Israeli intellectuals, and so forth. Palestinian universities as a matter of course do not invite Israeli academics or students to participate in conferences or seminars, even those Israelis known to be sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. One of my friends told me that, given so many incursions by the Israeli army into campuses, Palestinians feel that visiting Israeli faculty would be seen as in fact coming to places like Bir Zeit or Al-Najah Universities as extensions of, or protectorates of, the army. Unacceptable. Not having lived through these traumas myself I kept my own counsel, whereas in Egypt I was a good deal more forthcoming. To some of my Egyptian friends, all of them well-known as writers and intellectuals, I said that Palestinians suffered a great deal from the isolation of their confinement within territory all of whose exits and entrances were controlled by the Israeli army. The response I got was that it was a matter of national commitment not to go through Israeli checkpoints, not to get passports stamped or apply for Israeli visas, not to show any sign of "normalisation" with Israel so long as it remained an occupying force. To this conundrum, I repeated the answer Palestinians gave me: such Arab intellectuals wouldn't be coming to "normalise" with Israel, they would be there to express their solidarity with our struggle for self-determination, to help in our institutions, to give readings, lectures, and the like to our students, to make appearances whose goal would be both to raise morale and also to get to know our problems as Palestinians at close hand, concretely, intimately. Besides, I added, your position more or less leaves out entirely the Palestinian population of Israel: don't they have a right to be heard and seen by you? I don't think I made the impression I wanted to with my argument, but I did sense here and there the glimmering of a possibly new attitude. As for my own position, I have made it clear that, because of our disproportionate weakness vis-à-vis Israel, we have to undertake bold initiatives to carry our message to precisely those Israelis who for years have thrived on our absence and our silence. This is risky, of course, for all sorts of reasons, physical as well as political. Breaking barriers, after all, is a two-edged sword. But I am firmly convinced that this is what we Diaspora Palestinians need to do, despite the difficulty and unpleasantness of confronting die-hard Israeli nationalists in their intellectual sanctuaries where the whole question of Palestine is now just a matter of separation (as the contention between blacks and whites had been in South Africa), of Israeli security, of tactical fixing. Connected to the whole history of post-War and post-Holocaust politics, the injustice done to us as a people has yet to be taken up. And unless we bring it up, refusing to hide behind the historical forgetfulness accepted by Arafat and his tiny band of collaborators, we will continue to live through its agonies. This is as true for Israelis as it is for us. The consequences of l948 just won't go quietly away, partly because our conflict with Zionism is such a special one, as because in the main our situation in the 50 years since 1948 has festered, has only cosmetically changed, remains basically unrectified, under-analysed, morally and politically unacknowledged by most Israelis and Israeli supporters.
