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THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT: THE RHETORICAL TREATMENT OF LAND IN PALESTINIAN MEMOIRS _______________ A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of San Diego State University _______________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in Rhetoric and Writing Studies _______________ by Laura Marie Hofreiter Fall 2011 iii Copyright © 2011 by Laura Marie Hofreiter All Rights Reserved iv ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS The Arab-Israeli Conflict: The Rhetorical Treatment of Land in Palestinian Memoirs by Laura Marie Hofreiter Master of Arts in Rhetoric and Writing Studies San Diego State University, 2011 First person narratives in the form of memoirs can be powerful instruments for disseminating political points of view. The hotly contested area of the Arab-Israeli conflict is no exception. From the 1970's to the present, Palestinians have been using the memoir to communicate their perspectives to Western audiences. In these memoirs, the rhetorical treatment of land in its pre-national, national, and occupied dimensions are dominant tropes. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the rhetorical strategies Palestinian memoirists employ in order to persuade Western readers to support the Palestinian struggle for human rights and self-determination. v TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................. iv CHAPTER INTRODUCTION .....................................................................................................................1 1 REPRESENTATIONS OF PALESTINE AS A PRE-NATIONAL ENTITY ............11 2 PALESTINIAN MEMOIRS AND THE VOCABULARY OF NATIONALISM ..........................................................................................................32 3 PALESTINIAN MEMOIRS AND THE LANGUAGE OF OCCUPATION .............59 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................91 WORKS CITED ......................................................................................................................95 1 INTRODUCTION Outside of academia, scant attention has been paid to vernacular constructions of Palestinian narratives, and the attention they have garnered is largely in the field of political identity. However, in recent years, there has been an increase in Palestinian memoirs, written in English, and constructed for Western audiences. In these memoirs, the rhetorical treatment of land as pre-national, national, and occupied entities, constitutes three dominant tropes. It is this rhetorical treatment of land in Palestinian memoirs that will be the focus of this thesis. The central questions of this thesis are: What strategies do Palestinian memoirists choose when constructing their histories, their national rights, and their ties to a land, which to many Western minds, is no longer theirs (if, in fact, they concede that it ever was)? How do they introduce alternative narratives in order to trump, or at least contend with, dominant modes of thinking? The entrenched ideas they find themselves up against are not just those dealing specifically with competing Israeli and Palestinian accounts of events in the back- and-forth manner that frequently occurs in such debates; rather, they strike at our very notion of what constitutes legitimate belonging to a place. To begin, I’d like to address some of the salient qualities of the memoir as a genre, and offer some theories about why some Palestinian authors choose the memoir in order to present their arguments. According to Ben Yagoda in Memoir: A History, the Western memoir, meaning firsthand accounts of lives or discrete episodes within lives, has been with us since St. Augustine’s “Confessions.” Since then, memoirs have been written for a variety of purposes, many of which overlap. Some have been inaugurated as therapeutic projects, in order to help 2 the authors cope with various traumatic experiences, and then published in order to raise awareness or alleviate the suffering of others who have undergone similar experiences. Others, such as slave narratives, existed to give voices to the oppressed and advance social justice. Many are based on the theme of human redemption or salvation and often take an advocacy position, such as those that deal with an addict’s triumph over addiction, or a religious person’s victory over sin or demonic forces. Memoirs authored by more famous individuals, including politicians, rock stars, and actors—or their wives, brothers, or children—detail the extraordinary circumstances of public life, possibly to justify their choices, promote an album or political agenda, or add depth and dimension to their public ethos. In “Shtick Lit,” a term coined by Sarah Goldstein, writers engage in novel and unlikely projects with the express purpose of writing about them afterward. Examples include “Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping,” and “Dishwasher: One Man’s Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States.” These are just a few of the reasons for writing proposed by contemporary memoirists. Critics, particularly those of memoirs written in the last twenty or so years, sneer at what seems to be the sheer self-indulgence and self-promotion of memoirists, whose accounts seem overly victimized or just completely self-centered, lacking any authentic reflection on how their experiences illuminate broader questions of the human condition. Memoirs, particularly by those who are not notable individuals outside of their penning of their objectively trivial lives, are simply seen as another unfortunate side effect of the democratization of language, their company among the lowly ranks of blogs and online journals. To sum up the attitude, just because we all have unique experiences, that doesn’t mean that they are all interesting enough to write about, much less publish and distribute to 3 an audience outside our duly obligated inner circle of friends and family. While many memoirs have indeed received critical approval, such as Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, the form of the memoir makes it especially vulnerable to seeming both trite and self- celebratory, a particularly awful combination. However, while people might be writing about themselves with a fever heretofore unseen, they are also reading about the lives of others with just as much force. While we remain beholden to the juicy, otherworldly details of royal and celebrity lives, the day-to-day experiences of our neighbors have never seemed quite so fascinating. According to Yagoda, “Memoir has become the central form of the culture: not only the way stories are told, but the way arguments are put forth, products and properties marketed, ideas floated, acts justified, reputations constructed or salvaged. The sheer volume of memoirs is unprecedented….” (28- 29). Personal, Childhood, and Parental memoirs jumped more than four hundred percent between 2004 and 2008, according to Neilson Bookscan, which tracks about seventy percent of U.S. book sales. Seven of the top ten bestsellers in the U.K. in 2007 and 2008 were memoirs. In the U.S., some of the most popular memoirs have been made into feature films-- Sleepers, Girl Interrupted, Angela’s Ashes, Running with Scissors, and Marley & Me to name just a few—and have been featured both on Oprah Winfrey’s hugely popular talk show as well as her Book Club. Viewers tuned in to see her praise James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, watched as she defended him when the memoir was found to be fraudulent, and squirmed in their seats when she invited him for a final time to publicly scold him for his deceit. Our moral outrage in the face of this, and other similar, scandals, indicates our emotional investment in reading memoirs as “true” stories. 4 Memoirs of the so-called “third world” are also becoming more prominent in recent years. Traditionally, accounts of the cultures and lifestyles of far-flung places have been described by visitors in travel memoirs or travelogues, such as Mark Twain’s The Innocent’s Abroad, wherein he describes Palestine as an empty, desolate place, or Heinrich Harrer’s Seven Years In Tibet, which chronicles the country before the Chinese invasion. In recent years, however, the native inhabitants of places that are remote, war-torn or undeveloped have taken the initiative to write about their own experiences. One of the most surprising examples of this phenomenon is Ishmael Beah’s book, Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, which details his life as a child militant in Sierra Leone. What makes this memoir particularly surprising is its sponsorship and distribution; in 2007 the book was available for sale at Starbucks chains across the country, in addition to regular bookstores. Starbucks marketing strategies are known for their attempts to keep a finger poised on the pulse of the masses, by advertising more environmentally friendly and health conscious choices, selling a small selection of popular and indie CD’s, and supplying free iTunes downloads to their customers. That marketing strategists predicted that a third-world memoir would fit in well with the cultural zeitgeist is significant, and Beah’s book sold over 62,000 copies at Starbucks in the first three weeks, and eventually made it to #2 on the New York Times Best Seller’s List (Yagoda 29). The rising popularity of the memoir alone justifies the author’s choice to use it as a rhetorical vehicle, particularly when one wants to reach as broad a readership as possible. However, what else

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