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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

Rhetoric and Writing Studies

______

Laura Marie Hofreiter

Fall 2011

iii

Laura Marie Hofreiter

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 makes writing a memoir, as opposed to a novel, a book of poems, or a

history, an especially strategic method? In their introductions, several Palestinian memoirists

expressed the belief that by telling their stories, they could humanize a group of people that

had previously been ignored, represented in uni-dimensional terms, or reduced and codified to serve the interests of more powerful forces. According to Ghada Karmi, “If people could understand Palestinians as human beings with names and life histories, rather than in terms of collectives such as ‘Arab refugees,’ ‘extremists,’ or Islamic ‘terrorists,’ they would begin to empathize with individuals caught within this most tragic of stories” (xv). Likewise, Ramzy

Baroud, in recalling his father’s legacy, tells us, “My father: the shy, eccentric warrior.

Thanks to him, I am alive today, and my brothers and I have the privilege of telling a story that in many ways, is unique to him and us. In other ways, it resembles the untold stories of millions of Palestinian refugees everywhere” (xiv). In memoirs, the subject is the self, but the aim is to humanize and universalize individual struggles. Peter Birkenhead, whose memoir

Gonville centered on his relationship with an emotionally abusive father, writes:

…In any good memoir, the real antagonist isn’t the bad parents or a drug or a mountain. In Gonville, the antagonist is fear, my fear. And anger and confusion. My father was the focus of those things for me, but he wasn’t those things. A lot of us are taught about fear, in one way or another, by mountains or drugs or fathers, but it’s the fear, not the father, we ultimately battle with. (“Why Memoir?”)

Personal narratives of Jewish experiences, particularly those relating to the Holocaust,

have received wide popular acclaim and attention, and continue to do so even decades after

the fall of the Nazi Empire. Had the antagonists simply been Hitler and his Nazi murderers,

the stories would have lost their pertinence long ago. Instead, their relevance persists because

people are still haunted by the human potential to commit systematic evil. The Diary of Anne

Frank, for example, is an immensely popular first person narrative that has not only sold

more than twenty-five million copies and been translated into at least fifty languages, but has

been made into stage plays and movies; additionally, it has been required reading in school

curricula in the United States. Elie Wiesel’s Night was on the New York Times bestsellers

list for eighty consecutive weeks until it was dropped because, according to a member of the

Times Book Review staff, “The editorial spirit of the list is to track the sales of new books. . .

. . We simply cannot track such books [as “Night”] indefinitely” (Yagoda 7). More than any

other event of the twentieth century, the Holocaust reset our moral compass, and it is the

personal stories of its victims that almost magnetically align us with the depth, gravity, and

meaning that their suffering provided for us. As Birkenhead explained, “The telling of your

story is the opposite of self-pity—it is the act of joining the human race, of accepting and

appreciating your mortality, your responsibility to others, and the meaningfulness of your

life” (“Why Memoir?”). It is hard to conceive of another written modality that achieves these

effects as well as the memoir.

The modern memoir, then, enjoys broad readership; the potential to reach even wider

audiences through corporate sponsorship and cinematic renditions; and perhaps the unique

capacity to evoke memory, empathy, and identification among its audience. These reasons

substantiate the choice of the memoir as a rhetorical medium. However, Palestinian memoirs bear additional exigencies that influence their composition in ways that are unique to the

Palestinian situation.

First, there is the material fact that apart from memoirs, relatively few tangible artifacts of Palestinian society are available to Westerners, for a few reasons. The first is that many Palestinian documents have been lost, destroyed, or confined to Israeli archives, where they have remained largely inaccessible to Palestinian or Arab historians. As Ramzy Baroud

writes, “It isn’t easy to construct a history that, only several decades ago, was, along with

every standing building of that village, blown to smithereens, with the very intent of erasing

it from existence” (1). Rashid Khalidi emphasizes the difficulty of maintaining continuous

and coherent research in the absence of national or state institutions, such as universities,

libraries and state archives. According to Khalidi,

The unsettled situation of the Palestinian people since 1948, whether under occupation or in the Diaspora, has meant that when Palestinian archives, research institutions, and universities could be created, they were often denied the stability, continuity, and possibilities for long-term planning necessary to provide the requisite support for sustained research and scholarship.” (89)

As we shall see, many Palestinian professionals living under occupation recount episodes during which the Israeli army raids their offices, and confiscates or destroys material. There is also the tendency by historians to favor written records over the oral accounts of the illiterate, which made up a significant portion of the Palestinian population. Thus,

Palestinian memoirists must try to construct coherent cultural, political and national narratives by working with what official or unofficial documents they have, as well as by articulating their own memories and those of their parents and grandparents, before they die or descend into senility.

One of the most distinguishing features of Palestinian memoirs, however, is their rhetorical treatment of the antagonists in their narratives, who in their cases, are variously identified as Zionists, Israelis, settlers or Jews. According to Daniel Mendelsohn of The New

Yorker,

What the slave narratives, the émigré accounts, and the Holocaust and genocide memoirs have in common is that, in them, the stakes of redemption are much higher than ever before. Now the ‘soul’s eye’ that Augustine spoke of was turned outward as well as inward, documenting the suffering self but also, necessarily, recording the tormenting other. (“But Enough About Me”).

For Palestinians, the “tormenting other” also happens to be regarded as the most victimized group of people in the 20th century, and for good reason. This duality of roles, however,

complicates the Palestinians’ abilities to present their case sympathetically to Western

8 audiences, who are able to accept the racism and oppression evident in other colonial exploits, such as apartheid South Africa, but less able to do so in the context of the Arab-

Israeli conflict. As Edward Said notes, “Every thinking Palestinian…knows somehow that all the real parallels between Israel and South Africa get badly shaken up in his consciousness when he reflects seriously on the difference between white settlers in Africa and Jews fleeing European anti-Semitism” (119). The Palestinian memoirists, then, must very delicately construct alternative ways of thinking that would allow Western readers the ability to conceptualize Zionist Jews as victims in one sense, and as victimizers in another, concomitant reality. One way to do this, as Ghada Karmi does in her introduction, is to yoke

Palestinian and Jewish suffering to the same source, portraying the Palestinian exodus as an extension of the actions of Nazi Germany. She writes, “So too, I reasoned, must the

Palestinian narrative be presented, if only because it is a sequel, the last chapter that started far away from Middle Eastern shores. In that sense, the Palestinian story is inseparable from the Jewish one; it is its natural and poignant heir” (Karmi xv).

Palestinians also must reckon with Jewish victimhood because, according to the

Israeli national narrative—and more recently, widespread perception of the Arab role in the conflict—the Palestinians themselves, and particularly their representative bodies, such as the

PLO and Hamas, have emblemized aggression and terror, both in the region and on the worldwide stage. When violent acts of terrorism against Israelis, Americans, and others— which are neither morally justified nor winningly strategic--are presented as decontextualized events in the Western media, they bear the additional burden of seeming hateful as well as utterly senseless. Palestinian people and their grievances display a tendency to appear indistinguishable from other Arabs and their collective beefs with Israel and the United

States, a situation that isn’t helped by various Arab leaders co-opting the Palestinian cause to suit their own purposes. All of these factors put Palestinian memoirists in the unique position of having to construct an ethos for themselves and their antagonists, as well as a version of events, that radically differ from deeply held convictions of both.

For this thesis, I have selected the following memoirs to analyze: The Disinherited,

Soul In Exile, and Exile’s Return by Fawaz Turki; Samed, Palestinian Walks, When the Birds

Stopped Singing, and A Rift In Time by Raja Shehadeh; Sharon and My Mother-in-Law, by

Suad Amiry; Once Upon A Country, by Sari Nusseibeh; and In Search of Fatima by Ghada

Karmi. I chose these memoirs for a few reasons. The first is that they were all written in

English, indicating that their primary audience is of Western persuasion; it also means that I do not have to rely on translated material. I chose authors that I felt represented a range of

Palestinian backgrounds and experiences. I wanted both male (Turki, Shehadeh, and

Nusseibeh) and female (Amiry and Karmi) voices. Shehadeh’s background is Christian, while the rest of the authors are Muslims. Shehadeh, Nussiebeh, and Amiry live in occupied

Palestine, whereas Karmi and Turki live in exile in England and the United States, respectively. By choosing these memoirists, I tried to achieve as broad a range of backgrounds and experiences as possible.

However, the most significant reason for selecting these authors is that the rhetorical

treatment of land and place as pre-national, occupied, and nationally imagined entities are all

central tropes of their memoirs. I will be looking at how the memoirists describe the land of

Palestine before the birth of Israel, as organic, ancient, primordial, and sacred, with a culture

and society defined by tribes, villages, social classes, and religions, as opposed to national

identifications. Then I will analyze how the memoirists both analyze Palestinian national

10 tropes from a distance, as well as construct them in their memoirs. Finally, I shall examine how the memoirists discuss occupied Palestine, namely, as colonized and defiled, in order to advance their cause to end the occupation. I will be using theories of collective identity, such as those described by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities. I will also rely on the theoretical assumptions of prominent scholars of national rhetoric, including Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm.

The issue of Palestine, and the people who consider it their home, remains a central one in our collective political and moral mindscape. In this thesis, I will focus on how

Palestinian memoirists employ strategies that challenge ossified assumptions and legitimize contrapuntal perspectives. Through writing this thesis, I hope to provide a useful contribution to the study of rhetoric by exploring how Palestinian memoirs exemplify the potential of language to resurrect histories, re-conceptualize realities, and, ultimately, apprehend and assert political power.

CHAPTER 1

REPRESENTATIONS OF PALESTINE AS A PRE- NATIONAL ENTITY

It is probably taken for granted that most of us today experience some sense of

national belonging to our respective countries. Although nations are a relatively recent

human invention, most of us have little compelling reason to imagine how societies were

arranged, what life must have been like, and how people conceived of notions of belonging

before nationalism was superimposed on our collective psyches. While the field of collective

memory is a deeply contested area for many societies, Palestinian memoirists claim that the

denial and distortion of their history as a people continues to have devastating political

ramifications. As a result, many of their memoirs aim to imaginatively recreate the past in

such a way that it rhetorically binds them to the lands of historic Palestine. In this chapter, I

will be looking at examples of memoirists’ attempts to describe Palestinian

conceptualizations of land in their pre-national, agrarian dimensions, which they do for a number of strategic purposes. First, by doing so they challenge the general assumption that nationalism is a natural phenomenon, that nations have always existed in some form as the sole legitimate entities by which societies are organized; instead, they offer a critique of nationalism that highlights its limitations and its damaging impact on people and land.

Secondly, they offer some explanation for why Palestinians failed to convince the world of their claims to the land, contending that it was largely the inability of Palestinians to

formulate their appeals within a national framework, which ultimately undermined their

rights to stay on or return to the land that Jews claimed for the state of Israel.

But the most significant strategy at play behind the memoirists’ presentations of pre-

national Palestine, and perhaps the strategy best suited to the memoir form, is to convey to

readers a sense of genuine loss—not the loss of a battle or a debate, and not even necessarily

the loss of land, but the loss of a society, a lens, and a way of life. In doing so, they render a

historical portrait of Palestine and its people, as a living entity in its own right, before its

character was reduced to the caricaturized antagonist in the Arab-Israeli drama.

Palestinian memoirists contend that they have faced, and continue to face, the denial of Palestinians as a people with their own unique history and society. The claim that

Palestinians did not exist as a national entity serves to delegitimize their presence in Israel and the occupied territories, and allows their treatment, including the conditions of exile and occupation, to endure. The main questions of this chapter are: How do Palestinian memoirists rhetorically construct a version of the past in such a way that it advocates for their political concerns of the present? In admitting that they were not a people with a “national” presence in Palestine, how do they reverse the assumption that national identification forms the only valid basis for connecting a group of people to a specific place? As we shall see, memoirists employ rhetorical strategies that undermine these preconceptions, arguing instead that it is the very absence of a national lens that unified Palestinians with their surroundings, and thus justifies their current political ambitions.

Land, during its pre-national existence, is one of the most dominant tropes of

Palestinian memoirs. As such, it is incumbent upon the memoirists to recreate the consciousness of an agro-literate society, which has not only largely disappeared, but whose

13 members could not really speak for them selves and articulate their relationship to the land.

According to Ernest Gellner, “In the characteristic agro-literate polity, the ruling class forms a small minority of the population, rigidly separate from the great majority of direct agricultural producers, or peasants” (9). Gellner goes on to explain some of the general conditions that characterize agro-literate societies and distinguish them from industrial ones.

For example, in an agro-literate society, literacy is enjoyed by the few, rather than the many; social structure is rigid and vertical, as opposed to horizontal and fluid; and education is largely specialized and passed down within families, not a homogenized social program controlled by the state. Writers such as Karmi recall the structure and character of

Palestinian society during the British mandate era, into which she was born:

Even at my young age, I had already absorbed the prevailing social distinctions between the three major sectors of Palestinian society at the time: the peasants, the rural landowning families, and the townsfolk, with the peasants at the bottom of the heap. In many ways, this was an unjustified snobbery since the fellahin of Palestine contributed to the majority of the population and the backbone of the country. Palestine was above all an agricultural country and had scarcely a single industry until the twentieth century. (18)

The cultural and social features of such an agro-literate society would make it particularly resistant to the formation of national consciousness; as Gellner writes, “Almost everything in it militates against the definition of political units in terms of cultural boundaries. . . . Had nationalism been invented in such a period its prospects of general acceptance would have been slender indeed” (11). Instead, societies defined by rigid class structures were much more likely to identify themselves by kinship ties and regions of origin.

Karmi, for example, describes the importance of establishing lineage: “Palestine was a small place with a settled population. Because of this, families became associated with specific places, and surnames were usually all that was needed to establish someone’s geographic

origin” (185). Surnames could also, according to Karmi, mark one’s social class—for

example, peasants were recognizable by the fact that they used their fathers’ first names as

their surnames—and religion, for Muslim surnames were easily distinguishable from

Christian ones. The point she and others are trying to make is that while Palestinians had a

sense of belonging that was tied to notions of place, it was not a sense of national belonging.

In fact, as Gellner explains, such as society would have resisted qualities that were becoming inherent in industrial societies, such as egalitarianism and social mobility.

Furthermore, Palestinian society, particularly before it was forced to define itself in

terms borrowed from a nationalized vocabulary, lacked the state institutions characteristic of

industrial societies. In modern societies everything is counted, everyone accounted for;

numbers are assigned, births, deaths, and marriages are recorded, censuses are taken, and all

is stored in centralized state institutions. No such centralized power existed in Palestine and,

more to the point, neither did the widespread perception of the necessity for it. In his

discussion of the Jewish National Fund, established in 1901 for the purpose of purchasing

Palestinian land to be held in trust for Jews, Edward Said writes:

There was no such corresponding Arab effort to institutionalize Arab landholding in Palestine, no thought that it might be necessary to create an organization for holding lands “in perpetuity” for the “Arab people,” above all, no informational, money-raising, lobbying work done. . . .The Arabs mistakenly thought that owning the land and being on it were enough. (98)

In other words, they saw no need to record the details that could prove, and later justify, their

ties to the land. Their society had other social customs and types of epistemological

awareness that recorded any relevant social transactions, and the entire system was one that

was second nature to its constituents. Karmi exemplifies this attitude when she discusses the

occasion of her birth:

I was born possibly on November 19, 1939. I say possibly because my exact date of birth is not known. My mother had only an approximate memory of it—“it was winter, I know that.” This is not as odd as it might seem because birthdays were not traditionally important in the Arab world. . . . Neither my mother nor my father knew their exact dates of birth, which were not registered. They should have been because the Ottoman authorities, who ruled Palestine when they were both born, required all births to be notified. But it was not the custom, and my grandparents did not bother. (8)

According to Karmi, this attitude persisted to the bitter end of the British Mandate era and the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. This is the year that the event Palestinians refer to as the “nakba” or “disaster” took place, during which they were forcibly removed by Jewish forces or escaped the volatile war environment. Karmi’s family was one of those who fled.

In the following passage, she reflects on the fate of her nanny, a peasant woman named

Fatima, who was a motherly figure to Karmi:

She escaped to the village of al-Bireh, east of Jerusalem and still in Arab hands, where we presume she stayed. After that news of her died out. In the chaos that attended the fall of Palestine and the mass exodus of its people, lives were wrenched apart, families brutally sundered, life-long friendships abruptly severed. No organization existed to help people trace those they had lost. And so it was that we too lost Fatima, not knowing how to pluck her from the human whirlpool that had swallowed her after our departure. (126-127)

Examples such as those provided by Karmi illustrate Palestinian ties to place by explaining how certain segments of society—in Karmi’s case, specifically, a rather privileged class—

organized, defined, and conducted themselves in ways that precluded national identification.

She also justifies her family’s connection to Palestine by explaining that to them, it seemed

so self-evident as to not be questioned, or even consciously acknowledged. That is why

when her family fled, they did not bother to bring sentimental items, because the assumption was that they were only to be gone temporarily. It did not seem conceivable that another group of people could permanently claim what Palestinians saw as their land based on the

national argument that was being presented at the time. As a result, Karmi’s childhood

photographs and other personal documents were left in her family’s home and remained

there, “. . . until the Jewish family which was moved by the Israeli authorities into our empty

house found them and, for all I know, threw them away” (8). She describes the first

photograph of herself that she ever saw, which was taken after she had already left Palestine:

“Whenever I looked at it as a child, I used to think that my real life only started with that

photograph. What went before left no record and had no reality except in my dreams” (8-9).

Insights such as this mark a new shift in consciousness, which operates by fossilizing

elements of the past into symbols that fulfill the needs of the present. Given the especially

abrupt nature of the disintegration of Palestinian society, as opposed to the gradual

estrangement from nature experienced by others, memoirists argue that the Palestinian

imperative to assemble a symbolic repertoire was somewhat unique. We will examine this

phenomenon more in Chapter 2.

One of the major challenges associated with re-creating any authenticated version of

pre-national Palestinian ideas and beliefs is that due to the low literacy rate, very little

verifiable documentation exists for memoirists (or historians) to refer back to. Writing letters

or recording one’s innermost thoughts in diaries or journals were not pastimes exercised by

the peasant class, who represented the majority of the population in Palestine. Therefore,

musings on one’s culture and what it meant to be part of it, much less on one’s nation, would

have been anachronistic. According to Gellner, “In most of the closed micro-communities of

the agrarian age the limits of the culture were the limits of the world, and the culture often

itself remained unperceived, invisible. . . .” (111). It is this dearth of recorded material articulating one’s cultural and national sentiments that led to Golda Meir’s famous— infamous, among Palestinians—proclamation that there were no Palestinians: “It was not as

though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people

and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist”

(Nusseibeh and David 172). By that, she did not mean that there were no people there;

rather, the native population could not claim a right to the country based on the existence of a

prevailing national consciousness, which according to the Israeli national narrative, justified

claiming the land in order to build a state for the Jews. Scholars such as Rashid Khalidi

challenged this view by setting out to prove that “there is considerable evidence that much of

the population of Palestine came, in Benedict Anderson’s term, to ‘imagine’ themselves as a

political community with clear boundaries and rights to sovereignty, early in the twentieth

century” (28). Prior to that, he admits that there is plenty of evidence supporting Palestinian

attachment to their country, albeit “in pre-nationalist terms” (Khalidi 154). However, his

overall project was to prove that Palestinian national identity evolved not only in response to

Zionism, but with its own unique political agenda, and in ways similar to other concomitant

national movements. Much of his evidence is “evidentiary” in nature—concrete examples

derived from public sources, such as newspapers or pamphlets—and necessarily so. The

thoughts of dead peasants cannot literally be summoned to testify in any earthbound court of

law. Rashid Khalidi’s approach then, is a historical one, and as such, it must engage in the

battle of national narratives, which can be supported by varying amounts of evidence. This

is because nations, as argued by Gellner and Hobsbawm, are essentially top-down phenomena, and not typically initiated by the peasant classes (although peasants often come to serve as symbols for national ideologies, which we will discuss more in Chapter 2).

On the other hand, the opposite strategy is available to memoirists, and unlike the historical approach, they construct arguments based on supposed pre-national sentiment to

support them. Instead of relying on the strength of Palestinian national attachment, and

supporting it with whatever tangible evidence is available, they use a turnaround strategy.

Whereas many arguments in favor of establishing Palestine as a nation stress its national narrative so that it can compete with the Israeli one, memoirists use the very lack of a national consciousness to make their point. Shehadeh, in particular, tries to imaginatively recreate the land of Ottoman-era Palestine and its people, which is his project in A Rift In

Time: Travels With My Ottoman Uncle. In this memoir, he attempts to retrace the route that his Uncle Najib followed when he was on the run from the Ottoman authorities, noting the changes in landscapes and political boundaries that make many of his destinations inaccessible. During Shehadeh’s travels, he meets Abu Naif, a Bedouin centenarian, who lived during Ottoman times. Through his conversation with Abu Naif, he imparts the kind of folk narrative that is largely undocumented in the annalistic renderings of history, giving readers some insight into the pre-national Palestinian consciousness. Shehadeh includes, for

example, Abu Naif’s recollections of life during the First World War, when men would

marry women from “distant” villages in order to avoid conscription. Men who married

“foreign women” were not drafted because, according to Abu Naif’s explanation:

Because then after the man goes away, the woman would be left by herself in a village to which she does not belong. This would be dangerous. It could lead to immoral behavior. That’s why villages made deals with distant villages. You give us ten women and we’ll give you ten in exchange. This was how each village would save ten more men from the dreaded safar barlik. The fortunate men were those who came from Jerusalem. In those days, people were referred to by the name of their place of origin. So if you were Ahmad Makdisi (Ahmad of Jerusalem) the soldiers took care of you. They did not put you on the front line. . . Anyone from there must be touched by holiness, they believed. (A Rift in Time 90)

This passage illustrates some of the practices and attitudes, archaic by modern standards, of

village societies, which grounded their comprehensions of “belonging” in notions of “place.”

Exchanging women was a practice accommodated to avoid conscription, but ultimately,

women “belonged” in their original village. When Shehadeh asks Abu Naif whether he knew

his Uncle Najib, a journalist from Haifa, Abu Naif asks, “Who is he?” Shehadeh writes:

Abu Naif looked at me as though I were a lunatic. Immediately I realized what a silly question I had asked. Here was a farmer whose education ended at second grade, as he had proudly announced. He spent much of the war years hiding in a tunnel. He considered women who came from the next village as foreigners. He probably never saw a newspaper throughout his youth, let alone read one. He might never have visited Haifa as a young man, and yet I wanted him to know my great-great-uncle, a foreigner, a man of letters and in his eyes a pasha! (A Rift in Time 91)

Narratives taken from living relics, such as Abu Naif, transmit a certain type of information

that resists documentation; however, as Shehadeh illustrates, without it, there are steep

limitations imposed on the depth to which one can appreciate a society. As a rhetorical

strategy, by trying to portray the lens through which Palestinians experienced life, Shehadeh produces a countervailing force to resist proclamations such as Golda Meier’s, when she said, “there are no Palestinians.” Memoirists like Shehadeh will admit that Palestinians such as Abu Naif did not constitute a national collective; instead, he emphasizes just how limited the peasants’ worlds were to their immediate surroundings, and the vast extent to which their surroundings defined them. According to Shehadeh’s interpretation, this strengthens their attachment to a place; it does not diminish it.

Thus, memoirists present the Palestinian relationship to land as limited, interdependent, natural, primordial, and organic, as opposed to alienated and contrived as all national narratives are, to some degree. In Soul in Exile, Fawaz Turki explains the significance of land, “el ard,” to the pre-national Palestinian collective unconscious:

Land. El ard. If ever a common center held us all as Palestinians before the— essentially Western—concept of nationhood was added to our repertoire of historical consciousness, surely it was el ard. Over the centuries, in the

summative process of infinite individual adaptations in our social system that we call communal meaning, a notion has emerged—a notion whose origins are buried by time—that there truly exists a mystical affinity between people and their land or environment, and interactive relationship that touches on the very core of every impulse in their human and social condition. (65)

However, Palestinian memoirists contend that, eventually, in order to create a credible

justification for remaining on their land, Palestinians had to exploit this “mystical affinity” by

way of objectifying it into a national narrative. This required the replacement of one lens by

another. Furthermore, it is this replacement, this loss, which memoirists argue is just as

significant as the material loss of land, although the two are, in many ways, consanguineous.

Shehadeh presents a theory of how this process unfolds by relating the example of

Abu-‘Isa. Abu-‘Isa is an old man who lives in the westernmost entrance to Ramallah, in a region known as Batn al-Hawa or the “Belly of the Wind.” According to Shehadeh, “His sons and his grandchildren surrounding him, Abu-‘Isa benignly rules over a self-contained world” (Samed 85). Shehadeh describes an occasion during which a Jewish friend of his,

Robert Stone, expressed disappointment in what he deemed the lackluster presentation of

Palestinian national rhetoric. According to Shehadeh, “. . .It often seemed, he said, so shallow compared with the richness of Jews’ claims to this land. . . . It is something I myself have been feeling—that somehow, something important about the way we samadin live on

our land is not brought out in the war of words waged between Jews and Palestinians”

(Samed 85). Thinking that Abu-‘Isa may have the experience and wisdom needed to explain

the relative hollowness of Palestinian national rhetoric, Shehadeh takes his friend Stone to

visit the old man, but is disappointed to find that he has little to say: “When Robert asked

Abu-‘Isa about politics, the old man had nothing to say. Nor did he seem to follow the

answers his son Basel gave about Palestinian leadership, a state, independence, etc.” (Samed

85).

After the visit, Shehadeh is apologetic to his friend Robert, because Abu-‘Isa hadn’t

had much to say regarding politics. But Robert responds that “. . . it was precisely Abu-

‘Isa’s inarticulate, silent love that couldn’t be relayed in any rhetoric, because he himself had

no words for it” (Samed 86). At this point, Robert used an analogy to liken national rhetoric

to pornography, telling Shehadeh,

When you are exiled from your land. . .you begin, like a pornographer, to think about it in symbols. . . . We Jews had 2,000 years in which to become expert pornographers with a highly symbol-wrought, intellectualized yearning for this land—totally devoid of any actual memories of images of what it really looked like. And when Jews came to settle here this century, they saw the land through these symbols. (Samed 86)

By presenting the example of Abu-‘Isa and Robert’s analogy, Shehadeh demonstrates the fetishized nature of the national experience. Robert claims that it is like falling in love with

the image of woman and, upon meeting her, loving her not because of who she is, but

because of what she has come to represent for the pornographer: “You stare at her, gloating,

without really seeing her, let alone loving her” (Samed 86-87). Therefore, according to

Shehadeh, Palestinian national rhetoric is so weak precisely because the Palestinian

experience cannot be separated from its relationship to land—the people and the land they

inhabit are an organic whole. And, since they conceive of themselves, albeit unconsciously,

as integral extensions of the land, they have no need or even inclination to package it as a

linguistically separate entity, much less a political boundary, apart from them selves. The

strength, then, of the Israeli national narrative is derived from greed and lust, as opposed to

pure or romantic love—therefore, while the language may be more effective, the relationship

between Jews and Palestinian land is exploitative, deluded, and infinitely cheaper than what

native inhabitants experienced with a pre-national lens. Shehadeh offers the viewpoint that

national “pornography,” while good for supporting the robustness of national rhetoric, is

responsible for robbing individuals of a purer relationship to their surroundings. The

rationale for asserting this particular claim probably rests on the assumption that many

people living in modernized, developed countries feel pangs of anxiety as a result of their

contrived and limited contact with nature, and are therefore likely to relate to this sentiment.

Memoirists emphasize other characteristics of Palestine’s historical, prenational

presence as well, depicting its past as ancient and sacred; as a result, nationalism comes

across as soulless and artificial by comparison. They may do this by describing the place

itself as palpably sacred, or by stressing ancient familial history. In Sari Nusseibeh’s case, he

does both:

Fairy tales are also in my blood, and how could it be otherwise, with my having been raised surrounded by such a timeless and magical landscape? When my ancestors arrived in Jerusalem from Arabia thirteen centuries ago, the city’s history was already so hallowed by time—and of course, by the ancient Jewish prophets who once roamed its streets—that it left the newcomers from the desert in awe. That awe was so strong that as a child 1,300 years later, I couldn’t walk to the corner market without feeling it all the way to my fingertips. Sometimes, when I watched my uncle’s camels graze among the ruins of Suq al-Khawajat, or Goldsmith’s Souk, which had belonged to the Nusseibeh’s since time immemorial, the sensation of being a character in an ancient story swept through me. . . . (4).

In addition to using adjectives such as “timeless,” “hallowed,” “magical” and “ancient,”—

words infused with the spirit of transcendence—Nusseibeh weaves throughout his memoir strands of historical, religious, cultural, and familial narratives, generally in ways that intertwine Jewish, Christian and Muslim experiences. For example, he describes the Dome of the Rock as the place where the prophet Mohammad ascended to heaven during the Night

Journey, where Adam was created, and where Abraham was instructed by God to sacrifice

his son, according to Jewish tradition. It was also believed to be the site of the ancient

Temple of Solomon. Nusseibeh then establishes his familial connection to another holy site, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which he describes as “the holiest church in Christendom and a repository of divine history”; according to Nusseibeh’s account, this church is believed to be the site of Adam’s burial, Christ’s empty tomb, and the discovery site of the true cross and the crown of thorns (17-18). Nusseibeh claims that for the last half millennium, a member of his clan has been entrusted as the keeper of the key to the church. More specifically, a member of the Joudeh clan (a Jewish clan) has brought the key to a member of the Nusseibeh clan (a Muslim tribe) every morning at 4am, and the Nusseibeh has opened the church for the Christian worshippers (20).

The vast majority of Nusseibeh’s personal and historical accounts are centered in

Jerusalem, which he eventually comes to use as a model for the nation of Palestine of the future. The point, though, is that even then, he creates a national model that is defined by recalling what he argues is Palestine’s pre-national spirit, and it is the creation of realities based on national narratives, such as Israel’s, that have violated the land. He writes:

Dualities of good and evil, black and white, right and wrong, “us” and “them,” our “rights” and their “usurpation” have cut the Holy Land into ribbons. The only hope comes when we listen to the wisdom of tradition, and acknowledge that Jerusalem cannot be conquered or kept through violence. It is a city of three faiths and it is open to the world. . . . In Jerusalem’s tangled, ancient alleys, wonder and surprise are always lurking round the corner ready to remind you that this is not an ordinary place you can map out with a surveyor’s rod. It is sacred. (Nusseibeh and David 534)

In this passage, Nusseibeh criticizes terms from nationalist vocabularies, such as “rights” and

“usurpation,” as well as what he sees as the national imperative to divide, conquer, map out, and quantify. Instead he extols qualities such as “tradition,” and uses words such as

“ancient” and “tangled” to countervail the over-planned sameness inherent in modernity.

Likewise, he identifies the divisiveness implied in any national consciousness, and the

inevitable violence that comes with it.

In Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape, Shehadeh describes the transformation of land from a pure and sacred place to one that is irredeemably defiled by the forces of ideological mania. Through a rhetorical “reading” of the land, he depicts not only its physical desecration, but also the loss of a certain type of relationship to the land that transcends political identification. He organizes the book into six chapters describing six

“walks” or sarhat, which he describes as such: “To go on a sarha was to roam freely, at will, without restraint . . . . A man going on a sarha wanders aimlessly, not restricted by time and place . . .“ (Palestinian Walks 2). While describing the vanishing hills of Ramallah, “one of the natural treasures of the world,” Shehadeh writes, “whether it was cartographers preparing maps or travelers describing the landscape in the extensive travel literature, what mattered was not the land and its inhabitants as they actually were, but the confirmation of the viewer’s or reader’s religious or political beliefs” (Palestinian Walks xiv). Likewise, in A Rift

In Time, Shehadeh’s analysis of the Huleh, a lake in the Huleh Nature Reserve of the Israeli

Galilee region, illustrates the theory that rhetoric creates realities. According to Shehadeh, the lake had been an “ecological treasure chest,” home to aquatic plants, migratory birds, and the Marsh Arabs who herded water buffaloes. When the Israelis drained the marsh, it reduced the lake from an area covering 6,000 hectares to 240, and led to ecological devastation.

Shehadeh writes:

The project of draining the marsh, undertaken in the early 1950’s, gratified the young Israeli state’s anachronistic urge to control nature and enabled it to claim that it was bringing civilization to a wild and untamed region by draining malarial swamps and preserving the health of the population of the area from disease. In fact, this had already been achieved in 1946, two years before the establishment of the state, when DDT was introduced. . . . The Visitors Centre has a

photographic exhibition and a collection of stuffed specimens of those mammals and birds that once inhabited the march and have now vanished, along with the Marsh Arabs of Palestine. It also shows an agonized film that, while extolling Israel’s “great” engineering achievement, laments the environmental disaster that it unleashed. The film’s narrator tries to comfort the viewer by saying that what Israel did in the early 1950’s would have happened anyway several hundreds of thousands of years later. (A Rift in Time 128)

In this and other examples, Shehadeh argues that the land has suffered irreparable damage as a result of Israel’s determination to force it to confirm its ideological visions and political agenda. These “confirmations” are, according to Kenneth Burke’s theories, outcomes of certain types of “terministic screens.” Burke writes,

Not only does the nature of our terms affect the nature of our observations, in the sense that the terms direct the attention to one field rather than to another. Also, many of the ‘observations’ are but implications of the particular terminology in terms of which the observations are made.” (“Language as Action” 116)

Just as the same dream can have vastly different interpretations, based on whether it is analyzed by a Freudian or Jungian disciple, the same land is subject to whatever interpretations are implicated by a particular lens. The Israeli lens, as proposed by Shehadeh, is indicative of its national delusions, which regard its supremacy as divinely ordained and ensure a fetishistic relationship to the land. With this lens, its constituents feel justified in exercising their power to exploit the land, which Shehadeh regards as a form of environmental violence, and likens to “rape.”

Furthermore, as Burke points out, “All terminologies must implicitly or explicitly embody choices between the principle of continuity and the principle of discontinuity”

(“Language as Action” 121). Shehadeh’s criticism of “national symbolism” exemplifies this concept because he stresses that national symbolism and ideology represent a clear division between people and land. By experiencing a place in terms of national symbols, people are divided from the “immediate” experience of land, even as, paradoxically, such national

26 symbolism and narratives stress “unity.” (For example, the Israeli national narrative stresses an “eternal” Jewish Kingdom in the region, for “all” Jewish people, even those of non-

Middle Eastern descent). The irony is that “unity” can only be comprehended once some form of “division” has taken place. Any national fictions that stress the principle of unity are already positioned to interpret the self and/or the collective and the land, nation, etc. in distinct and alienated orbits. Shehadeh’s description of the Palestinian circulatory relationship to the land, on the other hand, stresses the principle of continuity, in both a historical sense and a visceral one. In other words, Palestinians, particularly the peasants, were an organic extension of the land, which they both tilled and received sustenance from symbiotically. This is in stark contrast to viewing the land through a national lens, such as that embodied by the State of Israel, which aims to dominate the land, even as it markets this dominance by using the rhetoric of “unification.”

In a modern, industrial age, land, and quite possibly everything else, is doomed to be seen through a lens terminally distorted by an agenda. To counter this unfortunate shift of consciousness, Shehadeh retroactively imagines a different type of relationship to the land, one that is “immediate and not experienced through the veil of words written about it,” although he admits that “it is in the unavoidable context of such literature that I write my own account . . .” (A Rift in Time xv). In other words, although Shehadeh is as doomed to the same irreversible loss of pure and visceral experiences of phenomena as everyone else, throughout Palestinian Walks, he uses the terminal and removed medium of language to convince readers that, at one time, such a transcendent relationship to one’s surroundings was possible. He writes:

In the course of a mere three decades, close to half a million Jewish people were settled within an area of only 2, 278 square miles. The damage caused to the land

by the infrastructural work necessary to sustain the life of such a large population, with enormous amounts of concrete poured to build entire cities, is not difficult to appreciate. I witnessed this complete transformation near where I grew up, and I write about it here. Beautiful wadis, springs, cliffs and ancient ruins were destroyed by those who claim a superior love of the land. By trying to record how the land felt and looked before this calamity, I hope to preserve, at least in words, what has been lost forever. (A Rift in Time xx)

Shehadeh, then, recognizes that language is the only available means for preserving, or at least momentarily conveying, what the native inhabitants of Palestine lost. In some ways, the deadened finality of the language of memory is as a tombstone is to the departed; it marks the existence of a mortal’s life, but is never confused for actually representing the mortal, or what he or she may have meant to the living. In a very significant way, much of what

Palestinian Walks amounts to is an elaborate epitaph.

In analyzing Shehadeh’s language, which draws inevitable comparisons between the deadness of language and the mortality of all things, one can see the effectiveness of such a strategy. To emphasize the finite quality of a people, a history, and a place, as well as the memories thereof that also must die, only to be preserved imperfectly in language, is to connect readers to a collective sense of mortality. Any individual morbidly wandering through cemeteries, or perhaps even more upbeat locations such as museums, is summoned to reflect upon the unifying experience of change, loss, and the necessary reconciliation one must make with the limitations of preserving the past. Shehadeh’s basic assumption is that change is inevitable, and the past can only be imperfectly preserved in the fixed and alienated medium of language. This position has important implications for notions of “return,” a rhetorical concept bought to life by the language of nationalism, which we will discuss in greater detail in Chapter Two. However, inasmuch as Palestinian memoirs provide an outlet

for memoirists to mourn the past, they are also a form of political action. In this capacity,

they outline a future that embodies some elements of the past. Shehadeh writes:

The past cannot be revived. The suffering that Najib and his descendents have endured cannot be undone. My hope is more modest: that travelers to and inhabitants of the Great Rift Valley, whether in the Occupied West Bank, where it is imprisoned between Israeli checkpoints, in Israel or further north, where it is fragmented by numerous political borders, will lift up their eyes and try, as I did, to imagine the whole of this valley as one, a land without borders where everyone is free to travel and enjoy all the wonderful pleasures it has to offer. Those able to succeed in looking with new eyes might share my experience of when writing this book, of a momentary rift in time, a respite from the confines of the dismal present. After all, change only comes thanks to those, like Najib, who are capable of imagining a different world. (A Rift in Time 231-232)

The type of pre-national relationship to place that Shehadeh envisions requires a self- conscious collective effort to reunify human beings with the land and with each other. This would not be the paradoxical model of “unity” that exists concomitantly with terminal and aggressive borders, but a “unity” that would translate into changes on the landscape. The urging of his readers to look with “new eyes” is a recognition of the way rhetorical lenses create realities. Significantly, he implies that these lenses not only change but can be changed, through an act, or a series of acts, of imagination. It is then not only the “imagined community” described by Benedict Anderson that Shehadeh attempts to describe, but the

“imagined consciousness” of a pre-national, agrarian community as well. He indicates that by imaginatively communing with the past, one can manifest change in the present.

Additionally, Shehadeh avers that this pre-national consciousness was experienced by, and expressed through, its own idiomatic language including a grammar and a vocabulary of its own. And, like the land it once represented, this language has been irrevocably lost as well. As Shehadeh writes:

My first encounter with the language of the hills was at the law courts, when as a young man I used to accompany my father, who was a recognized expert in land

law. He took on many cases of disputes between landowners who possessed kawasheen (certificates of ownership) for unregistered land where the boundaries of the plot were described in terms of the physical features, in the language of hill farmers. It was here that I encountered words such as sha’b, a’rsa, sabeel and bydar. In later years, when the Israeli occupation forces became interested in claiming Palestinian land for Jewish settlements, and I appealed against land acquisition orders to Israeli courts, the ambiguity in these documents was used against the farmers to dispute their ownership. (Palestinian Walks 4)

As a lawyer, Shehadeh demonstrates what happens when Palestinian bids for rights to their land occur in the context of Israeli courts; they are summarily delegitimized. As Gellner explains, “The state is that institution. . . specifically concerned with the enforcement of order. The state exists where specialized order enforcing agencies, such as police forces and courts, have separated out from the rest of social life. They are the state” (4). On the other hand, agrarian society “tends to communicate in terms whose meaning can only be identified in context” (Gellner 12). Gellner’s description aligns with what Shehadeh refers to as “the language of the hills.” Within an institutionalized setting, language is formulated precisely to maintain the legitimacy of the state. Its power lies in its ability to operationalize terms that support this end, and to nullify competing terminologies, such as Shehadeh’s “language of the hills.”

According to Shehadeh, the sacred, organic connection to the land as experienced outside of the context of nationalism is bound to become extinct when forced to reckon with a national program. Whereas Israeli ownership of land is recorded in an alienated nexus of maps and deeds, terms of ownership under the Palestinian system were features of the land itself—in other words, landmarks, like boulders or springs. He represents the mentality of the Bedouins to further make this point: “Theirs was a different vision of the land. They saw it as an integral whole. . . . In a country where there had been such a scramble over land they

hardly ever bothered to register any in their name. How could they when they didn’t conceive

of it as divisible plots?” (Palestinian Walks 141).

By reflecting upon a people’s relationship to land as a pre-national entity, Palestinian memoirists respond to a number of deeply held convictions about nationalism in general, and the Palestinian/Israeli situation in particular. Collectively, their rhetoric is meant to expose various tenets of nationalism as pure fictions. First, they dismiss the idea that land as nations- states is the ideal way of envisioning one’s relationship to place. Then they construct an imagined pre-nationalized consciousness of land, stressing the notion of continuity between the land and those who lived on it. As opposed to many of the works that focus on the

Palestinian-Israeli conflict, they present their arguments via the memoir, which avails itself to strategies, such as pathos appeals, by imparting knowledge informed by personal experiences and memories.

Through the trope of loss, Palestinian memoirists illustrate the collapse of a society and a way of life, which has affected all modern, industrialized societies to some extent. In the case of the Palestinians, this collapse happened relatively recently, and very quickly, within a single generation. Once this occurred, a group of dispersed people was coerced into redefining their justification to the land by adopting a national vocabulary that was not only alien to them, but also inappropriate, given what they perceive as the sacred character of their land. Indeed, most memoirists conclude their reflections on the note that the land claimed by

Israel and Palestine should be considered the “Holy Land,” a moniker that stands in opposition to other descriptive terms, such as “nation” or “homeland.” In his most recent memoir, Exile’s Return, Turki writes:

There is animate logic in calling this land the Holy Land, and nothing else. To call it a nation, a state, a country, is like debasing a rose by using its botanical name.

When this land is freed from the petty effusions of politics and the venomous fabric of nationalism and when we allow it, this little piece of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, to make accessible the magic of its metaphoric affinities with our being, then we have to call it simply what it calls itself: the Holy Land. No person who encounters this land, in this manner, could give to another so much of his love. (34)

It is interesting that Palestinian memoirists, while ultimately critiquing the nation-state as the optimal framework for the region, nonetheless advance arguments in support of a separate

Palestinian state. In Chapter Two, we will examine some of the ways that the imagined pre- national qualities of Palestine insinuate themselves into a national narrative and an argument for the establishment of Palestine as a state structure. Then in Chapter Three, we will discuss how the nature of the Israeli occupation has dashed the hopes many Palestinians had for the viability of such a state. Although there is sharp criticism of both the concept of nations as a model in general, and the concept of Israel as an exclusively Jewish state in particular, so far memoirists largely limit their discussions of the “Holy Land” by situating it in its pre- national past. Aspects of the “Holy Land” inform their national narrative, but the establishment of Palestine remains a national enterprise. The actual application of an inclusive Holy Land for the Abrahamic traditions would probably entail the dismantlement of

Israel as a Jewish state, an argument memoirists are not ready, or willing, to propose directly, at least in their memoirs. This may change as the prospects for a viable Palestinian state get slimmer and slimmer. However, for the time being, the pre-national qualities of Palestine are still reserved to the context of advancing the cause for a separate Palestinian state. To this end, they adopt a new set of terminologies, and weave elements of their past into a narrative premised upon the future of Palestine as a nation. How they do this will be the subject of our next chapter.

CHAPTER 2

PALESTINIAN MEMOIRS AND THE VOCABULARY OF NATIONALISM

In Chapter One, we discussed the ways that memoirists imaginatively recreated the trope pre-national Palestinian land, as well as the culture and the collective consciousness of the people who lived there, in order to establish the legitimacy of contemporary Palestinian rights to the land. However, Palestinian memoirists acknowledge that in order to carve out a place that addresses the material and existential anxieties posed by the experiences of exile and occupation, Palestinians need to advocate for their cause by formulating their claim within the language of nationhood and statehood. As a result, Palestinian history and culture have been processed into an overarching national narrative, which posits “land” as the most central, unifying feature of the Palestinian experience. In this chapter, I will examine the ways that memoirists analyze from an academic distance some of their national tropes, as well as how they reproduce them in their memoirs.

Whether Palestinian memoirists are arguing from the vantage point of exile or occupation, they frame their rhetoric around a shared, central theme, which is “land” and its related terms (“al ard” and “homeland”). Palestinian memoirists contend that in order to legitimize their connections to Palestine, Palestinians were compelled to process elements of their folk culture, which was a pre-national social system characterized by idiosyncratic histories and relationships, into a homogenized narrative that represented them as a national entity. In this narrative, the concept of “land” is central, and from it radiates a shared

33 nationalized vocabulary and collection of symbols, including terms and concepts that function in opposition to many of the same definitions central to the Zionist narrative, such as the Return (“al-Awda”). From the smithereens of their pre-national society, Palestinians inherited the task of constructing a vision of their imagined state, one that both fulfilled their collective existential and material needs, while at the same time, tried to convince the world of its legitimacy. By examining the trope of land as nationalized space, a picture emerges that both qualifies and complicates traditionally held assumptions about the validity of the competing nationalisms, particularly in the West. Ultimately, memoirists aim to reverse the belief system, which stipulates that Israel holds the moral high ground and, hence, the exclusive right to the land. As Karmi noted, “. . . In this conflict, victim and perpetrator, right and wrong were turned upside down to the extent that it was now up to Palestinians to prove their history and the title to the land they had lost, not the newcomers who had displaced them” (394). Given the difficulties entailed in “proving” history—the back and forth exchange of historical claims and counterclaims has been, for Palestinians, rhetorically ineffective---Palestinian memoirists opt to report their versions and render them credible. In doing so, they construct an ethos of a people with legitimate national rights equal to or greater than the rights claimed by Israel to belong to its citizens exclusively. A critical part of establishing this ethos entails re-appropriating terms enacted in a national vocabulary and redefining them in a Palestinian context.

Let us begin with an analysis of how the national lens came to supplant earlier conceptual models, a process which Palestinian memoirists identify from a distance. In chapter one, I examined the ways that Palestinian peasants, as imagined by the Palestinian memoirists who write of them, conceived of land through a non-national filter. Memoirists

34 present the Palestinian collective identity as indivisible from the land, arguing that the relationship was entrenched in the colloquialisms of the spoken language, and was essentially an unconscious and invisible aspect of the Palestinian existence. According to memoirists, a more articulated recognition of “el ard” occurred only after the Palestinians were coerced to explain it. In the following passage, Turki describes a 1955 interview between what he describes as “one of those wretched ‘area specialists’” from England and a displaced

Palestinian, Abu Samir:

“But why, why must you go back to Palestine?” she asks Abu Samir, thrusting her microphone close to his face. “Why Palestine specifically? There are many Arab countries you can be resettled in.” She was too ignorant of our culture to know how profoundly insulting she was being. . . yet Abu Samir simply straightens up stiffly in his chair and waits awhile before he answers. . . . “Sister, let me tell you this, “ he intones, his eyes almost closed as he puffs on his waterpipe. “The land is where our ancestors were born, died, and are now buried. We are from that land. The stuff of our bones and our soul comes from there. We and the soil are one. Every grain of my land carries the memories of our ancestors within it. And every part of me carries the history of that land within it. The land of others does not know me. I am a stranger to it and it is a stranger to me. Ardi-aardi,” he concludes. My land is my nobility. What an English journalist, coming from a culture that wants to “conquer space” and “tame nature” did with that bit of peasant self-definition, no one can say. (Soul in Exile 49-50)

Despite Turki’s claim in this passage that “no one can say” how a Westerner perceived such explanations from the Abu Samirs of the world, he and other Palestinian memoirists actually make it quite clear in their arguments that those types of explanations were summarily dismissed. Together, memoirists aver that the “mystical” Palestinian connection to “el ard” was irrelevant to Westerners, who only acknowledged such connections within a nationalized context. This was a lesson learned by younger generations of Palestinians—those who were exiled or placed under occupation at young ages, which includes the memoirists Nusseibeh,

Shehadeh, Karmi, and Turki, all of whom we will be examining. The absence of Palestinians

as a national collective meant that their rights to remain in the land of Palestine and establish their own system of self-governance were null and void. Memoirists contend that this

argument was used to justify the expulsion of Palestinians, who could simply be “resettled”

in “many other Arab countries.”

Thus, the various exigent circumstances generated from living under conditions of

occupation or exile compelled subsequent generations of Palestinians to take a step beyond

defining what “el ard” meant for their parents and ancestors, and package it in a nationalized

box complete with metaphors and terms that would resonate with a Western audience (who

were in many ways responsible for deciding their fate). While the Palestinian nationalized

relationship to land, or “el ard,” is rhetorically packaged as a “union”—a common trope in

national jargon--the “nation” of one’s “homeland” is actually experienced and animated

through feelings of alienation and loss. As Shehadeh describes it:

Sometimes, when I am walking through the hills, say Batn al-Hawa— unselfconsciously enjoying the touch of the hard land under my feet, the smell of thyme and the hills and trees around me—I find myself looking at an olive tree, and as I am looking at it, it transforms itself before my eyes into a symbol of the samidin, of our struggle, of our loss. And at that very moment, I am robbed of the tree; instead, there is a hollow space into which my anger and pain flow. . . .It is not any symbolism, but national symbolism that makes you into a land pornographer. It is the identification of the land with your people and through that with yourself. Although I am glad that this is happening—we could not hope to fight off the Israelis without it—I cannot but allow myself a moment of anger and regret. I feel deep, deep resentment against this invasion of my innermost imagery and consciousness by the Israelis. (Samed 88-89).

In this passage, Shehadeh is describing the transformation of one lens, characterized by the

unself-conscious pleasure he took in the land as a young boy, to a national lens, which

perceives the land as a political stage littered with nationalized “props.” The props—whether

they are the trees, representing the struggle, or the Israeli tanks, signifying the enemy, or the

land itself, which symbolizes personal and collective identity--are assessed primarily by virtue of their supporting roles in the national drama. The “invasion” of one’s “innermost imagery” entails a conscious awareness of an “audience” of judging spectators, as well as a consciousness of one’s self as an “actor.” Therefore, the generation of national symbols is only possible once a number of rhetorical divisions—between the various selves, the stage, the Others—have been redefined and internalized. This passage is also significant in that in it

Shehadeh acknowledges that adapting to the national framework is a necessary development, even as he resents the replacement of one lens by another arguably inferior one.

As a result, various cultural referents associated with the trope of land came to be processed through this national lens. The peasant culture itself, which was forever altered and largely ceased to exist after the Palestinian mass expulsion of 1948, morphed into a national symbol. Karmi explains that before 1948, middle and upper class Palestinians (such as her parents) viewed the peasant class as “uneducated and backward,” preferring to ape the latest

European fashions of the time (20-22). The peasant women wore traditional caftans with distinctive embroidered patterns, from which one could discern its origins. Karmi explains:

At the time of my childhood in Jerusalem, no woman who was not a peasant would have been seen dead in such a caftan, however beautifully embroidered. . . No one then could have known that after the loss of Palestine in 1948, this despised peasant costume would become a symbol of the homeland, worn with pride by the very women who had previously spurned it. (22-23)

Other embroidered crafts, such as pillow cushions and table runners, received similar treatment, and also came to be processed as symbols. The creation of folk crafts shifted from an individual endeavor to an industry, particularly in refugee camps. Karmi claims that, “It has become usual for well-to-do Palestinians who live in Britain or America to display these

37 embroidered cushions and hangings in their lounges and to explain their origins at length to visitors” (23-24). Karmi implies that for exiled Palestinians—especially those who are wealthy enough to collect identity-enforcing artifacts to begin with—it is the distance, the remoteness from exile’s reality, which allows such items to possess the exiled imagination and confer meaning to it. It does not matter so much that the crafts are no longer produced under the supposed idyllic conditions of Palestinian peasant culture in “the homeland,” instead originating from squalid camps shoved off to the sidelines in hostile, neighboring countries. The peasants came to be seen as “symbols of tenacity, simplicity, and steadfastness. . . .They represented continuity and tradition and the essence of what it means to be Palestinian” (Karmi 20-21). Through these examples, memoirists such as Karmi illustrate some of the ways that traditional Palestinian folk culture became an essential component of its national character, complete with its own nationalistic repertoire of symbols.

In the context of Palestinian memoirs, the qualities that came to be associated with the peasant class are fixated upon more among writers of exile than memoirists living in the occupied territories, particularly the vivid and “mystical” affinity between Palestinians and the land. Writers such as Turki admit that the forces of alienation and exile drive the internalization of a national identity premised upon this perceptual nexus, and that the experience of distance and division serves to intensify the potency of national imagery. Of the city of his birth, Turki writes, “Haifa now means more to me than it did to my father. It is more graphic in my mind than in his. Its image more enriching, more engulfing, as I grow up” (Soul in Exile 37). Of all the memoirists, only Turki grew up in a refugee camp, but all seem to agree that the fixation on Palestine is strongest among refugee camp dwellers.

Perhaps it is because it is there that material agonies, such as hunger, disease, overpopulation,

and exposure, and the existential purgatory of statelessness, merge. During a visit to a school

in a refugee camp in 1977, Karmi describes the refugees’ obsessions over the return to

Palestine, writing:

Zahra, the headteacher, took me to see the kindergarten. Each classroom was known by the name of a different Palestinian city. She paused outside the door called “Haifa.” “Do you want to come into the class? The kids here are four years old but should be able to tell you where they come from.” I was puzzled. “We teach our children all about Palestine,” she explained proudly. “ “Ahlan wa sahlan! [Welcome!]” chorused the children. “And where do we all come from?” she prompted. “Palestine!” they answered in a great shout. “And when we grow up,” continued the teacher, “where are we all going to?” “Palestine! Palestine!” (409)

Clearly, the relative proximity of Palestinians to their land affects their conceptualizations of Palestine as a “nation,” as well as the ways that the various nationalisms are rhetorically transcribed. The experience of alienation—which, as Turki

notes, is ironically also one of the most predominant themes in the great literary

accomplishments of Europeans Jews—creates some significant differences in the rhetorical application of the national terms “homeland” and “return,” both of which we will examine.

One important rhetorical feature is that the concept of “homeland” is fundamentally bound to the degrading condition of exile and the imagined redemption of the glorious “return.” For this reason, “homeland” is used much more often by writers in exile, such as Karmi and

Turki, and, as we shall discuss later, the focus on “the return” is more central. Shehadeh, for example, rarely refers to Palestine as his “homeland,” and though his family was internally displaced from Jaffa to Ramallah, he does not pursue a definition of “return” that would allow his family to go back to Jaffa. As part of a national vocabulary, “homeland” is taken to

39 mean the staging ground for the “nation.” Although it imagines pre-national sentiments as the basis for the establishment of the nation, its use is already entrenched in a national dialectic that is, by definition, divorced from pre-national realities. Therefore, one of the primary features of the “homeland” is that it is brought to life by the forces of alienation and exile.

Another prominent feature of “homeland” is that it is rhetorically paired against opposing Israeli definitions. Although memoirists go to great lengths to include renderings of

Palestinian history apart from the modern conflict with Israel, most contend that the idea of

Palestine as “nation” emerged largely in response to the Zionist threat. Thus, in their attempts to convince their Western readership of their rights to the nation of Palestine, they must confront the Israeli narrative, which is premised on the notion that the land of Israel is their “homeland.” No memoirist seriously attempts to argue that the concept of “homeland” existed before the mass Palestinian expulsion of 1948; indeed, most claim the opposite. As

Turki wrote, “Our name, which we acquired after 1948, was not so much a national title—we had had no nation—as an existential term” (Exile’s Return 272). The oldest example of the rhetorical linking of “nation” to “home” as offered in Palestinian memoirs occurs in excerpts from the Balfour Declaration, particularly the phrase directly advocating “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” As Shehadeh explains in his 2010 memoir, A Rift in Time: Travels With My Ottoman Uncle, the creation of Israel as a national home departed from the system that had previously allowed a number of diverse groups to exist under the same political umbrella in the Ottoman Empire. In his account of Palestinian history, he highlights how the prevailing national framework redefined space, social and political relationships, and the provisions regulating a peoples right to belong:

The millet system instituted by the Ottomans was the first attempt at creating out of the diverse members of one sect a singular group. But not one with national

rights. Each millet had control over matters of personal status, including marriages, inheritance and other religious affairs. . . . The government of the British Mandate in Palestine, which took over from the Ottomans after the Allied victory in the First World War, continued it, as did the governments of Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Authority. But the Mandate government did more than recognize the Jewish population as a separate millet; the terms of the Mandate endorsed the Zionist belief that Jews constituted a nation entitled to self- determination, and thus facilitated the creation in Palestine of a Jewish home which eventually succeeded in taking over the whole of Palestine from the Palestinian Arabs, whether Christian, Jewish or Muslim. (A Rift in Time 167-168)

This transformation of the political order instigated new ways of perceiving one’s relationship to place, and ultimately, inspired two dominant national narratives in the region, both with a particular (and in many ways, mutually exclusive) understanding of the meaning of “homeland.” Palestinian memoirists argue for the legitimacy of their definition of

“homeland” by juxtaposing it with the opposing Israeli version.

The term “homeland” refers, almost by definition, to a limited space, which happens to be the same space for both groups (“Eretz Israel” according to Zionists, “Palestine” according to Palestinian Arabs). However, the relation of the “homeland” to time varies between the two. As memoirists point out, according to the Zionist narrative, the Jewish

“homeland” is “eternal,” and their rationale for this belief is grounded in biblical theology.

Nusseibeh demonstrates the inherent difficulties in raising objections to those who believe that their presence is sanctioned by the forces of divinity. Recounting a conversation with an

Israeli student in East Jerusalem, he writes:

. . .One afternoon when, after visiting mother, I retraced my childhood walks through the streets of the Old City and came to the Goldsmith’s Souk. As I stood there, I struck up a conversation with one of the Jewish students who had taken it over, with the patronage of Ariel Sharon, meter by meter. Judging by his Brooklyn accent, I concluded he was an American. I explained to him that the souk belonged to my family. “Do you think we want to be here?” he asked, moving his hand in all directions. At first I was

encouraged by the question. I half expected to dive into an existential heart-to- heart between two people trapped in an impossible situation not of their choosing. I was wrong. “We are destined to be here,” he said. It was as if he was telling me that divinity—the same force that once upon a time told humanity thou shalt not steal—was telling him to dislodge us from our ancestral land, not because he wanted to do so, but because he had to. (Nusseibeh and David 238-239)

Nusseibeh’s passage illustrates the difference between the Zionist and the Palestinian conception of the “homeland” in relation to space and time. To the Palestinians, the homeland is ancient and ancestral, but not eternal. Their claim to Palestine as their ancestral patrimony is based on a cultural-turned-national narrative that emphasizes their longstanding presence on the land. While all the memoirists mention their own familial histories, cementing their personal ties to the land, the national narrative grew out of the attempt to homogenize these idiosyncratic histories and assimilate them into an official national regimen. Nusseibeh illustrates this by including a passage from a declaration of independence, written by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish:

Palestine, land of the three monastic faiths, is where the Palestinian Arab people was born, on which it grew, developed, and excelled. Thus the Palestinian Arab people ensured for itself an everlasting union between itself, its land, and its history. Resolute throughout that history, the Palestinian Arab people forged its national identity. . . . Nourished by an unfolding series of civilizations and cultures, inspired by a heritage rich in variety and kind, the Palestinian people added to its stature by consolidating a union between itself and its patrimonial Land. (297)

While Darwish’s declaration includes other common topoi of nationalisms, such as “union” and references to its “everlasting” nature, Nusseibeh includes it because it captures, in official discourse, the same conceptualization of the Palestinian national consciousness that

Nusseibeh is trying to confer in his memoir. Darwish’s document posits that Palestinian national identity gradually emerged throughout the ages; it is not presumed to exist from time

immemorial, but was shaped by a series of forces—“civilizations and cultures”—that are not

necessarily divinely orchestrated.

Darwish’s declaration is also significant because it hints to another important

difference between the Zionist definition of “homeland” and the Palestinian one. According

to the Zionist claims, as articulated by Palestinian memoirists, the nation of Israel, in addition

to defining itself as eternal, is also exclusive. As a religio-political construct, it is designed as

a national home for Jews, to the exclusion of other groups; although other groups live there,

such as Muslim, Druze, and Christian minorities, the Zionist position does not consider Israel

as a homeland to others, an ideology that is put into effect by politically disempowering non-

Jews and largely excluding them from civic life. The Palestinian version of the homeland,

again, as articulated by memoirists, underscores the diversity of cultural, historical, and religious attachments to it. Nusseibeh is particularly emphatic about the legitimacy of religious and historically grounded Jewish connections to Palestine. He cites, for example, a letter written in the early 20th century from the mayor of Jerusalem to the chief rabbi of

France, asking, “Who can contest the rights of Jews to Palestine?. . .God knows, historically, it is indeed your country” (Nusseibeh and David 23). Memoirists, particularly Nusseibeh, present Palestine as, ideally, a pluralistic society and home to all members of the Abrahamic faiths; as mentioned in Chapter One, Nusseibeh commonly refers to it as the “Holy Land,” and when he uses the word “homeland,” it is usually in the context of reprinting official national discourse, like Darwish’s declaration of independence or speeches by Yasser Arafat.

However, it is notable that memoirists do not present this “ideal” vision of “the Holy

Land” within the context of an argument for the one-state solution, although only Nusseibeh addresses directly why he abandoned such a model. He describes that his reaction to the

Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem and the occupation of the West Bank during the 1967

war was a positive one, writing, “The war had ended the division of my country. Defeat had

given me back my homeland. Growing up, I had never doubted for a moment that my

homeland started in Jerusalem and extended west to Jaffa” (Nusseibeh and David 98) In this

description, he defined his ideal borders, and uses “homeland” to refer to an imagined nation,

which included Jerusalem and other cities in Israel, and excluded Jordan and the East Bank.

(This is also one of his many statements indicating the Palestinian disinclination to simply

move to Jordan and consider it their homeland, otherwise known as “The Jordanian Option.”)

His rationale was that the annexation would lead to one secular, democratic state. Recalling

his former optimism, Nusseibeh writes:

I don’t have to mention here just how misplaced my optimism was. As there was no crystal ball in the cab, I couldn’t foresee the coming years of occupation, the thousands of corpses, or the twenty-foot high concrete wall or the electrified fences now carving up my country. . . . In 1967, I saw no reason why I couldn’t live in the same democratic secular state with the people who had cut in line for a taxi. (98)

Nusseibeh’s memoir documents the trajectory of Palestinian conceptualizations for statehood, illustrating that not only have they evolved throughout time, but that any model must be analyzed according to the historical context in which it was proposed. He reflects that by 1979, “My optimism for the natural evolution of ‘Palest-El’ started to crumble. It was becoming unmistakably clear to me that the nature of the Israeli occupation would systematically and intentionally undermine any kind of natural, peaceful, evolutionary development” (164).

Nusseibeh’s descriptions of the evolution of Palestine generally follow the same historical current as outlined by other Palestinian memoirists. In it, Palestine begins as the

“Holy Land,” the ideal, unifying, transcendent epicenter of humanity that, by its very nature,

resists the petty politics and divisive borders inherent in nations. Next, it becomes the

battleground for two competing nationalisms, from which various state solutions emerge. For

memoirists, the only solutions worth mentioning are the one-state solution, envisioned as secular and democratic, and the two-state solution, comprised of a separate secular and democratic Palestinian state alongside Israel. The symbols and references they employ are embedded in a national dialectic that, in the context of their memoirs, supports the creation of a separate Palestinian state. Ultimately, however, all memoirists posit that Israel is undermining both state models that would be acceptable to Palestinians, and they reflect doubtfully on the premise that the “Holy Land” can, or should, exist within a national. In

many of their recent publications, authors such as Nusseibeh and Karmi are proposing

alternative solutions, but whether or not these make their way into future memoirs remains to

be seen.

One of the major moral failings of Israel as a Jewish state, according to memoirists, is

the unchallengeable right of exclusivity, a condition that, according to memoirists, is

ideologically committed to maintaining superiority and “purity.” Nusseibeh illustrates this

with a bit of irony, by referencing ideologies related to ethnic nationalisms, which exist in

Israeli conceptualizations of its state:

The Hamas legislators now running my country no doubt would bristle at the thought of the “enemy” being at the source of our identity of Muslims. But the religious fundamentalist can eradicate Jews from Jerusalem only by first doing violence to Islam. At the deepest metaphysical level, Jews and Arabs are “allies,” and any attempt to separate them is a product of the modern European myth of a “pure” nation, purged of outsiders, as with Sharon’s wall. (533)

By mentioning the myth of “purity” Nusseibeh evokes a cloud of uncomfortable associations that he claims exist in the Jewish democracy. In order to achieve the virtue of “purity,” Israel predetermines that the majority status, and therefore, political power, will be reserved for a

45 specific group, regardless of emerging demographic realities. Such a system officially relegates the rights of non-Jews to an inferior status and, in its efforts to preserve the purity of the nation, justifies whatever actions it must take thwart the threats posed by “outsiders.”

Therefore, memoirists conclude that any developments that challenge either the Jewish or the

“democratic” character of the state must be dealt with, either by physically “purging” outsiders, or constructing official definitions that preclude the possibilities for legal citizenship of the malignant factions. Kenneth Burke points out the predictable trajectory of such rhetoric by applying a principle he calls “entelechy,” which maintains that humans are driven to manifest the implications of their terminologies to their fullest extent. Robert C.

Rowland and David A. Frank illustrate this in their analysis of Israelis like Meir Khane and

Baruch Goldstein, writing:

Such individuals are dangerous not because they are irrational but precisely because they are so consistent. The “logic” of such extremists is impeccable: if Israel is to remain in control of all of the ancient Kingdom of Israel and remain a “Jewish” society, then, given the rapid rate of the Palestinian population growth, the Palestinians must be forced out or killed. . . .An Israel defined by such ideas would be an entelechial and fascist society. (292)

By pointing out the underlying strain of “purity” in the Israeli rendition of nationality,

Nusseibeh argues that, ironically, the type of state that Jews envision for themselves seeks to exclude those identified as “outsiders,” a tendency shared by many of the same countries that

Jews sought refuge from. Given that the Jewish state is unwilling, and by Israel’s own self- definition, unable, to include Palestinians, Nusseibeh argues that Palestinians, who have legitimate reasons for wanting to inhabit the land claimed by Israel, deserve their own nation,

I have examined some of the significant differences between the ways that Palestinian memoirists use the term “homeland” and the ways that they claim the Israelis do, but there are striking rhetorical similarities as well. Both dominant narratives about the homeland are

simply different accounts of the same basic sequence. They contend that their people

originated there, were exiled from there, and must return there. Within this narrative, there is

a vocabulary shared by two nations largely conceived on the basis of a perceived exile from

the homeland. Because the notion of “exile” is central to this particular narrative strain,

ruminations on “the homeland” and the redemptive quality of the “return” are much more

prominent in the discourse of Palestinian writers of the Diaspora, such as Turki and Karmi, than they are among writers of occupied Palestine.

From the position of exile, return to the homeland (“al-Awda,” or “the return”), is an almost obsessive preoccupation. Yet the Palestinian imaginings of the return are fluid and variable, depending on the time and place in which they are conceived. Most memoirists admit that their ideas of return differ from their parents’, who imagined their exile as only temporary, and thus expected a literal return to the villages and homes of their past. Karmi exemplifies this attitude by describing her mother’s behavior in England, determined by her surety that their stay in England would be temporary. Karmi writes:

. . . For Palestinians in the immediate aftermath of the 1948 exodus, the prospect of return to Palestine was very real. Who can believe, they used to say, that we won’t be allowed to return to our homes? It’s our country, they’re our homes. The UN, the Americans, the British will never allow such a terrible injustice to happen. Of course we’re going back! This was my mother’s conviction, too. “I’ll put up with being here,” she would say about London, “because I know it won’t be for long. And you, children,” she would continue, “don’t get too used to things here, we’re not staying.” And she put this philosophy uncompromisingly into effect. She refused to learn English, she had no English friends, she would reject any sense of decorating our shabby house or even buying such a basic thing as a refrigerator. “I never had such a thing in Palestine where it was hot, why should I need it here where it’s freezing?” Agreeing to any house improvement other than cleaning would have meant that her stay in England was no longer temporary. (186-187)

According to Palestinian memoirists, their parents’ vision of return was something akin to

waking up from a bad dream, and resuming life as normal. By the time they realized that

their banishment was permanent, and that international forces would not intervene on their

behalf, it was too late to act; thus, it became the onus of their children to re-imagine the return to Palestine, which was bound to be drastically different from the Palestine of their parents’ memories. And, even within a single generation of writers—those born to

Palestinian men and women of the 1948 Nakba—their rhetorical use of the word “return” has changed throughout their writing careers. There is, for example, a much more stridently national tone in Turki’s 1972 The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile than in his later memoirs. It concludes with the statement, “There is no other place for us to go but

Palestine” (188), and takes a much more principled approach to the concept of “return.” He writes:

The reason. . . that Palestinians are obsessed with the notion of Returning, though indeed there is no Palestine to return to as it was a quarter-century before, is because the Return means the reconstitution of Palestinian’s integrity and the regaining of its place in history. It is not merely for a physical return to Palestine that a lot of men and women have given or dedicated their lives, but for the right to return of which they have been robbed. As the struggle for this right evolves and changes, the liberation of Palestine, in a sense, becomes the liberation of men and women. Palestinians, Arabs, and Israelis. The dismantling of Zionism, that oppresses them all, is the rebirth of them all. As such, Palestine is not a struggle that involves only Palestinians. It is Everyman. (The Disinherited 175-176)

Here, the Return is presented as the fruits from the labor of the national struggle, a moral victory in which winning the right of return is the ultimate achievement. As he says, “Our struggle. . . has not been merely to live in comfort, to pursue happiness, to acquire purpose, to create, to sing, to make love. . . .But it has been a struggle over the right to do it in

Palestine” (The Disinherited 146). The Palestinian Right of Return is the final indication of

the triumph of good over evil, at least in this particular conflict. Like Nusseibeh in 1967, the

twenty-nine year old Turki of 1972 still thought this was possible.

By 1994, when he writes Exile’s Return: The Making of a Palestinian American, there has been a fundamental shift in how he perceives the land of his childhood and the

notion of returning to it. During a trip to Mount Karmel, the site of a fondly recalled

childhood picnic, he muses:

I am home. Yet, as I say that to myself, I know how facile and illusory that outcry is. It is tawdry, I tell myself, for me to be saying that. I cannot return here, after forty years in exile, with my alternative order of meaning, my comfortable notions about homelessness being my only homeland, and say that I am home. . . .An awry force in history has changed the place, and my own sense of otherness has changed me. This place could not be lived in by anyone other than its new inhabitants, and they have already stripped it clean of everything but themselves. From time to time, I come across something here and there, inherited from nature—the view of the Mediterranean below, the cloudless sky above, the richly green trees around—that had always independently declared their own form of being, but apart from that, Haifa no longer speaks to me. (Exile’s Return 4)

Karmi, for her part, reaches similar conclusions. During a trip to Israel, also to visit important

sites from her childhood, she returns to her hotel with a feeling of emptiness. Then, upon

hearing the Islamic call to prayer, she reflects on “the unmistakable sound of another people

and another presence, definable, enduring, and continuous. Still there, not gone, not dead”

(Karmi 451). She writes:

I closed my eyes in awe and relief. The story had not ended after all—not for them, at least, the people who still lived there, though they were now herded into reservations a fraction of what had been Palestine. They would remain and multiply and one day return and maybe overtake. Their exile was material and temporary. But mine was a different exile, undefined by space or time, and from where I was, there would be no return. (Karmi 451)

Thus, Palestinian writers in exile admit with discomfiting self-awareness that a “return” to

Palestine, at least in any meaningful sense of the word, would be impossible. They

experience their Palestinianness primarily through the absence of Palestine, which produces a

crisis of identity that would only be compounded by exercising the right to return. As a

result, they reserve the viability of any meaningful form of return for their Palestinian

counterparts in the Occupied Territories and refugee camps, limiting their own hopes to a

vicarious victory, should a Palestinian state actualize. The subtext within this self-critical appraisal of “al-awda” is the implication that the Israeli “alia” (“ascension,” or “return” to

Israel) is similarly preposterous. Among the memoirists is the uncomfortable admission that any notion of truly “returning” to a time and place is illusory self-deception, which they identify by turning an unforgiving lens on themselves. And yet we are unable to forget that the cause of Karmi’s and Turki’s respective exiles was the establishment of the state of

Israel, which maintains the Jewish “Law of Return” as one of its “Basic Laws,” while excluding the same right to Palestinian refugees.

While this criticism of the Israeli right of return is implicit, in other instances, their condemnation is much more direct. Shehadeh comments on what he perceives as the tawdry showiness and inherent hypocrisy in the Israeli version of “return” by describing the Jewish settlers:

The tourist authorities in Israel delineated with ropes and small placards the site where the Essenes had lived two centuries before Christ, pointing out how this renegade community survived, where its adherents met, at and wrote, and how they collected and stored water and managed agriculture. They were the rebels of their day, settlers who broke away from the ruling establishment and created their own settlement in the harsh conditions by the Dead Sea, where they managed to live by their own laws and practices. . . . Today’s Jewish settlers, not unlike the Essenes, appear to think of themselves as renegades breaking away from the ruling establishment and following their own beliefs and interpretations of the Scriptures. When you see them on street corners with their bushy hair, long hair topped by the knitted yarmulkes. . .you can get a sense of how anachronistic they are, like people from another era. But unlike their predecessors these present day rebels live on state subsidies. They are

protected by the strongest army in the region and needn’t work for a living. Instead they spend their time studying Scripture in strategically positioned yeshivot. . .which use the pretext of religious study to metamorphose into Jewish settlements that serve political objectives. (Palestinian Walks 115-116)

Thus, despite the pretension that settlers are “bucking” the system, settling in Palestinian

territory and insisting that all of historic Palestine belongs to Israel, Shehadeh demonstrates

that their power and protection is afforded to them by the very state whose laws they rebuke.

By pointing this out, Shehadeh not only presents the settlers,’ as well as Israel’s, credibility

in a dubious light; he also implies that either within or without the official state structure,

Israel constructs or condones whatever definitions or actions that consolidate its power over

Palestinians. The Israeli “Law of Return” may technically restrict the parameters of the

“return” to the state of Israel, and not the Occupied Territories, but in practice Jewish

incomers can settle wherever they wish and still be protected by the state. As Shehadeh

writes:

When Sharon declares that the country must defend itself, he is not speaking about Israel of 1967 but of Israel and the territories occupied in this war. Likewise, when he announces that the country’s citizens must be safe, he is referring also to Israel’s citizens who are living outside their country in illegal settlements. Those outside who hear Sharon and don’t know his ideological commitment do not understand this. They argue, why should Israel not have the right to defend its territory and protect its citizens? Which territory and what citizens? is the question. (When the Birds Stopped Singing 76)

However, Shehadeh does not reserve the accusation of self-deception for the Israeli settlers; he is also scornful of foreigners with Palestinian heritage, who visit Palestine in search of their “roots.” He describes an event at the East Jerusalem YMCA where these visitors congregated, costumed in “traditional dress,” to participate in Palestinian folk culture. He writes:

The event reminded me of the few months I spent learning Hebrew in an Israeli Ulpan, in West Jerusalem. There I was given lectures on Israeli folklore,

taught Israeli dances. . .all laid on to encourage my American Jewish classmates to come here one day and make this their home. They too were interested in roots. Are we then repeating an Arab version of Zionist tactics? Is my role supposed to be that of the fulfilled, rooted local? The public relations stooge?—like Avigail, my Hebrew teacher in the Ulpan? She would come in every morning looking fresh, wearing a smile of fulfillment and wisdom and mystery. . . . And she would actually say: ‘Stay here—in a Jewish state—a state of your people—and you will be proud and happy.’ (She would, on these occasions, studiously avoid the eyes of another Arab on the course and myself). An Israeli friend told me that an Ulpan somewhere in the south of Israel, where they have ‘absorbed’ some Vietnamese refugees, they stage the same performance, the land of our forefathers, roots and all. (Samed 112)

There are a few tactics at play in the aforementioned paragraphs. Clearly, the memoirists’ positions toward the Palestinian “right of return” or “al-Awda” are dubious, and they express skepticism that a “return” could ever live up to the liberating ideal assigned to it in the collective Palestinian imagination, particularly the “imagination-in-exile.” However, they present this version of “return” while comparing it to the interpretation espoused by their

Israeli counterparts. The picture that emerges shows that there can be no “pure” form of return that corresponds to reality; rather, the concept of “return” can only be filtered through varying degrees of distortion. According to Benedict Anderson, all communities “are to be distinguished not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined”

(6). To be sure, memoirists depict the stylistic modifications that exist within various

Palestinian communities and generations. As mentioned, the concept of return to the memoirists’ parents meant, quite literally, a return to their villages, their homes, their way of life—not, notably, their “nation”—as if life in Palestine had only been temporarily interrupted, and was destined to resume any minute. Karmi writes of her mother, “Like some

Palestinian Miss Havisham, for her, the clock stopped in Jerusalem in April 1948” (174).

Memoirists present their parents visions of return as naïve, perhaps a bit pitiful, but not

outrageous, given the circumstances of their abrupt displacement. Memoirists like Shehadeh

may reflect cynically on the idea that “pampered,” foreign-born Palestinians can return to

their “roots” by wearing “traditional” dress and willingly submitting to blind indoctrination

of national ideology, while dancing the “dabkeh” and yelling, “We shall remain!”; however,

his cynicism yields to the following ironic acknowledgement:

. . . Perhaps beggars can’t be choosers and we are supposed to encourage everyone to come here, opting for quantity instead of quality. And this happy act is one of the burdens that samidin should take on. Is this what is happening—the oppressed imitating the oppressor’s worst manners—creating himself in the image of his master, the better to overthrow him? (Samed 113)

In other words, the patently artificial character of the “return” may be lamentable, but it is also the necessary counterpoint to the Zionist rendition; and, at any rate, it is inevitable, as

Turki and Karmi point out. However, all of this skeptical critique is presented against the backdrop of competing Israeli nationalism. And, in these presentations, there are in fact value judgments on the “genuineness/falsity” inherent in Palestinians’ and Israelis’ respective claims. As Shehadeh points out, this is a recycled strategy of the Israelis, who posited their own judgment on the “falsity” of Palestinian claims to the land, either by declaring that

Palestinians simply “didn’t exist” or that “Jordan is Palestine” or other such verdicts. In their memoirs, Palestinian writers assert the power to hand down their own adjudications on the

“falsity” of Israel’s claims. They always offer implicit or explicit reminders of the Israeli position, which maintains that all Jews, regardless of their ethnicities (i.e. Vietnamese), nationalities (Polish, American, etc.), parentage (converts, half-Jews, etc.) and Jewish sects

(Orthodox, Reform, etc.) have the exclusive “right” of “return” to a Kingdom that their ancestors may (or may not) have been exiled from 2,000 years ago. Such a loose definition of the word “return” stretches even the most generous bounds of credulity and, when

presented in this light, makes the Palestinian argument for the “right of return” come across

as the more credible, and indeed “genuine,” one.

For the most part, however, when Palestinian memoirists discuss the right of return, it is not as an abstract ethical principle; they present the “right of return” in the context of their

arguments for a Palestinian state. Ultimately, they aim to establish grounds for a right of

return that is limited and pragmatic. Even as they scoff at the Israeli national narrative, and

question the moral legitimacy of the Jewish right to the land to supplant the Palestinians’

rights, they do not argue for the dismantlement of Israel as a Jewish state. Even in his 1972

memoir The Disinherited, Turki suggests that Palestinians “consider” a separate state as an

acceptable solution, and his future memoirs assume this as his default position. Although

Ghada Karmi has come to advocate in other publications for one bi-national state, memoirists generally share the recognition that the Palestinian nation would have to fulfill more modest objectives, including the right for future generations of Palestinians to live in relative freedom and security, albeit on a fraction of historic Palestine.

Nusseibeh is most straightforward in his solution to the conflict, supporting a two-

state solution, which would include a free Palestinian state along the 1967 borders, with East

Jerusalem as its capital, and no blanket right of return into Israel for Palestinian refugees. Of

his position in 2001, he writes, “We have two rights. We have the right of return, in my

opinion. But we also have the right to live in freedom and independence. And very often in

life one has to forgo the implementation of one right in order to implement other rights”

(Nusseibeh and David 446) He added to this formula that, “Palestinians needed to know that

to get their state required acknowledging the moral right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state”

(Nusseibeh and David 446). When Shehadeh published Samed in 1984, he wrote that, due to

54 his friendship with a Jew, Enoch, he also realized that Palestinians would have to “sacrifice a lot” for the sake of peace. He writes:

It was because Enoch neither forgets his nor my people’s suffering—without entering into an obscene competition of who suffered more—that I have learned from him to be open to, and feel deeply, the past history of the Jews and what Israel means to them. It is due to him that I have come to accept that Palestinians will have to sacrifice a lot for peace: we will have to learn to share our land with the Jews in pre-1967 Israel—those who have settled in the Jaffa that my parents left and on land where whole villages of ours have been wiped out. (Samed 36)

In this passage, he is essentially making the same prescription for a two-state solution that

Nusseibeh does later in 2001. During these historical stages, they maintain that Palestinians have a “right” to “return,” but that Palestinians should recognize the state of Israel and choose to not exercise the Palestinian right of return. The imagined Palestinian state is a compromise, swapping the original, literal conception of “return” to their villages of the past, for a more abstract one, in which the state of Palestine symbolically fulfills present existential, as well as material, needs. Much has changed since 1984, but even as Shehadeh has become increasingly pessimistic about the potentiality for a true Palestinian state, none of his more recent memoirs have indicated a fundamental change in his position. Likewise, by the time Nusseibeh’s Once Upon a Country is published in 2007, he is also doubtful about the viability of the Palestinian state for which he advocated in 2001, but not does formally introduce any alternatives in his memoir. As authors writing from the Occupied Territories, any type of “return” that they envision reflects a pragmatic approach to ending the material vexations caused by the occupation, a phenomenon we will examine more closely in Chapter

For a writer in exile, like Turki, however, the idea of having a Palestinian state to go to as a place of refuge closely mirrors the Jewish conceptualization of the Israeli state—a

port to which one maintains a psychic connection premised upon ancestral lineage, as well as

a safe haven. Like the Israeli collective identity, Palestinians as a national group are

increasingly defined by themes of exile and persecution, which become more prominent

features of the emerging national narrative. Ultimately, the meaning of Palestine for the

Palestinians comes to resemble the meaning of Israel for Jews, and shares similar rhetorical

distinctions, particularly the emphasis on the state as a “refuge.” This rhetorical

metamorphosis is apparent in the final pages of Turki’s Exile’s Return. Published in 1994,

when many Palestinians were optimistic about the future of Palestine after the Oslo accords,

Turki concluded on an upbeat note, claiming, “. . .Though I am happy that Palestinians in the

West Bank and Gaza will soon be free to determine their own destinies, I will not pick up

and go to live in the Palestinian homeland” (Exile’s Return 271). And yet he explains that even though he is aware that, “like the square root of minus one, the awda was a big lie,” there is still an appeal in the idea of a Palestinian nation as a place where Palestinians can affectively terminate their condition of exile via asserting their right to choose to return, if they wish.

. . .Palestinians will learn to adjust, especially if the West Bank and Gaza are transformed from a mere homeground into an independent homeland. For then they will know that there is a tiny strip of land, a little corner of the earth tucked between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, where they can go when the Kuwaitis kick them out, when the frenzied packs come to their refugee camps, when the bullies in their host states start to snarl at their heels. . . . And I need not die in Haifa, Safad or Jaffa. Washington will do. I have lived here longer than in any other part of the world. Nor, when I’m dust and forgotten, should it be of any consequence to anyone where my remains are buried. Still, even to a hardened exile like myself, the emergence of a Palestinian state touches some covert longings in my soul. It will in any case compel me to rename myself. Palestinians in the homeground will laugh at those who continue to ascribe to their name attributes that predate the new Palestine. Henceforth, a Palestinian becomes what he is because he lives in Palestine. Believe us, they will say, we built a state because of our need for a safe haven, not for love of

nationalism. Come over here and live with us. We will turn our soul’s concern in your direction. May the Lord pour acid on your exile and destroy all the houses you’ve built in it. Come! (Exile’s Return 271-274)

In this passage, Turki implies that the mere existence of a Palestinian state is sufficient to soothe the pains wrought by collective traumas, including the indignity of the Nakba, the humiliation of refugee camps, the occupation, and the horrifying massacres of Deir Yassin,

Sabra and Shatila, etc. A legitimate state would validate Palestinian suffering and preserve

(or recreate) Palestinian history, which memoirists contend has been largely ignored, distorted, or denied. And these functions could perform in the realm of the psyche, without

Palestinians even having to live there.

Ostensibly, Jews feel a similar sentiment toward Israel. Karmi describes attending the wedding of one of her Jewish friends in England; during the reception, she is taken aback when the Israeli national anthem is played, and the guests toast Israel. With some degree of consternation, she writes:

Every person in that room was originally from Romania or England or Eastern Europe; not one of them originated in Israel. They were all British subjects and now lived in England. And yet, here they were, celebrating the national anthem of another country, as if they had been expatriates. I wondered who they believed they really were. . . .(Karmi 329)

While Karmi was born in Palestine, there is no recognition in this passage that hundreds of thousands of Palestinian descendents face the dilemma of being born outside of Palestine and yet identifying with and remaining invested in the potential Palestinian state. While it is possible that she reserves valid national longings only for residents of the Occupied

Territories or those who were physically born there, it is more likely that she simply regards the nature of the Jewish connection to the state as less legitimate than that experienced by her exiled counterparts. Turki’s passage, on the other hand, reflects sentiments similar to those

expressed by famed author and Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel. When asked why he chose

to not live in Israel, he replied:

How can it be explained that a Jew like myself, attached to the destiny of Israel with all the fiber of his being, has chosen to write, teach, work, found a family, and to live far away in a social and cultural environment that is far too generalized for that of our ancestors? Israelis put this question to me, as they do other Jews in the Diaspora....Is there a satisfactory response? If there is, I don't know it....For the moment, this is all I can say: as a Jew, I need Israel. More precisely: I can live as a Jew outside Israel but not without Israel. (“Elie Wiesel on Living in Israel”)

Clearly, the understanding of “return” is fluid, and continues to shape, and be shaped

by, the currents of history. It is unclear whether for Turki, the vision of Palestinian state he

wrote about in 1994 still resonates for him now, given the collapse of the Oslo accords, the

second intifada, the building of Sharon’s wall, and a number of other events that have

transformed the political and terrestrial landscape since then. In their more recent, post-Oslo

memoirs, Nusseibeh, Karmi, and Shehadeh have argued that the proliferation of illegal

settlements in the West Bank, the annexation of East Jerusalem, and other Israeli actions

have precluded the possibility for a separate Palestinian state. Rather, the type of state that

could provide the same psychic refuge and freedom, stability, and symbolic significance for

its citizens that Israel offers Jews, has been deliberately rendered unworkable by Israeli

policies. In the wake of its demise, memoirists argue that Israel has defined for Palestinians the type of state they could expect. According to Nusseibeh:

It would have little territory, no control over its borders, no capital, at least not one in East Jerusalem, and no economic viability. According to one Likud politician, ‘Well, they want to call it a state? Fine, they can call it fried chicken if they want to.” (398)

Likewise, Turki describe the potential Palestinian state as envisioned by Israelis as “a subservient, demilitarized province with a police force, a flag, and white buses that will come in the morning from Israel, pick up the workers and drop them back in the evenings” (The

Disinherited 177). In other words, according to memoirists, the kind of state Israel is willing to offer would be meaningless to Palestinians. More to the point: allowing Israel to define the terms of Palestinian statehood would reduce the Palestinian state to yet another symbol of

Israeli dominance. It would, in effect, be adding insult to injury.

It is the power of Israel to unilaterally define and apply the language of nationalism on their terms, which memoirists expose as its ultimate strength. They present numerous examples of this. Whether it is by renaming the country, roads, and villages, or by dubbing the wall the Security Fence, or by defining the meanings of “right of return” and “homeland,” the Israeli grip on control is primarily afforded by its nearly unchallenged ability to unilaterally construct the language of “belonging” it deems fit. In order to make the case for their rights to self-determination, memoirists recognize the Palestinian imperative to construct a plausible account of their own history, symbolism, and identification with

Palestine as their national home. In their memoirs, Palestinian writers analyze how their relationship to their land has been shaped by the development of a national vocabulary. Then they identify and redefine terms that have consistently undermined their national efforts, in an attempt to seize the political power that has thus far eluded them. Ultimately, their memoirs are acts of resistance against a regime that, from their perspectives, functions through its refusal to acknowledge Palestinian rights. According to their accounts, the treatment they endure under the Israeli occupation demonstrates the egregious extent of their loss of dignity, which they attempt to reclaim by urging for the occupation’s end. How they do this will be the subject of my third and final chapter.

CHAPTER 3

PALESTINIAN MEMOIRS AND THE LANGUAGE OF OCCUPATION

In our first two chapters, we examined Palestinian depictions of land as pre-national and nationalized entities, respectively. Both involved reimagining the past in order to set the stage for the imagined actualization of the future Palestinian state. In both endeavors, they confronted barriers that frustrate their national efforts, particularly in the form of reinterpreting rhetorical assignations that consistently operate against them. According to

Palestinian memoirists, the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, in effect since 1967, is the single most obstructive impediment in the Palestinian quest to achieve security and self-determination; however, as with other tropes related to land and its associated implications, such as nations, rights, and notions of belonging, memoirists aver that the occupation has been misrepresented and misunderstood. They claim that various misinterpretations are widespread in the Western world, particularly in the United States, and it is for a Western audience that they tailor and direct their arguments. As Fawaz Turki writes in Exile’s Return:

Americans do not understand. But not because. . . they don’t want to; rather because they cannot truly understand what Palestinians are going through and why they respond as they do to the challenges of their history. The fact of the matter is that no experience by one people is translatable unaltered into the language of another. When Americans read about the Palestinian struggle, they filter it through their own semantic and perceptual conventions, and it comes out very different from the ones that Palestinians are living (26).

Fawaz Turki, like other Palestinian memoirists, does not limit the difficulties of

understanding another’s experience to the confines of language, as in translating the vocabulary of Arabic words into their closest English counterparts. Naturally, such a preliminary translation is essential, but beyond that, memoirists have to address the

“semantic and perceptual conventions,” the “filters” or “screens” by which they presume

Americans judge the conflict. By presenting alternative views of the Israeli occupation from

Palestinians’ perspectives, they attempt to approximate the Western version of the conflict so that it resembles their own more closely. Ultimately, they aim to subvert the prevailing powers that control them, and procure the authority to exercise the rights they claim have been denied to them for so long. Far more essential than any armed struggle is the rhetorical finagling of terms and perceptions, which have thus far consistently undermined their purposes.

Palestinian memoirists have some unique challenges to face when presenting their perceptions of Israel and their personal experiences of the occupation. They argue that there are a number of presuppositions that are deeply entrenched in the Western version of the conflict, most of which are starkly at odds with what they consider the collective Palestinian reality. Among these are the Western misconceptions that the Jews were and are the victims

of Arab hostility as opposed to the aggressors; that the State of Israel is the one democratic

beacon in a violent and backward region; and that Israel is not an occupying entity at all, so

much as it is a nation of people who have reclaimed land that is theirs by legal as well as

moral right.

The main question of this chapter is, how do Palestinian authors address these presuppositions, and frame their arguments in order to reverse them in their favor?

In order to accomplish this, they commonly employ motifs related to ideologies such

as colonialism, racism, and fascism, and demonstrate how the essence of such distasteful

worldviews can be found in the Israeli occupation. In doing so, they emphasize certain

elements of the occupation, including the ways that Israeli legal rhetoric has systematically

stripped them of their rights. To this end, they allude to topoi associated with racial

discrimination and segregation, topics that an American audience would be familiar with.

Fawaz Turki capitalizes on several of these topoi when discussing his conversations about

politics with the “American left”:

After all, they say, in the long talks I had with them, how do you expect Israel to recognize your rights if you do not recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state in Palestine? After all, what guarantees can the Palestinians “offer” in the event Israel were to “offer” the Palestinians a separate state? And so on with that litany that has not changed since the days the British could not “offer” the Kenyans independence because the Kenyans “were not ready for it,” and the French could not “grant” the Tunisians self-government because the Tunisians “could not govern themselves.” For many years to come, we will remain to them, I say to myself, names, faceless, gooks, niggers, and wogs. That is, so long as we continue to refuse to go to them with hat in hand and produce ironclad guarantees that we would not destabilize the status quo they have established around us. These people did not seem to realize that to the Palestinians, like the slaves before them, it is the status quo that is at question and on trial. (Soul in Exile 131-132)

Although Zionist Jews are the occupying oppressors in the accounts of Palestinian memoirists, they are widely regarded as the consummate victim in the Western mythologized dramatization of history. Memoirists present the predicament of the Jew who, in simultaneously occupying both polar roles, creates a destabilizing dissonance that defies tidy resolutions; as a result of these tendencies, the Western idiom has resisted sympathetic identification with the lot of Palestinian Arabs. Therefore, as Turki’s passage demonstrates, they attempt to shift the perceptual moral alignment by likening Israel to colonizing

62 oppressors of the past, while constructing an image of Palestinians out of the disenfranchised ethos afforded to other racial or ethnic groups. To this end, they also selectively borrow specific terms, such as “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing” from other historical contexts and deliberately apply them to the occupation of Palestine. Given the general association of

Arabs with terrorism, particularly post 9/11, these analogies help to present their struggles in a more understandable and sympathetic light to Western audiences. Particularly by focusing on land under occupation, they transform an audience’s conception of the region from a haven for Jews into a prison for Palestinians.

Throughout their works, Palestinian memoirists position themselves to discredit many

Israeli justifications for what they consistently refer to as the “illegal” occupation of their land, which they portray as essentially colonialist by nature. The memoirists whose works we will examine, namely Raja Shehadeh, Sari Nusseibeh, Suad Amiry, and Ghada Karmi, employ their strategies in the post-colonial era, which has witnessed the end of apartheid in

South Africa and other popular revolutions. As one would expect, their choices of strategies hinge on a certain widespread disdain for imperialist ideologies. Since conquering for its own sake is no longer viewed as a morally acceptable endeavor, memoirists argue that

Zionist rhetoric has attempted to characterize the Israeli occupation in as favorable a light as possible. As Edward Said notes, “All the transformative projects for Palestine, including

Zionism, have rationalized the denial of a present reality with some argument about a

‘higher’ (or better, more worthy, more fitting; the comparatives are almost infinite) interest, cause or mission” (15). Palestinian memoirists argue that Israel and its allies—particularly, its staunchest and arguably exclusive ally, the United States--have fabricated and relied on a number of moral rationalizations, which are necessary to sustain its dominance over a land,

63 its resources, and its people. Memoirists dispute these rationalizations and unveil them as densely disguised colonialist rhetoric. During an Israeli invasion of Ramallah in March of

2002, a siege that lasted for a month and subjected Palestinian residents to strict curfews,

Raja Shehadeh wrote:

I keep thinking of the spring walks we are missing. Penny and I yearn to be able to go out to a café or to the movies or to see friends. It must be hell for people cooped up in small houses with large families. And then we hear how all this is necessary so that the Israeli people can live normal lives and go out to the cafes and on the streets. What is it all for but to pursue an expansionist colonialist policy? This is what we, both Palestinians and Israelis, are suffering for. (Palestinian Walks 83)

Through Israel’s disregard for and denial of Palestinian suffering in occupied conditions, memoirists claim that their colonialist domination is being sold under entirely different, supposedly ‘higher,’ auspices. As Sari Nusseibeh points out, “When a journalist asked Begin if he was prepared to negotiate on the future of the Occupied Territories, he snapped, ‘What occupied territories? If you mean Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip, they are liberated territories’” (153). Shehadeh and Nusseibeh demonstrate that Israeli rhetoric justifies its national project on the false premises of ensuring freedom; the unspoken reality is that any freedoms it protects applies only to Israeli citizens, not Palestinians of occupied territories

(and often, not Arab citizens of Israel either, who are referred to as “Arab Israelis,” never

“Palestinians.”) The Israeli premise is that they are reclaiming Israeli land from Arab squatters. That this territory is “liberated,” instead of illegally and immorally colonized, is one of the central beliefs of the occupation that the memoirists work to reverse.

One common justification for the Israeli occupation that memoirists deconstruct is the notion of “progress” as an inevitable, necessary, and desirable state of being. In doing so, they implicate contemporary frameworks of progress in basic imperialist mentalities. As

Gellner points out, “Industrial society is the only society ever to live by and rely on sustained

and perpetual growth, on an expected and continuous improvement. Not surprisingly, it was

the first society to invent the concept and ideal of progress . . . .” (22). As a result of this

attitude towards progress, colonizers were beckoned to invade other lands and maximize the production of their resources. According to Israeli accounts, Palestinian territory before

Israel’s conquest was a fallow, untended wasteland, mired in neglect from the unsophisticated natives, who needed European minds and machines to maximize them—to

“make the desert bloom.” Nusseibeh, for example, describes a stint of volunteer work on an

Israeli kibbutz. According to Nusseibeh, “Within an hour of my arrival, the kibbutzniks made

sure that before they showed up with their crude plows and immense energy, their land had

been a swamp owned by absentee landowners” (113). In Samed, Shehadeh recounts a conversation with an Israeli settler from Ofra, a settlement on the West Bank. The settler,

Aharon, wants to employ Shehadeh as a lawyer, but he refuses on the grounds of his

Palestinian national aspirations, as well as the illegal status of settlements on the West Bank.

When Shehadeh says that he will not work for Aharon, the following conversation ensues:

“Why not? We live in Ofra, you live in Ramallah . . . . Why should any of the locals refuse to do business with us? We are bringing progress to the area. Do you want to say you’re against that?” His voice had become high pitched and I could see that he was getting worked up. And still I couldn’t stop myself. I just couldn’t believe that he was serious. “But surely it is not quite so simple. Most Palestinians feel as I do. They will not have anything to do with the settlers,” I said. “But why? We are not depriving you of anything. The more settlements, the more progress. How can that be bad for you?” Aharon retorted. As he spoke, pictures of this progress flashed through my mind: rings of bright neon lights around Jewish settlements in dark Arab hills; sprinklers on Jewish lawns on dry Arab land. (Samed 92)

Criticism of “progress,” and how it is often touted to justify the Israeli occupation, is

one of Shehadeh’s stock rhetorical motifs. In Palestinian Walks, Shehadeh engages in a

series of rebuttals in a conversation with a young Israeli settler whom he encounters during a

walk in the hills. According the settler, the Israelis had made the hills into a nature reserve,

and protected it with a series of rules and regulations. Shehadeh tells him that before the

settlers came there, the land was a “real” nature park, with “deer leaping up the terraced hills,

wild rabbits, foxes, jackals and carpets of flowers . . . . preserved in more or less the same

state it had been in for hundreds of years” (Palestinian Walks 190). The young settler

replies to Shehadeh:

Nothing can remain untouched for hundreds of years. Progress is inevitable. You would have done the same as we are doing. Only you lacked the material and technical resources to connect these distant areas to power and service them with water and electricity. (Palestinian Walks 191)

In response to this general argument, Shehadeh warns the settler that, “The way it’s

going, we’ll end up with a land that is criss-crossed with roads. . . .Whether we call it Israel or Palestine, this land will become one big concrete maze” (Palestinian Walks 196). The

settler maintains his position that, “Building roads is progress, not destruction” (Palestinian

Walks 193).

There are a number of strategies at play in the conversations with Aharon and the

young settler. In the encounter with Aharon, Shehadeh devalues the notion of ‘progress’

through an emphasis on its artificiality. The gaudy and artificial lights from the Israeli

settlements are juxtaposed with the natural darkness of Arab land at night; the man-made

sprinkler system is imposed on naturally dry Arab land. Similarly to the conversation with

Aharon, Shehadeh’s encounter with the young Israeli settler shows the darker side of

progress. Inevitable or not, his implication is that progress, one of the highest ideals of

industrialized societies, destroys at least as much as it creates, particularly in the form of

blighted landscapes.

Shehadeh’s critique also works by appealing to the human reverence for nature, which he places in opposition to the Israeli settler account of “progress.” As opposed to following the arc of nature, modern impositions such as roads violate it, which he reveals through his choice of verbs, describing the land as “raped” or “butchered.” Shehadeh’s descriptions of occupied Palestine are pithy, but numerous, and include typical symbols associated with urban jungle environments, such as bulldozers, concrete rubble, chain link fences, and natural topographical features razed into submission. The pleasant and attractive

areas, on the other hand, are described as reserved for Israelis, and are nestled in the hills of

the West Bank, “where Israeli planners place Jewish settlements on hilltops and plan them

such that they can only see other settlements while strategically dominating the valleys in

which most Palestinian villages are located” (Palestinian Walks xvi). Following this

observation, Shehadeh includes some promotional material for one such settlement, as well

as an analysis by two Israeli architects, in a move intended to reveal the chicanery of Israeli

rhetoric:

A sales brochure, for the ultraorthodox West Bank settlement of Emmanuel, published in Brooklyn for member recruitment, evokes the picturesque: “The city of Emmanual, situated 440 meters above sea level, has a magnificent view of the coastal plain and the Judean mountains. The hilly landscape is dotted by green olive orchards and enjoys a pastoral calm.” Re-creating the picturesque scenes of a biblical landscape becomes a testimony to an ancient claim on the land. Commenting on advertisements such as this, the Israeli architects Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman perceptively uncover a “cruel paradox”: The very thing that renders the landscape “biblical,” its traditional inhabitation and cultivation in terraces, olive orchards, stone buildings, and the presence of livestock, is produced by the Palestinians, whom the Jewish settlers came to replace. And yet the very people who cultivate the “green olive orchards” and render the landscape

biblical are themselves excluded from the panorama. The Palestinians are there to produce the scenery and then disappear.” (Palestinian Walks xvi-xvii)

With this, Shehadeh frames the Israeli occupation as colonialist by honing in on two traits in particular: its artifice, and its exploitation of the native population. First, by mentioning that the pamphlet was produced for distribution in Brooklyn, Shehadeh insinuates that any such

“ancient claims” to the land are fictions, as any settlers responding to such sales pitches would be American nationals acclimated to city life. The Palestinians, on the other hand, are depicted as authentic, the “real deal,” for they are the ones accustomed to the “traditional inhabitation” of the pastoral life. Secondly, Shehadeh included the evaluation of Israeli— notably, not Palestinian—architects, who openly admit, albeit somewhat critically, that

Israeli planning policy uses a vision of sacredly tended space to encourage Jewish immigration to Israel, but the vision depends on the invisible presence of the natives. The

Palestinians have an authentic connection to the land, and produce its natural beauty through their intimate ministrations and their history of unbroken residency. According to Palestinian memoirists, as well as Israelis, the land is not only aesthetically pleasing, but maintains an aura of holiness. However, as colonizers, Israelis destroy the land—both its physical features and its spirit--by forcing land and cityscapes to conform to those modeled after places in

Europe. While Palestinians are confined to rubble-strewn cities and villages that lack basic amenities, such as access to water, the Israelis are entitled to luxuriate in exclusive localities that they do not produce, maintain, or come from. The memoirists’ overall contention is that

Israel usurps land for their exclusive benefit at the expense of the natives, and in order to further assert their dominance, inhabit settlements that are physically positioned to look down on Palestinians. These descriptions situate Israel’s use of land within a colonialist framework.

Shehadeh’s critique assumes the pairing of natural and artificial as contradictory states of being. This strategy relies on the warrant that naturalness in contemporary society is prized more highly than artificiality, as many people struggle with the feelings of isolation and disconnectedness from nature, which technological advances of the 20th and 21st centuries have wrought. (A walk through any American supermarket would clearly demonstrate the apparent selling power of the word “natural” for products such as food and cosmetics.) Shehadeh’s analysis yokes progress, Israeli-style, with colonialism. In addition to the antithetical properties of “authentic” and “artificial,” he pairs Israeli decadence against

Palestinian deprivation, appealing to the value fairness and equality.

In their appeals to equality, racism features prominently in Palestinian narratives, as evidenced by Shehadeh’s conversation with Aharon and the young settler in the hills.

Aharon implies that the locals should be grateful to have Israeli homes and businesses on their land, whereas the young settler in the second conversation says outright that the natives lack the ability to make decent lives for themselves, claiming, “You [Arabs] lack the know- how and the discipline. Leave planning and law enforcement to us” (Palestinian Walks 191).

Shehadeh, who has established an ethos of a calm, rational and educated lawyer, contradicts the claim that Arabs are an incapable lot, and instead portrays the settlers as crude, clumsy, and rough--the bulls in the china shop of the delicate Middle Eastern environment. His stance is that the occupation resulted in his physical confinement to scraps of land devastated by

Israeli blunderings, reduced him to a politically impotent member of a barely tolerated underclass, and changed his legal relationship to the land from owner to squatter. Nusseibeh expresses similar cynicism to the idea that Palestinians have benefitted from the occupation, writing, “‘Autonomy’ Likud-style envisioned a mass of Arabs happily bartering away

69 national aspirations for the right to pray and mix cement for a contractor building the next

Jewish settlement” (198-199). Their commentary elucidates the power shift they have undergone, from owners of land and citizens of a nation to powerless members of a permanent underclass. This gives the settlers’ insistence on all the “opportunities” they’ve bestowed on Palestinians, a particularly ironic edge.

Despite the evident imperialist sensibilities inherent in Israel’s approach to

Palestinians, memoirists argue that it has managed to evade reasonable comparisons to

European imperialist ideology and its innate racism. Edward Said notes:

. . .In formulating the concept of a Jewish nation “reclaiming” its own territory, Zionism not only accepted the generic racial concepts of European culture, it also banked on the fact that Palestine was actually peopled not by an advanced but a backward people, over which it ought to be dominant. Thus that implicit assumption of domination led specifically in the case of Zionism to the practice of ignoring the natives for the most part as not entitled to serious consideration. . . .In short, all the constitutive energies of Zionism were premised on the excluded presence, that is, the functional absence of “native people” in Palestine; institutions were built deliberately shutting out the natives, laws were drafted when Israel came into being that made sure the natives would remain in their “nonplace,” the Jews in theirs, and so on. (81-82)

A demonstration of this can be found in a passage wherein Nusseibeh describes the actions and the attitude of the “the Vienna-born” mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, Nusseibeh depicts the mayor’s dismissal of Palestinians as nonentities. Rather, they are resources to be utilized for the ultimate ambition of generating social and economic advancement within the context of a capitalist nation:

. . .Decent though he was, his actions tramped on our history in ways the Turks never dreamed of. When he lobbied the government to build the neighborhoods Ramat Eshkol, Neve Yaakov, and Gilo, he didn’t set out to harm our national rights. He simply didn’t factor them into his plans. Building Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem was in his eyes a matter of supreme national importance and a real estate deal that had brought construction jobs to an otherwise disorderly congregation of Arab individuals who happened by historical accident to find themselves in the city of David. Giving these Arabs work and

income was doing them a favor, Kollek thought. Why, it was the chance of a lifetime for them to live in a fast-growing modern metropolis. He couldn’t understand why we would make a fuss about it. (Nusseibeh and David 172-173)

These renditions depict Israelis as comprising a colonialist and racist superior class who use the natives for their own self-serving purposes, particularly to perform in industries devoted to manual labor; then, according to these accounts, the natives are relegated to an invisible underclass, albeit one that presumably affords them a better life than what they would have otherwise had. In the nationalized space of Israel, the land and the people are commodities to be exploited in a market economy. Memoirists present this view of Israel as contradictory to how it portrays itself, depending on which constituency it is playing to. On one hand, it presents its image as that of a secular, progressive society, embodying all the core values of capitalism and democracy. On the other hand, it insists that it is a sacred, eternal, and religious entity that exists exclusively for Jews the world over. Memoirists point out the inconsistencies in both of these versions, arguing that although both are rhetorically compelling, in reality, Israel fulfills neither vision.

Highlighting the racist aspects of the occupation is one of the ways that memoirists promote their argument that the land, which used to be the stage upon which they acted out their social and familial roles, has been warped into hostile territory. According to Shehadeh and Nusseibeh, in particular, the Arab race in its entirety is presumed to possess essential, internal qualities that both nullify their rights to own land, and legitimize their subordination.

For example, in his memoir, Nusseibeh references the book, The Arab Mind, by the Israeli

American author Raphael Patai, writing:

Included in its pages are such insights as: “Most Westerners have simply no inkling of how deep and fierce is the hate, especially of the West, that has gripped the modernizing Arab.” The book also claims that Arab males are full of twisted

sexual hang-ups. (Years later, Seymour Hersh referred to the book to help explain the torture conducted at Abu Ghraib). (143)

These accusations may sound familiar to American readers who have at least a general

cultural awareness of pro-slavery or anti-civil rights arguments, specifically, that a race of people can be, in essence, irrational and aggressive. By including statements such as Patai’s,

Nusseibeh implies how Israel relies on a model of the Arab race as a legitimization tool for its colonialist policies. As Patricia Roberts-Miller points out in her analysis of pro-slavery rhetoric, “There are important political consequences of this way of explaining behavior: one cannot reason or negotiate with people who are motivated by bloodlust so it is pointless to try” (54).

Memoirists contend that, although enduring the widespread existence of racist attitudes is no doubt unpleasant, even more importantly, there are material consequences when racism is formalized into official rhetorical bodies. Laws, military orders, and physical barriers segregate the region and institutionalize social and economic disadvantages. For example, within Palestinian memoirs are descriptions of roads that are only accessible to

Israeli citizens; color-coded license plates distinguish Palestinians of the occupied territories from Israelis, “marking” them as different. Nusseibeh identifies a law upheld by the Israeli

Supreme Court that forbids Arabs from living in certain areas of Jerusalem, such as the

Jewish Quarter.

The trope of racial segregation is an important one in promoting the idea that the occupation aims to appropriate all the land it can for the Jewish race while minimizing, or eliminating, the presence of Arabs. Memoirists regularly refer to extremist Israeli political parties who rally for the transfer of all Arabs from Israel. For example, when Yitzhak

Shamir included in his government the Moledet Party, whose “central platform called for the

72 expulsion of all Arabs from Israel’s ancestral ‘Judea and Samaria,’” according to Nusseibeh,

“it was as if in the United States the Republicans were to hand over a cabinet post to the

KKK” (318). Likewise, Shehadeh describes a visit to Ramallah by Meir Kahane, leader of the Kach movement, who distributed pamphlets and preached the following message:

The Arabs of Eretz Israel [Palestine] constitute a time bomb for the Jewish State. The only solution is for the Arabs to be sent out of here to the Arab states and to the West, and for all the Jews of the world to be brought to Israel—this is the only way. (Samed 44)

This message maintains that one race (Jews) is incapable of living with another (Arabs), and argues for absolute separation. While their message would be considered extreme to most

Westerners, memoirists point out that in Israel, these views are not uncommon. They claim that racist notions, including the belief that the Arab race must be abolished from Israel, are relatively common in Israeli society.

Although Palestinian memoirists do not make any direct connection to American racism, they seem to be aware of American sensitivity to race within the context of

America’s own racially charged history; therefore, they employ common tropes associated with racism, only within a Palestinian context. Whether it’s Nusseibeh’s likening of the

Moledet party to the Ku Klux Klan, or other memoirists’ various allusions to “separatist” racist policies—that do not even maintain the pretense of “equality”--memoirists demonstrate that for Arabs in Israel racism exists and is often institutionalized in law as well as abstracted in free-floating general attitude; thus, in spirit, it is not so different from similar claims of racist essentialism made against black peoples, even though the specifics of their oppressions are dissimilar. Popular racism still exists all over the world, but the difference for memoirists is that, in the occupied space of Palestine, racism is formalized in a set of laws, particularly

those that are most concerned with keeping Palestinians, literally, “in their place”—laws that

govern the ownership of land and the ability to move freely, both in and outside of Palestine.

Although the majority of their examples are allusions--mere inferences to other racist

groups, practices, and policies--Palestinian memoirists also on occasion make more overt references to other historical instances of injustice. One example of this is “apartheid,” and its related terms. Shehadeh does not use this term, although he liberally refers to Israelis as

“colonizers” and “occupiers.” Nusseibeh, however, makes the direct analogy between the

Palestinian and South African situations when he describes the wall that is being built in

Israel and parts of the occupied territories. Nusseibeh points out that Ariel Sharon once referred to the isolated Palestinian islands created by the wall as “Bantustans,” and writes that “. . . Sharon’s policy of caging Palestinians in enclaves would eventually lead to a South

African situation. . . .”(524). According to Nusseibeh, among certain Palestinians the wall is known as the “Apartheid Wall.” In order to illustrate the analogy, he describes some of the material and political consequences of the wall:

The major settlements fell into Sharon’s concrete lasso, but so did key water sources and much of the best land. All over the West Bank, thousands of acres were being expropriated; villagers were separated from agricultural field on which their livelihoods depended; hundreds of buildings and tens of thousands of fruit and olive trees had to make way for this jagged concrete barrier. In some areas, the wall penetrated deep into the West Bank, cutting villages off from one another, creating isolated enclaves, and destroying any hope of a contiguous Palestinian state. (523)

Nusseibeh’s description, among others, is juxtaposed with what the Israeli administration rhetorically dubs the “Security Fence.” The wall around Jerusalem is termed the “Jerusalem Security Envelope,” and the governmental body that built it is called the

“Seam Zone Administration” (Nusseibeh and David 519). To Israelis, the “fence,” an arguably friendlier term than “wall,” is described with innocuous terms including

“envelopes” and “seams,” and exists only for the utmost need for “security.” Of the many

moral justifications offered to explain Israeli undertakings, “security”--that is, security for the

Jewish subjects of Israel--is among the most common. Nusseibeh refutes this particular justification for the wall by claiming, “. . Few people suspected that [Ariel Sharon’s] real motive was not to stop terrorism. Qassam rockets can easily fly over a twenty-foot barrier.

His real foe was human dialogue and a desire for normalcy” (511). By giving an alternative

explanation for the wall, he changes its meaning. (He also points out that, in a former

instance of wall-naming, East German communists had called the Berlin Wall the “anti-

fascist protection barrier,” alluding to the way that names have been used to conceal the true

intents of such structures) (Nusseibeh and David 519).

According to memoirists, for Palestinians the wall is clearly not the neighborly

“fence” as the Israeli designation implies, nor is it the post office-inspired “envelope,” protecting its contents from the elements, nor the tailored “seams” that bind two separate pieces into a unified, indivisible whole. Instead, in the occupied territories, particularly post-

Oslo, the wall in addition to a series of checkpoints and blockades severely restricts travels between regions controlled by the Palestinian Authority. This leads Nusseibeh to make the observation that “these ‘liberated’ areas became, as Palestinians said, a series of big prisons”

(422). With his references to “Apartheid” and “Bantustans,” and his likening of Palestinian scraps of land to “prisons,” Nusseibeh provides a very alternative view of Israel. In his account, Israel has illegally appropriated land and resources, governed Palestinians using frankly racist justifications, and ultimately ghettoized them.

Nusseibeh also uses imagery when likening the “Apartheid Wall” to the Berlin Wall, claiming,

For a pilgrim to go from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher to the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem suddenly required a long wait before a scene reminiscent of the Berlin Wall—the same concrete, rolls of razor wire, watchtowers, and edgy soldiers clutching weapons. (524)

Nusseibeh makes clear and repeated rhetorical choices by describing the Palestinian

situation in terms borrowed from South African, East German, and Bosnian contexts,

wherein the term “ethnic cleansing” was first used. The Palestinians are rendered analogous,

in some way or another, to the moral and ideological sides in these conflicts that shared

values closely aligned with the West. This shifts the audience’s perspectives from seeing

Palestinians as the “Others” to a people whom Westerners can identify with. Nusseibeh’s reference to the Berlin Wall is not meant to imply a direct analogy, as much as it is to appeal to anti-fascist sentiment. Thus, his reference to the Berlin Wall exploits a collective association of walls with brutal oppression of a people by their power-hungry governments.

By describing ominous features of barbed wire and watchtowers, he likens the “Apartheid

Wall” to the “Berlin Wall,” while at the same time continuing to cast doubt on the disingenuous moniker, “Security Fence.” By using the Berlin Wall as an analogy, Nusseibeh argues that the function of the “Apartheid Wall” is to restrict freedom, autonomy, dialogue, transparency, and democracy.

Like Nusseibeh, Ghada Karmi in In Search of Fatima, also explicitly connects the

Palestinian plight to South African apartheid. During a trip to Israel, her first time back since her family’s exile in 1948, she pays a social visit to an Israeli couple. In this account, she first describes the setting of their home, emphasizing its artificial and European ambience:

On day 12 I called on an Israeli couple, friends of friends, he a left-wing writer, she an artist, both introduced to me as “progressive” Israelis. They lived in an Arab-style house which they assured me had belonged to Yemeni Jews, not Arabs, at the turn of the century: trendy, ethnic furnishings, embroidered cushions and rugs on the floor, she wearing long Palestinian-style silver earrings. The

atmosphere was relaxed, civilized, and European, Bach playing softly in the background. We almost could have been in Hampstead. (Karmi 440)

This description produces a portrait of a European bourgeoisie, which is to be envied for its power and privilege, but scorned for its cluelessness in the face of blatant irony.

Perhaps a fitting analogy would be the way that upper-class teenagers wear expensive designer jeans, artfully faded and torn to imitate a working classman’s disregard for fashion, while at the same time having no idea what the lifestyle of the working class is actually like.

The apparent solidarity is a function of style, not substance.

But in addition to using irony and openly showing disdain for the “European” artifice of her hosts’ dwellings, Karmi also employs the word “apartheid” when asked to describe her view of Israel:

When they asked me for my impressions of Israel, I cast about in my mind for some pithy way to summarize the range and complexity of what I had seen in the last week. Only one word came to mind: apartheid. As I said so, my hosts looked visibly shocked. They did not agree because, for a start, they said, there were people like them in Israel who were making links with Palestinians, developing a movement of solidarity and cooperation. “I realize that,” I persisted. “But the fact is there are two peoples here, unequal in every respect because the one considers itself superior to the other. . . .In the rest of the world, we call it racism.” They were both uncomfortable. “I must say, I don’t understand how decent, civilized people like you can bring yourselves to live in such a society.” “By trying to change it!” exclaimed the husband. But she, looking me straight in the eye, said coolly, “I live here because I belong here. This is my country.” (441-442).

Karmi defines apartheid in its most general sense, by delineating its most essential features and making no mention of its specific contextual elements. According to her definition,

“apartheid” is a structure of laws that allows the colonizing population to exploit the resources of the state to the disadvantage of the native population. In the example of Israel, the main exploited resource is land, which is appropriated and used for the sole benefit of its

Jewish citizens. Yet the contextual specifics of apartheid can be rhetorically problematic when applied to the Palestinian occupation. As Edward Said notes:

They [Palestinians] have had the extraordinarily bad luck to have a good case in resisting colonial invasion of their homeland combined with, in the international and moral scene, the most morally complex of all opponents, Jews, with a long history of victimization and terror behind them. The absolute wrong of settler- colonialism is very much diluted and perhaps even dissipated when it is a fervently believed in Jewish survival that uses settler-colonialism to straighten out its own destiny. I do not doubt that every thinking Palestinian. . . knows somehow that all the real parallels between Israel and South Africa get badly shaken up in his consciousness when he reflects seriously on the difference between white settlers in Africa and Jews fleeing European anti-Semitism. (119)

The treatment of Jews as the aggressors in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is doubtless one of the most difficult rhetorical terrains for memoirists to navigate, a point I will return to later.

For the time being, however, we’ll return to the point that memoirists are trying to make, which is that victims in Palestine and Africa suffer in much of the same ways, even though their victimizers are different. As Kenneth Burke notes, “A given terminology contains various implications. . . .” (“Definition of Man” 19). Thus, when memoirists use “apartheid” to describe the Palestinian occupation, it is because with it comes a package deal of associations, conclusions, and expectations.

Regardless of whether or not memoirists actually use the word “apartheid” they all provide a litany of various descriptions and examples that illustrate the segregation, oppression and racism reminiscent of South African apartheid. Palestinian memoirists almost without exception describe the discrepancy in wealth distribution, generally by juxtaposing images of poor, arid, and overcrowded Palestinians ghettoes with lush green landscapes and large homes with backyard pools enjoyed by their Israeli counterparts at the Palestinians’ expense. As Nusseibeh notes, “It became an everyday sight to see, perched on a hilltop, settlements with swimming pools and sprinkler systems within eyeshot of dust-bitten villages

where people had to walk a mile for a bucket of water—water, of course, pumped from West

Bank aquifers” (235). These observations reinforce the notion that one group is profiting

from the forced oppression and disenfranchisement of another, and do so without having to

confront the specific qualities and facts that differentiate the Israeli occupation from South

African apartheid. On the other hand, they do not benefit from the automatic associations

implicit in terms such as “apartheid,” and therefore they must demonstrate the injustices they

endure by using other means.

One of the ways to do this is by describing the occupation of Palestine in its own

unique context, which as an overall strategy, is far more common among Palestinian

memoirists. The language of control features prominently in narratives about the occupation as memoirists discuss the psychological and material power that Israel has over Palestinians, particularly through the language encoded in laws, military orders, and the other tortuous and perplexing bureaucratic particularities that govern a Palestinian’s right to own land and move freely within it. Similar to the memoirists’ treatment of Israel as a “democracy,” exposing it instead as an oppressive regime, their rhetorical handling of Israeli “law” aims to reveal it as ironically “lawless” in its positions and actions taken toward its Palestinian constituents. The standard of justice that Western-minded individuals have come to expect from the creation

and enforcement of laws is described in no uncertain terms as farcical or, as Shehadeh puts it,

a “charade.” This is in contrast to memoirists’ own visions of justice, which they support

with resolutions derived from “International Law.” International Law is really an

unenforceable set of guiding principles stemming from a generally shared moral center, and

provides a foundation for the just management of international affairs. Memoirists aver that

according to principles established by International Law, Israel is not held to the same

standards that are expected from other nations. For example, UN Security Council

Resolution 242, which called for Israel to withdraw from territories conquered in the 1967

war, is a common reference point among memoirists. According to Nusseibeh:

Article III calls for the “respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every state in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.” The official Israeli attitude toward 242 can be summed up by Ben-Gurion’s disparaging quip about the UM (the Hebrew acronym for the UN): “UM-shmum.” (109)

Likewise, Amiry depicts the distinctive place that certain terms and references exclusive to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict have in Palestinian discourse, particularly those related to official measures designed to deprive them of their lands. She describes an occasion during the 1991 Gulf War when she and some neighbors in her village brave breaking curfew to obtain gas masks that Israeli soldiers are rumored to be distributing. After several hours of chaos, during which time no masks are distributed, Amiry and her friends are herded onto a bus by an Israeli soldier. The following conversation takes place:

As the bus started moving, we heard one fellow say from behind: “You think they’re going to give us gas masks, ha? This is the Transfer Bus to Jordan!” We all burst into hysterical laughter. “Yes, that’s how in 1948 we were transferred out of Nazareth!” Another even more hysterical laugh. . . . . “We Palestinians are so stupid. They always manage to fool us. We never learn from past experiences,” joined in one woman. . . . . “Say goodbye to your relatives—you may never see them again.” As he waved his hand out of the window, we all followed suit. . . . .”We are gone until UN Resolution 194 concerning the right of refugees to return home is implemented,” joked another. (Amiry 91).

The bus ultimately ends up moving a few feet and stopping in front of an Israeli military compound, where the passengers are ordered to get off, go home, and remain there until the

80 curfew is lifted. But what is significant about this humorous exchange is the degree of cultural specificity in the jokes. It is hard to imagine a group of people mocking the impotence of Security Resolution 194 in any other context. Whereas using words such as

“apartheid” might capture the overarching spirit of the occupation, it is its specific elements that situate readers in Palestine’s unique culture of oppression.

Nowhere is this clearer than in memoirists’ descriptions of military orders and land laws. According to Nusseibeh, “Far from bringing the sides closer together, occupation was turning Palestinians into a permanent underclass of workers whose land, resources, and basic rights were being systematically violated and stripped away by a litany of regulation” (171-

172). Military Order 854, for example, gave “near absolute power to the Israeli authorities over faculty appointments, student admission, and curriculum” (Nusseibeh and David 189). It also stipulated that all foreign professors sign a loyalty oath, pledging among other things that they would not engage in opposition to the military government or participate in

“hostile” organizations, such as the PLO. In regards to the trope of land, one of the significant elements of the law is how it defines the term “foreign.” Nusseibeh reminds his readers that according to Israeli law, the definition of “foreign” refers to “anyone who had been physically absent from his home in the West Bank at the time Israel took over, even if he had been born and bred there and had been on vacation in June 1967 (189).

In addition to this definition of the term “foreign,” memoirists point out other paradoxical terms that Israel invented in order to explain Palestinians’ existence within

Israel, while drafting laws that were designed to nullify their rights. One such term is

“present absentees,” an unabashedly oxymoronic title that applies to Palestinians who were present in the territory conquered by Israel in 1948, but who were not physically in their

81 homes when the first census was taken, either because they voluntarily fled or left, or were involuntarily expelled. Shehadeh reports that under Israeli law:

A Palestinian only has the right to the property he resides in. Once he leaves it for whatever reason, it ceases to be his, it “reverts back” to those whom the Israeli system considers to be the original, rightful owners of “Judea and Sumaria,” the Jewish people, wherever they might be. Abandonment, which began as an economic imperative in some instances and a choice in others, had acquired legal and political implications with terrifying consequences. (Palestinian Walks 13)

Memoirists reveal the duplicity of Israeli rhetoric by focusing on Israeli laws and legal definitions, and explaining with some depth what, logically, they amount to. The political ideology that governs Israeli law maintains that property “reverts back” to a Jewish ownership that existed three thousand years prior, and regions, villages, and cities regain the names that were reminiscent of the time, such as Judea and Samaria. This is rendered possible because Israel is an “eternal” nation, which cannot be negated by what Nusseibeh refers to as “facts on the ground.” The Palestinian presence must be explained somehow, however, and the Israeli system does so by placing them in a legal framework. Although this system is as religiously and nationalistically animated as any of the fanatical or fundamentalist ideologies generally associated with Arab regimes—at least, according to memoirists—Israel manages to evade such parallelisms by cloaking its injustices in a legal system presumed to reflect Western values of justice. Within this legal framework,

Palestinians are squatters on lands that eternally belong to Jews. And, as memoirists explain, these lands can be seized regardless of whatever justification they choose to apply—the religious argument (which holds that Israel is eternally and exclusively reserved for Jews) or the secularized state argument (which claims that the state can apprehend lands that are required for its defense). According to Nusseibeh,

It was a common trick to declare an entire area a closed military zone, clear the people out, and then later turn it into a settlement. At the opening of a new settlement in October 1982, Begin’s minister of energy, Mordechai Zippori, explained the logic of settlement construction as “the backbone of the Zionist movement in the West Bank” and as the “only means to defeat any peace initiative which is intended to bring foreign rule to Judea and Samaria.” (217)

In examples such as this, memoirists depict the Israeli legal system as a smokescreen, one

designed to conceal illegal and unfair policies, particularly those that allow Israel to seize and

control lands that Palestinians contend they have a legitimate right to.

A common strategy among memoirists is to highlight some specific examples of how

these laws have failed to protect a sizable portion of its constituents. As a lawyer who has

worked for the past several decades in the Israeli court system, Shehadeh turns to the topos of

law more frequently than any other memoirist. Not surprisingly, his most recent memoirs

chronicle his bitter disillusionment and disappointments, leading him to finally conclude that

to Israeli settlers and officials motivated by national or religious zealotry, “the end seemed to

justify the use of any means” (Palestinian Walks 77). The forum where Shehadeh

demonstrates this claim is within the context of the Israeli court system. One example of this

occurs in a chapter called The Albina Case, which chronicles his quest to reclaim land for his

client, which settlers had seized and claimed as their own. Shehadeh is able to prove his client’s ownership to the court; according to the decision passed down by the Military

Objections Committee “There is no doubt in our eyes that the appellant (Albina) is the legal owner of the land in question” (Palestinian Walks 81). However, they ultimately found in

favor of the defendants, who apparently believed that the land they were settling on was

abandoned. Shehadeh presents how the court justified their decision, and his rebuttal:

They based this strange decision on Article 5 of Military Order 58, which states that “Any transaction carried out in good faith between the Custodian of Absentee Property and any other person, concerning property which the

Custodian believed when he entered into the transaction to be abandoned property, will not be void and will continue to be valid even if it were proved that the property was not at that time abandoned property.” In my summing up, I had anticipated the possibility that they might invoke this article and had written, “If Article 5 is not interpreted strictly and the Custodian then believes that whatever action he takes (even if based on improper legal considerations) would be retroactively validated by imputing to it good faith, without using strict criteria to ascertain whether or not it existed, the Custodian would in effect be given a free hand to act arbitrarily. . . If this happens, a mockery would have been made of the law.” (Palestinian Walks 81-82)

In other words, in this case ignorance of the law is a valid defensive position—even if that ignorance is merely alleged, not proved (if such a thing is provable)--and “legal ownership” in a court of law is, admittedly, meaningless. In Shehadeh’s example, a Palestinian’s legal claims to land, proved by official documentation, take a backseat to the thoughts, feelings, and religious or secularly-minded beliefs of Israeli citizens. Such a forum for handling legal matters is ironic, indeed. Shehadeh analyzes the reasoning that makes the decision in the

Albina case, and hundreds of others like it, possible:

I realized that to all intents and purposes, the lands on which the West Bank Jewish settlements were established are considered by Israel as Israeli land. The ideological position that the West Bank belonged by divine edict to Israel was given full force in secular legal terms and through elaborate administrative arrangements that ensured that the land was annexed to Israel in every aspect except by name. (Palestinian Walks 83)

According to his analysis, the Israeli legal system is a logical and moral inversion of the system idealized, if not always perfectly implemented, in the West. As opposed to a system designed to treat its subjects equally and consistently, Israeli law is a fluid structure designed to flow in a predetermined direction that favors Israeli citizens’ legal positions. Far from being an institution whose integrity rests on its impartiality, the Israeli courts clearly face a conflict of interests in determining Palestinian justice, given its nationalized function and its ideology, which maintains that all lands of Palestine belong to Israel. Finally, instead of

84 adjudicating with logic based on a generally universal and humanistic philosophical foundation, Israeli law is governed by narrow national objectives and/or subjective religious certitudes that apply to Israel exclusively. In other words, legal precedents established by

Israel contradict the rule of justice, an analogy that functions rhetorically by assuming that comparable subjects must be treated equally (McClish, 1). Israeli laws can only make sense if their rhetoric is able to convince the world that Palestinians and Israelis are not equal. It is the aim of memoirists to demonstrate that they are.

It is interesting to note that Shehadeh, Nusseibeh, and Amiry all refer to the works of

Franz Kafka to describe the random and labyrinthine nature of Israeli law, particularly his unfinished novel “The Trial.” Doubtless this odd work of literature has as many literary interpretations as it does readers, but for memoirists its most striking parallels to Palestinian experiences can be found in the basic details of its plot. In it, the protagonist, K., is arrested by two unnamed agents, who work for an inaccessible, mysterious authority, and is persecuted for an undisclosed crime. Throughout the novel, he learns that there is no way to ultimately evade a “guilty” verdict, as no defendants have ever been acquitted; the only option is to delay the inevitable by employing a number of subversive strategies. In the end, he is executed, although the nature of his crime remains a mystery. No sophisticated literary analysis is required to note the comparisons between K. and the Palestinians of memoirists’ accounts. According to memoirists, Palestinians can be arrested and detained indefinitely if they are suspected of threatening national security, a charge that can boil down to something as elemental as simply existing. Like K., they may sit in prison for months without knowing what, exactly, they are being accused of.

The situation is compounded by the fact that, prior to the establishment of the

Palestinian Authority, many Palestinian judges and lawyers refused to practice their professions due to political beliefs that, by doing so, they will be lending legitimacy to the

Israeli courts; as a result, they graduated from law school, passed the bar exam, and never argued a single case. Thus, many of the voices that could have advocated for the Palestinian position remained silent, for fear that by participating in Israeli courts and playing by Israeli rules, they would be tacitly legitimizing them. This “rhetorical silence”—similar to other

Arab refusals to speak or write “Israel” by name—is a strategy that Palestinians must grapple with. In one chapter, Shehadeh describes a visit to a courthouse to argue a case, but is unable to find any judges in the building. He writes:

When I opened the courtroom door, I was struck by the stench of onions. They also had hummus and beans and green peppers on the tray. Some were dipping their fingers to wipe what remained from the plate, others sat on the benches around the bar where the tray was placed, sipping tea from glasses and smoking. I felt embarrassed to have intruded on their private party. There were no judges amongst these lawyers. I slipped out. An old man leaning on his cane met me as I left the courtroom. ‘Where are the judges?” I asked him. ‘There are no judges,’ he said. ‘The real judges went away after the occupation. There are no judges now. No judges.’ I walked away from this old man. The tone of impending doom in his voice made me feel uneasy, and I did not want to encourage him to tell me anymore. (Samed 14)

The irony Shehadeh establishes here is that those who are in the position to advocate for the

Palestinian cause “advocate” by remaining silent. On the other hand, those who advocate by speaking risk undermining their own position. It is presented as a classic “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” dilemma. Shehadeh attests that although the Israeli courts are the sole

“legitimate” forums responsible for deciding the outcome of grievances, they can never reach

86 fair decisions because they are not motivated by the values of fairness and equality. By concluding thus, Shehadeh claims that he has to face his worst fear: “. . .that law, reason, words—everything I deal with—mean nothing; that I have refused to acknowledge this for fear of having to confront my own impotence” (Samed 105). It is this human powerlessness, combined with the impotent force of logic in the face of an omnipotent and senseless ideology, that lead Palestinian memoirists to conclude that their situation is “Kafkaesque.”

And, of course, the ironical subtext to Kafka references is that Kafka himself was a Jew, poignantly aware of and opposed to Jewish persecution.

Amiry, like Shehadeh, also reports extensively on life under occupation in Palestinian territories, particularly through a focus on its bureaucratic complexities. According to memoirists, much of Palestinian daily life is spent navigating through a baffling collection of regulatory strictures that define Palestinians and control them according to “their place.” She describes the monumental undertaking that was necessary in order for her and some of her colleagues to plan a trip to Egypt:

It must have taken Mohammad at least a month of hard work to get all the necessary travel documents, permits and visas. . . .Although we were a “nationally homogenous group” (all Palestinians living under occupation) we had at least seven different legal statuses when it came to our travel documents: Palestinians from the West Bank with Palestinian passports Palestinians from the West Bank with VIP diplomatic passports Palestinians from the West Bank with Jordanian passports Palestinians from Jerusalem (who are Israeli residents but not Israeli citizens) with Israeli travel documents Palestinians from “1948 Israel” with Israeli passports Palestinians from the West Bank with Canadian passports Palestinians from the Gaza Strip living in the West Bank with Palestinian passports (Amiry 195-196)

Amiry then describes some of the additional specifications that factored into their travel

planning. Most were not allowed to travel via the Tel Aviv airport, and so the group had to

travel through Amman. Depending on their statuses, some were required to have tourist

visas, checkpoints permits, and reservations made a few months in advance to take the bus

from Jericho to Jordan. According to Amiry, “What would be a ten-minute drive under

normal circumstances takes four to five hours” (197). She reports that most travelers in her

group were also required to obtain a permit from the Jordanian Ministry of Interior in order

to enter Jordan.

In yet another example of inane bureaucratic outcomes, Amiry is able to get a

Jerusalem passport for her dog, Nura, an endowment that is all but impossible for Palestinian

human beings to obtain. There is a rather convoluted explanation for why this is so, but it

boils down to the fact that the dog’s certificate of breed was issued in Jerusalem, and in order

to receive its vaccinations, it needed a Jerusalem passport. Palestinians, on the other hand,

wait years for a Jerusalem ID, which is a different, and less significant, document than an actual passport. Amiry writes:

It was not long before I decided to make use of Nura’s passport. “Can I see your permit and the car’s?” requested the soldier standing at the Jerusalem checkpoint. “I don’t have one, but I am the driver of this Jerusalem dog,” I replied, handing the soldier Nura’s passport. “Maze (What)?” asked the soldier, making a funny face. “I am the dog’s driver. As you can see, she is from Jerusalem, and she cannot possibly drive the car or go to Jerusalem all by herself.”. . . . The soldier looked closely at me, patted Nura’s head, which was still sticking out of the window, handed me her passport, and in a loud voice said: “SA’A. . . Go.” (117)

Like the extremist ideologies of Baruch Goldstein and Meir Khane that I discussed in

Chapter 2, this example also calls to mind Burke’s principle of “entelechy,” which he

describes as “a kind of ‘terministic compulsion’ to carry out the implications of one’s

terminology” ("A Definition of Man" 19). According to Burke:

Thus, each of our scientific nomenclatures suggests its own special range of possible developments, with specialists vowed to carry out these terministic possibilities to the extent of their personal ability and technical resources. ("A Definition of Man" 19)

If one were to replace “scientific” with “legal,” one would have an example of how the

Israeli system of justice applies to Palestinians. In Amiry’s example, the legal designation of

her dog supersedes her own legal status in the system. And, once translated into action by the

Israeli soldier, the human, Amiry, is only permitted to enter the city as a servant to her pet.

When Israel’s legal terminology is applied “to the extent of [its] personal and technical resources,” it finally concludes thus: that a Palestinian is lower than an animal ("A Definition of Man" 19).

In their presentations of life under an occupation governed by Israeli law, there are a few features in particular that memoirists emphasize: its utter arbitrariness; its absolute and unmitigated power over its Palestinian subjects; and its abuses of those powers. Yet unlike defectors from other occupied regions, for Palestinians such as Shehadeh there is no “escape” from the region of Palestine. One can only be forced off and then obligated to accept a life of permanent exile, for Israeli law stipulates that any Palestinian who “voluntarily” leaves, sacrifices his right to own and to ever return to his property. By relinquishing his right to his land, he also gives up the psychological ownership of elements of his historical, religious, and familial heritage. The immediate solution to this problem is to remain samed or

“steadfast,” and simply endure the Israeli occupation, the nature of which, memoirists argue,

89 is fundamentally different than Palestine’s previous occupiers—the British, and before them, the Ottoman Turks. “We were not just getting a new ruler to tax and control us. We faced a state with a military and civil bureaucracy with claims to our land” (Nussiebeh and David

99). By focusing on the nature of the Israeli occupation as manifestly different from

Palestine’s previous experiences with occupiers, memoirists open up the rhetorical space to argue that Palestine, as its own viable state, must be created, in order to be free of the poverty, oppression, and generally miserable conditions imposed by Israel. In the words of

Nusseibeh:

. . . The solution to our conflict with Israel was not more economic integration or a better elementary curriculum, or nicer military governors, or a more humane form of torture. Nor was it to make bad Israelis better. The occupation simply had to end—lock, stock, and barrel. (173)

The consensus among the memoirists is that the Israeli occupation is unjust, racist, colonialist, illegal, and in just about every way antithetical to the Western world’s conception of it. Indeed, antithesis, as a rhetorical device, is a common tool because, as Burke contends, all moral terms are naturally polarized. This is particularly useful for memoirists because, as far as they are concerned, the strength of their argument lies in the moral rightness of their positions. Thus, memoirists rely on a number of philosophical pairings: just/unjust; authentic/artificial; logic/irrationality; democracy/fascism; legal/illegal; ours/theirs. In every pairing, the Palestinian memoirists present their position as the morally just one and support their assertions with examples of their daily lives.

And yet it is important for memoirists to acknowledge the fact that between the poles of “right” and “wrong,” is the murky area that largely defines the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

Both sides seem to have realized that they must present the Other as a unifying scapegoat in order to galvanize the public and gain or maintain strength. Yet despite the memoirists’

insistence that the Israeli occupation is wrong, bad, illogical, unjust, etc., they also must

account for the fact that their enemies are also victims: the Jews. Centuries worth of Jewish

persecution, culminating in the Holocaust, have added moral nuances that simply do not exist

in otherwise comparable colonialist ventures. Of the two sides, Nusseibeh notes, “And so the

two strangers are each driven by fear and terror, totally unaware of the condition of the other.

The Jew seeks space to continue living, while the Arab defends his space to the death” (462).

By and large, the personal reflection that defines memoir writing is able to address these

nuances in ways that are antithetical to the spirit of the official, jingoistic dogmas, which all

too often dominate public discourse. How Palestinian memoirs provide a powerful,

countervailing force to the polarizing absolutes that characterize the Arab-Israeli conflict will be the subject of my concluding chapter.

CONCLUSION

In the memoirs we have examined, the overarching theme is the transformation of a peoples’ relationship to land and, with it, their collective sense of order and their private sense of belonging. In responding to the challenges of their history, Palestinian memoirists attempt to redefine terms, re-conceptualize relationships, and reorder a perceptual system that operates through the denial of their justifiable desires to control their own destinies. In doing so, they aim to shape reality by “shaking off” the rhetorical assignations that persist in confining them.

The nature of memoir writing is particularly conducive to the strategies they choose in attempting these feats. In one sense, the subjectivity of the memoir has the ironic potential to create a more credible account of “truth” than supposedly objective facts and historical evidence. As Turki noted in The Disinherited:

I am neither concerned nor qualified to indulge in the game of quote and counter- quote adopted by those whose business or ideology drives them to espouse the position of one or the other. I have found that with enough diligence, the historian can present a devastatingly convincing version of the Zionist/Israeli/Jewish (call it what you wish) claim in modern Palestine. Another historian, with equal reserves of diligence and partisan to our claims and grievances, can come up with a perfectly valid and at the same time diametrically opposite view. (8)

Author Michael Billig expresses like-minded suspicion of official accounts of history, claiming, “Ideology operates to make people forget that their world has been historically constructed. . . .Historians creatively remember ideologically convenient facts of the past, while overlooking what is discomfiting” (38). However, unofficial, vernacular accounts, like those of Palestinian memoirs, allow those who have been forgotten or dismissed to speak out from the margins, and with considerably more nuance and variance given that, on the surface

92 at least, they are representing no one but themselves. Thus, while no one can completely overcome the constraints, expectations, and associations of their respective ideologies, memoirists have the potential to reflect upon the limitations that their ideological presuppositions entail.

The ideal outcome of this practice is to imagine alternative realities that encourage thoughtful critique and continual revision, and that truly embody humanistic values. Of course, it is entirely possible for political puppets of all backgrounds to take advantage of the surging public interest in memoirs, and use the form to promote their agendas In fact, it would be anti-strategic not to, and I would argue that we are already sadly inundated by various insulting attempts to pass off self-promotion as genuine self-reflection, simply by having something ghost-written in the first person and including the word “memoir” in the title. Such endeavors justify the pejorative view of rhetoric first espoused by Plato in The

Gorgias, who defined it in opposition to “philosophy” and indicted it as “flattery” and

“sophistry” instead. Indeed, in the popular idiom, this understanding of “rhetoric” as cunning and exploitative speech persists.

I would argue, however, that the memoirists included in this study represent more beneficial and constructive examples of rhetoric, as they attempt to elicit the ideal outcome of encouraging thoughtful reflection on themselves, their culture, and their political circumstances. One core strategy of this undertaking is to recognize and accommodate the reality of the Other, which, in the context of Palestinian memoirs, is a role primarily fulfilled by Israelis. Palestinian memoirists indulge in this imaginative exercise by attempting to appreciate reality as animated by the consciousness of the Other. Of his Jewish friend,

Enoch, Shehadeh writes:

It was because Enoch neither forgets neither his nor my people’s suffering— without entering into an obscene competition of who suffered more—that I have learned from him to be open to, and feel deeply, the past history of the Jews and what Israel means to them. . . .I have been with Enoch to Yad Vashem, the memorial for the six million Jews exterminated by the Nazis. It was there that Enoch taught me the wisdom of the inmates of the Treblinka concentration camp: ‘Faced with two alternatives, always choose the third.’ (Samed 36-38)

In this passage, Shehadeh recognizes the imperative to acknowledge the collective history, as well as the subjective reality, of the Other. Without it, one can only remain locked in and restricted by the confines of one’s own language and experiences, and the lens they construct.

Only by engaging in this imaginative exercise can one begin to formulate alternative solutions to otherwise irreconcilable oppositions.

By trying to appreciate the position of the Other, memoirists also invite readers to do the same. It is a gesture that elicits reciprocation, leading to a type of persuasion that Kenneth

Burke refers to as “identification.” He writes that persuasion “involves communication by the signs of consubstantiality, the appeal of identification. . . .You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his” ("Language as Action" 55). Narratives of violence, which are central in Palestinian memoirs, are particularly useful in identifying with the Other, as

Shehadeh demonstrates in the following passage:

For the past twelve days we have been at the mercy of the Israeli bombing, afraid for our life. Then boom! One of our own strikes back. . . .And now it is they who are subject to our threat, our bombing. They go up in flames, their bodies shatter, their buildings are destroyed. It is momentary, one single explosion, not like the incessant bombing around us, which brings about the sudden reversal of roles. They are confused; we can see how confused they are. Gloved men wearing plastic over their shoes look for body parts. For a moment, we revel in our power, the sudden reversal of our fate. . . .Then we see the old woman crying. It is no longer abstract and faceless victims, it is now harm inflicted on an individual with

whom we can identify. She could be our mother, older sister, or neighbor. This changes everything. . . . In that brief moment of silence, our enemy and we are joined together. Then we are both shattered and raised up into the air, together. Both remain suspended in the air before the pieces begin to fall and scatter on the ground and the victims are counted to determine whose casualties are greater, who was the winner and who the loser of this round. There are no winners and we both know it. (When the Birds Stopped Singing, 78-79)

According to Palestinian memoirists, the fates of both Palestinians and Israelis are yoked, and if that basic truth is denied, violence will persist. And yet they contend that this denial exists today, despite the clear disadvantage that it poses to everyone invested in the promise of a peaceful resolution. They argue that the widespread perception of the

Palestinian role in the conflict is distorted, and must be corrected if any just solution is to actualize. Therefore, Palestinian memoirists designed their strategies to humanize

Palestinians as a people, validate their ties to a land and to a history, and frame their national aspirations in the language of universal human rights and freedoms. There is reason to believe that memoirs, as personal accounts of suffering, loss, and hope, can pose very formidable challenges to the default modes of truth and the forces that shape, and are shaped by, history. They may be able to coax readers out of the limits of their own worlds and into the imaginary realm of the Other. We shall see how this strategy pans out for Palestinians.

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