Palestine in a Transnational Context

Contributors

Heribert Adam is a political sociologist and holder of the Simons Chair at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Born in Germany and educated at the Frankfurt School of critical theory, Adam has published extensively on comparative ethnic conflicts, particularly sociopolitical developments in South Africa. He was awarded the 1998 Konrad Adenauer Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His most recent publication is Peace-Making in Divided Societies: The Israel–South Africa Analogy (Human Sciences Research Council). Joel Beinin is professor of Middle East history at Stanford University, where his research has focused on the social and cultural history of the modern Middle East. He has written and lectured extensively on Israel, Palestine, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. His recent books include Political Islam: Essays from “Middle East Report” (University of California Press, coedited with Joe Storck), and Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press). He is past president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America. Amahl Bishara is a Ph.D. student in anthropology at New York University. As a student in NYU’s Program in Culture and Media, she recently completed a documentary film, Across Oceans, among Colleagues (New York University Program in Culture and Media), investigating the Committee to Protect Journalists’ work in the Middle East. Samera Esmeir is a lawyer and a doctoral student in the Institute for Law and Society, New York University. She is the coeditor and cofounder of Adalah’s Review, a sociolegal journal published in Arabic, Hebrew, and English that focuses on the Palestinian minority in Israel. She is a regular contributor to the journal. Her current dissertation research focuses on colonial law in Egypt. Salah D. Hassan is assistant professor in the Department of English at Michigan State University. He is associate editor of CR: The New Centennial Review and is an editorial board member of the Middle East Report.

Vincent Lloyd is an undergraduate student in the Religion Department of Princeton University and a campus activist. His current research focuses on the ethical implications of postmodern theology. Zia Mian is a physicist researching nuclear disarmament issues with the Program on Science and Global Security at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He is the editor of several books: Out of the Nuclear Shadow (Lokayan, Rainbow, Zed Books, with Smitu Kothari), Pakistan’s Crises of State and Society (Mashal), and Pakistan’s Atomic Bomb and the Search for Security (Gautam). He is also a member of the Princeton Committee on Palestine and serves on the board of Faculty for Israel-Palestine Peace (www.ffipp.org), a national faculty network working for an end to the occupation and a just peace. Timothy Mitchell is professor of politics at New York University, where he is director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies. His most recent books are Questions of Modernity (University of Minnesota Press) and Rule of Experts (University of California Press). Gyan Prakash is professor of history at Princeton University and a member of the Subaltern Studies Group. He is the author of Bonded Histories (Cambridge University Press) and Another Reason (Princeton University Press) and has edited several volumes of essays on colonial history, including After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements (Princeton University Press). Ahmad H. Sa’di is a lecturer in the Department of Politics and Government at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. He publishes articles in English, Arabic, and Hebrew in a variety of journals, including Sociology, Work, Employment, and Society, Social Identities, Arab Studies Quarterly, and Al-Karmel. He has published several chapters in edited anthologies. His research investigates the reconstruction of the history of the Palestinian minority in Israel after Al-Nakbah.

Introduction PA L E S T I N E I N A T R A N S N AT I O N A L C O N T E X T

In the three years since the outbreak of the second Intifada in October 2000, the policy making of the U.S. government has been haunted by the question of Palestine. The Intifada made briefly visible the consequences of Israel’s continued occupation and expanded colonization of the West Bank and Gaza, an expansion facilitated by the Oslo accords of 1993 and disguised under the name of “the peace process.” Within a year, however, the launching of the worldwide war on terror provided Washington with a new way to misrepresent the nature of Israel’s war against the Palestinians. A century-long history of dispossession, expulsion, occupation, and resistance was reduced, once again, to a series of Palestinian acts of terror. A people’s loss of their homes and homeland, of their freedom of movement and human dignity, of their personal security and political future, could instead be framed as a battle of civilization against terror, of democracy against hatred, of the West against Islam. Under the banner of the war on terror, the United States then announced its plans for a war against Iraq as the cornerstone of an unapologetic project to remake the political order of the Middle East. Yet the question of Palestine refused to disappear. From the protests of up to half a million people in several cities of Europe to the revived antiwar activism of the campuses of North American universities (see Vincent Lloyd and Zia Mian’s essay in this issue), an emergent peace movement in the West placed the issue of Palestinian rights, alongside the right of the Iraqi people to be spared the devastation of war, at the center of its politics. The importance attached to the Palestine question was a response to the obvious discrepancy between Washington’s use of U.N. Security Council resolutions against Iraq, its disregard for council resolutions against Israel, and its vetoing of any international intervention on behalf of the Palestinians. But the importance reflected something larger. The injustice against the Palestinians has always been carried out in the name of the West. Washington supports, funds, and arms many forms of injustice in the Middle East. But only in the case of Israel is the injustice disguised and defended as a moral struggle of the West against the rest. The Palestine question now haunts the West, much as the question of apartheid haunted a previous generation. We draw the analogy with apartheid not to make any simplistic historical comparison between Israel and South Social Text 75, Vol. 21, No. 2, Summer 2003. Copyright © 2003 by Duke University Press.

Timothy Mitchell, Gyan Prakash, and Ella Shohat

Africa, but rather to place the Palestine question in a transnational and comparative frame, and to try to understand it in its historical complexity. In the aftermath of World War II, the hegemonic powers attempted to resolve the question of Palestine through a plan of partition. Postwar Europe sought to compensate for its deplorable record of genocidal practices toward Jewish communities of Europe by adopting a characteristically colonial solution — the partition of Palestine, and the displacement of its people from their lands to provide a state for European Jews. From the very beginning, therefore, the problem has been transnational, involving diverse populations, nation-states, and imperial powers, especially since the principle of the separation of Arabs and Jews had the concomitant effect of displacing Arab Jews from Arab countries (see the essay here by Ella Shohat). Furthermore, partition involved new articulations of nation and community, redefining the relationship between national identity and the nation-state. If the state was to be a nation-state, claiming to represent a singular national identity, then what was to be the relationship between the state and its multiple identities? Partition, as the example of the ethnoreligious bifurcation of British India and Pakistan in 1947 shows, produced only further conflicts between the majority and the minority, and sparked majoritarian and exclusivist nation-building. It is no coincidence that the introduction of the policy of apartheid in South Africa in 1948 took place in the same period of colonial crisis. The establishing of apartheid was an attempt, in a sense, to use the principle of territorial partition to resolve a colonial conflict through a project of national-geographical separation. Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians today have often been compared with apartheid. The reasons for the failure of the Oslo accords, in particular, have been discussed in this light. While granting limited autonomy to the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and in the major towns of the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem), the Israeli government broke these pockets of self-rule into noncontiguous islands and ringed them with expanded settlements, Jewish-only highways, and military control points. Historically, it will be recalled, apartheid was introduced in South Africa as a retreat from the more extreme colonial visions of race domination and as a long-term solution to the problem of multiple racial groups coexisting in the same territory. In Israel, too, apartheid describes not so much the existing situation of occupation and resistance as the solution that Israel and the United States envisage to the untenable politics of the present. Other contrasts and comparisons can be made between the Israeli and South African cases. The essay here by Heribert Adam illuminates the multiple differences between the two cases, analyzing the lessons that can be learned from a transnational comparison. This contrasts with the prevailing Israeli rejection of the view that we have nothing to learn from

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the comparison of Israel with other policies of territorial separation and population segregation. One lesson from the antiapartheid movement has been learned by diverse peace movements organized around the Palestinian issue. The resurgent student activism mentioned above has drawn inspiration for a series of university divestment campaigns from the earlier movement. For decades international activism on the left was reserved for the questions of Indochina, Latin America, and South Africa, while the Middle East was the realm of only a few. Today the U.S. Left is no longer afraid to speak about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The targeting of campus activism on the Palestine question by right-wing pressure groups is a small indication of this shift. Such activism is in part the product of a new wave of immigration to the United States, and a new diversity of student populations. But it is also one of the few positive results of the Oslo accords. The word Palestine and the cause it represents are no longer taboo. (See Lloyd and Mian’s essay here on divestment campaigns.) The transnationalization of the question of Palestine is also central to us as citizens or residents of the United States, whose government speaks on our behalf on the world stage. U.S. policy might be ignored if it were not for the fact that the occupying power — Israel — is its key ally in the oil-rich Middle East. Not surprisingly, then, the American media depict Israel as the only democracy in the region, conveniently overlooking the fact that its self-definition as a Jewish state discriminates against its Arab citizenry (see Samera Esmeir’s and Ahmad Sa’di’s essays in this issue). The euphemism of the “peace process” similarly rewrites the struggle against occupation as a negotiation between two relatively equal sides, sidestepping the question of rights and justice. Recently, Christian fundamentalists have joined the campaign to deny Palestinian rights by endorsing Israel’s claim to the biblical land. The U.S. print and television media, for their part, have joined the U.S. administration and the Israeli government in demonizing the Palestinians. They continue to reiterate the Clinton administration’s claim that Arafat rejected peace by walking away from Ehud Barak’s “generous offer” at Camp David in July 2000. In fact, the Palestinians never walked away but continued to negotiate until Barak broke off the negotiations in January 2001 to unsuccessfully contest the Israeli election, and it was the incoming Sharon and Bush administrations that refused to resume them. The media also wash away Sharon’s bloodstained record as the military commander who allowed the Phalangists in Lebanon to carry out massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in 1982, and his longstanding opposition to any accommodation with the Palestinians; instead, he was lauded by the Bush administration as a “man of peace,” while Arafat is reviled as complicit with terrorism. As the pro-Israeli lobby worked the media and the U.S. Congress in

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the wake of the September 11 attacks, and as the hysteria about militant Islam gripped the pundits, the Palestinian resistance against occupation was deftly redefined as terrorism. Yet the double standard in U.S. Middle East policy became increasingly obvious. The Bush administration was obliged to seek resolutions from the U.N. Security Council to build support for a war against Iraq. This entitles one to ask: what about the case of Israel? Flouting U.N. resolutions and international law, it has steadfastly built settlements over territories seized in 1967; since the Oslo agreements of 1993, successive Israeli governments, both Labour and Likud, have doubled the number of settlers in the West Bank and Gaza. While the United States has always been allied to and supportive of Israel, since September 11 its policy has shifted even closer to the Israeli regional agenda (see Joel Beinin’s essay here), as one is noticing a rift with another traditional U.S. ally — Saudi Arabia. With the second Intifada, the human toll exacted by the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories has reached unprecedented levels. The West Bank and Gaza have experienced horrific assaults by the Israeli military, which has exploited each act of violence on Israeli civilians and the army to attack and demonize all legitimate resistance as terrorism. Under Ariel Sharon, Israel has carried out a war against the Palestinian society as such, itself. The consequences are there for all to see. The Palestinian civilian infrastructure and life are wrecked, and observers report sharp escalations in unemployment and malnutrition. One can only imagine what it feels like to live under such catastrophic conditions. And what have the Israelis gained from this violent escalation in military occupation? Contrary to Sharon’s fantasy of terrorizing the occupied population into submission, Palestinian resistance remains as unbending as ever. Nor have Jewish-Israeli citizens gained from this aggressive policy; in fact, poverty rates have risen, the tourist economy has been devastated, there are increased levels of migration, and a general state of anxiety, fear, and depression reigns. The essays in this issue, taken together, highlight aspects of the conflict usually rendered invisible in the dominant representation. Israeli national identity is often imagined as strictly made up of European Jews, in line with the Zionist construction of the Jewish Nation — a Western state on the frontiers, pitting civilization against savagery, peace against terror. Ella Shohat’s essay investigates the close links between Zionist discourse and the production of scholarly knowledge about Israel/Palestine, arguing that the isolationist approach to the study of “Jewish History” was “crucial to a quite anomalous project in which the State created the Nation — not simply in the metaphorical sense of fabrication, but also in the literal sense of engineering the transplant of populations from all over

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the world.” While Shohat’s essay deconstructs Zionist and post-Zionist narratives of a homogenous Jewish Nation (largely through silencing the links between Arab Jews and the question of Palestine), Salah Hassan’s piece examines the construction of the Palestinian nation through the practice of literary anthologizing. The essays by Ahmad Sa’di and Samera Esmeir, meanwhile, contest the idea of Palestinians as always simply “outside” the State of Israel. Sa’di’s essay on collaboration addresses the way Palestinian citizens of Israel have been used within the Israeli state apparatus, and how they have resisted. Esmeir’s essay, meanwhile, tackles the invisibility of the past, suggesting that the Palestinian experience of AlNakbah (the catastrophe) of 1948 is rendered invisible through norms of legal and historical discourse. Indeed, the emphasis on terrorism has marginalized a thorough discussion of different modes of Palestinian resistance both within and outside the State of Israel and the occupied territories, from local food distribution networks, doctors’ rescue units, organized legal battles against land appropriation, and house demolitions. Amahl Bishara’s essay highlights such organized efforts in East Jerusalem to redefine spaces of belonging, creating de facto coexistence and even alternative visions for the future.

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Nation Validation MODERN PALESTINIAN LITERATURE AND THE POLITICS OF APPEASEMENT

From the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the summer of 1982 to the signing of the Declaration of Principles on 13 September 1993, Palestinian politics witnessed the transformation of the PLO from a revolutionary national liberation movement to a partner in a U.S.-led peace process. The demise of the PLO as a revolutionary movement began a decade earlier with its negotiated withdrawal from Beirut and the establishment of new headquarters in Tunis. The Sabra and Shatila massacres and the painful war of the camps in the mid-1980s devastated the PLO and revealed the weakness of Arafat’s leadership. Cut off from its major civilian constituencies in the refugee camps of Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan and wrecked as an armed resistance group, the post-1982 PLO was unable to formulate a coherent political strategy that could meet the demands of the constantly shifting grounds of the struggle. The beginning of the Intifada in December 1987 interrupted the PLO’s slide into inaction by upsetting the status quo in the occupied territories and opening alternative fronts of opposition to Israel. Long neglected by the PLO as a strategic locus of operations, the occupied territories emerged during the Intifada as the principal site of resistance and the real stake in the conflict. The remarkable achievements of the uprising, especially in its first two years, gave a new mandate to the debilitated PLO leadership in Tunis and somehow offset the failures of the post1982 period. The escalation of confrontations between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian youths enhanced the PLO’s ability to mobilize effective international opposition to Israel’s policy in the occupied territories and also forced the organization to reassess its established positions. At the 1988 Palestine National Council meeting in Algiers, the PLO made a “Declaration of Independence” and announced a new plan of action that indicated a reorientation centered on achieving an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories. By the early 1990s, however, the Intifada had run its course, and the many Palestinians living under occupation were finding it increasingly difficult to endure the worsened living conditions resulting from Israeli repression of the Intifada. The effects of the Gulf War — on the entire region, but especially on Palestinians following the PLO’s announcement of support for Iraq — put an end to the Intifada and undermined many of the gains produced by the three-year uprising. Social Text 75, Vol. 21, No. 2, Summer 2003. Copyright © 2003 by Duke University Press.

Salah D. Hassan

The 1990 – 91 Gulf War had a devastating effect on Palestinians in the occupied territories, sapped the Intifada, and isolated the PLO. One of the major outcomes of the war was the Middle East peace process, beginning with the public meetings in Madrid in October 1991, in which the Palestinian negotiation team was composed largely of personalities who had emerged during the Intifada as leaders from inside the occupied territories. The Madrid process came to an end with the announcement that the PLO and Israel had reached an agreement in secret meetings in Oslo, followed by the signing of the Declaration of Principles in Washington. The initial — and misplaced — euphoria following the Washington handshake between Arafat and Rabin, and Arafat’s subsequent arrival in Palestine in July 1994, did not last long. The actions of the Palestinian National Authority in Gaza and Jericho soon revealed the failure of Arafat to learn from the Intifada and understand the concerns expressed by the Palestinian negotiators during the post-Madrid bilateral rounds. No longer the head of a liberation organization — now the chairman of the National Authority — Arafat has proved himself to be often insensitive to Palestinians in the occupied territories and ineffective in negotiating with the Israelis. The years from 1982 to 1993 can now be understood as the period when the PLO abandoned the politics of resistance linked to those other struggles for national liberation and embraced the politics of appeasement, defined almost entirely in terms of U.S. recognition (Hassan 2001). I have rehearsed briefly the historical trajectory of the PLO from 1982 to the early 1990s, from Beirut to Jericho, to provide a specific context within which to discuss the relationship between Palestinian literary production and national politics. Prior to 1982, in the period when the PLO still retained a certain revolutionary air about it, the critical expectation was that all writings by Palestinians were primarily statements of national sentiment. To a certain degree this expectation is confirmed by the significant quantity of Palestinian writing whose general themes are dispossession, the Israeli occupation, and the national struggle. These themes find expression in the narratives of 1948, references to life in refugee camps, allusions to armed struggle, and memoirs of imprisonment and torture. While some critics may see a creative poverty or limitation in the political engagement of Palestinian poetry and narrative in the era of protest (1967– 82), others have found in it an example of what Barbara Harlow (1987), borrowing from Ghassan Kanafani, has called “resistance literature.” Harlow suggests that resistance literature is directly tied to armed insurgent political movements that have an organizational structure, such as the PLO or the ANC or the FLN in Algeria. Despite the often loose use of the term resistance literature to refer to any work that implies political opposition or subversion, in Harlow’s definition of the concept, resistance

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literature cannot be disassociated from revolutionary political organizations. She quotes Kanafani to support the connection between literature and armed struggle and the equal importance of both to a resistance movement: “For Kanafani, the extreme importance of the cultural form of resistance is no less valuable than the armed resistance itself ” (11). The era of “resistance literature” had come to a close by the 1980s at the latest, and by the end of that decade many of the revolutionary groups that inspired resistance writing, such as the ANC and the FMLN (the Salvadoran guerrilla movement), were moving toward negotiated settlements, as did the PLO. At a certain level Harlow identifies “resistance literature” as a significant tendency linked to armed struggle, just at the moment when it ceases to exist. If resistance literature can be used to describe those cultural projects that existed in tandem with the militancy of the PLO, then how is one to describe those quasi-official national literary endeavors that emerged with the Palestinian Authority? Published in 1992 by the prestigious Columbia University Press, the Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature edited by Salma Jayyusi came into circulation between the 1991 opening of the Madrid Peace Conference and the public announcement of the 1993 Palestinian-Israel Declaration of Principles. The anthology arrived on the scene at an apparently indeterminate juncture in Palestinian political history, just prior to the moment when the PLO shed its revolutionary rhetoric and began to make its transformation into the Palestinian National Authority. When considered in connection with the shifts taking place in Palestinian national politics in the early 1990s, the Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature entered the environment of U.S. culture and publishing unavoidably as part of a broader agenda that sought to rehabilitate and domesticate the Palestinian cause, to make it fit within the framework of the U.S.-sponsored peace process. The anthology is the only substantial collection of Palestinian literature published in English by a major U.S. university press. Several other anthologies have been compiled that deal with Arabic literature on Palestine, and there are a number of small collections that include translations of works by Palestinian poets, but there is nothing that is comparable to the Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, either in size or in prestige of publisher. Within the constraints of the moment, the Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature participates in a twofold struggle against the U.S. and Israeli denial of Palestinian political and cultural self-representation: first, the anthology delivers English translations of Arabic literature to a U.S. readership; second, it uses literary texts to give moral and intellectual depth to the Palestinian national movement built around the PLO. The representation of a nation through an anthology or any other literary text

Harlow identifies

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“resistance literature” as a significant tendency linked to armed struggle, just at the moment when it ceases to exist.

does not necessarily secure political recognition of the nation represented. That is to say, at the level of representation, anthologies generally fail to generate substantive transformations in politics and literature. Rather, the production of a national anthology may be seen as a belated response to the political recognition of a people as a nation. Jayyusi’s Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature is an instance of an anthology that connects political recognition of Palestinian national aspiration to literary representation of the nation, as if showcasing the work of Palestinian writers to a U.S. public might somehow give force to the political demands of the PLO in the 1990s. The Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature gives cultural validation to Palestinian nationalism as it enters the phase of appeasement. Before discussing this anthology in more detail, I want to make a brief digression to outline further the relationship between anthologies and nationalism.

Anthologies and Nationalism Whereas nationalism has often been the subject of widespread contemporary critical analysis, notably since the 1980s (Hassan 2001– 2), there have been surprisingly few attempts to theorize the anthology as a central institution in the construction of national literary traditions. The word anthology comes from the Greek anthos and logia, which the Oxford English Dictionary translates in its definition as a “collection of flowers.” This rhetorical figure relies on the obvious analogy between the natural beauty of a floral arrangement and the cultural value of the choice pickings of poetic texts. The metaphor naturalizes and mystifies cultural production by suggesting that literary expression and a collection of literary texts are as innocent as flowers in a garden or a blossoming bouquet. Constantinus Cephalus’s tenth-century Greek Anthology (1920 – 26), sometimes also called the Palatine Anthology, is the first widely recognized literary collection that used the flower metaphor to refer to a large compilation of literary texts. The Greek Anthology was intended to preserve Greek verbal arts through the ages and assert 2,000 years of historical continuity in the Greek literary tradition, running from the classical period to Byzantium. Cephalus’s era is characterized historiographically as the Macedonian Golden Age, a period when Byzantium reasserted itself militarily in opposition to the Abbasids in the East. Consequently, at its origins in Europe, the project of anthologizing was the textual counterpart to what might be considered the nationalist activity of Byzantium. While the army established Byzantium’s geopolitical borders, the Greek Anthology served as the state’s cultural extension. The anthology gave moral weight to a resurgent

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martial Byzantium that laid claim to classical Greek civilization and projected it into future literary developments in Europe. My point is not to assert some form of historical or etymological determinism. Nor do I wish to imply that a national anthology is simply another text that gives form to, and attests to, the existence of “imagined communities,” as Benedict Anderson might argue. Rather, I want to demonstrate the connection between the production of the literary anthology and the glorification of a people’s past achievements, which serves the demands of existing political regimes. Anthologies consolidate a literary tradition that already exists and ennoble a community that has already been imagined. At a certain level, they are intended as an embodiment of the national spirit; they assume an organic and even worldly form, but through the evaluative and definitional discourses of anthologizers they attain a transcendent character. According to the logic of anthologies, every nation must have its anthology, and great nations have significant and large anthologies, while lesser nations have minor and small anthologies. This hierarchy of national anthologies is matched by the internal hierarchy that characterizes every anthology. A national anthology operates within the literary field as a means of establishing the great works of the nation, separating major authors from minor authors. Most critics who have considered the effects of anthologies on the field have noted, as Kenneth Warren does in a 1993 article, that “the cut-and-paste operation of the anthology . . . acts to confer an aura upon a work and to embed it in, rather than detach it from, tradition” (341). But this observation focuses too much on the valorization of texts (“aura”) and the accumulation of a textual tradition. Increasing the variety of anthologized texts expands the center of the tradition but does little to transform canonical practices. Through its selection of texts, an anthology gives cultural definition and legitimacy to the political nation in terms of an exclusive intertextuality restricted to those works between the covers of the collection, which becomes the apotheosis of a shared and collective literary patrimony. Critical studies of specific anthologies have been, therefore, largely limited to polemics concerning the ideological implications of the selection, indicated by what texts or authors are excluded. For instance, the publication of The Heath Anthology of American Literature (Lauter 1994) provoked a significant debate in the United States concerning the anthology’s “reconstruction” of the American canon. John Crowley, a professor of English at Syracuse University who has written several books on W. D. Howells, notes in a 1999 article that the debate around The Heath Anthology pitted revisionist editors, who sought to break open the canon of American letters, against conservative Americanists, who wished to defend the exalted position of the so-called great works. Crowley claims that dis-

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agreement between the two groups was reduced to “yet another salvo in the Culture Wars.” For his part, Crowley’s critique of the contested anthology is built around his own understanding of U.S. literature and his interests as a contributor to The Heath; he focuses on the limits of the revisionist project, which he claims did not rethink the conventional presentation of “important,” but neglected, white male authors, such as W. D. Howells. Crowley’s critique of the anthological project of The Heath is decidedly conservative, and his gripe with the editors is largely beside the point. What is significant is his and the editors’ shared commitment to an anthological ideal and their acceptance of national anthologies as a valuable pedagogical instrument. In the field of Arab literary studies, the anthology as a literary genre is not problematized but is rated a fundamental tool for the presentation of Arabic texts in translation. Commenting on the anthologies prepared by the U.S.-based PROTA (Project for the Translation of Arabic), Roger Allen (1994) has observed that “Modern Arabic Poetry, edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi, [and] published by Columbia University Press in 1987, . . . was immediately recognized as a major contribution to modern Arabic literature studies in the English-speaking world. This anthology . . . is a critical selection of works, and not everyone has been happy about the selection in terms of inclusion and exclusion; I at least work on the assumption that no anthology can (or, probably, should) satisfy everyone.” In this brief essay, Allen defends the importance of such anthologies primarily because they make available a wide selection of translations from Arabic. I discuss this issue in greater detail below but wish only to note here that as with criticism of The Heath Anthology, assessments of Modern Arabic Poetry have centered on problems in the selection, and not the idea, of producing an anthology. Regardless of the problems that inhere in national collections, projects of anthologization, the general concept of anthology, and the relationship between anthology and nation go unquestioned. An anthology is thought to be simply a practical compendium of important literary works that has primarily pedagogical uses and succeeds to the degree that it accurately represents the literary tradition. The critical question asked about an anthology is whether it preserves or amends the established canon, and not whether anthologizing is a seriously compromised literary activity. I want to propose here that as a canonizing enterprise that seeks to define, represent, and validate a textual field, the anthology plays an especially key role in literary history connecting literature to nation. In a brief article on The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Theodore Mason develops a similar if more modest claim about the national character of anthologies. “For the most part, . . . the anthologies that most come to our collective imagination

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depend for their existence on an idea of cultural difference. . . . Further, the particular version of cultural difference that forms the basis for so many anthologies is the idea of the nation” (1998, 192). Mason’s interrogation of The Norton is one of the few attempts to complicate the practice of anthology making. His critique of the anthology as national text focuses in large part on the problems posed by revisionist canon formation that is marked by the conflict in a process of selection based both on the merit of texts and their ability to represent the nation in all its diversity (193). In other words, the tension is between the conventions of literary critical judgment and the transformative political demands of representing marginalized works and authors. Mason’s solution to this problem is to open the anthology onto the critical complexities of building a new tradition that stands in opposition to the dominant aesthetic values of the past. Rather than work against the cultural “grids” of selection by which national anthologies produce a particular literary history, Mason seeks simply to reclaim the political significance of an authoritative national collection, arguing that “the nationalist overtones of The Norton gestures toward the recognition of a community’s integrity and its capacity for at least literary self-determination” (190). Jayyusi’s Modern Palestinian Literature seeks to perform the same gesture on behalf of a repressed Palestinian culture. While this approach is certainly one way to understand the politics and problematics of national anthologies that challenge collective exclusions, it seems to me that despite claims of inclusiveness, all national anthologies exclude, and the exclusions are an important indication of the politics that condition every national anthology. Mason seems to overlook this fundamental aspect of anthologies and considers The Norton Anthology of African American Literature inclusive and comprehensive: “It is an exaggeration, but only a slight one, to say that it is hard to imagine who in the scholarly community interested in African American literature was not somehow included in the production of this anthology” (186). He later states, “The strength of the volume taken as a whole lies in its comprehensiveness and scope” (190). Past and current practices of anthologization circumscribe and reinforce the boundaries of ostensible literary traditions, partitioning the field of literary production into tidy categories of study. The national anthology is a literary project that self-consciously excludes works and severs significant links with literatures in order to set the borders of a unique culture, which is often tied to a particular geographical space. By sanctifying a specific spectrum of texts according to national cultural ideals, an anthology represses recalcitrant moments in the literary field in order to fortify a textual tradition that conforms to a manageable pattern of themes, styles, forms, and values. From this perspective, a national anthology is a limiting endeavor that

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All national anthologies exclude, and the exclusions are an important indication of the politics that condition every national anthology.

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justifies its selection on the basis of the originality and coherence of the nation’s cultural ethos and its presumed continuity across time and space. The term anthology is used today without any necessary national signification. Yet as John Guillory (1990) has observed with regard to the emergence of the English canon in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, anthologies have played a key role in nation formation: “For the first time works of English literature were collected into anthologies comprising selections of the best in each genre; and these anthologies, which looked very much like the Norton or Oxford anthologies of our day, were employed in schools as a means of teaching and disseminating Standard English” (241). Guillory emphasizes the normative and pedagogical function of anthologies, but implicit in his observations is the evident link between anthologization, canonization, and nation formation. Still, Englishlanguage anthologies that have proliferated in the last thirty years — including some anthologies of Arabic literature in translation — have tried to challenge the narrowness of national configurations by organizing their selections around other conceptual categories, such as style, gender, sexuality, or region. Recent anthologies of women’s writing, like Charlotte Nekola and Paula Rabinowitz’s Writing Red (1987), correct the marginal position of women, and in this case leftist women, contesting the national character of anthologies and also working against patriarchal and conservative literary canons. Similarly, large and more conventional literature collections, such as The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, seek to present a synchronic literary history by presenting translations of poems, stories, and excerpts from numerous cultural contexts positioned chronologically in terms of distinct periods. The expansion of The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces and other sizeable world literature anthologies attest to the transformation of the western canon in the wake of postcolonial studies and other projects aimed at making the field of literary studies more responsive to the plurality of the world. While these somewhat revisionist anthologies offer correctives to past exclusions of women’s writing and non-European literatures, they invariably fall back on national literary conventions to position the authors within the collections. They either select representative texts from a more inclusive national archive or multiply the number of national traditions included in the anthology. In both cases, the addition of women authors or of authors from beyond the borders of Europe and North America is generally symbolic and does not break open the national framework. Anthologies, like the entire field of literary studies, have not been able to shake off the national paradigm, which persists in shaping the conceptualization of cultural production. Indeed, anthologies have played a key

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role in defining the literary field in terms of the national, which, despite the significant critique of nationalism, remains one of the most resilient categories of literary ordering. Clearly, a national anthology participates in canon formation and asserts the unity of a literary tradition, but it should also be understood as responding to the historical contingencies of the nation that characterize the moment of its production. Although Cephalus’s project may have aspired to contain the totality of the Greek poetic tradition in a period of Byzantine expansion, contemporary national anthologies have far more modest ambitions, which are conditioned by a troublesome contradiction; national anthologies face increasing pressure to be comprehensive, and at the same time they must contend with the practical impossibility of absolute inclusiveness. Still, recent anthologies seek to overcome the contradiction through a coverage model, which is underwritten by the supposedly representative quality of the privileged texts. Each text included in the anthology is assumed to represent a part of the entire literary tradition and even the nation as a whole. When considered in these terms, a national anthology operates according to a synecdochic chain in which part of a “major” author’s work represents an author’s whole oeuvre, all the authors in the anthology represent the entire national literary tradition, and the national literary tradition embodies the national culture. The anthology is a contrivance by which a fragment of an author’s work can be construed through this chain as representative of the national culture. In her introduction to the Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, Jayyusi singles out Mahmoud Darwish as the representative national poet whose writing, she argues, expresses both the aesthetic qualities of modern poetry and the existential predicament of the Palestinian nation: “In a field teeming with poetic talent, Mahmoud Darwish stands apart, shining with a curious creative power; a poet of our times and of all times” (1992, 61). While one might agree that Darwish has been among the most important Arab writers to emerge in the late twentieth century, the special emphasis given to his work both in the introduction and in the selection of texts illustrates the process by which a particular author is made to represent the achievements of the national culture. Perhaps the best example in the anthology of the synecdochic chain is the long excerpt from Darwish’s “Song of the Land,” a literary part that most explicitly represents the whole of the Palestinian nation, notably in the following line: “I name the soil I call it / an extension of my soul” (146). The poetic fragment within the anthology holds the same status as the poet’s soul in relation to the soil of Palestine. This association of the poet’s soul — a metaphor for poetry itself — with the land or the national territory is a commonplace not only in Palestinian literature but also in many national literatures. Indeed,

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it is the quintessential folding of the national into the literary. In this trope, the physicality of the usurped or contested national territory, Palestine in the case of Darwish and Jayyusi, is projected into the metaphysical through association with the poet’s soul, achieving an alternative mode of being, as poetry in the absence of a nation-state.

Modern Palestinian Literature and Nation Validation Described on the dust cover as a “definitive anthology” that “offers the widest selection ever made of modern Palestinian literature,” Jayyusi’s collection brings together works by more than seventy writers and is unquestionably the largest selection of twentieth-century Palestinian writing available in English. The texts in the anthology testify to the existence of a modern Palestinian culture and work against the ugly images of depraved terrorists and helpless refugees. The collection is a literary reiteration of the modern history of Palestinian national existence. The anthology is not unlike Before Their Diaspora, a collection of photographs from the pre-1948 period that attests to the modern presence and lives of Palestinians on the land and in the cities of Palestine. The Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature is an ambitious response to attempts by official Israeli practices to erase Palestine and its cultural past. The collection of texts seeks more generally to give shape to a continuous and unified national literary tradition, provide an introduction to Palestinian literature, and reverse the political bias against Palestinians. Given the severe repression of Palestinian political and cultural rights under occupation and in exile, the strategic significance of this unifying project should not be overlooked. Until the 1990s, the official Israeli position denied the very existence of Palestinians; consequently, the compilation of an anthology reconstitutes the narrative of Palestinian literary history in the face of a ruthless effacement of Palestinian material history. Indeed, many of the 232 poems, 25 short stories, and 14 novel and personal account excerpts present collective narratives of occupation, exile, imprisonment, and resistance. However, some of the texts work against the anthology’s unifying project by foregrounding Arab culture, Third World solidarity, feminism, Marxism, or Islam. Ghareeb ‘Asqalani, Mahmoud Darwish, Emile Habiby, Akram Haniyyeh, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Ghassan Kanafani, Sahar Khalifeh, Hisham Sharabi, Anton Shammas, and Fadwa Tuqan are only a few of the writers in the anthology who connect Palestinian concerns with broader literary and political movements, struggling against cultural homogenization and isolation. Texts by these authors often fit awkwardly within the more moderate national literary framework set by

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Jayyusi. As mentioned earlier, one of the unstated ambitions of the Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature was to deliver an acceptable Palestinian politics and culture to a U.S. public at the very moment when the Palestinian national movement had unequivocally announced its willingness to enter negotiations with Israel on a two-state solution. The anthology can be read as the offspring of the Palestine National Council’s 1988 Declaration of Independence, the PLO’s response to the Intifada. The Declaration of Independence states in its preamble: In the heart of its homeland and on its periphery, in its places of exile near and far, the Palestinian Arab people has not lost its unwavering faith in its right to return nor its firm belief in its right to independence. Occupation, carnage and displacement have been unable to dispossess the Palestinians of their consciousness and their identity — their epic struggle has endured, and the formation of their national character has continued with the growing escalation of the struggle.

The Declaration of Independence stresses throughout “the constancy with which the people adhered to the land that gave that land its identity and which imbued its people with the national spirit.” On the one hand, this important document invokes a national unity that transcends place; on the other hand, it affirms the idea of a Palestinian nation tethered to the struggle in the historic land of Palestine. As a threshold political text, the PNC Declaration of Independence summons the language of resistance and self-determination that have been the identifying and unifying markers of the Palestinian national movement since the late 1960s, when the PLO defined itself in terms of Pan-Arab nationalism, Third World liberation, and anti-imperialism. The Declaration of Independence emphasizes both a “homeland denied” and the continuity of the nation in struggle. A similar rhetoric of hardship, resistance, and attachment is echoed in the introduction to the Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, which also alludes to the transcendent quality of the Palestinian national experience of dispossession and its concomitant unifying sentiments: Modern Palestinian experience is harsh, unrelenting, and all-penetrating; no Palestinian is free from its grip and no writer can evade it. It cannot be forgotten and its anguish cannot be transcended. Whether in Israel, or in the West Bank or in the diaspora, Palestinians are committed by their very identity to a life determined by events and circumstances arising out of their own rejection of captivity and national loss, as well as by other people’s intentions, suspicions, fears and aggressions. (2 – 3)

Despite the diverse locations of the Palestinian nation, the Declaration of Independence (“in the heart of its homeland and on its periphery, in its

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places of exile near and far”) and the introduction to the anthology (“whether in Israel, or in the West Bank or in the diaspora”) define Palestinian national identity in terms of “the epic struggle” and “commitment” by the people. Repressed by both the Declaration of Independence and the anthology is the dichotomy between inside and outside the occupied territories that does not correspond with the image of unified nation evoked by the anthology’s framework. Even the geographical unity of the future national territory poses an obstacle to national unity as the divide between West Bankers and Gazans assumes an increasingly political form. In other words, the unity of Palestine, both within and beyond the territories, is rhetorical and premised largely on a past that has been shattered by colonial partition, exile, and occupation. This is not to say that there are not alliances and forces of national unification that have connected the inside and the outside, or that the national liberation movement represented by the PLO internationally did not possess credible popular support inside the territories. But since the crisis of the early 1980s, the social and ideological fractures in the Palestinian national movement have exposed the limits of the unifying rhetoric. While the rhetoric of national unity is appropriate to a Declaration of Independence formulated in exile in support of an uprising on the national territory, in the anthology it serves to justify a selection of texts that privileges authors in exile and those works that represent the experience of dispossession. Accordingly, the dislocation caused by the creation of Israel becomes the defining moment in the Palestinian national narrative. The problem with this approach to defining the specificity of Palestinian culture is the implication that the Palestinian nation comes into existence as a consequence of Zionist oppression. This unintended and wrongheaded allusion is reasserted in the anthology’s chronology, which does not document the publication date of a single literary text in the collection but presents a detailed account of Palestinian nationalist activity consistently in relation to early Zionism and Israel. In effect, as Jayyusi strives to explain the specificity of Palestinian writing within the broader context of Arabic literature, it is the idea of a particular historical experience of oppression that serves as the main criterion for defining the Palestinian national tradition. She writes, “While one can say that all Arabic literature nowadays is involved in the social and political struggle of the Arab people, politics nevertheless imposes a greater strain on the Palestinian writer” (1992, 2). And later, that in the face of a violent political adversary, Palestinian literature has “actually risen to the forefront of contemporary Arabic letters” (3). This line of argument fails to establish convincingly the particularity of Palestinian literature, but more importantly it reduces the significance of Palestinian

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artistic expression to a second-order phenomenon that, like the Palestinian nation, is an effect of conditions created in large part by “the Zionist movement.” Much of the literature included in the anthology actually suggests otherwise and brings into focus a number of other important concerns that link Palestinian writers with writers throughout the Arab world and the Third World more generally. The overemphasis on Israel’s history in an effort to make a claim for Palestinian exceptionalism inadvertently dulls the more radical tendencies within Palestinian writing. To contain these claims, Jayyusi reintroduces the importance of aesthetics, which she uses to supplement a definition of the Palestinian literary tradition that otherwise would risk reducing everything Palestinian to politics. For Jayyusi, the relationship between art and the world is construed as a dichotomy between internal and external forces. The internal forces of literature fall into the realm of pure aesthetics, whereas the external forces of politics negatively impinge on literature. These positions appear to be a simplification of a more elaborate argument developed by Edward Said in The World, the Text, and the Critic (1985). In contrast to Said, however, who seeks to break with a tradition of literary criticism that neglects the political forces that produce texts, Jayyusi insists that the value of Palestinian literature lies in its capacity to rise above politics or in some measure to liberate the aesthetic from the constraints of the political. She writes, “Art has its own internal laws of growth and development” (1992, 1) and that “the history of modern Arabic literature, particularly poetry, and especially in the decades since the Palestine disaster of 1948, shows that art has its own way of reasserting its natural course of development and growth” (2). What is interesting about this quotation is that it was primarily after 1948, notably after the 1967 war, that Pan-Arab nationalism and Third World revolutionary politics dominated the Arab cultural scene. Post-1967 Arab writing was influenced by the leftist movements in literature from around the world and connected the struggle in Palestine with anticolonial movements in, for example, Vietnam, Cuba, and South Africa. As Harlow (1987) demonstrates in Resistance Literature, the late 1950s and 1960s witnessed the emergence of a particular alignment of international literary positions that were closely tied to organized armed resistance. While Harlow observes a remarkable trend that self-consciously disrupts the values of a literary establishment opposed to the marriage of politics and poetics, Jayyusi appears to be reacting to the excessive critical focus on political thematics in Palestinian poetry and prose. For example, she argues against a purely political reading of Palestinian literature: “What is involved in this literature, . . . is not simply a political situation that has to be expounded to the world. Literature would lose its immense

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value if restricted to polemical narrations or to propaganda, and perhaps the greatest achievement of Palestinian poetry is its subtle and esthetically sophisticated portrayal of a genuine existential situation” (1992, 71). By introducing the primacy of aesthetics in literature, Jayyusi holds at bay critical traditions of commitment and resistance that have played a central role in shaping Arabic literature since the 1950s. This gesture provides a corrective to politically reductive interpretations and the dismissal of Arabic literature as excessively didactic; Jayyusi’s corrective expresses, however, a rather reactionary position, which simply inverts the politics/ aesthetics polarity by emphasizing the emergence of Arab literary modernism as a fundamentally aesthetic phenomenon. Accordingly, the introduction to the anthology describes the history of twentieth-century Palestinian literature as the unfolding of a modernist aesthetics within a narrow national context. “Modernism” and “avant-garde” are here code words for stylistically mature writing, which signals the realization of an original national literature that can stand beside the other literatures of the world: “Exiled Palestinian poets are now among the foremost avant-garde poets of the Arab world” (5). Later in the introduction, she adds: “Wherever one goes in the dispersed world of the Palestinian exile, there is at least one poet helping to create the new principles of a modern art” (57). Palestinian poetry is of course the privileged genre in the formation of Arab modernism, and the exiled poet is the central figure in this narrative of modern Palestinian literary history. The second point concerning poets in exile is especially important in understanding the parallels between this anthology and the dominant tendencies in Palestinian national politics in the 1990s. Jayyusi explains her selection of texts by claiming that “the balance still tilts decidedly in favor of Palestinian literature written in exile, this being true of both poetry and prose” (7). Modern Palestinian Literature argues, therefore, that writers from the outside are “in,” while most of those living inside the territories are left “out.” Despite the rhetoric of national unity in the introduction, the underrepresentation of writers from inside historic Palestine is not explained in terms of the political conditions of occupation or the presumed isolation of writers inside the territories, but rather in terms of quality and aesthetic judgment. In order to construct a unified tradition of Palestinian literature in the name of national unity, the critical project of the anthology is abandoned. This issue seems particularly relevant in the broader context of the Arab world, where literature and art often critique national regimes as well as neocolonialism. While the leveling of geographical and political differences may be defended to satisfy the nationalist imperative in an era of armed resistance, this strategy does not translate into real gains in the period of appeasement.

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The unity of the inside and the outside had been the ideological mainstay of the Palestinian movement from 1967 until the 1990s, but the Oslo agreement revealed that political representation of the nation was exclusively in the hands of a few PLO officials in exile. Rita Giacaman commented at the time of the signing of the Oslo agreement that “the people of the Occupied Territories had thought we were participating in making our own history, when history was being made for us halfway across the world” (1993, 19). Shafik al-Hout also said in an interview, “[Arafat] doubtless thought in Washington that if he was victorious, then we were all victorious. . . . He got trapped being in Tunis away from the masses” (1993, 19). Jayyusi’s anthology is a relatively benign expression of control in comparison with Arafat’s acceptance of the terms of the Oslo agreement and his continued attempt to monopolize the national authority now operating under severely circumscribed conditions inside the territories, but both the anthology and the Oslo negotiations produce authoritative documents that surrender the radicalism of Palestinian liberation in favor of U.S. recognition.

Beyond Past and Present It may seem harsh, inappropriate, and untimely to criticize the Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature when, after all, Israel has intensified its assault against Palestinians, and the publication does challenge the Israeli effacement of Palestinians. In addition, the anthology has without question contributed to the small but growing body of Arabic literature published in the United States. It is nevertheless worth recognizing what the collection represents in both the literary and political fields in order to put the errors of the past in perspective and to clear the ground for the future. Just as it is necessary to address the conditions and compromises that produced the Oslo accords and the limited vision of the PLO leadership that signed the agreement, it is important to consider the literary projects that are an expression of that moment. Despite its massive reassertion of Palestinian culture in the face of an unyielding Israeli occupation and a U.S. public that is largely insensitive to the Palestinian situation, the collection does not make a powerful statement in the name of Palestinian politics or in the name of Arabic literature. The paratextual apparatus (namely, the chronology and introduction) of the Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature flattens out ideological contradictions and historical tensions within the national movement in order to advance a harmonious representation of Palestinian cultural production that is an unthreatening expression of a literary tradition for which aesthetics are supposedly never made sub-

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servient to politics. This broad national anthology speaks more to the concerns of a U.S. public than to the need for a challenging political presentation of Palestinian literature and politics. The Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature is seriously constrained by the format of the national anthology and by the conditions of its production, two points that are the core of my critique. In addition, Jayyusi’s attempt to reposition Palestinian literature in terms of modernist aesthetics, as opposed to resistance, does not seem to have opened a space for a more serious engagement with Palestinian culture. Beyond the limited world of Arabists, the collection has generally suffered a critical neglect that is reserved for Arabic literature in the United States. Said protested in 1990 that “critics, book reviewers and journal editors studiously avoid discussion of Arabic books” (278). The discussion of Arabic books is rare still, and when it does take place tends toward the excessively appreciative. In the current conjuncture, what is needed most is a critical discussion of Arabic literature and politics that brings into the present the relationship between the two and exposes the failures of Arab national projects during the last thirty years. As I have noted above, in the era of revolutionary anti-imperialism, Palestinian resistance literature was a cultural extension of the PLO resistance movement. The parallel structure of this relationship was produced by the conditions of guerrilla warfare. Conversely, the Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature is produced by the conditions that made possible the Oslo peace accords and seems to be motivated by some of the same concerns that led Arafat to sign an agreement with Rabin in 1993. The publication of the Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature may satisfy a demand for English translations of Palestinian literature, but it does not take up the urgent need to question both the literature of resistance of the pre-1982 period and the politics of appeasement that characterized the Palestinian nationalist leadership as it entered peace negotiations with Israel. The failure of the resistance movement to dislodge the Israeli occupation and the alarming deterioration of the Palestinian situation in the post-Oslo period call for a rethinking of Palestinian national politics that breaks with all the paradigms of the past and the modalities of the present (see Khalidi 2002).

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References Allen, Roger. 1994. PROTA: The project for the translation of Arabic. Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 28.2 (December): 165, w3fp.arizona.edu/ mesassoc/Bulletin/allen.htm. Cephalus, Constantinus, ed. 1920 – 26. The Greek anthology, translated by W. R. Paton. London: Heinemann. Crowley, John. 1999. Howells in The Heath. New England Quarterly 72.1: 89 – 101. Giacaman, Rita. 1993. Interview. Middle East Report 184 (September–October): 19. Guillory, John. 1990. Canons. In Critical terms for literary study, edited by Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Harlow, Barbara. 1987. Resistance literature. New York: Methuen. Hassan, Salah D. 2001. Undertaking partition: Palestine and postcolonial studies. Journal X 6.1 (autumn): 19 – 45. ———. 2001– 2. Terminus nation-state: Palestine and the critique of nationalism. New Formations 45 (winter): 54 –71. Hout, Shafik al-. 1993. Interview. Middle East Report 184 (September–October): 19. Jayyusi, Salma, ed. 1992. Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Khalidi, Rashid. 2002. Toward a clear Palestinian strategy. Journal of Palestine Studies 31.4 (summer): 5 –12. Lauter, Paul, et al., eds. 1994. The Heath anthology of American literature. Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath. Mason, Theodore O. 1998. The African American anthology: Mapping the territory, taking the national census, building the museum. American Literary History 10.1 (spring): 185 – 98. Nekola, Charlotte, and Paula Rabinowitz. Writing red: An anthology of American women writers, 1930 –1940. New York: City University, Feminist Press. Palestine National Council. 1988. Declaration of independence. Permanent Observer Mission of Palestine to the United Nations. 1988. www.Palestine-UN.Org/plo/frindex.html. Said, Edward. 1985. The world, the text, and the critic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 1990. Embargoed literature. Nation, 17 September, 278 – 80. Warren, Kenneth. 1993. The problem of anthologies, or making the dead wince. American Literature 65.2: 338 – 42.

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1948 L AW, H I S T O R Y, M E M O R Y

One of the difficulties in discussing violence against Palestinians during the 1948 war is that “Palestine,” the site of the violence, both persists and has ceased to exist. Its simultaneous presence and erasure occurs in part through the survival of Palestinians from the 1948 war in what has ceased to be Palestine. Their scattered yet persistent presence constitutes a thread with which one can return to that moment when Palestine was ruined. They embody the survival of Palestine, yet also stand for its death. This death continues both to impede their memory of what happened in 1948 and to structure it. The memories of the Palestinian survivors constitute a challenge to another kind of thread (mis)leading us back to 1948. The war also resulted in a birth — of a new Jewish state attempting to deny the simultaneous death that gave rise to its creation. The documents recording the birth of the state attempt to conceal the death of Palestine. Documents recording the birth of the Jewish state and memories recollecting the death of Palestine were recently put on trial in Israel. The case involved a disputed historical account of the seizure of the Palestinian village of Tantoura by Zionist forces during the 1948 war and what were called the “exceptional acts of killing” that followed the village’s surrender. This essay examines the memories of the Tantoura survivors and the dynamics of death/survival that structure them. It considers how legal rules of evidence and historical argument situated these memories and produced truths that transformed and often excluded them. The essay tries to rescue these narratives from the limits of positivist historiography and law, offering an alternative way of understanding them.

The Libel Case Theodore Katz, an Israeli Jewish graduate student in history at Haifa University, wrote a master’s thesis in March 1998 about the exodus of Arabs from five Palestinian villages in 1948.1 The thesis received an exceptionally high grade. It was a product of microhistorical research on five Palestinian villages located on the Mediterranean coast between Haifa and Hedera, with a special focus on two villages: Umm al-Zeinat and Tantoura. For the chapter on Tantoura, Katz wove the stories of the Tantoura Social Text 75, Vol. 21, No. 2, Summer 2003. Copyright © 2003 by Duke University Press.

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refugees with those of the veterans of the Alexandaroni Brigade, the unit of the Israeli army that captured the village, and the official records he located in various Israeli archives. The testimonies included reports concerning the killing, or massacring, of the village’s inhabitants by Alexandaroni fighters on the night of 22 May 1948, after the inhabitants had surrendered. Amir Gilat, a journalist, read the thesis and published an article outlining the conclusions of the chapter on Tantoura in the widely read Hebrew newspaper Ma’ariv.2 Gilat interviewed some of Katz’s witnesses, both Tantoura refugees and Alexandaroni veterans. The Palestinians talked about the massacre that took place after the occupation of the village, while the Alexandaroni fighters denied it. Gilat also solicited the opinion of several academics, some of whom praised the thesis while others dismissed it as a work of fabrication. However, what the thesis labeled as “exceptional acts of killing” after the occupation of the village were transformed in the media discussion that followed into talk about a massacre, partly drawing on the vocabulary of the Palestinian survivors and of the Israeli academics who praised the thesis. Following the public debate about the thesis, the Alexandaroni Brigade veterans’ association sued Katz for libel, seeking NIS (New Israeli Shekels) 1.1 million ($250,000) in damages.3 Katz was understood to have argued that after the fall of Tantoura and its inhabitants’ surrender, Zionist soldiers entered the village, deported the women, old men, and children to the nearby village of Furaydis, killed some 200 to 250 men, and took the remaining men as prisoners. Some of the killed were executed in groups on the shore. Others were killed in a rampage unleashed by soldiers’ rage at shots fired (with lethal results for one, two, or eight of them) after the village had officially surrendered. The imprisoned men were held for a year and a half. After their detention, most of them were expelled to what became the West Bank, where they were joined by their families. The other inhabitants of Tantoura fled east to Syria. The Alexandaroni veterans denied killing the village’s inhabitants after its surrender. To win the case, Katz had to choose between one of two arguments in his defense: either that he had told the truth or that he had acted in good faith. The second defense argues that even if he did not speak the truth, he had no intention to libel and acted in the subjective belief that his statements were true. Five lawyers represented him. The first, a cousin of the defendant, argued for minimizing the political nature of the case by adopting the good faith defense. The other lawyers shared an anti-Zionist political stance and wanted to prove that Katz spoke the truth by bringing Palestinian witnesses to talk about the massacre. This argument would have enabled them to turn the trial into a case about the denial of Al-

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Nakbah (the catastrophe, the Arabic term for the Palestinian tragedy of 1948). They wanted to transform the courtroom into a stage for a dramatization of historical pain and a public telling of the story of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians — a story, in their view, that the institutions of the Israeli state have suppressed.4 Katz was the first witness to take the stand. Ilan Pappe, an Israeli historian, was scheduled to present evidence supporting Katz’s research methods, and a number of Palestinian survivors of the massacre whom Katz had interviewed were due to follow Pappe. Katz’s testimony lasted two days. Despite the conversations that Katz had with the legal team advocating the defense that he spoke the truth, he ended up adopting the good faith argument. Katz stated several times that all he did was present the different stories about the war. “I don’t know if there was a massacre in Tantoura,” he insisted. Thirty-six hours before the resumption of the hearings, Katz signed an out-of-court settlement in which the Alexanderoni veterans dropped the suit in exchange for his retracting accusations that they had massacred Palestinians. The cousin-lawyer was with him, while the other lawyers were not informed of the settlement. As part of the settlement, Katz agreed to publish an apology in a half-page advertisement in two Israeli daily newspapers. The text of the apology reads as follows: I would like to clarify, that after re-examining the matter, it has become clear to me, beyond any doubt that, there is no basis to the argument that the Alexandaroni fighters, or any other force of the Hebraic Yishuv, conducted acts of killing after the surrender of the village. I ask to clarify that what I have written was apparently misunderstood, as I did not mean to suggest that there was a massacre in Tantoura and today I say that there was no massacre in Tantoura. I believe the Alexandaroni veterans who completely denied the occurrence of a massacre. I retreat from any implicit conclusion in the thesis as to the occurrence of a massacre or the killing of people with no weapons or means of defense.5

Judge Drora Pilpel of the Tel Aviv District Court approved the agreement and gave it the force of a court ruling. Meanwhile, Katz decided that he had made a terrible mistake and asked the court to allow him to rescind his agreement to the settlement and his promise to publish an apology. The judge rejected his request, noting that when two mature parties reach a settlement and ask the court to give it the force of a court ruling, they are expected to understand the implications of what they are doing. Katz appealed to the Supreme Court, but his appeal was rejected. Following the libel case, Haifa University formed a committee to

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investigate the accuracy of the thesis. The committee included one historian who had previously studied the 1948 war, one biographer of Saddam Hussein, and two experts in Arabic grammar and classical Islamic poetry. What brought them together was their knowledge of Arabic — a knowledge required to understand the testimonies of the Tantoura refugees, who spoke with Katz in Arabic. The committee reexamined the quotations whose accuracy the plaintiffs had challenged and decided that in four out of the six instances there were gross inaccuracies.6 In June 2001, the committee published its conclusion regarding the major defects in the thesis and in November 2001, the Council for Higher Education in Haifa University revoked the master’s degree that Katz had received and requested that he write a new thesis. The university rector ordered the removal of the original thesis from the library’s shelves.7 The Tantoura case was unique in the history of the Israeli legal system. It presented the court with a specific Al-Nakbah–related atrocity and asked it to decide on the question of its historical veracity.8 There is one other well-known Israeli case that discusses a massacre against Palestinians. In the Kufr Qassem case, members of the Israeli border police were convicted for their role in massacring forty-nine Palestinian citizens of Israel in 1956. The victims were farmers returning home from their fields who did not know that a curfew, normally imposed every day at 9:00 P.M., had on that particular day been moved forward to start at 5:00 P.M.9 However, while the circumstances in Kufr Qassem were intimately related to the consequences of Al-Nakbah, the incident happened eight years after the war. But there are other largely neglected cases in which Al-Nakbah atrocities were examined in Israeli courts. These were the “infiltrator” cases. Many of the Palestinian inhabitants fled the country during the 1948 war. When they attempted to come back home after the war, they were faced with legal and violent measures preventing their return. This was the experience, for example, of several inhabitants of Majd el-Krum, who fled their village following an “act of retaliation” committed by an Israeli army unit several days after the army seized control of the village, but later returned to what would become Israel. In 1951 they petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court to prevent their deportation and to request that Israeli identity cards be issued to them.10 The court constructed a new legal standard to decide the case, asking whether the inhabitants’ departure was “forced deportation” or “free will emigration.” Only in the former instance, the court decided, would they be granted a relief. The inhabitants argued that they fled the army’s actions in the village, which included the shooting and killing of several residents and the destruction of several houses. The court rejected the petition; although it accepted the petitioners’ ver-

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sion of the events, the court viewed the army’s action as an ordinary retaliatory act that did not amount to forced deportation. Later, the Israeli historian Benny Morris described the activity of the army in Majd el-Krum as a massacre that resulted in dozens of families leaving the village and going to Lebanon.11 It is possible to read the Tantoura case in relation to such “infiltrator” cases of the 1950s. But the Tantoura case invites other novel questions. How legitimate are the memories of the Palestinian survivors within the fields of law and history? What are the legal mechanisms that prevented the staging of the survivors’ testimonies in the courtroom? What was the historical value of these testimonies in Katz’s research? And more generally, how can one establish the occurrence of a deadly event that happened some fifty years earlier, but that continues to structure the lives of its victims? To answer these questions, I first consider the legal treatment of these testimonies in the courtroom. I then discuss Katz’s historical interrogation, first examining his interviews with the Tantoura survivors and the traces of historical positivism in his questioning, then focusing on his writing of history. In the last section I explore the survivors’ testimonies, as revealed in the interviews that Katz conducted, to ask what alternative evidence these can generate about 1948.

Bringing Memories to Court Understanding the role of law in recognizing historical wrongs entails a view of law not confined to the rulings or decisions of the courts. The legal practices of the different actors are just as central, if not more so, to this understanding. The briefs filed with the court, the preparations for the hearings, the examination and the cross-examination of the witnesses, and the judges’ remarks during the hearings are all important factors in making (im)possible the articulation of the survivors’ narratives about death and violence. A judge’s ruling could indeed establish the fact of a historical wrong, but everything that precedes the ruling could make the very staging of this historical wrong impossible. Here I am particularly interested in the lawyer-gatekeeper, whose cross-examination shapes the story admissible into law. The Tantoura case was concluded without hearing the testimonies of the village’s survivors. The court, following the settlement, did not need to decide whether or not a massacre took place. The law, it might be argued, did not issue its final verdict on the matter. But whereas the words of the law were not final, they were nevertheless significant in leading to the final settlement. The legal procedures that preceded Katz’s decision to

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reach a compromise with the plaintiffs should not be understood, I suggest, as external to Katz’s decision. Rather, they had a significant effect on his decision. Katz’s cross-examination in the courtroom for two days resulted in what any “good” cross-examination is meant to achieve: the collapse of the witness. The cross-examination was “successful” not simply because the plaintiffs’ lawyer was good or because Katz, as a witness, was weak. These were important factors. No less important were the mechanisms that Israeli law provided, within the framework of the rules of evidence, that in turn structured the “successful” interrogation. Evidence is legally evaluated according to four criteria: relevance, admissibility, reliability, and weight. In the course of the cross-examination, the evidence provided in Katz’s thesis was questioned on the basis of its admissibility or its reliability. To win the libel case, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Giora Ardinest, had to prove one or both of the following: to challenge the defense that Katz spoke the truth, he had to establish that there was no admissible or reliable evidence proving the fact of the massacre; to challenge the good faith defense, he had to demonstrate that Katz fabricated the evidence. Two strategies were thus employed throughout the crossexamination. The first aimed at demonstrating that the testimonies of the survivors did not prove the fact of the massacre. Both the admissibility and reliability of the evidence provided by the survivors were questioned. Some witnesses were shown to have not directly witnessed the supposed massacre, some were shown to be confused, some old and no longer capable of accurate memory, while others were shown to have a “political” interest in the case. Once the survivors’ testimonies, as recorded by Katz, were proven defective, the second strategy was introduced. Ardinest tried to establish that Katz fabricated the evidence about the massacre by revealing a lack of congruence between Katz’s thesis and the testimonies of the survivors he had tape-recorded. The plaintiffs presented six instances in which Katz misquoted or misinterpreted the witnesses’ words, demanding from Katz an acknowledgment that he had led the Tantoura witnesses into stating that a massacre had taken place, that he had preferred the information presented by the Palestinians over that presented by the Alexandaroni Brigade fighters,12 and that he had chosen to ignore the testimonies of the latter that denied the massacre. My concern is with the court’s disqualification of the testimonies of the Tantoura survivors rather than the disqualification of Katz’s academic work. In what follows, therefore, I focus on the first strategy of the plaintiffs, which aimed at refuting the fact of the massacre.

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Hearsay and the Hearsay of the State Ardinest opened the case by objecting to the transcripts of some of the interviews Katz conducted, submitted to the court as appendixes to Katz’s affidavit, on the grounds that they constituted hearsay evidence and as such were inadmissible.13 Some of the Tantoura refugees that Katz interviewed, some of whom were due to testify in court, did not see, Ardinest would later argue, the exceptional killing. They heard about it from others, or learned about its occurrence in an indirect way. Such was the case with Abu Nayif ’s testimony, for example. Referring to the arrival of “the Zikhronites,” people from the nearby Jewish settlement of Zikhron Ya’kov, he said: “We were lucky that they showed up, otherwise the soldiers would have continued” (court protocols, 17; thesis, 121). However, Abu Nayif also said that he did not see the killing. Ardinest asked Katz why he had failed to mention that Abu Nayif was not an eyewitness to the killing. The reason, answered Katz, was that Abu Nayif also said that “aside from this instance, I had three other cousins who collected the bodies.”14 “I am not asking you about what Abu Nayif heard; I am asking about what he saw,” replied Ardinest. Hearsay evidence, following the common law system, is not admissible evidence according to the Israeli rules of evidence. Hearsay evidence is produced by a witness who did not directly experience the event about which he or she is testifying. Therefore, in a cross-examination he or she cannot assert or refute the content of his or her evidence. It is also commonly argued that hearsay evidence opens the door for the fabrication of facts about the event in question. Direct evidence is considered to be more reliable; there is less of a threat of it being fabricated.15 Note that under the Rome Statute, the rules of evidence operative in the International Criminal Court do not exclude hearsay evidence or indirect evidence.16 The Rome Statute follows the tradition of international criminal tribunals by allowing the admission of all relevant and necessary evidence.17 Ardinest asked Katz more than once whether he had reached a conclusion as to what happened on that day. Upon his insistence that all he had done was gather the different stories as those were shaped and reshaped during the forty-nine years that had since passed, Ardinest asked Katz whether his thesis was in fact a collection of gossip, which ignored the written documents.18 Contemporary newspapers, for example, which Katz included in his thesis, did not refer to a massacre in Tantoura, and that should have alerted him, for how could it be that nobody reported it?19 Among other things, it was the lack of written documents that undermined Katz’s argument that some exceptionally violent acts might have

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taken place in Tantoura after its occupation. But not any written document would have sufficed. Written documents, according to the rules of evidence, also constitute hearsay. For unless the author of the document is available to testify, he or she cannot be subjected to cross-examination aimed at asserting/refuting the content of the document. State documents, however, are an exception to this rule. Article 36 of the Evidence Ordinance states that an “institutional record” of an event is admissible provided that first, “the institution normally conducts a recording of such an event as a matter of course and soon after its occurrence”; and second, “the way in which the data is collected for the purpose of recording the event and the production of the record testify to the true content of the record.” An “institutional record,” according to Article 35 of the Evidence Ordinance, is a document that was produced by an institution during its regular activity. An “institution,” according to the same article, is a “state, municipality, a business or anybody who provides a service to the public.” The power to generate evidence about the occupation of Tantoura was an important factor in this case. One event can give rise to very different amounts and types of evidence. But the social and political process by which events are transformed into legally relevant information is not inscrutable.20 Within the framework of hearsay evidence, the state is privileged twice: by allowing for the admissibility of its written documents despite their hearsay characteristics and because the institutional capacities of the state make the very generation of documents, reports, and written accounts more manageable. The centrality of the state in modern positive legal systems has generated considerable scholarship. But of importance here is the centrality of Israel as a Zionist state in the production of evidence about the 1948 war. Israel, in its official story, denies the very occurrence of Al-Nakbah, it denies that it was established on the ruins of the Palestinian people, and it suppresses attempts to expose the oppressive realities of the 1948 war. In the declaration of the establishment of the state and in its basic laws, Israel defines itself as a Jewish state, resulting in the exclusion of some 20 percent of its population from its definition — the Palestinian citizens of the state. For Israel, Palestine, if considered as a possible reality, is an entity that can be located in the future next to Israel, in the West Bank and Gaza, and not one that existed on the very land of Israel before its establishment. The establishment of Israel is not recorded by revealing the victimization of the Palestinians. It is addressed through exposing the victimization of the Jews in Europe in the Holocaust. Idith Zertal has recently argued that the State of Israel has appropriated the Holocaust and transformed it into a powerful instrument, both for the building of the nation

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and for negating the national aspirations of the Palestinians. Because the Holocaust threatened the existence of the Jews, any other embitterment of the lives of the Jews in Israel is haunted by the shadow of the Nazis.21 To account for the suffering of Palestinians during the war is to negate this project and to depict the Palestinians as victims, not as perpetrators. It follows that the absence of state documents reporting on the atrocities against the Palestinians during the 1948 war stems from the very project of the state. This absence makes it difficult to find “good” written evidence about violence against Palestinians during the war. What remain are the memories of those who survived the war.

The Lack of a Grid Even if it is admissible, not all evidence is legally reliable. Memory-based narratives have to manifest a certain order when admitted to modern law, Israeli law in particular. Describing modern law as a Faustian-Cartesian dream of order, Seyla Benhabib calls it “transparent, precise, planned, symmetric, organized and functional.” It stands in opposition to the “traditional, chaotic, unclear, lacking symmetry and overgrowing” system.22 Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey notice the historic absence of the narrative from legal scholarship as a self-conscious achievement designed to ground such work in the realm of scientific authority.23 Ronen Shamir, in his discussion of the property rights of Palestinian Bedouins in Israel, extended Ewick and Silbey’s argument to Israeli law and judicial discourse more generally in its treatment of the Palestinian Bedouins’ narratives.24 Inaccuracy, lack of order, contradictions, and absences constituted a good part of the vocabulary describing the testimonies of the Palestinian survivors as documented by Katz in his thesis. Ardinest pointed out that Abu Fahmy, “one of your central witnesses,” was eighty-eight years old at the time of the interview (court protocols, 9). Sabha, another witness, told an illusionary story about the occupation of the village that indicated confusion and lack of clarity. Ardinest questioned Katz’s reliance on the information provided by these witnesses about the occupation of the village, when these were clearly people incapable of accurate memory. Contradictions in the accounts of the Tantoura survivors were also emphasized in Katz’s cross-examination. Whereas Abu Fahmy said that he “collected” the bodies of the dead and wrote the names of ninety-five men and two women, there were other statements by Abu Fahmy that did not find their way into Katz’s thesis, in which Abu Fahmy denied that he witnessed the killing in Tantoura. In his answer, Katz did not attempt to extract some evidence from what seems to be a contradictory

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story. Instead, he emphasized the contradictions and explained their inevitability: When Abu Fahmy told me, after asking him if they were massacred in Tantoura, in the village, in the streets, my impression was that he saw that they were killing people. I did not do a classification. In sum, I presented, as I could, descriptive quotations from the witnesses. I did not conclude conclusions. I presented testimonies as they were said, after forty-nine years. People, after forty-nine years, and beyond what they had experienced in that day, have hung around with each other, listened and talked. I bring the conclusions of what had remained with them, in their thoughts, after forty-nine years. It is impossible for me to take responsibility for the fact that at one moment he [Abu Fahmy] said that they killed, and at the other he said that they did not kill. Therefore, I present what they said, and I do not seek any conclusions.25

Memory, in order to pass the requirements of law, should be a kind of photographic film. When witnesses are invited to remember, they are expected to describe accurately what happened. Their testimony is accompanied by a counterattempt to reveal the staining of the facts. The passing of time might not affect the admissibility of memory-based evidence. But it opens up the possibility of questioning the reliability of this evidence. When the main test of the law is one of directness and disinterest, contemporary state documents are destined to be the most reliable. All other evidence is immediately faced with the charge of not being recorded, of being distant and possibly fabricated. Furthermore, contradictions, lack of order, and multiplicities become invisible when reduced to writing. Oral histories and memories, yet to be reduced to writing, are always guilty of these charges. Hence the insistence that the latter form of evidence reveals the facts, and not an interpretation or construction of them. Judge Pilpel wrote in one of the decisions delivered during the hearings: The thesis is supposed to establish, from a factual point of view, the historical truth as to what happened during the occupation of the village of Tantoura; was there a massacre of unprotected civilians, or was there not. Facts that constitute historical truth are not interpretations. . . . At the outset, they should be posited as a factual foundation, and after the establishment of a factual foundation — one, which is not controversial but a matter of writing down true events that happened in the past — is it possible to write any interpretation. The establishment of historical events, i.e. reality in our case, should be pure, true and accurate from a factual perspective — as far as one can verify these facts.

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The Denial Faced with the lack of “convincing” evidence — state documents — and with law’s search for factuality, Katz stated that he believed everybody whom he interviewed: the Palestinian survivors, the Alexandaroni veterans, and the documents he consulted. All he did was gather the information, even if contradictory, and present it in his thesis. This was only the case with regard to the alleged massacre in Tantoura. Other questions, concerning the occupation of four other Palestinian villages during the 1948 war and the expulsion of their inhabitants, merited conclusions. For these had some evidential grounds in the archives: We live in a period in which historians, in part at least, do not think that in a specific location there was one single truth, that someone can reveal it and establish its singularity. . . . This is a central constituent upon which the historiography of this thesis is based. It is called a history from a constructed story, among other things, from an oral story. As the person who gathered the different testimonies, and who, of course, was not in Tantoura in 1948, it did not occur to me to write about what truly happened in Tantoura. . . . Therefore, I emphasize both in the introduction and the conclusion that I have no conclusion as to this very specific question [that of the massacre].26

A case that for many Palestinians was meant to challenge the denial of AlNakbah ended up asserting its denial, although in a vaguer way.

Bringing Memory to Historiography In historiography, as in law, memory-based testimonies are meant to establish a factual rendition of the past. This affinity between positivist law and historiography, which excludes a methodology based on understanding, came into being in the sixteenth century. Before that, history was a narrative art. The nonnarrative historical work developed in the faculty of law of sixteenth-century France. The humanists set out to establish the exact meaning of the Roman text, which they argued was overlaid with an unmanageable wealth of glosses and commentaries, and this involved a detailed exegesis of the exact meaning of all technical or doubtful words contained in the texts. It was this detailed and conscious historical criticism that made its appearance in the schools of jurisprudence under the name of “grammar”— the science of the meaning and use of words.27 Julian Franklin explores similar genealogical connections between law and history.28 He traces the sixteenth-century origins of what he calls the

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“methodological revolution” in the study of law and history in Europe by focusing on the works of French scholars of the later Renaissance. The break with Roman tradition, Franklin argues, came with the work of Jean Bodin. Bodin attempted to reconstruct juristic science on the basis of “universal history” and developed a synthetic comparative method in jurisprudence. He also attempted to establish a “system of internal criticism” within the theory of history that would permit the establishment of a basis of authority for historians and historical sources that would be “independent” of value judgments. Bodin’s emphasis on the “actual method of studying the past” brought with it a concern for the “theory of evidence” and accomplished a shift from the “art of writing history” to the “art of reading history.” Patrick Hutton argues that historiography in its ancient beginnings was literally immersed in collective memory, which continuously invoked the presence of the past.29 The trend of modern, and more emphatically postmodern, historiography has been away from reliance on the authority of received tradition. “In our time, we have come to speak of the uses rather than the influences of the past, and its moments are often little more than signatures employed to underscore our present concerns.”30 The different degrees of relevance of the past in modern historiography, on the one hand, and collective memory, on the other, signify different temporalities, one facing the future and constituting a moment of rupture with the past and one for which the past is a constitutive and a founding moment. The interviews Katz conducted with the survivors reveal the story of history and the story of memory simultaneously. Some of Katz’s questions point to the positivist historian’s conception of a linear progressive history, which separates past from present, focuses on isolated events, locates individual actors, and attempts to discover direct causal relations. The answers of the survivors reveal a different conception of time, in which past and present are not separate, and in which the emphasis is not on isolatable and describable events or massacres but on the terror that governed Palestinians’ lives during the war. To be sure, Katz’s reliance on oral sources distinguishes him from other positivist historians in general and from the dominant historical methodology in Israeli academia. As such, his research constitutes a critical contribution to the literature on the 1948 war. But my concern here is with the ways in which Katz treated these oral testimonies. I argue that some trends in positivist historical methodology, those dealing with archival records, continued to dominate his treatment of the oral testimonies. For his chapter on Tantoura, Katz conducted interviews with some forty men and women: twenty Tantoura refugees and twenty Alexanda-

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roni veterans. The research for the thesis started in 1997 and lasted for about a year. The task of collecting the testimonies from the Palestinian survivors was not easy. It was difficult to locate the people still alive who were in Tantoura on the night of its occupation, who remained in what would become Israel or became refugees in the occupied territories, and who were willing to speak about the war. Some interviews with the Palestinian survivors include Katz’s own statements in which he explains that he is interested in learning about the past, about something that happened some fifty years ago, and that the purpose of this learning is to generate knowledge about the past. We are not condemning anybody here, Katz assured an old Palestinian man, we are not looking to show “who was bad and who was good for this is not interesting.” What is interesting, Katz elaborated, is to know what had happened so that “my child [can] know in the future about the origins of his state” (interview with Abu Nayif, 16 February 1997, tape 16, transcription, 2). The emphasis in these statements was on a future made possible by the generation of historical knowledge that will allow Palestinians and Israelis to live in peace. Understanding past events will enable a process of recovery from the past and make possible a moment of rupture between past and future. While Katz would reject claims to objectivity and the single truth theory, he found himself in the same position of positivist historians by reiterating the distinction between past and present. The problem of objectivity in the historical sciences is more than a mere technical perplexity. For Ranke, objectivity, the “extinction of the self ” as the condition of “pure vision,” means historians must abstain from bestowing either praise or blame, and coupled with an attitude of perfect distance should follow the course of events as they were revealed in their documentary sources. Thus, objectivity, as noninterference and nondiscrimination, necessitates the remoteness of the past.31 Katz sought to break with the past of Al-Nakbah through the historicization of the violence of the 1948 war. His interviews with the survivors are patently skewed toward the identification of individual authors of violence, which entails, as Allen Feldman puts it, “a prosecutional focus on an ‘event history’— linear chronologies of acts and actors — who did what to who, when and why.”32 Events stood at the center of Katz’s investigation. The survivors were not usually invited to talk about the structure of emergency and of terror during the 1948 war. This is not to say that the interviewed did not seize the opportunity to talk about larger processes, about life prior to the war and in its aftermath. The most common question asked by Katz was: “Now, if you can please tell me what you remember from the night during which Tantoura was occupied?” His subsequent questions would focus on

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the exact hour when the village was attacked by the Zionist forces, when the forces entered the village, and the different locations to which they took the women and the children, on the one hand, and the men, on the other. Katz would also ask about whether they knew of an organized killing. What did you see? How many men stood in line? Who shot at them? Where were they standing? Where were the women and the children? When did the killing take place? How did they decide on the men to be killed? Many questions were directed at remembering who the executors were. How many were there? And where did the rest of the Zionist forces stand? Katz, in short, attempted to retrieve all possible details that could enable him to present a picture of the past that is as accurate as possible, for otherwise, he could not refute the official Zionist narrative that denies the bloody ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The event-centered historiography also led Katz to articulate a difference between legitimate and illegitimate violence. Faced with some of the survivors’ “failure” to remember the exact details of the exceptional acts of killing, in which dozens of men were ordered to stand in line and were systematically shot down, and their continual reference to other forms of killing that accompanied the occupation of their village, Katz pleaded with a number of survivors to remember the specific incident of the organized killing following the surrender of the village. In every war, he said, there are killings and people die. But what is inconceivable is that after people have surrendered, the killing continues. Hence, the unique importance of the exceptional organized killing as opposed to other forms of killing. But Katz’s thesis is not about the organized massacre in Tantoura. The killing in Tantoura constitutes one part of a whole chapter devoted more generally to the occupation of the village and its depopulation. Additionally, the other chapters of his thesis discuss the depopulation of other Palestinian villages during the 1948 war. Katz, thus, situated the exceptional activity in Tantoura in the general context of the depopulation and uprooting of these Palestinian villages. However, recognizing the connection between the state of exception and the general structure of war should have consequences for the ways in which we treat the testimonies about the exception. The latter stops being a pure exceptionality standing apart from the general rule. Rather, its existence as an exception is made possible by the general rule.33 This has consequences for understanding the testimonies about the exception. Because the exception is rooted in the general rule, the testimonies about it, especially the testimonies of those who experienced it, will also address it as part of the general rule and as indistinguishable from it.

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Writing History Positivist historiography assumes the existence of a state, the records of which constitute a reference for recovering the past and generating knowledge about it. Archives remain the primary source for most historians. But even when one wishes to overcome the limitations of state archives via memory-based history, the weight of the archives remains authoritative, as they are the main reference against which all other evidence is weighed. The written word has a recognized authority against which the oral word is considered. The first is fixed, not subject to the changes of the years, and the latter is always reshaped as the years pass by. Hence, the reference to the latter form of historiography as constructed, leaving the former in a state of atemporality, a state of permanent rigidity. To offer a challenge to the archival evidence, survivors are encouraged to go back to that distant moment in the past and to recollect the events of that moment. Survivors are led to overcome the flow of time, aiming to rid their narratives of the guilt of their constructiveness. As this proved to be difficult in this case, their memories were destined, in Katz’s thesis, to be just another story in addition to the one told in the archives. The Israeli state archives, the institutional memory of the state, provide a specific set of materials. These materials are both reflective and constitutive of the State of Israel, to which the question of Palestine is a central component. Katz conducted some parts of his archival research about the occupation of Tantoura in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) Archive. In his thesis, he mentions the archival records available about the occupation of the village. These included, for example, telegraphs that reported on “the successful mission” in which they “took hundreds of captives and loot,” and in which the forces also suffered some losses. Another telegraph reported that “after a strong resistance, Tantoura was occupied. We suffered losses. More details to come.” Based on these telegraphs, Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary: “The mission of Alexandaroni in Tantoura was successful. They took captives and weapons.” Based on such archival records, the historian Benny Morris presented an account of the occupation of the village.34 Morris also consulted a book on the Alexandaroni Brigade, which belongs to the tradition of institutional Israeli historiography.35 Like the IDF archival records, neither book accounts for any kind of an exceptional activity during or after the occupation of the village. Katz, however, was led to consider the occurrence of an exceptional activity in Tantoura when he found four documents in Arabic discussing it. These are two articles in the weekly Arabic newspaper Kull al-’Arab

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[All the Arabs], published in Israel, and two short quotations in two books in Arabic. The first article was prepared and written by a Palestinian journalist who is a citizen of Israel.36 It describes the massacre that took place in Tantoura, about which he heard from “the few who remained among the living in Israel and in the Occupied Territories.” The majority of the Tantoura inhabitants became refugees, residing in al-Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria. The second article was prepared by another Palestinian journalist from Israel who presented some of the memories of two elderly men who talked about the occupation of the village, which was accompanied by “cold-blood murder of Tantoura men.”37 The third publication is the Islamic Tourism Guide by Ahmad Fathi Khalifa, who mentions that there was a massacre in Tantoura. The fourth publication is by historian Marwan al-Madi, who refers to the occupation of the Tantoura, the killing of many, and the capture of others.38 Katz evaluated the official story available in the archives in light of the testimonies of the Tantoura refugees and Alexandaroni veterans. Whereas some of the latter testimonies revealed that there was exceptional killing in Tantoura, most of these testimonies do not report a systematic killing. Amber, one of the Alexandaroni veterans, stated that “there were things in Tantoura that I prefer not to talk about . . . the picture that remains in my memory is one of men in the cemetery. I saw many people being killed. I left the place when I saw that they were killing and killing and killing. That’s why I do not know how many were killed exactly. Women and children were not injured” (thesis, 137). Amber later retracted what he had said in an affidavit he submitted to the court. The Palestinian witnesses, on the other hand, talked about the systematic killing of some 40, 50, or 100 men on the shore, and others spoke about the burial of 250 men. Throughout his thesis, it is difficult to ascertain Katz’s position regarding the events in Tantoura during the night of its occupation. In the conclusion to his thesis, he writes that, with so many versions, there is no way to determine unequivocally exactly how many of the inhabitants were killed during the occupation of the village and afterward (183). “The number of the local Arab martyrs is disputed. You won’t find two people, Arab or Jews, who remember the same story and tell the same story in this regard. Many of them do not know about the killing. Others, when asked about the killing, definitely deny it, and at any rate they reject any possibility that would indicate that an act of killing of some sort was conducted in the village after its surrender” (136). As long as the archival record constituted a point of reference against which the memories of the survivors were compared, the variety of the accounts constituted a major difficulty for Katz. For the most part, the

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Israeli archives, or at least the unclassified documents, tell a coherent official story that denies the atrocities of the war.39 Against this “coherent” story, produced and maintained by state institutions, other accounts, which are not yet reduced to official writing, are depicted as multiple. However, to argue that this multiplicity means lack of coherence or absence of evidence is entirely different. The evidence available for the public in the archives was realized as coherent in a process directed by the state. The evidence extractable in the testimonies of the survivors was subjected to a different process. Its main characteristic was the absence of a state, but most importantly the death of the community. By deconstructing the realized coherence of the state archives and making sense of the multiplicity of the survivors’ accounts, it becomes possible to transcend the archives as a point of reference and to find evidence in what seems incoherent only when compared to the state archives.40 It is to the evidence available in memories that I turn now.

Evidence extractable in the testimonies of the survivors was subjected to a different process. Its main characteristic was the absence of a

Thinking through Memories In the courtroom, Katz was asked why, to his mind, the Tantoura refugees were silent for so long. Katz enumerated several reasons. The military rule under which the Palestinian population lived in Israel prevented people not only from moving from one place to another but from knowing whether they were allowed to speak. This fear continues to dominate the refugees up until today, added Katz. Additionally, people chose to be silent in order to survive in Israel, and they conceived of their silence as a condition for achieving equality in Israel. Silence also functioned to preserve their dignity after their defeat and the sudden transition from being a majority to becoming a minority. Finally, the traumatic events led people to suppress their memories. The massacres in Deir Yassin, another wellknown case from 1948, and Kufr Qassem were remembered only because there were immediate reports about the killings that made covering up the events impossible.41 These reasons, according to Katz, explain the silence of the survivors until the moment when he “revealed” what happened in Tantoura. The reasons, however, were not understood to structure the memories of the survivors — they remained external to their memories, resulting in either the absence of a narrative or in a contradictory narrative. Katz did not attempt to understand what this silence and these contradictions stand for; he simply pointed to them and based his inability to reach final conclusions on them. The possibility of understanding these contradictions and silences and revealing the evidence already embedded in them was not entertained.

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state, but most importantly the death of the community.

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Throughout the interviews, the witnesses had concrete stories to tell about the war, the village, the entry of the Zionist soldiers, the attempts to defend the village, the losses, the killing, the displacement, and the humiliation. One spoke about his uncle who witnessed the killing of his son while attempting to bring him from one of the positions occupied by men from Tantoura in order to protect the village against the Zionist invasion. Rizik, born in 1935, spoke about the many men who lay dead on the streets of Tantoura. He described how the bodies were collected: “They took thirty to forty men from the village. They started collecting all the people who died in the village. Where to put them? Imagine that they took a cart, they took a cart. Three or four people were pushing the cart and bringing it full, the cart. A cart with horses and four wheels. Where did they throw them? In the cemetery . . . where all the people were sitting, in front of their eyes” (Katz interview with Rizik, 9 March 1997, tape 7, transcription, 4). Rizik explained that one soldier took him to collect bread for the children who gathered on the shore (10). On his way, he saw the killing of a woman who was trying to protect her son. Returning to the shore, I saw those who were killed . . . we passed them . . . a bit further we saw another group, killed. The same thing . . . maybe fifty, maybe fifty, forty something like this . . . the same thing. Not far from them, maybe fifty meters. Then they took us to a place next to the cemetery. They searched us. You cannot have a watch, you cannot have money, you cannot have clothes. Then they started to clean [us out] . . . and this is how we left, empty. . . . they put us in the cemetery and told us that trucks would come to pick us up. Where would they take us? We did not know where would they take us. . . . They took us, the children and the elderly, to Furaydis. (11–12)

Abu Fahmy said that he was asked by the soldiers to collect the bodies from the streets. They gave him two carts and ten men to assist him. They asked him to write the names of those who were killed. Abu Fahmy wrote the names of ninety-five men and two women. The soldiers also asked Abu Fahmy to dig a grave for the dead. Abu Fahmy added that later on they joined the people of the village, who were taken to Zikhron-Ya’kov and from there to the prison. Rashida told another story of an old man killed by a Zionist soldier. She saw the killing of her uncle when she and the other women and children who remained in the village after its capture were forced to gather on the shore. We could do nothing to help him, she recalled. As for her husband, Rashida insisted that he did not flee to Syria. He stayed because “we are the children of this country, the owners of the land” (Katz inter-

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view with Rashida, 11 March 1997, transcription, 5). Rashida explained that she knows her husband was killed, although she did not see the killing. He was taken with the rest of the men, and the women were taken in another direction. On their way, she saw that they started killing the men. Sabha, whose nine-month-old child died during the war, talked about her heroic efforts to bring food and water to the children gathered together with the women on the shore and how she stood up to the soldiers who acted against others. There was a guard, she recalled, who stood next to the women and the children. He had a weapon and he fired it. “All the women started to scream. I went to him. I said to him, ‘Why are you doing this?’ I grabbed him and slapped him. . . . I told him: ‘Your role is to be a guard,’ and said in Hebrew ‘Why are you terrifying the children like this?’ ” (Katz interview with Sabha, 10 May 1997, transcription, 15). Anis and Nimer tried to explain the occupation and the killing of Palestinians. They blamed the inhabitants for refusing to surrender and to relinquish their weapons; they searched desperately for an external reason that could explain the infliction of pain as if brutality was inconceivable on its own terms. Zuhdi also explained that it was the Arabs’ fault for underestimating the power of the Jews in Palestine. Some survivors had stories to tell about good Zionist soldiers who helped them to bring water and food to the children on the shore. Rizik mentioned a soldier who saved the life of his mother. His mother could not walk and when they asked for help from the soldiers, one soldier wanted to kill her. Another soldier came to their aid and prevented the killing. Most of the survivors insisted on explaining the role that the Jewish settlers from Zikhron-Ya’kov played in stopping the killing in Tantoura. The integrity of the Zikhronites was repeatedly affirmed, contrasted with the conduct of the soldiers. They were the ones who saved the survivors. Without them, Muhammad Zeidan insisted, men, women, and children would have been killed. Not all of them could talk definitely about the organized massacre in which men were ordered to stand in line and were then systematically shot. Some could, some could not. Ahmad talked about the massacring of twenty to thirty men who were made to line up and were then shot. He also spoke about the killing of a woman who tried to save her son. Sabha talked about the women and children gathered on the shore. From their location, they could see the killing of the men, who were ordered to stand in line and were shot systematically. Others presented similar accounts about the systematic killing. Zuhdi explained that a Jewish man named

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Shimshon read out the names of the armed men of Tantoura and these men were taken to their homes by soldiers. The men found to have weapons in their houses either never returned or were gathered and shot dead. Muhammad said that all the men who were armed, and who were taken by the soldiers, never returned. Only his father returned because he could prove to the soldier that his weapon was useless. Muhammad Zeidan spoke of the gathering of groups of twenty, forty, or fifty men at a time next to the wall and their killing. He said that only ten people were killed during the occupation of the village, the rest were systematically shot. Anis recollected that there was a man who covered his face and pointed to some people who were in turn later shot. Twenty-seven men, according to Zeidan, were killed. They had a list of the armed Tantoura men, according to which they chose the men to be killed. Among those who could remember, there was no agreement as to the number of the massacred. Numbers, like the accounts, varied. One explanation for this variety rests on the argument that victims of trauma are incapable of coherent narratives. However, there exists another reason for explaining the different temporality organizing survivors’ memories, which in turn makes their adoption in the historical and legal regimes of truth somewhat difficult. Death and absence are what render the memories of survivors’ narratives unable to fit the linear model of historical time. Death is not simply something that occurs in the past and can be forgotten in the present. Death generates present absence and nonexistence. It is something that lives on with its survivors. By death, I do not simply mean physical death, but the death of human relationships, the death of societal bonds, the death of meaning, the death of commonalities — in short, the death of humanity conceived of in concrete terms. Tantoura’s inhabitants were massacred, but many of them were also killed during the war, and the majority of them did not stay in what would become Israel and were not allowed to return. Friends were separated and families were torn apart. The village was destroyed and the site of memories disappeared. To understand survivors’ memories of the massacre, of this very specific incident of death, one has to understand the complete death of human relationships that Palestinian society was subjected to following the 1948 war and the establishment of the State of Israel. It is this death, this absence, that does not dissipate, that structures the survivors’ ability to remember the tragedy of 1948. The word survivor also becomes problematic because it implies a linear temporality in which the moment of surviving is to follow the moment of death. Instead, I suggest using the word survival to mean a continuous process. The remaining inhabitants of Tantoura are still surviving every day, so they endure the impossibility of a moment of therapeutic recovery.

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Al-Nakbah, resulting in the death of human relationships, structured its aftermath, and its effects can never be overcome in the therapeutic sense. David Lloyd makes a similar point about the postcolonial condition and argues that a nontherapeutic relation to the past, structured around the notion of survival or living-on rather than recovery, is what should guide our critique of modernity and ground a different mode of historicization.42 Maurice Halbwachs argues that it is the individual as a member of the group who remembers.43 Dreams, thus, are different from all other memories, for they lack organization; in them all other human actors who characterize other aspects of waking life are absent. The life of reason, of consciousness and self-consciousness, can be rooted only in waking existence, which is in all cases firmly anchored in the collaboration of other human beings in the group life. Human dignity, human stature, and human distinctiveness can emerge only in the presence of other human beings. Survivors of the death of human relations are thus capable of a very specific form of memory. They might not be able to tell a unified story with regard to what happened. To be able to tell these stories, one needs others with whom one will be able to piece together a story, to recollect, to be reminded, to think collectively and socially. When society disappears, when family members are absent, memories fall short of the requirements of law and history. If Palestinians had been allowed to preserve their society and their village, the stories they would be able to tell today would have different dimensions. A woman could talk to her neighbor (who is now a refugee in Syria) while walking in Tantoura, facilitating recollection. One part of the story would explain the other, and Sabha could remind Amina of what she had suppressed and forgotten. The absence of a community, but also of institutions to support this endeavor, is an obstacle in the face of memory itself. But if history and law were concerned with understanding as opposed to establishing facts, these memories would become “admissible.” Memories of death would be understood on their terms — not as fragments of a story, but as narratives that were structured under the conditions they are expected to describe. Incoherence, contradictions, and absences should then be understood as signifiers of something that is still present — the death of human relationships, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and the destruction of an entire society. The intimate affinity between law and history in dealing with historical wrongs is not only historical or theoretical. The Katz case demonstrates that law relies heavily on the production of historical truths to establish legal ones. In this process, other forms of narrative are excluded. In the setting of Israel/Palestine, historical wrongs are not yet recognized for reparation to become possible. The recognition of past wrongs entails,

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When society disappears, when family members are absent, memories fall short of the requirements of law and history.

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as I have tried to argue, a different reading of the testimonies — a reading that would try to understand the tragedy of a society in the absences and gaps.

Notes 1. Theodore Katz, “The Exodus of Arabs from the Villages at the Foot of Southern Mount Carmel in 1948” (master’s thesis, University of Haifa, 1998). Page references from this work will be given parenthetically in the text. 2. Amir Gilat, “The Massacre in Tantoura,” Ma’ariv, 21 January 2000, 9. 3. Alexandaroni Society v. Theodore Katz, C.C. 1686/2000 (Tel Aviv District Court, 2000). 4. For historical scholarship on the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, see Walid Khalidi, ed., All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992); Nur Masalha, The Expulsion of Palestinians (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992); Benny Morris, “Israel: The New Historiography,” Tikkun (November–December 1988): 19 – 24; Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947 –1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 228. Note that the Hebrew edition of Morris’s book includes sharper conclusions as to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. 5. Dany Censor, 2000, www.ee.bug.ac.il/censor/kaz. 6. See Ilan Pappe, “The Cases of Katz and Tantoura” (in Hebrew), Theory and Critique 20 (2002): 191. 7. Ibid., 194. 8. Many suggested that little energy should be invested in this case, as it is ironic to ask the Israeli court to acknowledge the occurrence of a massacre, when the legal and political environment is one that does not recognize Al-Nakbah. Many argued: Do we want a proof from an Israeli court that a massacre took place? 9. For a collection of essays discussing the Kufr Qassem massacre, see Ruvik Rosenthal, ed., Kufr Qassem (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Kibbutz Hame’uchad, 2000). 10. Muhammad Ali Hussein v. Minister of Interior et al., H.C. 125, PD. 5, 1386 (1951). 11. Morris, Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 228. For a discussion of both the Majd el-Krum and Kufr Qassem cases, see Liora Bilski, “Kufr Qassem: Between Ordinary Politics and Transformative Politics,” Adalah’s Review 3 (2002): 69. 12. An example of such a case is one Katz mentions on page 151 of his thesis — there was one Yemenite, Rahamim Levi from Zikhron Ya’kov, who was especially cruel to the Tantourites. Katz relied on one Tantourite for this information. Katz searched for Rahamim Levi, who denied that he was ever in Tantoura, though Katz writes that the Zikhronites told him “not to take what he [Rahamim Levi] has to say for granted.” 13. Protocol of the court proceedings, Alexandaroni Society v. Theodore Katz, 8. 14. Ibid., 17. 15. See Ariel Yehezka’el, Rules of Evidence (in Hebrew) (Fardis Hana: A.D. Mishpatim, 2001).

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16. See Prosecutor v. Tadic (Case No. IT-94-1-T), Opinion and Judgment (7 May 1997), 36 ILM 908, 112 ILR 1, para. 555. 17. William Schabas, An Introduction to the Study of International Criminal Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 18. Protocol, Alexandaroni Society v. Theodore Katz, 36. 19. Ibid., 43. 20. See Mark Coony, “Evidence As Partisanship,” Law and Society Review 28.4 (1994): 832. 21. Idith Zertal, Death and the Nation: History, Memory, Politics (Or Yehuda: Dvir, 2002). 22. Seyla Benhabib, “Critical Theory and Postmodernism: On the Interplay of Ethics, Aesthetics, and Utopia in Critical Theory,” Cardozo Law Review 11 (1999): 1435. 23. Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey, “Hegemonic Narratives, Subversive Tales,” Law and Society Review 29.2 (1995): 197. 24. Ronen Shamir, “Suspended in Space: Bedouins under the Law of Israel,” Law and Society Review 30.2 (1996): 231. 25. Protocol, Alexandaroni Society v. Theodore Katz, 12. 26. Ibid., 25, 26. 27. J. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and Feudal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 28. Julian Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Sixteenth-Century Revolution in the Methodology of Law and History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963). 29. Patrick Hutton, History As an Art of Memory (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1993). 30. Ibid., xxi. 31. Hannah Arendt, discussing Ranke, Between Past and Present (New York: Penguin, 1968), 49. 32. Allen Feldman, “The Event and Its Shadow: Figure and Ground in Violence,” Transforming Anthropology 8.1– 2 (1999): 3 –11. 33. See Peter Fitzpatrick’s discussion of Giorgio Agamben’s work attending, among other things, to the state of exception. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998); Peter Fitzpatrick, “Bare Sovereignty: Homo Sacer and the Insistence of Law,” Theory and Event 5 (2001): 2. 34. Katz refers to the Hebrew version of Morris’s book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (Tel Aviv: ‘Am ‘Oved, 1991). Note that not all archival records are made public. Some records remain classified. 35. Zvi Sinai and Girshon Rivlin, eds., The “Alexandaroni” Brigade in the Independence War (Tel Aviv: Ma’rachot, Ministry of Defense, 1964). 36. Muhammad Husni Najib, “Tantoura —The Massacre and the History” (in Arabic), Kull al-’Arab, 22 November 1991. 37. Randa Abu ‘Abed, “Tantoura — Memories and Sorrow about Days That Passed” (in Arabic), Kull al-’Arab, 1 October 1997. 38. Marwan al-Madi, The Village of Ijzm the White Dove (in Arabic) (Damascus: al-Ahli li-tiba’a wa-nashr, 1994). 39. See Ilan Pappe, “The New History of the 1948 War” (in Hebrew), Theory and Critique 3 (1993): 99. 40. Writing about the Katz and Tantoura affairs, Ilan Pappe releases himself from the burden of the archives as a point of reference and argues that the testi-

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monies of the survivors should be read in conjunction with the state archives. Both, according to Pappe, are misinterpretations of a given reality, and they offer the historian a considerable space to extract meanings from them. Based on this methodology, Pappe is able to establish that there was a massacre in Tantoura. The massacre was conducted in two stages: the first, in the streets and the houses of the village; the second, in the systematic killing of men and youths on the shore. This massacre, according to Pappe, was not an exceptional activity but a component in the larger Zionist project of ethnic cleansing (Pappe, “Cases of Katz and Tantoura,” 191). 41. Protocol, Alexandaroni Society v. Theodore Katz, 47, 48. 42. David Lloyd, “Colonial Trauma/Postcolonial Recovery?” Interventions 2.2 (2000): 220. 43. Maurice Halbwachs, Collective Memory (New York: Harper and Row, 1980).

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Rupture and Return ZIONIST DISCOURSE AND THE STUDY OF ARAB JEWS

Eurocentric and Zionist norms of scholarship have had dire consequences for the representation of the history and identity of Arab Jews/Mizrahim (that is, Jews from Arab/Muslim regions) vis-à-vis the question of Palestine. In previous publications I suggested some of the historical, political, economic, and discursive links between the question of Palestine and Arab Jews, and argued for a scholarship that investigates the erasure of such links. Here, I will trace some moments in the hegemonic production of an isolationist approach to the study of “Jewish History” as crucial to a quite anomalous project in which the state created the nation — not simply in the metaphorical sense of fabrication, but also in the literal sense of engineering the transplant of populations from all over the world. New modes of knowledge about Jews were essential in this enterprise, which placed Palestinians and European Zionist Jews at opposite poles of the civilizational clash. Yet, Arab Jews presented some challenges for Zionist scholarship, precisely because their presence “messed up” its Enlightenment paradigm that had already figured the modern Jew as cleansed from its shtetl past. In Palestine, freed of its progenitor the Ostjuden, the New Jew could paradoxically live in the “East” without being of it. Central to Zionist thinking was the concept of Kibbutz Galuiot — the “ingathering of the exiles.” Following two millennia of homelessness and living presumably “outside of history,” Jews could once again “enter history” as subjects, as “normal” actors on the world stage by returning to their ancient birth place, Eretz Israel. In this way, Jews were thought to heal a deformative rupture produced by exilic existence. This transformation of Migola le’Geula — from diaspora to redemption — offered a teleological reading of Jewish History in which Zionism formed a redemptive vehicle for the renewal of Jewish life on a demarcated terrain, no longer simply spiritual and textual but rather national and political. The idea of Jewish return (which after the establishment of Israel was translated into legal language handing every Jew immediate access to Israeli citizenship) had been intertwined with the imaging of the empty land of Palestine. Its indigenous inhabitants could be bracketed or, alternately, portrayed as intruders deemed to “return” to their Arab land of origins (a discourse that was encoded in the various transfer plans). A corollary of the notion of Jewish “return” and continuity in Israel Social Text 75, Vol. 21, No. 2, Summer 2003. Copyright © 2003 by Ella Shohat.

Ella Shohat

was the idea of rupture and discontinuity with diasporic existence. In order to be transformed into “New Jews” (later Israelis), the “Diasporic Jews” had to abandon their diasporic culture, which, in the case of Arab Jews, meant abandoning Arabness and acquiescing in assimilationist modernization, for “their own good.” Within this Promethean rescue narrative, concepts of “ingathering” and “modernization” naturalized and glossed over the historical, psychic, and epistemological violence generated by the Zionist vision of the New Jew.1 This rescue narrative also elided Zionism’s own role in provoking ruptures, dislocations, and fragmentation for Palestinian lives, and — in a different way — for Middle Eastern and north African Jews. These ruptures were not only physical (the movement across borders) but also cultural (a rift in relation to previous cultural affiliations) as well as conceptual (in the very ways time and space, history, and geography were conceived). In this essay I will examine some of the foundational premises and substratal axioms of Zionist discourse concerning Arab Jews, arguing that writing a critical historiography in the wake of nationalism — both Arab and Jewish — requires the dismantling of a number of master narratives. I will attempt to disentangle the complexities of the Mizrahi question by unsettling the conceptual borders erected by more than a century of Zionist discourse, with its lethal binarisms of savagery versus civilization, tradition versus modernity, East versus West, and Arab versus Jew. While one might examine the position of Mizrahim within the restrictive parameters of what Zionist scholarship constructed as “Jewish History,” I have long argued against creating such a segregated discursive space for history, identity, and culture. Even if Mizrahi identity was “invented” within the process of the Zionist invention of the “Jewish nation,” it is important to unsettle the ghettoized nationalist analytical framework.2 A diasporized analysis would situate Arab Jewish history, since the advent of Zionism and the partition of Palestine, within a constellation of multidirectional and palimpsest cross-border movements. Although I do not focus here on contemporary intersections between Mizrahim and Palestinians, I am trying to offer a partial genealogy for today’s Mizrahi ambivalent positioning as occupying the actantial slot of both dominated and dominators; simultaneously disempowered as “Orientals” or “blacks” vis-à-vis “white” Euro-Israelis and empowered as Jews in a Jewish state vis-à-vis Palestinians. In a sense, Mizrahim are both embedded in and in excess of Zionist history. This essay offers another dimension to the critique of the denial of Palestinian right of return. It examines the Zionist foundational principle of the Jewish right of return in light of the contradictions that have emerged in the wake of the partition of Palestine for the Jewish minority in

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Arab/Muslim states. Post-Zionist revisionist history has Eurocentrically ignored this question and in this sense has retained the contours of a Zionist narrative in which Arab Jews are projected as if always already forming part of the Jewish nation. The critical project proposed here suggests that Mizrahim have been, at least partly, invented within Zionism, but simultaneously refuses to accept the hegemonic Zionist and post-Zionist naturalizing of the place of Arab Jews within Jewish nationalism. Furthermore, as Mizrahim are also actively reinventing their identity, a critical Mizrahi scholarship must invent a new understanding of the continuities and discontinuities entailed by the movement across national borders to Israel. The high-velocity history of the past century requires the rethinking of identity designations, intellectual grids, and disciplinary boundaries. Critical scholars especially need to dismantle the zoning of knowledge and rearticulate the relationships between the diverse interdisciplinary practices constituting multicultural Mizrahi inquiry. My purpose has been to rearticulate a different conceptual framework, one formulated within a multichronotopic notion of time and space, highlighting a dynamic palimpsest of identity formations. In this essay, my hope is to suggest the contours of an intellectual/institutional space for critical analysis, called here “Mizrahi studies,” that operates within a relational approach that highlights a nonfinalized and conjunctural definition of identity as a polysemic site of contradictory positionalities. In the following I will critically explore the dialectics of continuity and discontinuity, of rupture and return, as central to Zionist discourse, especially concerning Jews from west Asia and north Africa. I will examine these dialectics through the following grids: (1) dislocation: spatiality and the question of naming; (2) displacement: the narrative of cross-border movement; (3) dismemberment: the erasure of the hyphen; (4) dischronicity: temporality and the paradoxes of modernization; (5) dissonance: methodology as discursive rupture; and (6) disciplining: the move toward Mizrahi studies as a relational inquiry.

Dislocation: Spatiality and the Question of Naming In the paradigmatically Zionist film Sallah Shabbati (Israel, 1964), the spectator is first introduced to the Oriental Jew Sallah when he and his family land in Israel. He comes from the Levant, but within the film’s Eurocentric imaginary mapping, he comes from nowhere: first in the literal sense, since his place of origin remains unknown; and second in the metaphorical sense, since Asian and African geographies are suggested to

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amount to nothing of substance. While the protagonist’s Levantine essence forms the dynamic center of the narrative, his Levantine geography is crucially invisible. Sallah’s physical presence in Israel only embodies that geography’s absence, and highlights the process of erasure. Within the Zionist view, Jews from west Asia/north Africa arrive from obscure corners of the globe to Israel, the Promised Land, to which they have always already been destined. In this way, Mizrahim could be claimed as part of a continuous Jewish History/geography whose alpha and omega is in the Land of Israel, a land that the Zionist movement purported to represent. While superimposing a nationalist discourse on the spiritual messianic idea of Jewish renewal, Zionist ideologues sought not only the physical transfer of Palestinians to Arab countries, but also the transfer of Jews from Arab/Muslim countries to Palestine. However, for the latter, physical dislocation was not adequate, since the displaced Jews had to undergo a metamorphosis. The establishment, in a contemporary retelling of the biblical Exodus from Egypt, called for “the death of the desert generation” in order to facilitate their birth as the New Jews/Israelis, as embodied by the Sabra generation. The question of continuity and discontinuity is central, therefore, to the Zionist vision of the nation-state. Yet, one could argue that by provoking the geographical dispersal of Arab Jews, by placing them in a new situation “on the ground,” by attempting to reshape their identity as simply “Israeli,” by disdaining and trying to uproot their Arabness, and by racializing them and discriminating against them as a group, the Zionist project of the ingathering of exiles itself provoked a dislocation that resulted in a series of traumatic ruptures and exilic identity formations. The Israeli establishment obliged Arab Jews to redefine themselves in relation to new ideological paradigms and polarities, thus provoking the aporias of an identity constituted out of its own ruins. The Jews within Islam thought of themselves as Jews, but that Jewishness was part of a larger Judeo-Islamic cultural fabric. Under pressure from Zionism on the one hand and Arab nationalism on the other, that set of affiliations gradually changed, resulting in a transformed cultural semantics. The identity crisis provoked by this physical, political, and cultural rupture is reflected in a terminological crisis in which no single term seems to fully represent a coherent entity. The very proliferation of terms suggests the difficulties of grappling with the complexities of this identity: Sephardim; non-Ashkenazic Jews; Jews of Islam; Arab Jews; Middle Eastern, west Asian, or north African Jews; Asian and African Jews; nonEuropean Jews; Third World Jews; Levantine Jews; Jews of the Mediterranean; Maghrebian and Mashreqian Jews (from the western and eastern parts of the Arab world); Bnei Edot Ha Mizrah (descendants of the East-

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ern communities); yotzei artzot arav ve-ha-Islam (those who left Arab and Muslim countries); Blacks; Israel ha-Shniya (Second Israel); Mizrahiyim, or Mizrahim; or Iraqi Jews, Iranian Jews, Kurdish Jews, Palestinian Jews, Moroccan Jews, and so forth. Each term raises questions about the implicit history, politics, and discourses that generated the terms and that made them catchwords at specific conjunctures. Each term encodes a historical, geographical, and political point of view. Prior to their arrival in Israel, Jews in Iraq, for example, had a different self-designation. They had thought of themselves as Jews but that Jewish identity was diacritical — it played off and depended on a relation to other communities. Hyphens, in a sense, were used to highlight diverse aspects of a complexly embedded identity articulated in relation to other communities: Baghdadi Jews (in contrast to Jews of other cities), Babylonian Jews (to mark historical roots in the region), Iraqi Jews (to mark national affiliation), or Arab Jews (in contradistinction to Muslim and Christian Arabs, but also marking affiliation with the greater Arab culture or nation). Even the concept of Sephardicness was not part of the selfdefinition. That term strictly referred to the Jews of Spain who retained their Spanishness even outside of Iberia — for example, in Turkey, Bulgaria, Egypt, and Morocco. Yet a kind of transregional geocultural Jewish space, from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, was shaped, within which Jews, under the aegis of the larger Islamic world, traveled and exchanged ideas. They were culturally and politically interwoven into that world, even if they retained their Jewishness. Shaped by Arab Muslim culture, they also helped shape that culture in a dialogical process that generated their specific Judeo-Arab identity. The rise of Zionism and Arab nationalism, along with the implementation of partitions as a colonial solution for regional conflicts, impacted the identity designations of Jews in the Arab Muslim world. Arabness came to signify a national identity, requiring a realignment of Ottoman definitions. Their religion (Jewishness) was rapidly turning into a national marker in the international arena, which gradually conflicted with their affiliation with the Arab nation-state. With the rise of Arab nationalism on the one hand and Zionism on the other, they have come to occupy an ambivalent positioning vis-à-vis both movements. The explosive politics after the partition of Palestine and the establishment of the State of Israel rendered their existence virtually impossible within a context of Arab nationalism. Upon arrival in Israel, shorn of any alternative passport, Arab Jews entered a new linguistic/discursive environment, at once geopolitical (the Israel/Arab conflict), legal (Israeli citizenship), and cultural (East versus West). The normative term became Israeli, not merely a signifier of a new passport, but also an indicator of a new cultural and ideological para-

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digm. Whereas Jewishness in Iraq, for example, formed part of a constellation of coexisting and complexly stratified ethnicities and religions, Jewishness in Israel was now the assumed cultural and political “dominant.” Arabness became the marginalized category, and the religion of Arab Jews, for the first time in their history, was now affiliated with the dominant power, equated with the very basis of national belonging. Their culture (their Arabness), meanwhile, became a marker of ethnic, even racial, otherness, a kind of embarrassing excess. If in the Arab world, prior to their “Exodus,” their Jewishness (associated now with Zionism) was subjected to surveillance, in Israel their affiliation with an Arab cultural geography was similarly disciplined and punished. The processes of spatial rupture and cultural displacement have impacted and shifted identity designations.3 Each term implies a different historical moment, geographical space, and ideological perspective. Throughout this essay, I will move back and forth between different namings, precisely because I am interested in situating identities rather than proposing an essential core identity. Since I am arguing for a conjunctural, historically situated definition of identity, I also want to highlight the processes and discourses that enabled such identity transformation. Although I have often used the term Arab Jews, I do not use it to suggest a reductive and essential either Jewish or Arab identity. The aim in hyphenating Arab Jewish identity is to call into question the Eurocentric nationalist paradigm that erased the hyphen and made it taboo. The term Arab Jew obviously assumes an Arab cultural geography and, therefore, is not meant here to cover, in a global sweep, the histories of all Jews. In fact, I have used the term in diacritical opposition to the term Jewish History, arguing for Jewish histories. The term Mizrahi history, meanwhile, implies a recent history, one produced within the ideological space of Israel and Zionism. And while one might rightly argue that there is no single Mizrahi history, the term highlights the dislocation and the shaping of a new hybrid identity, neither simply Arab nor simply Jewish. Each designation calls attention to a different dimension of a complex history and spatial trajectory, and each term foregrounds specific aspects of communal affiliation. Each frame illuminates only partial aspects of overlapping collective identities shaped within the movement across borders. Each designation addresses specific and even contradictory dynamics between and within different world zones. There is a need for more flexible relations among the various conceptual frameworks — a mobile set of grids, a diverse set of disciplinary as well as cultural-geopolitical lenses — adequate to these complexities. Flexible, yet critical, usage of the terms that can address their politics of location is important not only for point-

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ing out historical and geographical contradictions and differences, but also for reaffirming historical/geographical links and structural analogies.

Displacement: Narratives of Cross-Border Movement The question of naming is also problematic in relation to the unprecedented movement across borders of west Asian/north African Jews from the late 1940s to the 1960s. Nationalist paradigms cannot capture the complexity of this historical moment, particularly for Arab Jews. Perhaps due to the idiosyncrasies of the situation, for a community trapped between two nationalisms — Arab and Jewish — each term used to designate the displacement seems problematic. None of the terms —aliya (ascendancy), yetzia (exit), exodus, expulsion, immigration, emigration, exile, refugees, expatriates, and population exchange — seems adequate. In the case of the Palestinians, the forced mass exodus easily fits the term refugee, since they never wanted to leave Palestine and have maintained the desire to return. In the case of Arab Jews the question of will, desire, and agency remains highly ambivalent and ambiguous. The very proliferation of terms suggests that it is not only a matter of legal definition of citizenship that is at stake, but also the issue of mental maps of belonging within the context of rival nationalisms. Did Arab Jews want to stay? Did they want to leave? Did they exercise free will? Did they actually make a decision? Once in Israel, did they want to go back? Were they able to do so? And did they regret the impossibility of returning? Different answers to these questions imply distinct assumptions about questions of agency, memory, and space. The displacement of Iraqi Jews, for example, was not simply the result of a decision made solely by Arab Jews themselves.4 Even if some Arab Jews expressed a desire to go to Israel, the question is why, suddenly, after millennia of not doing so, would they leave overnight? The displacement for most Arab Jews was the product of complex circumstances in which panic and disorientation, rather than desire for aliya, in the nationalist sense of the word, was the key factor. The “ingathering” seems less natural when one takes into account the circumstances forcing their departure: the efforts of the Zionist underground in Iraq to undermine the authority of community leaders such as Haham Sasson Khdhuri;5 the Zionist policy of placing a “wedge” between the Jewish and Muslim communities, generating anti-Arab panic on the part of Jews;6 the anti-Jewish propaganda, especially as channeled through the Istiklal or Independence Party; the failure of most Arab intellectuals and leaders to clarify and act

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on the distinction between Jews and Zionists; their failure to actively secure the place of Jews in the Arab world; the persecution of Communists — among them Jews who opposed Zionism; the secretive agreements between some Arab leaders and Israeli leaders concerning the idea of “population exchange”; and the misconceptions, on the part of many Arab Jews, about the differences between their own religious identity, affiliation, or sentiments and the secular nation-state project of Zionism, a movement that had virtually nothing to do with those sentiments, even if it capitalized on a quasi-religious rhetoric. The official term aliya, therefore, is multiply misleading. It suggests a commitment to Zionism, when in fact the majority of Jews — and certainly Jews within the Levant — were decidedly not Zionists. Zionist discourse normalized the telos of a Jewish nation-state; the move toward its borders was represented as the ultimate Jewish act. When the actual departure of Arab Jews is represented — as in the 1998 documentary series Tkuma produced by the state TV channel in conjunction with the fiftieth anniversary of Israel — it is narrated as merely an act of devotion. Images of Yemeni Jews arriving at the camps set up by the Jewish Agency are juxtaposed with a voice-over that reductively speaks of Messianic will and persecution. The Yemeni Jews are represented as willing to cross the desert and sacrifice their lives in order to get to the Promised Land, the State of Israel. Most Zionist writings highlight a kind of natural inevitability, while erasing diverse Zionist tactics to actively dislodge these communities. Even in much of Mizrahi literature and film, the historical complexity of the moment of dislocation, as well as its concomitant emotional, disorienting trauma, operates as a structuring absence. Such texts tend to delineate Jewish life in Israel and in the Arab world as separated existences taking place within disconnected cultural geographies. The production of split spaces that inform most narratives still manifest symptoms of a cultural schizophrenia — the difficulty with articulating the actual moment of departure — that crucial moment whereby overnight one’s identity marker as an Iraqi or Yemeni ends and that of an Israeli suddenly begins. This difficulty is present even in texts that do refer to the move. Sammy Michael’s Hebrew novel Victoria (1993), for example, describes the heroine’s life in Iraq from the turn of the century until the 1950s, after which she is magically transferred to her apartment in present-day Israel. The event surrounding her dislocation as well as the novelistic description of her move from Iraq to Israel form a textual silence, in which the move to Israel is a taken-for-granted, obvious, and transparent act in the heroine’s life. Yet, the writer more clearly articulates the haunting memory of dislocation in interviews.7 He speaks of a recurrent nightmare in which he

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is sitting in his favorite Baghdadi café— a place he is nostalgic for — but when he comes to pay he puts his hand in his pocket and takes out Israeli coins — a telltale sign of his enemy Zionist affiliations. The discursive lacuna concerning the dislocation, however, characterizes most representations that assume the inevitable telos of aliya to the Jewish homeland without interrogating its semantics within a specifically Arab Jewish history. The term aliya naturalizes both a negative and a positive pole: the will to escape persecution and the desire to go to the Jewish homeland. Yet this master narrative excludes narratives that relay moments of refusal, questioning, or ambivalence toward the immanent dislocations. The term aliya (literally, ascendancy) is borrowed from the realm of religion (aliya la’regel ), which originally referred to the pilgrimage to the Temple, and later to the holy sites of the land of Zion. Yet, within Zionist discourse, the term aliya has been transferred to the realm of citizenship and national identity. In this discursive conflation, the olim, according to official ideology, benefited from spiritual and even material ascendancy, a view sharply contrasting with the multifaceted devastation, the social descent ( yerida) experienced by most Jews from Muslim countries. Zionist discourse about the transition of Arab Jews to Israel deploys conceptual paradigms in which religious ideas such as redemption, ascent, and the ingathering are grafted onto nationalist paradigms. In this sense, even when scholars acknowledge that aliya was not simply voluntary, they often deploy a term that subliminally encodes this Zionist vision. At the same time, the dominant Arab nationalist discourse represented the mass exodus as an index of the Jewish betrayal of the Arab nation. Ironically, the Zionist view that Arabness and Jewishness were mutually exclusive gradually came to be shared by Arab nationalist discourse, placing Arab Jews on the horns of a terrible dilemma. The rigidity of both paradigms has produced the particular Arab Jewish tragedy, since neither paradigm could contain crossed or multiple identities.8 The displacement of Arab Jews from the Arab world took place, for the most part, without a fully conscious or comprehensive understanding on their part of what was at stake and what was yet to come. Arab Jews left their countries of origin with mingled excitement and terror, but most importantly buffeted by manipulated confusion, misunderstandings, and projections provoked by a Zionism that mingled messianic religiosity with secular nationalist purposes. Even, at times, Arab Jewish Zionists failed to grasp this distinction, and certainly never imagined the systematic racism that they were about to encounter in the “Jewish state.” Therefore some Arab Jewish Zionist activists came to lament the day that they set foot in Israel.9 The incorporation of the nonAshkenazim into a new culture was far more ambiguous than any simple

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The Zionist view that Arabness and Jewishness were mutually exclusive gradually came to be shared by Arab nationalist discourse, placing Arab Jews on the horns of a terrible dilemma.

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Although aliya to Israel is celebrated by official ideology and sometimes seen by Sephardim/ Mizrahim themselves as a return “home,” in fact this return, within a longer historical perspective, can also be seen as a new mode of exile.

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narrative of immigration and assimilation can convey. Although aliya to Israel is celebrated by official ideology and sometimes seen by Sephardim/ Mizrahim themselves as a return “home,” in fact this return, within a longer historical perspective, can also be seen as a new mode of exile. Arab Jews, in my view, could never fully foresee what the impossibility of return to their countries of origin would mean.10 The permission to leave — as in the case of Iraqi Jews — did not allow for a possible return either of individuals or of the community. Therefore, even the term immigration does not account for that massive crossing of borders. Iraqi Jews, for example, had to give up their citizenship (al-tasqit ), losing their right to return. Within Israel, for at least four decades, performing even a symbolic return within the public sphere — the expression of nostalgia for an Arab past — became taboo. The propagandistic description of the dislocation of Arab Jews as “population exchange,” which supposedly justifies the creation of Palestinian refugees, meanwhile, is also fundamentally problematic. It elides the simple fact that neither Arab Jews nor Palestinians were ever consulted about whether they would like to be exchanged. Although, following the partition of Palestine, both movements across borders in opposite directions may be described as traumatic, the forced departure of Arab Jews does not exactly parallel the circumstances of the Palestinian no-choice exodus during Al-Nakbah (the catastrophe). Furthermore, the right of return for Palestinians has remained a central political issue, even an identity-shaping factor, while for Arab Jews, the idea of return became a murky issue even when limited to the discursive and cultural sphere. Yet, despite these significant differences, the discursive naturalization of such terms as aliya or immigration has to be reevaluated, since the questions of will, desire, and agency remain extremely complex, contingent, and ambivalent. In sum, at the very core of the invention of Mizrahi identity, within the conceptual space of Zionism and within the physical space of Israel, lies an ambiguous relation to movement across the border. While for the Jews from the Muslim world the Land of Israel/Palestine was continuous with their cultural geography, the Eurocentric construct of the State of Israel on that land required discontinuity. The passage into the political space of Israel initiated Jews from Arab and Muslim lands into a new process within which they were transformed, almost overnight, into a new racialized ethnic identity. Therefore, a critical scholarship cannot afford to assume the Zionist master narrative of choice and desire; rather it needs to look into the deep anxious ambivalences generated by partition and the scars it left on the psyche of the displaced. Such scholarship probes the dialectics of continuity and discontinuity with regards to the Arab Muslim world as a palpitatingly vital issue that informs the transformation of Arab Jews into Mizrahim, as they have ended up, even if after the fact, in a largely colonial-settler enterprise.

Ella Shohat

Dismemberment: The Erasure of the Hyphen The master narrative of unique Jewish victimization has been crucial for legitimizing an anomalous nationalist project of “ingathering of the exiles from the four corners of the globe.” Yet this narrative has also legitimized the engendering of displacements of peoples from such diverse geographies, languages, cultures, and histories — a project in which, in many ways, a state created a nation. It has been argued that all nations are invented, yet I would suggest that some nations, such as Jewish/Israel, are more invented than others. Zionist writings made great efforts to normalize not simply “the Jew” but also the very discourses that redefined the multitude of Jewish communities as the “Jewish nation.” The metanarrative of the nation constructed one official past while simultaneously destroying other perspectives on that narrative. Noncanonical memories have been suppressed while previous affiliations have been severed. In the new conceptual vacuum, the hyphen, which made possible such terms as Judeo-Muslim and Arab Jew, was dropped, while legitimating others — specifically, Judeo-Christian, now a marker of a Western geopolitical culture. Memory of a common past (biblical times), common language (Hebrew), and common land (Eretz Israel) was magnified within a mythmaking machine. The nation’s memory was marshaled into suppressing any other possible memories from diverse pasts, languages, and lands. A state of perennial adrenal anxiety has marked the Zionist master narrative. Foregrounding an exceptionalist victimization discourse, this narrative manufactured the Muslim Arab as a common perennial “historical enemy” facing the “Jewish nation.” Zionist discourse has represented Palestinians, Arabs, or Muslims as merely one more “non-Jewish” obstacle to the Jewish/Israeli national trajectory. Its historiography concerning Jews within Islam consists of a morbidly selective “tracing the dots” from pogrom to pogrom. The word pogrom itself, it must be noted, derives from and is reflective of the Eastern European Jewish experience. I do not mean to idealize the position of Jews within Islam, rather I argue that Zionist discourse has, in a sense, hijacked Jews from their Judeo-Islamic political geography and subordinated them into the European Jewish chronicle of shtetl and pogrom. This picture of an ageless, relentless oppression and humiliation, however, has produced a double-edged amnesia: one with regard to the Zionist settlement of Palestine which, for the most part, disregarded the perspective and concerns of the inhabitants of Palestine, culminating in their dispossession and yielding almost a century of Palestinian antagonism to Zionism and Israel, now equated with Jews and Judaism; the second with regard to the Judeo-Islamic history, which

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deserves to be represented more complexly within a more multiperspectival approach.11 The Zionist conception of “Jewish History” presumes a unitary and universal notion of history, rather than a multiplicity of experiences, differing from period to period and from context to context. Positing the vision of Jewish nationalism on a demarcated territory as a “natural evolution” is in itself a problematic claim; but positing this vision as a panacea for all Jews is especially bewildering. In the same period that the idea of Zionism was being formulated within a Christian European context, Jews in the Muslim world occupied a different position, one that did not necessarily require a nationalist articulation of their identity. (In this sense, one might argue that the concept of Jewish nationalism was politically irrelevant to their existence as Jews within the Islamic world.) The Zionist “proof ” of a single Jewish experience, therefore, allows little space for comparative studies of Jews in relation to diverse religious and ethnic minorities, especially within Muslim spaces. The Zionist vision of a single Jewish experience leads to a historiographical narrative that excludes parallels and overlappings with non-Jewish religious and ethnic communities. Thus, this narrative ejects the idea of hyphenated and syncretic Jewish cultures, as well as the notion of linked and analogous oppressions between Jews and various communities. The selective reading of Judeo-Muslim history, in other words, makes two processes apparent: the unproblematized subordination of Jews within Islam to a “universal” Jewish experience and the rejection of an Arab and Muslim context for Jewish institutions, identities, and histories. Contemporary cultural practices illustrate this process of dismemberment: that is, the attempt to represent the Jews within Islam detached from Muslim Arab culture, philosophy, and institutions. The exhibition of Turkish Jewish costumes in the Jewish Museum in New York (1989) provides such an example. The exhibition offered its viewers a vehicle for imaginary travel into distant geography and history via the colorful costume of the “other” Jews. Displaced from one geography to another, the museological project removed the costumes from their social habitus, displaying them as exotic objects, fetishistically isolated from the Muslim Ottoman context. This isolationist concept elides the embeddedness of Jewish life in the dominant Muslim culture. Jewish dress codes were shared with the ambient Muslim world — albeit at times with some differences, depending on the specific period. As cultural imperialism was marching into the Muslim world, there was still nothing obvious or natural about a discursive act of “separating” Jews from the Muslim world and “unifying” them with the culture of Ashkenazi Jews. In fact, in the late nineteenth century, cultural dissonance seems to be

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most afflicting the relationships among the coreligionists (Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews) than among the coregionists (Arab Muslims and Jews). Nowhere is it clearer than when the Alliance Israelite Universelle (AIU) was attempting to install what was regarded as an alien culture in the “Levant.”12 The AIU — the schooling system founded in Paris in 1860 by Westernized Ashkenazi Jews — was meant to provide a French curriculum for the Jews of the Levant and to carry the banner of enlightenment and the civilizing mission into the “desolated” regions of the world. The AIU began its programs by requiring its students to change their “outmoded” dress code and hairstyle, perceived as signs of backwardness. The Baghdadi Jewish establishment partially collaborated with the AIU mission to provide education for Baghdadi children, since this type of education was seen as useful within a world of rising Western powers. However, the establishment did not understand the learning of French culture and history to mean the abandonment of Judeo-Arab culture.13 Consequently, it opposed the cultural power exercised by the AIU toward the students. The Baghdadi Jewish negative reaction to the practices of the AIU was also shared by Arab Muslims. One of the articles in the Judeo-Arabic newspaper Perah, published in India, reports on the Muslims’ response to the changes they began to perceive among upper-middle-class Jews: “From one day to the next the phenomenon [of shaving] is spreading so that the one who shaves his beard cannot be distinguished from the gentiles [Christians]. It has also become the occasion of ridicule by the Muslims in the marketplace who say: ‘Wonder of wonders, the Jews have forsaken their religion. . . . See how the Jews have abandoned their religion (heaven forbid) — before, not one of them would touch his beard and earlocks, and now they cut them and throw them into the dustbin.’ ”14 In contrast to contemporary representations of an inherent Muslim antiSemitism, one detects in this example a Muslim investment in maintaining Jewish identity as it had been known within the Muslim world. Both Muslims and Jews perceived Jewish identity as embedded within a larger Judeo-Islamic civilizational complex, while assimilation into Western style is seen as a betrayal of traditions at once culturally shared and religiously differentiated. In this respect, the Jewish French assimilationist practice is regarded as a violation of these norms. The Judeo-Arabic newspaper of the late nineteenth century cites the Muslim response as invoking the same code that the Jewish Baghdadi leaders also believed in. The anxiety that Arab Jews manifest here, ironically, concerns their image not in the eyes of French Jews, but in the eyes of their Muslim neighbors, who were not seeking the assimilation of Arab Jews. Zionist historiography advanced the idea of a homogeneous national past and precluded any “deviance” into a more historicized and relational

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The continuity of Jewish life meant the ceasing of Arab life for Arab Jews in Israel — at least in the public sphere. What was called by officialdom an “ingathering,” then, was also a cultural dismembering.

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narrative that would see Jews not simply through their religious commonalties but also in relation to their non-Jewish contextual cultures, institutions, and practices. Thus a historiography that assumes a pan-Jewish culture is often the same historiography that assumes the bifurcated discourse of “Arab versus Jew” without acknowledging a hyphenated Arab Jewish existence. In this sense, the erasure of the hyphen was crucial to Zionist writings. The Arabness and the Orientalness of Jews posed a challenge to any simplistic definition of Jewish national identity, questioning the very axioms and boundaries of the Euro-Israeli national project. The cultural affinity that Arab Jews shared with Arab Muslims — in many respects stronger than that which they shared with European Jews — threatened the Zionist conception of a homogeneous nation modeled on the European nationalist definition of the nation-state. As an integral part of the topography, language, culture, and history of the “East,” Eastern Jews have also threatened the Euro-Israeli self-image that has envisioned itself as a prolongation of “Europe,” in the “East” but not of it. Arab Jews, for the first time in their history, faced the imposed dilemma of choosing between Jewishness and Arabness in a geopolitical context that perpetuated the equation between Arabness, Middle Easterners, and Islam on the one hand and Jewishness, Europeaness, and Westerness on the other. Thus, the religious Jewish aspect of what has been a culturally diverse Jewish identity has been given primacy, a reductive categorization tantamount to dismembering the identity of a community. The continuity of Jewish life meant the ceasing of Arab life for Arab Jews in Israel — at least in the public sphere. What was called by officialdom an “ingathering,” then, was also a cultural dismembering, both within and between communities. But the Zionist reading of that dismemberment, both before and after the actual rupture, rendered it as a healing and a return. The past is subjected to contestation within diverse institutional force fields. Its narrators argue for a privileged ownership of the historical pain, collective memory, and of the copyrights on their deployment. Memories that endanger the hegemonic discourse are forbidden, become taboo, and disappear from the public arena. These taboos are often internalized even by the scarred bodies that might potentially articulate history from a different angle and within a different frame. Zionist discourse, which argued for the “right for normalcy,” narrated the historical past and envisioned a utopian future as a homogenous unified model. However, this regulation of “normalcy” created in its wake myriad forms of social “abnormalcy”— the syndromes of which have included the silencing and the kidnapping of the language of critical thinking. Rearticulating the terminology, concepts, and methods is crucial for producing transnational knowledge that undoes the Zionist normative apparatus.

Ella Shohat

Dischronicity: Temporality and Paradoxes of Modernization Discursively multifaceted, the ruptures provoked by Zionism were conceived at once geographically — dislodging the communities and transferring their bodies into a newly imagined political space of the alt-neu-land of Israel15— and historiographically, separating Jews from their culturally ossified habitus and integrating them into the dynamic march of universal culture. The Zionist return to the old biblical land, in other words, was never premised on a simple return to the ways of biblical times, even if it at times expressed nostalgia for ancient ways. Both Bedouins and Yemeni Jews were romanticized within an exoticized temporality. As with all civilizing missions, the “inevitable” march of progress simultaneously produced in its wake the devastation of “primitive” worlds and the mourning for their disappearance. Undergirding these paradoxical conceptualizations was a modernizing assumption of what I call here “dischronicity,” or the rupture of time, as though communities live in split time zones, some advanced and some lagging behind. The ideology of modernization thrives on a binarist demarcation of opposed concepts — modernity/tradition, underdevelopment/development, science/superstition, and technology/ backwardness. In this sense, modernization functions as a bridge between two opposite temporal poles within a stagist narrative that paradoxically assumes the essential “developedness” of one community over another, while also generating programs to transform the “underdeveloped” into modernity. In the case of Israel, modernization has been a central mechanism of policy making as well as of identity shaping within the formation of the nation-state. The modernization narrative has projected a Western national identity for a state geographically located in the Middle East and populated by Eastern European Jews as well as by a Middle Eastern majority — both Palestinians and non-Ashkenazi Jews. The dominant discourse of Euro-Israeli policy makers and scholars has suggested that Asian and African Jews — not unlike the Palestinian population — originate from “primitive,” “backward,” “underdeveloped,” “premodern” societies and therefore, unlike Ashkenazim, require modernization.16 But here modernization can also be seen as a euphemism, at best, for breaking away from Arab Levantine culture. Over the years Euro-Israeli political leaders, writers, and scholars have frequently advanced the historiographically suspect idea that “Jews of the Orient,” prior to their “ingathering” into Israel, were somehow “outside of ” history. This discourse ironically echoes nineteenth-century assessments, such as those of Hegel, that Jews, like blacks, lived outside of the progressively unfolding spirit of Western civilization.

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In the early fifties, some of Israel’s most celebrated intellectuals from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem wrote essays addressing the “ethnic problem” and in the process recycled a number of the tropes typically projected onto colonized and non-European people. For Karl Frankenstein, for example, “the primitive mentality of many of the immigrants from backward countries” might be profitably compared to “the primitive expression of children, the retarded, or the mentally disturbed.”17 And in 1964, Kalman Katznelson published his openly racist book The Ashkenazi Revolution, in which he argued the essential, irreversible genetic inferiority of the Sephardim, warning against mixed marriage as tainting the Ashkenazi race and calling for the Ashkenazim to protect their interests against a burgeoning Sephardi majority.18 In sociological and anthropological studies, the dispossession of Middle Eastern Jews of their culture has been justified by the concept of “the inevitable march of Western progress”— that is, those who have been living in a historically condemned temporality would inevitably disappear before the productive advances of modernity. Within traditional anthropology, one detects a desire to project the Mizrahim as living “allochronically,”19 in another time, often associated with earlier periods of individual life (childhood), or of human history (primitivism). From the perspective of official Zionism, the aliya to Israel signifies leaving behind premodernity. Jews from Arab and Muslim countries enter modernity only when they appear on the map of the Hebrew state, just as the modern history of Palestine is seen as beginning with the Zionist renewal of the biblical mandate. In Israeli history textbooks, Middle Eastern Jewish History has been presumed to begin with the arrival of Jews to Israel. Contemporary museological projects reproduce this teleological vision of history. The Babylon Jewish Museum in Or Yehuda, Israel, despite its name, is largely dedicated to the triumph of Zionism in Iraq.20 The exhibition creates a disproportionate spatial gap between life in Babylon/Iraq before and after the arrival of Zionism. The walls dramatically expand on the few decades of Zionist activism in Iraq but minimally condense the millennia of Jewish History lived between the Dijla and the Furat Rivers. This linear narrative naturalizes the transition into the modern nation. The converging discourses of enlightenment, progress, and modernization are central to the Zionist master narrative. A series of mutually reinforcing equations between modernity, science, technology, and the West has legitimized Zionism as an extension of the civilizing mission applied first to Palestine and then to Arab Jews. Discourses of progress were crucial to the colonization of Palestine, while later playing a central role in the process of incorporating Arab Jews into the Jewish nation. Rescue tropes such as “making the desert bloom”

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grounded the claim to Palestine in an argument that was not exclusively biblical but also scientific, buttressed by archeological evidence. Similarly, the “ingathering” project entailed not only a biblical messianic vision but also the idea of modernizing the “Land of the Fathers” and the “traditional Jews.”21 Zionist discourse portrayed Levantine Jewish culture prior to Zionism as static and passive and, like the virgin land of Palestine, lying in wait for the impregnating infusion of European dynamism. While presenting Palestine as an empty land to be transformed by Jewish labor, the Zionist “Founding Fathers” presented Arab Jews as passive vessels to be shaped by the revivifying spirit of Zionism.

Dissonance: Methodology As Discursive Rupture The rupture shaping the lives of Arab Jews, particularly since the partition of Palestine, has resulted in a scholarship that delineates their lives “before and after their arrival” to Israel. While one might argue about the validity of the facts described in sociological, anthropological, or historical accounts, I want here to point to a discursive oscillation, a conceptual, or even methodological, schizophrenia permeating such scholarship. Rather than a mere coincidence, this disjuncture of paradigms is virtually necessitated by the subliminal privileging of a Zionist vantage point. Studies of the Jews of Yemen, for example, detail their oppression at Muslim hands, relaying the kidnapping of young Jewish women, their forced conversion to Islam, and imposed marriage to Muslim men. When these same Yemeni Jews are studied within the Israeli framework, however, the writers abandon the historical account of victimization and shift into an anthropological account of folklore and tradition. A mixture of history and anthropology, Herbert S. Lewis’s After the Eagles Landed: The Yemenites of Israel begins by addressing Muslim persecution in Yemen, but then moves into detailing polygamy and gat chewing in Israel.22 The book mentions the Decree of Orphans in the seventeenth century, which forced fatherless Jewish children to be taken away from their family and community and converted into Islam. Yet the text deploys a selective tale of kidnapping. Although After the Eagles Landed was written in the mid-1990s, it fails to mention one of the most traumatic kidnappings to afflict the Yemeni Jewish community between the late 1940s and the 1960s, taking place not in a Muslim country, but rather in the Jewish state. Disoriented by the new reality in Israel, Yemenis, as well as other Jews from Arab and Muslim countries, fell prey to doctors, nurses, and social workers, most of them on the state payroll. These representatives of the state’s welfare institutions were involved in providing Yemeni babies

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for adoption by Ashkenazi parents largely in Israel and the United States, while telling the biological parents that the babies had died. The conspiracy was extensive enough to include the systematic issuance of fraudulent death certificates for the adopted babies and at times even fake burial sites for the babies who presumably had died, although the parents were never presented with the proof — a body. In this way, the government attempted to ensure that over several decades Mizrahi demands for investigation were silenced, while information was hidden and manipulated by government bureaus. The act of kidnapping was not simply a result of financial interests to increase the state’s revenues; it was also a result of a deeply ingrained belief in the inferiority of Jews from Arab and Muslim countries, seen as careless breeders possessing little sense of responsibility toward their own children. Doctors, nurses, and social workers, in this sense, saw themselves as missionaries of Western science and progress, faithful to their duty of carrying out the vision of modernity.23 Transferring babies from the space of premodernity to that of modernity, where they would be raised according to nuclear family values and Western behavioral norms, was perceived to be logical, rational, and scientific. Within this discursive framework, literally tearing babies away from the arms of their mothers seemed only natural, even redemptive. The act of kidnapping babies, therefore, operated on a continuum with the reigning academic discourses of the time. In this intersection of race, gender, and class, the displaced Jews from Muslim countries became victims of the logic of progress, bearing the marks of its pathologies on their bodies. A severe human rights violation — kidnapping — was subjected to systematic silencing and censorship.24 The scholarly elision of this central experience is complicitous with the institutional silencing. Instead, anthropological books tend to be typically organized around such concepts as kinship, marriage, rituals, religious values, and social attitudes. Studies such as After the Eagles Landed do not necessarily speak about Yemeni Jews within the sociology of modernization. Rather, they participate in the Eurocentric anthropology of romanticization, longing for the exotic authenticity of its subjects. The author, Herbert S. Lewis, for example, praises Yemeni culture for its simplicity and colorfulness — partially, it seems, as a rebuff to the elitist attitude toward Yemeni Jews. In this sense, romanticizing ethnography differs from modernization sociology. Yet, both the romanticization and the modernization narratives share the discursive production of the Mizrahi family as a site of deviance from an implicit cultural normativity. Therefore, the Orientalist emphasis on the Mizrahi extended family structure (the hamula) in both disciplines is unable to contain the devastation experienced by these families through the kidnappings performed with the complicity of certain sectors of the

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establishment. Both narratives have also kidnapped Mizrahi subjectivity by eliding the perspective of Jews from Muslim countries, who in their worst imaginings could have never predicted an act of kidnapping in — and indirectly sanctioned by — the “Jewish state.” Deploying the framework of either modernizing sociology or romanticizing ethnography to write about Jews within Israel while, at the same time, applying political historiography to write about Jews within Islam produces a selective tale of kidnapping contingent on a political geography. This dichotomous narrativization frames the act of kidnapping in one space as paradigmatic and defamatory, while in the other the same act is either ignored or seen as an aberration from the norm. Every negative experience in the Arab world is amplified, allegorized, made synecdochic; it becomes the center of the historical narrative. Every negative experience in Israel, meanwhile, is downplayed within an exoticizing ethnographic account. At a time when both activism and academic research on the issue have entered the public sphere,25 the structuring absence of the kidnapping case produces the scholarly equivalent of kidnapping — that is, the sequestering of Mizrahi intellectual agency in their own self-historicizing. The ideological rupture characteristic of Zionist discourse, then, is reflected in much of hegemonic scholarship. The rupture is reproduced not only in the themes but also in the analytical modes, resulting in a kind of a methodological schizophrenia. Moshe Gat’s book A Jewish Community in Crisis: The Exodus from Iraq, 1948 –1951, for example, analyzes the Iraqi political and economic interests in at first refusing and then permitting Iraqi Jews to leave (only upon giving up their citizenship).26 The book also characterizes the active opposition to Zionism on the part of the Iraqi Jewish leadership of Baghdad, depicting Hakham27 Sasson Khdhuri as simply fearing the loss of his status and position to the Zionists. Yet this dissection of motives, interest, and power is abandoned once the author moves to examine the activities of the Zionist movement in Iraq as well as the position of the Israeli establishment. Here, the author shifts into a benign and idealistic official discourse to characterize Israel’s “concern” for the Iraqi Jews, the very community being uprooted largely to the benefit of the Israeli state apparatus in terms of its political, demographic, and economic necessities: settling the country with Jews, securing the borders, obtaining cheap labor, and getting useful military personnel. As with any historiography, it is not simply the issue of “facts” that is at stake, but also the questions of narrative, tropes, characterizations, and points of view. The studies of Arab Jews tend to be organized around the agency of the Zionist movement and the State of Israel; the reader is sutured into a privileged point of view as well as into an implicit “norms of the text.”28 Thus, despite the methodological/discursive rupture, the historical tale

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remains coherent through the persistence of a hierarchical narrative structure, in which the Zionist idea provides the discursive “glue” that keeps the various elements together. A rupture of a different nature operates in Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land, a book that, unlike most texts, offers a complex picture of Arab Jewish existence within Muslim space.29 A hybrid of anthropology and history, the book interweaves ethnographic narratives concerning present-day Egyptian Muslims with historiographical accounts of the lives of Arab Jews in the twelfth century. Ghosh chronicles a Judeo-Islamic world largely through the travels of Ben-Yiju, a Tunisian Jewish merchant whose existence is conjured up from the shreds of the Geniza archive. The book vividly captures a geocultural Muslim space stretching from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, where Jews lived, traveled, and exchanged goods and ideas. Within this Muslim space the existence of Jewishness was not perceived in exclusionary terms, as a philosophical and cultural contradiction. Ghosh’s anthropology, however, focuses on his visits in the 1980s to an Egyptian village, exclusively dealing with the lives of contemporary Muslim Egyptians. The book produces a fascinating silence about the lives of present-day Egyptian, Tunisian, and other Arab Jews. In this fashion, In an Antique Land splits the subjects of his ethnography (Muslim Arabs) and his historiography (Jewish Arabs.) On Ghosh’s final trip to Egypt he learns that pilgrims from Israel are on their way to visit the tomb of the cabbalist mystic Sidi Abu-Haseira — a site holy for both Muslims and Sephardic Jews. Yet, for one prosaic reason or another, the anthropologist, Ghosh, ends up never meeting them. Ghosh, at the closure of his historiographical and anthropological odyssey, somehow ends his narrative at the very point where the subject of his historiography could have turned into the subject of his anthropology. Perhaps Ghosh’s missed rendezvous, his packing up and leaving Egypt precisely as the (Sephardic/Mizrahi) Arab Jews visit the AbuHaseira’s holy site, is revelatory of deeper contemporary representational crisis or paralysis. In the hegemonic narrative, the continuity of Jewishness means rupture from the Arab Muslim world. At the same time, in the contemporary Arab Muslim world, the millennia of Jewish existence is at best an unconscious memory, leaving only traces in the footnotes of antiZionist ideology. In such discourses, Arab Jews continue to “travel” in the pages of historical texts as imbricated within a legendary Islamic civilization. Yet, as the postcolonial story begins to unfold over the past decades, Arab Jews suddenly cease to exist. This split narrative seems to suggest that once in Israel, Arab Jews have reached their final destination — the State of Israel — and nothing more remains to be said about their Arabness. Even the more critical narratives, in their unguarded moments, reproduce the

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fait accompli of violent displacements. In this sense, alliances and conflicts between communities (such as Muslims and Jews) not only have shifted historically but have also produced narratives linked to contemporary ideologies. And as certain strands in a cultural fabric become taboo (for example, the Arabness of Jews), this narrative rests on blurring connections that once existed.

This ruptured discourse extracted Mizrahim from their Arab history only to have it

Disciplining: Mizrahi Studies As a Relational Inquiry

return to explain

While for the purpose of the nationalist telos Mizrahim are detached from the Arab Muslim geography of their belonging, a reattachment to that geography occurs for the purpose of explaining their marginalized position within Israeli society. Hegemonic paradigms in the humanities and social sciences have relied on developmentalist and modernization theories that have produced myriad forms of essentialized Oriental “deviance.” This scholarship entails a paradoxical relation to the Arab cultural geography of the Arab Jews/Mizrahim, manifested within a disciplinary division of labor. On the one hand, Zionist historiography and literary criticism have exiled Judeo-Arab identity from their texts. On the other, sociology and criminology have placed them at the center, positing Mizrahim as a maladjusted group in Israel. This ruptured discourse extracted Mizrahim from their Arab history only to have it return to explain Mizrahi social pathologies. Mizrahim crowd the pages of EuroIsraeli sociological, criminological, and anthropological texts that provide explanation for the “problem of the gap.” Here the Arab Muslim past looms as deformed vestiges in the lives of Israelis of Asian and African origins. Sociology and anthropology detect traces of underdevelopment, while hegemonic historiography and literary criticism tell the story of the past as a moral tale full of national purpose. The scholarly bifurcation of cultural geography cannot possibly capture the traumatic rupture, the complex transformation of an Arab Jewish/Mizrahi identity that is at once past and present, here and there — a palimpsestic identity inhabiting the dissonant, interstitial spaces between citizenship, religion, ethnicity, race, nation, and culture. The hegemonic study of Mizrahim has been neatly parceled out among the disciplines in a narrative whose terminus lies within the territory of Zionism and Israel, as though there were only rupture without continuities within the Arab Muslim world and only wholeness and redemption in Israel. In this sense, geopolitical borders are superimposed on cultural paradigms; once within the borders of the State of Israel, con-

Mizrahi social

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pathologies.

temporary Mizrahim are discursively dismembered from the complex Arab cultural space. Performed within the paradigms of development and modernization, the study of Mizrahim has reproduced Eurocentric notions of temporality and spatiality. An Oriental “essence” has also enriched anthropology with an opportunity to study Mizrahim’s “exotic” rituals and traditions, often fetishistically detached from their history and politics. The scholarship about the Mizrahim has assumed Israeliness as a telos. Thus present-day Mizrahi culture and activism tend to be narrated reductively, within the framework of a political geography — the State of Israel — lacking the wider perspective of a border-crossing analysis. In this essay, I have critiqued the study of Arab Jews that employs the Eurocentric and nationalist operations typifying Zionist discourse. A critical Mizrahi scholarship must disengage from the Zionized and nationalist modes of generating knowledge about “Jewish History,” often performed within ghettoized and geographically defined discursive spaces. I have argued for a relational understanding of the multiple histories of Jews, histories that stretched over thousands of years, spread over diverse geographies, and lived within different ideological regimes. Eurocentric definitions of the history of Jews in the Islamic world cast them into a fixed stereotypical role, playing a millennial role of passive victims lacking any form of agency. Thus, within standard Zionist writing, any ambivalence, or even refusal, of the Zionist gesture of aliya (such as on the part of Communist Arab Jews) is marginalized in relation to canonical historiography. Recognizing these invisible histories works against the Eurocentric legacies of Zionized Jewish studies to rearticulate the spaces, moments, and subjects of a critical Mizrahi studies. Charting a beginning for a Mizrahi epistemology requires, as we have seen, examining the terminological paradigms, the conceptual aporias, and the methodological inconsistencies plaguing diverse fields of hegemonic scholarship. Producing non-Orientalist and de-Zionized maps of the historical links between the question of Palestine and that of Arab Jews involves crossing a number of disciplinary assumptions and going against the grain of multiple normative political discourses. Such critical knowledge challenges the socialist as well as the capitalist Zionist narrative of modernization of Palestine and of the Mizrahim; it intervenes in the founding premises of naturalizing one return (Jewish) while repressing another (Palestinian); it deconstructs the folklorization and exoticization of non-European cultures; it demystifies the rescue narrative of the land of Palestine and of Arab Jews from their Arab Muslim captors; it rearticulates the place of Jews within the Arab Muslim culture as well as within and in relation to Palestine prior to and in the wake of the Zionist movement. Such critical studies interrupt the modernization narrative whereby

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anthropology renders Mizrahim as living “allochronically” in “another time”; in which sociology “otherizes” Mizrahim as “ethnicity” in contradistinction to an unmarked Ashkenazi-Sabra normativity; in which criminology forges an essentialist understanding of Oriental corruption; in which historiography fails to discern the political, economic, and discursive links between the question of Palestine and the Arab Jewish question both in Palestine and in the rest of Arab world; and in which political science assumes Arab Jewish/Mizrahi and Palestinian struggles as simply an “internal” versus an “external” problem. Critical scholarship, in contrast, deconstructs nationalist paradigms of “inside” and “outside,” yet without blurring questions of power and privilege. Within this transnational mapping, the critique of the Orientalization of Arab Jews would not entail obscuring the role played by Mizrahim — in their capacity as citizens of the State of Israel — in the continuing occupation and dispossession of Palestinians. This kind of complex positioning recalls other historical situations. In this sense, one might reflect on a useful structural analogy in which Palestinians have replayed the historical role of the dispossessed and occupied Native Americans for Zionism, while Arab Jews were cast as its displaced and exploited blacks.30 Or, to put it differently, Mizrahim, like U.S. racialized minorities, suffer at the hands of discriminatory ideology and policies, but also have been enlisted in the service of the colonizing nation-state. Yet, throughout the modern history of Arab Jews/Mizrahim, the question of Palestine, like the questions of Zionism, is far from being settled, provoking constant dissonance and a maze of contradictions. The transdisciplinary scholarly frame I am proposing here, for its part, hopes to desegregate intellectual spaces and relocates the issues in a much wider and denser geographic imaginary and historical mapping.

Notes This essay synthesizes and reworks ideas, arguments, and methodologies that I have been formulating in numerous scholarly publications over the past two decades. Some of these publications are referenced here in the notes. This essay appeared in a longer version, entitled “Rupture and Return: The Shaping of a Mizrahi Epistemology,” in the Israeli journal Hagar 2.1 (2001). 1. My critique here of the Zionist antidiaspora discourse, the displacement of Ostjuden onto the Mizrahim, and the menacing heteroglossia is largely taken from Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989), esp. 100, 208. For an elaborate critique of the negation of exile, see Amnon Raz-Krarkotzkin, “Exile within Sovereignty: Toward a Critique of the ‘Negation of Exile’ in Israeli Culture,” Theory and Criticism 4 (1993):

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23 – 56 and Theory and Criticism 5 (1994): 113 – 32. See also George Steiner, “Our Homeland, the Text,” Salmangudi 66 (winter–spring 1985): 4 – 25; and Yerach Gover, Zionism: The Limits of Moral Discourse in Israeli Hebrew Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 2. On the invention of the Mizrahim see Ella Shohat, “The Invention of the Mizrahim?” Journal of Palestine Studies 29 (autumn 1999). 3. For a detailed review of the terms, see the longer version of this essay in Hagar. 4. Even subsequent to the foundation of the State of Israel, the Jewish community in Iraq was constructing new schools and founding new enterprises, a fact hardly indicating an institutionalized intention to leave. 5. This effort is clearly expressed in texts written by Iraqi Zionists; see, for example, Shlomo Hillel, Ruah Kadim [Operation Babylon] (Jerusalem: Edanim, 1985), 259 – 63. 6. One of the most debated cases concerns the Zionist placing of bombs in synagogues. See Abbas Shiblak, The Lure of Zion (London: Al Saqi, 1986); and G. N. Giladi, Discord in Zion (London: Scorpion, 1990). 7. See interviews in the following documentary films: David Benchetrit, Samir (Israel, 1997); and Samir, Forget Baghdad (Switzerland, 2002). 8. While the position of Arab Jews is often used to justify the expulsion of Palestinians, there have been a few attempts to reflect on the position of Arab Jews vis-à-vis Arab nationalism from a different angle; see Shiblak, Lure of Zion; Ella Shohat, “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims,” Social Text, nos. 19/20 (fall 1988): 1– 35; Moshe Behar, “Time to Meet the Mizrahim?” al-Ahram, 15 – 21 October 1998; essays from “Mizrahim and Zionism: History, Political Discourse, Struggle” (special issue), News from Within 13.1 (January 1997): Tikva Honig-Parnass, “Introduction”; Sami Shalom Chetrit, “The Dream and the Nightmare: Some Remarks on the New Discourse in Mizrahi Politics in Israel, 1980 –1996”; Zvi Ben-Dor, “A Short History of the Incredible Mizrahi History”; and Moshe Behar, “Is the Mizrahi Question Relevant to the Future of the Entire Middle East?”; Joseph Massad, “The ‘Post-Colonial’ Colony: Time, Space, and Bodies in Palestine/Israel,” in The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 311– 46; Sami Shalom Chetrit, HaMahapeikha ha Ashkenazit Meta [The Ashkenazi revolution is dead] (Tel Aviv: Bimat Kedem, 1999). 9. For example, Naeim Giladi, a former Zionist activist in Iraq, who was imprisoned and tortured but was able to escape one week before execution, gradually came to change his outlook after living in Israel and has become an antiZionist activist. He left Israel in the mid-1980s and settled in New York, renouncing his Israeli citizenship. (From my diverse conversations with Giladi in New York during the late 1980s, when we both served as the representatives of the World Organization of Jews from Islamic Countries, an organization member of the United Nation’s NGO on “The Question of Palestine.”) 10. I am basing this argument on numerous conversations I have had with Iraqi Jews in Israel over the past two decades. It also forms part of a project that Sasson Somekh and I are currently collaborating on, focusing on the moment of dislocation from Iraq to Israel. 11. For more complex accounts of the histories of Jews, see Maxine Rodinson, Cult, Ghetto, and State: The Persistence of the Jewish Question (London: Al

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Saqi, 1983); Ilan Halevi, A History of the Jews: Ancient and Modern (London: Zed, 1987); Ammiel Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Mark R. Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995); Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “Historical Consciousness and Historical Responsibilities,” in From Vision to Revision: A Hundred Years of Historiography of Zionism, ed. Yechiam Weitz ( Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 1997); Joel Beinin, The Dispersion of the Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and Nissim Rejwan, Israel in Search of Identity (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1999). 12. On the history of the AIU, see Aron Rodrigue, Images of Sephardi and Eastern Jewries in Transition: The Teachers of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, 1860 –1939 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993). 13. See Zvi Yehuda, “The Jews of Babylon and Cultural Change through the Educational Activities of Alliance Israelite Universelle” (in Hebrew), Babylonian Jewry: A Journal for the Research of the History and Culture of the Jews of Babylon, no. 1 (fall 1995). 14. Perah (Calcutta), 23 September 1885. The translation from the JudeoArabic language is mine. A selection from Perah is included in the appendix of Yehuda, “The Jews of Babylon.” 15. Herzl’s visionary Zionist utopia was the subject of his 1902 Germanlanguage book: Theodor Herzl, Altneuland: Old New Land, trans. Miriam Kraus (Tel Aviv: Babel, 1997). 16. For other critical approaches to the dominant Israeli sociology, see Shlomo Swirski, Israel: The Oriental Majority (London: Zed, 1989); and Uri Ram, ed., Israeli Society: Critical Perspectives (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Breirot, 1993). Over the years, Mizrahim have argued against the dominant explanation of the “gap” between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim addressed in such magazines as Afikim, Hapanter ha-Shahor, Apirion, Pa’amon ha-Shkhunut, Hapatish, Iton Aher, and Hadshot Hila. 17. Another scholar, Yosef Gross, saw the immigrants as suffering from “mental regression” and a “lack of development of the ego.” Quotations from Frankenstein and Gross are taken from Tom Segev, 1949: The First Israelis (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Domino, 1984), 157. The extended symposium concerning the “Sephardi problem” was framed as a debate about the “essence of primitivism.” Only a strong infusion of European cultural values, the scholars concluded, would rescue the Arab Jews from their “backwardness.” 18. Kalman Katznelson, Hamahapeikha HaAshkenazit [The Ashkenazi revolution] (Tel Aviv: Anach, 1964). 19. The term allochronic is borrowed from Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 20. Located in Or Yehuda, the museum was founded by Iraqi Jews who were among the leaders of the Zionist movement. 21. For a more detailed critique of orientalist modernization and discourse, particularly what I call “the Zionist masternarrative” and its concomitant “rescue fantasies,” see Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema; “Sephardim in Israel”; and “Masternarrative/ Counter Readings,” in Resisting Images: Essays on Cinema and History, ed. Robert Sklar and Charles Musser (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 251–78. See also Sami Shalom Chetrit, “Castrated Mizrahi Identity,” in The Ashkenazi

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Revolution Is Dead (Tel Aviv: Kedem, 1999), 57– 60; and Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “Orientalism, Jewish Studies, and Israeli Society: A Few Comments,” Gma’a 3 (1999) 22. Herbert S. Lewis, After the Eagles Landed: The Yemenites of Israel (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland, 1994). 23. One of the nurses, Rouja Kushinski, was interviewed on the subject for a report on the Israeli television program Oovda (Channel 2, 1996), directed by Uri Rozenweig with research prepared by Shoshana Madmoni. Not only did the nurse admit to the act of taking children away, she maintained her belief that forcefully removing children from their biological parents was the right thing to do. 24. On 30 June 1986, for example, the Public Committee for the Discovery of the Missing Yemenite Children held a massive protest rally. The rally, like many Mizrahi protests and demonstrations, was completely ignored by the dominant media. A few months later, however, Israeli television produced a documentary on the subject, blaming the bureaucratic chaos of the period for unfortunate “rumors” and perpetuating the myth of Oriental parents as careless breeders with little sense of responsibility toward their own children. The same discourse was replayed in the mid-1990s, when a forceful protest led by Rabbi Uzi Meshulam overwhelmed the country. Meshulam was delegitimized and portrayed in the media as another David Koresh. Meshulam, who published various documents consisting of firsthand and first-person accounts by Yemeni mothers about the kidnapped babies, is still serving prison time for his campaign demanding access to government files of the case. The Mizrahi struggle to shed light on what exactly took place during those years and, most importantly, to give the families a chance to meet their kidnapped children, is still a major rallying factor for Mizrahim of diverse persuasions. 25. See Dov Levitan, The Aliya of the “Magic Carpet” As a Historical Continuation of the Earlier Yemenite Aliyas (in Hebrew) (master’s thesis, Bar-Ilan University, 1983); and investigative articles written by journalist Shosh Madmoni (in the magazine Shishi and the daily Yedioth Ahronot) and by Yigal Mashiah (in the daily Ha’aretz) in 1996. See also Shoshana Madmoni, “The Missing Yemenite Children: Sometimes Truth Is Stranger than Fiction,” News from Within (February 1996). 26. Moshe Gat, A Jewish Community in Crisis: The Exodus from Iraq, 1948 –1951 (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 1989). 27. Hakham is the Sephardi equivalent of Rabbi. 28. The term norms of the text is borrowed from Boris Uspensky, A Poetics of Composition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). 29. Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993). 30. I insist on the words “structural analogy” since I certainly am not trying to argue for an equation. For further exploration of this point, see E. Shohat, “Taboo Memories, Diasporic Visions: Columbus, Palestine, and Arab-Jews,” in Performing Hybridity, ed. May Joseph and Jennifer Fink (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

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The Incorporation of the Palestinian Minority by the Israeli State, 1948 –1970 ON THE NATURE, TRAN SFORMATION , AND CONS TRAIN TS OF COLLABORATION Although widely acknowledged as a universal phenomenon, collaboration has remained understudied in social sciences. Robinson (1972), who recognized the signi
cance of collaboration for the functioning and the effectiveness of regimes that principally rely on political control, argued that collaboration emanates from both compelling circumstances that the regime creates and a local social system conducive to such a behavior. Guha (1997) maintained that collaboration is only one aspect of such circumstances. Resistance comprises the other side of the coin. It is unfortunate that the insights of Robinson and Guha, which were developed within the discussion on colonialism, have not been elaborated and extended so as to deal with deeply divided societies governed by relations of control. The main argument in this article is that the Palestinians in Israel (those living within the 1948 Green Line) were incorporated by the Israeli state after 1948 through a system of collaboration. Theoretically the article relies on insights from Robinson (1972) and Guha (1997) as well as additional sources from the Gramscian tradition. Meanwhile, the historical framework was dictated by theoretical and practical considerations. While before 1948 organizations of the Yishuv — the Jewish community in Palestine — had been successful in attaining the collaboration of individual Palestinians through bribery, since the establishment of Israel in 1948 collaboration has become the of
cial system of the minority’s incorporation. Because the interest in this article is in collaboration as a system of governance rather than as a phenomenon relating to the behavior of individuals, 1948 will be regarded as the point of departure. The discussion ends in the early 1970s because reliable archival materials are unobtainable thereafter; nonetheless, the consequences for the Palestinian minority of the system of collaboration have been unraveling until the present, a subject which will also be theorized and discussed. Within this time frame, the system of collaboration has changed, and along with that its superstructure of cultural codes, vocabulary, subtexts, and myths has also been altered. These changes will be analyzed within their historical context.

Social Text 75, Vol. 21, No. 2, Summer 2003. Copyright © 2003 by Duke University Press.

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Al-Nakbah and Its Consequences The 1948 war is one of those momentous events about which the fourteenthcentury Arab social historian Ibn Khaldun wrote: “When there is a general change of conditions, it is as if the entire creation had changed and the whole world been altered” (quoted in Hourani 1992, 3). Indeed, AlNakbah (the immense catastrophe) challenged the basic tenets of the human existence of the Palestinians; the homeland, the place of residence, the land — a major source of wealth, dignity, and inuence — and the physical and cultural environment, the validity and endurance of which Palestinians had never questioned, turned out to be most insecure. Even the very existence of Palestinian society as an imagined community ceased to be taken for granted. After the end of the war, only a small minority of 160,000 out of the 900,000 Palestinians remained in the part of Palestine upon which Israel was established (Abu-Lughod 1971; see also Hadawi 1967). They were ruled by a military government that restricted their movements, controlled various aspects of their lives, and acted as a tool for the expropriation of the bulk of their lands (Jiryis 1976; Lustick 1982; Kretzmer 1987). After eighteen years, the military government was replaced by a system of control that was more elaborate and less visible (Lustick 1982). This shattering and disorienting transformation led to the accentuation of personal survival among the Palestinians. Moreover, their dependence upon the regime, their lack of secure prospects, and their precarious existential conditions constituted persuasive circumstances for some Palestinians to collaborate.

The Dignitaries Even during the war, the Israeli regime had begun to use those who collaborated with the Yishuv in the institutionalization of its rule over the captured Palestinian localities. Such collaborators acted as informers, and in some cases they were elevated to the status of intermediaries. One of the signi
cant assignments that collaborators with the Yishuv were able to carry out during the war was the defection of the Druze unit from the Arab
ghters’ side. Jabber Dahish Muadi, Labib Abu-Rokon, and Saleh Khne
s, who played a vital role in this affair, were later awarded seats in the Knesset (Linn 1999, 144 – 47) and were instrumental in the state strategy during the 1950s of drafting Druze men into the Israeli Army and the separation of the Druze from the Palestinian minority. After the end of the war, many collaborators were assigned leadership functions among the Palestinians as well as jobs in the bureaucracy that dealt with the minority.

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These roles included Arab Knesset members in lists af
liated to MAPAI, mayors, mukhtars, clerics (Muslim religious leaders such as imams, kadis, and the like), inspectors, headmasters, teachers, employees in the Arabic section of the broadcasting authority, and so on. An epitome of a collaborator, although less famous than the names just mentioned, is Hussein Hassan ‘Awad. His narration of the “services” that he delivered to the state was included in a letter that he sent on 10 October 1960 to the Israeli president Yitzhak Ben-Zvi: The Village of Mizra’ah — Acre’s region, Western Galilee 10.10.1960 We see in your persona the
gure of the loving father . . . and a symbol of our young, just and democratic State. Based on my knowledge of your character, I hope that this outcry would merit your attention. I would like,
rst, to present the history of my relationship with the State. Since 1948, and before this date, I have been in touch with the Israeli Authorities. Before the creation of the State I used to help the Hagana forces, which were stationed nearby, and the men of the adjacent Kibbutzim, and in the day of the Battle of Kabreh I was on my way to Beirut to bring weapons and ammunition to the Hagana and the men of the adjacent Kibbutz Ivren [Evron]. Moreover, on several occasions I went with the Jewish forces to villages and houses. I, also, used to bring food and all the needed supplies to the Hagana forces and the adjacent Kibbutzim. When my village “Gabssiah” was occupied, I had an agreement with a man from my village, Daoud al-Zebneh, according to which he would raise a white ag on the mosque. He did so, but the soldiers killed him. Then I went to the village of Yerka where I was contacted by Jewish men of the authorities who asked me to return [to my village] and become the Mukhtar [chief ]; I did so for the year 1949 – 50. Then I was asked by the regional commander [Yizrael Vshenski] to move to the village of Sheikh Daoud to become a Mukhtar and the person in charge of Sheikh Daoud and Sheikh Danown, because they wanted to seal off Gabssiah. At the beginning of 1951 the Military Governor of the area [Moshe Rayzer] asked me to move to [the village of ] Mizra’ah and become a Mukhtar, so I did. Since then, I have been collaborating with the State without a salary or other material bene
ts. . . . My economic situation has been deteriorating, since I am the breadwinner of eight persons, most of them are pupils in school. And for a long time I have not been able to buy even essential food . . . I received many promises but have not gotten basic assistance for livelihood. (‘Awad 1960)

It causes uneasiness, even from a dispassionate perspective, to reect on the behaviors of the letter’s composer. He collaborated during the war with the enemy, gave information to the Israeli Army to raid houses of

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Palestinians whom he had intimately known, collaborated in the transfer of his community, and continued to represent the regime in other localities to which he was transferred thereafter. However, through collaboration he had been unable either to salvage his community from the tragic fate of transfer or to improve his economic well-being. From a letter that he would write two years later, we learn that he was about to lose the small plot upon which he had constr ucted his new house (which he had received in exchange for the big house and large plot of land that he had owned in his village of origin) (‘Awad 1962). The letter also reveals the paradoxical nature embodied in his position, a paradox that emanated from the absence of an ideological frame of reference that could justify his behavior. While he employed the attering terms of justice and democracy to characterize the state, his narrative of the state’s treatment of the Palestinians undermined this description. The imposition of the military government, the transfer of civilians from their village, the killing of the mukhtar who raised a white ag signaling surrender, could not possibly verify either democracy or justice. Endeavors by collaborators to paint with agreeable colors a mode of governance that is based on coercion are constantly undermined by the normal functioning of the state apparatus, thus denying them the opportunity to shake off, even temporarily, the stigmatizing content of their role. In occasions of overt resistance to or conicts around the method of governance, even the attempt of justi
cation itself becomes unworthy. For example, on 20 February 1963 a crucial vote in the Knesset took place on four motions to abolish the military government. The government was able to vote down one of these motions with a slim majority of 57 to 56 because two Arab Knesset members — Jabber Dahish Muadi and Diab Obeid — voted with the government, while the other two — Ahmad Kamel Al-Dahir and Elias Nakhleh — played the tactic of abstention and voting against each of them at a time (Al-Hameshmar 1963; Kol Haam 963). They did so despite immense public pressure placed on them by the Palestinian population (by, for example, the Jewish-Arab Committee for the Abolishment of the Military Government 1963; Kussa 1963a; the Popular Committee 1963) and an unprecedented support by Knesset members from various parties — including Herut (a right-wing party then headed by Manachem Begin), MAPAM (a left-wing Zionist party), the Communist Party, the Liberals, and Ahdut Haavoda (a split-off party from MAPAI) — for abolishing this regime. Calls were also made by public
gures, including a petition signed by more than one hundred lecturers from the Hebrew University (Lecturers at the Hebrew University n.d.). Realizing the considerable pressure placed on the Arab Knesset members, Ben-Gurion decided to counter it through the sheer weight of his

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status. In a symbolic act of support, he met the Arab Knesset members (af
liated with MAPAI) to “discuss” with them the military government. The protocol of the meeting shows that they sought to please the prime minister by rehearsing the of
cial arguments. For example, Knesset member Diab Obeid said in his presentation: “I am pleased that this meeting of consultation regarding the Military Government has taken place, because the existence of the Military Government is as important for the State’s security as it is for the security of the Arab minority. . . . We assume that if the Military Government exists for security requirements then there would not be a decent Arab who would oppose it.” Similarly, Jabber Muadi said: We are amidst a conicting situation whether to vote for or against [the Military] Government. In fact, the Arabs are divided into two camps. The
rst hates Israel, the second seeks peace and loves Israel. The increase or decrease in the number of either camp depends on our handling of the affairs. We do not want anarchy, since it is against the Government and against us. We ask the party [MAPAI] to strengthen our position, and I suggest that every improvement or betterment which would be extended to the Arab population pass through the Arab Knesset members. (Protocol of the Meeting between the Prime Minister, Ben-Gurion, and the Arab Knesset Members n.d.)

The Israeli regime was in need of Palestinian collaborators, although there were a considerable number of Jews who spoke Arabic uently, and familiarized itself with the local customs prior to 1948. This requirement stemmed from the nature of the regime and the kind and scope of services that it could deliver. The regime designed to segregate the Palestinians institutionally. The Palestinians were prevented from directly approaching the bureaucracy and were excluded from the main political associations (for example, political parties) as well as of
cial and semiof
cial organizations (such as the farmers’ organizations and the Histadrut until 1960). Instead, a surrogate system based on favoritism was created for them. The collaborators were assigned some positions in this system, both to create a veneer of legitimacy for segregation and to give them the resources needed to ful
ll special assignments for the regime. Indeed, according to the of
cial claim, the treatment of the Palestinian minority through separate channels stemmed from the democratic principles of pluralism and autonomy (see, for example, Stendel 1973). This specious argument, however, was less signi
cant than the instrumental reasons for it. In this system, Palestinian collaborators were given the function of intermediaries. On many occasions Palestinians approached these collaborators in order to receive minor bene
ts from the state. Such favors

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included requests to be among the few who could meet relatives living in the West Bank and Jordan through the Mandelbaum Gate, to secure employment in the educational system, to get a telephone line, to receive permits for a variety of purposes, to seek medical treatment in the city, to import a machine (mainly tractors), to get a few days of work outside the locality, to get a travel permit to visit relatives living in other localities, to get a license for a business, and so on. Some bene
ts were of a collective nature, such as state support to build a school, connecting the village to the electricity grid or to the telephone network, and the like. The collaborators were not in positions to decide on the awarding of these bene
ts, however. They could only recommend and plead in the name of the person(s) concerned. Despite that, it was essential for both the collaborators and the regime that the collaborators bestow the bene
ts. This way of delivery meant to connect Palestinians through personal loyalties and feelings of gratitude to the collaborators, thus facilitating the ful
llment of their assignments. These assignments included,
rst, surveillance and information gathering. They had to supply comprehensive, credible, and timely information on the movements, the political behaviors, and the attitudes of Palestinians, including the unveiling of what Scott (1985) called “hidden transcripts.” Second, the collaborators were needed to deliver the enlistment of Palestinians’ support for the state and the ruling party, MAPAI. They not only had to report on political dissidents but also had to actively propagate the of
cial discourse. Moreover, they had to secure the lion’s share of the Arab vote for Arab lists af
liated with MAPAI and for MAPAI itself. Third, they functioned as gatekeepers. Their ability to provide immediate and accurate information enabled the regime to minimize mistakes and misidenti
cation in the granting of bene
ts. Moreover, that helped to foster the myths that surrounded the regime — such as authorities’ complete knowledge of what every person did or thought — thus contributing to further demoralization and suspiciousness of the Palestinian population. The state system of control, based on favoritism and collaboration, functioned with a reasonable degree of effectiveness due to both the restrictions imposed by the military government and the success of the regime in sustaining the kinship structure (extended family, hamula, and tribe). Moreover, these conditions explain the low costs of the system’s operations. Indeed, the letter of Mr. ‘Awad quoted above demonstrates that he had not received any
nancial bene
ts for his collaboration. Similar cases show that other collaborators did not get much
nancial reward, either. Instead they received symbolic bene
ts through their status as intermediaries, wherein they came in contact with the representatives of the ruling power and through that exercised authority over their compa-

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triots. They came from the traditional sections of the population and were prisoners of a worldview that laid emphasis on status, power, and their attached symbols. Moreover, collaboration is a self-perpetuating practice. The success of collaborators means, by the very de
nition of their function, the foiling of their social relations with various sections of their community. This increases their dependence upon the regime and makes their position more precarious, as the regime can always replace them with others from the “counterelite,” those who are always ready to step in and
ll vacant positions. The veiled and occasionally unveiled threat by MAPAI toward the collaborators had been manifested in various ways. For example, MAPAI used to establish more than one list attached to it in the local and the general elections.

They came from the traditional sections of the population and were prisoners of a worldview that laid emphasis on status, power,

New Agents, New Consciousness and their Soon after the abolishment of the military government, cracks in the system of control, which had been based on collaboration, became conspicuous. Lamenting this development, Shmouel Tolidano (who held the position of the prime minister’s adviser on Arab affairs between 1965 and 1977 and by virtue of that was responsible for the running of the daily life of Palestinians) argued in a closed discussion held on 20 June 1968 that “obviously it is easier to control persons like Diab Obeid. The question, however, [is] is it worthwhile to keep this kind of leader?” (Committee Dealing with Arab Affairs 1968, 19). These questions were bluntly stated; as Tolidano presented in detail the state’s policy toward the Palestinians, he raised the question: Should the state keep its support of the current leadership or should it cultivate a new breed? Indeed, the question concerning the identity of an Arab leadership that could both accept and promulgate the of
cial discourse — which was at odds with the everyday life experiences of most Palestinians — and at the same time could receive the respect and support of the Palestinians bewildered Israeli politicians and bureaucrats in charge of Arab affairs for a considerable time. This new leadership had also to
t into the new mode of governance that had to be formulated. The result of this endeavor was an attempt to develop a method of governance akin to what Femia (1988) has called “minimal hegemony.” According to this model, the regime develops a coherent political, economic, and ideological worldview for the dominant group, while it develops a framework of common interests with some sections among the subordinates, propagates abstract ideals, and places special emphasis on social norms that serve its interests — such as loyalty and personal success.

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This method yielded multiple policies. The
rst part, which included the incorporation of Mizrahi Jews in the Zionist project, began with their arrivals during the early 1950s. They were viewed as potential Zionists — in the same way as blacks in Africa were considered by white missionaries to be potential Christians — who could be integrated into the lower ranks of Israeli Jewish society after an intense process of Westernization, a process that Israeli social scientists identi
ed as composed of desocialization (the elimination of their Arab culture) and resocialization (teaching them Western, “civilized” modes of behavior, values, and aesthetics). This policy, called the “melting pot” (Kor Hitukh), was to be implemented through the functioning of various institutions, most notably the army and the educational system (see in particular Segev 1984, chap. 2). As for the Palestinians, they were the ultimate Other, an unassimilated group that, given its religions, history, collective memories, language, and so on, would always be excluded and dominated. However, domination and exploitation were to be submerged and blurred by policies of divide-andrule1 and favoritism and by promises of progress, prosperity, and idealized modern life. To ensure the success of this method, the regime had to enlist the support of some sections of the subordinate population’s intellectual elite, a group that has to ful
ll the function of mysti
cation, in Fanon’s (1968) terminology. The choice of new agents of the regime was of
cially announced by Prime Minister Golda Meir in her 1971– 72 budget address to the Knesset: “Among the Arabs of Israel, the educated, young, natives of Israel and graduates of secondary schools and institutions of higher learning in Israel are endeavoring to break out of the traditional social frameworks and to obtain representation in the leadership of the Arab population, in the Knesset, in local councils, municipalities and public institutions” (quoted in Stendel 1973, 205). In her speech, the “educated elite” was identi
ed as the targeted group from which agents of the regime would be chosen, and the discourse of knowledge and modernization was put forward as the abstract ideals that they had to promulgate. Although the modernization discourse, which portrays Zionism and later on the Israeli state as agents of modernizing the Arabs, dates back to the late nineteenth centur y (Sa’di 1997), Golda Meir’s presentation moved it to a new terrain. To use the modernization discourse for the purpose of mysti
cation through local leaders, there was a need to attach to it symbols, codes, subtexts and terms, and so on. These symbols and codes compose shortcuts and catchphrases that constitute a common understanding between the rulers and those from the subaltern who accept the of
cial discourse regarding the reading of reality, the interpretation of the country’s history, the nature of the regime, and the role assigned to the minority.

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Indeed, the differences between the new agents of the regime, to whom Israeli politicians and academics have frequently referred as the “New Arabs,” and the “dignitaries” are clearly evident in the letters that they sent to Jewish of
cials in charge of Arab affairs. First, while the old type drafted their letters mostly in poor Arabic, the New Arabs wrote their letters in clear and occasionally good Hebrew. Second, the old-type collaborators were preoccupied with symbolic and occasionally economic rewards in exchange for their collaboration; in contrast, the New Arabs asked for jobs, mainly in the bureaucracy and the state-run Arab educational system. Third, while the old-type collaborators used outright the language of hypocrisy, the New Arabs employed ideological terms and concepts that carefully masked their status and covered the majorityminority relations with an agreeable facade. The following letter, sent by a teacher who aspired to become an inspector to a high-ranking Arabist in MAPAI’s Arab department, illustrates the style of writing adopted by the New Arabs: Z. N. Taiba, 5.1.1967 Mr. Amnon Linn: I am Z. N. from the village of Taiba, I applied for an opening of inspector on 1 December 1966, advertised by the Arab department at the ministry of education and culture in Jerusalem. I see myself suitable to get this position, in the light of my activities, which are known to you, to Mr. Yacov Cohen, and to other of
ces. I am collaborating in a positive way, and even more, with these institutions and the state. I am most hopeful to get your help and the required recommendation. Sincerely Z. N. (1967)

Two points are noteworthy in this letter. First is the absence of any reference to the quali
cations of this person. Not only did he not consider his educational quali
cations worth mentioning or relevant to the position of inspector to which he applied, but he emphasized instead his collaboration as the criterion according to which he wants to be judged. Second, the letter was composed in Hebrew and includes various subtexts such as the term positive, an attribute that is given by the regime to those who have actively proven their appreciation of the regime and the endorsement of its ideology. An additional illustration of such subtexts is included in the following letter. The history of the relations between the letter’s sender and the Ara-

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bist to whom it is addressed exempli
es the wide gap that separates the ideology to which these subtexts allude and the actual social reality. M. A. G. The village of T. The Haver Amnon Linn The head of the Labor Party’s Arab Department The Acceptance of my daughter to Haifa’s teacher training college. Dear Haver, As you may remember, my daughter was dismissed from Haifa’s teacher training college, last year at the end of the
rst semester. This year she
lled in the relevant forms [of application] and was invited for an interview. I want to ask you (again) for help so that she will be accepted; thank you in advance. Greetings (G., M. A. 1968)

The content of the letter seems banal; given the corrupt nature of the state-run Arab educational system, an Arab man — who was MAPAI’s supporter and a Histadrut activist — asks the support of an Arabist from MAPAI’s Arab department to secure the admission of his academically underachieving daughter to the teacher training college. One of the codes used in the letter is the Hebrew word Haver, which has two meanings: the
rst is “friend.” Was the sender a personal friend of Mr. Linn? The answer is negative. From a dispute that erupted between the two a few months after the sending of this letter, we learn that they loathed each other. Thus, the word Haver could not possibly be used to indicate friendship. Had the word Haver been used in its second meaning, “comrade”— a title that members of socialist parties use to address each other? The answer is also negative. As a Palestinian, he could not be possibly accepted into the ranks of MAPAI, an exclusively Jewish party. What is the meaning of the word Haver in the letter, then? It does not have any exact meaning. Yet it has a signi
cant function; it was used to create a common ground with the Arabist, based on the sender’s appreciation of the claimed values of Mr. Linn’s party: a recognition of the values of equality, equity, and fairness that are supposed to form the basis of MAPAI as a socialist party and the attitudes of its members. Thus, by employing the word Haver, he implicitly appeals to these principles and expresses his recognition and appreciation of them. However, the very act of writing and sending the letter illustrates how in reality these principles are violated. Beyond that, the last two letters allude to a disturbing insight relating to subordinates’ consciousness. An adoption of the minimal hegemony seems to result, at

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least during the formative stages, not as much from the lure of the regime’s created ideology as from the active collaboration of persons and segments from the subordinate group. Moreover, the new regime’s agents tended to characterize majorityminority relations in terms of amenable coexistence while underplaying existing power relations. Such an ideological obfuscation found its most pronounced articulation by ‘Abd al-’Aziz al-Zu’bi, a successful New Arab who served as a deputy minister of health, and who is frequently mentioned for coining the phrase “My nation
ghts my state,” a statement that suggests that the Palestinians have similar af
nity to both parties, the Arab nation and the Israeli state. This despite the fact that they were considered by the Israeli regime an enemy af
liated group (Smooha 1978) and despite the self-de
nition of Israel as a Jewish state, a designation that implies the exclusion of the Palestinian minority from the group in whose name the state acts.

Typologies of the Ruling Political Culture Counterpoising the partial hegemony and its derivative subtexts and codes, a framework of concepts and typologies had been developed in the dominant political culture. These classi
cations aimed at the objectivizing of punishment and the awarding of bene
ts. The following letter sent by Mr. Mashel, who served as MAPAI’s regional of
cer in charge of the Palestinian communities in the Triangle to Mr. Amnon Linn, reveals some of the tenets in the construction of these categorizations. 2.8.1966 To: The Comrade Amnon Linn: By: Maer Mashel. M. A. Id —The village of Taiba He is the son of the Inspector A. I., graduate of “Hadasim,” achieved the Bagrut certi
cate. The Headmaster of Hadasim gave good and positive information on him. He applied to the faculty of Medicine in [the University of ] Jerusalem, and sat for the exam. We [I] strongly recommend helping him to be accepted to this department. And, to get a place in the student’s residential hall. With Comradeship (Mashel 1966)

According to the letter, the young man deserves help in light of various considerations. First, he is the son of a well-known inspector (that is, collaborator). It is assumed that his “positive” character is a result of his

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Palestinians are divided into positives and negatives. This dichotomy has become a cornerstone in any discussion on the Palestinians in the media, policy-making circles, and academia.

upbringing. Second, he studied at “Hadasim,” a Jewish school. The secondary socialization, at school, should have reinforced his understanding, acceptance, and appreciation of the hegemonic culture. Third, the school’s headmaster — a Jewish person — con
rms that the young man is “positive.” Fourth, he is academically good: the headmaster attested to that, and the young fellow proved himself by achieving the matriculation certi
cate, a rather exceptional achievement at that time. Mr. Mashel summarizes all of that in two similar though distinguishable terms: “good and positive.” This combination is what makes this person worth helping. While the word good comes to describe his educational standards, the word positive represents his position as a potential collaborator. Various classi
cations of the Palestinians have been constructed. For example, Shimon Peres, who served in many senior positions, including minister of defense, head of the Labor Party, and prime minister, divided the Palestinian minority into three categories: “the indifferent resigned; the actively hostile; the hostile resigned” (Lustick 1982, 67). Peres’s typology has not gained much prominence because it implies an admission of the regime’s inability to create New Arabs. The widely accepted classi
cation, however, has been the one in which the Palestinians are divided into positives and negatives. This dichotomy has become a cornerstone in any discussion on the Palestinians in the media, policy-making circles, and academia. Sometimes the labels of positive and negative are substituted by the terms moderates (Metunim) and extremists (Kitzonieem) (see, for example, Cohen 1990; Landau 1969, 1992; Rekhess 1976; Soffer 1983; Diskin 1989; Linn 1999). Relying on this common understanding, Koenig suggested in his policy recommendations to Yitzhak Rabin, then prime minister: “Steps should be taken against all negative personalities at all levels and in all institutions” (Koenig 1976, 194). Meanwhile, the sociologist Sammy Smooha (1989), who has surveyed Palestinian public opinion over the last two decades, split the categories of this dichotomy into four for further re
nement; his typology of Palestinians’ political orientations are accommodationists, reservationists, oppositionists, and rejectionists.

The Other Side of the Coin As various social thinkers and philosophers — most notably Gramsci, Scott, Foucault, and Said — have emphasized, the subordinates upon whom power is practiced tend to develop ways of resistance. For example, Said has compellingly argued: “No social system, no historical vision, no

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theoretical totalization, no matter how powerful, can exhaust all the alternatives and the practices that exist within its domain. There is always the possibility to transgress” (Said 1991, 55). Similarly, Scott has shown that in situations where the disparities of power between the dominant and the dominated are paramount, the subordinates tend to employ methods of resistance that he calls “weapons of the weak.” These methods aim at “working the system for their minimum disadvantage” (Scott 1985, 301). In the following, I present the sites, described in the previous sections, where collaboration took place from the viewpoint of those who chose the option of resistance. A different history of the village Gabssiah during its critical period comes to light in the letter Mr. ‘Ali Muhammad Abd-Al-hamead sent to the editor of the Ha’aretz newspaper, published on 12 January 1958. During the winter of 1950, in the period of the heavy snow, the residents of the village of Gabssiah were expelled, including myself, and were settled in a place distancing less than
ve hundred meters from the village, i.e., in Sheikh Danoun. We appealed to the high court of justice, and we won the case. However, the Defense Minister took a swift action and changed the law with a retroactive validity, and therefore we were denied the right to enter the village. . . . We compiled a second appeal to the high court of justice, which expressed astonishment regarding the explanations given by the Military Governor. . . . We sent several letters to the Justice Minister, but did not receive his response. . . . The answer came on 2 January when the army entered the village and demolished all the houses. Thus a fait accompli was created in order to silence the residents, with a court decision or without it. (Abd-Al-hamead 1958)

The letter reveals that although weak, defeated, and exiled, some of the residents tried to act through all possible venues. They did so despite formidable obstacles: having no command of Hebrew, which was the of
cial language; lacking knowledge regarding the system of government and its procedures; deprived of freedom of movement and expression under the restrictions of the military government; and not possessing, as refugees, the
nancial means needed for their struggle. Despite all this, they were able to gain a symbolic victory: a verdict of the Israeli high court of justice con
rming that their expulsion was illegal. The second case revolves around the vote in the Knesset for the abolishment of the military government. The reaction of Elias Kussa, a nationalist lawyer from Haifa, was diametric to that of Knesset member Diab Obeid. On 27 February 1963, he sent the following letter to Mr. Obeid:

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To his honour Mr. Diab Obeid Knesset Member Jerusalem Dear Mr. Obeid Greetings I am sending you my deepest congratulatory wishes on the occasion of the Ramadan feast, may God ensure that the feast return for many years to come, and that you and your family will continue to be joyful and happy. Attached to this letter please
nd the memorandum that I sent to BenGurion, in which I refute the false, imsy and misleading allegations that he made during the discussion in the Knesset dealing with the four motions for the abolishment of the Military Government. I am sad that your position regarding these motions was utterly shameful. . . . The Arab history will not forget the disgraceful crime that you committed against your people. And in the future you will regret carrying out this wrong deed because you are merely a tool, like all the oppressive and dishonest persons who preceded you in the Party who were thrown to the rubbish bin when they became useless [to their masters]. May God forgive you, and guide you to the way of justice, faith and Arab consciousness. Sincerely Yours Elias Kussa (Kussa 1963b)

Although Mr. Kussa lived and worked in Haifa, which as a mixed city was excluded from the areas upon which the military government was imposed, and thus he was only partially affected by its restrictions, he sought to
ght this regime that caused much suffering to his compatriots. In his letter he aimed at giving expression to the feelings of indignation that most Palestinians felt regarding Mr. Obeid’s voting. By giving voice to the largely silent majority of the Palestinians, he underscored his commitment to the role of organic intellectual that he assumed. It is worth noting that although the letter is personal, it found its way to the Labor Party’s archive, thus suggesting that Mr. Obeid passed into the party personal letters that he received, including this embarrassing one, a sign of limitless loyalty to his masters. In addition to Mr. Kussa’s letter, expressions of condemnation of the Arab Knesset members’ voting included two leaets, one signed by the Committee Demanding the Abolishment of the Military Government — Acre (1963) and the other by the Committee of the Arab Students at the Hebrew University (1963). The third site of collaboration consists of the creation of a Palestinian co-opted elite composed mostly of the traditional intellectuals, those who were employed in the educational system, the religious institutions, and

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the bureaucracy. The resistance to this group took the shape of informal popular methods, similar to those described by Scott (1985), including nicknaming, slander, and black humor. For example, one joke on the teachers states: “Throw a stone [in another version a boot] in an Arab village and you hit either a dog or a teacher” (Lustick 1982, 22). Describing this atmosphere, where conict between the minimal hegemony and the popular counterhegemony was prevalent, an ex-teacher and ex–Knesset member wrote: “The Arab teacher
nds himself trapped between the educational program prepared by the Ministry of Education and the informal education absorbed by his student, which is much stronger than the formal classroom education. This clash causes the social status of the teacher to decline in the eyes of both the students and the community at large: he is regarded as one who has surrendered, a coward” (Sadik 1984, 59). Beginning in the early 1970s but mainly since the 1980s, some educated Palestinians have sought to challenge the method of co-optation through the legal system. Various appeals were
led to the high court of justice in which dubious procedures of teachers’ hiring and promotion to management positions were challenged (Mazawi 1996).

Reintegration Palestinian agents of the regime function within a communal life that their activities tend to alter. The veil of respectability that covers the public attitude toward them usually drops when they leave of
ce, and the deepseated feelings of resentment and despisement surface. Moreover, some collaborators might realize that contempt and disgust constitute the underlying attitudes of their masters toward them. For example, Golda Meir stated in a party meeting on 15 January 1951 that when she saw an Arab swear allegiance to the State of Israel three times a day, “I feel bad,” the same ill feeling that she experienced when she sees (as a Zionist) an assimilated Jew (Benziman and Mansour 1992, 19). In the light of that, Ben-Gurion’s meeting with the Arab Knesset members before the decisive voting on the abolishment of the military government, discussed earlier, was a way of granting them respect, an act that highlights the background of dishonor that their public careers entail. Lacking the inuence of of
ce and the prospect of integration into the Jewish society, ex-collaborators tend to look for new bases for reintegration in the communal life, which their past activities meant to undermine. The
rst way of reintegration is the religious path. By making the pilgrimage to Mecca, ex-collaborators free themselves from accountability

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for past behaviors, as pilgrimage in the Islamic tradition amounts to rebirth. Thus they hold to the title Hajji, an icon of the status of virtuous elder, which they aspire to achieve. For example, Z. N., who described himself as “collaborating in a positive way, and even more, with these institutions and the state,” continued after his retirement to publish articles in the teachers’ journal, with the addition of the title Hajji to his name. The second path of reintegration is political rehabilitation. During the
rst Intifada, various collaborators publicly renounced their past conduct. The most senior of these was ‘Abd al-Wahab Darawsheh, who personi
ed the New Arab’s type. His biography is illustrative of a journey that ended in complete rehabilitation and reintegration. Since his early manhood, Mr. Darawsheh associated himself with the state and the Labor Party, serving in various representational positions in and on behalf of the party. His activities continued as he was promoted from teacher to headmaster and inspector. In 1984 he was elected in the Labor Party’s list to the Knesset (Reiter 1989, 66 – 67). The outbreak of the Intifada put in danger a career that seemed promising. He could not possibly continue claiming to represent the Palestinians in Israel and at the same time sit on the Labor Party benches alongside Yitzhak Rabin, who, then a minister of defense, ordered the Israeli army to break the Palestinian protesters’ bones. Moreover, his usefulness to the Labor Party in the future seemed to diminish dramatically. As a way out of the dead end in his political career, Mr. Darawsheh chose to leave the Labor Party and move to “nationalist camp.” He did so in a theatrical manner. He announced his resignation from the ranks of the Labor Party amid a public rally held in Nazareth in support of the Intifada (ibid., 67). Following his split from the Labor Party, Mr. Darawsheh established a political party — the Arab Democratic Party — which appealed to Palestinian voters, and as an independent Palestinian politician in the Knesset, he held many meetings with Mr. Arafat — the symbol of the Palestinian national movement— and leaders of many Arab countries. Moreover, although he has not made the pilgrimage, one of the Islamic movement’s factions (the southern faction headed by Shiekh Abdullah Nemir Darwish) gave him its backing in the 1992 election. In 1996 this faction composed with Darawsheh’s party “the United Arab List” to participate in the elections held that year. This list exists in the Knesset to the present day (December 2002). While the title Hajji became the icon of those who have chosen rehabilitation through the religious way, a photographed meeting with Mr. Arafat (since the signing of the Oslo accord) has become the icon of those who opted for the political path.

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Conclusion The main argument advanced in this article is that the Palestinians in Israel have been incorporated into the Israeli state through a system of collaboration. This mode derives from the nature of Israel as a Jewish state, thus unable to integrate the Palestinians living within its boundaries as equal citizens. By the imposition of the military government and the establishment of the system of collaboration, the regime was able to keep up the tenuous existential conditions of the minority. The system of collaboration was crude and instrumental in nature, in that it lacked an ideological superstructure. The removal of the restrictions imposed by the military government led to the disintegration of the classical system of collaboration and its eventual substitutions by new arrangements of co-option. Although collaboration and co-option were set to achieve the same objective — the incorporation of the minority by the state while keeping its subaltern position— their setup, their internal contradictions, and the forces that work upon them varied. The system of collaboration was constructed where a distance existed between the dominant and the dominated, a distance that could have had undesirable consequences for the regime. Being excluded from the state’s socializing mechanisms and dominant institutions, the minority was able to maintain its identity, norms, memory, ethos, and a sense of solidarity that had been bolstered by feelings of oppression. In such circumstances, the collaborators were needed to unveil to the regime the hidden transcripts of the minority and to weaken the social solidarity among its members through selective awarding of favors. In contrast, the system of co-option, although it represented a more advanced method of collaboration, was set to change the identity of the minority, its culture, and its ideological frame of reference. The minimal hegemony created by the regime for the minority, while disregarding the subordinate status of the Palestinians, highlighted the role of the state and the Jewish majority as modernizing agents. Moreover, it designated the traditional intellectuals (in the Gramscian sense) to personify the culture of the New Arab. Representing this conception, the sociologist Sammy Smooha writes: “The new Arab was born and has been educated since the establishment of the state, has at least post primary education, has command in both Arabic and Hebrew, and is versed in both Arab and Israeli culture. . . . He accepts Israel and sees his future tied to it” (quoted in Ehrlich 1987, 23). Smooha’s reference to the New Arab, as expressing the of
cial discourse, disregards the role that power and ideology play in the construction and operation of cultures, as well as the role that those who personify cultures

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(the culture that reects the ruling ideology and counterculture) play in the continuance of certain forms of power relations. The resistance of Palestinians has taken place at particular sites, and occasionally it has been directed against the system of collaboration as a whole. The repentance of some ex-collaborators demonstrates that these forms of resistance were successful in delegitimizing the system of collaboration, thus leaving the ideological superstructure among Palestinians beyond the state’s control.

Notes Many people made comments on different drafts of the article, gave insightful suggestions, or helped in the translation and editing of various citations; in particular I am thankful to Timothy Mitchell, Gyan Prakash, Ella Shohat, Neve Gordon, Catherine Rottenberg, Elia Zureik, André Mazawi, Paul Kelemen, and Geraldine Billingham. 1. As part of this policy, in 1962 the Druze were recognized as a separate community from the Palestinians, six years after the beginning of their conscription to the Israeli Army. The conscription of Druze to the army became a main component around which their identity evolved. For example, the
ve religious principles were instrumentalized and became the motif of the
ve-stripe ag of their army unit. However, these developments did not lead to the emergence of a new category essentially different from the two existing national groups of Jews and Palestinians. The Druze identity became a “half identity,” as they are treated as Arabs in some respects and as non-Arabs in others (on this subject, see Oppenhiemer 1979).

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Lecturers at the Hebrew University. n.d. A petition against the continuation of the military government. Files 26/11. Labor Party’s archive, Beit-Berl, Israel. Linn, Amnon. 1999. Stormy skies: Jews and Arabs in Israel (in Hebrew). Tel Aviv: Karni. Lustick, Ian. 1982. Arabs in the Jewish state: Israel’s control of a national minority. Austin: University of Texas Press. Mashel, Maer. 1966. A letter: To Mr. Amnon Linn, no. 2125, 2 August. Files 3/1. Labor Party’s archive, Beit-Berl, Israel. Mazawi, André. 1996. Patterns of competition over school management positions and the mediation of social inequalities: A case study of high court of justice petitions against the appointment of principals in public Arab schools in Israel. Israel Social Science Research 11.1: 87 –114. N., Z. 1967. A letter: To Mr. Amnon Linn, 5 January. Files 26/12/15. Labor Party’s archive, Beit-Berl, Israel. Oppenhiemer, Jonathan. 1979. The Druze as Arabs and as non-Arabs (in Hebrew). Mahbarot LeMehkar Velabikoret 3: 41– 58. Popular Committee. 1963. A letter: To Their Honor: Ahmad Kamel al-Dahir, Diab Obeid, Elias Nakhleh, Jabber Muadi, 8 February. Files 26/11. Labor Party’s archive, Beit-Berl, Israel. Protocol of the Meeting between the Prime Minister, Ben-Gurion, and the Arab Knesset Members. n.d. Files 26/11.1. Labor Party’s archive, Beit-Berl, Israel. Reiter, Yitzhak. 1989. The Arab Democratic Party and its place in the orientation of the Israeli Arabs (in Hebrew). In The Arab vote in Israel’s parliamentary elections, 1988, edited by Jacob Landau. Jerusalem: Jerusalem Institute for Israeli Studies. Rekhess, Elie. 1976. Israeli Arabs since 1967: The issue of identity (in Hebrew). Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University. Robinson, Ronald. 1972. Non-European foundations of European imperialism: Sketch for a theory of collaboration. In Studies in the theory of imperialism, edited by Roger Owen and Bob Sutcliffe, 117– 42. New York: Longman. Sa’di, Ahmad. 1997. Modernisation as an explanatory discourse of ZionistPalestinian relations. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 24.1: 25 – 48. Sadik, Walid. 1984. Towards a change in educational policy. New Outlook 27: 58 – 59. Said, Edward. 1991. Musical elaborations. New York: Columbia University Press. Scott, James. 1985. Weapons of the weak: Everyday forms of peasant resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Segev, Tom. 1984. 1949: The First Israelis (in Hebrew). Jerusalem: Domino. Smooha, Sammy. 1978. Israel: Pluralism and con
ict. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1989. Arabs and Jews in Israel: Con
icting and shared attitudes in a divided society. Boulder, Colo.: Westview. Soffer, Arnon. 1983. Geographical aspects of change within the Arab communities in northern Israel. Middle Eastern Studies 19: 213 – 43. Stendel, Ori. 1973. The minorities in Israel: Trends in the development of Arab and Druze communities, 1948 –1973. Jerusalem: Israel Economist.

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Visions of the Future during Political Transitions C O M PA R I N G A F R I K A N E R A N D I S R A E L I AT T I T U D E S

This essay focuses on discourses, anxieties, and competing strategies of white Afrikaners during the political transition in South Africa in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Its sources rely on opinion surveys, election results, political party pronouncements, academic analyses, and personal observations in lectures, group discussions, and formal interviews throughout this period. The article seeks to explore what can be learned from the negotiated settlement of a seemingly intractable ethnoracial conflict for the unresolved strife in the Middle East. When and why did a privileged ruling group consent to negotiate itself out of power? What divisions occurred and how were internal cleavages handled? How was the historic compromise marketed to a skeptical constituency? What role did civil society and dissidents play in the change? In short, can the South African “miracle” be replicated in the Middle East? Many activists advocate similar antiapartheid strategies (divestment, boycott) against Israel and assume that strong pressure would produce similar outcomes. There is nothing wrong with such idealistic optimism, except that it may foster illusions. The underlying assumption that the South Africa model of conflict resolution readily lends itself to export ignores unique historical circumstances. It may actually retard necessary new solutions by clinging to visions or processes of negotiation that may not work in another context. Above all, in South Africa an entire regime had to be changed, while in Israel the occupation and the status of the territories is the main contentious issue. Therefore, a more nuanced understanding of differences and similarities may enhance new approaches.

Differences and Similarities between South Africa and Israel/Palestine The lessons to be drawn were probed in a more comprehensive comparison, published as Peace-making in Divided Societies: The Israel–South Africa Analogy (Adam 2002), on which this essay elaborates. Six elements were evaluated in both contexts: economic interdependence, religious divisions, third-party intervention, leadership, political culture, and violence. As a background to the Afrikaner debate, it seems worthwhile to summarize Social Text 75, Vol. 21, No. 2, Summer 2003. Copyright © 2003 by Heribert Adam.

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the main arguments in each of the six realms for a clarification of the similarities and differences: 1. Economic interdependence and the emergence of a politicized union movement since the mid-1970s socialized South Africa in negotiation politics and trade-offs. The Israeli economy depends minimally on Palestinian labor, and the two economies exist more or less side by side. Israel uses closure as collective punishment. Palestinians are deprived of industrial action (strikes, consumer boycotts), which was heavily used by black South Africans to combat apartheid. Demographic ratios and dependency on black labor ruled out collective expulsion in favor of more expedient divideand-rule policies in South Africa. 2. Religion in South Africa served as a common bond to assail and delegitimize apartheid, while Judaism and Islam compete for sovereignty in Jerusalem. Religiously motivated settlers and ultraorthodox believers may not be as easily marginalized as Afrikaner extremists merely interested in territorial autonomy. 3. Both the African National Congress (ANC) and the National Party (NP) eschewed third-party intervention in their negotiations. An Israeli-Palestinian settlement depends heavily on a U.S. policy that strongly supports Israel. Sanctions (divestment and trade boycotts) are generally overrated in triggering South African change. Only loan refusals and, to a lesser extent, moral ostracism impacted significantly on the apartheid government. Such action against Israel by the West is inconceivable at present. Unlike Afrikaners, Israelis enjoy a supportive diaspora. 4. The South African negotiations were facilitated by a cohesive and credible leadership with a widely endorsed open mandate on both sides. Leaders could sell a controversial compromise to a skeptical constituency. Both the Israeli and Palestinian leadership is fragmented, with militant outbidding, a frequent tool of populist mobilization. The apartheid Westminster electoral system rewarded majority parties, in contrast to the minority influence in the proportional representation in Israel. 5. Much more personal interaction in a vertical status hierarchy shaped South African race relations, compared with the more horizontal social distance between Jews and Palestinians. Paternalism characterized Afrikaner attitudes. Moral erosion among the ruling elite in South Africa contrasts with moral myopia in Israel, a few hundred military objectors notwithstanding. Both sides in the Middle East display a collective sense of victimhood. Apartheid

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clearly privileged beneficiaries and disenfranchised a majority in a pariah state that lacked the universal legitimacy of Israel outside the Arab and Muslim world. 6. During the antiapartheid armed struggle, suicide was never used as a weapon and martyrdom never celebrated. Resulting from the huge power imbalance and the imagined Israeli defeat by Hizbollah in Lebanon, the tactics of the second Intifada are nevertheless counterproductive: the attacks on civilians unify Israeli public opinion on security and also destroy the social fabric of Palestinian society. In summary, on most counts, the differences between apartheid and Israel outweigh the similarities that could facilitate conditions to a negotiated compromise. Above all, opponents in South Africa finally realized that neither side could defeat the other, short of the destruction of the country. This perception of stalemate, as a precondition for negotiating in good faith, is missing in the Middle East. Peacemaking resulted in an inclusive democracy in South Africa, while territorial separation of the adversaries in two states is widely hailed as the solution in Israel/Palestine. However, despite some promising attempts at Taba in January 2001, the opponents are so far unable to reach a final agreement on the return of refugees, borders and settlers, and the status of Jerusalem. Contrasting insights from very different solutions to a communal conflict sheds light on the nature of ethnicity as well as the limits of negotiation politics.

Historical Background and Conceptual Clarification of “Settler States” Academic comparisons of domination and resistance mostly invoke the notion of settler societies. Alien intruders conquer and displace an indigenous population. They act on behalf of a metropolitan power. This colonial analogy has inspired both Palestinian and South African black resistance. However, settlers also develop their own interests, independent of and often against their sponsor abroad. The colonial concept leaves unanswered when and how settlers become indigenous. Yet the right of settlers to coexist with displaced people in the same land has long been conceded by mainstream Palestinian leaders and confirmed by the African National Congress’s Freedom Charter of 1955. Disputed issues are the terms of coexistence, the meaning of equal citizenship, and how to redress the legacy of past injustice.1 The notion of “settler societies” carries explanatory weight only if varieties are distinguished. As Donald Akenson has

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pointed out, “There is scarcely a society in Europe or North and South America that is not a settler society” (2001, 571). In the ideological battle for legitimacy, most Jewish analysts view their relationship with the Palestinians not as a colonial one, but as a conflict between two competing national entities. In their self-concept, Zionists are simply returning to their ancestral homeland, from which they were dispersed two millennia ago. Originally, most did not intend to exploit native labor and resources, as economic colonizers do. Probably the only unifying conviction across a deeply divided political spectrum in Israel concerns the preservation of a Jewish state as a response to historical antiSemitism. Such endorsements of an official ethnic state defy many prescriptions of multicultural citizenship in a liberal democracy. As a perceived sanctuary and guarantor of ethnic survival in a hostile neighborhood, however, it is based on the trauma of collective victimhood. The legacy of the Holocaust cannot be compared with Afrikaner anxieties. From the experience of victimization emanates the tendency to reject any criticism of Israeli policy by outsiders as anti-Semitism. Therefore, the clear distinction between despicable anti-Jewish sentiments and legitimate criticism of Israeli policy has to be made and underscored. The robust debate among the global Jewish community itself about Israeli policies demonstrates this distinction. Colonization out of necessity or out of greed makes little difference to the displaced indigenous people. The newcomers, however, acquire a different relationship to the land because they have no homeland to return to, unlike economic colonizers. Moreover, once the quest for a safe territory is focused on an imagined ancestral homeland, the guilt of alien intruders is removed. In their self-deception, Zionists now reclaimed the land “by right” of return. The later religious zealots of Gush Enumin even invoke divine destiny in occupying their outposts in Eretz Israel. Whatever the historical differences between Zionism and Afrikaner nationalism, their adherents share the notion of their current residential territory as their only homeland, regardless of whether this is accepted by their neighbors. The Zionist project was further strengthened demographically and ideologically by the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries in response to the establishment of Israel. These low-status Sephardim and their descendants in Israeli society form the backbone of anti-Arab hostility. These voters for right-wing parties deeply resent their double discrimination by Ashkenazi insiders and Arab outsiders previously. Similarly, the social base for right-wing Afrikaner parties was predominantly rural people, the lower echelons of the civil service, and the remnants of the Afrikaner working class — all sections that were dropped from state protection by an increasingly self-confident bureaucratic bourgeoisie.

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Six Categories of Political Attitudes and Strategies in Transitional Regimes Ruling groups must not be treated as monolithic blocs, particularly in ethnic democracies such as Israel and South Africa. Antagonisms within the dominant group often overshadow differences with designated opponents. Taking Afrikaners as an example, three categories of status quo supporters and three categories of dissident strategies may be distinguished. Each “ideal type” contains several distinct subconstituencies that are in constant flux and may overlap on some contested issues. The six categories on a right-left spectrum may be labeled: critical extremists, regime apologists, conformist bystanders, strategic dissenters, moral crusaders, and polarizing militants. Extremist Afrikaners, strongly opposed to the Afrikaner National Party government in the literal sense, were above all critical in potentially blocking reforms and negotiations, both electorally and violently. In the white election of 1989, this growing bloc commanded about 35 percent of the popular white vote and more than 40 percent of the Afrikaner vote. Critical extremists are often confused with neo-Nazi or fascist movements. The media focused heavily on the antics of Eugene Terre Blanche’s insignificant band of street performers and ignored the far more respectable ideologues of Treurnicht’s Conservative Party. While the AWB shared with European predecessors fascist symbols and the readiness to use violence, their goals differed. Fascist terror aimed at overthrowing democratic states and establishing a right-wing dictatorship. Ultraright Afrikaners, like Jewish settlers, support the ethnic state and want to preserve it and prevent its reform. Extremist terror emerges when the state is perceived as abandoning its traditional identity and conceding rights to common opponents. Looming peace settlements pose a real threat to groups that fear their special privileges will be eroded and that they will be betrayed by concessions to the enemy. Like the colons of Algeria, the loyalist vigilantes in Ulster, or the armed zealots in the occupied territories, Afrikaner paramilitaries targeted not only blacks, but above all their own volksvereir (traitors). Illegal armed challengers test the state’s monopoly of force. Since sections of the official security forces often sympathize with the rightwing extremists, the loyalty of the army and police is also at stake. In this contest, a conscript army representing all sections of society can be relied upon more than a self-selected professional force. On the whole, the South African police loyally backed the “legitimate” government and even shot some right-wingers in a decisive confrontation in Ventersdorp in 1989. During the transitional period of power-sharing between the

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National Party and the ANC, fragmented extremists became gradually marginalized by the moderation of influential leaders (Viljoen), gestures of reconciliation by the ANC, and the vague promise to achieve Afrikaner self-determination via political participation and “cultural councils.” Incorrigible extremists bent on sabotaging the new order in the security establishment and senior civil service received a generous golden handshake in what may be dubbed a “purchased revolution.” The right-wing strategy was decisively defeated in the last exclusively white referendum in March 1992, in which a surprising 69 percent of the white electorate gave de Klerk an open-ended mandate to negotiate a new constitution. The South African extremists also faced a hostile media that was answerable to reform-minded business or the state. Afrikaner extremists received little outside funding, all television and broadcasting channels were statecontrolled, and the maligned and ridiculed ethnic verkrampte (narrowminded) had to rely on grassroots mobilization for support. Regime apologists of the ruling National Party (NP) and the Broederbond, its think tank, since the early 1980s had adopted the language of reform and negotiation, provided conditions were ripe and pliable black leaders with credible legitimacy were available. Only a small minority in the inner circle of the NP considered “the communist-led ANC” to fit this bill. Another group hoped for a split between communists and nationalists, whom they considered more amenable without the Soviets and its South African Communist Party client dictating their strategy. Yet others wanted to build up Buthelezi’s Inkatha for an internal solution without the ANC. Great hope was placed on the co-optive strategy of separate parliaments for Coloureds and Indians, neglecting to consider that the omission of the African majority politicized all disenfranchised groups and led to the formation of a new united protest in the form of the UDF (United Democratic Front) in 1982. Many NP politicians also believed their own propaganda that the free-enterprise, law-and-order NP was relatively popular among the black majority. Some projected a 25 percent support vote among Africans, perhaps misled by the majority support of Coloured cultural Afrikaners for the NP. This unwarranted optimism — only 5 percent of the 76 percent of Africans voted for white-led parties in the first democratic elections — paradoxically led NP politicians to embrace a truly nonracial party system and to reject the Rhodesian model of guaranteed racial minority representation. In the words of Foreign Minister Pik Botha as quoted in Indicator: “In the new South Africa, the color of a person’s skin or his race will not form the power base of any political parties. Shared interests, values and standards will transcend racial lines so that ‘minority’ and ‘majority’

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should no longer be mistaken for ‘white’ and ‘black’ ” (1990, 10). Unlike the collective punishment meted out by the Israeli military, the South African army also believed that they could stem the revolutionary tide through material improvements of black life. A coordinating Security Management System was specifically set up to co-opt rather than alienate, in what the military defined as “the total onslaught.” General Georg Meiring explained what he called his “non-shooting war” as an activity that, ironically, also characterizes the strategy of Hamas: “Our strategy was not to keep the lid on, but rather to take the fire away from the pot. The major emphasis was on trying to win the hearts and minds of the people. We got involved in everything. For example, we had vets and doctors all over the show. We had teachers, we repaired windmills and waterholes. We looked after sick cattle and we built roads: you name it and we did it” (Hamann 2001, 62). When asked, in an interview with this author in July 2002, why the Israeli government does not use such sophisticated cooptation, a leading regime apologist whose name is being withheld bluntly confessed privately: “It is too costly and you do not need it when you want to get rid of an entire group.” Apartheid planners could not expect to get rid of their majority population, nor could they do without their labor, although the Bantustans functioned as dumping grounds for “surplus people.” Apartheid exploitation contrasts with Israeli exclusion as the main policy goal. Already in the 1970s, Prime Minister Vorster had used the slogan “adapt or die.” An Afrikaner future “too ghastly to contemplate” was painted as an alternative. In the early 1980s, a secret Broederbond circular identified the greatest risk to Afrikaner survival as “not to take any risks.” By the end of the decade, the Afrikaner electorate had slowly shifted to the left on apartheid issues, but to the right on security. Since 1986, a steady stream of dissidents, including a delegation of representatives of corporate South Africa, visited the exiled ANC leadership abroad. Initially the state sought to criminalize such contacts, just as in Israel the architects of Oslo are now denounced as “lackeys” of terrorists. After the fifty-person Dakar delegation returned from exploratory talks in July 1987, Defense Minister Magnus Malan threatened: “Those who talk to terrorists and condone terrorism owe South Africa an answer” (SAIR 1987: 55). In reality, at the same time P. W. Botha himself had authorized some trusted colleagues to establish secret contact with the ANC, especially the imprisoned Nelson Mandela. The National Intelligence chief explained in an interview with this author in March 2002 that “powerless people” constitute a nuisance and “only muddy the water” when they take it upon themselves to play high-level politics. Yet the informal, secret

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talks constituted a crucial learning process for both sides, clarified controversial issues, eased mutual suspicions, and laid the basis for subsequent formal agreements. The National Party fought the 1987 elections largely with a law-andorder campaign. Cabinet ministers boasted about the successes of the security forces, resulting largely from information forwarded to the police by the (black) public. Police Minister Vlok contended that his forces were effectively bloodying the nose of the ANC, and that they turned the assignments of insurgents into suicide missions (SAIR 1987: 56). All the while, the townships were in turmoil, there were frequent strikes in schools and factories, a few bombs exploded weekly in different parts of the country — mostly without causing loss of life — some police stations were attacked with hand grenades, and a permanent state of emergency was in force. In the 1989 elections the NP lost votes to both the CP (Conservative Party) and liberal DP (Democratic Party), but retained its majority of seats. Now issues of group rights, minority protection, and own affairs emerged strongly. After the resignation of the unpopular, bullying state president P. W. Botha, the pressure was on his successor, F. W. de Klerk, to deliver. In comparison with his close competitors for the position (Barend du Plessis and Pik Botha), de Klerk held the advantage of a cautious, conservative Transvaal image — a person who would not engage unnecessarily in liberal experiments, as proven in his previous role as hard-line education minister. In an interview two years later, one of his cabinet colleagues considered de Klerk an outright racist. In another interview in 1990, the finance minister, Barend du Plessis, confessed that “he as President would not have gotten away” with the policy shifts made by de Klerk, due to his suspect liberal image in the caucus and in the Afrikaner constituency. As with the Nixon/Kissinger reconciliation with China or Ronald Reagan’s détente with the Soviet Union, major policy shifts are easier to market when they are initiated by right-wing leaders. How far and how fast a new leader is willing to move obviously depends on many factors, not least on the assessment of voter support. The third category of “conformist bystanders” formed the majority of the Afrikaner population, and its interests and attitudes in the South African transition were decisive. Stanley Cohen (2001, 140) has stated “the word bystander has acquired the pejorative meanings of passivity and indifference.” While the majority of the voting public may be mere onlookers or spectators to the political process, they are not all politically apathetic, and most hold firm opinions. Their attitudes can be mobilized in elections or activated for other forms of irregular intervention. In a revealing survey of “white attitudes towards black majority rule” in 1979, 1984, and 1987, Pierre Hugo (1989) focused on such questions

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Table 1 Afrikaner Attitudes to Black Majority Rule in 1987 Statement

% Agree

Life for whites would carry on as before Physical safety of whites would be threatened Language and culture would be protected Income and living standards would suffer Law and order would be upheld Blacks would discriminate against whites White women would be molested by blacks Communist policies would be implemented White possessions would be safe

7.1 78.5 8.3 82.4 12.8 91.4 85.3 88.3 8.4

% Disagree 91.2 19.1 88.5 15.5 84.0 6.8 10.8 7.6 87.5

Source: Hugo 1989 Note: N=1,012

as “How frightened are whites and of what exactly are they frightened?” and “How long will white South Africans resist black majority rule, both in terms of capacity and will to resist?” Hugo assumes a pain threshold whose crossing breaks down the will to rule when the costs outweigh the benefits. In the late 1980s, virtually all South African social scientists, from the leading pollster Lawrence Schlemmer to astute analysts like Hermann Giliomee or Van Zyl Slabbert, agreed that Afrikaners in particular would not tolerate the loss of political status easily, that they would not hand over their state without major resistance, that they would not give up economic privilege, and that the whites’ fear of black rule was deeply entrenched. Indeed Hugo’s survey data (254) seem to confirm this assessment, particularly for Afrikaners. With hindsight, however, the predictions of Afrikaners digging in to defend their state to the last man proved wrong. The conventional wisdom of a bloodbath overlooked that the reported attitudes were, first, the result of indoctrination, not historical experience, and second, that they were mediated by influential leaders in an authoritarian culture. Therefore, if leaders redefine the threatening situation, their constituency is likely to follow. Clearly, Afrikaners entertained anxieties about a future under black rule, and a minority seriously flirted with establishing a volksstaat along the Jewish (Israeli?) model. However, the dream failed to garner support, and not only because of economic interdependence among the country’s ethnic groups. Unlike diaspora Jews, the ruling Afrikaner elite did not feel particularly vulnerable and had not faced persecution from blacks.

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victimhood.

Despite all the anxieties about black numbers swamping whites, white women being molested, or administrative chaos erupting, the paternalistic Afrikaner mindset did not believe that blacks collectively were inclined to — or even capable of — seriously harming their white overlords. To be sure, there was the occasional bombing of Wimpy bars and supermarkets or mines on remote farm roads, mainly attributed to white communists instigating blacks. Many civilians were maimed when guerrillas targeted the air force headquarters in a busy Pretoria street and when a black fringe group, the APLA (Azanian People’s Liberation Army) attacked a Cape Town church later, after negotiations had started. Still, most Afrikaners dismissed the armed struggle as the work of a few misguided communist terrorists. The signs of growing militancy did not shake the average bystander out of the customary complacency. Unlike Israelis, average urban Afrikaners hardly lived on the edge: safe in their cocooned suburbs, they continued to attend the Saturday afternoon rugby games and trusted their government to handle the occasional disturbances. Personal security was perceived as protection from individual black criminals rather than from the rage of an entire population, as in Israel. When, during a provocative invasion of Bophuthatswana, a few surrendering white right-wingers were finally shot in revenge by black policemen before rolling cameras, the event caused a traumatizing shock in the Afrikaner community. It is the differential experience of vulnerability between Zionists and Afrikaner nationalists that accounts, in part, for the different responses with regard to the question of separate versus common states. As obvious beneficiaries of racial minority rule, Afrikaners could hardly portray themselves as victims the way both Israelis and Palestinians sanctify victimhood. Israelis are far more convinced of their own rationalizations than Afrikaner nationalists ever were. A longtime foreign correspondent observes that “Israelis and Palestinians appear to suffer not from doubts, but from certainties” (Goldenberg 2002). Afrikaners never idealized their society or elevated their army into a “moral force,” whereas Israelis tend to think that their country operates on higher ethical standards. Such generalized reflections need to be qualified with a closer analysis of the three dissident strands in Afrikaner political thought. Strategic dissenters constitute insiders who aim at feasible alternatives rather than utopian ideals. As intellectual voortrekkers, they are nevertheless pragmatists who continue to engage the rulers on their own terms. The regime apologists cannot dismiss them as despised liberals and have to respond to their criticisms. Van Zyl Slabbert would be the epitome of this type of dissent, whether operating inside or (after 1986) outside of Parliament. If one wishes to personalize a strategic position, the epitome of the

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As obvious beneficiaries of racial minority rule, Afrikaners could hardly portray themselves as victims the way both Israelis and Palestinians sanctify

fifth category of “moral crusader” would be Beyers Naude. He founded the Christian Institute in 1963 after breaking away from his assigned role in the church and Broederbond. Moral crusaders primarily give witness to human rights violations and expose injustices relentlessly, but they are less concerned with incremental improvements. Moral crusaders are frequently aligned with religious groups in civil society or themselves have a theological background. They are a thorn in the side of regime apologists because of their disproportionate influence on foreign opinion but are dismissed as outsiders by the conformist bystanders. The Black Sash in English-speaking South African culture or segments of the peace camp in Israel belong in this category. Polarizing militants comprise those group members who unreservedly have joined the other side. Braam Fisher, an early Afrikaner leader of the outlawed Communist Party, would be one such example. They are suspicious of incremental improvements that are perceived as delaying the necessary structural changes. They are prepared to work in exile or underground as revolutionaries to change a system that they consider unreformable. Some prominent Afrikaner dissidents, like Breyten Breytenbach, have oscillated between all three positions — dissenters, moral crusaders, and militant revolutionaries — at different times. The last two categories commanded miniscule support in the Afrikaner community, and even if all voters for the PFP/DP (Progresse Federale Party/Democratic Party) during apartheid are included among strategic dissenters, their support never exceeded 6 percent. However, their main impact lies not in the weakening of regime support, but in conveying to the other side that generalizations about the hated enemy are problematic. One of the world’s leading criminologists, Stanley Cohen, in his perceptive book States of Denial, has compared different bystander motivations under Nazi rule, in Communist Eastern Europe, and in Israel and South Africa (2001, 146). Unlike the compliance out of fear in the totalitarian Nazi and communist regimes, Cohen diagnoses as voluntary the conformity with government policy in the ethnic democracies of Israel and white South Africa: “Denial of the injustices and injuries inflicted on the Palestinians is built into the social fabric. The Jewish public’s assent to official propaganda, myth and self-righteousness results from willing identification” (157). The real threat to life and limb through suicide bombers has, of course, reinforced a “defensive self-image and a character armor of insecurity and permanent victimhood.” Cohen traces the different idioms of denial in Israel that infect even critical visitors: “The same American Jews who are outspoken critics of human rights violations everywhere from El Salvador to Tibet now change from sophisticated observers into dumbed-down collective victims. Their fellow Jews who criticize the

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Israeli treatment of Palestinians too strongly or openly are denounced as ‘self-hating Jews’ or as having a ‘Diaspora mentality’ ” (165). In apartheid South Africa, the regime apologists, and all of the conformist bystanders as well, did not share this mindset. Their compliance resulted from indoctrination and community pressure. Most of the bystanders simply could not envisage a life outside the values and codes of proper Afrikaner behavior. They had minimal exposure to alternatives, because the exclusive discourse in a separate language already barred this temptation. Socialized in all-Afrikaner schools and universities, informed exclusively by Afrikaans newspapers and sanctified by at least nominal religious adherence, the life of racial privilege was taken for granted and assumed to be natural. Deviation resulted in ostracism that only a few autonomous individuals could bear. Cohen writes that “the essence of white consciousness in apartheid South Africa was a continuous shutting out of what seemed ‘obvious’ to any outsider” (2001, 146). If “shutting out” implies a conscious effort to repress contradictory information, the statement is problematic. On the contrary, at least the elite of regime apologists showed a keen interest in what the maligned opposition was arguing, particularly when it was written in Afrikaans. One could visit government offices in Pretoria for interviews, and the senior bureaucrats or generals often had Hermann Giliomee and André du Toit’s Die Suid-Afrikaan or Max du Preez’s Vrye Weekblad on their desks. Since the critical views were expressed by respectable fellow Afrikaners (and not by despised English liberals), they weighed more heavily, particularly since a compliant party media hardly ever exposed government scandals. The successful, patient erosion of a political hegemony by ethnic insiders cannot be quantified and also has never been recognized by the new rulers. Israeli and Palestinian peace activists can draw important lessons from this precedent. Those with the most impact on recalcitrant regimes are neither the moral crusaders — who merely express outrage, ridicule, or condemn the political actors — nor the polarizing militants who have joined the enemy camp unreservedly. Their critical line is predictable and instantly dismissed. Yet when a strategic dissenter speaks out and engages the regime apologists with feasible alternatives and lays bare the group’s own moral follies, the critique originates from a creditable source and hits home. If peace activists are able to enlist potential allies inside an intransigent regime and exploit the underrated cleavages between softand hard-liners, they have made more progress than by testifying to the immoral actions of an antagonist. A similar subversive role can be played by critical foreigners who cannot be instantly labeled supporters or opponents. For the colonized minds

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of apartheid South Africans — Afrikaners and blacks alike — anything imported from abroad, from fashion to academic expertise, carried a mythical quality and undeserved prestige. Most of the ethnic Afrikaner intelligentsia were keen to have their worldviews of the “communist threat” or the fickle nature of hostile world opinion or the “moral decay of liberal America” confirmed by the foreign visitor. There was little cognitive retreat from disturbing news — the average Afrikaner adult did not mind plainly discussing delicate subjects with visitors or even admitting his or her own racist atrocities. Non–South Africans were generally viewed as biased or misled, and National Party supporters went out of their way to enlighten the assumed ignorant foreigners and show them the “real” South Africa. Unfortunately, few liberal intellectuals from abroad took the opportunity to engage their hosts critically. Instead of sowing doubts and shattering the complacent myths of apartheid indoctrination, they boycotted the pariah state. Reaffirming their own purity and pseudoradical credentials seemed more important to many foreign academics than achieving an impact. The underlying assumption that racist and fascist minds were totally closed overlooked the quest for moral recognition by a shunned outcast people. Similar to the uncritical solidarity groups on pilgrimage to Israel, conservative foreigners fulfilled the need of justifying the unjustifiable. Paradoxically, when liberal intellectuals broke the ill-considered cultural boycott — as did the renowned Irish academic Conor Cruise O’Brien in 1987— they were hounded out of South Africa by the very activists whose cause those intellectuals supported. As previously argued, receptiveness to alternative visions among regime apologists in South Africa was always greater than has been the case among Zionists in Israel because of economic necessities, because of lower levels of violence, because of weaker religious justifications, because of different demographic ratios, and because of the obvious illegitimacy of racial minority rule compared with the global empathy accorded to persecuted Jews in their only sanctuary. With an articulate liberal opposition hammering home the contradictions of institutionalized racism and even powerful business lobbies constantly clamoring for the “high road” in fashionable future scenarios, Afrikaner nationalism soon fissured into pragmatic reformists on the one hand and an ideological ethnic wing on the other. The split roughly resembles the Labor-Likud or Left-Right division in Israel, except that the National Party always held a slight majority among the volk and could rely on support from English voters for its reforms if it lost majority support in its core constituency. Similar to Rabin’s reliance on Arab parliamentarians in the Knesset, such support by ethnic out-

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siders was castigated by the right-wing opposition as betrayal, but constituted a legitimate fallback position. Unlike the destabilizing PR electoral system in Israel, the first-past-the-post system in apartheid South Africa favored the stronger party and led to stable governments that could take controversial decisions without being held hostage by small special interest groups that commanded the balance of power. Therefore, unlike the disillusionment with Labor in Israel, the National Party did not lose control of the reform process. In contrast to the more quarrelsome, individualistic, and fragmented Jewish (Israeli?) political scene, the authoritarian Afrikaner culture places great trust in legitimate ethnic leaders. Even most disaffected rightwingers would respect the legitimacy of democratically elected incumbents of office, despite their deep disenchantment with fellow Afrikaner “sellouts.” A few months before de Klerk unbanned the liberation movements, no breakdown of ethnic cohesion had taken place. A comprehensive student survey by Stellenbosch political scientist Jannie Gagiano (1990) in mid-1989 revealed solid sympathy toward public authority, with only 6 percent of Afrikaans-speaking whites unsympathetic as opposed to 41 percent of English speakers. Less than 10 percent of Afrikaner males (as opposed to 35.5 percent of English speakers) would consider refusing to do military service, and only 6 percent of Afrikaners expressed unsympathetic attitudes toward the security establishment (21 percent among English students). What Gagiano calls the “repression potential” amounted to more than 90 percent among Afrikaners. He concluded: “The state need have no inordinate fear that repression will be seriously resisted by strategic sections within the white community” (203). Yet only a few months later, repression was replaced with liberalization and a new power-sharing transitional state. Gagiano, unfortunately, does not explain what accounts, in his words, for the “symbolically very significant and previously unthinkable . . . defections from the Afrikaner community to the ranks of the liberation movements” within the course of a year (207). Ethnic conformists’ unthinking devotion to a political leadership, regardless of major policy changes, would seem to provide a large part of the answer. If that is the case, the quality and vision of leaders in ethnic democracies would appear far more important than sociologists commonly tend to admit, although successful leaders must also be in tune with major material and ideal interests of their constituencies. Conventional explanations of regime change focus on turning points when rising costs outweigh benefits. These rational choice conceptualizations underestimate leadership agency. Leaders, however, are rarely only shrewdly calculating individuals, but always come with their own idiosyncrasies. Even a major change of the political environment — such as the

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collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, which finally triggered the South African transition — might not have been sufficient to have led a Conservative Party in power to similar shifts. Equally important: without a conciliatory Nelson Mandela counseling moderation and assisting the Afrikaner ideological leap into another order, the whole enterprise might have been derailed. Unfortunately, Ariel Sharon lacks the vision displayed by de Klerk, and Yasser Arafat is no Nelson Mandela. Nor is a de Gaulle in sight, either in Israel or in Washington, who could effectively impose a settlement against the violent resistance of hard-liners.

Note 1. There is a rich polemical and academic literature on the comparison of Israel and South Africa as settler societies. Comparative accounts range from Donald Akenson’s thoughtful God’s Peoples (1992) to the atheoretical chronology of Mitchell 2000. See also Rodinson 1973; Abu-Lughod and Abu-Laban 1974; Stevens and Elmessiri 1976; and the most scholarly comparison of British-Irish, French-Algerian, and Israeli-Palestinian relations by Ian Lustick, Unsettled States, Disputed Territories (1993). See also the insightful collection of essays on Northern Ireland, Israel, and South Africa edited by Hermann Giliomee and Jannie Gagiano, The Elusive Search for Peace (1990). The frequently employed settlernative dichotomy is not unproblematic for an analysis of contemporary divided societies, because it falsely assumes a continuing colonial relationship with the respective differential moral standing. As previously pointed out, there are also no objective criteria by which it can be decided when a newcomer becomes indigenous in the competition for entitlements, based on ancestral arrival in an area. If applied to contemporary immigrant societies, latecomers and recent migrants would be permanently disadvantaged, compared with earlier migrants. Such skepticism does not deny the historical record of colonial settler exploitation and dispossession of indigenous people and the legacy of conquest. On this issue see the informative article by Mahmood Mamdani (2001). The Palestinian definition of a colonial conflict in the Middle East, as opposed to the Jewish nationalist discourse, also obstructs compromises, because liberation means departure of the colonial intruder and implicitly denies the right of Jewish “settler” presence in Palestinian “native” territory. In South Africa, only the PAC applied the colonial analogy, while the ANC fudged the issue with the theory of “domestic/internal colonialism,” in which Europeans belonged to the land as long as they changed their colonial habits.

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References Abu-Lughod, Ibrahim, and Baha Abu-Laban, eds. Settler regimes in Africa and the Arab world. Wilmette, Il: Medina University Press, 1974. Adam, Heribert. 2002. Peace-making in Divided Societies: The Israel – South African Analogy. Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council. Akenson, Donald H. April 2001. Review of Mitchell, Native vs. Settler. Journal of Military History 65.2: 570 –71. Akenson, Donald H. 1992. God’s peoples: Covenant and land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster. Montreal: McGill/Queens University Press. Botha, Pik. 1990. Quoted in Indicator South Africa 8.1 (summer). Issued by the Center for Development Studies, University of Natal, 10. Cohen, Stanley. 2001. States of denial. Cambridge: Polity. Gagiano, Jannie. 1990. Ruling group cohesion. In Giliomee and Gagiano 1990. Cape Town: Oxford University Press. Giliomee, Hermann, and Jannie Gagiano, eds. 1990. The elusive search for peace. Cape Town: Oxford University Press. Goldenberg, Suzanne. 2002. Imagine if you could erase them all. Globe and Mail, 17 August. Hamann, Hilton. 2001. Days of the generals. Cape Town: Zebra. Hugo, Pierre, ed. 1989. Towards darkness and death: Racial demonology in South Africa. In South African perspectives. Cape Town: Die Suid Afrikaan. Lustick, Ian. 1993. Unsettled states, disputed territories. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Mamdani, Mahmood. 2001. Beyond settler and natives as political entities: Overcoming the political legacies of colonialism. Comparative Study of Society and History 32: 651– 64. Mitchell, Thomas G. 2000. Native vs. settler. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood. Rodinson, Maxime. 1973. Israel: A colonial settler state? New York: Monad. SAIR (South African Institute for Race Relations). 1987. Race Relations Survey. Johannesburg: South African Institute for Race Relations. Stevens, R. P., and A. M. Elmessiri. 1976. Israel and South Africa. New York: New World.

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Notes from the Princeton Divestment Campaign

One aspect of a student’s moral education lies not in the curriculum but in the behavior of the faculty, staff, and administration and in the policies of the institution. — Harold Shapiro (president of Princeton University, 1988 – 2000)

The divestment from Israel campaign on the Princeton campus — like similar campaigns elsewhere— has drawn upon precedents and traditions, vocabularies and tactics of earlier student movements to build support for dissociation from a regime that has been condemned by the international human rights community. We trace the campaign’s history, from earlier campus movements concerning socially responsible university policy, through the early planning and organizing of the campaign, to the responses of both the local and national communities to the campaign, and the campaign’s impact. At its core, the impetus has been to locate the university as a worldly institution, a place of people in interaction with each other and with the world, that must recognize its role as an ethical actor in relation to the local and global community.

Precedents In March 2002 Princeton alumnus Larry Hamm returned to campus to speak about past and current struggles for social justice, his activism at Princeton, and current struggles around which he organizes as the current chairperson of the People’s Organization for Progress, a Newark-based civil rights group. Hamm, a charismatic student leader who graduated from Princeton in 1978, had led over two hundred students in a famous twenty-seven-hour sit-in of Nassau Hall, the Princeton administration building, as a part of a protest calling for divestment from South Africa. Divestment protests, and even sit-ins, calling for divestment from South Africa had started in the late 1960s, and the issue roiled several generations of Princeton students. The last major mobilization took place in the spring of 1985. The Princeton Coalition for Divestment organized a petition that gained 3,000 signatures from the university community in a week, including those of 150 faculty members. Jesse Jackson came and

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spoke in support of divestment to a crowd of more than 2,500. 1 In a demonstration that blockaded Nassau Hall, ninety protestors, including
fty-eight undergraduates, twenty graduate students, and four junior faculty members, were arrested for trespassing and obstruction. 2 The next fall, the faculty voted 114 – 96 to support a resolution calling on the board of trustees to “adopt a policy of total divestment of university holdings in
rms doing business in South Africa.”3 Hamm had been invited back to Princeton by a network of organizations, among them the Workers’ Rights Organizing Committee (WROC), a successful effort to organize university maintenance and dining hall workers and support their demands for a living wage.4 WROC was itself the offshoot of an earlier antisweatshop campaign that began in 1998, ending several years of relative quiet from students at Princeton. The sweatshop campaign received the unanimous support of the student government, was supported in the campus newspaper, and even gained praise from university administrators for students’ “active participation . . . in encouraging the adoption of anti-sweatshop standards . . . and in helping to raise public awareness of these concerns.”5 The campaign highlighted— for a new generation of students and activists — that there were new political possibilities to be envisioned in challenging the morally questionable behavior of universities, in regard to both their place in society and the allocation of their resources.

Rumblings In his March 2002 remarks, Larry Hamm had raised the situation in the occupied Palestinian territories as an example of a struggle for social justice that called for the kind of solidarity activism that had surrounded the antiapartheid movement during his time at Princeton. In response to this challenge, a number of students who had attended the talk informally gathered to discuss Hamm’s remarks and eventually focused on the lack of attention given to the plight of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Much of the discussion focused on how uncritical of Israel the Princeton campus community was, how many other campuses (especially in California) had groups drawing attention to Israeli policy, and the possibilities for organizing similar campaigns at Princeton. There had been Palestine-related activism on the Princeton campus, as there had been on many campuses. Occasional vigils were organized along with educational events. However, these efforts always retained a low pro
le on the campus political stage, receiving little press attention and generally being ignored by the student body.

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Over the next several days, the ideas of what would become the divestment movement were re
ned. Several participants started to look at what was happening on other campuses in terms of Palestinian solidarity organizing. Articles were circulated about activities at the University of California–Berkeley, where a group called Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) had started to organize around divestment. The Berkeley campaign was calling on the University of California system to divest from companies supplying weapons to the Israeli military and large investors like General Electric and Intel, but also from U.S. media companies such as the parent companies of the major television networks because of perceived pro-Israeli bias. SJP was encouraging other campuses to form “chapters” that would adopt its organizing style, demands, and tactics. Its campaign actions included staf
ng an information table every day, setting up a mock checkpoint, collecting 3,000 signatures on a divestment petition, and occupying a university building. Although at
rst the Princeton divestment effort toyed with the idea of using the name Students for Justice in Palestine (and some initial literature produced actually did use this name), the decision was made not to associate ourselves too closely with the Berkeley campaign. On Monday, 11 March, we applied for permission to hang a banner over McCosh Walk — the main campus pedestrian thoroughfare — during the
rst week after break. It was only then that we noticed that this would be the
rst week of Passover, and our banner would be hanging next to the Center for Jewish Life’s banner inviting Jewish students to attend special events that week. The text of our banner — which was approved by Tom Dunne, Assistant Dean of Undergraduate Students — read “1100 Palestinians Murdered with Princeton’s $ / Stop Israeli Apartheid — Divest Now!” The decision to replace “Stop Israeli Apartheid” with “End the Israeli Occupation” was taken a few days later, after it was clear that some people strongly felt that the term apartheid was not only polarizing but ambiguous: Were we talking about the treatment of Palestinians within pre-1967 Israel, in the occupied territories, or both? This was the
rst step in calibrating the rhetoric of the campaign. Perhaps because of the Princeton campaign’s genealogy in university ethics campaigns, the focus became how to make “Palestinian human rights” a mainstream issue. The tension between rhetoric that was tempered and tactical, as opposed to forceful and provocative, would reemerge over the coming months. Obtaining information about how much of the university endowment was invested in companies doing business in Israel was surprisingly easy. Princeton provides a list of companies in which its endowment dollars are

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invested,6 and the Israeli embassy in Washington provides a list of U.S. companies with substantial investments in Israel on their Web site. By cross-checking the lists, we discovered that a total of just over $100 million of Princeton endowment funds were invested in companies doing substantial amounts of business in Israel. This is a remarkably small
gure: In 1985 the divestment from South Africa campaign estimated that Princeton had $306 million invested in companies doing business in South Africa or banks supporting the South African government.7 The Palestinian solidarity movement in Europe had started introducing boycotts into its campaigns. The Boycott Israeli Goods (BIG) campaign had compiled information on Israeli companies, as well as multinational corporations doing business in Israel, and provided information about the consumer products these companies produce so that concerned consumers can make a political statement against the Israeli occupation by avoiding them. The BIG campaign aims to discourage companies from doing business in Israel until the occupation ends, international law is obeyed, and human rights are respected. BIG has been explicit in making the analogy with South Africa and uses the slogan “Be BIG. Help Stop Apartheid.”8 Among academics, a petition was circulated calling for the suspension of research and cultural links between Europe and Israel. The Arab League has been supportive of these efforts, calling them a “noble, peaceful” means of expressing support for Palestinians. The Princeton divestment campaign organizers felt that neither a consumer boycott nor an academic boycott would be effective on the campus. Divestment allowed for participation of the entire university community: students, staff members, faculty, and town residents, and it raised the institutional issue of how university endowment dollars were invested. The divestment campaign crafted a statement built around four criteria that should govern Princeton decisions to invest in Israel. This was a model used successfully by WROC. These demands were derived primarily from reports recently issued by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and each demand made reference to a provision of international law, or the international consensus that Israel was challenging. On the divestment campaign Web site there was a hyperlink in each demand to the document produced by an international organization stating what the demand called for. The
rst three demands were straightforward: compliance with U.N. Resolution 242 (ending the occupation), compliance with U.N. Committee against Torture recommendations that Israel stop torturing Palestinian prisoners, and compliance with the Fourth Geneva Convention’s call for occupying powers not to “deport or transfer parts of its own civilian pop-

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ulation into territories it occupies.” The fourth demand — concerning the right to return of refugees— was more contentious. Originally, the wording explicitly af
rmed the rights of all Palestinian refugees to return to their homes. While all of the campaign organizers fully supported this, some raised questions about the tactical bene
t versus cost of adding this demand, since the most pressing objective was to end the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. However, other organizers felt that this goal was critical, so the compromise wording is less explicit: There should be no investment until “Israel acknowledges the applicability of United Nations Resolution 194 with respect to the rights of refugees.” Another decision that had to be made was whether the campaign would call for total divestment — divestment from any company doing any amount of business in Israel— or some form of partial divestment, like that which had been achieved in the case of South Africa on the Princeton campus during the 1980s. The call for total divestment was deemed to be the preferred course of action, since it was a clear, simple goal that could be easily explained, and the task at hand was to educate and mobilize.

Organizing The divestment campaign organizers continued to follow the example of WROC, seeking to build faculty support while at the same time planning to circulate a petition listing the four demands among the student body. The initial approach was to professors who had been involved in the South African divestment campaign and others who we thought would be sympathetic. Robert Tignor, a history professor serving as chair of the history department, was the
rst faculty member approached. He was extremely supportive, and while we were discussing the campaign with him, Arno Mayer, a distinguished Jewish historian of modern Europe, stopped by. Mayer was also enthusiastic about divestment and immediately signed on. Both had been active in South African antiapar theid movements, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. Other faculty members were less willing. But within a month, more than thirty faculty members had signed on to the divestment demands, and by the end of the spring semester the number topped forty. (During the spring semester of 2002, there were 994 permanent faculty members at Princeton.) We decided that the
rst major public move we would make would be to run an editorial on the
rst day of Passover. The editorial would make the argument that Passover was a particularly appropriate time for the Jewish community on campus to remember Palestinian suffering — and take action in the form of supporting divestment. The Passover message

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had been similarly appropriated in support of campaigns for divestment from South Africa two decades before.9 The divestment campaign also set up and staffed a literature table at the student center. It featured a poster display illustrating Israeli human rights abuses, violations of international law in the occupied Palestinian territories, and the condemnation of these abuses by the international community. We also handed out articles and information about the divestment campaign to passersby. On the
rst day of tabling, the Center for Jewish Life had reserved the adjacent table, where they were passing out free matzoth in celebration of Passover. When passersby stopped to pick up matzoth and inquired what the divestment table was, they were told that it was the “anti-Semitic table.” On this day all three people manning the divestment table happened to be Jewish and were enjoying some matzoth themselves. The allegation of anti-Semitism would surface again and again in the coming months. There were many aggressive and confrontational visitors to the table, challenging the information and opinions being put forth. There had not been this kind of challenge from within the student body while organizing earlier campaigns. Dealing with this was dif
cult for some of the thirty people who staffed the divestment table in two-hour lunchtime and dinner shifts during the
rst week. Many of them, though they had been active in other progressive causes, were new to the Palestinian cause. Some quickly read up on the conict, while others were discouraged and didn’t come back. Another break with earlier patterns of mobilization was the initial lack of support from the campus religious communities. On 15 April 2002 the divestment campaign sent an e-mail to Reverend Steven White, the Episcopal chaplain who in 2001 had preached a sermon (unprompted) in the university chapel in support of WROC. The e-mail, with the subject line “Human Rights & Princeton Investing,” referenced the living wage campaign of the previous year and also stated, “We realize that this [divestment] is a dif
cult issue, especially for religious communities. However, we were encouraged by Desmond Tutu’s recent remarks on this conict, calling on students across the country to work on behalf of Palestinian human rights in the same way they struggle for the human rights of blacks in South Africa.” A copy of an article from the Boston Globe of the previous day, discussing Tutu’s call for support of divestment from Israel efforts, was appended to the e-mail. Reverend White’s same-day response was typical of the sentiment expressed by a good proportion of the center-left community on campus — the community that was so successfully mobilized in support of the living

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wage campaign. White wrote that although he would leave the
nal decision as to whether or not to support divestment efforts to the student board of the chaplaincy, he would share his recommendation to them: “Any statement from us must oppose both the actions of the Israelis and the actions of the Palestinian suicide bombers, and those who support and encourage them.” In mid-April the Princeton divestment campaign held a rally in front of the Frist Campus Center in support of divestment. Over the previous two years, there had been vigils in support of Palestinian human rights, but this was the
rst event to bill itself as a rally — a term that had been used exclusively over the past several years by antisweatshop and living wage organizations. The rally was announced far enough in advance that divestment opponents, coordinated by the Princeton-Israel Public Affairs Committee, were well prepared. They announced a counter-rally to “Stand with Israel” and appeared holding posters with slogans such as “Arafat is no Mandela.” The encounter revealed important tensions among the students and for the
rst time brought the university into the act. The divestment rally, with more than one hundred students attending and several faculty speakers from both Princeton University and Princeton Theological Seminary, was on one side of the main path leading into the front of the Campus Center. Around
fty divestment opponents gathered on the other side of the path. Nearly all of the staff of the Student Life Of
ce were in attendance to supervise, along with numerous campus policemen (including one who told us that he had arrested students protesting for divestment from South Africa two decades earlier). Many more students came to watch the rallies. The campus police of
cers forced spectators to choose whether or not they were going to “participate” in the protests, and if they chose not to they had to stand far away from “participants.” One freshman, who wanted to observe both rallies, sat down in the middle of the sidewalk leading into the Campus Center, between the two groups. He was asked to leave by campus police. After the rally in front of the Campus Center, the divestment group marched to Nassau Hall and tried to deliver the divestment petition, which had more than three hundred student and thirty faculty signatures. The staff of Princeton University president Shirley Tilghman said that she — and every other administrator in the building — was unavailable, so the divestment petition was left with her receptionist. Meanwhile, the antidivestment group sang Israeli and American patriotic songs, including “God Bless America.”

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Responses President Tilghman has not responded to the petition calling for divestment from Israel. In this she reects a long tradition at Princeton. In 1978 William Bowen, then president of Princeton and now president of the Mellon Foundation, responded to a petition calling for divestment: If the university is to serve well the purposes for which it exists, there must be a continuing commitment to the freedom of each individual to think freshly and independently, to be as free as possible of every form of coercion, of every pressure to join a position because others — even a substantial majority — happen to hold it. Required too is a large measure of forbearance on the part of students, faculty and alumni, who will naturally and properly feel strongly about a great many causes which are extremely signi
cant to them. The university itself advances important causes by assuring that both their champions and their opponents have a full opportunity to argue their cases. This requires institutional restraint and a willingness to differentiate between the right of the individual to argue vigorously for what he or she believes and the obligation of the institution to remain open in fact and in appearance to different points of view.10

Bowen invoked the same reasoning and language in May 1985 when he made the university’s argument against divestment from apartheid South Africa in front of a packed campus forum: “What may be right action for an individual may not be right action for this kind of university” (emphasis in original).11 Bowen also suggested that some trustees “believe that the quest for ‘clean hands’ is an impossible one, in a world so full of imperfection.” But in the face of student pressure, the trustees
nally agreed to a policy of selective divestment from South Africa, stating: “The purpose of any policy of selective divestiture should not be to make political statements. . . . Rather, selective divestiture should be considered only when such action seems required to prevent the university from being associated, as a holder of securities, with a company whose behavior has been found to represent . . . a clear and serious conict with central values of the university.”12 The closest that the university has come to a response to calls for divestment from Israel was an essay, “Exploring the History of University Divestment Policies,” written in the campus newspaper, the Daily Princetonian, by Vice President for Public Affairs Robert Durkee. 13 He cites a 1978 statement saying that there is a “strong presumption against the University as an institution taking a position or playing an active role with respect to external issues of a political, economic, social, moral, or legal

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character.” Durkee characterizes as “one exception” the 1969 decision by the university not to invest in companies whose primary business was in South Africa. But there have been other exceptions; in 1978, 1985, and in 1987 when the university changed its policy. While the divestment campaign takes for granted that the university’s distance from the world has been and can be modi
ed in direct response to pressure from students and faculty, it is now also recognized and codi
ed by the university. In 1978 President Bowen suggested that if divestment happened and was “seen as the result of student protest, [it] would suggest that the trustees of the university had not in fact made a judgment on the merits of the case . . . but instead were simply trying . . . to appease a student group.”14 But the 1992 “Guidelines for Resources Committee Consideration of Investment-Driven ‘Social Responsibility’ Issues” notes that before the university will consider divesting, there must be “considerable, thoughtful, and sustained campus interest in an issue . . . over an extended period of time, say two academic years.” Once this sustained interest has been evidenced, the university must make its judgment based on whether “central University values are found to be at stake,” as well as whether it is “possible for the University community to reach a consensus on how the University should respond.” This seems to imply that it would consider divesting only if it were pressured by sustained student protest. While it took weeks for the Princeton campus media to pay attention to the divestment campaign, stories began to appear in the local and national press and television.15 Support for the divestment campaign had grown at other campuses, feeding from and back into Princeton. On 16 April MIT cognitive science professor Nancy Kanwisher e-mailed the Princeton divestment campaign, indicating her support and inquiring about starting a similar campaign on the MIT campus. Shortly thereafter, a group of Harvard and MIT faculty members launched a joint campaign, calling on their two universities to divest from Israel until the four demands that the Princeton campaign had formulated, with slight wording changes, were met. On 6 May the campaigns held a teach-in on the MIT campus, featuring, among others, Noam Chomsky, and attended by 350 people.16 The Harvard-MIT campaign swiftly received media attention, with an article in the Boston Globe appearing on the day of the teach-in; at the time there had already been forty faculty members from MIT and thirtynine from Harvard who had signed on to the divestment demands (by September 2002
fty-six MIT faculty and seventy-four from Harvard had signed on).17 Over the next several weeks, the Princeton campaign received more than a dozen inquiries from students on campuses across the country, from Rutgers to Washington University, inquiring about how

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to start divestment campaigns on their campuses. By October 2002 more than seventy campaigns had been started or were in the process of formation. Even Students for Justice in Palestine at UC–Berkeley has now adopted a divestment petition based on the four demands of the Princeton petition. There have been efforts to organize responses to divestment among the Jewish community. Hillel’s “Stand with Israel” campaign has organized nationally on campuses against divestment. On the Princeton campus, there have also been recent efforts to form a group of Jews for Justice and Peace, and some activists have attempted to stake out territory for the “Jewish Left” that is critical of Israel but does not support divestment — similar to the position of the national Tikkun Community — suggesting, for example, that the Jewish community should rally behind more measured actions, such as boycotts of products from settlements, rather than divestment. 18 This has started to restrict the space for Jewish voices among divestment organizers, who now
nd themselves excluded from both the mainstream of the Jewish community (beginning with their families) and from the Jewish Left. However, the response has been more moderate on Princeton’s campus than elsewhere. Harvard University president Larry Summers has associated the divestment movement with a rise in anti-Semitism on campuses, claiming that “serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent.” 19 In an effort organized by the American Jewish Committee, an ad was run in the New York Times on 7 October 2002, condemning intolerance and intimidation of Jewish students, and signed by more than three hundred college presidents. Princeton president Tilghman refused to sign the statement; a university spokesperson said Tilghman did not feel that the statement was inclusive enough because “it just mentions intimidation against Jewish students, and they are not the only students who might face intimidation.” 20 On campus, there have also been efforts to solidify antidivestment sentiment. A petition opposing divestment received approximately one hundred student signatures, and forty-three faculty members signed a letter to the Daily Princetonian opposing divestment. This letter was signed by some faculty members considered to be quite moderate or even sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, such as politics professor Maurizio Viroli and religious studies scholar Peter Schaefer. The statement that these faculty members signed focuses on the “incomprehensible” analogy between South African apartheid and Israeli oppression of Palestinians. But it is careful to state, “We recognize the political and moral necessity of an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories.”21 Some students who

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initially were supportive of divestment began to have doubts as time went on. One Princeton student who zealously supported the divestment movement in the spring of 2002 had a change of heart over the summer. In September he was quoted in the Boston Globe saying, “I came to the realization not only that it was impractical, . . . but that it is divisive in that the tactic isolates one group — Jews and Israeli people. . . . Many Jewish, Israeli, and Palestinian people are interested in the same things.”22 There has been some support for divestment among the Israeli academic community. Rachel Giora of Tel Aviv University circulated a letter of support for the Princeton divestment petition, and a few faculty members at Hebrew University and Technion also sent letters of support. The Israeli media took some interest in the divestment campaign at Princeton and later elsewhere, primarily as somewhat of a curiosity, with articles in the Jerusalem Post and Ha’aretz, among other papers. The American Arab Anti-Discrimination Network has signaled its support, as has the Middle East Research and Information Project, a leftwing Washington, D.C.–based think tank. But there has been no word from any representatives of the Palestinian Authority or other Palestinian organizations concerning support for U.S. divestment efforts.

Re
ections Divestment from Israel in spring 2002 was the right tactic at the right time. With the public debate in the United States on “Israel/Palestine” viewing the conict in terms of two opposing forces, divestment was able to bring the debate home and shift its framework to human rights violations, individual and institutional responsibility and choices, and the larger international consensus. Divestment was able to gain traction on campuses by pointing to earlier divestment campaigns and more recent antisweatshop and campus labor movements. These succeeded in organizing and mobilizing student opinion on grounds of justice and responsibility by focusing locally on an international or national problem. The divestment movement has been able to force students to think about Israeli human rights abuses — because it matters to them, on their campus, with their endowment dollars. Although antiapartheid activists, especially by the 1980s, viewed them as ineffective, the Sullivan Principles — guidelines drawn up for companies that were doing business in South Africa to act responsibly by not supporting the apartheid regime — were at least a step in the right direction. A serious effort to draft analogous principles for companies doing business in Israel has not yet been attempted, perhaps because the divestment

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movement has not yet gained enough widespread support. However, it is important to encourage mainstream organizations that have traditionally been concerned with socially responsible investing to write a document on divestment and Israel, calling on U.S. companies to stop supplying weapons to the Israeli Defense Forces while the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip continues. Furthermore, U.S. companies should be urged to stop doing any business whatsoever in the settlements. Calls for complete divestment from South Africa spawned a number of new and creative ideas for Princeton to try to effect positive change in that country. For instance, the board of trustees recommended that the university use its strengths in research and teaching to counter apartheid with long-term academic partnerships and to support South African organizations working toward a nonracial society. The trustees also supported expanding opportunities for faculty sabbatical leaves and research projects in South Africa, as well as programs to bring (nonwhite) South Africans to study at U.S. universities.23 Considering that, of the entire student population at Princeton, there is only one student of Palestinian descent, and that there are absolutely no exchange programs currently offered, any moves in this direction that could be a potential side effect of divestment efforts would be a substantial improvement. The divestment campaign has been informed by the memory of previous generations of activists on the Princeton campus. These predecessors shared a common goal: to see the university community as a place of connected individuals grounded in the speci
city and particularity of a time and place, but one that was not limited to the campus. Such a vision of the university necessitated institutional engagement with social issues affecting the larger community locally and globally. Equally consistent with the activists’ invocation of their vision, the university administrators have held
rm to their own vision of the university as a space for the expression and nurturing of difference, even if this means foreclosing the possibility of institutional social responsibilities. At the same time, however, university administrators seem to recognize that the ideals of a liberal education mean that there must be more to the place than classrooms, students, teachers, and ideas. President Harold Shapiro, who had resisted demands from the antisweatshop and WROC campaigns, for instance, argued, “One aspect of a student’s moral education lies not in the curriculum but in the behavior of the faculty, staff, and administration, and in the policies of the institution.”24 The challenge to the academy is to practice this moral education in a globalized world dominated by the United States.

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Notes 1. Elizabeth Haase, “Why Divestiture?” Princeton Alumni Weekly, 24 April 1985. 2. “90 Protesters Arrested for Blockading Nassau Hall,” Princeton Alumni Weekly, 22 May 1985. 3. “Faculty Votes for Total Divestment,” Princeton Alumni Weekly, 5 October 1985. 4. Among her
rst acts as president in 2001, Shirley Tilghman established an $11 minimum wage for all university employees (a year before there were workers making as little as $6.50) and committed the university to ending the formerly increasing use of outsourced labor. 5. Princeton University press release, www.princeton.edu/pr/news/99/q1/ 0315-sweatshop.htm; the contact person for the press release is Robert Durkee, whose name will recur below as a part of the institutional structure and memory of the university. 6. Why Princeton University does this is not clear, and it seems to be exceptional among private universities in volunteering this information. Although the university library and the treasurer’s of
ce each claimed that the other entity had the list for a few days, they eventually produced a copy for the divestment campaign and made an updated list available in the library. 7. Haase, “Why Divestiture?” 8. See www.boycottisraeligoods.org. 9. For an example of this on the Princeton campus, see Haase, “Why Divestiture?” 10. Quoted in Samuel A. Schreiner, A Place Called Princeton (New York: Arbor House, 1984), 72. 11. Princeton Alumni Weekly, 22 May 1985. 12. Quoted in “Trustees Amend South Africa Policy,” Princeton Alumni Weekly, 6 November 1985. 13. Robert Durkee, “Exploring the History of University Divestment Policies,” Daily Princetonian, 22 April 2002. 14. Quoted in Haase, “Why Divestiture?” 15. Robert Stern, “Princeton Students Take Sides,” Trenton Times, 19 April 2002. 16. George Brandt, “Hundreds Support Call for Divestment,” Harvard Crimson, 8 May 2002. 17. Jenna Russell, “Some on Harvard, MIT Faculties Urge Divestment in Israel,” Boston Globe, 6 May 2002. 18. Elliot Ratzman, “Divestment, Maybe . . .” American Foreign Policy 1.8 (2002). 19. See president.harvard.edu/speeches/2002/morningprayers.html. 20. Ben August, “College Presidents Decry Anti-Semitism,” Daily Princetonian, 7 October 2002. 21. “Evaluating Calls for Divestment,” Daily Princetonian, 17 May 2002. 22. Marcella Bombardieri, “On Campuses, Critics of Israel Fend Off a Label,” Boston Globe, 21 September 2002. 23. “Trustees Amend South Africa Policy.” 24. Harold Shapiro, “Liberal Education, Moral Education,” Princeton Alumni Weekly, 22 January 1999.

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The Israelization of American Middle East Policy Discourse

It is dimly possible to imagine that the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon could have provided an occasion to begin a serious national conversation about why some Muslims — relatively few to be sure — hate the United States enough to kill themselves to harm our country and its people. Instead, September 11 further consolidated an understanding of the world drawing sharp oppositions between “us” and “them,” and positing Islam as the “new enemy for a new world order.”1 President Bush declared, “Islam is not the enemy.” Nonetheless, the administration and its allies — neoconservatives, the Christian Right, and pro-Israel hawks — encouraged this understanding by promoting a vision of the world divided into the forces of freedom and “the evil ones.” The proposition articulated in the president’s January 2002 state of the union address that North Korea, Iran, and Iraq constitute an “axis of evil” may well be the most flawed and unsophisticated understanding of international affairs to have been offered by any head of state since the end of World War II. Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon quickly identified with the Bush administration’s post–September 11 worldview and sought to turn it to Israel’s advantage. Announcing a day of mourning in Israel and appropriating rhetoric from the era of the Cold War, Sharon declared, “The fight against terror is an international struggle of the free world against the forces of darkness who seek to destroy our liberty and way of life. Together we can defeat these forces of evil.”2 After September 11, Sharon repeatedly equated Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda with those he regarded as Israel’s more direct enemies: Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Lebanese Hizbollah, Iraq, and Iran.3 The Bush administration, with only minimal reservations, embraced this proposition. The consequence was to give Sharon a nearly free hand in repressing the second Palestinian Intifada, which erupted a year before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) attempted to give a patina of intellectual legitimacy to the Bush administration’s simplistic world outlook in a report entitled “Defending Civilization” released in November 2001.4 According to ACTA, criticism of the Bush adminisSocial Text 75, Vol. 21, No. 2, Summer 2003. Copyright © 2003 by Duke University Press.

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tration’s response to the September 11 attacks on campuses across the country is tantamount to negligence in “defending civilization” and proof that “our universities are failing America.” ACTA alleges that American universities have been brought to this sorry state by inadequate teaching of Western culture and American history. Consequently, students and faculty do not understand what is at stake in the fight against terrorism and are undermining the defense of civilization by asking too many questions. ACTA was founded by Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney. Former Democratic vice presidential candidate Senator Joseph Lieberman is a member of its national council. Lieberman criticized the report, though not too aggressively, after it appeared. Although she is no longer officially active in ACTA, a lengthy quote by Ms. Cheney appears on the cover of the report, suggesting that she supports its contents and giving the document the appearance of a quasi-official statement of government policy. The original version of “Defending Civilization” named and quoted comments by 117 university faculty members and students in reaction to the September 11 attacks. ACTA’s ire was aroused by my statement: “If Osama bin Laden is confirmed to be behind the attacks, the United States should bring him before an international tribunal on charges of crimes against humanity.” Other remarks in the report’s list of unacceptable speech included “Ignorance breeds hate” and “There needs to be an understanding of why this kind of suicidal violence could be undertaken against our country.” After receiving considerable criticism, ACTA removed the appendix to the report containing the names and quotes. Of course, ACTA’s attack on American universities in the name of “defending civilization” was a ruse for pursuing its shared agenda with the Bush administration: suppressing any form of dissent from the militarized policy response to the September 11 attacks. By vilifying those who attempted to engage in a debate over foreign policy and by creating a list of those who did not religiously endorse the line of the Bush administration, ACTA revealed its affiliation with the McCarthyite tradition in American political life conflating dissent with treason. It would be a grave error to imagine that only xenophobic conservatives have promoted a Manichaean view of the world, and in particular of the Arab and Muslim world. Over the last two decades this perspective has become institutionally entrenched among Washington policy makers, the leading think tanks that influence them, and much of the media that report on their activities. This is an expression of what might be called the “Israelization” of American Middle East policy discourse. There are two moments of departure for the emergence of this dis-

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course: the 1979 Iranian revolution and Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. In the aftermath of these events, U.S. citizens were targeted by radical Islamic forces. Because of the propensity for historical amnesia in our public culture, many Americans believed that there was no reason for those attacks. Following the Iranian revolution and the overthrow of Muhammad Reza Shah, on 4 November 1979 the U.S. embassy in Teheran was overrun by militants claiming to follow the line of Ayatollah Khomeini. Fiftytwo embassy staffers were taken hostage, precipitating a crisis that persisted for 444 days, until 20 January 1981. The immediate impetus for the seizure of the embassy was the news that the ousted shah had arrived in the United States for medical treatment. The militants demanded that he be returned to Iran for trial. In August 1953 this same shah fled Iran following a botched coup by the CIA that sought to remove the nationalist government of Muhammad Mosaddeq because it had nationalized Iran’s oil.5 The CIA and its local allies regrouped. The coup succeeded; Muhammad Reza Shah was restored to the Peacock Throne. Hence, the notion that the shah’s arrival in the United States was part of a plan to return him to power, although unsubstantiated, was not outlandish. The seizure of the American embassy in Teheran was a manifestation of the internal struggle within the Iranian revolutionary regime. Through such public dramas Ayatollah Khomeini consolidated his leadership, imposed rule through mullahs loyal to him, and eliminated other elements of the revolutionary coalition that overthrew the monarchy, blocking them from access to power. Relatively little of that story was prominently reported in the American corporate media. At a press conference in February 1980 an unusually bold reporter asked President Jimmy Carter if the CIA’s restoration of the shah to power in 1953 might have something to do with arousing Iranian anti-American sentiment that expressed itself in the hostage crisis. Carter replied that this was “ancient history” and that it was not “appropriate or helpful” to discuss it.6 This answer suggests that the Carter administration may not have carefully considered the potential consequences of bringing the deposed shah to the United States. Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 after receiving a “green light” from the Reagan administration, which hoped that this adventure would contribute to building an anti-Soviet strategic consensus in the Middle East. The hostilities were concluded with an agreement that the PLO would evacuate its fighters from Lebanon while the United States would guarantee the security of the Palestinian civilians left behind. U.S. Marines landed and then quickly departed after the evacuation of the PLO’s armed

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None of those involved in the Sabra and Shatila massacre were ever brought to account.

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forces, leaving the Israeli army in control of Beirut. Between 16 and 18 September, Maronite Phalangists allied with Israel and commanded by Elie Hobeika raped, tortured, and murdered between 700 and 3,500 unarmed Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps under the eyes of Israeli soldiers.7 The failure of the United States to honor its promise to protect the Palestinians and its alliance with Israel undoubtedly aggravated anti-American sentiments among Lebanese and Palestinians. None of those involved in the Sabra and Shatila massacre were ever brought to account. On 18 June 2001, twenty-three survivors filed charges in a Belgian court against Ariel Sharon, Israel’s minister of defense at the time of the massacre, for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. This is the man President Bush called “a man of peace” on 18 April 2002 — a description even Sharon’s closest friends and political allies would not dare to propose to an Israeli audience more familiar with the string of atrocities linked to his name, beginning in October 1953, when he led a retaliation raid/massacre of sixty-nine Palestinian civilians in the West Bank village of Qibya (then occupied by Jordan). After the Sabra and Shatila massacre, U.S. forces returned to Lebanon and briefly participated in the civil war, under way since 1975, in support of the Phalangists and Israel, which still occupied a large portion of the country. In April 1983 a car bomb at the U.S. embassy in Beirut exploded, killing sixty-three people, including seventeen Americans. Another car bomb at the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in October killed 241 marines, the largest number of casualties suffered by U.S. armed forces since the Vietnam War. The newly established Hizbollah was responsible for these bombings. Shortly after Israel invaded Lebanon, Iranian revolutionary guards arrived in the country and encouraged the formation of Hizbollah. The presence of the Iranians and Israel’s lengthy occupation of South Lebanon greatly accelerated the radicalization of the Lebanese Shi‘a community. In addition to the bombings of the U.S. embassy and the marine barracks and other attacks on U.S., British, and French citizens from 1982 to 1992, organizations apparently linked to Hizbollah abducted some forty-five U.S., British, and French citizens and held them hostage for varying lengths of time. The reasons for the attacks on Americans by Muslims in Iran and Lebanon were unknown and unexplained to most ordinary Americans. This allowed scholars, journalists, and pundits with an antipathy to Islam and a commitment to maintaining Israel as the principal U.S. ally in the Middle East to disseminate a highly simplified explanation of their meaning. The most prominent of the scholars who have lent their names to a policy of confrontation with Islam is Bernard Lewis. His arguments for

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the incompatibility of Islam with modern Western values have earned him an honored place at Princeton University, in congressional hearings, television studios, and the pages of many scholarly and popular periodicals. His perspective was taken up and generalized by Samuel Huntington in his notorious “clash of civilizations” thesis.8 The logic of their arguments led to the conclusion that despite the end of the Cold War, there was a new mission for the U.S.-Israeli alliance: containment of radical Islam. This notion was aggressively disseminated by a long list of columnists, commentators, and periodicals likely to support Israel “reflexively and without qualification.”9 Sharon’s full identification with the United States after September 11, and his efforts to strengthen the U.S.-Israeli alliance by pointing to radical Islam as a common civilizational enemy of both countries, was not an innovation in Israeli policy or a tactic specific to the Likud. The late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin actively offered Israel as an ally against radical Islam after the Labor Party came to power in 1992. In December the Rabin government rounded up over four hundred Palestinians and announced, without providing any evidence, that they were Hamas or Islamic Jihad activists. They were expelled to Lebanon, where most of them camped out on a hill overlooking the border for a year. When they were returned to their homes, they became heroes of a reenergized Palestinian radical Islamic movement. Inside the Beltway, one of the most effective proponents of maintaining and strengthening the U.S.-Israel alliance is the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), established in 1985 under the leadership of Martin Indyk. He had previously been research director of the leading pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. On the eve of the 1988 presidential elections, as the first Palestinian Intifada was under way, WINEP made its bid to become a major player in U.S. Middle East policy discussions by issuing a report entitled Building for Peace: An American Strategy for the Middle East. The report urged the incoming administration to “resist pressures for a procedural breakthrough [on Palestinian-Israeli peace issues] until conditions have ripened.”10 Six members of the study group responsible for the report joined the Bush I administration, which adopted this stalemate recipe not to change until change was unavoidable. Hence, it acceded to Israel’s refusal to negotiate with the Palestine Liberation Organization despite the PLO’s recognition of Israel at the November 1988 session of the Palestine National Council. After the 1991 Gulf War, the Bush I administration felt obliged to offer a reward to its Arab wartime allies by making an effort to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. It convened an international conference at Madrid in October, followed by eleven sessions of bilateral Palestinian-Israeli negoti-

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ations in Washington. These talks were fruitless, in part because Israel still refused to negotiate with Palestinians who were official representatives of the PLO. Then, as now, Israel preferred to choose the Palestinians with whom it would negotiate. When Israel became serious about attempting to reach an agreement with the Palestinians, it circumvented the U.S.-sponsored negotiations in Washington and spoke directly to representatives of the PLO in Oslo. The result was the 1993 Oslo Declaration of Principles. The adoption of the WINEP policy recommendation to “resist pressures for a procedural breakthrough” by both the Bush I and Clinton administrations delayed the start of meaningful Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, contributed to the demonization of the PLO, and augmented the death toll of the first Palestinian Intifada. Before WINEP became a powerful influence on Middle East policy making, the corporate mass media were fairly clear about its political commitments. The New York Times referred to WINEP as “a group with a pro-Israeli orientation.” The Los Angeles Times called it “staunchly proIsraeli.”11 A 1989 Washington Post profile of Martin Indyk reported that he disliked the description of the institute as “pro-Israeli.” The image that Indyk preferred “is that we are friendly to Israel but doing credible research on the Middle East in a realistic and balanced way.”12 WINEP’s access to power transformed its public image. It became simply a respected “research and study center,” according to the New York Times; a “private research organization,” according to the Los Angeles Times; and a “private think tank,” according to the Boston Globe.13 WINEP’s presence in the mass media is ubiquitous. Its associates, especially Deputy Director Patrick Clawson, Director for Policy and Planning Robert Satloff, and Senior Fellow Michael Eisenstadt, appear frequently on television and radio talk shows as commentators on Middle East issues. Its board of advisers includes Mortimer Zuckerman, editor in chief of U.S. News and World Report, and Martin Peretz, editor in chief of the New Republic. WINEP has strong connections to the Israeli military, political, and media establishments. It is especially close to the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. Yossi Olmert and Dore Gold, both figures in the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, are WINEP authors and former fellows. Israeli journalists Hirsh Goodman, David Makovsky, Ze’ev Schiff, and Ehud Yaari all have WINEP affiliations. WINEP and its associates have promoted the notion that Israel is a reliable U.S. ally against radical Islam. After Israel’s expulsion of the four hundred Palestinian Islamic activists, Israeli television Middle East analyst Ehud Yaari wrote an op-ed in the New York Times summarizing his Hebrew television report of a vast U.S.-based conspiracy to fund Hamas.14

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WINEP’s 1992 annual Soref Symposium —“Islam and the U.S.: Challenges for the Nineties”— focused on whether or not Islam was a danger to the United States. At that event Martin Indyk argued that the United States ought not to encourage democracy in countries that were friendly to Washington, like Jordan and Egypt, and that political participation should be limited to secular parties.15 This policy seems like a formula for ensuring that Islamic forces would forsake the political arena and engage in armed struggle and, to the extent that the United States was identified with this policy, that it would be targeted as well. This is, in fact, what happened in Egypt from 1992 to 1997. The Clinton administration was even more thoroughly colonized by WINEP associates than its predecessor. Eleven signatories of the final report of WINEP’s 1992 commission on U.S.-Israeli relations, Enduring Partnership, joined the Clinton administration. Among them were National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, U.N. Ambassador and later Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Undersecretary of Commerce Stuart Eizenstat, and Secretary of Defense Les Aspin. Shortly after assuming office in 1993, the Clinton administration announced a policy of “dual containment” directed against Iran and Iraq. The principal formulator and spokesperson for that policy was Martin Indyk, in his new role as special assistant to the president and senior director for Near East and South Asian affairs at the National Security Council.16 As Indyk had been raised and educated in Australia, he had to be quickly naturalized as an American citizen in order to join the Clinton administration. After his stint on the National Security Council, Indyk subsequently served as U.S. ambassador to Israel, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, and then again as ambassador to Israel. In all these positions Indyk was a significant player in Clinton administration policy toward the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations misleadingly known as the Oslo “peace process.” Another WINEP affiliate with major responsibility for PalestinianIsraeli issues in the Clinton administration was Dennis Ross, a holdover from the Bush I era. He had been a key aide to Secretary of State James Baker in formulating Middle East policy during the Bush I administration and became President Clinton’s special coordinator for the “peace process.” After retiring from government service, Ross assumed the directorship of WINEP. As in the Bush II administration, more sophisticated voices in the Clinton administration repeatedly stated that “Islam is not the enemy.” However, the “dual containment” policy of the Clinton administration and its overall Middle East policy record — the most pro-Israel of any U.S. administration since 1948— are the forerunners of President George

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W. Bush’s “axis of evil” policy. Nonetheless, WINEP has not been as prominent a presence in the Bush II administration as it was in the previous two. It has been replaced by individuals connected to more monolithically neoconservative and even more hawkish think tanks like the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), and the Center for Security Policy (CSP), which are closely linked.17 Before they entered the Bush II administration, JINSA’s board of advisers included Vice President Dick Cheney, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton, and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith. Twenty-two CSP associates secured positions in the Bush II national security apparatus. Richard Perle, a member of the JINSA board as well as the WINEP advisory board and one of the strongest proponents of a preemptive war against Iraq, is chair of the Defense Policy Board, which advises the Department of Defense. The Defense Policy Board reports to Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, a leading Iraq war hawk who sat on the WINEP advisory board with Perle until he joined the Bush administration. Perle’s credentials as an Israel-firster are well established. According to Seymour Hersh, when Henry Kissinger headed the National Security Council he determined through telephone taps that in 1970 Perle, then a foreign policy aide to Henry Jackson —“the Senator from Boeing”— passed classified information to the Israeli embassy.18 Perle, Feith, and Bolton’s special assistant, David Wurmser, sought to make common cause with Israel’s Likud Party for a war against Iraq, which they have been promoting since at least 1996, when they concluded that the Bush I administration erred in failing to remove Saddam Hussein from power after the first Gulf War. Perle argued for this position in a paper he prepared for the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies based in Washington, D.C., and Jerusalem.19 The paper, entitled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” was presented to the newly elected Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. It advocates a new foreign policy for Israel: repudiation of the Oslo accords, permanent annexation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and elimination of the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq —“an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right”— according to the “Clean Break” paper. On 10 July 1996, two days after receiving a copy of the paper, Netanyahu delivered an address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress embracing several of the paper’s propositions. The Wall Street Journal published excerpts from the “Clean Break” paper the same day and editorially endorsed it on 11 July. Following the September 11 attacks, the Defense Policy Board convened a two-day seminar. The consensus of those attending was that removing Saddam Hussein from power should be an objective in the U.S.

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war on terrorism, despite the lack of any evidence linking Iraq to the attacks or to Al-Qaeda. The Defense Policy Board then sent former CIA director and JINSA board member James Woolsey to London to gather evidence linking Iraq to the terrorist attacks. He announced that a member of Al-Qaeda met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague. There is no solid evidence that the meeting occurred, or that it had anything to do with the September 11 attacks. On 20 September Perle and several other Defense Policy Board members sent an open letter to President Bush. “Even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the [September 11] attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq,” they wrote. “Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.”20 Perle presided over the 10 July 2002 briefing of the Defense Policy Board at which RAND analyst Laurent Murawiec argued that Saudi Arabia is an enemy of the United States, “the kernel of evil, the prime mover, the most dangerous opponent” in the Middle East.21 This opinion ignores the historically close relations between the United States and Saudi Arabia and the enormous profits of U.S. corporations from oil and commercial exports to Saudi Arabia. It highlights the particular way that Osama bin Laden and his followers appropriated the Wahhabi Islamic doctrine, which is the state religion of Saudi Arabia. Although the Bush administration repudiated his views, the hawkish pro-Israel, neoconservative media echoed Murawiec’s arguments shortly after the briefing.22 Murawiec’s opinions are taken seriously by members of Vice President Cheney’s staff and the civilian leadership of the Pentagon. They are especially attracted by his argument that regime change in Iraq is the key to altering Saudi behavior. “The road to the entire Middle East goes through Baghdad,” said one anonymous administration official who favored a war on Iraq. “Once you have a democratic regime in Iraq, like the ones we helped establish in Germany and Japan after World War II, there are a lot of possibilities.”23 It is probably not accidental that Murawiec’s briefing was held and its contents leaked as the Bush II administration began seriously beating the drums for a war on Iraq. The most visible responses of the Bush II administration in the Middle East to the September 11 attacks have been to bomb Afghanistan, to draw closer to Israel, to call for the removal of Yasser Arafat as leader of the Palestinians as a prerequisite to entertaining Palestinian demands for an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and to loudly rattle its sabers for a preemptive war against Iraq. These activities have not been well received in the Arab and Muslim world, where out-

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rage against U.S. Middle East policy has reached unprecedented levels. They have, however, been popular in Israel and among its hawkish American supporters because they postpone Israel’s withdrawal from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip indefinitely and allow the Sharon government a free hand to repress the second Palestinian Intifada while expanding Israeli settlements. Robert Satloff, WINEP’s director of policy and planning, cochaired a fifty-two-member group of “experts” and members of Congress who concurred with the Bush administration position “that circumstances were not ripe for high-level efforts to restart the peace negotiations, and that the most urgent task was to prevent a regional war while fighting terrorism and weapons proliferation.”24 The advice, once again, is not to change until change is unavoidable — a policy that allows Israel to assert its overwhelming military advantage and to continue to create facts of the ground (settlements) that will make peace all the more difficult, if not impossible, to achieve in the future. Such pronouncements — indeed, the entire discursive framing of public discussion of the Middle East and Islam in the United States — make it almost impossible for ordinary citizens to understand the basic constituent elements of the circumstances confronting us post–September 11, 2001. Since then, many American scholars of Islam and the Middle East have worked overtime to educate the public about the complex issues behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Simultaneously, those inspired by Israeli understandings of political Islam have attempted to delegitimize any effort to explain that political Islam is a complex phenomenon and that the Middle East policies of the United States have created a huge reservoir of anger and resentment in the region. Martin Kramer, an American who immigrated to Israel in the 1970s, spent a year as a fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy writing a lengthy screed attacking the entire Middle East Studies Association of North America and calling on Congress to eliminate federal funding for Middle East centers.25 Kramer edits Middle East Quarterly, the mouthpiece of the Middle East Forum directed by Daniel Pipes, who is also a WINEP adjunct scholar. Kramer’s initial volley against American Middle East studies was followed by a sustained barrage of tendentious articles in the neoconservative media by Daniel Pipes, Stanley Kurtz, Stephen Schwartz, David Horowitz, and others.26 The community of interpretation constituted by these unsavory characters is exemplified by Horowitz’s establishment of a “Defense of Israel Campaign.” Its preposterous premise is that “never since its founding has Israel been in such dire peril.”27 Inspired by Kramer’s book, Middle East Forum set up a Campus Watch Web site that seeks to “monitor and gather information on profes-

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sors who fan the flames of disinformation, incitement, and ignorance.” Campus Watch does not care to ask whether scholars who study the Middle East might actually know something that would lead them to think that the world is not simply divided between the forces of good (us) and evil (them). Instead, it compiles dossiers on professors and universities that do not meet its standard of uncritical support for the policies of George Bush and Ariel Sharon. Among other things, this may be Pipes’s way of taking revenge on the scholarly community after failing in his own pursuit of an academic career in Middle East studies. Campus Watch alleges that Middle East scholars “seem generally to dislike their own country and think even less of American allies abroad. They portray U.S. policy in an unfriendly light and disparage allies.” Thus, Campus Watch claims it can penetrate the psyches of scholars whose opinions it does not sanction. Rather than engage those opinions, Campus Watch resorts to quotation out of context, distortion, and in some cases outright fabrication in attempting to damage the reputations of those it finds objectionable. Campus Watch notes that “Middle East studies in the United States has become the preserve of Middle Eastern Arabs, who have brought their views with them. Membership in the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the main scholarly association, is now fifty percent of Middle Eastern origin.” Excuse me?!? I thought all U.S. citizens have equal rights regardless of their country of origin, and that pointing to peoples’ country of origin to discredit them is a form of racism. This is apparently outmoded thinking according to Campus Watch (and the statement is false in any case). But imagine the uproar that would be created by the suggestion that because Daniel Pipes is Jewish he may be more loyal to Israel than to the United States. The efforts to stifle public debate about U.S. Middle East policy and criticism of Israel are being promoted by a network of neoconservative true believers with strong links to the Israeli far right. They are enthusiastic supporters of the Bush administration’s hands-off approach to Ariel Sharon’s suppression of the Palestinian uprising. And they are aggressive proponents of a preemptive U.S. strike against Iraq. One need not agree with the prevailing sentiment in the Muslim and Arab world, which is sharply critical of American policy toward the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the maintenance of sanctions on Iraq, the drive to war against Iraq, and the support for autocratic and corrupt regimes such as those in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. But no intelligent understanding or response to September 11 can be formulated without appreciating it. We must comprehend why the rhetoric and actions of someone like Osama bin Laden resonate with a significant constituency despite the fact

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Campus Watch does not care to ask whether scholars who study the Middle East might actually know something that would lead them to think that the world is not simply divided between the forces of good (us) and evil (them).

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that the vast majority of the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims do not support or condone his crimes. Even among Islamic radicals there is significant dissent from bin Laden’s views. President Bush’s addition of Lebanese Hizbollah to the “official” list of terrorist organizations on 2 November 2001 was applauded by Israel and its supporters.28 Yet, Sheikh Muhammad Fadl Allah, the spiritual leader of Hizbollah, condemned the attacks of September 11 and argued in the Lebanese press that they are incompatible with the Koran, shari‘a law, and the Muslim concept of jihad.29 Another Islamic radical, Egypt’s Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, made similar arguments.30 The Islamic Research Council of al-Azhar in Cairo — the most prestigious institution of learning in the Sunni Muslim world — condemned the September 11 attacks with a ruling confirming the historic consensus of Muslim scholars that “Islam provides clear rules and ethical norms that forbid the killing of noncombatants, as well as women, children, and the elderly, and also forbids pursuit of the enemy in defeat, the execution of those who surrender, the inflicting of harm on prisoners of war, and the destruction of property that is not used in hostilities.”31 These nuances and distinctions are critical to formulating a reasonable understanding of the Middle East and radical Islam. A foreign policy and public discourse based on a Manichaean division of the world and unconditional support of Israel, impedes such understanding and is likely to lead to grief for Americans and the peoples of the Middle East.

Notes 1. This phrase is adapted from Joe Stork, “New Enemies for a New World Order,” Middle East Report, no. 176 (May–June 1992). 2. Jerusalem Post, 12 September 2001. 3. For example, “Remarks by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon at the Ceremony in Solidarity with the American People and the Families of the Victims on the First Anniversary of the September 11th 2001 Terror Attack,” 11 September 2002, www.israelemb.org/articals/2002/September/2002091100.html. 4. American Council of Trustees and Alumni, Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done about It? (Washington, D.C., 2001). 5. The most recent research on the circumstances of the coup is Ervand Abrahamian, “The 1953 Coup in Iran,” Science and Society 65.2 (2001): 182 – 215. 6. New York Times, 14 February 1980. 7. The low figure is the official Israeli estimate. The high figure is suggested by Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk, who investigated the matter and reported his conclusion in Sabra and Shatila: Inquiry into a Massacre (Belmont, Mass: Association of Arab-American University Graduates, 1984).

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8. Bernard Lewis, “The Return of Islam,” Commentary, January 1976, reprinted in Islam and the West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 133 – 54; “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” Atlantic Monthly, September 1990, 47– 60; Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs (summer 1993): 22 – 49, expanded as The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). 9. Eric Alterman, 28 March 2002, MSNBC.com, applied this characterization to George Will, the Washington Post, Newsweek, and ABC News; William Safire, the New York Times; A. M. Rosenthal, the New York Daily News, formerly executive editor of and later columnist for the New York Times; Charles Krauthammer, the Washington Post, PBS, Time, and the Weekly Standard, formerly of the New Republic; Michael Kelly, the Washington Post, the Atlantic Monthly, National Journal, and MSNBC.com, formerly of the New Republic and the New Yorker; Lally Weymouth, the Washington Post and Newsweek; Martin Peretz, the New Republic; Daniel Pipes, the New York Post; Andrea Peyser, the New York Post; Dick Morris, the New York Post; Lawrence Kaplan, the New Republic; William Bennett, CNN; William Kristol, the Washington Post, the Weekly Standard, Fox News, formerly of ABC News; Robert Kagan, the Washington Post and the Weekly Standard; Mortimer Zuckerman, U.S. News and World Report (Zuckerman is also chairperson of Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations); David Gelertner, the Weekly Standard; John Podhoretz, the New York Post and the Weekly Standard; Mona Charen, the Washington Times; Morton Kondracke, Roll Call, Fox News, formerly of the McLaughlin Group, the New Republic, and PBS; Fred Barnes, the Weekly Standard, Fox News, formerly of the New Republic, the McLaughlin Group, and the Baltimore Sun; Yossi Klein Halevi, the New Republic; Sidney Zion, the New York Post, formerly of the New York Daily News; Norman Podhoretz, Commentary; Jonah Goldberg, National Review and CNN; Laura Ingraham, CNN, formerly of MSNBC and CBS News; Jeff Jacoby, the Boston Globe; Rich Lowry, National Review; Andrew Sullivan, the New Republic; Seth Lipsky, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Sun, formerly of the Jewish Forward; Irving Kristol, the Public Interest, the National Interest, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page; Chris Matthews, MSNBC; Allan Keyes, MSNBC, WorldNetDaily.com; Brit Hume, Fox News; John Leo, U.S. News and World Report; Robert Bartley, the Wall Street Journal editorial page; John Fund, the Wall Street Journal Opinion Journal, formerly of the Wall Street Journal editorial page; Peggy Noonan, the Wall Street Journal editorial page; Ben Wattenberg, the Washington Times, PBS; Tony Snow, the Washington Times and Fox News; Lawrence Kudlow, National Review and CNBC; Alan Dershowitz, Boston Herald and the Washington Times; David Horowitz, Frontpage.com; Jacob Heilbrun, the Los Angeles Times; Thomas Sowell, the Washington Times; Frank Gaffney Jr., the Washington Times; Emmett Tyrell, American Spectator and the New York Sun; Cal Thomas, the Washington Times; Oliver North, the Washington Times and Fox News, formerly of MSNBC; Michael Ledeen, Jewish World Review; William F. Buckley, National Review; Bill O’Reilly, Fox News; Paul Greenberg, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette; L. Brent Bozell, the Washington Times; Todd Lindberg, the Washington Times; Michael Barone, U.S. News and World Report and the McLaughlin Group; Ann Coulter, Human Events; Linda Chavez, Creators Syndicate; Cathy Young, Reason Magazine; Uri Dan, the New York Post; Dr. Laura Schlessinger, morality maven; and Rush Limbaugh, radio host. The

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periodicals include the New Republic (Martin Peretz, Michael Steinhardt, Roger Hertog, owners); Commentary (American Jewish Committee, owner); U.S. News and World Report (Mortimer Zuckerman, owner); the New York Daily News (Mortimer Zuckerman, owner); the New York Post (Rupert Murdoch, owner); the Weekly Standard (Rupert Murdoch, owner); the Wall Street Journal editorial page (Peter Kann, editor); and the Atlantic Monthly (Michael Kelly, editor). 10. Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Building for Peace: An American Strategy for the Middle East (Washington, D.C., 1988), xx. 11. New York Times, 20 July 1986; Los Angeles Times, 17 September 1988. 12. Washington Post, 24 March 1989. 13. New York Times, 17 September 1988; Los Angeles Times, 26 August 1990; Boston Globe, 5 July 1992. These citations and those in the previous two notes are from Ali Abunimah and Sam Husseini, “Truth in Labeling: Despite Ties to Two Governments, WINEP Succeeds in Neutral Pose,” Extra (November–December 2000), www.fair.org/extra/0011/winep.html. 14. Ehud Yaari, New York Times, 27 January 1993. 15. Martin Indyk, “The Implications for U.S. Policy,” in Islam and the U.S.: Challenges for the Nineties (Washington, D.C.: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1992), 87. 16. For example, Martin Indyk, “The Clinton Administration’s Approach to the Middle East,” Soref Symposium, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 18 May 1993, www.washingtoninstitute.org/pubs/indyk.htm. 17. Jason A. West, “The Men from JINSA and CSP,” Nation, 2 – 9 September 2002, 16 – 20. 18. Seymour Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the White House (New York: Summit, 1983), 322. 19. www.israeleconomy.org/strat1.htm. 20. Time.com, 14 September 2002, www.time.com/time/nation/article/ 0,8599,339186,00.html. 21. Washington Post, 6 August 2002. 22. Dan Quayle, “The Coming Saudi Showdown,” Weekly Standard, 15 July 2002; Victor Davis Hanson, “Our Enemies, the Saudis,” Commentary, July– August 2002. 23. Washington Post, 6 August 2002. 24. Los Angeles Times, 3 April 2002. 25. Martin Kramer, Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America (Washington, D.C.: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2001). 26. For example, Martin Kramer, “Professors of Palestine,” Middle East Quarterly (winter 2000); Martin Kramer, “Arabic Panic,” Middle East Quarterly (summer 2002); Stanley Kurtz, “Ivory Scam,” National Review Online, 29 May 2002, www.nationalreview.com/kurtz/kurtz052902.asp; Stanley Kurtz, “The More Things Stay the Same,” National Review Online, 22 July 2002, www.nationalreview.com/kurtz/kurtz072202.asp; Stephen Schwartz, “Treason of the Academics,” FrontPageMagazine.com, 22 July 2002, www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ Printable.asp?ID=2021; Daniel Pipes and Jonathan Schanzer, “Extremists on Campus,” New York Post, 25 June 2002. 27. www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/6/11/124227.shtml.

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28. Press release of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, 14 November 2001, www.aipac.org/documents/aipacfacts8.html. 29. Sheikh Muhammad Husayn Fadl Allah, interview in Journal of Palestine Studies 31.2 (winter 2002): 80. 30. New York Times, 27 January 2002. 31. Al-Hayat, 5 November 2001.

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House and Homeland EXAMINING SENTIMENTS ABOUT AND CLAIMS TO JERUSALEM AND ITS HOUSES

On Thursday, 28 September 2000, Israeli right-wing Knesset leader Ariel Sharon visited al-Haram al-Sharif or the Temple Mount, the location of al-Aqsa mosque and, in millennia past, of David and Herod’s temples, the place from which, according to Islamic texts, the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven and the location at which, according to Jewish texts, God will someday build a new temple to signify the coming of the Messiah. Ariel Sharon brought with him a one-thousand-member police force dressed in riot gear for the hour-long tour of the expansive stone platform. A military helicopter buzzed above the scene as Palestinians tried to break through the police forces. Several people on both sides were wounded in clashes. On Friday, Palestinians found police reinforcements on al-Haram al-Sharif again. Upon exiting the mosque after prayer, Palestinians began throwing stones at the police in protest of their presence. Some stones fell on Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall below. In the confrontations that followed, four Palestinians were killed and more than two hundred injured by Israeli rubber bullets and live ammunition. Protests quickly spread to Gaza, Ramallah, Bethlehem, and other places in the West Bank. This was the beginning of the second Intifada. Sharon’s visit was immediately the subject of much debate in Israel and around the world about proper behavior in these holy spaces. Palestinians saw the military intrusion on al-Haram al-Sharif as a violation of a holy site. Israelis were outraged that rocks had fallen on Jewish worshippers. The New York Times reported that while Jews were usually allowed by Muslims to visit the site, most Orthodox rabbis prohibit entry into it because of its extreme sacredness. Sharon asserted the legality of his visit, declaring “Arabs have the right to visit everywhere in the Land of Israel, and Jews have the right to visit every place in the Land of Israel.”1 Finally, Faisal Husseini, the Palestinian Authority’s representative in Jerusalem, saw Sharon’s military escort as proof of the illegitimacy of Israeli control: “Sharon thought that this place belongs to the Israelis, but the way he entered, with thousands of police protecting him, was clear proof to all the world that Israelis have no sovereignty here.”2 Fifteen years earlier, Ariel Sharon, then the minister of industry and trade, had made a different inflammatory move, that time into an apartment in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City. On 15 December 1987, Social Text 75, Vol. 21, No. 2, Summer 2003. Copyright © 2003 by Duke University Press.

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approximately one week after demonstrations that would become the first Intifada began, Sharon invited dozens of friends to celebrate the first night of Hanukkah in his new apartment. Mayor Teddy Kollek turned down the invitation, calling Sharon’s decision to purchase in the Old City a provocation and writing in a letter to Sharon, “I believe wholly in our historical right over Jerusalem. Because of this, it is our duty to act with restraint and common sense.”3 Many news articles following the ensuing controversy noted that Sharon’s move would be seen as particularly disrespectful because he was “the prime architect of Israel’s 1982 Lebanon invasion,”4 and thus, to those who knew the subtext of that tag, held responsible for the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. As an Arab student told reporters, “It’s not just a Jew living in an Arab area. Sharon is hated by the Arabs.”5 Sharon himself said that he had a clear right to live anywhere in Israel that he wanted to live, asserting an even Israeli sovereignty over what he considered state territory. He asked whether Palestinians living in predominantly Jewish cities are considered a provocation and commented, “I always believed that Jews and Arabs should live together and will live together in the Land of Israel.”6 A New York Times editorial countered Sharon’s claim that Jews should be able to live anywhere by noting that Arabs were not, in fact, allowed to live in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City. Published on Christmas Day, it drew on Christian traditions in an appeal for peace in the Holy Land: “On a day the mind seeks ageless thoughts of peace and beauty, the eye sees bitter reality. Palestinians are dying, Israeli values are being defiled, and friends of the Jewish state agonize over the wave of Palestinian unrest in Gaza, the West Bank and Israeli cities.”7 Right-wing Zionist groups articulated their view that Jews had a right to Israel that superseded the very democratic values to which the Times alluded. As an eighteen-year-old protester from the Kahane movement argued, “We think that every Jew has a right to live where he wants to. We don’t think the Arabs have that right.”8 Many on both sides saw this as part of a critical demographic battle for control over Jerusalem, since “much of the Land of Israel was not conquered, it was bought from the Arabs between 1904 and 1948.”9 A number of articles implicitly criticized Sharon’s presence by characterizing it as unnatural or forced, mentioning that after his Hanukkah party Sharon went to sleep in a hotel,10 that protecting his residence would cost up to a half million dollars per year according to police estimates,11 and that the heavy guard presence was seriously disrupting the lives of his neighbors. The San Diego Union-Tribune quoted one eighteen-year-old Palestinian neighbor as saying, “It’s my home and it’s like a prison.”12 Finally, a letter writer to the New York Times legitimized Sharon’s purchase based on the fact that the house had been owned and occupied by

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Jews “until Arab rioters expelled them in 1929.” As he asked the Times in response to their editorial critiquing Sharon’s move, “The real question perhaps is why you recognize the violent Arab expulsion of Jews in 1929 as the conclusive factor for residential legitimacy. Why, that is, should the determination of Jews to live in their historical homeland (and homes) still be so difficult for others to accept?”13

Connections to Home and Territory The pairing of homeland and homes may seem transparent at first, but the complex discussions around Sharon’s visiting and residency rights make it clear that no kind of presence in Jerusalem can be separated from national claims to Jerusalem. Yet, as I hope to elucidate in this essay, domestic presence can exceed these claims in important and underrecognized ways. The debates surrounding Sharon’s two impositions into Arab or Muslim space in Jerusalem reflect the ways recent and ancient history, the meaning of national sovereignty, private property claims, and ways of belonging connected to everyday life all come into play in claims to Jerusalem and its homes. Organizing these claims in terms of cultural property debates reveals how various assertions and sentiments are authorized by prevailing notions of culture. Exploring debates around contests both for Jerusalem and for its homes puts into relief two different valuations of Jerusalem. Most journalistic, political, and academic discourse takes for granted that the primary significance of Jerusalem is as a holy city and (potential, unrecognized, divided, illegally occupied, undivided eternal) national capital. Obviously, there are reasons for this kind of attention. However, these debates produce Israel/Palestine as political, historical, and religious territory.14 While most Palestinians and Israelis would probably wearily endorse this characterization of their city, it overwhelms a different kind of valuation that foregrounds Jerusalem as a city in which people have grown up and lived. The prevalence of the former characterization of Jerusalem delineates frameworks of representation — and negotiation — that slight Jerusalem’s past and current residents. In the movement from the more common level of political or religious analysis on Jerusalem to one that focuses on daily life, and thus from the level of the city as a whole to its individual houses, the house becomes an uneasy metaphor for the nation. First, unlike other metaphors used to discuss painful instances of cultural or national conflict, such as ships or intercultural romances,15 the house is idealized as stable and unchanging. Even in the least controversial contexts we might feel a shred of displacement or disbelief if a former resident of a house we have long inhabited

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Many of these Palestinians have held on to their keys and title deeds for decades.

knocks on our door to remember past lives. The house is “our corner of the world,” and it is difficult to imagine sharing it.16 In this sense, the house seems to resemble the ideal of the nation-state. Yet attention to what the house provides, and to the habits it allows us to embody, also reveals distinct ways of inhabiting and belonging at home. The house is also a powerful symbol for Jerusalemites, and in this sense, the house is an appropriate object of study because it is the metaphor we have. In 1948, during the war that followed the United Nations partition of British Mandate Palestine, approximately 28,500 Arab residents of Jerusalem fled their homes.17 Many did not take their belongings because they expected to come back once the fighting ended, but the new Israeli state never permitted their return. As Israeli historian Tom Segev writes about this moment: “Free people — Arabs — had gone into exile and become destitute refugees; destitute refugees — Jews — took the exiles’ places as a first step in their new lives as free people. One group lost all they had, while the other found everything they needed — tables, chairs, closets, pots, pans, plates, sometimes clothes, family albums, books, radios, and pets.”18 Many of these Palestinians have held on to their keys and title deeds for decades — small and by now antique icons of their homes and of their past status as home owners.19 The Absentee Property Law of 1950 formally denied refugees and internal refugees any right to their property in the new State of Israel. Moreover, houses have been the focal points of territorial struggle since the beginning of the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967. Mapping different relationships between people and their places is important because dominant categorizations of people and culture leave some people trapped, and others placeless altogether. Arjun Appadurai has observed: “Natives are those who are somehow confined to places by their connection to what the place permits.”20 This also implies a particular relationship to nonnatives: Natives are in one place, a place to which explorers, administrators, missionaries, and eventually anthropologists, come. These outsiders, these observers, are regarded as quintessentially mobile; they are the movers, the seers, the knowers. The natives are immobilized by their belonging to a place. Of course, when observers arrive, natives are capable of moving to another place. But this is not really motion; it is usually flight, escape, to another, equally confining place.21

Without dispelling the truth of this characterization, it must be noted that similar arguments about a culture’s dependence on a particular land have occasionally won it rights through cultural property arguments. Renato Rosaldo approaches this issue from another angle, noting that

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recognition of a culture can hinge on a people’s connectedness to place. Too much movement, by the wrong people, can disempower: “Degrees of mobility differentiate people with and without culture. People with culture appear sedentary and rooted in their particular niches,” while the rootless and nomadic lack culture.22 The Ilongots, for example, did not seem to be legitimate subjects of anthropological inquiry because they “lacked the ethnographic staples of the day: lineages, villages, men’s houses, elaborate rituals, not to mention matrilineal, cross-cousin marriage.”23 Palestinians, who can claim only some of these “ethnographic staples,” have had trouble proving their culture and identity to be stable enough to meet similar requirements for culture, like other groups with large refugee populations.24

Cultural Property Arguments and the Properties of “Culture” Arguments The discourse of cultural property is a cluster of related ideas taken up by anthropologists, indigenous peoples’ advocates, and philosophers. Rather more than an academic interpretive discourse, cultural property arguments are strategies used to assert that groups have a collective, proprietary right to the objects, ideas, practices, and land to which they are (or have in the past been) connected. Conceiving the Palestinian case through this framework is useful for several reasons. First of all, cultural property arguments are articulated not within a group, but rather to outside arbiters or between parties in a conflict, as Zionist and Palestinian nationalist arguments often have been. Second, the addition of the qualifier “cultural” to the concept of property underlines the variety of potential connections between land or objects and people, ranging, for example, from personal property to religious, cultural, or national property (that is, national patrimony), all of which are relevant to this case. It provides an opportunity to explore different relationships of bonding between persons or groups and land or objects, and the different kinds of agency and desire that underlie these relationships. While in most cultural property cases, a group mobilizes its identity in order to argue for control of an object as an end in itself, in this case, desiring the land is itself a way of transforming identity and justifying new kinds of agency. Finally, cultural property debates have occurred between indigenous groups and museums or between postcolonial states and their former colonizers; thus we can organize its patterns of claims and counterclaims. Specifically, cultural property claims made by indigenous groups or formerly colonized states often assert their right to an object (1) because it is part of their heritage; (2) because it is the creation of a member of their

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culture; (3) because it is necessary for the cultural survival of the group; (4) because they believe they have the rights to profit economically from it; or (5) because others will best be able to appreciate the object in its original cultural context. Counterclaims, often made by museums or formal colonial powers, may (1) make a legal argument that the object is their property; (2) make a stewardship argument that they deserve to keep an object because they can best take care of that object; (3) contend that the object is part of a universal human culture to which all people have a right; or (4) argue that they can best give wide access to the object and thus promote common benefits such as cultural understanding.25 These arguments are authorized by a certain idea of culture that has been criticized by scholars but that was also constituted in part through anthropological research. First, they presume that cultures are bounded enough that the traditions and products of a single cultural group may be clearly identified. Second, they assume that culture and cultural difference are valuable to humanity as a whole and thus are worth saving. They also imply that one of the reasons cultures are valuable is that they produce these coveted objects, styles, and knowledge systems that enrich others in some way. Third, many of these arguments rely on the idea that each cultural group is linked to a heritage that enables that group to persevere. Cultural property is related to indigenous people and their heritage in the way that national heirlooms are related to national people and their history — though, of course, the relationships among national people, their past, objects, and land have historically commanded a great deal more power than the analogous relationships for indigenous people.

The Struggle for Jerusalem: A Brief History of Claims United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181, which called for the partitioning of Mandate Palestine into a Palestinian Arab and a Jewish state, was supposed to have placed Jerusalem under international control “in order to protect and to preserve the unique spiritual and religious interests located in the city of the three great monotheistic faiths” and “to foster co-operation among all the inhabitants of the city.” Though this resolution quickly lost all chance of being implemented, it reflects the opinion of the international community at that time that legitimate rule over Jerusalem involves more than national sovereignty. Instead, it demands respect for the religious significance of the city and also accommodation of the city’s diverse inhabitants. In 1948, Zionist armies gained control over the western, newer parts of Jerusalem. During the next few years, Israel celebrated Jerusalem’s status as a national city:

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New Jerusalem today plays the same part in the life of Israel, as does Paris in the life of France, or Rome in that of Italy. It is at once spiritual center, and political capital. It is a potent force of integration in the life of the new State. Its future — economic, cultural, and political — is indissolubly bound up with the new life of Israel, just as that new life depends in vital measure on Jerusalem’s timeless inspiration. Their interdependence defies separation. Without Jerusalem, Israel is devoid of focus and vision. Detached from Israel, Jerusalem cannot survive.26

This passage simultaneously makes a cultural survival and a stewardship or development argument for Israeli sovereignty, and its nationalist framework highlights the way that a changing relationship to place transforms identity. When, in 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and Sinai, Israel countered Palestinian and U.N. accusations that Israel was militarily aggressive with a variety of political and cultural moves. A celebratory classical music concert on Mount Scopus after the war featured Leonard Bernstein and Isaac Stern. Mayor Teddy Kollek explained a motivation for holding the concert at that critical moment: “We wanted to present our true image to the world and not be branded as militarists simply because we had done well in battle. And we wanted Jerusalem in particular to stand for a peaceful and civilized life.”27 Kollek made a cultural property argument that Israel was the best steward for Jerusalem. The occupation of the Old City in June 1967 brought Jerusalem’s holy sites under Israeli control, giving Israel a new responsibility to oversee Christian and Muslim holy sites and allowing Israeli Jews easy access to the Western Wall for the first time since 1948. Immediately after the war, the Jerusalem municipality cleared the Moghrabi Quarter of the Old City in order to open up space next to the Western Wall. Kollek described his decision both in terms of Jewish heritage and again in terms of stewardship, this time expressed in the language of urban renewal: “The day after the Old City fell, it also became clear to me that something had to done about the small slum houses that crowded close to the Western Wall — the Moghrabi Quarter. . . . As the only remnant of the Temple compound that Titus destroyed almost two thousand years ago, the Wall symbolized the continuity of a people, a focal point of hope throughout the centuries.”28 This act also destroyed 135 houses in which 650 Palestinians had been living.29 Religious arguments for Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem became more important after 1967. We might recognize the fervency with which Zionists asserted their attachment to Jerusalem to be itself a statement of Israeli nationalism’s purpose of being a Jewish state; that is, if Israel was to be a Jewish state, how could it not make a claim to Jerusalem? In this state-

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ment, there is a strong resemblance to cultural property arguments about the important role heritage can play in sustaining a culture. However, in the case of the Jewish relationship to Jerusalem, the claim of heritage carries the extra weight of history, particularly since ancient Jewish presence in “the Holy Land” is part of the Christian tradition as well. Israeli officials realized that they also had to establish the legitimacy of their sovereignty over Jerusalem within the terms of liberal democracies. As Avi Melamed, who worked in the Arab affairs office in both Kollek and Ehud Omert’s administrations, observed, “If we fail to treat the Arab population equally, then we lose the moral basis of our claim to sovereignty.”30 The Israeli government offered citizenship to the newly occupied residents of East Jerusalem. Israeli leaders wanted demographic control of Jerusalem as well. As Mordechai Ish-Shalom, a former mayor and a city counselor, said at a meeting of the municipal council on 13 August 1967: “What is required — and quickly — is Jews, many Jews in Jerusalem. No more trickles of immigration.”31 Israel gerrymandered the city lines to include land and exclude Arabs, and Israel built settlements in East Jerusalem. Since then, bureaucratic rules have made it extremely difficult for Palestinians to build or renovate homes in Jerusalem. The key to the restrictions is the Town and Building Law of Israel of 1965, which declares that in order to construct a new building or add to or renovate an old one, the landowner must get a permit from the municipality and do his or her work within an approved town planning scheme. If this law is violated, the punishment often comes in the form of home demolition.32 When the law was passed, no Arab areas had town planning schemes, and so all construction was illegal. Since 1967, Israeli authorities have slowly created plans for only thirteen of the nineteen existing Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, while swiftly planning and building new Jewish settlements from scratch.33 The percentage of land in Arab neighborhoods zoned for residential use is approximately half that of the percentage zoned for residential use in Jewish settlements.34 Further exacerbating the situation, Arab areas are usually zoned for low-density housing, while Jewish settlements are often multistory buildings. The justification given for this is that there is an Arab cultural preference for a private lot with a private garden.35 Thus perceived (or attributed) cultural preference here becomes an instrument through which to limit Palestinian presence in the city, and demographic arguments, which might seem to be about democratic rule in the city, are actually facts created on the ground. While Israel was able to mobilize both arguments usually deployed by indigenous groups (such as cultural survival and heritage arguments) and those usually deployed by First World institutions (such as those about

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stewardship), Palestinians have been less successful in mobilizing either of these. This may be because Palestinians have struggled for decades simply to assert their identity in international circles. While from the 1920s through the 1940s Palestinian nationalism grew to be a considerable force in the area,36 Palestinian nationalist activity slowed considerably for years after Al-Nakbah, the mass Palestinian dispossession in 1948. East Jerusalem floundered under the Hashemites of Jordan, who were quite determined not to allow East Jerusalem to become a national city that would challenge Amman. By many accounts, the primary Palestinian success of the 1970s and 1980s was the gradual recognition of Palestinian identity in the international community.37 That this was such an accomplishment is itself worthy of examination. In 1917, Lord Balfour thought the Palestinians to be clearly second to the Jews in their national status, stating in 1919 that “Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far greater import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”38 Almost seventy years later, Joan Peters’s book From Time Immemorial laid out an argument of why these Arabs’ interests were negligible. Peters argued that during the British mandate there were large numbers of illegal Arab immigrants to Palestine, that these Arabs had come only to take part in the economic successes brought by Zionist settlement, and that therefore a large proportion of the 750,000 refugees dispossessed in 1948 in fact have no right to return because Palestine was never really their permanent home anyway.39 This denial of Palestinian rights to the land on which they had been living links Rosaldo’s observation that a proper connection to place legitimizes culture to cultural property arguments that cultures have rights to objects and resources they need for their survival. Perhaps in response to these and other more subtle arguments about the inauthenticity of Palestinian nationalism,40 Palestinians and their supporters have engaged in innumerable culture- and knowledge-producing activities to assert to outsiders that Palestinians exist, including historical scholarship, art production, and museum displays of the hard evidence of culture. These exertions bring up a persistent question. What do people need to do, really, to avoid predatory zoning schemes and home demolitions? In The Question of Palestine, Edward Said indirectly addressed this problem: We must understand the struggle between Palestinians and Zionism as a struggle between a presence and an interpretation, the former constantly appearing to be overpowered and eradicated by the latter. What was this presence? No matter how backward, uncivilized, and silent they were, the Palestinian Arabs were on the land. Read through any eighteenth- or nineteenth-

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century account of travels in the Orient — Chateaubriand, Mark Twain, Lamartine, Nerval, Disraeli — and you will find chronicled there accounts of Arab inhabitants on the land of Palestine. According to Israeli sources, in 1822 there were no more than 24,000 Jews in Palestine, less than 10 percent of the whole, overwhelmingly Arab population. For the most part, it is true, these Arabs were usually described as uninteresting and undeveloped, but at least they were there.41

This passage stays within the system of knowledge that Said might have guessed skeptical readers inhabit, in that it does not question the assumption that Palestinian Arabs were backward. However, this is precisely what is notable about this passage, the simple idea that “no matter how backward, uncivilized, and silent they were, the Palestinian Arabs were on the land.” In this way, the passage is fundamentally challenging the notion that only an objectified culture legitimizes collective rights. In the second half of this article, I will explore what being “on the land” in Jerusalem might mean for Palestinians and Israeli Jews today. Hardly divorced from the types of assertions about ethnically delineated space, history, and progress that have influenced the contest for control over Jerusalem as sketched out here, presentations of what it means to inhabit, or to have inhabited, Jerusalem imply that the stakes are still more dear than implied by these debates.

At Home in Jerusalem I will explain this further through a consideration of three documentaries that address houses in Jerusalem. The first two, which I will examine together, concern Palestinian and Israeli Jewish connections to homes of Palestinians dispossessed in 1948 and now owned by Israeli Jews. Amos Gitai’s A House in Jerusalem is about past Palestinian and current Jewish residents of West Jerusalem.42 The BBC documentary In Search of Palestine is about Palestinian intellectual Edward Said’s return to Israel/ Palestine to investigate the state of the peace process of the 1990s as lived on the ground and also to visit sites of his personal history in Jerusalem.43 It was also a biographical text relevant to a 1999 controversy surrounding Said’s background that revolved around ideas about culture, identity, and place. Near the beginning of In Search of Palestine, Said returns with his son and a dear friend to the West Jerusalem house in which he was born. Before we see the house today, Said introduces a home movie of him and his sisters playing outside their Jerusalem home in the late 1930s or early 1940s, excerpted over slow, contemplative piano music. A young Edward

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Said jumps down the stairs. The home movie scene ends, and Said, standing outside the house, explains that he wanted to show his home to his son, Wadie, and oldest Palestinian friend, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod. They approach it walking as Said remarks on his childhood boundaries of the street: where he was and was not allowed to go. When they reach the house, Said gestures toward a window: “This is the room I was born in.” Abu-Lughod asks with a dry humor whether his bed is also visible, hinting at the passage of time but also at the power of material connection to the past. Said points to the balcony, remarking that he remembers well the summer days he and his family spent there. A shot from the home movie shows the family sitting on the balcony drinking tea. Said then articulates how his home relates to a larger narrative of Palestinian dispossession: My connection with Palestine was always intellectual and cultural, and in some sense spiritual, but not physical. And I’ve resigned myself to the loss. But I still feel a moral commitment to it, because I think it’s terribly unjust. And the injustice done to us has never really been acknowledged. I mean, standing here in front of the house I was born in, and my family owned, I want the Israelis to understand all of us were driven out from places like this. I mean, perhaps not as nice, and not as grand, but still, this is our history, and it remains, whether they like it or try to forget it or not.

Said asserts that his connection to Palestine is “intellectual and cultural, and in some sense spiritual, but not physical.” Yet Abu-Lughod’s tender joke about whether the bed Said was born in is also visible through the window hints at the tugs these objects and places make on memory. Moreover, the house is not only a starting point for the documentary but also a place at which Said introduces the formidable topic of the Palestinian refugees. Although Said downplays his physical connection to Palestine, this scene in fact demonstrates something of a different relationship between place, experience, and voice. Why might these different kinds of commitment — intellectual, cultural, spiritual, and physical — not be allowed to overlap for Said? Why might he have made a choice of how to articulate his connection? Rather than making space for the profusion of claims, the situation seems to demand one logical argument, as the ensuing controversy regarding Said’s relationship to his house demonstrated. Another interesting aspect of the clip is Said’s assertion that “all of us were driven out from places like this,” qualified after just a breath. Given that most Palestinians lived in villages, not cities, and that Said’s family was wealthier than most Palestinian families, one must wonder, what is “like this” aside from what stands out about this portrayal of his youth: the home movie, the framing of the scene in piano music, the stately house. I would suggest it is not a contradiction that his family’s lifestyle,

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though not representative of Palestinian life before 1948, contains important embodied gestures and habits of emplacement that Palestinians would recognize to be in contrast with the decades of displacement that have followed. Perhaps it is certain pleasures or habits of home that many Palestinians have shared across class and geography, like drinking tea surrounded by one’s garden, that Palestinians would recognize. Perhaps it is less culturally specific; perhaps it is that knowledge of and love for a childhood place that many of us can relate to, like Said’s memory of the boundaries of his childhood world. In A House in Jerusalem, various kinds of connection to home — familial, historical, and embodied — do co-reside for Jewish Jerusalemites. Indeed, Gitai foregrounds the coexistence of the profoundly historical and the sensual in his interviews with Israelis. The main relevant history is that of the Holocaust, which deeply affected these Jerusalem residents’ sense of security in Europe. A man who had emigrated to Israel from London remarked on behalf of himself and his wife: “Perhaps particularly being both children of survivors of the Holocaust, we are both very conscious that had we had a house like this at the time, perhaps history would have turned out very differently.” A Belgian man also says that due to his own family losses during the Nazi Holocaust, Jerusalem offers a kind of freedom that would have been unimaginable in Europe. During an extended interview with the Belgian man, Gitai lets his camera wander around the patio on which they are sitting. The Belgian man’s contemplative air and Gitai’s extreme close-up of him gives the sense of his comfort in his home. Unlike for Said, there is no sense that his prosperity might be discrediting. In one slow pan, the shot moves from a gracefully arched window frame, identifiably in a local style, to items in a closet, rusting pipes, a garden hose, a bicycle, a plant, the table at which the home owner is sitting, and his glass of water. The shot emphasizes the materiality of the home: Why is this house and this homeland so dear? Not just because of a need for a place of security in a violent world, and not just because of exclusivist modern ideas about the nation-state, but because this patio is a lovely place to entertain guests or to enjoy a glass of water on a warm afternoon. A year after the BBC documentary about Said was released, Justus Weiner published an article entitled “ ‘My Beautiful Old House’ and Other Fabrications by Edward Said” in Commentary. Weiner asserted that Said’s real home was Egypt, and that “Jerusalem was one of several family vacation spots.”44 He wrote that Said’s father, also named Wadie, did not actually own the house, noting that Said’s aunt held the title. Moreover, Weiner cast doubt on how two large and prosperous (nuclear) families could have stayed together in the four-bedroom house: “It is hard to imagine Wadie Said, accustomed as he was to spacious arrangements, enduring

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this for any great length of time.” The inevitable conclusion for Weiner was that Said, “the man who for decades has presented himself to the world as a professional refugee,” is not who he claims to be.45 The ensuing controversy shows that rather than constituting a legitimate challenge to Said’s identity or integrity, this article and the debates surrounding it demonstrate the strict demands that can be made of Palestinians wishing to assert a lasting connection to Jerusalem or even to their collective identity as Palestinians. These demands recall histories of what types of people can properly be in place and who enjoys the right to travel. Even if political movements have won rights to assert a Palestinian identity in international arenas, it is clear that struggles for Palestinian identity also happen at the level of the individual. Many of Said’s supporters wrote to Commentary and to other journals and newspapers that covered the story. Several wrote that not only did Said’s traveling not disconnect him from his place and culture, but that these very practices were part of his culture. An Egyptian Jew whom Said had known in Cairo, André Sharon, reiterated this point in a letter addressed to Weiner, published in CounterPunch. Sharon wrote of his own family history of travel, concluding, “In short, that Said moved seamlessly from Palestine to Egypt to Lebanon is remarkable only for being so unremarkable to him, and to those he grew up with. He was a Palestinian Arab, like I was an Egyptian Jew.”46 Regarding what Weiner saw as improbably inconvenient house-sharing, Sharon wrote: Such a fuss over a house! Again, with respect, you’ve missed the point. We’re talking about extremely warm and closely-knit Middle Eastern communities. We lived in each other’s homes, all the time. I sometimes spent weeks at a time at my grandfather’s and grandmother’s apartments. . . . Friends and relatives drifted in and out of each other’s homes all the time. Extended families were the norm. . . . It’s a cultural phenomenon that is quite common in all social and economic strata in the Middle East.47

Sharon counters Weiner’s argument that Said lacked connection to place, and thus didn’t belong to his culture, with the argument that Said’s behavior meant he did belong to his culture — and thus also his place. In this sense, it does not completely undermine the homology between culture and place. Said’s and Sharon’s is a third kind of movement, specific to a particular context, and one that does not match that of either nomadic Bedouin or European elites. On a similar note, Alexander Cockburn’s article on the subject noted the similarities between the accusations made against Said and anti-Semitic remarks about Jewish “rootlessness.” If, as Weiner contended, Said was not Palestinian, quipped Cockburn, then he must be Jewish.48

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Homes — and specifically these Jerusalem stone houses — are important to both Jewish and Palestinian responses to this kind of accusation of placelessness. Omnipresent in Gitai’s movie is the off-white to pink limestone used to build houses in Jerusalem. Limestone walls, bedecked with vines, line residential streets, and Gitai’s opening and closing pans of the pale, sun-bleached city evoke austere beauty, ages of history, and indigenousness. This limestone, after all, is not a new building material like steel, glass, stucco, or aluminum siding; it does not seem fleeting like wood. It is locally quarried, and new homes are often built by using stones from older, failing structures.49 These stones can be seen as indices of an Israeli Jewish claim to indigenousness and historical connection. For Palestinians, too, they index a historical presence on the land. However, the meaning of these stones as they relate to Palestinian connection to the land is also more complex. These stone homes are only one of many different types of houses in pre-1948 Palestine, including mud brick and thatched houses, the style described in the book The Palestinian Village Home and memorialized in many forms of cultural production.50 Contrary to these kinds of homes, which signify a cultural difference from Americans and Europeans, Palestinian building and ownership of stone houses distances Palestinians from popular conceptions of the “native.” After all, these are homes into which Europeans could comfortably move. Built as they were by a growing middle class of Palestinians during Mandate Palestine,51 they stand for Palestinians’ own claim to modernist progress. The stones also index Palestinians’ long-term presence in Israel/Palestine, which has been called into question by books like From Time Immemorial. Jews before 1948, and Palestinians until today, have both had to contend with the world’s intolerance and disrespect for nonnational people. Limestone, a durable and local material, stands for history, indigenousness, and civilization, three important ingredients to nationhood for two peoples from whom the world has demanded all of these at great cost. However, the tight geography of Jerusalem tends to crowd out alternate meanings. I expect that the prevailing impression of the vista of Jerusalem from the hills overlooking the city, for most Israeli Jews and for most of those visiting Israel, is that this city represents an age-old Jewish — and not Palestinian — connection to the land. Others responding to Justus Weiner’s accusations against Said applauded his efforts. For one man who wrote a letter to the editor to Commentary, Robert Werman, Weiner’s account allayed personal concerns: Justus Reid Weiner tells us that Edward Said invented a house in Jerusalem. I would like to suggest that this phenomenon may be more common among Palestinians than the one example. . . .

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I have owned a house in West Jerusalem, in a neighborhood known as Neve Bezalel, since the late 60s. One fall morning in the early 70s, I found an Arab man at my door. He was well-dressed, spoke English, though with an accent, and was accompanied by two teenagers, who spoke good American English. The man, in his late forties, said he would like to show his children the house he grew up in. I was dumbfounded. My house is in a neighborhood that had never had Arab homeowners or even lodgers. Before purchasing and restoring it, I had traced its ownership back to 1910, when it was built. There had been only one family there before me, and it was definitely Jewish. At a loss, I invited the man and his two children to come in; he showed them the house, explaining the function of each room before, he said, he had been forced to leave. Very strange! Most of the house did not exist in 1948. When I purchased the property, the original floor space was 500 square feet in all and now it is 1,800 square feet. Originally there were two rooms on one level and now there are seven rooms on two-and-a-half levels. The man was polite and graceful, and his children listened in rapt attention to his “history.” . . . The experience was unsettling but now — in light of Said’s similar invention — I find it easier to accept.52

This anxious letter demonstrates Werman’s need for multiple kinds of belonging at home. His title deed is not enough to secure his house in the face of an unexpected visitor; he also presents an ethnic history to both the house and the neighborhood and notes the improvements he has made to the house. In Gitai’s film, as well, knowing about the house and doing renovations plays a significant role.53 The British Israeli shows an old picture of his house, noting that it had been modest and poorly built, but that they modernized it and added to it. The Belgian Israeli tells a history of his house since 1948, describing that for a while it had been subdivided to serve a number of families, but that when he bought it in 1973 he made his own changes. Likewise, a Palestinian man returning to his house, like the Palestinian man in Werman’s letter, asserted his knowledge of the building by walking around the house, pointing out the new additions, and describing what purpose each of the old rooms had served. While it is likely that none of these people actually did the building themselves, their knowledge of the houses became part of their claims to them.

Contemporary Displacements Jerusalem: An Occupation Set in Stone?, a video made by activist Marty Rosenbluth in conjunction with the Palestine Housing Rights Movement,

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documents Palestinian life in Jerusalem following the Oslo peace accords.54 A significant portion of the video presents stories about people’s personal property, and in it several Palestinians recount their stories of court struggles, home demolition, and dispossession. They offer accounts of their experiences and make pleas to imagined viewers with appeals to Palestinian values about what meanings reside in the home. In their stories, these Palestinians express a number of different valuations of their houses, all finally linked to a sense of injustice about what has happened to them. Many narratives center on the house as a site of family and memory. Narratives also point to the house as an important economic and materially dignifying possession. Nafuth and ‘Adnan Abu Nijmi, who were living with their thirteen children in two large shipping crates following the demolition of their home, focus on the practical difficulties of raising a family without a proper home. Their narrative is also colored by what they perceive as the injustice and embarrassment of their situation. Nafuth Abu Nijmi showed off their outdoor kitchen: “Is it not a shame for these children to have to live like this? After living in a six-room house with a verandah. Now we live in a wooden box.” ‘Adnan gestured inside their home and commented, “Fifteen people are living in this wooden box. It’s our bedroom, our living room, our kitchen, and our bathroom. And on top of that, our wooden box is now threatened with demolition. Is this justice?” ‘Adnan displayed photographs of his family living outside immediately after the demolition and demanded witness to what happened to his family: “Look how my children are living on the ground. . . . They left us in the miserable conditions of the cold November winter. They forced the children to sleep on the ground in the winter in the rubble of their home.” Muhanna ‘Arab’s house near the East Jerusalem settlement of Gilo was destroyed by settlers, not by the authorities, and he therefore was promised shelter, but instead of having his house rebuilt, the authorities gave him a municipal bus in which to live. Like the Abu Nijmis, ‘Arab narrated his story with a deep sense of the injustice done to him and of the absurdity of his situation: They wrote to us and said they were sorry, and that what happened was wrong. And that they would build us a house. But what did the municipality do? They brought us a bus. They didn’t build us a house. This bus here is the one they brought me. [He gestures toward a bus with awnings over the windows and covered with graffiti in three languages: Arabic, English, and Hebrew.] This is from the Jerusalem municipality. At first we lived in a tent from the Red Cross. After they brought the bus it took us a while to fix it up. It was a wreck. The important part of this issue, whether they gave us a bus, or, if they didn’t give us a bus, we are here on our land.

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As he tells it, there is something dryly funny about not only being given a bus in exchange for a house, but a broken old bus in need of repairs. Propeace graffiti on the bus and a plaque in which he proclaims his love for his land, his house, his country, his father, and peace are other media through which he makes his case. As placed in the documentary, this plaque implies that his claim to his house is bolstered by his other good values, such as his love of land, country, and family. This kind of justification recalls the Israeli assertion of its good values in claiming rights to Jerusalem. Muhammad Burqan, who did not have his house destroyed but who was evicted from his home because it was in the area that became the newly renovated Jewish Quarter, and Na‘imeh Joulani, whose home in East Jerusalem had been threatened by demolition orders but not yet demolished, focus instead on the home as a site of memory. Burqan attests: “I grew up in this house, I got married in this house. I raised four children, two boys, two girls, in this house. All of my childhood memories are in this house.” After he was evicted, the house was put up for auction, and he was not allowed to bid on it to repurchase it. Bidders were required to have served in the army or to have received an exemption from service, a common means of denying Palestinians in Israel rights to resources and services. Countering this new religious affiliation of the house, he asserts, “The land deeds for this house date back over four hundred years. These documents prove that this house was owned by Palestinian families. No Jewish person ever lived in it as a renter or an owner.” As with the homes in West Jerusalem, the particular ethnic history of the house is important.55 Na‘imeh Joulani, a widow in her late sixties or early seventies, focused on her husband’s dedication to the house: “I have nothing at all besides this house. All of his life, my husband worked as a driver for tourists. All his sweat and money he put into this house. At first, we built just two rooms, and then we built some more, and bit by bit we completed it. They want to take our house? All my memories of my husband are here. He planted this whole garden by hand, the flowers, the olive trees. All my memories. That is more important than the house.” Her description emphasizes that “the house shelters day-dreaming, the house projects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”56 Aside from Nafuth Abu Nijmi’s comment that her family had lived in a six-room house, no one above mentioned anything about material value. Hani Mourad argued that economic value was precisely the point. Of all of those in the video, Mourad is clearly the most affluent person interviewed, and the only person to deliver his statement in English:

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Palestinians — both collectively and individually— have encountered significant obstacles to articulating their

Even though we cannot use the lands, we are still asked to pay property tax on them. Of course we have olive trees on them, but that is not the real value of the land. We’re not farmers. We’re not interested in farming. We’re interested in business. So there’s absolutely nothing we can do with these lands. They’re just sitting there, and we’re paying taxes to the Israeli authorities. Economically, it makes absolutely no sense, and when you think of it, you think, OK, all that investment I have, even if I want to sell the land now — and I own it — I can’t sell it because nobody would want to buy it. Unless of course I am willing to sell to the Israelis, and that I certainly will not do.

Mourad’s class and professional interests are the most obvious aspect of his statement. But although he asserts that the “real value” of the land is economic, clearly it is national as well, since he considers the land Palestinian and will not surrender it to Israel even on the private market.

culture and even their existence.

Conclusion Feeling at home in a contested place like Jerusalem calls for anxiously layered or carefully delimited assertions of connection to both home and homeland. The inhabitation I have investigated in Jerusalem is of home as always located on national and international maps, informed by local perceptions of historical events and household economies, and also created through daily habits of taking care of — and pleasure in — one’s small place. This way of belonging is not separable from nationalism, but it does embody distinct needs and desires. Cultural property arguments have proven to be powerful strategies through which people have reclaimed objects related to their heritage. However, Palestinians — both collectively and individually — have encountered significant obstacles to articulating their culture and even their existence, thus often precluding the possibility of making effective cultural property claims to house or homeland in certain forums. Palestinians have been located on either end of a “pseudoevolutionary ladder” of culture,57 suspended between Joan Peters’s characterization of nomadic Arabs and Justus Weiner’s accusations against a too-well-traveled professor. Zionists, for their part, have deftly employed a variety of cultural property arguments related to both stewardship and cultural survival — tactics usually mobilized against each other, rather than in concert — to legitimize their relationship to the land of Israel/Palestine. This case demonstrates that prevailing notions of culture recognize certain cultures more easily than others for reasons often relating to aesthetic and historical contingencies. Yet, connection to place as lived or remembered in the everyday — at home, on the balcony — can be the way culture best

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promotes collective survival. To examine this kind of being on the land is to recognize that “people don’t just dwell in comfort or in misery, in centers or margins, in place or out of place, empowered or disempowered. People everywhere act on the integrity of their dwelling.”58 What would it mean to authorize this kind of culture? When those engaged in critical processes of representation attend to the ways Palestinians inhabit their places, or would want to, existing claims might be reconfigured in terms of less exclusivist assertions of connection to place and in favor of an overdue respect for what it means to be on the land.

Notes I am grateful to Steven Feld, Fred Myers, Lila Abu-Lughod, Faye Ginsburg, and Zachary Lockman for their encouragement and insightful comments on this project. I would also like to thank Timothy Mitchell, Randy Martin, and Gyan Prakash for their useful suggestions. 1. Joel Greenburg, “Sharon Touches a Nerve and Jerusalem Explodes,” New York Times, 28 September 2000. 2. Lamia Lahoud, “Arafat: Islamic States Must Protect Haram a-Sharif,” Jerusalem Post, 28 September 2000. 3. Quoted in George D. Moffett III, “Israel’s Sharon Sparks Controversy in Jerusalem,” Christian Science Monitor, 16 December 1987. 4. Thomas Friedman, “In Jerusalem, Sharon Apartment Creates a Stir,” New York Times, 31 December 1987. 5. Quoted in Dan Fisher, “Sharon Moves into Arab Neighborhood,” Los Angeles Times, 16 December 1987. 6. Quoted in Friedman, “Sharon Apartment Creates a Stir.” Sharon’s implication that Palestinians living in Jewish cities are not considered a provocation is disputed by Dan Rabinowitz’s Overlooking Nazareth: The Ethnography of Exclusion in Galilee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), about the everyday controversies of Palestinians living in Upper Nazareth, a city built as part of plans to render the Galilee more Jewish. 7. Editorial, New York Times, 25 December 1987. 8. Quoted in Fisher, “Sharon Moves into Arab Neighborhood.” 9. Robert I. Friedman, “The ‘Redemption’ of Arab Jerusalem: Is American Money Financing Israeli Land Purchases in the Moslem Quarter?” Washington Post, 10 January 1988. 10. “Home for Sharon Amid Arabs,” New York Times, 17 December 1988. 11. Nancie L. Katz, “Sharon’s Moslem City Move Called Insult,” San Diego Union-Tribune, 26 December 1987. 12. Ibid. 13. Jerold S. Auerbach, letter to the editor, New York Times, 15 January 1988.

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14. This is similar to processes within the discipline of anthropology identified by Arjun Appadurai, “Putting Hierarchy in Its Place,” Cultural Anthropology 3 (1988): 36 – 49; and Lila Abu-Lughod, “Zones of Theory in the Anthropology of the Arab World,” Annual Review of Anthropology 18 (1989): 267– 306, in which particular regions come to be identified with particular kinds of theory, thus spurring certain debates and preempting others. 15. See Paul Gilroy, Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Jean Rouch, La pyramide humaine (Paris: Comité du Film Ethographique, 1959). For a creative and relatively rare example of representations of cross-ethnicity romance in Israel/Palestine, see the clever personal advertisements of Palestinians seeking Jews as a way to return home, first published in the Village Voice classified advertisements, 12 February 2002, and republished in Harper’s, June 2002, 26 – 27. 16. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon, 1994), 6. 17. Nathan Krystall, “The De-Arabization of West Jerusalem, 1947–1950,” Journal of Palestine Studies 27 (1998): 5 – 22. 18. Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 161. 19. See Edward Said, After the Last Sky (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 14; as well as documentaries including Charles Bruce, In Search of Palestine (London: British Broadcasting Company, 1998); Badil Research Center, Yoom Ilak, Yoom Aleik: Jerusalem 1948 (Jerusalem: Badil Research Center, 1998); Robert Manthoulis, My Jaffa (1980). 20. Appadurai, “Putting Hierarchy in Its Place,” 37. 21. Ibid. 22. Renato Rosaldo, “Ideology, Place, and People without Culture,” Cultural Anthropology 3 (1988): 80. 23. Ibid., 77. 24. Liisa Malkki, “News and Culture: Transitory Phenomena and the Fieldwork Tradition,” in Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science, ed. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 25. Bruce Ziff and Pratima Rao, Borrowed Power: Essays on Cultural Appropriation (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997). 26. Israeli Government, Jerusalem, 1948 –1951 (Jerusalem: Government Printing Press, 1952), 30. 27. Teddy Kollek with Amos Kollek, For Jerusalem: A Life (New York: Random House, 1978), 199. 28. Ibid., 197. 29. Michael Dumper, The Politics of Jerusalem since 1967 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 162. 30. Quoted in Helena Cobban, “Redefinding Justice: Hopes for a Lasting Peace in Jerusalem,” Journal of Palestine Studies 25 (1997): 64. 31. Quoted in Dumper, The Politics of Jerusalem since 1967, 53. 32. Sarah Kaminker, “For Arabs Only: Building Restrictions in East Jerusalem,” Journal of Palestine Studies 26 (1997): 8. 33. Ibid.

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34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 10. 36. See Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 37. This is relevant to the apparent relationship between Palestinians and anthropology. In other instances, anthropologists have authorized the culture of a people through study of its salient forms. Often anthropologists have registered indigenous peoples’ ideas or aesthetic forms into the realm of universal human culture through their study. I would argue that for Palestinians — who are not normatively different enough from Europeans, are too out of place, and have been too heavily armed to be easily recognized as indigenous people — the gradual recognition of Palestinian identity in the world, along with shifting fields of inquiry in anthropology toward questions about nationalism, movement, and refugees, has opened up Palestinian society as a viable field site. 38. Quoted in Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 252. 39. Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial (New York: Harper and Row, 1984). For more on this book and the controversy that followed, see Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens, eds., Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (London: Verso, 1988). 40. See Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, chap. 8, for a discussion of these debates. 41. Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Times Books, 1979), 9. 42. Amos Gitai, A House in Jerusalem (Tel Aviv: Indic, 1998). 43. Charles Bruce, In Search of Palestine (London: British Broadcasting Company, 1998). 44. Justus Reid Weiner, “ ‘My Beautiful Old House’ and Other Fabrications by Edward Said,” Commentary, September 1999, 29. 45. Ibid., 27. 46. André Sharon, letter to the editor, CounterPunch 6 (1999): 6. 47. Ibid. 48. Alexander Cockburn, “Said As a Jew,” CounterPunch 6 (1999): 1. 49. See Rachel Leah Jones, 500 Dunam on the Moon (New York: RLJ Productions, 2002), for a documentary that explores the ironic moment in which Israeli home owners describe how they build their new homes out of stones from Haifan refugees’ empty houses. 50. Suad Amiry and Vera Tamari, The Palestinian Village Home (London: British Museum, 1989). See George Bisharat, “Exile to Compatriot: Transformations in the Social Identity of Palestinian Refugees in the West Bank,” in Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, ed. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997) for a discussion of the significance of the village in Palestinian exilic memory. 51. Dumper, The Politics of Jerusalem since 1967, 61– 62. 52. Robert Werman, letter to the editor, Commentary, January 1999, 6. 53. See also Susan Slyomovics, Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998) for a discussion of how Palestinians have done renovations on the homes from which they had been dispossessed in the Galilee town of Ein Hod. 54. Marty Rosenbluth, Jerusalem: An Occupation Set in Stone? (Jerusalem: Palestinian Housing Rights Movement, 1996).

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55. For more on Muhammed Burqan’s case as it relates to the creation of a Jewish Quarter in the Old City, see Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 56. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 6. 57. Rosaldo, “Identity, Place, and People without Culture,” 80. 58. Steven Feld and Keith Basso, eds., introduction to Senses of Place (Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research, 1996), 11.

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