En om jullıe ondertussen bezıg te houden: een lang artıkel van Rashid Khalidi: Palestine: Liberation Deferred
This article appeared in the May 26, 2008 edition of The Nation.

The “Palestine Question” has been with us for sixty years. During this
time it has become a running sore, its solution appearing ever more
distant. Whether the events sixty years ago that created this question
solved the previously perennial “Jewish Question” is once again open to
debate. This is the case after many years when the apparent triumph of
Zionism stilled doubts and drowned out the protests of those who argued
that what purported to be the solution to one problem had created an
entirely different one.

It is considered by some to be a slur on Israel and Zionism, and
indeed even tantamount to anti-Semitism, to suggest that these events
sixty years ago should be the subject of anything but unmitigated joy.
Commemoration, or even analysis, of what Palestinians call their
national catastrophe, al-Nakba–the expulsion, flight and loss of their
homes by a majority of their people sixty years ago–is thus considered
not in terms of this seminal event’s meaning to at least 8 million
Palestinians today (some estimates are over 10 million) but only
because it is directly related to the founding of Israel. Palestinians
presumably do not have the right to recall, much less mourn, their
national disaster if this would rain on the parade of celebrating
Zionists everywhere. The fact that the 1948 war that created Israel
also created the largest refugee problem in the Middle East (until the
US occupation of Iraq turned 4 million people into refugees) must
therefore be swept under the rug. Also disregarded is the obvious fact
that it would have been impossible to create a Jewish state in a land
nearly two-thirds of whose population was Arab without some form of
ethnic cleansing.

It is ironic and tragic that the resolution, if indeed it was a
resolution, of a Jewish question should have created a Palestine
question. It is even more ironic that the former should have been
resolved not where it arose in its most acute form, in the West, or at
the West’s expense, but rather in Palestine, and to the detriment of
Palestine’s people. This was in large part the result of the efforts of
a West stricken by a (fully justified) sense of guilt for centuries of
suffering inflicted on European Jews, culminating in the Holocaust, a
West that compounded its sins by helping to inflict further suffering,
this time on Palestinians. It is also tragic that beyond the harm that
was done to the Palestinians by the growth of Zionism and the
establishment of Israel, these same developments should have led to the
uprooting of the world’s oldest and most secure Jewish communities,
which had found in the Arab lands a tolerance that, albeit imperfect,
was nonexistent in the often genocidal, Jew-hating Christian West.

A few things seem clear sixty years after 1948. One is that if the
Jewish question has lost its saliency, perhaps more as a consequence of
the enormity of the atrocities of the Nazis than for any other reason,
the creation of Israel has raised different questions and problems for
its supporters and others. To the extent that Zionism has succeeded in
winning acceptance of its assertion that all Jews are part of a
national body whose nation-state is Israel, it has linked the status
and circumstances of Jews everywhere not only to the fate of that state
but to every facet of that state’s policies and actions. Insofar as
some of those policies and actions may be unacceptable, their very
existence must be denied or elided, and reality bent to suit the tender
sensibilities of supporters of Israel: for example, the rank
discrimination against the 1.4 million Arab citizens of Israel who are
not part of the Jewish ethnicity in whose name and for whose interests
the state was created and exists; or the collective punishment
inflicted on the 1.5 million people of the Gaza Strip imprisoned for
months on end; or the systematic torture and humiliation inflicted on
the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have passed through the
Israeli prison system. We see the results of this bending of reality in
the travesty that passes for news coverage of Israel and Palestine in
the American media.

Where reality cannot be bent and such violations of basic human rights
and dignity cannot be denied or elided, they are justified as necessary
for the “security” of the Jewish state. This argument carries weight
after centuries of profound Jewish insecurities, but it masks the fact
that these oppressive and unjust policies and actions sow resentment
that guarantees Israel’s eternal insecurity. Even worse, some of
Israel’s supporters in the United States and elsewhere apparently feel
obliged to become general partisans of discrimination and racial
profiling, or collective punishment, or torture, or imprisonment
without due process, or all of the above. Thus, if the Jewish question
is resolved through the establishment by force of a Jewish state in
what was an Arab land, then the maintenance of this state in the face
of the natural, understandable resentment of those harmed in the
process involves its supporters not only in justifying the
unjustifiable in Israel and Palestine but by logical extension also in
justifying it in the United States, in Guantánamo, and in Iraq and
Afghanistan. This is a sad result not only for those who have sought a
remedy for an age-old problem but also for those dismayed at the new
problems this solution has created and the ripple effect of this
solution far from Israel or Palestine.

Another thing has become clearer and clearer over these sixty years: a
just resolution of the Palestine question will be far from simple, if
it is indeed possible at all; and if it is ever to be resolved, this
will depend in large measure on the Palestinians themselves, whose
current status is perhaps as desperate as it has been since 1948. Such
a resolution will not be simple, because the now universally applauded
two-state solution faces the juggernaut of Israel’s actions in the
occupied territories over more than forty years, actions that have been
expressly designed to make its realization in any meaningful form
impossible. This is true whether those actions involve the unending
process of the meticulously planned and state-supported colonization
and effective annexation of slice after slice of the West Bank, the
isolation of Arab East Jerusalem from its hinterland in the West Bank,
the systematic confinement of more than 2 million Palestinians living
there in smaller and smaller and ever more hermetically sealed cantons,
or the cancerous growth of what might be called an Israeli
prison-industrial complex. This military, security, state and private
apparatus controls most of the important decisions in the lives of the
nearly 4 million Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, who are
about to enter their forty-second year of military occupation, and it
has harbored a Palestinian prison population of about 10,000 since
2000.

In principle this juggernaut is, of course, not unstoppable. There is,
however, no sign that its momentum has slowed in the past seventeen
years (since the Madrid conference) of the cruelly misnamed “peace
process,” let alone recognition of its vast power, or a willingness to
confront and reverse it, on the part of most Israeli, American or other
decision-makers. The deceitful, feeble silence of US policy under three
administrations about this juggernaut, and the mass media’s attitude
that the emperor’s clothes look just splendid, would be nauseating if
one was not already accustomed to this sort of feckless, insouciant
irresponsibility on the part of Washington, and of the American media’s
complicity with it.

While the two-state solution is thus deeply flawed–if it has not
become unrealizable–there are also flaws in the alternatives, grouped
under the rubric of the one-state solution. How can most Israelis and
Palestinians be persuaded to forgo their aspirations for a state of
their own, and to overcome their dislike of each other such that they
can contemplate living together in one state, whether binational,
federal, cantonal or unitary? How would it be possible to reverse the
ideological triumph of Zionism, which convinced Israelis and others
that the main lesson of the Holocaust is that there must be a Jewish
state (while in the same breath they are told that this state will have
to fight for its existence against an environment rendered permanently
hostile by the conditions of its establishment and maintenance)? How
would it be possible to reverse the process whereby all Palestinian
political formations of any consequence have gradually become wedded to
the idea that the establishment of a Palestinian state in 22 percent of
historic Palestine–via the reversal of forty-one years of Israeli
occupation practices carried out with the acquiescence of the United
States and that render the creation of such a state virtually
impossible–would be an acceptable solution to the question of
Palestine? This was true first of Fatah, and then of more radical
Palestinian groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine, and is now true even of Hamas.

Moving toward a two-state, or a one-state, solution or toward any
other resolution of the Palestine question–that is, getting the
Palestinians out of the parlous state they are currently in–is
dependent on a reversal in the dynamic of the Palestinian polity. For
several years, this has been spiraling downward, and it now seems to be
nearly in free-fall. Only when the Palestinians were united, when they
had some sense of what their national strategy was, and when they chose
tactics appropriate to that strategy, did they have any success at all,
minimal though it has been, over the past forty-one years, the past
sixty years–indeed, over the past ninety years. The Palestinians were
most emphatically not united around a clear strategy and appropriate
tactics during the British Mandate until 1948 or during the two decades
afterward, nor have they been for the past decade or so, both periods
that have been disastrous for them. Even during the era from the heyday
of the PLO in the late 1960s through the first intifada of 1987-91,
when the Palestinians gained broad international legitimacy and
sympathy, and grudging recognition from Israel, this unity and
strategic clarity were flawed in many ways.

In particular, Palestinians lacked clarity about the moral, legal and
political disadvantages in the use of violence against an Israeli
polity able to mobilize in defense of its actions, however unspeakable,
the most powerful tropes of victimhood in modern Western culture. This
confusion among some Palestinians exists although farsighted thinkers
like Edward Said and Eqbal Ahmad understood decades ago that nonviolent
resistance was integral to Palestinian success; although the greatest
successes of the Palestinians were won by the unarmed popular protests
of the first intifada; and despite widespread (but underreported)
peaceful joint Palestinian-Israeli protest movements against Israel’s
illegal wall inside the West Bank. Many Palestinians understandably
cling to the legitimate right of any people under occupation to resist
their oppressors. They see only the extensive, continuous violence
directed by Israel against the Palestinians, much of it structural and
integral to the maintenance of the occupation. They cannot understand
that because of Israel’s cloak of permanent victimhood, its massive
violence remains either invisible or justified in the West, while every
Israeli casualty seems to be mourned there with infinite sadness and is
taken as another sign of the inherent barbarity of the Palestinians.

Today we are witness to the spectacle of two feeble and clueless
Palestinian political movements, both lacking strategic vision and
bereft of the selfless patriotism that would lead them to bury their
petty differences, fighting like two cocks on a garbage heap, as the
Arabic expression has it. They do so although overwhelming majorities
of Palestinians have consistently demanded that they compromise with
each other in the interest of national unity. The Fatah-dominated
Palestinian Authority has abandoned any idea of popular mobilization,
any last shred of an ethos of service to the people, any sense of the
vital importance of national unity if even minimal Palestinian
objectives are to be achieved, any respect for the democratic process
that brought its rivals in Hamas into power in January 2006, and any
sense of the danger of hitching the Palestinians to the bankrupt
policies of a lame-duck American President who heads the most
pro-Israeli Administration in US history.

The blindness of Hamas is as bad: neither able to fight nor to
negotiate effectively, neither able to compromise with Fatah nor to
govern on its own, and no more able to break free of the clutches of
its external backers than is Fatah vis-à-vis its own foreign backers,
Hamas has lurched from disaster to disaster since its unexpected
victory in the 2006 elections. Undermined by the refusal of the United
States and Israel even to attempt to negotiate with a Hamas-dominated
government, last summer it made the fatal mistake of taking over the
Gaza Strip in response to preparations for a US-supported coup by Fatah
strongman Muhammad Dahlan. Hamas reached a low point in April, when a
poll showed that it enjoyed the support of less than 18 percent of
Palestinians (versus 32 percent for Fatah, whose leader, Mahmoud Abbas,
however, is even more unpopular than Ismail Haniya of Hamas: 11.7
percent to 13.3 percent). The ideological bankruptcy and the degree of
popular rejection of both of the formations that dominate Palestinian
politics are illustrated by the fact that together they enjoy the
support of barely 50 percent of Palestinians.

If there is to be a resolution of the Palestine problem, it depends on
the Palestinians’ understanding the massive disadvantages they labor
under in fighting a struggle for liberation against the heirs of the
victims of the Holocaust, in the growing shadow of worldwide
Islamophobia. It depends on their unity and on their adopting the
appropriate strategy and tactics for this difficult task, in mobilizing
the powerful moral force of their cause and the remarkable strengths of
Palestinians under occupation and in the diaspora who have withstood
extreme pressures but have neither submitted nor despaired. These
strengths must be deployed not just for a defensive steadfastness but
for a positive goal of liberation, peace and justice, one that can
change the terms of the conflict and the way it is understood, and win
over enough of their opponents and enough of the outside world to
change the unfavorable balance of forces that today keeps them
scattered, dispersed, confined and imprisoned sixty years after the
destruction of Arab Palestine.