One event, two signs
By Hassan Khader *
On the one hand,
"calamity"; on the other,
"liberation". How can two contradictory
narratives be reconciled in a common destiny? Hassan
Khader investigates the semiotic sleights-of-hand
which serve to obscure the historic responsibilities
-- and to obstruct the creation of a future.
Language is a mode of communication between a
transmitter and a receiver. It is also a vehicle for
thought, fantasy and dreams. The reality we attempt
to describe is not immune to the emotional and
political dynamics we project on it. Rather, in our
linguistic representations of reality, we transform
language into a system for encoding, at both the
individual and collective levels. As the purpose of
communication develops and as the features of reality
increase in complexity and grow ever more intricately
intertwined with present interests and historical and
social ramifications, the more convoluted become the
masks that we affix upon reality and the more
difficult becomes the task of freeing it from
attempts to alter or obliterate it.
The purpose of this article is to analyse the
linguistic signs in Palestinian and Israeli discourse
concerning the creation of the state of Israel in
1948. The comparison involved in this context is not
intended to place two narratives in a state of
conflict on equal footing, but rather to treat their
respective representations of an event that occurred
at a specific time and place and to shed light on the
implications of the elimination of a specific
signification or the selection of another
signification for an historical event experienced by
both sides.
The Palestinians have epitomized their defeat in
the War of 1948, their loss of large portions of
their country, the transformation of the greater
majority of them into refugees and the collapse of
their political, geographical and social entity in
the word nakba (calamity). Lisan al-Arab lists
numerous synonyms for the word ((which may be
rendered in English variously as: -- and then leave
out the transliterated Arabic -- ) among which are:
hadath (misfortune), naa'iba (vicissitude), nawba
(evil turn of fate), riziya (heavy loss), aamma
(cataclysmic disaster), ghaashiya (oppressive
misery), jaa'iha (devastation), mulimma
(tribulation), aariqa (sudden affliction) , haaqa
(infliction), and naaqira (grievous hardship). It
defines nakbaa' , derived from the same triliteral
root, as "any of the four winds that shifts
madly, wreaking havoc among the winds, so as to
engulf the land and wreak great devastation."
The connotative significance of all these synonyms
taken together is, firstly, a deference to nature,
with all its latent violence and its impetuosity;
secondly, a resignation to the vicissitudes of fate;
and, thirdly, a relinquishment of responsibility for
the catastrophe.
Do we find in the Palestinians struggle against
the Jewish settlement movement, which began in the
late 19th century and which was interspersed with
violent confrontations and dire predictions for the
future, and which engendered the emergence of
political parties and organizations, cause to support
the element of surprise and the arbitrariness of
fate? Or is there cause to entertain the notions of a
gradual decay in forces and a disposition to the
necessary elements for defeat?
In the conflict that arose between an immigrant
settler minority and an indigent majority, which
eventually led to the defeat and expulsion of the
majority, were there elements to suggest an oncoming
catastrophe? Could there be a question of historic
responsibility, in light of which the entire
Palestinian entity (before 1948), with all its
social, political, cultural and economic
institutions, might be subject to accountability,
revision and criticism?
The sign, nakba, represents an attempt to hone in
on the human drama entailed in the event and to
transform it into a key for discourse. The attempt
was nurtured by two phenomena: the absence of
critical Palestinian self-analysis and the birth of a
body of literature heavily imbued with a longing for
a lost paradise. This literature is inhabited by
refugees whose tents are tattered by the winds, whose
hearts burn for revenge, and who suffer the
degradation of having to live off foreign relief
assistance as they await the day of salvation.
This was the context that gave birth to the
Palestinian refugee denizen of the literary text,
and, with him, to Palestine. Palestine, in reality,
was never a paradise; nor was it lost. It was a
remote part of the Ottoman Empire, inhabited by poor
peasant-farmers. The West Bank and Gaza, which were
in and of Palestine, possessed the constituent
elements for the perpetuity of Palestinian existence
that might have stemmed the deterioration resulting
from the annihilation of the larger entity.
However, for the idea of nakba to be complete, the
idea of entity could not exist. Consequently,
'refugee' became the catchword for identity, which in
turn required ignoring the existence of approximately
180,000 Palestinians who remained in that portion of
Palestine that was lost. Their continued presence in
their country was not viewed as proof of the
impossibility of uprooting a people from their land,
or as proof of their attachment to their land. Rather
it was viewed as cause for embarrassment due to the
certain contamination engendered by their daily
contact with the usurpers of the land.
Although the land was the object of the conflict
between the Jewish minority and the Palestinian
minority, it was not to be found with the literary
refugee. Nor was it in Palestine, as the object of
mental abstractions incapable of depleting the
significations of paradise. The irony is that the
Palestinian identity that became rampant in the
seventies, with its revival and glorification of the
land , was, in fact, the new utopia created by the
manufacturers of Palestinian identity who grew up and
thrived in Galilee, not in the refugee tents (e.g.:
Emil Habibi, Mahmoud Darwish, Samih Qasem, etc.)
If the use of nakba had conformed to the
circumstances that afflicted a society consisting
largely of peasant farmers, the conversion of this
sign into hard political currency did not occur with
the same measure of innocence or spontaneity.
Following the 1948 defeat, the Palestinian question
became an Arab question. The remainder of Palestine
had fallen under the administration of two Arab
countries (Egypt and Jordan), large numbers of
Palestinian refugees had fled to these and other Arab
countries, and the defeat of the Arab armies left a
widespread and deeply felt rancor. The Palestine
issue was thus absorbed into the movement of the
social elite in the Arab world, particularly in those
countries bordering on Palestine where the blame for
defeat and the loss of Palestine was cast on
defective weapons and treachery. At the Arab level,
therefore, the signification of nakba was reinforced.
It became essential for the incitement and
mobilization of opinion within the context of the
domestic power struggle, in which faulty weapons and
treachery were the catchwords for toppling some of
the existing regimes. This process in turn required
that the question of Palestinian accountability be
shunted aside and turned into a technicality that
could be resolved with non-defective weapons and
patriotic rulers. For their part, the Palestinians
took on board entire excerpts of the Arab narrative
and merged them with their own, as new evidence of
their commitment to their national-Arab identity.
It is only possible to understand the sudden
radicalism that pervaded the discourse of the
Palestinians following the Arab defeat in June 1967
as a backlash against the Arab narrative which had
countered in many ways the Palestinian ontological
existence. It is only possible to understand the
Palestinians' insistence on political autonomy, their
assault on the idea of the refugee, their elevation
of the refugee camp from a place of misery and
degradation to a production plant for freedom
fighters and the birth of the idea of the state at
the expense of the idea of paradise as a retaliation
against the two intervening decades between 1948 and
1967 and as a reproach against their social and
political leaders.
If, for the Palestinians, the sign, nakba, had as
its reference the vicissitudes of 'nature', for the
Zionists 'history' served as the reference out of
which they modeled two designations for the event of
1948: "independence" and
"liberation." It is impossible to
understand the relationship between these two terms
and the victory of a minority of immigrant settlers
over an indigenous majority population outside of the
context of Zionist discourse itself. This discourse
is suffused with the notion of normalising Jewish
life, of transforming the Jews from a religious group
outside history to a national group that acts on
history and is acted upon by history in the same
manner as other national groups.
"Independence" in this context renders
three signfications. Firstly, it identifies the
Zionist movement with the other national liberation
movements in the wake of World War II. Secondly, it
locates the Jewish settler drive in Palestine in
history as the last and most recent manifestation of
the purported Jewish continuity with this land from
the collapse of the Jewish entity in AD 70 until the
first half of the 20th century. Thirdly, it elevates
the notion of statehood advocated by a handful of
Jews from Eastern Europe to a vanguard movement that
rests its political enterprise on the ontology of a
people as a pre-existing nation (though without a
land).
For this sign to be complete, certain facts that
would undermine the possibility of normalising Jewish
life would have to be excluded. Customary political
thought presupposes existence of a people as proof of
the existence of a nationalist movement. In Zionism
the equation is inverted, whereby the existence of a
national movement became proof of the existence of a
people. Normally a nation of people projects itself
onto the land it inhabits. Zionism required the land
in order to project itself onto the people.
Even with this conceptual inversion the Zionists
could not stretch the sign ('independence') to its
absurdest limits: to signify the liberation of
Palestine from Palestinians and the realization of
Israeli independence with the overthrow of a
Palestinian occupation of the land. The Zionist
classics, including Hertzle's The Jewish State, speak
of the "Jewish settlement fund in
Palestine" and the possibility of buying the
land from the Ottoman authorities or obtaining the
land under international guarantees. Never before in
history has a national liberation movement had to buy
its own nation. Nor could a demographic minority that
had been living on the land for only a matter of
decades and that controlled less than seven per cent
of that land possess sufficient historical or
nationalist cause to comport itself as a national
liberation movement in this sense.
Consequently, Zionist discourse suppressed its
conflict with the Palestinians and transformed the
Palestinian uprisings into disturbances instigated by
armed Arab groups. It excluded the Palestinians from
the dynamic of colonialism and liberation and
accorded this significance to the British. Thus,
three decades of the British mandate in Palestine
became the "colonial era" and the
operations mounted by the Zionist gangs against the
British forces became the primary expression of the
Jewish war of liberation and independence in
Palestine. Conveniently forgotten was the fact that
the British were the fathers of the Balfour
Declaration and the original guarantors of the Jewish
settler movement in Palestine.
The Zionist narrative thus transformed its
conflict with the Palestinians into a quirk of fate:
two rival nationalist movements had emerged in the
same place at the same time, along with the
consequent misunderstanding and inability to seek a
mode of cooperation against the British occupiers. As
for the expulsion of the majority of the indigenous
population, it was the tragic result of the Arab
military intervention intended to dislodge the
nascent Jewish "independent" entity. The
subsequent objective existence of refugees became, in
turn, a political device, invented by Arab states for
the purposes of perpetual agitation against Israel.
In spite of its inherent contradictions and
aberration of history , the notion of
"independence" is still a central sign in
Israeli narrative and discourse. Nevertheless, in the
new generation of (Israeli) historians and social
scientists, it is possible to come across new
developments, the results of which are difficult to
predict, but which suggest that the official
narrative has depleted many of its ideological
defenses and ideological fallacies. These
developments have revolved around two points: the
investigation into the origins of the Palestinian
refugee problem and the reexamination of the Zionist
movement's omission of the Palestinians until 1948.
These inquiries have yielded a recognition of the
centrality of the Zionist conflict, not with the
British, but with the Palestinians in conjunction
with a realization that the Zionist leaders can not
be exonerated of their responsibility for the
expulsion of the Palestinians and for ignoring their
nationalist ambitions at the time of the British
protectorate. Even if they only exist within a narrow
scope of academicians, the importance of these
developments can not be underestimated as they
intersect with the anxieties and qualms that have
emerged in the works of a number of Israeli novelists
and poets over the past three decades.
The process of linguistic codification is
intertwined with a range of cultural elements, among
which are the relationship of a specific culture with
itself, the extent of its capacity for self-criticism
and the relative importance of a specific linguistic
sign at a specific time and place for the cultural
group in question. However, the sign is not
immutable. It is perpetually mutating, which explains
the constant change in beliefs in various societies.
While nakba may have shrouded what the
Palestinians were incapable of doing or expressing
five decades ago, their present circumstances are
very different. The current minority-majority
conflict in Palestine is in need of a revision of its
signs. Specifically the problem summons a restoration
of the former element of demographic superiority. The
lost Palestine will never return. As for the real
Palestine, it exists in the Palestine of today with
its particular demographic, cultural and linguistic
characteristics and notably with its narrow majority
of Jews and its Palestinian minority that stands to
become a demographic majority within a few decades.
What occurred five decades ago, apart from the
human drama, was that Palestinian sovereignty over
the land was violently wrested away and supplanted by
a model for exclusive Jewish statehood. The displaced
Palestinians did not counter with a model of
statehood of their own until the latter half of the
seventies. Even then they were incapable of elevating
that model from the status of a political slogan to a
sign of significance in their own narrative of events
and, sadly, it was forgotten in the rush of
subsequent political developments.
The Palestinians still have the task of deriving a
model of statehood capable of solving the
Palestinian-Jewish question. Today, this task appears
more urgent than ever. This year the Palestinians
have been commemorating the passage of fifty years
since they lost their country. If the aim of this
attention is to incite the collective memory to
defend the land of its identity by invoking the names
of more Palestinian villages that were eradicated and
the human suffering that this engendered, then we
must conclude that the war juxtaposing the
Palestinian memory against the Zionist colonizer
still dominates the Palestinian mindset at the
threshold to the next fifty years after the
elimination of the Palestinian political entity. The
rationale that regenerates the search for the lost
Paradise may have its advantages, but only if we
distance ourselves from the memories of bitterness
and grief engendered by reality in the past which
alienate us further from reality today.
The backlash against the sign, nakba, offers proof
that the Palestinian narrative has reached the age of
maturity. Every narrative of what happened inherently
contains proposals of what should be. The way in
which we narrate our stories determines the end we
want to hear. The conflict between two stories -
between the Palestinian and Israeli narratives - is
the essence and the key to the conflict. I do not
believe that the rifts that have emerged in the
Israeli narrative of the event should remain a purely
Israeli concern. On the contrary, we should make
these rifts into one of our most important
priorities. The more we can contribute to expanding
those rifts and to discovering the potential they
offer, the closer we will come to the perception of
the end we seek.
We who are alive today and who have experienced
the war between Palestinian memory and the Zionist
colonizers will not live to see the end of the next
fifty years. However we can start to think about what
it should be like and to sew the seeds for what our
children will reap half a century from now. Palestine
will always be where it is. The problem will be how
to judge those who have not understood the lessons of
the past and remain mired in the repetition of the
mistakes of that past.
* Hasan Khader is the recipient of this
years Palestine Award for best newspaper writing and
is an expert on Israeli literature. He has published
a study on the subject "Hawiyyat al
Akhar" (1996, Ittihad el Kuttab
publications), & translated a novel by David
Grossman
