The Edward Said Reader

  In Amman today two ways of life enclose all the other ways, which finally connect the main two. These two are being a refugee in a camp and being an active member of one of the resistance groups. It is difficult to remember, as one visits the refugee camps, that such places, with their mean rows of neat, ugly tents, are not there to be visited, nor even to impress one in a sentimental way with their poverty and squalor. Each camp is an absolute minimum, where a communal life can be led just because refugees believe that they need continue in this confining fashion only until they can return to their place of origin. A Palestinian UNRWA official with whom I chatted said that what never failed to amaze him was how the refugees simply hung on. He had difficulty describing the quality of the refugee’s life, and I noticed how anxious he was to avoid the word “passivity.” He went on to say that although each camp contained about 35,000 people there was no crime to report, no “immorality,” no social unrest. I saw that what he was doing—since he himself was also a refugee—was protecting the camp-dwellers, or rather protecting their right to be as they were, for the time being: I took this as I think he wanted it taken, that the duration of a refugee’s life in the camp was a moral fact with unspoken meaning, attested to by some deep faculty of knowing endurance, and a faith that being a refugee would end at the right time.

  Women and children were very much in evidence, but hardly any men or young boys. If they are not engaged as day laborers in the Ghor (the valley between Amman and the river) they belong to one of the guerrilla groups, the boys to the Ashbal (cubs) whose regimen includes a standard education and military training. There are almost daily air attacks (about which little is heard in the U.S.A.) by the Israelis over the fertile Ghor. The pretext of these raids is military targets, but their achievement is the destruction of crops and of the few inhabited villages left. Yet life there, like that of the camps, goes on because there is some evidence that hope is not entirely baseless. I talked with three Fatah men who had just returned from a raid; five of the original party were killed, but the three who came back had expected a loss of this magnitude. They all had wives and mothers in the camps. Now they also have dead or living comrades and relatives on the West Bank: this investment has made a difference, and no amount of tiresome cant about being refugees who won’t settle with, or won’t be settled by, the other Arabs, or being “pawns” or “footballs” or “terrorists,” can alter it for them.

  The other Arab cities are, of course, touched by the experience of the past twenty years, but none today so urgently enlivens that experience as Amman. This has not always been true since 1948; but it is true now, for reasons that have to do with each Arab country. I shall return to those reasons shortly. To the Palestinian Arab the Jordanian border with Israel is the border: the closest one spiritually, the one travelled across most painfully, the one that most fully characterizes the displacement and the proximity of its cause. Therefore, as a place Amman has become a terminal with no other raison d’être than temporarily to preserve displacement; beyond the city, physically and in consciousness, are a desert and extinction. In Amman the Palestinian either stays on as best he can, or he repatriates himself from it as a guerrilla. He has really stopped thinking about Kuwait, or Beirut, or Cairo. He has only himself to consider now, and what he discovers, by whatever technique he uses, is how he is a Palestinian—or rather, how he has already become a Palestinian again and what this must mean for him. For the most recent arrivals in Amman it has been a necessity, and this necessity has galvanized the residents who have been there since 1948. What has emerged, in short, is Palestinianism.

  States of the popular soul are, I know, almost impossible to examine scientifically, even discursively. It is no false modesty on my part, for example, to feel that what I am now writing is at too far a remove from the ongoing fortunes of Palestinianism. The realities of the Palestinian experience are both complex and elusive, so much so as to escape the descriptive order of what must appear to be a series of afterthoughts. But this recognition, which I certainly make, is an exact analogy of a significant new aspect of the Palestinian experience. The discontinuity between writing about, let us say, and the direct experience of which the writing tries to treat, is like the essential condition for the Palestinian’s transformed consciousness. Just as he can see that Amman is not Jerusalem, Beirut not Amman, Cairo not Amman—hitherto interchangeable parts of a collective Arab dream, strung together like identical beads on a string—he can now know that being a Palestinian includes, but does not reconcile, being in Amman and being under military occupation in Jerusalem, Gaza, Nablus, or Jericho. Yet what he feels as discontinuity is no longer a void which he had previously tried to forget—by going to Beirut, or coming to the United States. That void had been an inert gap that stood for the absence of any real encounter with Israel.

  For there has been one major encounter between the Palestinians and Israel since June 1967, an encounter that aptly concentrated and thereby symbolized the possibility of popular resistance to a political enemy (despite a whole prior series of sporadic guerrilla operations, which had lacked coherence). That was the battle of Karameh in March 1968. At that moment, when an invading Israeli force was met by a local one defending what it could no longer afford to give up, at that moment the void changed into a direct experience of true political discontinuity: the actual face-to-face enmity between Zionism and Palestinianism. This conflict thus became an event, not simply a news release doctored to fit a wildly polemical broadcast.

  All occurrences become events after they occur. In part, events are mythic, but like all effective myths they record an important aspect of a real experience. An event like the battle of Karameh was a decisive moment which, for the Palestinians, was suited to be a certain demarcation between what came before it and what came after it. At Karameh—unlike the West Bank village of Al-Sammu, which Israel had razed unopposed—the opponents were clearly pitted against each other. A regular Israeli force moved against an irregular Palestinian one, and the latter answered with a refusal merely to push off and let Karameh (a village built by refugees: hence its significance) be destroyed; by refusing, it stayed to become a truly popular activation of a conflict that had formerly been left to the Arabs at large. Thus Karameh divides the Palestinian experience into a before that had refused an encounter, which meant accepting a retrospective fiat declared against the Palestinian Arab past, and an after that finds the Palestinian standing in, becoming, fighting to dramatize, the disjunction of his history in Palestine before 1948 with his history at the peripheries since 1948. In this sense then a void, felt by every Palestinian, has been altered by an event into a discontinuity. And the difference between void and discontinuity is crucial: one is inert absence, the other is disconnection that requires re-connection.

  The odds against a re-connection of the displaced Palestinian with his land and with his subjugated compatriot are severe indeed, and the battle has only just begun. Israel’s stated policy has been categorically to deny the reality of a Palestinian people, but such a policy is thoroughly consonant with the Zionist vision since Herzl. Nevertheless morale is probably higher amongst West Bank Arabs than it is outside, because on the West Bank at least one is an inhabitant (albeit a third-class citizen), whereas outside, the Palestinian is excruciatingly aware of how thin his existence has been during the past twenty-one years. A better way of saying this is that the displaced Palestinian has had his human prerogative, i.e., the right to object to his exile, suffering, loss, death, taken from him in his political struggle. His oppressor has been a political enemy surfeited with this prerogative. But whereas the very most has been made out of Jewish suffering, the very least has been made out of Palestinian Arab suffering. For example, the diplomatic haggling between Israel and the Arab states is always depicted by Israel and its supporters as a quarrel between “Jews” who want peace and a place of their own at last, and “Arabs” who will not let them have either. That Israel has been more than a match for a whole world of Arabs,
or that it is presently inflated to three times its original size or, most important, that Palestinian Arabs, who have suffered incalculable miseries for the sake of Western anti-Semitism, really do exist, have existed, and will continue to exist as part of Israel’s extravagant cost—about these things very little is heard, apart from the usual unctuous complaints about injustice, the lack of reason, and the necessity of peace.

  It is becoming more and more certain to the Palestinian that Israel in its present state of thriving militarism has no need of peace. If it does want peace that would be because the Israelis wanted some rest from the strain on their economy or on their “image.” Most Palestinians fear large-scale sell-outs by the Arab states, themselves tired out by the uneven struggle. It is due to this fear that relations between the fedayin and the Arab governments are so problematic: each suspects that the other’s interest will suffer, as it must of course. Another danger is that the Palestinian organizations will allow themselves to become enmeshed in local Arab conflicts. Yet from the larger world the Palestinian expects (and is getting) attention, but no more than that. He has no benefits to gain from Western good-thinkers who sympathize so effortlessly with the Vietnamese peasant, the American black, or the Latin American laborer. And this only because he is an “Arab” who is opposed by the “Jew.” To live in America, for example, and to know this truth is especially painful. For here the emotional residue of what has been a singularly dirty chapter in world history, from no matter whose side it is studied, has been turned against the Arab. Even the word “Arab” works quite easily as an insult. From the Final Solution, to American unwillingness to permit European Jews entry to the United States, to Lord Moyne’s murder, to the sordid role of the British, to the Lavon affair, to Sirhan’s assassination of Robert Kennedy (which was stripped of its political significance by the press), to Bernadotte’s murder by the Stern Gang: the tracks are messy, yet scarcely recognizable in, for instance, Commentary’s clean pages.

  Insofar as my personal experience is admissible in evidence, I can try to substantiate a few of these thoughts. In 1948 I was twelve, a student at an English school in Cairo. Aside from my immediate family, most of my other relatives were in Palestine. For one reason or another they were to resettle themselves either in Jordan, Egypt, or Lebanon: a few remained in Israel. My closest friend at the time was a Jewish boy who had a Spanish passport. I remember him telling me that autumn how shameful it was that six countries were pitted against one; the appeal, I believed, was to my sporting instinct developed at cricket and soccer games. I said nothing, but I felt badly. On similar occasions many years later I also said nothing (actually I said I was from Lebanon, which was as cowardly as saying nothing since it meant saying something that was intended to be deliberately not provocative). I was born in Jerusalem, so was my father, his father, and so on; my mother was born in Nazareth. These facts were rarely mentioned. I earned my degrees, I became a professor, I wrote books and articles on European literature. And, as the jolts of Near Eastern politics dictated, I occasionally saw my family on vacations: sometimes in Egypt, in Jordan, finally in Lebanon. In 1967 I was “from” Lebanon.

  That did me no good during that awful week in June. I was an Arab, and we—“you” to most of my embarrassed friends—were being whipped. I wrote one or two eloquent letters to the Times, but these were not published, and with a few other Arabs had sessions of group-think that were really group therapy; then I began compulsively to clip things out of papers and magazines. A year and a half later, out of those smoldering extracts and with a dose of self-pity, I wrote an essay called “The Arab Portrayed” in which I lamented and documented the ways in which the Arab, in contrast to the Israeli, had been depicted in America. This vulgar demotion, as I called it, was what made American accounts of the June War so unfair and so disgraceful an example of anti-Arabism. Yet what I was also saying, almost without realizing it, was that a too-integral nationalism, which the Arab himself purported to embody, had failed him as much as it had failed even the Israelis, who in the months after June 1967 were robbed of “Arab” recognition. In the meantime I continued with my own work, and the “Arabs” with theirs.

  By Arab work I mean the way in which, grosso modo, the Arab countries set about their national existence as a result of the June War (of course I am being impressionistic). Much of the very recent work done by the Arabs has been reductive. This is not entirely bad and, to my mind, it has been necessary. Arab independence was, and in some cases still is, a Western construction. I am not a political scientist nor a social psychologist, but what I am trying to articulate is my sense that Arab independence was not so much earned but granted in forms that suited the former colonizers. One becomes especially conscious of this in, to take a classic case, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, where it is gradually revealed that Lawrence’s triumph was in having used the Arabs’ vague national aspiration as the stuff out of which his chivalric-medieval-romantic dream could be carved. Even if Lawrence and the Arabs both awakened to the dream’s betrayal, it has taken the Arabs a longer time to rid themselves of its haunting effects. Therefore the nationalism of independence, when finally left to itself, was in part borrowed, grandiose, aimless, self-serving, relatively authentic—but fairly inexpensive. The reductive process has been costly, for there has been a realization of these inadequacies, and an attempt to decompose Arab nationalism into discreter units finely sensitive to the true cost of real independence. In most Arab countries today (Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon in particular) the reduction has taken the form of left-wing critique amongst many, but by no means all, thinkers: thus it could be shown that the traditional class structure of those societies has yet to undergo revolutionary change. This may be true, but lurking in everyone’s mind is the massive fact of Israel’s presence, and the costs of that presence have still to be fully felt universally. Hence the accentuated importance of the Palestinian today, for he is being pragmatically forced to create his identity in accordance with real impingements upon it.

  I remarked above that one working psychological change since 1967 was that Amman and Jordan had become more central to the whole Palestinian question than ever before. The reason for this refocusing is not only because the Palestinian has made the change, but also—let it be admitted—because of a general feeling in other Arab countries that Palestine had neither served, nor been adequately served by, actions taken in the interests of Arab nationalism. I don’t want to dwell on this too much because, like my comments on Arab independence, at best I am making general, rather presumptuous speculations about some very complicated movements in the Arab world at large (from which I have conveniently excluded Libya, Sudan, Algeria, Tunis, and Morocco); besides, things are in too much flux to do more than suggest reasons tentatively. First, of course, was the military defeat, as well as the humiliating difference between the exhuberance of prediction and the aftermath of rout. For no matter how correct the moral stand it could not be detached from the methods of its implementation and expression, and those were shown to be disastrously wanting. Second, it became apparent that Arab nationalism was far from unitary; the creed was fed by many subsidiary ideologies, and therefore assumed differing roles. Abdallah Laroui’s book, L’Idéologie arabe contemporaine, is an excellent recent account both of what makes up Arab nationalism, as well as its differences from other Third World movements. I need not go over what he has discussed so well.

  On what seemed Arab nationalism’s most unanimous argument, opposition to Israel, there could never be real thought since, as Sartre and Cecil Hourani have both observed, one cannot truly oppose what one neither knows nor confronts. The hiatus that prevented Arab unity was Israel, and this the Arabs collectively proclaimed; but a hiatus, like any other rupture, cannot be dealt with by not dealing with it. By this I mean that the problem of Israel always remained on the other side, literally and figuratively, of what the Arabs collectively did. Israel was always being left to the realm of generality (in which, not surprisingly, Arab nat
ionalism also operated) where it was hoped that Zionism could be treated as an interruption to be ignored, or drowned out by a general concert of voices and action. This concert then was the job of Arabism, just as on other levels it was the job of the army, of the ministries of information, of the Arab League, in sum, of the Arab Nation. Since Israel was the Other, which of course it still is, it was felt that other agencies would take care of it on behalf of us. One always felt involved in the sentiments of anti-Zionism, whereas the action always seemed to be taken by proxy, at some distance from the sentiments. That sort of cleavage, then, is what 1967 exposed.

  It was as an understandable reaction to the devastations of the June War that in Egypt, to take the principle case in point, open-minded intellectuals recognized the limitations of the prewar psychology by rediscovering the limits of their own national interests. The expedition to Yemen had further irritated their awareness. In refusing to be deluded by proclamations that the June War was only a setback, these intellectuals saw that what one of them called “nationalitarianism” did Egypt itself a disservice. One perhaps minor but fascinating development out of this view was a renewed interest in works like Hussein Fawzi’s brilliant Sinbad Misri (An Egyptian Sinbad) which had originally appeared in 1961, subtitled “Voyages Over the Vast Spaces of History.” Quite the most original work produced in Egypt over the past twenty years, Fawzi’s book took for its theme the absolute coherence of Egypt’s history, from the pharaohs to the modern period.

  Although the book’s theme was not a new one, the assured subtlety of his thought enabled Fawzi to construct a series of historical tableaux in which a specifically Egyptian kind of history developed which, he argued, showed Egypt’s people to be “makers of civilization.” The implicit point here, made explicitly by other Egyptian intellectuals like Lewis Awad, was that Egypt had its own mission, quite apart from an Arab one, to fulfill, and that did not primarily include violence. Israel’s occupation of Sinai has unfortunately vitiated the argument somewhat.