The Edward Said Reader

  There were comparable redefinitions of the relationship between Arabism and local nationalism taking place, in different forms of course and not always as standard left-wing critiques, in the other Arab countries. However I do not wish to imply that such reassessments had never taken place before; they have been taking place all along—witness the earlier work of Constantine Zurayck, Ra’if Khouri, Ibrahim Amer, and Salama Musa, to mention a few examples at random. It is just that the present redefinitions possess a cumulative thrust that has sharpened and extended the horizon of national self-knowledge. Like the Lebanese cabinet stalemate of 1969, the recent redefinitions and self-criticisms can be understood in psychological terms as what Erik Erikson has called identity crisis, although certainly I am aware that analogies between individual and collective identities are dangerous to make. Another risk is that Erikson’s use of his own concept is so finely ingenious as to make gross adaptations like mine seem clumsy and hopelessly far-fetched. Still there is something to be gained, I believe, from applying the following description by Erikson to the post-1967 period:

  I have called the major crisis of adolescence the identity crisis; it occurs in that period of the life cycle when each youth must forge for himself some central perspective and direction, some working unity, out of the effective remnants of his childhood and the hopes of his anticipated adulthood; he must detect some meaningful resemblance between what he has come to see in himself and what his sharpened awareness tells him others judge and expect him to be. This sounds dangerously like common sense; like all health, however, it is a matter of course only to those who possess it, and appears as a most complex achievement to those who have tasted its absence. Only in ill health does one realize the intricacy of the body; and only in a crisis, individual or historical, does it become obvious what a sensitive combination of interrelated factors the human personality is—a combination of capacities created in the distant past and of opportunities divined in the present; a combination of totally unconscious preconditions developed in individual growth and of social conditions created and recreated in the precarious interplay of generations. In some young people, in some classes, at some periods in history, this crisis will be minimal; in other people, classes, and periods, the crisis will be clearly marked off as a critical period, a kind of “second birth,” apt to be aggravated either by widespread neuroticisms or by pervasive ideological unrest.2

  “Adolescence” must not at all be understood as implying condescension towards a recent history that has so obviously been painful: this is why the present identity crisis is not minimal, but a matter of profound moment. What is crucial to Erikson’s definition is awareness of the crisis on the part of those undergoing it—and this, I think, is the new situation amongst those who together make up the vanguard of the Arab mind today. Whereas Jacques Berque, in some minds the most brilliant Western thinker about the Arabs, had deliberately called the first chapter of his book on the Arabs “The Disruption of Traditional Man,” the notion was not commonly recognized to be true, and thereby acted upon, by Arabs themselves.

  The identity crisis solicits above all a recognition of disruption. And to have this recognition one needs a very clear idea that something has been left behind in order that a new development based on a stronger identity might become possible. I speculate once again when I suggest that what is now being left behind is the Arab-Islamic idea of reality, staggeringly complex no doubt, but based, as Berque argues so cogently, on the plenitude of the present. Hitherto the Arab genius had taken the world as fullness and simultaneity; thus, there was no unconscious, no latency that was not immediately accessible to vision, belief, tradition, and especially, language. Any change in that sort of order can only be a mixed blessing that disturbs confidence, yet in the context of Arab national independence (which roughly coincided with the inception and growth of Zionism) the phase to 1948 was a period of youth and adolescence, of initiation into a new history. After 1967 came the slow realization of what that really meant.

  It is useful to compare the course of Arab nationalism with that of Jewish nationalism in order to indicate the traumas involved in the change I have just been discussing. Near the beginning of this century both nationalisms seem to have been phenomena of projection, like all emerging national ideologies. Each had its aims, its plans for realizations, and its philosophical and rhetorical styles. The Arab version has been studied and restudied at great length in works like George Antonious’s The Arab Awakening and Albert Hourani’s Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age. What 1967 climaxed for the Arabs, however, was a gradual attenuation of their projection; and it seemed to them that Zionism—no longer an idea but a state that sprawled over much of their territory—had realized its original projections. Neither side, each occupied with its own problems, was charitably aware of hardships suffered by the other. For the Arab then it seemed that quite without him a foreign growth had spread in his midst, forcing him to attenuate his vision from pan-Arabism to collective as well as individual defeat, displacement, loss. To him the Israeli had asked for and received the world’s backing in a well-planned project of dissemination and growth. Yet the current emergence of the Palestinian movement is not only, I think, a sign of the diminished vision of Arab nationalism, but also a hopeful sign that the contrast between Arab and Jewish nationalism has been muted. In having to respond to the claims of Palestinians Zionism must itself undergo the attenuation it had forced on the Arabs at large, and if there is any future reconciliation between Jewish nationalists and the Palestinians it must be as a result of this reversal of trends.

  It can also be said that during the years up to and including 1967 it never did the Arabs much good to believe that absolute right was on their side. I do not mean by this that Zionism was something to be tolerated passively, but rather that the elevation of a political conflict into a framework of cosmic morality had two noticeably damaging effects. In the first place, it made the Arabs rely on the self-convincing moral force of their arguments which, as I said above, isolated the Israelis and insulated the Arabs from the essentially political nature of the conflict. Emotion and rhetoric can never be wholly divorced from politics (this is particularly true, as I shall remark a little later, in so fraught a region as Palestine) but it is when they are employed as a substitute for politics that they do most harm. Worst of all they play directly into the hands of a political argument whose greatest strength is its apparent aloofness from history and politics: and this is the second damaging effect. For Zionism, or Jewish nationalism, has prospered on arguments and actions either for or against its exclusivity, whether as positive good or, from the Arab side, as negative evil.

  This is not as paradoxical as it may seem. Zionism is historically incommensurate with any sort of liberalism so long as Zionism is believed by its supporters to be identical with, or at least a logical extension of, Judaism as a religion of secular exclusion and non-assimilation. This is not to say that every Zionist is a Herzl or a Jabotinsky or a Dayan; Buber, Magnes, and in America, I. F. Stone had argued for some sort of dilution of the extremist view. In the main, however, the moderates have not fared well. The dialectic of polar opposition has been too strong for them. With every apparent consolidation of its national existence Israel seems more and more to represent not only the place apart of Judaism but also the concentrated actions of Judaism. And Judaism, in two dimensions, each, commonsensically, incompatible with the other; the universal (timeless) and the secular (temporal). Thus Israel can make claims for its historical presence based on its timeless attachment to a place, and supports its universalism by absolutely rejecting, with tangible military force, any other historical or temporal (in this case Arab Palestinian) counterclaims. I do not think it is unfair either to the Israelis or to the Arabs to say that both contributed, each in his own way, to this maelstrom of exclusions. The Arab has acceded to that aspect of Judaism which, as Arthur Koestler put it in The Trial of the Dinosaur, “unlike any other [religion], is racially discriminating,
nationally segregative, socially tension-creating.” In his refusal to deal with Israel at all, the Arab simply enforced the self-segregating tendency in Judaism, for which Israel assumed secular responsibility.

  The obvious bearing of the Jewish experience in World War II on present-day Zionism cannot be overestimated. Yet even there, as Hannah Arendt, for one, sensitively exposed the issues in her Eichmann in Jerusalem, problems for the non-Israeli Jew, especially for the notoriously conservative American Zionist, persist. It is not my task to consider here the ambiguities of being a Zionist, remaining in America, and thinking of the Arab solely as Israel’s opponent, beyond remarking how American Zionism symbolizes the vast range of the Zionist projection and, conversely, the attenuation of Arabism: both nationalisms have reached their furthest extremities. Yet because of the Palestinian resurgence the conflict has been compressed into its most economical local form in the present confrontation between the conquering Israeli and the resisting Palestinian. For all its difficulty and violence this form of conflict strikes me as being more clear, and more hopeful, than the morass of thought which seeks to drag in every conceivable confusion. Nevertheless, many doubtless imponderable forces also intersect at the essential node of the conflict. These range from overtly bumbling great power competition to, equally irrational and perhaps even more compelling, the subliminal forces of primitive religious emotion, mythic racism, and ideological originality of the worst sort. For it must never be forgotten—and this may be the clue to the entire imbroglio—that Palestine carries the heaviest weight of competing monotheistic totalitarianism of any spot on earth. While it may be dangerously optimistic to pretend that a reconciliation of supernatural arguments can take place in a natural setting, there is some encouragement in remembering that until 1948 Palestine seems simultaneously to have given birth to interconnected ideas of the One and the Many, of the individual and the community.

  Since 1948 the Arab Palestinian has had to endure a political living death, and whatever he now experiences in the way of vitality is because since 1967 he has begun to revitalize his thought just to avoid total extinction, and because the dreams of Arabism have broken on his acutely exposed situation. The two reasons are different sides of the same coin. The main characteristics of the Arab Palestinian’s life since 1948 had been his peripherality, his isolation, and his silence—all of those are conditions of displacement and loss. (It cannot fail to escape the Palestinian’s notice, by the way, how much his experience begins to resemble that of the Diaspora Jew.) Peripherality, like the other two characteristics I’ve mentioned, is not tolerable past the point where displacement (not being where you ought to be) means not being any place else really, not being able to stand at the center of your destiny, feeling that all your prerogatives have been usurped. If you cede your initiatives to a larger entity, and if you tie your fortunes to others’, you are apt to be awakened from this passivity when you discover that your priorities have been disordered. Like every other Mediterranean, the way Maurice Le Lannou describes him, the Palestinian belongs first to his village, land, and tribe, then second, and with many misgivings, to the vaster group. When after 1967 it became apparent that the first fact of the Palestinian’s life was Israeli occupation, the second his dispersion amongst the other Arabs, and only third, his Arabism, the priorities had righted themselves. Peripherality took on a close literal meaning, and was intolerable.

  Political silence, in the case of the Palestinian, has meant not knowing to whom or for what to talk, and therefore talking with different voices, none of them his own. The silence was broken under the new, more oppressive occupation of 1967. Here too the priorities emerged more clearly: the Palestinian must first address the Israeli, now as a rebellious prisoner speaking to his guard, or as a challenge to a coercive presence. It is the Arabs inside occupied Palestine whose restiveness, at least as far as the outside world is concerned, has made pre-1967 silence seem inauthentic. A whole range of Palestinian speech has erupted, all originating at the proper source—Arabs under occupation in Palestine—and thereby channelled out to the world. Call them rumors, myths, para-literature, propaganda, or whatever: they replace the silence with what is now only a substitute political voice (just as Amman is a substitute political center), but which at least derives from an objective, because directly experienced, condition of imposed silence. This essay of mine, I feel, because it is in English partakes both of the peripherality and of the paradoxical silence that I have been trying to describe.

  The Palestinian’s isolation has been a disorientation more than anything else. Or so it now appears. Previously a classless “refugee,” since 1967 he has become a political consciousness with nothing to lose but his refugeedom; that isn’t much of a possession, and it is his only political possession at present. The attenuation of the Arab project, or the demythification of the Arab potential, has left the Palestinian with his original starting point, as Gerard Manley Hopkins phrased it, being “a lonely began”: the fact that he is a deracinated refugee from Palestine. Karameh presented the refugee with a new alternative, the chance to root peripherality, isolation, and silence in resisting action. If once it made the Palestinian generally angry and resentful that neither the Arabs, the Israelis, nor the rest of the world fully grasped his predicament, such organizations as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, al-Fatah, and even the Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut are his way of grasping himself and his predicament alone.

  Before discussing the meaning of the Palestinian movement more fully, it may be worthwhile to comment briefly on two sympathetic sources of outside interest in the Palestinian issue. One is the so-called realistic view, which is held by some Zionists and many non-Zionists as well. In this view the word “tragedy” turns up with cloying frequency. Thus, runs the argument, while the Jews have an undeniable right to what they have so laboriously earned, it is a tragedy that a million and a half Arabs, innocent of European anti-Semitism, have had to be one of the costs of the enterprise. Such is the material of tragedy, but life must go on. Reason, and negotiation, ought now to prevail. The trouble with this argument is that, no less than Four Power settlement, it is an imposition of an occidental aesthetic model on what is in large measure a non-occidental political situation. Tragedy, as Jaspers put it bluntly in another connection, is not enough. It would be just as silly to try to convince a refugee living in a tent outside Amman that he is the daily victim of a tragedy, as it would be to tell an Israeli that he is a tragic hero. Tragedy is not a Semitic idea, much less a universal one. Moreover, the tragic vision is a static one, unsuited to the dynamics of political action currently enacted and lived through. If there was a tragedy, it was part of the common Semitic past in its sufferings at the hands of the West: the Jews in World War II, the Arabs in Palestine evicted by the power of Western-backed Zionism. The reality of Palestine remains, however, and that requires action, not tragic suffering.

  The second source of sympathy is from the international radical Left. Although wishing to accept that sympathy, the Palestinians— myself included—suggest a number of reservations. One is that the Left argues the case against Israel too much from the outside, whereas what is needed is a corrective from the inside of the situation. It might have been possible to show how Israel was originally a creation of Western colonialism (as Maxime Rodinson has done with such telling effect), yet it does not alter the fact that there is such a thing as Israeli imperialism and that is now affecting all Palestinians more directly than Western colonialism. The latter, to Israel’s immediate credit and to its ultimate disadvantage, has had the function of helping the Israelis remain in the curiously skewed position of assuming territorially sovereign status as well as a historically and politically aloof and repressive position whenever it came to the Arab inhabitants of Palestine. To the Palestinian, what matters now is the troubling immediacy of the Israeli presence, not the contradictions inherent in European and American colonialism.

  Another aspect of the Left
argument that disquiets me (I can’t speak for anyone besides myself) is what bothered me when I quoted Erikson so tentatively, or when I disavowed the tragic view. I simply have no way of knowing how political analyses developed in the West ultimately apply elsewhere. There is, for example, an Israeli Left, just as there is an Arab Left: they are still opposed on more direct grounds than theoretical ones. I have no answer to this problem, and I raise it only as a symptom of difficulties with any so-called internationalist overview, whether political, psychological, or aesthetic. Finally, no Palestinian can forget three things about the Left. First, that it was Russia and its satellites that went along with the United States in the Partition Plans and in UN creation of Israel in 1948. Second, that there is an alarming symmetry in the manner by which the Left has recently joined or replaced anti-Semitic supporters (who were a source of endless trouble) of the Arabs against Israel. Third, that the new Palestinian ideology owes next to nothing to the Western Left which, bogged down in its dynastic worries and conflicts over racism and/or conflicts and/or its own internationalism, had little to contribute to the Palestinian during the 1967 War.

  The present phase of the Palestinian experience is in trying to sharpen the experience by keeping it pertinent to Palestine, thereby liberating Palestine, actually and intellectually, from the segregations and the confusions that have captured it for so long. All sorts of difficulties tamper with this effort, Israel most of all. Every Jewish Zionist I have either read, heard, or spoken to, whether he is an Israeli or an American, adheres to a notion whose common denominator is that Israel must remain as it is now is in order to safeguard the Jewish rhythm of life, a phrase that presumably serves to camouflage the wide social discrepancies between the European, the Oriental, the Orthodox, and the secular Jews in Israel. This, I gather, makes sense to many Jews: I can’t tell. For a Palestinian, it is difficult to accept the rhythm-of-life view except as one of two things. Either the phrase stands for a fear that the Holocaust could be repeated, which makes of Israel (after twenty-one years of much-vaunted independence) what the English would call a funk-hole for every still-dispersed Jew. Or the phrase is an argument for preserving Israel from having to face the no less real truth that the Jewish rhythm has supplanted a more inclusive one, the Palestinian, which has and would allow Christian, Moslem, and Jew to live in counterpoint with each other.