Fragments on the Occasion of yet Another Anniversary Celebration

(Journal of Palestine Studies 109, Vol.28. No.1. Autumn 1998)

"……celebrations trivialise the historical process, at the same time they mythicise history" Silencing the Past: Power & The Production of History. Michel Rolph Trouillh

I am doubtful that there can be such a thing as a collective
Palestinian memory of the events of 1948. I use the term
"events" consciously and deliberately; the term "nakba" has a
cataclysmic ring that sounds hollow. Perhaps this is a
generational thing, but I feel it is more than that. The plain
fact is that Palestinian society was not only socially and
economically differentiated, and consequently affected in
different ways by 1948 and its aftermath, but it was also
geographically differentiated. Physical uprooting, expulsion,
destitution--this was the experience of a sizable segment of
the Palestinians, perhaps the majority, but by no means all.
For those who stayed put and whose towns and villages were not
conquered by the Israeli army, I am not sure that 1948
constitutes a watershed. British rule in Palestine lasted a
mere thirty two years, a brief interlude after the centuries
of Ottoman rule, and there was no hopeful expectation that
this would be a lasting state of affairs.
For those who remained in what became known as Jordan's West
Bank--and I am cold heartedly discounting the thousands of
refugees who populated the camps--the "nakba" came much later.
Perhaps in June 1967, but more probably as a process over a
number of years starting with the occupation and culminating
in the signing of the Oslo Accords and the beginning of the
implementation of the autonomy agreement. If on the individual
level this did not result in physical expulsion or material
destitution, on the collective level the abandonment of hope
and resignation to defeat constitute a "nakba" of much larger
proportions. Although I hesitate even to allow myself to think
this (at least most of the time), I sometimes imagine that
after 1948 there was not a single Palestinian people, but
numerous ones, all appearing outwardly to cling to the same
identity (though even this is debatable), yet without much in
common. But perhaps an analysis grounded in material reality
is not part and parcel of "imagined identities." And in time,
thanks largely to Israel and to the post-colonial Arab state
system, the Palestinians have indeed come to regard themselves
as a single people with shared interests and a common
identity. This is so nothwithstanding the widespread
recognition that there are Kuwaiti Palestinians, Jordanian
Palestinians, Lebanese Palestinians, Syrian Palestinians,
Israeli Palestinians, and of course Sulta Palestinians, to
name only the larger concentrations. Thus the question of
whether or not the Palestinians have become one people has not
lost its relevance.
Growing up in "Jordanian" Jerusalem in the 1950s, what strikes
me most today is the total absence of Palestine and things
Palestinian in my then-worldview, both as a child and as an
adolescent. True, on my daily trip to school I walked in the
shadow of the wall built by the Jordanian army presumably to
protect people from Israeli sniper fire, but the task it
actually fulfilled was much more ominous--it rendered not only
the enemy, but Palestine itself, invisible. East Jerusalem and
the West Bank, as the name implied, were no longer Palestine
but Jordan; "Palestine" was over there, beyond the flimsy wall
that started at Damascus Gate and stretched all the way to
Shaykh Jarrah.
Things were not much different at home. I can barely remember
references to Palestine or to the events of 1948, not to
mention prior to 1948. At various stages I had garnered some
rudimentary facts, such as that my family had lived in the
Qatamon quarter of West Jerusalem, and that some time not long
after the Haganah blew up the Semiramis Hotel not far from our
house, my mother fled with me and my elder sister in tow to
Gaza to stay with relatives, after which she continued on to
Alexandria where she was joined by my father. Some months
later, prevented from returning to their own home in West
Jerusalem, now occupied by Israel, my family managed to
return, and not without difficulty, to the Jordanian-occupied
part of the city. This was the sum total of my knowledge up to
1967. I had once asked my father, who had an obsessive love
for books, why he did not have a library, and he replied that
he used to have one, but that it was lost in 1948 along with
everything else. He did not elaborate. The conversation ended
there and then. Why? I am not sure I have an answer to this
day.
The outbreak of the June 1967 war coincided with the end of my
first year at University. Having been shipped off to school in
England on the occasion of my sixteenth birthday, I had little
awareness of the events taking place in the Arab world beyond
the little that I could glean from the tightly controlled
media during my annual visits to Jerusalem for the summer
holidays. Even before that, having grown up in the culturally
arid atmosphere of Jordanian-ruled Jerusalem and attending St.
Gerorge's, a British-run Anglican missionary school where the
language of instruction was English, my knowledge of the Arab
World and the social and political currents within it had been
minimal. There was, however, a striking war atmosphere in the
British media following the closure of the Straits of Tiran,
and it seemed certain that the region was heading towards war.
Curiously enough, this did not cause me much concern. Having
derived my information from the British media, which
empahsized the overwhelming superiority of the Arab side in
terms of numbers, armaments, etc., I was confident that the
Arabs would beat Israel. I had no personal recollections of
the Suez War, but I accepted the prevailing Arab opinion that
grew in its aftermath, first that it was a Victory, and
secondly that Israel would have been defeated had Britain and
France not stepped in. This time round, Israel was going to be
defeated. I did not speculate much beyond that, and I did not
see the approaching conflagration through a Palestinian prism.
This was a war between Israel and the Arab states, but the
object was not the liberation of Palestine. Not that I lacked
enthusiasm, but my world view was not very much colored by my
Palestinian identity. If I remember rightly I used to identify
myself at the time as a Jordanian of Palestinian origin. Being
Arab was more meaningful to me. The Arab defeat when it came
was too swift for me to be able to deal with rationally.
Shortly after the war was over I made the trip to the Israeli
Embassy in London and demanded to be allowed to return to
Jerusalem. I refused the explanations of the stonewalling
official regarding my Jordanian passport, and I remember
clearly affirming that I went with Jerusalem. Since the
Israelis were now in control of Jerusalem, they had to find a
way of getting me back to it. In retrospect, perhaps this is
the strongest attachment I have felt, despite the fact that
unlike many others, I have never been able to discern
Jerusalem's physical charms, nor do I have fond memories of
childhood or adolescence. Even my recollections of the city's
physical contours in the 1950s are vague, and when I talk to
contemporaries, I am amazed by their recollections of the
changing physical aspects of the city to which I am oblivious.
Filastin to my mind is inextricably linked with Israel. I
cannot separate the two. When I make the short drive from
Jerusalem down to the coast, and stroll around Shenken Street
in Tel Aviv, or browse through Shouk Ha Karmel, I feel I am in
Palestine. I know it is not Jaffa `Arus al Bahr, that this was
not some Arab quarter that had been taken over and "ethnically
cleansed," but I also know that Filastin in 1948 was
ethnically cleansed. Nevertheless, I cannot help but feel
whenever I make the fifty-minute drive to Yaffa/Tel Aviv that
I have arrived in Palestine. I don't have this feeling in
Nablus, nor in Amman, by far the largest Palestinian city in
the world. The fact that Tel Aviv is teeming with Jews is
itself an intrinsic part of this feeling. I cannot visualize
my Palestine without Jews. I try to keep myself under control
by recalling numbers and hard facts: the Jews were a minority
in 1948, their ownership of land was minuscule, etc. I know
that this is not what Palestine would have looked, smelt, and
felt like pre 1948. But I have no recollection of Filastin,
not even a second-hand one. The Palestine I know is the one I
discovered on that first visit to Jerusalem and points
westward after the June war, though I only really came to know
the place in the aftermath of September 1970. And this
Palestine was already Israel. The two are intertwined.
June 1967 was the historical divider between "before" and
"after," but in retrospect it was the events of September 1970
that drove home in personal terms the meaning of identity and
the dimensions of defeat. I had travelled in the summer of
1970 from London to Amman, lured like thousands of young Arabs
(and numerous non Arabs) by the promise of "the armed
struggle" and its empowering potential. The rude awakening
came with the swift defeat at the hands of the Jordanian army
and what I perceived to be the disintigration of the
Palestinian leadership. Some prominent leaders who fell into
the hands of the Jordanian army made radio appeals calling for
an end to the fighting, while those who remained at liberty
saw their salvation in the intervention of "friendly" Arab
states--the same ones they had denounced for their dismal
performance in June 1967. I believe it was then that I decided
that I wanted to go back and live in Jerusalem. This was the
closest I could get to Filastin; an occupied and a divided
city to be sure, but I saw that as an advantage. Living in
Jerusalem would enable me to overcome at will what was both an
imaginary and a physical border.
Until the outbreak of the intifada in December 1987, the
occupation had in fact reunited Palestine, or at least
effected a re-Palestinization of the West Bank. There were
negative sides, to be sure. One was the separation from the
Arab world which resulted in a lack of social and cultural
development. The West Bank, as many Palestinian returnees
discovered to their dismay in the early 1990s, was frozen in
time. I began teaching at Birzeit in 1974 and despite all the
hype soon discovered that the university, modest in its
resources and not particularly blessed in its faculty and
administration, functioned essentially as an export factory
for the manpower-hungry economies of the Gulf. Although I did
not realize it at the time, it was foolish to expect the place
to be an island of enlightenment. Socially and culturally it
was part of its natural environment, a closed and conservative
society nurtured by the sterile years of Jordanian rule on
which was superimposed the arbitary rule of the military
occupation (though Israeli interference in the daily workings
of the university was, to my surprise, less than I had
expected).
All these shortcomings notwithstanding, I felt myself
particularly lucky. I wanted to live in Palestine, and for the
time being Birzeit was the vehicle that allowed me to do so. I
could cross the imaginary border at will, traveling to
Nazareth, Beersheba, Shafa`amer, Rameh, Ramat Aviv, or
wherever. Unlike many of my acquaintances, I never saw myself
as an outsider in Israel. Although I am sure that for most
Israelis I was an unwelcome intruder, I saw my presence in the
smallest and most remote corner as one of right. One instance
I particularly remember was looking for somewhere to stay in
the occupied Syrian Heights and, unable to do so, finally
ending up in a kibbutz guest house on the Israeli side of the
border. Kibbutz Hagoshrim, I soon found out, made its living
by manufacturing night sights for Israeli tanks. With my one-
year old son in tow, I took up the advertised offer to see
their products exhibit. Although I have no particular interest
in tank sights, I felt I had to make my presence known.
Irrespective of the Jewish inhabitants, the kibbutz, the tank
sights, this was my Palestine.
There has always been an unresolved tension when the issue is
reduced to flesh-and-bone Israelis. I mean Jews, of course.
There is also a tension where Arabs who reside in Israel are
concerned, but this is usually quickly overcome. Both sides go
out of their way to accommodate each other. This is of course
a temporary arrangement and recognized as such by both. With
Jews this is not the case. As far as they are concerned, I
feel I remain invisible. They do not see me, they definitely
do not recognize my presence in their midst, although they are
an integral part of my Filastin. Irrespective of the length of
my stay in Jerusalem, the only Jews I meet are the ones I have
to meet--that is, officials of all sorts, whether civilian or
military (though mostly, of course, of the latter type). While
living in London I had a large circle of Israeli friends and
acquaintances, yet living in Jerusalem with no physical
barrier between the Arab and Jewish parts of the city, there
seems to be an insurmountalbe chasm that militates against any
kind of social interaction. Hundreds of Jews travel daily on
the road in front of my house on their way from West Jerusalem
to the Hebrew University Campus on Mount Scopus. Not
infrequently, some stop to ask for directions, and fall
speechless when I respond to their questions in Arabic. The
presence of Arabs in the city always comes as a surprise to
them. The use of Arabic in itself seems to pose a dangerous
threat. This was driven home to me on the occasion of a
protest meeting at a Tel Aviv University Forum in the
aftermath of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, when I happened
to meet General Aharon Yariv, a lukewarm dove even by Israeli
standards. He addressed me in Hebrew, and I replied in English
that I did not speak Hebrew. His rejoinder was a revelation:
"It is not that you do not speak Hebrew, it's that you refuse
to speak it," he said. Although it took me some time, I
eventually came to see the wisdom of his words. Now,
everywhere I travel in Israel/Palestine I insist upon speaking
Arabic. In my Palestine, Arabic is the lingua franca. I have
made my historic compromise. Now it is the turn of the Jews.