Something's happened in the last year: the debate over the 1967 borders is giving way to a debate over the '48 borders. Ilan Pappe said this was happening in his book on '48, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, now it's all around us; Israel's 60th birthday is causing even the New Yorker to print the word Nakba. If Israel actually wanted to preserve the two-state solution, it would issue a statement tomorrow acknowledging the great suffering in the Nakba, and the need to address the refugees' rights.
Yesterday the softspoken Columbia U. anthropologist, Lila Agu-Lughod, co-author of the book Nakba (who met her co author, Ahmad Sa'di, at her father's funeral in Jaffa 7 years ago), posted these eloquent comments on the Columbia University Press blog to honor the 60th anniversary of the Nakba:
The Palestine/ Israel conflict has occupied center stage in international affairs at least since the Balfour Declaration in 1917... Its macabre manifestations confront us on TV screens and newspapers’ pages daily. The efforts invested to solve it peacefully have so far failed. And despite apparently huge diplomatic efforts (genuine, self-serving, or cynical) doomed approaches continue, paradoxically, to prevail. These approaches most commonly—and with various degrees of sophistication—construct a political landscape that is dominated by elites who are described as either for or against peace. Leaders are classified in loaded and dichotomous terms: as moderate or radical; westernized or traditional; secular or fundamentalist. Very little, if anything at all, is said about those who construct these categories and their interests in doing so, let alone their role in perpetuating the conflict. Nothing is said about the morality of those who categorize....
[A] durable peace between Israelis and Palestinians must begin by tackling the moral foundation of the conflict. In 1948 the vast majority of the indigenous population, the more than 750,000 Arab Palestinians who resided on 77.8% of the land of their country—which later became Israel—were expelled. The will of the international community to allow their return, expressed in the UN resolution 194, has been ignored.
How can Palestinians challenge the current realities that are constructed by powerful nations and the dominant narrative that denies their existence, dreams, and aspirations? Why has the morality of their claims to nationhood and to a return to their homes not been understood or supported?
Which nakba?
Which response to nakba?
Israel has acknowledged one "nakba", that is that their birth involved pains for others, that others suffered, that there was a great tragedy for the Palestinians, partially as a result of Israel's direct actions (some avoidable some not), and also partially as a result of policies formed by their "solidarity" (prohibiting assimilation in Lebanon, Egypt, Syria).
Israel rejects the "nakba" of intentional and conspiratorial ethnic cleansing, of intending for Palestinians to permanently live in harm and pain.
The oft-stated remedy towards Israelis, is to "get the fuck out". "You don't belong here". "This is our home, not yours".
While that might have been true 100 years ago, it is not true now, even in the settlements (as dumb and wrong as the settlement project was and remains in its exclusiveness and national expropriation orientation).
They are now Israeli's, people's (not political abstractions), homes.
The strange bedfellows in resistance are difficult for even a peace-seeking Zionist to reconcile. The logic of assertion is both important and ends up rationalizing terror as means.
I myself have experienced starting in a march supporting Palestinian self-determination, only to hear chanting of "death to Israel", in the same demonstration.
I left, and it permanently soured my attitude about Palestinian "solidarity", to the point of requiring clarity about whether the solidarity was humane or inhumane.
As frustrating as that is to those with sincere goals of wanting Palestinian suffering and dispossession to end.
If stated as zero-sum, I want no part of it.
Phil,
Remember how a few weeks ago I said that getting into conversations with ultra-Zionst types like Richard Witty ultimately hinged on the definitions of things? Well I take back my bashing on Witty, but for the chickenhawkish ultra-Zionists, their entire argument depends on controlling definitions. Now today the writer you cite writes the following:
"Leaders are classified in loaded and dichotomous terms: as moderate or radical; westernized or traditional; secular or fundamentalist. Very little, if anything at all, is said about those who construct these categories and their interests in doing so, let alone their role in perpetuating the conflict."
Here is confirmation of what I was saying. Incredibly, in this Sunday's Post there is another even more laser-like analysis and discussion of "pro-Israel" by Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street, titled "5 Myths About Being Pro-Israel":
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/08/AR2008050801521.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
I almost yelled out in happiness when reading my own exact philosophy and definition of my own "pro-Israel" beliefs. I would work for this man.
The tides are turning against the chickenhawks, and all this on the same day Obama looks set to take the superdelegate lead! Better days are coming.
Hey everybody the agenda for the AIPAC treason fest in June is now available.
You are right on the money with this post Phil.
Break Out Session 2
Learn how to effectively promote Nakba denial on your college campus as we celebrate 60 years of fraud and ethnic cleansing on the anniversary of Apartheid Israel's creation.
AIPAC Announces Annual Treachery Fest Agenda For…June 2, 2008… Chicago, Illinois
http://homo-sapien-underground.blogspot.com/2008/05/aipac-announces-annual-treachery-fest.html
Re Witty's dilemna: I wonder how many Americans (especially the lunch pails out of a decent job, left with only god, guns & bowlling), leaning towards Obama, feel the same way after they've got a good dose of his formative mentor, Rev Wright?
How does the 100 year home versus the 2,000 year home fit in here? On the same land. The old plantation South & Jim Crow versus the last four decades of Affirmative Action?
Does anyone remember when the sophisticated people were cosmopolitan? Does anyone know what the concept means? Why do people have to be praised for raising their humanity and ethics over their identity politics? Why do we need to be astonished when someone makes an attempt to step out of their ghetto? When did it become more laudable to exclude others because they don't belong to the tribe? Yeah, yeah, there were racists etc. but they were the ignorant people, the great unwashed, not the cool people. Identity politics is a blight on the world.
Does anyone remember when the sophisticated people were cosmopolitan? Does anyone know what the concept means? Why do people have to be praised for raising their humanity and ethics over their identity politics? Why do we need to be astonished when someone makes an attempt to step out of their ghetto? When did it become more laudable to exclude others because they don't belong to the tribe? Yeah, yeah, there were racists etc. but they were the ignorant people, the great unwashed, not the cool people. Identity politics is a blight on the world.
RE: "Identity politics is a blight on the world."
It's running the democratic presidential campaigns now. Not surprising since that's been the democratic hole card for about fifty years. Now the democratic campaign has boiled down to how can we appeal to white working and lower-middle class (gentile) males, the group left out for four decades.
But that just covers the domestic front.
Foreign policy and its real impact, plus monetary policy and its real impact, seems to escape the majority ken on all sides.
Who are the Gold Star Mothers gonna support?
Who are those who don't want to bail out Wall St & lying "get something for nothing" home buyers and flippers gonna support?
What will lunch bucket Americans have to say by vote about that?
I predict McCain will win because foreign policy & long-term economics are not even part of the campaign debate in any
meaningful way, any way that will actually make the average voter think of how we've got into this mess.
If a pretext for scare from the Middle East comes along, I'd bet on it.
McCain will win, more ependables will die or get horribly maimed for life, the rich will get richer, non-stop war on credit at 20% interest, payable by our children.
Not sure yet whether to vote for Ron Paul or Obama.
"To be a Zionist is to prevent assimilation, to be a Zionist is to engage in some form of Jewish political tribalism. Zionism indeed colonizes Palestine but its branches are far-reaching. Zionism is not a local movement supported by some enthusiastic lobbies around the world. Zionism is a global network. It is a clannish political apparatus that systematically endangers our planet for the sake of a miniature ethnic group. This very group is not the Jews per se, it is actually the Jewish political tribe. Zionism is there to shape and re-shape the notion of the Ghetto, to form and re-form the dialectic of chosenness, to balance the emerging tension between insularity and openness and yet to include most of the Jews. Zionism is a global network with no head, it is a spirit and spirit cannot be defeated. Yet, spirit can be revealed and spiritual supremacy must be exposed."
Gilad Atzmon
Ultra-right Zionist types?
You know, Richard, those for a "Greater Israel" and largely resistant to sympathizing with the Palestinians or Israel's neighbors.
I acknowledge you don't define your own views this way, and think you are quite "normal" or mainstream, but that's just no longer true, if it ever was, and is becoming less true every day.
That's not to say you can't evolve and change as well.
Richard, you love to engage in abstractions. They all favor your obvious view: My son will gladly die for Israel. I will support him all the way. Gentiles are there to be used. Fuck those goy sub-humans.
"Gentiles are there to be used. Fuck those goy sub-humans."
I never said ANYTHING remotely resembling those statements.
That inference is your own paranoia Charles.
Why of course you don't say anything directly, Richard. Anybody entering this blog can just search your abstractions and comments. Let them decide who you are, and what you want, and who you want to pay.
Thanks for posting this blog comment by Lila Abu-Lughod and her co-editor of the book, Nakba. Abu-Lughod is probably the best known of her generation of anthropologists of the Middle East. She is a brilliant scholar, a lovely and lucid writer, and a leader among feminist anthropologists in doing scholarly work that reshapes how academics such as myself think about the Middle East.