I love the London Review of Books for publishing Walt and Mearsheimer 5 years ago (and for publishing this delicious exploration of Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water), and my love temperature just went up yesterday when I finally read Adam Shatz’s bravura reporting from Palestine: “Is Palestine Next?” For Shatz was given an assignment that no American publication would allow, to spend 3 weeks in Palestine and tell us, What is the effect of the Arab spring on Palestine? What do Palestinians want?
The results are staggering, and yes, they echo many of the things we’ve said at this site: that the Arab spring combined with the utter failure of the peace process has hit reset for Palestinians, that Palestinian thinkers are now looking back at 1948 and doubting Partition, that the focus is on political rights and the right of return has become a transcendent idea (even for those who do not wish to exercise it), that for all the talk of the next intifadah there is enormous hope for democracy, and that Palestinians are willing to wait the Israelis out as the international democracy movement slowly transforms the situation.
I will give a few excerpts in a minute, but the genius of this piece, the staggering realization I had at the end, as if waking from a dream was: AT NO TIME DID SHATZ FEEL THE NECESSITY TO CALL UP AN ISRAELI JEW OR AN AMERICAN JEWISH EXPERT FOR INTERPRETATION. No. This was a piece about Palestinian consciousness, and for some goddamned reason Shatz trusted Palestinians to express their political desires to him, and to interpret them as well without a translator. Simply amazing. And did he feel uncomfortable with these demands for human rights? No–or only when they seemed youthful/pie-in-the-sky to Shatz, and then who did he retreat to? He spoke to Diana Buttu, the Canadian-Palestinian lawyer, for perspective. Oh and Raja Shehadeh.
And so a journalist has actually granted Palestinians full journalistic rights to represent themselves. Revolutionary.
Read the whole piece. But here are some great moments in the piece. First, on the emphasis on rights over borders, and the lack of excitement over the Palestinian statehood declaration:
the declaration sticks to the modest, 1967 parameters at the very moment the Netanyahu government is building a Greater Israel. If Israel continues to act as if 1948 never ended, and shows no sign of wanting to reach a compromise on the 1967 borders, many Palestinians say, why shouldn’t we call for more too?
And there’s yet another reason for the lack of interest in the declaration: as the prospect of a genuine – a sovereign and independent – Palestinian state has receded, another discourse has returned, one with much deeper roots in the Palestinian political imagination than talk of statehood, and much closer to the ideas that inspired the Arab uprisings. It’s often forgotten that until the mid-1970s, Palestinians were looking not to establish a state but to achieve ‘national liberation’, to restore their rights in the land from which they had been driven – beginning with the right of return. Palestinians rarely talk about statehood, but they often talk about their rights; statehood is viewed, at best, as a means to achieve them.
On the Palestinian nonviolent movement and the importance of the right of return.
Today Bilin – along with the villages of Nilin, Budros and Nabi Saleh – is a heroic symbol of Palestinian defiance. In a recent speech in the Knesset, Netanyahu spoke about this dusty little village as if it were an existential threat to the Jewish state, mentioning a protest in Bilin when ‘a young girl was walking along holding a large symbolic key. Every Palestinian knows what that key symbolises. This is not the key to their homes in Bilin, Ramallah or Nablus. It is the key to our homes in Jaffa, Acre, Haifa and Ramle.’ That girl, [Muhammad el-]Khatib told me proudly, was his six-year-old daughter…
‘I am not for one state or for two states,’ he said, something you often hear from Palestinians. ‘I am for equality. The principles of equality and human rights are global principles, and they are no less applicable here than elsewhere.’
On the ways in which the failure of the peace process and the Arab spring have galvanized even young Fatah officials to speak of democracy and the right of return:
‘Obama, the poor man, he got into the ring with Netanyahu and he got a bloody nose while the whole world was watching,’ [Fatah Dept of Foreign Relations deputy Husam] Zomlot said. ‘Should we wait for America to come around? We’ve been waiting for 20 years. The depressing fact is that America is impotent.’ But the Arabs, at last, are not. ‘The region has changed irreversibly,’ Zomlot said, ‘but Israel still has the manual of 1948. The removal of the Arab regimes that stood in the way of the Palestinians is neutralising Israel’s machine. If the Israelis don’t change, they will end up as a tiny minority in a sea of Arab democracies. I hope they will come back to their senses before it’s too late.’ But it may already be too late for partition. ‘I’m afraid we’re beyond the two states,’ he said….
When we met, Zomlot had just returned from Washington after a failed mission to persuade senior officials in the State Department and National Security Council to support the Palestinian declaration of statehood. I asked him why he was devoting time to a project he no longer thought feasible. Statehood, he explained, was a tactic, not a goal. ‘The struggle to end injustice is cumulative,’ he said. ‘You don’t waste all the diplomatic gains that you’ve achieved in the last 40 years. If the two-state solution materialises, Palestinians will accept it. If it doesn’t, we move to a different strategy. In any case, our strategic objective isn’t two states or one state, but to end the occupation, to ensure that the right of return is implemented, and to establish equal rights for the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Whether these objectives are achieved in one state, or two states, or a hundred states, doesn’t matter to most Palestinians.’ Palestinians may not be strong enough yet to achieve their objectives, but at least they can block the Israelis from achieving theirs.
On the centrality of the right of return:
[I]n the Palestinian imagination the idea of return has always been not so much about reclaiming the past as redeeming it. It is about culture and honour as much as about politics, and to question it – or to appear to renege on it, as the Palestinian negotiators were revealed to be doing by al-Jazeera’s leaked Palestine Papers – is to question, even to deny, Palestinian identity. Determined to prove that its passion for return is no less feverish than its constituents’, the PA mounted a boisterous street fair in al-Manara on Nakba Day.
Palestinian patience:
‘I am a student of history. [says Hussam Khader, a Fatah leader] Sooner or later, and it might take another hundred years, we will liberate all of Palestine, from the river to the sea. Don’t believe we will continue for ever in peace negotiations. These will fail, just as the leaves of the trees fall in autumn. Israel is like the British Mandate, like Babylon. These states eventually pass. Ninety per cent of Israelis are originally from outside Palestine. One day they will even leave Tel Aviv.’
More of the inspiration of the Arab spring and ideas of democracy for young activists:
‘The fact that youth played such an important role in the revolutions in the Arab world has given us a lot of courage,’ [Ibrahim] Shikaki said. ‘And older people have become more afraid of the young, or at least more afraid of disagreeing with us.’ Unlike the PLO and Hamas – unlike most people in the West Bank – they are calling for a single democratic state in all of Palestine. ‘My grandfather was from Zarnouka, which is inside the Green Line,’ Shikaki said. ‘The two-state solution means I can’t go there, while any Jewish person, from anywhere in the world, can go to Israel, become a citizen, and live in my grandfather’s house. I can’t accept this.’
An amazing moment, about Palestinian resilience and human rights and the endlessness of this conflict until Palestinian humanity is acknowledged and honored:
‘This conflict is about two major issues, the right of return and the Law of Return,’ Hassan Jabareen, the general director of Adalah, a legal centre for Palestinian rights in Israel, said, referring to the 1950 law which allows Jews from anywhere in the world to become citizens of Israel, even as Palestinian refugees and their descendants are denied their right to return, or even enter. ‘All the rest,’ he continued, ‘is footnotes. Once the indigenous people are given their right of return, the Law of Return will not be a problem, and the state can be normalised. The question of how to divide the territory can come later, and it will be much easier then.’ So long as Israel accepts the right of return, and acknowledges the historic injustice of the Nakba, he said, ‘whether democracy takes the form of one, two or three states is irrelevant to me.’ The reality, however, is that Israel is day by day consolidating itself as a Jewish state, at the expense of Palestinians inside. I asked Jabareen if he was afraid. ‘We are an indigenous people, so we don’t have that fear of being a minority. Haven’t you noticed the quietness that Palestinians have, that resilience?’
