Humanizing the Mideast conflict

THREE decades after its publication The Question of Palestine remains a landmark work and a must-read for anyone interested in the Middle East. The author, Edward Said, a Palestinian by birth, has been described as the most eloquent spokesman for the plight of the Palestinians. At a time when the Palestinian struggle for a homeland spurred negative thoughts, misconceptions and hateful stereotypes, Said was considered one of the most eminent and respected advocate for the Palestinian cause until his untimely death.

A world-renowned scholar, writer and critic, Said was born in 1935 in Jerusalem. He lived in Egypt before moving to the United States as a student. During most of his academic career, he taught at Columbia University. He was diagnosed with leukemia in the 1990s and he died in New York in 2003.

Many of his books, including The Question of Palestine, After the Last Sky, Blaming the Victims, The Politics of Dispossession and an autobiography "Out of Place" were inspired by his lifelong concern for Palestine.

In The Question of Palestine, Said aims to present the Western reader "a broadly representative Palestinian position." He acknowledges that Palestinians have failed in drawing West's attention to their legitimate cause and furthermore recognizes that in the West, a Palestinian is seen in political terms as an "outlaw of sorts, or at any rate very much an outsider."

The first part of the book is absolutely brilliant. It is imbued with the spirit of his masterpiece "Orientalism" which forced Westerners to rethink and reexamine their perceptions of the Islamic world. Said reminds us that until the last 30 years of the nineteenth century, all the countries behind an imaginary line running between Greece and Turkey were known as the 'Orient.'

"As a designation made in Europe, 'the Orient' for many centuries represented a special mentality ... a kind of indiscriminate generality associated not only with difference and otherness, but with the vast spaces, the undifferentiated masses of mostly colored people, and the romance, exotic locales, and mystery of the "marvels of the East," explains Said.

At the beginning of the 20th century, European powers colonized about 85 percent of the world thus the so-called romance of the Orient was followed by the problems of dealing with the Orient, a place of numerous subdivisions. One of these, the Middle East, survives today as a region of the Orient conjuring images of permanent clashes and tensions. The question of Palestine remains until today the cause of political unrest in many countries and a flagrant show of human injustice after a mainly European decision was made to recapture the land for Jews who were to be brought from elsewhere according to the Zionist slogan: A land without people, for a people without land. The acceptance of the idea was largely due to the European belief in their colonizing mission. This mission was based on "notions about the inequality of men, races, and civilizations, an inequality allowing the most extreme forms of self-aggrandizing projections, and the most extreme forms of punitive discipline toward the unfortunate natives whose existence, paradoxically, was denied," writes Said.

As a result, the native resistance to the Zionists was mostly ignored by the West and the world believed that Britain was blocking the presence of Jews in Palestine. In 1948, at the time when Israel declared itself a state, it only owned six percent of the land of Palestine. With the presence of fascism in Europe, the idea of a Jewish state acquired a remarkable aura of moral prestige. The refusal to accept the Zionist theory left a Westerner with few alternatives: being negative, anti-Semitic, or a defender of Islam and the Arabs.

"Between Zionism and the West there was and still is a community of language and of ideology; so far as the Arab was concerned, he was not part of this community. To a very great extent this community depends heavily on a remarkable tradition in the West of enmity toward Islam in particular and the Orient in general" explains Said

The Palestinians are also largely seen as a collection of negative attributes. They have been linked with opposition to Zionism, with being the root cause of the Middle East problem and with being terrorists. Moreover, they have had the bad luck to be opposed to Jews who have a long history of victimization behind them. The Palestinians who chose to remain in Israel have been denied a national identity. Arab schools are in bad shape and Arabs are made to feel isolated from the rest of the population.

Moreover Israeli Arab citizens carry Israeli passports therefore it has been difficult for them to visit Arab countries. They are also viewed suspiciously by other Arabs and even Palestinians.

Their painful situation has been perfectly described by the poet Mahmud Darwish in a poem entitled "Identity Card" in which a Palestinian wants important details of his life to be recorded on his identity card which is supposed to contain key information. The whole poem is characterized by the recurring repetition of the verb, "Record".

Record!

I am an Arab

And my Identity Card

Is number fifty thousand

I have eight children

And the ninth

Is coming in midsummer

Will you be angry?

Two stanzas later, Darwish says:

Record!

I am an Arab

Without a name without title

Patient in a country

With people enraged

That poem is a perfect example of the so-called 'resistance writing,' a new genre of writing whereby Palestinians and other writers express their feelings about political oppression and their beliefs in the legitimate Palestinian cause.

"Quite literally, the irreducible and functional meaning of being a Palestinian has meant living through Zionism first as a method of acquiring Palestine, second as a method for dispossessing and exiling Palestinians, and third as a method for maintaining Israel as a state in which Palestinians are treated as non-Jews, and from which politically they remain exiles despite their continued presence on the land," writes Said.

The author believes that Westerners have supported Israel mainly because of their guilt over anti-Semitism and also because Israel's image in the West has not been sullied with its unlawful practices toward the Palestinians.

He also predicted that the Palestinians resistance would increase and time has proved him right.

In this seminal work, Said succeeds brilliantly in not only personalizing but also humanizing the Palestinian conflict. He formulates in a scholarly and eloquent manner, his vision of peace and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians, a vision based on a mutual recognition and a profound respect of their respective beliefs.