Elias Khoury’s speech on the occassion of the Public Roundtable Debate “RETHINKING THE POLITICS OF ISRAEL/PALESTINE”, organized by the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue and the S&Group in the European Parliament in Brussels, February 5th 2015
„The big question that is still puzzling me is why the myths in the question of Palestine were and are still able to veil the realities of the present.
I am not referring here to the original myth which was the midwife of the original sin of Israel during the war of the Nakba in 1948 that led to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
I will be referring to three myths that are still playing a major role in misleading the public opinion, and creating a feeling that peace and justice can never be two complementary elements in formulating the present and the near future of the Arab Mashreq known as the Middle East.
One of the major obstacles facing the discussion of the question of Palestine is that we have always to prove evident facts such as: the Palestinian people exists and was pushed by force from its land, and that Palestine was never a waste land or a desert and that Palestine is now the last country in the world that is still under a colonial military and racist occupation, where the Palestinians are becoming the Jews of the Jews.
What I am calling here evident facts becomes, with the three myths that I will be trying to discuss today, a real problem, because without the demystification of these three myths we will remain in a political and moral labyrinth, where the only outcome would be a dead end.
The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote in one of his poems about “the invader’s fear of memories and songs”, this fear is not a poetic metaphor, but is part of the daily realities of the Palestinian villages in Israel destroyed and then covered with forests. The relationship between these new forests and the buried memory will lead in the story of the Israeli writer A.B.Yehoshua entitled “Facing the Forests” to a huge fire eating the trees and uncovering the remains of a past that is still the present of the land of Palestine.
I will not be speaking about memories and the nostalgia for a lost homeland, but rather about recent history, about this past that is still the present, and about facts that are covered by the thick narrative of the victor that was able to make from the myths an integral part of the dominant discourse.
I will be speaking this morning about three myths: 1-the myth of partition, 2-the myth of the refugee problem as an outcome of the Arab Israeli war in 1948, and 3-the myth of the peace process and the two states solution in the frame of the Oslo agreements. The deconstruction of these myths will be the first step towards imagining a possible future.
1-The myth of partition
The big question raised in the face of the Palestinian struggle is why the Palestinians did not accept the UN partition plan of 1947, and when the reply is that the P.L.O. in the Palestinian congress of Algiers built its claim for statehood on the UN resolution 181, which was the legal document of partition, the reply will be but it is too late now.
It is absurd to argue the idea of being late with an ideology whose legitimacy is based upon the so called heavenly promise, and with a national discourse based upon the idea of waiting 2000 years before the “return” of the Jews to their “promised land”!
This kind of debate will lead nowhere, and instead I want to question the idea of partition itself: Was there a real project of partition? or partition was a project to cover ethnic cleansing and the annexation of what will be left of Palestine to Transjordan?
The first project of partition was suggested by the British Royal Commission led by Lord Peel which was sent to Palestine in April 1936, during the Palestinian revolt against the British colonialism and the Jewish immigration. There are 3 major points in this plan:
1- The number of the Arab population in the suggested Jewish state was nearly equal to the number of its Jewish population: 304,900 Jews and 294,700 Palestinians, whereas the number of the population in the suggested Arab State was 485,200 Arabs and 7200 Jews. In order to solve this problem that makes of the Jewish state a bi-national state, the report suggested a “compulsory transfer” of the Arabs from the Jewish State.
2- The commission recommended the annexation of the Arab State to Transjordan.
3- The report mentioned that Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Ramallah and tens of Palestinian villages will stay under British mandate.
This plan will become the master plan of the other projects of partition, this will be the case with the British government project of partition of 1944, that made some changes on the Peel project, but one of the major common elements between these two projects was the fact that the so called Arab state will be annexed to Transjordan.
In these two projects of partition there was no Palestinian state. Although the UN resolution of the partition November 29 1947, mentioned two states, but it was clear that there were no two states in the horizon, and that the destiny of Palestine was already decided with the Peel report: a Jewish state and the annexation of what will be left to Jordan. This feeling turned out to be a reality after the publication of the historical facts by the New Israeli Historians about a deal between the Zionist leadership and prince Abdullah of Jordan.
2-The refugee problem and the Arab Israeli war
The refugee problem was not an outcome of the war launched by the Arab states against the new born Jewish state inMay 15 1948, but it was an outcome of an Israeli military master plan of occupation and ethnic cleansing under the name of the Dalet plan.
In his study “The Dalet Plan”, first published in the Middle East Forum 1961, the Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi proved that this plan which its implementation began in April 1948, two months and a half before the end of the British mandate and the entrance of the Arab armies, was composed of 13 military operations, 8 of them were outside the boarders of the Jewish state as according to the UN partition plan.
The outcome of the Dalet Plan was the occupation of the major coastal cities: Haifa, Jaffa and Acre, and the destruction of dozens of Palestinian villages.
The first Palestinian city to fall was Tiberius, April 16 1948, followed by Haifa, April 21 and Jaffa, May 13 and Acre, May 16. The attacks of the well organized and equipped Israeli forces were faced by unorganized resistance and local militias which were without a coherent leadership.
The horrors of the massacre of Deir Yassin, April 9 1948, will be repeated in different places and ways, and the major part of the ethnic cleansing was already achieved before the beginning of the Arab Israeli war in 1948.
I do not want to enter now in the myth of the Israeli David facing the Arab Goliath, because the facts of the military Israeli supremacy are unveiled now. But what I want to sign out here is that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was not an outcome of a war but one of its reasons, and that the transfer of the Palestinians, first mentioned in the Peel plan, was the major element in the project of the occupation of Palestine by a colonial movement.
One can speak here about the errors, the weakness, and the lack of leadership in the Palestinian ranks, but this weakness justifies nothing, yes they clarify the situation but the weakness of the oppressed can never justify the acts of the oppressors.
The Palestinian novelist Ghassan kanafani, in his novel “Return to Haifa” formulated the question of weakness and mistakes with these words: “When are you going to stop considering the weakness and mistakes of others are endorsed over to the account of your own prerogatives? … And you, do you believe we’ll continue making mistakes? If we should stop making mistakes one day, what would be left for you then?
The myth of the peace process
Edward Said considered the Oslo Agreement as a major Palestinian mistake. For The author of “Orientalism” the Palestinian leadership did not learn from the lessons of history, and accepted to sign an agreement that did not solve the main issue which in his words is the struggle between present and interpretation. The Palestinian present is interpreted by the dominant Israeli discourse as an absence. Thus the notion of the present absents (a legal Israeli term to describe the Palestinians who were displaced inside the state of Israel), will become now extend to the Palestinians in the occupied territories who are living under a problematic autonomy, witnessing and struggling against the Israeli project of their political disappearance, and against the creation of new facts represented by the Jewish colonies that are spreading all over the occupied West Bank.
The historical development has proved that Said’s hypothesis was not baseless. But I would like to read the so called peace process beyond the notion of historical errors. My hypothesis is that the adequate word to describe it is “surrender”. The Palestinian leadership did not exchange its recognition of the state of Israel with the recognition of the right of The Palestinian people to self-determination, but with the recognition of the P.L.O.
On the other hand the P.L.O. made a huge concession when it renounced to the rights of the Palestinians in 78 percent of Palestine and accepted a new partition of the land which goes far beyond what was given to the Jewish state in the U.N. partition plan. This was surrender by all means. And like all surrenders the defeated that recognizes his defeat will defend mainly his right to exist. This is my reading of the Oslo Agreements. The Palestinians accepted the unacceptable in order to survive, or at least this is what the leadership of the PLO thought.
The total failure of these agreements showed that the Israeli establishment is unwilling and may be unable to accept the idea of the partition of the land between two sovereign states. This inability is not the outcome of the policies of the Israeli right wing governments, as most people think. Actually the failure was declared under the Ehud Barak labor government in the Camp David negotiations in 2000, which led to the second Intifada.
The dead end of the peace process finds its reasons in the refusal of the Israeli establishment to accept a Palestinian surrender, because accepting such surrender is a way, even if it is oblique, to recognize the Palestinian present, and to dismiss its interpretation as an absence.
This will lead us to the fact that the Nakba is not a historical event, that began and ended in 1948, but a process that began in 1948 and is still continuing, and there are no signs that it will stop in the coming future.
The Palestinian writer Raef Zreik suggested that any serious discussion must take us to 1948. The point of departure in rethinking the future of Palestine/Israel must be the Nakba not as a historical fact only, but also in its manifestations now.
This is a great intellectual and political task, reading the continuous Nakba in a perspective of justice, equality and peace, needs new approaches that will take us beyond the mythical, nationalistic and religious claims, towards discovering a new way that will decolonize the land and liberates its inhabitants from the illusion of building the present with the stones of a messianic and/or apocalyptic past.
Does this means a bi-national state, or two states in one confederation, or a Middle Eastern democratic and socialist confederation? I don’t know, all what I know is that there must be a new way of thinking that will pave the way for the struggle for freedom and liberation.
Unveiling the myths does not necessarily lead to a solution; it can also lead to an arrogant nationalistic discourse, as it is the case with the New Zionists Historians, who are giving legitimacy to the crime, through admitting it. This phenomenon demonstrates how the ideology of our savage capitalist era can lead to a discourse that despises the human sufferings, and become prisoner of a racist religious nationalist project, whether it is a Jewish State that wants its victims to recognize its Jewish nature thus losing all their rights, or an Islamic state, that is unable to recognize that The Arab Mashreq (The Levant) was and will continue to be a land of diversity.
I am suggesting that the best way to read Palestine is to read it as a question. Palestine is the question of the human conscious in our times.. Reading it only as a national question will make from the victims of the holocaust the victimizers of the Palestinians.
I want to end my intervention with the story related by the Israeli New Historian Ilan Pappe in his book “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”, about the occupation and destruction of the Palestinian village Sa’a’ in February 14 1948. The commander of the Israeli battalion Moshe Kalman responsible for the attack told the New York Times (April 14 1948) that the Jewish troops encountered no resistance from the residents as they entered the village and began attaching T.N.T. to the houses. “We ran into an Arab guard”, Kalman recounted, “he was so surprised that he didn’t ask min hada? Who is it? But eish hada? What is it? One of our troops who knew Arabic responded humorously hada (this is in Arabic) eish (fire in Hebrew) and shot a volley into him”.
This story reveals the difference between questions and answers, instead of questioning what was and is still going on, the soldier transformed the Arabic- Hebrew mixture in his reply to bullets that shot the question and the killed the poor peasant who dared to ask.
Between the Arabic eish (what) and the Hebrew eish (fire) lays the tragedy of Palestine/ Israel. If we will continue to treat the issue as an answer then the eish or fire will not only burn the forest, as it is the case in the story of A.B.Yehoshua but will burn also the Israeli forest’s watcher and the mute Palestinian peasant, and the whole region.“
