Journal of Rtfuget Studio Vol 2. No.

1 19S9

The Challenge of Palestine

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EDWAftD SAID

Professor Said is Parr Professor at Columbia University and Editor of the Arab Studies
Quarterly. His books include fhe Question of Palest/he, Orientalism, Covering Islam,
After the Last Sky and $Jbmin§ tM Victims.

For the past four months, the Palestinians who have lived under Israeli
niilitary occupation for twenty y^ars on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip
have mounted what is by all accounts one of the most extraordinary anti-
colonial mass insurrections in modern times. What has made this uprising or
intifada so unusual is that the antagonists - Palestinians and Israelis - are no
ordinary people, and what they dispute is perhaps the most unusual piece of
territory in history; Palestine is a land drenched in historical, religious,
political and cultural significance. Palestine is Central to Christianity, Islam
and Judaism. If we recall the Crusades, the history of Western culture and
thought, as well as Islamic and Judaic traditions, to say nothing of Christianity's
culture, we gain some measure Of the richness and radiance of Palestine, which
Is now convulsed by unpleasant and oppressive struggles.

The Nature of the Challenge

I want to suggest that what we have been witnessing is an eruption Of history,
an uprising of unarmed civilians whose political, cultural, civil and human
rights have been repeatedly violated for at least forty years, and that Palestine
insurgency represents a major, and, as yet incompletely understood, challenge
to the hegemony of Israel, a state which has become increasingly insecure and
isolattdjnternatiqnally, undermined by its Obdurate unwillingness to face up
to the horrendous cost is has exacted^from the Palestinians - not to inention to
U.S. taxpayers.

Israel and the USA

The challenge of Palestine, to people like us in the United States, is especially
serious. Since 1948 the U.S. has poured astounding Sums into Israel; Since
1982 all aid to Israel, which absorbs by far the largest portion of the USA
foreign aid budget, is in the form of unrestricted grants, with debts completely
cancelled. No other state gets aid with no strings attached. No country in
history — or for that matter no disadvantage U.S. citizen — has received as
much per capita aid as every Israeli man, woman, and child, each of whom
gets $1400 per year in subsidies; every Israeli soldier gets roughly $10,000 per
© Oxford Univenity Preta 1989
 The Challenge of Palestine 171
annum. The U.S. has a strategic understanding with Israel: Israel has equal
partnership with NATO and it can compete with U.S. defence manufacturers
on the open market — those very manufacturers whose tax-dollars subsidize
their Israeli competitors. Israel continues to defy international law by bomb-

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ing, invading, and occupying countries at will, and all of this with U.S.
support.
At the behest of the Israeli lobby, surely the most powerful foreign lobby in
the U.S., the U.S. has contravened international law, violating its treaty obliga-
tions with the U.N., by passing a congressional statute forbidding.the exist-
ence of a PLO observer mission at the United Nations. Three U.N. General
Assembly resolutions have condemned this action, all of them passing by votes
of 14S to 1, the one being Israel.

Misrepresenting the History of Palestine

The challenge of the Palestinians and of Palestine today is that, for the first
time, the world is being asked to confront a different reality. Now a new truth
has emerged except, ironically, it is the same truth the Palestinians have been
proclaiming during the entire century: far from being, as is expressed in the
commonly cited phrase, a case of Jews arriving into 'a land without people, as
a people without land,' the Zionists in fact fame to Palestine, found another
people already there, and dispossessed and alienated that people, the Palesti-
nians, with the moral approval and support of the West generally, and the
U.S. in particular. An Israeli prime minister - Golda Meir - could say in 1969
'Who are the Palestinians? There are no Palestinians.' The systematic policy
to deny a Palestinian existence has had the political and economic support of
the United States, which has only just begun — after weeks of protest by many
American Jews and countless other citizens — to assert some of its own policy
perogatives, and to demur at many of the Israeli responses to the intifada.
As an organized Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation in the late
1960's and 1970's emerged, Palestinians have been systematically dehumanized.
The Israeli propaganda has labelled Palestinian acts of resistance indiscrimi-
nately as terrorism. In this connection an important article by the prominent
Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk, [Le Monde Diplomatique, February
1986], notes the policy by which all references to the Palestinians by official
agencies of the Israeli government and the press routinely began to use the
word 'terrorism' to characterize Palestinian actions from the mid 1970's — a
policy also taken up by the American media and the government.
It would be wrong to try to come to terms with the challenge of Palestine
today without looking at the struggle for Palestine historically. Long-
proclaimed by Palestinians, who have been its victims, this is a history almost
totally belied and hidden by long decades of Zionist propaganda, long decades
of Western political complicity, long decades of hypocrisy and misrepresenta-
tion by intellectual, cultural and religious supporters of Israel in the West. The
notions that Israel came into being peacefully and by means of United Nations
resolutions; that Israel has long wanted peace but the Arabs have not; that the
172 Edward Said
Palestinians, if they were there at all, left Palestine in 1948 in such large
numbers because they were told to by the Arab states; that Israel is a
democracy like any other democracy in the West; that it wishes to live at peace
with its neighbours, after minor adjustments to its borders — are all under

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scrutiny by an increasing number of countries.
Furthermore it is precisely these myths that the current uprising disputes.
We should be asking therefore how it is that people, living in conditions
described by a British minister visiting Gaza in 1988 as 'a blot on civilization'
should, without regard for safety or punishment, take on the most formidable
army outside Europe and the United States, armed only with stones and their
minds? And we should also be asking how long it is that a country long fabled
for its civilized attitudes towards life should be deploying an army against
Palestinians who have no rights - no rights to move around, to dig wells, to
plant new trees, to vote or to contest the occupation. I want to suggest that
resistance did not just happen on a certain day — in this case December 8,1987
— but that it has been long in the making, and deep in its intensity and force.
Here are the truths which are uncontested, even by Israelis: the Palestinian
Arabs were promised independence by Britain after World War One as a quid
pro quo for joining the war against the Ottomans on the Allied side. In 1917,
however, the British also promised Palestine to the Zionists, even though the
population of Palestine was at that time about 90 per cent Arab. In 1948 after
decades of Jewish immigration to Palestine, aided and abetted by the British,
Palestine was still only 30 per cent Jewish and about 70 per cent Arab; and in-
deed, the Zionist settlers still owned only about six per cent of the land with
Arabs owning all the rest. Of course, the Arabs contested the Partition project
of 1947 for perfectly sound reasons which were that 55 per cent of Palestine
(and the best part of the country at that) was allotted to one third of the
population. Moreover, the Zionists made it absolutely clear that their
acceptance of the resolution that gave them more land and power than their
number deserved, was only a tactical ploy; their intention was in fact to gain
the whole of Palestine, and as evefits later showed, they were intent on driving
out the Palestinians.
Whenj*arJirjQktjatttin_ 194&, the British left the country suddenly, leaving
behind a Jewish army ten times larger and a hundred times better equipped
than any native Palestinians could muster. As for the armies of other Arab na-
tions, they were there to get the part of Palestine not conquered by the
Zionists; hence Egypt took Gaza, Jordan the West Bank. We now know that
in the spring of 1948 the Zionist military succeeded in pushing out about
800,000 Palestinian Arabs. In the course of the 1948 war, almost 400 Arab
Palestinian villages were destroyed — as M6SK Diyan adSflitted publicly on
several occasions. Thousands of people were killed and/or dispossessed and by
the end of the spring Arab Palestine had been shattered. This is what the
Israelis call the 'war of liberatien'.
It is also important to note the following: when Ben-Gurion declared the in-
dependence of Israel in May 1948 he omitted to mention the actual borders of
 The Challenge of Palestine 173
the state. And to this day, Israel is the only state in the world with no officially
declared borders, just as it is the only state in the world posited not as the state
of its citizens, but as the state of the whole Jewish people. Israel moreover has
racially discriminatory immigration laws in which any Jew anywhere can

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become a citizen — this is the Law of Return — whereas people like myself,
any of the five million Palestinians who were born in Palestine, have no right
of return. So when Palestinians today are asked to recognize the state of Israel,
most of us are hard put to know which Israel we are to recognize, within which
borders, covering which territories, claiming which prerogatives?
Nor is this all. It has now recently come to light that immediately after the
state of Israel was declared in 1948 every major Arab state — Syria, Jordan,
Egypt — petitioned Israel for peace. Yet Ben-Gurion systematically refused
their offers, preferring to maintain Israel in a state of war, the better to get
foreign sympathy and foreign support. These informative historical narratives
have been produced by Israeli scholars such as Tom Segev and Simcha Flapan,
and yet the American media has simply taken no note of them (in fact,
Flapan's book, which is a major historical study, scrupulously researched and
documented, has been reviewed nowhere at all in the U.S. Press).

Misrepresenting the Present Reality

Nothing I have cited about Israel's treatment of the Palestinians over at least
forty years is approximate, or metaphorical; it can be documented amply, not
only from Arab but from Israeli sources. Our conviction, and this is un-
shakeable, is that the misrepresentation of the past by Israel and the interna-
tional media continues unabated.
In Lebanon alone during the summer of 1982 it is estimated that Israel killed
more than 20,000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians; reporting of killings in
the Occupied Territories is challenged by Israel because of the adverse image
this creates. Yet the media complains about Palestinian terrorism when a few
Israelis are killed. I am against terrorism; I deplore the killing of innocent
civilians by Palestinians, or by anyone else; but I also cannot stand the
ignorance or hypocrisy that in general assumes that it is acceptable for Israel to
kill say, four hundred civilians in one bombing raid in Beirut during July 1981,
but regales us with pictures of grieving Israeli families when one Israeli civilian
is killed.
Israel's policy, I would argue, has been to eliminate all traces of Palestinian
national life, to treat the Palestinians not as a people but as inconsequential
nomads who could be driven out, or whose life, property and national rights
could be trampled underfoot. By 1950 vast amounts of Arab land were ex-
propriated arbitrarily or consigned to a Jewish authority which safeguards the
land in perpetuity for the Jewish people. The Arabs were reduced to a sullen
minority, until 1966, by the same military laws applied by the British against
both Jews and Arabs in colonial Palestine, in which the institutions and pro-
grammes of the state discriminated rigidly against Arabs, or non-Jews as they
were juridically known.
174 Edward Said
In 1967 Israel acquired the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and the en-
tire Sinai peninsula. It returned Sinai to Egypt in 1979, in a treaty — The
Camp David Accord — that explicitly reduced Palestinian rights to nearly
nothing, even as more illegal settlements were being built on the West Bank

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and Gaza. Today, after about twenty years of occupation, over 50 per cent of
Palestinian land in the Occupied Territories has been expropriated; 120 settle-
ments and 65,000 settlers sit provocatively on land taken from Arabs. These
settlers are permitted arms and the protection of the Israeli army, even as, next
to them, the Palestinians suffer curfews and collective punishment. For years
the accepted myth was that Israeli occupation was benign — a myth pro-
pagated even today in the USA. But remember that Gaza was brutally pacified
in early 1971, which resulted in mass evictions, deportations, razing of houses,
and the turning of Gaza into a vast ghetto housing 650,000 people. The
Palestinian uprising, spearheaded by the bravery and resourcefulness of the
all-but-forgotten Gazans, is the result of a nationalism nourished on the food
of suffering, humiliation and systematic debasement.
For over twenty years Israel's occupation has tried to crush the Palestinians
with a system of laws and military measures — expulsion, forbidding of
Palestinian colours, even of the word 'Palestine', closing of schools. The
Palestinians have suffered with scarcely a voice in the West to support them in
this struggle. The miracle is not that we endured these cruelties, but that our
spirit as a people has not been broken, that we have not capitulated. People
who excoriate the dictatorships of the Third World, who stand up for Afghans
and Nicaraguans, have little or nothing to say about Israeli contempt for
Palestinian human rights. And to think, as every Palestinian thinks, that the
United States has paid for the occupation.
Since 1982 when Israeli tanks entered Beirut there has been a proportionate
rise in the visibility and the declared power of the Israeli lobby to express its
defence of Israel in the USA — whether on Capitol Hill, or in all branches of
the media. Yet there is much evidence of the intricate web of influence and
sheer-intimidation that ean be mobilized whenever Israel's interests appear to
be threatened, a remarkable chronicle of which has been provided by both
Paul fuTflOfcy in his book They Dared to Speak Out, and Edward Tivnan in
The Lobby. Elections have Seen won or losT because 6T THelsraeli lobby;
pro-Palestinian or crirical-of-Israel statements produce predictable media re-
sponses. Major media outlets are open to pro-Israeli views more or less at will.
The American free-lance journalist Robert Friedman has detailed the ways in
which major news programmes and talk shows routinely consult with the
Israeli consulate on who the spokespersons for the Arabs' side should be, and
in many instances they have veto power over undesirables-. These examples
constitute only a small indicator of the power, the range, and the hegemony of
pro-Israel thinking in American domestic life. In recent months when the
shocking scenes of Israeli brutality were flashed on screens and on front pages
throughout the USA during the presidential campaign, the politicians were in
the large part stunningly silent.
 The Challenge of Palestine 175
The Challenge of iPeace and Sovereignty
Despite a terrible historical injustice inflicted upon the Palestinians we still
have not given in either to despair or to blind vengeance. 1 want now to con-
sider how Palestinians have taken up the problems that have beset them in re-

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cent years, and have managed to formulate a coherent response in the very
midst of adversity. In a sense this is the most important part of my message.
Certainly I must comment, as I have, On what has been done to us and how we
have resisted. But I must also seek to elucidate the record of our peace-making
efforts which have long also been obfuscated and tarnished by propaganda.
In the face of all) Palestinians have been identified with terror and violence,
as if by blaming the victims Israel can obtain the peace and security it has
claimed to be wanting for these past forty years. Israel has neither peace nor
security. The great, perhaps the greatest, irony is that it is precisely the central
party, the PLO — long vilified, caricatured, and attacked — which has pro-
posed the only decently humane and politically acceptable peace plan to sur-
facft in the region.
ilince 1974, the PNC under the leadership of Chairman Arafat has articulated
a programme which is nothing less than that Israel and a new Palestinian state
should divide historical Palestine betwfeen them. As recently as April 19&7, the
Algiers meeting of the PNC voted in favour of a political settlement in the con-
text of an international conference, the result of which would be that peace
would be obtained in exchange for land. This decision, it should be observed,
Was made while a small-scale Syrian-backed Amal militia was besieging the
refugee camps at ShatUa and Bourj al Barajneh in Beirut, while numerous
Arab states (including Jordan) were scheming to co-opt or finesse the Palesti-
nian issue, with the Palestinians still essentially a nation without sovereignty or
territory, with no safe haven, with no freedom or range of operation or move-
ment and under great duress. And for at least four years Chairman Arafat has
declared willingness to negotiate face-to-face with Israel at an international
conference. To prove his good faith he is willing to negotiate on the basis of
UN Resolutions 242 and 338 along with the relevant UN resolutions that deal
directly with the Palestine conflict. Araft is too careful and responsible a man
to speak only for himself; what he has been saying reflects the Fez Plan, the
PNC resolutions since 1974, and of course the international consensus (sup-
ported by Europe, the OAU, the Non-Aligned countries, the Islamic Con-
ference, the socialist bloc, to name the key groupings). The point to be noted is
that Arafat has been making these declarations repeatedly and unambiguously.
It must also be noted that he has been speaking of peace and coexistence at a
time when his people and his territories are under occupation by the Israeli
army. He speaks not as the possessor of national self-determination and
sovereignty, but as an aspirant to it, as the articulator of the experience of the
dispossessed and the victimized, representing a people which has lost its
sovereignty, its land, but neither its will nor its hope;
Israel and the US together, until retently, have stood outside the interna-
tional consensus, and as numerous commentators have persuasively shown,
176 Edward Said
have been the rejectionist and obstructionist powers. Objections, reservations,
qualifications and pre-conditions have been placed before the Palestinians. In
1975 Henry Kissinger placed a veto against recognizing or negotiating with the
PLO which has prevailed. Like every colonial power in history, Israel has

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refused to deal with the PLO not because it is not representative, but precisely
because it is. Despite Israeli insistence otherwise, terrorism is not the reason
for Israeli reluctance and stubbornness, but rather the fact that because, as the
only representative of the Palestinians, the PLO makes a serious, and seriously
justifiable claim, against Israel.
No declarations by Palestinians seem to suffice for Israel and the United
States. We have accepted Israel's existence, we have said we are willing to
live in peace and co-existence, we have spoken positively about mutual recog-
nition and mutual self-determination, we have said we would negotiate a final
settlement of the conflict directly with Israel, we would accept UN auspices,
internationalization, demilitarization. Israel will not give up the military oc-
cupation, will not recognize Palestinian rights, will not deal with Palestinian
representatives, will not — even in principle — accept the idea of a Palestinian
state, will not come to a conference, will only negotiate the control which it
wants to negotiate, even if it says all of its positions are non-negotiable. The
core of the conflict is between Palestinians and Israelis, and yet Israel will not
deal with the question at all. The Labour party chief, Peres, is credited with
a somewhat more advanced position than Prime Minister Shamir, and yet let
us look closely at what Peres does say: no PLO, on Palestinian state, no return
of the territories except here and there, no sovereignty for the Palestinians,
no representatives of the Palestinians except those acceptable to Israel. No
Palestinian or Arab in the past decade has laid down such intransigent pre-
conditions. Why are Palestinians asked always to let someone else negotiate
for them — Jordan? the Arabs in general? Palestinians? Why is Israel not also
asked to renounce violence and terror in the way Palestinians are? Why will
Israel not even deign to put Palestine on the agenda?
The .challenge of Palestine, at the present timeJU what caanot, cm no longer
be, denied — the actuality of the Palestinian people. All the obstacles, the dif-
ficulties and real deprivations that the Palestinian people today face, have not
7-aTEic^ for our
rights. The uprising has proved first of all that no ideological and totalitarian
system that inhibits speech, prevents thought, imprisons and kills people, can
ever completely dominate a people that struggles on behalf of justice and
freedom. The intifada is one of the great mass uprisings of all time, and it
behoves Israel and the United States to look anew at what the Palestinians
offer in 4he way of an alternative to the vision of a Zionism huilt upon the
negation of the Palestinians.
Nor is this all. We have heard a great deal about Muslim fundamentalism;
In truth, Islam is often used as a cover for resistance to unjust and unpopular
regimes in the Arab world and in Israel. I myself to do not consider that Islam
plays as big a role in the Palestinian movement as is frequently alleged in the
 The Challenge of Palestine 177
West. The leadership of the uprising on the West Bank and Gaza is pre-emi-
nently PLO, and in Gaza, there is a low level of Islamic groups' participation.
Of course the language, the rhetoric and the discourse of Palestinian na-
tionalism is both Arab and Islamic but nowhere is there evident a role com-

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parable to that of the religious Right in Israel. Thus, whilst emphasis is placed
upon the Islamic component of religious revivalism, little is noted about the in-
fluential rabbinical component in Israel's life as a state, much of its directed
against Arabs as non-Jews.
Having chronicled the rise of fanaticism and hypocrisy, having detailed the
villainy of all concerned, having damned history, reality, what is left? Is there
any meeting of the challenge of Palestine that is at all possible in our lifetimes?
I happily and strongly reply, yes, there is. It takes a considerable effort of will
— remember Gramsci's motto, pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the
will — but that is what politics and the Palestinian uprising are all about. They
are refusals to accept the dismal, the status quo, and they squarely put the
onus of meeting the challenge directly on each of us.
For there are hopeful signs, the greatest one of which is the continued
resistance of the Palestinian people. Their message, as they understand and
live it, is that, 'we will not go away, we will not submit to tyranny, we will
resist, but we will do so in terms of a vision of the future — the Palestinian
idea — based not on exclusivism and rejection, but upon coexistence, mutu-
ality, sharing and vision'. I think it is now universally true that Palestinians
realize, along with most Arabs, that Israel and Israelis are part of the Middle
East, and that they cannot be expected to leave. We will live with them.
Therefore we must seek means to do so. Our duty is to work with those Israeli
and other Jews who have begun, in part at least, by virtue of the uprising, to
understand the main premises of the Palestinian case and to criticize the Israeli
rejectionism. There has emerged an Israeli opposition, whose focus today is
not the vague one of peace, or political solutions but, is — or ought to be —
the end of the occupation. That is now the nub of the question: ending the
occupation, since national self-determination, either from the Israeli or the
Palestinian points of view, is incompatible with the domination of one people
by another, in which one people has all the rights, the other none. But I would
caution against accepting even the statement of such a position as sufficient.
The next step is important, although the Israeli Labour party cannot seem to
take it. That step is that, if you say the situation cannot continue, then you
must commit yourself in no uncertain terms, as a member or supporter of a
government — whose occupation has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of
Palestinians and the imprisonment today of at least 4000, without trial or
charge, the forbidding of media reporting, the cutting off of water, fuel, elec-
tricity and telephone links — to the necessity for that government to withdraw
all its troops from the Occupied Territories forthwith. The challenge of
Palestine and the lesson of the uprising today are one. After every preventive
measure — tear gas, curfews, barricades, closing of business and schools, im-
prisonments, and so on — the uprising continues, stronger than before. The
178 Edward Said
Palestinians as potentially the greatest beneficiaries of peace, are therefore the
most in need of it. And their current activities in resistance to the Israeli
military occupation furnish a forecast and a. pattern for the new thinking, the
new politics of liberation and anti-colonialism from which Palestinians and

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Israelis can b,oth benefit. First, the uprising is about freeing oneself without
oppressing someone else. The various organizations, all under the PLO, who
lead an uprising that the Israelis can neither contain nor understand, spring
from the whole people, not from a small elite band. It struggles to prize a_w,§y
the people and the land, through liberated villages and zones, from tije
military authorities. Its methods are not to rely on military might, but on the
soil and people of Palestine, stones, and young kids, women, young men.
Second, the uprising seeks to liberate by providing an alternative; indeed,
one can say that under Israeli rule it is an emergent and alternative cultur-e.
Constantly in movement, decentralized, intelligent and resourceful, as well as
courageous, it has propounded a new rhetoric through pamphlets and leaflets,
which the people respond to and follow. It has created parallel institutions for
food distribution, medical aid, instruction and planning; this isolates the old
Israeli and Jordanian apparatus, grounds the uprising in a new, hence alter-
native, set of mass institutions which the Israelis cannot touch and cannot
stop.
Third, the uprising has brought uni£y. The Israeli plan for the occupation
was discontinuity for the Palestinians and unity, by means of a network of
roads and settlements, for the Jewish colonists. Now the uprising has made the
occupation discontinuous, the Palestinians a continuous mass of resistance,
through the use of moving walls, changing sites of resistance chosen by the
Palestinians, and, unpredicted by the Israelis, new forms of struggle. Above
all, it has brought all Palestinians — the 1.5 million in the Occupied Ter-
ritories, 750,000 in Israel, 2.5 million in exile — together as neyer before.
Thus I would say the Palestinians present themselves as interlocutors with
the Israelis for peace. We are not an inconsiderable people, and our achieve-
ments in education, business, science, learning, and engineering testify to
intelligence, will and foresight. We say to the Israelis and their U.S. friends,
live wilh us, but not on top of us. Your logic, by which you forecast an endless
siege7 is doomed;ihTWaTaTl^elolIiBTallvlnTBfe: w^rttoontwJrWe-knowthat
Israelis derive from a heritage of suffering, and that the Holocaust looms
large over their present thoughts. But we Palestinians cannot be expected
merely to submit to military rule and the denial of our human and political
rights, particularly since our attachment to Palestine is as significant, as deep
and as lasting as theirs. Therefore we must together formulate the modes of
coexistence, of mutuality and sharing, those modes that can take, us heyjand
fear and suffering into the future, and an extraordinarily interesting and
impressive future at that.