W.E.B. Du Bois Institute

Territories of the National Imagination: Intifada ObservedIntifada: The Palestinian Uprising Against Israeli Occupation. by Zachary Lockman; JoelBeinin; Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising-Israel's Third Front. by Zeʾev Schiff; Ehud Yaʾari;Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising. by Don Peretz; Palestine and Israel: The Uprising andBeyond. by David McDowallReview by: Ella ShohatTransition, No. 53 (1991), pp. 124-132Published by: Indiana University Press on behalf of the W.E.B. Du Bois InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2935179 .Accessed: 20/12/2011 14:23

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T R A N S I T I ON Under Review

TERRITORIES OF THE

NATIONAL IMAGINATION:

INTIFADA OBSERVED

Ella Shohat

Discussed in this essay

Intifada: The Palestin- ian Uprising Against Israeli Occupation, Za-

chary Lockman and Joel Beinin, eds. Boston: A Merip Book, South End Press

Intifada: The Palestin- ian Uprising-Israel's Third Front, Ze'ev

Schiff and Ehud Ya'ari, New York: Simon and Schuster

Intifada. The Palestin- ian Uprising, Don Peretz, Boulder: West- view Press

Palestine and Israel: The Uprising and Be-

yond, David McDow- all, London: I.B. Tauris & Co.

At a time when the intifada's visibility in

the media has been eclipsed by a war and

its aftermath, it becomes especially im-

portant to recall the Palestinian dimen- sion of the Middle Eastern entangle- ment-the perennial "question of

Palestine." Public culture in the United

States, as Edward Said argued in 1984, provides no sanctioned narratives that could counterpoise the story of Palestin- ians to that of the Israelis. At the same

time, one is struck by the way the inti-

fada erupted into the American media;

destabilizing, to some extent, the Man-

ichean representation of the Israel/Arab

conflict, even reversing some of its dom- inant tropes-such as that of little David

facing the mighty (philistine) Goliath. Palestinian cultural production, in-

spired by the uprising, has even reached an American audience, albeit in rela-

tively marginal forums. The intifada has become the subject of poetry (Mahmoud Darwish's "Those Who Pass Between the Fleeting Words," Nizar Qabbani's "Children Bearing Rocks"), of music

(the Sabrin and Rahali groups), of theater

(the Jerusalem-based Palestinian theater

El-Hakawati, which Joseph Papp, well- known as an anti-censorship advocate, refused to defend against political pres- sures, ultimately canceling the perfor- mance for larger forums), of films

(George Khleifi and Ziad Fahoum's The Stone Throwers, 1989), and of a series of

videotapes collectively entitled "Upris- ing" (organized by Elia Suleiman and Dan Walworth for Artist's Space in New

York). There have also been a number of

panels at academic and political confer-

ences, reflecting Palestinian national life since the uprising, both under occupa- tion and in exile. Nevertheless, these is- sues are still subjected to subtle and not so subtle forms of censorship. Private and public institutions in the United

States, responding to vocal or "silent"

pressure from funders and trustees, continue to censor Palestinian-related

productions-often with convenient ex- cuses about "unbalanced presentation." In any case, the last few years have wit- nessed the consolidation of the "ques- tions of Palestine" as a legitimate issue for the North American Left.

Several recent books concerning the

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intifada have been published in English, most of them in the United States: Inti-

fada: The Palestinian Uprising Against Israeli Occupation edited by Zachary Lockman and Joel Beinin, Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising-Israel's Third Front

by Ze'ev Schiff and Ehud Ya'ari (trans- lation from the Hebrew), Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising by Don Peretz, and Palestine and Israel: The Uprising and Be-

yond by David McDowall (a British pub- lication). These publications, which go beyond the daily media reportage of "events" and "stories" from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, reflect a notewor-

thy change in the debate about Palestin- ian national identity, even if the necessity of a Palestinian state is still not com-

pletely recognized. This change can per-

haps be best summarized as a readi-

ness to be sympathetic towards the Pal- estinian plight, a readiness largely pro- duced by exposure to media images of the war in Lebanon and the intifada. The

spectator's human identification with Palestinian children armed only with

slings confronting Israeli soldiers armed to the teeth is at the same time undercut

by the media's superficial treatment of the uprising, which has generally elided its rootedness in the history of the Pal- estinian encounter with Israel. All these books contribute to filling the gap cre- ated by the dominant media coverage of the intifada. They attempt, in different

ways and to different degrees, to expli- cate the intifada-for example, through a fuller survey of its international context

(especially in McDowall's Palestine and Israel: The Uprising and Beyond and

TERRITORIES OF THE NATIONAL IMAGINATION 125

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Peretz's Intifada: The Palestinian Upris-

ing), or through a focus on the military and diplomatic chronology of events (es-

pecially in Schiff-Ya'ari's Intifada: The

Palestinian Uprising-Israel's Third Front and Peretz's Intifada: The Palestinian Up-

rising). By and large, these works present both Israeli and Palestinian perspectives. However, only Lockman-Beinin's Inti-

fada: The Palestinian Uprising Against Is-

raeli Occupation qualifies as a truly

comprehensive, in-depth, and interdisci-

plinary study of the Palestinian uprising. The Lockman-Beinin book goes be-

yond the conventional academic (Pe- retz's) and journalistic (Schiff-Ya'ari's and McDowall's) ways of framing the

subject, in which a national struggle serves as an object for analysis and study, or as an occasion for narrating a military

spectacle. It is perhaps not surprising that the jackets of the Schiff-Ya'ari and Peretz books describe their work as "ob-

jective." The convention of the omni- scient narrator governs most of the ac-

counts and analyses of the intifada,

signalling a safe distance between the writer and the event covered. Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising Against Israeli

Occupation, in contrast, interweaves po- etry, photography, eyewitness accounts,

personal narratives, and lectures accom-

panied with discussions; it assembles as-

tute political analyses and reference

materials, going beyond conventional

historiography. This anthology, diverse

yet unified in its liberatory thrust, invites its reader to participate in writing a new

history, to "become partners in the com- mon struggle, and not onlookers or mere

passive observers," as Edward Said writes in his dense and illuminating introduction. Works such as this anthol-

ogy-edited, introduced, and partly written by academics whose professional vocation is not divorced from their activism-must be regarded as contem-

porary models for the notion of the "or-

ganic intellectual" at a historical moment when some of the academic left seems more inclined toward scholastic dispu-

The intifada is the site of both continuity and

rupture in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian

conflict

tation than any actual engagement with "crude" political matters.

The intifada forms the site of conti-

nuity and rupture in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On one level, as Said argues, "there emerged a percep- tible continuity between Zionist theories and actions before as well as after 1967. The occupation, for all its deliberate and

programmatic humiliation of Palestin-

ians, its bare-knuckled attempts to rob a whole people of nationhood, identity and history, its systematic assault on civil institutions and vulnerabilities, could be seen as extending the logic of earlier Zi- onists like Herzl, Jabotinsky and Ben- Gurion into the present." At the same

time, the intifada marks a new phase in the media representation of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict, as well as in the po- litical, economic, and psychological di- mensions of the conflict. Schiff and Ya'ari's major argument is that the inti- fada surprised Israel in opening a new, third front. "Until the uprising the Is- raelis knew that they must be prepared to

fight on two fronts: a regular war against

126 TRANSITION ISSUE 53

standing armies and both an open and secret war against terrorism. By their

rebellion, however, the Palestinians

opened a third front of mass, unarmed, civilian violence-a new kind of warfare for which Israel had no effective re-

sponse." The intifada brought in its wake a

feeling of national renaissance. Even

Israeli-Palestinians (Palestinians within

Israel proper), often ignored as a factor in

debates on the Israeli-Palestinian con-

flict, have participated in the uprising, largely through their symbolic solidar-

ity. Despite differences of status (among Palestinian citizens of Israel, Palestin-

ians on the occupied West Bank and the

Gaza Strip, and deported and exiled Pal-

estinians), class, region, religion (largely between Muslim and Christian), and

ideology, "there exists today," as Rashid Khalidi puts it, "a strong sense of na-

tional unity, of loyalty to a unified set of

symbols and concepts, and of mutual in-

terdependence, sentiments which were

lacking in 1967."

Israeli officials initially attempted to

discredit the intifada by insinuating that it was the work of outside agitators, and

later blamed the international media as

encouraging "Palestinian violence." As

all the books suggest, however, the in-

tifada has gone beyond a situation in

which political directives came from the

Palestinian leadership in exile. Even Pal-

estinian popular culture, one might add, has parodied the Israeli obsession with "outside agitators" through a series of

intifada-related jokes. (The amount of

black humor linked to the intifada, un-

derstandably not within the scope of the

books, deserves an anthology of its

own.) One joke recounts the Israeli in-

terrogation of a seven-year-old Palestin-

ian, aimed at finding out the identity of his "superior" who ordered him to throw stones and who turns out to be ... his four-year-old brother.

In fact, the intifada does mark the

emergence of a new, younger leadership. Although aligned with the Palestinian

In the wake of the self- respect generated by the

uprising, the PLO was able to downplay both the

Palestine National Covenant and the old

slogan of "armed struggle"

Liberation Organization and insistent that the PLO be the sole representative of the Palestinian people, it reflects the

experiences and the perspectives of the

younger generation born into occupa- tion. This shift was displayed in the de- cisions of the November 1988 Palestine

National Council meeting in Algiers. After decades of rejecting partition as

unjust and illegitimate and of favoring a secular democratic state in all of Pales-

tine, the PNC explicitly stated the Pal-

estinian national movement's acceptance of the two-state solution and called for a diplomatic solution for the conflict.

Apart from having an effect on the in-

tended target, Israel, the intifada has

clearly had a symbolic impact on Pales-

tinians themselves-on their sense of

unity and leadership. Thus, on a psycho-

logical level, as Schiff and Ya'ari argue, the Palestinians showed a new measure

of self-confidence, defying the Israeli

TERRITORIES OF THE NATIONAL IMAGINATION 127

strategy-as described, for example, by Yitzhak Shamir-of instilling fear of the

Jews in the hearts of the Arabs. In the

wake of the self-respect generated by the

uprising, the PLO (as Rashid Khalidi in

the Lockman-Beinin book points out) was able to downplay both the Palestine National Covenant and the old slogan of "armed struggle," neither of which is

mentioned in the Palestine National

Council's political statement.

Despite this remarkable shaking up of

the political status quo, the Israeli gov- ernment has refused any dialogue. In

fact, it remained locked into old dis-

courses and practices. Early Israeli na-

tionalist discourse was characterized by a

typical First World Promethean rescue

fantasy in relation to the land and people of the Third World, epitomized in such

tropes as "making the desert bloom,"

"fecundating the wilderness," and "en-

lightening the natives." This "benefi- cent" sense of mission has continued in

the administration of the occupied terri-

tories, where policies have been con- ducted in the name of "improvement of the quality of life." Some of the claims of the occupation authorities, cited in the Peretz book, reveal the same Prospero complex: "Since 1967 economic life in

the area [the West Bank] has been char- acterized by rapid growth and a very substantial increase in living standards, made possible by the interaction of econ-

omies of the areas with Israel." But the

intifada has shown that "carrot" mea-

sures could not conceal the brutality of

"stick" policies. As Salim Tamari argues in the Lockman-Beinin book, Moshe

Dayan has already charted the integra- tion of the occupied territories into the

body of Israel through three institutional

mechanisms: infrastructure, labor, and markets. These three central modes of

control constituted the foundation on which Israel built and sustained its po- litical hegemony over the region, under-

girded, of course, by Israel's monopoly of coercive force and a pervasive intelli-

gence network. The Schiff-Ya'ari book, Intifada: The

Palestinian Uprising-Israel's Third Front, is most informative about the Israeli mil-

itary operation and intelligence work, often seen from the angle of Israeli dip- lomatic and military dilemmas. Schiff and Ya'ari, as well-established Israelis, had access to information and docu- ments from Shin Bet (the Israeli coun-

terpart to the FBI). Adding another di-

mension to the accounts of the intifada, their book relates attempted actions and unrealized plans as well as internal con- flicts and contradictions in military and

diplomatic circles. While the book's chronicle of events presents tactics and

strategies of both Israelis and Palestin-

ians, the focus of the book tends to be on Israel. For example, in the first chapter, "The Surprise," the imagery of encircle- ment subliminally drafts the reader into the besieged situation of Israeli soldiers, even if the apparent theme is the curfew and siege of Palestinians.

Although the Western media have fo- cused on the spectacle of Israeli soldiers

shooting stone-throwing Palestinian sha-

bab, the real war "behind the screen" was the consistent Israeli attempt to destroy Palestinian "alternative" economic and

organizational structures and the contin- uous Palestinian attempts to resist and sustain alternative institutional forms. If before the state of Israel was established, Zionism created embryonic institutions

128 TRANSITION ISSUE 53

(called in Zionist historiography "the

state on the way"), "inside" and "out-

side" Palestinians have also created such institutions. The process started before the intifada. In the late seventies, for ex-

ample, local institutions such as workers'

unions, professional associations, mu-

nicipalities, and, perhaps especially, uni- versities were developed, as Salim Tam- ari writes in the Lockman-Beinin

collection, "to serve as institutional

components of future power, so that

when a Palestinian state arrives it will not arrive in a vacuum," but have instead "an infrastructure of political and civic institutions to support it." The intifada,

however, has intensified this process of

self-sufficiency. The policies of eco- nomic boycott both of Israeli products and of employment in Israel has fostered local production, including small-scale

agriculture conducted by families in

search of self-sufficiency ("victory" gar- dens), and the development of an "alter-

native economy." The intifada has, indeed, had far-

reaching ramifications for the Palestinian

people in the West Bank and Gaza, af-

fecting most aspects of daily life and

power relations in the communities: it

has altered relations between country and city, between regions, generations, classes, and genders. The communiques (nida', Arabic for "appeal") issued by the

Unified National Command, have ad-

dressed the diverse segments of the pop- ulation, asking for different kinds of con- tributions and sacrifices from the

working classes, from the businessmen, and the professionals: "Brother work-

ers," reads communique number 1 re-

printed in the Lockman-Beinin collec-

tion, "your abidance by the strike by not

going to work and to plants is real sup- port for the glorious uprising.... Brother businessmen and grocers, you must fully abide by the call for a com-

prehensive strike during the period of the strike. ... Brother doctors and pharma- cists, you must be on emergency status to offer assistance to those of our kinfolk who are ill."

The way that women's lives have been affected by the intifada also varies

by region and class. Women in refugee camps and villages have been more ac- tive than urban women, reflecting the central role of these communities in the

uprising. As Rita Giacaman and Penny Johnson suggest in their contribution to the Lockman-Beinin collection, this con- stitutes a historical reversal in the orien- tation of the women's movement in Pal-

estine, although it is not yet reflected in women's leadership, where decision-

making still remains largely in the hands of urban middle-class women. If Pales- tinian national struggle has expanded the

public role of women, however, the

challenge they pose to the authority of men has not been without limitations, as Palestinian women well realize. "You have all heard that since the intifada women are equal," runs one rueful inti- fada joke. "They build barricades, they break barriers, they throw stones, they demonstrate, they organize local com- mittees! But dinner is always ready at six." There is little doubt that gender re-

lations, as much as class questions, will be battled over long after independence is won. However, to examine the

achievements of Palestinian women

solely in terms of gender equality, or lack

thereof, is at best an exercise in bad faith. The issue of national power no less

TERRITORIES OF THE NATIONAL IMAGINATION 129

dominates their lives, even in the biolog- ical sense of the phrase; Palestinian

women have suffered miscarriages caused by gas and have been subject to incarceration or to crippling, even lethal violence.

The various authors in the Lockman- Beinin book situate the intifada in a multi-leveled historical context. Rashid

Khalidi's "The Palestinian People: Twenty Years After 1967," for example, provides an overview of the Palestinian

struggle from the days of pan-Arabism,

represented by Nasser's aspiration to act for and in the name of Palestinians. Is- raeli official discourse, one might add, often used pan-Arabism to "prove" that

there is no such a thing as a distinct and

separate Palestinian people. The spe- ciousness of such an argument is obvious

by a comparison with other "pan" movements, such as pan-Latin- American or pan-African nationalism, where a felt sense of commonalities

hardly precludes a sense of national dif- ference and self-determination). It is also an ironic one. Official Israeli discourse

promoted its claims for a Jewish state by

amalgamating many differences among Jews of the world (significant differences of language, "race," history, territory) under the assumed commonalities

among Jews (principally the Jewish reli-

gion, the Hebrew language as a tongue of religious observance, and the concept of a shared history in the Land of Israel

before the enforced exile of the people of

Israel); yet it refused to accept the parallel

logic of differences and commonalities

among Arabs. What makes this refusal

especially striking is the particular char-

acter of Zionist nationalism, in which the

state, in many ways, created the nation,

whose people had to be gathered from "the four corners of the world" and set-

tled in a territory. The foundation of Is- rael as a state, unlike that of most coun-

tries, was the result of the enactment of an explicit political ideology, rather than

being the product of a kind of aleatory historical accretion over centuries, a pro- cess that has been more characteristic of Palestinian nationalism.

Still, the events of 1967 marked a

turning point, Rashid Kahlidi argues, by encouraging Palestinian self-assertion in the face of corrupt Arab regimes. The

occupied territories, no longer under

Egyptian and Jordanian control, came under the responsibility of Palestinians themselves. The image and even self-

image of the Palestinians as "passive ref-

ugees" was subsequently transformed, whether into the active but sinister ter- rorists of the Western media, or into the liberation fighters of "non-aligned" dis- course. It is a historical irony that the

Jewish image, after the establishment of

Israel, in contrast, has been transformed in the American media from that of dia-

spora victim and defenseless refugee into the heroic Israeli Sabra, the fighter for

Jewish liberation, perhaps best exempli- fied in Paul Newman's incarnation of the Sabra in the film Exodus. But if the

Jews, the "Easterners" of anti-Semitic

European discourse, could be re- admitted to the West via their physical rupture from Europe and "spiritual" re- union with the West (a Western-style state presumably as evidence for theJew- ish metamorphosis into "normal" peo- ple), the Arab-Palestinians, due to their "inherent" Easternness, could not be cel- ebrated as either enlightened Westerners or heroic nationalist fighters. For the

130 TRANSITION ISSUE 53

Palestinian version of nationalism has been formulated in the tradition of anti- colonial struggles with an anti-Western thrust.

The NewJew, the Israeli, in contrast, came to be seen as an integral part of the West due to the West's identification with its Middle-Eastern representative,

Israel's Western self- conception is nicely exemplified by its

participation in the annually televised

European popular music contest, Eurovision

Israel, whose own ideologues have in-

sisted on its Western soul despite its geo- graphical location in the East, and de-

spite the fact that the majority of the

Jewish Israelis are not of European ori-

gins but of Asian and African origins. (The country may be located in Asia geo-

graphically, but Israel's Western self-

conception is nicely exemplified by its

participation in the annually televised

European popular music contest, Euro-

vision.) In this respect, it is unfortunate

that none of the books reviewed here

delve into the complex impact of the in-

tifada on class and ethnic relation within

Israel. And while Reuven Kaminer's es-

say in the Lockman-Beinin collection

explicitly addresses the protest move-

ment in Israel, it fails to mention the ac-

tivities and movements of the Sephardic Left, which has had a different concep- tion of peace from that of the Ashkenazic

Left.

Palestinian nationalism, meanwhile,

hardly internalized a "Western" super-

ego. The liberation fighters of Palestine never spoke in terms of nationalist lib- eration of the West. Zionism saw itself on a nineteenth-century continuum of nationalist renaissance in Europe, even

though the restablishment of its state co- incided with the era of Third World na-

tionalism; Palestinian nationalism, in

contrast, defined itself in terms of that

very notion of Third Worldness. Here Don Peretz's suggestion that Arab na- tionalism and Zionism were influenced

by European nationalism fails to situate both nationalisms in relation to the Third World context, and to root the dis- courses of these movements in anti- colonial discourses. Third World nation- alisms cannot be simply defined as a

mirror-image of Europe's arrangement of the world into nation-states; rather,

they must be seen as a resistance to Eu-

ropean oppression, a resistance that dates back to the first colonial encounters in

America, Africa, and Asia, whose liber- ation took place at a historical moment when collective freedom and self- determination had been defined largely in terms of nation-states.

The intifada, with its anti-colonial

overtones, and the Israeli-Palestinian

conflict as a whole, touches, one might argue, on some sensitive historical nerve of "America," itself the product of a

schizophrenic master-narrative of a colonial-settler state interwoven with anti-colonial memories. In a world filled with competing national claims, the United States has been subliminally readier for Israeli nationalist discourse than for the Palestinian, in part, I would

argue, because of a certain resonance of national mythology. The American hero has been celebrated as prelapsarian

TERRITORIES OF THE NATIONAL IMAGINATION 131

Adam, as a New Man emancipated from

history (i.e., European history), before

whom all the world and time lay avail-

able, much as the "Sabra" was conceived as the antithesis of the "Old World" Eu-

ropean Jew. The rupture with the "Old

World," both in Israeli and American of- ficial discourses, was similarly premised on the absent "parent." The American

Adam and the Israeli Sabra archetypes implied not only their status as creators, blessed with the divine prerogative of

naming the elements of the scene about

them, but also their fundamental inno-

cence. The notions of an American Adam

and an Israeli Sabra elided a number of

crucial facts, notably that there were

other civilizations in the Promised Land; the settlers were not creating "being from nothingness." And, of course, the

settlers, in both cases, had scarcely jetti- soned all their Old World cultural bag- gage, their deeply ingrained attitudes and assumptions. Here the gendered metaphors of the "virgin land," promi- nent both in Israeli and American pio- neer discourses, must be seen in contra-

distinction to the metaphor of the

(European) "motherland." A "virgin" land is implicitly available for defloration and fecundation. Lacking owners, it therefore becomes the property of its

"discoverers" and cultivators. Needless

to say, this rhetoric of "purity" masks the dispossession of the land and its re-

sources. A land already fecund, already

producing for the indigenous peoples, and in that sense a "mother," is meta-

phorically projected as virgin, "un-

touched nature," and therefore as avail- able and awaiting a master.

In the case of Zionist discourse, the

concept of the "return to the mother

land," however, suggests a double rela-

tion to the settled lands. This doubleness

derives, in many ways, from an ambiv- alent relation to the "East" as the place of

Jewish origins as well as the locus for im-

plementing the "West." Israel, like the United States, fought against British co-

lonialism, while practicing colonial pol- icies toward the indigenous people. (One could argue for a triangular structural

analogy by which the Palestinians rep- resent the aboriginal "Indians" of Euro- Israeli discourse, while the Sephardim constitute the "blacks" of Israel.) The Sabra embodied the humanitarian and liberationist project of Zionism, carrying the same banner of the "civilizing mis- sion" that European powers unfurled

during their surge into "found lands." The classic images of Sabra pioneers, as settlers on the Middle Eastern frontiers,

fighting Indian-like Arabs--along with the reverberations of the early American biblical discourse encapsulated in such notions as "Adam," "Canaan," and "Promised Land"-made possible the

sympathetic reception of Israeli nation- alism in the United States.

As recent history attests, however, the Palestinians have manifestly refused to play the role of the presumably doomed Indians of this transplanted Western. If the result has been to change, at long last, their image in the interna- tional media, it may also help serve no- tice to the world that another story of Palestine remains to be heard.

132 TRANSITION ISSUE 53