A New Palestine or a "Fixed" One

A New Palestine or a "Fixed" One
By Jihan Abdalla

We Palestinians have been anti-colonialist and anti-racist in our
struggle for independence and self-determination. Unfortunately, our
historical reality has been framed around the fact that our opponents
have been the greatest victims of racism in history. Perhaps also,
our struggle has been waged at an awkward, postcolonial period in the
modern world's history. We have clearly struggled for a better future
but for the fact that Israel, the state preventing us from having a
future of our own, has already determined our devastating future for
us.
We are Arab, and yet not simply Arab. We are exiles, and yet
tolerated guests in some countries of our exiles. We can speak at the
United Nations of our own problems, yet only as observers.
Ultimately, Palestine can be best thought of as having the function
of both a place to be returned to and of an entirely new place. It is
a vision partially of a restored past and of a novel future, perhaps
even a historical disaster transformed into a hope for a different
future.
The Palestinians have oscillated in their political struggle between
return and novelty based on their present geographical locations.
Those Palestinians in manifest exile want to return; those in
internal exile want independence, freedom, and self-government where
they are. A refugee from Galilee or Jaffa who now lives either in
Jordan, Lebanon, or Kuwait thinks primarily in terms of what he has
lost when he left in 1948 or later; he wants to be put back, or to
fight his way back, into Palestine. He wants return. Conversely, the
present Palestinian resident of Gaza, Nablus or Nazareth faces an
occupying power, an unchecked Israeli domination over him. He wants
to see that power removed. In the case of the Arab Israeli, he no
longer wishes to be known and treated negatively as a "non-Jew". He
wants novelty. One Palestinian wants to move, the other wants to
stay; both want a radical change.
There is a special structure to every Palestinian identity as each
identity functions politically towards independence and freedom from
oppression. The irreducible reality for Arab-Israelis is their
precarious presence on the land inside a state that considers them to
be an unwelcome, but unavoidable nuisance. The fundamental stability
of their lives comes from the land or, paradoxically from the absence
of any viable legitimacy for their tie to the land as non-Jews inside
Israel.
The exact opposite sentiment is felt by Palestinians in exile. Their
lives have been made unbearable because they have no roots where they
are now. Their horizons are formed by international agencies like the
United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), by refugee camps in
one or another Arab country, and by their immediate and widely
differing circumstances. The exiled Palestinian people are living as
it has become known, in ghurba.
The Palestinian people as a whole today constitute a nation
in exile, and are not a random collection of individuals. For many
years, the official policies of Israel and the United States assumed
that the Palestinians would fade into the Arab world or that
Palestinians would accept permanent subservience. What we need to
ensure is that nothing less than Palestinian self-determination will
do, we need to make sure of that.
The international achievement of Zionism is in having seized
Palestine from within Palestine and, perhaps more significantly, in
having made the native Palestinian population seem like the
outsiders. Palestinians have thus found themselves in the situation
of someone outside looking inside; they have found that the fact of
banishment to be the main defining characteristic of their existence.
Our struggle seems to be centered on the need to affirm and prove a
prior belonging. Paradoxically, the more we deny this fact, the more
we confirm it, unless we cease to be outsiders and can finally
exercise our self-determination. But how can we rise beyond our
limited and limiting circumstances, beyond negativity and into a
positive affirmation of who and what we are and what we want? It is
clearly not simply a matter of will. It is also of finding the right
modality, the right rhetoric and ideas through which we can assemble
our people, our friends. We need to establish what goals to aim
towards, which past to let go of, and which future to fight for.

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