The Question of Palestine

Summary

Edward W. Said, writing as a Palestinian for an American reader, presents a broadly representative Palestinian position built from the Palestinian experience since the first wave of Zionist colonialists reached Palestine in the early 1880s: a people’s traumatic national encounter with Zionism. The Introduction states the book’s premises — the continuing existence of a Palestinian Arab people, Israel’s effacement of the Palestinian in words and actions, built in many ways on negation of Palestine, and self-determination as a fundamental right, with no one to be threatened with transfer. Chapter One argues that Palestine was an inhabited, predominantly Arab and Islamic country whose people were denied and displaced by a European decision: the Balfour Declaration disposed of their country in flat disregard of the native majority, and the liberal West, through a hegemonic coalescence of liberal discourse with the Zionist view, accepted Zionism’s diffusion of its own reality over the Palestinian reality and its practice of speaking for — representing — the Palestinians instead of hearing them; the question is a contest between an affirmation and a denial, a presence and an interpretation. Chapter Two, Zionism from the standpoint of its victims, documents transfer as policy in Joseph Weitz’s diaries, the machinery that kept the 1948 refugees out (for which Said’s notes cite Erskine Childers’s study finding no evidence of Arab orders to leave), and the separate legal existence imposed on the Arabs who stayed — military government, absentee-property laws, the Koenig report. Chapter Three turns to the Palestinian side: the remnants, the exiles and the occupied, their divided situations and histories, Palestinian consciousness carried by Kanafani, Habibi, Darwish and Mahfouz, and the PLO — risen after Karameh, under Arafat, with the National Fund and the crises in Jordan and Lebanon — as the first leadership to take responsibility for all three segments, arguing for an independent Palestinian state on part of Palestine, grounded in a detailed grasp of Zionist effectiveness and retaining the Secular Democratic State as the larger ideal. Chapter Four reads the post-Camp David scene: U.S. rhetoric of peace and moderation, Saunders’s testimony, Sadat’s Egyptian program and Begin’s legalism, and the autonomy plan on the ground — Sharon’s settlements, the double-backbone roads, water, Schiff’s security forecast — as a Bantustan, a fraction of the people promised a fraction of its rights in a fraction of its homeland; against it Said sets the Palestinians’ own ignored signals to the United States and ends with two certainties, that the Jews of Israel will remain and the Palestinians will also remain, and an encounter between the two peoples that has yet to occur. A Bibliographical Note, full Chapter Notes (which name several authorities the text leaves unnamed, among them Yehoshafat Harkabi for the 1967 Arabist passage and Yehuda Zvi Blum for the 1977 Geneva Conventions argument), an Index, an About the Author page and the publisher’s back cover complete the file.

What the file is

• The file is the First Vintage Books Edition (October 1980) of Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine, copyright 1979 by Edward W. Said, originally published by Times Books, a division of Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., Inc., New York, in November 1979, and simultaneously in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside, Ltd., Toronto (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.5). The PDF is the Internet Archive scan of that edition (PDF metadata: Digitized by the Internet Archive; ABBYY FineReader 11).
• Length and parts: 291 PDF pages; printed front matter in roman numerals, Introduction at printed p.ix, main text printed p.3-238, followed by the Bibliographical Note (printed p.239-242), the Chapter Notes (printed p.243-253), an Index heading page and the Index (printed p.257-265), an About the Author page and the back cover (the contents entries for the back matter are garbled in the text copy — see Open questions). The book has four chapters: One, The Question of Palestine (I Palestine and the Palestinians, II Palestine and the Liberal West, III The Issue of Representation, IV Palestinian Rights); Two, Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims; Three, Toward Palestinian Self-Determination; Four, The Palestinian Question after Camp David (PDF p.8-9).
• Coverage: PDF p.1-291 — front matter, Introduction in full, Chapter One I-IV in full, Chapter Two I-II in full, Chapter Three I-IV in full (III PDF p.178-190 / printed p.157-169; IV PDF p.190-202 / printed p.169-181), Chapter Four I-IV in full (I PDF p.203-218 / printed p.182-197; II PDF p.218-234 / printed p.197-213; III PDF p.235-256 / printed p.214-235; IV PDF p.256-259 / printed p.235-238, ending the main text), the Bibliographical Note in full (PDF p.260-263 / printed p.239-242), the Chapter Notes in full (PDF p.264-274 / printed p.243-253: Introduction notes, Chapter One notes 1-34, Chapter Two notes 1-55, Chapter Three notes 1-15, Chapter Four notes 1-33), blank pages at PDF p.275 and PDF p.277, the Index heading page (PDF p.276, bearing only the heading INDEX), the Index in full (PDF p.278-286 / printed p.257-265), a blank page at PDF p.287, About the Author (PDF p.288), blank pages at PDF p.289-290, and the back cover (PDF p.291). The two-page map of Israeli settlements on the West Bank sits at PDF p.229-230 / printed p.208-209, between the text pages printed p.207 and p.210. Printed pagination from Chapter One on: printed p. = PDF p. − 21.
• Text copy: the supplied text copy (raw/1979-said-question-of-palestine.txt, from Josh’s memex vault) has a page marker for every page, 1-291, and about 115,600 words in the copy as counted on intake. It is OCR of the scan and is garbled throughout in small ways — letter substitutions in names and headings, split words, misread roman numerals and contents numbers, and a confused footnote-number sequence in Chapter One — flagged in the reading notes (reading/said-1979-question-of-palestine.md). The prose is continuous and nothing in PDF p.1-227 was unreadable in substance except one education ratio on PDF p.148, garbled in the copy and recorded in the reading notes and Open questions; the original was not needed for gaps in parts 1-4 as first ingested; it was opened for the part-4 fix check at PDF p.175, 178, 196-197, 200, 207-208, 220 and 225, which confirmed or corrected the forms recorded in the reading notes. In part 4 the copy’s OCR garbles several titles and names: Habibi’s Arabic title, Mahfouz’s Hub taht al Mattar (original, PDF p.178; the copy garbles it to Hub tahi al Maitar), Sharaby’s Arabic title (original, PDF p.207, prints al mujtama’ al ‘araby; the copy garbles it to al rmtjiama’ a! ‘araby), and Bookshin, which is printed as “Bookshin” in both the copy and the original. In part 5 the copy carries only the settlements map’s title on PDF p.229 and nothing on PDF p.230; the original was opened at PDF p.229-230 in this part and shows the two pages form one sideways two-page map, with no prose text. The Bibliographical Note and Chapter Notes (PDF p.260-267) are letter-spaced throughout in the copy, with words broken letter by letter; they are readable in substance, and the items whose years or titles cannot be recovered from the copy are recorded as printed in the reading notes and under Open questions.
• In part 6 the Chapter Notes (PDF p.268-274) are letter-spaced and garbled in the copy as in part 5, and the Index (PDF p.278-286) garbles many numerals; the original was therefore opened at PDF p.268-286, PDF p.288 and PDF p.291 in this part and resolved the forms recorded in the reading notes (among them Waines at p.220 not 120, Weizmann’s Trial and Error at p.371 not 171, the mutton and grape collective-punishment years 1969 and 1970, Temple’s Native Races, and the Index’s Resolution 2535B). The blank pages at PDF p.275, 277, 287, 289 and 290 and the Index heading-only page at PDF p.276 were verified in the original.
• Most of the book was written during 1977 and the early part of 1978 (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.10 / printed p.ix). Said calls it a political essay, not an expert view or personal testimony (PDF p.16 / printed p.xv).
• Attribution inside the work: the Introduction and chapters are Said’s own. The long quotations in this part are other people’s words quoted by Said and are credited to their authors on this page: Hannah Arendt, General Gur (in an Al-Hamishmar interview), a late-tenth-century Arabic geographer (unnamed in the passage), George Sandys, Theodor Herzl’s Diaries, Lord Rothschild, Chaim Weizmann, the Chief Rabbi Dr. J. H. Herz, Moshe Dayan, Israel Shahak, Balfour’s August 1919 memorandum, Sylvain Lévi, Amos Elon, Reinhold Niebuhr and his co-signatories, Edmund Wilson, and Nicholas Von Hoffman. In parts 2-3 also Joseph Weitz, Yoseph Elgazi, Amnon Lin, Uri Avneri, Israel Koenig, Sabri Jiryis (on Arab education in Israel), Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Albert Hourani, Norman Daniel, David Ben-Gurion, Tawfiq Zayyad (poetry) and Ghassan Kanafani (fiction, Men in the Sun, in Said’s translation). The Chapter Notes completed in part 6 are Said’s own apparatus; the authorities they cite for passages the text leaves unnamed include Nafez Nazzal (the Kabri story’s source), Erskine Childers (the exodus study), Yehoshafat Harkabi, Clinton Bailey, Yehuda Zvi Blum and Fayez Sayegh, each credited in the notes entries below. The back cover (PDF p.291) is the publisher’s matter, quoting Christopher Lehmann-Haupt and Nicholas Bethell of the New York Times and its Book Review, not Said.

Section by section

Introduction — PDF p.10-20 / printed p.ix-xix

Said’s aim is a book “putting before the American reader a broadly representative Palestinian position”, formulated from the Palestinian experience, which became self-conscious when the first wave of Zionist colonialists reached Palestine in the early 1880s; Palestinian history’s defining characteristic, its traumatic national encounter with Zionism, is unique in the region (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.10). Palestinians, he says, are perhaps an unexceptional people who failed in their contest with a basically European and ambitious ideology, yet have constructed a political identity and will of their own, a remarkable resilience and national resurgence, the support of all the peoples of the Third World, and a unity despite dispersion, fragmentation and territorial loss, because the Palestinian idea, articulated out of dispossession and exclusionary oppression, has a coherence they have all responded to. The book describes the full spectrum of Palestinian failure and subsequent return in their lived details (PDF p.10-11).

He does not spend much time on terrorism, because the association is invidious and treating it would be defensive; in brute numbers of bodies and property destroyed there is nothing to compare between what Zionism has done to Palestinians and what, in retaliation, Palestinians have done to Zionists, and the almost constant Israeli assault on Palestinian civilian refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan for the last twenty years is only one index of these completely asymmetrical records of destruction. Worse is the hypocrisy of Western (and liberal Zionist) journalism, with its rhetoric of outrage for “Arab” terror and of neutrality for “Israeli” attacks on “Palestinian positions”, by which no one could know Palestinian refugee camps in South Lebanon are being named (PDF p.11). He quotes at length an interview no U.S. newspaper carried, with General Gur, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Army, on the March 1978 invasion of Lebanon: a million and a half refugees made along the Suez Canal, four villages in South Lebanon bombed without authorisation after Avivim, Irbid bombed, the Jordan valley emptied, and, asked whether the population ought to be punished, “Of course, and I have never had any doubt about that” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.12-13; Al-Hamishmar, May 10, 1978). One thing about “terrorism” is thus the imbalance in its perception and in its perpetration. Speaking only as one Palestinian, Said says he has been horrified at the hijacking of planes, the suicidal missions, the assassinations, the bombing of schools and hotels, and tries instead to convey the larger Palestinian story from which these things came — the reality of a collective national trauma (PDF p.13).

A small non-European people is not wealthy in documents, which accounts for the lack of a major authoritative text on Palestinian history; Said has not tried to supply it. He has tried to show that the Palestinian experience is an important and concrete part of history ignored by the Zionists who wished it had never been there and by Europeans and Americans who have not known what to do with it, and that the Muslim and Christian Palestinians who lived in Palestine for hundreds of years until they were driven out in 1948 were victims of the same movement whose aim had been to end the victimization of Jews by Christian Europe; an ironic double vision is needed to see both Zionism’s well-known success and the far less known Palestinian disaster, portrayed in the Hannah Arendt passage quoted under Key passages (PDF p.13-14).

The terms of debate are impoverished: Palestinians have been known only as refugees, extremists or terrorists; a corps of Middle East “experts” has monopolised discussion with social science jargon and ideological clichés masked as knowledge; and an entrenched cultural attitude deriving from age-old Western prejudices about Islam, the Arabs and the Orient — from which Zionism in its turn drew for its view of the Palestinians — dehumanised Palestinians and reduced them to the barely tolerated status of a nuisance. Most academic political science continues this tradition, accepts the framework that legitimised Zionism as against Palestinian rights, and cannot prepare anyone for what has taken place in the region, from Iran to the Lebanese civil war to the 1973 war. Said consciously avoids its “value-free” pitfalls (superpower-rivalry accounts, the West’s modernizing mission, praise of client regimes, “rational”, “empirical” and “pragmatic” teloi), whose shortcomings were blamed for “our” loss of Iran and then reasserted; even as he writes, the serious defects of Camp David seem to prove the point (PDF p.14-16).

Until 1976, he says, even Palestinians concurred in their own derogation; then “we discovered ourselves, we discovered the world, and it discovered us”. Throughout the experience is the strand formed by Zionism, which to Palestinians meant concrete things of which they collectively bear the living traces. The book is a political essay, putting the matter before the American reader as something to be thought through and engaged with, neither an expert view nor personal testimony but a series of experienced realities grounded in human rights (PDF p.16).

Basic premises (PDF p.17): the continuing existence of a Palestinian Arab people; understanding their experience is necessary to understanding the impasse between Zionism and the Arab world; Israel and its supporters have tried to efface the Palestinian in words and actions because the Jewish state in many (but not all) ways is built on negation of Palestine and the Palestinians — merely to mention the Palestinians or Palestine in Israel, or to a convinced Zionist, is to name the unnameable; and, finally, a moral premise taken for granted: human beings individually and selectively are entitled to fundamental rights, of which self-determination is one — no human being should be threatened with “transfer” out of home or land, discriminated against for religion, or stripped of land, national identity or culture, no matter the cause. The book’s question is what Israel, the United States and the Arabs are going to do about the Palestinians. Against Sadat, Said does not believe 99 percent of the cards are in U.S. hands, nor mainly in Israel’s or the Arab states’: there are Palestinian hands, playing an active role in Palestinian aspirations, struggles, achievements and setbacks; yet what Jews and Americans think and do has an important place, to which the book addresses itself (PDF p.17).

The existential bedrock (PDF p.17-18): “We were on the land called Palestine; were our dispossession and our effacement, by which almost a million of us were made to leave Palestine and our society made nonexistent, justified even to save the remnant of European Jews that had survived Nazism?” By what moral or political standard are Palestinians expected to lay aside their claims to national existence, land and human rights? The animating power of the Palestinian movement is its awareness of these simple, enormously consequential questions. The United States, like its treatment of the Iranian opposition that brought down the Shah in January 1979, prefers tidy simple solutions; the present Administration proclaimed a comprehensive peace including a just solution of the Palestinian problem “in all its aspects”, yet since Camp David has been powerless to see the problem whole: why four million people should be content with less (autonomy, so-called) than every other national group has accepted, why treaties can be signed in the absence of the main party, why Palestinians ought to accept permanent colonialization by Israel, or why they are not going to fight indefinitely to regain their denied national rights — these are questions the book poses and answers, and its concluding chapter analyses the post-Camp David scene (PDF p.18-19).

The book was not easy to write; much derives from study of modern Palestinian history and much from active participation, in exile, in the quest for Palestinian self-determination. To explain one’s sense of oneself as a Palestinian to the West, where Said lives, is to feel embattled: politically, to be a Palestinian there is to be an outlaw of sorts, or at any rate very much an outsider (PDF p.19). Acknowledgements to Debbie Rogers, Asma Khauwly and Paul Lipari, and to fellow Palestinians and friends in the United States, Israel and the Arab countries (PDF p.19-20). The introduction closes with the two memorialised friends, Farid Haddad and Rashid Hussein, both Palestinians who lived the obsessed lives of exiles and died unhappy deaths, and who between them illuminated the Palestinian cause for Said (PDF p.20; see the entity pages).

One, I. Palestine and the Palestinians — PDF p.24-36 / printed p.3-15

Until roughly the last thirty years of the nineteenth century, everything east of an imaginary line between Greece and Turkey was called the Orient, a European designation carrying a special mentality and cultural, political and racial characteristics, but mainly an indiscriminate generality associated with difference, vast spaces and undifferentiated masses. The political “Eastern Question” then displaced “the Orient”; by 1918 European powers were in colonial occupation of about 85 percent of the globe. The romance of the Orient was succeeded by the problems of dealing with it — against other European powers and against colonial peoples in their struggles for independence — and the Orient became a place of urgent, precise detail and numerous subdivisions, among them the Middle East, at whose center stands the question of Palestine (PDF p.24-25).

“The question of” carries three meanings, all implied for Palestine: a matter apart; a long-standing intractable problem; and, uncommonly, that the status of the thing is uncertain and contested. Palestine itself is a much debated, contested notion: the name is for Palestinians an act of positive political assertion and for their enemies an act of negative, threatening denial; American street factions in the late sixties and seventies said either “Palestine is” or “There is no Palestine”; in Israel the official custom is “so-called Palestinians”, gentler than Golda Meir’s flat assertion in 1969 that the Palestinians did not exist (PDF p.25-26). “The fact of the matter is that today Palestine does not exist, except as a memory or, more importantly, as an idea, a political and human experience, and an act of sustained popular will.” For most press-followers the Middle East is essentially the Arab-Israeli conflict and little more, a reductiveness that blocks Palestine from the Middle East of today, symbolized since September 1978 by Begin, Sadat and Carter at Camp David; most literature on the Middle East until 1968 presents unending wars between Arab countries and Israel, and its readers are ignorant that there had been an entity called Palestine until 1948, or that Israel’s existence was the result of the eradication of Palestine. Most important is the avoidance of the existence today of about four million Muslim and Christian Arabs known as Palestinians: they make up the question of Palestine, and if there is no country called Palestine it is not because there are no Palestinians (PDF p.26).

Palestinians in Western representation are terrorists (any film needs a card-carrying Palestinian terrorist; Black Sunday and Sorcerer come to mind) or refugees who fester in camps, are a political “football” of Arab states, a breeding ground for communism, and procreate like rabbits; analytic commentators add that Palestinians are an Arab-world elite, with the highest educational attainment, placed in Gulf oil ministries, economic and educational advisories and the Arab upper bourgeoisie, and supposed to be hungry for trouble and revenge (PDF p.26-27). Most recently, for the first time since 1948 American debate has turned to the Palestinian problem: beginning with President Carter, it is no longer rank anti-Semitism to say peace must take the Palestinians seriously; a “Palestinian homeland” and Palestinian representation challenge public consciousness; the question’s first post-1948 appearance as an independent General Assembly agenda item in 1974, embodied in Yasir Arafat’s appearance, followed affirmative votes from 1969 — Resolution 2535B’s grave concern at collective punishment, arbitrary detention, curfews, destruction of houses and property, deportation and other repressive acts, and its reaffirmation of the inalienable rights of the people of Palestine, and Resolution 2627C’s recognition a year later that the people of Palestine are entitled to equal rights and self-determination (PDF p.27-28). Despite these determinations Palestinians remain a synonym for rootless, mindless, gratuitous trouble, and the sophistical commentator blames Muslim oil, fanaticism and blackmail (PDF p.28).

The irreducible core beneath all this: on the land called Palestine there existed as a huge majority for hundreds of years a largely pastoral, nevertheless socially, culturally, politically and economically identifiable people, Arabic in language and (for a huge majority) Islam in religion, which identified itself with the land it tilled and lived on. After an almost wholly European decision was made to resettle, reconstitute and recapture the land for Jews brought from elsewhere, no significant Palestinian gesture has accepted this modern reconquest or accepted that Zionism has permanently removed Palestinians; Palestinian actuality is built upon resistance to this new foreign colonialism, matched by the inverse resistance of Zionism and Israel: refusal to admit the existence of Palestinian Arabs as a population with an indissoluble bond with the land. “The question of Palestine is therefore the contest between an affirmation and a denial”, dating back over a hundred years (PDF p.28-29). The contest has been almost comically uneven: in the West, an advanced (because European) incoming population performed miracles of construction and civilizing and fought brilliantly successful technical wars against a dumb, essentially repellent population of uncivilized Arab natives. The contest has indeed been between an advanced culture and a relatively backward, traditional one; the task is to understand its instruments, and how they shaped history so that history now appears to confirm the Zionist claims and denigrate the Palestinian ones. The struggle is between a presence and an interpretation, the former constantly appearing to be overpowered and eradicated by the latter (PDF p.29).

The presence: Palestinian Arabs were on the land, chronicled in every eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travel account (Chateaubriand, Mark Twain, Lamartine, Nerval, Disraeli); according to Israeli sources there were in 1822 no more than 24,000 Jews in Palestine, less than 10 percent of the overwhelmingly Arab population. Yet because Palestine was controlled in the Western mind not by its present realities and inhabitants but by its glorious past and its seemingly limitless future potential, it was seen as a place to be possessed anew and reconstructed. Alphonse de Lamartine, who visited in 1833 and detailed numerous encounters with Arab peasants and town dwellers in his Voyage en Orient, announced in his Résumé politique that the territory was not really a country and therefore a marvelous place for a French imperial or colonial project: he cancels and transcends an actual reality by means of a future wish, precisely the thinking that informed Israel Zangwill’s slogan for Palestine toward the end of the century: a land without people, for a people without land (PDF p.30).

Palestine has always played a special role in the imagination and political will of the West, where modern Zionism also originated: a place of causes and pilgrimages, prize of the Crusades, whose very name is an issue of doctrinal importance — to call it Palestine and not Israel or Zion is already an act of political will. Pro-Zionist writing insists Palestine was only a Roman administrative designation, never used since except under the Mandate after 1922, to show Palestine is an interpretation with less continuity and prestige than Israel; but geographers, historians, philosophers and poets writing in Arabic from the eighth century on refer to Palestine. Epistemologically, because Palestine carries so heavy an imaginative and doctrinal freight, its name and the presence of bodies in it are transmuted from reality into nonreality, presence into absence. For the Arab Palestinian, the Zionist project for and conquest of Palestine was simply the most successful and most protracted of many such European projects since the Middle Ages (PDF p.30-31).

Palestine became a predominantly Arab and Islamic country by the end of the seventh century; its boundaries, characteristics and Arabic name, Filastin, became known across the Islamic world, as the late-tenth-century Arabic passage quoted under Key passages shows: Filastin the westernmost province of Syria, watered by rains and dew, the most fertile of the Syrian provinces, its capital Ar Ramlah, with about twenty mosques with pulpits for the Friday prayer. In 1516 Palestine became an Ottoman province, no less fertile, Arab or Islamic; George Sandys a century later called it a land that flowed with milk and honey, and such reports persist through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ending in the scientific quarterly reports of the Palestine Exploration Fund (PDF p.31-32). Despite the steady arrival of Jewish colonists after 1882, not until the few weeks immediately preceding the establishment of Israel in spring 1948 was there anything other than a huge Arab majority: the Jewish population was 174,606 of a total of 1,033,314 in 1931, 384,078 of 1,366,692 in 1936, and 608,225 of 1,912,112 in 1946; in all these statistics natives were easily distinguishable from arriving colonists (PDF p.32).

The natives all spoke Arabic and were mainly Sunni Muslims, with Christian, Druze and Shiite minorities; approximately 65 percent were agricultural people living in about 500 villages; the principal cities — Nablus, Jerusalem, Nazareth, Acre, Jaffa, Jericho, Ramlah, Hebron and Haifa — were built in the main by Palestinian Arabs; there was a respectable intellectual and professional class, beginnings of small industry and a highly developed national consciousness, organised around independence and anticolonialism against the legacy of Ottoman rule, then Zionist colonialism, then British mandatory authority all together. Palestinians felt themselves part of the great Arab awakening; writers and intellectuals like Hakam Darwazeh, Khalil Sakakineh [as printed], Khalil Beidas and Najib Nassar, organisations like the Futtuwa and Najada, the Arab Higher Committees and the Arab League of Arab National Liberation, formed great national blocs, created a Palestinian identity opposed equally to British rule and Jewish colonization, and solidified a distinct national group with its own Palestinian Arab dialect and communal sense, threatened particularly by Zionism (PDF p.33).

From the beginning of serious Zionist planning (roughly the period during and after World War I), the idea prevailed that Israel was to be built on the ruins of this Arab Palestine, at first stated circumspectly, to fit the conceptions of a reconstructing colonialism crucial to high European imperialism. Herzl’s 1895 Diaries, Rothschild’s July 18, 1917 memorandum, on the principle that Palestine should be re-constituted as the National Home for the Jewish People (the text copy reads “re-constitutcd” at this point), Weizmann on the British understanding that the Jews alone could rebuild Palestine, and Chief Rabbi Herz on re-establishment, all leave out unambiguous reference to the inconvenient fact that the country was already constituted and inhabited by hundreds of thousands of Arabs unlikely to be happy about their “reconstitution” by a new colonial force; but the statements are accurate — Palestine was rebuilt, reconstructed, reestablished (PDF p.34). How brutal these acts were is indicated by Moshe Dayan’s April 1969 remarks quoted under Key passages: Jewish villages built in the place of Arab villages whose names no longer exist. Even Dayan’s terminology is euphemistic: the villages were destroyed systematically — almost four hundred villages thus eliminated, by Israel Shahak’s reckoning, destroyed completely, with houses, garden-walls, cemeteries and tombstones. After the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza the same policy was carried out there: 7,554 Arab houses razed by the end of 1969, and 16,212 demolished by August 1971, according to the London Sunday Times of June 19, 1977. Approximately 780,000 Arab Palestinians were dispossessed and displaced in 1948, by the most precise calculation yet made; these refugees now number well over two million; and the Arabs held since 1967 inside the Occupied Territories, which Begin claims to have “liberated”, are 1.7 million, of them half a million part of pre-1967 Israel. The transformation of Palestine which resulted in Israel has been an extraordinarily expensive project, especially for the Arab Palestinians (PDF p.35-36).

One, II. Palestine and the Liberal West — PDF p.36-58 / printed p.15-37

All transformative projects for Palestine, including Zionism, have rationalized the denial of present reality with an argument about a “higher” interest, cause or mission, entitling their proponents to claim the natives are not worth considering and therefore nonexistent, and that the natives and Palestine itself have been superseded definitively, even while the natives demonstrate exactly the opposite; the Arab Palestinian has been pitted against an antagonist whose consciousness of himself and of the Palestinian is exactly, positionally, superior (PDF p.36). The Balfour Declaration, made in November 1917 as a letter to Lord Rothschild, undertook to view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. It matters as the long-standing juridical basis of Zionist claims, and, more crucially, as a statement whose positional force appears only against Palestine’s demographic realities: it was made (a) by a European power, (b) about a non-European territory, (c) in flat disregard of both the presence and the wishes of the native majority, and (d) as a promise of that territory to another foreign group, so that it might quite literally make it a national home for the Jewish people (PDF p.36-37). Balfour’s statements take for granted the higher right of a colonial power to dispose of a territory as it saw fit, as his August 1919 memorandum, quoted under Key passages, shows: he was aware of the contradictory promises, and what counted was the priority of Zionism over the desire and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land. That was a statement of policy that radically altered history for those 700,000 Arabs and their descendants (PDF p.37-38).

Against Balfour’s rationale stand the countable facts of the British Census for Palestine in 1922, the only reliable source for the time (despite its considerable undercounts, and used consistently by Israeli historians): the 1914 population made by the census at 689,272 persons, of whom no more than 60,000 were Jews; by 1922 some 590,890 (78 per cent) Muslim, 73,024 (9.6 per cent) Christian, less than 10,000 (1 per cent) Other, and 83,794 (11 per cent) Jewish, perhaps two thirds of the latter European immigrants and their offspring. By the end of World War II the non-Jewish proportion was 70 percent, and 70 percent of the Jewish 30 percent lived in cities and villages, not “on the land”. British policy made Zionism its beneficiary demographically: against a normal natural increase of 1.5 percent a year, Jews in Palestine increased between 1922 and 1946 at an average of 9.0 percent annually (28.7 percent in 1927 alone, 25.9 percent in 1934), helped by the British policy of forcing a Jewish majority on the country (PDF p.38-39). The only way these brute, politically manipulated disproportions could be made acceptable was Balfour’s rationale: a superior idea, Zionism, given legitimacy until 1948 and after. The Zionists saw themselves as its beneficiaries and ignored the Arab multitudes; the blindness Amos Elon describes in a recent book was as true of left-wing ideologues like Ber Borochov and Ha’poel Ha’tzair as of romantic right-wingers like Vladimir Jabotinsky and his Revisionists, Begin’s political ancestors: the Arab problem was something either to be avoided completely, or denied (and hence attacked) completely. There is no separating Balfour’s ideology from Zionism’s: both visions play down and cancel out the Arabs as secondary and negligible, raise the moral importance of the vision above the mere presence of natives, and belong fundamentally to the ethos of a European Mission civilisatrice — nineteenth-century, colonialist, racist even — built on notions of the inequality of men, races and civilizations (PDF p.39-40).

Zionist policy toward the natives ran: first denial (they convinced themselves the natives did not exist), then making them exist only in the most rarefied forms — “First denial, then blocking, shrinking, silencing, hemming in.” This complex policy includes Israel’s policy toward its Arab colonies and the character of the occupying forces on the West Bank and Gaza after 1967 (PDF p.40). Because the contest between a native presence and an incoming European/Western culture was conducted largely outside Palestine, Palestine’s Jewish minority were not consulted either: no publicity was undertaken for the Balfour Declaration in Palestine, in keeping with Balfour’s view that the present inhabitants need not be consulted. Sylvain Lévi, the French Orientalist speaking for the Zionist delegation to the Supreme War Council preparing the Paris Peace Conference, conceded Palestine was a small and poor land with 600,000 Arabs whom incoming Jews, with a higher standard of living, would tend to dispossess — which embarrassed the Zionists, since, as Weizmann later said, the world would judge the Jewish state by what it shall do with the Arabs. It was the world that made the success of Zionism possible (PDF p.40-41). Not all the world had Balfour’s disregard — even anti-imperialists like John Hobson believed in “subject races” — but the British and Zionists knew the natives would appear and make their resistance known; George Antonius’s The Arab Awakening, the finest Arab study of the struggle for independence, showed the Arab renaissance would make Arabs aware of the contradiction between their plans and the plans of Balfour, the Zionists and the French. The task became to convert Palestine into a Jewish state without making it possible for the world to take seriously, or even later know about, the natives’ protest (PDF p.41).

The systematic denial of a substantial native Arab presence was accompanied by its destruction, blocking and confinement in Palestine and its blocking and confinement in the councils of the world; and the Zionists diffused their views and reality over the Palestinian Arabs’ views and reality. A negative project, denial and blocking, entailed an equal and opposite positive project, diffusion — not mere propaganda, which alone would never have realized Zionism in Israel, but a diffusive strength focused on the colonization’s successes, feats and institutions, whose intrinsic aspect was systematic repression of the Arab reality: accounts of the Kibbutz leave out that Arabs were never admitted as members, that cheap (Arab or Oriental Jewish) hired labor is essential to kibbutz functioning, and that “socialist” kibbutzim were established on land confiscated from Arabs, so the kibbutz appeared to prosper spontaneously in an uninhabited land (PDF p.41-42). So too Avoda Ivrit (Jewish Labor), whose purpose Amos Elon describes (see Jewish Labour Only): a completely separate economic sector for the newcomers, in which native labor must not be “exploited”, Jews must do everything themselves, and, there being no “exploitation” of Arab labor, Arab laborers could not “objectively” be opposed to the Zionists — a doctrinaire, inconsistent subculture enjoying immunity from Turkish, British or Arab “reality”. The principal and direct benefit to the natives was the loss of their country; “objective” here means Zionism won its battles on its own ground and not against anyone, “anyone” being defined as non-Jewish, and even Elon cannot see that the native presence’s unbroken existence for centuries gives it incomparably greater moral authority than the imperial European power’s. After 1948 the Zionists eliminated the Arab Palestinians objectively, in Weizmann’s typical view a miraculous cleaning of the land (PDF p.42-43).

All Zionist appeals were therefore international appeals, waged, fuelled and supplied in the great capitals of the West; between 1922 and 1947 the great issue the world witnessed was presented not as natives against new colonists but as Britain against the Zionists — an epistemological achievement, the blotting out from knowledge of almost a million natives, the more ironic because in 1948 Israel legally owned a little more than 6 percent of the land of Palestine and its Jewish population was a fraction of the total. Address the world as the aggrieved, with Britain as your enemy; ignore the natives, and have nothing said about them, so long as you cannot be seen directly to be exploiting them (PDF p.43-44). The diffusion was spearheaded by the Jewish communities in the West; the Zionist campaign’s essence was an appeal so specific, yet so full of general justification, as to make all opposition impossibly general and generally inadmissible, bringing most of the liberal and enlightened West to its side. Herzl’s Zionism, a movement to free Jews and solve anti-Semitism (with South America and East Africa considered and dropped as locations), claimed Palestine both as a backward, largely uninhabited territory and as the place where Jews, enjoying a unique historical privilege under the covenant, could reconstitute a Jewish homeland; to oppose it was immediately to align oneself with anti-Semitism, while supporting it solved a specific problem with a specific solution, carrying the ideology of a constructive colonial adventure and a scientific, disciplined social solution, and, since fascism, a remarkable aura of moral prestige (PDF p.44-45). The opponent was left simply negative, anti-Semitic, or an apologist for Islam and the Arabs — a general Arab and Islamic bloc, amorphous and dark, against the handful of European Jews hewing a civilization of sweetness and light out of the black Islamic sea; even Antonius’s argument was the Arab awakening, not the Palestinian presence. “Arabs” were always being represented, never able to speak for themselves: today the Palestine Liberation Organization is recognized by over 100 nations, and by all Palestinians, as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, yet neither the United States nor Israel concedes it represents Palestinians, and Camp David arrogated Palestinian representation to the United States, Israel and Egypt (PDF p.45-46).

In making Zionism attractive its leaders not only ignored the Arab; when necessary they made him intelligible, representing him to the West as something understandable and manageable. Between Zionism and the West there is a community of language and ideology, depending heavily on a remarkable Western tradition of enmity toward Islam in particular and the Orient in general, documented in Said’s study of Orientalism: practically the only ethnic group about whom in the West racial slurs are tolerated, even encouraged, is the Arabs, who in popular and scholarly discourse represent viciousness, veniality, degenerate vice, lechery and stupidity; on this collective representation Zionism, like its Western ideological parents, drew — a perfect instance of how propaganda, politicized scholarship and ideological information have power, implement policy, and can appear to be “objective truth” (PDF p.46-47). First, the Zionists, a partially “Eastern” people emancipated from the worst Eastern excesses, took it upon themselves to explain the Oriental Arabs to the West, never letting Arabs appear equally with them as existing in Palestine. Weizmann’s letter to Balfour of May 30, 1918, quoted at length (PDF p.47-49), is the instance: the Arabs “superficially clever and quick witted” who “worship one thing, and one thing only — power and success”; their treacherous nature requiring them to be “nursed” lest they stab the Army in the back; the Arab who screams and blackmails; corrupt, inefficient Arab and Syrian officials regretting the days of baksheesh; the fairer the English regime, the more arrogant the Arab; the Arab official’s unfair advantage of knowing the language, habits and ways of his own country; an administration distinctly hostile to Jews whose only guide, the democratic principle, reckons numerical strength, and the brutal numbers operate against the Zionists, for there are five Arabs to one Jew (the text copy reads “arc” for “are” at this point); no Arab Palestine would in fact result, because “the fellah is at least four centuries behind the times, and the effendi (who, by the way, is the real gainer from the present system) is dishonest, uneducated, greedy, and as unpatriotic as he is inefficient”. Said’s commentary: Weizmann identifies himself with Balfour as a European who knows the Oriental from the Occidental mind; Arabs are therefore less human and valuable, do not deserve to own a country despite their numbers; he recapitulates John Stuart Mill’s arguments denying Indians self-rule as centuries behind the English; the Zionist fuses with the white European against the colored Oriental, whose claim is only quantitative, and — because he understands the Eastern mind from within — represents the Arab, speaks for him, explains him to the European; both share the ideals of fair play, civilization and progress, none of which the Oriental could understand; the conflict is a struggle to wrest control of land from natives, dignified by an idea, and the idea was everything (PDF p.49).

Secondly, Zionism’s conflict with the Arabs was seen as extending and enhancing, to the West’s advantage, the age-old conflict between the West and the Orient, whose main surrogate was Islam: a civilizational as well as colonial matter. Israel was a device for holding Islam, and later the Soviet Union or communism, at bay; Zionism and Israel were associated with liberalism, freedom, democracy, knowledge and light, their enemies with Oriental despotism, sensuality, ignorance and backwardness. It did not matter that the backward Muslim had his own forms of life, to which he was entitled as a human being, or that his attachment to the land, invested in centuries of habitation, was as great as or greater than that of the Jew who yearned for Zion in exile; all that mattered were ethnocentric ideals valorizing the white man’s superiority and his right over territory consonant with those ideals (PDF p.49-50).

These notions as accepted ideas in enlightened American liberal democracy are documented in two cases. Reinhold Niebuhr and six other notables wrote to The New York Times on November 21, 1947 for partition: American interests dictate speedy modernization of the Middle East; there is “only one vanguard of progress and modernization in the Middle East”, Jewish Palestine, with Christian Lebanon a second island of Western civilization, against a hopeless Arab-Moslem picture. Niebuhr’s great intellectual authority gives the remarks force, yet to the Arab Palestinian they are violent: “we would like” and “we would want” for lands populated by millions of Muslim Arabs override their wishes; the islands (less disingenuously: colonies) mitigate a hopeless Muslim world because Islam is the enemy of Judaism and Christianity; real live people in the region are an unthought-of possibility, screened out ideologically (PDF p.50-52). A year earlier, in “A New View of Palestine” (The Spectator, August 6, 1946, p.162 as printed), Niebuhr spoke as from one imperial agency to another: Arab opinion is limited to a small circle of feudal overlords, there is no middle class, the miserable masses are in such abject poverty that an opinion is an impossible luxury; the technical and dynamic civilization the Jews might introduce, with American capital, river-development, soil-conservation and native power, would not be acceptable to Arab chieftains though beneficial to the masses, and would have to be imposed provisionally. Said replies that Niebuhr never discussed, much less supported, “Arab rights”; the sociology is bogus; Arabs ought simply not obstruct the civilization European Jews bring; like Marx on the British in India, Niebuhr does not see a national right violated, does not reckon that for every Jewish immigrant an Arab or Arabs were displaced, and does not hear the miserable masses, whose natural wishes would include not being displaced or violently “benefited”. Such condescension would not have been tolerated about South Africa or the American South, yet Niebuhr believes himself progressive and liberal (PDF p.52-54).

The second case, Edmund Wilson, shows support for Zionism entailing an affirmative feeling that Zionism had done well in destroying Arab Palestine. Wilson, the most widely read American man of letters, a brilliant catholic critic who never identified with the State or anything chauvinistic, was held by the Jews, Hebrew and the Old Testament; in Black, Red, Blond and Olive his diary of a visit to Israel sees terrorism as the result of Nazi persecutions and British policy, with a terrorist habit and moral fanaticism established, and Israelis showing signs of returning to the callous intolerance of the Israelites toward the people they dispossessed — about the dispossession itself he takes no position, although it was actually happening around him. His portrait of the Arabs of Acre and Israel, quoted in the reading notes, presents a fierce but picturesque, pathetically retarded people: swarming squalor, flocks of dirty, untaught, diseased urchins, easy Arab divorce and nomadic fathers abandoning offspring, a natural Western contempt, the stupid obstinacy of Arab refugees in Jordan refusing UNRWA resettlement and insisting on returning to their villages — all framed as bringing out a Jewish tendency toward exclusiveness. Said replies that the reason for Arab poverty matters more than its appearance; the remarks amount to saying Orientals do not regard human life as “we” do; and “exclusiveness” is a maddening dishonesty for the treatment of Arabs who did not leave, governed in Wilson’s time by the Emergency Defense Regulations, devised by the British, denounced by Jews under the Mandate as colonial and racist, never used in Israel against Jews, and retained after 1948 to forbid Arabs movement, land purchase and settlement — of which Wilson says nothing, though Sabri Jiryis’s The Arabs in Israel made the post-1948 Zionist writing against those abuses easy to ascertain (PDF p.54-57). Implicit in Wilson is that any enlightened humanistic liberal can have an expert opinion on the Middle East: where the nineteenth century looked to the scholar-Orientalist, the twentieth-century Westerner turns to the Zionist for evidence about the Orient; Israel is the norm and the authentically native presence, Arabs a nuisance, Palestinians a quasi-mythical propaganda reality; Israeli origins are forgotten, and Israel simply is a Western democracy gratuitously set upon by anti-Semitic Arabs — the reversal in actuality complete, and the greatest success of Zionist diffusion, since Wilson’s remarks are a verbatim copy of what Israelis, as Western colonialists in a backward area, think of Arabs, while the elision hides that the Israeli-Arab relationship is the result of a continuing process of dispossession, displacement and colonial de facto apartheid, and that Zionists were arrivals from Europe (PDF p.57-58).

One, III. The Issue of Representation — PDF p.58-66 / printed p.37-45

Section III opens on the last lines of PDF p.58 and continues past this part’s end (it runs to printed p.55, before IV at printed p.46 [contents figures as printed; the chapter’s internal pagination is taken up in part 2]). Wilson’s writing is the perfect symbol of a political reality in the common discourse of enlightened American liberal democracy: the complete hegemonic coalescence between the liberal Western view of things and the Zionist-Israeli view. Said uses “hegemonic” advisedly, with its resonances in Antonio Gramsci, for whom hegemony works by consent and acquiescence, not mere domination. By mid-century there was a willing identification between Western liberal discourse and Zionism; its concrete meaning for the Arab Palestinian was disastrous: displaced and dispossessed, the Arab had become a nonperson, as much because the Zionist had become the only person in Palestine as because the Arab’s negative personality (Oriental, decadent, inferior) had intensified. In Zionism the liberal West saw the triumph of reason and idealism, and only that; in liberalism Zionism saw itself as it wanted to be; in both cases the Arab was eliminated, except as trouble, negation, “bad” values — a unique instance of ideology overriding simple economics, since on purely economic grounds, given the vast aid it receives, Israel is a disaster, yet its triumph of pioneering reason justifies more and more aid, with the grounds for affirmation shrinking gradually (PDF p.58-59).

Niebuhr and Wilson date from the forties and fifties. In the decade after the June 1967 war Israel’s borders expanded enormously and approximately one million Arabs were accumulated; “Arab” no longer served for everyone not Jewish — there were the “old” Arabs in Israel, the new West Bank-Gaza set, the militant liberation fighters (later the PLO), and the communities scattered in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and the Arabian Gulf. The West Bank is designated “Judea and Samaria”, but its people will not be so easily dissolved. The new obstacle for Zionism-liberalism is the occupation, which Israel presents as “living together”: on May 2, 1976 The New York Times’s lead editorial denounced “Arab propagandists”, chiefly for attacking the occupation of Arab territory, and proclaimed the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza “a model for future cooperation” between Arabs and Jews — a military occupation taken as representative of good relations, just as “autonomy” was supposed to be what “the Arabs of Eretz Israel” really wanted (PDF p.59-60).

The issue is Representation, always lurking near the question of Palestine: Zionism undertakes to speak for Palestine and the Palestinians, a blocking operation by which the Palestinian cannot be heard from, or represent himself, directly on the world stage — as the expert Orientalist believed only he could speak, paternally, for the natives he had studied, his presence denoting their absence. In an age of mass and instant communication, sensational guerrilla or terrorist exploits can “speak” directly for an otherwise blocked presence, and the repressed presence filters through, the more so when denied; this latest denial has turned out to be the greatest, but most inevitable, mistake Zionism has made since its inception, a matter for the next chapter. Here Said details recent instances of the hegemonic union (PDF p.60).

Who speaks for what is an almost infallible index of acceptability and political legitimacy in the United States: the NLF’s selective legitimacy drew on prominent figures (Dr. Spock, Jane Fonda, Noam Chomsky, Senator McGovern) condemning the U.S. enterprise in Vietnam. Conversely, speaking warmly for Israel is de rigueur for anyone in public or intellectual life, and the sheer impossibility of finding a space in which to speak for the Palestinians is enormous; every statement on behalf of Israel intensifies pressure on the Palestinian to be silent and accept repression, so it is legitimate to be for Israel and against the Palestinians. Articles by Israelis about Israel circulate publicly; articles by Arabs about themselves are very rare — not only a gross numerical disproportion but a qualitative one: during the 1973 war The New York Times Sunday Magazine ran one week a prominent Israeli lawyer on what it felt like to be at war, and the next week a supposedly symmetrical feature written by a former U.S. ambassador to Syria; when an Arab voice is heard it is selected to make the least impression, or is a Western expert or a quasi-official Arab “statement” (PDF p.60-61).

Visiting writers after 1967 — most recently Saul Bellow, and Stephen Spender, Francine Du Plessix Gray, Renata Adler and Gary Wills — could not avoid the occupied territories, and in each account the Arabs are dealt with through an Israeli Arab expert, usually a worldly wise colonial officer, sometimes an academic with a background in military intelligence; Bellow and Spender were exactly alike. Their liberal humanity, demonstrated by a talk with such an expert who represented the Arab “reality” to them and reassured them about Israeli democracy, let that view stand for what the Arab Palestinian was, wanted and felt — exactly like sending a white “black affairs” officer to tell a visiting Western intellectual what the South African black majority really was, wanted and felt, except that such a misrepresentation would be rejected as incredible; Bellow’s To Jerusalem and Back gets its force from this accepted, legitimated representation (PDF p.61-62).

Evidence about what was really happening was available: Israelis visiting the United States remark that the American pro-Zionist is far less candid about Israel and its Arab “problem” than the Israeli. The cause of Israel in the United States is virtually sacrosanct, its founding discussed with the same hushed breath as the Marshall Plan; at the drop of a hat in 1974 and 1975 major figures signed statements protesting Israel’s “expulsion”, as it was called, and the United Nations’ condemnation of Zionism as racism, while only occasionally — Noam Chomsky the lone voice, so far as Said could determine — did anyone say what was being done to the Palestinian Arab, whose discrimination as “non-Jew” in Israel was indistinguishable from other forms of racial oppression elsewhere; instead one could watch Daniel Patrick Moynihan attacking villainy and defending freedom in the moral and intellectual vacuum reserved for Israel and Zionism (PDF p.62). The sociology of a “cause” breaks down completely for Israel: no liberal would be silent championing human rights in the Soviet Union, Chile or Africa, yet on similar matters in Israel there is almost total silence, and military government, its abuses and human rights violations stubbornly resist becoming a “cause” — even when the few critics’ sources are Israeli sources. For years the Israeli League of Human Rights has diffused information on demolition of Arab houses, expropriation of Arab lands, treatment of Arab workers, torture and illegal detention of Arabs, documented principally by translations of Israeli journals and newspapers; none of it sees the light of day in the United States, though sent to editors, columnists and outspoken liberals — nor do tens of Israeli news services, liberal newsletters and quarterlies, United Nations reports, former UN supervisors’ accounts, Amnesty International and Red Cross reports, or dozens of Arab and Arab-American studies (PDF p.62-63). The most outlandish omission concerns the London Sunday Times “Insight” Report on torture in Israel (June 19, 1977), which revealed by exhaustive investigative techniques that torture of Arabs is a regular, methodical and officially sanctioned device in Israel, hundreds of Arabs detained and tortured, the state condoning the practice to intimidate, control and terrorize the “native” population in the Occupied Territories. With one known exception (the Boston Globe), no major American newspaper, journal, magazine or television news program carried it, and none has mentioned the Amnesty, Red Cross and other reports that followed. Said quotes Nicholas Von Hoffman on this scandalous informational dereliction: Israel’s embassy answered with name-calling and self-exonerating investigations, the grotesque irony of using gas as an instrument of torture ought to have been too much, the respected Insight Team’s story was ignored because the New York Times covered it in an 86-word article on page 13 and other editors prefer the safety of letting the nation’s most prestigious paper decide, especially on Israel, where adverse publicity wins an editor vociferous abuse from the nation’s best-organized lobby (PDF p.63-64). The Von Hoffman quotation continues on PDF p.65: even when such a column is published, its rarity and isolation drain it of effectiveness, because the consensus between Israel and liberal opinion dispels contrary evidence by its sheer institutional presence and can convert devastating challenges into support. Said’s instance is Menachem Begin: author of The Revolt, admitting responsibility for the April 1948 massacre of 250 women and children at Deir Yassin, yet transmuted within weeks of his May 1977 election into a “statesman”, given an honorary LLD by Northwestern University in 1978 and part of a Nobel Peace Prize, while liberals who discover outrages everywhere say nothing about Begin, torture in Israel, or annexationist policies (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.65). On refugees, Said lists the evasions of agency — exchange for Jews from Arab countries, Haganah urgings, better-off Arabs who stayed, twenty Arab havens, a “binational” 1967 occupation, biblical prophecy, Palestine in Transjordan, other refugees resettling, Palestinians as a pawn of Arab regimes — each converting the refugee question into evidence for Zionism’s morality, although even Israeli sources dispute only the numbers (500,000 to 800,000), not the 1948 exodus itself (PDF p.66). Section III ends on PDF p.66.

One, IV. Palestinian Rights — PDF p.67-76 / printed p.46-55

IV frames the refugee problem by three questions: do the refugees want repatriation, compensation or resettlement; is there international and moral consensus on the answers; and what mechanism makes Jews immigrants then citizens in Israel while preventing Palestinian refugees from benefiting. No evidence cited is arcane; it is ignored or denied (PDF p.67). Palestinians fall into three groups — inside pre-1967 Israel, inside the Occupied Territories, and outside former Palestine — and no plebiscite among them has ever been conducted, for reasons of dispersion and jurisdiction; their will is evidenced instead by the legitimacy of the Palestine Liberation Organization, constant resistance to military rule, demonstrations, strikes and Palestinian organisations, and their repeated insistence on return, self-determination and opposition to Zionism as it has affected them (PDF p.67-68). That insistence is supported, Said argues, by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 13, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights Article 12, and UN Commission on Human Rights determinations on return, all quoted, and by UN General Assembly Resolution 194 of December 11, 1948, affirming return to homes and property and repassed twenty-eight times since (PDF p.68-69). Whether Palestinians left in 1948 because Arab states urged them is, for the right of return, finally irrelevant; Said’s own view is that the conclusive reason was a different one (PDF p.69). Israel negates return juridically: absentee-property laws expropriating Arab land to the Jewish National Fund, which owns land for the whole Jewish people, and the Law of Return, giving any Jew born anywhere immediate citizenship while no Arab can return even on proof of generations of residence — two exclusionary categories making return, compensation and equal citizenship impossible (PDF p.69-70). Said does not deny the passion behind the political-suicide and Jewish-state arguments, nor that Palestinian and Israeli Jews are now fully implicated in each other’s lives; he insists on discriminating between an invading, dispossessing presence and the presence it dispossesses, the two not being equal (PDF p.70). Opposition to Zionism is routinely misread as anti-Semitism or genocide; rational discussion should change the terms. The US-USSR joint declaration of October 1, 1977, which spoke of Palestinian rights, drew a proudly abusive mobilisation that taught that any deviation from unconditional acceptance of Israel would mobilise total opposition, keeping the Middle East a domestic US issue and mobilising on fear (PDF p.71-72). Political reality, against war talk: a Palestinian people, an occupation, Palestinians under occupation, 650,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel (15 percent of its population), and a large exile population; Palestinians have grown, not shrunk, under repression. Criticising Zionism now is criticising a wall of denials and saying Palestinians and Israeli Jews must discuss immigration rights, compensation and all outstanding issues, in the context of Zionist acceptance that Jewish national liberation took place on the ruins of another national existence (PDF p.72-73). The parties are two communities considering themselves in exile, engaging universal matters; Said proposes scaling down to a human rights view against a strictly national one, against the region’s inherited minority-rule legacy — minority governments in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Israel, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia over a Sunni majority, repressive central states, and in Israel a state divided into Jews and non-Jews and further into European and Oriental Jews. At the equitable horizon, Israel would be the state of its present Jewish and non-Arab citizens, not of the whole Jewish people (PDF p.73-74). The long-run goal is freedom from fear, insecurity, terror and oppression and from exercising unjust domination — for Jews, freedom from anti-Semitism culminating in Nazi genocide, from fear of Arabs, and from programmatic Zionism’s blindness against the non-Jew; for Palestinians, freedom from exile, dispossession and historical marginality (PDF p.74-75). Chapter One closes by announcing Chapter Two (Zionism from the victims’ standpoint), Chapter Three (modern Palestinian experience) and Chapter Four (US policy and peace) (PDF p.75-76).

Two, I. Zionism and the Attitudes of European Colonialism — PDF p.77-103 / printed p.56-82

Chapter Two opens by refusing to treat Zionism as an unchanging idea in the realm of ideas: effective political ideas must be examined genealogically — provenance, kinship, affiliation with other ideas and institutions — and as practical systems for accumulation (power, land, ideological legitimacy) and displacement (people, other ideas, prior legitimacy). Zionism’s hegemony in liberal establishment discourse and its concealment of its own historical ground, political cost to the natives and discriminations between Jews and non-Jews make the examination difficult; Begin honoured at Northwestern in May 1978, a month after his army created 300,000 new refugees in South Lebanon, is the startling instance (PDF p.77-79). In no country except Israel is Zionism so enshrined, backed in the US by press, liberal intelligentsia, military-industrial complex, academia and labor unions; recent modulation from Arab oil, US-allied conservative states and PLO visibility has not ended the bias (PDF p.79). Criticism must make distinctions: anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism, and Palestinian self-determination does not entail support for the Saudi royal family or oppressive Arab state structures — distinctions obscured by the Holocaust broadcast’s use as Zionist justification during the Lebanon devastation (H.D.S. Greenway, Washington Post, March 25, 1978) and by the equation, enforced by absence of non-Zionist sources, media simplifications, pressure groups, Gramscian traditional intellectuals as experts in legitimation, and fear around Jewish victimhood, which I. F. Stone noted exceeds even most Israelis’ Zionism (PDF p.79-81). Said states his own double position — Western intellectual formation, direct knowledge of anti-Semitism and the meaning of Israel for Jews, and, as an Arab Palestinian, sight of Zionism’s other aspects (PDF p.81).

The literary genealogy is George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), a novel whose main subject is Zionism, read as a secular religious project revising upward the chastened domestic ending of Middlemarch: Daniel, ward of Sir Hugo Mallinger, discovers his Jewish identity, becomes disciple of Mordecai Ezra Cohen, marries Mirah and leaves for Palestine with a complete equipment for travel (PDF p.81-82). Its backdrop is generalised homelessness, English as well as Jewish; Mordecai’s programme, quoted at length, calls to revive the organic centre, give dispersed Israel a national life with a voice among the peoples of East and West, redeem the soil “from debauched and paupered conquerors”, and found a polity shining with “the brightness of Western freedom amid the despotisms of the East”, a neutral ground for the East as Belgium is for the West (PDF p.82-85). Said’s critique: Eliot sustains admiration only by seeing Zionism transforming East into West; the actual inhabitants of the East, Palestine in particular, are totally absent and irrelevant; brightness, freedom and redemption are restricted to Europeans and Jews. Eliot is no different from Mill and Marx, opponents of injustice who held liberty inapplicable in the Orient for reasons today called racist; nineteenth-century European culture was racist in varying virulence — Renan outright anti-Semitic, Eliot indifferent to races unassimilable to European ideas (PDF p.86-87). Gentile and Jewish Zionism agreed on the Holy Land as essentially empty — not because inhabitants were undescribed (travel accounts, Disraeli’s Tancred, Baedekers describe them), but because their status as sovereign human inhabitants was systematically denied; the roots of both are in high liberal-capitalism (PDF p.87). Moses Hess, Rome and Jerusalem (1862), sounds the same language, quoting Ernest Laharanne’s The New Eastern Question on Jews as bearers of civilisation to inexperienced peoples, mediators between Europe and far Asia, reclaiming barren land from desert sands with French help (PDF p.87-88). Three interdependent ideas in Hess and Eliot, and later almost every Zionist thinker: the nonexistent Arab inhabitants, the Western-Jewish attitude to an “empty” territory, and the restorative project rebuilding a vanished Jewish state with disciplined separate colonies and a special land agency, all addressed to a European context; unlike most colonial visions, Zionism did not include the natives even in a redemptive Mission civilisatrice (PDF p.89). Zionism appealed to Europeans who classified overseas natives canonically; hence every formerly colonised African and Asian state or movement supports the Palestinian struggle. It coincided simultaneously with virulent anti-Semitism and with unparalleled European territorial acquisition, and Herzl launched it as a Jewish movement for colonial settlement in the Orient, not unambiguously as a liberation movement; once victims themselves, Occidental Jews in Israel have become oppressors of Palestinian Arabs and Oriental Jews (PDF p.89-90). No sizeable Israeli segment has confronted the injustice to native Palestinians, and no Palestinian has reconciled himself to an exclusionary, discriminatory, colonialist praxis; to break the iron circle one must see how ideas and culture forged it (PDF p.90-91).

Herzl, brought to Jewish consciousness by the Dreyfus Affair, reached overseas colonial settlement via Baron Maurice de Hirsch’s Jewish Colonization Association (Argentina and Brazil), considering South America then Africa; he had absorbed the imperialist perspective on natives and territory, knew from travel accounts and Baedeker that Palestine held 650,000 mostly Arab people in the 1880s, and still planned discreet expropriation and removal — the 1895 diary passage — predicting large landowners could be had for a price, in a scheme Desmond Stewart notes outstripped African colonial plans (PDF p.91-92). World opinion’s indifference until Palestinians forced their presence in the 1960s-70s rested on a prior European classificatory grid making natives sui generis inferior, which Zionists appropriated; what served justified ends for Jews also collaborated with the culture that made non-Europeans inferior, marginal and irrelevant, and “for the Palestinian Arab, therefore, it is the collaboration that has counted” (PDF p.92-93). Zionism’s successes make the victim’s questions — what the victim felt, where Zionism’s roots and practices toward him lie — the ones never asked; Gramsci’s inventory is the first necessity (PDF p.93-94). Imperialism is defined as a political philosophy whose aim is territorial expansion and its legitimisation, a domain including constituting an area, accumulating its inhabitants and converting people, land and ideas to a hegemonic design; claiming an idea and claiming a territory were sides of the same process (PDF p.94). Science was deformed into rationalisation: Linnaeus, Buffon and Cuvier made white races scientifically different and their territories vacant; Gobineau and Spengler made lesser races objects of study; Clemenceau in 1918 claimed an unlimited right to levy black troops, Poincaré’s economic gunfodder (PDF p.95). Linguistics (Bopp, Jones, Schlegel — in 1808 creative Aryan against mechanical Semitic-African languages — and Renan) extended language families into racial types; empiricist philosophy (Bracken’s study; Locke, Hume) made European rule axiomatic by the mid-nineteenth century (PDF p.95-96). The land doxology — civilised men cultivate and build, uncivilised peoples farm badly or let land rot — licensed dispossession, Conrad’s Kurtz, Robert Knox’s producers and wasters, Westlake and Vattel’s empty (though inhabited) territories ready for takeover; geography’s blank spaces (Curzon; Marlow on maps, quoted) organised acquisition, and Conrad’s redeeming “idea” dignified conquest with science, morality and philosophy (PDF p.96-98). Paul Leroy-Beaulieu in the 1870s, quoted, defined colonisation as a mature society procreating a new society without consulting natives, “the subjugation of the universe or a vast part of it to that people’s language, customs, ideas, and laws”; imperialism was the theory, colonialism the practice converting uselessly unoccupied territories into little Europes, confining the rest of the natives to reservations and compounds, lived with grotesque normality (PDF p.98-100). For Palestine specifically, British scholars, administrators and experts prepared Zionist attitudes from the mid-nineteenth century: the Bishop of Salisbury to the Palestine Exploration Fund in 1903 regretting nothing at the suppression of Canaanite civilisation by Israelite civilisation; and Miriam Rosen’s collection — Tyrwhitt Drake on the fellahin’s crass stupidity and total lack of moral sense, the Dean of Westminster on Oriental craft, ignorance and stupidity, Kitchener rescuing Capernaum from the uneducated Arab, Conder’s brutally ignorant, fanatical, inveterate liars, Petrie’s disgustingly incapable Arab, Clermont-Ganneau’s nonexistent Arab civilisation, Cook’s need for the hand of man to till the ground, Macalister’s most unprogressive country — all quoted (PDF p.100-102). Said’s summary: Zionism saw Palestine as the European imperialist did, an empty territory paradoxically filled with dispensable natives, allied itself with imperial powers (Weizmann, after World War I), and met — as Zionist historians Yehoshua Porath and Neville Mandel show — unmistakable native resistance, not because natives thought Jews evil but because natives do not take kindly to foreign settlement; it banked on a backward people over which it ought to be dominant, and developed “with a unique consciousness of itself, but with little or nothing left over for the unfortunate natives”. Maxime Rodinson, quoted, ties the indifference to European supremacy and notes the whole connection to imperialism turned on one small detail: “Palestine was inhabited by another people.” Institutions were built shutting natives out, whose negation is the most consistent thread running through Zionism (PDF p.102-103).

Two, II. Zionist Population, Palestinian Depopulation — PDF p.104-135 / printed p.83-114

II turns from the conceptual unevenness to how the imperialist view worked in politics and lives: “an immensely traumatic Zionist effectiveness”. The Arab delegation’s 1922 reply to Churchill’s White Paper, quoted — “The intention to create the Jewish National Home is to cause the disappearance or subordination of the Arabic population, culture and language” — catches the general Palestinian reaction; a further quoted passage describes socialist Jews interpreting brotherhood on a strictly national, racial basis, living on Jewish bread raised on Jewish soil protected by a Jewish rifle (PDF p.104; the quoted passage’s author is not named in the text as read — see Open questions). Everything positive from the Zionist standpoint looked absolutely negative from the native perspective; Said’s premise is that Israel developed out of the thesis that colonisation was to be accomplished for and by Jews and by displacement of the Palestinians, Zionism attempting first to minimise, then eliminate, then subjugate the natives, so Israel would be the state of “the whole Jewish people” with a sovereignty no other state possesses (PDF p.105). Weizmann translates design into action: God covered Palestine’s soil with rocks, marshes and sand so its beauty could be brought out only by those who love it; the Sursuk sale generalised into a whole territory unused and unappreciated; his 1907 visit (written 1941) describing a dolorous, neglected country of something above six hundred thousand, about eighty thousand Jews, with “neglect” naming the native inhabitants of an essentially empty, patient territory; the short-term gain that Zionism raised land values while the land was cut politically from under Arabs (PDF p.105-106). Reclaiming required Jewish energy, will, new blood and enterprise, colonies as schools for national self-revival, replacing reliance on Rothschild benefactors with self-sustaining colonial institutions (PDF p.107). The scheme was a network of realities — language, grid of colonies, organisations — that would ignore existing realities, grow alongside them and blot them out as a forest blots out weeds; Weizmann’s shift from establishment to “reestablishment” of the National Home enclosed the territory with the oldest possible reality, so colonisation proceeded as repetition — reclaimed, redeemed, repeated, replanted — a return resembling nineteenth-century European colonialism more than first-century forebears (PDF p.107-108). Every reestablishment project had two components: Jewish self-betterment (identity, citizens’ rights, revival of a home language through Eliezer Ben Yehudah), heard worldwide, and, at its unseen interior, an equally firm boundary between benefits for Jews and none, later punishment, for non-Jews (PDF p.108). The bifurcation’s consequences: Arabs saw only rejection, added their own dogmatic Arabism and, in Arab states, repression and censorship justified by fighting Zionist aggression; in Israel, humanistic institutions for Jews — Kibbutz, Law of Return, immigrant acculturation — were determinedly inhuman for Arabs, who expressed whatever stood outside Zionism by definition. Zionism aimed to create a native society with minimal metropolitan ties while refusing terms with the natives it replaced with new European “natives”, Arabs remaining only as docile objects, every challenge read as an outside Orient bent on destruction (PDF p.108-110). Dr. A. Carlebach in Ma’ariv, October 7, 1955, quoted at length, argues Arab Islamic countries suffer only from Islam — Islamic psychology as despotism, murder, illogic and lunacy, “on the path of Islam, even the trees have died” — and warns that presenting the conflict politically, as two similar parties, dresses savages in a European robe of justice and grants Arabs claims that are not theirs, since occupation in Islam’s own eyes certifies ownership and no Muslim politician is moved by refugees: “Allah expelled. Allah will care.” Said notes Israeli studies of Arab attitudes (the canonical one by General Harkabi [as printed]) ignore an analysis more magical and racist than anything likely from a Palestinian, and that dehumanisation saturates Israeli society: the 1973-war army booklet by central command rabbi Abraham Avidan, quoted, instructing that encountered civilians may and by Halachic standards must be killed when they cannot be ascertained incapable of hitting back, and that no Arab should ever be trusted; children’s literature of valiant Jews killing low, treacherous Arabs named Mastoul, Bandura and Bukra, as a Ha’aretz writer of September 20, 1974 described it — ideas deriving logically from the state’s institutions (PDF p.110-112). Weizmann embodies the duality: Samuel Pevsner praised, then Palestine as a social wilderness for such people; Zionism as all foregrounding, the Arab as irremediable opposite, combination of savage and superhuman; Weizmann on the Arab as subtle debater whose immense talent is expressing opposite views with exquisite politeness, negotiations like chasing a mirage — all quoted (PDF p.112-113). Ruppin’s walk over the Jaffa dunes — “Here we shall create a Jewish city!” — the germ of Tel Aviv, told with only the slightest allusion to existing Arab Jaffa, which Tel Aviv was destined to outstrip and whose preeminence was later buttressed by Jaffa’s military capture: the colony idea fleshed out as colony, colonisers and colonised. Weizmann believed he understood the Arab’s talent for never telling the truth, exactly the colonial problem of controlling a native majority with a handful of pioneers, illustrated by a long quotation identified on PDF p.115 as C. L. Temple, Native Races and Their Rulers (1918), Lugard’s assistant in Nigeria and, like Weizmann, a liberal Fabian, on inherent African dishonesty and lack of mental initiative: for both, natives of a stationary culture had to be prodded, perhaps dislocated, by an advanced European culture (PDF p.113-115). Zionism’s effectiveness lay in a policy of detail: Palestine surveyed to the last millimeter, constructed inch by inch — “another acre, another goat”, Weizmann — against a Palestinian opposition of general principles with no equally detailed counterproposal, assuming living on and legally owning the land was enough; even today seventy-seven “illegal” Zionist colonies stand on the West Bank and Israel has confiscated about 27 percent of its Arab-owned land while world condemnation does not stop settlement (PDF p.116). The 1917 “Outline of Program for the Jewish Resettlement of Palestine”, quoted, would have a Suzerain Government sanction a Jewish company under its direct protection — legitimised not by natives but by an outside force — with full powers of land purchase and development, Crown lands, roads, railways, harbours and shipping to open the country; Said reads the company as an army in matrix form, dressing colonists in Jewish labor and Jewish land as a uniform requiring only Jews, its power a system of positions held in agriculture, culture, commerce and industry (PDF p.116-118). The apparatus in fact: the Second Zionist Congress (Basel, August 1898) created the Jewish Colonial Trust Limited, its Jaffa subsidiary of 1903 the Anglo-Palestine Company; out of the Trust in 1901 came the Jewish National Fund, a trust for the Jewish people usable exclusively for land purchase in Palestine and Syria, always under the World Zionist Organization, first purchases in 1905; in 1920, after the Palestinian Land Development Company was founded as a JNF agency, a Palestine Foundation Fund organised immigration and colonisation (PDF p.118). Holding land for “the Jewish people” made the coming state not the state of its citizens but of a mostly Diaspora people, made non-Jews second-class citizens, gave Zionist organisations extraterritorial power — JNF land, in John Hope Simpson’s 1930 words quoted, “extraterritorialized” so no Arab could ever gain advantage from it — against no corresponding Arab institution for holding land in perpetuity. Even so, by the end of 1947 total Zionist landholding was 1,734,000 dunams, 6.59 percent of mandate Palestine’s 26,323,000 dunams (JNF alone 936,000), with illegal buying continuing after 1940 inside the 65 percent restricted to Arabs and included as a fait accompli in the 1947 partition plan; after statehood, laws assimilated huge tracts of refugee Arab land whose owners were pronounced “absentee landlords”, in order to expropriate their lands and prevent their return under any circumstances, to the JNF — “The process of land alienation (from the Arab standpoint) had been completed” — and the JNF gives Israeli discourse a legal method for converting Arab land into Jewish land, Judaizing territory coterminously with de-Arabizing it, with a strategic, security rationale added for the post-1967 occupied land (PDF p.119-120).

Joseph Weitz, director of the Jewish National Land Fund from 1932, supplies what Said calls privileged evidence, from My Diary, and Letters to the Children (published in Israel in 1965). His diary for December 19, 1940 (quoted at length, PDF p.120-121) holds that there is no room for both peoples in this country, that no “development” will bring the aim closer, that the only solution is Eretz Israel, or at least Western Eretz Israel, without Arabs, with no room for compromise, and that the state must come all at once, in the manner of a Salvation, by transferring all the Arabs to Iraq, Syria and even Transjordan, leaving not a single village or tribe except maybe Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem. Said reads these not as prophecy only but as policy statements in which Weitz spoke with the voice of the Zionist consensus — literally hundreds of such statements, beginning with Herzl — with which the conquest of Palestine and the eviction of its Arabs were later carried out. A territory once full of Arabs emerged from the 1948 war essentially emptied of its original residents and made impossible for Palestinians to return to; the Dalet Plan, as described by the Zionist historians Jon and David Kimche, was to capture strategic heights and fill the vacuum left by the departing British so as to create a contiguous Jewish-held area, and in Galilee, the coast from Jaffa to Acre, parts of Jerusalem, Lydda and Ramla and Arab Haifa it was also filling space lived in by Arabs being, in Weitz’s word, “transferred” (PDF p.121-122). Against the claim that Palestinians left on their leaders’ orders, Said says categorically that no one has produced evidence of such orders sufficient to produce so vast and final an exodus: to understand why 780,000 Palestinians left, the exodus must be seen as produced by a relative lack of Palestinian political and organizational response to Zionist effectiveness and a psychological mood of failure and terror. Atrocities such as the Deir Yassin massacre of 350 Arab civilians by Menachem Begin and his Irgun terrorists in April 1948 (Said’s figure in this passage; see Open questions) had their effect, but Deir Yassin was one of many massacres beginning in the immediate post-World War I period; what probably counted more was the machinery for keeping unarmed civilians away once they had moved to avoid the brutalities of war, and the instrumentalities, before and after they left, for obliterating their presence (PDF p.122-123). Weitz on May 18, 1948, quoted, records Moshe Shertok (later Sharett) blessing any initiative to transform the exodus into an established fact so the Arabs return no more; and Weitz visiting the evacuated village of Mu’ar, its destruction completed by three tractors, reports nothing in him moved — no regret and no hate — because the inhabitants wanted to exterminate “us”, which in Said’s reading licenses the destruction: from a nonentity in theory the Palestinian became a nonentity in legal fact, able to witness but not effectively to communicate his or her own civil extinction (PDF p.123-124).

For the remnant that stayed — that wretched 120,000, now about 650,000 — Israel took over the Emergency Defense Regulations it had agitated against under the Mandate and used them, unchanged, against the Arabs, alongside a continuing policy of Judaization in Arab-majority areas: a new Jewish Nazareth built to outstrip the old Arab town as Tel Aviv was to outstrip Jaffa. Yoseph Elgazi, quoted from Zo Hadareh, July 30, 1975, describes Upper Nazareth, created some fifteen years earlier as a counterweight to Arab Nazareth and a cornerstone of the “Judaization of the Galilee”, built on thousands of acres expropriated by force from Arab settlements, particularly Nazareth and Rana [as printed], privileged in every way while since 1966 the Ministry of Housing has not built a single unit in old Nazareth; Upper, Jewish, Nazareth has 16,000 residents, Arab Nazareth 45,000 (PDF p.124-125). The rift is intended as absolute difference, not degree: the Jew represents “the whole Jewish people”, past, present, future and elsewhere, and is entitled to the maximum; the non-Jew represents permanent banishment and is given a bare minimum — villages without libraries, youth or cultural centers, most without electricity, telephones or health centers, none with sewage except Nazareth partly, none with paved roads — and of 80,000 Arab workers, 60,000 work in Jewish enterprises, their only prosperous “industry” the creation and supply of manpower, without political significance, territorial base or cultural continuity (PDF p.125-126). Until 1966 the Arab citizens were ruled by a military government existing exclusively to control every facet of Arab life; after 1966 the situation is scarcely better; the regulations expropriated thousands of acres by security-zone declarations or by ruling land absentee property even when the absentees were present; the laws any Palestinian can name are the Absentee’s Property Law of 1950, the Land Acquisition Law of 1953, the Law for the Requisitioning of Property in Time of Emergency (1949) and the Prescription Law of 1958; Arabs were forbidden to travel freely, lease land from Jews, or speak, agitate or be educated freely; suddenly imposed curfews ended in peasants being summarily shot, most brutally at Kafr Kassim in October 1956, when 49 unarmed peasants were shot by the frontier guard and the officer in charge, tried and found guilty, was fined one piaster (PDF p.126-127).

Since 1967 Israel has acquired approximately a million more Arab subjects in the West Bank and Gaza, and its record has been no better — the testimony of Israeli Arabs before 1967 (Sabri Jiryis, Fouzi al-Asmar, Elia T. Zurayk, all named) is the best introduction. Its goal has been to keep the Arabs pacified: nationalist leaders deported, imprisoned without trial or disappeared, approximately 17,000 Arab houses blown up, censorship on everything written by or about Arabs, and a corps of Israeli “Arabist” experts ruling the Arabs behind a facade of privileged expertise — Amnon Lin, quoted from 1968, on their unique, unchallengeable position in every department, the Histadrut and the parties (PDF p.127). Settlements on occupied territory multiply (over ninety since 1967), following the pre-1948 pattern. There are Zionism and Israel for Jews and for non-Jews, a system for keeping them apart including the completely apartheid kibbutzim, and a separate government premised on the impossibility of isonomic rule: Uri Avneri, quoted to the Knesset, describes a complete secret government in the Arab sector, unsanctioned by law, its agents scattered among the ministries, deciding everything from teachers’ seminars and tractors to Knesset and local-council elections (PDF p.128). The most unguarded instance is the secret Koenig Report by Israel Koenig, northern district commissioner, written for Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on “handling the Arabs in Israel” and leaked to Al-Hamishmar on September 7, 1976: Arabs present a demographic problem, increasing at 5.9 percent a year against the Jews’ 1.5 percent; Jewish settlement is to be expanded and deepened where Arab contiguity is prominent and existing Arab concentrations diluted, with special attention to border areas and Nazareth, and state law enforced to limit Arab “breaking of new ground”; troublesome Arab leaders are to be replaced and acceptable new Arab figures “created”, and a special team is to examine the personal habits of leaders and other negative people for the electorate (PDF p.128-130). Koenig then proposes economically “neutralizing” and “encumbering” the Arabs and checkmating the frustrated intelligentsia by social engineering against the Arab’s backward “Levantine character”: equal university reception criteria and scholarships, meticulously implemented, will produce a “natural selection” reducing Arab students and leaving low-standard graduates easily absorbed into menial jobs; channel students into technical and scientific professions, which leave less time for nationalism and have a higher dropout rate; make study abroad easier and return and employment harder, to encourage emigration; take tough measures against student agitators; and prepare absorption in advance for the better part of the graduates (PDF p.130-131). Said: such ideas from Stalinists, Orwellian socialists or Arab nationalists would draw a deafening liberal outcry; Koenig conflicts with nothing in Zionism’s basic dichotomy — benevolence toward Jews, essential but paternalistic hostility toward Arabs — and, consecrated and licensed by the institutions of the Jewish state, he thinks in terms of a maximum future for Jews and a minimal one for non-Jews (PDF p.131).

Between Weizmann and Koenig, what was visionary projection became a context of actual law: after 1948 every Palestinian disappeared nationally and legally, some reappearing juridically as “non-Jews” in Israel, those who left as “refugees”, yet no Palestinian lost his “old” Palestinian identity, and out of those legal fictions the Palestinian has finally emerged (PDF p.132). On the 1975 “Zionism is racism” resolution, Said holds both that Israel’s achievements on behalf of European Jews — less so for the Sephardic (Oriental) Jewish majority — are considerable and should not be sloppily tarnished, and that for the Palestinian, who knows the Law of Return just as exactly prevents his own return and that Palestinians as a race have become synonymous with unmotivated terrorism, “Racism is too vague a term: Zionism is Zionism”, a tautology whose sense for the Arab Palestinian is exactly the opposite of what it says to Jews (PDF p.132-133). Israel today, its military budget draining 35 percent of its Gross National Product, faces a grim future; Sadat’s peace mission has occasioned only the semblance of opposition to Begin, and no conceptual or institutional apparatus exists for coming humanely to terms with Palestinian actualities, while the U.S. defense establishment heaps advanced weapons on Israel and now Egypt — Ha’aretz, March 24, 1978, quoted, celebrating the Israeli defense force in Lebanon as today an American army in equipment (PDF p.133). Western and Israeli intellectuals have played Gramsci’s “experts in legitimation” for thirty years; only a small handful — Noam Chomsky, Israel Shahak, I. F. Stone, Elmer Berger, Judah Magnes — tried to see what Zionism did to the Palestinians over the years, while evidence of preventive detention, torture, population transfer and deportation draws literal silence. The extreme instance is a 1962 meeting between Martin Buber and Avraham Aderet, published in Peiahim [as printed], December 1974: Aderet extols the army through an episode in the 1956 war in which an officer ordered soldiers to kill Egyptian prisoners in their hands, volunteers shot them, and Aderet locates the harm only in the internal undermining afterwards; Buber, moral philosopher and former binationalist, can say only “This is a great and true story, you should write it down.” Chapter Two closes: no Jew in the last hundred years has been untouched by Zionism and no Palestinian unmarked by it, yet the Palestinian was not simply a function of Zionism — his life, culture and politics have their own dynamic and authenticity, to which the book now turns (PDF p.134-135).

Three, I. The Remnants, Those in Exile, Those Under Occupation — PDF p.136-162 / printed p.115-141

Chapter Three opens with the population and the general fact. There are now between 3½ million and 4 million Palestinian Arabs scattered throughout the world: about 650,000 “Israeli Arabs”, 1 million on the West Bank and Gaza under Israeli military occupation, another 1 million or so in Jordan, approximately 450,000 in Lebanon, and the balance through the Gulf states, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Iraq and, in much smaller numbers, Europe and the Americas. Every one would say he or she is in exile, though its conditions vary; behind every Palestinian is the general fact that he once lived in a land of his own called Palestine, which is now no longer his homeland — and, as with Tolstoy’s unhappy families, the individual trauma is one of 3½ million variations on the same theme (PDF p.136). One variation, recorded in 1973, is an elderly peasant woman of Kabri, a small Arab village in western Galilee that fell to Zionist forces in spring 1948, now in a refugee camp in Lebanon, quoted at length: she found her husband shot in the back of the head, buried him sideways in his mother’s grave for want of a way to dig, stayed in Kabri six days without eating, and left to join her sister in Syria, not knowing what happened to those she left (PDF p.136-137). Such a narrative could not have been read in English before the middle or late sixties; for twenty years the world knew only “Palestinian refugees”, more commonly “Arab refugees”, and a standard text, Social Forces in the Middle East, edited by Sydney N. Fisher (Cornell University Press, 1955), gave Palestinians no existence except as a minor irritant to “progress” or UN refugee statistics. The twenty-year split — those manifestly in exile and those in secluded internal exile within Israel, the first tending toward Arab politics or assimilation, the second cut off from the Arab world — lacked a coalescing political force to make the experience more than a passive nightmare (PDF p.137-138).

The main thing missing was a country, predominantly Arab (Muslim and Christian) until supplanted by Israel. Its inhabitants called themselves Palestinians and distinguished themselves from Syrians, Lebanese and Transjordanians; Palestinian self-assertion was articulated in response to Jewish immigration since the 1880s and to Zionist pronouncements, and under a constantly felt sense of foreign invasion Palestinian Arabs grew together during the interwar years — village and family identity, customs, cuisine, folklore, dialect and history adduced as evidence they formed a people; 60 percent of the population was in agriculture, the balance townspeople and a relatively small nomadic group, and for all of the twentieth century they called their country Filastinuna (our Palestine) (PDF p.138-139). Said’s contention for the chapter: precisely because Palestinian political identity is now generally accepted, a general solution might miss, indeed destroy, the specific, detailed reality of the Palestinians; Americans in general seem unaware Palestinians actually lived in Palestine before Israel, and only if their values and history are taken into account can bases for compromise, settlement and peace be seen. Palestinians are still perceived, even at times by themselves, as a collection of basically negative attributes — refusals, opposition to Zionism, terrorism, intransigence — and Self-determination is extraordinarily difficult because it requires a clearly seen “self” to determine (PDF p.139-140). The absolute wrong of settler-colonialism is diluted when a fervently believed-in Jewish survival uses it to straighten out its own destiny: thinking Palestinians know the Israel–South Africa parallels shake when they reflect on the difference between white settlers in Africa and Jews fleeing European anti-Semitism, though the victims are wounded and scarred in much the same ways. Zionists and others (many Arabs also) showed total ignorance of basic human psychology: hoping the Arabs would go away if ignored, then that punishment would incline them to accept Zionism, then after 1948 reducing the native population to mindless, barely mobile, obedient objects, and after 1967 loosing more ferocity on the occupied Arabs — torture, concentration camps, deportation, razed villages, defoliated fields (the wheat fields of Akraba, in the West Bank, decimated by chemicals dropped from a Piper Cub on April 28, 1972, as reported in Le Nouvel Observateur, July 3, 1972), destroyed houses, confiscated lands and transferred populations well into the thousands — yet still the Palestinians have not disappeared (PDF p.140-141).

The form of survival is the concern: a divided, dispersed community with no territorial sovereignty, cast as absent or wholly negative interlocutor, caught in inter-Arab dynamics, Great Power competition and regional ideological struggles, with a collective Palestinian position but no comprehensive Palestinian situation. In Lebanon a large armed Palestinian presence is symbolized by the PLO, yet Lebanon is controlled and checkmated by Syria, so the PLO situation there is mediated by Syria; Palestinians in Jordan hold Jordanian citizenship but Jordan’s mediation is troubled by its anti-Palestinian war of 1970-71; Palestinians in Iraq and the Gulf face the laws that deny full civil freedom even to native citizens; West Bankers, Gazans and Israeli Arabs live in a grid of laws and domination unlike that of Jordan or Lebanon (PDF p.141-142). Each community maintains identity on two levels — as Palestinian against the encounter with Zionism and the loss of a homeland, and as Palestinian in the day-to-day state of residence, having no state as a Palestinian while being “of” a state he does not belong to — and children born in New York or Amman still identify as “from” Shafa’Amr, Jerusalem or Tiberias, adding to a genealogy of paradoxical Palestinian presence built by an acutely concrete space-time conflation: a real but partly mythologized spot of land, a house, a village, then the disappearance of collective identity, concrete exile, collision with laws designed specifically for the Palestinian, and finally a recent sense of revived hope and pride (PDF p.142-143). No dispossessed people is freighted with so multiple yet unreachable significance: interlocutors of the Jews through Zionism and ultimately political and spiritual Judaism, and related at once to Islam, Arab nationalism, Third World anticolonial struggle, the Christian world, Marxists and the socialist world — struggling clearly for self-determination but for having no place to conduct the struggle, clearly anticolonialist and antiracist but for opponents who are the greatest victims of racism in history, Arab yet not simply Arab, exiles yet tolerated guests, able to speak at the United Nations only as observers, while a U.S. president says cautiously they should participate in determining their future without ever having met a real live Palestinian. These are not psychological difficulties primarily but real historical, material ones; Palestinian actuality is cubistic, its daily agenda running from PLO relations with Saudi Arabia, China and the Soviet Union and every Arab country, to feeding, schooling, arming, training and informing many thousand people every day in Lebanon amid run-ins with the Syrian army and the Lebanese right wing (PDF p.143-145).

To be a Palestinian since 1948 has been to live in a utopia, a nonplace, and the struggle today is profoundly topical — focused on getting a place, a territory, on which to be located nationally. The 1967 war and Israel’s additional acquisition of Palestinian territory put exiled Palestinians in touch with their place: Israeli Zionism came out into the open, militarily ruling hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in full view of a world that grasped military occupation, and self-determination has come to rest largely on an independent state on a liberated part of the original territory of Palestine (PDF p.145-146). But “Palestine” has also become a symbol for struggle against social injustice far beyond that: “We are all Palestinians” was a slogan of Egyptian student demonstrations in the early seventies, and Iranian demonstrators against the shah in 1978 identified themselves with the Palestinians; resistance gets content, muscle, detail and a new approach to the microphysics of oppression from Palestine, understood as both a place to be returned to and an entirely new place, a historical disaster transformed into a hope for a different future (PDF p.146). The oscillation between return and novelty answers Palestinian geography: those in manifest exile — a refugee from Galilee or Jaffa in Lebanon or Kuwait — want to be put back, or to fight their way back; those in internal exile — a resident of Gaza, Nazareth or Nablus facing an occupying power, or the Arab Israeli citizen who no longer wishes to be treated negatively as a “non-Jew” — want that power removed and a new, pluralistic, democratic order where they are. “One Palestinian wants to move, the other to stay: both want a pretty radical change” — but a quick “yes” to their concert would be too rhetorical: lived history has riven the community deeply (PDF p.146-147).

Inside Israel after 1948 the Palestinian’s horizon was supplied by Zionist legality — Mapai, Knesset debates, law courts, land in continual dispute — and his education was poor by design: compulsory education not really enforced, high dropout rate, dramatically few and mostly untrained teachers, the state’s first training college for Arab teachers opened in Jaffa only in 1956, a policy of benign neglect whose ascertainable effect is to isolate and depress the Arab citizens, preventing them from ever acquiring a national consciousness (PDF p.147-148). Sabri Jiryis’s figures, quoted: by the early seventies still only 900 university graduates among over 400,000 Arabs inside Israel (the copy’s second ratio, for Palestinian students outside Israel, is garbled — see Open questions); 19 vocational training schools with 1,048 pupils in the Arab sector against 250 schools and 53,847 pupils in the Jewish sector; 32 hours of 416 in the university arts program on Arab history, without Moorish Spain, against Jewish history taught broadly at every stage; Arab subjects presented through decline, corruption or violence, with nothing asked in examinations about Mohammed, Harun al-Rashid or Saladin. Jiryis’s long quotation on the history program (PDF p.149) shows it geared to celebrating Jewish history and warping Arab history “to a point bordering on falsehood” — five hours on the Arabian peninsula against ten on the Hebrews in fifth grade, a five-century gap in Arab history by eighth grade — in a policy a government committee, in Ha’aretz, March 19, 1971, described as producing “loyalty to the state” and underlining the isolation of the Arabs in Israel. The policy also estranged the two communities from each other: Israeli Arab citizens, holding Israeli passports and barred in practice from visiting the Arab world, meet exiles under considerable mutual suspicion (PDF p.148-150).

Inside Israel, opposition was hemmed in by Israeli legality — Israel has no constitution, only “basic laws” — depending first on the Communist Party (Jewish and Arab membership) and second on nationalist groups such as the Popular Front of the mid-to-late fifties; the most significant force was Usrat al-Ard (Usrat al-Ard, “family of the land”), founded by young Palestinian nationalists in 1958, whose raison d’être was the Palestinian’s right to be in Palestine and which sought an independent Palestinian Arab political presence within Israeli hegemony rather than emphasizing liberation. Its major achievement was negative: it demonstrated the impossibility of equality for non-Jews in Israel, falling by the early sixties, though it had always worked legally, to laws forbidding its newspapers, its presses and even its registration as a legal party; Al-Ard was the first Palestinian Arab political group to call for a separate Palestinian state (PDF p.150-151). The remnant’s irreducible reality is its precarious presence in a state that considers it an unwelcome, temporarily unavoidable nuisance, its stability paradoxically from the land and from the absence of any viable legitimacy for its tie to it — expressed in Tawfiq Zayyad’s poem “Baqun” (“We Shall Remain”) (poetry), with its “twenty impossibles” and its staying on: “Here — we have a past / a present / and a future” (PDF p.151). The exiles, in the ghurba, live the opposite sentiment — no roots where they are — their horizons formed by UNRWA, camps and widely differing circumstances, reflecting every variety of modern Arab political consciousness (Palestinian Nasserites, Baathists, Marxists, a Palestinian bourgeoisie), each with a theory, if not always a practical plan, of return (PDF p.151-152).

1967 was the watershed: failure of the conventional Arab setup, and Palestinian self-help, self-responsibility and self-identity in consensus political organizations can be traced to it. Until then Arab states supported Palestinians by reason of state as much as by aspiration, and UNRWA’s main goal remained survival just short of political independence, its nonpolitical paternalism — doled-out food, clothing, medical and educational facilities, refugees counted in sterile figures and held as in transition between eviction and resettlement — breeding a constantly latent dissatisfaction in a highly politicized refugee population; Palestinian-staffed UNRWA schools sharpened the disparity between their history and their actuality. Palestinians in UNRWA were probably important to the shift in Lebanon and Jordan, where Palestinians gradually assumed responsibility for social services, a transition formally completed on a political level with the rise of the PLO, even though UNRWA continues (PDF p.152-154). The 1967 occupation also focused the exiles’ effort on territories — the West Bank and Gaza — from which the refugees in Jordan and Lebanon did not originally come, which is why the “rejectionists” among them opposed a West Bank state; their plight crystallized dispersion’s triple problem, to which every Palestinian difficulty since 1967 can be traced: aspiration to self-determination, absence of a secure territorial base, and the need for a Palestinian authority that would not get involved in struggles with the local authority (PDF p.154). The PLO was founded by the Arab League in 1964 to institutionalize, perhaps even contain, Palestinian energies — early on more a rhetorical apparatus attracting functionaries than policy makers — but it attracted militants for whom it might become genuinely national, responsible and governmental; unlike other liberation movements it had no native territory, its tragic flaw, and it has not to this day resolved whether it is a national independence or a national liberation movement, yet it created advanced social services, mobilized exiled Palestinians with spectacular success, and gained the commitment of the overwhelming majority of Palestinians exiled, occupied or inside Israel. The nationalist tradition in exile fed it: small groups formed in 1956 to attack the Israelis after they occupied Gaza, about forty Palestinian organizations in exile by 1960-61, and an enormous literature of poems, tracts, history and journalism; and Nasser’s ideas of Arab unity, anti-imperialism and revolutionary struggle owed, Said says, a profound debt to his Palestinian experiences (PDF p.154-156). In exile national groups in nuce become national groups in fact, though dispersion prevented homogeneity: the fact of loss created an authentic community, and what Palestinians call the Palestinian Revolution is a positive forging of identity, a liberation from nonentity, oppression and exile. The remnant–exile contrast follows: the PLO, a mainly expatriate organization, has been concerned with return as liberation’s chief result, while the remnant, in Al-Ard’s language of remaining, redefined its national identity to take account of Israel and fought for equal rights within the Israeli polity without facing head-on the contradistinction of being a non-Jew in a Jewish state; the exiles thought holistically — all of Palestine had to be liberated — without adequately explaining Israel’s support among its Jewish citizens and part of the world, or the legitimacy and coherence Israel had acquired to its chosen citizens (PDF p.156-157).

The third segment, those under occupation since 1967 — West Bankers formerly Jordanian citizens, Gazans under Egyptian administration, East Jerusalemites whose city was functionally annexed — started reliving the experiences of the Arabs inside Israel plus some difficulties of exile: deportations from Nablus and Ramallah, thousands of families’ houses destroyed, thousands transferred (about 20,000 Beduins in Gaza among them), and no citizenship privileges in their own land; they became refugees in a sense, but unlike the first 780,000 they stayed on the land, in full view of a world that could see Israeli soldiers patrolling unarmed villages and that condemned the occupation and dozens of illegal settlements (PDF p.157-158). Occupation made Israel an occupying power, not simply a Jewish state; renewed contact between Israeli Arabs and the West Bank and Gaza raised political awareness on all sides; and Israeli policy, colonially shortsighted, deported or jailed every potential nationalist leader and punished restlessness with administrative detention — for the first time in its history Israel literally produced, manufactured a new class of person [the copy reads “lime” for “time” in this phrase, recorded in the reading notes], not “the Arab” of the post-1948 legal net but the “terrorist”, who kept turning into a nationalist patriot. The new Arabs could not be made to disappear into the old regulations for non-Jews; every ad hoc measure seemed self-defeating, and the more Israel identified the PLO with “terrorism” in the territories, the more Palestinians considered the PLO their only political hope; after 1967 extending the job beyond Israel’s agreed boundaries became expansionism, not redeeming the land. “In a generation the Israelis had been transformed from underdogs into overlords. And for a change the Palestinian, as a Palestinian, appeared” (PDF p.158-159). Official Israel still denies him political reality: Golda Meir in 1969 said there were no Palestinians (her departments and Arabists calling them “South Syrians”), Yitzhak Rabin always said “so-called” Palestinians, and Menachem Begin calls them the Arabs of Eretz Israel, Israel’s “own” blacks, offering self-rule under Israeli military protection; all three sanctioned large-scale state terrorism against Palestinian civilians outside Israel and total indifference to the dispossession (PDF p.159-160).

The PLO’s stunning successes trace, Said argues, to the negative aspects of Israeli policy and the Palestinian will coalescing around alternatives. Palestinians were the first Arab community to take up the problem of a multiethnic population, proposing a secular-democratic state for Muslims, Christians and Jews, and no organization in the region was as responsive to post-1967 realities. First, the PLO consciously undertook responsibility for all Palestinians — exile, occupied, inside Israel — within a catholic vision providing theoretically for an important Jewish presence, taking over schooling, arming, protecting, feeding and generally providing wherever it could. Second, it used its international authority to interpret the Palestinian reality to the world and to Palestinians themselves — an independent diplomatic identity and an impressive informational and research apparatus of study centers, institutes and publishing houses, putting Palestinians in touch with other colonized peoples and transforming the Zionist settler, retrospectively and actually, into an analogue of white settlers in Africa. Third, it opened itself to the entire community, making being a Palestinian not only possible but meaningful for every Palestinian, and turning him from a passive into a participating political being — also a source of perhaps dangerous incoherence (PDF p.160-161). The best overview is Ibrahim Abu-Lughod’s, summarized and quoted: after 1948 exiles and remnant adopted a “politics of accommodation”; in the fifties they engaged in a “politics of rejection” (Al-Ard inside Israel; refusal of depoliticization and criticism of fraternal Arab policies outside); the shock of the June War of 1967 ushered in the politics of revolution and hope — resistance and open Palestinian assertion embodied in the PLO for the exiles, greater militancy and support for the Communist Party’s stand for two states while affirming Palestinian unity for the remnant — with, Said adds, a third segment Abu-Lughod does not mention, the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, and a convergence today between the segments (PDF p.161-162). Section I ends here.

Three, II. The Emergence of a Palestinian Consciousness — PDF p.162-178 / printed p.141-157

Section II begins on PDF p.162, announcing its method — abstract clarity sacrificed to concrete accuracy — and its prelude: the Lebanese War of 1975-77 was not simply the stage for a Lebanese-Syrian-Palestinian drama but a microcosm of international politics, Great Power interests, the history of minorities in the Arab world, sociopolitical revolution and the legacy of Western colonialism; what took place in Lebanon, Palestinians and Syrians apart, repeats 1845 and 1860, Maronites and Druzes in bitter opposition with Great Power involvement, though the communities do not define themselves exclusively on religious grounds, and there the useful analogy ends (PDF p.162-163). Two twentieth-century changes frame the analysis: since World War II feelings attached to the nation-state, and the authority of the state and its apparatus, have grown altogether beyond the Ottoman kind; and local questions are now grasped and fought over in large global generalities — Zionists in Palestine, Maronite zealots as Western civilization against barbarian hordes, Palestinians since 1967 in the framework of Vietnam, Algeria, Cuba and black Africa — fed by worldwide political consciousness, the struggle against colonialism, and mass media, whose feedback is a gross political rhetoric that inflates, italicizes and theologizes issues, from which no one has been free (PDF p.163-164). Statements about “the Arabs”, “the Lebanese”, “the Jews” or “the Israelis” thus speak of volatile interpretations, not stable entities, while the states themselves inhabit a shifting political vocabulary: after the 1976 Syrian invasion of Lebanon, what do “the Arabs” or “radical Arab states” mean, and which Israel — of 1948, of 1967, or of the patrol boats blockading or bombarding the southern Lebanese coast, sometimes in conjunction with Syrian boats — are “the Arabs” asked to recognize? Precisely because a recent premium has been placed on states and their definition is bound up with generalities of almost cosmic ambition, the eccentricity of the modern Near East is accentuated (PDF p.164-165). Palestinians faced Arab nationalism’s double demand before any other indigenous group: identify resistance with the post-Ottoman Arab struggle for independence and statehood, and confront a demand for specifically Jewish statehood that excluded them as a whole; and the region’s active, quarrelsome interpretive agencies, usually minority governments struggling like Israel to impose their vision, usually with outside powers sponsoring minorities, complete the setting (PDF p.165-166).

Albert Hourani, quoted, describes the minorities’ closed communities: each a “world” sufficient to its members and exacting ultimate loyalty, the worlds touching but not mingling, stagnant and limited, while the Sunni world, though torn by internal dissension, had something universal, a self-confidence and sense of responsibility the others lacked, all of them marginal and shut out from power. Minorities separate and subdivide — Israel into Oriental and European Jews, to say nothing of Arabs; Eastern Christians cherishing their sect distinctions — and in Lebanon the conflagration’s obscured structure is Maronites against Sunni Muslims not allied with the populous Shiites, with the Greek Orthodox, Protestant, Armenian and Greek Catholic communities nothing like unanimous behind it, while Israel actively eggs on the Maronites with arms, supplies and political support out of a common minority cause against the Palestinians. David Ben-Gurion, at the Congress of the World Council of Po’ale Zion, July 29 to August 7, 1937, quoted: Lebanon is the natural ally of Jewish Eretz Israel, its Christian people facing a destiny similar to that of the Jewish people (PDF p.166-167). Militant minorities have almost always been aggressors against the universality of Sunni, majority, Islam: Norman Daniel’s Islam and the West: The Making of an Image shows it was the Syrian Christians — Saint John of Damascus (c.675-c.749) and the ninth-century philosopher Al-Kindi among them — who first supplied European Christianity with the theological, usually scurrilous, materials against Islam and Mohammed from which the common stereotypes (whoremonger, false prophet, hypocritical sensualist) descend, seeking powerful European allies against a proselytizing, conquering religion; many Zionists have subscribed to that legacy, whereas in Palestine, with no dominant unchanging Christian community and a common enemy in the Zionist colonists since 1880, such myths were never part of a Christian’s education (PDF p.167-168). When minority consciousness joins ambitious political generalization and both are forced into statehood, divisive separatism ensues; most Middle Eastern states, Israel included, smolder with the conflict between self-isolation and self-generalization — Egypt’s Arab unity against its specifically Egyptian national identity under Sadat’s “sacred mission”, Syria’s dialectic of Arab nationalism and withdrawals for reasons of state — and the ironies peak in President Hafez el-Assad’s July 21, 1976 speech justifying his Lebanese policy and attack on the PLO on behalf of Arab nationalism and the Palestinian revolution, when Syrian policy rested on raisons d’état, not Arab interests (PDF p.168-169).

The Palestinians’ curious fate is to have no patrie of their own since the postwar period, their deprivation concrete, having opposed Zionism from the start as both foreign and a minority political culture; Zionism, taking the road of minority provincialism and lacking organic ties with the Sunni Arab majority, became an even more self-enclosed world, so that there is an exact, troubling symmetry between Israeli-Jewish statehood and Palestinian selfhood in exile based on deprivation, and Palestinian identity’s principal tenets are the repossession of the land and the realization of Palestinian statehood, which Zionism has always denied in legitimacy and reality alike (PDF p.169). A well-known Israeli military figure and “Arabist”, writing about a year before the 1967 war and quoted at length (PDF p.170, unnamed in the passage — see Open questions), asks what of the Arabs’ is appropriate to imitate and answers through cultural superiority: Arab culture’s principal assets are of the Middle Ages, doubtful guides for a generation that has reached the moon, unimpressed by the Mu’allaqat, the Maqamat or al-Ghazali, and European culture has so much more to offer. Said: extended logically, because Americans reached the moon Shakespeare would be outdated; the point is that a specific Palestinian grievance is answered in the largest general thesis of minority cultural superiority, Palestinian deprivation transmuted into an overall “Arab” hostility, Israel metamorphosed into a symbol of progressive European culture (à la George Eliot) and the Palestinians into the symbol of Arab cultural inferiority (PDF p.170-171). Said then turns to the Palestinian quest for haven in the generality of Arab culture and its exploitation by Israel and the other Arabs, asking how and why the shift from accommodation to rejection, revolution and hope took place: the Palestinian predicament is a need for political survival combined with territorial and political alienation, and his relation to other Arabs is paradoxical — fraternal on one level, separated by an unbridgeable gap on another — enacted in the present, the problem of contemporaneity (PDF p.171).

The concrete example is fiction: the opening scene of Ghassan Kanafani’s novella Rijal fil Shams (Men in the Sun), in Said’s translation. Said notes Kanafani remained inside Israel until the early sixties, then went into exile as a militant journalist and writer, and in 1972 was assassinated by the Israelis in Beirut (PDF p.171). In the novella (fiction; its events are not stated as fact here), Abu Qais lies on the dew-wet earth near the estuary of the Tigris and Euphrates, feeling its throb like a tired heart’s beats and smelling his wife’s hair washed in cold water, awaiting arrangements to be smuggled illegally into Kuwait for work; his present is an amalgam of disjointed memory — his teacher’s pre-1948 geography lesson on the estuary — with his difficult situation as a refugee with a family under a blinding sun signifying universal indifference; the approaching light of the opening is proleptic of the final episode, in which Abu Qais and two other Palestinian refugees, smuggled in the empty belly of a tanker truck, are left too long during the border inspection and die of suffocation, unable even to give a sign of their presence (PDF p.172-173). Said’s reading of Kanafani’s style: in almost every scene the present is unstable, subject to echoes from the past and to synesthesia, defensive against the harsh present and protective of a cherished fragment of the past; the clauses “every time”, “since that first time” and “there on the land he had left ten years ago” are dominated by the image of tearing a road out of darkness toward light; in the dusty street of an Iraqi town the three men petition and bargain with “specialists” to take them across the border, the Palestinian impelled by exile to carve a path in an existence that is not a given even among fraternal Arabs, his past broken off just before it could bring forth fruit while family and life press in the present (PDF p.173). The Kanafani reading concludes on PDF p.174: when the men finally move reluctantly but necessarily into the present they will die invisibly, anonymously, killed in the sun; the Palestinian must make the present, a literal existential necessity, and, the 1948 disaster preventing continuity, the present is intelligible only as an achievement. Said then sets beside Kanafani the other first-rate Palestinian fiction, Emile Habibi’s epistolary novel, consistently ironic, depicting the outstanding and invisible condition of Palestinians inside Israel; both writers record the Kafkaesque alternation between being and not-being there (PDF p.174). Palestinian writing dramatizes Palestinian survival in the Arab/Islamic setting: the Palestinian is a form of political memory, at once a representative Arab and an outcast, and every Palestinian achievement is flawed by the paradox that survival outside Palestine is impermanent and groundless, its freedom impinged on by the Arab states (PDF p.175-176). Arabic literature now boasts a genre of Palestinian resistance writing; its national poem is Mahmoud Darwish’s “Identity Card” (poetry), governed by the imperative Record, read off an identity card to an Israeli police clerk, ending in the Palestinian emergence — a warning against the narrator’s hunger and anger (PDF p.176-177). Nagib Mahfouz made that emergence the climax of his 1973 novel Love in the Rain (fiction), whose Palestinian guerrilla Abu’l Nasr al Kabir lives in Cairo, not Nazareth or Nablus; until 1975 or 1976 the Israeli Palestinian Arabs lost out to the glamour of the exiles (PDF p.177-178).

Three, III. The PLO Rises to Prominence — PDF p.178-190 / printed p.157-169

No completely satisfactory analytic explanation exists of how the exiled Palestinians became a political force; the narrative sequence is misleadingly simple. Al-Fateh began in 1965 with a small raid into Israel, and militant organizations and clashes increased, the effort enclosed until March 1968 by general Arab, Nasserist or Baathist, development. Karameh in March 1968, the first post-1967 and post-1948 battle between regular Israeli forces and Palestinian irregulars — the defenders stayed and fought, backed later by Jordanian regulars, and inflicted much damage on columns accustomed to impunity at as-Sammu — began the phase of quickest growth; within a year fedayeen were the force to be reckoned with in Jordan (PDF p.178-179). There took form the besetting PLO vacillation between a revolutionary direction (liberation) and transforming Palestinian power into an Arab state (national independence); the PLO ran a quasi state inside a host Arab state, first Jordan then Lebanon, which came into collision with the larger one, while its strength was attracting every avant-garde element: “Palestinian” was synonymous with novelty, and with politics (PDF p.179-180). The prominent PLO organizations are Fateh, the Popular Front, the Popular Democratic Front, Saiqa and smaller units; politics is at times dizzyingly incoherent, at times bloody, yet unanimous on self-determination, with an unbroken record of refusal to sell out (PDF p.180). Fateh, dominated by Yasir Arafat, is basically Nasserite — a visible za’im and a centrist nationalist philosophy — keeps organization to a minimum except for fighting Zionism, tacitly encourages democracy of idea and style, and represents the bottom-line fact of being an oppressed Palestinian; it is a majority group, relatively optimistic, pragmatic rather than ideological, and the least rejectionist, hence the most likely group to come to a responsible settlement (PDF p.180-182). The Popular Front called for an Arab revolution and refuses any political settlement; the Democratic Front (DPF), born 1969, first articulated the transitional program the PLO adopted in 1974, refined in 1977 — a national authority, now a state, on any part of Palestine evacuated by Israel — and the rejectionists and DPF together challenge Fateh’s improvisatory, family-style politics with ideological, organizational and strategical questions, consuming at times more energy than fighting Zionism and producing skewed priorities, a function of the philosophies at war and of the cubistic form of Palestinian existence, each Arab regime seeking influence or a proxy in Palestinian politics (PDF p.182-183). Arafat has been a genius at containing that Arab baggage, as in the Fateh–Iraqi-sponsored rejectionist conflict of early 1978; by and large Palestinian politics tend toward accommodation rather than conflict, unlike the Vietnamese and Algerian movements (PDF p.184). Armed struggle is reassessed: its actual significance was also the end of liberation struggle and the beginning of a nationalist effort, arms protecting a central national authority, as Resolution 242 had converted Nasserism’s and Baathism’s armies into conservative defenders of the status quo; in Jordan the weapons defended an independent Palestinian identity but could not make revolutionary headway. What saved the movement was the Palestinian vision: first espoused by the PLO, the Secular Democratic State idea was the true novelty and revolutionary force (PDF p.184-185). The PLO emerged from expulsion from Jordan far more powerful than its aggregate, because it represented a general Palestinian consensus, not a made-up device to terrorize the world; its legitimacy remained constant and since 1974 its bedrock strengthened, and within a decade it managed students’ and women’s organizations, trade unions, schools, veterans welfare and a vast health network, making a place for any Palestinian anywhere (PDF p.185-186). Two under-discussed factors: Arafat, the first leader both to grasp all the major factors affecting Palestinians everywhere and to hold sway over the detail of Palestinian life, assuming quasi-governmental responsibility without despotism; and money — the Palestinian National Fund, accountable to the Palestinian National Council, pays for services, supplies, training and armaments for about a million people, supplemented by Arab states, which breaks down the classic analysis of a Third World movement constant in alienation and poverty (PDF p.186-187). A large educated minority with impressive resources raises the conflict of social ideals with conservative institutions, the war of Arab state conventions with progressive currents, and the dangerous prospect of embourgeoisement; the conservative quest, a return to 1948 property under traditional despots, is intolerable, yet success breeds a retrograde vision; exile’s effect and post-1967 history have so far held the community together (PDF p.187-188). After 1967 the Arab states could not settle the dispute militarily; Nasser before his 1970 death shifted to accommodation with the United States and acceptance of Israel, whose effects included the Jordanian and Lebanese crises of 1970-71 and 1975-76 — inevitable crises whose paradoxical result was an increase in the PLO’s nationalist authority: the 1974 Rabat decision designating the PLO the only legitimate representative followed the Jordan clash, and Lebanon rallied all segments around the PLO (PDF p.188-189). Between the crises, the 1973 war intensified accommodation; Sadat’s offer — peace and a Palestinian state contingent on complete Israeli withdrawal — was offered in 1971, 1973 and late 1977, and the Palestinian position moved with it: after the PNC meetings of 1974 and, more affirmatively, 1977, the Palestinians resolved upon a state. What swayed the PLO was a new constituency: the West Bank and Gaza Palestinians in the 1976 municipal elections, and the Palestinians inside Israel through the Day of the Land on March 30, 1976 (PDF p.189-190).

Three, IV. The Palestinians Still in Question — PDF p.190-202 / printed p.169-181

The fundamental difficulty persists: punished for his presence in Palestine at its colonial settlement, the Palestinian has been punished afterwards for his absence; in 1974 over a hundred nations accepted the PLO as representative, yet the nations most concerned challenge that and Palestinian identity itself, and fragmentation has never been a more acute obstacle (PDF p.190-191). Paradoxes: the Arab world has come around to peace with Israel yet inter-Arab violence has never been greater; the Palestinian cause is highest on every Arab agenda yet Palestinian dead at Arab hands are appallingly high; superpower parity is enshrined yet the Soviet Union is marginal while the United States dominates; Palestinians must be involved in the peace process yet the leaders of Egypt, Israel and the United States speak for them — all doors open in theory, none in reality (PDF p.191). The concrete instance is U.S. policy: Kissinger’s gradualism and bilateralism after the Sinai agreements of 1974 and 1975 shrank the unit of political attention, froze regimes in their discreteness, ruptured continuity, and made U.S. interests the substitute for regional cooperation; bilateralism allies minorities with one another, the old Ottoman millet system become the order of the day, with the one transnational community, the Palestinians, the odd man out, Lebanon’s dilemma the embodiment (PDF p.191-192). The vocabulary for the Palestinian is an aphasic system making his reality unpronounceable: associated with terrorism, though Said holds many individual acts immoral and useless, the PLO has since the early seventies avoided and condemned terror, the Maalot incident of May 1974 was preceded by weeks of Israeli napalm bombing of refugee camps in southern Lebanon, and nothing in Palestinian history rivals the record of Zionist terror or Israel’s lawlessness; a workforce of about 80,000 to 100,000 West Bank and Gaza Arabs fills the Israeli labor market as hewers of wood, and “Arab” in Israeli parlance is synonymous with dirty, stupid and incompetent, a history of racial exploitation pardoned and praised in the West (PDF p.192-193). Because Israel has shut its own and the world’s eyes, with a phalanx of Western intellectuals lauding achievements whose dark underside blighted a people; Israeli doves are encouraging but security arguments sweep alternatives away, and among the Arab states the Palestinian is a satellite of each state’s interests, his cause an abstraction whose sacredness lends respectability (PDF p.194). The obstacle within: Palestinians, limited often to denying their nonentity, stand outside looking in, and affirming prior belonging confirms banishment unless self-determination is exercised; the task is a positive affirmation — the right modality, forces, rhetoric, goal, past and future (PDF p.194-195). Palestinians are beginning to get hold of these, and two essential truths are now part of their actuality: most Palestinians, unlike the Israelis, realize their Other, the Israeli-Jewish people, is a concrete reality they must live with, and self-determination includes all Palestinians, the PLO’s main achievement (PDF p.195-196). The community has changed from general to particular liberation — from a secular democratic state in all of Palestine to a state on the West Bank and Gaza — retaining its values and the larger ideal that no one be defined or confined by race or religion, while Jaffa, Haifa and the Galilee remain a haunting loss; Said’s own belief is that an independent and sovereign Palestinian state is required at this stage, and such a patrie would be the first step toward peace between neighbor states, whose borders would in time mean less than human contact (PDF p.196-197). Two experiences measure effectiveness: as a boy in mid-forties Palestine Said heard a prominent Jerusalem lawyer answer the chorus that the Zionists were organized and armed with the claim that Khalilis from Hebron would chase them away with sticks — an epitome of a society organized feudally and tribally, unprepared for the three strains of Mandate, Zionist colonial effort and modernization, its notables’ leadership fissured (PDF p.197-198). Against that, the spring 1977 Palestinian National Council in Cairo: about 290 delegates, about 150 West Bank members absent because Israel would not let them return, a week of open discussion whose real subject was how well the PLO did, the executive subjected to minute critical scrutiny in the Arab world’s first broadly representative democratic debate, unnoticed by reporters and experts; the assembled exiles sought in detail how the struggle could be carried on and dealt with Israel and the Jews as essential to Palestinian destiny, a recognition Zionism, built on denial, could not boast (PDF p.198-200). The distance is not vulgar realism: the contemporary Palestinian grasps effectiveness, sees the day-to-day effectiveness of Zionism in oppressing the natives, and formulates a critique and an alternative; the consensus program defines reality historically as the precise effect of Zionism on its victims, and being a Palestinian has meant living through Zionism as acquisition, dispossession and maintenance of a state treating Palestinians as non-Jews, premised on the evacuation of Palestine by its majority — the fact of substitution with which the search for peace must begin and has not yet begun to deal (PDF p.200-202). Chapter Three ends here.

Four, I. Terms of Reference: Rhetoric and Power — PDF p.203-218 / printed p.182-197

Discussions are now dominated by the Egyptian-Israeli treaty, Camp David, or Iran after the shah; since Carter took office events have been disorienting, anti-imperialist energies seem weaker, nationalism tighter and more factional, Sadat’s theatrical action outstripped rhetoric, and American influence became an institution guaranteed by agreements signed in Washington and the Maryland hills; Lebanon is scarcely an entity, and extraordinary Arab wealth, confusion and repression sit side by side, yet the collective potential of a great Arab nation should never be underestimated (PDF p.203-204). U.S. attention has treated the Middle East as spectacle without analytic quality. The Eastern Arab world occupies a curiously middle, mixed place: analogies with Algerian resistance break down, and Israel, a colonial settler-state resembling South Africa, is not totally similar, Jews not Afrikaaners; grand ideas — Islam, Arabism, national liberation — cannot easily apply and must be redefined in terms of an actuality and a possible future, while ideological labels substitute for concrete analysis in Arab debate and cool U.S. analysis alike (PDF p.204-205). Seeing the Arab world accurately means seeing it in the world, part of Asia, Africa and even Europe, against Arab and Western refusals that enclose arguments in hermetic packages, whether the Islamic or Arab mind-set or self-approval (PDF p.205-206). Liberation, modernization, peace and progress suffer most: the failure to distinguish borrowed from earned ideas of liberation brought the Arabs to their present pass; Sadat’s initiative posed defeat confessed, territory regained and American aid against liberation drums, repression and battlefield failure, and the alternative of a genuine national war seems unlikely to be adopted (PDF p.206-207). As Gerard Chaliand argues, most Third World liberation struggles produced undistinguished regimes of state worship, bureaucracy and police; the Arab world has not discussed human community or the postcolonial state enough — Hisham Sharaby’s dissection of the patriarchal family ends in a blank where a replacement community should be, while Murray Bookshin’s study of Spanish anarchism shows millions struggling for communities free of repression; with the two exceptions of the Palestinian attempt to speak of a new social organization and the Lebanese National Movement of 1975-77, hardly any concrete social forms have been struggled for, and the two rhetorics, negative criticism and self-glorification, guarantee a future in which things happen to the Arab world (PDF p.207-208). The U.S. vision complements these failures: oil and armed alliances against popular currents, a Dulles reversion, stated most clearly in Harold H. Saunders’s testimony of June 12, 1978, with its catalogue of interests and four premises, its postman remark, and its categorical association of the West Bank and Gaza with Jordan and rejection of an independent Palestinian state (PDF p.209-210). Peace and moderation puts radicalism and nationalism outside the pale; any conflict is bad for the United States, whose priorities are absence of change, oil, markets and bilateral links, then military convergences, leaving Egypt and Israel completely dependent clients of the U.S. arms industry (PDF p.210-211). Underneath is unconditional enmity to transformation: in Iran the United States stood by the shah and supplied his army with oil in January 1979 hoping for a coup against the Khomeini forces, went through with the separate treaty against Jordanian, Saudi and Kuwaiti opposition, and renewed its commitment after every failure from Vietnam to Iran; the treaty embodies governments willing to war for others’ resources and to attack movements not subservient to imported peace, moderation and progress (PDF p.211-212). The media and liberal intelligentsia have reserved peace, moderation, modernization and progress for U.S. strategies; I. F. Stone resisted Camp David only with difficulty and spoke of Carter as an epic hero, Anthony Lewis argued Camp David was all we had, and the unanswerable questions assumed no war with Egypt, anti-peace opponents and a first public agreement on the Palestinian question (PDF p.212-213). With that went absolute silence on what Camp David entailed: no mention of settlements in the West Bank, Gaza and Golan, Begin’s Knesset deal of Sinai returned for the other territories kept, the autonomy plan an overt Bantustan, its irreversible-process suggestion only in adjunct letters canceled by Israeli letters, Dayan telling Sadat’s acting foreign minister to delete any mention of the PLO from his Knesset speech, and Sadat omitting the Palestinians at the signing for fear of irritating the Israelis (PDF p.213-214). Where clarity existed it was Israeli action: twenty new West Bank settlements announced on signing day, atop seventy-seven; and Halhoul, punished for demonstrating against the treaty on March 15 with a laborer and a schoolgirl killed, a twenty-three-hour curfew on 8,000 inhabitants, reported by Jonathan Kandell in The New York Times on March 27, 1979, while the Times editorialized against confusing peace with allegations of torture (PDF p.214-215). Palestinians, never consulted, were assumed content, while everywhere they rejected autonomy; Brzezinski pronounced “Bye-bye PLO”, Jimmy Carter likened the PLO to the American Nazi Party, the Ku Klux Klan and the Communist Party and wished it would go away, having never met a Palestinian, and no liberal or moral authority took a public stand on Palestinian rights; Begin was never asked about annexation or the destruction of Palestinian society, Arafat always asked about driving Jews into the sea (PDF p.215-216). U.S. peace rhetoric is coterminous with making the question of Palestine disappear — a final solution the Palestinian people resist, having in a hundred years produced not a single quisling. Two roads: Camp David’s autonomy under indefinite Israeli, Egyptian and U.S. rule, premised on breaking the Palestinian will and promising continued nonindependence, against which stand four wars since 1970 and the Iranian precedent; or a second road Said details later, whose grounds are that every Arab state has accepted Resolution 242, the PLO will formulate concrete peace proposals in return for a U.S. declaration for self-determination culminating in an independent state, and for the first time a legitimate leadership, a national consensus and a capability of defining self-determination, along the PNC meetings of 1974, 1977 and 1979, exist (PDF p.216-218). Until the unacceptable linkage — peace predicated on the Palestinians giving up their national existence — is understood, the illusions, violence and human waste will continue (PDF p.218).

Four, II. Egypt, Israel, and the United States: What Else the Treaty Involved — PDF p.218-234 / printed p.197-213

Section II opens with the Washington signing on March 26, 1979: Carter, Anwar al-Sadat and Begin, hands clasped, imposing a television commercial on a continuing dialectic against which the United States committed its power directly — a hundred U.S. advisers in North Yemen, bolstering against popular disorder, the crescent of crisis — while a CBS-New York Times poll in late March 1979 found most people unimpressed with the treaty, its cost and arms (estimates $5billionto$15 billion), over 70 percent disapproving the promise to supply Israel with oil for fifteen years (PDF p.218-219). Yet Carter was the first president to speak seriously of the Palestinian people, and Israeli opposition figures like Shimon Peres had begun to speak of Palestinian rights; why did the treaty scant them? Starting with Egypt: Sadat, stripped by polemic of history, had as early as 1971, during Gunnar Jarring’s mission, promised recognition and normalization for territory, his Palestinian politics an annex to his Egyptian bulwark, unlike Nasser and the Syrian Baathists; the seventies became a fight over the Arab state system, Sadatian Egypt and Saudi Arabia ascendant, and Sadat conducted the 1973 war as an Egyptian political war to involve the United States, dealing with Zionism on the psycho-cultural terrain it held unchallenged in the West (PDF p.219-220). But Sadat squandered his most creative move: his program was entirely Egyptian, a theatrical dismantling of Nasser’s programs and legacy, attacking Israel’s monopoly of U.S. support by retaining the initiative, ending the Soviet relationship, and tying Israel, Egypt and the United States together; the Saudis, hamstrung by cumbersome wealth, held the fort with support to conflicting forces, the Lebanese right wing and the PLO alike (PDF p.221). The crucial year was 1975: Sinai II began Egypt’s regaining of territory while Syria sought a comprehensive settlement, and the Lebanese war widened the rift; Syria, prepared to confront Egyptian particularism and, in June 1976, Palestinian nationalism itself, attacked the PLO in Lebanon; the Riyadh conference of October 1976 briefly restored contact under Saudi auspices (PDF p.221-222). Carter’s arrival seemed to favor the Syrian line — Geneva, Palestinian presence, Soviet cooperation — which frightened Egypt and Israel; Sadat, no less than Israel, opposed the U.S.-USSR joint statement of October 1, 1977, and after the early 1977 food riots could not risk postponement, political opening or economic disintegration; his Jerusalem announcement of November 17 changed everything, and Said doubts it surprised Washington (PDF p.222-223). The United States reordered priorities to a separate treaty: Palestine as evolved through the United Nations was dropped first, then the joint statement and Geneva representation; Sadat detached himself from the PLO — Arafat could not deliver — silenced nationalist opposition, and rephrased the Palestinian cause as his own championship (PDF p.223). Sadat and Israel had agreed early on the economic benefits of a joint alliance blessed by the United States, a mutual coprosperity sphere dividing the Middle East into haves and have-nots, confining and snuffing out radicalism and Arabism, freeing Sadat for Africa and the trilateral world; despite the Baghdad summit, the Iranian insurrection and the incipient PLO-Iranian alliance, every Arab state signaled willingness to live alongside Israel and shuck the Soviet Union for U.S. aid (PDF p.224). The United States clung to the separate peace as a claimed first step, supporting everything intransigent and regressive in Egypt and Israel and alienating the Palestinians, the Arab masses and the Third World, taken in by Sadat as by Marshall Ky, Chiang Kai-shek and the shah, and blind to how its support fortified its clients’ most unpopular goals (PDF p.224-225). Nowhere more than Israel: Begin was quickly rehabilitated from extremism and terrorism, made no substantive concessions, kept the territories, saw Palestinian Arabs as a coolie class, and effectively changed Israel’s position on Resolution 242, his later U.N. representative arguing in 1977 that the Geneva Conventions did not and never would apply there; Israel tightened links with South Africa, Chile and Nicaragua, and its chief of staff, General Eytan, on January 19, 1979, described the Arabs of the Galilee — Palestinians simply remained there for thirty years — as engaged in a process of conquest, and reaffirmed that the state was established to conquer the country, in Yediot Aharonot (PDF p.225-226). Sinai, demilitarized, was easy to promise, with legitimacy, neutralization of the largest Arab state, a U.S. security arrangement, fifteen years of oil, about $15 billion in arms and aid, an Arab market and cheap Egyptian labor; where territory was an issue Israel would always control it, and the American press’s legitimation of autonomy made Palestinian and Jordanian refusal appear irrational (PDF p.226). Historically details count more than principles for Zionism; Begin brought legal skills beyond Labor’s force and improvisation — the liberated territories, the defensive-war admission wrung from Sadat at Ismailia on December 26, 1977, self-rule for inhabitants distinguished from sovereignty over the land, and the legality of ever-expanding borders, where Ben-Gurion in 1948 had deliberately left borders unstated; about this combination of theology, legal refinement and casuistry the U.S. press has had little to say (PDF p.227). The section concludes (PDF p.228-234): while the press spun out disquisitions on Khomeini’s Islamic republic there was no effort to understand Begin’s theocratic view, or autonomy for people but not for the land; Israeli journalists were forthcoming, and actions spoke louder — Begin pressed for more settlements, leaving the project to Arik Sharon, by the end of 1978 there were seventy-seven settlements on the West Bank alone with approximately 27 percent of the land confiscated, and Gush Emunim was the vanguard of a settler population reliably given as 90,000 including Arab Jerusalem. Autonomy could be nothing more than a carefully regulated reservation, in the words of an unnamed Tel Aviv University authority on Palestinian nationalism, for eliminating their national aspirations. The double-backbone theory would reconstitute the West Bank as a military backbone: north-south and east-west military roads (the map at PDF p.229-230) dividing it into quadrants concentrating the Palestinians, Sharon in Ma’ariv (January 26, 1979) demanding roads, army camps and military training belts — continuity for Zionism, discontinuity for Palestinians; approximately 30 percent of Israel’s water comes from the West Bank and its sources are to be secured for Israel. Zeev Schiff in Ha’aretz (January 14 and 16, 1979), quoted at length, foresaw Israeli security authorities keeping intelligence, arrests (with Palestinian police cooperation only formal) and interrogation indefinitely, fighting subversiveness defined as anything advancing a Palestinian state, the apparatus touching all aspects of Palestinian life. Repatriation provisions cover only Palestinians originally from Gaza or the West Bank — approximately 150,000 driven out in 1967 — screened by Israel, the over 2 million other exiles, per Dayan, expected to remain where they are; an unnamed distinguished Palestinian writer’s formula, quoted in full, gives autonomy as a fraction of the people promised a fraction of its rights in a fraction of its homeland under an Israeli veto. Against the liberal U.S. argument (this is the most Palestinians have ever been given; a state would just grow, as Anthony Lewis implied, March 26, 1979) Said sets the three factors such arguments ignore: Zionism as a systematic practice for Jews and against non-Jews, Palestinian history as a coherent experience of dispossession with an answering dialectic toward self-determination, and the real conflict between them — with self-rule made to depend on the PLO’s demise and quislings who have not turned up. Section II ends by turning to what the Palestinians themselves have done and said.

Four, III. Palestinian and Regional Actualities — PDF p.235-256 / printed p.214-235

The Middle East as a mixed, middle place restated with its complications: Palestinian dispossession by an invading settler colonialism is what happened to them as victims, but takes in neither European anti-Semitism nor Israel as a state with, for Jews, real accomplishments and the commitment of its people and much of the world, nor is the struggle the pristine black-majority/white-minority struggle of southern Africa; the Arab liberation struggle is relatively well financed, and Arab liberation itself dissolves under questioning (oil states coopted, political life unliberated, radicals flawed in support of Palestine) (PDF p.235). Discussion of Arabs and Palestinians in the West is so confused and slanted that fair representation risks not dispelling the lies; Said holds the historical and moral sufficiency of the Palestinian cause will outlast misrepresentation, and that a people’s struggle, not writers about it, determines its history — nevertheless writing counts (PDF p.235-236). First point: the tendency always to postpone serious discussion of the Palestinians, the point of George Ball, Yehoshafat Harkabi’s Op-Ed “The Mideast Challenge” (The New York Times, April 1, 1979); the U.S. holds the absurd notion the PLO can be bypassed when, as senior officials say privately, the PLO is the Palestinian question, and the Sinai II / Kissinger condition (no recognition or talks unless the PLO accepts 242 and recognizes Israel) has withheld legitimacy and encouraged the association of the PLO with terrorism (PDF p.236-237). The press and intellectual community have gone along, a sympathetic television portrait was still framed as why the terrorists are terrorists, most Americans do not know the Palestinians lived where Israel now is and were kicked out, and the government’s demons (Palestinian radicalism, Iraq, Libya) serve to promote its policies and keep alive military options; total silence met Israel’s March 1978 raid into south Lebanon with cluster bombs, while U.S. allies’ genocidal wars (Indonesia in East Timor) go unsaid and Israel stays associated with good causes, the circle of debate shrinking and Palestinian nationalism eliminated (PDF p.237-238). Two ideas follow: important changes in the Palestinian position since 1967, never given their political weight; and the question’s affiliations with major regional historical processes (PDF p.238-239). The parents’ generation held Palestine as Filastin Arabiyah and could not accept it had become Israel; between 1948 and 1967 Israel absorbed Arab national energies, defined Arabism’s limits and legitimized regimes, which offered Palestinians only philosophies of a glorious return; after the June war Nasserism, Baathism, Arab nationalism, Islamic fundamentalism and almost the whole gamut of left parties foundered, being borrowed philosophies undigested, with no decisive rupture between colonial and postcolonial periods in any eastern Arab country; Nasser, the only leader to take Third World anti-imperialism seriously, subordinated an oppositional popular culture to a top-heavy national security state, yet awakened Arab energies and made Egypt the focus of the Arab world, where Sadat’s Egypt has lost its Arab aura (PDF p.239-240). After 1967 the Palestinian resistance was the first Arab movement to confront the presence of Jews in Palestine immediately, and formulated the Secular Democratic State: it accepted a community of Jews who had gained their state by conquest and posited a state based on secular human rights, not religious or minority exclusivity, transcending the ghetto state, the national security state and the minority government — still the only possible and acceptable destiny for the multicommunal Middle East; much of its work was done in its formulation, the first historical acculturation of the idea of an Arab Palestine, ungrasped by Western commentators and the Zionist establishment, who equated it with genocide, while Israel called Palestinians non-Jews or the Arabs of Eretz Israel and the liberal intelligentsia passed over child exploitation, workers locked up at night, torture and special laws, speaking of a benign occupation (PDF p.241-242). The PLO had to lead an exile constituency mainly from neither the West Bank nor Gaza toward nationhood likeliest there, drawing counterpressure and the costly conflicts of Jordan and Lebanon; Israel turned occupied into settled territory and produced colonial institutions, concerned Jews awakened, and sheer Palestinian persistence — still calling themselves Palestinians, still claiming return — made claims on Israel that nothing in Zionist political life could make room for, since admitting a competing national right was the obstinate fact covered up by talk of security and terrorism (PDF p.242-244). Palestinian terror inflicted minimal casualties while, per Gur, official Israeli policy attacked Arab civilians en masse; in 1974 the leadership concluded Arab Palestine could not be restored, Arab pressure after 1973 could make inroads, and Rabat confirmed the PLO as the only possible representative, so Arafat at the UN in November 1974 gave up any purely military solution; the PLO repeatedly stated willingness to accept a West Bank-Gaza state, the National Council in 1974 and 1977 committing the community with an implicit recognition of Israel as a neighbor, Arafat asking his constituency to trade lost homes for statehood against rejectionist opposition, while Zionists ignored the offers and doves demanded prior concessions (PDF p.245-246). The United States in 1974-77 played an astonishingly destructive role — Kissinger’s arms, bilateralism, hints of using the CIA to escalate the Lebanese war to consume the PLO, Iran and Israel as bulwarks — and tossed Palestinian signals aside: Resolution 3236, protection of American citizens in Lebanon in 1975-76, PLO support on January 22, 1976 for a Security Council resolution on self-determination and all states’ right to live in peace, vetoed by Daniel P. Moynihan; Carter’s March 1977 Clinton declarations drew Arafat’s careful reciprocity at the Cairo National Council, and by late summer 1977 an agreement (PLO acceptance of 242 with a reservation, for U.S. recognition and something definite on self-determination) collapsed when the United States would go only to a dialogue (PDF p.246-247). Geneva contacts were canceled November 19, 1977, and still Arafat persisted — accept a state, recognize Israel de facto, told Anthony Lewis (May 1978) and Congressman Paul Findley (January 1979) he could live peacefully next to Israel — while impossible things were demanded, his aides were murdered in 1978 and early 1979, and he faced 30,000 Israeli troops in South Lebanon; neither Palestinians nor King Hussein could be tempted by Camp David, Sadat’s leverage without the USSR, Arab or wider U.S. support would be verbal at best, and the United States, Egypt and PLO struggle at odds to Israel’s advantage (PDF p.248-249). The organized Jewish constituency in the U.S. welcomed the treaty grudgingly for neutralizing Egypt and attacked it for possibly opening self-determination, magazines like The New Republic and Commentary (Theodore Draper’s March 1979 piece noted) holding views Said ventriloquizes as telling Palestinians their claims are canceled and they must be content with nothing; the Brookings Report of 1975, written with Brzezinski and William Quandt, is a forgotten relic, and the treaty curtains off Syria, Iraq, the PLO, Saudi Arabia and Jordan (PDF p.249-250). Regional actualities: for the first time since 1967 a genuinely popular Arab nationalist response might develop, Palestine having become the symbolical nexus of nearly every Arab, Islamic and Third World popular issue and the acceptable trope for criticising state authority (the Kuwaiti parliament closed in late 1976, the Baghdad Conference of March 1979, Iran’s response after February), with hidden currents released; the danger is protracted incoherence and postponement of the PLO’s national claims, and an Israel-Egypt pact shutting Palestinians out hardens both countries into lonely fortresses (PDF p.250-251). The imperatives: the question, traced in the lives of all 4 million Palestinians, cannot be made to go away, yet is a concrete historical question comprehensible in human terms, not a psychological monster; equating the struggle for rights with terrorism, genocide and anti-Semitism licenses another century of violence; the impossibility of talking rationally about it in the U.S. serves neither the U.S. nor Jews, and denial will produce more fear, less peace (PDF p.251-252). Said sympathizes with Jewish fear of future genocidal attempts, but a life conducted to prevent the past recurring mortgages the Palestinians’ future to that fear — a disaster for them and for Jews; he has presented the Palestinians as representable, both histories fundamentally reconcilable within a common historical perspective, his aim to see the past clearly in order to get beyond it, Palestinian aspirations achievable ones (PDF p.252-253). The West appears ready for the first time to hear the Palestinian side: Palestinians must tell it, engage the liberal Zionist establishment that has betrayed its human mission (no condemnation of the spring 1978 expulsion of 250,000 civilians from South Lebanon), and enter the peace debate in full force; today’s Palestinian is better schooled in political democracy than any other Arab, Palestinian leaders have spoken of two societies side by side, and the Palestinian mission is a mission of peace — the PLO a choice of peace and human will over steel and sheer force, the mission coming down to individuals like Arafat and the poet Samih al Qassem [as printed] asking by what right a Jew born in Chicago may immigrate while a Palestinian born in Jaffa is a refugee (PDF p.253-255). The alternative: the most heavily armed region in the world, Israel helping South Africa with its nuclear program and unsigned on the nonproliferation treaty, ideological cliches in place of justice, realism and compassion, Israel’s official Jews/non-Jews division unscrapped; the instrument that will bring peace is self-conscious rational struggle in the interests of human community — really asking the question of Palestine (PDF p.255-256). Section III ends here.

Four, IV. Uncertain Future — PDF p.256-259 / printed p.235-238

Two things are certain; the Jews of Israel will remain; the Palestinians will also remain. To say much more is a foolish risk (PDF p.256). In the short run the U.S. will press the Israel-Egypt autonomy negotiations, Jordan will not join, Begin will harden, and no Palestinian of consequence will participate; the variables are Egypt’s opposition and isolation, Saudi Arabia’s and Jordan’s acute positions and ruling houses, Iran’s continuing upheaval, the forecast Syria-Iraq union against each country’s individual priorities, Saudi economic pressure, Libya’s mercurial regime and oil, Jordan’s status quo tempting an Israeli strike to make the Hashemites give way to a Palestinian polity on the East Bank, Dayan’s gestures toward Syria and the PLO drowned by protest, and the convergence of Israeli and U.S. views on Palestinian self-determination — after spring 1978, Said says, serious thought had been given in Israel to a final solution for the Palestinians, Camp David lending credence to that pessimistic view (PDF p.256-257). Economic issues and social revolution, a U.S. on record willing to invade an oil country, Israel and Egypt advertising themselves as willing gendarmes since the shah’s fall, Lebanon’s anarchy and Iran’s revolution make any blueprint impossible; U.S. policy nonetheless projects one — self-rule and autonomy well short of self-determination — every such liberal interventionism has failed, but Said is no mechanistic determinist: he relies on the Palestinian will to self-determination and on a large group of Americans realising the policies that brought disaster in Vietnam must not be used against the Palestinians (PDF p.258). A significant Palestinian counterresponse is certain, the PLO gathering support, but a confident prediction of a Palestinian initiative carrying the region forward would forget Palestine is saturated with blood: much turbulence and ugly human waste in the short term, the question renewing itself in well-known forms, and so too the people of Palestine — Arabs and Jews — whose encounter has yet to occur on any important scale but will occur, to their mutual benefit (PDF p.258-259). Chapter Four and the main text end here.

Bibliographical Note — PDF p.260-263 / printed p.239-242

Said notes a small part of an enormous, hopelessly proliferating mass of writing, pointing to material the Anglo-American reader is less likely to know than standard political science expertise or pro-Zionist writing (PDF p.260). The detailed bibliography in Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: An Annotated Bibliography, eds. Walid Khalidi and Jill Khadduri (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1974), and the Institute’s Journal of Palestine Studies; the two indispensable compilations, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod’s Transformation of Palestine (1971) and Walid Khalidi’s From Haven to Conquest (1971); Antonius’s The Arab Awakening as the classic work, supplemented by Doreen Ingrams’s Palestine Papers, 1917-1922, Tibawi’s three books (his historical research the finest yet produced by a Palestinian), Hadawi’s Bitter Harvest and Fawaz Turki’s The Disinherited as testimonial history, John Davis’s The Evasive Peace, Gary V. Smith’s Jewish critique of Zionism, Alan R. Taylor’s Prelude to Israel, David Waines’s A Sentence of Exile and J. C. Hurewitz’s The Struggle for Palestine (PDF p.260-261). Chaliand’s and David Hirst’s books on the resurgence of resistance, Abu-Ghazaleh on Mandate cultural nationalism, the RAND study by Quandt, Jabber and Lesch and Quandt’s Decade of Decisions, Sheehan’s Kissinger book, Stevens on American Zionism and Snetsinger on Truman and the Jewish vote, Gaspar’s Histoire de la Palestine, Aruri and Ghareeb’s Enemy of the Sun for resistance poetry, Jiryis’s The Arabs in Israel and al-Asmar’s To Be An Arab in Israel, and Zurayk’s The Palestinians in Israel as the more sociologically sophisticated work (PDF p.261-262). Deutscher and Rodinson’s two books as the major European socialist statements, Kapeliouk’s Israel: La Fin des mythes and the journalism of Kapeliouk, Hirst, Eric Rouleau and John K. Cooley as far above The New York Times, Chomsky’s Peace in the Middle East? as the most sustained radical analysis, The Other Israel and the Ithaca Press string (Davis and Mezvinsky, Davis, Mack and Yuval-Davis, Felicia Langer, Blatt, Davis and Kleinbaum), and above all Israel Shahak’s materials, the Shahak Papers from the Palestine Human Rights Campaign, supplemented by the National Lawyers Guild delegation report on treatment of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza (PDF p.262). Counterarchival organizations (AAUG, MERIP), periodicals from Khamsin to the Village Voice columns of Cockburn and Ridgeway, Zed Press and Maspero, establishment sources read for their viewpoint, Abu-Lughod’s and Aruri’s edited volumes on the 1967 and 1973 wars and Aharon Cohen; two qualifications — Arabic material from the PLO Research Center is crucial yet hard for Western readers to get, and everything listed is much harder to come by than pro-Zionist material, a situation colluded in by major networks, publishers, news services and distributors; and recent items: Hudson against Safran, Kayyali supplemented by Rosemary Sayigh’s Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries, Mishal and Smooha, Lilienthal’s The Zionist Connection, and Abu Iyad’s Palestinien sans patrie with Eric Rouleau (PDF p.262-263). The full item-by-item record is in the reading notes.

Chapter Notes — PDF p.264-274 / printed p.243-253

The Chapter Notes begin (PDF p.264). Introduction notes: a note (numbered i as printed) on analogous censorship citing a Noam Chomsky piece whose title and journal are garbled in the copy, and note 1, Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1973), p.290, the source of the Introduction’s Arendt passage. Chapter One notes 1-34 in full (PDF p.264-266): Said’s Orientalism pp.31-49 (note 1); Mayhew and Adams, Publish It Not, with Said’s long note on consensus censorship, the New York Times’s reviewing habits and the New York Review of Books’ iron barrier against Palestinians representing themselves (note 2); Bernard Lewis’s “The Return of Islam” as refurbished Zionist propaganda (note 3); Lamartine’s Voyage en Orient, vol. 2, p.533 (note 4); the Arabic geographical passage quoted from Istakhari and Ibn Hawkal in Guy Le Strange, Palestine Under the Moslems (1890; reprinted 1965), p.28 (note 5 — resolving the unnamed geographer of PDF p.31-32); Bevis, the Anglo-Palestine Yearbook 1947-48, Abu-Ghazaleh, Herzl’s Complete Diaries vol. I p.88, Ingrams’s Palestine Papers, Davis and Mezvinsky’s Documents From Israel, Janet Abu-Lughod’s demographic transformation (twice), Sykes’s Crossroads to Israel, A Survey of Palestine (1946) p.146 (notes 6-15); Amos Elon, The Israelis: Founders and Sons (1971), pp.194 ff. and pp.220, 222 (notes 16, 21 — resolving the unnamed Elon book of the text); Ingrams again, Weizmann’s Trial and Error p.462, The Candid Kibbutz Book (notes 17-20); McDonald’s My Mission to Israel p.176, Antonius p.15 [as read], Orientalism pp.284-328, Ingrams, Stokes on the English Utilitarians and India, Wilson’s A Piece of My Mind p.85 and Black, Red, Blond and Olive pp.462-63, Jiryis, Bellow’s To Jerusalem and Back and Spender with Chomsky’s critique of Bellow, Stone’s “Confessions of a Jewish Dissident”, Moynihan’s A Dangerous Place, Von Hoffman’s Daily Pilot piece of July 6, 1977, and the UN’s The Right of Return of the Palestinian People (1978) (notes 22-34). Chapter Two notes 1-21 (PDF p.266-267): Stone again, Daniel Deronda (three notes), Orientalism, Hertzberg’s The Zionist Idea, Jiryis with Shahak’s The Non-Jew in the Jewish State, Curtin’s Imperialism, Stewart’s Theodor Herzl, Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks p.324 with the Quaderni del Carcere reference, Arendt’s Origins p.129, Bracken on essence, accident and race, Curtin on Knox, Curzon’s Subjects of the Day, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (twice), Murphy on French imperialism, an Amos Oz quotation from Time, May 15, 1978, p.61, Miriam Rosen’s 1976 Hunter College thesis as the source of the British-archaeology quotations, and Mandel and Porath.

Chapter Two notes 22-55 conclude the chapter’s notes (PDF p.268-270 / printed p.247-249; the original was opened for these pages in part 6 and the forms below follow it where the letter-spaced copy garbles them): Elon, The Israelis, pp.218-24 (note 22); Maxime Rodinson, Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?, trans. David Thorstad (1973), p.39, and ibid. p.38 (notes 23-24); a passage quoted in David Waines, The Failure of the Nationalist Resistance, in The Transformation of Palestine, ed. Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (1971), p.220, and ibid. p.213 (notes 25-26); Weizmann’s Trial and Error at pp.371, 125, 128-29 and 253, and 128 (notes 27-30); Yehoshafat Harkabi, Arab Attitudes to Israel (Keter Press, 1972), with Said’s biographical note — chief of military intelligence until dismissed in 1959 by Ben Gurion, later a Hebrew University professor and, in Said’s words, the principal propagandist in Israel against everything Arab and especially Palestinian, author of Palestinians and Israel (1974), distributed gratis in the United States by the Israeli embassy, and recently a “dove” and a supporter of the Peace Now movement (note 31 — giving the full name of the text’s General Harkabi); Haolam Hazeh, May 15, 1974, and Uri Avnery’s Israel Without Zionism (1968), with Avnery’s description of Moshe Dayan as an Arab-fighter (note 32); Trial and Error again at pp.130, 188, 215-16, 130 (notes 33-36); C. L. Temple, The Native Races and Their Rulers (1918; reprinted 1968), p.41 (note 37); Trial and Error, pp.156-57 (note 38); Michel Foucault on the army as a matrix for organizing society and Yves Lacoste on geography and war (note 39); Walter Lehn, “The Jewish National Fund”, Journal of Palestine Studies III, 4 (Summer 1974), 74-90, with Said’s long note on Lehn’s 1977-78 year as visiting professor at Bir Zeit University, his January 6 eyewitness protest letter over the beating of two Palestinian students, and the denial of his work permit in May 1978, unreported in any U.S. newspaper, and Davis and Lehn, And the Fund Still Lives (1978) (note 40); the fate of Umm al-Fahm as an example — 140,000 dunams and 5,000 people before 1948, 15,000 mostly rocky dunams and about 20,000 inhabitants in 1978, the best land confiscated under legal decrees including the 1953 law as printed, and the socialist kibbutzim Megiddo and Givat Oz built on the confiscated land (note 41); Weitz, My Diary, vol. II, pp.181-82 (note 42); Jon and David Kimche, A Clash of Destinies (1960), p.92, with Walid Khalidi’s “The Fall of Haifa” (1959) and “Plan Dalet” (1961) articles (note 43); Erskine Childers, “The Wordless Wish: From Citizens to Refugees” (1971), pp.165-202 — the most thorough study ever made of the Palestinian exodus, in Said’s note, which after combing every Arab newspaper and broadcast of the period revealed absolutely no evidence of orders to leave, or of anything except urgings to Palestinians to remain (note 44); Avnery again (note 45); Weitz, My Diary, vol. III, p.293 and p.302 (notes 46-47); Tawfiq Zayyad, “Fate of the Arabs in Israel” (1976) (note 48); and a long closing note on the New York Times editorial of May 19, 1976, on repression denounced by Amnesty International, the Red Cross and the 1978 State Department Report, and on collective punishment — the sale of mutton forbidden in Ramallah in 1969, grapes in 1970, and a seven-day curfew on Nablus in April 1978 (note 49). Then Jiryis p.70 (note 50), Bellow (note 51), John Cooley on the settlement drive, Yamit’s planned 1.25-million Jewish majority for the West Bank by 2000 and South African Jews and nuclear cooperation (note 52), Jiryis again (note 53), the Koenig Report’s full text in SWASIA (note 54), and Maalot — two weeks of Israeli bombardment of southern Lebanon, well over 200 civilians killed by napalm and at least 10,000 made homeless, before the May 1974 raid, unnoted by any U.S. newspaper (note 55).

Chapter Three notes 1-15 in full (PDF p.270-272 / printed p.249-251): Nafez Nazzal, The Zionist Occupation of Western Galilee, 1948, Journal of Palestine Studies III, 3 (Spring 1974), p.70 — the source of the Kabri woman’s recorded story (note 1); Chaliand (note 2, its title given in the note as Restoration in the Third World — see Open questions); Jiryis, pp.210-12 (note 3); Enemy of the Sun (note 4); Rosemary Sayigh, Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (1979) (note 5); the reports of the Palestine Human Rights Campaign, Shahak, the American Friends Service Committee, Amnesty International, the Red Cross and the U.S. Department of State surveys of 1977 and 1978 (note 6); Abu-Lughod’s review of Jiryis (note 7); Hourani, Minorities in the Arab World (1947), p.22 (note 8); Daniel, Islam and the West (1960) (note 9); Yehoshafat Harkabi, The Position of Israel in the Israeli-Arab Conflict (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1967), p.84 (note 10 — matching the footnote number at PDF p.170, so the well-known Israeli military figure and Arabist quoted there at length is Harkabi); Kanafani, Rijal fil Shams (1963), pp.7-8 (note 11); Quandt, Jabber and Lesch, The Politics of Palestinian Nationalism (1977), done for the RAND Corporation (note 12); Dorman and Omeed on reporting Iran, Chomsky on East Timor, and Said’s own “Whose Islam?” (note 13); Sarah Graham-Brown, The Structural Impact of Israeli Colonization (1979), the most complete analysis of the subject now available (note 14); and the Peace Now movement, Sheli and the Israeli-Palestinian Council for Peace, none of which has gone as far as Rakah, the Israeli League of Human Rights or the offshoots of Matzpen (note 15).

Chapter Four notes 1-33 in full (PDF p.272-274 / printed p.251-253): Fouad Ajami, “The End of Pan-Arabism” (note 1); Steinberg on the new world (dis)order (note 2); Chaliand, Revolution in the Third World (note 3); Sharaby’s Muqadimat li dirasit al mujtama’ al ‘araby (1975) and Bookshin’s The Spanish Anarchists (note 4); Munif al Razzaz and Anwar Abdel Malek’s two selections of Arabic thought (note 5); Saunders in MERIP Reports (note 6); Chomsky, “Human Rights” and American Foreign Policy (note 7); Stone, “The Case for Camp David” (note 8); the four adjunct letters signed with the Camp David Agreements, September 18, 1978 (note 9); Kapeliouk, De l’affrontement à la convergence (note 10); Walid Khalidi, “Thinking the Unthinkable: A Sovereign Palestinian State”, Foreign Affairs (July 1978) (note 11); The New York Times, March 29, 1979 (note 12); Malcolm Kerr, The Arab Cold War (note 13); testimony of Yehuda Zvi Blum in The Colonization of the West Bank Territories by Israel, U.S. Senate hearings, October 17 and 18, 1977, pp.24-46 (note 14 — with the Index listing Blum only at printed p.204, this identifies the man who was later to become Begin’s U.N. representative in the passage at PDF p.225); Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars with Chomsky’s and Falk’s criticisms of his leniency toward Israel (note 15); Bar-Zohar’s Ben-Gurion: A Biography, p.161 (note 16); Sharon’s career and Unit 101 in The Voice of Zionism (note 17); Clinton Bailey in The Jerusalem Post, February 22, 1979 (note 18 — matching the footnote number at PDF p.228, the source for the Tel Aviv University authority on Palestinian nationalism quoted there); Paul Quiring [as printed], “Israeli Settlements and Palestinian Rights”, Middle East International (1978) (note 19); Kapeliouk, “L’Autonomie selon Israël” (note 20); Fayez Sayegh, “The Camp David Agreement and the Palestine Problem”, Journal of Palestine Studies VIII, 2 (Winter 1979), p.40 (note 21); Hudson, Arab Politics (note 22); Barbara Kalkas on industrialization in nineteenth-century Egypt (note 23); Abdel Malek, Egypt, Military Society (note 24); Saul Mishal, East Bank West Bank (1978, as the note prints it) (note 25); Harkabi as the most “expert” proponent of this view, his books standard reading for the Israeli army and routinely distributed by Israeli embassies and consulates in the West (note 26); The Market of Arab Children in Israel (1978) (note 27); Roger Morris, Uncertain Greatness, p.261 (note 28); Eqbal Ahmad, “What Washington Wants” (1975), with Said’s own 1973 Journal of Palestine Studies study (note 29); the Brookings Report, “Towards Peace in the Middle East” (1975) (note 30); Kapeliouk, “Le Pari” (April 1979) (note 31); the Washington Post lead editorial of April 12, 1979, on muzzling talk by the Palestinians in this country (note 32); and Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad), Palestinien sans patrie (1978) (note 33). The Chapter Notes end here.

Index — PDF p.276-286

After a blank page (PDF p.275) and a page bearing only the heading INDEX (PDF p.276), and another blank page (PDF p.277), the Index runs from printed p.257 to printed p.265 (PDF p.278-286), alphabetically from Absentee Property Law to Zurayk, giving printed page locators for the book’s people, organizations, places, events, laws, documents and concepts, with subentries for the large heads (Arabs; Palestine, Palestinians; Israel; Zionism, Zionists; Lebanon; United States; Camp David). It is a finding aid and adds no argument; the entries that confirm names, titles or locators left uncertain in the text are recorded in the reading notes and under Open questions — among them Blum, Yehuda Zvi, at printed p.204 only; Harkabi, Yehoshafat, with The Position of Israel in the Israeli-Arab Conflict at printed p.149; Temple’s Native Races and Their Rulers; Resolution 2535B; and “Rana”, Sakakineh and Peiahim as printed. A blank page follows (PDF p.287).

About the Author and back cover — PDF p.288-291

About the Author (PDF p.288): Edward W. Said is the author of Orientalism; Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, and Beginnings: Intention and Method. He lives in New York City. Two blank pages follow (PDF p.289-290). The back cover (PDF p.291), under the heading INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, is the publisher’s blurb: Said, a Palestinian by birth and now a member of the Palestine National Council, argues the plight of the four million scattered Muslim and Christian Arabs known as Palestinians, disenfranchised and deprived of their homeland, with praise quoted from Christopher Lehmann-Haupt (New York Times) and Nicholas Bethell (New York Times Book Review). The file ends here.

Key passages

• “putting before the American reader a broadly representative Palestinian position” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.10 / printed p.ix) [short form; the sentence continues by calling the position not very well known and not well appreciated even now — the text copy has an OCR slip in that continuation, recorded in the reading notes]

• “Of course, and I have never had any doubt about that” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.12 / printed p.xi) — General Gur, quoted by Said from Al-Hamishmar, May 10, 1978, on whether the population ought to be punished.

• “the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of the stateless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.14 / printed p.xiii) — Hannah Arendt, quoted by Said.

• “were our dispossession and our effacement, by which almost a million of us were made to leave Palestine and our society made nonexistent, justified even to save the remnant of European Jews that had survived Nazism?” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.17-18 / printed p.xvi-xvii)

• “The fact of the matter is that today Palestine does not exist, except as a memory or, more importantly, as an idea, a political and human experience, and an act of sustained popular will.” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.26 / printed p.5)

• “The question of Palestine is therefore the contest between an affirmation and a denial” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.29 / printed p.8)

• “We shall have to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country.” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.34 / printed p.13) — Theodor Herzl, Diaries (1895), quoted by Said.

• “There is not one place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.35 / printed p.14) — Moshe Dayan, Ha-Aretz, April 4, 1969, quoted by Said.

• “For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.37 / printed p.16) — Balfour’s memorandum of August 1919, quoted by Said.

• “Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desire and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.37-38 / printed p.16-17) — Balfour’s memorandum, quoted by Said.

• “First denial, then blocking, shrinking, silencing, hemming in.” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.40 / printed p.19)

• “no evidence I cite here and elsewhere is arcane or obscure; most of it is to be found in easily available documents” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.67 / printed p.46)

• “UN General Assembly resolution— Number 194— affirming” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.69 / printed p.48) — Said, on Resolution 194, passed December 11, 1948 and repassed twenty-eight times since (the copy reads “December 11. 1948” at this point).

• Said on speaking of the Palestinians rationally: to stop speaking about war or genocide and start to deal seriously with political reality (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.72 / printed p.51) [paraphrase — the copy’s OCR reads “1 think” for “I think” in the sentence, so it is not quoted verbatim here].

• “a human life. I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.83 / printed p.62) — George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, quoted by Said.

• “Imperialism was the theory, colonialism the practice of changing the uselessly unoccupied territories of the world into useful new versions of the European metropolitan society.” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.99 / printed p.78)

• “Palestine was inhabited by another people.” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.103 / printed p.82) — Maxime Rodinson, quoted by Said.

• “The intention to create the Jewish National Home is to cause the disappearance or subordination of the Arabic population, culture and language” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.104 / printed p.83) — the Arab delegation’s 1922 reply to Churchill’s White Paper, quoted by Said.

• “another acre, another goat” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.116 / printed p.95) — Chaim Weizmann, quoted by Said.

• “There is no room for compromise on this point!” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.121 / printed p.100) — Joseph Weitz, diary, December 19, 1940, quoted by Said. [The same entry’s sentence on there being no room for both peoples is not quoted verbatim here: the copy reads hoth for both in it, recorded in the reading notes.]

• “Racism is too vague a term: Zionism is Zionism.” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.133 / printed p.112)

• “We shall remain” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.151 / printed p.130) — Tawfiq Zayyad, “Baqun” (poetry), quoted by Said.

• “a liberation from nonentity, oppression, and exile” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.156 / printed p.135) — Said, on what Palestinians call the Palestinian Revolution.

• “In a generation the Israelis had been transformed from underdogs into overlords.” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.159 / printed p.138)

• “Record!” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.177 / printed p.156) — Mahmoud Darwish, “Identity Card” (poetry), quoted by Said; the imperative governs the poem.

• “Bye-bye PLO.” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.215 / printed p.194) — Zbigniew Brzezinski, quoted by Said.

• “before the State of Israel existed we came here to conquer this country, and for this purpose the state was established” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.226 / printed p.205) — General Eytan, Yediot Aharonot, January 19, 1979, quoted by Said.

• “Not only [should there be] settlements: there should be roads which will ensure the territorial continuity between the towns and settlements. And not only roads; a wide infrastructure of army camps and military training belts” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.231 / printed p.210) — Arik Sharon, Ma’ariv, January 26, 1979, quoted by Said.

• “Thus continuity for Zionism, discontinuity for Palestinians.” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.231 / printed p.210)

• “touch upon all aspects of Palestinian life” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.233 / printed p.212) — Zeev Schiff, Ha’aretz, January 14 and 16, 1979, as concluded in the passage quoted by Said.

• “permanent loss of its Palestinian national identity, to permanent exile and statelessness” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.233 / printed p.212) — an unnamed distinguished Palestinian writer on Camp David autonomy, quoted by Said. [The same quotation’s phrase on rights is not quoted verbatim here: the copy reads “inciuding” inside it, recorded in the reading notes.]

• “the only possible and acceptable destiny for the multicommunal Middle East” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.241 / printed p.220) — Said, on the notion of a state based on secular human rights.

• “the PLO is the Palestinian question” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.236 / printed p.215) — Said, reporting what senior administration officials have been saying privately.

• “Better fully acknowledged conflict than hidden and unstated fears” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.253 / printed p.232)

• “the Jews of Israel will remain” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.256 / printed p.235) — Said’s first of two certainties. [The paired second certainty is not quoted verbatim here: the copy reads “wili” for “will” in it, recorded in the reading notes.]

• “the inhabitants did not collaborate with the police” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.270 / printed p.249) — Said, in Chapter Two note 49, giving the stated reason for the seven-day curfew imposed on Nablus in April 1978.

• “Books such as Mr. Said’s need to be written and read in the hope that understanding will provide a better chance of survival.” (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.291) — Nicholas Bethell, New York Times Book Review, quoted in the publisher’s back-cover blurb (publisher’s matter, not Said’s text).

Evidence the work relies on

In this part the work is a political essay arguing from documents, statements and press texts it quotes or cites, with chapter notes at the end of the book (not read until a later part); the notes below record what the text of PDF p.1-64 itself presents, each credited to the right author.

• The British Census for Palestine in 1922 — presented by Said as the only reliable source for the demographic realities of the time, used also by Israeli historians, for the 1914 population (689,272; no more than 60,000 Jews) and the 1922 breakdown (590,890 Muslim, 73,024 Christian, under 10,000 Other, 83,794 Jewish), and for the population figures of 1931, 1936 and 1946 (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.32, p.38 / printed p.11, p.17).

• Israeli sources, unnamed in the passage, for the 1822 figure: no more than 24,000 Jews in Palestine, less than 10 percent of the population (PDF p.30 / printed p.9).

• UN General Assembly Resolution 2535B (1969) and Resolution 2627C [as printed] (1970), quoted for the reaffirmation of Palestinian rights and self-determination (PDF p.27-28 / printed p.6-7).

• A late-tenth-century Arabic geographical description of Filastin, quoted in full (PDF p.31-32 / printed p.10-11); George Sandys on Palestine as a land flowing with milk and honey (PDF p.32 / printed p.11); the scientific quarterly reports of the Palestine Exploration Fund, invoked for the persistence of such reports into the late nineteenth century (PDF p.32).

• Theodor Herzl, Diaries (1895 entry), quoted for spiritting the penniless population across the border (PDF p.34 / printed p.13).

• Lord Rothschild’s memorandum of July 18, 1917; Chaim Weizmann on the British understanding that the Jews alone could rebuild Palestine; Chief Rabbi Dr. J. H. Herz on re-establishment (all PDF p.34 / printed p.13); the Balfour Declaration as a letter to Lord Rothschild, November 1917 (PDF p.36 / printed p.15); and Balfour’s Cabinet memorandum of August 1919, quoted at length, including the 700,000 Arabs passage (PDF p.37-38 / printed p.16-17).

• Moshe Dayan’s remarks in Ha-Aretz, April 4, 1969, quoted in full (PDF p.35 / printed p.14); Israel Shahak’s reckoning of almost four hundred destroyed villages, quoted (PDF p.35); the London Sunday Times of June 19, 1977, cited for 7,554 Arab houses razed by the end of 1969 and 16,212 by August 1971, and, in Section III, as the source of the “Insight” Report on torture in Israel of the same date (PDF p.35, p.63-64 / printed p.14, p.42-43). The most precise calculation yet made, unnamed in the passage, for approximately 780,000 Palestinians dispossessed and displaced in 1948 (PDF p.35 / printed p.14).

• The Al-Hamishmar interview with General Gur, May 10, 1978, quoted in the Introduction (PDF p.12-13 / printed p.xi-xii); Hannah Arendt, quoted on the solution of the Jewish question producing a new category of refugees, the Arabs (PDF p.14 / printed p.xiii).

• George Antonius, The Arab Awakening — named as the finest Arab study of the struggle for independence, and for the Arab renaissance’s awareness of the contradiction between Arab plans and those of Balfour, the Zionists and the French; its argument (the Arab awakening, Arabization and Islamization) is also noted (PDF p.41, p.45 / printed p.20, p.24).

• Amos Elon, a recent book about the Israelis written by an Israeli, unnamed in the passages — described and quoted for the blindness of the settlers, the Arab problem as avoided or denied and attacked completely, and the purpose of Avoda Ivrit (PDF p.39, p.42-43 / printed p.18, p.21-22).

• Chaim Weizmann’s letter to Balfour of May 30, 1918, quoted at length (PDF p.47-49 / printed p.26-28); Weizmann’s remark that the world would judge the Jewish state by what it shall do with the Arabs, and his later view of 1948 as a miraculous cleaning of the land (PDF p.41, p.43 / printed p.20, p.22); Sylvain Lévi’s testimony to the Supreme War Council (PDF p.41 / printed p.20).

• Reinhold Niebuhr and six other notables, letter to The New York Times, November 21, 1947, quoted (PDF p.51 / printed p.30); Niebuhr, “A New View of Palestine”, The Spectator, August 6, 1946, p.162 as printed, quoted (PDF p.52-53 / printed p.31-32).

• Edmund Wilson, Black, Red, Blond and Olive, the Israel diary section, quoted at length, including the Arabs of Acre passage (PDF p.55-56 / printed p.34-35); Sabri Jiryis, The Arabs in Israel, invoked for the post-1948 Zionist writing against the Emergency Defense Regulations’ abuses (PDF p.57 / printed p.36).

• The New York Times lead editorial of May 2, 1976 (the occupation as a model for future cooperation) and its Sunday Magazine’s 1973 war features and its 86-word page-13 coverage of the torture investigation (PDF p.59-60, p.61, p.64 / printed p.38-39, p.40, p.43); Nicholas Von Hoffman on the Sunday Times torture report, quoted at length (PDF p.64 / printed p.43, continuing into part 2); the Israeli League of Human Rights’ diffused information, documented principally from Israeli journals and newspapers (PDF p.63 / printed p.42).

• In this part (PDF p.65-119): Menachem Begin, The Revolt, described and cited for the Deir Yassin admission (PDF p.65); the refugee figures as disputed (500,000-800,000) (PDF p.66); the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) Article 13, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) Article 12, and UN Commission on Human Rights determinations, all quoted (PDF p.68-69); UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (December 11, 1948) and its twenty-eight repassings (PDF p.69); the absentee-property laws, the Jewish National Fund formula, and the Law of Return (PDF p.69-70); the US-USSR joint declaration of October 1, 1977 and Jim Hoagland, Washington Post, October 26, 1977 (PDF p.71-72); the 650,000 / 15 percent figure for Palestinians who are Israeli citizens (PDF p.72).

• H.D.S. Greenway, “Vietnam-style Raids Gut South Lebanon”, Washington Post, March 25, 1978, and I. F. Stone on American unanimity exceeding most Israelis’ Zionism (PDF p.80-81); George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876), quoted at length including Mordecai’s speeches, and Middlemarch for the Saint Teresa reference (PDF p.81-85); Moses Hess, Rome and Jerusalem (1862), quoting Ernest Laharanne, The New Eastern Question, both quoted (PDF p.88); Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred, and the Baedekers, invoked as descriptions of the inhabitants (PDF p.87); Herzl’s Diaries and Desmond Stewart on Herzl (PDF p.91-92); Gramsci on knowing thyself and the inventory (PDF p.94).

• Linnaeus, Buffon, Cuvier, Gobineau, Spengler, Clemenceau (1918) and Poincaré on race and levying black troops (PDF p.95); Bopp, Jones, Schlegel (1808) and Renan on language families (PDF p.95-96); Harry Bracken’s study of empiricism, Locke and Hume (PDF p.96); Robert Knox, The Races of Man, John Westlake and Emer de Vattel on empty territories (PDF p.97); Lord Curzon on geography and Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, quoted at length (Marlow on maps; the redeeming idea) (PDF p.97-98); Paul Leroy-Beaulieu on colonisation, quoted (PDF p.98-99); the Bishop of Salisbury to the Palestine Exploration Fund (1903) and Miriam Rosen’s compilation of British attitudes (Tyrwhitt Drake, the Dean of Westminster, Kitchener, Conder, Petrie, Clermont-Ganneau, Cook, Macalister), all quoted (PDF p.100-102); Yehoshua Porath and Neville Mandel on native resistance, and Maxime Rodinson, quoted twice (PDF p.102-103).

• The Arab delegation’s reply (1922) to Churchill’s White Paper, quoted (PDF p.104); Weizmann’s writings, quoted extensively — the rocks and marshes passage and the Sursuk sale, the 1907 visit description (written 1941), new blood, the national impulse, “another acre, another goat”, the Pevsner and social-wilderness passages, the Arab as debater, and the Ruppin Tel Aviv walk (PDF p.106-107, p.112-114); Eliezer Ben Yehudah’s labours on the home language (PDF p.108); Dr. A. Carlebach, Ma’ariv, October 7, 1955, quoted at length (PDF p.110-111); General Harkabi’s canonical study of Arab attitudes, invoked (PDF p.111); the 1973-war army booklet by Rabbi Abraham Avidan (preface by General Yona Efrati), quoted, and a Ha’aretz writer, September 20, 1974, on children’s books (PDF p.111-112); C. L. Temple, Native Races and Their Rulers (1918), quoted and identified as Lugard’s assistant’s work (PDF p.114-115); the 1917 “Outline of Program for the Jewish Resettlement of Palestine”, quoted (PDF p.117); Walter Lehn’s research on the JNF, relied on for the apparatus details, and John Hope Simpson (1930) on extraterritorialised land, quoted (PDF p.118-119); the land figures — JNF 936,000 dunams, total Zionist holding at end of 1947 1,734,000 dunams, 6.59 percent of 26,323,000 dunams (PDF p.119).

• In this part (PDF p.120-173): Joseph Weitz, My Diary, and Letters to the Children (published in Israel, 1965), quoted at length — the December 19, 1940 diary entry and the May 18, 1948 Shertok conversation and Mu’ar visit (PDF p.120-121, p.123); Jon and David Kimche on the Dalet Plan, quoted (PDF p.122); Yoseph Elgazi in Zo Hadareh, July 30, 1975, on Upper Nazareth, quoted (PDF p.124-125); the Arab mayor of Nazareth on Arab villages, and the 80,000 / 60,000 Arab work-force figures (PDF p.125-126); the land laws of 1949, 1950, 1953 and 1958 (PDF p.126); Sabri Jiryis, The Arabs in Israel, Fouzi al-Asmar, To Be an Arab in Israel, and Elia T. Zurayk, The Palestinians in Israel: A Study in Internal Colonialism, named as testimony (PDF p.127); Amnon Lin (1968), quoted, and Uri Avneri to the Knesset, quoted (PDF p.127-128); the Koenig report to Prime Minister Rabin, leaked to Al-Hamishmar, September 7, 1976, quoted at length (PDF p.128-131); Ha’aretz, March 24, 1978, on Israeli equipment in Lebanon, quoted (PDF p.133); the Buber–Aderet meeting of 1962 as published in Peiahim [as printed], December 1974 (PDF p.134-135); the Kabri woman’s story, recorded in 1973, quoted (PDF p.136-137); Sydney N. Fisher (ed.), Social Forces in the Middle East (Cornell University Press, 1955) (PDF p.137); Le Nouvel Observateur, July 3, 1972, on Akraba (PDF p.141); Jiryis on Arab education in Israel, quoted at length, with a government committee in Ha’aretz, March 19, 1971 (PDF p.148-149); Tawfiq Zayyad, “Baqun” (poetry), quoted (PDF p.151); Ibrahim Abu-Lughod’s recent analysis, summarized and quoted (PDF p.161-162); Albert Hourani on the minorities, quoted (PDF p.166); David Ben-Gurion at the World Council of Po’ale Zion congress, 1937, quoted (PDF p.167); Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (PDF p.167-168); Hafez el-Assad’s speech of July 21, 1976 (PDF p.169); a well-known Israeli military figure and “Arabist” (unnamed in the passage), writing about a year before the 1967 war, quoted (PDF p.170); and Ghassan Kanafani, Rijal fil Shams (Men in the Sun) (fiction), opening scene quoted in Said’s translation (PDF p.171-173).

• In this part (PDF p.174-227): Emile Habibi’s epistolary novel and Hanan Mikhail Ashrawi, Contemporary Palestinian Literature Under Occupation (Birzeit University Publications, 1976) (PDF p.174-175); Mahmoud Darwish, “Identity Card” (poetry), quoted (PDF p.176-177); Nagib Mahfouz, Hub taht al Mattar (Love in the Rain) (1973) (fiction) (PDF p.177-178); the Palestinian account of Karameh (PDF p.179); the DPF transitional program adopted by the PLO in 1974 and refined in 1977 (PDF p.182); the Palestinian National Fund and National Council budget for approximately a million people (PDF p.187); the 1974 Rabat Conference decision (PDF p.189); the 1976 West Bank and Gaza municipal elections and the Day of the Land, March 30, 1976 (PDF p.190); Kissinger’s Interim Agreements of 1975 (PDF p.191-192); the Maalot incident, May 1974, and the preceding Israeli napalm bombing of southern Lebanon camps (PDF p.193, footnote 13 as printed); Said’s own participation in the Palestinian National Council, Cairo, spring 1977 (about 290 delegates, about 150 West Bank members absent) (PDF p.199); Gerard Chaliand, Revolution in the Third World, Hisham Sharaby’s Arabic study of Arab society, and Murray Bookshin’s study of the Spanish anarchist movement, 1868-1936 (PDF p.207); Harold H. Saunders, testimony before the House Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East, June 12, 1978, quoted at length (PDF p.209-210); I. F. Stone and Anthony Lewis on Camp David (PDF p.212); the Camp David documents and adjunct letters (PDF p.213); Jonathan Kandell, The New York Times, March 27, 1979, on Halhoul, quoted (PDF p.214); Zbigniew Brzezinski and President Carter on the PLO, quoted (PDF p.215); Eqbal Ahmad, The New York Times, March 26, 1979, quoted (PDF p.217); the CBS-New York Times poll of late March 1979 (PDF p.219); Gunnar Jarring’s UN mission, 1971 (PDF p.220); the Riyadh conference, October 1976 (PDF p.222); and General Eytan in Yediot Aharonot, January 19, 1979, quoted (PDF p.225-226).

• In this part (PDF p.228-267): Arik Sharon in Ma’ariv, January 26, 1979, quoted (PDF p.231); the map of Israeli settlements on the West Bank (PDF p.229-230); the settlement and land figures (seventy-seven West Bank settlements, approximately 27 percent confiscated, 90,000 settlers including Arab Jerusalem) and the West Bank water figure (approximately 30 percent of Israel’s supply), authorities unnamed in the passages as read (PDF p.228, p.231); Zeev Schiff, Ha’aretz, January 14 and 16, 1979, quoted at length (PDF p.231-233); an unnamed Tel Aviv University authority on Palestinian nationalism, quoted (PDF p.228, footnote 18 as printed); an unnamed distinguished Palestinian writer’s autonomy formula, quoted (PDF p.233, footnote as printed); Anthony Lewis, “And Now the Palestinians”, The New York Times, March 26, 1979 (PDF p.234); George Ball, “The Mideast Challenge”, The New York Times, April 1, 1979 (PDF p.236); UN Resolution 3236 (November 22, 1974) and the Security Council resolution of January 22, 1976, vetoed by Daniel P. Moynihan, both as Said presents them (PDF p.246-247); Carter’s declarations at Clinton, Mass., March 1977 (PDF p.247); Arafat’s statements to Anthony Lewis (May 1978) and Congressman Paul Findley (January 1979), as reported by Said (PDF p.248); Theodore Draper, “How Not to Make Peace in the Middle East”, Commentary, March 1979 (PDF p.249); the Brookings Report of 1975 (PDF p.250); the Baghdad Conference, March 1979 (PDF p.251); and the spring 1978 South Lebanon expulsion figure of 250,000 civilians (PDF p.253). The Bibliographical Note’s evidence is its whole catalogue of works, recorded item by item in the reading notes (PDF p.260-263), and the Chapter Notes read in this part document the Introduction, Chapter One and the start of Chapter Two, including Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1973), p.290 (Introduction note 1); Istakhari and Ibn Hawkal in Le Strange, Palestine Under the Moslems, p.28 (Chapter One note 5); and Amos Elon, The Israelis: Founders and Sons (1971), pp.194 ff. and pp.220, 222 (Chapter One notes 16 and 21) (PDF p.264-266).

• In this part (PDF p.268-291): the Chapter Notes completed — Chapter Two notes 22-55, Chapter Three notes 1-15 and Chapter Four notes 1-33 — document the text’s unnamed authorities and studies, among them Amos Elon, The Israelis, pp.218-24; Maxime Rodinson, Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? (1973), pp.39, 38; David Waines, The Failure of the Nationalist Resistance (1971), p.220; Yehoshafat Harkabi, Arab Attitudes to Israel (1972) and The Position of Israel in the Israeli-Arab Conflict (1967), p.84; Walter Lehn, “The Jewish National Fund”, Journal of Palestine Studies III, 4 (Summer 1974), 74-90, and Davis and Lehn, And the Fund Still Lives (1978); Joseph Weitz, My Diary, vol. II, pp.181-82 and vol. III, pp.293, 302; Jon and David Kimche, A Clash of Destinies (1960), p.92, with Walid Khalidi’s Haifa and Plan Dalet articles (1959, 1961); Erskine Childers, “The Wordless Wish: From Citizens to Refugees” (1971), pp.165-202; the full text of the Koenig Report in SWASIA, III, 41 (October 15, 1976); Nafez Nazzal, The Zionist Occupation of Western Galilee, 1948, Journal of Palestine Studies III, 3 (Spring 1974), p.70; the testimony of Yehuda Zvi Blum in The Colonization of the West Bank Territories by Israel, U.S. Senate hearings (October 17 and 18, 1977), pp.24-46; Clinton Bailey, The Jerusalem Post, February 22, 1979; Amnon Kapeliouk, “L’Autonomie selon Israël”, Le Monde Diplomatique (January 1979); Fayez Sayegh, “The Camp David Agreement and the Palestine Problem”, Journal of Palestine Studies VIII, 2 (Winter 1979), p.40; and Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad), Palestinien sans patrie (1978) (PDF p.268-274). The Index (PDF p.278-286 / printed p.257-265) is the book’s own finding aid and is relied on here only for the names, titles and locators it confirms.

Analysis

Method: a political essay (Said’s own description) that argues by juxtaposition and by quotation at length. A Palestinian presence is established from censuses, Arabic geographical writing, travel accounts and Palestinian testimony, and set against an interpretation — Orientalist, Zionist and liberal-Western — established from its own canonical documents and spokesmen, quoted in their own words: Balfour’s declaration and 1919 memorandum, Herzl’s diary, Weizmann’s 1918 letter and autobiography, Niebuhr’s letter and article, Wilson’s diary, Weitz’s diaries, the Koenig report, Schiff on autonomy’s security apparatus, and the Camp David documents and adjunct letters. The framing devices are Said’s: affirmation against denial, presence against interpretation, denial then blocking and diffusion, representation and hegemony (Gramsci), and, for the Palestinian side, the remnants/exiles/occupied triad and the passage from accommodation through rejection to revolution and hope (Abu-Lughod’s schema, which Said adopts and extends). The Chapter Notes, read in full in the final part, document the text’s claims passage by passage and in several places name what the text leaves unnamed — Harkabi, Blum, Bailey’s piece, Childers’s exodus study, Nazzal’s Kabri source — which strengthens the documentation for those passages without changing the text’s own presentation of them as unnamed. Perspective: avowedly Palestinian and not detached, addressed to the American reader, with its premises stated openly (PDF p.17), and written from inside the movement it describes — Said participated in the 1977 Palestinian National Council he analyses, and the back cover identifies him as a member of that Council. Limits visible in the work as read: several key figures are carried in the text on unnamed or loosely named authority (Israeli sources for 1822; the most precise calculation for 780,000; the settlement, land and water figures of Chapter Four, whose authorities the notes only partly supply); the text gives conflicting figures for the same events in different places, recorded under Open questions and not reconciled by Said (Deir Yassin 250 against 350; the 1948 refugee totals; the house-demolition and South Lebanon totals); the footnote-number sequence is confused in the copy and occasionally in the printed notes’ sequence, so some note attributions — the fraction formula’s author among them — cannot be fixed with certainty from the notes alone; and the argument’s predictive close (Chapter Four IV) is avowedly uncertain, offering two certainties and a reliance on Palestinian will rather than a scenario. The Bibliographical Note is frankly selective — material the Anglo-American reader is less likely to know — and the Index is a finding aid whose locators occasionally err as printed (the Israel military-strength locators beyond the book’s pages). How well the claims are supported: where Said quotes documents, the quotations are extensive and located, and the demographic core of Chapter One rests on the 1922 census he names; where he generalises about Western discourse, the evidence is exemplary — Niebuhr, Wilson, the New York Times’s treatment of the torture report — rather than exhaustive, by the essay’s own design.

People, organizations, places and events

Edward Said, Farid Haddad, Rashid Hussein, Hannah Arendt, General Gur, Alphonse de Lamartine, Israel Zangwill, Theodor Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, Moshe Dayan, Israel Shahak, Balfour Declaration, Sylvain Lévi, Amos Elon, George Antonius, Reinhold Niebuhr, Edmund Wilson, Saul Bellow, Sabri Jiryis, Palestine Exploration Fund, Kibbutz, Israeli League of Human Rights, Palestine Liberation Organization, Israel, Acre, Menachem Begin, Deir Yassin, George Eliot, Moses Hess, Maxime Rodinson, Jewish National Fund, World Zionist Organization, Jaffa, Joseph Weitz, Israel Koenig, Koenig Report, Kafr Kassim, Dalet Plan, Usrat al-Ard, Tawfiq Zayyad, UNRWA, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Albert Hourani, David Ben-Gurion, Ghassan Kanafani, Men in the Sun, Histadrut, Irgun, British Emergency Regulations, Emile Habibi, Mahmoud Darwish, Nagib Mahfouz, Fateh, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Yasir Arafat, Karameh, Palestinian National Council, Day of the Land, Camp David Accords, Anwar al-Sadat, Jimmy Carter, Harold H. Saunders, General Eytan, Arik Sharon, Gush Emunim, Zeev Schiff, Daniel P. Moynihan, George Ball, Yehoshafat Harkabi

Concepts

Orientalism, Representation, Mission civilisatrice, Zionism, Settler Colonialism, Imperialism, Jewish Labour Only, Racism, Judaization, Self-determination, Eretz Israel, Secular Democratic State, Resistance Poetry

How it relates to other sources

With Zionist Colonialism in Palestine: Said’s account agrees with Sayegh’s frame on the decisive role of the British alliance and the Balfour Declaration — Said adds Balfour’s own August 1919 memorandum, which Sayegh’s excerpt does not quote, and centres the declaration’s disregard of the native majority, where Sayegh lists Britain’s acts for the settler community. Both treat the settler project as incompatible with the natives’ continued presence: Sayegh as a structural feature of Zionist colonisation, Said through the documents of denial and reconstitution (Herzl’s 1895 diary entry, in neither of the earlier sources) and through transfer as documented policy in Weitz’s diaries and the apparatus of land law. Said’s Chapter Two notes cite the same Rodinson book Sayegh’s tradition rests on, and his Chapter Four notes cite Fayez Sayegh’s own 1979 Journal of Palestine Studies article on the Camp David agreement, so Sayegh appears in Said both as a predecessor in the frame and as a contemporary analyst of Camp David. Said extends the frame in time beyond Sayegh’s 1965 text: the post-1967 occupation, the PLO’s rise, Karameh, Rabat 1974, and the Camp David autonomy of 1978-79 have no counterpart in Sayegh’s excerpt. With The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine: Said’s Avoda Ivrit passage, through Amos Elon, is the same Jewish Labour Only policy Kanafani documents from the labour market of the 1930s, here analysed as a device of denial (no objective exploitation) rather than of wage competition; and Kanafani himself appears in Said in the other register — not the historian of the 1936-39 revolt but the fiction writer of Men in the Sun (fiction), whose present that must be made Said sets beside Habibi and Darwish as the carriers of Palestinian consciousness, with Kanafani’s assassination in Beirut in 1972 recorded. New in Said against both earlier sources: the liberal West as a subject — the hegemonic coalescence of liberal discourse with Zionism, documented through Niebuhr and Wilson — with Representation and Orientalism as named mechanisms; the post-1967 occupation’s representation in American media, the Sunday Times torture report and its American omission; the Palestinian interior — remnants, exiles and occupied as one people with divided situations, and the PLO’s quasi-state of services, fund and diplomacy; and a forward-looking political program, an independent state on part of Palestine under the retained ideal of a secular democratic state, where Sayegh’s excerpt ends at liberation and Kanafani’s at the revolt’s defeat.

Open questions

• Contents figures: the text copy’s contents (PDF p.8-9) garbles several printed page numbers (I Palestine and the Palestinians, III The Issue of Representation, and the Bibliographical Note / Chapter Notes / Index sequence 259 / 243 / 255 as printed). Chapter One’s own openings fix I at printed p.3, II at printed p.15 and III beginning on printed p.37 (PDF p.58), which sits awkwardly against the contents’ III at 33 as reconstructed and IV at 46: whether printed p.33 belongs to a subsection or the copy misreads 37 cannot be settled from PDF p.1-64; the Chapter Notes and the part-2 openings will be checked against this in a later part, and this page’s section ranges follow the chapter openings as read, not the contents.

• Footnote numbers in Chapter One as the copy prints them are internally confused (two different notes numbered 11 in the PDF p.35 stretch; footnote 19 used for Weizmann on PDF p.41 and for Jiryis on PDF p.57; footnote 31 twice on PDF p.62; footnote 30 on PDF p.61 after 19 on PDF p.57, which the sequence 20, 21 on PDF p.42-43 makes plausible only if notes 22-29 fall in PDF p.44-60, where the copy prints few markers). Note attributions in the Evidence section are therefore given by passage, not by number, wherever the number is doubtful.

• PDF p.62 passage: the copy’s sentence on the 1974-75 statements has the words from UNESCO (letter-spaced U N ESCO in the copy) between politics and signed statements protesting Israel’s expulsion, which does not construe as printed; recorded as printed in the reading notes, not corrected. What the sentence refers to is not explained in the passage.

• Introduction’s Gur interview: the copy reads “Jrbid” for Irbid and “[978” for 1978; the town and date are given in this page’s summary as Irbid and 1978 on the passage’s own bracketed gloss, with the slips recorded in the reading notes.

• Dayan’s village names (PDF p.35) are partly garbled in the copy (Mahalul, Jibta, Haneifs, Tell Shaman as printed); they are recorded as printed in the reading notes and not normalised on the wiki pages.

• “Khalil Sakakineh” (PDF p.33) is recorded as printed; the name is more usually transliterated Sakakini, but no other source in the wiki yet gives the name, so the copy’s spelling stands here with this note.

• Resolution “2627C” (PDF p.28) is recorded as printed in the copy; the resolution number’s letter is not verified against any other ingested source.

• The late-tenth-century Arabic geographer quoted on PDF p.31-32, left unnamed in the text in part 1, is resolved in part 5 by Chapter One note 5 (PDF p.265): quoted from Istakhari and Ibn Hawkal [as printed in the copy], in Guy Le Strange, Palestine Under the Moslems (1890; reprinted Beirut: Khayat, 1965), p.28. The passage’s words are therefore those two geographers’ as Le Strange translates/compiles them, as Said’s note presents them.

• Amos Elon’s book, quoted and described on PDF p.39 and p.42-43 and left unnamed in the text in part 1, is resolved in part 5 by Chapter One notes 16 and 21 (PDF p.265-266): Amos Elon, The Israelis: Founders and Sons (1971; reprinted New York: Bantam Books, 1972), pp.194 ff. and pp.220, 222.

• Chapter One IV / Chapter Two openings settle the contents puzzle in part: IV begins on printed p.46 (PDF p.67), exactly as the contents gave it, so the contents’ III at printed p.33 cannot be III’s opening — III in fact begins on printed p.37 (PDF p.58) and runs to printed p.45. Whether the contents’ “33” is a copy misread or refers to something else remains open; this page continues to follow the chapter openings as read.

• PDF p.74: the printed wording, checked against the original (opened for the spot check, printed p.53), is that at the equitable horizon Israel would be the state of its present Jewish and non-Arab citizens — non-Arab (without quotation marks here: the text copy’s OCR reads “Jew:ish” in the phrase, so the checker cannot match it verbatim) is what the printed page says, not a text-copy slip, so it stands as printed and no correction is made. Reading: the wording is puzzling in context, since the passage has just divided the state into Jews and non-Jews; no substitute wording is proposed.

• The long passage quoted at the end of PDF p.104 (socialist Jews, Jewish bread, Jewish soil, Jewish rifle; footnote 26 as printed) is not attributed to a named author in the passage as read; the attribution presumably sits in the Chapter Notes, to be read in a later part. Not supplied from outside knowledge.

• Footnote numbering in Chapter Two as the copy prints it jumps (Temple’s passage is footnoted 37 on PDF p.115 after 32 on PDF p.112; the 1917 Outline and JNF passages carry 38-40 in a sequence that skips numbers), consistent with the confused sequence recorded for Chapter One; attributions in this part are given by passage, not by number, wherever doubtful.

• General “Harkabi” (PDF p.111) is recorded as printed in the copy (“General Harkabis’” in the possessive); no first name is given in the passage as read.

• Refugee-figure conflict within this part: PDF p.66 gives the disputed 1948 figures as ranging between 500,000 and 800,000, while Chapter One (PDF p.35) gave approximately 780,000 dispossessed and displaced by the most precise calculation yet made and the Introduction (PDF p.17-18) said almost a million were made to leave. All three are recorded as Said presents them; they are not reconciled in the text as read.

• Deir Yassin figures conflict within this work: PDF p.65 (part 2) gave Begin admitting responsibility in The Revolt for the massacre of 250 women and children at Deir Yassin, while PDF p.122 (this part) calls Deir Yassin a massacre of 350 Arab civilians by Begin and his Irgun terrorists in April 1948. Both figures are recorded as Said presents them; the text as read does not reconcile them.

• Arab-house figures in this part in different contexts: approximately 17,000 Arab houses blown up by the army in the Occupied Territories (PDF p.127), against 7,554 houses razed by the end of 1969 and 16,212 demolished by August 1971 in Chapter One (PDF p.35, from the London Sunday Times, June 19, 1977). The passages’ scopes differ as presented and are not reconciled in the text.

• Education ratio garbled (PDF p.148): alongside the 900 university graduates figure (the copy reads “goo”), the copy’s sentence on Palestinian university students outside Israel reads “is n in each t.ooo of the refugee population” in substance, so the ratio cannot be recovered from the text copy as read; it is recorded as printed in the reading notes and not supplied from outside knowledge. The original at that page was not opened in this part.

• The Israeli military figure and “Arabist” quoted at length on PDF p.170 (writing about a year before the 1967 war, footnote 10 as printed), left unnamed in the text in part 3, is resolved in part 6 by Chapter Three note 10 (PDF p.271): Yehoshafat Harkabi, The Position of Israel in the Israeli-Arab Conflict (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1967), p.84 — the note number matches the footnote number recorded in the text, and the Index lists Harkabi’s book at printed p.149, this passage’s page. See Yehoshafat Harkabi.

• Upper Nazareth land (PDF p.125): the settlements named in the Elgazi quotation are Nazareth and “Rana” as printed in the copy; the second name is recorded as printed and not normalised.

• The journal of the Buber–Aderet meeting (PDF p.134-135) is printed in the copy as Peiahim; the title is recorded as printed.

• The Kabri narrator (PDF p.136-137, footnote 1 as printed for Chapter Three) is an unnamed elderly peasant woman and remains unnamed; the source of the recorded 1973 story, not named in the passage as read in part 3, is given in part 6 by Chapter Three note 1 (PDF p.270): quoted in Nafez Nazzal, The Zionist Occupation of Western Galilee, 1948, Journal of Palestine Studies III, 3 (Spring 1974), p.70.

• Habibi’s title (PDF p.174): the copy garbles the Arabic title of Emile Habibi’s epistolary novel and its English gloss in places; the title is recorded as printed in the reading notes and not normalised on the wiki pages, and no other ingested source gives it.

• Footnote numbering in Chapters Three and Four as the copy prints it continues the confused sequence recorded for Chapters One and Two (a footnote 7 appears both in the Bookshin stretch on PDF p.208 and in the U.S.-policy stretch on PDF p.211; the Maalot footnote is 13 on PDF p.193 and the Halhoul / Sadat footnotes run 10-16 across PDF p.213-227 in an order that skips and repeats); attributions in this part are given by passage, not by number, wherever doubtful.

• Sadat’s psycho-cultural terrain passage (PDF p.220), resolved in the part-4 fix check: the original at PDF p.220 / printed p.199 prints “in the West” in italics at the point where the copy reads “she HV17”; “the West” is therefore the original’s wording, not a supplied reading, and the paraphrase on the wiki pages follows the original. The copy form “she HV17” is recorded exactly in the reading notes.

• Forms checked in the original in the part-4 fix check (PDF p.175, 178, 196-197, 200, 207-208, 225): (a) PDF p.200 — the original prints “losing” in italics between “a people” and “its”; the copy drops the word, and the reading notes’ earlier supplied “[defending]” and scrambled-line-order explanation are removed. (b) PDF p.196-197 — the original prints “peace” and splits “neighbor” as “neigh-” / “bor” (American spelling, not “neighbour”); the copy reads “pcacc”, “neigh-” / “bur”, “lime” for “time” and “quulity” for “quality”, all recorded exactly in the reading notes. (c) PDF p.207-208 — the name is printed “Bookshin” in both the copy and the original; “Bookchin” is a normalised spelling from outside knowledge, is marked as that normalisation here, and is not used elsewhere on the wiki pages for this work. Sharaby’s title at PDF p.207 is printed in the original as al mujtama’ al ‘araby, so that form is the original’s, not a normalisation; the copy garble is recorded in the reading notes. (d) PDF p.225 — the name is printed “Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlevi” in both the copy and the original; “Pahlavi” is a normalised spelling from outside knowledge, is marked as that normalisation here, and is not used elsewhere on the wiki pages for this work. (e) PDF p.175 — the copy and the original print “explusions”; the reading notes’ earlier “expusions” is corrected to that exact form. (f) PDF p.178 — the original prints Hub taht al Mattar; the copy garbles the italic title to “Hub tahi al Maitar”, recorded exactly in the reading notes, and the wiki pages follow the original.

• The man who was later to become Begin’s U.N. representative (PDF p.225), left unnamed in the passage as read in part 4, is resolved in part 6: Chapter Four note 14 (PDF p.272-273) gives the testimony of Yehuda Zvi Blum in The Colonization of the West Bank Territories by Israel, U.S. Senate hearings, October 17 and 18, 1977, pp.24-46, and the Index (PDF p.279) lists Blum only at printed p.204, this passage’s page.

• Contents figures, further discrepancy found in part 5: the contents (PDF p.8-9) gave Chapter Four IV (Uncertain Future) at printed p.231, but the section in fact begins on printed p.235 (PDF p.256), and Chapter Four III begins on printed p.214 (PDF p.235). As with Chapter One III, this page follows the chapter openings as read, not the contents.

• Settlement figures within this part in different contexts: PDF p.214 (part 4) gave twenty new West Bank settlements announced on signing day atop seventy-seven, while PDF p.228 gives seventy-seven settlements on the West Bank alone by the end of 1978 and approximately 27 percent of the land confiscated; the passages’ dates and scopes differ as presented and are not reconciled in the text.

• South Lebanon 1978 figures: the spring 1978 expulsion of 250,000 civilians from their homes in South Lebanon (PDF p.253) sits alongside the Introduction’s and part-4 figures for the March 1978 invasion (300,000 new refugees in Begin’s May 1978 honours entry, from PDF p.65) — all recorded as Said presents them; the text as read does not reconcile them.

• The Tel Aviv University authority on Palestinian nationalism quoted on PDF p.228 (“for eliminating their national aspirations”, footnote 18 as printed), left unnamed in part 5, is resolved as a source in part 6: Chapter Four note 18 (PDF p.273), matching the footnote number recorded in the text, gives Clinton Bailey in The Jerusalem Post, February 22, 1979. The distinguished Palestinian writer of the fraction formula quoted on PDF p.233 remains not named with certainty: Chapter Four note 21 (PDF p.273) gives Fayez Sayegh, “The Camp David Agreement and the Palestine Problem”, Journal of Palestine Studies VIII, 2 (Winter 1979), p.40, in the notes sequence for the autonomy discussion, but the copy’s confused footnote numbering at the quotation (footnote 19 as printed in the stretch, numbered “11” at its end) does not fix the attribution to Sayegh’s article from the notes alone, so it is recorded as the candidate, not as settled.

• The copy prints a stray “IV” at the head of PDF p.248, before the continuation “the Palestinian national question”; no section heading occurs there in the argument (Section IV begins on PDF p.256), and the stray is recorded as printed in the reading notes, not explained.

• Chapter Notes items garbled in the letter-spaced copy beyond recovery as read: the Introduction note i’s Chomsky piece (its first word/number and its journal name), Tibawi’s British Interests in Palestine year in the Bibliographical Note, the Journal of Palestine Studies Washington zip in the Bibliographical Note, the AAUG P.O. Box number, the page of Chapter Two note 2 (Daniel Deronda) and of note 6 (Hertzberg), Miriam Rosen’s thesis pages (note 20), and Porath’s volume years (note 21). All are recorded as printed in the reading notes and not supplied from outside knowledge; the original was not opened for these in this part.

• Footnote numbering in Chapter Four III and in the Chapter Notes as the copy prints it continues the confused sequence recorded for earlier chapters (Chapter Four III footnotes run 20/11, 21, 15-19, 18-19, 30-31 in the stretches read; Chapter One note 24 is printed “34” and note 28 is printed “18” in the notes); attributions in this part are given by passage, not by number, wherever doubtful.

• General Harkabi’s first name, left open in part 2, is resolved in part 6: Chapter Two note 31 (PDF p.268) and Chapter Three note 10 (PDF p.271) both give Yehoshafat Harkabi, with the biography recorded in the Section by section entry for the notes; the Index (PDF p.281) gives the same name. The spelling of Uri Avnery’s name varies within the work as printed: the text in part 3 read Avneri, while Chapter Two note 32 and the Index (PDF p.268, p.278) read Avnery; both forms are recorded as printed in their places.

• Chaliand title conflict within this work: Chapter Three note 2 (PDF p.270) gives Gerard Chaliand’s book as Restoration in the Third World: Myths and Prospects (as printed in the original, opened at that page), while the text (PDF p.207) and Chapter Four note 3 (PDF p.272) give Revolution in the Third World: Myths and Prospects. Both forms are recorded as printed; the work does not reconcile them.

• Mishal year discrepancy: the Bibliographical Note (PDF p.263), read in the copy in part 5, gave Saul Mishal’s East Bank West Bank with the year read as 1976, while Chapter Four note 25 (PDF p.273), checked in the original in part 6, prints 1978 (and reverses the title’s word order as East Bank West Bank: The Palestinians in Jordan, 1949-1967). Recorded as printed in both places; not reconciled.

• Index locators beyond the book: the Index entry for Israel gives its military strength at printed p.331 and 344-45 (PDF p.281, checked in the original), beyond the book’s last printed page (265). Recorded as printed; the work does not explain them.

• Contents figures, final state: the back matter as read in full is Bibliographical Note printed p.239-242, Chapter Notes printed p.243-253, Index heading page (PDF p.276, no printed number shown) and Index printed p.257-265, which does not match the contents sequence garbled in the copy (259 / 243 / 255 as printed there); as with the chapter openings recorded above, this page follows the pages as read, not the contents.

• Habibi’s title, further form: the Index (PDF p.280, checked in the original) gives Emile Habibi’s novel as Waqui’il Ghurceba Fi Ikhtifa’ Said Abi Nahs Al-Mutasha’il, Al (Strange Truths Concerning the Disappearance of Said Abi Nahs Mutasha’il), a fuller form than the garbled text form of PDF p.174, with its own transliteration; it is recorded as printed in the reading notes, and no normalised form is used on the wiki pages.

Coverage

PDF p.1-291 of 291, read in full (parts 1-6 of 6). Reading notes in reading/said-1979-question-of-palestine.md cover PDF p.1-10, PDF p.11-20, PDF p.21-30, PDF p.31-40, PDF p.41-50, PDF p.51-60, PDF p.61-64, PDF p.65-74, PDF p.75-84, PDF p.85-94, PDF p.95-104, PDF p.105-114, PDF p.115-119, PDF p.120-129, PDF p.130-139, PDF p.140-149, PDF p.150-159, PDF p.160-169, PDF p.170-173, PDF p.174-183, PDF p.184-193, PDF p.194-203, PDF p.204-213, PDF p.214-223, PDF p.224-227, PDF p.228-237, PDF p.238-247, PDF p.248-257, PDF p.258-267, PDF p.268-277, PDF p.278-287 and PDF p.288-291 with no gaps. Introduction and Chapter One I-IV are complete; Chapter Two I-II are complete; Chapter Three I-IV are complete; Chapter Four I-IV are complete and the main text ends on PDF p.259; the Bibliographical Note is complete (PDF p.260-263); the Chapter Notes are complete (PDF p.264-274: Introduction notes, Chapter One notes 1-34, Chapter Two notes 1-55, Chapter Three notes 1-15, Chapter Four notes 1-33); the Index is complete (heading page PDF p.276, entries PDF p.278-286 / printed p.257-265, with blank pages at PDF p.275, 277 and 287); About the Author (PDF p.288), blank pages (PDF p.289-290) and the back cover (PDF p.291) are read, completing the file.