From: "Clifford Duffy" <cwduff-AT-hotmail.com> Subject: insist/repetition Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2001 03:19:36 -0400 Here in the dark room -- as already stated --// break thru the grey room -- sad authority of list -- discuss -- cuss discourse --//cynics rhetoric evaded -- your language better than mine? Says who? Hurry up Now Mister Palestine Paleolithic Hurry Up Mister Goliath -- tell no lies and I shall cite no histories sortires stories in quote -- crippled kids -- stones -- West Bank -- Jericho // Wild boys of West Bank hurled their sad stones -- break through the gray room -- back room boys of discourse curious?? Not me. I am the slide of petrol and degenerative grammar --- Curious, who me? I am rhetoric that sides its middle // the sad boys of genet swooped down on the hawk kill that Oedipal virus -- that one god monster village -- blow that type? Curious connections between dead arseholes of cripples?? No need to explain the pain -- spies? Israeleez?? Mozzad, KGB Chechnya, you know better. Ramallah, Bethelem, Jericho, falling falling falling dust in the reality studios of shit and oil Ka wa ma tan It was and was not There was and there was not a city called Baghdad ---// falling windows fadograph the girl pitched her stone high arc in the air // my people -- for all the brave and bleary they are blamed --- -------------------------- >From owner-deleuze-guattari-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU Thu Oct 26 17:19:59 2000 From: "Clifford Duffy" <cwduff-AT-hotmail.com> Subject: The Grandeur of Yasser Arafat Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2000 17:18:34 EDT The Palestinian cause is first and foremost the set of injustices that these people have suffered and continue to suffer. These injustices are acts of violence, but also illogicalities, false reasonings, false guarantees that claim to compensate or vindicate them. Arafat needed only one word to describe the broken promises, the violated agreements, at the moment of the Sabra and Shatila massacres: shame, shame (italics in the original).<1> It`s said that this is not a genocide. And yet it's a story that consists of many Oradours, from the very beginning.2<2> Zionist terrorism was practiced not soley against the English, but on the Arab village which had to disappear;Irgoun was very active in this respect (Deir Yasin).<3> From begining to end, it involved acting as if the Palestinian people not only must not exist, but had never existed. The conquerors were those who had themselves suffered the greatest genocide in history. Of this genocide the Zionists have made an absolute evil (italics in original). But transforming the greatest genocide in history into an absolute evil is a religious and mystical vision, not a historical vision. It doesn't stop the evil; on the contrary, it spreads the evil, makes it fall once again on other innocents, demands reparation that makes these others suffer part of what the Jews suffered (expulsion, restriction to ghettos, disappearance as a people). With "colder" means than genocide, one ends up with the same result. The United States and Europe owed reparation to the Jews. And they made a people, about whom the least that could be said is that they had no hand in adn were singularly innocent of any holocaust and had't even heard of it, pay this reparation. It's there that the groteque begins, as well as the violence. Zionism, then the state of Israel will demand that the Palestinians recognize its right(droit).(italics and french in the trans.) But the state of Israel will never stop denying the very fact of a Palestinian people. They will never speak of Palestinians but of the Arabs of Palestine, as if they found themselves there by chance or in error. And later, they will act as if the expelled Palestinians came from outside, they will speak of the first war of resitance that the Palestinians led all alone. Since they haven't recognized Israel's right, they will be made into descendants of Hitler. But Israel reserves the right to deny their existence in fact. Here begins a fiction that had to stretch further and further, and to weigh on all those who defended the Palestinian cause. This fiction, this wager of Israel's, was to make all those who would contest the de facto conditions and actions of the Zionist state appear as anti-Semites. This operation finds its source in Israel's cold politics with respect to the Palestinians. From the start, Israel has never concealed its goal:to empty the Palestinian territory. And better, to act as if the Palestinian territory were empty, always destined for the Zionists. It was clearly a matter of colonizatio, but not in the nine-teenth-century European sense: the local inhabitants would not be exploited, they would be made to leave. Those who remained would be made, not into a dependent territorial workforce, but rather into a mobile and deteched workforce, as if they were immigrants placed into a ghetto. From the start, lands bought on the condition that they be empty of occupants, or can be emptied. It's a genocide, but one in which physical extermination remains subordinated to geographical evacuation:being only Arabs in general, the surviving Palestinians must go merge with other Arabs. Physical extermination , though it may or may not be entrusted to mercenaries, is most certainly present. But this isn't a genocide, they say, since it's not the "final goal"; in reality, it's just one means among others. The complicity of the United States with Israel does not arise soley from the Zionist lobby. Elias Sanbar ( Revue D'Etudes palestiniennes) has shown clearly how the United States rediscovered in Israel an aspect of its own history:the extermination of the Indians which, there as well, was only in part physical. It was a matter of emptying, as if there had never been an Indian except in the ghettos which were made for them as immigrants from inside. In many respects, the Palestinians are the new Indians, the Indians of Israel. Marxist analysis reveals the two complementary movements of capitalism:constantly to impose limits, which it develops and exploits its own system; and always pushes these limits farther back, to exceed them in order to begin its own foundation once again on a larger and more intense scale. Pushing back limits was the act of American capitalism, the American dream, taken up by Israel and the dream of Greater Israel on Arab territory, on the backs of the Arabs. How the Palestinian people learned to resist and are resisting; how a people of ancient lineage became an armed nation; how they gave themselves a body which simply represent them but embodied them, outside their territory and without a state:all these events demanded a greater historical character, one who, we might say from a Western point of view, could have stepped out of Shakespeare, and that was Arafat. It wasn't the first time in history that something like this had happened (the French can think of Free France,except for the fact that it had a smaller popular base at the begining). And all the occassons on which a solution or element of solution was possible, occassions tha thte Israelis have deliberately , knowingly destroyed, are not happening for the first time in history either. The Israelis held onto their religious position of denying not only the Palestinian right but also the Palestinian fact. They cleansed themselves of their own terrorism by treating the Palestinians as terrorists from outside. And precisely because the Palestinians were not that, but rather were a specific people as different from other Arabs as Europeans can be among themselves, they could expect only ambiguous aid from the Arab states themselves, aid which sometime turned back into hostility and extermination when the Palestinian model became dangerous for them. The Palestinians have run through all the infernal cycles of history: the failure of solutions each they were possible, the worst reversals of alliance of which they bore they brunt, the most solemn promises not kept. And on all this their resistance had to nourish itself. It may well be that one of the goals of the Sabra and Shatila massacres was to discredit Arafat. He only consented to the departure of the combatants, the force of which remained intact, on condition that the security of their families be absolutely guaranteed by the United States and even by Israel. After the massacres hge had no other word than "shame." If the ensuing crisis for the PLO resulted, in more or less the long term, either in an integration into an Arab state or a dissolution into Muslim fundamentalism, then it could be said that the Palestinian people had effectively disappeared. But this would be in such conditions that the world, the United States and even Israel would not finish regretting the lost occasions, including those that still remain today. To Israel's most arrogant formula, "We are not a people like others," the Palestinians have not stopped responding with the cry that was invoked in the first issue of the Revue d'etudes palestiniennes: "we are people like others, we only want to be that...." By leading the terrorist war in Lebanon, Israel believed it could be suppress the PLO and deprive it of the support of the Palestinian people, already deprived of their land. And perhaps's its succeeding, since in surrounded Tripoli there is nothing more than the physical presence of Arafat among his own, all in a sort of solitary grandeur. But the Palestinian peopl;e will not lose their identity without creating in its place a double terrorims, of the state and of religion, which will profit from its disappearance and render impossible any peaceful settlement with Israel. From the war in Lebanon Israel will not escape merely morally divided and economically disorganzied, it will find itself faced with the mirror of its own intolerance. A political solution, a peaceful settlement is possible with an independent PLO which will not have disappeare into an already existing state and will not be losst among the diverse Islamic movements. The disappearance of the PLO would only be a victory for the blind forces of war, indifferent to the survial of the Palestinian people. Gilles Deleuze Tranlated by Timothy Murphy Originally published in Revue d'etudes palestiniennes, September 1983. This trans. from Discourse Fall 1998. Notes 1. Sabra and Shatila massacres:1982 massacres of Palestinians at refugee camps in Lebanon, carried by Lebanese Phalangist aided by the Israeli army. 2 Oradour french village destroye by Nazi occupation troops in retaliation for Resistance activity shorty after the start of the D-Day invasion. 3. Irgoun:right wing Zionist organization that used terrorist tacts against British force and others in postwar Palestine. ___________________________________________ I would also like to point out that the signing of Oslo accords was the same date September 13 as the start of the Sabra massacres. Edward Said and others have noted this parallel. Perhaps if Deleuze were writing now, he would compare Arafat to a lost Shakespearean tragic figure whose denoument is endless;Sharon who masterminded the 1982 war of which Deleuze speaks and who also was indifferent to Sabra and Chatila stands now to form at least on part of the crazy Israeli state. I should also point out that Deleuze wrote about the Palestinians about 3 other times after this article was published. As well he wrote letters of protest about the massacre of the Iraqui people in the so-called Gulf war. best wishes, Clifford Duffy _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
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