From: "Nur Yavuz" <nur-AT-crimsoncurtain.com>
Subject: Re: the famous poem of mahmoud darwish
Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2002 18:40:15 -0500


Re: the famous poem of mahmoud darwish I found this running along by the
poems...
nur



The MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies
Vol. 1, May 2001

Crossing Boundaries: New Perspectives on the Middle East

http://web.mit.edu/cis/www/mitejmes/



The Indians of Palestine (1982) [1]

Gilles Deleuze & Elias Sanbar[2]





We have waited a long time for an Arab journal in French, but instead of
coming from North Africa, it's being done by the Palestinians.  La Revue d'
Études Palestiniennes has two characteristics obviously centered on
Palestinian problems which also concern the entire Arab world.  On the one
hand it presents very profound socio-political analyses in a masterful yet
calm tone.  On the other hand, it mobilizes a specifically Arab literary,
historical and sociological "corpus" which is very rich and little known.

Gilles Deleuze




Deleuze:  Something seems to have ripened on the Palestinian side.  A new
tone, as if they have overcome the first state of their crisis, as if they
have attained a region of certainty and serenity, of "right" [droit], which
bears witness to a new consciousness.  A state which allows them to speak in
a new way, neither aggressively nor defensively, but "equal to equal" with
everyone.  How do you explain this since the Palestinians have not yet
achieved their objectives?



Sanbar:  We have felt this reaction since the appearance of the first issue.
There are the actors who said to themselves, "look, the Palestinians are
also doing journals like this," and that has shaken a well-established image
in their heads.  Don't forget that for many people the image of the
Palestinian combatant for which we claim responsibility has remained very
abstract.  Let me explain.  Before we established the reality of our
presence we were perceived as refugees.  When our resistance movement
established that our struggle was one to be reckoned with, we were trapped
once again in a reductive image.



Multiplied and isolated to infinity, it was an image of us as pure
militarists, and we were perceived as doing only that.  It's in order to
leave that behind that we prefer our image of combatants to that of
militiamen in the strict sense.



I believe that the astonishment which the appearance of this journal has
provoked also comes from the fact that certain people must now begin to
admit to themselves that the Palestinians exist and that simply recalling
abstract principles does not suffice.  If this journal comes from Palestine,
it nonetheless constitutes a terrain on which multiple pre-occupations are
expressed, a place where not only Palestinians take the floor but also
Arabs, Europeans, Jews, etc..



Above all certain people must begin to realize that if there is such a labor
as this, such a diversity of horizons, it probably must also include, at
other levels of Palestine, painters, sculptors, workers, peasants,
novelists, bankers, actors, business people, professors.in short a real
society, of whose existence this journal gives an account.



Palestine is not only a people but also a land.   It is the link between
this people and their despoiled land, it is the place where an absence and
an immense desire to return are enacted.  And this place is unique, it's
made up of all the expulsions that our people have lived through since 1948.
When one has Palestine in one's eyes, one studies it, scrutinizes it,
follows the least of its movements, one notes each change which awaits it,
one adds up all its old images, in short one never loses sight of it.



Deleuze:  Many articles in the Revue d'Études Palestiniennes recall and
analyze in a new way the procedures by which the Palestinians have been
driven out of their territories.  This is very important because the
Palestinians are not in the situation of colonized peoples but of evacuees,
of people driven out.  You insist, in the book you're writing, on the
comparison with the American Indians.  There are two very different
movements within capitalism.  Now it's a matter of taking a people on their
own territory and making them work, exploiting them, in order to accumulate
a surplus:  that's what's ordinarily called a colony.  Now, on the contrary,
it's a matter of emptying a territory of its people in order to make a leap
forward, even if it means making them into a workforce elsewhere.  The
history of Zionism and Israel, like that of America, happened that second
way:  how to make an empty space, how to throw out a people?



In an interview, Yasser Arafat  marks the limit of this comparison, and this
limit also forms the horizon of the Revue d'Études Palestiniennes:  there is
an Arab world, while the American Indians had at their disposal no base or
force outside of the territory from which they were expelled.



Sanbar:  We are unique deportees because we haven't been displaced to
foreign lands but to the continuation of our "own place."  We have been
displaced onto Arab land where not only does no-one want to break us up but
where this idea is itself an aberration.  Here I'm thinking of the immense
hypocrisy of certain Israeli assertions which reproach the other Arabs with
not having "integrated" us, which in Israeli language means "made us
disappear". Those who expelled us have suddenly become concerned about
alleged Arab racism with respect to us.  Does this mean that we haven't
confronted contradictions in certain Arab countries?  Certainly not, but
still these confrontations were not the results of the fact that we were
Arabs, they were sometimes inevitable because we were and are an armed
revolution.  We are also the American Indians of the Jewish settlers in
Palestine.  In their eyes our one and only role consisted in disappearing.
In this it's certain that the history of the establishment of Israel
reproduces the process which gave birth to the United States of America.



This is probably one of the essential elements for understanding those
nations' reciprocal solidarity.  There are also elements which signify that
during the period of the Mandate affair we did not have the customary
"classical" colonization, the cohabitation of settlers and colonized.  The
French, the English etc..wished to settle spaces in which the presence of
the natives was the condition of existence of these spaces.  It was quite
necessary that the dominated be there for domination to be practiced.  This
created common spaces whether one wanted them or not, that is to say
networks, sectors, levels of social life where this "encounter" between the
settlers and the colonized happened.  The fact that it was intolerable,
crushing, exploitative, dominating does not alter the fact that in order to
dominate the "local," the "foreigner" had to begin by being "in contact"
with that "local."



Then comes Zionism, which begins on the contrary from the necessity of our
absence and which, more than the specificity of its members (their
membership in Jewish communities), formed the cornerstone of our rejection,
of our displacement, of the "transference" and substitution which Ilan
Halevi has so well described.  Thus for us were born those who it seems to
me must be called "unknown settlers," who arrived in the same stride as
those whom I called "foreign settlers."  The "unknown settlers" whose entire
approach was to make their own characteristics the basis of a total
rejection of the Other.



Moreover, I think that in 1948 our country was not merely occupied but was
somehow "disappeared."  That's certainly the way that the Jewish settlers,
who at that moment became "Israelis," had to live the thing.



The Zionist movement mobilized the Jewish community in Palestine not with
the idea that the Palestinians were going to leave one day, but with the
idea that the country was "empty."  Of course there were certain people who,
arriving there, noticed the opposite and wrote about it!  But the bulk of
this community functioned vis-ŕ-vis the people with whom it physically
rubbed shoulders every day as if those people were not there.  And this
blindness was not physical, no one was deceived in the slightest degree, but
everyone knew that these people present today were "on the point of
disappearance," everyone also realized that in order for this disappearance
to succeed, it had to function from the start as if it had already taken
place, which is to say by never "seeing" the existence of the other who was
indisputably present all the same.  In order to succeed, the emptiness of
the terrain must be based in an evacuation of the "other" from the settlers'
own heads.



In order to arrive there the Zionist movement consistently played upon a
racist vision which made Judaism the very basis of the expulsion, of the
rejection of the other.  This was decisively aided by the persecutions in
Europe which, led by other racists, allowed them to find a confirmation of
their own approach.



We think moreover that Zionism has imprisoned the Jews, it's taking them
captive with this vision I just described.  I'm saying that it's taking them
captive and not that it took them captive at a given time.  I say this
because once the holocaust passed, the approach evolved, it was transformed
into a pseudo-"eternal principle" that says the Jews are always and
everywhere "the Other" of the societies in which they live.



But there is no people, no community which could claim-and happily for
them-perpetually to occupy this position of the rejected and accursed
"other."



Today, the other in the Middle East is the Arab, the Palestinian.  And the
height of hypocrisy and cynicism is the demand, made by Western powers upon
this other whose disappearance is constantly the order of the day, for
guarantees.  But we are the ones who need guarantees against the madness of
the Israeli military leaders.



Despite this the PLO, our one and only representative, has presented its
solution to the conflict:  the democratic state of Palestine, a state which
would tear down the existing walls separating all the inhabitants, whoever
they may be.



Deleuze:  La Revue d'Études Palestiniennes has its manifesto, which appears
in the first two pages of issue #1:  we are "a people like others."  It's a
cry whose meaning [sens] is multiple.  In the first place, it's a reminder
or an appeal.



The Palestinians are constantly reproached for refusing to recognize Israel.
Look, the Israelis say, they want to destroy us.  But the Palestinians
themselves have struggled for more than 50 years to be recognized.



In the second place, it's in opposition to the Israeli manifesto, which is
"we are not a people like others," by reason of our transcendence and the
enormity of the persecutions we have suffered.  Hence the importance, in
issue #2 of the Revue, of two texts on the Holocaust by Israeli writers, on
Zionist reactions to the Holocaust, and on the significance that the event
has acquired in Israel, in relation to the Palestinians and the entire Arab
world which were not involved in it.  Demanding "to be treated as a people
outside the norm," the state of Israel maintains itself all the more
completely in a situation of economic and financial dependence upon the West
such that no other state has ever known (Boaz Evron).   This is why the
Palestinians hold fast to the opposite claim:  to become what they are, that
is, a completely "normal" people.



Against apocalyptic history, there is another sense of history that is only
made with the possible, the multiplicity of the possible, the profusion of
possibles at each moment.  Isn't this what the Revue wants to show, even and
above all in its analyses of current events?



Sanbar:  Absolutely.  This question of reminding the world of our existence
is certainly full of meaning, but it's also extremely simple.  It's a sort
of truth which, when truly admitted, will make the task very difficult for
those who have looked forward to the disappearance of the Palestinian
people.  Because, finally, what it says is that all people have a kind of
"right to rights" [droit au droit].  This is an obvious statement, but one
of such force that it very nearly represents the point of departure and the
point of arrival of all political struggle.  Let's take the Zionists, what
do they say on this subject?  Never will you hear them say, "the Palestinian
people have no right to anything," no amount of force can support such a
position and they know it very well.  On the contrary you will certainly
hear them affirm that "there is no Palestinian people."



It's for this reason that our affirmation of the existence of the
Palestinian people is, why not say it, much stronger than it appeared at
first glance.



Translated by Timothy S. Murphy

(Originally published in Liberation, May 8-9, 1982)



----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----

[1] This article first appeared in Discourses, 20.3, Fall 1998, pp. 25-29.
1998 © Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309.

[2] Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) a philosopher, and one of the most active and
well known French intellectuals, taught at the University of Vincennes-St.
Denis. He is the author of several seminal works in philosophy and film
theory. Elie Sanbar is the founder and editor of Revue d'etudes
Palestiniennes and the author of Palestine 1948, L'expulsion.







The MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies
Vol. 1, May 2001

Crossing Boundaries: New Perspectives on the Middle East

http://web.mit.edu/cis/www/mitejmes/





The Troublemakers[1]



Gilles Deleuze[2]





Why would the Palestinians be "valid negotiators" since they don't have a
country?  Why would they have a country, since theirs has been taken?  They
have never been given any other choice than to surrender unconditionally.
They have been offered only death.  In the war that opposes them to Israel,
Israel's actions are considered legitimate reprisals (even if they appear
disproportionate), while those of the Palestinians are treated exclusively
as terrorist crimes.  And an Arab death has neither the same value nor the
same weight as an Israeli death.



Since 1969 Israel has continuously bombed and shelled South Lebanon.  Israel
explicitly recognized that the recent invasion of that country was not a
reprisal for the Tel Aviv commando action (thirty thousand soldiers against
eleven terrorists), but the premeditated, crowning moment of a whole series
of operations whose initiative Israel reserved to itself.  For a "final
solution" to the Palestinian problem, Israel can count on the almost
unanimous complicity of other states, with a variety of nuances and
restrictions.  The Palestinians, people with neither land nor state, are
seen as obstacles by everyone. No matter how many weapons and how much money
they have received from certain countries, they know what they're saying
when they declare that they are absolutely alone.



The Palestinian combatants also say that they have just won a certain
victory.  They had left only resistance groups in South Lebanon, groups
which seem to have held up quite well.   On the other hand, the Israeli
invasion struck blindly at Palestinian refugees, Lebanese peasants, all the
poor agricultural people.  The destruction of villages and cities, massacres
of civilians have been confirmed;  the use of cluster bombs [bombes ŕ
billes] has been reported in several quarters.  For several years this South
Lebanese populace has been continuously fleeing and returning, in perpetual
exodus, under Israeli blows that cannot very clearly be distinguished from
terrorist acts.  The current escalation has driven two hundred thousand
people onto the roads without shelter.  The state of Israel is applying to
South Lebanon the method that proved itself in Galilee and elsewhere in
1948:  it is "palestining" South Lebanon.



The Palestinian combatants are drawn from the refugees.  Israel claims to
defeat the combatants only by turning thousand of others into refugees,
among whom new combatants will be born.



It's not only our relations with Lebanon that make us say that the state of
Israel is murdering a fragile and complex country.  There is also another
aspect.  The Israel-Palestine model is determinant in current problems of
terrorism, even in Europe.  The worldwide understanding among states and the
organization of a world police force with worldwide jurisdiction, currently
under way, necessarily lead to an expansion in which more and more people
are classified as virtual "terrorists."  We find ourselves in a situation
analogous to that of the Spanish Civil War, when Spain served as the
laboratory and experimentation for a still more terrible future.



Today, the state of Israel leads the experimentation.   It is establishing a
model of repression that will be converted in other countries, adapted by
other countries.  There is a great deal of continuity in its politics.
Israel has always considered that the UN resolutions which verbally
condemned it in fact proved it right.  It transformed the invitation to
withdraw from the occupied territories into the duty to establish colonies
there.  Currently it considers the deployment of the international force in
South Lebanon an excellent idea.on the condition that this force is ordered
to transform the region into a surveillance zone or a controlled desert.  It
's an odd kind of blackmail, which the whole world will give up only if
there is sufficient pressure to ensure that the Palestinians are finally
recognized for what they are, "valid negotiators," since they are in a state
of war for which they are most certainly not responsible.



Translated by Timothy S. Murphy

(originally published in Le Monde, April 7, 1978)



----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----

[1] . This article first appeared in Discourses, 20.3, Fall 1998, pp. 23-24.
Copyright by 1998 © Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan
48201-1309

[2] Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) a philosopher, and one of the most active and
well known French intellectuals, taught at the University of Vincennes-St.
Denis. He is the author of several seminal works in philosophy and film
theory including A Thousand Plateaus (with Felix Guttari) and Cinema I and
Cinema II.










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