Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2002 18:48:55 -0500 (EST)
From: Jeffrey Alan Sacks <jas80-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: Re: the famous poem of mahmoud darwish


hi all,

an excellent volume is:

Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature
Ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi
New York: Columia University Press, 1992

best,

jeff



On Mon, 28 Jan 2002, Nur Yavuz
wrote:

> 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'
> tudes 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'tudes 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'tudes 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--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'tudes 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
> 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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