Dispatch from Palestine (Studies)

The 1938 Eastern Women’s Congress (for the Defense of Palestine), Cairo.

Last week I participated in a moving and historic meeting of Palestinian academics at the University of California, Berkeley convened by Ussama Makdisi. The conference was organized to inaugurate a newly endowed Program in Palestinian and Arab Studies and associated May Ziadeh Chair, but far more than that it represented an opportunity to pause and reflect on the limits and possibilities of our scholarly efforts, amidst genocide.  

Ilan Pappé reported on the sorry state of the European scene and alerted us to the founding of the Hashim Sani Center for Palestine Studies at the University of Malaya in 2022. Jehad Abusalim powerfully critiqued Palestine Studies’ “Gaza problem,” on material and epistemological grounds. Fida Adely drew attention to the anti-colonial heritage of Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. Maha Nassar appraised the state of Palestinian historiography, forty years after Ibrahim Abu-Lughod’s “The Pitfalls of Palestiniology.” A panel of California-based scholars described Palestine’s place in Ethnic Studies, an embattled site of political organizing and knowledge production. Overall, Palestine Studies emerged as a formidable force, at least in its war of position on North American university campuses bombarded by the sovereign power of Israel Studies. I offered some historical reflections on the activities of Palestinian and Israeli academics in the second half of the twentieth century and their relationship to the Third World (more of that in my book, forthcoming). I prefaced my remarks with the following warning:

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As National Security Advisor for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, McGeorge Bundy was one of the key architects of the American genocidal war against the Vietnamese people. Even after he left the White House in 1966 to become the president of the Ford Foundation, he remained a steadfast public supporter of the imperialist war. But Bundy was also closely involved in the war at home, so to speak. The Ford Foundation wielded its billions to accommodate the war being waged within and against universities, and suppress the black insurgency against internal colonialism and apartheid sweeping across American cities. The late Robert Allen, long time professor here at Berkeley who passed away last July, appraised Bundy’s methods of counterinsurgency in his 1968 pamphlet “The Ford Foundation and Black Power”: “Bundy learned that it is necessary to work both sides of the street in order to secure and expand the American empire. Thus he was a staunch supporter of Kennedy's and Johnson's war policies in Vietnam while at the same time stressing the necessity of keeping channels open to the Soviet Union. Such a man was ideally suited to work with and aid civil rights groups, including black power advocates, while at the same time the government is arming and preparing to use force to suppress the black communities.”  

The tradition of Black Studies was not of course wholly made in the Ford Foundation’s image or totally co-opted by American imperial forms of knowledge. The efforts of Allen, Vincent Harding and others at the Institute of the Black World, which affiliated directly with movements for liberation across the Third World, is just one example. But we cannot deny the soporific effect institutes, departments, and chairs can have on a popular struggle waged from below. I offer this example, not to cast aspersions on our efforts here but to respond to Ussama’s first question. What do we want from Palestine Studies at Berkeley? We may simply make one demand, of the field in general, that in this moment of institutional enthusiasm for Palestine—an enthusiasm mixed no doubt with pity and contempt—we prepare ourselves for disaster: that Palestine studies may increase in such a size as to replace Palestine itself.  That Palestine Studies will increase in size in proportion to the increase in Palestinian death and the disappearance of Palestinian land. We have, in fact, long contended with a problem of abundance, despite our colonized condition, our struggles and setbacks. Edward Said put it this way in 1979, when he tried to appraise the differences between the Palestinian case and other Third World liberation movements: “there is the problematic fact that the Arab liberation struggle, unlike most other such struggles, is relatively well financed; the sheer presence and availability of almost unlimited capital bears very oddly on even the idea of liberation.” 

Fredric Jameson (1934 – 2024) on Zionism and Capitalism

Fredric Jameson with Eqbal Ahmad, Yasser Arafat, David Dellinger, Don Luce, Ramsey Clark in Beirut, 1981. Via the South Asian American Digital Archive.

Peace to Fredric Jameson, who lived a long life. His principal intellectual contributions were not in the study of Zionism or Palestinian history, but his work on history, literature, and Marxism has been fundamental to the work of this website. Indeed, my first ever post in 2012—when this was just my college scrapbook— included a quotation from Jameson’s Postmodernism. But Jameson has long been a friend to the Palestinians in general, and to some important Palestinian intellectuals, including his student Saree Makdisi and, of course, the late Edward Said. In the summer of 1979, Jameson visited Lebanon on a trip arranged by Said and Eqbal Ahmad. Said reflected on the trip and his motivations in a letter to another colleague: 

A funny coincidence is that Fred Jameson, and a small group of others whose trip here was encouraged and to a certain extent arranged by me—I thought it was time for them (especially Fred, who I like and admire as you know) to get involved seriously in a political issue, involving people, movements, struggle, war even, and not just theory, if you see what I mean. The situation here is really desperate, and desperately tense: there is violence everywhere… I’m taking Fred and the others to the south tomorrow so they can see it with their own eyes (quoted in Timothy Brennan, Places of the Mind, 151-152).

In the May 1988 issue of the Radical Historians Newsletter, Alan Wald, a perceptive historian of the American left, recalled: “While I am not familiar with Jameson’s overall record of activism, I do recall that he made an appearance at a University of Michigan literary conference several years ago conditional on the university also arranging for him to give  public address on Palestine, where he defended the right to self-determination with force and clarity.” In 1980, the Journal of Palestine Studies reprinted excerpts from an essay by Jameson’s on Israel and Zionism, under the title “Capitalism, not Zionism, is the Problem.” I have reproduced that text below. Motivated readers would do well to seek out the full text of the essay in the relevant issue of Seven Days.  

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Given the complexities of the Palestine/ Israel conflict many in the West either despair of a solution or believe it can only come from a lengthy and gradual diplomatic process. In an article in Seven Days (September 28, 1979), Marxist writer Fred Jameson looked at the conflict from a broad perspective that took in Israeli fears, Palestinian psychology and Zionism as a variant of nineteenth century imperialism and Orientalism, arguing that a real solution hinged on a radical social transformation of Israeli society.

“The PLO has made it very clear that it would ‘accept’ an independent Palestine on the West Bank of the Jordan River, connected to the Gaza Strip (only some twenty miles distant) by an appropriate corridor. PLO spokespeople don’t say it quite this way, and their formulation is ingenious: We are willing, says Abu Jihad, one of the PLO’s top military leaders, to establish a Palestinian state on any territories evacuated by the Israelis. Recognition of Israel? ‘It is a card I have,’ says Arafat. ‘The Israelis have many cards to play. When will they play them? For now I am waiting for the right time to play my card.’

“⚈ There is no such thing as a Palestinian.”
– Golda Meir, 1969

“⚈ We have nothing whatsoever to talk to them about on the two basic issues they want to raise: (1) the creation of a Palestinian state; (2) the fate of Palestinian refugees.”
– Moshe Dayan, October 1977

“⚈ We don’t want the PLO to recognize us.”
– Ezer Weizman, Israeli Defence Minister, July 1979

“The intransigence of the Israeli position masks increasingly complex attitudes toward the PLO. A decade ago it was perhaps possible for the majority of Israelis to believe that providentially the Jews, a ‘people without a land’  had found themselves ‘a land without a people.’ (Local Arabs, being Arabs, ought to feel equally at home anywhere in the Arab world.) The shift in awareness is exemplified in the words of a young Israeli woman on military service in Upper Galilee, front line in the Israeli struggle against war-torn South Lebanon: “Arafat is a murderer. I hate the Palestinians and everything they’re doing, but their cause is just.” It is equally apparent in a recent poll showing that 89 percent of the Israelis are against the creation of a Palestinian state, whose eventual existence 50 percent of Israel’s population believes ‘inevitable.’

Israeli broodings about the justice of Arafat’s cause, about the inevitability of a Palestinian state, plainly reflect a growing appreciation of Palestinian “identity.” That five-year-olds in Lebanese refugee camps are raised to understand that they “come from” this or that village in pre-1948 Palestine (as likely as not long since bulldozed out of existence by Israeli authorities) is a fact whose implications Israelis at all levels of society have come to grasp. Not, of course, in such a way as to render any less rigid their hostility to the creation of a Palestinian state.

“Quite the contrary. A well-informed Israeli (an ex-leftist who once opposed the Vietnam war and has since gained top-level experience in journalism and the military) confided his sudden illumination on the matter of Palestinian identity. ‘PLO prisoners never answered our routine question, “Where do you come from?” by mentioning where they were living or training,’  he said. ‘It was always, “I come from Safad,” or “I come from Jaffa,” or some other town where their families had lived before 1948.’  Then, he went on to draw that what is apparently a widespread moral: ‘There is no solution possible, these people want our homes. Our backs are to the wall, and if our throats are going to be cut, we’ll take everything with us. The Palestinian state will never be a solution for them. It will only be a beginning, the first step toward repossessing all the rest of so-called occupied Palestine.’

“So, despite an appreciation of Palestinian identity and despite the well-publicized claims of the leading theoreticians within the umbrella organization which is the PLO that ‘armed struggle as such will cease with the creation of a Palestinian state on the West Bank,’ the Israelis remain as intransigent as ever.

“On the surface this persistent inflexibility can seem a bit of rational realpolitik. But matters are complex. Listen to the further remarks of our ex-leftist Israeli informant: ‘It is better to live thirty, fifty, even one-hundred years like this, on a constant war footing, than to live five years in a concentration camp or ten years in an Eastern European ghetto or fifty years in an anti-Semetic US small town… Actually, the best way to get rid of Arafat, though, is to give him his state! Look at the violence of Arab politics; those people will start to kill each other off. With the enormous and insoluble problems of a Palestinian state on the West Bank, Israel will have ten years of peace.’

“On the one hand, an anxiety-ridden sense of powerlessness and victimization: We’re absolutely alone, abandoned by everybody, surrounded by 100,000,000 enemies. On the other hand, supreme confidence; the PLO is absolutely insignificant as a military force, hopelessly confused, unable in the end to do any better than they have done before.

“It is these contradictory attitudes which at the moment underlie Israeli intransigence. And, any understanding of the Middle East situation that avoids the classical conclusion of exposure to Middle East politics — the whole thing is hopeless, both sides are right (or wrong) — must temporarily bypass the temptations of diplomatic suggestions for boundary lines and formulas acceptable to both sides to examine the ‘psychological’  import of the new Palestinian sense of “identity.”

“No one can doubt that the Arabs, the Arab world and Islam, are frequently the objects of a kind of racism. What Edward Said shows, in his recent book Orientalism, is that this racism is no mere matter of individual bigotry or prejudiced opinion. It is a system for thinking about the Islamic ‘Other,’ which organizes the very academic disciplines of ‘Oriental studies’ and ‘Middle Eastern Studies’ themselves. Not merely a set of offensive thoughts, ‘Orientalism’  is a conceptual system designed to control and to repress this alien reality, a conceptual system intimately related throughout its history with the actual political control over Arab lands by the European imperialist powers.

“The core of Said’s most recent book (The Question of Palestine) appeared in the new Marxist periodical Social Text. It ran under the title ‘Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims.’ And, true to this title, Said’s complex arguments explore the dialectic between the view of the dominant Israeli powers—their subjects are (undifferentiatedly) ‘orientals’—and the view of those oppressed subjects who cannot help but see their masters exclusively in terms of a global, monolithic identity—Zionism.

“As thus perceived, Zionism (and it is this ‘Zionism,’ not the multifaceted historical movement, that the PLO so vociferously promises to annihilate completely) is a specific historical variant of classical late-nineteenth century imperialism, of “Orientalism,” a complex apparatus designed to implement and enforce control over a colonial population (the Palestinians) in a colonial space (Israel).

“Said, of course, is well aware that Zionism as perceived by its victims is woefully unfaithful to the real nature of Jewish men and women and even to Israeli society with its undoubted democratic tradition and varied currents, including the recent peace movement. But Said’s aim is to allow us to hear the voices of people who have not been able to speak. And Zionism for them is a matter of their experience of the Israeli state — forced exile, systemic expropriation of their lands, discrimination in education and social services, the awesome might of the Israeli Army, and (as abundantly documented by the report of the National Lawyers’ Guild) police brutality and torture. Zionism has thus produced ‘Zionism’— an understandably horrific image of itself—and an anti-Zionism that mirrors exactly the strategies of Zionism’s originators.

“Thus, Zionism, ironically in view of its roots, comes to generate a mirror image of itself. Terrorism? The life of the prime minister of Israel is the greatest success story of terrorism in modern history. It is this terrorism which Palestinian terrorism mirrors. And with uncanny accuracy. The two facets of Begin’s terrorist heritage, IRA-type terror against the foreign oppressor (the bombing of the King David hotel) and its more grisly acts against an indigenous civilian population (the infamous Deir Yassin massacre)—are faithfully reproduced in Palestinian terrorism, with its romantic commando-suicide raids, and its very different acts of individual protest and desperation by a people living under military occupation, as when an anonymous Arab workman throws a grenade into a bus full of people on the West Bank.

“Collective identity? The glorious reaffirmation of an authentically Jewish and Zionist identity spells out in advance all the dynamics that the reawakening of properly Palestinian identity will undergo in the years after 1967: Mystique of the homeland; mirage of a history of past grandeur; the financial tithes of a wealthy diaspora, as well as the virtually inalienable political backing of powerful foreign states (in the one case, the United States; in the other, the Arab bloc); virtual unanimity of internal public opinion against the enemy; the (sometimes doubtful) ideological strength of a unique religious orthodoxy; the authority of incalculable collective suffering; the list could be indefinitely extended. It should not be taken as fuel for more endless, undecidable, and sterile judgments as to what came first and who bears the ‘ultimate’ responsibility. Rather, it should mean something quite different: That those who have been able to grasp and feel profound sympathy for the sufferings and struggles of the Jewish people are paradoxically also in the very best position of all to understand the sufferings and the struggles of the Palestinians.

“Indeed, once the objective situation which has generated anti-Zionism is grasped, it’s clear that what is at stake is far from a matter of anti-Jewish racism. Just as ‘diplomatic’ solutions must inevitably dead-end in the Middle East, so too must those which overemphasize the ‘psychological’—pitting Palestinian ‘identity’ against Jewish ‘identity.’ The problem can only be solved by considering the social relations in which the anti-Zionism of the PLO is rooted.

“Israel—this lush and beautiful place, the California of the Middle East, with its glittering hotels along the gorgeous beaches of Tel Aviv, its fertile and prosperous kibbutzim, its fruit farms and extraordinary light, the liveliness of its citizens and the well-nigh of Tuscan beauty of the ancient city of Jerusalem—Israel lives in an anxiety deeper than that of foreign intervention by inefficient Arab armies or insignificant handfuls of Palestinian freedom-fighters. It lives the anxiety from within: the anxiety of class conflict — fear, not of external enemies, but of the sullen and menacing presence of a Palestinian underclass in its own midst, a class socially manageable only because so many of its numbers have been driven out into the refugee camps beyond the border. The Palestinians are the Blacks and Chicanos of the Israeli capitalist system. ‘What do these people want?’ the Israelis ask themselves. ‘Do they want to come into our luxury hotels or be able to buy posh houses in our neighbourhoods or maybe even to take over our own houses for themselves?’

“The problem’s real name, in other words, is not Zionism, but capitalism. For a genuine solution to the Middle East ‘problem’ to be thinkable, the possibility of radical social transformation within Israeli society would have to become a real one. This is the sense in which the familiar slogan — anti-Zionism means anti-Semitism—is to be rejected. Anti-Zionism in this sense is rather to be understood as opposition to a whole unjust social system, that of the United States fully as much as that of Israel. It means, not hostility to a people or a religion, but resistance to racism, oppressive social relations, imperialism, monopolies, consumerism—resistance, in short, to an enemy that the American Left has long since identified here at home.”

“Capitalism, not Zionism, is the Problem,” Journal of Palestine Studies 9:2 (1980), 154-157. Readers may also be interested in Jameson's more recent preface to a recent issue of Rethinking Marxism on “Marxist Perspectives on Palestine/Israel” edited by Oded Nir and Joel Wainwright, Jameson, “Preface,” Rethinking Marxism 30:3 (2018), 333-335. 

A Brief Note on Israel Studies

Maisara Baroud, I'm Still Alive (2024). Ink on Canson paper, 21 x 30 cm. Link.

In a recent interview with the Van Leer journal Hazman Hazeh, the historian Derek Penslar claims that when he started researching Israeli history four decades ago he "was probably the only historian in North America who dealt with Israel." Disregarding Palestinians and Palestinian history for a moment (as Penslar usually does), we may note that the historians Zachary Lockman and Joel Beinin were writing about Israel from the late 70s onwards (to mention only some of Penslar's prominent contemporaries).¹ But Penslar's claim is interesting not because of his own disciplinary myopia, but for how it speaks to Israel Studies’ disciplinary formations.² He goes on to say that American political scientists and sociologists were writing about Israel, unlike historians. 

In the United States, Israel Studies was institutionalized by political scientists (the Association for Israel Studies in 1985). So dominant were political scientists in the new association—all the officers were political scientists—that early editions of their newsletter pleaded to those outside their discipline to contribute to their journal and meetings. Meanwhile, sociologists represented the vanguard of the proverbial "New Historians” in Israel itself. Penslar's first book Zionism and Technocracy: The Engineering of Jewish Settlement in Palestine (published in 1990, based on a 1987 Berkeley dissertation) was, in line with earlier currents of Zionist historiography, a narrative with some distance from the confrontation with colonialism represented (imperfectly) by the "New Historians." The sociologist Gershon Shafir (whose Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict was published in 1989, when he was already at UCSD), provides a useful and illuminating review—entitled "Tech for Tech's Sake"—of Penslar's first book. Shafir wrote in the Journal of Palestine Studies: 

This work can potentially be used to reinterpret important aspects of Zionist history, although the author, for reasons one can only surmise, underplays much of his own innovative perspective and claims only to have tried to round out the historical account of the sources of Zionist colonization in the Ottoman era... In spite of Penslar's novel and suggestive emphasis on the formative impact of social  engineering and technocracy on Zionist settlement, his work is old-fashioned in its disregard for the Jewish-Palestinian conflict as a  formative influence on the colonization process... Penslar's thesis, however, emphasizes the  technocratic, and downplays the colonial dimension of Zionist settlement. Part of the author's reluctance to develop this side of his argument seems to result from the cautious  attitude that is the hallmark of the historian's responsibility. This circumspect demeanor puts the European colonial influences in proper context, recognizes their multiplicity and limited impact, and highlights the fact  that sometimes they played only a legitimating role. At the same time, Penslar's caution leads him to ignore the broader context of  technocracy, its political and colonial character. Colonization was never a technocratic process only; its political, and hence moral, dimensions were never far below the surface.³ 

In the same interview with Hazman Hazeh, Penslar reiterates his usual objections to Israel being understood as colonial, namely a unique Jewish historical connection to the "land of Israel" and the language of Hebrew, and admits that it doesn't really matter if people disagree with him, seemingly abandoning his position in an ostensible "debate" he has proffered for decades. What matters, Penslar contends, is that Israel exists now and we must pour our efforts into defining the future of “Arabs” and “Jews” (his categories). That colonialism is not simply a question of the past, but a pressing matter in the present, remains lost on Penslar (or rather, denied). Penslar notes that he fell in love with Israel when he went to the kibbutz Ma‘agan Mikhael in 1981 (a place that shares the same coast as Gaza, which lies only 75 miles south, but is a world away). Ma‘agan Mikhael was established in 1949, after the coastal area south of Haifa, including the village of Kabara, was depopulated of its native Palestinians. 

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¹. We may dwell endlessly on this point. Arthur Hertzberg, of The Zionist Idea (1959) fame, was a professionally trained historian, for example. And why ignore those efforts in England, i.e. Morris, Shlaim, and Pappe? Even developments in Israeli historiography were not separate from the American scene. An English edition of Tom Segev’s 1949: The First Israelis was published in the United States in 1986 (Segev himself studied German history at Boston University). 

². On this point, I note that the development of Palestinian historiography and Palestine Studies in North America was an unabashedly transnational undertaking with little regard to discipline, which included professional historians, and historically minded scholars with degrees in Oriental/Near Eastern/Middle Eastern Studies, literature, economics, political science, sociology, etc. As a field in North America it was developed adjacent to, but decidedly outside, universities and traditional academic publishing. 

³. Gershon Shafir, “Tech for Tech’s Sake,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 21:4 (1992), 103, 105. Like Penslar, Shafir also studied at Berkeley, but in the Sociology Department, where he completed his Ph.D on Gramsci in 1974. 

Each Palestinian is True: On Solidarity

Francoise Kesteman's funeral march and burial at the Martyr's Cemetery in the Shatila refugee camp, Beiurt. Via: al-Safir 11 October, 1984.

Each Palestinian is true.

— Jean Genet, in an interview from 1983. “Jean Genet: Affirmation of Existence Through Rebellion,” Journal of Palestine Studies 16:2 (1987), 74. 

I am fully committed to the Palestinian revolution, I am happy, my life is in danger. 

— Francoise Kesteman, in a message to her former husband two months before she was killed by Israeli forces during a guerrilla operation in southern Lebanon. “French woman turned from nurse to guerrilla,” United Press International (25 September, 1984). Beirut’s al-Safir newspaper reported these words as “Francoise’s Will,” al-Safir (26 September, 1984), 12. 

After all these years I spent with the Palestinians, I became one of them. 

— Faiz Ahmad Faiz, in an interview with the Palestinian researcher Abd al-Qadir Yasin months before his death (1984). Faiz A. Faiz: The Living World (Tunis: Lotus Books, 1987), 79.

But lest my judgements and concerns be misunderstood, I should begin by affirming my solidarity with you is fraternal. In the marvelously universal terms in which Arab patriots defined Arabism, I should be counted as an Arab. Syed Haider Abdel Shafi shall surely recall the century-ol definition offered at the outset of the Arab national movement: Kullu munn kanu arabun fi lughatihim, va thaqafathihim, va valaihim fa hum al-arab (All those who are Arab in their language, culture, and feeling are Arabs). In this age of sectarian and exclusionary nationalism, this was an open invitation I could not resist. So, meant this way, I am an Arab and entitled to making harsh judgements on the man-made disasters that pile on us. 

— Eqbal Ahmad in his remarks at “Gaza’s first human rights conference” in 1994. “An Address in Gaza,” The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmed, Carollee Bengelsdorf, Margaret Cerullo, and Yogesh Chandrani, eds., (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 377. 

There’s first the issue of who is a Palestinian. Many people take a biological stand on this—nationality goes by paternal descent. If my father is Palestinian, I am Palestinian. I’m not with this idea—not because I want to make a claim to be Palestinian myself, but because I consider it a political choice, a political identity. People who are not born Palestinian, but who are active for the cause, shouldn’t they be considered Palestinian? For example, there is Jean Calder, an Australian woman who adopted three handicapped Palestinian children. I first got to know her during the invasion of 1982—I came across her in a shelter with these three handicapped kids, one of them clinging round her neck. At the same time, she was working with the Palestinian Red Crescent. I saw her again in Khan Yunis in 1998, still with the Red Crescent, and still with the three kids. If Jean isn’t considered a Palestinian mother, something is wrong.

— Rosemary Sayigh, in an interview with Mayssoun Sukarieh in 2008. “Speaking Palestinian: An Interview with Rosemary Sayigh,” Journal of Palestine Studies 38:4 (2009), 26.

I wish for my remains to be cremated. I do not wish for my ashes to be scattered or my remains to be buried as my body does not belong anywhere in this world. If a time comes when Palestinians regain control of their land, and if the people native to the land would be open to the possibility, I would love for my ashes to be scattered in a free Palestine.

— Aaron Bushnell’s will (2024).