Palestine: Listening to the Inaudible

Mohammed A. Bamyeh

The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 102, Number 4, Fall 2003, pp. 825-849
(Article)

Published by Duke University Press

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Mohammed A. Bamyeh

Palestine: Listening to the Inaudible

This is the twenty-first century, how could

this be happening now?’’ The words belong to
a resident of the town of Jenin in the West
Bank, reached by a radio station on his cellular
phone in the spring of  amid the slaugh-
ter wrought by the Israeli military Operation
Defensive Shield. The statement summed up
much of the underlying attitude of most Pales-
tinians from that point on: hardships, suffering,
and accumulated losses could all be tolerated
so long as they were flavored with hints of pos-
sible progress and globally oriented futurity. But
then, history ceased its optimistic march, the
promises of peace and progress were withdrawn.
We regressed to an earlier era of hopelessness
and abandonment. All that had been built up
with enormous investments of resources, labor,
patience, care, and attachment was destroyed:
lives, houses, orchards, connections, and all
other aspects of civilized life. All indications
pointed not to any reconstruction but to even
more destruction to come.
In an age of globalization and reduced sov-
ereignty, the time of nations and their states
seems to be passing. Yet over Palestine today
The South Atlantic Quarterly :, Fall .
Copyright ©  by Duke University Press.
826 Mohammed A. Bamyeh

hovers a logic fully out of joint with its times. The old-fashioned colonialism
that had devoured Palestine shows no signs of relenting. If anything, the
opposite is happening. Today we witness a far more fanatic religious attach-
ment to a greater ‘‘Eretz Yisrael’’ than had been the case half a century ago.
The tragedy of modern Palestine, beyond all the horrors and suffering
associated with it, is doubly tragic in that it appears to have been caused not
by any necessary logic of history but rather by countertimely events. First,
on the eve of a global era of independence, Palestine became a settler colony.
Second, at the outset of a global era whose common language seemed typi-
fied by secularism, science, future orientation, modernization, and prog-
ress, Palestine became the object of a moribund religious mythology.
Today we speak of postcolonialism, but Palestine is still deep in the throes
of old-fashioned colonialism. The fact that the state of Israel marks  as
its year of ‘‘independence’’ illustrates the vicious nature of this particular
colonialism. It seeks to erase its victim under the mark of its own liberty—
an unmistakable piracy of anticolonial terminology by a colonizing power,
which has always acted in collusion with previous colonial masters of the
Middle East and their contemporary heirs. It seems that to use the words of
the times would make it sufficient for one to enter those times, even if one
is entering at the wrong time—that is, at the time when one ought to have
been departing.
For Palestine, the modern era begins with colonization rather than
decolonization, in contrast to almost all other Third World political experi-
ences. Thus it would seem natural to argue that Palestine must be allowed
to resume its rightful but long-postponed march along the path of decolo-
nization and independence.Yet, in Palestine we confront the possibility that
even this seemingly modest proposal may now be out of date.
It seems therefore that the situation here calls for something original. But
whatever that is, it would invariably require as a first step unlearning the
bad lessons of the colonial logic. All of them, that is, and not simply decolo-
nizing the land or speaking one’s native tongue, as Ngugi wa Thiong’o rec-
ommends.1 It means also going beyond Jews and Arabs, as Ammiel Alcalay
evocatively proposes.2 This may seem completely unrealistic from today’s
point of view, but there will never be any other way. The logic of fanatic
nationalism will only foster schemes of control, animosity, revenge, ethnic
cleansing, and genocide. All these have already been acted upon, and will
continue to be acted upon if the basic language of the conflict is not altered
 Listening to the Inaudible 827

in a radical way. The deadly weight of our reality itself cries for a step beyond
this immobilizing attentiveness to ‘‘realism.’’
In much of the West, but especially in the United States, it continues to
be difficult to speak about Palestine for a number of reasons. There are well-
known reasons, namely the propensity for critical commentary on Israel or
Zionism to give rise to charges of anti-Semitism. But was there a more anti-
Semitic act than removing the Jews from Europe into Palestine after the
Holocaust—in effect completing the work of the Holocaust, and in the pro-
cess creating another entangled regional crisis elsewhere in the world when
the reparation for Jewish suffering ought to have taken place in Europe?
This point must be stated because it is part of the tale of injustice done to
both sides and now part of their common narrative. An agreement on a com-
mon narrative must be considered as an element of any possible resolution.
But there is another reason for the difficulty of speaking about Palestine,
and this reason is now becoming more weighty. There does not seem to be
much more to say about this issue beyond what has already been said a thou-
sand times by many commentators. For the past thirty-six years there has
been only one solution, namely creating two states largely along the 
borders. That solution was fairly obvious, it has the backing of an interna-
tional consensus, also of majorities among both Palestinians and Israelis. It
was articulated again and again in countless peace proposals. Several wars
from now and thousands more in casualties, it would still be hard to con-
ceive of any other solution. Yet it seems impossible to get there. And it is
this failure of the obvious, of realism, which should perhaps encourage us
to think beyond its limits.
To go beyond the limits of ‘‘realism’’ begins with realism. That means
as a first step dismantling the other countertimely constitutive logic of the
conflict over Palestine, namely its deep grounding in religious myth. In
much of Western imagination Palestine has rarely been imagined without
religious reference points. Indeed, much of the conflict was packaged in
religious terms in the West far more often than it was in its home terri-
tory. Yvonne Haddad noted upon the signing of the Oslo Accords in 
in Washington, D.C., that of the three speakers on that occasion—Arafat,
Rabin, and Clinton—only Clinton used biblical reference points. In essence
his speech consisted of little other than such reference, even to describe
the modest initial designs of the accord for Jericho (whose ancient walls
were mentioned even though they are no longer standing, but whose recent
828 Mohammed A. Bamyeh

history and suffering—which were the point—were conveniently passed

over).
This way of thinking may not seem so ‘‘countertimely’’ today, but even
this observation confirms the propensity of one error, left uncorrected,
to generate another. Allowing a mythico-religious logic to fester over the
wound for so long, and to impose itself more by sheer violence than logical
necessity, only proliferates that deadly logic into all quarters and increases
its propensity to fanaticism. In , few Palestinian expressed their cause
in religious terms, but today a large minority among them are inclined to
do so. Likewise, while in  Zionism was still a largely secular move-
ment even as it used biblical references for its purposes, now the entire
Zionist enterprise is held hostage to religious parties whose acrimonious
provocations have largely succeeded in undermining various attempted
resolutions.
The historian Lawrence Davidson shows how around World War I the
popular press in Britain was lavish in its Bible-inspired descriptions of the
British Army’s advance into Palestine, and how subsequent U.S. policy con-
cerning Palestine likewise kept an open ear to biblically informed inter-
preters, including those who were not particularly religious but nonethe-
less had no other frame of reference for the issue.3 This is probably even
more true today, given the fact that the American religious right sits in the
cabinet directly for the first time in its history, and that the current admin-
istration is highly mindful of its effective role in generating votes, money,
and publicity for its otherwise unsuccessful election campaigns. The role of
biblical interpreters in informing U.S. policy toward Palestine, a role many
sober commentators do not wish to believe, is further evident in the fact
that meetings with prominent leaders of the religious right in the United
States have been featured regularly on the Washington itinerary of visiting
Israeli prime ministers.
This background is important to note as we survey the failure of diplo-
matic language, which in its effort to measure the limits of reality incor-
porates the mythical understandings of the powerful actors as if they were
equal in weight to material grievances. Thus the diplomatic level could
downplay the fact that much of the real conflict is obviously about resources:
land, water, services, taxation, representation, material benefits, and so on.
But it is impossible to get to these issues without dismantling the blinding
religious mythology with which this concreteness of things is covered up
 Listening to the Inaudible 829

so thoroughly. While many early and late settlers, as well as their Western
supporters, have justified their enterprise through biblical language, most
Palestinians have until recently expressed their cause in terms of concrete
grievances.

Basic Considerations for a New Realism

A realism of a new kind is urgently needed. It would of course be the kind of
realism that dismisses religious myth and focuses on concrete grievances,
asserting that material needs come before spiritual or symbolic needs. And out of
that we craft yet another level of realism, one that goes beyond the insignia
of states and sovereignties, and joins larger logics of global life. The success-
ful resolution of the Palestinian question has the potential to bring peace,
justice, and freedom not just to the Israelis and Palestinians alike, but to
the region as a whole and certainly to the world. The question of Palestine
is not simply about Palestine.
The character of the current situation consists of endless violence, the
absence of any workable peace plan, frightening levels of extremism, open
public discussion of ethnic cleansing, complete hopelessness—generally,
an environment so bleak that one no longer hears the comforting adage, ‘‘At
least it cannot get any worse.’’ It is clear that resolutions thus far attempted
are at best unlikely to succeed, even in revised formats. At worst, such reso-
lutions are themselves part of the problem. I suspect that they are the latter,
for reasons I discuss later in this essay. But in so doing, I would suggest that
Palestine has given us in the past half century of it being a ‘‘problem’’ oppor-
tunities to imagine a totally different framework of conflict resolution—
one in tandem with the logic of our times, and in some respects even ahead
of it. Perhaps it is good at this point to go altogether beyond the logic of
decolonization, independence, sovereignty, statehood, and all such famil-
iar terms, and imagine something superior, which, if not justified enough
by its better approximation of the spirit of our times, at least it would be by
the complete failure of all other attempts.
A new outlook would require three reorientations in the language of the
conflict: () a reappraisal of the failure of the diplomatic language in general,
and the inadequacy of state-level diplomacy; () a thorough demythologiza-
tion of the conflict, on both religious as well as secular planes; () a radical
departure from, or at least a realistic interpretation of, the hitherto unques-
830 Mohammed A. Bamyeh

tioned concept of ‘‘security.’’ All three considerations are not only at odds
with what peace processes attempted so far, whose record in any case is
hardly impressive. They are also in perfect harmony with larger logics of
globalization permeating the world at large. Experimenting with these in a
place like Palestine would not only prove their contemporary worthiness,
but furthermore reveal to the world at large the virtues of the more humane
possibilities of common global processes, which we will not be able to escape in
any case.

The Failures of Diplomatic Language and Diplomatic Imagination. In ,

John Foster Dulles suggested a simple solution to the conflict: ‘‘The Pal-
estinian problem will be solved in time, only when a new generation of
Palestinians grow up with no attachment to the land.’’ This highly stunning
proposal is informative of much, not the least of which is that lack of imagi-
nation is not the monopoly of current office-holders. Politicians bound too
closely to immediate interests of states have little use for the foresight and
critical imagination to propel interests more humane, larger than, or dif-
ferent from those of states. Thus bound in their action and imagination to
state interests, the diplomatic level opts out of any nonstate-based human
complexity, even when it is crucial for the victims of the process. Thus the
governing logic of ‘‘motion’’ of early American diplomacy regarding Pales-
tine was that since a solution appeared too complicated to sort out, simply
entrust it to time.
The problem was that time failed in the task. This is hardly surprising,
but so is Dulles’s proposal. The proposal epitomizes, in fact, the nature of
diplomacy when it concerns itself with human problems. The diplomatic
level, or the level of state-to-state relations, tends when confronted with the
unpalatable outcomes of its larger designs to follow the path of least resis-
tance. That is, do nothing or as close to nothing as possible, until the crisis
erupts again. At that point you rush to the scene with poorly articulated
good intentions, and when calm is restored you proceed to do nothing or
as next to nothing as possible. And so on.
The assertion that the diplomatic level cannot be trusted with will or
imagination sufficient enough to resolve this particular conflict is borne out
not by any political theory as much as by more than five-and-a-half decades
of bitter experience. In the s the diplomatic discourse preferred to for-
get Palestine and indeed wait until a generation has passed away, and along
 Listening to the Inaudible 831

with it the problem. That was true also insofar as Arab governments were
concerned, which while rhetorically adopting the Palestinian cause as their
own, did so because of popular pressures; they never truly prepared for
war against Israel (the  war, precisely in being so lopsided, proves how
much of the professed Arab state opposition to Israel took more the charac-
ter of blustering rhetoric than material opposition).
Left to its devices, the diplomatic level will continue to do nothing other
than follow the path of least resistance. Until the s ‘‘Palestine’’ as such
was not the object of any negotiations, and the crisis surrounding it was in
diplomatic circles conceived of as a conflict between the existing states of
the region. Palestinians registered only as ‘‘refugees,’’ and the settlement
of their issue was regarded as more of a humanitarian than political issue.
Even when the Palestinians increasingly abandoned their reliance on Arab
governments after  and organized their own movements, it would still
take a quarter of a century more before any serious discussion of a politi-
cal solution occurred—that is, the creation of a very modest state for the
Palestinians in their own historic land. Today, even that humble vision of
independence seems remote.
The basic problem is that the language of diplomacy could only imagine
solutions structured in terms of sovereignties and states, and those were
always teeming with problems when it came to such a contested place as
Palestine. The discovery of the Palestinians is indeed of a rather recent ori-
gin. It is entirely associated with their sustained rebellion—the late s
mass emergence of Palestinian resistance groups, crushed by the Jordanian
government in –; the s mass mobilization in Lebanon, disori-
ented by the Lebanese Civil War and aborted in a particularly savage war
by General Sharon in , culminating in massacres of refugees in the
suburbs of Beirut; then the first intifada in the Occupied Territories from
the late s, which reached its terminus in the inconclusive Madrid Con-
ference before being betrayed by the Oslo Accords; and then the bloodier
second intifada, uneasily suspended in the face of an uncertain ‘‘road map’’
to peace.
The fact that Palestinians ever register on the political map, therefore,
results only from their own efforts, and certainly not from the moral
awakening of any state functionaries, the repentance of their enemies, or
the self-serving efforts of Arab states. Each suppression was either more
brutal or introduced more hopelessness than the preceding one. Conse-
832 Mohammed A. Bamyeh

quently each stage of resistance included more shocking spectacles of resis-

tance than were imaginable during the preceding one. Quantitatively and
qualitatively, the violence of the intifada, indiscriminate and unapologetic
as it may seem, still pales in comparison to the violence of the occupation,
which had been indiscriminate and unapologetic for decades already. From
the perspective of many Palestinians today, history shows that the world
pays attention only to outbursts that shock it, and not to ongoing and accu-
mulating injustice. After each setback, the Palestinians disappeared again
from the diplomatic language, until the following round of noisy mobiliza-
tion, activism, and violence.
It is hard to dispute the central lesson of this history, as seen from a Pal-
estinian perspective. Without generating constant noise, your problem will
be immediately forgotten, because it is easier for governments in general
not to do something about that which is not their business if the cost of
anything other than ‘‘moral support’’ is high, as it has always been when
it comes to Palestine. But as Ammiel Alcalay argues in this issue of SAQ,
even when an official recognition is extended to the Palestinians, the recog-
nition is so structured as to actually undermine the Palestinian movement
and take away all its potentials, rather than to address the grievances that
generate it.
The experience with the Palestinian Authority under Arafat, and the
whole range of imagination of the diplomatic language in which it is
steeped, shows the dire limits of any solution premised on familiar state
forms: ‘‘independence,’’ sovereignty, clear borders, and all the symbols asso-
ciated with them. What is frequently forgotten amid the current stalemate
is that Arafat was reintroduced into the scene in Oslo (and in secret negotia-
tions no less) precisely as he was on his way out as a Palestinian leader. The
apparent calculation was that he, eager to reestablish his waning authority,
would be more likely than other rising figures among the Palestinians to be
controlled, or to agree to confine himself to the role of Israel’s policeman
in the territories. The fact that such a calculation failed is analytically less
compelling than the fact that it was acted upon to begin with. The latter fact
is consistent with the pattern of thinking of diplomacy.
Diplomacy has so far functioned by taking existing categories of social
experience, in order to repackage them in ossified, lifeless forms. In this way
a historically rich and polyvalent concept such as country becomes reduced
to the globally standard concept of state. The concept of nation likewise is
packed right into that same fossil, which is assumed to be its natural abode.
 Listening to the Inaudible 833

So much so that the nation appears in its state, and the state claims all signi-
fications of the idea of country. The diplomatic language has always worked
within these basic categories, which simplify its task. But since the social
world abhors simplicity in its structure, motives, and motions, it is easy to
see how a language like diplomacy’s, oriented as it is to efficiency, will only
ever know the surface of its object or at best the outer appearances of its
superstructure. Over time, the diplomatic language becomes the guardian
of a stifling, undynamic world of formal structures.
These formal structures would still of course be an improvement over a
condition of total war, as we have now. But what I think is becoming more
obvious is that the road to peace itself may pass through an uncharted land-
scape of joint sovereignties, half-states, multiple citizenships, mixed identi-
ties, and open traffic. Fundamentally, the ultimate failure of the diplomatic
consists of precisely this inability to consider such a vision of peace. It has
always thought of peace as a state-to-state arrangement constructed by an
acquiescence to the balance of power that obtains between them. Diplo-
matic peace, therefore, always possessed a formal appearance. It was under-
stood as a state-level affair, a ‘‘process’’ negotiated by high officials and spe-
cial envoys, culminating in an official treaty encoding its conditions.
Such an attitude leaves far too much to be desired. For example, the reper-
toire of diplomacy has over the past few decades produced a basic outline
for a possible solution around a simple but problematic formula: ‘‘land for
peace.’’ Israel would give up land it had occupied in exchange for peace. This
highly reductive way of looking at things essentially eliminated the core of
the conflict from view. For it then appeared as a petty quarrel over land,
rather than as over more profound issues, such as justice.
The alternative formula ‘‘justice for peace’’ is unlikely to be proposed by
diplomats, but it does summarize the conflict much better. Durable peace
is peace wedded to justice, and lack of justice will guarantee that there shall
be no peace. Quarrels over justice, in the final analysis, are part of our social
being, and the range of issues they cover includes but goes beyond the ques-
tion of land. The South African experience with the Truth and Reconcilia-
tion Commission, the trials in Rwanda, that of Milosovic, and the whole
regime of the proposed International Criminal Court, all point in spite of
limits to this evolving conception of the centrality of justice restoration to an
inescapably diverse world, a world attempting to proceed beyond the apart-
heid model being proposed for Palestine.
To begin with, the fixation on territoriality as such, even if it leads to an
834 Mohammed A. Bamyeh

independent Palestinian state, will only deliver a state that is already not
fully sovereign. In many ways that would not be dissimilar from the fate of
many of today’s states that are embroiled in the logic of globalization. But in
this case we have in addition the fact that such a state will immediately have
to be tied to a grander regional consortium. The peace that will result from
any peace process, as the overall vision proclaims, would be a regional peace.
The Palestinian state would be small and poor, possibly demilitarized, eco-
nomically but possibly also politically tied to and dependent on Israel and
Jordan in the first place.
The humble vision of the Palestinian state, coupled such as it is with
the difficulties of implementing it, has led some commentators recently
(e.g., Edward Said, Lama Abu-Odeh) to resurrect an old idea of ‘‘one state’’
or ‘‘binational state.’’ 4 The idea here is that since the division of the land
is too cumbersome and the result such a highly truncated entity, why not
simply skip it and imagine instead a single country, with all citizens, Jews
and Arabs, enjoying full and equal rights, as well as any protections and
communal autonomies as might be necessary. The idea is to challenge failed
‘‘realism’’: when the need for justice cannot be served by current state form,
state form itself must be determined by the need for justice. States them-
selves have no reason to survive or be created if they do not serve the cause
of justice, and there is nothing natural or necessary about states. They may
be imagined as epigraphs of justice, but it is justice that is the point, not
the state.
If the solution is to be expressed in terms of state, in my own view a
binational, single state would be a far superior notion than anything that is
currently on the table (at the moment practically nothing). It would resolve
without quarrel the issue of sovereignty, it would be in tandem with the
transethnic logic of our times, it would normalize that whole state as a natu-
ral part of the Middle East region, Israel would cease to be a perpetual garri-
son settler-colonial state. Such a state may very well anticipate (in more con-
trolled forms) links created by cultural diffusion, trade, and travel, which
would result in any case from any peace.
But that is not the only way to proceed, and the practical complexities
involved are enormous, even though all other potential solutions will invari-
ably be complex. In any case, superior ethical visions do not need to keep
us from considering the smaller ethics of something more workable. That
is, even a modest, truncated Palestinian state would still be a momentous
 Listening to the Inaudible 835

improvement on current conditions, a fully defensible ‘‘progress in the pres-

ent order.’’ Certainly the elimination of the Israeli occupation, one of the
most brutal regimes in modern history, could only be welcomed. But the
question of Palestine is deeper than the question of occupation, which is
only one of the material manifestations of unsettled, older grievances.
From the perspective of the strong, peace is essentially a question of an
acquiescence to a current balance of power and thus may seem to require
no more than territorial haggling, but from the perspective of the weak,
peace has no high value if it does not also involve a more ethical dimen-
sion, namely a demonstrated concern for rectifying historical injustice. This
means much more than territoriality, and it may very well be the case that
territoriality, states, and sovereignties would all become less of a central
concern if we orient ourselves fully from the limited concern with land to
the broader concern with justice. In what follows, I offer my own vision of
what this broader concern might entail.

Truth in Place of Myth. Anwar Sadat once said that  percent of the Arab-
Israeli conflict was ‘‘psychological’’ in nature. For many who had lost rela-
tives, friends, livelihood, or property, the statement seemed like an insult.
A psychological condition is a misperception of reality treated with therapy.
Sadat’s preferred technique was shock therapy, which he did not survive and
which only resulted in a ‘‘cold peace.’’ More to its detriment, it also failed to
resolve the inner core of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
Certainly psychological was a poor choice of word, myth-based would have
been more appropriate. A myth-based conflict consists to a certain extent of
a misperception of reality. But, more importantly, it is fueled by the drive to
bring about a new reality inspired by ancient mythology, highly inadequate
as it may be for contemporary times and places. As a pursuit of essentially
contemporary problems into the fabric of deep time, a mythical outlook like-
wise universalizes the essentially local suffering out of which it emerges.
Contemporary, local problems thus appear eternal and universal. Hints of
the inadequacy of such an outlook are already evident in the composition
of the movement speaking of those contemporary, local problems. The fact
that Zionism is a modern movement should have certainly qualified notions
of eternal persecution. The fact that all founding figures of Zionism were
European Jews should have placed an adequate limit on the effort to univer-
salize and homogenize the experiences of Jewish communities everywhere.
836 Mohammed A. Bamyeh

Further, historical realizations such as the fact that the Inquisition did
not happen in Islamic Spain, that the Holocaust could scarcely be imagined
without European-style nationalism, that Middle Eastern societies housed
until  large and thriving Jewish communities, could scarcely support a
solution to the ‘‘Jewish problem’’ that is European-inspired and supported,
highly nationalistic, and directed against the people among whom the Jews
had historically the least problems! While this strange myopia may be
explained by the blinding desire to create a uniquely safe haven for Jews, few
expected history to have an irony waiting for us at the end of this thoughtless
road: today precisely in Israel are Jews not safe.
In the United States a different mythology surrounding Israel exists. It
concerns the aforementioned biblical interpretation of the conflict, increas-
ingly influential as Melani McAlister shows in her article in this issue. It
is a different kind of myth than the one on which the Israeli state bases
itself, its anti-Semitism is barely concealed, and it is centered on an apoca-
lyptic vision of the future rather than a deliverance vision of the present. Yet
these differences between the Christian right’s myth of Israel and the Israeli
state’s own propagated myth of itself lead to the same outcome, which is a
grand civilizational conception of the conflict. Significantly, one of Roberta
Combs’s first acts as the new leader of the Christian Coalition in the United
States was to travel to Israel in order to meet Jewish settlers in the occu-
pied territories and assure them of the coalition’s full support of their reli-
gious quest.
Unfortunately, mythology employed by one side has the tendency to
beget mythology by the other side. In this case, such a dynamic is apparent
in the increased religiosity of the conflict, which was not there in  or
. The mythologies surrounding this conflict now constitute enormous
burdens, and there has rarely been a similar case in which the reality of
things requires being completely and thoroughly reintroduced. This rein-
troduction requires two steps: first, a sole focus on concrete grievances, a
focus from which all spiritual and cultural appendages are expunged. And
second, a sense of ‘‘historical justice’’ based on a jointly elaborated histori-
cal narrative—a process for which something like South Africa’s Truth and
Reconciliation Commission may serve as a possible model.
The concrete is buried deep under a barrage of culturalism, religion,
civilizational discourse, and identity. I remember a student I advised, who
wanted to write a thesis demonstrating how analyzing the cultural dimen-
 Listening to the Inaudible 837

sion of the conflict may provide insights into its resolution. The problem
with such an enterprise, which seemed originally worthwhile, was the pro-
pensity of ‘‘culture’’ to offer a convenient way out of having to discuss the
concreteness of the struggle, which most street-level protagonists experi-
ence most directly. Culturalist mythology thus covers up the fact that the
struggle has always been over concrete resources: land and water, primarily,
but a host of other grievances that come with them, namely deprivation
of political, civil, or human rights; economic destruction of communities;
house demolitions; residence permit revocations; the making of peoples
into refugees; collective punishment; and severe restrictions on people’s
movements, education, freedom of press, and every other aspect of civic life
one has come to expect from living in the modern world. Today culture is
often used to direct attention away from the fact that it is material existence
and material grievances that create suffering and struggle. In this usage,
the notion of culture is worse than useless.
Especially now, with the rise of extremism all around this conflict and its
expression in grandiose ‘‘East-West’’ terms further concealing its concrete-
ness, we need to maintain the sobriety of the concrete at all costs. The his-
tory of this conflict leads one to believe that the concrete substance of the
conflict is concealed in myth and all the trappings of ‘‘culture’’ either when
an injustice is about to be committed, or when there is no real desire to
resolve the issue. Secular states, like the United States, so deft at obviating
religious difference when seeking solutions to conflicts, suddenly throw up
their hands at the bugaboo of ‘‘culture’’ in despair when they lack motiva-
tion. At no other time do we have a use for culture in negotiating a reso-
lution, which means that a framework for a resolution should exclude all
spiritual, religious, myth-laden reference points, while referencing the full
range of the concrete grievances.
To many this may appear obvious, and the diplomatic language has, to its
credit, focused only on concrete issues, but far less than is minimally nec-
essary to establish itself as a credible venue for justice, and only because of
its propensity for uncontroversial minimalism rather than genuine inclina-
tion to resolve things. Far more is needed. Concrete sobriety will show us
that even the seemingly most irrational acts, like suicide bombings, have
their basis in concrete but ignored grievances. Citing a number of episodes
in which suicide bombers left a note about their motives, Avishai Margalit
notes that ‘‘it is in fact a common practice among the bombers to mention
838 Mohammed A. Bamyeh

a very specific event or incident for which they take revenge,’’ such as the
Israeli military killing a specific family member or friend.5
When the concrete is understood, even a frightening and apparently
uncontrollable phenomenon like suicide bombing appears manageable.
Simply denouncing the killing of civilians in suicide bombings has never
been enough to deter them. Certainly no civilian population should suffer
sudden outbreaks of irrationality, no innocent life, Israeli or Palestinian or
otherwise, should be threatened by a walk to the market or a trip to work.
But these principles in themselves resolve no distress: under different sce-
narios, if one lives under a state one believes to be ruled by justice, one is not
as quickly persuaded by suicidal desperation as the proper response even
to criminal assaults by authorities. If the system under which one lives or
with which one is negotiating is considered to be capable of self-correction,
or ‘‘justice,’’ one always has other means at one’s disposal to bring about
grievances.
There is only one venue left out of this morass: it begins with a depar-
ture from myth, culture, and ideological posturing, and continues into the
land of concrete grievances. Illusions about the self and the other are natu-
ral corollaries to any long-enduring, major conflict. But illusions may in
the course of due time become indistinguishable ingredients in the fabric
of reality. If I kill you because of my illusion, the murder itself confirms
the reality of the illusion above that of a previous reality in which no mur-
der had been committed. Out of this new and disheartening reality we have
one of two pathways to follow: either accept the new reality as given, which
means also accepting that derangements should be allowed to drive history,
or embark on a ‘‘truth and reconciliation’’ process, which acknowledges the
crime and establishes that derangements are amendable accidents, and not
the logic of history or social life. Since the mythology we are dealing with
has the weight of at least five-and-a-half decades behind it, it is imperative
therefore that the demythologization process, inasmuch as it articulates a
resolution on the basis of concrete grievances, also articulates a vision of
history based on ‘‘truth and reconciliation,’’ the humane process already
experimented with in South Africa (whose own history has much to teach
us here).
I am fully aware of the myriad philosophical, perspectivist, and relativist
objections that many thoughtful people will make to any attempt at ‘‘truth.’’
In this case, what I am addressing is a simpler form of truth—that is, truth
 Listening to the Inaudible 839

insofar as it is connected to accountability for past wrongs and injustices,

truth of a historical narrative devoid of all mythical elements, lies, and fabri-
cations, and thus truth as a basis for reconciliation. That means declassified
documents, war-crime tribunals, full accountability, and systemic apologies
(namely, those that could be incorporated into public-sphere debates and
education) for those past injustices that may not be amenable to outright
rectification.
Processes of truth and reconciliation, already proven to work, would
establish in this case two essential positive pointers to a necessarily common
future, however unrealistic it may appear at present: () an alternative to the
monopoly of diplomatic language over the parameters of conflict articula-
tion and conflict resolution; and () a common narrative that serves as a pillar
of that which we will never be able to escape in any case—common life and
common society.
The truth and reconciliation model has been wholly absent from all
frameworks of resolutions and negotiations attempted so far, and by all
high-level partners, including the Palestinian leadership. This may appear
especially surprising given that it would cost almost nothing in concrete
price compared to other likely aspects of any resolution, such as dismantling
the settlements, land exchange, doing something for the refugees, building
a new state of Palestine, and the full range of assistance and aid regimes that
will be necessary to stabilize the peace. On economic and logistical grounds
alone, therefore, a truth and reconciliation process is by far the easiest to
carry out and the most beneficial in terms of its ‘‘marginal returns.’’ Fur-
ther, it is imperative in any process whose aim is to uncover the many layers
of myth surrounding the conflict, so that one’s attention remains focused
on the concrete.
Truth and reconciliation means unraveling all the mystification that has
enveloped this conflict since its inception. Truth means not uncovering hid-
den secrets, but making audible (and thus part of the fabric of a common
narrative) that which has been well-known for some time but could not be
disclosed because of the restrictions imposed by the needs and inclinations
of diplomatic language. It would bring into the realm of the common narra-
tive, for example, the fact that far from intending to destroy Israel in ,
King Abdullah of Jordan had already made a deal with the leaders of the state
to divide up historic Palestine between them and his new but resourceless
kingdom east of the Jordan River. Likewise truth would bring into the ethic
840 Mohammed A. Bamyeh

of the common narrative the fact that ethnic cleansing of Palestinians was
deliberately carried out. And in that same narrative we would include tales
of the culpability, incompetence, and cynical manipulation of Arab govern-
ments in the aftermath of the  war, which resulted in most of the urban
centers of the Middle East losing their great historic Sephardic communities
to Israel. Thus we would finally speak openly of the fact that, contrary to the
official myth, Arab governments did not expect a war in ; that Sadat’s
intention in  was to create conditions for a negotiable peace settlement
and not to liberate the occupied territories.
The common narrative would also bring to the fore and clarify cen-
tral belief systems that accompany this conflict but that have never been
thought of as proper topics for the negotiation table. For example, the cen-
trality of the experience of the Holocaust, especially in terms of the fact that
it is an act of gross injustice ‘‘corrected’’ by another act of gross injustice.
This simple and well-known point is a good place to start the entire truth
and reconciliation process, because we would learn through it a pattern of
overcoming mystification: you deny my suffering, so I respond by denying
yours. The Holocaust did happen, but for most Palestinians, indeed most
Arabs, it is irrelevant to the whole story. Truth and reconciliation means,
among other things, making it relevant, since it happened and is obviously
part of the larger dynamic of the conflict from its inception. But truth and
reconciliation would also place the experience of the Holocaust in its proper
dimension: the Palestinians are not responsible for it, even though the
blood debt of Europe was settled with their account.
Truth and reconciliation, in other words, denies no one’s experience but
puts them back where they belong, outlines them in their proper context,
allows us to finally mature beyond infancy—our own respective histori-
cal calamities—so that we may treat history as something to be overcome
rather than as something to be repeated or lived perpetually. In other words,
it allows us finally to bury the dead. But it will do far more. One aspect of
any process of demystification is that it allows certain words, oft repeated as
central categories of struggle, to finally refer to their actual meaning. A good
example is the Palestinian slogan of ‘Awda, or ‘‘return.’’ The term circulates
among the masses of refugees, whose predicament, we are told, was one of
the issues responsible for the failure of the Barak-Arafat summit, which in
turn led to the carnage that has followed.
Nothing illustrates the inadequacy of the diplomatic language more than
 Listening to the Inaudible 841

its failure to truly appreciate what is exactly meant by ‘‘return,’’ which in the
world of diplomacy is understood to refer to an actual, physical return. The
diplomatic paradigm does not think it its job to dissect levels of meaning,
indeed, has no time for such exercises. But if we wish to consider what this
slogan means, we need first to consider who is using it. To simplify, take
three generations of Palestinians among whom the notion of return persists:
the generation of pre-, which tends to use the concept of return to refer
to the physical land, the houses, the orchards, and the street layout of their
towns, which they teach their children in the diaspora. For that generation,
return is a return to that which has already been experienced, and lost.
Then take the generation following that, born after Palestine was divided
between Israel and Jordan (Gaza was administered by Egypt until ,
but unlike the West Bank it was not annexed to Egypt). Large numbers of
those were born as refugees in various Arab countries, and experienced
thus two contradictory moments of consciousness: an awareness of a lost
country and a belief in its imminent retrieval. For those, a return meant
something less physical in nature, and was used more as a general code
word for justice. The concept persisted among a subsequent generation,
born altogether after all of historical Palestine had become inaccessible to
diaspora Palestinians.
Each of these generations could be further divided in two: those who
stayed, and those who continued on outside. Those who knew nothing but
occupation, and those who knew nothing but the image of the country.
Those who knew only part of it, and those who knew only another part.
Those for whom Israel remained a strange abstraction, and those who
absorbed its full ferocity firsthand. How could all those people speak of
return, and how could return be the same return in each case? And of those,
now the majority of diaspora population, who never saw Palestine, one may
ask the question, How does one ‘‘return’’ to what one never experienced? In
After the Last Sky, Edward Said speaks to an ‘‘indefinitely postponed meta-
physics of return,’’ referring to this indeterminacy yet persistence of a feel-
ing that justice must ultimately prevail, even though all material indications
point to how far-fetched justice may be at the moment.6
In an early novel entitled Return to Haifa, the great Palestinian writer
Ghassan Kanafani offers elements of a possible answer to this question. A
Palestinian couple takes advantage of a temporary relaxation of border con-
trol following the  war in order to visit their old home in Haifa and
842 Mohammed A. Bamyeh

reminisce. They find the stones unchanged, and much of the space encour-
ages them to continue to think of return in physical terms. But then, they
meet actual people and actual experiences. The infant they had unintention-
ally left behind during the chaos and confusion of the city’s evacuation some
twenty years back is now a proud member of the Israeli border guard. He
knows his origins, but that knowledge does not move him. For him, there
is no natural order of belonging other than that shaped by the context of his
upbringing and life experience.
Meanwhile, the couple’s other son, born and raised outside of Palestine
and after the Nakba, is ostensibly on his way to join the nascent movement
of Palestinian fedaye’en, over his parents’ objections. On their way back from
the shock of such a return, the parents conclude that they on the one hand,
and their fedaye’ son on the other, are returning to different things. They
are returning to the past, he is returning, as it were, to the future. So he is
not returning at all, even when he is going to the old country with a gun in
his hand.
Thus the concept of return is used by various generations of Palestinians
not as a standard reference to a necessary physical eventuality, but more like
a common heuristic or a candlelight, to summarize or shed light on com-
mon suffering. Return is the most efficient and unifying in the vocabulary
of resistance. The common denominator between all the cleavages within
the concept of return, therefore, concerns not its physical allusion as much
as the investment in it of an undefined meaning of restoration. A return is
a ‘‘restoration of justice,’’ precisely in this general sense and no more pre-
cisely than that. Restoration of justice, in this sense, cannot be alleviated
by a simple ‘‘compensation’’ lacking, as it is likely to be, of any admission of
wrongdoing or culpability in causing injustice.
Return, in other words, means for various generations simply that jus-
tice in the final analysis is possible, and its possibility could only be verified
by means of truth and reconciliation. A return, in other words, is truth and
reconciliation: it is a settlement of an account and a correction of the story,
so that even when one does not physically return, one could live with the
contentment that justice has been reestablished, in the sense that truth is
reintroduced to a history from which one had been disenfranchised.

‘‘Security’’: The Impossibility of Machtpolitik. Everything that has been said

so far is scarcely imaginable without an outline of a realistic security frame-
 Listening to the Inaudible 843

work. The question of security is explicitly connected to the current break-

down in all negotiations, has been there since the beginning of this process,
and is latent in this conflict from its beginning—namely the program to
establish a homeland for the Jews where they could be uniquely ‘‘secure.’’
The latter project has manifestly failed, and the other corollaries and details
have just likewise failed. Yet these failures do not in themselves invalidate
the notion that peace and justice are associated with a certain level of secu-
rity. It only calls for two modifications of the dictum of security:
• First, emphasizing security as the outcome of processes generating
peace and justice, rather than as the prerequisite for such processes, as
has been the case so far
• Second, defining a realistic rather than absolute (and hence impossible)
expectation of security
Under current circumstances, it is hard to see the prospect of any move-
ment forward without more original approaches to the historical dilemma
of security. What generates security? A certain reduction in the intensity
of the conflict? A complete cessation of hostilities? An incorporation of
all troublemakers into a common arrangement? An outgrowth of a more
organic and popular quest rather than a diplomatic need? A commence-
ment of mutual love? A forgetfulness of the past? A primary mutual inter-
est? A treaty or a formal agreement? A division of the country? Or the con-
tinuation of the conflict as is but minus the bloodletting (which may very
well have been the design behind Oslo)? Which of those meanings is exactly
that of security, which should we aspire to attain?
As we try to answer this question, another immediately follows on its
heals: What is the price for the kind of security that we define as appropri-
ate? If we attempt to know, then we would immediately confront the possi-
bility that we have reversed priorities, for perhaps we ought to have asked
the question of price first, and then proceeded to ask how much security
would it get us and settle at that. For if it turns out that a predefined level of
security is attainable only by killing everyone, it would be prudent to ask first
whether that kind of security is desirable. It is true that the most tranquil are
the dead. But they do not constitute good negotiating partners. Machtpolitik
has always led either to humanitarian horrors or to political dead-ends of
the nonnegotiable sort, but never to security.
It seems, therefore, that two reorientations of thinking are warranted
844 Mohammed A. Bamyeh

insofar as the paramount concept of security is concerned. The first is a

retreat from the dogma of absolute security, unattainable with the vehicle
usually used for that purpose, namely state violence. The second is a con-
struction of a ‘‘hard’’ rather than ‘‘soft’’ peace process, namely a process struc-
tured so as to withstand sporadic outbreaks of insecurity, in a way that pre-
vious processes have not been.
A reappraisal of the concept of absolute security should have been war-
ranted from the lessons of any episode of this conflict, had it not been for
the fact that the Israeli concept of absolute security has always been seen
as an inviolable dogma. For example, in  Israel invaded Lebanon for
expressed reasons, and the invasion culminated in a treaty signed on May ,
 between Israel and Lebanon. In spite of the heavy price paid for it—
the most destructive war Lebanon had ever seen and Israel’s longest war to
that point—the treaty was abrogated after a mass uprising in Beirut in the
following February. The treaty declared the end of the ‘‘war’’ between the
two countries, and was signed for the Lebanese side by an Israeli-imposed
government. The price of the invasion leading up to the treaty, which was its
expressed goal, was death to twenty thousand civilians, misery and home-
lessness to at least one hundred thousand more. That slaughter did not
fail to declare its peaceful intentions from the start: the invasion was code-
named ‘‘peace for Galilee.’’
The fact that such a horrific method for achieving security failed miser-
ably did not apparently impress those who were committed to the principle
of absolute security. The lessons of the failed Israeli occupation of south
Lebanon warrant being raised in this context. In its characteristic empha-
sis on total security, the occupation authorities systematically destroyed all
known old opponents, only to make room for a new and unexpected type of
opponent (notably the ferocious Hizbullah) who may not have had as much
of a chance to emerge without the removal of its competitors. Hizbullah had
not existed when Israel invaded Lebanon in order to remove older enemies
such as the PLO and the Lebanese leftists. Just as a sanitarium disinfected
beyond common-sense necessity provides ample opportunity for the most
virulent organisms, so did the fanatical Israeli obsession with security pro-
vide ample opportunity for a new type of opponent it could not overcome.
The Israeli emphasis on total security only predisposed the occupation
authorities to practices that, in due time, resulted in multiplying the num-
ber of its more extreme enemies and in decreasing the influence of its more
 Listening to the Inaudible 845

moderate opponents. In measures that continue to be practiced today in

the Palestinian occupied territories, the Israeli authorities in south Lebanon
followed a policy of disproportionate response, collective punishment, eco-
nomic blockades, and the assassination of individual resistance leaders.
This dynamic was set in place at a very early stage of the occupation; the
minor early antioccupation tactics undertaken anonymously as of late ,
such as planting homemade roadside bombs against Israeli patrols, pro-
voked harsh retaliations aimed at entire villages.
Even when it tried to restrain itself from seeking to subdue the entire
population through self-defeating acts of sacrilege (such as when an Israeli
patrol inexplicably defiled the holy Shi’a festival of ‘Ashura on October ,
), the occupation authorities maintained the basic principle of collec-
tive punishment of civilian populations for individual or small-group acts of
resistance against it. Tactics used involved the closure of the entire territory
of the south or severely restricting access to it, a policy that served to choke
off the economy of the south and created unbearable hardships. These col-
lectively shared hardships, in turn, far from persuading the villagers and
townspeople that they should blame for their suffering those individuals
among them who resisted the occupation, only persuaded them of the oppo-
site. They only saw that the occupation itself had imposed unnecessary suf-
fering on them. They usually had no use for the extra rationalizing step that
the authorities demanded of them.
It is not, therefore, simply noteworthy but astonishing that the Israeli
occupation policies in the Palestinian occupied territories today simply
repeat, almost to the letter, the same techniques of control that so patently
failed in Lebanon. In fact, the replacement of Amal by Hizbullah in south
Lebanon during the period of Israeli occupation seems to parallel closely the
continuing rise of Hamas and its possible replacement of the Palestinian
Authority in the West Bank and Gaza. A radical movement could only be
nourished by the dogma of its opponent.
In both cases, the more radical movement rises steadily and with deadly
certainty out of the festering environment, where political immobility is
virtually guaranteed by a twin dynamic: a dogmatic but impractical priority
placed on total security on the part of an oppressive occupation authority,
an authority with a substantial number of opponents and thus no realis-
tic prospect of achieving total security. The policies produced by this logic
only guarantee constant confrontation, and in due time help only in under-
846 Mohammed A. Bamyeh

mining the virtue of relative moderation as a guiding principle of resistance.

The more established forces of ‘‘moderation,’’ whether it is the secular Pal-
estinian authority or secular Amal in Lebanon, find themselves compelled
to embrace the radicalism of the underground movements, if only for cyni-
cal reasons and simply to safeguard their shrinking base of support. As the
occupation habitually retaliates against all for an infraction by anyone, with
time it becomes evident for all classes of the subjugated population that
relative moderation and ‘‘legal’’ or diplomatic politics are ineffective in pro-
ducing results quick or substantial enough to remedy their accumulated
loss of economic and psychological resources and potentials.
We have here an authority that so obviously fails to learn from its mis-
takes, which suggests that we are dealing with dogma, in the sense of a basic
worldview, which makes learning impossible to the extent that the world-
view is basic to self-understanding. Dogma here indicates a commitment
to a certain practice or worldview in the face of the fact that the practice or
worldview manifestly replicates the same type of enemies every time they
are exercised. Dogma here indicates a habitual avoidance of practical neces-
sity, in this case the need for reflective thought on failed principles, due to the
assumption that such reflection would threaten survival. If, for example, the
principle asserts that survival could be assured only through ‘‘total security,’’
a dogmatic outlook discourages reflection on the demonstrated fact that
total security has never been possible, especially given the magnitude of the
grievances in question.
A pragmatic interpretation, in contrast to the dogmatic, would consider
both the principle and its record. Out of that reflection it would devise a
new practical accommodation: if ‘‘zero tolerance’’ has proven to do more
harm than good, then adopt a principle that accepts a more manageable
level of insecurity. This kind of pragmatism, it should be clear, has as its
prerequisite a rejection of dynamo principles. Dogma, by contrast, is fed
by the assumption that one cannot afford to lose a single battle or allow the
slightest infraction. But in this way the authority becomes consumed with
tiny calculations and quickly loses strategic or holistic perspective. And as
a result, it eventually loses the entire war. Indeed, such was the outcome of
the war in south Lebanon.
Dogmatic thought can also be seen in one’s continuing commitment to
one’s already failed modeling of the behavior or intellect of the adversary.
For example, the obvious fallacy of the assumption that collective punish-
 Listening to the Inaudible 847

ment would be understood by its victims as the fault of those who resist
occupation has not prevented it from continuing to be a central technique
of control everywhere there continues to be an Israeli occupation.
In Lebanon, this dynamic is clear. In  the highest religious authority
in Lebanon, Mehdi Shamseddin, responding to the outrage at ‘Ashura, still
called for no more than ‘‘civil disobedience’’ against the Israeli occupation.
By , with most of the civilian population in the south having been duly
and repeatedly punished, the rising cleric Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah defected
from the more tame Amal to Hizbullah and called for a jihad against the
same occupation. If these two slogans could be drawn on a time scale, it
would closely coincide with the increasing radicalization of the resistance
over the same period. But more importantly, it would show how a phenome-
non like Hizbullah, had been marginal for a number of years, became not
only the voice of the oppressed but, perhaps more spectacularly, the voice
of a radicalized established elite.
The lesson of this history seems clear: a dogmatic concept of security
only undermines security. The vicious circle could be escaped only if dog-
matic thought is escaped. And this, in turn, is possible only when less than
total security is no longer associated with threat to survival. The fact that the
experience of the Holocaust may be readily mentioned as a justification for
a paranoid approach to security should no longer be persuasive. Not only
do we have a horrible historical record to show the failure of such a con-
ception of security, we also have the obvious fact that the Palestinians are
continuing to suffer from an injustice of a historical proportion; and it is
only natural that such a state of affairs will beget acts of resistance, whether
individual or authorized by some group or another. There is nothing more
natural than resistance to injustice, and especially the kind of injustice that
offers absolutely no hope of redress.
Even worse, the concept of security is bound to fail in this case due to
its partiality. That is, if it is assumed that only one side is entitled to secu-
rity, or that one side is more entitled to security than the other side, it is
predictable that the result will be practices that, while increasing the secu-
rity of the more powerful side will by their nature decrease the security of
the weaker side. Currently, the Palestinians have no security, and yet the
issue of security is still discussed as if it concerned only the Israelis. Entitle-
ment to security is not considered to be subject to equal distribution, which
presents us, under conditions of struggle, with a feeling of no security by
848 Mohammed A. Bamyeh

any party. Thus at a great cost to themselves, the Palestinians transposed a

hint of their own permanent insecurity into the heart of their enemy. It is
impossible to see a way out of this deadly embrace, so long as the concept of
security is approached as a dogmatic principle, so long as it is seen to apply
more to one party than to the other, and, above all, so long as it precedes
rather than flows from the concept of justice.
The final question is, What sort of process could overcome the multi-
tude of difficulties and perspectivist problems enumerated in this essay?
Combining realism and optimism requires an educated process of peace
into which nondiplomatic- and nonstate-oriented interests are involved;
requires a truth and reconciliation approach as a central moving vehicle, as
central as the more tangible questions of borders, settlements, and so on;
and requires a realistic reappraisal of the concept of security. The only pos-
sible process of peace we could have now is a ‘‘hard’’ rather than the ‘‘soft’’
process attempted so far. With one-sided security as its priority, the process
we have now is a soft one. A soft process can be easily hijacked, derailed, or
aborted outright by any dissent, even by minor players. Such a process could
be easily shot down by any act of sabotage, any act against security, even one
without much popular or institutional support. The more frequently the
process fails under such assaults—natural and to be expected as they should
be given the historical nature of this struggle—the more numerous become
the ranks of those who had simply tolerated the process but suspected its
potential.
Attempting to listen to the substance of that which is inaudible in the
conflict has rarely been more justifiable. Seemingly theoretical or ‘‘utopian’’
enterprises gain great currency, after all, not so much due to the logical
strength of their argument as to the collapse of so-called realism, its failure
to do anything other than contribute to more suffering and greater body
count. What I am suggesting is that we cannot just learn from this terrible
history, which is by no means over. We can also transcend it if we are truly
attuned to the logic of our times. Not so much the theoretical validity of
the argument as the extent of the contemporary horror justifies bypassing
the nation-state into the global-zone model immediately. The same justifies
apprehending with full realism, with no mythology and no sentimentalism,
how the great potential of a magnificent region like the Middle East is squan-
dered in petty squabbles of fanatics. The argument that religious freedom
ought to be respected, after all, should never have been allowed to morph
 Listening to the Inaudible 849

into the insidious posture in which religious myth determines the image of
politics. Jerusalem must be saved from its saviors, it must be returned to its
status as a normal city and no more. A city of that nature, after all, should
never be entrusted to the pitiless characters who are currently in charge
of it, or to the apocalyptic souls who manipulate its image in the hope of
bringing about the end of the world.
Above all, Palestine may very well provide, because of its great tragedy,
the great laboratory for the vision of not merely ‘‘political’’ but human eman-
cipation, borne out of a common narrative, of truth and reconciliation. The
requirements and outlines for this process, difficult as they may seem, are
not in the final analysis any more painful to discern than the unceasingly
ascending mountains of death all around us. Those we must all be able to
see by now, even at this great distance. A hard process is facilitated by this
genuine but simple agreement that we all see this multitudinous death. For
we do see death, all of it, and not simply the body count or the otherwise
empirical death, but the death of all: the death of the those already dead as
well as the death of the living. The former are no longer in our sight. It is the
putrefaction of the latter that we still endure, in plain sight of civilization.

Notes
 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature
(Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, ).
 Ammiel Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, ).
 Lawrence Davidson, America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to
Israeli Statehood (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, ).
 See Lama Abu-Odeh, ‘‘The Case for Binationalism,’’ The Boston Review (December -
January ); Edward Said, ‘‘The One-State Solution,’’ New York Times Magazine, Janu-
ary , , –.
 Avishai Margalit, ‘‘The Suicide Bombers,’’ New York Review of Books, January , ,
–.
 Edward Said, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (New York: Columbia University Press,
 []).