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Figures du
Palestinien, identité des origines, identité de devenir
(Figures of the Palestinian: Identity of Origins and Identity
to Come), Elias Sanbar, Paris: Gallimard
Early in his newly
published essay, Figures du Palestinien, identité des origines,
identité de devenir, Elias Sanbar explains that though he has
long wanted to produce a book on Palestinian history and
identity he has, up to now, been frustrated in his search for
an appropriate form for the book to take. Even before deciding
on the form and possible content of the book there was the
question of what to call it, only resolved by chance
encounters with a film by Joseph Losey and a painting by
Francis Bacon, both entitled Figure(s) in a Landscape and both
asserting a relationship between individuals and the
landscapes containing them.
Sanbar's "figures" are those of Palestinians at three
historical moments and set against three different landscapes:
as part of the Ottoman empire until 1918, under the British
mandate until 1948, and, following the creation of the state
of Israel, as refugees, obliged to force themselves on world
attention if historical Palestine, and with it Palestinian
identity, were not to be forgotten. Palestinian identity,
Sanbar suggests, is a matter of tracing Palestinians through
these formative moments of their history, in so doing
short-circuiting a debate on historical precedence -- who was
in Palestine first -- the terms of which can have nothing to
do either with righting present injustices or with
illuminating Palestinian or Israeli identities.
The author or editor of a good half dozen books on aspects of
Palestine, most recently a collection of photographs and
images of Palestine and Palestinians from 1839 to the present,
Sanbar is also founder and editor of the French-language Revue
des études palestiniennes, perhaps the pre-eminent forum for
discussion of all aspects of Palestinian history and society.
His 2001 memoir, Le Bien des absents (Absentees' Property),
presented key episodes from his autobiography, from his
family's fleeing Palestine in 1948 when Sanbar was only 15
months old, to a life spent in exile but one closely involved
with the Palestinian cause. This background gives the present
book its authority, as Sanbar's most elaborate statement on
Palestinian history and identity to date, and it will find a
wide and appreciative audience.
The first part, or "figure", of the book, "People of the Holy
Land," describes nineteenth-century Palestine, when the area
was part of the Ottoman empire. Like other Ottoman-controlled
areas, Palestine was accorded a deal of local autonomy, at
least until reform efforts, known as the tanzimat, attempted
to assert central Ottoman control in the second half of the
century. Also like other areas controlled by the Ottoman
state, Palestine was the object of intrigue by the European
powers, chiefly Britain, France and Russia, feeding off
Ottoman weakness and eager for influence at each other's
expense, this jostling for influence bearing a religious
inflection that was absent, for example, in Anglo-French
rivalry for control of Egypt.
Indeed, it was the religious significance of Palestine for the
European powers, when combined with Ottoman weakness, that
determined the country's future. Sanbar shows how the European
habit of seeing in Palestine a land ripe for "redemption,"
ignoring its actual inhabitants, paved the way for later
colonial control and for a Zionist project of return to a
"land without people." While the nineteenth-century European
search for biblical origins in the Arab regions of the Ottoman
empire was not confined to Palestine, contributing, for
example, to archaeological ventures in what is now Iraq, in
Palestine the search was a particularly intense one and
carried with it the habit of seeing the Palestinian population
as a vestige of Ottoman administration ready to be replaced by
a resurrected Israel.
As early as 1838, British protestant writers were promoting
the idea that this part of the Ottoman empire should be awoken
from its "oriental slumbers" through British intervention and
sponsorship of a proto-Zionist cause of constructing a Jewish
state in Palestine. However, nineteenth-century Palestine was
far from slumbering, and Sanbar reveals the extent of the
changes that transformed Palestinian society in the course of
the century. From being a predominantly rural society
organized around local centres where families of local
notables held sway, Palestine by the end of the century was
integrated into the world economy, notably through the
thriving ports of Jaffa and Haifa, and it had gained a
conception of itself as an Arab society distinct from the
empire of which it was a part.
This development of Palestinian national consciousness is a
theme of the book's second section, "Arabs of Palestine,"
which examines Palestinian history from the end of Ottoman
rule until the close of the British mandate and the creation
of the state of Israel in 1948. Betrayed by the British at the
beginning of the period, when the former Arab provinces of the
defeated Ottoman empire were carved up and awarded as mandates
to the European powers, the Palestinians were then awarded a
double whammy: not only were they now to live under formal
European control, negating efforts towards self-
determination, but they were also to live in a sense on
borrowed time, one nation having, in Arthur Koestler's words,
"solemnly promised the territory of another to a third."
Sanbar, quoting Koestler's observation, goes on to examine the
famous 1917 "Balfour Declaration," in which this promise was
made. Taking the form of a letter from the then British
foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, to Lord Rothschild of the
Zionist Federation, it said that the British government would
"view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national
home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours
to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly
understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the
civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities
in Palestine."
As Sanbar points out, this text does not promise the
establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, only of a
"national home," and it sees the establishment of this home as
being carried out under British administration and control.
There is a guarantee of the rights of "non-Jewish communities
in Palestine," though this pointedly avoids speaking of a
Palestinian nation, as Koestler does. Nevertheless, British
colonial control of Palestine after 1918 and the British
promise contained in the Balfour Declaration meant that the
Palestinians were obliged to struggle not only for
self-determination and against colonial control, but also
against a threat of another kind specific to their situation
and not shared by neighbouring Arab countries also fighting
for independence.
Sanbar's third "figure" is the "Invisible Palestinian, the
Absentee," his text exploring the Palestinian condition after
1948 and recalling meditations on visibility and absence
already broached in his memoir Le Bien des absents. For Sanbar,
the challenge after 1948 was one of fighting loss through a
heightened effort of memory and through an effort to make
Palestine continuously visible, not least to Palestinians
themselves. Living in exile, Palestinian writers produced
inventories of what had been lost, one of the earliest of
which, Mustapha Mourad al-Dabbagh's ten- volume Biladuna
Filastina (Our Country Palestine), was "the reconstitution
down to the smallest detail of a swallowed-up society."
Commenting on the work of Palestinian writers, both inside and
outside of Israel, including Mahmoud Darwish, Fadwa Tuquan,
Ghassan Kanafani and Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Sanbar notes that
their role has been in large part to ensure the "existential
re-emergence of the Palestinian people." In addition, the fact
that such figures, among the best known of all Arab writers,
also played a key role in the modernisation of Arab
intellectual life in general and not just in keeping alive the
link between Palestinian past and present, links them to the
role the Palestinians have long played in suggesting new
horizons for politics and society in the Arab world as a whole
and not just in Palestine.
Recalling the various groups that have made up the Palestine
Liberation Organisation and contributed to Palestinian
intellectual and political life, Sanbar writes that the
Palestinians have played the part of an "Arab avant- garde,"
their experiments in original forms of political organisation,
forced by the circumstances in which they have found
themselves, have led to the development of a particularly
active civil society as well as a commitment to
root-and-branch change.
"Anyone who lived through these years will remember the ardour
with which the Palestinians threw themselves into any action
aimed at overthrowing the established order," Sanbar writes,
"as well as their passion for new kinds of social organisation
in the Arab world," sometimes leading to tensions between the
Arab regimes and the Palestinians. While the Palestinian cause
had "an immense capacity for popular moblisation" throughout
the Arab region, as often as not the "Arab governments were
for the Palestinian cause but against the Palestinians,"
Sanbar comments.
Summarizing his narrative at the end of the Figures du
Palestinien, Sanbar writes that the Palestinians have been
unique in the Arab world, playing a special role for it. This
special role, bound up with Palestinian history and what this
has contributed to Palestinian identities, Sanbar sees as
continuing in the future, as a promise of identities to come.
"In 1917, when the region was divided into countries
controlled by France and Britain, Palestinian territory was
promised as a national Jewish homeland. In 1948, when the
colonised Arab countries were becoming independent and
beginning their transformation into nation- states, Palestine
disappeared from the map. The Palestinians have therefore
always been in the way, never in tune with what is going on
whatever they may do, whether avoiding embarrassment to their
host countries, or working to overturn the established order
in the countries that have welcomed them.
"If uncertain relations with Arab governments have dominated
recent Palestinian experience, this has not been the same for
the relationship between the Palestinians and the peoples of
these same governments. To confuse the two would be to forget
the extraordinary capacity that Palestine has to mobilise
support, as well as to fail to take note of people's
solidarity with the Palestinians, seeing in them more than
victims needing support, but rather a people carrying the hope
of change in their own lives."
By David Tresilian
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