Fawaz Turki - Violence and Resistance in the Struggle for Palestine (1975)

Speaker 1: The program tonight will consist first of Fawaz Turki, whom I will introduce later on. This is the official Miller Lecture component of the evening's program. Fawaz Turki is known to some of you. He was born in Haifa. in 1940 and as a boy of eight he left in the Exodus and grew up in Beirut in Lebanon. He spent several years there in a refugee camp and attended high school there. He later went to university in England and also in Australia. He traveled extensively He was telling me of a few places he'd been to before I came here. And until quite recently, he was living in Paris, in France, where he taught at the University of Sorbonne. He's the author, in 1972, of the book, The Disinherited Journal of a Palestinian Exile. This was described by the Washington Post as a brilliant book that restores a dimension of humanity to the impassioned abstraction that the Middle East has become. He's lectured widely here. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, Ramparts, Journal of Palestine Studies. Newsweek has printed a profile of him, and the French newspaper Le Monde has given attention to his role in Palestinian politics and literature. Tonight, well, I have two titles for his talk here tonight, so I'm going to tell you both of them, and he will have to tell you which one he is going to give. Perhaps they're not so different. One is violence and resistance in the struggle for Palestine. The other one is resistance and terrorism in the Middle East. Mr. Tawas Toki.

Fawaz Turki: Thank you. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for being here. And thank you for wanting to have the patience to listen to yet another lecture on the struggle for Palestine. It does require patience, you know, to understand the nature of conflict, the nature of struggle in Palestine. Because for many years, many years now, the conflict in Palestine has acquired such complexity, such a whole body of mythology, all of its own, particularly in North America, that the basic facts about this conflict have been obscured that indeed we have lost sight of who was the injured party in the dispute who was the victim who was the victimizer who was the occupier and who was the occupied who was the settler in palestine who was the native son and daughter and who indeed was the slave and who was the master tonight What I wish to address myself to in this talk is to an issue that bristles with all sorts of political traps, namely the question of violence in Palestine, violence and resistance. And I wish to address myself to the theoretical implications of violence in Palestine, not just for the people of Palestine, but indeed by implication for probably all peoples in the third world. who are struggling for self-determination, for dignity, and for their national aspirations. I'd like to alert you initially, I'd like to alert you to the fact that I, as a Palestinian, feel very qualified to talk about violence. You see, I've suffered violence virtually every day of my life, not just physical violence, but the more devastating form, psychological violence, that form of violence that terrorizes, that negates, that dehumanizes the very soul of an individual. I would like to alert you further to the fact that we as a people, as a nation in exile, have suffered violence virtually continually over the last 26 years. Physical violence, psychological violence inflicted on us, inflicted on us till we have evolved, till we have grown up with it, like we have grown up with our skin, like we have grown up with our name. Therefore, I feel what I'm talking about is, in a sense, a direct extension of my very reality as a Palestinian, a direct extension of our reality as a people, as a nation in exile. Forgive me if I use the first person singular. I cannot detach myself from the Palestinian problem, from the question of violence and resistance in Palestine and talk about it as if I were detached from it, as if I were an objective observer. I have been part of that process. I have been part of that accumulated set of experiences that have been an integral part of the struggle for Palestine for the last 26 years. You see, what I'm talking about, what I wish to talk to you about this evening is very difficult. You see, the world of non-being inhabited by the oppressed, the world of the ghetto the world of the refugee camp, the world of the occupied, the world of the occupied in the West Bank in Gaza, the world of the exile, the world of the Afro-American, the world of the Vietnamese peasant and his hamlet. It's an encapsulated little world that is very difficult to transmute to others whose idiom, whose metaphor, and the quality of whose force, it really stems from the isolation from it. It stems from the fact that they stand with their back to this world, unable to understand its essence, to understand the motivating force the motivating drives of the people inside it, inside this world of devastation, this world of non-being. The rage, the anger, the violence, the struggle for liberation and the dignity of the human soul that the oppressed wage from within the confines of this encapsulated world of non-being is very difficult to explain to others. To others, that is, whose psychic tension was never ravaged by degradation, was never, perhaps I should say allegorically, metaphorically, by the whip of the slave master. I'll bring to you, therefore, a glimpse of the third world, or that part of it that we call Palestine. I'll bring to you something about the essence of that violence in Palestine, as I have lived it, as we have lived it, as it has been practiced upon us, as we have suffered it. For the last six or seven years, when Palestinians took to armed struggle again, to armed violence, a great many people in North America have come to adopt a view, fostered, perhaps, In the bourgeois press, in the New York Times, the Washington Post, that violence in Palestine is a new phenomenon practiced almost exclusively by Palestinians. Whereas, in fact, as I said earlier on, violence in all its manifestations, institutional violence, terroristic violence, adventurous violence, has been an integral part of the struggle for Palestine by both people for the last, at least, 60 years. And another erroneous view held here, specifically in North America, is that resistance by Palestinians is a new phenomena that emerged also over the last six or seven years in the vacuum, that is, that occurred in the Arab world following the 1967 war. Whereas, in fact, the palestinian national movement and the palestinian resistance to zionism and zionist irredentism and oppression i have a long tradition behind them that stretches as far back inside palestine as 1917. in other words what i'm saying is the palestinian national movement has not emerged but rather re-emerged in 1967 after two decades of crisis it is just that people or peoples in the west forgot between 1948 and 1967 about the existence of a people called the Palestinian people whom they came to identify as the, alternately, the Arab refugees or the refugees or whatever You see, violence and resistance in Palestine have roots, have an origin in the experiences of the Palestinian people Beginning, if you wish, with their confrontation in 1917 with the absurd Balfour Declaration issued by the British in the heyday of their colonial hegemony in Palestine A declaration issued in the tradition of colonial overlordship making decisions over the heads, over the pleas of a colonized people This particular declaration in 1917, in fact, may be taken as an event as a challenge, as a condition marking the day when violence in all its forms became part of the struggle for Palestine, the struggle of two peoples, two movements, two opposing dialectics in fierce confrontation for control of this country, this intangible reality, if you wish, that we have come to call Palestine. On the one hand, we had the Palestinian people faced by threat to their independence in their own country. and the influx of an alien people that threatened to overtake their country and turn their majority into minority. And on the other, we had a movement, Zionism, whose principles, as perceived by the Palestinian people, were derived from the contempt that Europeans had in those days for third world peoples, and which, a movement which, in the words of one of its founders, Fyodor Herzl, claimed, we shall there form, in Palestine, we shall there form a rampart of Europe against Asia. an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism. Inactively, of course, inactively and predictively, this was a formula guaranteed to create conditions for challenge and response, for violence and resistance, and the clash of right and wrong, to create, in other words, the classical dichotomy between oppressor and oppressed. I don't wish to tabulate to you in detail or even briefly The campaign of violence, of terror and destruction that this movement, the Zionist movement, has conducted over the years to attain its ends, to have its day. to culminate in 1948 in the creation of the Israeli entity in Palestine at the cost of the Palestinian people. I don't wish to do that, but what I do wish to do is to tabulate to you a pattern of this violence, of this terror, of this destruction, in order that we may understand the historical and political roots of Palestinian violence as we have come to understand it today. You see, there's a delicate, there's always a delicate correlation, a delicate nexus that binds the past to the present. There's a delicate correlation between the political and the existential. There's a delicate correlation between what is happening now about Palestinians and what happened before to Palestinians, against Palestinians, in Palestine. This campaign, incidentally, is an ongoing campaign, and it has had a method to its crushing, dehumanizing madness. Simply, this was at the time, this is still now. to create an Israel homogenously Jewish. And in the words, again, of one of its leaders, Menachem Begin, head of the, in those days, neo-fascist Orgun gang, and now head of the opposition in Israel, an Israel clean of Arabs. And when that was achieved, and Israel not threatened by Arabs. In 1922, the Israelis committed, or rather, the Sunnis committed an act of violence. It had a purpose. It had a method to its crushing, dehumanizing madness. This was specifically to frighten both peoples, the Palestinian people and the Jewish people in Palestine, to create a dichotomy, a division between them, to prevent an alliance that may have been created between them as two oppressed, indeed, two oppressed people. In 1922, The Zionist movement, site one example, was responsible for the massacre of Khan Yunus, where 73 people were killed in an Arab marketplace. Bombs were thrown in a very crowded marketplace, which resulted in the death of 73 people. In 1948, this method or this pattern of violence terror of destruction manifested itself again in the massacre of Deir Yassin. The massacre of Deir Yassin was specifically done to frighten the Palestinian people into fleeing or escaping Palestine. On the night of April 8, 1948, the Ogun gang attacked the rural community of Deir Yassin and massacred 254 men, women, and children, which resulted on the path of the Palestinian villagers, farmers, and urban dwellers to flee Palestine and to seek refuge in the surrounding countries. In 1953, on the night of October 14th and 15th, the Israeli army, or unit of the Israeli army, attacked the village of Kivya. on the Jordanian side of the border and massacred 43 Palestinian villagers and razed the whole village to the ground. This was incidentally also an act of violence with a method to its madness. It was simply to terrorize the people and to commit an act of sheer revenge. For three nights before that, a Palestinian villager from that village had crossed into the border, the Israeli border, to pick the fruit of his trees and as he was caught he killed two Israeli men and an Israeli woman he was killed in the act 1956 when the Israelis in their alliance with the imperialist powers in France and England attacked Egypt and they occupied the Gaza Strip in 1956 in August the Israelis had a curfew in the town of Kafir Qasim many of the villagers were not aware of that curfew A unit of the Israeli army found these villagers on the way back home, unaware, ignorant of the curfew or the time of the curfew. 56 of these villagers, walking away from the fields, returning home, were massacred. All these, incidentally, are already in the history books. And all these acts of murder, acts of violence, have had a method, have had a pattern, have had a political cause in the thinking of the Israeli government and the Zionist movement Now, as we look at Palestine at the moment, as we look at the Palestinian people, as we look at the ongoing struggle for Palestine, there's always a danger for the observer. There's always a danger that any observer of the scene in Palestine would be carried away by the deceptive plausibility of the status quo. See, Israel is a state. It has a government. It has a territorial and institutional integrity, legitimized by the recognition accorded it by Western governments. Few realize, few begin or stop to begin to question the fact that this territorial and institutional integrity came about at the cost of the very negation of the territorial and institutional integrity of the Palestinian people. Observers of the scene in Palestine are indeed deceived by the status quo to the point that where they see the status quo as already being established in South Africa, in Israel, in Rhodesia. And to go back to the status quo ante, of course, would be destabilizing, overthrowing, or restructuring the status quo. And that, of course, is intolerable. And this is behind the notion that the Palestinian people find it intolerable to accept the idea of the so-called territorial and institutional integrity of the State of Israel. Because that, by implication, means the territorial and institutional negation of the Palestinians. If the Israelis or the Zionists became a state, it was only because the Palestinians became stateless. If the Jewish immigrants into Palestine ceased to be refugees in the 40s and 30s, it's because the Palestinian people became refugees in the 40s and 60s. But you know, what is violence? Having given this background, historical background, very brief, what is in fact violence as practiced by regimes such as Israel, such as South Africa, such as Rhodesia? Very simply, the very system upon which these states is founded, are founded rather, is a system of oppression. The very system itself is a system of negation and oppression. See, when you deny a people the right to return to his country, you are committing an act of violence. When you have a system that allows the occupation of a people by another, that is an act of violence. When you send B-52s and Phantoms to raze to the ground villages and to terrorize and kill refugees in refugee camps, that is an act of violence in a quintessential form. When you degrade, when you negate, When you occupy, when you terrorize, when you incarcerate a people that is smaller than you, that is an act of violence. When the very system upon which a state is built is a system that projects its very foundation in violence, physical or psychological, we are talking about violence. in its very quintessential, sheer, naked form. But you see, to the Palestinians, over the last 26 years, violence has been inflicted upon them in a variety of forms. Perhaps the most devastating has been both the physical one, in the form of occupation and its terrors, and the psychological one, in the form of alienation and statelessness. Let me tell you something very briefly about occupation and what it feels like to be an occupied individual and collectively to be an occupied people. The occupation of a people by another is decidedly the most degrading manifestations of the human soul. It is one of the most degrading affronts to the dignity of the human soul. If you walk in the streets of Jerusalem and you sit in your coffee shops and you go to your church or to your mosque, if you go to your office or to your shop and you see around you tanks driven by foreign soldiers and you see around you foreign soldiers with their guns poking you demanding to see your identity card and if you as an occupied person get hauled and taken away to stand trial for an offense in the eyes of the occupier and to be tried by an alien person by an occupier you are being inflicted with doses of suffering and pain with doses of violence, with a challenge to which as a human being, you cannot but respond. When you see the very ancient streets of Jerusalem and Nablus, when you see your very culture your music, your poetry, your own people, negated and occupied, the pressures on you are pressures that demand that you respond. And your response, a response stemming from fathomless anger, from rage, is violence. Psychological violence inflicted upon Palestinians not under occupation, Palestinians individually, existentially, Palestinians as a people in exile, living in a refugee camp and being told, That someone from Russia, simply because he happens to be of the Jewish faith, has more right to emigrate to and settle in Haifa than you do is a form of violence. While you have to continue living in a refugee camp, waiting for 26 years in a state of quiescence for the conscience of the world, you become aware of the degradation inflicted upon you is a form of violence. See, no one can deny, no one can deny at this moment not even fanatic supporters of Zionist apartheid in Palestine, that the Palestinians are the injured party in this dispute, that they are the victims. But now let us assume, let us assume for the moment that the Israelis have not inflicted any act of violence against the Palestinian people. Let us assume that Israel before and after its creation did not practice any violence in any form. Let us assume it does not occupy Palestinian land. Let us assume it does not occupy one and a half million Palestinians. Let us assume that it does not napalm refugee camps. Let us assume that it does not practice torture against 14,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. Let us assume that it does not practice Preventive detention, let us assume that it does not prevent Palestinians from returning to their homes, villages and towns. Let us assume all that and more. I submit to you that the sheer existence of Israel as a state, or South Africa or Rhodesia as a state, is itself a sheer act of violence. The sheer existence of the institutions and the very system that gave birth and that perpetuates the state of Israel is in itself an act of violence. You see, a state, by definition, wields power. In this case, the power to enact laws and institutions. The power, for example, to implement the law of return The law of return meaning that someone from Holland can go and live in Haifa and someone who was born in Haifa whose traditions and ethos and metaphor and culture were born there cannot go there The power to implement the preventive detention law The power to bar Palestinians from returning home It possesses as a state sheer power. In that sense, the sheer exercise of power alone in that particular instant becomes institutional violence in its most relentless and most ruthless manifestations. Such is the case in South Africa with institutional apartheid, in Rhodesia with institutional racism, and in Israel, of course, with institutional settler colonialism. The sheer existence of the system, I submit to you, itself, without the conjunct of physical terror or violence, is an act of terror and violence. The sheer presence, the sheer tone, and the sheer spell of the power of the state is an act of violence. See, the master, the slave master, does not have to whip his slave daily in order for us to discern the presence of violence. For the sheer institution of slavery, benign though it may be on a plantation, is what violence is all about. And in the case that we're examining at this moment, Israeli military occupation, benign though it may be, as some people like to claim, is a degradation, is a challenge, is an indignity, is a sheer act of violence. Indeed, it's an affront to the liberal and humanist traditions of Judaism. It's an affront, a mendacity, a crime. for a people to call itself free while it enslaves another. Now, the violence that stems from passive-aggressive institutions or systems or power of the state, how different is that form of violence? How less undignified is it than the violence adopted, if you wish, macrocosmically by a common criminal or a street mugger? For Israel, for example, to perpetuate its power over an occupied people, and the people in exile, and exact obedience from it. Obedience to its diktats is no different, if you wish, from a street mugger who holds me up and robs me with the help of a knife or a gun. No different at all. Though in this particular instance, no violence may have been inflicted. In either case, in either case, power was used to subdue, to rob, to enslave, to negate, to degrade. So even for those, even to those who believe that Israel is a benign state, a benign occupier, a benign slave master, indeed a state whose existence is mandatory. To those people, I say contemplate the system and what it does, even without the conjunct of violence, physical violence. what it does to the very soul of a whole people upon whose negation the state of Israel itself was created in 1948. Now, one cannot talk about violence without talking about it existentially. Now, I do not subscribe to a great deal of what Frantz Fanon had to say in his Le Dernier de la Terre, but I would like to give you the existential concept of the practice of violence in Palestine. Existentially, you see, the use of violence an individual against his oppressor against this power against the power of the state that oppresses him it carries connotations that transcend traditions of political or philosophical thought and reach in a way in a sense into the psychology of helplessness and the and the inward movement of the of the soul you know as um as alexey the talkville reminds us in his commentary on the on the French Revolution, and I quote, he said, patiently endured so long as it seemed beyond redress, a grievance comes to appear intolerable once the possibility of removing it crosses an oppressed person's mind. In other words, once the notion of liberation is grasped by an oppressed individual, a slave, a refugee, an occupied individual, once that notion enters his consciousness or her consciousness, somehow catches flame and there's no going back. Hence, to the individual, I say to you, to the individual in his headlong clash with occupation, occupation functionaries or occupation soldiers or occupation judges or colonial overlords or masters blocking or impeding his road to liberation and self-determination anything that this individual, this militant can muster from beer bottles and Molotov cocktails to Kalashnikovs and rockets becomes an extension, a justified extension of his inaptible, predictable reality and direction for liberation. In this context, what we're talking about is the violence of the oppressed against the violence of the power of oppression. In this context, what we're talking about is the violence of the slave that he uses to break his chains as opposed to the violence of the master to subdue him or her. In this context then, what I'm talking about is that the ascendancy, the ascendancy of violence over power, this kind of power, is the ascendancy of revolution over counter-revolution, the ascendancy of freedom over oppression. But you know, this is very ironic. The irony, indeed the tragedy, that has accompanied the struggle of Third World peoples' liberation is that the oppressed, always, always, the oppressed has to justify the construct of his violence. Why, why am I practicing violence, they say to me? You cutthroats, you murderers, you killers, why are you practicing violence against this system of oppression? Why don't you justify the construct of your violence? They come to the oppressed and they say, the oppressed has to justify that. He has to justify the dimensions of his vision. the ideological sincerity of his platform. The oppressor, you know, in this context, the oppressor does not. South Africa, Israel, Rhodesia are states. Their governments are essentially organized and institutional power, which in this case needs no justification. The justification for the use of power and violence of the state being inherent in their existence. as governments or states. But no one goes to these states and says, explain your violence. Explain the violence that stems from the very system upon which you're founded. Explain your power, in other words. Explain your institutional violence. The psychology of violence, you know, as felt by the oppressed, is not always projected. The suffering that oppressed people feel as a consequence of violence being inflicted upon them is not always reflected in counter-violence on their part. I'm not arguing that oppression results often in violence on the part of the oppressed. You know, the dehumanizing conditions of occupation, torture, homelessness may result, in some cases, may result in rage or anger, which may project itself in violence.

Speaker 1: In other cases, you know,

Fawaz Turki: Psychologically, in other cases, the practice of violence on an oppressed person may result, paradoxically enough, may result in submissiveness, docility, quiescence, which hides, that is to say, at moments when the oppressed person cannot respond to the magnitude, to the enormity of the oppression. When he finds or she finds that he or she cannot respond to oppression, he internalizes that oppression and projects us again, as it were, in submissiveness which hides the hatred, the anger, the violence that seethes Until that moment, until that juncture in his or her evolutionary continuum on that moment that the Tocqueville told us about on that moment when the vision, the glimpse of the possibility of removing oppression crosses his or her mind, and then the inner movement to the soul, the consciousness, are set aflame. You know, to the Palestinians who were docile, who were quiescent, who were submissive, and who have, in fact, in some cases, been cowed into submissiveness in places like Gaza and the West Bank under occupation. and who were, as we all know, very submissive between 1948 and 1967. In a sense, In a sense, to these Palestinians, to all Palestinians, nothing remained. In the end, in the final analysis, nothing remained but armed violence. And violence remained the only means to ensure a hearing, a hearing for the voice of moderation, the voice of pain and suffering. Does that sound like a paradox, the use of violence to ensure a hearing to the voice of moderation? It is a paradox. The Palestinians, you know, Palestine has always been a land pregnant with paradoxes, a land to which alien peoples and movements have come to implant their paradoxes. The Crusaders came there, arming themselves with dialectical images of right and wrong, arming themselves with messianic slogans against the infidel, arming themselves with the word of God. The Ottomans came there, the British came there, the Zionists came there, arming themselves each with a sense of mission. And of course, the Europeans went to Africa, South Africa and Rhodesia. The Arabs indeed went to Spain, the French to Algeria, each with their mission culturelle as the French called it each isolating itself each refusing to be part of the people the land of the metaphor of the world of the world that they came to inhabit they went over there to occupy to terrorize ultimately we all know what has happened what is in fact happening now to these forces to these movements to these people historical determinism catches up with them historical determinism asserting as it has asserted in the past, its fierce and relentless exigencies, and the revolt of the indigenous population, the dignity of us all, to respond, to challenge, to defy, and ultimately to triumph over these forces. I seem to have spoken for a bit longer than I intended. But you know, I would like to say one final thing. What is left for the Palestinians when they've been robbed of everything? when they have nothing and nothing to lose. What is left for the Palestinians living in that encapsulated world of non-being I told you about earlier on, that they have inhabited for the last 26 years? What is left? Except, in a sense, to paraphrase Voltaire. Except, in a sense, to say, I can, therefore I will. Except, in a sense, come to realize that if the voice of moderation, the voice of dignity that we wish to have heard was rejected, then we have to resort to violence to ensure that the voice of moderation is indeed heard. There's a kind of universality. about the nature and the pattern of struggle, the pattern of violence used by oppressed peoples all over the world, be they in Harlem or Watts, in Vietnam, in Palestine, in South Africa, elsewhere. There's a pattern, there's a message, there's an eloquent statement being made by people in the Third World who share with you all in the West their humanity, their sense of humanity, who share with you their capacity to laugh, to cry. The eloquent statement is, we have a dignity, we have a soul, we have a sense of nationhood, we have a vision that cannot be denied us. And if you deny it to us, we shall fight against you, violently or non-violently. Thank you.