Muhammed Hallaj - on the Question of Palestine (1983)

Speaker 1: Dr. Hallaj is the former Vice President of Academic Affairs at Birzeit University and Director for the Council of Higher Education in the West Bank and Gaza. He is currently the Director of the Institute for Arab Affairs in Boston. Dr. Hallaj will speak on a Palestinian perspective of the Middle East today.

Muhammed Hallaj: Our subject tonight is the Palestine question. The Palestine question, to put it in the briefest possible way, refers to the destruction of Palestine as a country and as a society. Palestine ceased to exist. You can't find it on the maps of the world today. Palestine was destroyed as a country in the sense that the country was broken up. It was crushed to pieces. It was fragmented. One piece of it By far the largest piece became Israel, about 80% of the country. Another piece became the West Bank. Another piece became the Gaza Strip. And there were a few other little bits and pieces which became demilitarized zones and no man's lands. This is what became of a country. But Palestine itself disappeared and ceased to exist. Palestinian society was dismantled, dispersed and scattered. About 400 Palestinian towns and villages were razed, completely erased, as if they had never existed. The names of other towns and rivers and mountains and streets were changed from Arabic to Hebrew. Quite a bit of the country was demolished completely, and what was left was changed. Its identity was changed simply by changing names from Arabic to Hebrew. Even in 1952, the United Nations General Assembly decided to drop the Palestine question from its agenda, as if to crown this process of the destruction of Palestine. The UN decided to drop it and replaced it by another item called the Arab refugees. So the Palestinians became faceless refugees. In 1974 it was restored, by the way, and now it is back on the agenda of the United Nations as the question of Palestine. So the totality of all this is what I have in mind when I speak of the destruction of Palestine. So I mean it in its literal meaning. Physically, the physical presence of the people and the country was obliterated. Now, the destruction of Palestine did not happen as the unintended consequence of unforeseen events. It was planned to happen. When the Zionist movement decided that A Jew cannot live among Gentiles. He must have his own society. The society needed a place. Palestine was selected as the site for various reasons. One of the most important, of course, is what Theodor Herzl called in his diaries, the mighty legend, the myth of the promised land, the historic homeland of the Jewish people. It is more justifiable for the Zionist movement to seek to implant this future Jewish society in Palestine because after all the Jewish people have lived in Palestine before and therefore they are returning home. The problem with this of course is that Palestine was not an empty country. It was already the homeland of another people. And as one writer put it, this simple fact posed an ethical dilemma for the Zionist movement. How are you going to establish a society in a country that's already inhabited by another society. See, the Zionist movement came about to be, according in its own self-image, as the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. The problem is that national liberation movements come about to free native societies from alien domination. This is what a national liberation movement is. Zionism cannot possibly do that by establishing a state in Palestine. It has to destroy a native society rather than to free it. It has to displace it. It has to dominate it. And there was this internal clash in the Zionist mind, thinking of itself as a national liberation movement, the Jewish people, and knowing that to achieve its purpose, it has to destroy an indigenous community, which has done it no harm. So it was important to them that the existence of the Palestinian people be suppressed. The Zionist movement needed to appear to be without victims. One of the first methods used by the Zionist movement was simply to deny in the most crude way the existence of the Palestinian people. There just were no Palestinian people. It coined a slogan very early in its history, A land without a people for a people without a land. This was one of the earliest slogans of the Zionist movement. You see, nobody's going to get hurt this way. We are a people without a land. There's a land without people. You put the two together, everybody lives happily ever after. Now, it became more and more difficult for the Zionist movement to maintain this myth. So they came up with a new version of the same idea of Palestinian non-existence. That yes, there are people, but they really don't merit the status of a nation. And in that sense, they do not merit national rights. This is the important thing. They don't need a homeland. They don't need a country. They don't need independence. They don't need a state. Vladimir Jabotinsky, who is Mr. Begin's guru politically, described the Palestinian Arabs, he said the Arabs are a rabble dressed in gaudy, savage rags.

Speaker 1: Dismissed the Palestinian Arab population in this manner.

Muhammed Hallaj: One of the earliest and best-known theoreticians of the Zionist movement, Barakhoff, said of the Palestinian Arabs, he said they have no culture and none of the characteristics of nationhood. The Zionist movement proceeded through the organization of the massive Jewish immigration from abroad to create a dual society in Palestine, as one Israeli writer described it, to create a hermetically sealed Jewish society in the midst of a disintegrating Arab society. They created a dual society in the same country. Because you see, one thing that is important to remember is that Jewish immigration under Zionist auspices to Palestine was different than other migrations that were taking place at the same time throughout the world, including the migration of Jews to other countries, like to the United States. Jewish immigration to Palestine was politically motivated with the ultimate intent is to convert it demographically from an Arab to a Jewish country with the consequence of establishing a Jewish political society, a Jewish polity, the State of Israel. Total transformation of the country. So the Zionist movement did not organize the immigration of Jews to Palestine in order to live in a Palestinian melting pot. They created a hermetically sealed Jewish society that doesn't interact with the rest of its environment. That was one of the ways in which Palestine as a country and as a society began to disintegrate. So through all of these processes, Palestine became really ripe for destruction when the first Arab-Israeli war came about. The destruction of Palestine did not prove to be an irrevocable historic reality. In the 1950s and 60s, there was Palestinian rebirth. There are reasons for this. One is the continued attachment. of the Palestinian to Palestinian. See, Palestine is a pretty country. It's poor. It doesn't really have much in the way of resources. But it's a nice place. The Jews could not forget it after 2,000 years. Palestinians can't forget it after 10 years or 20 years. And so the attachment, as the Palestinians lived in the diaspora, they dreamed of Palestine, and they spoke of Palestine, and they never accepted the idea that they're really refugees. A Palestinian writer who ended up in Iraq in 1948, he said, we're not refugees because we're not seeking refuge. We were ex-police. We were expelled from our country. This is a general Palestinian feeling. Wherever they went, Palestine remained in their hearts. And they dreamed about it, and they sang to it. Palestinian poets. One Palestinian poet, speaking of Palestine, said, we're lovers who died from ecstasy, a dark-skinned man and his woman. And when the soldiers smash my head and make me sip the cold of prison to forget you, I love you even more. This became the literature, the poetry. Another reason that brought about Palestinian rebirth is the fact that as 1948 was not beginning of the road, it was not the end of the story either. The Palestinians soon discovered that oppression and deprivation is going on, is continuing. And of course the 1967 war, which resulted in the occupation of the rest of Palestine, which made Palestinian deprivation total, every single Palestinian became either in exile or under occupation, enhanced this feeling that we have to do something about it. This is not the end of the road. They're not letting us go. So this helped generate the feeling that Palestinians must become activists in the struggle for their own rights. Now the result... of all of these factors, was that in the 1960s and the 70s, there has begun what you might call a reversal of the previous process, which I call the destruction of Palestine, a process of reconstruction of Palestine. Palestine was being recreated. Palestinians all of a sudden remembered that they were Palestinians. They had forgotten in the 50s. So psychologically, there was a complete comeback for the Palestinian people. There's also been material rebirth. The Palestinian people have, through the achievements they have made in the field of education in particular, began to recreate their institutions. you begin to see the Palestine Red Crescent Society. This is the Palestinian Red Cross. The general union of Palestinian students, the general union of Palestinian teachers, the general union of Palestinian women, the general union of Palestinian workers. Psychologically and in terms of institution building, the Palestinian community was coming back to life as an entity, as a collectivity, as a society. The initial Palestinian reawakening was giving an impetus with the rise of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the PLO helped complete this process and advance it more than before. In many ways, the most important of which is that it reestablished Palestinian relations with the world community. The Palestine Liberation Organization has become truly a member of the community of nations. Last December, the United Nations General Assembly voted on a resolution supporting the creation of Palestinian state under PLO leadership. The vote was 128 to 2. This is the degree to which the international environment has become supportive of Palestinian rights. The two needless to say are Israel and Mrs. Jean Kirkpatrick. But the PLO became, in effect, the Palestinian people's window to the world. And in that sense, by giving the Palestinian people this international status, status as a member of the community of nations, it had advanced a great deal the process of Palestinian rebirth which has been going on. The response that Palestinian national aspirations were meeting in the world community, the increasing support and understanding, made the attainment of Palestinian rights appear more practical, more credible. It's no longer a dream. It has become possible. And so the Palestinian national movement felt, as a result of this, as I said, had to take itself more seriously, which meant it had to address more responsibly the question of what does it mean for the Palestinians to return or to liberate Palestine. So they came up with a proposition. They said, when we struggle for Palestinian rights, when we struggle for the reconstitution and rebirth of Palestine, what we are really struggling for is the reconstitution of Palestine as a democratic, secular republic. This is the aim of our struggle. This is what we talk about when we say we want to liberate Palestine. Because you see, before that, when Palestinians kept talking about liberation, the Israelis found it very easily to take that and present it to world public opinion as an intent to throw the Jews into the sea. Destroy Israel, throw the Jews into the sea. It was very easy to do. They took the rhetoric to the world and said, look what these people are saying. I mean, what does it mean to liberate Palestine? Because the Palestinians themselves didn't say. They just used the expression. But now, as I said, when they began to take themselves more seriously and the world began to be more responsive, they felt they had to put content into this concept. And the development of the concept of democratic secular state was the result of this Palestinian rethinking of the aims of Palestinian struggle. Now, what this concept meant. is that the Palestinians said there was a time when we could not understand what the Zionist movement was trying to do. We could not see any legitimacy on what they were trying to do. They were bringing us people from Russia and Poland and Hungary and Bulgaria and telling us that these people are returning home. They couldn't grasp the idea. It was totally illegitimate to them. What the Palestinians are beginning to say, beginning in the late 50s, is that all right, regardless of how it happened, we have to find a way to go from here. We no longer say that these people don't exist or have to go back to Poland where they came from. But on the other hand, we will never accept their idea that we should never come back either. So what do you do when there's a conflict of this kind? Is it irreconcilable? Is it a zero-sum game? And the Palestinian National Movement came with the proposition that no, it's not a zero-sum game. The conflict and the conflicting claims are reconcilable, and the way to reconcile them is to re-establish Palestine as the common homeland of both peoples. It would be a Jewish-Palestinian society, an Israeli-Palestinian society, where the rights of citizenships and the obligations of the citizen depend on the person rather than his religious or ethnic affiliations. So the Palestinians were sold on this idea, that this is the most sensible way to cope with these conflicting claims. If the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Palestinian struggle against Israelis is not to become truly a zero-sum game, where one only gains when the other loses, then this is the only sensible way to go about it. This is basically the rationale of the Palestinian concept of democratic secular state. The Palestinian National Movement in 1968, 69, 70, and 71 presented this to the world public opinion as the solution suggested by the Palestinians to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. I think this was tremendously significant development in the sense that for the first time of this struggle, the Palestinian people were willing to legitimize Jewish presence in Palestine, substantial Jewish presence in Palestine. to see it not as an invasion, which the Palestinians have always done, have always seen Jewish immigrants coming to Palestine as an invasionary force, a part of Europe coming into Asia. It's just like the French in Algeria or the English in South Africa, same kind of situation. For the first time in the history of the struggle, the Palestinian people, and I'm not talking about a few intellectuals advocating this idea and tossing it around, I'm talking about official policy of the Palestine Liberation Organization, legitimizing substantial Jewish presence in the country and advocating that the Arab-Israeli conflict be ended on the basis of sharing the land by both peoples as citizens with equal rights and obligations. Unfortunately, Israel would not even consider the idea. Not only would not accept, would not even consider. It was automatically dubbed as a euphemism for the destruction of Israel. So it was summarily dismissed as not worthy of consideration. The Palestinians, after a few years, decided that the idea was not becoming a viable idea. in the sense that not only Israelis were not interested in even discussing it. The world community as a whole was evolving its political position in the direction of the two-state solution in Palestine. Create a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza or on a part of Palestine to live alongside an Israeli state in another part of Palestine was becoming the gist of the international consensus. The Palestinians for these reasons began to be pulled in the same direction. In 1974, the Palestine National Council began to redefine the purposes of Palestinian struggle, the objectives of that struggle, as in its essence, the two-state solution. The Palestinian National Movement began to advocate and fight for and struggle for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in a part of Palestine, which in effect is acceptance of the partition of the country and the coexistence of two independent states, one Jewish, one Palestinian in Palestine. And this is in effect where the Palestinian political position is today. Now, Israel became very apprehensive about these developments I've been describing under the heading of Palestinian rebirth. Palestine was supposed to have been destroyed for good. It didn't turn out that way. It was coming back to life. Israel found these developments leading to the rebirth of Palestine as signifying a failure. Israeli attack on Lebanon this summer ended up ultimately as an attempt, in effect, to mangle the Palestinian community in Lebanon. Because the Palestinian community in Lebanon was not just the PLO. was really the infrastructure of the PLO. And Israeli leaders often, during the war and just before the war, spoke of the need to destroy the infrastructure of the PLO. Not just the fighters, the community which gave them legitimacy and support, which made the PLO possible, the institutions, the health, educational, social institutions, You see, Palestinians became participants in the Olympic Games. It's a very disturbing thing to someone who wants to make the destruction of Palestine an irreversibly historic reality. Palestinians sending athletes to the Olympic Games. But it's an indication of the extent to which the process of the recreation of Palestine has gone. The attack on Lebanon... was primarily motivated by an Israeli attempt to bring about the completion of the process. of the destruction of Palestine and to make it an irreversible historic reality. The same idea motivates Israeli behavior in the occupied territories. The program of confiscation of land, the building of settlements, deportation, the dismantlement of the municipal system, closure of universities, deportations of faculty members, an attempt again to deprive the Palestinian community in the occupied territory of the viability, which was making it into a coherent and productive society, and therefore giving credibility to the concept of Palestinian nationhood and independence. It was making the world community look at the Palestinian aspiration for nationhood and independence as a sensible and a reasonable aspiration. You have a place inhabited by a society that is coherent, viable, productive. All you need is to make it free. You don't need to discover a new world to give the Palestinian people a homeland. You don't need to expel another people and put them in their place. All you need is to make them free. which means withdrawing the Israeli occupation. So these two developments, the rise of the Palestinian national movement outside the country in the form of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the channels and the contacts it built with the world community, and the increasing viability of the Palestinian community under occupation, they were perceived both by Israel to complement each other. They are part of the process of the recreation of Palestine. And if Palestine is to be destroyed, and if its destruction is to be made irreversible, both of these had to be hit. And this explains the wave of repression in the occupied territories in the spring of 82 and the war which degenerated to genocide levels in Lebanon in the summer. I think that people can find a great deal of fault in anybody's position, Israelis, Palestinians, other Arabs, third parties. But I think one thing is sure, is verifiable, is that the Palestinians have shown more flexibility in dealing with the problem that they have been facing than almost any other party, contrary to prevailing stereotype, by the way. What the Palestinian people have been saying, at least for 15 years now, is that let's share this land on a basis of equality, either as a joint country, a common homeland under the concept of the democratic secular state, or separately if you don't want to live with us. You're Europeans, we're third world people. We understand why you don't want to become Palestinians of Jewish faith. You want to have your own separate European society in Asia. Fine. The only thing the Palestinians will not accept is a Middle East without Palestine and Palestinians. This is the only thing that is not acceptable. Everything else can be talked about. Now, it's unfortunate that neither Israel nor its number one sustainer and supporter, the United States, have seen an opportunity in this flexibility of the Palestinian position, have not tried to encourage it, no. On the contrary, the more indications the Palestinians give in terms of the flexibility of their position, for example, the shift from the vague concept of liberation to the idea of democratic secular state in 68, or the shift from the democratic secular state in 58 to the two-state solution in 74 and after, were not recognized at all as if they didn't happen. Positions even stiffened more against Palestinian aspirations as the Palestinians became more flexible. Palestinian national movements have continually modified its political position, becoming more accommodationist, has been de-escalating the use of violence, and at the same time, they're being hit harder. The United States, I think, bears a great deal of responsibility for this. The United States has appointed itself as the general manager of the Arab-Israeli conflict. We all know that. And it has more influence, incomparably much more influence, on the course of the conflict than any other country in the world. Every political proposition from the United States or supported by it in the past 10, 15 years has been given Israel the wrong signals. And I have in mind in particular three political propositions. Security Council Resolution 242, the Camp David Accords, and Mr. Reagan's plan of September 1, 1982. These are the three basic political schemes that came out either from the United States or supported by the United States in the past 10, 15 years. And every single one of them is compatible with the concept of the destruction of Palestine. Every single one of them refuses to accept the nationhood of the Palestinian people and the right of the Palestinian people to statehood. In fact, you see a regression. The Camp David Agreements left the future of the occupied territories open, at least, did not rule out the possibility of Palestinian statehood. It said the future of the ultimate status of the West Bank and Gaza will be negotiated. Mr. Reagan's proposal says no, explicitly, to Palestinian statehood. You're not a nation, you're not entitled to national rights, you're not entitled to independence. So the United States, unfortunately, has been sending to Israel wrong signals, the signals which reinforce the traditional, deep-rooted, long-standing Zionist rejection of the concept of Palestinian nationhood and Palestinian national rights. If the United States ever joins the international consensus... and concedes Palestinian nationhood and the right of the Palestinian people to national rights that don't infringe on the security or life or existence of the State of Israel, then I think it becomes possible for the Arab-Israeli conflict to change from an irreconcilable, deadly conflict, a zero-sum game, into a reconcilable conflict.