Palestine: Kan Wa-Ma Kan?

D O R A JOURNAL OF TRANSNATIONAL STUDIES Diaspora 7:1 1998 Palestine: Kan Wa-Ma Kan? Barbara Harlow The University of Texas Too Many Enemies: The Palestinian Experience in Lebanon. Rosemary Sayigh. London: Zed Books, 1994. La Diaspora palestinienne. Bassma Kodmani-Darwish. Paris: Presses Universitaires de la France, 1997. The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village. Susan Slyomovics. Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press, 1998. Too many memories? Difficulties of diaspora? Or lapses in memory? The spring of 1998 marked the passage of fifty years of nakba, the historic Palestinian "catastrophe." Israel celebrated the season as an anniversary, commemorating the fifty elapsed years of its statehood. The short-lived "peace process" initiated in the preliminary if protracted negotiations in Madrid in 1990, which were abruptly concluded in their displacement to Oslo, was once again "stalled." Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced plans to expand the boundaries of West Jerusalem, in a move clearly designed to add to the pressures on Arab East Jerusalem and predetermine the "final status" talks of the process by decisively altering both the topography and the demography of greater Jerusalem. And the Israeli Supreme Court referred the highly controversial issue of the legalized torture of Palestinian prisoners back to the Knesset for further determination. What had happened to the "human rights," and their universal declaration, that were also being commemorated in the year 1998, in celebration of the passage in 1948 of the United Nations Universal Declaration ofHuman Rights? According to Article 5 ofthe Declaration, "No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment." And under the terms of Article 13, "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country." Additionally, according to Article 15, first, "Everyone has the right to a nationality," and second, "No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality." What then was happening in Palestine, to the Palestinians, in the spring of 1998 when these anniversaries came up? Diaspora 7:1 1998 The year 1998 marked fifty years ofcontest and struggle over the question of Palestine, a question that was globally contextualized by the post-World War Two processes of decolonization and by the more recent decades of transition from national liberation to political negotiation and various state formations—from South Africa to El Salvador, anticipated in Northern Ireland, checked in Nicaragua, overthrown in Zaire, and generally under constant revision in a since changed world order. But the long-standing question of a Palestinian state still remains a dubiously disputed proposition. There is a Palestinian Authority in place, but what is its place? Over whom does it exercise its authority? And by what means and to what ends is it exercising that authority? Is it that there have been just "too many enemies," or that the Palestinian refugees—displaced by the wars of 1948 and 1967 alike—have become now a modern "diaspora," or even that Palestine is now but an "object ofmemory," which renders the question of Palestine still the subject of an open book? According to Edward Said, in an essay written following his spring 1998 visit to Jerusalem and the West Bank, where he was making a film for the BBC, "Palestine and Palestinians remain." "Whether," he goes on to insist, "as an idea, a memory, and as an often buried or invisible reality, Palestine and its people have simply not disappeared." But even if it is the case for Said that "no matter where you turn, we are there," there is also that "overriding impression ... that minute by minute, hour by hour, day after day, we are losing more and more Palestinian land." In traditional Palestinian chronologies, the 1948 nakba is noted as an event, a crisis, a catastrophe, with—at the time—untold consequences , but nonetheless as a decisive, determining moment. However, those consequences, their momentum, in their unfolding and their telling and retelling, suggest that that catastrophe was by turns as much a history as a crisis, and it is to and from that history, its historiography, and its eventual historical implications that Rosemary Sayigh, Bassma Kodmani-Darwish, and...