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Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44.4 (2002) 432-454



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The Kahan Commission Report and A Balcony over the Fakihani:
A Tale of Two Fictions

Steven Salaita


Deportation

Before they came for me
I took my voice and hid it under the dawn
so they found only my bleeding mouth, my broken
hands, my eyes empty of vision

They traveled
to every corner of my country,
frustration building
The sound of my voice split their heads like thunder,
my agony pumped through their veins

Later they took my bleeding mouth, my broken hands,
my eyes empty of vision
and threw them past the horizon
So I left them with a voice
singing its song of love for my country
which they will never understand
never embrace and never possess.

—Aminah Kazak

This essay will examine two conceptualizations of the 1975-83 Lebanese Civil War, one literary and the other legal. The civil war reached an international scale upon Israel's intervention in the early eighties, and produced even larger attention when reports of a mass civilian slaughter in two Beirut refugee camps, Sabra and Shatila, appeared in the Western media. Liyana Badr's A Balcony Over the Fakihani offers a fictional look into the lives of various Palestinians during the war, as opposed to the Kahan Commission [End Page 432] Report, which deals primarily with the Israeli government and Israeli soldiers. As a result of these two starkly different interpretations of the same war, much of what I will discuss is perspective, by which I mean the social and moral methods of conceptualizing and explaining a set of events. Regarding the Lebanese Civil War, I will look specifically at the Israeli intervention and the massacre of civilians, events readily acknowledged by both Palestinians and the government of Israel. The purposes of acknowledgment in these two cases, however, differ greatly, and in these contrasts we have a fertile basis for examining social and ethnic constructions and how they affect the language of politics and the manufacture of knowledge. A crucial facet of literature is perspective, which helps determine how the authors' stories achieve their larger ends—aesthetic, political, social, philosophical, moral, and so forth. Perspective allows an author to choose from a variety of strategies to employ according to the sensibilities of the target audience. Accordingly, a critical methodology that assesses the interaction between author and reader gains a clearer stake in understanding the moral intricacies of social conflict (in this case, Lebanon's Civil War) based on the political perspective the author uses and the political expectations of the author's audience.

The Proclamation of Independence

The tenets of Manifest Destiny in the Kahan Commission Report were played out much earlier in the 1948 State of Israel Proclamation of Independence, which proclaims, "[Jews] brought the blessings of progress to all inhabitants of the country and looked forward to sovereign independence" (qtd. in Laqueur, 159). Much like the pioneering settlers of the New World, Zionist colonizers constructed themselves as bearers of enlightenment to a heretofore savage land. This role is noted elsewhere in the Proclamation of Independence, which calls on Jews everywhere to assist in the development of the land, a task, the reader can infer, the Arabs were unable to perform. The attitudes displayed in this Proclamation were fundamental in construing the Arab as either a nonentity or the bearer of irrational aggression. Most Arabs, of course, would explain the situation in different terms, but the power to enact laws falls to those in the position to colonize. The colonized subsequently had no means of challenging or formulating the legislation of the dominant power, and so they were left to accept their fate as dramatized in the theology of divine progress. Much of the Israeli legislation directly before and after 1948 placed the onus of responsibility on Arabs for their own Diaspora, with the reasoning ranging from the argument that Palestinians willingly sold all their property to the duplicitous explanation that Arabs arrived only after Jewish immigrants cultivated the unused...

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