Discourses of denial: silencing the Palestinians, delegitimizing their claims.

• Author: Shinko, Rosemary E.

The following analysis will draw upon critical constructivism and theories of discourse and identity in order to analyze the discursive frames that emerged during the Truman Administration. These frames include the meanings that were attached to Palestine, the terms by which Jews and Palestinians were identified and defined and the deeper embedded meanings that informed discussions over partition and statehood. Attention will be drawn to the ways in which President Truman, his domestic advisors, the State and Defense Departments, the American press and the American public described and characterized Jews and Palestinians. The significant aspect of this approach is "not to provide the 'true' representation, but to provide a critical account of how particular representations circulate and take hold to produce practical political effects." (1) In short, the key question is, what discursive structures emerged during the Truman years and how were they deployed in order to assess the validity of competing Jewish and Arab claims to Palestine in the years leading up to the creation of the State of Israel?

The answer to this question is significant not only in terms of the influence of meaning-making and its relationship to specific political outcomes, but more importantly, how these structures of discourse impact prospects for state building. Frames of meaning can create patterns of either exclusion or inclusion. In their most deleterious capacity, they can indicate sites where fundamental injustices become hardened into institutional and organizational constructs, and ultimately where representational practices become embedded in unequal power relationships. Identifying such moments of originary exclusion or marginalization is crucial to the creation of viable state building processes. This study, then, is an attempt to explore the influences of discursive framing as a crucial prelude to state creation and building.

THEORETICAL FRAMES OF REFERENCE

Critical constructivism and theories of discourse and identity inform the direction and scope of this study. Perhaps one of the most interesting applications of critical constructivism is provided by Jutta Weldes, who focuses a critical constructivist's gaze on the study of bureaucratic politics. Her work raises the issue of the "discursive struggles in and through which worlds are constituted, policy issues are defined, and policy is made." (2) Her policymaking is, at its most fundamental level, a struggle between different forms of reasoning. She relies upon three basic critical constructivist assumptions: that social reality is constructed; that these social constructions embody power relations; and that one must contest the "naturalness" of these dominant constructions. Interests are not exogenously given, instead "they emerge out of the representations that define for actors the situations and events they face.'" (3) Thus, bureaucratic actors are involved not only in the production of interests, but are themselves active participants in the discourses, which inform and give shape to those interests. Discursive and representational practices are crucial in understanding the how and why of bureaucratic policymaking.

Discursive and representational practices not only serve to define situations and events, but, more significantly, they are the means through which some actors are legitimized while others are marginalized. Frames of reference define who is a legitimate actor and who is not. In Arendtian terms, they identify who gets to act and speak. Bonnie Honig has interpreted Hannah Arendt's work as providing a basis for a "performative politics"--a politics where identities are not treated as stable, reified entities, naturally given, but rather as unsettled, fragmented and incomplete. (4)

The crucial aspect of Arendtian thought, however, is that speech and action create a political space, which enable identities to emerge. To be deprived of this space means to be deprived of reality, appearance and being. (5) Arendt assumes that there is an inherent drive within all humans to distinguish themselves and to muster the courage to step forward into the agonism (the struggle between individuals contending for recognition) of politics. Identity requires the presence of "others" who acknowledge and witness an individual's speech and acts. In essence, recognition confers identity. However, what about those instances where this impulse to distinguish oneself as unique and distinct is thwarted, deliberately circumscribed and recognition is denied? What then?

It is precisely at this point where the insights provided by Hegel, Foucault and Derrida come into play. Within Hegel's dialectical confrontation between master and the slave lies a violent impulse to deny recognition of the "other" in order to privilege and secure one's own identity. Arendt presumes the equality of those who emerge within the realm of the political, whereas Hegel exposes the inequalities and violence that must be overcome in order to progress toward true self-consciousness. Arendt's understanding of equality between political actors rests on her realization that we all share a common world. Therefore, it is only within such a shared political context that oneself as well as others can recognize one's identity. However, "Hegel shrewdly understands that humans often find radical dependence on others intolerable and adopt various means--from psychological denial to the establishment of relations of force--to circumvent such dependence and the vulnerabilities that accompany it." (6) The complexity of Hegel's thought is evident in the fact that he also realizes identity's dependence on difference. Thus it becomes essential to construct and maintain a series of differentiations between self and other in order to secure one's own identity and to ensure one's own recognition. "The necessity of difference with an other to produce one's own identity is found in Hegel's bondsman tale, where the more powerful slaveowner can neither know his own identity nor exercise his superior power until his slave, his other, helps him construct that identity through practice." (7)

Foucault exposes the webs of power that permeate and enmesh all forms of human discourse. Power circulates. Power is productive. "[We] should try to discover how it is that subjects are gradually, progressively, really and materially constituted through a multiplicity of organisms, forces, energies, materials, desires, thoughts, etc." (8) Foucault dismisses Hegel's contention that identities rooted in relations of subjugation and domination can be overcome by man's accession to universal reason. Identities are constructed through relations of power and secured via our discursive practices. "Discourses bring with them the power to constitute worlds." (9)

Derrida argues that oppositionally juxtaposed terms always privilege one term over another. Terms are always arranged hierarchically. One is preferred over another. One is designated as subordinate and placed beyond the boundary of what is deemed acceptable and significant. Disparities in power accompany the differential weighting of these juxtaposed pairings. "Derrida's work provides some evidence that we do shape our world somehow in accord with our discursive structures, therefore, changing the latter might help us change the former." (10)

What insights and implications might be drawn from these theoretical approaches about how the struggle over meaning-making shapes identities and frames the ways in which we comprehend events? What are the implications of such an approach for this particular case study, which attempts to trace the framing of Jewish and Palestinian identities within the context of American politics? The simple and direct response is that discursive structurings (meaning the very terms and phrases we deploy in order to define ourselves, establish our political positions and advance our political, social or economic claims) define and delineate actors, situations and events. In varying ways, Hegel, Derrida and Foucault all draw attention to the inequity embedded in the struggle between political actors caught up in this discursive battle.

All identities can be said to emerge within the context of a political struggle, but the crucial aspect is obviously how we elaborate and define the context within which this struggle unfolds. Thus these theoretical lines of thought draw our attention to the ways in which American interests in the Middle East emerged in tandem with frames of meaning, creating legitimate criteria that denied or accorded recognition to various Jewish, Arab and Palestinian political actors. It is the struggle over partition that supplies the context within which the juxtaposition of competing Jewish and Palestinian claims and identities emerge.

These theoretical observations caution us to become aware of the wavs in which we ascribe meaning to events, claims and actors because it is within the frames of meaning that unequal power relations become embedded in political structures. Perhaps power relations in the Middle East, which had the effect of inscribing patterns of violent conflict, could have been different if alternative frames of meaning were chosen to ascribe legitimacy and accord equal recognition to both Palestinian and Jewish political actors. Could such an alternative framing have created the opening to establish some type of binational Palestinian state? (11) Isolating the patterns of meaning-making in the Truman Administration is important because it can serve as an exemplar of how discursive frames create and inscribe patterns of inequality, which ultimately threaten to undermine and destabilize state building efforts.

WHAT DID ARAB "PRESENCE" SIGNIFY?

That the Palestinian Arabs existed cannot be denied. According to the Supplement to Survey of Palestine compiled bv the British for the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine in 1947, the...