Palestinians: the land and the law, an inverse relationship.

• Author: Heacock, Roger

THE POLITICS AND AESTHETICS OF THE LAND, BEFORE AND AFTER THE NAKBA

Prior to 1947, the Palestinians, who hoped one day to be part of a sovereign Arab Palestine, whether within Syria or as an independent state, were able to live in and move over their land freely. When they were displaced, it was almost always as a result of financial transactions (where land was bought and sold over their heads) or economic need (unemployment). Of course they had no political rights, but they maintained physical access to the land. Despite the encroachment of both the British and the Zionists, they were able to prosper in some parts of the country. (1)

Before the land was lost to them, physically in part, and politically in its entirety, Palestinians had the same type of deep attachment "to place" as other "traditional or semitraditional societies." (2) Their interest in the land was implicit, rather than obsessively verbalized, since they took it for granted as a place they had lived in for generations and which provided them with physical and symbolic sustenance. It was what the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan calls a "rootedness" characterized by its unself-conscious quality, and opposed to the "sense of place" requiring "distance between self and place." (3) And it was certainly not an attachment to the land as landscape, for that was a particularly Western phenomenon. W.J.T. Mitchell speaks ironically of the ethnocentric and self-justifying perceptions of colonialist Westerners, but his analysis of the Palestinian relation to the land prior to the 1947-48 nakba has a great deal of pertinence in that it is describing a situation in which indigenous people are both in and of the land:

The primitive or aboriginal dweller on the land (literally, the "pagan" or "rustic" villager) is seen as part of the landscape, not as a self-consciously detached viewer who sees nature "for its own sake" as the Western observer does. In addition, the native dweller is seen as someone who fails to see the material wealth and value of the land, a value that is obvious to the Western observer. The failure of the native to exploit, develop and "improve" the landscape is, paradoxically, what makes it so valuable, so ripe for appropriation. The failure to exploit the land, its "undeveloped" character, also seems to confer a presumptive right of conquest and colonization on the Western observer, who comes armed both with weapons and arguments to underwrite the legitimacy of his appropriation of the land ... Landscape thus serves as an aesthetic alibi for conquest, a way of naturalizing imperial expansion, and even making it look "disinterested" in a Kantian sense. (4) As historians have shown, the pre-history of contemporary Palestinian identity can be found in the particular configuration of the maqamat, or holy shrines, that peppered the territory and defined the particular form of religiosity of Palestinian mountain dwellers as well as plains people, in which attachment to a particular place within the countryside was central. Each village, or at the very least each district, had a saint (wali) who protected the villagers. The wall's name was always invoked during prolonged absences from home. (5)

The coherence of the Palestinian land, expressed economically, socially, and culturally, had made it possible and logical in the 19th century for the European powers, in the course of their maneuvers over the Eastern Question in 1840, to offer the Egyptian ruler Muhammad All control over the so-called "pashalik of Acre," with borders that have since become universally familiar, since "for the first time" five European powers had "defined the contours of that which would in the twentieth century become mandatory Palestine." (6)

In other words, while the Palestinians cared very much about their land and had done so for generations, they were entirely "in-and-of" it and thus largely unself-conscious about it until the nakba, when everything changed.

The Arab poets of Sicilian extraction (or were they Sicilians of Arab extraction?), such as 'Abd al-Jabbar Ibn Hamdis, did not immortalize the magical specificity of their island until they had lost it forever in the 11th century, only then reaching unsurpassed lyrical grandeur in their longing after the Garden of Eden from which they had been wrenched. In the same way Joachim du Bellay, the 16th-century poet, member of the Pleiade group, waxes eloquent over an ungrateful "France, mere des arts, des armes et des lois" (Les regrets) from his Roman exile, and Shakespeare (through the voice of the dying John of Gaunt) immortalizes England as "[t]his precious stone set in the silver sea" (Richard II, Act 2 Sc. 1), in order to lament the fact that it "[i]s now leas'd out," and his conclusion is similar to that of so many Palestinians since 1948: "Ah! Would the scandal vanish with my life,/ How happy then were my ensuing death."

The Palestinian perspective thus changed radically as a result of dispossession, and Mitchell's observations become pertinent once again, when he points out that

We are saying, what I have heard Edward Said say so many times, that political thinking must not be conducted in an aesthetic vacuum, that politics must engage in complex dialectical negotiations with questions of form, affect, and sensibility, with cultural formations. We are called upon, in short, to think of Palestine as a work of landscape art in progress, to ask what vision of this land can be imagined, what geographical poetry can be recited over it, to heal, repair, unite, understand, and commemorate this place. (7) After 1948, the dialectics of politics and aesthetics become ubiquitous and are nowhere more present than in the poetry of Mahmud Darwish, for example in 'an alsumud (On Steadfastness):

We love the rose But we love wheat more. We love the essence of the rose But the spike of grain is purer, So protect your grain from these times With your chest, immovable from its place, Let us make a wall of chests, Of chests, then how could it be broken? Grasp the spikes of grain As you would grip a dagger! The land, the peasant, persistence, Tell me how can these be subdued? This trinity, how can it be overcome? (8) Increasingly with the passing of time, the passion of the lost land came alive "as one maintains a fire by blowing on its embers." (9) There was also a political awakening, and the Palestinians understood even better the importance of gaining statehood (whether macroArab or micro-Palestinian) as the means by which the reestablishment of their status as being "in-and-of" the land could be achieved.

After the nakba, one portion of the Palestinians (the 120,000 left in the newly created state of Israel, better known throughout the Arab world as "1948 Palestinians," one example among many of the separation, and subsequent conflation, of time and space (10) remained in their land while being legally excluded from their positive right to feel that they were of it. They were simultaneously subjected to a nearly two-decade-long military government intended to enforce that separation of particles, paradoxically combined, down to the present time, with measures designed to make sure that they remained in it rather than moving to urban coastal centers like Tel Aviv, where more lucrative jobs were available, but which were reserved essentially for Jews.

The three-quarters of a million refugees in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan (including the West Bank), and the Gaza strip remained of but not in the land (with the exception of those Palestinian villagers and urbanites who had managed to stay put), a situation that (excepting for several hundred thousands more driven eastward over the Jordan in June 1967) has endured throughout the period of Israeli occupation. This diversified physical and symbolic relationship to the land is reflected in literary and political themes subsequent to 1948 and 1967: a longing for the land that intensified with the passing of years and successive setbacks and displacements.

FROM NATURAL LAW TO POSITIVE LAW

Speaking of the specific case of Palestinians in the West Bank (including Jerusalem) and the Gaza strip, from a common experience in 1948, there has been a progressive ethical and legal transformation of the framework within which the struggle over land has taken place. This has been reflected at the level of consciousness, particularly among the poorest, who have always shown "greater readiness for militancy." (11) From mandate times until the outbreak of the 1987 intifada, Palestinian resistance had to be carried out in the light of universally recognized rights such as, after 1919, and even more clearly after 1945, that to self-determination, bolstered on the humanitarian side by "Nuremberg law," the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Geneva Conventions, as well as a battery of United Nations Security Council and General Assembly Resolutions. All of these placed the Palestinians under the purview of positive international law. But since these instruments remained subject to interpretation by the parties, in contractual terms this period fell within the realm of natural law and therefore natural rights, and was essentially lived that way by the Palestinian masses. In particular, and without going back to Aristotle or even Aquinas, the discourse and action of Palestinian resistance was carried out in the light of something very much like Hobbes's ninth and tenth "laws of nature," human equality and the reciprocity of rights (Kant's categorical imperative). The particular natural right being sought under these "natural laws" was the "right...