Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism

where identity is open onto plurality, not a fort or a trench

—Mahmoud Darwish

AMONG EDWARD SAID’S FINAL REFLECTIONS were a set of speculations that, in my view, seemed to imply that binationalism could be the undoing of nationalism. Of course, one has to pause at the very start of such a consideration, since it makes sense to be opposed to Zionist forms of nationalism, but do we want to oppose the nationalism of those who have yet to see a state, of the Palestinians who are still seeking to gather a nation, to establish a nation-state for the first time and without firm international support? To this most urgent question I want to suggest that we try to think for a moment not only about whether all nationalisms are the same (they surely are not), but what we might mean by “nation.” For one of the very first assumptions we make is that a nation gathers people in place and time, establishes boundaries and borders that can and must be secured through military means, and develops modes of democratic self-governance and sovereign territory and right. And, though surely few things could be more important for Palestine than laying claim to the lands that rightfully are its own, that right does not immediately imply a specific form of the nation-state. Indeed, one could formulate the right in light of international law or on the basis of moral and political arguments that may or may not be framed within a specific version of the nation-state. The right to lay claim to the land may well be based on a historical analysis of a set of illegal practices of land confiscation that have become essential to the founding and self-legitimating practices of the Israeli nation-state. Israel has been built on a series of land confiscations that preceded 1948, continued through 1967, and continue now with the extension of settlements, the building and rebuilding of the wall, and the strategic ways in which the borders are constantly expanding when checkpoints are arbitrarily relocated. But even if we start with the presumption that the State of Israel does not exist without the practice of illegal land acquisition and confiscation, as I think we must, we are still brought back to two facts that compel us to ask how we are to understand the nation of Palestine and what ways that nation can and must be specified.

The first issue is that the Palestinians of 1948 who lost lands and homes and who were forced from the territory are diasporic, and for the most part they remain scattered in various locations—outside the land that constitutes historic Palestine. Indeed, the history of Palestinian diaspora effectively begins with the events of 1948.¹ The right of return for those who were dispossessed of land and work and who have joined the Palestinian diaspora remains crucial to any understanding of the Palestinian nation.² In this sense, the nation is partially scattered, and any notion of the nation would have to consider the rights of those who have been forcibly expelled from their own homes and lands. Historically considered, then, the nation of Palestine is not bound by any existing or negotiated borders, which means not only that rights and obligations extend beyond existing boundaries, but that existing boundaries are the effect of illegal land appropriations. Thus to accept those boundaries as the borders of the nation-state is to ratify and confirm that illegality as the acceptable foundation of the nation, an illegality that not only marks the origin of the nation-state but continues still as its mode of self-reproduction. To accept the current borders (whatever they happen to be at a given time) is effectively to agree to set aside both land confiscations and forcible expulsions as issues for any emergent Palestinian nation. Any nation built on these presuppositions depends on the disavowal of 1948, furthers that disavowal, and blinds itself to the continuing condition of expulsion for diasporic Palestinians.

The right of return for Palestinians can take many forms. Some have suggested resettlement plans (the Israelis are very good at building settlements, so perhaps some of that talent can be used to build new housing for Palestinians on their rightful lands).³ Some have considered modes of financial compensation, and yet others have considered modes of public and international acknowledgment. At a time when even the work of Zochrot to name and commemorate the decimation of Palestinian villages in 1948 is legally barred on what is called Israeli Independence Day, and those who engage in the activity of commemoration are now actively accused of treason, the question of publicly acknowledging the destruction and dispossession of Palestinians in 1948 is no merely symbolic matter; if anything, it is powerfully symbolic.⁴ Moreover, the right of return is supported by UN resolutions and remains consistent with an entire international body of law that is meant to secure the rights of refugees who were forcibly driven from their homes. Given that the right to return has various meanings (some of which have been explored paradoxically by contemporary Jews who were driven from their homes under the Spanish Inquisition more than five hundred years ago), it makes no sense to say that one cannot afford to affirm or dispute such a right until one understands, at least, which version of the right is under discussion and whether the right under consideration is legitimate. If one waves this topic away, saying it is simply impossible or too complex, unthinkable, or too costly, perhaps this “waving away” remains the contemporary gestic form that the disavowal of coercive expulsion now takes, a trace within everyday discourse that has uncannily taken up a place within common sense.

For instance, it might seem like a reasonable way to address the unsolved problem of refugees and the stateless to convene an international conference on the right of return and to establish as a priority a careful consideration of the various formulations of that right and various modes of redress. The task would be to move toward a consensus (a fraught consensus is still a consensus) on what that right means and how it might be honored, and in that way, how the fulfillment of an international law and obligation might finally take place—a set of civic and legal moves that would seek to address continuing injustice and whose solution might pave the way for a less violent cohabitation between peoples in the region.

But, all too often, one finds in mainstream public opinion a reflex dismissal of this right (a waving of the hand, a look to the floor, a sign of exasperation), as if such a solution could only mean that Palestinians will suddenly and forcibly enter the homes of Israeli Jews and dispossess them of their kitchenware and property. So any approach to this problem means setting aside such dismissive gestures and projective phantasies (whose homes were, in fact, taken over, and who had to flee?). The right of return has to be both complex and effective, which means that it has to be grounded in the rights of refugees, the illegitimacy of dispossession, and a new conception of the redistribution of lands. While this may seem ideal or impossible or suggest that the region would have to be leveled and start over from scratch, I would point out that the Israelis are redistributing land all the time; these processes and techniques are already in place. So the question would be: how to intervene upon and reverse this process of land redistribution so that it now honors the rights of refugees and the legitimate demands for acknowledgment and compensation by those forcibly dispossessed of their property and lands? This would mean moving forward with a clear acknowledgment of history, to be sure. This process is made all the more complex by the fact that this particular history is constantly vanishing—Abu Mazen time and again offers to set it aside—always at risk of effacement, and is, in effect, still struggling to become understood as part of history. What does it mean, under current circumstances, to move forward when the historical past has not yet been established?

Any advance into the future will surely not be helpful if it fails to resist this constant threat of historical effacement. And yet so many of the putatively practical approaches to the question of Palestine depend on this effacement. Of course, a set of events can only emerge as historical if they are not effaced, and it is only once they come to be historical that we can begin to think meaningfully and publicly about what new possibilities there may be for the future. Otherwise, the Naqba continues to happen, is indistinguishable from the present and so precludes any other temporal movement. Hence the struggle against the effacement of the Naqba is essential to any possibility of moving forward, which means that the same set of strokes establish the historical record and allow the future to take place. In this way the oblivion into which the Naqba is always threatening to fall not only requires an intervention of the Benjaminian kind but recalls as well the importance of Primo Levi’s twofold task: the refusal of revisionism and the uses of forgetfulness for aesthetic production and existential survival. In the second section of this chapter I will try to understand from Mahmoud Darwish what kind of future is addressed by Said, especially in his final reflections on binationalism. It is important to note that for Said and for my own argument here, binationalism leads not to a two-state solution, but to a single state, one that would eradicate all forms of discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, race, and religion. So let us move patiently between the ideas of population, nation, and state.

But first I want to suggest that since the rights of diasporic Palestinians are at stake in any consideration of the Palestinian nation, we are under some obligation to rethink the idea of the nation of Palestine as one that “includes” the diasporic, or what is most often referred to as al-manfa or exile.⁵ This was surely Said’s point, and he made it time and again.⁶ And here the right of return does not imply converting every diasporic status into a national one, but, rather, deriving from the diasporic, understood as a scattering of the population, al shattat, a set of precepts for any possible future polity. As I understand it, manfa implies forced exile, either involuntarily or voluntarily in response to hard conditions. Shattat is diaspora in the senses of scattering, also for the most part coerced, but not always. Are there political principles that are derived from the diasporic condition that must also, as it were, be brought home, that pertain centrally to refugee status and to dispossession? If we think of the right of return as canceling the diasporic status in favor of the national, is there still something of the diasporic that remains within the national or must so remain, presenting itself as an internal criticism of the national, if not a set of qualifications and safeguards that inhere in any possible nation? In other words, if the condition of diaspora provides certain perspectives on the status of the refugee, modes of living across temporal and spatial distance, practices of mourning, cultural transmission, including literature, music, film and the arts, modes of commemoration and alliance that take place within conditions of scattering and containment, then we may well ask, how do the political claims that emerge from the condition of diaspora continue to inform and disrupt ideas of the nation and the national?

What would the articulation of the national look like that begins with the primary rights of refugees? And, moreover, given the Israeli interpretation of that right, in its own Law of Return and in its establishment of the State of Israel as a sanctuary for all Jews who conform to the contemporary rabbinic and legal definitions, it is all the more imperative to establish an understanding of the rights of refugees that cannot become the justification for a right to dispossess a people of their lands. Indeed, one of the most massive and consequential contradictions committed by the founding of the State of Israel was to establish the state on the basis of the right of refugees to seek sanctuary from their forcible expulsion from Europe, which, in turn, and without recourse to that selfsame principle, led to the forcible expulsion of Palestinians from their lands. Hence the question we might ask of any invocation of the rights of refugees is simply this: how might the rights of refugees be formulated in relation to rights against forcible dispossession and expulsion, rights that are especially important to minorities? Indeed, these are rights that belong to minorities precisely as they lose their minority status and become stateless. A legal and political imaginary that demands the coupling of both rights is necessary not only to describe and evaluate the injustice of the Naqba, but to make sure that no formulation for honoring the rights of refugees requires the production of a new stateless class. Until a solution based on this principle is achieved in Israel/Palestine, it is clearly necessary to impose an indefinite moratorium on the Law of Return. Indeed, under conditions in which the Law of Return is instrumentalized time and again to secure the demographic advantage of the Jewish population, it is patently discriminatory and antidemocratic.

We might then conclude the following: until a law of return is coupled with the right to return, there should be no Law of Return. Or we might say, since the existing Law of Return is designed to foreclose the right of return, the Law of Return is still and again engaged in the production of a stateless class, thereby canceling the principle of its own legitimation. And though it appears to be based on the rights of refugees, it works to abrogate those very rights, which means that the Law of Return, which is supposed to support the rights of refugees, actively denies the rights of refugees. Hannah Arendt surely saw this when, in opposing the creation of Israel as a nation-state for the Jewish people, she predicted that it could only be accomplished by creating a new stateless population and, as a result, decades of conflict.⁷

So it follows that any right of refugees would have to be exercised in such a way that the rights of refugees are not denied. The political question raised here is not completely settled by the establishment of legal status and claims for diasporic Palestinians from 1948 or, indeed, 1967 or, indeed, those who were forced out of Beirut in 1982 or further dispossessed by Oslo in 1993 or for all those who live still, sometimes after several decades, in refugee camps throughout the region. By the right of return is meant modes of legal restitution and acknowledgment as well as rights of resettlement. I understand that this last word, resettlement, registers acoustically to many people like one-state solution, even though the vowels and consonants are distinctly different. In fact, there are one-state and two-state versions of the right of return. The opposition is based upon a great fear among those who worry that Jews will lose their demographic majority in Israel and that a de facto binationalism will follow. The presupposition here is that a Jewish state can only be preserved through demographic advantage, even though one might rightly wager that there are forms of Judaism or Jewishness that would oppose all forms of domination of this kind; those versions of Judaism would be doubtless dismissed as anti-Israel, and it is true that they are not Zionist. But that is less important for this argument than there other responses. The first is normative: no democratic polity has the right to secure demographic advantage for any particular ethnic or religious group; the second is strategic: the loss of demographic advantage for the Jewish population in Israel would surely improve prospects for democracy in that region. My third rejoinder is, oddly enough, descriptive: there are already forms of de facto binationalism that have taken shape, and they are distinctively wretched (just as there are ongoing processes of land distribution underway, and they are patently unjust). We see the wretched forms of binationalism in the militarized streets in East Jerusalem where Palestinians have to defend their homes against repossession by right-wing Israelis who invoke the rights of Jews to property held by Palestinians, in some cases for more than one hundred years, and whose efforts are for the most part backed by Israeli courts and secured by Israeli police.⁸

We find wretched forms of binationalism as well in the perverse economic dependencies that have emerged between the settlements in the West Bank and Palestinian workers who, barred from travel to other workplaces, provide goods and services to the settlements. It is profoundly ironic to think about this exchange between Palestinians and Israelis as a form of binationalism, since these are hardly those chosen and semideliberate forms of alliances that one finds sporadically in Budrus and Bil’in and other towns along the separation wall where Israeli anarchists and Palestinians resist Israeli military force. Such nonwretched alliances are clearly more marginal to the main forms of wretched binationalism. A third form of wretched binationalism exists for Palestinians who are nominal or partial citizens of the State of Israel, but whose prospects of employment, housing, education, and mobility are increasingly restricted by legal and social policy.⁹ As Samera Esmeir has argued, Israel has never been a Jewish state; it has always included, through subjugation, non-Jews, Christian and Muslim Palestinians, Druze, and Bedouins—and in Jerusalem, a wide number of people from various faiths who have good reasons to lay claim to that city and its multivalent history and land. Indeed, the struggle to achieve demographic advantage for Jews is one way of confessing that the majority status is already precarious and that a military, political, and cultural struggle has always to be waged in order to keep that political imbalance that disproportionally favors the Jewish populations over all others—favors Jews of European origin over Arab Jews and Jews of Spanish descent, that is, both Mizrachim and Sephardim.

The fact remains that Israel defines itself as a Jewish nation founded on principles of Jewish sovereignty, which means that it is committed to maintaining Palestinians as a permanent minority (and, when they become too numerous within the borders, to manage the population through further disenfranchisement, expulsion, and containment). On occasion, Israeli politicians openly debate a full expulsion of the Palestinian population, but let us note that even such a move, were it to be realized, would commit Israel to a permanent war at the border and so a permanent embroilment with those whom it not only expels, but must keep expelled from their own lands. Thus Israeli claims to sovereignty depend upon permanent strategies of expulsion and containment, and this is a way of maintaining a permanent relation to the Palestinians. Nothing about the strategy of full expulsion overcomes the condition of unwilled proximity and permanent engagement; it simply continues in another form what Darwish described as “the self and enemy … entangled and embroiled, trapped in a land with too much history and too many prophets.”¹⁰ We see here as well how describing Palestinians as a “minority” only works under the condition that we restrict the reference to those who live with documentation within whatever borders of Israel are currently established (where that border is always lurching in the direction of Israel’s expansion). On the one hand, one has to make a case against demographic advantage as a racist and antidemocratic principle, and even defend the rights of minorities, without identifying Palestinians exclusively in terms of their status as documented minorities within Israel. On the other hand, that very struggle against permanent minority status must be linked to the opposition to the occupation and the rights of refugees, whether scattered or contained in camps or immobilized within militarized zones.

Given the shifting demographics of the region, the only way that the project of demographic advantage, the hallmark of contemporary Zionism, can continue is by claiming more land, dispossessing, and expelling more people of non-Jewish descent, mainly Palestinians and Bedouins. Interestingly, in 1999, Said predicted that demographic advantage for Jews would be lost by 2010.¹¹ What he did not calculate was how the Law of Return would be invoked to increase Jewish immigration and how both new land confiscations and new boundaries would alter demography. Consequently, it is only one part of this large constellation to examine the relation of a domestic minority without full rights of citizenship to a polity that grants full rights and entitlements only to a specific ethnic or religious majority whose majoritarian status is mandated through state policy. The subject who lives under colonial subjugation under occupation and/or in refugee camps, subjugated either through strategies of containment or expulsion, is never stable; indeed, in southern Lebanon the refugee camps are efforts to contain the expelled, and it surely could be argued that containment is a continuation of the strategy of expulsion itself, a continuous mechanism for invalidating the right of return and foreclosing its exercise.

Moreover, repeated conversion of the quasi-citizen with rights to land into the person living under occupation reveals the structural link between the two categories; moreover, the person living under occupation is expelled in one sense, but not in the sense that we usually identify with the diasporic. And yet the expulsion of the quasi citizen and the confiscation of land show that the relation between the quasi citizen, the subject of colonial occupation, and the exile are internally linked and that mechanisms exist for the conversion into ever more extreme forms of dispossession. Some appear to be internal to borders, and others are occupied under controlled but externalized borders, and yet others are outside both those borders and, in that sense, diasporic. Still, we would probably be wrong to save the word diasporic exclusively for that last condition, since we can see that the push into the diaspora operates all along as the force and aim of this process by which status is converted. Indeed, without the idea of diaspora we would not be able to grasp the convertibility of status and its systematic movement in the unilateral direction of dispossession. At the same time, it is crucial to remember that dispossession also takes place in situ, without movement, but only through a change of status, loss of land, or further deprivation of rights, including their arbitrary regulation. And since diasporic Palestinian populations obviously do often achieve citizenship elsewhere, the movement does not always end with permanent disenfranchisement. But the disenfranchisement of rights of belonging to Palestine is not overcome by the achievement of rights and citizenship for Palestinians elsewhere. It persists, haunting that newer sense of belonging; remaining unredressed as a global injustice, both historic and contemporary, that is, as an ongoing catastrophe.

At this juncture, I am simply trying to make the relatively simple point that we cannot simply refer to minorities, the occupied, and the expelled as if they were stable categories, since there is no timeless way of distinguishing one from another, and there certainly are a set of mechanisms for converting one into the other, in the direction of further dispossession. Zionism depends on several contradictory presuppositions, but one of them can be formulated this way: (a) Israel is governed by principles of Jewish sovereignty and is itself a Jewish state and (b) Israel, precisely because it is not a fully Jewish state, must struggle to maintain its demographic advantage over non-Jewish minorities. To maintain demographic advantage, it requires three processes pertaining to the Palestinian people: minoritization, occupation, and expulsion. At the same time, it must continually seek to cover over the gap that exists permanently between its claim to be a Jewish state and its struggle to maintain demographic advantage because it is not a Jewish state. My point here is that this last struggle accounts in many ways for the convertibility process I have just described. The project of maintaining Jewish demographic advantage not only presupposes active processes of minoritization and dispossession, including land confiscation, but requires these continuing practices of settler colonialism for its very existence. It must multiply and extend those strategies and remain committed to them for what we might call a political eternity. In other words, we might understand these colonizing practices as binding Israel to its colonized for all time and so constituting within the very terms of colonialism another, perhaps most fundamental, form of wretched binationalism.

Indeed, what would Israel do without its subjugated and expelled populations, without its mechanisms of dispossession? In fact, Israel in its present form cannot do without its mechanisms of dispossession without destroying itself as Israel. In this sense, the threat to Israel is a consequence of its fundamental dependency on dispossession and expulsion for its existence. So it is not a question of cleaning up the act of present-day Israel or implementing reforms, but of overcoming a fundamental and ongoing structure of colonial subjugation that is essential to its existence. So in asking, what would Israel be without its subjugation of the Palestinians, we pose a question that underscores that Israel as we know it is unthinkable without that subjugation. Without that subjugation, something other than Israel emerges—but is that thinkable? Whatever it is, it is not the destruction of the Jewish people, but rather the dismantling of the structure of Jewish sovereignty and demographic advantage. (Another argument could clearly show that this would be better for the Jews and for all inhabitants of the land and so would lead neither to the destruction of the Jewish people nor the Palestinian people, nor any other people). What would Israel do or be without the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians? What happens when we pair this question with the one posed by the title of Mahmoud Darwish’s poem, “Who am I, without exile?” as well as the recurring refrain, “what shall we do without exile?” The questions seek to open up a future under the conditions in which the future has been foreclosed or in which the future can only be thought as repeated subjugation.

To approach what it means to “address the future,” I return to some of Edward Said’s final political reflections. The first can be found in his reasons for moving from a two-state to a one-state solution in the late 1990s. The second can be found in his explicit effort to think Palestinian and Jewish history together, calling attention to the diasporic character of their different histories. In relation to this last problematic, he elaborates on how both identities are constituted by their relation to alterity, a condition of having been scattered, having lived among those to whom one does not clearly belong, often in modes of unwilled proximity; these are modes of life derived from culturally heterogeneous sources. Obviously, he is not saying that both predicaments are the same or that the histories are strictly analogous; neither is he returning to the cultural holism of Martin Buber’s A Land of Two Peoples.¹²

Said seems to be actively wondering whether there are historical resources for thinking about the status of the refugee that can be derived from these divergent and convergent histories of exile.¹³ He reminds the Jewish people of their status as exiles, wanderers, and refugees and asks that they extrapolate from that specificity into more general principles that would protect the rights of minorities and refugees from forcible expulsion and containment. For Said, diasporic existence is constituted in the midst of cultural heterogeneity, negotiating difference, indeed affirming difference or plurality as a condition of its own existence. When he raises this question in his small volume Freud and the Non-European, he makes much of the notion that Moses is an Egyptian and, hence, a certain figure for the Jew who comes from and dwells within Arab lands and is himself an Arab Jew.¹⁴ But it is not the Moses who leads the people out of the wilderness who is most important here, but rather the one who wanders, a motif that is affirmed time and again by Jewish philosophers, Franz Rosenzweig among them, who resist the Zionist resolution for Jewish life and cast doubt on whether political territory in Palestine should be the goal for Jewish politics. Said takes an interesting turn within scholarship on Moses by casting him among the refugees, invoking the “diasporic, unhoused character” of Jewish life. Further, Said underscores the alliance of this diasporic version of Jewishness “in our age of vast population transfers, of refugees, exiles, expatriates, and immigrants” (FNE, 53).

As if calling for a Jewish approach to binationalism that would shed its commitments to Zionist forms of settler colonialism in favor of a polity that would commence with an understanding of the rights of refugees, Said continues, “the strength of this thought is that it can be articulated in and speak to other besieged identities as well … as a troubling, disabling, destabilizing secular wound” (FNE, 54). “Articulated in” and “speak to” constitute two modalities of alliance that emerge from convergent diasporas that are not quite the same and cannot be. Said asks whether we might continue to think this thought of two diasporic peoples living together, where the diasporic limits the conditions of attaining identity to this situation of living with and among the other, a potential basis for a less than wretched binationalism. The one is articulated within the other, and in this sense they speak to, address one another, cannot be thought outside this mode of address.

To move toward less wretched forms of binationalism, Jewish Israelis would have to set aside their Jewishness in any account of citizenship and the rights of refugees; paradoxically, and crucially, they could most easily engage in this setting aside by drawing precisely on their own exilic histories in order to extrapolate a set of principles that would defend, without qualification, the rights of all minorities and refugees, the opposition to coercive containment and expulsion, the necessity of dismantling colonial and military control over borders, natural resources, and human freedoms. Once again, that extrapolation from one history of suffering to another does not depend on strict analogies. Indeed, it is precisely at the point where analogies break down that translations begin and certain generalizable principles become possible. And among such principles would be the following: no rights to refugees are legitimate that by their very exercise produce a new population of the stateless.

Although it seems that Said is here referring to cultural and historical resources for the rethinking of binationalism, it is important to note that his work moves in the direction of political principles and the imagining of a new polity. And though many people associate binationalism with the two-state solution, for Said, binationalism is the basis for a one-state solution. One reason that binational or coexistence projects that seek to cultivate cultural goodwill “on both sides” remain problematic is that they fail to address the structure of settler colonialism through which these foundational and reiterated practices of dispossession take place. Indeed, the framework that installs an artificial equality within the encounter group, for instance, in which each side gives voice to its experience, not only effaces the power relations that hold between them, but uses the structural presumption of equality in the very session or project to mask and so to protect and further the structure of Israeli colonial rule.¹⁵

So how was it that only eleven years ago Said and Darwish both were able to open to a future? There are historical reasons, to be sure, but other reasons emerge when we consider the forms of address they use. And perhaps none is more telling than the final form of address that Darwish reserved for Said on the occasion of his death. There is probably no one who gave voice more clearly to the condition of unwilled proximity, the modes of being bound together in antagonism and without contract, than Mahmoud Darwish. He did not precisely imagine a solution to this problem, but he made clear that this terrible embrace had to become something else and that exile forms something of a signpost for the future.

In his poem written on the occasion of Said’s death, called “Edward Said: A Contrapuntal Reading,”¹⁶ Darwish writes the dialogue between the two of them:

He also said: If I die before you,

my will is the impossible.

I asked: Is the impossible far off?

He said: A generation away.

I asked: And if I die before you?

He said: I shall pay my condolences to Mount Galilee,

and write, “the aesthetic is to reach

Poise.” And now, don’t forget:

If I die before you, my will is the impossible.

In this voice, attributed to Said, Darwish is left with the “impossible” (in some translations the “impossible task”). Repeated twice, it is something of a bequest or an inheritance, an aesthetic injunction to find the highest form of concordance—poise, adequation, the translation of mulaa’im (agreement, gathering). What is this task, and, if it is impossible, how can Darwish take it up as his own? The impossibility is restated time and again throughout the poem. It is an impossibility of being located and of having one’s own language. Consider again these lines from “Edward Said: A Contrapuntal Reading” where Darwish is describing Said:

On wind he walks, and in wind

he knows himself. There is no ceiling for the wind,

no home for the wind. Wind is the compass

of the stranger’s North.

He says: I am from there, I am from here,

but I am neither there nor here.

I have two names which meet and part …

I have two languages, but I have long forgotten

which is the language of my dreams.

(176–77)

And then later in this same poem, it is Darwish who poses a question to Said about identity, and the voice of Said quickly turns the question into the problem of exile:

What about identity? I asked.

He said: It’s a self-defense …

Identity is the child of birth, but

at the end, it’s self-invention, and not

an inheritance of the past. I am multiple …

Within me an ever new exterior. And

I belong to the question of the victim. Were I not

from there, I would have trained my heart

to nurture there deer of metaphor …

So carry your homeland wherever you go, and be

A narcissist if need be

The outside world is exile,
exile is the world inside.

And what are you between the two?

(177, my emphasis)

The contrapuntal force of the poem involves two voices; an interrogatory mode of address answered by the other voice, a prosopopeia of Said. The one voice, apparently Darwish, asks about what it was like when he returned to his home in Talbiyah in Jerusalem, was he afraid? The voice of Said responds: “I could not meet loss face to face. I stood by the door like a beggar. How could I ask permission from strangers sleeping in my own bed?” He is inside the neighborhood and even inside the home, but exiled still, suggesting that exile is external and internal at once or, rather, that exile confounds the stability of that very distinction. It takes place inside the border and outside the border, since one is still outside inside and, outside, one is in some sense persisting still inside.

Darwish puts poetry in Said’s mouth, nourishing him with his own words, but then turns Said toward the readers and, in that way, nourishes us in turn. But it is in the voice of this Said that we hear “the poem could host / loss, a thread of light shining / at the heart of a guitar.” And, then, as if to explain, the line: “the aesthetic is but the presence of the real / in form / In a world without a sky, the earth / becomes an abyss. The poem / a consolation, an attribute / of the wind …” These lines are then followed by a series of admonitions:

Do not describe what the camera can see

of your wounds. And scream that you may hear yourself,

and scream that you may know you’re alive,

and alive, and that life on this earth is

possible.

(181)

It is hard to know how to read that last transition: “And scream”—is this a command or a recommendation? Or is the voice perhaps issuing a prohibition? “Do not describe what the camera can see of your wounds and do not scream that you may hear yourself.” Does the conjunction here, and, operate as pivot, so that the you who is addressed is asked not to describe what the camera can see of your wounds, since the camera has already registered the wound. Is the “you” of the poem to do something else with voice, something precisely that the camera cannot do? One is caught, contrapuntally, between the two readings (and one begins to wonder whether the contrapuntal is the poetic form for the impossible task, carrying on in a form of self-splitting). The ambiguity continues with a repetition that is inaugurated time and again by that conjunction and—“and scream that you may know you’re alive.” Does this voice say to scream? What it seems to say, time and again, is that a set of conjunctions is possible, and that these links do not follow logically, and they do not follow causally. The “and” binds two phrases together that do not quite seem to fit in any unity. It is building a sequence laterally, pushing the horizontality of metonymy, and we can only follow the turns and wonder what is happening as we go. The “and” that begins the noncausal move from admonition to what seems to be a set of imperatives is then repeated within the imperative itself: “And scream that you may hear yourself, / and scream that you may know you’re still alive, /and alive, and that life on this earth is possible.” By the next line it seems that the imperative is voiced by Said, but even the voice of Said articulates through this contrapuntal rhythm, asserting and contesting the same claim and sometimes establishing an ambiguity between them.

An illumination approaches in the very next line: still within the language of bequest and imperative, the Said voice says, “Invent a hope for speech.” This line is initially disconcerting, since one might expect that the poet is being told to rather invent a speech for hope. But no, the imperative is to invent a hope for speech, since apparently speech is lacking such a hope. And then, further: “invent a direction, a mirage to extend hope. And sing, for the aesthetic is freedom.” By the end of this stanza it seems we have already left the scream behind, or, rather, the scream is now suddenly crafted into song, and we enter into the aesthetic. The scream is carried forward into the song that takes its place. We have arrived there through a series of conjunctions that are always less than causal. The movement is metonymic. In this same poem, Darwish writes, “Metonymy was sleeping on the river’s bank; had it not been for the pollution / it could have embraced the other bank” (178). An extraordinary line because not only is metonymy itself personified—figure laid upon figure—but metonymy is apparently sleeping alone, not able to make the links that can happen only by contiguity and proximity. After all, metonymy shows us how to get from one thing to another with which it obviously has not much in common. In this poetic scene, there is no crossing over that river, polluted as it is. Too much toxicity stands in the way of what might otherwise be a surprising or felicitous contact, indeed, a form of highly cathected entanglement, if not the kind of unwilled up-againstness that belongs to a wretched bond.

Let us return for a moment to Darwish’s sequence, since once that scream becomes song we enter into an aesthetic region that is equated with freedom. How are we to understand the aesthetic here? We are given plenty of examples, including the idea that one might invent a hope for speech, a direction, a mirage to extend hope, and we are told to sing, and that song belongs to the aesthetic, and that way is freedom. A series of statements then take place, perhaps as so many ways of inventing hope for speech. The “I”—Darwish—remarks upon and owns his own enunciation: “I say: The life which cannot be defined / except by death is not a life” (182). And then it is as if the poem has shifted to a set of stage directions levied from elsewhere. The voices seem situated nowhere, and the time of their speaking remains uncertain:

He says: we shall live.

So let us be masters of words which

Make their readers immortal …

(182)

The stanza can only make us pause, since he, Said, is gone, and yet here he is, in Darwish’s poem, speaking in the present, perhaps impossibly immortalized in the word, and delivering a speech act with confidence in his own name, but also as a plurality. The “we” who shall live are surely Palestinians, to be sure, but also Said, who lives, in the poetic presence Darwish provides, in solidarity and in an extended present time. It is Said’s voice that makes this happen, or is it that of Darwish? Or does it happen precisely because we are not sure which is his voice and which belongs to Darwish and which is figured here as belonging to every Palestinian? This contrapuntal rhythm takes both writers into its rhythm, but it is Darwish, still living then, who is figured as giving life to Said. This seems to happen through addressing him and having him address Darwish back, but also by addressing everyone and anyone else as well. How does this address give life or invent hope? Because the Naqba in some ways never stops happening, never settles as history; there remains the question of what other time might yet be possible. At one point Darwish writes, “It is neither me nor him [Said] who asks; it is a reader asking: What can poetry say in a time of catastrophe?” (180). We might add: what does the saying of poetry do to open up a future beyond catastrophe?

Perhaps, in asking this question, we are still tracing the movement of the scream into poetry. Is this related to the impossible task that Said is said to have left to Darwish? We have already seen how unclear it was whether that scream was something that should or should not be done, and it seemed that what came from the scream was a song and then a veritable ode to the aesthetic, conceived as freedom, that could have come out of a nineteenth-century tract of German Idealism. But perhaps to fathom the impossible task we need to return for a moment to that “scream that you may know that you’re still alive / and alive, and that life on this earth is / possible.”

The Said of the poem makes clear that the task is not to achieve possibility, perhaps not even a possible life: his will is the impossible. Here are the lines again, the first and last repeat each other, cradling all that is said between: “If I die before you, my will is the impossible.” In a line that resonates with Kafka’s parables, the Darwish voice asks, “Is the impossible far off?” and the Said voice responds, “a generation away.” Of course, we are right to ask, is his will the impossible or the possible, since, if it is a generation away, it is possible—just not for us. The line resonates with the famous quip by Kafka: “Oh, plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope, but not for us.” Kafka writes this line after explaining that our lives were just a bad mood of God, some of his suicidal thoughts. The strange thing about this moment is that it implies that God surely has other moods, but that our lives are not inside them.¹⁷ Something similar seems to be happening with Said and the question of willing the impossible. Of course, it may be left to us to understand this paradox: a possible life is one that wills the impossible. The “I” who voices Darwish in the poem has already claimed, “the life which cannot be defined / except by death is not a life.”

So how, then, might we understand the impossible—is it precisely the life that is not defined by death, but by some horizon of life? Is Said in effect given poetic occasion by Darwish to live still so that Palestinian life becomes possible? Is that what happens when Darwish refers to Said in an impossible present even here, on the occasion of his elegy: “He says: we shall live.” This is no narration of past events: it is no optimistic rumouring—“he said we shall live!” No, Said is said to say it now, in this present, and he says it for any and all Palestinians, an open-ended “we” and an utterance that extends through time. Said’s life is thus linked with Palestinian life, and plurality emerges without fort or trench.

And such a life is made possible by Said’s word, at least within the world of this poem. Of course, no one’s word can make life possible, but, perhaps here, Said’s word, delivered in the present tense in which Said no longer lives, makes Said’s living still possible through voice. Implicit to this immortalizing of Said is the notion that if he ceases to speak, Palestinians will cease to live. Paradoxically, it is Darwish’s word that carries him here, even though it is Said who speaks in the first-person from no place and within no clear sense of present time. Something has been invented for language, and it is Said speaking precisely in the time when Said can no longer speak, securing the collective life of his people beyond a catastrophic time into another; this poem, then, is precisely inventing a hope for speech. And, perhaps also, it delivers words and claims with the performative force to state and predict that “we shall live.” It is a declaration of hope, but also of unfathomable confidence, given the threats to life, the slow, sporadic, yet systematic erosion of everyday life under occupation. Some overweening confidence and surety is already there when “he,” Said, is said to say: “So let us be masters of words which / Make their readers immortal …”

We can surely then ask whether Darwish does not furnish words on this occasion that make Said immortal, since there he is, in some uncanny present, speaking still—an impossible task, to be sure, and yet the one that Darwish must do. But what Darwish has him speak is precisely “immortal life”—yes, for the readers, but for every Palestinian, on the inside or the outside or both, who read Darwish or Said in order to find a way to live the impossible, which is to live outside the defining threat of death, where death is less an existential problem than the poisonous air of the everyday, the sudden incursion, the persistent block, the predictable destruction, the reiterated expulsion and containment. So, through the poem, Darwish gives life to Said, who gives life to all Palestinians. And it is this quite ineffable and impossible affirmation that moves the poem toward its closure. The final lines are a farewell, and we expect that they will be a farewell to Said. But what Darwish writes is simply these two lines:

Farewell,

Farewell poetry of pain.

The salute to Said leaves the poetry of pain behind, since in this contrapuntal ode the scream is effectively transmuted to song, and the song is dedicated to Said, who left it to Darwish, but to his readers as well, to will the impossible. And in this way the poem becomes the very exercise of that will and the fulfillment of that bequest. If one is to honor Said’s final wish, then, the poetry of pain will be overcome by the poetry that wills the impossible. Whose will is it? It belongs exclusively neither to Darwish nor to Said, finally, but to the Palestinian people who have become, within the terms of the poem, its readers and who enter that impossible life and freedom through its aesthetic form. And the form is an address, and it admonishes and exhorts its reader; it prompts its reader to act, to speak, to invent, and to will the impossible, which is not just a future other than perpetual catastrophe, but the break with catastrophe, which would be the very possibility of the future. Walter Benjamin wrote presciently in 1940 against those false notions of progress that can only produce towers of destruction in their wake, a position that was clearly at a critical distance from the progressive historiography of Zionism. Catastrophe is precisely not a chain of events where something in the past leads to something in the future. Under conditions of catastrophe, there is only one catastrophe, and it keeps on happening, “keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage” in a present time that is the time of reiterated destruction. Or course, the modes and strategies of expulsion and occupation have changed and do change, but if we imagine that addressing this or that change—the settlements, the Likud party, the wall—will provide the solution to the colonial subjugation and expulsion of the Palestinian people, we have not grasped the catastrophe in its enormity and repetition.

One might wish the poem could become a home or homeland that puts an end to exile, but the poem is no place, its borders are not closed. It is in this sense utopic, opening out to a plurality that is called forth by the scene of its address. The poem calls Said into being and houses him in its language, but it also calls forth, constitutes the people, precisely under conditions when self-determination is so radically co-opted or undermined. Indeed, we might say, citing Darwish, that the poem is “where identity … open[s] onto plurality / not a fort or a trench” (178).

When Darwish asks, “What shall we do without exile?” in the poem called “Who Am I, Without Exile?” published in 1999, he is posing the question to others, but also to a land and to a time in which this problem might actually arise.¹⁸ For what would it mean to live in a time in which there was no thought beyond exile? The stranger to whom he addresses the poem is someone else, but also himself. It seems to be a question for a binationalism that would depend upon discarding the myths of the nation:

There’s nothing left of me but you, and nothing left of you

but me, the stranger massaging his stranger’s thigh.

stranger! what will we do with what is left to us

of calm and of a snooze between two myths?

And nothing carries us: not the road and not the house.

(91)

Darwish is thus let loose with the nameless stranger in a wilderness of uncharted lands. He refers elsewhere to the poem itself as a place of exile. What would we do without poetry? Against all the odds, it gives us no direction, but a new political cartography. Darwish invokes Said in his contrapuntal ode: “He says: I am from there, I am from here, / But I am neither there nor here.” Who can say these lines? The ones who are within the State of Israel: surely. The Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza: surely. In refugee camps in southern Lebanon: yes. Exile is the name of separation, but alliance is found precisely there, not yet in a place, in a place that was and is and in the impossible place of the not yet, happening now.