Holy Land in Transit

Steven Salaita

Created:

My 15 highlights

On 31 January 2002, Latuff published a series of cartoons "on behalf of brave Palestinian people."35 The series consists of seven illustrations: "Black people after [the] U.S. Civil War," "South-African black people in apartheid days," "South-Vietnamese civilians during [the] Vietnam War," "Tibetans under Chinese rule," "Native Americans facing U.S. Cavalry," "Natives from Chiapas facing Mexican troops," and "Warsaw Ghetto."36 Every plate depicts a moment of oppression in each group's history, with an individual, representing the oppressed community, uttering the line, "I am Palestinian."
The ethnocratic, not national, characteristics of the United States and Israel are nearly identical; their deep camaraderie is not merely strategic, nor is it accidental. Understanding the interplay between these governments on all levels will create possibilities to identify and implicate the narratives underscoring neoliberalism, the West's latest form of colonization.
Those with the power to influence a nation's policy are able to incorporate their narratives into the pageantry of that nation. Natives, as wards of the United States, the same nation that committed genocide, are unable to institutionalize remembrance into the American consciousness. Instead, the Nazi Holocaust and those committed by other nations are inserted into American ethos, both to reinforce America's self-professed civility and to provide a barrier behind which American genocide can be concealed.
The Invention of Ancient Israel, Whitelam details Europe's rapture with ancient Israel, what he calls the taproot of Western civilization. From these narratives, Europeans set out to discover new lands and claim them as economic dependents under the sovereignty of God, a process that most affects Indigenous societies in three ways: (1) their histories are silenced in place of Western metanarratives of progress and liberation; (2) lands are usurped under the alleged authority of God, almost completely precluding humanistic dialogue among colonizer and colonized; and (3) the discourse of conquest is ultimately incorporated into all aspects of the colonizer's popular and intellectual institutions, becoming normalized and perceived as natural over time
It is a mistake to conceptualize ethnic cleansing simply as a physical act. Its importance lies in its psychological power.
Others also challenge the Zionist narrative by decentering it from its mythical discourse. Ward Churchill is the most ardent Native critic of Zionism.
Ethnic cleansing is not the result of an innate pathology that compels the ruthless to murder and dispossess. It is a calculated and conscious act born from the desire to absolve greed or hostility by striking from existence physical figures that might hinder absolution. Ethnic cleansing is the removal of humans in order that narratives will disappear. In this sense, ethnic cleansing, although complex beyond any categorical definition, functions essentially on two levels: a practical clearing of people for the purpose of one's colonial mission, whether that mission is grounded in greed or ideology; and a blinding of the national imagination so colonial history will be removed along with the dispossessed.
Thinkers in academe and in more popular political forums on the left tend to struggle within the confines of traditional American tenets of life, liberty, and justice in examining inequities at home and abroad. These concepts, however, are at times superficial, having coincided with slavery and with the Native genocide (one of the worst in human history). They are also employed with vigor during periods of overseas aggression. It is impossible, in other words, to separate the American notion of liberty from memories of treachery and plunder.
When critics urge writers to work in the service of the community, then they risk unwittingly invoking the same sort of sensibility that was used to effect political conformity in the Soviet Union, Islamist Iran, and 1950s America. The intention of ethnic critics, of course, is totally different from that of leaders involved in the situations I just mentioned, yet one cannot help but be wary of the method, as it has proved time and again to have the potential to evolve into an injunction demanding obedience to what a few deem to be the common good.
In colonial situations, the center defines the extreme in order that the center's own extremist positions can be concealed behind diplomacy and thus validated under the guise of progress or rationality. Its underlying ethics are articulated by those it comes to define as extreme.
For Native America, see: David Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992); Vine Deloria, Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1970), God Is Red (Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum, 1994), and Red Earth, White Lies (Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum, 1997); Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1999); Peter Mancall and James Merrell, eds., American Encounters (New York: Routledge, 1999); Calvin Martin, ed., The American Indian and the Problem of History (Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987); Phillip White, American Indian Studies: A Bibliographic Guide (New York: Libraries Unlimited, 1995); Allison Lassieur, Before the Storm: American Indians Before the Europeans (New York: Facts on File, Inc., 1998); and Sharon Helen Venne, Our Elders Understand Our Rights (Penticon, British Columbia: Theytus, 1998). For Palestine, see: Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle (Boston: South End Press, 1983); Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage, 1992) and Reflections on Exile (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2001); Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1997); Keith Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History (New York: Routledge, 1996); Rosemary Sayigh, Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1979); Mohamed Heikal, Secret Channels (New York: HarperCollins, 1996); Hanan Ashrawi, This Side of Peace (New York: Touchstone, 1995); Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, Original Sins (New York: Olive Branch Press, 1993); Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987); Naseer Aruri, Occupation: Israel Over Palestine (Washington, D.C.: Association of Arab-American University Graduates, 1989); Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001); and Ann M. Lesch and Dan Tschirgi, Origins and Development of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1998).
Both Maracle and Darwish attempt the same thing Latuff had in mind in creating his sketches: the transformation of history from isolated episodes into a fluid continuum. Of particular interest is the point of view Darwish employs, which is that of a Native and implies that dispossession in Palestine, even more than five hundred years after Columbus's mission, is still part of the aftermath of that mission.
Kathleen Christison offers another mature example of reciprocal intercommunalism. Perceptions of Palestine, a diplomatic history that surveys what Christison calls an "Israel-centered" attitude among most American politicians,
Maracle's "Poem to a Palestinian Child"
In this case, the important matters—oppression, domination, and a peculiarly executed form of messianic settlement—leave Natives and Palestinians with an amorphous but attainable challenge: recontextualize through pragmatism and creative theorization aspects of their historical encounters that have been decontextualized from the present by apologists for the past. One might respond to historical apologism through an ethnocentric reassessment of the past, but a more interesting approach will avoid the stratification of Indigenous intellectual traditions by transforming ethnocentric concerns into interethnic paradigms.