So. Good afternoon and welcome, everybody. It's it's an honour and a pleasure and a personal pleasure to have to introduce to you Dr. Bashir Abu Mani, a speaker today. Dr. Abu Name is currently a reader in postcolonial literature in the School of English at the University of Kent.
He took as many of you know, his dphil from Oxford, and his current research deals with topics such as global English literature of the Middle East, literary realism and modernism and literary and cultural theory, Marxist postcolonial and I guess otherwise. His most recent book is the Palestinian novel from 1948 to the present published by Cambridge University Press. And the title of his talk today is Habib's The Possibility Optimist in 1948.
Thank you. Thank you all for coming. I'm very happy to be here. So I speak for around 40 minutes and then we can take some questions. So you mean Habib was a leading Palestinian writer? He was a journalist. He was a politician. He was a member of Knesset for the Communist Party for around 20 years. Weeks before he died, he said the following. He said, I write only when I am shaken, shaken to my core, and my way of crying is through the ink that comes out of the pen.
I want to propose several things today that Habib is here referring to the Nakba, that the Nakba is the key structuring event in his literature that he writes to return to it, to register and mourn it, and to ruminate on its memory and its ongoing effects. That he reads the Nakba not only as a site of mass defeat, but as one of individual collapse, of subordination and crucially, of anxieties of culture and collaboration.
That he also reads it as a site of future resistance, that he identifies it as the underlying cause of his intolerable living, of what he describes as the cotillion, the severance from everything you hold dear, that finally the Nakba generates the static fantasy that enables the struggle against political defeat and enables also self-determining agency. These are conceived in literary rather than political terms.
It is the freedom to imagine and to write your own self that is sanctified and advocated. Nothing outside of that act can be trusted. This is ultimately Habib's literary project. If Habib spent most of his political life trying to attenuate, to rectify or to overcome the Nakba, calling, for example, for Palestinian rights recognition, self-determination against conquest and occupation. It is in literature where he dwells on the. What he dwells on morning.
What he dwells on the everlasting pain of national. And also for him, familiar substance, raising the spectre that his political hopes won't materialise here. That is, neither collective freedom nor a clear political mechanism advocated or posited to overcome the Nakba. If politics for Habib was about struggle and about optimism, literature was about weakness, and it was also about the dearth of prospects for change and transformation.
Such complex amalgamations as optimism captured Habib's contradictory imperatives, both struggling against reality and also submitting to it both realist and otherworldly, both present and disappeared, both captured and escaped.
So as Habib has made literary testimony, the best of the optimist shows it is because of 1948 and of Israel's deepening settler colonial victory that Habib ultimately sees no possibility for worldly salvation for his imagined Palestinian protagonist in the novel goes by the name of Sayyid. At the end of the novel, he leaves Saeed sitting on a stake, waiting essentially for extraterrestrial salvation. So you have a portrait of an unrealistic character.
If ever there was one good side, writing the story of his life and disappearance change his fate. That becomes the question motivating the novel. So that is the macabre condition that Habib describes in The Optimist, his most important literary work, which was published in 1974. So to give you a sense of how he writes the Nakba that I would like to read out a deeply consequential moment in the novel.
It's not only a great example of how he was literary realism in The Optimist, in which can describe as individual destiny, typifies a historical collective change. But it is also a moment that embodies the whole narrative structure of the moment. Loss, human weakness and the tragedy of expulsion here, combined with the sadness of staying and also the sadness of being dominated by the short parts I want to read is from the ironically titled How Side First Participated in the War of Independence,
not the Nakba. That's the title. It does have side as he's being driven back from the north to Haifa by his father's military contact and how the jeep this is the setting for the scene suddenly stops on the edge of acre. So as the Jewish driver and I start to quote jump from it like a shot gun in hand, he raced into the sesame stalks, parting them with his bones.
I saw a peasant woman, the narrator says, crouching down there in her lap, a child, his eyes wide in terror, from which village demanded the governor. The mother, remain, crouching, staring at him askance, although he stood right over her huge as a mountain. From betwee, he yelled. She made no response, but continued to stare at him. He then pointed his gun straight at the child's head and screamed, Reply or I'll empty this into him.
At this I tensed. Then I later says, ready to spring at him come what may. After all, the blood of youth surged hot within me at my age, then of 24, and not even a stone could have been unmoved at the sight. However, I recalled my father's final counsel and my mother's blessing, and then said to myself, I certainly shall attack him if he fires his gun, but so far he is merely threatening her. I remained I treading the woman dead. Reply Yes, from between.
Are you returning there? He demanded. Yes, returning. Didn't we warn you here that anyone returning there will be killed? Don't you all understand the meaning of discipline? Do you think it's the same as chaos? Get up and run ahead of me. Go back anywhere you like to the east. And if I ever see you again on this road, I'll show you no mercy. No woman stood up and gripping her child by the hand set off towards the east.
Not once looking back, her child walked beside her and he too never looked back at this point. And this is Habib's interpretation of the event. The narrator with through the narrator's voice, he says, At this point I observed the first example of that amazing phenomena that was to occur again and again until I finally met my friends from outer space for the father, the woman and child went from where we were, the governor and I standing and I standing in the jeep.
The taller they grew, by the time they emerged with their own shadows in the sinking sun, they had become bigger than the plane of acre itself. The governor still stood there, awaiting their final disappearance while I remained huddled in the jeep. Finally, he asked in amazement, Will they ever disappear?
The question, however, was not directed at me, Habibie later adds in the same chapter betwee is the village of the poet, of course, Mahmoud Darwish, who said, 15 years later, I, lord executioner Victor, over a dark eyed maiden, hurrah for the Vanquisher of villages, hurrah for the Butcher of Infants. Was he this very child? The narrator asks. Had he gone on walking eastward after releasing himself from his mother's hand, leaving her in the shadows?
By this, I end this long episode in the novel, so I want to flag three issues about this encounter, essentially between a colonial official and a dispossessed refugee. First, the position of the narrator. Second, this idea, this notion that Palestinian history is seen here as refugee history, as a refugee story. And third, the last thing that literature resists historical injury. So I'll begin with the first one. Mm hmm. So first on Syed's behaviour and position, it is.
There's no other words to describe it, is it? It is currently it is complicit and it is also contrary to the peasants own displacement. She's being pushed out as he's making his way back in. He does nothing to help her remain silent witnesses, essentially her expulsion, and thus acts on the side of her executioner. Crucially, this becomes very important. Historically, Sayyid is Habib himself nearly 40 years after writing this incident.
And the problem is he confirmed its historical accuracy in a documentary that Dalia Capella made about his life just a couple of weeks before he died. This incident did indeed take place. He was the one riding next to the military governor, and he did nothing to stop the expulsion. In the documentary, he says that to happen, these are his words. Why was Habib so paralysed? And his answer in the documentary is out of political responsibility.
These are his words. He reasoned, and then he says, Bah, pose. But what is this consequential responsibility that Habib is referring to? What could motivate a Communist committed to human emancipation to do absolutely nothing to alleviate such stark individual human suffering? It's impossible to understand either the historical weight of this episode or Habib's guilt without briefly reviewing the history of the Communist Party in Palestine.
For Habibie to recall this episode in the weeks before he died shows that it is tied up with his own sense of political legacy. He belonged to a Communist Party that has spent most of its time since the Palestinian rebellion of 1930 639, totally committed to the Arab national movement and fully in support of the rebellion.
These are the words of Moussa Woodberry, the Communist Party historian, because it saw anti-imperialism as the core axis of Palestinian politics when it actively participated in a popular front coalition with Palestinian nationalists. And as a result of this, the emphasised class struggle and social revolution. Indeed, national contradictions between Jews and Arabs were so severe that they led to the sea splitting on national lines in 1943 for Habibie and his comrades.
There was no way of reconciling and essentially colonial and ruling nationality, only national liberation struggles. Again, these are the words of one fellow, the Soviet appointed Communist Party secretary. Habib's tragedy then can be summed up as follows An anti-imperialist Arab communist ended up accepting and justifying the imperialist partition of a homeland he had earlier sought to liberate. He did so because he followed the Soviet Union, and that's very important as a reason.
And he also accepted that the results of the Nakba meant national defeat. Indeed, all Arab Communist parties acting as Soviet foreign policy satellites were forced to accept the partition because it became indelibly tainted with outside interference and ideological complicity with Jewish statehood. Arab communism suffered for years to come as a result of this enforced decision suddenly until the Soviet replacement with Arab nationalism in the late fifties.
So for Palestinians, partition was not only treacherous, but violated the right of self-government and the right of self-determination. That is why Habib was nearly killed in Ramallah for accepting it and had to flee to Lebanon as a result. So as if subservience to Soviet foreign policy objectives was not enough, the 1948 war intensified Communist Arab-Jewish antagonism within the party and had lasting effects.
While our Communist mobilised to protect Palestinians from the engulfing catastrophe, prominent Jewish Communist leaders like McInnis actively supported the Hagana forces and helped them in procuring arms from the Communist bloc to bring the war essentially in their favour. Another prominent Jewish communist leader, Meir Wilner, signed the Israeli Declaration of Independence on behalf of the Communist Party as the expulsions,
essentially, of Palestinians were taking place around him. What must Palestinian communists have felt and thought when, after the Nakba they were forced back under the organisational and the political hegemony of those who supported the state's violent objectives? During the Nakba, Habib's sense of guilt and responsibility can therefore only be understood in this context of national collapse and overpowering social political disintegration.
The scars and the injuries of 4749 would mark Habib until the end of his life. This is, of course, not to deny the role that the Communist Party played in the 1950s and the 1960s in the struggle against Israel's military government. Communists were at the forefront of political challenge to the state and demanded full rights and equality for Palestinians in Israel. They also played a key role in exposing state crimes like, of course, the massacre of 49 Palestinian citizens in 1956.
It is also not to argue, as nationalists now do, that Arab communists collaborated with Israel. To believe that is not only to misconstrue and to falsify their overall contribution to Palestinian society in Israel. It is also to ignore how active they were in fighting against Israel's regime of collaboration, the regime of surveillance, and the regime of control. Adapting to circumstances one cannot change is quite distinct from actively collaborating with an occupying regime.
This is confirmed by Hillel Cohen's work and I'll refer to his book Good Arabs, Israeli Security Agencies and Israeli Arabs from 1940 to 1967. I'm just going to make one quote from the book in order to support what I'm arguing about the communists, the communists, he says. Organised mass demonstrations urged internal refugees to return to their villages without permits and conducted other protest activities.
Some under the banner of Jewish are a partnership. The Israeli establishment thus viewed them as a clear and present plus present danger to the state. The Communists also attacked collaborators boisterously and constantly tried to shame them in publicly, publicly coining terms like government steals, not Hakimi, which quickly became very popular. Indeed, if in the confusing circumstances that followed 1948, he continues the 48 war.
Many Arabs chose to collaborate. The Communists offered a nationalist alternative, although a complex one that recognised Jewish national aspirations and the right of Israel to exist within restricted borders. And the quote from Hillel Cohen. So there is no question that our communists did fortifying Palestinian resistance to Israel and did actively oppose its unjust and discriminatory state policies,
including land expropriation. Israel barely tolerated the Communist Party, and Ben-Gurion wanted to ban it. It was always hounded. It was always spied on. It was always politically restricted. The optimist should be right. I think in this context of struggle and forced compromise, political strains that haunted Habib. But one particular fact that is key to understanding this episode reported before is that side is not communist adapting to the new reality of a colonial Israel.
He is a straight up collaborator who comes from a family of collaborators. This is the way he's depicted in the novel. This is a very harsh judgement by Habib that it saves his own skin while people around him suffer banishment and exile. But the depiction is also deceptive, since it stars ordinary Palestinians who remain the brunt of collaboration.
When the actual historical event was about Habib himself, ultimately the weight of an overbearing Nakba prevails, and 1948 produces a deep sense of human failure and Habib for witnessing it importantly, and also for being protected from it. He returns only to see more expelled. So I'll say two more things that are worth emphasising about the episode.
Saeed resists what he witnesses by describing it in a certain way, in a very particular way as refugee mother and child leave and had eastwards that figure slowly. Town is a very beautiful image. They towered over the landscape around them. If expulsion eliminates physical presence, it also enhances its figurative and its symbolic dimensions. Shadows will continue to hover over an empty land until they can return.
That is why refugee absence only grows in his consciousness, haunts and shadows his every move. This is Habib's way of minimising Katia. The courtyard expulsion, the substance of expulsion, the fact that families, villages, cities, communities were torn asunder by Israel. It also conveys the centrality of 1948 in Palestinian history. Will the refugees also haunt the Israeli military governor who asks if they will ever disappear? Will the excluded surface for him as well?
There is no suggestion in the novel that the perpetrators of the Nakba feel any remorse or compassion for the victims. Why would a leader that becomes the question in a binational Communist Party whose daily life is filled with encounters and discussions and friendships with Israeli Jews, never depict an ordinary Israeli in the novel. In fact, none of Habib's Jewish figures in the novel are independents, as it were, their all including his Mizrahi handler repressive state agents.
Why? Especially when Kanafani manages to humanise Miriam in his novel returning to Haifa and to draw out her suffering as a Holocaust survivor, and also to draw to her human motivations for staying, not her Zionist motivations and human motivations for staying. And also when Mahmoud Darwish writes love poetry to his Jewish lover, Rita. Why then does Habib stay silent on the score? It is hard to answer this question, I think with any certainty.
Habib was a disciplined political being, and his onerous public life of representing an oppressed and suffering population mattered most to him so he couldn't afford their wishes liberties.
He also had a particular way of thinking about his own imaginative work in relation to his political commitments, politics and literature, where he would famously reiterate in his journalism what he described as the two watermelons he carried, but the pain to burdens, but also to different and separate entities and activities. Literature was his freedom from political constraint. His personal truth. Literature doesn't lie, he tells Dalia. These are his words in the documentary.
If his political world was suffused with Israelis, he wanted his literary world to speak to his knockabout pain and though his Nakba injury. Again as the initial quote, as a form of crime writing, as a way to revisit the scars and the wounds and to remember who inflicted them, to expect that everyday encounters with Israelis would rectify or would attenuate. This is to misconstrue the ongoing nature of the injustice of Palestinian exile and Palestinian dispossession.
The response to this point about the specificity of the literary for Habib brings me to my third comment on the expulsion sequence I quoted earlier. So thirdly, 48 and Habib's description generates a literal response, and this is crucial for his novel here as well. The symbolic resists the real by asking whether the child in the encounter is Mahmoud Darwish Habib.
It was a direct link between expulsion and poetry. If the act of expulsion silenced outside the character, it doesn't silence the child. A new generation will fight with words and resist Israel's crimes. The son can finally adopt this generation. 48 Palestinians, 48 generation resistance poets, resistance writers, those who under conditions of cultural and political sieged siege.
These are the kind of families that terms managed to forge an emancipatory culture, a humanist culture against oppression and against national negation. So the emphasis on literary voice and speech is key in the novel. I would I would go even further. If anything, this is Habib's literary legacy to live. The contradictions of Palestinian communism in Israel is to produce a distinctly haunted literary voice.
It's a voice that holds up so far, authoring as a placeholder for the core values of self-determination and South emancipation in the spirit of some cosmic form that Habib quotes at the beginning of the novel urging Palestinians, I'm not going to quote the whole poem to not to wait. And in the words of the poem, unto yourself, compose. He does, you should to yourself compose those letters you anticipate. But Habib buys such literary, imaginative freedom at a cost.
And this is what I want to emphasise in what follows. Having outlined why I think 1948 is key to understanding the possibilities, I want to focus now on why Habib opts to live side on a stake at the end of the novel. Why is fantasy and writing the only option left at the end? As the magic creature tells Saeed, this is the creature from outer space that Saeed appeals to all the time.
The creature tells him, This is the way you always are when you have no luck, when you can no longer endure your misery. He tells him You cannot. Yet you cannot bear to pay the high price you know is needed to change it. You come to me for help, but I see what other people do and the price they pay, allowing no one to squeeze them into one of these tunnels, he tells him. And then I become furious with you. What is it you lack?
Is any one of you lacking a life he can offer or lacking a death to make him fear for his life? End of quote. So to leave Saeed on a stake, Habib has to reject other options and other political possibilities. So what does Habib sidelined in order to end up with literary fantasy and to end up with imagination as the main effect? There are two core rejections, and I'll just go through them quickly that are key.
As I alluded to earlier, he rejects any form of political organisation, for example, that the Communists were undertaking at the time as he's sitting on a stake. So he looks down to see a boy selling little hard newspaper on one bazaar where the communists find the energy to fight side count. Such self-sacrifice doesn't appeal to one side also rejects. And this is another important rejection, another form of sacrifice, the option of armed resistance.
That was politically all the rage when Habib wrote the novel. So in another key episode in the novel, there's a clash of ideologies between the passivity, the silence, the fight emblem, witnesses, and the armed response. And that's rehearsed inside encounter with his son Wala, which means loyalty in Arabic wallah as his son from his Second Life Mafia, the one who remained after his first wife in the novel yard was violently expelled.
So the dialogue I'm referring to is essentially is fundamentally about the distinct life form of 48 Palestinians, those who, in a sense, by historical fluke, remained in what became Israel. I'm just going to outline the main part here, just to give you a sense of what options that that Habib has to reject in order to keep side on the stake at the end.
So shocked by his parents, silent and silence inducing life Walla rebels in the novel as he's surrounded by police under Entourage, which was of course very important as a depopulated. Destroyed village in 1948, but also as a site of massacre. Habibie sets the scene there. Well, has an exchange with his mother. Bucky outside had brought Makhaya to the beach so she so he can convince Vala to surrender.
Her decision instead to join Willa and his fellow Vanguard revolutionaries is beautifully and sadly evoked by Habib. So rather than helping come out of the caves, she actively joins him and they disappear. Join the armed struggle with others. So by the end, again, Saeed is left behind. He's alone. Both his wife and his son leave him to join the Palestinian Resistance Movement. This is the exchange, he tells his mother. These are Doric quotes, he says.
I'm not hiding, mother. I've taken up arms only because I got sick and tired of your hiding. Suffocated, he says. It was to liberate. It was to breathe free. That I came to the cellar to breathe and freedom. Just once in my cradle he tells us. You stifled me. You stifled my crying as I grew and tried to learn how to talk. From what you said, I heard only whispers as I went to school. You want me? Careful what you say. When I told you my teacher was my friend, you whispered.
He may be spying on you. One morning you told me. Mother, you talk in your sleep. Careful what you sings in your sleep. His mother cried out a way out how death is no way out. She was merely an end. There is no shame in how we live, she says. If we are secretive, it's only in hope of deliverance. If we're careful, it's only to protect all of you. Where's the shame in you coming out to us. To your father and mother. Alone. You have power over nothing. This is the end of this episode.
So if the time for collective regeneration hasn't come yet, then wala as Vanguard, the armed struggle will always have its advocates. Habibie is not tempted by it though, and this is important novel, however attractive its lure was from the mid 1960s onwards. Unlike the problems of Iraq, despite the writer from Bethlehem originally, his FIDA heroes are celebrated in his novels. That kind of self-sacrifice never appealed to Habibie.
It's also it also, incidentally, didn't appeal to Sahar Khalifa, who critiques the PLO in her novel. While fans and critics armed struggle as a mechanism of overcoming the Palestinian Lukman occupation for the occupied armed struggle against the militarily vastly superior state seemed futile and self-destructive time. But the argues may yet bring collective change in the meantime. She does have some. Until where? Until they are ready. These are her words.
Habibie live side open to accusations of submission and subservience and also accusations of silence. What that tells his mother at the end of this episode, then why doesn't he speak? Her mother replies, He's not very good with the words Habibie strategy. And the problem is, is to be good with words. It is to show that if political reality is marked by defeat, by compromise, by subservience, by complicit history, etc., then literary words can provide the necessary margin of freedom.
It is clear from the novel that such a cultural strategy has the benefits of ruminating on injury, exposing injustice, and telling the truth about history. That is why the novel ends with a rumination on the importance of truth. This is the last chapter on history historical consciousness. The novel also shows that not only political resistance, but even collaboration is not an option for side. There's a very funny scene in the novel. One side raises.
After 1967, we hear on the radio that all [INAUDIBLE] should raise the white flag. And of course, the radio is referring to the Palestinians occupied the 1967 areas in the West Bank and Gaza. But while sitting in Haifa, he sees himself as part of this community, and he also raises the white flag, and they arrest him for implying that this is occupied land. You know, that this is this is act of submission becomes, in a sense, in the novel, an act of resistance.
So, again, collaboration, even if you're a very good collaborator, is not an option in the novel, right. The strategy that Habib ends up advocating does have serious limitations. It advocates a literary resolution to real world problems of history. It also, ironically, praises, as it does, that the Oriental imagination, he says, as a mechanism of survival and coping under Israel's arrogant and colonial domination.
Imagination and invention are the only values left standing at the end, unsullied by reality. Considering the brutality of Palestinian existence under Israel. There's something deeply unsatisfactory about this. Invoking the imagination is, of course, heartwarming literary stuff. It warms the hearts of all literature people. You say imagination will solve everything. It is the ultimate hope. And there are moments when I'm much more generous than what's coming next about Habibie.
When I read this cultural gesture more positively as an opening to the future, as an anticipation of political self-determination, etc. But what is troubling is Habibie is active preclusion and reduction of other existing options. People can't live by culture alone, especially not oppressed peoples. Hope is about formulating political projects and strategies for emancipation.
However magnificent Habibie imaginings are, the reality of Palestinian existence means that his literary escape cannot just be read as a form of freedom. It has to be evaluated and it has to be critiqued. If Habibie Stalinist politics were not the answer to the Nakba, should that preclude other forms of politics from informing mass sentiment?
Maybe Habib himself is here, refusing to draw political lessons from his own aesthetic practice and to say that self writing means democratic self making and that Palestinians need a more self-organized form of politics than the CPA at the time could provide. Whatever the answer. The problem is clear Palestinian social and political life has been constitutively marked, if not irreparably devastated by the Nakba.
It is this reality that Habibie articulates in the novel, like no one else in the annals of Palestinian fiction. Habib takes us back to the point of national destruction and forces us to reckon with the costs of defeats. He inserts himself into mass tragedy and reveals by doing so his own wounds and his own scars. A profound sense of loss and disjuncture emanates from this Palestinian national and individual fracture as Palestine is usurped, dispossessed, lost, ruled over and then lived in.
Habib experiences his own reduction to an alien in his own homeland, a severed remnant left behind to witness the daily humiliations of a settler colonial responsibility that is governed by the exclusions, by the domination and by the violence of Jewish statehood. Habib's account is about experiencing how a dispossessing state actively rolls over you but doesn't belong to you. It belongs to and is claimed by someone else elsewhere.
What remains is the impossibility of Palestinian existence under such harsh conditions, with an increasingly dire political situations situation and no prospects for betterment in the near future. Maybe Habib's metaphoric steak brings more to today than it did in 1974. I prefer to read it as a warning rather than as a reality. Everyday Palestinians show that sitting on a stake is not an option, that they will continue to fight for justice and for freedom.
If 70 years to the Nakba has taught us anything, it is that Palestinians will never give up until they achieve justice and independence. Habib's stake is a fantasy. In a sense, they cannot afford neither in reality could he. So I would like to end with some thoughts on whether there are implications for Israel studies from working on Habib. Habib is usually read in the Palestinian register and the implications of his work for Israel are not the main focus of concern.
So it might be worth asking. Then at the end, the following question What does Habib offer the academic study of Israel? I think the simple answer is the Nakba. There's no way of understanding Israel without understanding what Weitzman called it, standing over Haifa, that miraculous clearing of the land without tackling its foundational act of dispossessing the majority of Palestinians.
What this act tells us about the nature of Israel itself, and also what it tells us about Israel's ongoing colonial practices. There's no way of understanding Israel without therefore appreciating as critical. Sociologists like Gershon, Saffir and Barak have argued the constitutive nature of colonisation and colonial conflict. For Israel as an entity, these following processes and practices, for example, are not only historical, but they are ongoing.
Jewish conquest of land and labour. Historical. Ongoing. Pioneering and settlement. Historical and ongoing. Historical. Biblical writers justification the same and the construction of what political sociologist Avi so calls a permanent war society. That, too, is ongoing. Of course, colonialism is thus a crucial determinant of state formation and also of nation building, and continues to govern the allocation of power of rights and privileges in Israel Palestine to this day.
From such a perspective, the Nakba is an ongoing event. The 1967 occupation does not only have a more violent prequel in this regard, but should be read as part of an ongoing process of colonisation that began much earlier than that. It's also worth adding that none of these questions have necessarily to do with politics. One can't, for example, study the Nakba like many more as did, and conclude that we need more expulsion today.
Knowledge is clearly not a safeguard against dehumanising practices, but I believe that Morris is politically in the extreme minority and that, given a chance, ordinary Israelis would respond differently to to learning about the history of the Nakba. It's a wager I'm happy to take, actually. Why else would Israel spend so much time repressing and denying the Nakba, sealing off most of the archives about 1948, disappearing the Palestinians from history?
If it didn't think that knowledge and public debate would change people's attitudes and perceptions. Reckoning with the Nakba is reckoning with both historical truth and also present day reality. Without it, Israelis who live on such a large dose of historical denial can never achieve self understanding, and they can also never be free. They would remain shackled to fears, anxieties and the moral distortions of oppressing others,
and they would never be able to reconcile with their enemies. Reconciliation goes through the Nakba. That's what Habib has to offer. Thank you. Thank you so much. Making it okay if we keep on recording. Anyone has an objection. Okay, so let's open. Well. So I guess the question, I guess, which is more about the background to the publication of the book, I mean, obviously I read it when I was in graduate school, but if it came out in 1974, was you writing it between 67 and 73?
Yeah. Wrote it immediately after the 73 war. When when was he writing it and sort of what was the journey to publication? Because he's obviously writing about one episode, but living through a very different. Yes. So that's what's intriguing about having Habib was that was writing fiction short stories in the forties before the Nakba and then after the Nakba, there's total silence. So he begins writing again. Fiction, not journalism, not political writings, in a sense, fiction immediately.
Just before and immediately after 1967, he published his his first collection of short stories, the AM Super Sextet of the Six Days Immediately as a result of 1967. So what 1967 does for him as a writer and also goes for many Palestinians, is it opens up the floodgates of 1948. So he remembers the events of 1948. And he also begins to write about them effectively and begins to connect with 1948 and begins to connect with the West Bank and Gaza and with Palestinians in the West Bank.
And Gaza is a very nice script. But he says the Palestinians and US occupied Palestinians enough are now united under one present of right. So that there's something about that moment which you can also see in Kanafani, for example, Kanafani writes in his novel Returning to Haifa and remembers 1948, which opens like a floodgate into his writing immediately after 1967.
So there is that national moment that Habib comes to epitomise in The Optimist, and he begins writing the novel and is published in Little Southern in Parts, and then it's published as one volume in 1974. So the Optimist Sextet of the sixties are of that moment, of that very crucial, I would say, conjuncture in Palestinian politics after 1967 and before.
You know, you can there are various ways of describing this politically before the political closure of the Arab revolution, the Palestinian revolution, beginning in the seventies and black September, but also ultimately after the October war, when you have a completely different political moment. So that's the most fertile cultural and political moment for Palestinians, in a sense, from 67. The irony of it is it's an outcome of occupation that becomes the irony of it all.
But that's when he returns to 40. It's also interesting as sort of a fully formed and it was already completed entirely by 1973 or so. Yes. The sort of influence of that moment. So it's really sort of a 67 to 73. Yes. Yes. So it it it has those memories of 48 ruminating on 48 that everything essentially, I think Habib in his world, in his own imagining if it's possible to make that claim, I think writing for Habib is 48. There's nothing else which is more important than for him then 48.
He is totally haunted by ghosts, by spectres, by feelings that are connected to fun. He uses fiction writing unlike political writing, what he would argue with his enemies. And you know, he's a very sharp pen. He's also a journalistic hack. You know, there's no you don't want to [INAUDIBLE] with having you politically write. And so, you know, politically, it could be vicious.
But in his literature, he kept it open for that space because so much pain, so many scars, so much sense of individual complicity, silence, etc. So he does something else in the literary side of things. I think where, where what I'm trying to lay out seems to suggest that he maybe was something less of a literary talent. But so the notion of not at all unable to sort of rid himself of some of his political shackles was just this is a constraint that we should acknowledge.
And, you know, let that be. It's not a constraint. It's totally not a constraint. It's the way he conceived of those activities. I think, Habib, as as a literary figure, I think you can write them very highly amongst the Palestinians. So I don't want to start comparing and especially because the was recording.
But you know, there's something about the problems and the contradictions that Habib embodies, which gives you amazing literature where that's where he lives because he's so tortured and troubled and conflicted by the kind of literature he produces, I think is incredibly unlikely. And it's not only important in a small context for Palestinians in Israel. Or for the Palestinians in the West Bank or for Syrians in general.
It's also important for the Arab world. Habib is a significant presence in the Arab world. I think on some level the optimist as a literary text is unrivalled. So I wouldn't I think those divisions have been, you know, have some they have served him very well. Knew how to function with the constraints of of of of very repressive politics, an extreme allegiance to Soviet policy for the longest time, which enforced the partition on him as a political position.
And at the same time, to give himself a space to breathe where you get all those things that that you couldn't simply tuck them in under his politics. And that's what makes him such an interesting and at some level contradictory figure. So I have, I guess, a comment, maybe two questions.
The comment is regarding I find your last reference to why what is the relevance for this is with a somewhat perplexing because ever thought it's not relevant to Israeli in the study of Israel must include everything that falls under Israeli society is very close to Israeli state and also this is all part of even sure division of fight.
But this is just another way of, you know, curious perspective difference for us because, um, so I have one question regarding Habib and one question regarding your position. In a sense, when it comes to your critique of Habib, would you be willing to accept that at least an input in merit of his work is that by writing fiction, he has helped to keep the memory of 48 alive, as you describe.
I mean, there's an ongoing campaign to either repress or silence it, and he found a very successful way of keeping it alive. So in this I mean, would you give him credit for this? Although, you know, he does it in that very peculiar way that he does. Um, and regarding Habib himself, did he offer an alternative to Syrian nationalism as a viable program for political identification among the 48%? So I'm glad you say that about Israel.
So this is very good news for me that Israel studies is deeply preoccupied with questions of of foundational expulsion and the creation of is that, you know, my encounters have been less the less optimistic than that. But, you know, I'll I'll take your word for it. Yeah, I'm delighted about that. So the question about let me begin with the last question about whether he constituted an alternative. I think I think Habib's is on is a Palestinian nationalist.
His nationalism is mediated through the peculiarities of his Stalinism. But I think what which forced him to take positions which he you could argue, willingly took or, you know, he was just he was a party apparatchik. He was forced to take those ideas.
You couldn't not take those positions if you wanted to stay in the Communist Party of recognising Israel as recognising the partition, operating within those parameters, advocating for certain positions which jar with with other forms of Palestinian nationalism, you know. So it had this problem. I don't think it constitutes an alternative. I think he was just on some level a Palestinian state.
So you can you could discuss somebody who arguably had political illusions about possibilities of peace, who welcomed Oslo because he felt Oslo was the moment that Israel recognised the Palestinians and you could build on that and move forward. That is proved to be a total failure. Even critics saw that at the beginning of Oslo.
So, you know, it was it was necessary for him to believe that that Israel wanted was interested in creating a state in the West Bank and Gaza in reality, because this is this justifies his ideology and justifies his own position that, you know, you have a state for Israelis and then you have a state for for the Palestinians. And this was the logic of partition. So it justified his own position to justify this.
All stars don't think in that sense. You know, he's presents an alternative, I think, on some level politically amongst Palestinians in Israel. That was, if you want to put it in those terms, I was Palestinian mainstream, but we have one state now. The job of people who are actively political or political formations within 48 Palestinians is now to make sure that you pressure Israel. You advocate for the creation of the other state because you already have that one state.
You also, of course, advocated the right of return, etc. But, you know, essentially that became his position. So I don't think he presents that kind of an alternative. In fact, there are many troubling things about his personal histories, political history that come out of, you know, essentially what when you think about the Communist Party, you have to you have to put it in a historical context.
Those were a very small group of people. Most of the ones who didn't want partition split off ended up being isolated. The ones who accepted partition and carried it through a small group of people, a small couple of people essentially that were given this whole weight of trying to tackle the Palestinian-Israeli question. So I don't think their shoulders bear that much weight. So I don't think you know, I don't think that.
The problem of either the two state solution or Israeli policies lies with anything that has to do with the commons. I think the commons is essentially mostly a sideshow, right? If you're into it's a kind of an anthropological exercise that's only interesting for those who are interested in the politics of for the Palestinians. Not more not more than so. I don't think you can put a lot of weight on their position as such. Your second question, I forgot the man Megan did.
Do you see the book is offering a way of talking about. Yeah, totally. I think I. So what I want to argue about the optimist is that it is essentially a knuckleball that you cannot understand the novel without understanding how deeply marked by the numbers, not only the way the novel is written, not only the structure of the novel, but the events of the novel, the relationship between historical, the historical real and the introduction of otherworldly creatures.
Y otherworldly creatures come because of the pressures of the real. They become intolerable. He has to find salvation from outside. All those things are essentially about them. And my question is, would you consider this to be a political act of total writing against it? Yeah, totally. Yeah, of course. But, you know, I don't think Habibie was thinking I'm going to write a novel which ultimately Israeli society will read, nor Habibie was thinking that I cannot because he was.
So what's the word? Constricted by his political affiliations. Right. Which meant that you couldn't dwell on the Nakba so much because what you needed to do was to create that other state. Right? Because this is what's going to resolve the conflict as a two state solution. So there was an element in which politically you couldn't dwell so much on the Nakba, right? And that that became a release for him.
So the notion that, you know, he made the comment once that and I think it's correct that, you know, commerce shouldn't be happy with the optimist. I think there's something there because he's not writing as a communist. But this is not a party line. That's what what what makes the novel so interesting that it's not a party line? You can accuse some other Palestinian writers of toeing party lines, and some of them are unmemorable, whether they advocate different positions.
They just write literature in order to advocate those positions, etc. But Habib is not one of those figures, and that's what's what makes him so interesting that he used literature for, in a sense, for what it should be used for writing, where you have a margin to imagine something which is politically impossible to imagine and to live there, including speaking about your injury, which was very difficult for him. But thank you very much for your talk. I found it profoundly interesting.
A quarter of a century ago I was doing an hour because here at Oxford and one of our texts was the optimist. So I know the first 20 or 30 pages of the book in Arabic quite well. I did then, but I only approached it as a literary text. And you placed Amir Habib in his literary as well as political and broader historical context, which I found very illuminating. And you emphasis was on 1948. The Nakba is the formative experience which coloured everything else that he wrote.
But I remember not very distinctly one line of the dialogue in the book when the old man says to a younger man about the Israelis, My son, the Israelis are occupiers, but this is the nature of occupiers. They are no worse than the British were before them and I are with the Ottomans were before them.
This is a rather philosophical and charitable attitude towards the Israeli occupation, which doesn't sit in very easily with the experience of the Nakba and the episode with which you quoted of the wheel violence and inhumanity of the Israeli occupiers. So I don't recall that sentence. I have to look it up specifically to be able to address your question more more directly. I think there are several. He's fascinated when it comes to energy. He's fascinated by how much memory they remember.
It's 2000 years that, you know, the diaspora. This is narrative story about the diaspora leaving for 2000. They have that long memory, you know, how can he is interested in this notion of memory when you need to remember how and this notion that, you know, if they have the license to remember. Ten years ago. Why doesn't he have a license to remember just 20 years ago? What is it that makes his position deniable and they're completely not really interested in?
He's troubled by those questions because he knows, as it were, he because he's surrounded by the culture, which is ultimately critiquing, because he knows it so well. He posits it sometimes within the frame of that culture. So I think that's one way of thinking about thinking about this this question.
What strikes me most about the novel is, is the fact that speaking to his social and historical and political experiences, the fact that it doesn't have Israeli characters that you can sympathise with, unlike if you take Kanafani, for example, as an example, who makes it his mission to understand the perspective of a Holocaust survivor who ends up occupying the house of a Palestinian in 1948? And not only that, but also, you know, in between quotes inheriting that his sons were left.
So, you know, he's deeply interested in with those ordinary human everyday motivations and questions how maybe it's not there. And then you have to ask yourself, why is he not there when this is his historical experience of combining with others of of of speaking Hebrew, of being surrounded by Jewish comrades. But why more than the novel? I think the only way is to think about it as that space where the Nakba could be articulated. And if if Israelis are perpetuators of they're not.
But then there's very little one can think of them outside of that, if if writing for them is dwelling in pain, I can give you the specific quote from. I would love that. Yes. Because I used it as the opening sentence in an article I wrote many, many years ago, the debate about 1948, in which I reviewed the main points of contention between the old historians and the right historian. And they start with this quote. So I can give you I'd love to see it.
Yeah, but I want to move, if I may, to your conclusion about the implications of this text and of Emil Habib more generally for Israel studies. And you mentioned Benny Morris. Yes. Benny Morris. And his changed, his political views revealed to the extreme right. But he never went back on his historical research at all. So everything he's written is still valid. And the conclusion is that Israel was mainly overwhelmingly responsible for the Nakba and for creating the Palestinian refugee problem.
But in the past, he used to be opposed to this historian and just present the evidence and not draw any conclusions. Whereas after he went to the extreme right, he started passing political judgements and saying David Ben-Gurion, who was the great expeller in 48, that he was a defeatist and that he made a terrible historical mistake in not expelling the whole office and allowing 150,000 Palestinians to stay. But that's completely of no interest at all.
What is of value is Benny Morris's historical research rather than his political commentary. So the other comment I want to make is about Edward Saved, who took the initiative in the conference that we had here at the Middle East Centre on what he wanted the conference to be on that the moral and political consequences of 1948.
I don't know whether you were here when these talks took place, but they resulted in a volume that Eugene Rogan and I edited on the The War for Palestine Rewriting the History of 1948. And we all new historians, revisionist historians. But at the end, there is an afterword by Edwards side which sums up his engagement with the Palestinian issue. It's a very, very neat, eloquent essay covering his whole trajectory in relation to this issue.
And it may be there, but it may have been in other contexts that he commented on the value of new history on the Nakba, and particularly the work of the new historians. And he said it was useful at three levels. One is that it educated the Israeli public about their own history and about the Palestinian view of the common history. The other value is that in coming to encourage Palestinian historians to become more critical of their own leadership in 1948. And thirdly, he said that.
On the second point, he also said that new history gave Palestinians a version of the past which was honest, which was genuine, and which was line in line with their own experience of what happened rather than the propaganda of the victors. And finally, that this kind of openness on both sides could be conducive to mutual understanding and reconciliation. So this is, I would say, the long time ago before Oslo, I think.
And but it is about the importance of 1948, even both for Israel study and post Palestine study. I know. I know. The afterword he wrote for the book.
So my point that what Morris is very specific, my point about Morris is not that he didn't change political colouring and that he that the historical writings that he did an unquestioned said, I wasn't making that argument I'm just saying that as an event, if you look at 48, you could draw conclusions politically, which he ultimately did that we needed more of it. So there's nothing about the event itself which prevents you from saying we needed more of this event.
So. So, no, but my my wager was that subject to public debate, talking, publicly, engaging, learning the history of 1948.
In a public context, my wager would be that ordinary people wouldn't respond like Benny Morris, and that because there was something very specific about his own form of response after the second intifada and his own way of conceiving of the problem of 1948 and imagining continued expulsion in order to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, etc. But so I'm not worried about. I'm not questioning at all the historical reasons and its value.
I'm just saying that you could you could take it different ways politically, depending on your own political perspective. But my wager is that for the majority of people or for a significant number of people, if you allow public debate about this, their attitudes would change. If if I didn't think that, then Israel's position about denying the Nakba, not wanting to discuss it, silencing it totally would be irrational.
Why would they do it if if they didn't think that by doing it, they are controlling attitudes around history, sympathies towards enemies, etc. That's what I meant about the question of occupation. I know I understand what you mean about Habib's quote. So Habib made this reference, but there's something also very distinctive. There's something very playful about, you know, occupiers and you know, my son, this is how they come and go.
But there's something very distinct about the Israeli occupiers which make this narrative, which troubled this narrative that Israeli occupied came not just as occupiers of land, but also settlers. They transformed society. They expelled the majority of the population. They made the home at the cost of the people who were there, unlike some of the other occupiers before them.
So there's a huge social sociopolitical transformation that took place, which makes this judgement slightly too playful for Habib in that sense, because the weight of it is the weight of history is much, much more burdensome than than this comment suggests that there's something distinct about my grandmother sometimes used to say this, you know, or any grandmother, if you talk to them, those who remember the Ottoman times,
they tell you the Ottomans were here, they left, the English were here, they left. The Israelis are here. One day they will leave and you tell them what. But to do something different, the motivation is right. There's something different about the nature of the society that they created. There's something they're not. They're here to stay. You'd be able to, as it were, settle with them, reckon with them.
It's not like it's not like the other occupation I wish it were, you know, like the Ottoman soil, which wasn't mostly an occupation or like the British. Sorry. Well, thank you so much for we still I mean. Well, not to make it through too much. Listen to too much of a bender, but they seem to remember you asking these questions of bloody man.
Yes, I remember. You really think that? But I want to ask you instead about the day and whether this research could actually be taken forward in a comparatively be just be five feet of French and Italian communist political leaders then said, hey, it's sort of like a literary space in which they open.
I think this may be a worthy way of like bringing the research forward and they themselves defamed his wife in office in this space, from the indications, both in both of the party, he sometimes even wanted to self-police even his phase of. And they even if they were like, you used to go, yeah, I mean, the thing they need or if they want to get more of those like different grants and so forth, but they always made sure that this stayed as a sort of free space.
Yeah. Describe. And I was wondering whether you knew if you intentionally did something that you could do to bring this, is that people who are doing it and the comparatively and I would put it the same question to the Jewish community. Yes. Not just, you know, not just the marquee members, but also, you know, Arab just is such a thin, you know, so so.
Yes. So that that it's a way into, as it were, certain 20th century the problems that this problem of started as in political studies and problem of of the culture of the Communist Party's problem of, you know, so there's something around that which is very further and how people work can be extremely loyal politically to a certain ideology would would do other things in their own literary work so that you couldn't just say that these are socialist realist.
You couldn't put them under those labels, which are constricting labels and don't define what are. So I think that's an incredibly further way of thinking about that problem, especially in Italy.
And Greece, of course is another example. So absolutely that so that's and what and the intention of thinking about Habibie in a sense through that geopolitical context is to be able to say that there's only so much that this generation can wait, can, can bear as weight, that their policies were essentially derivative policies that were forced on them and that they had to uphold on some level that you should think about even today,
the history of the Communist Party in Israel as a Stalinist formation loyal to the Soviet Union and Soviet foreign policy. So that gives you a very little margin for manoeuvre politically. So on some level you can say, okay, you can blame them for upholding those positions because ultimately they were agents that were advocating those of those policies. But in another level, you can say, you know, either you stay in the party or you leave. And this was his position.
Now, at the end of his life, Habibie was very troubled by the notion that he understood political responsibility as other in complete repression. Right. So he was very troubled by by the consequences of of of very youthful. Right. He was 24 at the time. Youthful decisions. We have all done things at the age of 24 which really, you know, so you could see the burden of that. Right. But I think this and that's what I meant.
And that's why I like your question, because I want that generation to be understood in that context of of the Cold War, because that's how they framed their own not only political and work contribution, but also their own sense of culture. So they would read. So if you look at how it was deeply in touch with events from the Third World, Soviet literature, developments by writings by Gorky, Chekhov, you know, they belong to that kind of milieu, all the Communists did.
And that that gives you something very compelling. And that's on some level because of the nature of 20th century, like a universal issue, is the question of ignorance and denial connected to that? That can be the statement. I know nothing about Israel. And you mentioned Israeli studies. Yes. I said with this kind of level of education, are you suggesting that in the school curriculum there isn't Palestinian stories being told about 1948 in history couldn't be ignored in geography?
It's difficult in the literature. It doesn't appear that the Israeli kids grew up with the story about the Palestinian story. It used to be optional. Yeah, but. But, but it's an option was taken, not picked up. So it's not part of its heart is ignorance and not denial and the opportunity to digest this. So the state denies this. So there's an official state line. You know, now the question of denial in Israel is a very complicated question.
So one you can say about Israeli society that Israeli society doesn't do things politically because it simply doesn't know. Right. And that if Israeli society knew, let's say, give you more a more controlled example, if it knew what happens in the West Bank and Gaza, it would behave differently again, because it's a settler colony. Settler colonists are very anxious, very fearful.
It's hard to make that argument in that in that sense. It's also hard because Israeli society serves in the West Bank and Gaza. The army is a conscription army. So they know there's no question of ignorance about is. It's hard to argue that the Israelis do not know the facts about what's happening around them. Do they know the fact? That's one question as well.
Question of colonisation, occupation, what's happening in Gaza, etc. It's hard to argue that they don't know how it's manipulated ideologically, how its what, what narrative it's given by the media. That's another set of questions. We can think about. The more specific question is do they know about the Nakba?
I think that's a hard claim to make. I think they especially this generation, older generations who participated in the Nakba, in the war, know, of course they know they don't speak openly. They don't want to speak. These things are silenced because they don't. Because the culture, the political culture may may have changed. They're worried about how the new generation will respond to it. They don't talk about those things.
So there is I think there is a problem of of public knowledge about 1948 being openly discussed and debated. I think I think and I think ending that denial it is a denialism about this question is is key to beginning to understand the story about Israel which the Israeli public is always not told. The Israeli public conception about Israel is Israel is the small country, plucky little country that is barely surviving on the edge of the Middle East.
And all the Arabs around them want to throw them into the sea. And that's why we need to be active in the social not never alive, because we need to continue. That's the story that told. So the fear paralysing in a sense the Israeli population into certain political positions is active all this all the time by the Israeli.
So if you tell the story of 48 and you reckon with that history, Israelis would be able to see how they are, in fact belong in a history of perpetrators, that they are not the victims that they think they are. In fact, they were extremely powerful in 48 and they committed all those crimes, massacres, expulsions, etc. So there's no guarantees. And it depends on the public debate. It depends on the nature of political groups mobilising around this, etc.
But to have it suddenly more publicly acknowledged and debated. I one it's an elementary democratic demand. And two, because I'm not afraid of democracy. They are I want to debate those events publicly with them. Now, they might win at the end of it. I doubt it. Right. But I want that open. Silencing it doesn't help anyone. Silencing it turns it into a completely different event.
So there is an element of ignorance when it comes to 48, but there's also an element of state denial and indeed denial. So the moment that I'll be moulded and shaped, the new historians moment, the moment of, if you like, during the Oslo years when Israel publicly was more open about questions of 1948 is completely closed now, and it's closed because the state decided that it's politically. Maybe, Avi, you can tell us more about this. It's politically difficult to control right now.
I would like to add. Yeah, please comment in answer to your question. I went to school in Israel and we did study 1948, but the term the Nakba was never mentioned. I only knew it as the War of Independence, and it was the Zionist narrative that you have just summarised about what happened in 1948. And as far as the refugee problem is concerned, what we were taught in school is that the Arabs attacked us and we managed to survive. It was a miracle and we didn't harm anyone.
But the Arab leaders told the people to get out of the way, to make way for the invading Arab armies. So Israel is completely innocent of any misdeeds in 1948. But after Oslo, there was the of the era of openness in Israeli society, and there was the Rabin government.
And we had a very liberal minister of education, Yossi Sarid, and he ordered the rewriting of history textbooks for secondary schools to incorporate some of the findings of the new research and especially the findings of Benny Morris. So the new research had some impact on the teaching of history about 1948, but it didn't amount to just. Just that in listening the old narrative, but it was more subtle, the textbook said.
Imagine yourself is a boy or a girl in an Arab village in the middle of the war and having to flee because of the war. So it didn't allocate responsibility to Israel, but at least it opened up questions and made people think about what it would have been like to have been a Palestinian boy or girl. So that was a move towards greater openness, greater honesty and educating the public about what actually happened in that year. But then there was the second intifada. The Likud came back to power.
There was a really early morning that was the education minister. She was a real hard line nationalist and she ordered the rewriting of the history books and she restored the old Zionist narrative about the refugee problem and everything else. And she also wrote an article in the Jerusalem Post in which she talked about the Oslo criminals. The Oslo criminals were Rabin, Peres, Yossi Beilin, the democratically elected Israeli government which signed a peace accord with the Palestinians.
For her, they were criminals. So there's a new discourse around 48 of probably knows more more about this than I do. But I've been picking this up in the press. There's the new way of talking about 1948 is to say that the Palestinians are self victimising. They are. They are. They are committing they are committing their own Nakba by holding onto the right of return, by perpetuating their own misery, etc.
So rather than so, you turn. So again, you blame the victims for something that you did to them. Right. So there's this discourse around self victimisation. So you should, you know, forget about the past. You should reconcile with the past. Enough of those things. You should disband the umbrella, right? That educates the refugees, etc., supports them, protects them, etc. You should just give up on the idea that you are refugees. There is no no way to return to.
You don't have the political right to to get over it. And that new discourse is a discourse of blame. So the right of return is described not just not as a form of justice towards people that you committed crimes against, but the right of return is described as a war against Israel. The discourse around Gaza they are marching to to return to Israel and take over is completely, you know, terror inducing fear in its own population about what the Palestinians want to do.
So again, that's the peculiarity of Israeli political culture, that it's seeped in that language. Let's come back to that comment you made that, as I understand it, the colonialism, if you're going to use that word, is unique to Israel. No. Yes. Because it's a different kind of colonialism that the has to study and the characteristic of colonies as they went through the through history, once the colonial power left, it left a society which was strong, but a political administration.
It was very, very weak. And we've got, as I understand it, something happening, an evolutionary process going on, but that comes out in the novels. And so that you have a build up to 1948 and then you have how do we deal with this in terms of use of history? What really happened was nobody knows what really happened. We have a memory of what happens. And the memory is essential to my identity, my mind, my own personal memory of about my own life is who I am.
Yes. But it's it's these kind of conflicts that they're resolving, perhaps. And we've got a few more generations to go. But there's something happening, and especially in literature and drama and poetry, but fantasy and imagination can deal with that, which is not what happened, not the reality, but the dream, the hope, the anticipation of what could be. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So that's all they're questioning in your question is the things that go around my head as I listen to the other.
Maybe that. Maybe they. What do you think the potential for a Palestinian. Yeah. Is and something about the form of colonisation. So the form of colonisation. Okay. Israel doesn't have a mother country it came from. And this is always an argument that's used to say that, you know, then Israel is not a. Well, you know. Well, it's a new kind of cyclical. And here it is. It functions like a settler colony. And they're also immigrants.
And they're also Holocaust survivors. And they're also settlers. So there's something very distinct about Israel. And to be able to understand the specificity of the Palestinian question is to be able to understand the distinct nature of of the founding members around the notion that Israel built itself around a victim state and the notion that, you know, Jews were persecuted, anti-Semitic persecution around the world for generations, for years to come before that.
So that, you know, that is the specificity of the Palestinian that we're not dealing with whites and blacks in South Africa, which is much easier. But we are dealing with with a population with a state that claims and rightly so, with it with a population that was persecuted in Europe, suffered the Holocaust, etc., so that it's part of the problem.
So at the same time, the practices of our colonial, at the same time one's human sympathies are with victims and Jews were victims in Europe of persecution, holocaust, etc. So it has its own unique, you know, overdetermined nature as, as a conflict. But the notion that you have a settler population that is there doesn't necessarily mean that you need the state, which is settler colonial state. The state can be configured differently to where it where it can be.
For example, one elementary thing which would make Israel a democratic state, they wanted the state like England was a state, when in reality it's not like, you know, no, it's not like England is a state. England. Britain is a state for all citizens. Israel is not.
Israel is a state for all Jews. Yeah. And there's something about that, making Israel consistent with elementary democratic norms, which would change that situation where you have the colonial privileges of anybody who's a Jew from around the world being able to claim citizens while Palestinian refugees who were who were dispossessed as a result of the creation of Israel cannot return. So there's something.
So there are ways of dealing with the nature of that history and the legacy and making it more consistent with elementary political demands, which are necessary, I think, politically resonant. This has nothing to do with moving the settler population, putting it somewhere. I'm not talking about the West Bank and Gaza, I'm talking about Israel proper, etc. All these things can be configured with the two populations existing there in Israel.
It doesn't. There's no mother country to leave back to. There is no Algeria option in Israel. Palestine. That is the only option that we, the Palestinians and the Israelis are there forever. And they need to find a way to figure out how to live with each other without one side or the other.
Yeah. So the current oppression is the Israeli side, but also you want to guarantee in the future that in an area which is majority Arab, majority Muslim, you do not have a situation where minorities are persecuted. So I'm all for what the spirit of what you're describing. Does literature play play a role in preparing for that?
You know, yes. But, you know, literature is also that the effects of literature are, you know, I don't want to dump on my literary colleagues here, you know, but the effects of literature are, you know, how literature can save the world, it cannot save the world. Ultimately, political organisation can save the world. And you need. You need organisations that struggle for values that are consistent with universal people to reflect. Yes. In a way other than the political state.
Totally. Yeah. But I think there's something more interesting. So if you look at Israeli state level, it's it's a horrifying story. You look at Israel, what it does every day in Gaza, the killings, sniping, people are armless, defenceless, civilian population being picked off by highly trained soldiers. You know, it's on the state level. It's horrifying. But on on a more mass level, on a popular level, there are more questions.
Israelis Israelis I talked to, they have questions about how long is this going to be sustained? For how long can we live like this? It's a it's a very intrusive state, Israeli state. Forget about Palestinian society. It's intrusive on Israeli society. The demands it makes of Israelis are very high for any state to make. It's constant giving time away, going going off to occupy, to kill you ask to kill all the time in the name of the state.
So I think there is a sense of, you know, the Israeli state tries to work against them, but there's a sense of tiredness from the conflict, a genuine tiredness. And that opens questions. Yeah. Questions about. I bumped into somebody on an aeroplane going back home and he told me no, they on their own they only Musharaff. An older generation is in his early sixties and they started a study group.
But he wanted to know. About the villages around him. So all these things, you can't you know, these things are all all happening in Israel, right? That you cannot that if you only look at the state level, you don't see. Hopefully they will amount to something politically. They haven't yet. But they're there. They're there and they exist. There's literature play a role in opening up spaces like that. Yes, of course it does. And you have these film people.
Prizes, exhibitions of films that are made in conjunction Israelis and Palestinians. Yes, film festivals, festivals, film festivals. And then you have also victims of from both sides coming together families. That's a very significant development in the last under impossible circumstances where a Palestinian families whose members died as a result of Israeli action and Israeli families will remember. They come together. They speak about their joint pain.
They speak about the suffering. They, regardless of political colouring that's on a more popular level. There are these things. But the situation is extremely difficult and much worse than it was before. You know, nobody can deny that. Absolutely. Yes. So I think we should close here.
I must know that this fascinating discussion that you obviously think you which deals with the possibly some optimist title, ended up in what I would say, a democratically optimistic tone, which being the I guess the pessimist in this room I'm going to exercise, will have that to comment on. And I want to thank you again for coming. I want you all for being. And thank you. Thank you very much.