bout de papier, Vol. 9, No. 4 (1992) — Fall 1992 // Automne 1992, pp. 42–43
The People of Nowhere translated by Ina
Friedman, Times Books Random House,
1991, 160 pp., $23.50.
Danny Rubinstein’s recently-published The People of Nowhere will be a valuable source of information and analysis on a contentious subject. Books on the Middle East tend to have strong emotional content reflecting their authors’ political convictions. It is refreshing that Rubinstein has chosen to let his story speak for itself. This may afford little satisfaction to active partisans of either side in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
While there is no, one, paramount issue dominating all the troubles of the Middle East, the one closest to its heart is the competition for recognition and land-possession between the two peoples who over the centuries have occupied the territories known as Palestine. Since 1948 the Israelis have led decisively in terms of power and possession, but the Palestinians remain in the contest. Israel’s claim expressed the determination of the survivors of the holocaust and other Jews responding to the Zionist urge to settle anew in this land of their ancestors, with a unique religion, language and culture. Their Arab opponents base their claim to the land on the simple fact that they and their families have lived on it for centuries.
It was only gradually that the Palestinians found their voice in the growing dispute for possession of the land. In the first phase after the 1948 war, the sovereign Arab states carried the banner, but it was an Arab banner, not one recognized as Palestinian. Rubinstein picks up his analysis at this point, pointing out that the Arabs of Palestine traditionally were more attached to their own land and their villages than to a larger community. He quotes the simple and touching Palestinian peasant saying “What has a man but his God in heaven above and his land on the earth below” • This attachment finds eloquent expression in the practice of identifying parts of Palestinian refugee camps by the names of villages whence most of the occupants came. The sense of loss and homelessness these refugees suffered was intensely personal and was linked to those things closest to them. In those early days, the author concludes that, had the Israeli authorities permitted it, many of the refugees would have returned to their homes accepting that this would mean living under Israeli rule.
Danny Rubinstein describes his purpose as twofold: to explore the “sense of homelessness that has enveloped most of the Palestinians since 1948” and “to clarify the issue of the refugees and their right to return”. ’. In a broader sense, he is looking for evidence that there is a real Palestinian national identity that is more profound and substantial than a mere product of PLO propaganda. He does credit the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) with having influence on the evolution of Palestinian national feeling, but he finds the greater source in the experiences of these people under Israeli occupation and in the refugee camps. His description of the result as a “broad-based and distinctively Palestinian identity emerging for perhaps the first time” suggests he finds it genuine and lasting.
The author faithfully traces Palestinian experiences after the Six Day War in 1967 when refugees in Jordan or farther abroad were able to visit their former villages (at least those that still existed). The disillusionment and despair which followed these encounters reinforced their original sense of homelessness. Their resentment at their exile broadened to include the Arab nations in whose lands their refugee camps lay, and the attitudes of the other Arabs as well as the Israelis. As time passed with no improvement in their situation, the refugees’ common miserable experience fuelled their latent national feeling.
With the conclusion of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty, the focus of the dispute sharpened on the occupied territories. If up to 1967 the development of a Palestinian national spirit was inhibited by their traditional attachment to clans and lost villages, thereafter the combination of despair in the camps and Israel’s unremitting pressure on the Palestinians in the territories created “a new type of solidarity, a shared aspiration to future independence”. The need to defend themselves against the Israeli threat to their national character and continued existence on the land found expression in a vast outpouring of publications on Palestinian heritage and ultimately in its most dramatic expression, the intifada which began in December 1987.
At several points the author deals also with the attitudes of the Arabs who have continued to live in Israel itself throughout the period. With different and in some cases as difficult experiences as the refugees, they have developed their own lives in the limited context Israel offers them and have no desire to move from where they are, even to a Palestinian homeland if one existed. Expressing their determination to stay steadfast on the land, they have supported the refugees’ struggle only in a symbolic and limited way, as if knowing now that their destinies will diverge. Rubinstein offers no judgments but notes that the PLO has shown understanding of the dilemmas of the Israeli Arabs. He also remarks on their steadfastness in remaining there in contrast to the figures for Jewish emigration from Israel, which are little publicized.
As presented in English in Ina Friedman’s translation, Danny Rubinstein’s style is simple and informative. He is a respected Israeli journalist (or Haaretz of Jerusalem) who has tried successfully to relate what he has learned without bias or polemic. He has researched widely, using reliable sources such as Meron Benvenisti’s West Bank Project, personal interviews and liberal illustration from a variety of literary works. Rubinstein has not attempted to draw clear conclusions particularly about the right of return of the refugees or the degree to which this might be exercised if the opportunity were given. Rather he leaves the reader with the thought that the issue would not arise in its starkest form, and that in some part at least the right of return has become collectivized in the concept of an independent homeland.
Inevitably the resolution of the Palestinian refugee problem will be the hardest of all the parts of the Arab-Israeli dispute to resolve because it has the largest human content. For more than forty years, the outside world has been able to ignore the refugees’ situation and avoid grappling with the essential political problem through generous technical assistance and the payment of “conscience money” through UNRWA. Now that there seems to be the political will to try seriously to negotiate some progress toward a peaceful resolution of the problem, there is a greater need than ever for reliable objective contemporary studies to inform the policy advice developed for interested governments. While Rubinstein’s volume deals neither exclusively nor comprehensively with the refugee problem, it offers important insights and sensitive commentary on the Palestinian national experience over recent years and makes a worthwhile contribution to understanding.
View the original scanned pages →
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 9, No. 4 (1992) — Fall 1992 // Automne 1992, pp. 42–43. Read the rest of this issue →
