Abstract
“One of the things that occurred to me,” said Edward Said in 1993, “is that it might be possible to end the conflict with the Israelis not by defeating them but by trying to provide a model of reconciliation for them and their history, and for us and our history, together.”1 History, broadly conceived as the story a culture tells itself, could become a site of what we identified as the exodus project in the previous chapter. This project, weaning exilic communities off of their own narrow and defensive conceptions of themselves and their others, prepares them for new forms of self-understanding and opens the way for new interactions with their others. For Said, I have argued, reconciliation required transcending the demands of identity, “overcoming imagined pedigrees” articulated in historical and archaeological work, and doing so through what he called “interpretive sophistication.”2 Part of this interpretive sophistication would be recognizing identity claims as what they are: constructions that name self and community in order to distinguish both from others. This recognition requires a period of serious self-reflection, including a critical look at a community’s history, as a prelude to letting go of dangerous and counterproductive practices of exclusion.
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Notes
Edward W. Said, Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said, ed. Gauri Vismanathan (New York: Pantheon Books, 2001), 203.
Ibid., 130. See also Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), especially, “The CommitmenttoTheory” and “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” 19–39, 139–170.
Edward W. Said, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives, with photographs by Jean Mohr (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
See Rogers Smith, Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), which discusses with the narrative dimensions of the creation and sustaining of peoples but deals only rather obliquely with territorial dimensions of the claim to peoplehood.
Seyla Benhabib, in The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), argues that the “the ideal of territorial self-sufficiency flies in the face of the tremendous interdependence of the peoples of the world” (216), but concedes that she sees “no way to cut this Gordian knot linking territoriality, representation, and democratic voice” (219). See also,
Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism, ed. Robert Post, with commentaries by Jeremy Waldron, Bonnie Honig, and Will Kymlicka (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)
I will use the original PRIME texts as they were made available and in translation online: Peace Research Institute in the Middle East, Learning Each Other’s Historical Narrative: Palestinians and Israelis. 1st booklet (2002): www.vispo.com/PRIME/leohnl.pdf; 2nd booklet (2004): www.vispo.com/PRIME/narrative.pdf. The quote here is from booklet I, page i. These texts, unlike the recent valuable published edition
Side by Side: Parallel Histories of Israel-Palestine, ed. Sami Adwan, Dan Bar-On, Eyal Naveh, and PRIME (New York: The New Press, 2012), preserve the blank space between the two narratives for student/reader comments. The significance of this space will become clearer later in this chapter.
Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 8; my emphasis.
See Martin Buber, On Zion: The History of an Idea, trans. Stanly Godman (London: Horovitz Publishing, 1973) and
A Land of Two Peoples: Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs, ed. Paul R. Mendes-Flohr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). See also
Jacqueline Rose, The Question of Zion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005)
Like Said, Iris Marion Young challenges this assumption, writing in Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), that while “some group-based jurisdictions should be associated with place in order to serve as anchor for identities that have been hybrid, interregional character,” “the right to a place to exercise self-determination does not entail exclusive rule of the bounded territories Israel now claims. Because Palestinians also have legitimate claims to self-determination, certain vital resources, such as water, must be fairly shared, and certain spaces, such as the city of Jerusalem, must also be shared jurisdicfions” (262).
Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 147. See
Edward W. Said, Politics of Dispossession (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), xvi–xvii.
See, for example, Said, Power, Politics, and Culture, 221–222, 391–392, 430–431. See also Muhammad Y. Muslih, The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Khalidi, Palestinian Identity
See Said, Power, Politics, and Culture, 129–131; 140–141; “Secular Criticism” in Edward W. Said, The World, the Text and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 1–30, and Humanism and Democratic Criticism, especially chapters 1, 2, and 5.
Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (New York: Norton Books, 2001), 316. See also
Nicholas Guyatt, The Absence of Peace: Understanding the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (London: Zed Books, 1998), 10.
Anne Phillips, “Dealing With Difference: A Politics of Ideas or a Politics of Presence?” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 143.
See Rose, The Question of Zion; and Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
See David Hartman, “Essentials for a Lasting Peace” in Peace in the Promised Land, ed. Srdja Trifkovic (Rockford, IL: Chronicle Press, 2006), 191–208.
See David Grossman, The Yellow Wind, trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Picador Books USA, 2002) and The Smile of the Lamb, trans. Betsy Rosenberg (New York: Picador Books USA, 2003).
Dan Bar-On and Sami Adwan, “The Psychology of Better Dialogue between Two Separate but Interdependent Narratives” in Israeli and Palestinian Narratives of Conflict, ed. Robert I. Rotberg (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 205.
See also Elie Podeh, “The Right of Return versus the Law of Return: Contrasting Historical Narratives in Israeli and Palestinian Textbooks,” in Exile and Return: Predicaments of Palestinians and Jews, ed. Ann M. Lesch and Ian S. Lustick (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 41–56.
See Wendy Brown’s discussion of Freud in relation to the practices of walling in Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Brooklyn NY: Zone Books, 2010), 123–133; and Naveh Eyal, “The Dynamics of Identity Construction in Israel through Education in History” in Israeli and Palestinian Narratives of Conflict, ed. Rotberg, 244–270.
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© 2013 John Randolph LeBlanc
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LeBlanc, J.R. (2013). Articulating Presence, Narrating Detachment. In: Edward Said on the Prospects of Peace in Palestine and Israel. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137008589_6
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