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Seeing PalestineGitha HariharanPublished online 24 Nov 2014

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Seeing Palestine

GithaHariharan

Reading the Holy Land

Seeing Palestine ndash what is seen in

Palestine ndash has for hundreds of

years depended on what the

beholders are looking for on the burden of their beliefs the

depth of their wishes to map the place afresh and the sweep

of their imagination Given the variety of beholders Palestine

has been invented time and again Most of these inventions

have been exercises in imposing a sacred landscape onto a

real one The Holy Land and the holy book were read together

In 1870 William M Thomson described the resulting lsquoall-

perfect textrsquo in The Land and the Book lsquoPalestine is one vast

table whereupon Godrsquos messages to men have been drawn

and graven deep in living characters by the Great Publisher rsquo

(Thomson quoted in Obenzinger lsquoHoly Land Travelrsquo 42)

Earlier in 1844 William Makepeace Thackeray described

the landscape on which these messages from God are written

Parched mountains with a grey bleak olive tree

trembling here and there savage ravines and valleys

paved with tombstones mdash a landscape unspeakably

ghastly and desolate meet the eye wherever you

wander round about the city The place seems quite

adapted to the events which are recorded in the

Hebrew histories It and they as it seems to me can

never be regarded without terror Fear and blood

crime and punishment follow from page to page in

frightful succession There is not a spot at which you

look but some violent deed has been done there

some massacre has been committed some victim has

been murdered some idol has been worshipped with

bloody and dreadful rites (Thackeray quoted in

Shehadeh Palestinian Walks xiii)

The Palestinian writer Raja Shehadeh knows that such

words resonate with different meanings for different people in

different times Shehadeh is perfectly aware of what it is to see

a place and imbue it with multiple meanings lsquoThe Western

worldrsquos confrontation with Palestine is perhaps the longest

running drama in historyrsquo he wrote in his extraordinary book on

a vanishing landscape Palestinian Walks (ibid)

Several moments of this drama have been recorded in

travellersrsquo accounts It is a varied drama the cast ranging from

writers like Thackeray Twain and Melville to journal-keeping

lady travellers and evangelicals Whether they were acting out

the emotions of wonder or the comfort of ownership or

disappointment all of them had the same guide book with

them the Bible

Touring the Holy Land in 1840 Lady Francis Egerton was

charmed by the picturesque

The whole scene Arabs camels vegetation and

aspects of the country is so totally unlike anything I

have ever thought on before much less seen that I

and we all are enchanted (Egerton 9)

A month into the tour her enthusiasm seemed to have

attached itself to more solemn subjects possibly because her

lsquolist of travel necessitiesrsquo included lsquoThe Bible (the best guide

in these countries)rsquo and the Dictionary of the Bible (138) lsquoOur

Blessed Saviourrsquo she now wrote

has trodden the path we have come today and

perhaps like us rested at this fountain It is very

delightful to be in a country which constantly suggests

such subjects of thoughts to one (42)

Some years earlier in 1833 Edward Robinson wrote an

account that also named this delight but with greater insight

What struck him was recognition the way in which Biblical

places and persons came to life before his eyes He could see

lsquo the city where God of old had dwelt and where the

Saviour of the world had lived and taught and diedrsquo (Robinson

and Smith 358) And how did he recognise this city

From the earliest childhood I had read of and studied

the localities of this sacred spot now I beheld them

with my own eyes and they all seemed familiar to me

as if the realisation of a former dream I seemed to be

again among cherished scenes of childhood long

unvisited indeed but distinctly recollected (ibid)

Robinson experienced an overwhelming sense of connection

of lsquocoming homersquo He would not be the last to go through this

epiphany Visitors such as Episcopal Bishop Henry White

Warren were prompted by the lsquosacred geographyrsquo of the Holy

Land to say that it was lsquothe first country where I have felt at

homersquo (Warren quoted in Obenzinger lsquoHoly Land Travelrsquo 43)

But there were others who had to work harder to draw

such a moment out of Palestine

Wasafiri Vol 29 No 4 December 2014 pp 17ndash23

ISSN 0269-0055 printISSN 1747-1508 online 2014 Wasafiri

httpwwwtandfonlinecom httpdxdoiorg101080026900552014946672

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Many nineteenth-century visitors Protestant Europeans

and Americans immersed in the Bible experienced a

disconnect mdash between the lsquothe land of milk and honeyrsquo

the divine landscape of their expectations and the

disappointingly real land before them This was especially true

of Jerusalem always of profound symbolic value Instead of

the lsquoshining city on a hillrsquo the travellers saw a dusty

provincial outpost Luckily reality was not necessarily a

deterrent When he was in Palestine in 1869 wrote the

Reverend Andrew Thomson he was conducted by his

guide to an open spot covered with large stones On learning

that this banal spot was Jacobrsquos well Thomson confessed to

lsquoa temporary feeling of extreme disappointmentrsquo (Thomson

148) But he was also certain that lsquoOn this very spot Jesus

had sat and conversed From this very point he had looked

forth on the scenes on which we were now lookingrsquo (ibid)

The problem was that Thomson was lsquonot prepared

for such a complete defacement of the old picture as

thisrsquo (ibid)

Like most visitors to the Holy Land Reverend Thomson

expected to see things pretty much as Jesus and his disciples

had left them What exactly did that mean Most travellers

wanted real-life versions of the pictures they had seen in the

illustrated Bibles of their childhood When this did not

happen they were disappointed but like a miracle their

letdown could also turn to certainty This had to be evidence

of defacement Sacred scenes and places defaced This called

for a mission a sacred mission to restore what had been

damaged or lost

Raja Shehadeh says lsquoInterpreting a religious text as real

history as real geography is sacrilegious as far as I am

concernedrsquo (Hariharan np)

Palestine lived ndash as it still does ndash a life of its own in the

settler-colonial imagination

Twenty kilometres south of the city of Nablus a village called

Lubban (or Al-Laban) is surrounded by the hilltop settlements

of Marsquoale Levona Eli and Shilo Marsquoale Levona ndash the name

is the Judaised version of Lubban ndash was established by a

prominent member of the Gush Emunim or the lsquoBlock of the

Faithfulrsquo an umbrella organisation of Zionists They are

committed to establishing Jewish settlements in the West

Bank the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights for ideological

reasons For them the West Bank heartland is promised

Biblical land Judea and Samaria1

The nineteenth-century travellers who also saw this as

Biblical land were partial to lsquotentingrsquo ndash on lsquounoccupiedrsquo land

where it was easier to set their mythical notions ndash than in

villages and cities where the locals went about their profane

daily lives As if in keeping with this preference lsquotemporaryrsquo

caravans were first placed in what became Marsquoale Levona as

an lsquooutpostrsquo on land expropriated from the villages These

caravans were slowly replaced by fancy villas Eli was

established in 1984 on Ali hilltop mdash and the name Ali

judaised to Eli Mobile caravans were added over a period of

time and the settlement grew till it occupied seven hilltops

belonging to Palestinian villages including Lubban

Khalid Samih Hammed Draghmeh also known as Abu

Jamal or Father of Jamal is a farmer His ancestral house is an

old khan mdash a roadside inn or caravanserai Khalidrsquos house

and what remained of his fields are now cut off from the rest

of Lubban Village2

If the settlement of Marsquoale Levona is to be linked to other

settlements extending from the Jordan Valley to the Green

Line the khan is in the way It cannot remain as it

is mdash Palestinian In 2003 settlers began to attack the khan

in 2007 they managed to occupy it for three months They

flew an Israeli flag over the house and held religious rituals

Khalid filed papers in the occupation court to prove he owned

the khan and the land around it lsquoBut that was not enoughrsquo

said Khalid lsquoThey left because we the real owners did not

leave them alonersquo

lsquoThere is another reason the settlers want the house and

the land around itrsquo said Khalid showing me a small tank to

one side of his house Many Zionists believe that Moses once

washed himself in this tank The settlers above the village as

well as some Zionists from elsewhere used to come here and

wash themselves stated Khalid lsquoto absolve themselves of

their sinsrsquo One day said Khalid with a kind of stern glee he

locked them in Then he emptied the tank of water But still

lsquoThey badger me to give them the house and tank because

they think it is their history I said I would if they gave us

Jerusalemrsquo

The evangelical spirit lives and it uses both old and new

weapons

It is not as if all the writers of another time shared the zealous

enthusiasm of the evangelicals

Mark Twain part of a tourist excursion organised by

Reverend Henry Ward Beecherrsquos Plymouth Church wrote of

Jerusalem as a lsquopeculiarrsquo city lsquoas knobby with countless little

domes as a prison door is with boltheadsrsquo (Twain Ch L111 np)

Herman Melville said of the rocky landscape lsquoJudea is one

accumulation of stonesrsquo (Melville cited in Obenzinger

lsquoHerman Melvillersquo np) Twain and Melville were like others

bothered by the gap between imagination and lived reality

but both were too sceptical of missionary proclivities to trade

disappointment for reinvention Melville for example

recorded his encounters with American missionaries who were

lsquopreparing the soil literally and figurativelyrsquo for Jewish

restoration to the Holy Land (Melville 93) He regarded

Christian Zionism which was an obsession among

evangelicals as a lsquopreposterous Jew maniarsquo that was lsquohalf

melancholy half farcicalrsquo (Melville 94) As for the assorted

lsquocreedsrsquo who came to see and lsquomakersquo the Holy Land whether

Presbyterians Baptists Catholics Methodists or

Episcopalians lsquo they entered the country with their

verdicts already prepared and they could no more write

dispassionately and impartially about it than they could about

their own wives and childrenrsquo (Twain quoted in Obenzinger

American Palestine 49) The acerbic Twain predicted that

The pilgrims will tell of Palestine when they get home

not as it appeared to them but as it appeared to

Thompson and Robinson and Grimes mdash with the

tints varied to suit each pilgrimrsquos creed (Twain

Ch XLVIII np)

18 Seeing Palestine

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But their scepticism had to compete with their general

disappointment with the Holy Land lsquoPalestine sits in

sackcloth and ashes desolate and unlovelyrsquo (Twain Ch LVI

np) Twain found the land lsquodismalrsquo lsquobarrenrsquo and

lsquounpicturesquersquo (ibid) lsquoIt isrsquo he concluded lsquoa hopeless

dreary heartbroken landrsquo (ibid) Melville agreed lsquoNo country

will more quickly dissipate romantic expectation than

Palestine mdash particularly Jerusalemrsquo he wrote in his travel

journals of 1856ndash1857 (Melville 91) And in Melvillersquos case

there was another undercurrent at work The language of

lsquoblessings and cursesrsquo seemed to him the natural idiom for

this land (Melville cited in Obenzinger lsquoHerman Melvillersquo np)

Though Melville was sharp about lsquothis preposterous Jew

maniarsquo of return lsquoa Quixotismrsquo that required a miracle to be

made real it also appealed as a lsquohalf melancholy half

farcicalrsquo spiritual quest that Ahab of Moby Dick may undertake

(Obenzinger lsquoHoly Land Travelrsquo 44) And Jerusalem in

particular held Melville for a somewhat unusual reason it

was vested with the lsquodistress of his soulrsquo (ibid)

It was not hard to recall these readings of Jerusalem when

meeting that Palestinian farmer in 2013 and hearing his tales

of the believers in the Moses tank Or when reading Raja

Shehadeh writing of Old Jerusalem in 2012

As a tourist visiting the Old City of Jerusalem seeing

Christians Jews and Muslims walking side by side

hearing church bells ringing and Muslims being called

to prayer you might think the place is a model of

tolerance (Shehadeh lsquoA Palestinian in Jerusalemrsquo np)

Shehadeh challenges this illusion For the non-Jewish

residents of Old Jerusalem living in the city means being

marginalised in every possible way Shehadeh asks

Who are these Israeli Jews anyway Who are they to

want to live among Palestinians so at odds with their

neighbours that they feel the need for 24-hour

security for putting iron bars on their windows and

doors for making their houses look more like cages

than dwellings (ibid)

When lsquoa man in his 30s wearing a kipparsquo is asked lsquoWhy live

like thisrsquo he replies lsquoItrsquos a mitzvah a religious dutyrsquo (ibid)

That old language of a religious mission the inevitability

of mapping blessings and curses onto the Holy Land lives in

the idiom of real life as well as the literary accounts of

the past

From once-in-a-lifetime package tours to lsquovicarious

journeys of the imaginationrsquo nineteenth-century travel

through lsquoBiblical landsrsquo was recorded in more than words The

nascent medium of photography and the advent of

archaeology influenced how the Holy Land was seen

Photographs of Biblical sites replaced fanciful illustrations

based on artistsrsquo sketches mdash but the medium that promised

truth and accuracy could also produce distorted views The

subjects sought out were those that would confirm

connections to stories from the Bible If the images included

people they had to be doing something suitably Biblical or

lsquoantiquersquo say a man tending his flock or a woman drawing

water from a well The scene had to evoke scripture In a

photograph entitled lsquoJews at the Western Wallrsquo for example

French photographer Felix Bonfils showed a group of Jews

huddled by the Wailing Wall praying In 1854 his compatriot

artist and archaeologist Auguste Salzmann produced

photographs that used light and form to animate old buildings

in Jerusalem The idea was to record monuments left by the

Crusades and find evidence of the Biblical kingdom of David

for the controversial historical and architectural theories of

scholar Felicien de Saulcy For de Saulcy and Salzmann the

latterrsquos photographs were lsquobrute conclusive factsrsquo (Salzmann

quoted in John Paul Getty Museum np)

There are equally brute conclusive facts in the images of

our own times Therersquos one thing about the high-tech world we

live in itrsquos hard to plead ignorance of what is happening to

real people in real places Take for instance the images and

eyewitness accounts of Gaza on Al Jazeera or the Electronic

Intifada in 2009

The pictures are hard to look at

Therersquos a photo of a girlrsquos hand sticking out of rubble

which used to be her home in the al-Zeitoun neighbourhood

of Gaza City Perhaps her family too is buried under it Another

picture also of a home in al-Zeitoun has no hint of bodies

at all Twenty-four members of this family were killed when an

F-16 fighter jet dropped a bomb on their house The only

lsquoremainsrsquo visible in the picture include a pillow a belt

a childrsquos school bag and paper that the caption describes as

pages of a torn copy of the Koran These possessions are

strewn about in the concrete and metal wreckage

It is harder to deny the existence of Palestinians today

though attempts are still made

In another time it was done easily enough

Western travellers saw Palestine as a Biblical landscape

as arid and desolate as awe inspiring as a home promised

by God So overwhelming was the demand of both real and

imaginary land to be seen and explained that many managed

not to see ndash or barely see ndash the people

Years later this may have helped see Palestine as a land

that needed people especially the sort of people who needed

a home To superimpose a new map on an existing one it

was not enough to conjure a landscape of belief and people it

with extracts from religious texts The place was important for

international geopolitics but military and economic aims

could coexist with religious fervour Western European powers

were poised to intervene if Ottoman rule in the region

collapsed they saw clearly the major trade routes to India

and with the completion of the Suez Canal connecting

the Mediterranean and Red Seas the area grew even more

vital The question then ndash and in 1948 when a new nation

was mapped onto the land ndash was what to do with the people

already there The question blurred in some heads

so when it was asked again it became But were there

people

One apologist for Eretz Israel3 writes of a lsquoland virtually

laid waste with little populationrsquo (Katz np) One historian after

another goes the claim has shown that lsquoin the twelve and a

half centuries between the Arab conquest in the seventh

century and the beginnings of the Jewish return in the 1880s

Palestine was laid wastersquo (ibid) The fertile land described in

Seeing Palestine 19

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02

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embe

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14

the Bible had lsquovanished into desert and desolationrsquo and in

the mid-eighteenth century Palestine did not have enough

people to till its soil (ibid) Further proof is offered with quotes

from secular sources

the British Consul in Palestine reported in 1857 that

lsquoThe country is in a considerable degree empty of

inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is that of a

body of population rsquo (James Finn to the Earl of

Clarendon Jerusalem 15 Sept 1857 quoted in

Katz np)

Years later Golda Meir would announce lsquoThere are no

Palestiniansrsquo (Butt np)

What is it like to be told you and your family donrsquot exist

Or that what was home in a peoplersquos living memory was not

actually their home at all

Edward Said took statements like Golda Meirrsquos and

transformed them into questions Palestinians could ask after

their existence had been overlooked or denied or their

existence noticed long enough to dispossess them or send

them into exile or to refugee camps lsquoDo we existrsquo

asked Said

What proof do we have The further we get from the

Palestine of our past the more precarious our status

the more disrupted our being the more intermittent

our presence (Said Politics 108ndash09)

Seeing Palestine Visiting the place reading that land as

holy as land that must be lsquorecoveredrsquo in some way or

the other This is one sort of lsquoreturnrsquo But for the people of

this land seeing Palestine ndash or seeing themselves as

Palestinian ndash involves a longer and more torturous journey

the kind of homeward journey Mahmoud Darwish wrote of

Darwishrsquos poetry said Edward Said was lsquoan epic effort to

transform the lyrics of loss into the indefinitely postponed

drama of returnrsquo (Said Reflections 197)

Writing home

Mahmoud Darwish often referred to as the Palestinian

national poet was born in 1941 in Al Birweh a village in

Galilee under the British mandate in Palestine When he

was six his world was turned upside down and it never set

itself right again As the Israeli army occupied Birweh Darwish

and his family were forced to join the great exodus of

refugees They spent a year in Lebanon living on UN

handouts By the time they returned to their village in 1949

Israel had been created their village was one of the

hundreds of Palestinian villages which had been razed

to the ground

They were refugees again infiltrators in their own land

Their return was lsquoillegalrsquo they were given the status of

lsquopresent-absent aliensrsquo

Years later Darwish recalled how his grandfather chose to

live on a hill that overlooked his land lsquoUntil he died he would

watch [Jewish] immigrants from Yemen living in his place

which he was unable even to visitrsquo (Jaggi np) The message

of such an experience could have been lsquoYou were not here

This was not Palestinersquo

Darwish described this identity in terms of a continuous

lsquostruggle between two memoriesrsquo (ibid) If his memories were

real his poetry had to challenge the Zionist tenet of a land

without a people for a people without a land The result was

often a strange contest within the poet For instance Darwish

admired the work of the Hebrew poet Yehuda Amichai but he

also recognised that Amichairsquos poems were a challenge to

him Darwish said of Amichai

He wants to use the landscape and history for his own

benefit based on my destroyed identity So we have a

competition who is the owner of the language of this

land Who loves it more Who writes it better (ibid)

Darwish wrote of a state of siege in which anger simmers

but he also wrote

Here on the slopes of hills facing the dusk and the

cannon of time

Close to the gardens of broken shadows

We do what prisoners do

And what the jobless do

We cultivate hope (From lsquoUnder Siegersquo np)

The lsquosense of abyssrsquo could be transformed Darwish

seemed to say through political acts and acts of imagination

into something more life affirming Therersquos siege but therersquos

also hope Therersquos loss but therersquos also belonging

Darwish was often called lsquothe poet of the resistancersquo but

in the course of his lifersquos work he somehow managed to resist

any neat or simplistic label He wrote the Palestinian

declaration of independence in 1988 and many poems of

resistance that are an integral part of every Arabrsquos

consciousness But he also allowed himself to grow

into a poet who did not close his mind to other ways of

seeing

He said for instance

Poetry and beauty are always making peace When

you read something beautiful you find coexistence it

breaks walls down I always humanise the other

I even humanised the Israeli soldier (Jaggi np)

Just after the 1967 war Darwish wrote a tender poem about an

Israeli friend who decided to leave the country on his return

from the front The poem lsquoA Soldier Who Dreams of White

Liliesrsquo drew criticism from many admirers But Darwish wrote

that he would lsquocontinue to humanise even the enemyrsquo (ibid)

This was the same Darwish who had not hesitated to write

[To a killer] If you had contemplated the victimrsquos face

And thought it through you would have remembered

your mother in the

Gas chamber you would have been freed from the

reason for the rifle

And you would have changed your mind this is not

the way

to find onersquos identity again (From lsquoUnder Siegersquo np)

Darwish died in 2008 For some years before he died he

had made the hills of Ramallah his home (What kind of a

home could it have been lsquoI have learned and dismantled all

the words in order to draw from them a single word Homersquo)

(from lsquoI Belong Therersquo np)

20 Seeing Palestine

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at 2

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02

Dec

embe

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14

Darwish and Raja Shehadeh were neighbours in Ramallah

In 2002 there was curfew Israeli tanks rolled down the

narrow streets One day when curfew was lifted for five hours

Shehadeh interviewed Darwish They spoke of many things

from Darwishrsquos partiality for Mozart to the need to liberate

Arabic poetry from older forms When Shehadeh broached the

subject of how the local landscape affected his poetry

Darwish replied

I find that the landscape is already written and

because it has been so fully described I feel it is

difficult to add to it The poetic image has been

realised geographically My role as a contemporary

poet is to liberate the natural landscape from the

burden of those legends and ease the burden of

history (Darwish quoted in Shehadeh lsquoMahmoud

Darwishrsquo np)

In Ramallah in 2013 I went to the Darwish Museum

situated on a hilltop From the outside the building looked

brand new somewhat blank and bleached like an empty page

that could be written on a tabula rasa An elegant young man

in charge hastened to explain the building has been designed

to look like an open book

The park in which the museum stands is called al-Birweh

The headstone which also says lsquoal-Birweh Palestinersquo quotes

Darwishrsquos poem on what makes his life worthwhile lsquoOn this

earth what makes life worth living It used to be known as

PalestineIt became known as Palestine rsquo (from lsquoOn This

Earth What Makes Life Worth Livingrsquo np)

The home Darwish lost in Galilee in 1947 has gone forever

In its place this landscaped garden and white tomb house

Darwish so all Palestinians can visit him But this al-Birweh in

Ramallah a city many Palestinians do not see as a possible

capital can never be the home Darwish sought The poet who

wrote of the search for a Palestinian home rests in a divided

house Ramallah is in the occupied West Bank the real

al-Birweh is beyond the reach of Palestinians who are not

Israeli citizens

The burden of legends and histories and their translation

into the everyday realities of a lost home continues

Losing home trying to return The words continue to be

written as new walls and barriers are built on the land

In summer 1996 after thirty years of exile the poet

Mourid Barghouti stood at the Allenby Bridge waiting for

permission to proceed lsquoBehind me was the world ahead of

me my world rsquo (Barghouti I Saw Ramallah 1) His mind

filled with racing thoughts about lsquoa lifetime spent trying to get

herersquo (ibid) But it was a temporary return fraught with

conditions about where he could go and what he could do

Even in the midst of reunion there was loss lsquoThe Occupationrsquo

he wrote in I Saw Ramallah lsquohas created generations of us

that have to adore an unknown beloved distant difficult

surrounded by guards by walls by nuclear missiles by sheer

terrorrsquo (62) Edward Said described Barghoutirsquos account as

lsquoone of the finest existential accounts of Palestinian

displacement that we now haversquo (Said Foreword vii)

Where is home when it is an occupied and brutalised

place To describe broken or lost homes to understand why

they are still homes why they need to be homes writers have

to grapple with the notion of exile whether external or

internal They have to confront the past the powerful ghost

that haunts all those who have been displaced They have to

recognise the need to reconstruct home ndash in words and in

personal and political action ndash and affirm the multiplicity of

the places they come from Most of all they have to give voice

to the aspirations of those who can only go back home if they

search for it and locate it afresh This is what the writers in

Seeking Palestine a 2012 collection edited by Raja Shehadeh

and Penny Johnson do

For homeless Palestinians whether they are still in

Palestine or far away the poet Darwishrsquos idea of lsquocultivating

hopersquo could be a credo They have to seek Palestine so they

may hope they have to hope so they can find Palestine It is

impossible to talk of Palestine ndash historic Palestine occupied

Palestine or the idea of Palestine in the future ndash without

viewing the multiple meanings held by the notions of home

exile and dispossession Rana Barakat one of the

contributors to Seeking Palestine gives us an idea of this

complex task

Palestine-in-exile is an idea a love a goal

a movement a massacre a march a parade a poem

a thesis a novel and yes a commodity as well as a

people scattered displaced dispossessed and

determined (Barakat 145)

It is all this but a home must be ordinary if it is to be a

home Raja Shehadeh and other writers speak of their desire

to move Palestine from a place of lsquoinsistent memoryrsquo to a

place where lsquoa robust Palestinersquo can be lsquonothing more than

homersquo (Johnson and Shehaheh xi) But this has not yet

happened Palestine still resides in conditions of crisis of

statelessness of transience Most of all it resides in the

Palestinians wherever they are

What then does it mean to be Palestinian The

essayists poets novelists critics and memoirists writing in

Seeking Palestine reflect on this question and come up with

individual and collective experiences of seeking waiting

living for and being or becoming Palestinian For many

writing Palestine is an exercise in lsquoimagining rather than

representingrsquo home (Johnson and Shehadah x) It means

disappeared villages erased histories It means going back

home with a tourist visa indeed entries and exits comprise

a recurring theme For Rana Barakat lsquohome is provisionalrsquo

(Barakat 138) given its foundation in lsquothe tragic indignity of

exilersquo (140) and the lsquounrealisticrsquo resistance of this indignity

(139) For Mourid Barghouti being Palestinian means being

in suspension

The suspended blob of air in which we are

swinging is now our place of exile from this earth

This bubble of air is the unyielding Occupation itself It

is the rootless roaming of the Palestinians through the

air of othersrsquo countries We sink upward I want

my high standing to be brought low Grandmother I

want to descend from this regal elevation and touch

the mud and dust once more so that I can be an

ordinary traveller again (Barghouti lsquoThe Driver

Mahmoudrsquo 110)

Seeing Palestine 21

Dow

nloa

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Am

eric

an U

nive

rsity

of

Bei

rut]

at 2

305

02

Dec

embe

r 20

14

For Sharif S Elmusa being Palestinian is lsquoa state of

enduring expectationrsquo (Elmusa 23) Susan Abulhawa in an

engaging and candid personal essay lists some of the

inevitable experiences that come with the Palestinian tag

To be alone without papers without a family or clan

a land or a country means one must live at the mercy

of others There are those who might take pity on you

and those who will exploit and harm you You live at

the whims of your hosts sometimes preyed upon and

nearly always put in your place But there are

particular beauties and peculiar strengths that can

only be found in the trenches of such a life mdash like the

ability to hold your head high even when someone

has their boot on your neck the wisdom to do

whatever it takes to get an education even when

yoursquore denied a school the freedom of shedding

shame and living onersquos truth no matter how messy

without apologies the victory of a heart that does

not succumb to fear or hatred or bitterness

(Abulhawa 15)

Being Palestinian means being in a limbo mdash

dispossessed disinherited exiled It means belonging is

denied or controlled by the occupier But seeking Palestine

also involves resistance in myriad ways How does this

happen How do people survive being a refugee in someone

elsersquos country and even in their own Among the modes of

survival these Palestinian writers illuminate for us are humour

wry and biting in turn apathy anger longing the use of

words of memory the living out of intensely political lives

stoking the idea of Palestine so it may flame into reality In

this limbo of banal as well as exalted despair and hope

lsquoPalestinians have been waiting at borders for nearly a century

nowrsquo (ibid)

Notes

1 Judea and Samaria are the Biblical names for the generalareas south and north of Jerusalem (respectively)Historically they include substantial portions of pre-1967Israel but not the Jordan Valley or the Benyamina district(both within the West Bank) For political purposes anddespite the geographical imprecision involved theannexationist camp in Israel prefers to refer to the areabetween the Green Line and the Jordan River not as theWest Bank but as Judea and Samaria See For the Landand the Lord The Evolution of Gush Emunim Ian S LustickBhttpwwwsasupennedupennciplusticklustick13htmltxt4

2 The sections on my visit to Palestine in 2013 are based onGitha Hariharan lsquoFrom India to Palestine RevisitingSolidarityrsquo in From India to Palestine Essays in Solidarityed Githa Hariharan New Delhi LeftWord Books 2014 andlsquoSeeing Palestinersquo in Githa Hariharan Almost Home Citiesand Other Places New Delhi HarperCollinsforthcoming 2014

3 On Eretz Israel Wikipedia says lsquoEretz Yisrael is a Biblicalname for the territory roughly corresponding to the areaencompassed by the Southern Levant The Land ofIsrael concept has been evoked by the founders of theState of Israel It often surfaces in political debates on thestatus of the West Bank which coincides with the biblicalareas of Judea and Samariarsquo

Works Cited

Abulhawa Susan lsquoMemories of an Un-Palestinian Story in a

Can of Tunarsquo Seeking Palestine Ed P Johnson andR Shehadeh New Delhi Women Unlimited 2012 4ndash16Barakat Rana lsquoThe Right to Wait Exile Home and Returnrsquo

Seeking Palestine Ed P Johnson and R Shehadeh New DelhiWomen Unlimited 2012 135ndash51Barghouti Mourid lsquoThe Driver Mahmoudrsquo Seeking Palestine

Ed P Johnson and R Shehadeh New Delhi Women Unlimited2012 97ndash110mdashmdashmdash I Saw Ramallah Trans Ahdaf Soueif London

Bloomsbury 2005Butt Gerald lsquoGolda Meirrsquo Profiles BBC Online Network21 Apr 1998 Bhttpnewsbbccouk2hieventsisrael_at_50profiles81288stm

Darwish Mahmoud lsquoI Belong Therersquo Unfortunately It WasParadise Trans and ed Munir Akash and Carolyn Forche withSinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein California U of California P

2003 Bhttpwwwpoetsorgpoetsorgpoemi-belong-theremdashmdashmdash lsquoOn This Earth What Makes Life Worth Livingrsquo Trans

Karim Abuawad Bhttpasitoughttobecom20100824on-this-earth-what-makes-life-worth-living-3mdashmdashmdash lsquoUnder Siegersquo Trans Marjolijn De Jager AdabcomArabic Poetry website Bhttpwwwadabcomenmodules

phpname=Sh3erampdoWhat=shqasampqid=92Egerton Lady Francis Journal of a Tour in the Holy Land inMay and June 1840 London Harrison and Co 1841

Accessed 18 June 2014 Bhttpsarchiveorgdetailsjournaloftourinh00egerElmusa Sharif S lsquoPortable Absence My Camp Re-memberedrsquo

Seeking Palestine Ed P Johnson and R Shehadeh New DelhiWomen Unlimited 2012 22ndash42Hariharan Githa lsquoSeeing Palestinersquo Almost Home Cities and

Other Places Delhi HarperCollins forthcoming 2014Jaggi Maya Profile of Mahmoud Darwish The Guardian 8 June2002 Bhttpwwwtheguardiancombooks2002jun08featuresreviewsguardianreview19

John Paul Getty Museum lsquoIn Search of Biblical Lands FromJerusalem to Jordan in 19th-Century Photographyrsquo Exhibitionslide show Bhttpwwwgettyeduartexhibitions

biblical_landsslideshowhtmlJohnson Penny and Raja Shehadeh ed Seeking PalestineNew Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home New Delhi

Women Unlimited 2012Katz Joseph lsquoPalestine a land virtually laid waste with littlepopulationrsquo EretzYisroelOrg website Bhttpwww

eretzyisroelorgsimpetersdepopulatedhtmlMelville Herman Journals Ed Howard C Horsford with LynnHorth Evanston and Chicago IL Northwestern UP and theNewberry Library 1989

Obenzinger Hilton American Palestine Melville Twain andthe Holy Land Mania Princeton NJ Princeton UP 1999mdashmdashmdash lsquoHerman Melville Returns to Jerusalemrsquo Jerusalem

Quarterly 43 (2010) BhttpwwwjerusalemquarterlyorgViewArticleaspxid=352mdashmdashmdash lsquoHoly Land Travel and the American Covenant 19th

Century Palestine in the Settler-Colonial ImaginationrsquoJerusalem Quarterly 12 (2003) 41ndash48 BhttpwwwjerusalemquarterlyorgimagesArticlesPdf17_holylandpdfRobinson E and E Smith Biblical Researches in Palestine

Mount Sinai and Arabia Petraea A Journal of Travels in theYear 1838 Vol I Boston MA Crocker amp Brewster 1841Accessed 18 June 2014 Bhttpsarchiveorgstream

biblicalresearc05smitgoogpagen6mode2up

22 Seeing Palestine

Dow

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ded

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at 2

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Dec

embe

r 20

14

But their scepticism had to compete with their general

disappointment with the Holy Land lsquoPalestine sits in

sackcloth and ashes desolate and unlovelyrsquo (Twain Ch LVI

np) Twain found the land lsquodismalrsquo lsquobarrenrsquo and

lsquounpicturesquersquo (ibid) lsquoIt isrsquo he concluded lsquoa hopeless

dreary heartbroken landrsquo (ibid) Melville agreed lsquoNo country

will more quickly dissipate romantic expectation than

Palestine mdash particularly Jerusalemrsquo he wrote in his travel

journals of 1856ndash1857 (Melville 91) And in Melvillersquos case

there was another undercurrent at work The language of

lsquoblessings and cursesrsquo seemed to him the natural idiom for

this land (Melville cited in Obenzinger lsquoHerman Melvillersquo np)

Though Melville was sharp about lsquothis preposterous Jew

maniarsquo of return lsquoa Quixotismrsquo that required a miracle to be

made real it also appealed as a lsquohalf melancholy half

farcicalrsquo spiritual quest that Ahab of Moby Dick may undertake

(Obenzinger lsquoHoly Land Travelrsquo 44) And Jerusalem in

particular held Melville for a somewhat unusual reason it

was vested with the lsquodistress of his soulrsquo (ibid)

It was not hard to recall these readings of Jerusalem when

meeting that Palestinian farmer in 2013 and hearing his tales

of the believers in the Moses tank Or when reading Raja

Shehadeh writing of Old Jerusalem in 2012

As a tourist visiting the Old City of Jerusalem seeing

Christians Jews and Muslims walking side by side

hearing church bells ringing and Muslims being called

to prayer you might think the place is a model of

tolerance (Shehadeh lsquoA Palestinian in Jerusalemrsquo np)

Shehadeh challenges this illusion For the non-Jewish

residents of Old Jerusalem living in the city means being

marginalised in every possible way Shehadeh asks

Who are these Israeli Jews anyway Who are they to

want to live among Palestinians so at odds with their

neighbours that they feel the need for 24-hour

security for putting iron bars on their windows and

doors for making their houses look more like cages

than dwellings (ibid)

When lsquoa man in his 30s wearing a kipparsquo is asked lsquoWhy live

like thisrsquo he replies lsquoItrsquos a mitzvah a religious dutyrsquo (ibid)

That old language of a religious mission the inevitability

of mapping blessings and curses onto the Holy Land lives in

the idiom of real life as well as the literary accounts of

the past

From once-in-a-lifetime package tours to lsquovicarious

journeys of the imaginationrsquo nineteenth-century travel

through lsquoBiblical landsrsquo was recorded in more than words The

nascent medium of photography and the advent of

archaeology influenced how the Holy Land was seen

Photographs of Biblical sites replaced fanciful illustrations

based on artistsrsquo sketches mdash but the medium that promised

truth and accuracy could also produce distorted views The

subjects sought out were those that would confirm

connections to stories from the Bible If the images included

people they had to be doing something suitably Biblical or

lsquoantiquersquo say a man tending his flock or a woman drawing

water from a well The scene had to evoke scripture In a

photograph entitled lsquoJews at the Western Wallrsquo for example

French photographer Felix Bonfils showed a group of Jews

huddled by the Wailing Wall praying In 1854 his compatriot

artist and archaeologist Auguste Salzmann produced

photographs that used light and form to animate old buildings

in Jerusalem The idea was to record monuments left by the

Crusades and find evidence of the Biblical kingdom of David

for the controversial historical and architectural theories of

scholar Felicien de Saulcy For de Saulcy and Salzmann the

latterrsquos photographs were lsquobrute conclusive factsrsquo (Salzmann

quoted in John Paul Getty Museum np)

There are equally brute conclusive facts in the images of

our own times Therersquos one thing about the high-tech world we

live in itrsquos hard to plead ignorance of what is happening to

real people in real places Take for instance the images and

eyewitness accounts of Gaza on Al Jazeera or the Electronic

Intifada in 2009

The pictures are hard to look at

Therersquos a photo of a girlrsquos hand sticking out of rubble

which used to be her home in the al-Zeitoun neighbourhood

of Gaza City Perhaps her family too is buried under it Another

picture also of a home in al-Zeitoun has no hint of bodies

at all Twenty-four members of this family were killed when an

F-16 fighter jet dropped a bomb on their house The only

lsquoremainsrsquo visible in the picture include a pillow a belt

a childrsquos school bag and paper that the caption describes as

pages of a torn copy of the Koran These possessions are

strewn about in the concrete and metal wreckage

It is harder to deny the existence of Palestinians today

though attempts are still made

In another time it was done easily enough

Western travellers saw Palestine as a Biblical landscape

as arid and desolate as awe inspiring as a home promised

by God So overwhelming was the demand of both real and

imaginary land to be seen and explained that many managed

not to see ndash or barely see ndash the people

Years later this may have helped see Palestine as a land

that needed people especially the sort of people who needed

a home To superimpose a new map on an existing one it

was not enough to conjure a landscape of belief and people it

with extracts from religious texts The place was important for

international geopolitics but military and economic aims

could coexist with religious fervour Western European powers

were poised to intervene if Ottoman rule in the region

collapsed they saw clearly the major trade routes to India

and with the completion of the Suez Canal connecting

the Mediterranean and Red Seas the area grew even more

vital The question then ndash and in 1948 when a new nation

was mapped onto the land ndash was what to do with the people

already there The question blurred in some heads

so when it was asked again it became But were there

people

One apologist for Eretz Israel3 writes of a lsquoland virtually

laid waste with little populationrsquo (Katz np) One historian after

another goes the claim has shown that lsquoin the twelve and a

half centuries between the Arab conquest in the seventh

century and the beginnings of the Jewish return in the 1880s

Palestine was laid wastersquo (ibid) The fertile land described in

Seeing Palestine 19

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

eric

an U

nive

rsity

of

Bei

rut]

at 2

305

02

Dec

embe

r 20

14

the Bible had lsquovanished into desert and desolationrsquo and in

the mid-eighteenth century Palestine did not have enough

people to till its soil (ibid) Further proof is offered with quotes

from secular sources

the British Consul in Palestine reported in 1857 that

lsquoThe country is in a considerable degree empty of

inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is that of a

body of population rsquo (James Finn to the Earl of

Clarendon Jerusalem 15 Sept 1857 quoted in

Katz np)

Years later Golda Meir would announce lsquoThere are no

Palestiniansrsquo (Butt np)

What is it like to be told you and your family donrsquot exist

Or that what was home in a peoplersquos living memory was not

actually their home at all

Edward Said took statements like Golda Meirrsquos and

transformed them into questions Palestinians could ask after

their existence had been overlooked or denied or their

existence noticed long enough to dispossess them or send

them into exile or to refugee camps lsquoDo we existrsquo

asked Said

What proof do we have The further we get from the

Palestine of our past the more precarious our status

the more disrupted our being the more intermittent

our presence (Said Politics 108ndash09)

Seeing Palestine Visiting the place reading that land as

holy as land that must be lsquorecoveredrsquo in some way or

the other This is one sort of lsquoreturnrsquo But for the people of

this land seeing Palestine ndash or seeing themselves as

Palestinian ndash involves a longer and more torturous journey

the kind of homeward journey Mahmoud Darwish wrote of

Darwishrsquos poetry said Edward Said was lsquoan epic effort to

transform the lyrics of loss into the indefinitely postponed

drama of returnrsquo (Said Reflections 197)

Writing home

Mahmoud Darwish often referred to as the Palestinian

national poet was born in 1941 in Al Birweh a village in

Galilee under the British mandate in Palestine When he

was six his world was turned upside down and it never set

itself right again As the Israeli army occupied Birweh Darwish

and his family were forced to join the great exodus of

refugees They spent a year in Lebanon living on UN

handouts By the time they returned to their village in 1949

Israel had been created their village was one of the

hundreds of Palestinian villages which had been razed

to the ground

They were refugees again infiltrators in their own land

Their return was lsquoillegalrsquo they were given the status of

lsquopresent-absent aliensrsquo

Years later Darwish recalled how his grandfather chose to

live on a hill that overlooked his land lsquoUntil he died he would

watch [Jewish] immigrants from Yemen living in his place

which he was unable even to visitrsquo (Jaggi np) The message

of such an experience could have been lsquoYou were not here

This was not Palestinersquo

Darwish described this identity in terms of a continuous

lsquostruggle between two memoriesrsquo (ibid) If his memories were

real his poetry had to challenge the Zionist tenet of a land

without a people for a people without a land The result was

often a strange contest within the poet For instance Darwish

admired the work of the Hebrew poet Yehuda Amichai but he

also recognised that Amichairsquos poems were a challenge to

him Darwish said of Amichai

He wants to use the landscape and history for his own

benefit based on my destroyed identity So we have a

competition who is the owner of the language of this

land Who loves it more Who writes it better (ibid)

Darwish wrote of a state of siege in which anger simmers

but he also wrote

Here on the slopes of hills facing the dusk and the

cannon of time

Close to the gardens of broken shadows

We do what prisoners do

And what the jobless do

We cultivate hope (From lsquoUnder Siegersquo np)

The lsquosense of abyssrsquo could be transformed Darwish

seemed to say through political acts and acts of imagination

into something more life affirming Therersquos siege but therersquos

also hope Therersquos loss but therersquos also belonging

Darwish was often called lsquothe poet of the resistancersquo but

in the course of his lifersquos work he somehow managed to resist

any neat or simplistic label He wrote the Palestinian

declaration of independence in 1988 and many poems of

resistance that are an integral part of every Arabrsquos

consciousness But he also allowed himself to grow

into a poet who did not close his mind to other ways of

seeing

He said for instance

Poetry and beauty are always making peace When

you read something beautiful you find coexistence it

breaks walls down I always humanise the other

I even humanised the Israeli soldier (Jaggi np)

Just after the 1967 war Darwish wrote a tender poem about an

Israeli friend who decided to leave the country on his return

from the front The poem lsquoA Soldier Who Dreams of White

Liliesrsquo drew criticism from many admirers But Darwish wrote

that he would lsquocontinue to humanise even the enemyrsquo (ibid)

This was the same Darwish who had not hesitated to write

[To a killer] If you had contemplated the victimrsquos face

And thought it through you would have remembered

your mother in the

Gas chamber you would have been freed from the

reason for the rifle

And you would have changed your mind this is not

the way

to find onersquos identity again (From lsquoUnder Siegersquo np)

Darwish died in 2008 For some years before he died he

had made the hills of Ramallah his home (What kind of a

home could it have been lsquoI have learned and dismantled all

the words in order to draw from them a single word Homersquo)

(from lsquoI Belong Therersquo np)

20 Seeing Palestine

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

eric

an U

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rsity

of

Bei

rut]

at 2

305

02

Dec

embe

r 20

14

Darwish and Raja Shehadeh were neighbours in Ramallah

In 2002 there was curfew Israeli tanks rolled down the

narrow streets One day when curfew was lifted for five hours

Shehadeh interviewed Darwish They spoke of many things

from Darwishrsquos partiality for Mozart to the need to liberate

Arabic poetry from older forms When Shehadeh broached the

subject of how the local landscape affected his poetry

Darwish replied

I find that the landscape is already written and

because it has been so fully described I feel it is

difficult to add to it The poetic image has been

realised geographically My role as a contemporary

poet is to liberate the natural landscape from the

burden of those legends and ease the burden of

history (Darwish quoted in Shehadeh lsquoMahmoud

Darwishrsquo np)

In Ramallah in 2013 I went to the Darwish Museum

situated on a hilltop From the outside the building looked

brand new somewhat blank and bleached like an empty page

that could be written on a tabula rasa An elegant young man

in charge hastened to explain the building has been designed

to look like an open book

The park in which the museum stands is called al-Birweh

The headstone which also says lsquoal-Birweh Palestinersquo quotes

Darwishrsquos poem on what makes his life worthwhile lsquoOn this

earth what makes life worth living It used to be known as

PalestineIt became known as Palestine rsquo (from lsquoOn This

Earth What Makes Life Worth Livingrsquo np)

The home Darwish lost in Galilee in 1947 has gone forever

In its place this landscaped garden and white tomb house

Darwish so all Palestinians can visit him But this al-Birweh in

Ramallah a city many Palestinians do not see as a possible

capital can never be the home Darwish sought The poet who

wrote of the search for a Palestinian home rests in a divided

house Ramallah is in the occupied West Bank the real

al-Birweh is beyond the reach of Palestinians who are not

Israeli citizens

The burden of legends and histories and their translation

into the everyday realities of a lost home continues

Losing home trying to return The words continue to be

written as new walls and barriers are built on the land

In summer 1996 after thirty years of exile the poet

Mourid Barghouti stood at the Allenby Bridge waiting for

permission to proceed lsquoBehind me was the world ahead of

me my world rsquo (Barghouti I Saw Ramallah 1) His mind

filled with racing thoughts about lsquoa lifetime spent trying to get

herersquo (ibid) But it was a temporary return fraught with

conditions about where he could go and what he could do

Even in the midst of reunion there was loss lsquoThe Occupationrsquo

he wrote in I Saw Ramallah lsquohas created generations of us

that have to adore an unknown beloved distant difficult

surrounded by guards by walls by nuclear missiles by sheer

terrorrsquo (62) Edward Said described Barghoutirsquos account as

lsquoone of the finest existential accounts of Palestinian

displacement that we now haversquo (Said Foreword vii)

Where is home when it is an occupied and brutalised

place To describe broken or lost homes to understand why

they are still homes why they need to be homes writers have

to grapple with the notion of exile whether external or

internal They have to confront the past the powerful ghost

that haunts all those who have been displaced They have to

recognise the need to reconstruct home ndash in words and in

personal and political action ndash and affirm the multiplicity of

the places they come from Most of all they have to give voice

to the aspirations of those who can only go back home if they

search for it and locate it afresh This is what the writers in

Seeking Palestine a 2012 collection edited by Raja Shehadeh

and Penny Johnson do

For homeless Palestinians whether they are still in

Palestine or far away the poet Darwishrsquos idea of lsquocultivating

hopersquo could be a credo They have to seek Palestine so they

may hope they have to hope so they can find Palestine It is

impossible to talk of Palestine ndash historic Palestine occupied

Palestine or the idea of Palestine in the future ndash without

viewing the multiple meanings held by the notions of home

exile and dispossession Rana Barakat one of the

contributors to Seeking Palestine gives us an idea of this

complex task

Palestine-in-exile is an idea a love a goal

a movement a massacre a march a parade a poem

a thesis a novel and yes a commodity as well as a

people scattered displaced dispossessed and

determined (Barakat 145)

It is all this but a home must be ordinary if it is to be a

home Raja Shehadeh and other writers speak of their desire

to move Palestine from a place of lsquoinsistent memoryrsquo to a

place where lsquoa robust Palestinersquo can be lsquonothing more than

homersquo (Johnson and Shehaheh xi) But this has not yet

happened Palestine still resides in conditions of crisis of

statelessness of transience Most of all it resides in the

Palestinians wherever they are

What then does it mean to be Palestinian The

essayists poets novelists critics and memoirists writing in

Seeking Palestine reflect on this question and come up with

individual and collective experiences of seeking waiting

living for and being or becoming Palestinian For many

writing Palestine is an exercise in lsquoimagining rather than

representingrsquo home (Johnson and Shehadah x) It means

disappeared villages erased histories It means going back

home with a tourist visa indeed entries and exits comprise

a recurring theme For Rana Barakat lsquohome is provisionalrsquo

(Barakat 138) given its foundation in lsquothe tragic indignity of

exilersquo (140) and the lsquounrealisticrsquo resistance of this indignity

(139) For Mourid Barghouti being Palestinian means being

in suspension

The suspended blob of air in which we are

swinging is now our place of exile from this earth

This bubble of air is the unyielding Occupation itself It

is the rootless roaming of the Palestinians through the

air of othersrsquo countries We sink upward I want

my high standing to be brought low Grandmother I

want to descend from this regal elevation and touch

the mud and dust once more so that I can be an

ordinary traveller again (Barghouti lsquoThe Driver

Mahmoudrsquo 110)

Seeing Palestine 21

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

eric

an U

nive

rsity

of

Bei

rut]

at 2

305

02

Dec

embe

r 20

14

For Sharif S Elmusa being Palestinian is lsquoa state of

enduring expectationrsquo (Elmusa 23) Susan Abulhawa in an

engaging and candid personal essay lists some of the

inevitable experiences that come with the Palestinian tag

To be alone without papers without a family or clan

a land or a country means one must live at the mercy

of others There are those who might take pity on you

and those who will exploit and harm you You live at

the whims of your hosts sometimes preyed upon and

nearly always put in your place But there are

particular beauties and peculiar strengths that can

only be found in the trenches of such a life mdash like the

ability to hold your head high even when someone

has their boot on your neck the wisdom to do

whatever it takes to get an education even when

yoursquore denied a school the freedom of shedding

shame and living onersquos truth no matter how messy

without apologies the victory of a heart that does

not succumb to fear or hatred or bitterness

(Abulhawa 15)

Being Palestinian means being in a limbo mdash

dispossessed disinherited exiled It means belonging is

denied or controlled by the occupier But seeking Palestine

also involves resistance in myriad ways How does this

happen How do people survive being a refugee in someone

elsersquos country and even in their own Among the modes of

survival these Palestinian writers illuminate for us are humour

wry and biting in turn apathy anger longing the use of

words of memory the living out of intensely political lives

stoking the idea of Palestine so it may flame into reality In

this limbo of banal as well as exalted despair and hope

lsquoPalestinians have been waiting at borders for nearly a century

nowrsquo (ibid)

Notes

1 Judea and Samaria are the Biblical names for the generalareas south and north of Jerusalem (respectively)Historically they include substantial portions of pre-1967Israel but not the Jordan Valley or the Benyamina district(both within the West Bank) For political purposes anddespite the geographical imprecision involved theannexationist camp in Israel prefers to refer to the areabetween the Green Line and the Jordan River not as theWest Bank but as Judea and Samaria See For the Landand the Lord The Evolution of Gush Emunim Ian S LustickBhttpwwwsasupennedupennciplusticklustick13htmltxt4

2 The sections on my visit to Palestine in 2013 are based onGitha Hariharan lsquoFrom India to Palestine RevisitingSolidarityrsquo in From India to Palestine Essays in Solidarityed Githa Hariharan New Delhi LeftWord Books 2014 andlsquoSeeing Palestinersquo in Githa Hariharan Almost Home Citiesand Other Places New Delhi HarperCollinsforthcoming 2014

3 On Eretz Israel Wikipedia says lsquoEretz Yisrael is a Biblicalname for the territory roughly corresponding to the areaencompassed by the Southern Levant The Land ofIsrael concept has been evoked by the founders of theState of Israel It often surfaces in political debates on thestatus of the West Bank which coincides with the biblicalareas of Judea and Samariarsquo

Works Cited

Abulhawa Susan lsquoMemories of an Un-Palestinian Story in a

Can of Tunarsquo Seeking Palestine Ed P Johnson andR Shehadeh New Delhi Women Unlimited 2012 4ndash16Barakat Rana lsquoThe Right to Wait Exile Home and Returnrsquo

Seeking Palestine Ed P Johnson and R Shehadeh New DelhiWomen Unlimited 2012 135ndash51Barghouti Mourid lsquoThe Driver Mahmoudrsquo Seeking Palestine

Ed P Johnson and R Shehadeh New Delhi Women Unlimited2012 97ndash110mdashmdashmdash I Saw Ramallah Trans Ahdaf Soueif London

Bloomsbury 2005Butt Gerald lsquoGolda Meirrsquo Profiles BBC Online Network21 Apr 1998 Bhttpnewsbbccouk2hieventsisrael_at_50profiles81288stm

Darwish Mahmoud lsquoI Belong Therersquo Unfortunately It WasParadise Trans and ed Munir Akash and Carolyn Forche withSinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein California U of California P

2003 Bhttpwwwpoetsorgpoetsorgpoemi-belong-theremdashmdashmdash lsquoOn This Earth What Makes Life Worth Livingrsquo Trans

Karim Abuawad Bhttpasitoughttobecom20100824on-this-earth-what-makes-life-worth-living-3mdashmdashmdash lsquoUnder Siegersquo Trans Marjolijn De Jager AdabcomArabic Poetry website Bhttpwwwadabcomenmodules

phpname=Sh3erampdoWhat=shqasampqid=92Egerton Lady Francis Journal of a Tour in the Holy Land inMay and June 1840 London Harrison and Co 1841

Accessed 18 June 2014 Bhttpsarchiveorgdetailsjournaloftourinh00egerElmusa Sharif S lsquoPortable Absence My Camp Re-memberedrsquo

Seeking Palestine Ed P Johnson and R Shehadeh New DelhiWomen Unlimited 2012 22ndash42Hariharan Githa lsquoSeeing Palestinersquo Almost Home Cities and

Other Places Delhi HarperCollins forthcoming 2014Jaggi Maya Profile of Mahmoud Darwish The Guardian 8 June2002 Bhttpwwwtheguardiancombooks2002jun08featuresreviewsguardianreview19

John Paul Getty Museum lsquoIn Search of Biblical Lands FromJerusalem to Jordan in 19th-Century Photographyrsquo Exhibitionslide show Bhttpwwwgettyeduartexhibitions

biblical_landsslideshowhtmlJohnson Penny and Raja Shehadeh ed Seeking PalestineNew Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home New Delhi

Women Unlimited 2012Katz Joseph lsquoPalestine a land virtually laid waste with littlepopulationrsquo EretzYisroelOrg website Bhttpwww

eretzyisroelorgsimpetersdepopulatedhtmlMelville Herman Journals Ed Howard C Horsford with LynnHorth Evanston and Chicago IL Northwestern UP and theNewberry Library 1989

Obenzinger Hilton American Palestine Melville Twain andthe Holy Land Mania Princeton NJ Princeton UP 1999mdashmdashmdash lsquoHerman Melville Returns to Jerusalemrsquo Jerusalem

Quarterly 43 (2010) BhttpwwwjerusalemquarterlyorgViewArticleaspxid=352mdashmdashmdash lsquoHoly Land Travel and the American Covenant 19th

Century Palestine in the Settler-Colonial ImaginationrsquoJerusalem Quarterly 12 (2003) 41ndash48 BhttpwwwjerusalemquarterlyorgimagesArticlesPdf17_holylandpdfRobinson E and E Smith Biblical Researches in Palestine

Mount Sinai and Arabia Petraea A Journal of Travels in theYear 1838 Vol I Boston MA Crocker amp Brewster 1841Accessed 18 June 2014 Bhttpsarchiveorgstream

biblicalresearc05smitgoogpagen6mode2up

22 Seeing Palestine

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

eric

an U

nive

rsity

of

Bei

rut]

at 2

305

02

Dec

embe

r 20

14

the Bible had lsquovanished into desert and desolationrsquo and in

the mid-eighteenth century Palestine did not have enough

people to till its soil (ibid) Further proof is offered with quotes

from secular sources

the British Consul in Palestine reported in 1857 that

lsquoThe country is in a considerable degree empty of

inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is that of a

body of population rsquo (James Finn to the Earl of

Clarendon Jerusalem 15 Sept 1857 quoted in

Katz np)

Years later Golda Meir would announce lsquoThere are no

Palestiniansrsquo (Butt np)

What is it like to be told you and your family donrsquot exist

Or that what was home in a peoplersquos living memory was not

actually their home at all

Edward Said took statements like Golda Meirrsquos and

transformed them into questions Palestinians could ask after

their existence had been overlooked or denied or their

existence noticed long enough to dispossess them or send

them into exile or to refugee camps lsquoDo we existrsquo

asked Said

What proof do we have The further we get from the

Palestine of our past the more precarious our status

the more disrupted our being the more intermittent

our presence (Said Politics 108ndash09)

Seeing Palestine Visiting the place reading that land as

holy as land that must be lsquorecoveredrsquo in some way or

the other This is one sort of lsquoreturnrsquo But for the people of

this land seeing Palestine ndash or seeing themselves as

Palestinian ndash involves a longer and more torturous journey

the kind of homeward journey Mahmoud Darwish wrote of

Darwishrsquos poetry said Edward Said was lsquoan epic effort to

transform the lyrics of loss into the indefinitely postponed

drama of returnrsquo (Said Reflections 197)

Writing home

Mahmoud Darwish often referred to as the Palestinian

national poet was born in 1941 in Al Birweh a village in

Galilee under the British mandate in Palestine When he

was six his world was turned upside down and it never set

itself right again As the Israeli army occupied Birweh Darwish

and his family were forced to join the great exodus of

refugees They spent a year in Lebanon living on UN

handouts By the time they returned to their village in 1949

Israel had been created their village was one of the

hundreds of Palestinian villages which had been razed

to the ground

They were refugees again infiltrators in their own land

Their return was lsquoillegalrsquo they were given the status of

lsquopresent-absent aliensrsquo

Years later Darwish recalled how his grandfather chose to

live on a hill that overlooked his land lsquoUntil he died he would

watch [Jewish] immigrants from Yemen living in his place

which he was unable even to visitrsquo (Jaggi np) The message

of such an experience could have been lsquoYou were not here

This was not Palestinersquo

Darwish described this identity in terms of a continuous

lsquostruggle between two memoriesrsquo (ibid) If his memories were

real his poetry had to challenge the Zionist tenet of a land

without a people for a people without a land The result was

often a strange contest within the poet For instance Darwish

admired the work of the Hebrew poet Yehuda Amichai but he

also recognised that Amichairsquos poems were a challenge to

him Darwish said of Amichai

He wants to use the landscape and history for his own

benefit based on my destroyed identity So we have a

competition who is the owner of the language of this

land Who loves it more Who writes it better (ibid)

Darwish wrote of a state of siege in which anger simmers

but he also wrote

Here on the slopes of hills facing the dusk and the

cannon of time

Close to the gardens of broken shadows

We do what prisoners do

And what the jobless do

We cultivate hope (From lsquoUnder Siegersquo np)

The lsquosense of abyssrsquo could be transformed Darwish

seemed to say through political acts and acts of imagination

into something more life affirming Therersquos siege but therersquos

also hope Therersquos loss but therersquos also belonging

Darwish was often called lsquothe poet of the resistancersquo but

in the course of his lifersquos work he somehow managed to resist

any neat or simplistic label He wrote the Palestinian

declaration of independence in 1988 and many poems of

resistance that are an integral part of every Arabrsquos

consciousness But he also allowed himself to grow

into a poet who did not close his mind to other ways of

seeing

He said for instance

Poetry and beauty are always making peace When

you read something beautiful you find coexistence it

breaks walls down I always humanise the other

I even humanised the Israeli soldier (Jaggi np)

Just after the 1967 war Darwish wrote a tender poem about an

Israeli friend who decided to leave the country on his return

from the front The poem lsquoA Soldier Who Dreams of White

Liliesrsquo drew criticism from many admirers But Darwish wrote

that he would lsquocontinue to humanise even the enemyrsquo (ibid)

This was the same Darwish who had not hesitated to write

[To a killer] If you had contemplated the victimrsquos face

And thought it through you would have remembered

your mother in the

Gas chamber you would have been freed from the

reason for the rifle

And you would have changed your mind this is not

the way

to find onersquos identity again (From lsquoUnder Siegersquo np)

Darwish died in 2008 For some years before he died he

had made the hills of Ramallah his home (What kind of a

home could it have been lsquoI have learned and dismantled all

the words in order to draw from them a single word Homersquo)

(from lsquoI Belong Therersquo np)

20 Seeing Palestine

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

eric

an U

nive

rsity

of

Bei

rut]

at 2

305

02

Dec

embe

r 20

14

Darwish and Raja Shehadeh were neighbours in Ramallah

In 2002 there was curfew Israeli tanks rolled down the

narrow streets One day when curfew was lifted for five hours

Shehadeh interviewed Darwish They spoke of many things

from Darwishrsquos partiality for Mozart to the need to liberate

Arabic poetry from older forms When Shehadeh broached the

subject of how the local landscape affected his poetry

Darwish replied

I find that the landscape is already written and

because it has been so fully described I feel it is

difficult to add to it The poetic image has been

realised geographically My role as a contemporary

poet is to liberate the natural landscape from the

burden of those legends and ease the burden of

history (Darwish quoted in Shehadeh lsquoMahmoud

Darwishrsquo np)

In Ramallah in 2013 I went to the Darwish Museum

situated on a hilltop From the outside the building looked

brand new somewhat blank and bleached like an empty page

that could be written on a tabula rasa An elegant young man

in charge hastened to explain the building has been designed

to look like an open book

The park in which the museum stands is called al-Birweh

The headstone which also says lsquoal-Birweh Palestinersquo quotes

Darwishrsquos poem on what makes his life worthwhile lsquoOn this

earth what makes life worth living It used to be known as

PalestineIt became known as Palestine rsquo (from lsquoOn This

Earth What Makes Life Worth Livingrsquo np)

The home Darwish lost in Galilee in 1947 has gone forever

In its place this landscaped garden and white tomb house

Darwish so all Palestinians can visit him But this al-Birweh in

Ramallah a city many Palestinians do not see as a possible

capital can never be the home Darwish sought The poet who

wrote of the search for a Palestinian home rests in a divided

house Ramallah is in the occupied West Bank the real

al-Birweh is beyond the reach of Palestinians who are not

Israeli citizens

The burden of legends and histories and their translation

into the everyday realities of a lost home continues

Losing home trying to return The words continue to be

written as new walls and barriers are built on the land

In summer 1996 after thirty years of exile the poet

Mourid Barghouti stood at the Allenby Bridge waiting for

permission to proceed lsquoBehind me was the world ahead of

me my world rsquo (Barghouti I Saw Ramallah 1) His mind

filled with racing thoughts about lsquoa lifetime spent trying to get

herersquo (ibid) But it was a temporary return fraught with

conditions about where he could go and what he could do

Even in the midst of reunion there was loss lsquoThe Occupationrsquo

he wrote in I Saw Ramallah lsquohas created generations of us

that have to adore an unknown beloved distant difficult

surrounded by guards by walls by nuclear missiles by sheer

terrorrsquo (62) Edward Said described Barghoutirsquos account as

lsquoone of the finest existential accounts of Palestinian

displacement that we now haversquo (Said Foreword vii)

Where is home when it is an occupied and brutalised

place To describe broken or lost homes to understand why

they are still homes why they need to be homes writers have

to grapple with the notion of exile whether external or

internal They have to confront the past the powerful ghost

that haunts all those who have been displaced They have to

recognise the need to reconstruct home ndash in words and in

personal and political action ndash and affirm the multiplicity of

the places they come from Most of all they have to give voice

to the aspirations of those who can only go back home if they

search for it and locate it afresh This is what the writers in

Seeking Palestine a 2012 collection edited by Raja Shehadeh

and Penny Johnson do

For homeless Palestinians whether they are still in

Palestine or far away the poet Darwishrsquos idea of lsquocultivating

hopersquo could be a credo They have to seek Palestine so they

may hope they have to hope so they can find Palestine It is

impossible to talk of Palestine ndash historic Palestine occupied

Palestine or the idea of Palestine in the future ndash without

viewing the multiple meanings held by the notions of home

exile and dispossession Rana Barakat one of the

contributors to Seeking Palestine gives us an idea of this

complex task

Palestine-in-exile is an idea a love a goal

a movement a massacre a march a parade a poem

a thesis a novel and yes a commodity as well as a

people scattered displaced dispossessed and

determined (Barakat 145)

It is all this but a home must be ordinary if it is to be a

home Raja Shehadeh and other writers speak of their desire

to move Palestine from a place of lsquoinsistent memoryrsquo to a

place where lsquoa robust Palestinersquo can be lsquonothing more than

homersquo (Johnson and Shehaheh xi) But this has not yet

happened Palestine still resides in conditions of crisis of

statelessness of transience Most of all it resides in the

Palestinians wherever they are

What then does it mean to be Palestinian The

essayists poets novelists critics and memoirists writing in

Seeking Palestine reflect on this question and come up with

individual and collective experiences of seeking waiting

living for and being or becoming Palestinian For many

writing Palestine is an exercise in lsquoimagining rather than

representingrsquo home (Johnson and Shehadah x) It means

disappeared villages erased histories It means going back

home with a tourist visa indeed entries and exits comprise

a recurring theme For Rana Barakat lsquohome is provisionalrsquo

(Barakat 138) given its foundation in lsquothe tragic indignity of

exilersquo (140) and the lsquounrealisticrsquo resistance of this indignity

(139) For Mourid Barghouti being Palestinian means being

in suspension

The suspended blob of air in which we are

swinging is now our place of exile from this earth

This bubble of air is the unyielding Occupation itself It

is the rootless roaming of the Palestinians through the

air of othersrsquo countries We sink upward I want

my high standing to be brought low Grandmother I

want to descend from this regal elevation and touch

the mud and dust once more so that I can be an

ordinary traveller again (Barghouti lsquoThe Driver

Mahmoudrsquo 110)

Seeing Palestine 21

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

eric

an U

nive

rsity

of

Bei

rut]

at 2

305

02

Dec

embe

r 20

14

For Sharif S Elmusa being Palestinian is lsquoa state of

enduring expectationrsquo (Elmusa 23) Susan Abulhawa in an

engaging and candid personal essay lists some of the

inevitable experiences that come with the Palestinian tag

To be alone without papers without a family or clan

a land or a country means one must live at the mercy

of others There are those who might take pity on you

and those who will exploit and harm you You live at

the whims of your hosts sometimes preyed upon and

nearly always put in your place But there are

particular beauties and peculiar strengths that can

only be found in the trenches of such a life mdash like the

ability to hold your head high even when someone

has their boot on your neck the wisdom to do

whatever it takes to get an education even when

yoursquore denied a school the freedom of shedding

shame and living onersquos truth no matter how messy

without apologies the victory of a heart that does

not succumb to fear or hatred or bitterness

(Abulhawa 15)

Being Palestinian means being in a limbo mdash

dispossessed disinherited exiled It means belonging is

denied or controlled by the occupier But seeking Palestine

also involves resistance in myriad ways How does this

happen How do people survive being a refugee in someone

elsersquos country and even in their own Among the modes of

survival these Palestinian writers illuminate for us are humour

wry and biting in turn apathy anger longing the use of

words of memory the living out of intensely political lives

stoking the idea of Palestine so it may flame into reality In

this limbo of banal as well as exalted despair and hope

lsquoPalestinians have been waiting at borders for nearly a century

nowrsquo (ibid)

Notes

1 Judea and Samaria are the Biblical names for the generalareas south and north of Jerusalem (respectively)Historically they include substantial portions of pre-1967Israel but not the Jordan Valley or the Benyamina district(both within the West Bank) For political purposes anddespite the geographical imprecision involved theannexationist camp in Israel prefers to refer to the areabetween the Green Line and the Jordan River not as theWest Bank but as Judea and Samaria See For the Landand the Lord The Evolution of Gush Emunim Ian S LustickBhttpwwwsasupennedupennciplusticklustick13htmltxt4

2 The sections on my visit to Palestine in 2013 are based onGitha Hariharan lsquoFrom India to Palestine RevisitingSolidarityrsquo in From India to Palestine Essays in Solidarityed Githa Hariharan New Delhi LeftWord Books 2014 andlsquoSeeing Palestinersquo in Githa Hariharan Almost Home Citiesand Other Places New Delhi HarperCollinsforthcoming 2014

3 On Eretz Israel Wikipedia says lsquoEretz Yisrael is a Biblicalname for the territory roughly corresponding to the areaencompassed by the Southern Levant The Land ofIsrael concept has been evoked by the founders of theState of Israel It often surfaces in political debates on thestatus of the West Bank which coincides with the biblicalareas of Judea and Samariarsquo

Works Cited

Abulhawa Susan lsquoMemories of an Un-Palestinian Story in a

Can of Tunarsquo Seeking Palestine Ed P Johnson andR Shehadeh New Delhi Women Unlimited 2012 4ndash16Barakat Rana lsquoThe Right to Wait Exile Home and Returnrsquo

Seeking Palestine Ed P Johnson and R Shehadeh New DelhiWomen Unlimited 2012 135ndash51Barghouti Mourid lsquoThe Driver Mahmoudrsquo Seeking Palestine

Ed P Johnson and R Shehadeh New Delhi Women Unlimited2012 97ndash110mdashmdashmdash I Saw Ramallah Trans Ahdaf Soueif London

Bloomsbury 2005Butt Gerald lsquoGolda Meirrsquo Profiles BBC Online Network21 Apr 1998 Bhttpnewsbbccouk2hieventsisrael_at_50profiles81288stm

Darwish Mahmoud lsquoI Belong Therersquo Unfortunately It WasParadise Trans and ed Munir Akash and Carolyn Forche withSinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein California U of California P

2003 Bhttpwwwpoetsorgpoetsorgpoemi-belong-theremdashmdashmdash lsquoOn This Earth What Makes Life Worth Livingrsquo Trans

Karim Abuawad Bhttpasitoughttobecom20100824on-this-earth-what-makes-life-worth-living-3mdashmdashmdash lsquoUnder Siegersquo Trans Marjolijn De Jager AdabcomArabic Poetry website Bhttpwwwadabcomenmodules

phpname=Sh3erampdoWhat=shqasampqid=92Egerton Lady Francis Journal of a Tour in the Holy Land inMay and June 1840 London Harrison and Co 1841

Accessed 18 June 2014 Bhttpsarchiveorgdetailsjournaloftourinh00egerElmusa Sharif S lsquoPortable Absence My Camp Re-memberedrsquo

Seeking Palestine Ed P Johnson and R Shehadeh New DelhiWomen Unlimited 2012 22ndash42Hariharan Githa lsquoSeeing Palestinersquo Almost Home Cities and

Other Places Delhi HarperCollins forthcoming 2014Jaggi Maya Profile of Mahmoud Darwish The Guardian 8 June2002 Bhttpwwwtheguardiancombooks2002jun08featuresreviewsguardianreview19

John Paul Getty Museum lsquoIn Search of Biblical Lands FromJerusalem to Jordan in 19th-Century Photographyrsquo Exhibitionslide show Bhttpwwwgettyeduartexhibitions

biblical_landsslideshowhtmlJohnson Penny and Raja Shehadeh ed Seeking PalestineNew Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home New Delhi

Women Unlimited 2012Katz Joseph lsquoPalestine a land virtually laid waste with littlepopulationrsquo EretzYisroelOrg website Bhttpwww

eretzyisroelorgsimpetersdepopulatedhtmlMelville Herman Journals Ed Howard C Horsford with LynnHorth Evanston and Chicago IL Northwestern UP and theNewberry Library 1989

Obenzinger Hilton American Palestine Melville Twain andthe Holy Land Mania Princeton NJ Princeton UP 1999mdashmdashmdash lsquoHerman Melville Returns to Jerusalemrsquo Jerusalem

Quarterly 43 (2010) BhttpwwwjerusalemquarterlyorgViewArticleaspxid=352mdashmdashmdash lsquoHoly Land Travel and the American Covenant 19th

Century Palestine in the Settler-Colonial ImaginationrsquoJerusalem Quarterly 12 (2003) 41ndash48 BhttpwwwjerusalemquarterlyorgimagesArticlesPdf17_holylandpdfRobinson E and E Smith Biblical Researches in Palestine

Mount Sinai and Arabia Petraea A Journal of Travels in theYear 1838 Vol I Boston MA Crocker amp Brewster 1841Accessed 18 June 2014 Bhttpsarchiveorgstream

biblicalresearc05smitgoogpagen6mode2up

22 Seeing Palestine

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

eric

an U

nive

rsity

of

Bei

rut]

at 2

305

02

Dec

embe

r 20

14

Darwish and Raja Shehadeh were neighbours in Ramallah

In 2002 there was curfew Israeli tanks rolled down the

narrow streets One day when curfew was lifted for five hours

Shehadeh interviewed Darwish They spoke of many things

from Darwishrsquos partiality for Mozart to the need to liberate

Arabic poetry from older forms When Shehadeh broached the

subject of how the local landscape affected his poetry

Darwish replied

I find that the landscape is already written and

because it has been so fully described I feel it is

difficult to add to it The poetic image has been

realised geographically My role as a contemporary

poet is to liberate the natural landscape from the

burden of those legends and ease the burden of

history (Darwish quoted in Shehadeh lsquoMahmoud

Darwishrsquo np)

In Ramallah in 2013 I went to the Darwish Museum

situated on a hilltop From the outside the building looked

brand new somewhat blank and bleached like an empty page

that could be written on a tabula rasa An elegant young man

in charge hastened to explain the building has been designed

to look like an open book

The park in which the museum stands is called al-Birweh

The headstone which also says lsquoal-Birweh Palestinersquo quotes

Darwishrsquos poem on what makes his life worthwhile lsquoOn this

earth what makes life worth living It used to be known as

PalestineIt became known as Palestine rsquo (from lsquoOn This

Earth What Makes Life Worth Livingrsquo np)

The home Darwish lost in Galilee in 1947 has gone forever

In its place this landscaped garden and white tomb house

Darwish so all Palestinians can visit him But this al-Birweh in

Ramallah a city many Palestinians do not see as a possible

capital can never be the home Darwish sought The poet who

wrote of the search for a Palestinian home rests in a divided

house Ramallah is in the occupied West Bank the real

al-Birweh is beyond the reach of Palestinians who are not

Israeli citizens

The burden of legends and histories and their translation

into the everyday realities of a lost home continues

Losing home trying to return The words continue to be

written as new walls and barriers are built on the land

In summer 1996 after thirty years of exile the poet

Mourid Barghouti stood at the Allenby Bridge waiting for

permission to proceed lsquoBehind me was the world ahead of

me my world rsquo (Barghouti I Saw Ramallah 1) His mind

filled with racing thoughts about lsquoa lifetime spent trying to get

herersquo (ibid) But it was a temporary return fraught with

conditions about where he could go and what he could do

Even in the midst of reunion there was loss lsquoThe Occupationrsquo

he wrote in I Saw Ramallah lsquohas created generations of us

that have to adore an unknown beloved distant difficult

surrounded by guards by walls by nuclear missiles by sheer

terrorrsquo (62) Edward Said described Barghoutirsquos account as

lsquoone of the finest existential accounts of Palestinian

displacement that we now haversquo (Said Foreword vii)

Where is home when it is an occupied and brutalised

place To describe broken or lost homes to understand why

they are still homes why they need to be homes writers have

to grapple with the notion of exile whether external or

internal They have to confront the past the powerful ghost

that haunts all those who have been displaced They have to

recognise the need to reconstruct home ndash in words and in

personal and political action ndash and affirm the multiplicity of

the places they come from Most of all they have to give voice

to the aspirations of those who can only go back home if they

search for it and locate it afresh This is what the writers in

Seeking Palestine a 2012 collection edited by Raja Shehadeh

and Penny Johnson do

For homeless Palestinians whether they are still in

Palestine or far away the poet Darwishrsquos idea of lsquocultivating

hopersquo could be a credo They have to seek Palestine so they

may hope they have to hope so they can find Palestine It is

impossible to talk of Palestine ndash historic Palestine occupied

Palestine or the idea of Palestine in the future ndash without

viewing the multiple meanings held by the notions of home

exile and dispossession Rana Barakat one of the

contributors to Seeking Palestine gives us an idea of this

complex task

Palestine-in-exile is an idea a love a goal

a movement a massacre a march a parade a poem

a thesis a novel and yes a commodity as well as a

people scattered displaced dispossessed and

determined (Barakat 145)

It is all this but a home must be ordinary if it is to be a

home Raja Shehadeh and other writers speak of their desire

to move Palestine from a place of lsquoinsistent memoryrsquo to a

place where lsquoa robust Palestinersquo can be lsquonothing more than

homersquo (Johnson and Shehaheh xi) But this has not yet

happened Palestine still resides in conditions of crisis of

statelessness of transience Most of all it resides in the

Palestinians wherever they are

What then does it mean to be Palestinian The

essayists poets novelists critics and memoirists writing in

Seeking Palestine reflect on this question and come up with

individual and collective experiences of seeking waiting

living for and being or becoming Palestinian For many

writing Palestine is an exercise in lsquoimagining rather than

representingrsquo home (Johnson and Shehadah x) It means

disappeared villages erased histories It means going back

home with a tourist visa indeed entries and exits comprise

a recurring theme For Rana Barakat lsquohome is provisionalrsquo

(Barakat 138) given its foundation in lsquothe tragic indignity of

exilersquo (140) and the lsquounrealisticrsquo resistance of this indignity

(139) For Mourid Barghouti being Palestinian means being

in suspension

The suspended blob of air in which we are

swinging is now our place of exile from this earth

This bubble of air is the unyielding Occupation itself It

is the rootless roaming of the Palestinians through the

air of othersrsquo countries We sink upward I want

my high standing to be brought low Grandmother I

want to descend from this regal elevation and touch

the mud and dust once more so that I can be an

ordinary traveller again (Barghouti lsquoThe Driver

Mahmoudrsquo 110)

Seeing Palestine 21

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

eric

an U

nive

rsity

of

Bei

rut]

at 2

305

02

Dec

embe

r 20

14

For Sharif S Elmusa being Palestinian is lsquoa state of

enduring expectationrsquo (Elmusa 23) Susan Abulhawa in an

engaging and candid personal essay lists some of the

inevitable experiences that come with the Palestinian tag

To be alone without papers without a family or clan

a land or a country means one must live at the mercy

of others There are those who might take pity on you

and those who will exploit and harm you You live at

the whims of your hosts sometimes preyed upon and

nearly always put in your place But there are

particular beauties and peculiar strengths that can

only be found in the trenches of such a life mdash like the

ability to hold your head high even when someone

has their boot on your neck the wisdom to do

whatever it takes to get an education even when

yoursquore denied a school the freedom of shedding

shame and living onersquos truth no matter how messy

without apologies the victory of a heart that does

not succumb to fear or hatred or bitterness

(Abulhawa 15)

Being Palestinian means being in a limbo mdash

dispossessed disinherited exiled It means belonging is

denied or controlled by the occupier But seeking Palestine

also involves resistance in myriad ways How does this

happen How do people survive being a refugee in someone

elsersquos country and even in their own Among the modes of

survival these Palestinian writers illuminate for us are humour

wry and biting in turn apathy anger longing the use of

words of memory the living out of intensely political lives

stoking the idea of Palestine so it may flame into reality In

this limbo of banal as well as exalted despair and hope

lsquoPalestinians have been waiting at borders for nearly a century

nowrsquo (ibid)

Notes

1 Judea and Samaria are the Biblical names for the generalareas south and north of Jerusalem (respectively)Historically they include substantial portions of pre-1967Israel but not the Jordan Valley or the Benyamina district(both within the West Bank) For political purposes anddespite the geographical imprecision involved theannexationist camp in Israel prefers to refer to the areabetween the Green Line and the Jordan River not as theWest Bank but as Judea and Samaria See For the Landand the Lord The Evolution of Gush Emunim Ian S LustickBhttpwwwsasupennedupennciplusticklustick13htmltxt4

2 The sections on my visit to Palestine in 2013 are based onGitha Hariharan lsquoFrom India to Palestine RevisitingSolidarityrsquo in From India to Palestine Essays in Solidarityed Githa Hariharan New Delhi LeftWord Books 2014 andlsquoSeeing Palestinersquo in Githa Hariharan Almost Home Citiesand Other Places New Delhi HarperCollinsforthcoming 2014

3 On Eretz Israel Wikipedia says lsquoEretz Yisrael is a Biblicalname for the territory roughly corresponding to the areaencompassed by the Southern Levant The Land ofIsrael concept has been evoked by the founders of theState of Israel It often surfaces in political debates on thestatus of the West Bank which coincides with the biblicalareas of Judea and Samariarsquo

Works Cited

Abulhawa Susan lsquoMemories of an Un-Palestinian Story in a

Can of Tunarsquo Seeking Palestine Ed P Johnson andR Shehadeh New Delhi Women Unlimited 2012 4ndash16Barakat Rana lsquoThe Right to Wait Exile Home and Returnrsquo

Seeking Palestine Ed P Johnson and R Shehadeh New DelhiWomen Unlimited 2012 135ndash51Barghouti Mourid lsquoThe Driver Mahmoudrsquo Seeking Palestine

Ed P Johnson and R Shehadeh New Delhi Women Unlimited2012 97ndash110mdashmdashmdash I Saw Ramallah Trans Ahdaf Soueif London

Bloomsbury 2005Butt Gerald lsquoGolda Meirrsquo Profiles BBC Online Network21 Apr 1998 Bhttpnewsbbccouk2hieventsisrael_at_50profiles81288stm

Darwish Mahmoud lsquoI Belong Therersquo Unfortunately It WasParadise Trans and ed Munir Akash and Carolyn Forche withSinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein California U of California P

2003 Bhttpwwwpoetsorgpoetsorgpoemi-belong-theremdashmdashmdash lsquoOn This Earth What Makes Life Worth Livingrsquo Trans

Karim Abuawad Bhttpasitoughttobecom20100824on-this-earth-what-makes-life-worth-living-3mdashmdashmdash lsquoUnder Siegersquo Trans Marjolijn De Jager AdabcomArabic Poetry website Bhttpwwwadabcomenmodules

phpname=Sh3erampdoWhat=shqasampqid=92Egerton Lady Francis Journal of a Tour in the Holy Land inMay and June 1840 London Harrison and Co 1841

Accessed 18 June 2014 Bhttpsarchiveorgdetailsjournaloftourinh00egerElmusa Sharif S lsquoPortable Absence My Camp Re-memberedrsquo

Seeking Palestine Ed P Johnson and R Shehadeh New DelhiWomen Unlimited 2012 22ndash42Hariharan Githa lsquoSeeing Palestinersquo Almost Home Cities and

Other Places Delhi HarperCollins forthcoming 2014Jaggi Maya Profile of Mahmoud Darwish The Guardian 8 June2002 Bhttpwwwtheguardiancombooks2002jun08featuresreviewsguardianreview19

John Paul Getty Museum lsquoIn Search of Biblical Lands FromJerusalem to Jordan in 19th-Century Photographyrsquo Exhibitionslide show Bhttpwwwgettyeduartexhibitions

biblical_landsslideshowhtmlJohnson Penny and Raja Shehadeh ed Seeking PalestineNew Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home New Delhi

Women Unlimited 2012Katz Joseph lsquoPalestine a land virtually laid waste with littlepopulationrsquo EretzYisroelOrg website Bhttpwww

eretzyisroelorgsimpetersdepopulatedhtmlMelville Herman Journals Ed Howard C Horsford with LynnHorth Evanston and Chicago IL Northwestern UP and theNewberry Library 1989

Obenzinger Hilton American Palestine Melville Twain andthe Holy Land Mania Princeton NJ Princeton UP 1999mdashmdashmdash lsquoHerman Melville Returns to Jerusalemrsquo Jerusalem

Quarterly 43 (2010) BhttpwwwjerusalemquarterlyorgViewArticleaspxid=352mdashmdashmdash lsquoHoly Land Travel and the American Covenant 19th

Century Palestine in the Settler-Colonial ImaginationrsquoJerusalem Quarterly 12 (2003) 41ndash48 BhttpwwwjerusalemquarterlyorgimagesArticlesPdf17_holylandpdfRobinson E and E Smith Biblical Researches in Palestine

Mount Sinai and Arabia Petraea A Journal of Travels in theYear 1838 Vol I Boston MA Crocker amp Brewster 1841Accessed 18 June 2014 Bhttpsarchiveorgstream

biblicalresearc05smitgoogpagen6mode2up

22 Seeing Palestine

Dow

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by [

Am

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at 2

305

02

Dec

embe

r 20

14

For Sharif S Elmusa being Palestinian is lsquoa state of

enduring expectationrsquo (Elmusa 23) Susan Abulhawa in an

engaging and candid personal essay lists some of the

inevitable experiences that come with the Palestinian tag

To be alone without papers without a family or clan

a land or a country means one must live at the mercy

of others There are those who might take pity on you

and those who will exploit and harm you You live at

the whims of your hosts sometimes preyed upon and

nearly always put in your place But there are

particular beauties and peculiar strengths that can

only be found in the trenches of such a life mdash like the

ability to hold your head high even when someone

has their boot on your neck the wisdom to do

whatever it takes to get an education even when

yoursquore denied a school the freedom of shedding

shame and living onersquos truth no matter how messy

without apologies the victory of a heart that does

not succumb to fear or hatred or bitterness

(Abulhawa 15)

Being Palestinian means being in a limbo mdash

dispossessed disinherited exiled It means belonging is

denied or controlled by the occupier But seeking Palestine

also involves resistance in myriad ways How does this

happen How do people survive being a refugee in someone

elsersquos country and even in their own Among the modes of

survival these Palestinian writers illuminate for us are humour

wry and biting in turn apathy anger longing the use of

words of memory the living out of intensely political lives

stoking the idea of Palestine so it may flame into reality In

this limbo of banal as well as exalted despair and hope

lsquoPalestinians have been waiting at borders for nearly a century

nowrsquo (ibid)

Notes

1 Judea and Samaria are the Biblical names for the generalareas south and north of Jerusalem (respectively)Historically they include substantial portions of pre-1967Israel but not the Jordan Valley or the Benyamina district(both within the West Bank) For political purposes anddespite the geographical imprecision involved theannexationist camp in Israel prefers to refer to the areabetween the Green Line and the Jordan River not as theWest Bank but as Judea and Samaria See For the Landand the Lord The Evolution of Gush Emunim Ian S LustickBhttpwwwsasupennedupennciplusticklustick13htmltxt4

2 The sections on my visit to Palestine in 2013 are based onGitha Hariharan lsquoFrom India to Palestine RevisitingSolidarityrsquo in From India to Palestine Essays in Solidarityed Githa Hariharan New Delhi LeftWord Books 2014 andlsquoSeeing Palestinersquo in Githa Hariharan Almost Home Citiesand Other Places New Delhi HarperCollinsforthcoming 2014

3 On Eretz Israel Wikipedia says lsquoEretz Yisrael is a Biblicalname for the territory roughly corresponding to the areaencompassed by the Southern Levant The Land ofIsrael concept has been evoked by the founders of theState of Israel It often surfaces in political debates on thestatus of the West Bank which coincides with the biblicalareas of Judea and Samariarsquo

Works Cited

Abulhawa Susan lsquoMemories of an Un-Palestinian Story in a

Can of Tunarsquo Seeking Palestine Ed P Johnson andR Shehadeh New Delhi Women Unlimited 2012 4ndash16Barakat Rana lsquoThe Right to Wait Exile Home and Returnrsquo

Seeking Palestine Ed P Johnson and R Shehadeh New DelhiWomen Unlimited 2012 135ndash51Barghouti Mourid lsquoThe Driver Mahmoudrsquo Seeking Palestine

Ed P Johnson and R Shehadeh New Delhi Women Unlimited2012 97ndash110mdashmdashmdash I Saw Ramallah Trans Ahdaf Soueif London

Bloomsbury 2005Butt Gerald lsquoGolda Meirrsquo Profiles BBC Online Network21 Apr 1998 Bhttpnewsbbccouk2hieventsisrael_at_50profiles81288stm

Darwish Mahmoud lsquoI Belong Therersquo Unfortunately It WasParadise Trans and ed Munir Akash and Carolyn Forche withSinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein California U of California P

2003 Bhttpwwwpoetsorgpoetsorgpoemi-belong-theremdashmdashmdash lsquoOn This Earth What Makes Life Worth Livingrsquo Trans

Karim Abuawad Bhttpasitoughttobecom20100824on-this-earth-what-makes-life-worth-living-3mdashmdashmdash lsquoUnder Siegersquo Trans Marjolijn De Jager AdabcomArabic Poetry website Bhttpwwwadabcomenmodules

phpname=Sh3erampdoWhat=shqasampqid=92Egerton Lady Francis Journal of a Tour in the Holy Land inMay and June 1840 London Harrison and Co 1841

Accessed 18 June 2014 Bhttpsarchiveorgdetailsjournaloftourinh00egerElmusa Sharif S lsquoPortable Absence My Camp Re-memberedrsquo

Seeking Palestine Ed P Johnson and R Shehadeh New DelhiWomen Unlimited 2012 22ndash42Hariharan Githa lsquoSeeing Palestinersquo Almost Home Cities and

Other Places Delhi HarperCollins forthcoming 2014Jaggi Maya Profile of Mahmoud Darwish The Guardian 8 June2002 Bhttpwwwtheguardiancombooks2002jun08featuresreviewsguardianreview19

John Paul Getty Museum lsquoIn Search of Biblical Lands FromJerusalem to Jordan in 19th-Century Photographyrsquo Exhibitionslide show Bhttpwwwgettyeduartexhibitions

biblical_landsslideshowhtmlJohnson Penny and Raja Shehadeh ed Seeking PalestineNew Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home New Delhi

Women Unlimited 2012Katz Joseph lsquoPalestine a land virtually laid waste with littlepopulationrsquo EretzYisroelOrg website Bhttpwww

eretzyisroelorgsimpetersdepopulatedhtmlMelville Herman Journals Ed Howard C Horsford with LynnHorth Evanston and Chicago IL Northwestern UP and theNewberry Library 1989

Obenzinger Hilton American Palestine Melville Twain andthe Holy Land Mania Princeton NJ Princeton UP 1999mdashmdashmdash lsquoHerman Melville Returns to Jerusalemrsquo Jerusalem

Quarterly 43 (2010) BhttpwwwjerusalemquarterlyorgViewArticleaspxid=352mdashmdashmdash lsquoHoly Land Travel and the American Covenant 19th

Century Palestine in the Settler-Colonial ImaginationrsquoJerusalem Quarterly 12 (2003) 41ndash48 BhttpwwwjerusalemquarterlyorgimagesArticlesPdf17_holylandpdfRobinson E and E Smith Biblical Researches in Palestine

Mount Sinai and Arabia Petraea A Journal of Travels in theYear 1838 Vol I Boston MA Crocker amp Brewster 1841Accessed 18 June 2014 Bhttpsarchiveorgstream

biblicalresearc05smitgoogpagen6mode2up

22 Seeing Palestine

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

eric

an U

nive

rsity

of

Bei

rut]

at 2

305

02

Dec

embe

r 20

14

Said Edward W Foreword I Saw Ramallah Mourid Barghouti

Trans Ahdaf Soueif London Bloomsbury 2005mdashmdashmdash The Politics of Dispossession The Struggle forPalestinian Self-Determination 1969ndash1994 LondonVintage 1995mdashmdashmdash Reflections on Exile and Other Essays Cambridge MAHarvard UP 2000

Shehadeh Raja lsquoMahmoud Darwishrsquo Artists in ConversationBOMB Magazine 81 (Fall 2002) Bhttpbombmagazineorgarticle2520

mdashmdashmdash lsquoA Palestinian in Jerusalemrsquo The New York Times online19 July 2012 Bhttplatitudeblogsnytimescom20120719a-palestinian-in-old-jerusalem

mdashmdashmdash Palestinian Walks Notes on a Vanishing Landscape

London Profile Books 2007Thomson Reverend Andrew In the Holy Land LondonT Nelson amp Sons 1874 Bhttpsarchiveorgstream

inholylandajour00thomgooginholylandajour00thomgoog_djvutxtTwain Mark (Samuel Clemens) The Innocents Abroad 1869

Bhttpclassiclitaboutcomlibrarybl-etextsmtwainbl-mtwain-innocents-53htm

Seeing Palestine 23

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

eric

an U

nive

rsity

of

Bei

rut]

at 2

305

02

Dec

embe

r 20

14