Abstract
Separation has been a permanent but deeply problematic fixture in the politics of Palestine/Israel. As a strategy employed by both parties, its failure can be marked by the absence of peace or security for either community, by the ongoing instability of the space called Palestine/Israel, and by the ignorance and mistrust that characterize the interactions between Israelis and Palestinians. The failure of separation did not surprise Said who worked from the assumption that “political separation is at best a makeshift measure.” Said argued that “partition is a legacy of imperialism”1 and, in the instance of Palestine/Israel, attempts at separation deny the fact that Palestine has always been a hybrid space, a polyvalent space where different communities interacted and, more often than not, lived together peacefully.2
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See Gudrun Kramer, A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel, trans. Graham Harman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011);
Tom Segev, One Palestine Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate, trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Henry Holt, 1999); and
Ilan Pappe, A History of Modern Palestine, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Walzer concedes that “Good fences make good neighbors only when there is some minimal agreement on where the fences should go.” See Walzer, “The New Tribalism,” in Theorizing Nationalism, ed. Ronald Beiner, (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1999), 206.
Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2010), 26.
Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 435.
On walling in general and the Israeli “Separation Barrier” in particular, see Brown, Walled States. We will return to Brown’s discussion below. For specific considerations of the Israeli “Apartheid Wall” see Rene Backmann, A Wall in Palestine (New York: Picador Books, 2010);
Michael Sorkin, ed., Against the Wall (New York: The New Press, 2005) and
Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso Books, 2012), 161–184.
An excellent survey of the issues surrounding the notion of exile in Palestine/Israel can be found in the essays in Ann M. Lesch and Ian Lustick, eds., Exile and Return: Predicaments of Palestinians and Jews (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).
See Elie Podeh, “The Right of Return versus the Law of Return: Contrasting Historical Narratives in Israeli and Palestinian School Textbooks” and Amal Jamal, “The Palestinian IDPs in Israel and the Predicament of Return: Between Imagining the Impossible and Enabling the Imaginative,” in Exile and Return: Predicaments of Palestiniansand Jews, ed. Ann Lesch and Ian S. Lustick, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 41–56, 133–160.
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 19–49.
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 54.
Edward W. Said, Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said, ed. Gauri Viswanathan (New York: Pantheon Books, 2001), 340.
Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1923) quoted in Backmann, A Wall in Palestine, 27–28.
Ian Lustick, “To Build and to be Built by: Israel and the Hidden Logic of the ‘Iron Wall’,” in Israel Studies 1, no. 1 (1996): 199.
Said, From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map: Essays, (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004), 281.
See Sara Roy, Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, (London: Pluto Press, 2007), especially the chapter “Ending the Palestinian Economy,” 250–293; see also
Ben White, Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination, and Democracy (London: Pluto Press, 2012). In addition, the United Nations’ “Basic Facts and Figures” on Palestine notes the following consequences of the occupation on Palestinians more than a decade after Oslo:
In Book XX of The Prince, Machiavelli argues “That prince who is more of afraid of his own people than of foreigners should build fortresses; but one who is more afraid of foreigners than of his people should not consider constructing them.” See Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa, eds. and trans., The Portable Machiavelli (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 149.
See Benny Morris, “Israel Under Siege.” The Daily Beast, July 31, 2012, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/31/israel-under-siege.html (accessed August 6, 2012). See also Peter Beinart, The Crisis of Zionism (New York: Picador, 2013) and
Gershom Gorenberg, The Unmaking of Israel (New York: Harper Perennial, 2012). For Said-inspired views from the “barbarians,” see
Muge Gursoy Sokmen and Basak Ertur, eds., Waiting for the Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward Said (London: Verso Books, 2008).
An excellent window on the scope of these peace efforts can be found in Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta, Refusing to be Enemies: Palestinian and Israeli Nonviolent Resistance to the Israeli Occupation (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 2011). After presenting her own case for nonviolent resistance, Kaufman-Lacusta brings together contributions from other peace activists and intellectuals like Ghassan Andoni and Jeff Halper.
Such discussions are in no way limited to Palestine/Israel. There was (and still is) a diversity of criticisms and defenses of the United States response to 9/11 and its embarkation upon wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. See Ken Booth and Tim Dunne, eds., Worlds in Collision: Terror and the Future of Global Order (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Among political theorists, defenses for the military (and other forms of response) ranged from
Jean Bethke Elshtain’s justifications for American preemption in Just War Against Terror: The Burden of Power in a Violent World (New York: Basic Books, 2004) to
Michael Ignatieff’s defense of the need for democracies to dirty their hands in self-defense in The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). More circumspect was
Benjamin Barber in Fear’s Empire: War, Terrorism, and Democracy (New York: Norton, 2004). Butler’s Precarious Life remains an underappreciated and deeply humane response to 9/11 and its aftermath.
Graham Usher, “Unmaking Palestine: On Israel, the Palestinians, and the Wall” Journal of Palestine Studies 35, no. 1 (Autumn 2005): 25–43.
See Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
See Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage Books, 1992). Martin Buber advocated a binational sharing of the space of Palestine but lamented the intervention of “politics.” See
Buber, “Two Peoples in Palestine,” in A Land of Two Peoples: Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs, ed. Paul R. Mendes-Flohr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 194–202.
See Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). See also the perceptive work of
Jacob Shamir and Khalil Shikaki, “Self-Serving Perceptions of Terrorism among Israelis and Palestinians,” Political Psychology 23, no. 3 (September 2002): 537–557.
My writing partner Carolyn M. Jones Medine and I have discussed Said’s nationalism in relationship to Palestinian statelessness elsewhere finding that, at times, it carries a hint of what is called “Liberal Nationalism.” See John Randolph LeBlanc and Carolyn M. Jones Medine, “The Politics of Statelessness: Edward Said and the Ambiguities of Liberal Nationalism,” in Ancient and Modern Religion and Politics: Negotiating Transitive Spaces and Hybrid Identities (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 43–66.
See Muhammad Y. Muslih, Origins of Palestinian Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988) and Khalidi, Palestinian Identity and
Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (New York: Beacon Press, 2006).
Said’s post-Oslo analyses are run through with criticisms of the Palestinian leadership. See Said, End of the Peace Process and From Oslo to Iraq. See also As’ad Ghanem, Palestinian Politics after Arafat: A Failed National Movement (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010).
For a perspective on how Palestinians began localizing their struggle after Oslo, see Eli Rekhess’s work in “The Arabs of Israel after Oslo: Localization of the National Struggle,” Israel Studies 7, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 1–44 and “The Evolvement of an Arab-Palestinian National Minority in Israel,” Israel Studies 12, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 1–28.
For example, see Haym Benaroya et al., “Letters: Rock Throwing Raises Hackles,” Academe 87 no. 2 (March–April 2001): 2–3.
See Edward Said, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). We will take up this text and how it fits in the project in chapter 5.
Copyright information
© 2013 John Randolph LeBlanc
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
LeBlanc, J.R. (2013). Separation and the “Exile as Potentate”. In: Edward Said on the Prospects of Peace in Palestine and Israel. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137008589_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137008589_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-43564-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-00858-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Political & Intern. Studies CollectionPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)