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Being Palestinian1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Karma Nabulsi
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Abstract

This article presents an interpretation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's notion of the general will through the example of the modern Palestinian predicament. ‘Being Palestinian’ focuses in particular on the continuing crisis of the Palestinian refugees of 1948, the Palestinian people being largely a refugee population. It discusses the mechanisms that express the general will for a stateless people, and demonstrates how particular political sentiments, negotiating positions, common understandings and political will are expressed, deliber-ated and understood within the Palestinian body politic, both across borders and within besieged national institutions.

Type
Politics of Identity – III
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 38 , Issue 4 , 2003 , pp. 479 - 496
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2003.

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Footnotes

1

The author is grateful to Sudhir Hazareesingh of Balliol College, Oxford and to Marc Stears of Emmanuel College for their helpful comments.

References

2 J. J. Rousseau, Introduction, The Social Contract and the Discourses, London, Everyman Dent, 1913, p. xxxvi.

3 Mahmoud Darwish, ‘We Travel Like Other People’, in Victims of a Map, trans. Adballah Udhari, London, El Saqi, 1984, p. 31.

4 The Declaration of Independence 1988 issued by the Palestine National Council, Jerusalem, PASSIA (Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs), 1990.

5 The Declaration of Independence 1988, op. cit.

6 See, for example, Isaiah Berlin's powerful but predisposed view of nationalism (i.e. created from a national psychic wound) in ‘The Bent Twig: On the Rise of Nationalism’, in The Crooked Timber of Humanity, London, John Murray, 1990; and also his association of the general will with the most unpleasant sort of positive freedom in ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1969, p. 34. Hannah Arendt is another example of this. In On Revolution, she pairs Rousseau's name constantly with that of Robespierre, in an understanding of the general will that is bound intimately with the work of the Committee of Public Safety of France in 1793; she uses the concepts of the nation, the national interest and the general will interchangeably throughout as if they were the same thing. On Revolution, London, Penguin, 1990, esp. pp. 76–9.

7 Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Blanco and Roberts, London, W. W. Norton, 1998, Book 7, ch. 77, s. 7.

8 There was a series of popular general strikes and insurrections and rebellions by Palestinians throughout the twentieth century, especially in the 1920s and 1930s when under British rule.

9 Rousseau adds in a note here ‘To be general, a will need not always be unanimous; but every vote must be counted: any formal exclusion destroys generality’. J. J. Rousseau, Le Contrat Social, Oeuvres Complètes, Gagnebin and Raymond (eds), Paris, Pléiade, 1959–95, vol. iii, p. 369.

10 Ibid., p. 369.

11 Ibid., p. 369.

12 Ibid., p. 368.

13 As Salim Tamari points out in ‘Bourgeois Nostalgia and Exilic Narratives’, in Robin and Strath (eds), Homelands: Poetic Power and the Politics of Space, Brussels, P. I. E., 2003, p. 76. ‘[n]evertheless the absence of the voice of average people from these private histories and biographies is indeed an astonishing void. It is the task of new researchers to provide this voice with the forum and appropriate tools (such as oral histories) so that it can be restored and articulate its own experience’.

14 The Commission's Report contains a preface by Professor Richard Falk who was part of the three-person United Nations Commission on Human Rights sent to the region during the intifada in the spring of 2001 (see the UN's human rights report at www.un.org.unispal), and was also part of the international legal team in the summer of 1982 (Sean MacBride International Commission of Inquiry into the Israeli Invasion of 1982). Although the report has sections which provide analysis, historical and legal contexts, general themes, experts’ evidence, and several key recommendations by the British Commission of Parliamentarians, the bulk of the report (some 250 of its 315 pages) is the submitted oral and written evidence by refugees themselves. Right to Return: Joint Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry on Palestinian Refugees, 2nd edn, London, Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat, Middle East Councils, March 2001.

15 During the Commission's trip to the region many refugees and members of NGOs representing refugees’ welfare mentioned, in particular, the recent Atkinson Report which they all felt misrepresented their views.

16 Adnan Shahada, from Yasur, Right to Return, op. cit., p. 34.

17 Amal Jado, originally from Al-Maliha (Jerusalem), Right to Return, op. cit., p. 84.

18 Ziyad Sarafandi, originally from Yibna, Right to Return, op. cit., p. 112.

19 Amnah Jibril, originally from Haifa, Right to Return, op. cit., p. 276.

20 Haifa Jamal, originally from Shafa Amr (Haifa) Right to Return, op. cit., p. 21.

21 Ismail Abu Hashash, originally from Iraq el-Manshiya, Right to Return, op. cit., p. 44.

22 Ahmad Salah, originally from Nahaf (Acre), Right to Return, op. cit., p. 267.

23 J. J. Rousseau, Oeuvres Complètes, op. cit., p. 112.

24 Right to Return, op. cit., pp. 49–57.

25 As Amna Ghanayam, of the Shu’fat Women's Centre said ‘Holding a referendum about this right [of return] is an insult to the Palestinian people because it questions their loyalty to their homeland. Every Palestinian dreams of return. I have been asked “Return or Jerusalem?” This question, as far as I am concerned is the same as “which one of your eyes do you want to knock out, the left or the right?” ’. Amnah Ghanayem, originally from Tal al Rish (Jaffa), Right to Return, op. cit., p. 83.

26 Denis Diderot, ‘Le Droit Naturel’, in Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Metiers, Paris, Imprimerie Nationale, 1950, vol. i, p. 58. See also, in English, John Mason and Robert Wokler (eds), Denis Diderot, Political Writings, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 20–1. This same formulation was actually used by Rousseau to describe the General Will in the first draft of the Social Contract, known as the Geneva Manuscript.