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INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDITION
Explanation or Narration?
“Palestine narrated for everyone”: that’s the task this short book assumes—perhaps a disproportionate one, if we accept the current view of the conflict as interminable and insoluble.
Interminable it has been, one hundred and thirty years since the “Palestinian Question” was raised at the First Zionist Conference in Basel in 1897, and the groundwork laid to found a Jewish state in Palestine. Insoluble as well, since the question is held to have no hope of a solution and is reduced to a litany of “missed opportunities.”
Interminable, insoluble, can these obstacles be overcome, or even grasped and understood, with the help of the little book the reader holds in his hands?
I’ll start by saying that the reader alone can answer these questions, that the answer will come at the end of this book.
A few remarks are justified all the same, distinctions really, that I think are important to discuss at the outset.
Distinctions that I would describe as keys to understanding the Palestinian Question.
The location first of all. The conflict is unfolding in a land that is extraordinarily special, we might say unique, the Holy Land, the only land that is holy to all three of the great monotheistic faiths: Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. The land has also been targeted by various empires over the centuries for conquest and domination.
This feature has given rise, if we filter out the specifics of each effort at conquest or capture, to a continuity of attempts at appropriation, all of which have come “from the outside,” as exterior threats.
This special land has been host, then, to any number of controversies, at times peaceable but more often conflict-ridden: Crusades, wars of religion, dreams of colonial domination, orientalism in its many guises, modernization and Arab reform, questions of nationalism, the Jewish Question, Zionism, Palestinian sovereignty, and so on.
To sum up, Palestine, both its land and its people, acts as a sounding board for the world at large. This explains its centrality and also one of the reasons it has a reputation for complexity.
The reader of this brief introduction will have glimpsed already the reason why I have chosen to speak of distinctions, to draw a bright line between narrating and explaining.
I do not here take on the work, essential though it may be, of narrating the history of Palestine—the diversity of its contents, the multiplicity, diversity, and particularity of its epochs. The ambition of this book is to propose a certain number of “keys to understanding.”
These keys to understanding are offered to help untangle and resolve what I would call the stubborn, recurring, and immovable constants that regularly obtrude, no matter the era or the issue in question.
Turning now to the book’s form. Essential to shaping content, the form employed here is not that of a lecture or an essay. I have cast the book as a conversation.
Wrongly considered exclusionary and adapted only to journalistic encounters, a conversation may, if well conducted, lead to exchanges where the interlocutor is placed in the position of having to answer very directly, to address undeviatingly the point raised by the question.
Not that a conversation imposes rules in any absolute way or offers a panacea. It can instead become an opportunity for virtuosos of obfuscation to lead questioners a long way from the explanations they would like to hear.
That risk is inherent in this form of exchange. I will leave it to the reader to judge the honesty and, especially, the usefulness of my answers.
Furthermore, this mode of conversation, the form here chosen, picks its way across a succession of themes. They appear as the titles to short chapters, which address a series of issues that, overarching the different periods and sequences of the Palestinian Question, stubbornly recur.
It is to these insistent questions that this little book would like to propose what I have termed “keys to understanding.”
These are addressed each in turn in the series of chapters to come.
Independent to some extent from particular events, indispensable, they are intended to accompany any and all who have chosen to follow the roads and byways of the Palestinian Question.
Enjoy the book, and good luck on your journey!