The Truth About Palestine

Echoes of the Past Hope is said to have a bitter taste. Nowhere is that more the case than in the Middle East where the possibilities for peace have been squandered and the longings for justice have grown ever more burdensome over the last half-century. Worry over the treatment of Arabs by Jews stretches back…

In the last two years I have made three trips to Israel and Occupied Palestine (the West Bank and Gaza Strip). Each trip represents a journey into an approximation of the literary nightmares of George Orwell and Franz Kafka. To a certain extent we are all subject to the Orwellian version of these nightmares. It…

Practically all peoples, nations and societies have recourse to a treasury of legends, tales or poetic fictions stemming from their more or less remote antiquity. These are mostly enacted by supernatural beings or by human heroes, expressing in terms of fable or story, interpretations of the world and idealized conceptions of life, and sometimes serve,…

It is an honor for me to be here today. We have gathered to talk about what is called a just peace, and we have gathered for the most part as a community of academics and activists, so there are already several questions before us, ones that are posed by the title of this conference,…

As the wrangling over the roadmap continues and the Palestinian people are subjected to unprecedented new forms of horror, we may find it helpful to put details of the horrors to one side for a moment, and sketch a general overview of the situation. Since the Oslo process, the Israelis have engaged in a deliberate…

In June 16, 2002, the Israeli Defense Ministry began building a wall along the so-called “joint areas” between core Israel and the occupied territories in the West Bank. This fact is by no means trivial. The implications of this wall depend entirely on what function one would like to attribute to it. Should it vouchsafe…

Introduction There are three ways in which the Geneva Accord differs from previous documents dealing with an Israeli-Palestinian settlement. First, this is a model for a permanent status agreement that puts an end to the conflict and to all mutual claims. Prior to the signing of the Geneva Accord in Jordan on 13 October 2003,…

The publication in France in 1966 of Georges Friedmann’s The End of the Jewish People?, almost coinciding as it did both with a special issue of Les Temps Modernes on the Arab-Israeli conflict and with the latest round in that seemingly unending struggle for possession of the Promised Land, seems to have had a calming…

In one of my last conversations with Edward Said, I told him I had arranged to speak at the upcoming Modern Language Association meeting (December 2003) on Dreaming of Palestine, the notorious novel about the Intifada by a 15-year-old Egyptian-Italian girl named Randa Ghazy.[1] He said, with his usual bluntness: “It’s a terrible novel, isn’t…

The interplay between Palestinian feelings of alienation as a result of the Nakbeh and the implications of 1948, the feeling of being uprooted and treated as a sub-human in the refugee camps amid world apathy, and Palestinian insistence on the preservation of their identity has led to the reassertion of Palestinian-Arab identity and national consciousness…