— The Shoah After Gaza - Pankaj Mishra, London Review of Books, Mar. 21, 2024
“Five years later, insisting that Arabs were the new Nazis and Yasser Arafat the new Hitler, Begin assaulted Lebanon. By the time Ronald Reagan accused him of perpetrating a ‘holocaust’ and ordered him to end it, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) had killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese and obliterated large parts of Beirut. In his novel Kapo (1993), the Serbian-Jewish author Aleksandar Tišma captures the revulsion many survivors of the Shoah felt at the images coming out of Lebanon: ‘Jews, his kinsmen, the sons and grandsons of his contemporaries, former inmates of the camps, stood in tank turrets and drove, flags waving, through undefended settlements, through human flesh, ripping it apart with machine-gun bullets, rounding up the survivors in camps fenced off with barbed wire.’”
— Permission to narrate - Edward Said, London Review of Books, Feb. 16, 1984
“Having made a strong impression regionally and internationally during the years 1970 to 1982, the Palestinian narrative, as we shall see in a moment, is now barely in evidence. This is not an aesthetic judgment. Like Zionism itself, post-1948 Palestinian nationalism has had to achieve formal and ideological prominence well before any actual land has been gained. Strange nationalisms these, conducted for years in exile and alienation, for years projective, stubborn, passionately believed in. The major difference is that Zionism was a hothouse flower grown from European nationalism, anti-semitism and colonialism, while Palestinian nationalism, derived from the great wave of Arab and Islamic anti-colonial sentiment, has since 1967, though tinged with retrogressive religious sentiment, been located within the mainstream of secular post-imperialist thought. Even more important, Zionism is essentially a dispossessing movement so far as non-Jews are concerned. Palestinianism since 1967 has generally been inclusive, trying (satisfactorily or not) to deal with the problem created by the presence of more than one national community in historical Palestine. And for the years between 1974 and 1982, there was a genuine international consensus underwriting the Palestinian communal narrative and restoring it as a historical story to its place of origin and future resolution in Palestine. I speak here of the idea that Israel should return the Occupied Territories and that a Palestinian state be created alongside Israel. That this went against the grain of Zionism, despite its many internal differences, was obvious: nevertheless, there were many people in the world both willing and able to contest Golda Meir’s 1969 fiat that the Palestinians did not exist historically, had no communal identity, and no national rights. But when the whole force of the Palestinian national movement proposed a political resolution in Palestine based on the narrative shape of alienation, return and partition, in order to make room for two peoples, one Jewish and the other Arab, neither Israel nor the West accepted it.”
Currently reading: Notebooks, 1936-1947 - Victor Serge
Currently listening: ENEMY MENTALITY - While She Sleeps