Tolerance Is a Wasteland

Palestine and the Culture of Denial

Saree Makdisi

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780520975798
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Oriente Medio

How denial sustains the liberal imagination of a progressive and democratic Israel. The question that this book aims to answer might seem simple: how can a violent project of dispossession and discrimination be imagined, felt, and profoundly believed in as though it were the exact opposite––an embodiment of sustainability, multicultural tolerance, and democratic idealism? Despite well-documented evidence of racism and human rights abuse, Israel has long been embraced by the most liberal sectors of European and American society as a manifestation of the progressive values of tolerance, plurality, inclusivity, and democracy, and hence a project that can be passionately defended for its lofty ideals. Tolerance Is a Wasteland argues that the key to this miraculous act of political alchemy is a very specific form of denial. Here the Palestinian presence in, and claim to, Palestine is not simply refused or covered up, but negated in such a way that the act of denial is itself denied. The effects of destruction and repression are reframed, inverted into affirmations of liberal virtues that can be passionately championed. In Tolerance Is a Wasteland, Saree Makdisi explores many such acts of affirmation and denial in a range of venues: from the haunted landscape of thickly planted forests covering the ruins of Palestinian villages forcibly depopulated in 1948; to the theater of "pinkwashing"as Israel presents itself to the world as a gay-friendly haven of cultural inclusion; to the so-called Museum of Tolerance being built on top of the ruins of a Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem, which was methodically desecrated in order to clear the space for this monument to "human dignity." Tolerance Is a Wasteland reveals the system of emotional investments and curated perceptions that makes this massive project of cognitive dissonance possible.

1

Sustainability

My absence is entirely trees.

— Mahmoud Darwish

So, having grown up in the Bay Area, I fondly remember those Jewish national fund boxes that we would use to collect donations to plant trees for Israel. Years later when I visited Israel for the first time, I saw the fruits of that effort and the Israeli ingenuity that has truly made a desert bloom.

— Kamala Harris

When Said, the narrator of Emile Habibi’s darkly satirical 1972 novel, The Pessoptimist—which is set during and immediately after the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948—returns from over the border in Lebanon, he takes shelter in the courtyard of the Jazzar mosque in Acre and is besieged by people asking him if he happened to have come across people from their villages, which were occupied and destroyed by Zionist militias, their people driven from their homes:

“We are from Kwaykat, which was demolished and its people scattered; did you meet anyone from Kwaykat?”

I found the repetition of the “k” in Kwaykat amusing. But my suppressed laughter was thankfully preempted by the voice of a woman from behind the sundial: “The girl is not sleeping, o Shukriyya; she’s dead, o Shukriyya.”

A stifled cry came to our ears, and everyone caught their breath until the cry died away. Then they returned to their questions. I said “no.”

“I am from Manshiyya. Not a stone remains standing there, other than the tombstones. Do you know anyone from Manshiyya?”

“No.”

“We here are from Amqa. They obliterated it completely. Do you know anyone from Amqa?”

“No.”

“We here are from Berweh. They threw us out and demolished it. Do you know anyone from Berweh?”

“Actually, I know one woman who was hiding with her child among the sesame stalks.”

I heard many voices trying to figure out who this woman was, naming more than twenty mothers, until someone shouted, “Stop! She is mother Berweh, and her fate is our fate too.” So they stopped.

But then the voices resumed, even more insistently, naming one village after another, which I understood had to have been destroyed by Zionist troops:

“We are from al-Ruweis.”

“We are from al-Hadtha.”

“We are from al-Damoun.”

“We are from al-Mazraa.”

“We are from Shaab.”

“We are from Mi’ar.”

“We are from Waarat al-Sarris.”

“We are from al-Zib.”

“We are from al-Bassa.”

“We are from al-Kabri.”

“We are from Iqrit.”¹

Iqrit, al-Kabri, al-Bassa, al-Damoun, al-Ruweis, Berweh, Manshiyya, and the other villages mentioned here are all actual places, only a few of the hundreds of Palestinian villages forcibly depopulated during what was for Palestinians the catastrophe of 1948.² During this calamitous event, explains Constantine Zurayq in the book in which he coined the term “Nakba” to describe what happened, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians “are forced to flee pell-mell from their homes. They have their wealth and property stripped from them and wander like madmen in what is left of Palestine and in the other Arab countries. They do not know what fate has in store for them, nor what means of livelihood they should seek.”³ Almost all—87 percent—of the Palestinian towns and villages in what would become the state of Israel were emptied of their people as 800,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes.⁴ Their subsequent return to their homes was (and remains to this day) blocked, first by gangs of Zionist militants and later by the Israeli army (into which those gangs eventually coalesced), despite their moral and legal right of return, as recognized by the United Nations.⁵

The Nakba is most productively thought of, however, not as a single episode that took place in 1948 but as an ongoing process. “Invasion is a structure, not an event,” as the historian Patrick Wolfe once put it.⁶ That is to say, the Nakba began but did not end in 1948. The refugees of that original moment of displacement have yet to be allowed to return; the Palestinians who survived the ethnic cleansing of their homeland in 1948, who now constitute a fifth of the population of Israel within its pre-1967 borders, remain second-class citizens of a state that legally and institutionally privileges Jews over non-Jews. Palestinian homes continue to be demolished, not only in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem but also—on an astonishing scale—within Israel itself. And Palestinians continue to be removed from their homes, denied entry to their country, stripped of residency rights, and expelled from Jerusalem. The Nakba continues, in other words; but, put somewhat differently, it’s also not over, not complete, not a done deal: it continues to be contested and resisted by Palestinians. Indeed, for all its capacity for sheer destruction, it remains clearer than ever that the Zionist settler-colonial project in Palestine remains a fraught affair. The structure that emerged in 1948 is yet incomplete; it has not ended—but neither has it been entirely successful. This duality of extreme violence coupled with profound insecurity plays a major role in the ongoing conflict.

After the guns had fallen silent and the last shuffling echoes of the banished families’ footsteps had faded into an eerie silence, the new Israeli state controlled a desolated terrain: a Palestinian Arab landscape of (now) empty and partially ruined villages, tens of thousands of acres of rich olive and citrus groves, and a surrounding and connecting texture of scrubland. The mixture of cultural and natural processes over time had rendered the eastern Mediterranean landscape of Palestine both a natural and a cultural heritage, according to Jala Makhzoumi. “As a repository of what remains of the native Mediterranean forest,” she argues, “the rural landscape is a natural heritage, its diverse fabric combines woodlands and valuable maquis scrubland, a habitat for the region’s exceptional biodiversity.” But she adds that “traditional rural landscapes are a cultural heritage, a place of identity and a repository of vernacular use, management practices and traditional socio-cultural values and perceptions.”⁷ That is, the Palestinian landscape that fell into Israeli hands was a hybrid of social and natural processes—as much the result of culture as of nature in a raw sense—that had coevolved over centuries.

From the beginning—from even before the actual desolation of Palestine—the Zionist plan was to claim this landscape and turn it into something else, alienating it both materially and symbolically from its indigenous people, most of whom had been “transferred” across the armistice lines into the neighboring Arab countries. “Transfer” is the Zionist euphemism for the forcible expulsion of the Palestinian population, which was widely discussed and planned long before the actual outbreak of hostilities in 1948, it being understood from a Zionist standpoint that, as Josef Weitz put it in 1940, “there is no way but to transfer the Arabs [i.e., Palestinians] from here to the neighboring countries, to transfer all of them, perhaps with the exception of Bethlehem, Nazareth and the old Jerusalem. Not one village must be left.”⁸ In late 1948, Weitz himself established the Transfer Committee, whose intention was, as he put it, “preventing the Arabs [i.e., Palestinians] from returning to their places [through] the destruction of villages as much as possible during military operations . . . [and through] preventing of any cultivation of land by them, including reaping, collection [of crops], picking [of olives] and so on.”⁹

Despite the excessive use of force designed to cause as much damage as possible to Palestinian homes in order to render them uninhabitable during the fighting, entire villages survived the war intact. As Nur Masalha points out, Israel’s methodical demolition of Palestinian villages continued long after the war, into the 1950s and 1960s.¹⁰ It was only in the spring of 1965—almost twenty years after the Nakba—“that a clear policy was established to ‘level’ the abandoned villages with the aim of ‘clearing’ the country, to quote the official term used at the time.”¹¹ This would stop tourists from raising, as one Foreign Ministry official put it, “superfluous questions” about the ghostly landscape of ruins inhabited by Israelis.¹² The plan “was to ‘level’ an area stretching from the Galilee panhandle southward; to include every hill, mound, and hut, so that the land would be ‘clean.’ As one interviewee said, this would prevent Arab [i.e., Palestinian] villagers from claiming one day: ‘That is my tree. This was my village.’ ”¹³ Neither tree nor village would be left: the idea was that the erasure of the landscape would erase with it the political rights and claims based on belonging.

An integral part of this process of destruction and erasure was rewriting, both in the material sense and at the level of symbols. Arabic place-names were erased and replaced with Hebrew ones, reclaiming the topography in and through language, much as had been done in other settler-colonial endeavors—only in this case not in the fifteenth century or the seventeenth, but in the televisual glow of the twentieth century. The Naming Committee was established to produce a new Hebrew topography on the new maps that corresponded to the creation of a new landscape. After 1948, as Meron Benvenisti points out, “the country had become a blank slate upon which the committee could inscribe names as it wished,” and the result was a mixture of either vaguely authentic or wholly invented biblical or pseudo-biblical place-names.¹⁴ Hundreds of Palestinian villages were erased from the maps—their very names wiped clear or “transferred,” so to speak, into new, Hebrew place-names—as they were being wiped off the surface of the earth.

One intention here was to produce a seemingly peaceful pastoral landscape complete with biblical place-names, as though the modern Jewish viewer of the land could somehow be transported back in time to the moment of the Bible itself. “The gaze that sees a ‘pastoral, Biblical landscape’ does not register what it does not want to see; it is a visual exclusion that seeks a physical exclusion,” Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman argue. “Like a theatrical set, the panorama can be seen as an edited landscape put together by invisible stage hands that must step off the set as the lights come on.” This kind of landscape, they point out, does not simply signify power relations: it functions as a mechanism of domination and control.¹⁵ And its main intention was to rewrite the territory and landscape of Palestine, to eliminate the indigenous Palestinian presence in order to secure a more purely Jewish vision of the land. “It is precisely in order not to see the Palestinian that they [Jewish settlers] are obliged to form a vision that conceals him,” Uri Eisenzweig notes; “in short, emptied of all otherness, the dreamed-of space is necessarily seen as Self.”¹⁶ This attempt to claim the space by eliminating all traces of the other has a dual structure: on the one hand, it seeks to deny the Palestinian presence and hence the Palestinian claim to the land; on the other hand, by creating a carefully managed, putatively Jewish landscape—Segal and Weizman’s theatrical set—it also affirms a contrary bundle of values. At its most powerful, then, this landscape structure denies its own denial of the Palestinian presence in the very process of affirming its contrary, allowing the viewer to bask in the emptied-out stage set as though it were always already empty and waiting to be fulfilled: a land without a people for a people without a land, to use the notorious Zionist catchphrase.

This attempt to erase the indigenous landscape and the Palestinian presence remains starkly incomplete, however. Israel within its pre-196...