LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

ibrahim muhawinascent state of Israel to refer to that segment of the population who ended upaway from their villages when the fighting stopped, and whose lands it wantedto confiscate. They were absent from their property, but were still present in thecountry. Not having been allowed to return to their homes these groups ofPalestinians thus constitute an internal diaspora, just as the refugees who liveoutside the homeland constitute an external one. The ‘present-absent’ labelapplies to all Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel as well, whether or not they formpart of that internal diaspora. They live in an internal exile, caught on thehorns of a dilemma (to which I will return in my discussion of Habibi). The landon which they live is their homeland, but the dominant culture is not theirculture and the country is not their country. Their civic status as citizens iscompromised by the fact of their not being Jews. Referring to his ambiguousstatus in the country, Darwish describes this state of affairs thus: ‘Here, I’m nota citizen, and I’m not a resident. Then where, and who am I?’ Later in the samepassage, he asks, ‘Am I here, or am I absent? Give me an expert in philosophy sothat I can prove to him I exist’ (1973: 94).The present-absent contradiction has been a dominant feature of Westerndiscourse about Palestine since at least the middle of the nineteenth century. Ithas been used to de-legitimise the national rights of the Palestinian people bymaking them absent when and where they should be seen as being present. Thefirst such example in modern times was the manifesto of the First ZionistCongress (1897) in Basel: ‘The aim of Zionism is to create for the Jewish peoplea home in Eretz-Israel secured under public law.’ Here, though the reference isto Palestine, the country and its indigenous people have been made totallyabsent. The Balfour Declaration issued by the British Government in 1917adopted a modified version of this manifesto in favouring ‘the establishment inPalestine of a national home for the Jewish people.’ 3 In referring to the Arabmajority in negative terms as the ‘existing non-Jewish communities’, theDeclaration defines them as a minority consisting of disparate groupings, andnot as a people. And, in identifying them negatively as non-Jews, the Declarationadopts the rhetorical strategy of making them absent while they are stillpresent, thus turning them into a diasporic people while they are still livingin their homeland and long before the establishment of the state of Israel in1948.Absentification, of course, is a common strategy used by colonisers intentupon dispossessing indigenous people of their land. As Rundstrom et al. note inrelation to the experience of Native American tribes:Dispossession is more than a physical act, for it occurs in rhetorical strategies thatanticipate the action. Randy Bertolas (1998: 98–111) examined such a strategy inthe redefinition of Cree places as ‘wilderness.’ He argued that imagining a place asempty of humans, although only a dream, allows the coloniser-dreamer to then— 34 —www.taq.ir