Epistemic Violence, Smear Campaigns, and Hit Lists: Disappearing the Palestinians

Nada Elia

“What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say?”

—Audre Lorde (1984), “The Transformation of Silence”

“But if I didn't name myself Palestinian, who would?”

—Suheir Hammad (1996), Drops of This Story

I welcome every new multicultural anthology, every new leftist journal, with pleas­ure that borders on masochism: my voracious appetite for readings that celebrate dif­ference remains unsatiated, my enthusiastic desire for a greater knowledge of the plight of the underdog is soon disenchanted, as I note once again, with ever greater pain, the absence of a whole people from the list of the world's oppressed natives, the dispossessed, and the targets of ethnic cleansing.

I am a subaltern, a pariah, a member of a people the liberal left cannot accommodate. The Western dominant discourse, both left and right, has so obliterated my existence that, although I am Semitic, I am never the referent in the expression “anti-Semitic” (Elia 1998; I will excerpt from this article throughout).

In this essay, I examine the epistemic violence operative in U.S. culture that al­lows for the disappearance of a whole people, the Palestinians, whose plight has been rendered so invisible that, to millions of Americans, they are, at best, no more than a highly abstract concept—not a suffering people, but a problem. Without sug­gesting that physical violence is a minor aspect of the plight of the Palestinian peo­ple, I focus here on only one facet of our condition, the linguistic oppression that daily subjects us to ethnic cleansing, to a denial not only of our civil and political rights, but of our very identity.

A well-wishing friend who knew I was on the job market advised me: “Get the job first, and then tell them you’re Palestinian. If you absolutely have to.”

Whoever said silence is golden was a hypocrite, preaching the opposite of what they were engaging in, engaging in what they were preaching against. From that pa­tronizing position, they were able to preserve their privileges, including that of speaking for others, representing them.

Our silence does not protect us, it directly benefits our oppressors.

Today, members of non-hegemonic social groups know that the improvement of their circumstances is contingent upon rendering their problems visible. Yet it would be naive to assume that visibility alone is the solution, rather than a venue for airing the problem, a sine qua non for the cure. And visibility comes at a high cost. Visibil­ity, the foothold that non-hegemonic groups seek to achieve, is generally met by gi­gantic counter-attacks from the right, which still constitutes the dominant discourse. It is quite revealing of this culture’s mood that books such as Alan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind and Dinesh d’Souza’s Illiberal Education: The Poli­tics of Race and Sex on Campus, demonizing feminism and multiculturalism, are best-sellers, purchased by individuals who would never themselves consider going to college, yet rejoice in the attacks on challenges to the canon. Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, or Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Barrel of a Pen remain as marginalized as the people they seek to empower.

When it comes to the Palestinians, however, both the right and left discourses conflate to efface signs of the suffering of that people.

The very few.

On the whole, the U.S. liberals and leftist intellectuals seem incapable of moving beyond the Zionist meta-narrative which equates being Jewish with being oppressed. While they celebrate the collapse of the binary with regards to other discourses, they have proven resistant to ambivalence when it comes to the Middle East. As Europe’s “others,” the Ashkenazim are posited at the opposite end of the East/West, Op- pressed/Oppressor binary. The voices of anyone residing East of those European Jews are too distant—the voices of the Native Palestinians are muffled. Critics of Zionism are labeled anti-Semitic, (self-hating if they happen to be Jewish), a stigma that silences its bearers, denying them the very right to defend their position. Among the numerous linguistic achievements of the Zionist meta-narrative is the ease with which the charge of anti-Semitism becomes an indictment, a final verdict—the accu­sation becomes a conviction as soon as it is articulated. [For a lengthy discussion of the hegemonic Zionist discourse, see Edward Said’s The Question of Palestine, par­ticularly chapter 2, “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims;” Ella Shohats’ “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims,” in Social Text, 19/20 (Fall 1988); and Nada Elia, “Affirming Life, Inscribing the Intifada,” in Radical Philosophy Review, 1998]

The journal Diaspora was pressured for featuring the displacement of non-Jews (such as Palestinians and Armenians), and the word “Holocaust” is apparently the monopoly of the Jews, not to be used for the genocide of Native Americans or other victims of ethnic cleansing.

Delegitimized by the left, the plight of the Palestinians is pushed into subaltern status.

Years ago, I had a button on my backpack that read “Support the Intifada, End the Occupation.” A Jewish colleague in women's studies asked me, “What occupa­tion?”

A startling cultural moment in the late 1980s was the appearance on American television of Hanan Ashrawi, an articulate Palestinian woman who shattered the stereotype of the uneducated, submissive, veiled Arab female. The American media must have secretly rejoiced when Ashrawi became openly critical of the Palestinian Authority—rather than comment on the tribulations and labor pains of a fledgling not-yet-state, they could now prove to their spectators that Ashrawi was, after all, not representative of her people. Ashrawi becomes the odd one out, the few who abuse their power are more “typical” of that uncivilized people, the Palestinians.

Similarly, academics who do not fit the stereotype of thick-featured, thick- accented, emotional and cantankerous speakers are forever reminded that they may not/do not speak for the Palestinians, for are they not, after all, Western-educated in­tellectuals? To be “other,” to be Palestinian, is deemed a fixed entity. In his essay “The Other Question,” Homi Bhabha (1996) argues that a stereotype “impedes the circulation and articulation of the signifier ‘race' as anything other than its fixity as racism. We already know that blacks are licentious, Asiatics duplicitous.” To which we must add “Palestinians are depraved murderers.” In keeping with the culture of the Hyperreal, where the illusion has greater currency than reality, all those who do not fit the stereotype of “The Palestinian” are denied authenticity, and the suicide bomber becomes the sole representative of his/her people.

And language continues its pernicious operation. Every Palestinian act of vio­lence is termed terrorism, every Israeli massacre is presented as reprisal, or the iso­lated act of a crazed individual. Thus Dr. Baruch Goldstein, who machine-gunned praying men and boys at Hebron's Ibrahimi Mosque, killing twenty-nine, and setting off riots during which many more were killed, is a “crazed individual.” What about Rabbi Ya'acov Perin, who at Goldstein's funeral, at which he declared him a martyr, claimed that “One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail?”* What about the Jews who daily visit Goldstein's grave, now a national shrine at Kiryat Arba?** Each and every one an isolated crazed individual? [*Cited (deemed “fit to print”) in the New York Times, February 28, 1994. **See Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, XVI, 1 (June/July 1997) page 3.]

In Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida writes that a deleted word always leaves a trace behind, that the crossing out never completely obliterates a sign (1967/1976). But to be deleted, a symbol has first to be inscribed. In the United States, the press, the liberal intelligentsia, and the academic community combine to ensure that the Palestinian sign is never allowed to fully impress itself before it can be deleted, crossed out, leaving if only the slightest trace. Those exceptional individuals who have managed to achieve academic and media prominence have been subjected to vicious smear campaigns ranging from character assassination to scholarly delegiti­mization.

Professor Edward Said was placed on the Jewish Defense League hit list after the murder of Meir Kahane. How many people know that fact? How many denounced it?

Visibility requires courage, even as it is essential for survival.

Our silence does not protect us. Other genocides make the news, ours goes unde­nounced. By failing to represent us, language annihilates us.

“But if I didn't name myself Palestinian, who would?” asks a weary Suheir Hammad in the autobiographical Drops of This Story. Hammad, who grew up in Brooklyn, recounts an episode sadly familiar to numerous Palestinian-Americans: “I stood up in class one day and let my teacher know I was Palestinian, and that we did exist as a nation, as a people” (1996: 60). But the teacher was relentless:

What did you say? Pakistani? Which one of your parents is black?...

I'm Palestinian. I'd have to point it out on the map (the region, not the name).

Oh, you're Israeli! Did any of your family survive the holocaust?

Reply that my people were living through their own holocaust.

Teachers would challenge me:

There's no such place as Palestine. Where is it on the map?

Why do you people make so much trouble? Don't you know what the Jews have been through? (1996: 73)

All entrance into culture requires language, and language, or rather a venue for language, is denied us. As victims of epistemic violence, we have no ready venue to articulate and inscribe our oppression. Language betrays us, perniciously pushing us not to the margins, but off the page, outside the text. The scope of suffering, poverty, hunger, disease, unemployment, and despair among Palestinians is comparable to that of the Jews during the Third Reich; standards of living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, already very low prior to the Oslo Accord, declined by seventy percent inside of four years (Amos 1997). But reports of the misery of Palestinians rarely make the news in the United States, and will certainly not catalyze nation-wide de­nunciation and relief efforts.

In Israel, where the reality of human bodies cannot be overlooked, where flesh and blood litter the streets, the Palestinian presence is dealt with, with a monstrous military apparatus. Two continents away, it is sufficient to manipulate the words and images that are supposed to “bring” that distant land to us, and the flesh and blood are forgotten, pushed off the text.

Language is political. Words allow us to tell lies, to create an illusion that takes hold of our minds, which in turn attempts, often successfully, to take hold of matter. Golda Meir, who claimed in 1969 that “There are no Palestinians. These are South­ern Syrians,” remains unshaken on her pedestal. Yet the left is unforgiving of other political leaders whose statements are not nearly as outrageous. When language is not within reach, semiotic utterances can still break the silence, affirming life.

It is vital for Palestinians and their supporters to break the hegemonic discourse by denouncing the misrepresentative binary.

Words allow us to tell lies, something the dominant discourse has historically done. In occupied Algeria, the French fumigated tribes that had taken shelter in caves, and reported to the metropolis on their “pacification efforts.” The European settlers in Australia spoke of the success of their “assimilation projects”—which the Aborigines termed the “annihilation plan.” And today's Zionist meta-narrative, by suggesting that Jews are the sole occupants of the margins of hegemonic discourse, is annihilating the Palestinian presence.

European Jews, the Ashkenazim, are the victims of European anti-Semitism, and Zionism, the call for a “return” to Eretz Israel, started among them. Ninety percent of the Ashkenazim still live outside of Israel, and their denunciation of racism and dis­crimination does not address the plight of the victims of anti-Semitism in the Middle East. Maybe when the left realizes there is a whole people “East” of the Jews, and that Zionism as an ideology and movement for the empowerment of European Jews has created problems of a magnitude comparable to that of the (Jewish) holocaust, we will finally be able to address solutions for both Jews and Palestinians. Until then, the Palestinians will keep on being violated, will keep on screaming, hoping to break through hegemonic discourse.

When language is not within reach, semiotic utterances still can break the si­lence, affirming life.

References

Amos, D. (1997). Report on “All Things Considered,” October 17, 1997. National Public Radio.

Bernal, Martin. (1987). Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civiliza­tion. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Bhabha, Homi K. (1996). The other question. Contemporary Postcolonial Theory, edited by Padmini Mongia, pp. 37-45. New York: Saint Martin's Press. First published in Screen 24.6 (1983): 18-36.

Bloom, Alan. (1987). The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Derrida, Jacques. (1976). Of Grammatology. Translated from the French (De la grammatologie, 1967) by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: John Hop­kins University Press.

d’ Souza, Dinesh. (1991). Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Cam­pus. New York: Free Press.

Elia, Nada. (1998). Affirming life, inscribing the Intifada. Radical Philosophy Re­view 1:1.

Hammad, Suheir. (1996). Drops of This Story. New York: Harlem River Press.

Lorde, Audre. (1984). The transformation of silence into language and action. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, pp. 110-113. Freedom, California: Crossing Press.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o. (1983). Barrel of a Pen: Resistance to Repression in Neo­colonial Kenya. Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press.

Said, Edward W. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.

---------. (1980). The Question of Palestine. New York: Random House.