On Palestine Read Free Page A

non-elite groups have the power to impact and change the conversation in effective ways.
    In 1982, in the wake of Israel’s first invasion of Lebanon, Edward Said wrote an article titled “Permission to Narrate” in which he called upon the Palestinians to extend their struggle into the realm of representation and historical versions or narratives. The actual balance of political, economic, and military powers did not mean, he asserted, that the disempowered did not possess the ability to struggle over the production of knowledge. Whether such producers in, or in the name of, Palestine have heeded Said directly, or were thinking along these lines anyway, this project has indeed begun in earnest. Academic Palestinian historiography and the “new history” in Israel has succeeded in debunking some of Israel’s more absurd claims about what happened in 1948 and to a lesser extent had been able to refute the depiction of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as a purely terrorist organization.
    But it seems that the historiographical revision and setting the record right has not had an impact on a peace process that ignored 1948 altogether. The absence of the narrative and the historical conversation about what passes nowadays as a peace process seems to serve the political elites of the day well—on either side of the divide and in the world at large. There is no incentive whatsoever, it seems, to transform the hegemonic discourse that seems to be acceptable exactly because it does not ask for a dramatic change on the ground.
    As Said proposed, such hegemony can be challenged by language and narration. We need a more guarded approach when offering this new perspective, as we are not only challenging the hegemonic powers but also the convictions of many Palestinians and genuine friends of the Palestine cause. Hence framing this challenge as a conversation may be more helpful.
    I suggest enhancing this conversation by producing a theoretical dictionary, specific to the Palestine issue, that gradually replaces the old one. The new dictionary contains decolonization , regime change , one-state solution , and other terms discussed in the following pages and later with Noam Chomsky and others who try to find a way forward and out of an ongoing catastrophe. With the help of these entries, I hope to reexamine the hegemonic discourse employed by both the powers that be and the solidarity movement with Palestine.
    However, before presenting the entries in the new dictionary, I would like to look more closely at the waning of the old one still dominating the conversation about Palestine among diplomats, academics, politicians, and activists in the West. I call this discourse “The Dictionary of the Peace Orthodoxy” (in fact, not my term; but alas I cannot recall where I first heard it and I apologize for justifiable claims of unoriginality).

    The Challenge to Peace Orthodoxy
    The Dictionary of the Peace Orthodoxy sprang from an almost religious belief in the two-state solution. The partition of the land of Palestine (by allocating 80 percent of the land to Israel and 20 percent to the Palestinians) was thought to be a feasible target that could be achieved with the help of international diplomacy and a change within the Israeli society. Two fully sovereign states would live next to each other and agree on how to solve the Palestine refugee problem and would decide jointly what kind of a Jerusalem there would be. There was also a wish to see Israel more of a state of all its citizens and less as a Jewish state that retains its Jewish character.
    This vision was clearly based on the desire to help the Palestinians on the one hand and on realpolitik considerations on the other. It was, and is, driven by oversensitivity to the wishes and ambitions of the powerful Israeli side and by exaggerated consideration for the international balance of power. It is a language born of American political science