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Seeing Palestine
Githa Hariharan
Published online: 24 Nov 2014.

To cite this article: Githa Hariharan (2014) Seeing Palestine, Wasafiri, 29:4, 17-23, DOI: 10.1080/02690055.2014.946672
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Seeing Palestine
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Githa
Hariharan

Reading the Holy Land

Seeing Palestine what is seen in

Palestine has, for hundreds of
years, depended on what the
beholders are looking for; on the burden of their beliefs, the
depth of their wishes to map the place afresh and the sweep
of their imagination. Given the variety of beholders, Palestine
has been invented time and again. Most of these inventions
have been exercises in imposing a sacred landscape onto a
real one. The Holy Land and the holy book were read together.
In 1870, William M Thomson described the resulting allperfect text in The Land and the Book: Palestine is one vast
table whereupon Gods messages to men have been drawn,
and graven deep in living characters by the Great Publisher . . .
(Thomson quoted in Obenzinger, Holy Land Travel 42).
Earlier, in 1844, William Makepeace Thackeray described
the landscape on which these messages from God are written:
Parched mountains, with a grey bleak olive tree
trembling here and there; savage ravines and valleys
paved with tombstones a landscape unspeakably
ghastly and desolate, meet the eye wherever you
wander round about the city. The place seems quite
adapted to the events which are recorded in the
Hebrew histories. It and they, as it seems to me, can
never be regarded without terror. Fear and blood,
crime and punishment, follow from page to page in
frightful succession. There is not a spot at which you
look, but some violent deed has been done there:
some massacre has been committed, some victim has
been murdered, some idol has been worshipped with
bloody and dreadful rites. (Thackeray quoted in
Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks xiii)
The Palestinian writer Raja Shehadeh knows that such
words resonate with different meanings for different people in
different times. Shehadeh is perfectly aware of what it is to see
a place and imbue it with multiple meanings. The Western
worlds confrontation with Palestine is perhaps the longest
running drama in history, he wrote in his extraordinary book on
a vanishing landscape, Palestinian Walks (ibid).
Several moments of this drama have been recorded in
travellers accounts. It is a varied drama, the cast ranging from
writers like Thackeray, Twain and Melville to journal-keeping

lady travellers and evangelicals. Whether they were acting out

the emotions of wonder or the comfort of ownership or
disappointment, all of them had the same guide book with
them: the Bible.
Touring the Holy Land in 1840, Lady Francis Egerton was
charmed by the picturesque:
The whole scene, Arabs, camels, vegetation, and
aspects of the country, is so totally unlike anything I
have ever thought on before, much less seen, that I,
and we all, are enchanted. (Egerton 9)
A month into the tour, her enthusiasm seemed to have
attached itself to more solemn subjects, possibly because her
list of travel necessities included The Bible (the best guide
in these countries) and the Dictionary of the Bible (138). Our
Blessed Saviour, she now wrote,
has trodden the path we have come today, and
perhaps, like us, rested at this fountain . . . It is very
delightful to be in a country which constantly suggests
such subjects of thoughts to one. (42)
Some years earlier, in 1833, Edward Robinson wrote an
account that also named this delight, but with greater insight.
What struck him was recognition, the way in which Biblical
places and persons came to life before his eyes. He could see
. . . the city where God of old had dwelt, and where the
Saviour of the world had lived and taught and died (Robinson
and Smith 358). And how did he recognise this city?
From the earliest childhood I had read of and studied
the localities of this sacred spot; now I beheld them
with my own eyes; and they all seemed familiar to me,
as if the realisation of a former dream. I seemed to be
again among cherished scenes of childhood, long
unvisited, indeed, but distinctly recollected . . . (ibid)
Robinson experienced an overwhelming sense of connection,
of coming home. He would not be the last to go through this
epiphany. Visitors such as Episcopal Bishop Henry White
Warren were prompted by the sacred geography of the Holy
Land to say that it was the first country where I have felt at
home (Warren quoted in Obenzinger, Holy Land Travel 43).
But there were others who had to work harder to draw
such a moment out of Palestine.

Wasafiri Vol. 29, No. 4, December 2014, pp. 1723

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18

Seeing Palestine

Many nineteenth-century visitors, Protestant Europeans

and Americans immersed in the Bible, experienced a
disconnect between the the land of milk and honey,
the divine landscape of their expectations, and the
disappointingly real land before them. This was especially true
of Jerusalem, always of profound symbolic value. Instead of
the shining city on a hill, the travellers saw a dusty,
provincial outpost. Luckily, reality was not necessarily a
deterrent. When he was in Palestine in 1869, wrote the
Reverend Andrew Thomson, he was conducted by his
guide to an open spot covered with large stones. On learning
that this banal spot was Jacobs well, Thomson confessed to
a temporary feeling of extreme disappointment (Thomson
148). But he was also certain that On this very spot Jesus
had sat and conversed. From this very point he had looked
forth on the scenes on which we were now looking (ibid).
The problem was that Thomson was not prepared
for such a complete defacement of the old picture as
this (ibid).
Like most visitors to the Holy Land, Reverend Thomson
expected to see things pretty much as Jesus and his disciples
had left them. What exactly did that mean? Most travellers
wanted real-life versions of the pictures they had seen in the
illustrated Bibles of their childhood. When this did not
happen, they were disappointed; but, like a miracle, their
letdown could also turn to certainty. This had to be evidence
of defacement. Sacred scenes and places defaced. This called
for a mission, a sacred mission, to restore what had been
damaged or lost.
Raja Shehadeh says: Interpreting a religious text as real
history, as real geography, is sacrilegious as far as I am
concerned (Hariharan np).
Palestine lived as it still does a life of its own in the
settler-colonial imagination.

Twenty kilometres south of the city of Nablus, a village called

Lubban (or Al-Laban) is surrounded by the hilltop settlements
of Maale Levona, Eli and Shilo. Maale Levona the name
is the Judaised version of Lubban was established by a
prominent member of the Gush Emunim or the Block of the
Faithful, an umbrella organisation of Zionists. They are
committed to establishing Jewish settlements in the West
Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights for ideological
reasons. For them, the West Bank heartland is promised
Biblical land, Judea and Samaria.1
The nineteenth-century travellers who also saw this as
Biblical land were partial to tenting on unoccupied land
where it was easier to set their mythical notions than in
villages and cities where the locals went about their profane
daily lives. As if in keeping with this preference, temporary
caravans were first placed in what became Maale Levona as
an outpost on land expropriated from the villages. These
caravans were slowly replaced by fancy villas. Eli was
established in 1984 on Ali hilltop and the name Ali
judaised to Eli. Mobile caravans were added over a period of
time and the settlement grew till it occupied seven hilltops
belonging to Palestinian villages including Lubban.
Khalid Samih Hammed Draghmeh, also known as Abu
Jamal or Father of Jamal, is a farmer. His ancestral house is an

old khan a roadside inn or caravanserai. Khalids house

and what remained of his fields are now cut off from the rest
of Lubban Village.2
If the settlement of Maale Levona is to be linked to other
settlements extending from the Jordan Valley to the Green
Line, the khan is in the way. It cannot remain as it
is Palestinian. In 2003, settlers began to attack the khan;
in 2007 they managed to occupy it for three months. They
flew an Israeli flag over the house and held religious rituals.
Khalid filed papers in the occupation court to prove he owned
the khan and the land around it. But that was not enough,
said Khalid. They left because we, the real owners, did not
leave them alone.
There is another reason the settlers want the house and
the land around it, said Khalid, showing me a small tank to
one side of his house. Many Zionists believe that Moses once
washed himself in this tank. The settlers above the village, as
well as some Zionists from elsewhere, used to come here and
wash themselves, stated Khalid, to absolve themselves of
their sins. One day, said Khalid with a kind of stern glee, he
locked them in. Then he emptied the tank of water. But still,
They badger me to give them the house and tank because
they think it is their history. I said I would if they gave us
Jerusalem.
The evangelical spirit lives; and it uses both old and new
weapons.

It is not as if all the writers of another time shared the zealous

enthusiasm of the evangelicals.
Mark Twain, part of a tourist excursion organised by
Reverend Henry Ward Beechers Plymouth Church, wrote of
Jerusalem as a peculiar city as knobby with countless little
domes as a prison door is with boltheads (Twain Ch. L111 np).
Herman Melville said of the rocky landscape: Judea is one
accumulation of stones (Melville cited in Obenzinger,
Herman Melville np). Twain and Melville were, like others,
bothered by the gap between imagination and lived reality;
but both were too sceptical of missionary proclivities to trade
disappointment for reinvention. Melville, for example,
recorded his encounters with American missionaries who were
preparing the soil literally and figuratively for Jewish
restoration to the Holy Land (Melville 93). He regarded
Christian Zionism, which was an obsession among
evangelicals, as a preposterous Jew mania that was half
melancholy, half farcical (Melville 94). As for the assorted
creeds who came to see and make the Holy Land, whether
Presbyterians, Baptists, Catholics, Methodists or
Episcopalians, . . . they entered the country with their
verdicts already prepared, and they could no more write
dispassionately and impartially about it than they could about
their own wives and children (Twain quoted in Obenzinger,
American Palestine 49). The acerbic Twain predicted that
The pilgrims will tell of Palestine, when they get home,
not as it appeared to them, but as it appeared to
Thompson and Robinson and Grimes with the
tints varied to suit each pilgrims creed. (Twain,
Ch. XLVIII np)

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Seeing Palestine

But their scepticism had to compete with their general

disappointment with the Holy Land. Palestine sits in
sackcloth and ashes . . . desolate and unlovely (Twain Ch. LVI
np). Twain found the land dismal, barren and
unpicturesque (ibid). It is, he concluded, a hopeless,
dreary, heartbroken land (ibid). Melville agreed. No country
will more quickly dissipate romantic expectation than
Palestine particularly Jerusalem, he wrote in his travel
journals of 18561857 (Melville 91). And in Melvilles case,
there was another undercurrent at work. The language of
blessings and curses seemed to him the natural idiom for
this land (Melville cited in Obenzinger, Herman Melville np).
Though Melville was sharp about this preposterous Jew
mania of return, a Quixotism that required a miracle to be
made real, it also appealed as a half melancholy, half
farcical spiritual quest that Ahab of Moby Dick may undertake
(Obenzinger, Holy Land Travel 44). And Jerusalem, in
particular, held Melville for a somewhat unusual reason; it
was vested with the distress of his soul (ibid).

It was not hard to recall these readings of Jerusalem when

meeting that Palestinian farmer in 2013 and hearing his tales
of the believers in the Moses tank. Or when reading Raja
Shehadeh writing of Old Jerusalem in 2012:
As a tourist visiting the Old City of Jerusalem, seeing
Christians, Jews and Muslims walking side by side,
hearing church bells ringing and Muslims being called
to prayer, you might think the place is a model of
tolerance. (Shehadeh, A Palestinian in Jerusalem np)
Shehadeh challenges this illusion. For the non-Jewish
residents of Old Jerusalem, living in the city means being
marginalised in every possible way. Shehadeh asks,
Who are these Israeli Jews anyway? Who are they to
want to live among Palestinians, so at odds with their
neighbours that they feel the need for 24-hour
security, for putting iron bars on their windows and
doors, for making their houses look more like cages
than dwellings? (ibid)
When a man in his 30s wearing a kippa is asked Why live
like this?, he replies, Its a mitzvah, a religious duty (ibid).
That old language of a religious mission, the inevitability
of mapping blessings and curses onto the Holy Land, lives in
the idiom of real life as well as the literary accounts of
the past.
From once-in-a-lifetime package tours to vicarious
journeys of the imagination, nineteenth-century travel
through Biblical lands was recorded in more than words. The
nascent medium of photography and the advent of
archaeology influenced how the Holy Land was seen.
Photographs of Biblical sites replaced fanciful illustrations
based on artists sketches but the medium that promised
truth and accuracy could also produce distorted views. The
subjects sought out were those that would confirm
connections to stories from the Bible. If the images included
people, they had to be doing something suitably Biblical or
antique, say a man tending his flock or a woman drawing
water from a well. The scene had to evoke scripture. In a

19

photograph entitled Jews at the Western Wall, for example,

French photographer Felix Bonfils showed a group of Jews
huddled by the Wailing Wall, praying. In 1854, his compatriot,
artist and archaeologist Auguste Salzmann, produced
photographs that used light and form to animate old buildings
in Jerusalem. The idea was to record monuments left by the
Crusades and find evidence of the Biblical kingdom of David
for the controversial historical and architectural theories of
scholar Felicien de Saulcy. For de Saulcy and Salzmann, the
latters photographs were brute, conclusive facts (Salzmann
quoted in John Paul Getty Museum np).
There are equally brute, conclusive facts in the images of
our own times. Theres one thing about the high-tech world we
live in; its hard to plead ignorance of what is happening to
real people in real places. Take, for instance, the images and
eyewitness accounts of Gaza on Al Jazeera or the Electronic
Intifada in 2009.
The pictures are hard to look at.
Theres a photo of a girls hand sticking out of rubble
which used to be her home in the al-Zeitoun neighbourhood
of Gaza City. Perhaps her family too is buried under it. Another
picture, also of a home in al-Zeitoun, has no hint of bodies
at all. Twenty-four members of this family were killed when an
F-16 fighter jet dropped a bomb on their house. The only
remains visible in the picture include a pillow, a belt,
a childs school bag and paper that the caption describes as
pages of a torn copy of the Koran. These possessions are
strewn about in the concrete and metal wreckage.
It is harder to deny the existence of Palestinians today,
though attempts are still made.

In another time, it was done easily enough.

Western travellers saw Palestine as a Biblical landscape,
as arid and desolate, as awe inspiring, as a home promised
by God. So overwhelming was the demand of both real and
imaginary land to be seen and explained that many managed
not to see or barely see the people.
Years later, this may have helped see Palestine as a land
that needed people, especially the sort of people who needed
a home. To superimpose a new map on an existing one, it
was not enough to conjure a landscape of belief and people it
with extracts from religious texts. The place was important for
international geopolitics; but military and economic aims
could coexist with religious fervour. Western European powers
were poised to intervene if Ottoman rule in the region
collapsed; they saw clearly the major trade routes to India;
and, with the completion of the Suez Canal connecting
the Mediterranean and Red Seas, the area grew even more
vital. The question then and in 1948 when a new nation
was mapped onto the land was what to do with the people
already there. The question blurred in some heads,
so when it was asked again, it became: But were there
people?
One apologist for Eretz Israel3 writes of a land virtually
laid waste with little population (Katz np). One historian after
another, goes the claim, has shown that in the twelve and a
half centuries between the Arab conquest in the seventh
century and the beginnings of the Jewish return in the 1880s,
Palestine was laid waste (ibid). The fertile land described in

20

Seeing Palestine

the Bible had vanished into desert and desolation and, in

the mid-eighteenth century, Palestine did not have enough
people to till its soil (ibid). Further proof is offered with quotes
from secular sources:

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the British Consul in Palestine reported in 1857 that

The country is in a considerable degree empty of
inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is that of a
body of population . . . . (James Finn to the Earl of
Clarendon, Jerusalem, 15 Sept. 1857, quoted in
Katz np)
Years later, Golda Meir would announce, There are no
Palestinians (Butt np).
What is it like to be told you and your family dont exist?
Or that what was home in a peoples living memory was not
actually their home at all?
Edward Said took statements like Golda Meirs and
transformed them into questions Palestinians could ask after
their existence had been overlooked or denied; or their
existence noticed long enough to dispossess them or send
them into exile or to refugee camps. Do we exist?
asked Said,
What proof do we have? The further we get from the
Palestine of our past, the more precarious our status,
the more disrupted our being, the more intermittent
our presence. (Said, Politics 10809)
Seeing Palestine. Visiting the place, reading that land as
holy, as land that must be recovered in some way or
the other. This is one sort of return. But for the people of
this land, seeing Palestine or seeing themselves as
Palestinian involves a longer and more torturous journey,
the kind of homeward journey Mahmoud Darwish wrote of.
Darwishs poetry, said Edward Said, was an epic effort to
transform the lyrics of loss into the indefinitely postponed
drama of return (Said, Reflections 197).

Writing home
Mahmoud Darwish, often referred to as the Palestinian
national poet, was born in 1941 in Al Birweh, a village in
Galilee, under the British mandate in Palestine. When he
was six, his world was turned upside down and it never set
itself right again. As the Israeli army occupied Birweh, Darwish
and his family were forced to join the great exodus of
refugees. They spent a year in Lebanon living on UN
handouts. By the time they returned to their village in 1949,
Israel had been created; their village was one of the
hundreds of Palestinian villages which had been razed
to the ground.
They were refugees again, infiltrators in their own land.
Their return was illegal; they were given the status of
present-absent aliens.
Years later, Darwish recalled how his grandfather chose to
live on a hill that overlooked his land. Until he died he would
watch [Jewish] immigrants from Yemen living in his place,
which he was unable even to visit (Jaggi np). The message
of such an experience could have been You were not here.
This was not Palestine.

Darwish described this identity in terms of a continuous

struggle between two memories (ibid). If his memories were
real, his poetry had to challenge the Zionist tenet of a land
without a people for a people without a land. The result was,
often, a strange contest within the poet. For instance, Darwish
admired the work of the Hebrew poet Yehuda Amichai; but he
also recognised that Amichais poems were a challenge to
him. Darwish said of Amichai,
He wants to use the landscape and history for his own
benefit, based on my destroyed identity. So we have a
competition: who is the owner of the language of this
land? Who loves it more? Who writes it better? (ibid)
Darwish wrote of a state of siege in which anger simmers;
but he also wrote,
Here on the slopes of hills, facing the dusk and the
cannon of time
Close to the gardens of broken shadows,
We do what prisoners do,
And what the jobless do:
We cultivate hope. (From Under Siege np)
The sense of abyss could be transformed, Darwish
seemed to say, through political acts and acts of imagination,
into something more life affirming. Theres siege, but theres
also hope. Theres loss, but theres also belonging.
Darwish was often called the poet of the resistance but,
in the course of his lifes work, he somehow managed to resist
any neat or simplistic label. He wrote the Palestinian
declaration of independence in 1988 and many poems of
resistance that are an integral part of every Arabs
consciousness. But he also allowed himself to grow
into a poet who did not close his mind to other ways of
seeing.
He said, for instance:
Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When
you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it
breaks walls down . . . I always humanise the other.
I even humanised the Israeli soldier . . . (Jaggi np)
Just after the 1967 war, Darwish wrote a tender poem about an
Israeli friend who decided to leave the country on his return
from the front. The poem, A Soldier Who Dreams of White
Lilies, drew criticism from many admirers. But Darwish wrote
that he would continue to humanise even the enemy (ibid).
This was the same Darwish who had not hesitated to write:
[To a killer] If you had contemplated the victims face
And thought it through, you would have remembered
your mother in the
Gas chamber, you would have been freed from the
reason for the rifle
And you would have changed your mind: this is not
the way
to find ones identity again. (From Under Siege np)
Darwish died in 2008. For some years before he died, he
had made the hills of Ramallah his home. (What kind of a
home could it have been? I have learned and dismantled all
the words in order to draw from them a single word: Home)
(from I Belong There np).

Seeing Palestine

Darwish and Raja Shehadeh were neighbours in Ramallah.

In 2002, there was curfew; Israeli tanks rolled down the
narrow streets. One day, when curfew was lifted for five hours,
Shehadeh interviewed Darwish. They spoke of many things,
from Darwishs partiality for Mozart to the need to liberate
Arabic poetry from older forms. When Shehadeh broached the
subject of how the local landscape affected his poetry,
Darwish replied:

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I find that the landscape is already written, and

because it has been so fully described, I feel it is
difficult to add to it. The poetic image has been
realised geographically. My role as a contemporary
poet is to liberate the natural landscape from the
burden of those legends and ease the burden of
history . . . (Darwish quoted in Shehadeh, Mahmoud
Darwish np)
In Ramallah in 2013, I went to the Darwish Museum
situated on a hilltop. From the outside, the building looked
brand new, somewhat blank and bleached like an empty page
that could be written on; a tabula rasa. An elegant young man
in charge hastened to explain; the building has been designed
to look like an open book.
The park in which the museum stands is called al-Birweh.
The headstone, which also says al-Birweh, Palestine quotes
Darwishs poem on what makes his life worthwhile: On this
earth what makes life worth living/ . . . It used to be known as
Palestine/It became known as Palestine . . . (from On This
Earth What Makes Life Worth Living np).
The home Darwish lost in Galilee in 1947 has gone forever.
In its place, this landscaped garden and white tomb house
Darwish so all Palestinians can visit him. But this al-Birweh in
Ramallah, a city many Palestinians do not see as a possible
capital, can never be the home Darwish sought. The poet who
wrote of the search for a Palestinian home rests in a divided
house. Ramallah is in the occupied West Bank; the real
al-Birweh is beyond the reach of Palestinians who are not
Israeli citizens.
The burden of legends and histories and their translation
into the everyday realities of a lost home continues.

Losing home, trying to return. The words continue to be

written as new walls and barriers are built on the land.
In summer 1996, after thirty years of exile, the poet
Mourid Barghouti stood at the Allenby Bridge, waiting for
permission to proceed. Behind me was the world, ahead of
me my world . . . (Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah 1). His mind
filled with racing thoughts about a lifetime spent trying to get
here (ibid). But it was a temporary return, fraught with
conditions about where he could go and what he could do.
Even in the midst of reunion there was loss. The Occupation,
he wrote in I Saw Ramallah, has created generations of us
that have to adore an unknown beloved: distant, difficult,
surrounded by guards, by walls, by nuclear missiles, by sheer
terror (62). Edward Said described Barghoutis account as
one of the finest existential accounts of Palestinian
displacement that we now have (Said, Foreword vii).
Where is home when it is an occupied and brutalised
place? To describe broken or lost homes, to understand why

21

they are still homes, why they need to be homes, writers have
to grapple with the notion of exile, whether external or
internal. They have to confront the past, the powerful ghost
that haunts all those who have been displaced. They have to
recognise the need to reconstruct home in words and in
personal and political action and affirm the multiplicity of
the places they come from. Most of all, they have to give voice
to the aspirations of those who can only go back home if they
search for it and locate it afresh. This is what the writers in
Seeking Palestine, a 2012 collection edited by Raja Shehadeh
and Penny Johnson, do.
For homeless Palestinians, whether they are still in
Palestine or far away, the poet Darwishs idea of cultivating
hope could be a credo. They have to seek Palestine so they
may hope; they have to hope so they can find Palestine. It is
impossible to talk of Palestine historic Palestine, occupied
Palestine or the idea of Palestine in the future without
viewing the multiple meanings held by the notions of home,
exile and dispossession. Rana Barakat, one of the
contributors to Seeking Palestine, gives us an idea of this
complex task:
Palestine-in-exile is an idea, a love, a goal,
a movement, a massacre, a march, a parade, a poem,
a thesis, a novel and yes, a commodity, as well as a
people scattered, displaced, dispossessed and
determined. (Barakat 145)
It is all this; but a home must be ordinary if it is to be a
home. Raja Shehadeh and other writers speak of their desire
to move Palestine from a place of insistent memory to a
place where a robust Palestine can be nothing more . . . than
home (Johnson and Shehaheh xi). But this has not yet
happened. Palestine still resides in conditions of crisis; of
statelessness, of transience. Most of all, it resides in the
Palestinians, wherever they are.
What, then, does it mean to be Palestinian? The
essayists, poets, novelists, critics and memoirists writing in
Seeking Palestine reflect on this question and come up with
individual and collective experiences of seeking, waiting,
living for and being or becoming Palestinian. For many,
writing Palestine is an exercise in imagining rather than
representing home (Johnson and Shehadah x). It means
disappeared villages, erased histories. It means going back
home with a tourist visa; indeed, entries and exits comprise
a recurring theme. For Rana Barakat, home is provisional
(Barakat 138) given its foundation in the tragic indignity of
exile (140) and the unrealistic resistance of this indignity
(139). For Mourid Barghouti, being Palestinian means being
in suspension:
The suspended blob of air in which we . . . are
swinging is now our place of exile from this earth . . .
This bubble of air is the unyielding Occupation itself. It
is the rootless roaming of the Palestinians through the
air of others countries . . . We sink upward . . . I want
my high standing to be brought low, Grandmother. I
want to descend from this regal elevation and touch
the mud and dust once more so that I can be an
ordinary traveller again. (Barghouti, The Driver
Mahmoud 110)

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For Sharif S Elmusa, being Palestinian is a state of

enduring expectation (Elmusa 23). Susan Abulhawa, in an
engaging and candid personal essay, lists some of the
inevitable experiences that come with the Palestinian tag:
To be alone, without papers, without a family or clan,
a land or a country means one must live at the mercy
of others. There are those who might take pity on you
and those who will exploit and harm you. You live at
the whims of your hosts, sometimes preyed upon and
nearly always put in your place . . . But there are
particular beauties and peculiar strengths that can
only be found in the trenches of such a life like the
ability to hold your head high, even when someone
has their boot on your neck; the wisdom to do
whatever it takes to get an education, even when
youre denied a school; the freedom of shedding
shame and living ones truth, no matter how messy,
without apologies; . . . the victory of a heart that does
not succumb to fear or hatred or bitterness.
(Abulhawa 15)
Being Palestinian means being in a limbo
dispossessed, disinherited, exiled. It means belonging is
denied or controlled by the occupier. But seeking Palestine
also involves resistance in myriad ways. How does this
happen? How do people survive being a refugee in someone
elses country and even in their own? Among the modes of
survival these Palestinian writers illuminate for us are humour,
wry and biting in turn; apathy, anger, longing; the use of
words, of memory; the living out of intensely political lives,
stoking the idea of Palestine so it may flame into reality. In
this limbo of banal as well as exalted despair and hope,
Palestinians have been waiting at borders for nearly a century
now (ibid).

Notes
1 Judea and Samaria are the Biblical names for the general
areas south and north of Jerusalem (respectively).
Historically, they include substantial portions of pre-1967
Israel, but not the Jordan Valley or the Benyamina district
(both within the West Bank). For political purposes, and
despite the geographical imprecision involved, the
annexationist camp in Israel prefers to refer to the area
between the Green Line and the Jordan River not as the
West Bank, but as Judea and Samaria. See For the Land
and the Lord: The Evolution of Gush Emunim. Ian S Lustick.
Bhttp://www.sas.upenn.edu/penncip/lustick/lustick13.
html#txt4.
2 The sections on my visit to Palestine in 2013 are based on
Githa Hariharan, From India to Palestine: Revisiting
Solidarity in From India to Palestine: Essays in Solidarity,
ed. Githa Hariharan, New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2014; and
Seeing Palestine in Githa Hariharan, Almost Home: Cities
and Other Places, New Delhi: HarperCollins,
forthcoming 2014.
3 On Eretz Israel, Wikipedia says: Eretz Yisrael is a Biblical
name for the territory roughly corresponding to the area
encompassed by the Southern Levant . . . The Land of
Israel concept has been evoked by the founders of the
State of Israel. It often surfaces in political debates on the
status of the West Bank, which coincides with the biblical
areas of Judea and Samaria.

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