http://www.newint.org/columns/essays/2003/08/01/
Attacked by the apartheid hate-language of Israeli generals,
surrounded by daily humiliation and daily death, I dream of writing a
poem about life.
But as a Palestinian against whom this language is directed, and the
poet I happen to be, how gruelling and intricate it is to write the
poetry I dream of. For whoever fights monsters, as Nietzsche put it,
should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.
I was born in 1944 in the mountainous village of Deir Ghassaneh near
Ramallah, on the eastern hills of Palestine. In childhood I came to see
some Palestinians whose accents were different from that of mine. It was
obvious they had arrived from other places. They used to ask for
shelter and food. It was then that I heard the word ‘refugees’ for the
first time. I was told that they were expelled out of their homes in
hundreds of coastal villages destroyed by the armed Zionist brigades
that declared the State of Israel in 1948.
‘Refugees?’ I used to ask my father, ‘Why do we call them refugees when they are Palestinians like us?’
I did not realize what it meant to be a refugee until I became one
myself. When the Israeli army occupied Deir Ghassaneh and the whole
eastern part of Palestine in 1967, the news bulletins began to speak of
the Israeli Defence Force’s occupation of the West Bank. The pollution
of language can get no more blatant than in the term West Bank. West of
what? Bank of what? The reference here is to the west bank of the River
Jordan, not to eastern Palestine. The west bank of a river is a
geographical location - not a country, not a homeland.
The battle for language becomes the battle for the land. The
destruction of one leads to the destruction of the other. When Palestine
disappears as a word it disappears as a state, as a country and as a
homeland. The name of Palestine itself had to vanish. The occupation
wanted it to be forgotten, to become extinct, to die out. The Israeli
leaders, practising their conviction that the whole land of Palestine
belongs to them, would concretize the myth and give my country yet
another biblical name: Judea and Samaria, and give our villages and
towns and cities Hebrew names. But call it the West Bank, or call it
Judea and Samaria, the fact remains that these territories are occupied.
No problem! The Israeli governments, whether Right or Left or a
combination of both, simply dropped the term ‘occupied’ and used The
Territories! Brilliant! I am Palestinian but my homeland is The
Territories! What’s happening here?
By a single word they redefine an entire nation and delete history....
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