From other issue one, June 2003
By Joel Schalit Illustrations by Duncan Long
As red, white and green Jordanian flags fluttered in the fall wind over San Francisco’s Dolores Park, I wondered if this city’s community of Jordanian cafe owners had decided to stage a demonstration against discrimination directed at Arab-Americans in the wake the September 11th attacks. Driving closer to throngs of keffiyeh-wearing protesters, I could hear shouts of "Free Palestine" and "Another World is Possible," two slogans increasingly synonymous with anti-globalization gatherings over the past year.
No, I'm obviously wrong, I wagered as I surveyed what, upon closer inspection, turned out to be a distinctly white, middle-class crowd of tattooed and pierced punk rock activists. I probably should have known what to expect: this was supposed to be a demonstration of solidarity with the Palestinian people, not by them. Besides, how many Arab-Americans does one ever see at any of these kinds of gatherings in the gentrified Mission district? Not that many.
Given how similar the color schemes of Jordan’s and Palestine's flags are (red, white and green), it became increasingly apparent that the pro-Palestinian protesters had quite possibly mistaken the two. They were waving Jordanian flags around, thinking that they were Palestinian. I could be wrong. But, as several blonde women departed from the demonstration wearing Israeli flag-colored blue-and-white keffiyehs around their shoulders, I suspected the worst kind of stereotypical provinciality to be at play.
How many Americans know the distinctions between the color schemes of the keffiyehs of Palestinian resistance organizations? I wondered as I watched these ethnic headdress-bedecked progressives disappear around the corner. Black and white stands for Yassir Arafat's organization, Fatah. Red and white designates the color scheme of the communist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Green and white symbolizes the color scheme of Islamic fundamentalist factions such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
At least they weren’t wearing burkas.
Where Have All The Colors Gone? It would be nice to think that the left’s years of historical interest in the third world would make a difference at such protests, especially given its long history of appropriating the aesthetics of rebellious cultures. At the very least, progressives like these might have taken the time to figure out the distinctions between Middle Eastern political iconographies. More importantly, they could have chosen between the symbols of political factions within the Arab world, identifying which ones American leftists ought to support. Not all Arabs wear keffiyehs. Very few, if any, would want to be caught dead wearing ones bearing any resemblance to Israel’s national colors.
Sadly, the lack of attention these activists placed on the aesthetics of Middle Eastern politics is indicative of a profound lack of learned sensitivity towards the symbolic nuances of the Arab-Israeli conflict. But my point isn’t to offer up the usual cynical truisms about the lack of attention to detail in American activist ideology, or to indulge the neoconservative cliché that American progressives are guilt-ridden white liberals who collapse all ethnic peoples into sympathetically-dominated exotics. Instead, I want to propose reading such examples of upsetting naiveté as crucial exposés of the complexities of Middle Eastern politics. What if we were to consider such political faux pas as necessary to the education of the left, because of how they might ironically invoke real subjects of debate in the Arab-Israeli conflict?
Take for example the fact that Jordan has a disproportionately high percentage of Palestinian citizens, whom some right-wing Israelis claim to represent as much as eighty percent of the country's population. If one did not know that this demonstration was staged on behalf of Palestinians suffering under the weight of Israeli military occupation, it would be just as easy for observers to conclude that they'd witnessed a demonstration by American Jews against a de facto Palestinian colonial occupation of Jordan. The presence of blue-and-white keffiyehs on the shoulders of female protesters would almost be enough evidence to help support such a depressing hypothesis.
Every consciousness-raising movement has to endure such moments of well-meaning cluelessness - they are one way progressives overcome their own naiveté about the subjects which they seek to make issues of public conscience. But how might such movement learning-processes ideally happen? One way would be for pro-Palestinian activists to consider how their appropriations of Middle Eastern political iconography fit into the region’s post-colonial history. In particular, they might ponder how their protests reflect the beliefs of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. He may be almost universally despised, but one of the main sources of Sharon’s strength lies in his ability to command reasonably sound historical arguments about the ethnic makeup of Israel’s neighbors in order to defer granting independence to the Palestinians.
The Devil Is In The Details Over the years, when asked why he has not moved towards permitting the establishment of a Palestinian state in the occupied territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Sharon is famous for invoking the half-truth that a Palestinian state already exists in the form of Israel’s neighbor, Jordan. Ruled by a monarchy imported from the Arabian Peninsula, Jordan was set up by British colonial authorities in order to defuse local tribal conflicts in the years following the First World War. Palestinian refugees flooded into Jordan during Israel's 1948 War of Independence, making it (according to Sharon) a Palestinian state ruled by ‘foreigners’ who will eventually pass into history and inevitably yield to an ‘indigenous’ Palestinian regime.
This hypothesis about Jordan's future cannot be anything but repugnant to progressives seeking a just resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, because it doesn’t address Israel's territorial dispossession of the Palestinian people. Yet there’s an ugly truth in Sharon's argument for the existence of a Palestinian state on the east bank of the river Jordan: after all, Jordan is just as much an artificial construct as the state of Israel. Like Israel, Jordan is both a product of British colonialism, and a country with a large Palestinian population that cannot fully participate in its politics. Palestinians are nevertheless an essential part of Jordanian national life - just as they are in Israel - no matter how disenfranchised they might be, whether they live in refugee camps or are the descendents of those who fled across the border in the 1948 or 1967 wars. And like Israel, Jordan is an incomplete national construct whose future is just as dependent on the resolution of the so-called Palestinian problem as Israel’s.
When the Palestinians finally achieve independence in the West Bank and Gaza, Jordan’s relationship to the Palestinians will remain the same as it is now under Israeli occupation. The only difference might be that immediate threats to Jordanian stability will be remarkably reduced. However, one could conjecture that given the status of Jordan’s large Palestinian population, and the quasi-authoritarian nature of the country’s government, the establishment of a Palestinian state in the occupied territories would open debate about the status of Jordan. Such a debate could potentially lead to a confederation of both countries under Palestinian rule. Such a development would be anathema to Israel, though it might be something of a dream to autocrats like Sharon. This could be the easy out he’s been waiting for - it would certainly take pressure off Israel to grant territorial concessions to the Palestinians.
The potential emergence of a greater Palestine hovers in the background of international relations, much like the notion of a greater Israel, or a greater Albania. These kinds of possible futures have always haunted nations with large minority populations, especially when those populations have been long-term refugees or are divided by arbitrarily drawn colonial borders. But Israel will remain an ineradicable fact, unwilling to absorb returning Palestinian refugees who want to reclaim their homes and property in Israel proper after a final designation of Palestinian and Israeli national boundaries. In the future, debates about independence, domination and freedom in the Middle East will simply transfer themselves to their next tragic phase.
The potential emergence of a greater Palestine hovers in the background of international relations, much like the notion of a greater Israel, or a greater Albania. These kinds of possible futures have always haunted nations with large minority populations, especially when those populations have been long-term refugees or are divided by arbitrarily drawn colonial borders. But Israel will remain an ineradicable fact, unwilling to absorb returning Palestinian refugees who want to reclaim their homes and property in Israel proper after a final designation of Palestinian and Israeli national boundaries. In the future, debates about independence, domination and freedom in the Middle East will simply transfer themselves to their next tragic phase.-- Michael Pugliese