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Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August 2008, page 55 Waging Peace Palestine Inside Out, An Everyday Occupation
DR. SAREE MAKDISI, a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA, has just written a powerful book called Palestine Inside Out, An Everyday Occupation (available from the AET Bookclub). A May 28 book-signing event at the Palestine Center in Washington, DC was packed with people anxious to hear about the daily experiences that shape Palestinian life under Israeli occupation. C-SPAN filmed the talk by Makdisi, who is a frequent commentator on Middle East issues as well as the nephew of the late Edward Said. To his audience’s dismay, he told them that DC’s independent and highly respected bookstore, Politics and Prose, had just cancelled his scheduled appearance. Carla Cohen, the owner, had e-mailed him saying: “I do not believe that your book will further constructive debate in the United States. A single state is not a solution.” [After receiving letters of protest and eloquent entreaties, Politics and Prose reissued Makdisi’s invitation. See p. 38.] His book does not “bombard the reader with facts,” Dr. Makdisi explained, but instead takes him or her on “a tour of everyday life under occupation.” He then talks about the history “to help make sense of it”—hence its title, “inside out.” Palestine is still being turned inside out, the professor noted. People are still being evicted. Palestinians are still being removed from their land, maybe just one or two a day, instead of thousands at a time, as in 1948 or 1967. Just dealing with the occupation requires an inordinate amount of work, he pointed out. Palestinians’ interior lives, their personal lives, are policed and regulated by occupation. Makdisi proceeded to read gut-wrenching examples, including a passage about Fareed, a 39-year-old father of two who is stopped for hours at a checkpoint with his family for no reason. Another passage describes Samira’s dilemma as she tries to renew her residency permit to stay in her birthplace, Jerusalem. If she were Jewish she’d be granted immediate residency, Makdisi noted. “One population is being removed and another being moved in.” Gazans are being starved and no one is talking about it, Makdisi added. Israel refuses to allow the import of paper, ink, and other vital school supplies. One out of three textbooks are missing. West Bank children are rattled by the time they get to school through the checkpoints, and Gazans are so hungry they are unable to concentrate. There is no room in Gaza’s universities for all its young people. In years past they could leave to continue their education abroad or in the West Bank, but that no longer is permitted. Education has always provided a way out, a last avenue of escape for Palestinians, Dr. Makdisi told his listeners, but that door, too, is gradually closing. As for the two-state solution, Makdisi pointed out that half the West Bank is off-limits to Palestinians. There is no land left for a state. “Jerusalem is off limits and Gaza is a different planet,” he said. Settlers have never stopped colonizing the West Bank, and the settlement movement has accelerated since Annapolis. To still think there is a two-state solution is “delusional,” Makdisi concluded. Israelis are the biggest advocates of a two-state solution, he noted, and have no counter argument to a single democratic, secular state with equal rights for all. —Delinda C. Hanley |
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