pop culture and politics for the new outcasts

You Got Your Keffiyeh... page 2

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

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.