He said: Self-defenceIdentity is the daughter of birth, but in the end shes what her owner creates, not an inheritance of a past. I am the plural. Within my interior my renewing exterior resides yet I belong to the victims question.
Were I not from there I would have trained my heart to rear the gazelle of metonymy
So carry your land wherever you go, and be a narcissist if you need to be
(Mahmoud Darwish, Counterpoint, Exile, 2005)
IDENTITY is a powerful marker of ones difference from others, and especially in the era of strong nation states, rampant neoliberal globalisation and its post-modernist equivalent in the academy, for a people under occupation, sometimes the only means of self-defence against obliteration from written history. So rearing the gazelles of metonymy are two such occupied peoples, the subjects of the two books under review, namely, the Mzeina Bedouin of the formerly Israeli and now Egyptian Sinai and the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, chronicled by Smadar Lavie and Avram Bornstein respectively. Both peoples have been under occupation for decades, and the similarities as well as the differences are striking. The Mzeina, nomads who, like all their ilk, prefer constant movement to sedentarisation, have had to contend first with Israeli occupation, and following the return of the Sinai, occupation by Egypt, which continues to this day, mirroring the larger dynamics of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Palestinians, too, are semi-forgotten victims of the same conflict for half a century as well as useful playthings for inter-Arab rivalries.
Both occupations have been sustained by occupiers as well as local collaborators. However, the similarities end there; the responses of both peoples to the fact of occupation have been no less striking.
The Mzeina, according to Lavie, have set it upon themselves to allegorise their plight vis-a-vis the occupying other, Israeli or Egyptian, and vis-a-vis those in their midst who prefer to reduce the fact of occupation to an opportunity for private gain or loss. This paradox of Mzeina identity can best be described in anthropological discourse as liminality (pages 323-24) and is best represented by Lavies portraits of seven characters who occupy various positions bordering on authority, legitimacy, honour and gender in Mzeina society: the Sheikh, the Madwoman, the Ex-Smuggler, the Old Woman, the Fool, the Symbolic Battle Coordinator and the Anthropologist.
Thus the Sheikh represents not only purity and honour conferred by his genealogical origins but also collaboration with the occupier and a lack of concern for the propriety bestowed by the observance of Muslim ritual so important to Mzeina Bedouin identity. He can perform both roles not only by licking the ass of the government (page 90) but by negotiating for Bedouin rights to the regions charcoal and fishing with the former (pages 104-8 and 99-100).
Another star of Lavies cast, the Ex-Smuggler, represents the same paradoxes by exploiting both the occupier and occupied to set up a wage-labour system by using the same strategies in direct contrast to the nomadic Bedouin way of life, as well as by justifying the pillage by invoking his membership in a historically pure lineage (pages 156-57). The Fool, in my opinion, is the most interesting character because he is someone totally alienated and ostracised by mainstream Mzeina society owing to his absurdities of mien and speech and for his being a merchant of sins (page 223) fattening himself on the economic rent he milks off foreign tourists on the beach. He not only makes up for it by using his fabulous profits to build mosques, but also mounts an allegorical resistance by sending off Lavie on a wild goose chase in the middle of the Sinai: his sceptical, mocking response to the 1978 Camp David accord between Egypt and Israel. Thus the Fool, rather than being true to persona, is actually a very astute person and occupies an interesting space between resistance and collaboration.
Lavies allegorical discussions of Bedouin women bring out striking contrasts with the lives of their male counterparts. Women in Bedouin-Muslim society occupy a subjugated and heavily gendered position, midwifed by notions of honour almost always in thrall to the concepts of nafs (lust) and sabar (patience), with a limited form of empowerment forthcoming only in bed where they can deny sexual favours to the men until certain requests have been fulfilled. Where the stereotypes fall apart are in the cases of the Madwoman and the Old Woman. The former offers a rational solution to the problem of female emancipation in such patriarchal societies because they are free from the restrictions and taboos expected of and imposed on them by a male-dominated society, having been relegated to the periphery of the mainstream after having successfully challenged these conventions. Similarly, the latter, once freed from the burdens of youth and child-bearing, is freer to intervene in the affairs of the patriarchal household and of the village at large. While she has no hesitation in surrendering to tourist stereotypes of herself as an exotic Bedouin woman by inviting the former for photographs, in several cases the challenge to patriarchy can be severe, as illustrated by her successful negotiation with an Israeli Minister for a few unused fuel barrels in the absence of the village omda (pages 208-09).
Finally the Writer-cum-Anthropologist herself occupies a marginal position, both within the dominant Israeli Zionist and Mzeina Bedouin narratives as an Other with maternal half-Yemeni ancestry and as a Jewish-Israeli Other, respectively. Perhaps this enhances her suitability for undertaking such an enterprise on the paradoxes of identity. According to Lavie, then, these paradoxes leave the Mzeina no choice but to mount a poetic, allegorical resistance to the occupation of their land; it might not be an effective strategy to combat the usurpers nor a solution to the subjugation of their women but, in the absence of political/military means, offers a temporary solution to the many paradoxes endangering the continued lived reality of Bedouin life under occupation.
Much more complex is the conflict between the Palestinians and Israel, having its origins in real estate for over half a century, thus necessitating responses vastly different to those shown by the Mzeina. The Green Line dividing the occupied Palestinian territories from Israel has become the metaphor for almost daily oppression and humiliation inflicted by the latter on the former. Lenin said Politics is concentrated economics, while Clausewitz noted that war is a continuation of politics by other means. No conflict today more acutely reflects these realities than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. According to Bornstein, the border often forces contradictory choices on the mostly Palestinian protagonists, which at heart originate from the political nature of the conflict. For the majority of West Bank residents, that choice is limited to servicing the needs of the Israeli construction industry, made starker by the fact that an additional Palestinian from among the reserve army of labour (page 67) is always willing to work for a pittance should another one leave. Mirroring the worldwide trend of neoliberal globalisation, where labour unlike capital is unfree and immobile, the Israelis have created an efficient sweatshop system in and around the Green Line, whereby the fruits of Palestinian labour are ruthlessly appropriated from them and marketed as Made in Israel by separating the point of production from the point of labours reproduction (Bornstein quoting Kearney, page 67).
Possibilities of resistance to this model are limited to the Palestinians overcharging gullible Israelis for servicing the latters cars or by stealing them outright, much like the Fool in Lavies book (page 73). There is an interesting dialogue between the writer and the Israeli settler Shmuel at a Palestinian garage where the latter had come to have his car repaired. Going to the economic roots of the Zionist system, Bornstein points out that Palestinian garages are much cheaper than Israeli garages because the Palestinian worker does not have the same rights, freedom and protection (page 75). The dispossession of the male Palestinian worker is complemented by even more adverse circumstances for his female counterpart. Her limited occupation in sewing creates more problems for young Palestinian women, burdened as they are by the additional baggage of shame and modesty. In contrast to her male counterpart, she can neither cross the border nor rise to become the owner of her shop or set up a new one by dint of hard work.
The only options open to the women are the routinised, mundane work of the shop floor or eventual marriage. Such a limited, economistic goal rather than reducing gender inequality, merely adapts to existing inequalities (page 81).
While avenues of resistance are less open to younger Palestinian women (short of mass births of babies to change the demographic balance, as Israeli commentators like Amira Hass have also noted), older women like Umm Samud can challenge the patriarchal order in Palestinian society by making their voice heard as in the confrontation with Abu Karim over the construction of an additional greenhouse (page 87) and in her rigid adherence to traditional Palestinian customs of household work in defiance of more modern mores (page 102).
This architecture of Israeli economic domination over Palestinians is undoubtedly helped by a layer of collaborators richer Palestinians, mostly entrepreneurs who have made it good and are helping to advance their own short-term economic interests in tandem with Israeli economic interests at the cost of Palestinian economic and political sovereignty, and dignity (pages 90-91). Women who are blackmailed into helping them thus become their unwilling accomplices.
In the absence of direct resistance, customs become the carriers of Palestinian identity through the actions of women who refuse to cross the border to become part of the economic and by extension sexual commodification of Palestinian labour, like their male counterparts, who went despite the fact that doing so took away their own freedom to live their lives; and despite the fact that many Palestinians are willing to debase themselves by preferring Arab-Israeli spouses merely to obtain Israeli citizenship. Also, the resort to the home economy subsidised by womens household work during the intifada not only reaffirmed Palestinian identity but the paramount place of women in shaping it (page 102).
At another level, Umm Samuds loving gifts of Palestinian food to relatives in Jordan (page 114) are a unique exportation of Palestinian identity, reminding the latter that customs can play a potent role in returning to a way of life deemed to be threatened by occupation. Thus, according to Bornstein, Customs were part of a practical struggle against the larger system of exploitation (page 111).
Diaspora Palestinians have a complicated relationship with the fatherland, having done very well for themselves economically in countries like Jordan and Kuwait, but politically marginalised in their adopted countries, as in the West Bank. Thus having developed complex inequalities and dependencies (page 125), they might wish to build a family home in the latter for eventual retirement, as a rite of passage or as a vacation spot for the summer, but a longer-term reckoning with their inherent Palestinian identity seems futile.
This flies in the face of the concept of Al-Awda or the Right of Return, one of the most contentious issues between Israel and the Palestinians at the moment. Bornstein also fails to address how remote these exiles thus become from the lives of their less fortunate kin back in the West Bank. Indeed, one of the critiques advanced at the current Palestinian leadership is that they are not adequately Palestinian enough, having spent more time in luxurious exile, away from their people, as opposed to popular leaders like Marwan Barghouti, one of the organisers of the first intifada and now in an Israeli jail.
Bornsteins comparison of occupied Palestine with apartheid-era South Africa is even more apt now after the unilateral rejection of the Goldstone Report by Israel and its American backers. The ubiquitous border thus continues to shape and define what it means to be a Palestinian today, for worker and peasant, resister and collaborator, male and female, resident and non-resident.
He loves a land then departs from itand says: I am what I become and will becomeI will make myself by myselfAnd choose my exile.(Darwish, Ibid.)
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