Content area
Full Text
Palestine is often buried in negative representations. It is seen as a place of indecipherable complexity or Muslim fanaticism. But, as a site of continuous struggle and resistance against colonialism and its imperial patrons, Palestine has meant a great deal to a great many people around the world. The international dimensions of the Palestinian struggle for freedom are now well known. Its links to Cuba, to Algeria, or to Vietnam are impossible to deny today. The political and emotional resonance between Palestine and Vietnam, to give one example, is laid bare in an evocative anecdote about Ghassan Kanafani, who, at a meeting of the Afro-Asian Writers in China, burst into tears after a North Vietnamese writer distributed shrapnel from an American fighter jet shot down the week before. Kanafani was reportedly so moved that he did not read his prepared speech, saying he had nothing of such magnitude to offer but promising to do so at the next meeting.1
The first intifada, announced from Gaza in 1987, altered the dynamics of Palestine's international circulation. A stream of slovenly journalistic accounts rolled off the presses, promising wisdom about a benighted holy land, the impressions akin in politics and practice to the voluminous Victorian travelogues of a century earlier. The piece de resistance of this corpus was Thomas Friedman's inaugural book-length excreta, From Beirut to Jerusalem (1989). More significant, however, for Palestinians at least, was the arrival of new cadres of writerly fellow travelers. While Palestinian camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and elsewhere had long welcomed foreign visitors of many kinds throughout the revolution, the intifada initiated a powerful new genre of eye-witness accounts from inside the so-called territories. Although such writings may be cliché now, as they have proliferated under the conditions of the Oslo regime, those written in the heat of the intifada register the lost sentiments of a wholly different era of popular activity.
C. M. Naim, the great scholar of Urdu letters who was born in the north of British India in 1936, visited Palestine in 1989. Naim's account of his trip is rich and detailed. It is at once critical, sympathetic, and learned. Throughout the piece, Naim drew comparisons between India and Palestine. "People asked me where I was 'originally' from," Naim wrote,...