(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
In an interview the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) did in 1982 with the Palestinian jurist and journal editor Elias Sanbar (b. 1947, both pictured below), says Sanbar:
“As refugees, we [Palestinians] are special in that we were not displaced to completely foreign lands, but to the outer edges of our own. […] We are like the redskins for the Jewish colonists in Palestine. In their eyes, our task is simply to evaporate. In this sense, the establishment of Israel is a repetition of the process that led to the birth of the United States of America." (See note at the end)
This 'image' is so striking that Deleuze uses it as the title of the Sanbar interview, "Indians in Palestine" (1982). And the image is striking because it is so apt: the 'Indian' stands as the metonymic designation (a part denoting the whole) of the original population where settler colonialism is and/or has taken place. The Palestinians are thus Israel's Indians.
Before you think about it more carefully, 'settler colonialism' may seem like an unnecessarily strict and judgmental term to use. But it is the label historians apply where a group (i.e. the colonizing power) needs land, areas and areas for its relatively independent, self-sufficient existence and therefore with force, often also violence, expels, eliminates or assimilates the group(s) (' the Indians') who already live there. Examples of this are the aborigines, in Australia from the end of the 1700th century; the Maori, in New Zealand from ca. 1830; Bantu such as the Shona and Ndele, in Zimbabwe from the late 1800th century; the Bantu etc., in Kenya from approx. 1900; the Makua and Tsonga people, etc., in Mozambique from approx. 1900 – plus people groups in Algeria, Congo, Namibia, South Africa, etc. And in North America it was the Algonquins, the Iroquois, the Wyandots, the Wampanoags, the Mohicans, the Chippewas, the Sioux, the Cheyennes and others who were spared.
Terra nullius
The philosophers were among those who sat down when the Europeans' colonization gained momentum from around 1600, and among these again are John Locke (1632–1704) worth mentioning. The colonialists needed legitimacy and justification. For the trading colonies, the civilizational dimension was good to resort to, as when God's deputy, the Pope, already in 1493 divided South America between Spain and Portugal.
In Locke's North America, we get the international law terra nullius doctrine, which several people help to create. The doctrine simply means that 'empty land' is land that can be taken. Locke's special contribution is linked to the work's importance for property rights. Land must be cultivated, cultivated and cultivated, because if the land is uncultivated, it is 'empty'. Locke insists that the non-cultivators cannot have property rights. Since the wild, uncivilized Indians lived in the state of nature, it was the Cherokees and others who became 'Indians' in Locke's Carolina. (2)
Terra nullius-doctrine has also played a role in Palestine. In Ottoman times, the Land Act from 1858 stated that whoever cultivates, i.e. cultivates, an area of land for ten years, gets ownership of the area regardless of how it was first acquired, and further that areas that have been fallow, in the sense of uncultivated, for three years , accrues to the state. An Israeli Supreme Court ruling in 1990, known as Elon Moreh, this last provision gave an actualizing twist in that it allowed Israeli settlements in the occupied territories after the Six-Day War (1967) on all dead or empty land where no agriculture was practiced (Dead-land).
"To succeed in emptying the land, you first had to remove 'the others' from the minds of the colonists."
However, the doctrine may not have played its most important role in a legal-administrative sense, but as propaganda and indoctrination. In the interview says Sanbar on to Deleuze:
"The Zionists mobilized the Jewish community not with the idea that the Palestinians would one day leave Palestine, but with the idea that the land was 'empty.' Of course, some of the Jews who arrived noted that this was not the case, and wrote about it! But the lion's share behaved as if the Palestinians, whom they physically surrounded every day, were not there. This blindness was not physical, it was not how the Jews were duped, but on the other hand a kind of certainty that these other people who were still present as of today were 'about to disappear'. The success of the disappearance number depended on a behavior which suggested that the disappearance had already taken place, i.e. that one never 'saw' the others' existence, no matter how intrusively present it was. In order to succeed in emptying the land, one first had to remove 'the others' from the minds of the colonists."
Yasir Arafat's greatness
The international community had a difficult dilemma in its lap when the state Israel 14 May 1948 was proclaimed by the Zionists. This happened on the parts of the British Palestine Mandate (1920) which the UN partition plan (29 November 1947) allocated to the Jews. On the one hand, as a result of the monstrous extermination of Jews on European soil during the Second World War, Israel had a great deal of support and sympathy, especially from Europe and the United States, which with its restrictive refugee policy before the war had a great deal of responsibility for the Nazi genocide of the Jews becoming so extensive . On the other hand, the affected lands did not become any more depopulated as a result of this sympathy, and settler-colonialist Israel began its existence by wiping out Palestinian villages and displacing 750 Palestinians. From the Israeli side, great effort is put into denying the dilemma indicated above, and in addition characterizing the pointing out of this dilemma as 'anti-Jewish'.
In anger at the atrocities Israel allowed to happen in the Palestinian refugee camps Sabra and Shatila (1982), Gilles Deleuze writes a small text (about 1400 words) as a tribute to the leader of the Palestinian liberation movement PLO, Yasir Arafat (1929–2004). He writes:
"The United States and Europe owed the Jews compensation and reparation. But they let the repairs be paid for by a people who were not to blame for any damage, much less the genocide they had not even heard of. This is the grotesque starting point where the violence finds its beginning. The Zionists, and then the State of Israel, demand from the Palestinians that Israel's right be recognized. But even the state of Israel will deny that the Palestinians exist at all. […] Here begins a fiction that gradually intensifies and weighs on everyone who speaks for the Palestinians. According to this fiction, which is a fool's game on the part of Israel, anyone who disputes the perception of reality and the actions of the Zionist state will be considered anti-Semites.
Supporters and financial aid did their part to ensure that the Zionists over ten years and well ahead of the declaration of independence already had a state formation in place. On the Palestinian side, things were worse. The Arab League, which was perhaps the closest to help, was weak, in part the Arab countries had their own interests in the Palestinian territories, and in part the countries were in conflict with each other. The Palestinians did not really get a powerful representative for their cause until the creation of the PLO (1964). Deleuze writes:
Terra nullius-doctrine has also played a role in Palestine.
"With the PLO, the Palestinians have gained an organization that not only represents them, but is made up of them, regardless of territories and state formation. For all this, a historical figure of Shakespearean format was needed, and his name is Arafat."
The Shakespearean figure Deleuze refers to is Caliban in the play Stormen (1611, see also the picture above). Half man, half monster, Caliban is an image of the colonized – whom the colonists partly bear the burden of civilizing and partly have to keep in check by force.
A Jewish national feeling grew out of the Russian pogroms (from about 1880), and correspondingly the Palestinian national feeling grew out of Israeli abuses of land and people. In 1983, Arafat is the unifying symbol of resistance and national identity, and Caliban is an apt image of this symbol. When Caliban is not mentioned by name, but only implied, this can either be because Deleuze often formulates himself a bit knowingly and lapidarily, or it can be because the name is not wanted to be mentioned, since in Shakespeare Caliban is defeated.
"Palestinization"
After the Oslo Accords (1993) a victory seemed to be imminent for Arafat and the Palestinians. The PLO has recognized Israel, Israel has apparently recognized the Palestinians' right to self-determination, and new rounds of negotiations could conceivably end with the creation of a Palestinian state. That's not how it works. The agreement is poorly negotiated, and colonialization and "Palestinization", as Deleuze calls it, i.e. that Palestinians are driven from their farms and land and driven to flight, intensifies. New Israeli settlements are constantly being established, roads between them, which can only be used by Israelis, are being built. Fences, security checks and settlements make the Palestinian areas a patchwork of smaller enclaves. Transport of people and goods stagnates, the economy is in decline. Water, land, air and borders are controlled by the colonists. The self-governing authority that is established with the agreement is perceived as a Quisling regime.
Growing Palestinian discontent culminates in the outbreak of the second intifada (September 2000). The violence escalated after a few quieter years. From 2002, Arafat was kept under house arrest. On 11 November 2004 he dies. Officially, the cause of death is unknown. The Swiss forensic team which, seven years later, autopsies Arafat, concludes that polonium poisoning may have killed the PLO leader.
It looked so bright for a while, but it didn't end so well for Arafat. It is not easy to say what hopes Deleuze had for Palestine and the Palestinians. In any case, he wrote: "Israel has been clear from the very beginning what their goal is: to empty the Palestinian territory."
Gilles Deleuze, “Grandeur de Yasser Arafat,” i Two crazy regimes. Written in the fall of 1983, first published in Elias Sanbar's Revue d'Etudes Palestiniennes ("Journal of Palestine Studies") 1984. An English translation is available at the website for the publication of Deleuze's lecture transcripts, etc. The Deleuze Seminars [https://deleuze.cla.purdue.edu/resource/the-grandeur-of-yasser-arafat/]. The rights holders did not allow MODERN TIMES and the undersigned to translate the entire text into Norwegian.
