PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 43

F ourth image : a F rench police chief in 1973
Anyone can lose their documents. But if you are a
Palestinian, losing your papers can quickly become a
dramatic situation. When I lost my Syrian travel doc-
ument and found myself at the police station in Tou-
louse I was extremely anxious. The police chief looked
me up and down and threatened:
‘If you haven’t got a passport you’re not staying in
France, you’re going back tomorrow to your country.’
He spoke quite brutally and was no doubt aware
that it was cruel, but at the same time I got the feeling
that he wanted to help me. He got out a form.
‘Surname, first name… nationality … so, Syrian!’
‘No’, I objected, ‘I’m not Syrian.’
‘Oh, so you’re Israeli.’
‘No, I’m not Israeli! I’m Palestinian!’
He stared at me for a few seconds in silence and then
continued, in the same neutral tone:
‘Listen, I don’t know of any country called Palestine.
Look on a map: there’s Israel, there’s Jordan, there’s
Syria… but there isn’t any Palestine.’
With a sadness filled with bottled-up anger I replied:
‘Sir, I was born in Palestine, in a village called Al
Ja’una.’
Seeing in my expression the pain and humiliation
he had awakened without intending it, he changed his
tone and asked:
‘Why did you come to France? Can you show me
any proof of your knowledge of French culture?’
I had read a great many novels, so I started to tell
him about a few books by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
and André Malraux. I told him that Sartre had been
translated into Arabic. I even mentioned that I found
Gaston Bachelard particularly interesting. With each
author that I mentioned his expression relaxed. Bring-
ing the conversation to a close he asked me to bring
him a photo and, with a conspiratorial glance he said:
‘I’ll put “Palestinian refugee” in the nationality box.’
And that same day I had a French pass.
In Toulouse there were four Palestinians who
regarded political activism as an “organic” part of their
lives. Together we set up a local branch of the GUPS
(General Union of Palestinian Students) 10 and organ-
ized conferences with other young students in France
who were militating for other causes across the world.
On Sundays we would go around the markets, hand-
ing out tracts and brochures to the curious. Answering
the questions of passers-by was a real challenge because
they asked a great many. To be able to speak with cer-
tainty required a thorough knowledge of the history of
Zionism and my knowledge on that subject was pretty
limited. So I read the works of many Jewish authors,
include Martin Buber and Bernard Lazare.
What struck me in my research was the pains that the
left-wing intellectuals of Europe took to provide a moral
explanation for the Zionist phenomenon, knowing per-
fectly well that the extermination of the Palestinians
could not be justified. In 1973 I sent my first article to
the magazine published by Anis Sayegh, 11 Shu’un Filas-
tiniya, ‘Palestinian Matters’, 12 which I entitled ‘Zionism
and racism’, and he printed it.
Through my reading I tried to understand the funda-
mentals of Zionism without making a definitive judge-
ment. It was the only way to dissect it and understand
from where it drew its strength. And I came to under-
stand two important things: first that the strength of
Zionism lay not in its ideology but in the support it got
from the West – without the Europeans and Americans,
Zionism would never have had sufficient funding. But I
also had to admit that the Palestinians do not have the
means to understand, to anticipate or to counter this
ideology. We have a very naive view of historic events
and think only in the short term whereas to counter
Zionism one must be able to analyse and examine its
long-term strategies layer by layer, something we have
almost never done. We reacted emotionally to an ideol-
ogy that had everything worked out in advance, down
to its smallest detail, and that was bothered neither by
international law nor by morality.
I had the good fortune to obtain a grant to study
for a doctorate, so I went to Paris where I found all the
intellectual nourishment that I needed to prepare my
thesis on the subject of “The alienation and religious
alienation of the young Karl Marx”. 13 The disposses-
sion of the individual for the benefit of society fasci-
nated me and I read every book on the subject; I was
under the illusion that by reading a great deal I would
understand better.
F ifth image : the massacre of T el A l Z aatar ,
L ebanon
I arrived in Beirut in 1975 with a letter of introduction
in my pocket, written by a theatrical person in Paris
to a political person in Lebanon. This document was
supposed to allow me to enter Lebanon without prob-
lems. But the world of French arts was far away, very
Feissal
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