The Indigenous Palestinians_Twice Dispossessed by Biblical Texts

8/12/2019 The Indigenous Palestinians_Twice Dispossessed by Biblical Texts

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36 or more Arab villages, and the dispossession of anothergeneration of Palestinians. According to Adallah, the LegalCenter for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, the underlyingpremise of the draft bill is that there is no Bedouin landownership, effectively negating the populations right toproperty and historic affinity to the land. At the heart ofthis matter is the ongoing contestation of Palestinian landrights, with the Israeli government using its authority todefine these policies to favor the Jewish population overthe Arab. Thus, this bill, like others before it, promotesthe principle of segregation along the lines of ethnic af-filiation and labeling.

While the contestations within Palestine and related

On November 10th, 2013, the Israeli cabinetvoted in a special session to authorize thedemolition and removal of Umm al-Hiran,an unauthorized Palestinian Bedouinvillage in the Negev Desert. In its place

was to be built a new community for national Jews tobe named Hiran, which had been planned and approvedin early 2002. The stated reason for this demolition andforceful eviction is the existing settlements lack of permits,

with Umm al-Hiran being one of a number of PalestinianBedouin communities that were settled without permitsand are currently subject to intense Israeli plans forremoval. Umm al-Hiran itself was set-up in early 1956 bythe Palestinian Abu-Alkian tribe after they had been forcedto move from their ancestral tribal lands near KibbutzShoval in the Northern Negev.

A more critical development related to this event isthe Israeli Parliaments passing of the first reading of thePrawer law. If the law wins final approval, as it appears itwill, it would cause the forceful displacement of 40,000-70,000 Arab Bedouins from the Negev, the confiscation of

800,000 dunams of Arab land, the razing to the ground of

Dr. HATEM BAZIAN is a senior lecturer at

the University of California, Berkeley. Re-cently, he was named one of The Muslim 500

for his work in social justice. He received his

Ph.D. in Philosophy and Islamic Studies from

the University of California, Berkeley.

The Indigenous PalestiniansTwice Dispossessed by the Biblical Text

DR. HATEM BAZIAN

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diplomatic efforts are focused on contemporary events, anontologically constructed and operative interpretation ofthe issue is rooted in what I define as the biblical theol-ogy of dispossession a process of using religious text asa vehicle by which to grant legitimacy to the displacementand collective silencing of the Palestinians. The physicalremoval of the Palestinians from their lands in the present

is preceded by an epistemic dispossession which is facili-tated by the ongoing attempts at recreating the biblicaltext in the modern, religious nationalist period. Attempt-ing to address the Palestine crisis without accounting forthe textual manipulation and theologically sanctioneddispossession of the Palestinians will only manage to delaya future cycle of religiously motivated violence directed atthe indigenous population, which is deemed to be standingin the way of divine fulfillment and the Return. Thus,one way to approach the Palestinian issue is to ask criticalquestions about the biblical theology of dispossession, how

it functions to silence the Palestinians, and how it autho-rizes a trans-historical and continuous process of uprootingthe indigenous population to bring about fulfillment of aDivine promise. Also important at this time is to explore

how groups and nations undertake the manipulation ofreligious texts in colonial and nationalist projects aroundthe world including the modern Zionist project inorder to clothe human projects in divine purpose, whichoften leads to destruction, conflict, and profound misery.

Narrative Manipulation Affecting Peace ProcessesThe debates within Israel proper surrounding the

eviction of the Arab Bedouin communities focus on thesame themes that propel the building and expansion ofsettlements in the Occupied West Bank and the GolanHeights. Since Israels occupation of both areas in 1967,policy has been to effectively alter the areas demographiclandscape by transferring and settling Jewish civilianpopulations onto confiscated lands, with the end goal ofpreventing the emergence of a contiguous Palestinianstate. Indeed, settler movement into the West Bank hasswelled in the past 20 years, and at present some 344,779settlers reside in approximately 130 settlements authorizedand protected by the Israeli government. In addition, an-other 200,000 settlers have moved into East Jerusalem inhopes of altering the Palestinian demography in the cityand preventing a possible Palestinian capital from emerg-ing if a peace agreement is reached.

In 1993, Yasser Arafat, on behalf of the Palestine Lib-

eration Organization (PLO), signed the Oslo agreement, a

declaration of principles to be followed during negotiationsto resolve many outstanding issues including: settlements,borders, refugees, water rights, sovereignty, Jerusalem, andsecurity between the parties. Needless to say, the only partof the agreement that has been operational is the issue ofsecurity, and only through the Palestinians being giventhe responsibility to protect the illegal settlements. What

started on a hopeful note in 1993 with the White Houseceremony has been transformed into facts on the ground,by-pass roads, an apartheid wall, and the fragmentationof the West Bank into Bantustans.

While many would lay the blame on the violencecommitted by Palestinians, one must also consider theintensive campaign of deep biblical conviction waged bythe right wing in Israel. In my view, the problem is deeperthan the peace process, for at the core rests a narrativeof dispossession that not only informed the past but servesas the cauldron for shaping the present reconstruction of

the imagined past. What is constantly omitted from thisreconstruction of the past is the identity of Palestinians asan indigenous population. The settlements, the eviction ofBedouins, the uprooting of 1.2 million trees, the burning

of crops, the confiscation of land, the denial of residencypermits, the theft of water and resources, the demolitionof homes, the arrest and imprisonment strategies, thedumping of sewage, the restriction of marriages, and thedaily use of violence and humiliation are all supposedlysanctioned by biblical authority. We must confront theidea that Palestinians are not disposable in the past andthe present, thus asserting their indigenous rights to theirancestral land and property. A theology of dispossessionand manifest destiny should not be allowed to claim theregion as a well of God. Rather, we should insist that itis a human enterprise rooted in human goals.

Roots in the Biblical TextWriting on the silencing of Palestinian history, Pro-

fessor Keith W. Whitelam, in his book The Invention ofAncient Israel, asserts that the history of ancient Palestinehas been ignored and silenced by biblical studies becauseits object of interest has been ancient Israel conceivedand presented as the taproot of Western civilization.Whitelams book is of great importance, managing totake the established and authoritative biblical account totask, while also focusing on developing ways for scholarsand academics to make Palestines history speak for itself,

A similar authoritative figure is Thomas L. Thomp-

son, who in 1975 was forced out of academia and into a

...the problem is deeper than the peace process, for at the

core rests a narrative of dispossesion that not only informed

the past but serves as the cauldron for shaping the present...

Winter 2014 H A R V A R D I N T E R N A T I O N A L R E V I E W 41


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Efull-time house-painter and handyman job for his Ph.D.thesis arguing against the historicity of the tales of thepatriarchs in Genesis. He developed a much later datingfor the constructed narrative and, in a later book, TheMythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel,forcefully altered the academic debate on the history ofPalestine. Another important work on this early period

in the history of the region is Israel Finkelstein and NeilAsher Silbermans The Bible Unearthed: ArchaeologysNew Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its SacredTexts. Finkelstein and Silberman maintain that it is nowevident that many events of biblical history did take placein either the particular era or the manner described. Someof the most famous events in the Bible clearly never hap-pened at all.

This of course does not to imply that everyone is inagreement with the shifting ground in the field of bibli-cal studies. William G. Dever, in What Did the BiblicalWriters Know and When Did they Know it? What Ar-

chaeology Can Tell Us About the Reality of Ancient Israel,strongly counters what is known as the minimalist orrevisionist school of Biblical Studies by asserting that theHebrew Bible, is so familiar to those of us still steeped inthe Western cultural tradition that it would seem to needlittle explanation, much less defense.

However, over the past 40 years, we have witnesseda shift in the basic academic assumptions concerningthe history of ancient Palestine. In the process, this hasfundamentally altered the field of Biblical studies. We seethat central to all of these works, even those that are inopposition, has been the ancient Palestinian history, whichup to this day is only allowed to exist as a backdrop tothe histories of Israel and Judah. (Whitelam 1996, p.2)At present, this Palestinian history is seen as a problemdisrupting the triumphant return of the Biblical people.We therefore must begin to answer important questions:who are the Palestinians, what are their origins, whatdoes archeology and history inform us about this humangroup, and why would it be important to approach theseand other questions about the Palestinians?

Consequences of Erasing the Palestinian NarrativeRecognizing now that the Palestinian narrative gets

erased and misappropriated through a biblical theology

of dispossession, what does this mean, in practical terms,for the conflict? How does it function on a daily basis? Ifa people have no history, then their ability to interrogatethe past and engage with it for the present will constantlyencounter insurmountable limits. In this regard, the firstact of true liberation and freedom is to be located in themind, with the reclamation of the history and memory ofthe Palestinians and Palestine.

We must also note that to interrogate the above ques-tions would be a normal academic exercise if it had to dowith any other region in the world, but when it comes toPalestine and its people, the starting point for many tends

to be the rendition of the familiar biblical narrative, ending

with the creation of modern Israel by Zionism. Indeed,the success of modern Zionism in Palestine complicatesour attempts to locate and treat the history of the indig-enous Palestinians, since the colonial project undertookthe normative strategy of negating or problematizing therelationship of the people to their ancestral lands, as illus-trated by the case of the Bedouins in the Negev. Utilizing

such rudimentary and racist notions as a land without apeople for a people without a land or making the desertbloom, colonialist rhetoric on the one hand implies thatthe territory was not inhabited or cultivated, and on theother gives credence to the idea of a religious communityreturning to claim what rightfully belongs to it.

Indeed, one has to admit that nothing related toPalestine is without contestation, from the name, people,borders, history, economy, religion, cities, archeology,language, food, dress, and I am certain the term indigenous

as well. However, this contestation must not be a deter-rence. Rather, it is a statement of the present record andtopography of speaking Palestine in the modern world.How should we understand the Palestinians from theindigenous lens, knowing that the concept of indigeneityitself is evolving, and that an international legal structureis increasingly developing that might reshape the discourserelated to Palestine and its people?

Much has been said and written about Palestine, andI do expect more to be forthcoming as the issue continuesto occupy the world in the coming decades. My article isnot an attempt to provide a grand scheme for solving this

Palestinian youth fight for the preservation and recogni-tion of their culture as distinct, separate, and independentfrom the Israeli state.

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intractable issue, nor an offer of a chronological historyof the conflict and its many up and mostly down details.Rather, I wish to establish that, at this juncture, it is criti-cal to seriously isolate the existing Palestinian history, andto locate it away from being a mere oppositional to theestablishment of a State for the Jews. What we must ad-vance in reading the past and rewriting Palestines history

is the vantage point of an indigenous population facing

the consequences of a biblical theology of dispossession,

which has translated into a colonial and religious nation-alist project. In reality, Palestinians are an indigenouspopulation that entered the 20th century as victims of aglobal, colonial grab at the territory and resources of thecollapsing Ottoman order. The major powers completedisregard for Palestinian rights at the turn of the centurywas on the one hand informed by the biblical theology ofdispossession, but on the other was a normative politicaldiscourse concerning the treatment of indigenous popula-tions which aimed to take control of land and resourcesin a vast territory. Greed was the motivation. The biblicaltext was used as a deed to claim the territory.

The Palestinian as a True IndigenousWhile the history of the Palestinians, as an indig-

enous group, is unique, it should not be separated fromthe broader global struggle of native and indigenouspopulations. Since the ushering of the new world by thediscovery of the Americas in 1492, we have witnessedthe systematic and industrialized process of dispossessionand complete elimination of indigenous populations andcultures across the globe, with limited remnants of theseaffected communities visible today. Ravaged by greed,disease, and systematic military destruction, the indig-

enous populations in the Americas, Africa, and parts ofAsia faced the trilogy that caused the death of countlessmillions over the past five hundred years.

From a broader perspective, one can begin to down-play the suffering of the Palestinians as an indigenouspopulation, considering the circumstances of other nativegroups around the world and the history of genocide andtotal destruction visited upon them over the years. Inaddition, I can also understand those who would arguethat the horrors of the Holocaust should engender thePalestinians to be more understanding of the Zionist ideal,and thus not see or describe it as a colonial project. Some

insist that the Jewish population itself should be viewed

equally indigenous to the land, rather than as an extensionof Western colonization.

The problem in this context is once again a crimeof omission and memory. I do not espouse the denialof Jewish suffering at any level, and I assert that eachpeople have a right to speak of their pain and history ofsuffering. However, at no time should this give birth to

an open-ended colonial project that is supported by a

biblical theology of dispossession. Over a 50 year period,

the indigenous Palestinians faced an emergent Europeannationalist movement that succeeded in dispossessingthem and transforming their ancestral homeland into amodern nation state that locates its genesis in the biblicaltext. Not dissimilar to the Native Americans or Africanswho suffered under manifest destiny, the Palestinianswere relegated to a secondary role and possessed no rightsother than those granted to them by the emerging colo-nial state. Palestinians are victims of a Zionist manifestdestiny that functions to create facts on the ground andattempts to recreate the mythical past in the presentthrough reenactment of biblical narrative.

ConclusionThe Bedouins are as ancient as the land itself and can

trace their movement in the region over generations andeven back to biblical times. They are often referenced in,or even central to, narratives of biblical myth. The indig-enous Palestinians are an amalgamation of all the people,civilizations, tribes, and religious groups escaping thepersecution of powers that left their imprint on the land-scape. However, we must maintain that the original andmost ancient inhabitants of Palestine are the Canaanites,while everyone else is a historical passer-by in the land.

Todays Palestinians are not pure Canaanites, for no onecan assert a purity of lineage, but at the same time this doesnot mean that they have no critical and sustained presenceon the land in order to claim ownership of it.

The Bedouins of the Negev are rightfully living ontheir land, and the Israeli state, through its apartheid lawsand policies, cannot alter this fact. For anyone desiringpeace in the region, the starting point is the setting asideof the biblical text and the theology of dispossession, andthe recognition in word and deed of the Palestinians asindigenous people of the land. Then, and only then, can wehave a discussion of what can be done to solve the specific

context emerging from the theology of dispossession.

I do not espouse the denial of Jewish suffering at any level...

However, at no time should this give birth to an open-ended

colonial project that is supported by a biblical theology of dis-

possession.

Winter 2014 H A R V A R D I N T E R N A T I O N A L R E V I E W 43

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The Indigenous Palestinians_Twice Dispossessed by Biblical Texts