The Question of Palestine by Edward W. Said

Author:Edward W. Said [Said, Edward W.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780679739883
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-08-19T04:00:00+00:00

3

Toward Palestinian Self-Determination

I

The Remnants, Those in Exile, Those Under Occupation

There are now between 3½ million and 4 million Palestinian Arabs scattered throughout the world. About 650,000 of them are what is called Israeli Arabs, 1 million live on the West Bank and Gaza under Israeli military occupation, another 1 million or so live in Jordan, approximately 450,000 live in Lebanon, and the balance are dispersed through the Arabian Gulf states, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Iraq, and in considerably smaller numbers in Europe and North and South America. Any one of these people, I am sure, would say that he or she is in exile, although it is perfectly clear that the conditions and the type of exile vary greatly. Nevertheless, behind every Palestinian there is a great general fact: that he once—and not so long ago—lived in a land of his own called Palestine, which is now no longer his homeland. No nuances are necessary for a Palestinian to make such a statement; very few conditions or qualifications seem attached to it. Yet as Tolstoy said about families, that happy ones were all the same and unhappy ones were each different in their unhappiness, the individual Palestinian trauma seems like one out of 3½ million variations on the same theme. Here is one variation, told about events in a small Arab village in western Galilee which fell to Zionist forces in the spring of 1948. The speaker is an elderly peasant woman who now lives in a refugee camp in Lebanon; her story was recorded in 1973.

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