Summer 2000
Volume 26, Number 4

Both Israeli and Palestinian national narratives diligently manufacture images and symbols that stand in diametric opposition to their respective diasporic icons. Early Zionism treated the Jewish diaspora--negatively termed Gola (exile)--as something to be overcome and eventually discarded and forgotten. Diasporic cultural markers, particularly language and attire, became a burden, pushing newcomers to quickly hide and shed them. Ironically, the cultural substitutions that influential Zionist outfits such as Hashomer, Hagana, and Palmah adopted were often modeled after Palestinian culture.1

Within Palestinian national narratives, a similar process brought about the reinvention of the Palestinian peasant, the Fallah, as national signifier. 2 The corporeal presence, way of life, and character of the Palestinian peasant, resiliently rooting himself in the soil through the powerful symbolic images of olive trees, orange groves, and cacti, became counterimages of the detached, diasporic urbanite.3

The Jewish and the Palestinian diasporas thus play central roles in their respective ethno-territorial narratives. Relying on essentialized negativism, these narratives represent the diaspora as an aberration. It is marginalized, tolerated primarily as a depository of resources for the nation. It is, in many ways, the anvil against which the image of the "real" (that is, territorial) nation is being forged.

There are signs, however, that these sentiments are being modified, not least due to the rapid changes triggered by globalization and transnationalism. The growing legitimacy of diasporic subjectivities within the Jewish and the Palestinian folds ceaselessly challenges the self-congratulatory territorializing narration of the nation.

[...]

Most diasporic Jews and many Palestinians do not incorporate the notions and the symbols of ethno-territoriality into their self-image and identity. With the exception of the dispossessed Palestinians still living as refugees (mainly in Lebanon and Syria), most other actors--Jews as well as Palestinians--do not treat Israel/Palestine as a crucial aspect of their daily experience. Many Jews have never been to see the nation's homeland, nor are they particularly eager to do so. Likewise, defining historic moments of erupting violence and, for that matter, reconciliation, fail to include acknowledgment, incorporation, or recognition of either diaspora.

The experiences associated with life in the diaspora, on the other hand, are more ubiquitous, direct, and meaningful than narrators of the nation are ready to admit. The diaspora involves immediate personal experience. It is a theater where kinship, social networks, cultural trends, and visions of individual and familial futures are enacted. More often than not it is an environment isolated from the national order of things and from the homeland territory.

Narrators of the nation are weary of diasporas. They have a vested interest in blocking diasporic subjectivities from entering mainstream discourse. Such entry, after all, might encourage deterritorialization and, god forbid, denationalization of the national project. Seen in transnational perspective, land can no longer be treated as the sanctified object of collective desire. It cannot be defended any longer as a romantic heartland, an irreplaceable place well worth killing and getting killed for. The discourse of transnationalism, with its concomitant recognition of the legitimate place of the diaspora, devalorizes territory, undermining its unquestionable status as the nation's ultimate destiny, historicizing it, and striving to place it back on a more relative scale of human experience.

The picture thus becomes more open, containing more options. The disputed territory becomes a meeting place for at least two histories, a site where two diasporas overlap and mix. Such an imagination of the interface between the two collectives can perhaps facilitate solutions different from the partition variety. Research on Palestine and Palestinians, and on Israel and Israelis, should thus seek to identify and explore experiences associated with diasporas that can in turn subvert narrations of the nation.

1. This was the main path for the incorporation of a variety of Arabic phrases into daily Hebrew parlance (for example, ya'ani, dugri, habibi, shwayeh , dahilak, ahalan wasahalan, ahla, and ma'alesh, to name but a few). It also had an impact on the adoption in the 1940s and 1950s of Palestinian attire such as the Kufiya and of foodstuffs such as humus , tahina, falafel, and pita bread as markers of new Israeliness.

2. See Ted Swedenburg, Memories of Revolt: The 1936Ð1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past (Minneapolis, 1995).

3. Such sentiments are reflected in Sharif Kanaana's account of intifada humor, which depicts Palestinian returnees, particularly from the United States, as hesitant and soft, and generally unwilling to take an active part in demonstrations against the Israeli occupation; see Sharif Kanaana, "Humor of the Palestinian Intifada," Journal of Folklore Research 27 (Sept.ÐDec. 1990): 231Ð40.