Here in the dark room -- as already stated --// break thru the grey room --
sad authority of list -- discuss -- cuss discourse --//cynics rhetoric
evaded -- your language better than mine? Says who? Hurry up Now Mister
Palestine Paleolithic Hurry Up Mister Goliath -- tell no lies and I shall
cite no histories sortires stories in quote -- crippled kids -- stones --
West Bank -- Jericho // Wild boys of West Bank hurled their sad stones --
break through the gray room -- back room boys of discourse curious?? Not me.
I am the slide of petrol and degenerative grammar --- Curious, who me? I am
rhetoric that sides its middle // the sad boys of genet swooped down on the
hawk kill that Oedipal virus -- that one god monster village -- blow that
type? Curious connections between dead arseholes of cripples?? No need to
explain the pain -- spies? Israeleez?? Mozzad, KGB Chechnya, you know
better. Ramallah, Bethelem, Jericho, falling falling falling dust in the
reality studios of shit and oil Ka wa ma tan It was and was not There was
and there was not a city called Baghdad ---// falling windows fadograph the
girl pitched her stone high arc in the air // my people -- for all the brave
and bleary they are blamed ---
--------------------------
>From owner-deleuze-guattari@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Thu Oct 26 17:19:59
2000
From: "Clifford Duffy" <cwduff@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: The Grandeur of Yasser Arafat
Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2000 17:18:34 EDT
The Palestinian cause is first and foremost the set of injustices that these
people have suffered and continue to suffer. These injustices are acts of
violence, but also illogicalities, false reasonings, false guarantees that
claim to compensate or vindicate them. Arafat needed only one word to
describe the broken promises, the violated agreements, at the moment of the
Sabra and Shatila massacres: shame, shame (italics in the original).<1>
It`s said that this is not a genocide. And yet it's a story that consists
of many Oradours, from the very beginning.2<2> Zionist terrorism was
practiced not soley against the English, but on the Arab village which had
to disappear;Irgoun was very active in this respect (Deir Yasin).<3> From
begining to end, it involved acting as if the Palestinian people not only
must not exist, but had never existed.
The conquerors were those who had themselves suffered the greatest
genocide in history. Of this genocide the Zionists have made an absolute
evil (italics in original). But transforming the greatest genocide in
history into an absolute evil is a religious and mystical vision, not a
historical vision. It doesn't stop the evil; on the contrary, it spreads the
evil, makes it fall once again on other innocents, demands reparation that
makes these others suffer part of what the Jews suffered (expulsion,
restriction to ghettos, disappearance as a people). With "colder" means than
genocide, one ends up with the same result.
The United States and Europe owed reparation to the Jews. And they made a
people, about whom the least that could be said is that they had no hand in
adn were singularly innocent of any holocaust and had't even heard of it,
pay this reparation. It's there that the groteque begins, as well as the
violence. Zionism, then the state of Israel will demand that the
Palestinians recognize its right(droit).(italics and french in the trans.)
But the state of Israel will never stop denying the very fact of a
Palestinian people. They will never speak of Palestinians but of the Arabs
of Palestine, as if they found themselves there by chance or in error. And
later, they will act as if the expelled Palestinians came from outside, they
will speak of the first war of resitance that the Palestinians led all
alone. Since they haven't recognized Israel's right, they will be made into
descendants of Hitler. But Israel reserves the right to deny their existence
in fact. Here begins a fiction that had to stretch further and further, and
to weigh on all those who defended the Palestinian cause. This fiction, this
wager of Israel's, was to make all those who would contest the de facto
conditions and actions of the Zionist state appear as anti-Semites. This
operation finds its source in Israel's cold politics with respect to the
Palestinians.
From the start, Israel has never concealed its goal:to empty the
Palestinian territory. And better, to act as if the Palestinian territory
were empty, always destined for the Zionists. It was clearly a matter of
colonizatio, but not in the nine-teenth-century European sense: the local
inhabitants would not be exploited, they would be made to leave. Those who
remained would be made, not into a dependent territorial workforce, but
rather into a mobile and deteched workforce, as if they were immigrants
placed into a ghetto. From the start, lands bought on the condition that
they be empty of occupants, or can be emptied. It's a genocide, but one in
which physical extermination remains subordinated to geographical
evacuation:being only Arabs in general, the surviving Palestinians must go
merge with other Arabs. Physical extermination , though it may or may not be
entrusted to mercenaries, is most certainly present. But this isn't a
genocide, they say, since it's not the "final goal"; in reality, it's just
one means among others.
The complicity of the United States with Israel does not arise soley from
the Zionist lobby. Elias Sanbar ( Revue D'Etudes palestiniennes) has shown
clearly how the United States rediscovered in Israel an aspect of its own
history:the extermination of the Indians which, there as well, was only in
part physical. It was a matter of emptying, as if there had never been an
Indian except in the ghettos which were made for them as immigrants from
inside. In many respects, the Palestinians are the new Indians, the Indians
of Israel. Marxist analysis reveals the two complementary movements of
capitalism:constantly to impose limits, which it develops and exploits its
own system; and always pushes these limits farther back, to exceed them in
order to begin its own foundation once again on a larger and more intense
scale. Pushing back limits was the act of American capitalism, the American
dream, taken up by Israel and the dream of Greater Israel on Arab territory,
on the backs of the Arabs.
How the Palestinian people learned to resist and are resisting; how a
people of ancient lineage became an armed nation; how they gave themselves a
body which simply represent them but embodied them, outside their territory
and without a state:all these events demanded a greater historical
character, one who, we might say from a Western point of view, could have
stepped out of Shakespeare, and that was Arafat. It wasn't the first time in
history that something like this had happened (the French can think of Free
France,except for the fact that it had a smaller popular base at the
begining). And all the occassons on which a solution or element of solution
was possible, occassions tha thte Israelis have deliberately , knowingly
destroyed, are not happening for the first time in history either. The
Israelis held onto their religious position of denying not only the
Palestinian right but also the Palestinian fact. They cleansed themselves of
their own terrorism by treating the Palestinians as terrorists from outside.
And precisely because the Palestinians were not that, but rather were a
specific people as different from other Arabs as Europeans can be among
themselves, they could expect only ambiguous aid from the Arab states
themselves, aid which sometime turned back into hostility and extermination
when the Palestinian model became dangerous for them. The Palestinians have
run through all the infernal cycles of history: the failure of solutions
each they were possible, the worst reversals of alliance of which they bore
they brunt, the most solemn promises not kept. And on all this their
resistance had to nourish itself.
It may well be that one of the goals of the Sabra and Shatila massacres
was to discredit Arafat. He only consented to the departure of the
combatants, the force of which remained intact, on condition that the
security of their families be absolutely guaranteed by the United States and
even by Israel. After the massacres hge had no other word than "shame." If
the ensuing crisis for the PLO resulted, in more or less the long term,
either in an integration into an Arab state or a dissolution into Muslim
fundamentalism, then it could be said that the Palestinian people had
effectively disappeared. But this would be in such conditions that the
world, the United States and even Israel would not finish regretting the
lost occasions, including those that still remain today. To Israel's most
arrogant formula, "We are not a people like others," the Palestinians have
not stopped responding with the cry that was invoked in the first issue of
the Revue d'etudes palestiniennes: "we are people like others, we only want
to be that...."
By leading the terrorist war in Lebanon, Israel believed it could be
suppress the PLO and deprive it of the support of the Palestinian people,
already deprived of their land. And perhaps's its succeeding, since in
surrounded Tripoli there is nothing more than the physical presence of
Arafat among his own, all in a sort of solitary grandeur.
But the Palestinian peopl;e will not lose their identity without creating in
its place a double terrorims, of the state and of religion, which will
profit from its disappearance and render impossible any peaceful settlement
with Israel. From the war in Lebanon Israel will not escape merely morally
divided and economically disorganzied, it will find itself faced with the
mirror of its own intolerance. A political solution, a peaceful settlement
is possible with an independent PLO which will not have disappeare into an
already existing state and will not be losst among the diverse Islamic
movements. The disappearance of the PLO would only be a victory for the
blind forces of war, indifferent to the survial of the Palestinian people.
Gilles Deleuze
Tranlated by Timothy Murphy
Originally published in Revue d'etudes palestiniennes,
September 1983.
This trans. from Discourse Fall 1998.
Notes
1. Sabra and Shatila massacres:1982 massacres of Palestinians at refugee
camps in Lebanon, carried by Lebanese Phalangist aided by the Israeli army.
2 Oradour french village destroye by Nazi occupation troops in retaliation
for Resistance activity shorty after the start of the D-Day invasion.
3. Irgoun:right wing Zionist organization that used terrorist tacts against
British force and others in postwar Palestine.
___________________________________________
I would also like to point out that the signing of Oslo accords was the same
date September 13 as the start of the Sabra massacres. Edward Said and
others have noted this parallel. Perhaps if Deleuze were writing now, he
would compare Arafat to a lost Shakespearean tragic figure whose denoument
is endless;Sharon who masterminded the 1982 war of which Deleuze speaks and
who also was indifferent to Sabra and Chatila stands now to form at least on
part of the crazy Israeli state.
I should also point out that Deleuze wrote about the Palestinians about 3
other times after this article was published. As well he wrote letters of
protest about the massacre of the Iraqui people in the so-called Gulf war.
best wishes, Clifford Duffy
_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
sad authority of list -- discuss -- cuss discourse --//cynics rhetoric
evaded -- your language better than mine? Says who? Hurry up Now Mister
Palestine Paleolithic Hurry Up Mister Goliath -- tell no lies and I shall
cite no histories sortires stories in quote -- crippled kids -- stones --
West Bank -- Jericho // Wild boys of West Bank hurled their sad stones --
break through the gray room -- back room boys of discourse curious?? Not me.
I am the slide of petrol and degenerative grammar --- Curious, who me? I am
rhetoric that sides its middle // the sad boys of genet swooped down on the
hawk kill that Oedipal virus -- that one god monster village -- blow that
type? Curious connections between dead arseholes of cripples?? No need to
explain the pain -- spies? Israeleez?? Mozzad, KGB Chechnya, you know
better. Ramallah, Bethelem, Jericho, falling falling falling dust in the
reality studios of shit and oil Ka wa ma tan It was and was not There was
and there was not a city called Baghdad ---// falling windows fadograph the
girl pitched her stone high arc in the air // my people -- for all the brave
and bleary they are blamed ---
--------------------------
>From owner-deleuze-guattari@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Thu Oct 26 17:19:59
2000
From: "Clifford Duffy" <cwduff@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: The Grandeur of Yasser Arafat
Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2000 17:18:34 EDT
The Palestinian cause is first and foremost the set of injustices that these
people have suffered and continue to suffer. These injustices are acts of
violence, but also illogicalities, false reasonings, false guarantees that
claim to compensate or vindicate them. Arafat needed only one word to
describe the broken promises, the violated agreements, at the moment of the
Sabra and Shatila massacres: shame, shame (italics in the original).<1>
It`s said that this is not a genocide. And yet it's a story that consists
of many Oradours, from the very beginning.2<2> Zionist terrorism was
practiced not soley against the English, but on the Arab village which had
to disappear;Irgoun was very active in this respect (Deir Yasin).<3> From
begining to end, it involved acting as if the Palestinian people not only
must not exist, but had never existed.
The conquerors were those who had themselves suffered the greatest
genocide in history. Of this genocide the Zionists have made an absolute
evil (italics in original). But transforming the greatest genocide in
history into an absolute evil is a religious and mystical vision, not a
historical vision. It doesn't stop the evil; on the contrary, it spreads the
evil, makes it fall once again on other innocents, demands reparation that
makes these others suffer part of what the Jews suffered (expulsion,
restriction to ghettos, disappearance as a people). With "colder" means than
genocide, one ends up with the same result.
The United States and Europe owed reparation to the Jews. And they made a
people, about whom the least that could be said is that they had no hand in
adn were singularly innocent of any holocaust and had't even heard of it,
pay this reparation. It's there that the groteque begins, as well as the
violence. Zionism, then the state of Israel will demand that the
Palestinians recognize its right(droit).(italics and french in the trans.)
But the state of Israel will never stop denying the very fact of a
Palestinian people. They will never speak of Palestinians but of the Arabs
of Palestine, as if they found themselves there by chance or in error. And
later, they will act as if the expelled Palestinians came from outside, they
will speak of the first war of resitance that the Palestinians led all
alone. Since they haven't recognized Israel's right, they will be made into
descendants of Hitler. But Israel reserves the right to deny their existence
in fact. Here begins a fiction that had to stretch further and further, and
to weigh on all those who defended the Palestinian cause. This fiction, this
wager of Israel's, was to make all those who would contest the de facto
conditions and actions of the Zionist state appear as anti-Semites. This
operation finds its source in Israel's cold politics with respect to the
Palestinians.
From the start, Israel has never concealed its goal:to empty the
Palestinian territory. And better, to act as if the Palestinian territory
were empty, always destined for the Zionists. It was clearly a matter of
colonizatio, but not in the nine-teenth-century European sense: the local
inhabitants would not be exploited, they would be made to leave. Those who
remained would be made, not into a dependent territorial workforce, but
rather into a mobile and deteched workforce, as if they were immigrants
placed into a ghetto. From the start, lands bought on the condition that
they be empty of occupants, or can be emptied. It's a genocide, but one in
which physical extermination remains subordinated to geographical
evacuation:being only Arabs in general, the surviving Palestinians must go
merge with other Arabs. Physical extermination , though it may or may not be
entrusted to mercenaries, is most certainly present. But this isn't a
genocide, they say, since it's not the "final goal"; in reality, it's just
one means among others.
The complicity of the United States with Israel does not arise soley from
the Zionist lobby. Elias Sanbar ( Revue D'Etudes palestiniennes) has shown
clearly how the United States rediscovered in Israel an aspect of its own
history:the extermination of the Indians which, there as well, was only in
part physical. It was a matter of emptying, as if there had never been an
Indian except in the ghettos which were made for them as immigrants from
inside. In many respects, the Palestinians are the new Indians, the Indians
of Israel. Marxist analysis reveals the two complementary movements of
capitalism:constantly to impose limits, which it develops and exploits its
own system; and always pushes these limits farther back, to exceed them in
order to begin its own foundation once again on a larger and more intense
scale. Pushing back limits was the act of American capitalism, the American
dream, taken up by Israel and the dream of Greater Israel on Arab territory,
on the backs of the Arabs.
How the Palestinian people learned to resist and are resisting; how a
people of ancient lineage became an armed nation; how they gave themselves a
body which simply represent them but embodied them, outside their territory
and without a state:all these events demanded a greater historical
character, one who, we might say from a Western point of view, could have
stepped out of Shakespeare, and that was Arafat. It wasn't the first time in
history that something like this had happened (the French can think of Free
France,except for the fact that it had a smaller popular base at the
begining). And all the occassons on which a solution or element of solution
was possible, occassions tha thte Israelis have deliberately , knowingly
destroyed, are not happening for the first time in history either. The
Israelis held onto their religious position of denying not only the
Palestinian right but also the Palestinian fact. They cleansed themselves of
their own terrorism by treating the Palestinians as terrorists from outside.
And precisely because the Palestinians were not that, but rather were a
specific people as different from other Arabs as Europeans can be among
themselves, they could expect only ambiguous aid from the Arab states
themselves, aid which sometime turned back into hostility and extermination
when the Palestinian model became dangerous for them. The Palestinians have
run through all the infernal cycles of history: the failure of solutions
each they were possible, the worst reversals of alliance of which they bore
they brunt, the most solemn promises not kept. And on all this their
resistance had to nourish itself.
It may well be that one of the goals of the Sabra and Shatila massacres
was to discredit Arafat. He only consented to the departure of the
combatants, the force of which remained intact, on condition that the
security of their families be absolutely guaranteed by the United States and
even by Israel. After the massacres hge had no other word than "shame." If
the ensuing crisis for the PLO resulted, in more or less the long term,
either in an integration into an Arab state or a dissolution into Muslim
fundamentalism, then it could be said that the Palestinian people had
effectively disappeared. But this would be in such conditions that the
world, the United States and even Israel would not finish regretting the
lost occasions, including those that still remain today. To Israel's most
arrogant formula, "We are not a people like others," the Palestinians have
not stopped responding with the cry that was invoked in the first issue of
the Revue d'etudes palestiniennes: "we are people like others, we only want
to be that...."
By leading the terrorist war in Lebanon, Israel believed it could be
suppress the PLO and deprive it of the support of the Palestinian people,
already deprived of their land. And perhaps's its succeeding, since in
surrounded Tripoli there is nothing more than the physical presence of
Arafat among his own, all in a sort of solitary grandeur.
But the Palestinian peopl;e will not lose their identity without creating in
its place a double terrorims, of the state and of religion, which will
profit from its disappearance and render impossible any peaceful settlement
with Israel. From the war in Lebanon Israel will not escape merely morally
divided and economically disorganzied, it will find itself faced with the
mirror of its own intolerance. A political solution, a peaceful settlement
is possible with an independent PLO which will not have disappeare into an
already existing state and will not be losst among the diverse Islamic
movements. The disappearance of the PLO would only be a victory for the
blind forces of war, indifferent to the survial of the Palestinian people.
Gilles Deleuze
Tranlated by Timothy Murphy
Originally published in Revue d'etudes palestiniennes,
September 1983.
This trans. from Discourse Fall 1998.
Notes
1. Sabra and Shatila massacres:1982 massacres of Palestinians at refugee
camps in Lebanon, carried by Lebanese Phalangist aided by the Israeli army.
2 Oradour french village destroye by Nazi occupation troops in retaliation
for Resistance activity shorty after the start of the D-Day invasion.
3. Irgoun:right wing Zionist organization that used terrorist tacts against
British force and others in postwar Palestine.
___________________________________________
I would also like to point out that the signing of Oslo accords was the same
date September 13 as the start of the Sabra massacres. Edward Said and
others have noted this parallel. Perhaps if Deleuze were writing now, he
would compare Arafat to a lost Shakespearean tragic figure whose denoument
is endless;Sharon who masterminded the 1982 war of which Deleuze speaks and
who also was indifferent to Sabra and Chatila stands now to form at least on
part of the crazy Israeli state.
I should also point out that Deleuze wrote about the Palestinians about 3
other times after this article was published. As well he wrote letters of
protest about the massacre of the Iraqui people in the so-called Gulf war.
best wishes, Clifford Duffy
_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.