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.And in the land itself there lived another people; a peoplewho neglected the land, but who lived on it.Indeed the return toZion was accompanied by ceaseless violent clashes with the smallArab population.(cited in Said 1988: 5)One of the many ironies here is the extent to which the various gov-ernments of which Peres has been a member have been responsible for 92 Said and Palestinian Dispossessionturning the non-Jewish parts of the Holy Land into desolate, uninvit-ing semi-desert (or worse) through the practice of diverting increasingquantities of water to Jewish cities, settlements and farms; and whilemalaria may not currently be a major problem, a range of diseases, espe-cially in Gaza, are on the increase as a result of the lack of clean water(see Zeitoun 2008).A third standard colonial option for the achievement of an emptyland is to make the population leave or disappear.Although somethingresembling persuasion looks preferable to modern sensibilities, theforcible removal of indigenous peoples has historically been the methodmost frequently adopted.Once again, and despite denials, removal ofthe Palestinians has been and continues to be a basic assumptionfor Israeli politicians and Zionist thinkers.Herzl in the 1890s saw theprocess as essentially non-violent: We shall have to spirit the pennilesspopulation across the border by procuring employment for it in transitcountries, while denying it any employment in our own country.Boththe process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carriedout discreetly and circumspectly (Herzl, cited in Said 1992: 70 1).Fortyyears on, David Ben Gurion, later to become Prime Minister, viewedthings very differently.In a letter to his son, he wrote: We must expel theArabs and take their place, and if we have to use force, to guarantee ourown right to settle in those places, then we have force at our disposal.In his War Diary in 1948, he argued that: During the assault we must beready to strike the decisive blow; that is, either to destroy the town orexpel its inhabitants so our people can replace them. And, finally, writ-ing to the head of the Jewish National Fund, he stated: The war will giveus land.The concepts of ours and not ours are peace concepts; only,in war they lose their whole meaning (cited in Martin 2005).As far as 1948 is concerned, one of the key legitimating historicalaccounts offered by the Israelis in terms of an empty land is that whentheir forces entered Palestinian territory, the Palestinians had simplyleft their homes and fled en masse.The principal reasons suggested forthis somewhat unusual collective behaviour were that the Palestinianshad been persuaded by their own leaders and those of neighbouringArab states to run away, or that they had fled to avoid the Arab armiesthat invaded Palestine when the Israeli state was declared in May 1948.Despite having been routinely repeated over the years and appar-ently still believed in certain quarters this was a direct obfuscatorylie on the part of the Israeli government, disproved by a secret reportproduced by their army intelligence services as early as the summer of Patrick Williams 931948, showing that the emptiness of the land was in fact the productof successful Israeli military and terrorist actions, psychological warfareand propaganda campaigns.The fact that many of these predated May1948 was a further indication of the nature of the lie being perpetrated.The ability or perhaps the need of ideology to resist contact withreality is further demonstrated by the fact that even in the 1990s the liberal Shimon Peres was happy to repeat in his book The New MiddleEast the central Zionist lie that the Palestinian population ran away in1948 because their leaders told them to (Peres 1993).One of the central problems confronting the continuing Israelidesire for population transfer in order to clear the land of unwantedindigenous inhabitants has always been the simple stubborn resist-ance of Palestinians to further dispossessions and displacements.Saidhas frequently highlighted the quality of summud, that is, the patient,unspectacular, refusal of the Palestinians either to give up or go away,no matter how oppressive the behaviour of the Israeli government,army and settlers may be.In Darwish s simple formulation in Stateof Siege , his people are: Standing here.Sitting here.Always here.Eternally here./ And we have one single united goal: To be./ After that,we differ on everything (Darwish 2002).Merely staying put can in cer-tain circumstances be a not inconsiderable form of resistance, and Saidquotes Tawfiq Zayyad s poem Baqun [We shall remain] in this context,where the Palestinian ability to endure literally sticks in the throats ofthe occupiers just as they themselves stick to the land:Our roots are entrenchedDeep in the earthLike twenty impossiblesWe shall remain(cited in Said 1992: 130)The enigmatic like twenty impossibles has more recently been takenas the title of a 2003 film by Annemarie Jacir, which also highlights theability of culture to remain and resist military occupation.The most obvious step to be taken in the overcoming of the dispos-session suffered by the Palestinian people would of course be to returnto them some or all of the land stolen in 1948, or, failing that, in1967 and on an ongoing basis since then.Despite being obvious, just,and, until recently a fundamental demand of most Palestinians, it 94 Said and Palestinian Dispossessionremains unsurprisingly totally unthinkable and unacceptable to themajority of Israelis, and slightly more surprisingly perhaps in the circum-stances a subject on which Palestinians have become both pragmaticand flexible.The simple desire to return is one of the fundamental assumptionsof diaspora theory.Stuart Hall s classic article on diaspora and culturalidentity offers a somewhat different perspective on the question:Diaspora does not refer us to those scattered tribes whose identitycan only be secured in relation to some sacred homeland to whichthey must at all costs return, even if it means pushing other peopleinto the sea.This is the old, the imperialising, the hegemonisingform of ethnicity
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