»And she asked: Who are you?
And the two without speaking
Will answer her: we are the silver tray
upon which it [the State] was given to you.«
(Natan Altermann)

In an interview conducted a few months before he was elected head of state, Ehud Barak said that, if he had been born a Palestinian, he would probably have joined a terrorist organisation. His political opponents from the Likud party wasted no time in using this statement against him, accompanying it with the comment »There is something wrong with this man.«

Barak's own party portrayed his statement as a slip of the tongue, and hoped it would be forgotten. Barak himself also backed down from his words, which, more than legitimising terrorist acts, require the Israelis to take part in a kind of simulation game. For this game, the Israelis would then be the ones under violent occupation and who had to choose their own way of fighting the occupiers. This role game could allow the Israelis to »know the enemy better« by continuing to perceive the Palestinians as enemies, but it could also become an opportunity for a deeper understanding of and identification with the other.

Barak's party were of the view that he had no choice but to play down this statement so as to avoid giving his opponents additional handles for attack. Since Barak realised that his statement didn't help the Likud party to win the last election, he had a chance to re-appropriate his statement and make it a companion, compass and guide both for the war and for peace negotiations with the Palestinians.

Such an identification with the Palestinian plight could have broken the symmetry between Palestinian and Israeli suffering, a symmetry constantly invoked by the Zionist left. This would have meant that peace negotiations would have taken the suffering of the Palestinian people into account, whereas Barak wanted talks to be sterile, objective, like business negotiations. Any identification with the Palestinian plight could lay bare the existing hierarchical relationships between the occupiers and occupied; what is more, it could make the suffering of the Palestinian people a more important factor should compensation have to be made.

The Israeli occupiers often use the balance between the two sides as a weapon allowing them to disregard the different motives, and thus in a way to prevent the Palestinians' plight from being politicised, so they can raise it to a human, universal plane. When the Israeli occupiers come to the negotiating table with this »weapon« of symmetry, it is no wonder that peace contacts rapidly become war contacts. It leads to a war about the nature of war, to a war about the limits of war, to a war about the weapons that cause the war, to a war about the monopoly of the weapons, sometimes mainly about the symbolic weapons, to a war about the way the war is depicted, to a war about the right to fight. All these »wars« - which are always carried out on the condition of a cease-fire - are fronts in the Palestinian struggle against occupation, as well as in the Israeli fight to retain the occupation.

One characteristic of the Al-Aqsa Intifada is the Palestinians' altered attitude to symmetry as a symbolic weapon. Instead of waging war [i]against[/i] the symmetry, the Palestinians began to fight [i]for[/i] the symmetry itself, against the Israeli monopoly in this domain. They tried to refute the way the situation of occupation was represented as symmetrical by the Israelis, and began a fight for the creation of symmetrical relationships, and not only on the level of suffering, as the Israelis did for years.

In the hands of the Palestinians, symmetry became both the meaning of the fight, and the weapon used in it. A fight to create and propagate more and more symmetrical pictures. The aim is to make the Israelis aware of their words and horrible deeds, as if in a reflection, whenever they talk about occupation or act in its name. In other words, the Palestinians try, using a surplus of symmetrical pictures, to force the Israelis to face the occupation and its consequences.

I shall begin by portraying a symmetry: Many pictures published in newspapers during the first months of the Al-Aqsa Intifada showed armed Palestinian policemen surrounded by a group of children. One photograph, which was taken by photographers from the IP agency (»Ha'aretz«¹, November 6 2000), for example, shows a Palestinian policeman holding his loaded weapon in both hands. His finger is on the trigger, his gaze is directed towards the place where the photographer is standing, he is holding his rifle slanting backwards, ready at any time to shoot over the small stone wall meant to protect him from counter-attacks. His ears seem to be pricked as if they wanted to compensate for the limited range of visibility and give him information about the situation. This policeman is surrounded by a group of unarmed young people; they, too, are trying somehow to protect their bodies. The posture of the policeman, the way he is listening alertly, show the viewer that what is being shown is a conflict situation: »Careful! There's shooting going on here! What the devil are these children doing next to him?!« There is war here, but, in the eyes of an occupying country, war is really a matter for soldiers, and all other combatants are people who offend against all order and every law: terrorists or members of the youth organisation of the Fatah.

The newspaper sets up a meeting for us with the children, who are abandoned even to their deaths; with children who wander about the streets of the war, who seem to be despatched into the war under the wings of the adults. But the newspaper does not content itself with merely showing the children, but also provides the pictures with a written commentary that claims the cynical exploitation of death through the Palestinians themselves: »Palestinian policeman and a group of young people in Ramallah yesterday.«

In the accompanying text, these seemingly objective facts are changed into the authoritarian claim that the Palestinians want to use death as a means of manipulation: »The Zahal head committee claims that the Palestinians report deaths during nighttime fighting as if the people had been killed in shooting during peaceful demonstrations.« The newspaper commentary does not mention any specific case that could be verified, instead contenting itself with claims about anonymous Palestinians who, according to an unidentifiable head committee, died in one particular way and not another. The newspaper wants to suggest to its readers that the Palestinians play around with the number of deaths. It insinuates that they are busy doing public relations work and trying to disparage the name of the Zahal, depicting it as an army shooting at unarmed civilians. The newspaper turns to us, saying »Here, please take a good look at these pictures. Alongside every group of young people there is an armed policeman who shoots, has shot, and will shoot.«²

I do not want to discuss here the truth of the head committee's claims, whether about the case depicted in this picture or in general, but instead take a look at the structure and symptomatic content of the claim.

So, in what does the structure of this claim consist? A senior member of the Zahal - but it could just as well be any other Israeli: an officer, an official, a member of parliament, a civilian, a settler or a judge - goes and stands in front of the mute body of a dead Palestinian, and takes it upon themselves to talk about his death. But this is not some general talk about death. Rather, it is a speech with the aim of denying the way in which the death is depicted by the Palestinians, to disclaim their own responsibility for this death, to object to the reasons for this depiction and call them to account; a speech about how the depiction of the death by the Palestinians is used both at a personal and at a social level. All of this is to be achieved by emphasising the differences between the two peoples in their relationship to death. Of course, the Palestinians are portrayed as inferior, wild and manipulative.

This claim already has a cyclic existence - it emerged in the first months of the Intifada, and since then has recurred almost every time the Zahal has caused the death of a Palestinian.

The claim is intended to give the death of the Palestinian a meaning and a value, it is meant to penetrate the closed body in order to connect quasi technical data with it and reintroduce it to the (blood) circulation of the occupation. Often, a plea can be seen in this speech, an address prepared in advance to shake off responsibility. But even then this speech contains something more; however, to understand that, one should ask what exactly in the presence of the Palestinian - whether dead or alive - makes the Israeli take possession of the Palestinian's death. What induces the Israelis to be present at funerals and provoke the mourners with their armed presence? To make every death yet another battlefield? To put it another way: Why do the Israelis insist on bringing Palestinian deaths back onto the battlefield where the Israelis are both observers and reporters? The answer to this question can quite often be derived from the pictures of funerals of those killed in the Al-Aqsa Intifada. One such picture, taken by IP photographers, (»Ha'aretz,« November 28 2000), shows the funeral of five Palestinians who were killed during a Zahal operation in Kalkilya. The photograph was published on the same page as a report on a press conference given by the general of the Southern District. In this report, reasons were sought why the young boy Mohammed al-Dura met his death at the Netzarim crossing.

The pictures of the massacre in Kalkilya, like that of the child in Netzarim, were accompanied by commentaries on the pattern I have already described. This time, the text appeared in its most common version: The Palestinians are depicted as people who are actually looking to die: »At the end of the press conference, General Samia asked questions without answers: What was the child doing at the crossing? Why didn't the father leave the location with his son during the shooting? When he was asked what he was trying to suggest with these questions, he said they should be posed to the father of the boy, Gamal al-Dura.«³

As I have said, this is not the first time that journalists, officers or politicians have asked: »What was the child doing there?!« This is a question designed to accuse the parents, and through them the entire Palestinian people, of misusing their children cynically for political or strategic purposes, and of being ready even to sacrifice them in this cause.⁴

At the same time, the language aims at achieving a balance between Israelis and Palestinians - as if this were not a matter of a fight between occupiers and the occupied, but of two equal parties fighting with one another - and to emphasise the moral difference, there are only soldiers fighting »on our side« - as if Israeli soldiers weren't 18-year-old kids whose parents give them up into the so-called protection of the state.

But the true extent of this claim, and its ritual aspect, are not to be found in the contents of the speech: it is the speech itself, the obstinate attempts of the Israelis to transform the death of the Palestinians into a place for debate. The photograph of the funeral in Kalkilya shows five bodies raised up above the crowd. They are lying on biers that look like »silver trays« decorated with blossoms and Palestinian flags. The faces of the dead men are made up, and they rest, without a care, wrapped in a kafia giving them protection they no longer need. Five mute corpses in the hands of the thunderous crowd, which has withdrawn into its grief, pain and struggle. It emits sounds of grieving, cries, weeping; sounds that are dissociated from any form of clear articulation, speaking only to those who have become a part of the crowd. Being part of the crowd means to help determine the creation of the noises, thus dissociating oneself from the outside. The borders of this united crowd are sharply drawn and become more impenetrable for all who do not belong to it. The mourners do not spend any time on rituals of hospitality: they drive off anyone who does not belong with subtle gestures and noises. Looked at from the outside, the crowd seems excited and rebellious, but in fact it is reserved, withdrawn, giving itself up to an ecstatic partnership that will soon be disturbed again by the course of life, by the price that death demands in the everyday reality of occupation.

The time during which mourners gather around the dead is the only time in which the Palestinian people is able to push away the Israelis, to place them at a distance, and create a place free of occupation for one brief moment. The reservedness of the crowd seems so threatening because otherwise, for the rest of the time, even during the fighting, Israelis and Palestinians mix, hating and loving one another, helping and sabotaging one another, supporting and tricking one another, dealing sincerely with or deceiving one another. Mostly, the Israelis, as the occupiers, have the right and ability to cut off the hybrid relationship between the two parties, restricting it to violent force and authoritarian behaviour. Paradoxically, the moment of the funeral, at the centre of which there is a dead man whose death was caused by the Israelis, is the only moment in which the Palestinians force their model upon the relationship with the Israeli occupiers.⁵

This is the moment in which the occupied drive away the occupiers in order to banish them from the picture; oust them from every communications channel so that a clear picture of the wrongdoing of the Israelis must of necessity emerge. A picture that shows them as the »net enemy,« depicting them as unwelcome observers, uninvited guests present here and now who are responsible for the death. Their very absence from the picture testifies to their responsibility for its creation. In the face of this mute picture, in the face of the complete otherness of these voices of pain and lamenting, the Israelis come once more to trade with the death of Palestinians, to dissect it bureaucratically and put it on the books, in order to appear as enlightened occupiers and place the blame on the Palestinians. Enlightened occupiers who use only rubber bullets, who, if they hit anyone, do not do so on purpose; their missiles are always accurate and hit only justified targets, and their murderous helicopters never miss.

So let us take the first picture once more, which shows a Palestinian policeman surrounded by a group of young people. The photograph was published above an article about Benjamin Nethanyahu's visit to Gilo. Despite the strict orders of his security officials, Nethanyahu insisted on walking through Anafa Lane: »Why can't I visit it when so many families live there?« The route was chosen in consultation with the Area Police Commander. Contrary to police expectations, the crowd waiting for Nethanyahu joined him, marching behind him in a solid mass without the police being able to prevent it. And so, in chance proximity on a newspaper page, the report on Nethanyahu's irresponsible act - a boastful presence in the middle of an »exposed« area, a display of power, a claim to ownership and sovereignty - is juxtaposed with the photography of the young Palestinian fighters. Suddenly, on that Page 2A of »Ha'aretz,« the Palestinian youths share the same belligerent ethos as that of Nethanyahu, calling provocatively to their opponents: »This is my house, and the enemy's bullets will not defeat me.«

The similarity between the two situations put aside not only the question of which was the first, but also the editors' intention. It would be possible to call this juxtaposition a coincidence, but such coincidences occur constantly, revealing themselves to be a method, part of a post-colonial, daring strategy of the strength and imaginative power of the Palestinians. The focus of this strategy is: »Let us create a symmetry!« - wherever it is possible, in all possible areas, but above all in those where the Israeli occupiers have brought about a lack of symmetry. In other words, as both the symmetry and the asymmetry are created by the occupiers, as both of them are symptoms of the occupation and part of its system of rule, these are targets and they should be attacked with exactly the same methods.

Here are some examples of the strategy of symmetry as used by the occupied: A few months after the party leader of the Popular Front , Ali Mustafa, was »liquidated,« the Israeli minister Rechav'am Ze'evi was assassinated. Israeli news reports described his murder as a crime, emphasising the difference between this deplorable act and the justified liquidation of Palestinian leaders by the Israelis. Only a few reporters reporting in the occupied territories from a Palestinian point of view were able, or managed, to hint at the symmetry of these liquidations. From a Palestinian standpoint, things look like this: »If Palestinian leaders are subjected to liquidations, we shall also carry out liquidations. It was not [i]our[/i] plan. The murder of the Popular Front party leader was not a matter to be taken lightly. Should the Israelis have been surprised at Ze'evi's assassination? Ze'evi's head is not worth more than Mustafa's head.«⁶

The symmetry reflected in the above-quoted words of Marwan Barghouti, one of the Intifada leaders, is a matter not only of the matching of the worth of the two leaders, but also of the justification of the violence used against them. In the face of the claim made constantly by the Israelis that »we had no choice,« Barghouti shows Ze'evi's assassination as being committed precisely because the Palestinians had no other choice. If Israel liquidates Palestinian leaders, then we have no choice but to kill Jewish leaders. In this interview, which Barghouti published about a year after the Intifada broke out, he repeatedly describes the situation from a symmetrical viewpoint: »I would like it if the operations of all organisations could have concentrated on the territories, but I can understand why they carry out their operations in Israel. Why should you feel safe in Tel Aviv, when we do not feel safe on the streets of Ramallah and Bethlehem? Why? More than 80% of the deaths have occurred in the A territories. For me, Ramallah and Tel Aviv belong to the A territories. They are equal. If you want safety in Tel Aviv, give us safety in Ramallah.«

Barghouti attacks the language of the occupiers; it reveals the relationship between the occupiers and the occupied by adapting expressions that allowed the occupying forces to exist for years in peace and safety. The most striking expression of this kind is the word »security,« which is used exclusively for Israelis, disregarding the insecurity in which the Palestinians live. Barghouti does not demand that these expressions be expropriated; he would just like to share them with the Israelis, in order to dispense once and for all with the asymmetrical formulation of »occupation and security,« in the guise of »peace and security«. Barghouti's words seem like a justified strategy after a year of armed conflict, but similar words could be heard here earlier, during the entire second Intifada.⁷

For example, after the lynching of the Israeli reserve soldiers in Ramallah, troops moved into the autonomous Palestinian territories A and B to accuse some people of taking part in the lynching. The newspaper said: »Leaders of the Fatah organisation yesterday threatened there would be furious reactions.« Husseini Ashech, a leading member of Fatah, told state television: »This give us the right to operate freely and, for example, to catch the murderers of Mohammed al-Dura, the boy who was killed at the Netzarim crossing.«⁸

When Sharon asked Barak for Dahlan's head, the Palestinians replied threateningly with the request for the head of Mofazz, the Chief of Staff. Since 1997, the Palestinians have countered (without any great success) the enlargement of Jerusalem towards Ramallah with an enlargement of Ramallah in the direction of Jerusalem.⁹

Sheik Ahmad Yassin replied to the Zahal's claim that Palestinians were using their children in the war by saying that the Israeli settlers in the Gaza Strip were bringing their children into dangerous areas (following the attack in Gush Katif on a bus carrying children in November 2000). In accordance with the double standards applied by the Israelis in diplomatic negotiations with the Palestinians - peace talks on the one hand, further mistreatment of the Palestinians on the other - the Palestinians sign draft treaties and agreements but, parallel to this, keep on shooting.

At the finish of Barak's term of office, Arafat replied - on Israeli television as well - to the stream of Israeli words about all the stones Israel had turned on the way to peace, saying that the face of the Palestinians was turned towards peace. As a result of the pathetic discussions that Israeli security forces or commentators like Ze'ev Schiff and Ehud Ya'ari carried out at the start of the Intifada about whether Arafat was capable of putting a stop to the shooting, Muhammad Dahlan, a leading figure in the Palestinian Authority, pointed to Moffazz's only partial authority over his soldiers. A few days later, Arafat himself described Moffazz and his army as an independent power that was not loyal to Barak. The countless other examples of the use of the weapon of symmetry, even if it is accompanied by terrorist attacks and liquidations, are no match for the guns and »clever« weapons that the Israelis can deploy. Nonetheless, this subtle weapon is impressive in the way it can dissect on all levels the one-sided picture that Israel constantly tries to paint. This one-sided picture serves representatives of the Israeli government again and again as an excuse: either there are negotiations or there is force. At the same time, on the Israeli side, the diametric opposition between the war of defence or its legitimation and the Palestinian terrorist acts continues to be promulgated. But the one-sided picture only goes towards emphasising the balance between the two sides. In pictures, the difference between the numerous tanks and helicopters attacking Palestinian cities, and mobile rocket launcher waved about by Palestinians in a photograph on the first page of the »Ha'aretz« newspaper is made clear.

The weapon of symmetry, which the Palestinians have used frequently in recent times, forces the Israelis to change their symmetrical attitude to reality. The heart of the newly created picture of reality is the constant presence of the Palestinians, that is, their constant escape from the places assigned to them. On the day of Lea Rabin's funeral, Yasser Arafat appeared briefly on Israeli television. He spoke to the Israeli people, declaring that the Palestinians »are very eager to continue on with the peace process. A peace, created by courageous people, which I believe in, and in which I see a historical event without parallel.« The declaration was broadcast while the armed Palestinian conflict in the occupied areas went on. The declaration looked like and sounded like an exact reflection of the style used by Israeli government leaders Shamir, Rabin, Nethanyahu, Barak or Sharon, when they mumble their peace mantra while working for peace in the violent everyday routine of the occupiers. The peace they feel committed to is a purely imaginary peace. It is not a problem for them present it to the Palestinians even when the building of settlements or the tempo of liquidations is accelerated. Both sides may present their imaginary peace less and less frequently, but they do not cease holding on to their weapon. In this sense, there is now a real symmetry between them.

But after more than a year of bloodshed, it is clear that the reflection held up to the Israelis has not made them recognise the terrible nature of their fight against the Palestinians, nor caused them to think about whether their politics are justified. Both sides are bound by their feeling of not having any choice. The double reflection of this feeling only strengthens the impression that things have reached a stalemate. This stalemate causes the creation of more and more symmetrical pictures for a reality whose basis is becoming increasingly asymmetrical from day to day as the situation of the Palestinians worsens.

Only the violent acts can be represented as symmetrical. No real symmetry exists in the responsibility, in the armed conflict or at a political level. The efforts of the Palestinians to create a symmetrical depiction is a part of their commitment to the armed conflict: the fact that the Israelis deny any symmetry in the killings solely in order to produce it again at a political level is a part of their commitment to the occupation.

Let us imagine for one moment - it is a utopian, but not completely unreal idea - that the Palestinians gave up their armed fight completely without backing down from any of their demands and without any negotiations with Israel. Imagine that they decided in favour of a non-violent rebellion. Then, neither this rebellion nor the political relationship between the two sides could be expressed in symmetrical terms. A lack of symmetry in reality would then be matched by a lack of symmetrical depiction of reality. This strategy seems to be the only way, apart from the intervention of a third party, to break through the stalemate. But who am I, an Israeli writer, to suggest a strategy of rebellion to the Palestinians?

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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