A Bridge to Palestine

The images last week of 415 Palestinians exiled to a cold and muddy mountain in southern Lebanon may slowly be supplanting the ones we have of terrorists with rifles and checkered kaffiyehs. Traditionally, however, reports from the Middle East--sketchy and out-of-context--have never left the Palestinians glowing in a sympathetic light. This was as true in 1947, when we learned that they had rejected a UN land grant because it forced them to share Palestine with Jewish Holocaust refugees, as it was in 1992, when many Palestinians supported Saddam Hussein. The revelation awaiting readers of several newly published books, however, is that the Palestinians are as understandable in context as they are mysterious outside of it.

Portrayals of Haj Amin al-Husseini, who led the Palestinians in the 1920s and ‘30s, show what a difference context can make. In most books and news reports, including “The New Palestinians,” he is remembered only unsympathetically as the friend of Mussolini who attempted to stop the transport of Jews to Palestine. But after reading Sandra Mackey’s richer portrait of him in Passion and Politics: The Turbulent World of the Arabs (Dutton: $23; 448 pp.), his behavior seems at least understandable. Initially, Mackey reports, Haj Amin tried earnestly to work within the system to win representation for his people from Palestine’s British rulers. Shedding Arab garb for white spats and black patent-leather shoes, he would knock meekly on government doors and glumly sit “in cheap hotels waiting for permission to make a perfunctory visit to a lower-level official in the colonial office.” All the while, says Mackey, he watched “Zionists float through the drawing rooms of Britain’s political elite.”

Such humiliation does not excuse Haj Amin’s later rabid anti-Zionism, of course, but Mackey’s thoughtful, searching analysis of the central role honor plays in Arab society does help explain why Britain’s brushoff affected him so deeply. In ancient Arabia, Mackey writes, the code of honor imposed order on tight, cohesive tribal units--ensuring, for instance, that competition would occur only between tribes of equal strength. The West had similar codes, of course, but it abandoned most of them when it began to trade surplus goods, an economy that required more intricate legal codes. The Arabs, in contrast, living in a harsh world of sand, dust and rock that yielded few surplus goods, held on far more tightly to their ancient ethics.

(This may help explain why Western images of the Arabs--such as the memoirs of Paul Bowles or the novels of David Grossman--have tended to portray Arab culture as exotically primal. Arab leaders point out that while such images certainly help writers turn a good yarn, they also encourage the kind of racism that handicapped representatives like Haj Amin at the bargaining table.)

The Palestinians began to pay a price for their resistance to change when the first Jews fled the pogroms of Europe for Palestine in the 1890s. As professors Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal write in their informative, pro-Zionist history, Palestinians: The Making of a People (Free Press: $29.95; 362 pp.), the technology, education and capital the Jews brought to Palestine gave them a huge economic advantage over the resident Arabs. By 1934, Palestinian Jews had an annual per capita income equivalent to 34; for Palestinians, it was only 7. As Mackey writes, “Rather than benefiting from any trickle-down phenomenon from the Jewish economy, the Palestinian faced a steeply escalating cost of living brought about by the infusion of foreign money to which he had no access.”

In religion, many Palestinians found an effective balm against the pain of their powerlessness. Typical was Abdul Aziz Rantisi, the exiled Islamic Studies professor who now leads prayers for the Palestinians currently stranded in Lebanon. In The New Palestinians: The Emerging Generation of Leaders by John Wallach and Janet Wallach (Prima Publishing, P.O. Box 1260WAL, Rocklin, CA 95677: $22.95; 331 pp.), a series of generally vivid portraits, authors John Wallach and Janet Wallach show how Abdul Aziz spent his childhood in circumstances not unlike the ones he finds himself in today: in a tent camp in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip. “I will never forget that I had no shoes,” he remembers. “I had to go to school with bare feet and torn clothes. I never had enough to eat.” After he lost his uncle in a 1956 bombing of the camp and some of his friends in the 1967 War, Abdul Aziz found himself sitting silent and alone for long periods of time. Then he found religion. He was initiated into the Muslim Brotherhood, ironically, by members of a mosque built with money the Israelis had given the Gazans in an attempt to quell uprisings after the 1967 war.

Ultimately, the story enacted here is about much more than whether to call a small, Maryland-sized patch of desert Israel or Palestine. It is about a people trying to emerge from the Third World into the First--and we are certain to hear more of it as the North/South rivalry replaces the old East/West one. Whether the intellect and courage the Palestinians display so clearly in these books will be enough to help them make this transition, or whether they will remain invisible until they accumulate cruder expressions of strength, from oil to armaments, remains to be seen. Meanwhile, all we can do is root for those Palestinians now trying to build bridges from old to new.