Palestine Made Flesh

In a 1998 opinion piece for Egyptian weekly Al Ahram, Edward Said memorably skewered Yasser Arafat’s intention to issue his second declaration of Palestinian statehood within a year. Said wrote, “I say [statehood] with some irony because, at first glance, the notion of declaring a state for a second time (Algiers, November 1998 was the first) must strike the untutored spectator as inherently funny, since in both instances, except for about 60 per cent of Gaza, there is very little land for this state.”1 Indeed, Arafat’s poorly thought out decrees for statehood never succeeded, resulting instead in the expected Is-raeli backlash against Palestinians living under occupation and within the Israeli state. But as Said went on to criticise the most obvious flaws of the illusive ‘statehood’ Arafat strove for, he made quite a pro-found assertion: “If by declaring that what, in effect, is a theoretical abridgement of true statehood is the first step towards the realization of actual statehood, then one might as well hope to extract sunlight from a cucumber on the basis of the sun having entered the cucum-ber in the first place. This is an example not of serious, but of magical thought, something we have no need of now.”2 Lover of poetry and music though he was, Edward Said seriously devalues the radical potential of imagination in his article. Specifically, he slights the role that imagination plays in creating and sustaining a truly autonomous Palestinian nation. A nation with no land but also no borders; a na-tion with no military but also no war, and a nation with no recognition based on the destructive logics of empire. This is all to say, a nation that is lived without restrictions through the innovative and agile prac-tice of imagining otherwise. This brief essay’s exploration of imagin-ing an ‘other’ way to recognize Palestine pays its respects to Edward Said’s dogged pursuit of liberation, but remembers that Edward Said, like millions of other Palestinians, lived, and died, elsewhere.