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IN JUNE 2013, the Guardian newspaper published an official survey of refugee numbers from the United Nations which did not include 4.9 million Palestinians excluded from their native land.
This, the paper explained, was because Palestinian refugees were specifically and intentionally excluded from the international refugee law regime established in 1951.
“So began our long ordeal of confinement by exclusivist categorisation,” writes Raja Shehadeh, author of this important study of language as a weapon of war.
According to Shehadeh, Palestinian refugees became a special category, different from refugees the world over, and were considered “absentees.” A category without context, it meant that they were denied compensation and the right of return.
This semantic juggling was not invented by the zionists or the UN bureaucrats who colluded with them. It is as old as Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass, when Humpty Dumpty was made to declare that: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
The search for justice alluded to in the book’s subtitle has certainly been compromised by the zionist glossing of “hasbara,” a Hebrew word literally meaning “explaining” that, in reality, is propaganda, pure though not so simple.
The Humpty-Dumpty semantics of hasbara means that those Palestinians excluded from their land are described as absentees, even if they have been accorded the second-class citizenship of being Arab in a Jewish state. If they move from the part of Israel where they are permitted to live, albeit only temporarily, official policy is to “encourage” them to emigrate — they are categorised as interlopers.
This is not pedagogical point-scoring, for Shehadeh is no academic. As well as being a brilliant writer, whose prose burns on the page, he was involved in the 1991 Washington negotiations between the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Israel.
He devotes an entire chapter to a post mortem of the so-called Oslo accords, describing how in 1993 he packed his bags and left when the PLO leadership refused to examine Israel’s military policy in the occupied lands and he is critical of the Palestinian negotiators and even of Hamas.
These and other insights underline that while hasbara may be a weapon of war, this book is very much a weapon of peace and justice.