Memory of the vanquished

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Palestinian intellectuals, across different decades, have written about Zionism and the subjugated Palestinian who confronts it. There has always been an image of Palestine belonging to one era and fighting against another, and an image of Zionism fortified by biblical myths and the last vestiges of colonialism. Perhaps the tragic difference between these two historical periods—Palestine's being the era of the resurgent "sick man of Europe"—is what imposed upon the Palestinian intellectual a confused reading, one that sees "Zionist progress" and heralds victory, urging Palestinians to struggle while haunted by despair. This reading may sometimes see what it wants to see, and at other times overlook what it should see. Within these parameters, the Palestinian national cultural memory, whose core is the Palestinian-Zionist conflict, is the sum of the correct and incorrect readings produced by Palestinian intellectuals, and the sum of intellectual efforts that attempted the truth but missed it, or came close to it but never settled on it. All of this does not diminish the importance or value of this memory, for it was, and remains, a national heritage and a national necessity: a heritage that illuminates noble and successive efforts that derived the questions of culture from the questions of the homeland; and an indispensable necessity that provides the Palestinian with resolve, confidence, and much-needed knowledge, which is then refined and engaged with by subsequent knowledge. And in this dialogue, within its narrow and sorrowful timeframe, Palestinian memory is constructed—a memory of resistance and struggle, or a memory forced by an unjust context to be resistant and struggle, or not to be at all.