에드워드 사이드의 팔레스타인 문제 해법: 이민족일국가론

Abstract

The question of Palestine brought about by the conflict between Israeli Jews and Palestinians had been the most significant task to solve to Edward Said (1935~2003) throughout his intellectual career. Although his other works such as Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism have made him well-known to the world, his works on the Palestine question far exceed others in range and consistency: he has left almost 10 books on the question including The Question of Palestine, Covering Islam, Peace and Its Discontents, The End of the Peace Process, and From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map. His strategy to tackle the question in his early works such as the Question of Palestine and Covering Islam was to construct a Palestinian resistant discursive field in opposition to the discourse of Israeli zionism. This strategy came from his conviction in Foucaudian notion of discourse which supposes discourse constructs reality rather than the other way at the time. However, in his later works on the question, he directly faced the Palestinian life and history and consequently presented the more practical and desirable bi-national state solution. This paper examines Said's bi-national state solution to the Palestine question. The Palestine question started when Jews settled in the land of Palestine and expelled Palestinians from there. Said's bi-national state solution overcomes the precedently suggested one nation-state and two-state solutions. One nation-state solution is the idea that either Jews or Palestinians live in the Palestine land and the other go away. This idea comes from extremists whether they are Jews or Palestinians. The two-state solution is the idea that Jews and Palestinians live in their own nation-state side by side in the land. This idea brought about the Oslo Accords in 1993. But the Oslo Accords proved to be a failure. The accords turned out to be a Israeli strategy of colonizing Palestinians and the land. Said's bi-national state solution is the idea that Israeli Jews and Palestinians live together in the Israeli-Palestinian nation-state. This solution is based on Said's observation of the de facto bi-national society of Israel and the historical multi-ethnic and multi-cultural Palestinian society. By establishing a bi-national state in the Palestine land, Said argues that the truth and reconciliation among Jews and Palestinians would be possible as have been in South Africa after Apartheid.