Khoury???s talismans
Elias Khoury
feels ???the Palestinian issue must be rethought in a different way??? and that the
entire rebellion in Syria has been hampered by a lack of purpose. BY VIJAY
PRASHAD
TUCKED
away in Beirut’s Verdun neighbourhood is the Institute for Palestine Studies
(founded in 1963). On its upper reaches is the office of Elias Khoury, the
Lebanese novelist and editor of the institute???s Arabic language journal, Majallat-al-Dirasat-al-Filastiniyah.
Khoury is not Palestinian, but as a young man in 1967, he threw himself into
the Fatah???the main organisation of the Palestinian resistance???while he lived in
the radical milieu of Jordan???s Palestinian camps. An active role in the
Lebanese Civil War and close relations with the intellectual currents of
radical Palestinian life (alongside the writers Ghassan Kanafani and Mahmoud
Darwish) deepened Khoury???s political anchor. Later he was to say of the
editorial collective of a cultural magazine of those days, ???We were neither on
the liberal right nor on the classical left. Intellectually speaking, we were
very much linked to the Palestinian experience.??? This formula suits Khoury, who
has kept his distance from Lebanon???s Communist movement and from the liberals
who are too often able to make alliances with the United States and Saudi
Arabia.
