The Uncountry

Some words are weapons pretending to be nouns; this is the biography of those who wield one, swearing it’s nothing more than a label.

Cairo. March 1959.

At the Council of the Arab League, Nasser’s government sidelined a proposal concerning Palestinians. It called for “the reorganization of the Palestinian people and the establishment of its entity as a united people, its voice heard in the national [Arab] arena and on the international level, through representatives chosen by the Palestinian people.”

The council assented. The Arabic was al-kiyan al-filastini. Within five years, that kiyan had an acronym, a chairman, a movement, and offices in the Egyptian capital.

What kiyan is not.

It’s not dawla, the plain Arabic word for “state.” Kiyan is much more grey. Etymologically, it related to “being” and is used to refer to a formation, entity, or organization. Pointed at Palestine in 1959, the word was a prophecy in waiting.

It meant not yet.

The same noun was directed at Israel. This time it meant never.

One term with two tenses and legitimacy to chase. Toward Palestine it tilts forward to a nation in gestation. Toward Israel it goes backwards, condemning an error and awaiting its correction.

This may be one of the most elegant device polemicists ever marshaled. Elegant. Elegant and infantile. It’s akin to using “those we don’t speak of” to speak of them—the irony has no place to hide.

Most of the people reaching for kiyan in English couldn’t tell you where it began.

After 1948, Arab governments needed a way to admit Israel was there without calling it a state. Al-kiyan al-sahyuni, “the Zionist entity,” did the job. It spread under Egyptian President Nasser, especially after the Suez Crisis in 1956. You could hear it through radio, diplomacy, political movements, and the U.N.

I find this name-game humorous and adolescent. It reminds me of when my fellow liberals said “he’s not my president.” I would think, that’s all well and good, but he is actually the president.

Even some of Israel’s critics recognize the childish nature of the refusal to say the name. Edward Said called it “a stupid and wasteful policy” to speak of “the Zionist entity.” Amos Oz remembered Arab broadcasters approaching the country’s name as though it were “a four-letter word.”

The phrase hilariously collapses under its own weight. In 2009, Hamas ran a Gaza workshop titled “How to Talk to Israel,” where participants debated whether to call Israel the “Israeli entity” or the “Zionist entity.”

They said Israel’s name to decide how not to say it.

At the U.N., speakers have called the “Zionist entity” both “the only State” of its kind and one guilty of “State terrorism.”

A Kuwaiti newspaper reports on the entity’s passports, citizens, and strategic partnerships. Fatima Mohammed reached rhetorical perfection when she explained “the Israeli entity, which is Israel—the Zionist entity, which is Israel.”