The subject of this study was inspired by the seemingly unanswerable question asked by a colleague at a conference. ‘Where is Palestine, then?’ she wanted to know. The more thought I gave it, the more I realised Palestine has remained a question whose answer was like the Hindu meditational practice called ‘neti, neti’. Whenever a thought comes into the mind, you negate it by saying to yourself ‘neti, neti’, meaning ‘not this, not this’. Thus Palestine is not the West Bank, and it is not Gaza; and it is not the West Bank and Gaza combined. It is not the Palestinian Authority; and it is not Israel. It is not even historic Palestine except as a dream. Palestine exists in exile as a signifier whose signified does not match its shape or magnitude. To a large extent then, this nation exists in the dream of signification projected on it by its members because the historical process that would create a correspondence between signifier and signified seems to be endlessly postponed. Like the Buddhist Self, it is something that is, and is not; it is both present and absent. More than anything else, it is perhaps a metaphysical condition resembling Hamlet's dilemma. ‘Nothing is left for us,’ says Mahmoud Darwish, ‘except the weapon of madness [al-junun].