By: Dr. Edward Said
>
> With the bombs and missiles falling on Afghanistan in the high-altitude US
> destruction that is Operation Enduring Freedom, the Palestine question may
> seem tangential to the altogether more urgent events in Central Asia. It
> would be a mistake to think so -- and not just because Osama Bin Laden and
> his followers (no one knows how many there are, in theory or in practice)
> have tried to capture Palestine as a rhetorical part of their
> unconscionable
> campaign of terror; for so too has Israel, for its own purposes. With the
> killing of Cabinet Minister Rahavam Zeevi on 17 October as retaliation by
> the PFLP for the assassination of its leader by Israel last August,
> General
> Sharon's sustained campaign against the Palestine Authority as Israel's
> Bin
> Laden has risen to a new, semi- hysterical pitch. Israel has been
> assassinating Palestinian leaders and militants (over 60 of them to date)
> for the past several months, and can't have been surprised that its
> illegal
> methods would sooner or later prompt Palestinian retaliation in kind. But
> why one set of killings should be acceptable and others not is a question
> Israel and its supporters are unable to answer. So the violence goes on,
> with Israel's occupation the more deadly, and the vastly more destructive,
> causing huge civilian suffering: in the period between 18 and 21 October,
> six Palestinian towns re-occupied by Israeli forces; five more Palestinian
> activists assassinated plus 21 civilians killed and 160 injured; curfews
> imposed everywhere -- and all this Israel has the gall to compare with the
> US war against Afghanistan and terrorism.
>
> Thus, the frustration and subsequent impasse in pressing the claims of a
> people dispossessed for 53 years and militarily occupied for 34 have
> definitively gone beyond the main arena of struggle and are willy-nilly
> tied
> in all sorts of ways to the global war against terrorism. Israel and its
> supporters worry that the US will sell them out, all the while protesting
> contradictorily that Israel isn't the issue in the new war. Palestinians,
> Arabs and Muslims generally have felt either uneasiness or a creeping
> guilt
> by association that attaches to them in the public realm, despite efforts
> by
> political leaders to keep dissociating Bin Laden from Islam and the Arabs:
> but they, too, keep referring to Palestine as the great symbolic nexus of
> their disaffection.
>
> In official Washington, however, George Bush and Colin Powell have more
> than
> once revealed unambiguously that Palestinian self-determination is an
> important, perhaps even a central issue. The turbulence of war and its
> unknown dimensions and complications (its consequences in places like
> Saudi
> Arabia and Egypt are likely to be dramatic, if as yet unknown) have
> stirred
> up the whole Middle East in striking ways, so that the need for some
> genuinely positive change in the status of the seven million stateless
> Palestinians is sure to grow in importance, even though a number of quite
> dispiriting things about its present impasse are evident enough now. The
> main problem is whether or not the US and the parties are going to resort
> only to the stopgap measures that brought us the disastrous Oslo
> agreement.
>
> The immediate experience of the Al-Aqsa Intifada has universalised Arab
> and
> Muslim powerlessness and exasperation to a degree never before magnified
> as
> it is now. The Western media hasn't at all conveyed the crushing pain and
> humiliation imposed on Palestinians by Israel's collective punishment, its
> house demolitions, its invasions of Palestinian areas, its air bombings
> and
> killings, as have the nightly broadcasts by Al- Jazeera satellite
> television, or admirable daily reporting in Ha'aretz by the Israeli
> journalist Amira Hass and commentators like her. At the same time, I
> think,
> there is widespread understanding among Arabs that the Palestinians (and,
> by
> extension, the other Arabs) have been traduced and hopelessly misled by
> their leaders. An abyss visibly separates nattily suited negotiators who
> make declarations in luxurious surroundings and the dusty hell of the
> streets of Nablus, Jenin, Hebron, and elsewhere. Schooling is inadequate;
> unemployment and poverty rates have climbed to alarming heights; anxiety
> and
> insecurity fill the atmosphere, with governments unable or unwilling to
> stop
> either the rise of Islamic extremism or an astonishingly flagrant
> corruption
> at the very top. Above all, the brave secularists who protest at human
> rights abuses, fight clerical tyranny, and try to speak and act on behalf
> of
> a new modern democratic Arab order are pretty much left alone in their
> fight, unassisted by the official culture, their books and careers
> sometimes
> thrown as a sop to mounting Islamic fury. A huge dank cloud of mediocrity
> and incompetence hangs over everyone, and this in turn has given rise to
> magical thinking and/or a cult of death that is more prevalent than ever.
>
> I know it is often argued that suicide bombings are either the result of
> frustration and desperation, or that they emerge from the criminal
> pathology
> of deranged religious fanatics. But these are inadequate explanations. The
> New York and Washington suicide terrorists were middle-class, far from
> illiterate men, perfectly capable of modern planning, audacious as well as
> terrifyingly deliberate destruction. The young men sent out by Hamas and
> Islamic Jihad do what they are told with a conviction that suggests
> clarity
> of purpose, if not of much else. The real culprit is a system of primary
> education that is woefully piecemeal, cobbled together out of the Qur'an,
> rote exercises based on outdated 50-year-old textbooks, hopelessly large
> classes, woefully ill-equipped teachers, and a nearly total inability to
> think critically. Along with the oversized Arab armies -- all of them
> burdened with unusable military hardware and no record of any positive
> achievement -- this antiquated educational apparatus has produced the
> bizarre failures in logic, moral reasoning, and appreciation of human life
> that lead either to leaps of religious enthusiasm of the worst kind or to
> a
> servile worship of power.
>
> Similar failures in vision and logic operate on the Israeli side. How it
> has
> come to seem morally possible, and even justifiable, for Israel to
> maintain
> and defend its 34-year occupation fairly boggles the mind, but even
> Israeli
> "peace" intellectuals remain fixated on the supposed absence of a
> Palestinian peace camp, forgetting that a people under occupation doesn't
> have the same luxury as the occupier to decide whether or not an
> interlocutor exists. In the process, military occupation is taken as an
> acceptable given and is scarcely mentioned; Palestinian terrorism becomes
> the cause, not the effect, of violence, even though one side possesses a
> modern military arsenal (unconditionally supplied by the US), while the
> other is stateless, virtually defenceless, savagely persecuted at will,
> herded inside 160 little cantons, schools closed, life made impossible.
> Worst of all, the daily killing and wounding of Palestinians is
> accompanied
> by the growth of Israeli settlements and the 400,000 settlers who dot the
> Palestinian landscape without respite.
>
> A recent report issued by Peace Now in Israel states the following:
>
> 1. At the end of June 2001 there were 6,593 housing units in different
> stages of active construction in settlements.
>
> 2. During the Barak administration, 6,045 housing units were begun in
> settlements. In fact, settlement building in the year 2000 reached the
> highest since 1992, with 4,499 starts.
>
> 3. When the Oslo agreements were signed there were 32,750 housing units in
> the settlements. Since the signing of the Oslo agreements 20,371 housing
> units have been constructed, representing an increase of 62 per cent in
> settlements units.
>
> The essence of the Israeli position is its total irreconcilability with
> what
> the "Jewish state" wants -- peace and security, even though everything it
> does assures neither one nor the other.
>
> The US has underwritten Israel's intransigence and brutality: there are no
> two ways about it -- $92 billion and unending political support, for all
> the
> world to see. Ironically, this was far truer during, rather than either
> before or after, the Oslo process. The plain truth of the matter is that
> anti- Americanism in the Arab and Muslim world is tied directly to the
> US's
> behaviour, lecturing the world on democracy and justice while openly
> supporting their exact opposites. There also is an undoubted ignorance
> about
> the United States in the Arab and Islamic worlds, and there has been far
> too
> great a tendency to use rhetorical tirades and sweeping general
> condemnation
> instead of rational analysis and critical understanding of America. The
> same
> is true of Arab attitudes to Israel.
>
> Both the Arab governments and the intellectuals have failed in important
> ways on this matter. Governments have failed to devote any time or
> resources
> to an aggressive cultural policy that puts across an adequate
> representation
> of culture, tradition and contemporary society, with the result that these
> things are unknown in the West, leaving unchallenged pictures of Arabs and
> Muslims as violent, over-sexed fanatics. The intellectual failure is no
> less
> great. It is simply inadequate to keep repeating cliches about struggle
> and
> resistance that imply a military programme of action when none is either
> possible or really desirable. Our defence against unjust policies is a
> moral
> one, and we must first occupy the moral high ground and then promote
> understanding of that position in Israel and the US, something we have
> never
> done. We have refused interaction and debate, disparagingly calling them
> only normalisation and collaboration. Refusing to compromise in putting
> forth our just position (which is what I am calling for) cannot possibly
> be
> construed as a concession, especially when it is made directly and
> forcefully to the occupier or the author of unjust policies of occupation
> and reprisal. Why do we fear confronting our oppressors directly,
> humanely,
> persuasively, and why do we keep believing in precisely the vague
> ideological promises of redemptive violence that are little different from
> the poison spewed by Bin Laden and the Islamists? The answer to our needs
> is
> in principled resistance, well-organised civil disobedience against
> military
> occupation and illegal settlement, and an educational programme that
> promotes coexistence, citizenship and the worth of human life.
>
> But we are now in an intolerable impasse, requiring more than ever a
> genuine
> return to the all- but-abandoned bases of peace that were proclaimed at
> Madrid in 1991: UN Resolutions 242 and 332, land for peace. There can be
> no
> peace without pressure on Israel to withdraw from the occupied
> territories,
> including Jerusalem, and -- as the Mitchell report affirmed -- to
> dismantle
> its settlements. This can obviously be done in a phased way, with some
> sort
> of immediate emergency protection for undefended Palestinians, but the
> great
> failing of Oslo must be remedied now, at the start: a clearly articulated
> end to occupation, the establishment of a viable, genuinely independent
> Palestinian state, and the existence of peace through mutual recognition.
> These goals have to be stated as the objective of negotiations, a beacon
> shining at the end of the tunnel. Palestinian negotiators have to be firm
> about this, and not use the re-opening of talks -- if any should now
> begin,
> in this atmosphere of harsh Israeli war on the Palestinian people -- as an
> excuse simply to return to Oslo. In the end, though, only the US can
> restore
> negotiations, with European, Islamic, Arab, and African support; but this
> must be done through the United Nations, which must be the essential
> sponsor
> of the effort.
>
> And since the Palestinian-Israeli struggle has been so humanly
> impoverishing
> I would suggest that important symbolic gestures of recognition and
> responsibility, undertaken perhaps under the auspices of a Mandela or a
> panel of impeccably credentialed peace-makers, should try to establish
> justice and compassion as crucial elements in the proceedings.
> Unfortunately, it is perhaps true that neither Arafat nor Sharon are
> suited
> to so high an enterprise. The Palestinian political scene must absolutely
> be
> overhauled to represent seamlessly what every Palestinian longs for --
> peace
> with dignity and justice and, most important, decent, equal coexistence
> with
> Israeli Jews. We need to move beyond the undignified shenanigans, the
> disgraceful backing and filling of a leader who hasn't in a long time come
> anywhere near the sacrifices of his long- suffering people. The same is
> true
> of Israelis, who are led abysmally by the likes of General Sharon. What we
> need is a vision that can lift the much abused spirit beyond the sordid
> present, something that will not fail when presented unwaveringly as what
> people need to aspire to. |
