"Occupation is the Atrocity" (by Edward Said)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>From: Rewand Nakad <rewandn at hotmail.com>
>Reply-To: ews1 at columbia.edu
>Subject: [BRC-NEWS] Occupation is the Atrocity
>Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2001 06:04:03 -0400 (EDT)
>
>http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/2001/547/op2.htm
>
>Al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo)
>
>16-22 August 2001 [Issue No. 547]
>
>[What the Palestinians need now, writes Edward Said, is a
>united leadership that takes positions and plans mass
>actions designed not to return to Oslo but to press on with
>resistance and liberation.]
>
>Occupation is the Atrocity
>
>By Edward Said <ews1 at columbia.edu>
>
>In the United States, where Israel has its main political
>base and from which it has received over $92 billion in aid
>since 1967, the terrible human cost of Thursday's Jerusalem
>restaurant bombing and Monday's Haifa disaster settles
>quickly into a familiar explanatory framework. Arafat hasn't
>done enough to control his terrorists; suicidal Islamic
>extremists are to be found everywhere, bringing harm on "us"
>and our strongest allies, driven by sheer human hatred;
>Israel must defend its security. A thoughtful individual
>might add: these people have been fighting tiresomely for
>thousands of years anyway; the violence must be stopped;
>there has been too much suffering on both sides, although
>the way Palestinians send their children into battle is
>another sign of how much Israel has to put up with. And so,
>exasperated but still restrained, Israel invades unfortified
>and undefended Jenin with bulldozers and tanks, destroys the
>Palestine Authority's police buildings plus several others,
>and then sends out its propagandists to say that it has sent
>a message to Arafat to curb his terrorists. In the meantime,
>he and his coterie are begging for American protection,
>doubtless forgetting that Israel is the one with US
>protection and that all he will get, for the 6,000th time,
>is an injunction to stop the violence.
>
>The fact is that in America, Israel has pretty much won the
>propaganda war, and America is where it's about to put
>several more million dollars into a public relations
>campaign (using stars like Zubin Mehta, Yitzhak Pearlman,
>and Amos Oz) to further improve its image. But consider what
>Israel's unrelenting war against the undefended, basically
>unarmed, stateless and poorly led Palestinian people has
>already achieved. The disparity in power is so vast that it
>makes you cry. Equipped with the latest in American-built
>(and freely given) air power, helicopter gunships,
>uncountable tanks and missiles, and a superb navy as well as
>a state of the art intelligence service, Israel is a nuclear
>power abusing a people without any armour or artillery, no
>air force (its one pathetic airfield in Gaza is controlled
>by Israel) or navy or army, none of the institutions of a
>modern state. The appallingly unbroken history of Israel's
>34-year-old military occupation (the second longest in
>modern history) of illegally conquered Palestinian land has
>been obliterated from public memory nearly everywhere, as
>has been the destruction of Palestinian society in 1948 and
>the expulsion of 68 per cent of its native people, of whom
>4.5 million remain refugees today. Behind the reams of
>newspeak, the stark outlines of Israel's decades-long daily
>pressure on a people whose main sin is that they happened to
>be there, in Israel's way, is staggeringly perceptible in
>its inhuman sadism. The fantastically cruel confinement of
>1.3 million people jammed like so many human sardines into
>the Gaza strip, plus the nearly two million Palestinian
>residents of the West Bank, has no parallel in the annals of
>apartheid or colonialism. F-16 jets were never used to bomb
>South African homelands. They are used against Palestinians
>towns and villages. All entrances and exits to the
>territories are controlled by Israel (Gaza is completely
>surrounded by a barbed wire fence), which also controls the
>entire water supply. Divided into about 63 non-contiguous
>cantons, completely encircled and besieged by Israeli
>troops, punctuated by 140 settlements (many of them built
>under Ehud Barak's premiership) with their own road network
>banned to "non-Jews," as Arabs are referred to, along with
>such unflattering epithets as thieves, snakes, cockroaches
>and grasshoppers, Palestinians under occupation have now
>been reduced to 60 per cent unemployment and a poverty rate
>of 50 per cent (half the people of Gaza and the West Bank
>live on less than $2 a day); they cannot travel from one
>place to the next; they must endure long lines at Israeli
>checkpoints that detain and humiliate the elderly, the sick,
>the student, and the cleric for hours on end; 150,000 of
>their olive and citrus trees have been punitively uprooted;
>2,000 of their houses demolished; acres of their land either
>destroyed or expropriated for military settlement purposes.
>
>Since the Al-Aqsa Intifada began late last September, 609
>Palestinians have been killed (four times more than Israeli
>fatalities) and 15,000 wounded (a dozen times more than on
>the other side). Regular Israeli army assassinations have
>picked off alleged terrorists at will, most of the time
>killing innocents like so many flies. Last week, 14
>Palestinians were murdered openly by Israeli forces using
>helicopter gunships and missiles; they were thus "prevented"
>from killing Israelis, although at least two children and
>five innocents were also murdered, to say nothing of many
>wounded civilians and several destroyed buildings -- part of
>the somehow acceptable collateral damage. Nameless and
>faceless, Israel's daily Palestinian victims barely rate a
>mention on America's news programmes, even though -- for
>reasons that I simply cannot understand -- Arafat is still
>hoping that the Americans will rescue him and his crumbling
>regime.
>
>Nor is this all. Israel's plan is not just to hold land and
>fill it with dreadful, murderous armed settlers who,
>defended by the army, wreak havoc on Palestinian orchards,
>schoolchildren and homes; it is, as the American researcher
>Sara Roy has named it, to de-develop Palestinian society, to
>make life impossible so that the Palestinians will leave, or
>give up somehow, or do something crazy like blow themselves
>up. Since 1967, leaders have been jailed and deported by the
>Israeli occupation regime, small businesses and farms made
>unviable by confiscation and sheer destruction, students
>prevented from studying, universities closed (in the
>mid-'80s Palestinian universities on the West Bank were
>closed for four years). No Palestinian farmer or business
>can export to any Arab country directly; their products must
>pass through Israel. Taxes are paid to Israel. Even after
>the Oslo peace process began in 1993, the occupation was
>simply re-packaged, only 18 per cent of the land given to
>the corrupt Vichy-like Authority of Arafat, whose mandate
>seems to have been only to police and tax his people for
>Israel's sake. After eight fruitless immiserating years of
>the Oslo negotiations masterminded by an American team of
>former Israeli lobby staffers like Martin Indyk and Dennis
>Ross, Israel was still in control, the occupation packaged
>more efficiently, the phrase "peace process" given a
>consecrated halo that allowed more abuses, more settlements,
>more imprisonments, more Palestinian suffering to go on than
>before. Including a "Judaised" East Jerusalem, with Orient
>House occupied and its contents looted or carted off (there
>are invaluable records, land deeds, maps, that in a
>repetition of what it did when it stole PLO archives from
>Beirut in 1982, Israel has simply stolen), Israel has
>implanted no less than 400,000 settlers on Palestinian land.
>To call them vigilantes and hoodlums is not an exaggeration.
>
>It is worth recalling that a couple of weeks after Ariel
>Sharon's gratuitously arrogant visit to Jerusalem's Haram
>Al-Sharif on 28 September, with 1,000 soldiers and guards
>supplied by Prime Minister Barak, Israel was condemned for
>this action by a unanimous Security Council resolution.
>Then, as even the merest child could have predicted, the
>anti-colonial rebellion broke out, with eight killed
>Palestinians its first victims. Sharon was swept to power
>essentially to "subdue" the Palestinians, teach them a
>lesson, get rid of them. His record as an Arab-killer goes
>back 30 years, before the Sabra and Shatila massacres that
>his forces supervised in 1982, and for which he has now been
>indicted in a Belgian court. Still, Arafat wants to
>negotiate with him and come perhaps to a cozy arrangement
>with him so as to safeguard the very Authority that Sharon
>is systematically dismantling, destroying, razing to the
>ground.
>
>But he isn't a fool either. With every Palestinian act of
>resistance, his forces ratchet up the pressure a notch
>higher, tightening the siege more, taking more land, making
>a habit of more and deeper incursions into Palestinian towns
>like Jenin and Ramallah, cutting off more supplies, openly
>assassinating Palestinian leaders, making life more
>intolerable, redefining the terms of his government's
>actions, that it once made "generous concessions" while
>"defending" itself, that it "prevents" terrorism, that it
>"secures" areas, that it "re-establishes" control, and so
>on. Meanwhile he and his minions attack and dehumanise
>Arafat, even saying that he is the "arch-terrorist"
>(although he literally can't move without Israeli
>permission), and that "we" have no war with the Palestinian
>people. What a boon for that people! With such "restraint,"
>why should a massive invasion, carefully bruited about to
>terrorise the Palestinians even more sadistically, be
>necessary? Israel knows that it can retake their buildings
>at will (witness the wholesale theft of Jerusalem's Orient
>House, plus nine other buildings, offices, libraries,
>archives there and in Abu Dis), just as it has all but
>eliminated the Palestinians as a people.
>
>This is the real story of Israel's pretended
>"victimisation," constructed with such premeditated care and
>evil intent for months now. Language has been sundered from
>reality. Pity not the inept Arab governments who can and
>will do nothing to stop Israel: pity the people who bear the
>wounds in their flesh and the emaciated bodies of their
>children, some of whom believe that martyrdom is the only
>way out for them. And Israel, stuck in a futureless
>campaign, flailing about mercilessly? As James Cousins, the
>Irish poet and critic, said in 1925, the coloniser is in the
>grip of "false and selfish pre- occupations that stand in
>the way of its attention to the natural evolution of its own
>national genius and pull[ed] from the path of open rectitude
>into the twisted byways of dishonest thought, speech, and
>action, in the artificial defense of a false position." All
>colonisers have gone that way, learning or stopping at
>nothing, until at last, as Israel turned tail from its 22
>year occupation of Lebanon, they exit the territory, leaving
>behind an exhausted and crippled people. If this was
>supposed to fulfil Jewish aspirations, why did it require so
>many new victims from another people who had nothing to do
>with Jewish exile and persecution in the first place?
>
>With Arafat and Company in command, there is no hope. What
>is the man doing, grotesquely fetching up in the Vatican and
>Lagos and other miscellaneous places, pleading without
>dignity or even intelligence for imaginary observers, Arab
>aid, international support, instead of staying with his
>people, trying to aid them with medical supplies,
>morale-boosting measures and real leadership? What we need
>is a unified leadership of people who are on the ground, who
>are actually doing the resisting, who are really with and of
>their people, not the fat, cigar-chomping bureaucrats who
>want their business deals preserved and their VIP passes
>renewed, and who have lost all trace of decency or
>credibility. A united leadership that takes positions and
>plans mass actions designed not to return to Oslo (can you
>believe the folly of that idea?) but to press on with
>resistance and liberation, instead of confusing people with
>talk of negotiations and the stupid Mitchell Plan.
>
>Arafat is finished: why don't we admit that he can neither
>lead, nor plan, nor do anything that makes any difference
>except to him and his Oslo cronies who have benefited
>materially from their people's misery? All the polls show
>that his presence blocks whatever forward movement might be
>possible. We need a united leadership to make decisions, not
>simply to grovel before the Pope and the moronic George W
>Bush, even as the Israelis are killing his heroic people
>with impunity. A leader must lead the resistance, reflect
>the realities on the ground, respond to his people's needs,
>plan, think, and expose himself to the same dangers and
>difficulties that everyone experiences. The struggle for
>liberation from Israeli occupation is where every
>Palestinian worth anything now stands: Oslo cannot be
>restored or re-packaged as Arafat and Company might desire.
>It's over for them and the sooner they pack and get out, the
>better for everyone.
>
>Copyright (c) 2001 Al-Ahram Weekly. All Rights Reserved.
>
>
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