Said: A vision to lift the spirit

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Thu Nov 1 02:56:13 PST 2001


Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 25 - 31 October 2001, Issue No.557 Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

A vision to lift the spirit

Principles and education: these are the ways out of the Middle East

impasse, writes 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 clichés 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.



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