Said: A vision to lift the spirit

[Michael Pollak]

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.