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.