[Reader-list] [Fwd] Edward Said on Israel/Palestine

[rustam]

Subject: Edward Said on Israel/Palestine 
Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2002 14:44:47 -0500 (EST) 
March 24 - March 30, 2002 What Price Oslo? 
By Edward Said 
The television images on Al-Jazeera have been burningly clear. 
There is a kind of Palestinian heroism in evidence there that 
makes this the story of our time. An entire army, navy, and air 
force supplied munificently and 
unconditionally by the United States have been wreaking 
destruction on the 18 per cent of the West Bank and 60 per cent 
of Gaza afforded Palestinians after ten years of negotiations with 
Israel and the US. 
Palestinian hospitals, schools, refugee camps and civilian 
residences have been at the receiving end of a merciless, criminal 
assault by Israeli troops huddled inside their helicopter gun-ships, 
F-16's and Merkavas, and still the poorly armed resistance 
fighters take on this preposterously more powerful force 
undaunted and unyielding. 
In the US, CNN and newspapers like The New York Times fail, 
to their discredit, to ever mention that "the violence" is uneven and 
that there aren't two sides involved here, but only one state turning 
all its great power against a stateless, repeatedly refugeed, and 
dispossessed people, bereft of arms and real leadership, with the 
aim of destroying this people, "dealing them a terrible blow" as the 
war criminal who leads Israel shamelessly put it. 
As an index of how deranged Sharon has become, I might quote 
here what he said to Ha'aretz on 5 March: "The PA is behind the 
terror, it's all terror. Arafat is behind the terror. Our pressure is 
aimed at ending the terror. Don't expect Arafat to act against the 
terror. We have to cause them heavy casualties and then they'll 
know they can't keep using terror and win political achievements." 
Besides symptomatically revealing the workings of an obsessed 
mind bent on destruction and sheer, adulterated hatred, Sharon's 
words indicate the failures of reason and criticism loosed on the 
world since last September. 
Yes, there was a terrorist outrage, but there's more to the world 
than terror. There is politics, and struggle, and history, and 
injustice, and resistance and yes, state terror as well. With 
scarcely a peep from the American professorate or intelligentsia, 
we have all succumbed to the promiscuous misuse of language 
and sense, by which everything we don't like has become terror 
and what we do is pure and simple good -- fighting terror, no 
matter how much wealth, and lives, and destruction is involved. 
Swept away are all the Enlightenment precepts by which we 
attempt to educate our students and our-fellow citizens, replaced 
by a disproportionate orgy of vindictiveness and self-righteous 
wrath of the kind that only the wealthy and the powerful, it would 
seem, have the right to use and act upon. No wonder then that a 
fourth-rate thug like Sharon feels entitled (by emulation and 
derivation) to do what he does when in the greatest democracy on 
earth, laws, constitutional rights, writs of habeas corpus and 
reason itself are consigned to the rubbish bin in the pursuit of 
terror and terrorism. As educators and as citizens, we have failed 
in our mission by allowing ourselves to be bamboozled in this way, 
without so much as an organised public discussion about a 
defence budget that has shot up to $400 billion while 40 million 
people remain without health insurance. 
Israelis, Arabs and Americans are told that love of country 
requires such expenditures and such destruction because a good 
cause is at stake. Nonsense. What is at stake are material 
interests that keep rulers in power, corporations making profits, 
people in a state of manufactured consent, just so long as they 
don't get up one morning and start to think about where, in this 
mad technologised rush to bomb and kill, we are going. 
Israel is now waging a war against civilians, pure and simple, 
although you will never hear it put that way in the US. This is a 
racist war, and in its strategy and tactics, a colonial one as well. 
People are being killed and made to suffer disproportionately 
because they are not Jews. What an irony! 
Yet CNN never refers to "occupied" territories (always rather to 
"violence in Israel" as if the main battlefields are the concert halls 
and cafes of Tel Aviv and not in fact the ghettoes and besieged 
refugee camps of Palestine that have already been surrounded by 
150 illegal Israeli settlements). For the past ten years, the great 
fraud of Oslo was foisted on the world by the US, with hardly an 
awareness that only 18 per cent of the West Bank were given up, 
and 60 per cent of Gaza. No one knows geography and it's better 
not to know, since the reality on the ground is so astonishing, 
considering the verbal hoopla and self-congratulation. 
And that pseudo-pundit -- the insufferably conceited Thomas 
Friedman -- still has the gall to say that "Arab TV" shows one-
sided pictures, as if "Arab TV" should be showing things from 
Israel's point-of-view the way CNN does, with "Mid-East 
violence" the catch-all word for the ethnic cleansing that Israel is 
wreaking on the Palestinians in their ghettoes and camps. 
Has Friedman (or CNN for that matter) ever tried to point out the 
difference between an attacking army fighting a colonial war on 
the territory of the people it has occupied for 35 years, and the 
people defending themselves against that butchery? Of course 
not, for indeed why should Friedman ever bother to say honestly 
that there is no Palestinian occupation, there are no Palestinian F-
16's, no Apache helicopters, no gunboats, no Merkava tanks, in 
short, no Palestinian occupation of Israel. 
So much for Friedman's credentials as an honest commentator 
and reporter who has utterly failed, in unadorned terms, to explain 
the US view or to understand the Arab and Palestinian cause. 
Can he not see that he and his writings are part of the problem, 
that in their maundering self-justifications and the dishonesty in 
which he shows no sign of the self-criticism he keeps hectoringly 
expecting of others, he actually aggravates the ignorance and the 
misperceptions rather than reducing them? 
Poor journalist and educator, he. The picture you get here is that 
Israelis are battling for their lives instead of for their settlements 
and military bases on the occupied lands of Palestine. No maps 
have been run for months in the American media. On 8 March, 
hitherto the bloodiest day for 
Palestinians of the 16-month Intifada, CNN's main evening news 
specified the death of 40 "people" and failed even to mention the 
death of several Red Crescent workers killed while their 
ambulances were prevented by Israeli tanks from getting to the 
wounded. Just "people," and no pictures of the hell they've been 
living in this the 35th year of military occupation. Tul Karm is 
undergoing a siege of sieges with 24 hour curfews, electricity and 
water cut-off, systematic round-ups and the removal of 800young 
men, the wanton smashing of refugee houses, wholesale 
destruction of property (and I'm not speaking of nightclubs or 
sports facilities but of shacks and lean-tos that furnished twice 
displaced refugees with hovels for bare subsistence) and limitless 
cases of sadistic cruelty to unarmed and undefended civilians who 
are pushed and beaten and left to bleed to death, women allowed 
to give birth to stillborn babies while they wait needlessly at Israeli 
road-blocks, old men made to strip and take off their shoes and 
walk barefoot for a gum-chewing 18-year-old waving around an 
M-16 that my taxes have paid for. 
Bethlehem, its town center and university destroyed, flattened at 
5,000 feet by valiant Israeli bombers swooshing in with their 
marvelous F-16's which I've paid for too. Balata camp, Aida and 
Dheheisheh and Azza Camps, the tiny villages of Khadr and 
Husam, all battered into rubble without even a mention by the US 
press, whose New York editors so obviously have no problems 
with it, with a few exceptions here and there. 
The uncounted dead and wounded, the unburied and unassisted, to 
say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of lives maimed, 
distorted, catastrophically marked by wantonly caused suffering, 
all of it ordered at a safe distance from the action in leafy, calm 
West Jerusalem by men for whom the West Bank and Gaza are 
distant rat holes filled with insects and rodents that must be 
"subdued" and driven out, taught a lesson in the accepted jargon of 
Israel's superb military. On Tuesday, in the biggest attack of all, 
Ramallah has been invaded and is being ravaged by 140 Israeli 
tanks, thus completing Israel's re-conquest of the already-
occupied Palestinian territories. 
The Palestinian people are paying the heavy, heavy 
unconscionable price of Oslo, which after 10 years of negotiating 
left them with bits of land lacking coherence and continuity, 
security institutions designed to assure their subservience to Israel, 
and a life that impoverished them so that the Jewish state could 
thrive and prosper. In vain during those 10 years did some of us 
warn that the distance between the US-Israeli language of peace 
and the appalling realities on the ground was never bridged, never 
even intended to be bridged. Words and phrases like "peace 
process" and "terrorism" took hold without reference to any real 
referent. Land confiscations were either overlooked or referred to 
as "bilateral negotiations" that were taking place between a state 
consolidating its hold on territory it wanted at all costs, and a 
mediocre set of uninformed negotiators whom it took four years to 
acquire, much less use, a reliable map of the land they were 
negotiating over. The worst misrepresentation of all is that in the 
54 years since 1948, never has a narrative of Palestinian heroism 
and suffering been allowed to emerge. We are all depicted as 
violent fanatic extremists who are little more than the terrorists 
that George Bush and his cabal have imposed on the 
consciousness of a stunned and systematically misinformed 
population, aided and uncritically abetted by an entire army of 
commentators and media stars -- the Blitzers, Zahns, Lehrers, 
Rathers, Brokaws, Russerts, and their ilk. 
The Israeli lobby is scarcely needed with such faithful disciples 
trailing happily in its ranks. But now that the Saudi peace proposal 
has become the point of discussion and of hope, it is necessary, I 
think, to put it in its real, as opposed to its supposed, context. First 
of all, this is the re-cycled Reagan plan of 1982, the Fahd Plan of 
1983, the Madrid plan of 1991, and so on: in other words, it 
follows a series of plans many times put forward which in the end 
both Israel and the US have not only refused to implement, but 
have actively torpedoed. The way I see it, the only negotiations 
worth having should be on the phases of a total Israeli withdrawal 
and not, as was the case with Oslo, bargaining over what pieces 
of land Israel was willing very grudgingly to give up. There's been 
too much Palestinian blood spilled, too much Israeli contempt and 
racist violence dispensed for any serious return to Oslo-style 
negotiations brokered by that most biased of honest brokers, the 
United States. Everyone is aware, however, that the old 
Palestinian negotiators haven't given up on their dreams and 
illusions, and that meetings have been occurring throughout the 
raids and bombings. 
But I would argue that due weight be given to decades of 
Palestinian suffering and the real human costs of Israel's 
destructive policies before any negotiations accord undue status to 
Israeli governments that have trampled on Palestinian rights the 
way they have demolished our houses and killed our people. Any 
Arab-Israeli negotiations that do not factor in history -- and for 
this task a team of historians, economists, and geographers with a 
conscience are needed -- are not worth having, just as 
Palestinians must now elect a new set of negotiators and 
representatives in the hope of salvaging something from the 
present calamity. 
In short, in whatever meetings that now occur between Israeli and 
Palestinian representatives, the gravity of Israeli depredations 
against our people has to be given attention and not simply 
brushed aside as so much past history. Oslo, in effect, pardoned 
the occupation, excusing it for all the buildings and lives destroyed 
over the first 25 years of occupation. After so much further 
suffering, Israel cannot be excused and allowed to walk away 
from the table with not even a rhetorical demand that it needs to 
atone for what it did. I will be told that politics is about what is 
possible, not about what is desired, and that we should be grateful 
to get even a small Israeli pullback. I disagree strongly.
Negotiations can only be about when the total withdrawal will 
take place, not what percentage Israel is willing to concede. A 
conqueror and a vandal cannot concede anything: he must simply 
return what he's taken and pay for the abuses that are his 
responsibility to bear, just as Saddam Hussein should and did pay 
for his occupation of Kuwait. We are still a considerable distance 
from that goal, although in the meantime the extraordinary 
unbowed bravery of all Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank 
has in effect politically and morally defeated Sharon, who will lose 
his seat in the not too distant future. But, that in two decades his 
armies can invade Arab cities at will, killing and sowing 
destruction without so much as a collective Arab peep speaks 
reams for the Arab world's leaders. 
Lastly, what the various Arab rulers who are so delicately silent 
now while Palestine is being raped on TV think they are doing, I 
don't know, but I can imagine that deepin their souls they must 
feel no small amount of shame and disgrace. Powerless militarily, 
politically, economically and above all morally, they have little 
credibility and no real standing, except as obedient pawns on the 
American-Israeli chessboard. Perhaps they feel they are playing a 
waiting game. Perhaps. But they (like Arafat and his men) 
haven't learned the power of systematically disseminated 
information as a way of protecting their people from the 
onslaughts of those who consider all Arabs militant, extremist, 
terrorist fanatics. The good news is that the time for that sort of 
irresponsible and contemptible behavior is very short. Will the new 
generation do any better? It is for a whole new attitude toward 
secular education to decide the answer, whether collectively we 
go down again to disorganisation, corruption and mediocrity or 
whether at last we can become a nation. 

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