Hi. I’ll be gone over the weekend. I like to leave you with an interesting,
relevant article; in this case, by one of the great minds of the 20th century.
As well, the struggle of the Palestinian people is the spiritual center and
emblem of today’s metamorphoses in the middle east. See you Monday.
Ed
<http://www.counterpunch.org/said09252003.html>
Dignity, Solidarity and the Penal Colony
*Palestinian violence, the response of a desperate and horribly oppressed
people, has been stripped of its context and the terrible suffering from
which it arises: a failure to see that is a failure in humanity, and that
context doesn't make the violence any less terrible but at least situates it
in a real history and real geography.*
*By EDWARD SAID*
CounterPunch: September 25, 2003
[An Excerpt from *The Politics of
Anti-Semitism<http://www.easycarts.net/ecarts/CounterPunch/CounterPunch_Bookshop.html>
*, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair]
Aside from the obvious physical discomforts, being ill for a long period of
time fills the spirit with a terrible feeling of helplessness, but also with
periods of analytic lucidity, which, of course, must be treasured. For the
past three months now I have been in and out of the hospital, with days
marked by lengthy and painful treatments, blood transfusions, endless tests,
hours and hours of unproductive time spent staring at the ceiling, draining
fatigue and infection, inability to do normal work, and thinking, thinking,
thinking.
But there are also the intermittent passages of lucidity and reflection that
sometimes give the mind a perspective on daily life that allows it to see
things (without being able to do much about them) from a different
perspective. Reading the news from
of death and destruction on television, it has been my experience to be
utterly amazed and aghast at what I have deduced from those details about
Israeli government policy, more particularly about what has been going on in
the mind of Ariel Sharon. And when, after the recent
his F-16s in which nine children were massacred, he was quoted as
congratulating the pilot and boasting of a great Israeli success, I was able
to form a much clearer idea than before of what a pathologically deranged
mind is capable of, not only in terms of what it plans and orders but,
worse, how it manages to persuade other minds to think in the same
delusional and criminal way. Getting inside the official Israeli mind is a
worthwhile, if lurid, experience.
In the West, however, there's been such repetitious and unedifying attention
paid to Palestinian suicide bombing that a gross distortion in reality has
completely obscured what is much worse: the official Israeli, and perhaps
the uniquely Sharonian evil that has been visited so deliberately and so
methodically on the Palestinian people. Suicide bombing is reprehensible but
it is a direct and, in my opinion, a consciously programmed result of years
of abuse, powerlessness and despair. It has as little to do with the Arab or
Muslim supposed propensity for violence as the man in the moon.
terrorism, not peace, and he does everything in his power to create the
conditions for it. But for all its horror, Palestinian violence, the
response of a desperate and horribly oppressed people, has been stripped of
its context and the terrible suffering from which it arises: a failure to
see that is a failure in humanity, and that context doesn't make the
violence any less terrible but at least situates it in a real history and
real geography.
Yet the location of Palestinian terror--of course it is terror--is never
allowed a moment's chance to appear, so remorseless has been the focus on it
as a phenomenon apart, a pure, gratuitous evil which
acting on behalf of pure good, has been virtuously battling in its variously
appalling acts of disproportionate violence against a population of three
million Palestinian civilians. I am not speaking only about
manipulation of opinion, but its exploitation of the American equivalent of
the campaign against terrorism without which
it has done. (In fact, I cannot think of any other country on earth that, in
full view of nightly TV audiences, has performed such miracles of detailed
sadism against an entire society and gotten away with it.) That this evil
has been made consciously part of George W. Bush's campaign against
terrorism, irrationally magnifying American fantasies and fixations with
extraordinary ease, is no small part of its blind destructiveness. Like the
brigades of eager (and in my opinion completely corrupt) American
intellectuals who spin enormous structures of falsehoods about the benign
purpose and necessity of
service numerous academics, policy intellectuals at think tanks, and
ex-military men now in defense-related and public relations business, all to
rationalize and make convincing inhuman punitive policies that are
supposedly based on the need for Israeli security.
Israeli security is now a fabled beast. Like a unicorn it is endlessly
hunted and never found, remaining, everlastingly, the goal of future action.
That over time
neighbors scarcely merits a moment's notice. But then who challenges the
view that Israeli security ought to define the moral world we live in?
Certainly not the Arab and Palestinian leaderships, who for 30 years have
conceded everything to Israeli security. Shouldn't that ever be questioned,
given that
Arabs relative to its size than any country in the world,
nuclear arsenal, its air force, navy and army limitlessly supplied by the
taxpayer? As a result the daily, minute occurrences of what Palestinians
have to live through are hidden and, more important, covered over by a logic
of self-defense and the pursuit of terrorism (terrorist infrastructure,
terrorist nests, terrorist bomb factories, terrorist suspects--the list is
infinite) which perfectly suits Sharon and the lamentable George Bush. Ideas
about terrorism have thus taken on a life of their own, legitimized and
re-legitimized without proof, logic or rational argument.
Consider for instance the devastation of
the "targeted" assassinations of almost 100 Palestinians (to say nothing of
the many thousands of "suspects" rounded-up and still imprisoned by Israeli
soldiers) on the other: nobody asks whether all these people killed were in
fact terrorists, or proved to be terrorists, or were about to become
terrorists. They are all assumed to be dangers by acts of simple,
unchallenged affirmation. All you need is an arrogant spokesman or two, like
the loutish Ranaan Gissin, Avi Pazner or Dore Gold, and in
non-stop apologist for ignorance and incoherence like Ari Fleischer, and the
targets in question are just as good as dead. Without doubts, questions or
demurral. No need for proof or any such tiresome delicacy. Terrorism and its
obsessive pursuit have become an entirely circular, self-fulfilling murder
and slow death of enemies who have no choice or say in the matter.
With the exception of reports by a few intrepid journalists and writers such
as Amira Hass, Gideon Levy, Amos Elon, Tanya Leibowitz, Jeff Halper,
Shamir and a few others, public discourse in the Israeli media has declined
terribly in quality and honesty. Patriotism and blind support for the
government has replaced skeptical reflection and moral seriousness. Gone are
the days of Israel Shahak, Jakob Talmon and Yehoshua Leibowitch. I can think
of few Israeli academics and intellectuals--men like Zeev Sternhell, Uri
Avnery and Ilan Pappe, for instance--who are courageous enough to depart
from the imbecilic and debased debate about "security" and "terrorism" that
seems to have overtaken the Israeli peace establishment, or even its rapidly
dwindling left opposition. Crimes are being committed every day in the name
of
strategic withdrawal, or perhaps whether to incorporate settlements or not,
or whether to keep building that monstrous fence (has a crazier idea ever
been realized in the modern world, that you can put several million people
in a cage and say they don't exist?) in a manner befitting a general or a
politician, rather than in ways more suited to intellectuals and artists
with independent judgment and some sort of moral standard. Where are the
Israeli equivalents of Nadine Gordimer, Andre Brink, Athol Fugard, those
white writers who spoke out unequivocally and with unambiguous clarity
against the evils of South African apartheid? They simply don't exist in
equivocation and the repetition of official propaganda, and where most
really first-class writing and thought has disappeared from even the
academic establishment.
But to return to Israeli practices and the mind-set that has gripped the
country with such obduracy during the past few years, think of
plan. It entails nothing less than the obliteration of an entire people by
slow, systematic methods of suffocation, outright murder and the stifling of
everyday life. There is a remarkable story by Kafka, *In the Penal
Colony,*about a crazed official who shows off a fantastically detailed
torture
machine whose purpose is to write all over the body of the victim, using a
complex apparatus of needles to inscribe the captive's body with minute
letters that ultimately causes the prisoner to bleed to death. This is what
Sharon and his brigades of willing executioners are doing to the
Palestinians, with only the most limited and most symbolic of opposition.
Every Palestinian has become a prisoner.
electrified wire fence on three sides; imprisoned like animals, Gazans are
unable to move, unable to work, unable to sell their vegetables or fruit,
unable to go to school. They are exposed from the air to Israeli planes and
helicopters and are gunned down like turkeys on the ground by tanks and
machine guns. Impoverished and starved,
whose little pieces of episodes-like what takes place at Erez, or near the
settlements-involves thousands of soldiers in the humiliation, punishment,
intolerable enfeeblement of each Palestinian, without regard for age, gender
or illness. Medical supplies are held up at the border, ambulances are fired
upon or detained. Hundreds of houses are demolished, and hundreds of
thousands of trees and agricultural land destroyed in acts of systematic
collective punishment against civilians, most of whom are already refugees
from
from the Palestinian vocabulary so that only raw defiance remains, and still
Sharon and his sadistic minions prattle on about eliminating terrorism by an
ever-encroaching occupation that has continued now for 35 years. That the
campaign itself is, like all colonial brutality, futile, or that it has the
effect of making Palestinians more, rather than less, defiant simply does
not enter
The
fire upon and terrorize civilians. Curfews are imposed for periods of up to
two weeks, without respite. Schools and universities are either closed or
impossible to get to. No one can travel, not just between the nine main
cities but within the cities. Every town today is a wasteland of destroyed
buildings, looted offices, purposely ruined water and electrical systems.
Commerce is finished. Malnutrition prevails in half the number of children.
Two-thirds of the population lives below the poverty level of $2 a day.
Tanks in Jenin (where the demolition of the refugee camp by Israeli armor, a
major war crime, was never investigated because cowardly international
bureaucrats such as Kofi Annan back down when
and kill children, but that is only one drop in an unending stream of
Palestinian civilian deaths caused by Israeli soldiers who furnish the
illegal Israeli military occupation with loyal, unquestioning service.
Palestinians are all "terrorist suspects". The soul of this occupation is
that young Israeli conscripts are allowed full rein to subject Palestinians
at checkpoints to every known form of private torture and abjection. There
is the waiting in the sun for hours; then there is the detention of medical
supplies and produce until they rot; there are the insulting words and
beatings administered at will; the sudden rampage of jeeps and soldiers
against civilians waiting their turn by the thousands at the innumerable
checkpoints that have made of Palestinian life a choking hell; making dozens
of youths kneel in the sun for hours; forcing men to take off their clothes;
insulting and humiliating parents in front of their children; forbidding the
sick to pass through for no other reason than personal whim; stopping
ambulances and firing on them. And the steady number of Palestinian deaths
(quadruple that of Israelis) increases on a daily, mostly untabulated basis.
More "terrorist suspects" plus their wives and children, but "we" regret
those deaths very much. Thank you.
democracy without a conscience, a country whose soul has been captured by a
mania for punishing the weak, a democracy that faithfully mirrors the
psychopathic mentality of its ruler, General Sharon, whose sole idea-if that
is the right word for it-is to kill, reduce, maim, drive away Palestinians
until "they break". He provides nothing more concrete as a goal for his
campaigns, now or in the past, beyond that, and like the garrulous official
in Kafka's story he is most proud of his machine for abusing defenseless
Palestinian civilians, all the while monstrously abetted in his grotesque
lies by his court advisers and philosophers and generals, as well as by his
chorus of faithful American servants. There is no Palestinian army of
occupation, no Palestinian tanks, no soldiers, no helicopter gun-ships, no
artillery, no government to speak of. But there are the "terrorists" and the
"violence" that
inscribed on the bodies of Palestinians, without effective protest from the
overwhelming majority of
artists, peace activists. Palestinian schools, libraries and universities
have ceased normal functioning for months now; and we still wait for the
Western freedom-to-write groups and the vociferous defenders of academic
freedom in
academic organization either in
about this profound abrogation of the Palestinian right to knowledge, to
learning, to attend school.
In sum, Palestinians must die a slow death so that
security, which is just around the corner but cannot be realized because of
the special Israeli "insecurity". The whole world must sympathize, while the
cries of Palestinian orphans, sick old women, bereaved communities and
tortured prisoners simply go unheard and unrecorded. Doubtless, we will be
told, these horrors serve a larger purpose than mere sadistic cruelty. After
all, "the two sides" are engaged in a "cycle of violence" which has to be
stopped, sometime, somewhere. Once in a while, we ought to pause and declare
indignantly that there is only one side with an army and a country: the
other is a stateless, dispossessed population without rights or any present
way of securing them. The language of suffering and concrete daily life has
either been hijacked, or it has been so perverted as, in my opinion, to be
useless except as pure fiction deployed as a screen for the purpose of more
killing and painstaking torture-slowly, fastidiously, inexorably. That is
the truth of what Palestinians suffer. But in any case, Israeli policy will
ultimately fail.
Anyone who believes that the road map devised by the Bush administration
actually offers anything resembling a settlement or that it tackles the
basic issues is wrong. Like so much of the prevailing peace discourse, it
places the need for restraint and renunciation and sacrifice squarely on
Palestinian shoulders, thus denying the density and sheer gravity of
Palestinian history. To read through the road map is to confront an
unsituated document, oblivious of its time and place.
The road map, in other words, is not about a plan for peace so much as a
plan for pacification: it is about putting an end to
Hence the repetition of the term "performance" in the document's wooden
prose-in other words, how the Palestinians are expected to behave, almost in
the social sense of the word. No violence, no protest, more democracy,
better leaders and institutions, all based on the notion that the underlying
problem has been the ferocity of Palestinian resistance, rather than the
occupation that has given rise to it. Nothing comparable is expected of
entirely new classification which suggests that some Israeli implantations
on Palestinian land are legal) must be given up and, yes, the major
settlements "frozen" but certainly not dismantled. Not a word is said about
what since 1948, and then again since 1967, Palestinians have endured at the
hands of
Palestinian economy as described by the American researcher Sara Roy in her
forthcoming *Scholarship and Politics*. House demolitions, the uprooting of
trees, the 5000 prisoners or more, the policy of targeted assassinations,
the closures since 1993, the wholesale ruin of the infrastructure, the
incredible number of deaths and maimings-all that and more passes without a
word.
Nonetheless It may seem quixotic for me to say, even if the immediate
prospects are grim from a Palestinian perspective, they are not all dark.
The Palestinians stubbornly survive, and Palestinian society-devastated,
nearly ruined, desolate in so many ways-is, like Hardy's thrush in its
blast-beruffled plume, still capable of flinging its soul upon the growing
gloom. No other Arab society is as rambunctious and healthily unruly, and
none is fuller of civic and social initiatives and functioning institutions
(including a miraculously vital musical conservatory). Even though they are
mostly unorganized and in some cases lead miserable lives of exile and
statelessness, Diaspora Palestinians are still energetically engaged by the
problems of their collective destiny, and everyone that I know is always
trying somehow to advance the cause. Only a minuscule fraction of this
energy has ever found its way into the Palestinian Authority, which except
for the highly ambivalent figure of Arafat has remained strangely marginal
to the common fate. According to recent polls, [in the early summer of 2003]
Fateh and Hamas between them have the support of roughly 45 percent of the
Palestinian electorate, with the remaining 55 percent evolving quite
different, much more hopeful-looking political formations.
One in particular has struck me as significant (and I have attached myself
to it) inasmuch as it now provides the only genuine grassroots formation
that steers clear both of the religious parties and their fundamentally
sectarian politics, and of the traditional nationalism offered up by
Arafat's old (rather than young) Fateh activists. It's been called the
National Political Initiative (NPI) and its main figure is Mostapha
Barghuti, a Moscow-trained physician, whose main work has been as director
of the impressive Village Medical Relief Committee, which has brought health
care to more than 100,000 rural Palestinians. A former Communist Party
stalwart, Barghuti is a quiet-spoken organizer and leader who has overcome
the hundreds of physical obstacles impeding Palestinian movement or travel
abroad to rally nearly every independent individual and organization of note
behind a political program that promises social reform as well as liberation
across doctrinal lines. Singularly free of conventional rhetoric, Barghuti
has worked with Israelis, Europeans, Americans, Africans, Asians, Arabs to
build an enviably well-run solidarity movement that practices the pluralism
and co-existence it preaches. NPI does not throw up its hands at the
directionless militarization of the intifada. It offers training programs
for the unemployed and social services for the destitute on the grounds that
this answers to present circumstances and Israeli pressure. Above all, NPI,
which is about to become a recognized political party, seeks to mobilize
Palestinian society at home and in exile for free elections-authentic
elections which will represent Palestinian, rather than Israeli or US,
interests. This sense of authenticity is what seems so lacking in the path
cut out for Abu Mazen.
The vision here isn't a manufactured provisional state on 40 percent of the
land, with the refugees abandoned and
sovereign territory liberated from military occupation by mass action
involving Arabs and Jews wherever possible. Because NPI is an authentic
Palestinian movement, reform and democracy have become part of its everyday
practice. Many hundreds of
independents have already signed up, and organizational meetings have
already been held, with many more planned abroad and in
the terrible difficulties of getting around
of movement. It is some solace to think that, while formal negotiations and
discussions go on, a host of informal, un-coopted alternatives exist, of
which NPI and a growing international solidarity campaign are now the main
components.
In early May, I was in
dinner one night with Rachel Corrie's parents and sister, who were still
reeling from the shock of their daughter's murder on March 16 in
Israeli bulldozer. Mr. Corrie told me that he had himself driven bulldozers,
although the one that killed his daughter deliberately because she was
trying valiantly to protect a Palestinian home in Rafah from demolition was
a 60 ton behemoth especially designed by Caterpillar for house demolitions,
a far bigger machine than anything he had ever seen or driven. Two things
struck me about my brief visit with the Corries. One was the story they told
about their return to the
immediately sought out their
both Democrats, told them their story and received the expected expressions
of shock, outrage, anger and promises of investigations. After both women
returned to
promised investigation simply didn't materialize. As expected, the
lobby had explained the realities to them, and both women simply begged off.
An American citizen willfully murdered by the soldiers of a client state of
the
investigation that had been promised her family.
But the second and far more important aspect of the Rachel Corrie story for
me was the young woman's action itself, heroic and dignified at the same
time. Born and brought up in
contact before. Her letters back to her family are truly remarkable
documents of her ordinary humanity that make for very difficult and moving
reading, especially when she describes the kindness and concern showed her
by all the Palestinians she encounters who clearly welcome her as one of
their own, because she lives with them exactly as they do, sharing their
lives and worries, as well as the horrors of the Israeli occupation and its
terrible effects on even the smallest child. She understands the fate of
refugees, and what she calls the Israeli government's insidious attempt at a
kind of genocide by making it almost impossible for this particular group of
people to survive. So moving is her solidarity that it inspires an Israeli
reservist named Danny who has refused service to write her and tell her,
"You are doing a good thing. I thank you for it."
What shines through all the letters she wrote home, which were subsequently
published in the London Guardian, is the amazing resistance put up by the
Palestinian people themselves, average human beings stuck in the most
terrible position of suffering and despair but continuing to survive just
the same. We have heard so much recently about the road map and the
prospects for peace that we have overlooked the most basic fact of all,
which is that Palestinians have refused to capitulate or surrender even
under the collective punishment meted out to them by the combined might of
the
existence of a road map and all the numerous so-called peace plans before
it, not at all some conviction on the part of the
international community for humanitarian reasons that the killing and the
violence must stop. If we miss that truth about the power of Palestinian
resistance (by which I do not at all mean suicide bombing, which does much
more harm than good), despite all its failings and all its mistakes, we miss
everything. Palestinians have always been a problem for the Zionist project,
and so-called solutions have perennially been proposed that minimize, rather
than solve, the problem. The official Israeli policy, no matter whether
Ariel Sharon uses the word "occupation" or not or whether or not he
dismantles a rusty, unused tower or two, has always been not to accept the
reality of the Palestinian people as equals or ever to admit that their
rights were scandalously violated all along by
courageous Israelis over the years have tried to deal with this other
concealed history, most Israelis and what seems like the majority of
American Jews have made every effort to deny, avoid, or negate the
Palestinian reality. This is why there is no peace. Moreover, the road map
says nothing about justice or about the historical punishment meted out to
the Palestinian people for too many decades to count. What Rachel Corrie's
work in
of the living history of the Palestinian people as a national community, and
not merely as a collection of deprived refugees. That is what she was in
solidarity with. And we need to remember that that kind of solidarity is no
longer confined to a small number of intrepid souls here and there, but is
recognized the world over. In the past six months I have lectured in four
continents to many thousands of people. What brings them together is
for emancipation and enlightenment, regardless of all the vilification
heaped on them by their enemies.
Whenever the facts are made known, there is immediate recognition and an
expression of the most profound solidarity with the justice of the
Palestinian cause and the valiant struggle by the Palestinian people on its
behalf. It is an extraordinary thing that
year both during the
during the Davos and
spectrum. Simply because our fellow citizens in this country are fed an
atrociously biased diet of ignorance and misrepresentation by the media,
where the occupation is never referred to in lurid descriptions of suicide
attacks, where the apartheid wall 25 feet high, five feet thick and 350
kilometers long that
(or so much as referred to in passing throughout the lifeless prose of the
road map), and where the crimes of war, the gratuitous destruction and
humiliation, maiming and death imposed on Palestinian civilians are never
shown for the daily, completely routine ordeal that they are, one shouldn't
be surprised that Americans in the main have a very low opinion of Arabs and
Palestinians. After all, please remember that all the main organs of the
establishment media, from left liberal all the way over to fringe right, are
unanimously anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian. Look at the
pusillanimity of the media during the buildup to an illegal and unjust war
against
damage against Iraqi society done by the sanctions, and how relatively few
accounts there were of the immense world-wide outpouring of opinion against
the war. Hardly a single journalist except Helen Thomas took the
administration directly to task for the outrageous lies and confected
"facts" that were spun out about
US before the war, just as now the same government propagandists who
cynically invented and manipulated "facts" about WMD are let off the hook by
media heavies in discussing the awful, the literally inexcusable situation
for the people of
single-handedly created there. However else one blames Saddam Hussein as a
vicious tyrant, which he was, he had provided the people of
best infrastructure of services like water, electricity, health and
education of any Arab country. None of this is any longer in place.
With the extraordinary fear of seeming anti-Semitic by criticizing
for its daily crimes of war against innocent, unarmed Palestinian civilians,
or seeming anti-American for criticizing the
war and its dreadfully run military occupation, it is no wonder, then, that
the vicious media and government campaign against Arab society, culture,
history and mentality that has been led by Neanderthal publicists and
Orientalists like Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes has cowed far too many of
us into believing that Arabs really are an underdeveloped, incompetent and
doomed people, and that with all the failures in democracy and development,
Arabs are alone in this world for being retarded, behind the times,
unmodernized and deeply reactionary. Here is where dignity and critical
historical thinking must be mobilized to see what is what and to disentangle
truth from propaganda.
No one would deny that most Arab countries today are ruled by unpopular
regimes and that vast numbers of poor, disadvantaged young Arabs are exposed
to the ruthless forms of fundamentalist religion. Yet it is simply a lie to
say, as The New York Times regularly does, that Arab societies are totally
controlled, and that there is no freedom of opinion, no civil institutions,
no functioning social movements for and by the people. Press laws
notwithstanding, you can go to downtown
Party newspaper as well as an Islamist one;
papers and journals that suggest much more debate and discussion than these
societies are given credit for; the satellite channels are bursting with
opinions of a dizzying variety; civil institutions are, on many levels
having to do with social services, human rights, syndicates and research
institutes, very lively all over the Arab world. A great deal more must be
done before we have the appropriate level of democracy, but we are on the
way.
In
this kind of activity that has kept society going. Under the worst possible
circumstances, Palestinian society has neither been defeated nor has it
crumbled completely. Kids still go to school, doctors and nurses still take
care of their patients, men and women go to work, organizations have their
meetings, and people continue to live, which seems to be an offense to
Sharon and the other extremists who simply want Palestinians either
imprisoned or driven away altogether. The military solution hasn't worked at
all, and never will work. Why is that so hard for Israelis to see? We must
help them to understand this, not by suicide bombs but by rational argument,
mass civil disobedience, organized protest, here and everywhere.
The point I am trying to make is that we have to see the Arab world
generally and
than superficial and dismissive books like Lewis's What Went Wrong and Paul
Wolfowitz's ignorant statements about bringing democracy to the Arab and
Islamic world even begin to suggest. Whatever else is true about the Arabs,
there is an active dynamic at work because as real people they live in a
real society with all sorts of currents and crosscurrents which can't be
easily caricatured as just one seething mass of violent fanaticism. The
Palestinian struggle for justice is especially something with which one must
express solidarity, rather than endless criticism and exasperated,
frustrating discouragement, or crippling divisiveness. Remember the
solidarity here and everywhere in Latin America, Africa, Europe,
committed themselves, difficulties and terrible obstacles notwithstanding.
Why? Because it is a just cause, a noble ideal, a moral quest for equality
and human rights.
I want now to speak about dignity, which of course has a special place in
every culture known to historians, anthropologists, sociologists and
humanists. I shall begin by saying immediately that it is a radically wrong,
Orientalist and indeed racist proposition to accept that, unlike Europeans
and Americans, Arabs have no sense of individuality, no regard for
individual life, no values that express love, intimacy and understanding
which are supposed to be the property exclusively of cultures that had a
Renaissance, a Reformation and an Enlightenment. Among many others, it is
the vulgar and jejune Thomas Friedman who has been peddling this rubbish,
which has alas been picked up by equally ignorant and self-deceiving Arab
intellectuals-I don't need to mention any names here-who have seen in the
atrocities of 9/11 a sign that the Arab and Islamic worlds are somehow more
diseased and more dysfunctional than any other, and that terrorism is a sign
of a wider distortion than has occurred in any other culture.
We can leave to one side that, between them, Europe and the
by far the largest number of violent deaths during the 20th century, the
Islamic world hardly a fraction of it. Behind all of that specious,
unscientific nonsense about wrong and right civilizations, there is the
grotesque shadow of the great false prophet Samuel Huntington, who has led a
lot of people to believe that the world can be divided into distinct
civilizations battling against each other forever. But
wrong on every point he makes. No culture or civilization exists by itself;
none is made up of things like individuality and enlightenment that are
exclusive to it; and none exists without the basic human attributes of
community, love, value for life and all the others. To suggest otherwise as
he does is the purest invidious racism of the same stripe as that of people
who argue that Africans have naturally inferior brains, or that Asians are
really born for servitude, or that Europeans are a naturally superior race.
This is a sort of parody of Hitlerian science directed uniquely today
against Arabs and Muslims, and we must be very firm as to not even go
through the motions of arguing against it. It is the purest drivel. On the
other hand, there is the much more credible and serious stipulation that,
like every other instance of humanity, Arab and Muslim life has an inherent
value and dignity that are expressed by Arabs and Muslims in their unique
cultural style, and those expressions needn't resemble or be a copy of one
approved model suitable for everyone to follow.
The whole point about human diversity is that it is in the end a form of
deep co-existence between very different styles of individuality and
experience that can't all be reduced to one superior form: this is the
spurious argument foisted on us by pundits who bewail the lack of
development and knowledge in the Arab world. All one has to do is to look at
the huge variety of literature, cinema, theater, painting, music and popular
culture produced by and for Arabs from
needs to be assessed as an indication of whether or not Arabs are developed,
and not just how on any given day statistical tables of industrial
production either indicate an appropriate level of development or show
failure.
The more important point I want to make, though, is that there is a very
wide discrepancy today between our cultures and societies and the small
group of people who now rule these societies. Rarely in history has such
power been so concentrated in so tiny a group as the various kings,
generals, sultans and presidents who preside today over the Arabs. The worst
thing about them as a group, almost without exception, is that they do not
represent the best of their people. This is not just a matter of no
democracy. It is that they seem to radically underestimate themselves and
their people in ways that close them off, that make them intolerant and
fearful of change, frightened of opening up their societies to their people,
terrified most of all that they might anger big brother, that is, the United
States. Instead of seeing their citizens as the potential wealth of the
nation, they regard them all as guilty conspirators vying for the ruler's
power.
This is the real failure, how during the terrible war against the Iraqi
people, no Arab leader had the self-dignity and confidence to say something
about the pillaging and military occupation of one of the most important
Arab countries. Fine, it is an excellent thing that Saddam Hussein's
appalling regime is no more, but who appointed the
Who asked the
citizens and bring it something called "democracy", especially at a time
when the school system, the health system and the whole economy in
are degenerating to the worst levels since the 1929 Depression? Why was the
collective Arab voice NOT raised against the
intervention, which did so much harm and inflicted so much humiliation upon
the entire Arab nation? This is truly a colossal failure in nerve, in
dignity, in self-solidarity.
With all the Bush administration's talk about guidance from the Almighty,
doesn't one Arab leader have the courage just to say that, as a great
people, we are guided by our own lights and traditions and religions? But
nothing, not a word, as the poor citizens of
terrible ordeals and the rest of the region quakes in its collective boots,
each one petrified that his country may be next. How unfortunate the embrace
of George Bush, the man whose war destroyed an Arab country gratuitously, by
the combined leadership of the major Arab countries. Was there no one who
had the guts to remind George W. that he has brought more suffering to the
Arab people than anyone before him? Must he always be greeted with hugs,
smiles, kisses and low bows? Where is the diplomatic and political and
economic support necessary to sustain an anti-occupation movement on the
West Bank and
the Palestinians to mind their ways, avoid violence and keep at the peace
negotiations, even though it has been so obvious that
peace is just about zero. There has been no concerted Arab response to the
separation wall, or to the assassinations, or to collective punishment, only
a bunch of tired clichés repeating the well-worn formulas authorized by the
State Department.
Perhaps the one thing that strikes me as the low point in Arab inability to
grasp the dignity of the Palestinian cause is expressed by the current state
of the Palestinian Authority. Abu Mazen, a subordinate figure with little
political support among his own people, was picked for the job by Arafat,
or a great organizer, or anything really except a dutiful aide to Yasser
Arafat, and because I am afraid they see in him a man who will do
bidding. How could even Abu Mazen stand there in Aqaba to pronounce words
written for him, like a ventriloquist's puppet, by some State Department
functionary, in which he commendably speaks about Jewish suffering but then
amazingly says next to nothing about his own people's suffering at the hands
of
himself, and how could he forget his self-respect as the representative of a
people that has been fighting heroically for its rights for over a century
just because the US and
says that there will be a "provisional" Palestinian state, without any
contrition for the horrendous amount of damage it has done, the uncountable
war crimes, the sheer sadistic, systematic humiliation of every single
Palestinian, man, woman, child, I must confess to a complete lack of
understanding as to why a leader or representative of that people doesn't so
much as take note of it. Has he entirely lost his sense of dignity?
Has he forgotten that he is not just an individual but also the bearer of
his people's fate at an especially crucial moment? Is there anyone who was
not bitterly disappointed at this total failure to rise to the occasion and
stand with dignity-the dignity of his people's experience and cause-and
testify to it with pride, and without compromise, without ambiguity, without
the half embarrassed, half apologetic tone that Palestinian leaders take
when they are begging for a little kindness from some totally unworthy white
father?
But that has been the behavior of Palestinian rulers since
since Haj Amin, a combination of misplaced juvenile defiance and plaintive
supplication. Why on earth do they always think it absolutely necessary to
read scripts written for them by their enemies? The basic dignity of our
life as Arabs in
is that we are our own people, with a heritage, a history, a tradition and
above all a language that is more than adequate to the task of representing
our real aspirations, since those aspirations derive from the experience of
dispossession and suffering that has been imposed on each Palestinian since
1948. Not one of our political spokespeople-the same is true of the Arabs
since Abdel Nasser's time-ever speaks with self-respect and dignity of what
we are, what we want, what we have done and where we want to go.
Slowly, however, the situation is changing, and the old regime made up of
the Abu Mazens and Abu Ammars of this world is passing and will gradually be
replaced by a new set of emerging leaders all over the Arab world. The most
promising is made up of the members of the National Political Initiative;
they are grassroots activists whose main activity is not pushing papers on a
desk, nor juggling bank accounts, nor looking for journalists to pay
attention to them, but who come from the ranks of the professionals, the
working classes, the young intellectuals and activists, the teachers,
doctors, lawyers, working people who have kept society going while also
fending off daily Israeli attacks. Second, these are people committed to the
kind of democracy and popular participation undreamt of by the Authority,
whose idea of democracy is stability and security for itself. Lastly, they
offer social services to the unemployed, health to the uninsured and the
poor, proper secular education to a new generation of Palestinians who must
be taught the realities of the modern world, not just the extraordinary
worth of the old one. For such programs, the NPI stipulates that getting rid
of the occupation is the only way forward, and that in order to do that, a
representative national unified leadership must be elected freely to replace
the cronies, the outdated perspectives and the ineffectiveness that have
plagued Palestinian leaders for the past century.
Only if we respect ourselves as Arabs and understand the true dignity and
justice of our struggle, only then can we appreciate why, almost despite
ourselves, so many people all over the world, including Rachel Corrie and
the two young people wounded with her from ISM, Tom Hurndall and Brian
Avery, have felt it possible to express their solidarity with us.
I conclude with one last irony. Isn't it astonishing that all the signs of
popular solidarity that
comparable sign of solidarity and dignity for ourselves, that others admire
and respect us more than we do ourselves? Isn't it time we caught up with
our own status and made certain that our representatives here and elsewhere
realize, as a first step, that they are fighting for a just and noble cause,
and that they have nothing to apologize for or anything to be embarrassed
about? On the contrary, they should be proud of what their people have done
and proud also to represent them.
*Edward Said* is a professor at
Cockburn and St. Clair's, *The Politics of
Anti-Semitism<http://www.easycarts.net/ecarts/CounterPunch/CounterPunch_Bookshop.html>
* (AK Press).
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