Al-Ahram Weekly
Online 25 - 31 October 2001 Issue No.557 Published in Cairo
by AL-AHRAM :
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 differentstages 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 talksif 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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