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Thinking ahead
by Edward
Said
Anyone with any connection
at all to Palestine is today in a state of stunned outrage and shock.
While almost a repeat of what happened in 1982, Israel's current all-out
colonial assault on the Palestinian people (with George Bush's
astoundingly ignorant and grotesque support) is indeed worse than
Sharon's two previous mass forays in 1971 and 1982 against the
Palestinian people. The political and moral climate today is a good deal
cruder and reductive, the media's destructive role (which has played the
part almost entirely of singling out Palestinian suicide attacks and
isolating them from their context in Israel's 35-year illegal occupation
of the Palestinian territories) greater in favouring the Israeli view of
things, the US's power more unchallenged, the war against terrorism has
more completely taken over the global agenda and, so far as the Arab
environment is concerned, there is greater incoherence and fragmentation
than ever before.
Sharon's homicidal instincts
have been enhanced (if that's the right word) by all of the above, and
magnified to boot. This in effect means that he can do more damage with
more impunity than before, although he is also more deeply undermined than
before in all his efforts as well as in his entire career by the failure
that comes with single-minded negation and hate, which in the end nourish
neither political nor even military success. Conflicts between peoples
such as this contain more elements than can be eliminated by tanks and air
power, and a war against unarmed civilians -- no matter how many times
Sharon lumberingly and mindlessly trumpets his stupid mantras about terror
-- can never bring a really lasting political result of the sort his
dreams tells him he can have. Palestinians will not go away. Besides,
Sharon will almost certainly end up disgraced and rejected by his people.
He has no plan, except to destroy everything about Palestine and the
Palestinians. Even in his enraged fixation on Arafat and terror, he is
failing to do much more than raise the man's prestige while essentially
drawing attention to the blind monomania of his own position.
In the end he is Israel's
problem to deal with. For us, our main consideration now is morally to do
everything in our power to make certain that despite the enormous
suffering and destruction imposed on us by a criminal war, we must go on.
When a renowned and respected retired politician like Zbigniew Brzezinski
says explicitly on national television that Israel has been behaving like
the white supremacist regime of apartheid South Africa, one can be certain
that he is not alone in this view, and that an increasing number of
Americans and others are slowly growing not only disenchanted but also
disgusted with Israel as a hugely expensive and draining ward of the
United States, costing far too much, increasing American isolation, and
seriously damaging the country's reputation with its allies and its
citizens. The question is what, in this most difficult of moments, can we
rationally learn about the present crisis that we need to include in our
plans for the future?
What I have to say now is
highly selective, but it is the modest fruit of many years working on
behalf of the Palestinian cause as someone who is from both Arab and
Western worlds. I neither know nor can say everything, but here are some
of the handful of thoughts I can contribute at this very difficult hour.
Each of the four points that follow here is related to the other.
1) For better or for worse,
Palestine is not just an Arab and Islamic cause, it is important to many
different, contradictory and yet intersecting worlds. To work for
Palestine is necessarily to be aware of these many dimensions and
constantly to educate oneself in them. For that we need a highly educated,
vigilant and sophisticated leadership and democratic support for it. Above
all we must, as Mandela never tired of saying about his struggle,
be aware that Palestine is one of the great moral causes of our time.
Therefore, we need to treat it as such. It's not a matter of trade, or
bartering negotiations, or making a career. It is a just cause which
should allow Palestinians to capture the high moral ground and keep it.
2) There are different kinds
of power, military of course being the most obvious. What has enabled
Israel to do what it has been doing to the Palestinians for the past 54
years is the result of a carefully and scientifically planned campaign to
validate Israeli actions and, simultaneously, devalue and efface
Palestinian actions. This is not just a matter of maintaining a powerful
military but of organising opinion, especially in the United States and
Western Europe, and is a power derived from slow, methodical work where
Israel's position is seen as one to be easily identified with, whereas the
Palestinians are thought of as Israel's enemies, hence repugnant,
dangerous, against "us." Since the end of the Cold War, Europe has faded
into near-insignificance so far as the organisation of opinion, images and
thought are concerned. America (outside of Palestine itself) is the main
arena of battle. We have simply never learned the importance of
systematically organising our political work in this country on a mass
level, so that for instance the average American will not immediately
think of "terrorism" when the word "Palestinian" is pronounced. That kind
of work quite literally protects whatever gains we might have made through
on-the-ground resistance to Israel's occupation.
What has enabled Israel to
deal with us with impunity, therefore, has been that we are unprotected by
any body of opinion that would deter Sharon from practicing his war crimes
and saying that what he has done is to fight terrorism. Given the immense
diffusionary, insistent, and repetitive power of the images broadcast by
CNN, for example, in which the phrase "suicide bomb" is numbingly repeated
a hundred times an hour for the American consumer and tax-payer, it is the
grossest negligence not to have had a team of people like Hanan Ashrawi,
Leila Shahid, Ghassan Khatib, Afif Safie -- to mention just a few --
sitting in Washington ready to go on CNN or any of the other channels just
to tell the Palestinian story, provide context and understanding, give us
a moral and narrative presence with positive, rather than merely negative,
value. We need a future leadership that understands this as one of the
basic lessons of modern politics in an age of electronic communication.
Not to have understood this is part of the tragedy of today.
3) There is simply no use
operating politically and responsibly in a world dominated by one
superpower without a profound familiarity and knowledge of that superpower
-- America, its history, its institutions, its currents and counter-
currents, its politics and culture; and, above all, a perfect working
knowledge of its language. To hear our spokesmen, as well as the other
Arabs, saying the most ridiculous things about America, throwing
themselves on its mercy, cursing it in one breath, asking for its help in
another, all in miserably inadequate fractured English, shows a state of
such primitive incompetence as to make one cry. America is not monolithic.
We have friends and we have possible friends. We can cultivate, mobilise,
and use our communities and their affiliated communities here as an
integral part of our politics of liberation, just as the South Africans
did, or as the Algerians did in France during their struggle for
liberation. Planning, discipline, coordination. We have not at all
understood the politics of non- violence. Moreover, neither have we
understood the power of trying to address Israelis directly, the way the
ANC addressed the white South Africans, as part of a politics of inclusion
and mutual respect. Coexistence is our answer to Israeli exclusivism and
belligerence. This is not conceding: it is creating solidarity, and
therefore isolating the exclusivists, the racists, the fundamentalists.
4) The most important lesson
of all for us to understand about ourselves is manifest in the terrible
tragedies of what Israel is now doing in the occupied territories. The
fact is that we are a people and a society, and despite Israel's ferocious
attack against the PA, our society still functions. We are a people
because we have a functioning society which goes on -- and has gone on for
the past 54 years -- despite every sort of abuse, every cruel turn of
history, every misfortune we have suffered, every tragedy we have gone
through as a people. Our greatest victory over Israel is that people like
Sharon and his kind do not have the capacity to see that, and this is why
they are doomed despite their great power and their awful, inhuman
cruelty. We have surmounted the tragedies and memories of our past,
whereas such Israelis as Sharon have not. He will go to his grave only as
an Arab-killer, and a failed politician who brought more unrest and
insecurity to his people. It must surely be the legacy of a leader that he
should leave something behind upon which future generations will build.
Sharon, Mofaz, and all the others associated with them in this bullying,
sadistic campaign of death and carnage will have left nothing except
gravestones. Negation breeds negation.
As Palestinians, I think we
can say that we left a vision and a society that has survived every
attempt to kill it. And that is something. It is for the generation of my
children and yours, to go on from there, critically, rationally, with hope
and forbearance.
Source:
by courtesy & © 2002 Al-Ahram weekly & Edward Said
by the same author:
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