|
|
|
Disunity and factionalism
by Edward
Said
Underlying most of the
findings in the much cited 2002 UNDP Arab Human Development Report is
the extraordinary lack of coordination between Arab countries. There is
considerable irony in the fact that the Arabs are discussed and referred
to both in this report and elsewhere as a group even though they seem
rarely to function as one, except negatively. Thus the report correctly
says that there is no Arab democracy, Arab women are uniformly an
oppressed majority, and in science and technology every Arab state is
behind the rest of the world. Certainly there is little strategic
cooperation between them and virtually none in the economic sphere. As
for more specific issues like policy towards Israel, the US and the
Palestinians, and despite a common front of embarrassed hand-wringing
and disgraceful powerlessness, one senses a frightened determination
first of all not to offend the US, not to engage in war or in a real
peace with Israel, not ever to think of a common Arab front even on
matters that affect an over-all Arab future or security. Yet when it
comes to the perpetuation of each regime, the Arab ruling classes are
united in purpose and survival skills.
This shambles of inertia and
impotence is, I am convinced, an affront to every Arab. This is why so
many Egyptians, Syrians, Jordanians, Moroccans and others have taken to
the streets in support of the Palestinian people undergoing the nightmare
of Israeli occupation, with the Arab leadership looking on and basically
doing nothing. Street demonstrations are demonstrations not only of
support for Palestine, but also protests at the immobilising effects of
Arab disunity. An even more eloquent sign of the common disenchantment is
the frequent, wrenchingly sad television scene of a Palestinian woman
surveying the ruins of her house demolished by Israeli bulldozers, wailing
to the world at large "ya Arab, ya Arab" ("oh you Arabs, you Arabs").
There is no more eloquent testimony to the betrayal of the Arab people by
their (mostly unelected) leaders than that indictment, which is to say:
"why don't you Arabs ever do anything to help us?" Despite money and oil
aplenty, there is only the stony silence of an unmoved spectator.
Even on an individual level,
alas, disunity and factionalism have crippled one national effort after
the other. Take the saddest of all instances, the case of the Palestinian
people. I recall wondering during the Amman and Beirut days why it was
necessary for somewhere between eight to 12 Palestinian factions to exist,
each fighting over uselessly academic issues of ideology and organisation
while Israel and the local militias bled us dry. Looking back over the
Lebanese days that came to a terrible end in Sabra and Shatilla, whose
purpose did it serve to have the Popular Front, Fatah, and the Democratic
Front -- to mention only three factions -- fighting among each other, to
have leaders within Fatah proclaiming needlessly provocative slogans like
"the road to Tel Aviv goes through Jounieh" even as Israel allied itself
with the right-wing Lebanese militias to destroy the Palestinian presence
for Israel's purposes? And what cause has been served by Yasser Arafat's
tactics of creating factions, subgroups and security forces to war against
each other during the Oslo process and leave his people unprotected and
unprepared for the Israeli destruction of the infrastructure and re-
occupation of Area A?
It's always the same thing,
factionalism, disunity, the absence of a common purpose for which in the
end ordinary people pay the price in suffering, blood and endless
destruction. Even on the level of social structure, it is almost a
commonplace that Arabs as a group fight among themselves more than they do
for a common purpose. We are individualists, it is said by way of
justification, ignoring the fact that such disunity and internal
disorganisation in the end damages our very existence as a people. Nothing
can be more disheartening than the disputes that corrode Arab expatriate
organisations, especially in places like the US and Europe, where
relatively small Arab communities are surrounded by hostile environments
and militant opponents who will stop at nothing to discredit the Arab
struggle. Still, instead of trying to unite and work together, these
communities get torn apart by totally unnecessary ideological and
factional struggles that have no immediate relevance, no necessity at all
so far as the surrounding field is concerned.
A few days ago, I was startled
by a discussion programme on Al-Jazeera television in which the two
participants and a needlessly provocative moderator vehemently discussed
Arab-American activism during the present crisis. One man, a certain Mr
Dalbah, identified vaguely as a "political analyst" in Washington (without
apparent affiliation or institutional connection) spent all of his time
discrediting the one serious national Arab-American group, the
Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), which he accused of
ineffectiveness and its leaders of egoism, opportunism and personal
corruption. The other gentleman, whose name I didn't catch, admitted that
he has only been in the US for a very few years and didn't seem to know
much about what was going on, except of course to argue that he had better
ideas than all the other community leaders. Although I only watched the
first and last parts of the programme, I was thoroughly disillusioned and
even disgraced by the discussion. What was the point, I asked myself? In
what way is it useful to tear down an organisation that has been doing by
far the best work in a country where Arabs are outnumbered and out-organised
not only by all the many, much larger and extremely well- financed Zionist
organisations, but also where the society itself and its media are so
hostile to Arabs, Islam, and their causes in general? None at all, of
course. Yet there remains this pernicious factionalism by which, with
almost Pavlovian regularity, Arabs try to hurt and impede each other
rather than uniting behind a common purpose. If there is little
justification for such behavior in the Arab lands themselves, surely there
is less reason for it abroad, where Arab individuals and communities are
targeted and threatened as undesirable aliens and terrorists.
The Al-Jazeera programme was
more offensive by its gratuitous inaccuracy and the needless personal harm
it did to the late Hala Salam Maksoud, who literally gave her life to the
cause of ADC, and to its current president Dr Ziad Asli, a public-spirited
physician who voluntarily gave up his medical practice to run the
organisation on a pro bono basis. Dalbah kept insinuating that both these
activists were motivated by reasons of personal monetary gain, and that
whatever ADC did it did badly. Aside from the scandalous untruth of such
allegations, Dalbah's idle and malicious gossip -- it was no more than
that -- harmed the collective Arab cause, leaving anger and more
factionalism in its wake. Moreover, it should be noted that given the
extremely inhospitable American political setting to the Arab cause, ADC
has been very successful in Washington and nationally as an organisation
rebutting charges against Arabs in the media, protecting individuals from
government persecution after 9/11, and keeping Arab-Americans involved and
participating in the national debate. Because of this success under
Asli, factionalism has infected the organisation's employees who suddenly
embarked on a campaign of personal vilification masked as ideological
argument. Of course everyone has the right to criticise but why in the
face of such threats as those we face in the US should we splinter and
weaken ourselves like this, when it is clear that the only beneficiary is
the pro-Israel lobby? Organisations like ADC are first of all American
organisations and cannot function as partisans in struggles of the kind
that recall those of Fakahani in the mid-seventies.
Perhaps the main reason for
Arab factionalism at every level of our societies, at home and abroad, is
the marked absence of ideals and role models. Since Abdel-Nasser's death,
whatever one may have thought of some of his more ruinous policies, no
figure has captured the Arab imagination or had a role in setting a
popular liberation struggle. Look at the disaster of the PLO, which has
been reduced from the days of its glory to an old unshaven man, sitting at
a broken-down table, in half a house in Ramallah, trying to survive at any
cost, whether or not he sells out, whether or not he says foolish things,
whether what he says means anything or not. (A couple of weeks ago, he was
quoted as saying that he now accepts the 2000 Clinton plan, though the
only problem is that it is now 2002 and Clinton is no longer president.)
It has been years since Arafat represented his people, their sufferings
and cause, and like his other Arab counterparts, he hangs on like a
much-too-ripe fruit without real purpose or position. There is thus no
strong moral centre in the Arab world today. Cogent analysis and rational
discussion have given way to fanatical ranting, concerted action on behalf
of liberation has been reduced to suicidal attacks, and the idea if not
the practice of integrity and honesty as a model to be followed has simply
disappeared. So corrupting has the atmosphere exuded from the Arab world
become that one scarcely knows why some people are successful while others
are thrown in jail.
As a terribly shocking
instance, consider the Egyptian sociologist Saadeddin Ibrahim's fate.
Released by a civil court a few months ago, he has now been tried, found
guilty and sentenced to a cruelly unjustified sentence by the state
security court for exactly those "crimes" for which he was earlier
released. Where is the moral justification for such toying with a person's
life, career and reputation? A matter of months ago, he was a trusted
adviser to the government and on the boards of several Arab institutes and
projects. Now he is considered to be a condemned criminal. Whose
interests, whether by virtue of national unity, or coherent strategy, or
moral imperative, does his gratuitous punishment in this way serve? More
factionalism, more disintegration, more sense of drift and fear and a
pervading sense of frustrated justice.
Arabs have for so long been
deprived of a sense of participation and citizenship by their rulers that
most of us have lost even the capacity of understanding what personal
commitment to a cause bigger than ourselves might mean. The Palestinian
struggle -- that a people should endure such unremitting cruelty from
Israel and still not give up, is a collective miracle -- but why can't the
lessons of living (as opposed to suicidal, nihilistic) resistance be made
clearer, and more possible to follow? This is the real problem, the
absence all over the Arab world and abroad of a leadership that
communicates with its people, not via communiqués that express an
impersonal, almost disdainful disregard of them as citizens, but through
the actual practice of concerted dedication and personal example. Unable
to move the US from its illegal support of Israel's crimes, Arab leaders
simply throw out one "peace" proposal (the same one) after another, each
of which is dismissed derisively by both Israel and the US. Bush and his
psychopathic henchman Rumsfeld keep leaking news of their impending
invasion for "regime change" in Iraq, and the Arabs have still not
communicated a unified deterrent position against this new American
insanity. When individuals and organisations like ADC try to do something
on behalf of a cause they are gunned down by troublemakers who have little
else to do but destroy and disturb.
Surely the time has come to
start thinking of ourselves as a people with a common history and goals,
and not as a collection of cowardly delinquents. But that is up to each
one, and it's no good sitting back blaming "the Arabs" since, after all,
we are the Arabs.
Source:
by courtesy & © 2002 Al-Ahram weekly & Edward Said
by the same author:
|
|
|
