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Dignity and solidarity
by Edward
Said
In early May I was in
Seattle lecturing for a few days. While there I had dinner one night
with Rachel Corrie's parents and sister, who were still reeling from the
shock of their daughter's murder on 16 March in Gaza by an 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 US with their
daughter's body. They had immediately sought out their US senators,
Patty Murray and Mary Cantwell, both Democrats, told them their story
and received the expected expressions of shock, outrage, anger and
promises of investigations. After both women returned to Washington, the
Corries never heard from them again, and the promised investigation
simply didn't materialise. As expected, the Israeli 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 US
without so much as an official peep or even the de rigeur 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 Olympia, a small city 60 miles south of Seattle, she had joined the
International Solidarity Movement and gone to Gaza to stand with suffering
human beings with whom she had never had any 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 and which were subsequently published in London's
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 roadmap 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 by the combined might of the US and
Israel. It is that extraordinary fact which is the reason for the
existence of a roadmap and all the numerous so-called peace plans before
them, not at all because the US and Israel and the international community
have been convinced 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
minimise, 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 nor ever to admit
that their rights have been scandalously violated all along by Israel.
Whereas a few 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 roadmap 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 Gaza recognised, however, was precisely the gravity and the
density 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 recognised the world over. In the past six months I have
lectured on four continents to many thousands of people. What brings them
together is Palestine and the struggle of the Palestinian people which is
now a byword 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 Palestine was a central issue this year during
both the Porto Alegre anti-globalisation meetings as well as during the
Davos and Amman meetings, both poles of the world-wide political spectrum.
Because our fellow citizens in this country are fed an atrociously biased
diet of ignorance and misrepresentation by the media -- the occupation is
referred to in lurid descriptions of suicide attacks while the apartheid
wall 25 feet high, five feet thick, and 350 kilometres long that Israel is
building is never even shown on CNN and the networks (or so much as
referred to in passing throughout the lifeless prose of the roadmap) and
the war crimes, gratuitous destruction and humiliation, maiming, house
demolitions, agricultural destruction 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 Iraq, and look at how little
coverage there was of the immense 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 has taken the administration to task for
the outrageous lies and confected "facts" that were spun out about Iraq as
an imminent military threat to the US before the war, just as now the same
government propagandists, whose cynically invented and manipulated "facts"
about WMD are now more or less forgotten or shrugged off as irrelevant,
are let off the hook by media heavies in discussing the awful, the
literally inexcusable situation for the people of Iraq that the US has now
single-handedly and irresponsibly created there. Whatever one thinks of
Saddam Hussein, and he was a vicious tyrant, he provided the people of
Iraq with the best infrastructure of services like water, electricity,
health, and education of any Arab country. None of this is any longer in
place.
It is no wonder, then, with
the extraordinary fear of seeming anti-Semitic by criticising Israel for
its daily crimes of war against innocent unarmed Palestinian civilians or
criticising the US government and being called "anti-American" for its
illegal war and its dreadfully run military occupation, 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, unmodernised
and deeply reactionary. Here is where dignity and critical historical
thinking must be mobilised to see what is what and to disentangle truth
from propaganda.
No one would deny that most
Arab countries are ruled by unpopular regimes and that vast numbers of
poor, disadvantaged young Arabs are exposed to 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 Amman today and buy a communist party newspaper as well
as an Islamist one; Egypt and Lebanon are full of papers and journals that
suggest much more debate and discussion than these societies are given
credit for; satellite channels are bursting with diverse opinions in 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 Palestine alone there are
over a thousand NGOs and it is this vitality and this kind of activity
that has kept society going, despite every American and Israeli effort
made to vilify, stop or mutilate it on a daily basis. 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, organisations
have their meetings, and people continue to live, which seems to be an
offence to Sharon and the other extremists who simply want Palestinians
either imprisoned or driven away altogether. The military solution hasn't
worked 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, organised protest, here and everywhere.
The point I am trying to make
is that we have to see the Arab world generally and Palestine in
particular in more comparative and critical ways 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 that cannot be easily
caricatured as just one seething mass of violent fanaticism. The
Palestinian struggle for justice is especially something with which one
expresses solidarity, rather than endless criticism and exasperated,
frustrating discouragement and crippling divisiveness. Remember the
solidarity here and everywhere in Latin America, Africa, Europe, Asia and
Australia, and remember also that there is a cause to which many people
have 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 that are supposed to be the
property exclusively of cultures like those of Europe and America 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 that has
occurred.
We can leave to one side that,
between them, Europe and the US account for by far the largest number of
violent deaths during the 20th century. Behind all that specious nonsense
about wrong and right civilisations, 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 civilisations battling against
each other forever. On the contrary, Huntington is wrong on every point he
makes. No culture or civilisation exists by itself; none is made up of
things like individuality and enlightenment that are completely exclusive
to it; and none exists without the basic human attributes of community,
love, value for life and all the others. To suggest otherwise is the
purest racism, of the same stripe as 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 Arab and Muslims, and
we must be very firm in not even going 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 expressed
by Arabs and Muslims in their unique cultural style. Such 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, theatre, painting, music and popular culture produced by and for
Arabs from Morocco to the Gulf. Surely that 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 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 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 US to be the Arab mentor? Who asked the US to take
over the Arab world, allegedly on behalf of its citizens, and bring it
something called "democracy", especially at a time when the school system,
the health system, and the whole economy in America are degenerating into
their worst levels since the 1929 Depression. Why was the collective Arab
voice not raised against the US's flagrantly illegal intervention,
which did so much harm and inflicted so much humiliation upon the entire
Arab nation? This is truly a colossal failure of nerve, dignity, and
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 religion? But nothing, not a word, as
the poor citizens of Iraq live through the most terrible ordeals and the
rest of the region quakes in its collective boots, each one petrified that
his country may be next. How unfortunate was the embrace of George Bush,
the man whose war destroyed an Arab country gratuitously, by the combined
leadership of the major Arab countries this month. Was there no one there
who had the guts to remind George W what he has done to humiliate and
bring more suffering to the Arab people than anyone before him, and 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 Gaza? Instead, all one hears
is that foreign ministers preach to the Palestinians to mind their ways,
avoid violence, and keep at the peace negotiations, even though it has
been obvious that Sharon's interest in peace is 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 authorised by the State Department.
The 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, Israel, and the US precisely
because he has no constituency, is not an orator or a great organiser, or
anything really except a dutiful aide to Yasser Arafat. They see in him a
man who will do Israel's bidding. But 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
spoke about Jewish suffering but then amazingly said next to nothing about
his own people's suffering at the hands of Israel? How could he accept so
undignified and manipulated a role for himself, and how could he forget
his self-dignity as the representative of a people that has been fighting
heroically for its rights for over a century just because the US and
Israel have told him he must? And when Israel simply 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 long-suffering 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
behaviour of Palestinian rulers since Oslo, and indeed 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 Palestine, throughout the Arab world, and here in America, 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, aspirations that 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 are made up
of the members of the National Palestinian Initiative; they are
grass-roots 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, and young intellectuals and activists, the teachers, doctors,
lawyers and 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 programmes, 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 be elected freely to replace
the cronies, the outdated and the ineffectiveness that have plagued
Palestinian leaders for the past century.
Only if we respect ourselves
as Arabs and Americans, 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
Palestine and the Arabs receive occur with no 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 realise, as a
first step, that they are fighting for a just and noble cause, and that
they have nothing to apologise for or anything to be embarrassed about? On
the contrary, they should be proud of what their people have done and
proud to represent them.
Source:
by courtesy & © 2003 Al-Ahram weekly & Edward Said
by the same author:
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