Edward Said on Middle East Situation

Thinking ahead: After survival, what happens? 
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.