KK-Forum,
sender videre dette av Edward Said, tatt fra
http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/2000/471/op2.htm
Knut Rognes
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The gap grows wider
By Edward Said
On his visit to Birzeit University, Lionel Jospin had the gall to speak of
the Hizbullah fighters as terrorists, also expressing his "understanding"
of Israel's actions against Lebanon. As is now widely known, he was greeted
after his speech by many hundreds of students, who stoned his car and that
of his escort, Minister Nabil Shaath. Jospin's visit to the Palestinian
territories (still under occupation by Israel, which is aided in its
occupation by the Palestinian Authority) was under the supposed auspices of
the Authority, which was exposed for its unpopularity and incompetence.
Embarrassed and angry, the Palestinian boss, Yasser Arafat, condemned the
attack, paying no heed to the justice of what the students were saying,
which was that there was one common front of resistance against Israeli
occupation from Beirut to Birzeit, and using his security forces to beat
the students and perhaps later imprison and torture some of them.
Threatened by the wave of discontent, the panicky Birzeit administration
closed the university for three days, more or less acting under the
Authority's injunctions.
Like dictators everywhere, Arafat has no real support anymore and has lost
sight of what it is he is supposed to be doing, namely liberating his
people. Far from that, he is colluding with Israel to confine them still
more, all the while fattening himself and his cronies on the ill-gotten
gains provided by his monopolies, casinos, skimmed-off-the-top businesses,
extortion and protection money. Without any law or real civil institutions
Arafat is the perfect partner for Israel and the US, who now have a native
sub-contractor in the oppression of Palestinians and in the furtherance of
their interests: therefore, they could not be happier. Even though "peace"
isn't a step closer to realisation than under Netanyahu -- in fact, I had
predicted that Barak would be a good deal worse, and he has confirmed that
by allowing or encouraging more settlement building than his predecessor --
the various rulers and "peace" professionals seem not to have taken notice
of a widening gap between the people ruled and the justly-maligned process.
Typically though, it isn't the seasoned politicians or the intellectuals
who have taken the lead in opposing the enslavement of the so-called peace,
but rather the students.
In Beirut, at the American University, students have been demonstrating
against US policy, which is nothing less than full support for Israel's
bombing of civilian targets, a crime punishable according to the Fourth
Geneva Convention. But whereas the US government and organisations like
Human Rights Watch have been agitating to bring Saddam Hussein to trial for
crimes against humanity (few deserve it more, by the way), nothing is said
about Sharon, Barak, Peres, and all the other leaders whose routine
assaults on civilian and human rights constitute the longest-standing and
longest-unpunished set of war crimes in history. These go back to 1948,
when Palestine was ethnically cleansed. The invidiousness of such a policy
enraged the Beirut students, and they made life a little difficult for the
US ambassador, who was attending some public function at the AUB. One would
wish there was a similar policy of peaceful resistance taken against those
rulers in the Arab countries who either take no favorable notice of the
demonstrations or who pander openly to the Israelis and the Americans.
As for Lionel Jospin, he follows in the long tradition of bad faith and
duplicity of the European Left, which has always actively supported Zionism
with scarce regard for the tenets of socialism, much less of liberal
humanism. It is a strange thing indeed, but the Western Left has basically
been blind to what Zionism did to the Palestinians, so carefully did the
publicists of that movement cultivate the totally fraudulent notion that
Zionism was essentially a socialist and progressive movement. In fact, as
several Israeli historians have shown, Zionism was profoundly
anti-socialist, and was very much in favour of capitalism so long as it
could be put to what was then characterised as "Jewish" purposes and aims
in Palestine. This was as true of Ben Gurion as it was of Weizmann, as it
was of all their followers in the Israeli Labour Party. It is a
breathtaking prevarication, this pretence of socialism, but has been
sustained successfully for almost a century: Israel's Labour Party is a
member of the Socialist International; the kibbutz, which was a sort of
window-dressing operation constituting less than one per cent of the
population, became the symbol of socialist Zionism; and a whole generation
of European politicians from Crossman to Jospin have followed along
unquestioningly. In Jospin's case, he is a member of the Protestant
minority and likely to feel pangs of identification with Israeli Jews
(forgetting totally the Palestinian minority, for racist reasons), as well
as some sense of collective guilt for the Holocaust. As to why it should be
allowable for Israel to bomb Lebanon as an aspect of its illegal occupation
of the South, that is left unexplained. Perhaps it is also worth mentioning
that Jospin's sudden expression of enthusiasm was kindled by the fact that
ElAl, the Israeli airline, is in the process of refurbishing its fleet of
aircraft, and Aerospatiale, the French producers of the AirBus, are
Boeing's chief competitor for the enormous, multi-billion dollar deal.
Jospin must have accordingly felt that a little cost-free French support (I
think he and Mrs Albright call it "understanding") for Israeli bombing
would be an extra incentive for ElAl to buy French products. Besides, he
supposed, where more convincingly could he make his point sincerely than
under Palestinian noses, so to speak. They would never object, poor little
brown people that they are. French racism and condescension, hand in hand.
Thank heavens for the students, who were more courageous than their
professors and their so-called leaders, who probably (I have no
information) just sat on their hands politely and let the villainous Jospin
blather on. But that has been the Arab elite habit for some time now:
taking it imperturbably on the chin when a white man insults and humiliates
them, all of this abjection as a way of demonstrating to the world that we
are not the terrorists and fanatics that we have sometimes seemed to be.
Boss Arafat and Nabil Shaath, who was at Birzeit and was pummeled by the
students as a symbol of collaboration, went out of their way to express
anger at the students, instead of refusing to speak to Jospin at all. Any
other leadership worth its salt would have done exactly that. But ours is
too far gone to notice that "peace" to most people is a cynical game and
the shameless pandering to Israel's bankrupt and ruthlessly arrogant
leadership will get them no further than exactly as far as they have come
to date, which isn't much of a distance at all.
Thus the gap between the interests of the preponderant majority of the
people and the ruling juntas (Arab as well as Israeli) increases. In whose
interest exactly is Israel's quasi-insane military spending? Certainly not
that of the urban masses or the Mizrahim, who are forced to swallow insult
upon insult, to say nothing of grinding poverty and discrimination, while
the Ashkenazi elites go on their merry way regardless, acquiring bigger
cars and apartments while the majority suffers. This is not to mention the
present suicidal course of Israel's foreign policy, whose result is to lay
up more and more hatred among Arabs who are conceived of as only
"understanding the language of force." What blindness and what moral
obtuseness this is, as if more and more gratuitous punishment and
humiliation of the Arabs will make Israel more acceptable and more popular
instead of more hated and more likely to be the target of indiscriminate
Arab violence. The Israelis seem to have learned nothing from the history
of cruelty, which simply breeds counter-responses that prolong the
dialectic of force, instead of the other way round.
They are no less unwise than their Arab counterparts, who somehow doggedly
believe that the Americans will protect them in the long run from the wrath
of their long-suffering people. There will be no escape from that so long
as the gap widens between the rhetoric and institutions of the false peace,
on the one hand, and the appalling distortions of reality on the other.
Peace in the Palestinian world has meant more land taken, houses
demolished, corruption, continued political prisoners and torture,
despotism, and no land really liberated to speak of. At this point it
doesn't matter who does the oppressing, Israeli or Palestinian security
men. Torture can't be justified if it is done by a Palestinian policeman,
any more than it could be justified when an Israeli did it. Torture is
torture, occupation is occupation. And above all, injustice is injustice
and will be perceived as such, whether it is uttered by a French politician
or an Arab one. As Fanon said, it cannot be the aim of liberation simply to
replace a white policeman by a non-white policeman. Liberation must go a
great deal further.
The important thing for now is to keep hammering away at the phony rhetoric
and promises of the peace process, showing relentlessly not only that it
hasn't worked and has created a gap between rulers and ruled, but also, and
more importantly, that in its present form it cannot work. Human, political
and civil rights are indivisible: they cannot be partially achieved by one
people and fully enjoyed by another living in the same territory. This is
the deep flaw of Oslo. The only way to overcome it is to raise the cry
"equality or nothing, for Arabs and Jews". If one people enjoys a right of
return, the other one must also. Otherwise the conflict continues -- in the
real interests of no one at all. No one, not even those who seem to be
profiting in the short run.
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