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<TD class=aawtop vAlign=bottom width=291 colSpan=2>Al-Ahram Weekly
Online<BR><!---- Date, issue # ---->14 - 20 March 2002<BR>Issue
No.577</TD></TR>
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<TD class=estab vAlign=center bgColor=#ffffff colSpan=2>Published in Cairo
by AL-AHRAM established in 1875</TD>
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<H1>What Price Oslo?</H1><SPAN class=lead>Due weight given to decades of
Palestinian suffering, to the enormous human costs of Israel's destructive
policies: this, writes <B>Edward Said</B>, is the only possible framework for
negotiations </SPAN>
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<P><IMG height=128 alt="Edward Said" hspace=5
src="http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/standard/said.PNG" width=98 align=left
vspace=2 border=1>The television images on Al-Jazeera have been burningly
clear. There is a kind of Palestinian heroism in evidence there that makes
this <I>the </I>story of our time. An entire army, navy, and air force
supplied munificently and unconditionally by the United States have been
wreaking destruction on the 18 per cent of the West Bank and 60 per cent of
Gaza afforded Palestinians after ten years of negotiations with Israel and the
US. Palestinian hospitals, schools, refugee camps and civilian residences have
been at the receiving end of a merciless, criminal assault by Israeli troops
huddled inside their helicopter gun-ships, F-16's and Merkavas, and still the
poorly armed resistance fighters take on this preposterously more powerful
force undaunted and unyielding. In the US, CNN and newspapers like <I>The New
York Times </I>fail, to their discredit, to ever mention that "the violence"
is uneven and that there aren't two sides involved here, but only one state
turning all its great power against a stateless, repeatedly refugeed, and
dispossessed people, bereft of arms and real leadership, with the aim of
destroying this people, "dealing them a terrible blow" as the war criminal who
leads Israel shamelessly put it. As an index of how deranged Sharon has
become, I might quote here what he said to <I>Ha'aretz </I>on 5 March: "The PA
is behind the terror, it's all terror. Arafat is behind the terror. Our
pressure is aimed at ending the terror. Don't expect Arafat to act against the
terror. We have to cause them heavy casualties and then they'll know they
can't keep using terror and win political achievements."
<P>Besides symptomatically revealing the workings of an obsessed mind bent on
destruction and sheer, unadulterated hatred, Sharon's words indicate the
failures of reason and criticism loosed on the world since last September.
Yes, there was a terrorist outrage, but there's more to the world than terror.
There is politics, and struggle, and history, and injustice, and resistance
and yes, state terror as well. With scarcely a peep from the American
professorate or intelligentsia, we have all succumbed to the promiscuous
misuse of language and sense, by which everything we don't like has become
terror and what we do is pure and simple good -- fighting terror, no matter
how much wealth, and lives, and destruction is involved. Swept away are all
the Enlightenment precepts by which we attempt to educate our students and
our-fellow citizens, replaced by a disproportionate orgy of vindictiveness and
self-righteous wrath of the kind that only the wealthy and the powerful, it
would seem, have the right to use and act upon. No wonder then that a
fourth-rate thug like Sharon feels entitled (by emulation and derivation) to
do what he does when in the greatest democracy on earth, laws, constitutional
rights, writs of habeas corpus and reason itself are consigned to the rubbish
bin in the pursuit of terror and terrorism. As educators and as citizens, we
have failed in our mission by allowing ourselves to be bamboozled in this way,
without so much as an organised public discussion about a defence budget that
has shot up to $400 billion while 40 million people remain without health
insurance.
<P>Israelis, Arabs and Americans are told that love of country requires such
expenditures and such destruction because a good cause is at stake. Nonsense.
What is at stake are material interests that keep rulers in power,
corporations making profits, people in a state of manufactured consent, just
so long as they don't get up one morning and start to think about where, in
this mad technologised rush to bomb and kill, we are going.
<P>Israel is now waging a war against civilians, pure and simple, although you
will never hear it put that way in the US. This is a racist war, and in its
strategy and tactics, a colonial one as well. People are being killed and made
to suffer disproportionately because they are not Jews. What an irony! Yet CNN
never refers to "occupied" territories (always rather to "violence in Israel"
as if the main battlefields are the concert halls and cafes of Tel Aviv and
not in fact the ghettoes and besieged refugee camps of Palestine that have
already been surrounded by 150 illegal Israeli settlements). For the past ten
years, the great fraud of Oslo was foisted on the world by the US, with hardly
an awareness that only 18 per cent of the West Bank were given up, and 60 per
cent of Gaza. No one knows geography and it's better not to know, since the
reality on the ground is so astonishing, considering the verbal hoopla and
self-congratulation.
<P>And that pseudo-pundit -- the insufferably conceited Thomas Friedman --
still has the gall to say that "Arab TV" shows one-sided pictures, as if "Arab
TV" should be showing things from Israel's point-of-view the way CNN does,
with "Mid-East violence" the catch-all word for the ethnic cleansing that
Israel is wreaking on the Palestinians in their ghettoes and camps. Has
Friedman (or CNN for that matter) ever tried to point out the difference
between an attacking army fighting a colonial war on the territory of the
people it has occupied for 35 years, and the people defending themselves
against that butchery? Of course not, for indeed why should Friedman ever
bother to say honestly that there is no Palestinian occupation, there are no
Palestinian F-16's, no Apache helicopters, no gunboats, no Merkava tanks, in
short, no Palestinian occupation of Israel. So much for Friedman's credentials
as an honest commentator and reporter who has utterly failed, in unadorned
terms, to explain the US view or to understand the Arab and Palestinian cause.
Can he not see that he and his writings are part of the problem, that in their
maundering self-justifications and the dishonesty in which he shows no sign of
the self- criticism he keeps hectoringly expecting of others, he actually
aggravates the ignorance and the misperceptions rather than reducing them?
Poor journalist and educator, he.
<P>The picture you get here is that Israelis are battling for their lives
instead of for their settlements and military bases on the occupied lands of
Palestine. No maps have been run for months in the American media. On 8 March,
hitherto the bloodiest day for Palestinians of the 16-month Intifada, CNN's
main evening news specified the death of 40 "people" and failed even to
mention the death of several Red Crescent workers killed while their
ambulances were prevented by Israeli tanks from getting to the wounded. Just
"people," and no pictures of the hell they've been living in this the 35th
year of military occupation. Tul Karm is undergoing a siege of sieges with 24
hour curfews, electricity and water cut-off, systematic round-ups and the
removal of 800 young men, the wanton smashing of refugee houses, wholesale
destruction of property (and I'm not speaking of nightclubs or sports
facilities but of shacks and lean-tos that furnished twice displaced refugees
with hovels for bare subsistence) and limitless cases of sadistic cruelty to
unarmed and undefended civilians who are pushed and beaten and left to bleed
to death, women allowed to give birth to stillborn babies while they wait
needlessly at Israeli road-blocks, old men made to strip and take off their
shoes and walk barefoot for a gum-chewing 18-year-old waving around an M-16
that my taxes have paid for. Bethlehem, its town center and university
destroyed, flattened at 5,000 feet by valiant Israeli bombers swooshing in
with their marvelous F-16's which I've paid for too. Balata camp, Aida and
Dheheisheh and Azza Camps, the tiny villages of Khadr and Husam, all battered
into rubble without even a mention by the US press, whose New York editors so
obviously have no problems with it, with a few exceptions here and there. The
uncounted dead and wounded, the unburied and unassisted, to say nothing of the
hundreds of thousands of lives maimed, distorted, catastrophically marked by
wantonly caused suffering, all of it ordered at a safe distance from the
action in leafy, calm West Jerusalem by men for whom the West Bank and Gaza
are distant rat holes filled with insects and rodents that must be "subdued"
and driven out, taught a lesson in the accepted jargon of Israel's superb
military. On Tuesday, in the biggest attack of all, Ramallah has been invaded
and is being ravaged by 140 Israeli tanks, thus completing Israel's
re-conquest of the already-occupied Palestinian territories.
<P>The Palestinian people are paying the heavy, heavy unconscionable price of
Oslo, which after 10 years of negotiating left them with bits of land lacking
coherence and continuity, security institutions designed to assure their
subservience to Israel, and a life that impoverished them so that the Jewish
state could thrive and prosper. In vain during those 10 years did some of us
warn that the distance between the US-Israeli language of peace and the
appalling realities on the ground was never bridged, never even intended to be
bridged. Words and phrases like "peace process" and "terrorism" took hold
without reference to any real referent. Land confiscations were either
overlooked or referred to as "bilateral negotiations" that were taking place
between a state consolidating its hold on territory it wanted at all costs,
and a mediocre set of uninformed negotiators whom it took four years to
acquire, much less use, a reliable map of the land they were negotiating over.
The worst misrepresentation of all is that in the 54 years since 1948, never
has a narrative of Palestinian heroism and suffering been allowed to emerge.
We are all depicted as violent fanatic extremists who are little more than the
terrorists that George Bush and his cabal have imposed on the consciousness of
a stunned and systematically misinformed population, aided and uncritically
abetted by an entire army of commentators and media stars -- the Blitzers,
Zahns, Lehrers, Rathers, Brokaws, Russerts, and their ilk. The Israeli lobby
is scarcely needed with such faithful disciples trailing happily in its ranks.
<P>But now that the Saudi peace proposal has become the point of discussion
and of hope, it is necessary, I think, to put it in its real, as opposed to
its supposed, context. First of all, this is the re-cycled Reagan plan of
1982, the Fahd Plan of 1983, the Madrid plan of 1991, and so on: in other
words, it follows a series of plans many times put forward which in the end
both Israel and the US have not only refused to implement, but have actively
torpedoed. The way I see it, the only negotiations worth having should be on
the phases of a total Israeli withdrawal and not, as was the case with Oslo,
bargaining over what pieces of land Israel was willing very grudgingly to give
up. There's been too much Palestinian blood spilled, too much Israeli contempt
and racist violence dispensed for any serious return to Oslo-style
negotiations brokered by that most biased of honest brokers, the United
States. Everyone is aware, however, that the old Palestinian negotiators
haven't given up on their dreams and illusions, and that meetings have been
occurring throughout the raids and bombings. But I would argue that due weight
be given to decades of Palestinian suffering and the real human costs of
Israel's destructive policies before any negotiations accord undue status to
Israeli governments that have trampled on Palestinian rights the way they have
demolished our houses and killed our people. Any Arab-Israeli negotiations
that do not factor in history -- and for this task a team of historians,
economists, and geographers with a conscience are needed -- are not worth
having, just as Palestinians must now elect a new set of negotiators and
representatives in the hope of salvaging something from the present calamity.
<P>In short, in whatever meetings that now occur between Israeli and
Palestinian representatives, the gravity of Israeli depredations against our
people has to be given attention and not simply brushed aside as so much past
history. Oslo, in effect, pardoned the occupation, excusing it for all the
buildings and lives destroyed over the first 25 years of occupation. After so
much further suffering, Israel cannot be excused and allowed to walk away from
the table with not even a rhetorical demand that it needs to atone for what it
did.
<P>I will be told that politics is about what is possible, not about what is
desired, and that we should be grateful to get even a small Israeli pullback.
I disagree strongly. Negotiations can only be about <I>when </I>the total
withdrawal will take place, not what percentage Israel is willing to concede.
A conqueror and a vandal cannot concede anything: he must simply return what
he's taken and pay for the abuses that are his responsibility to bear, just as
Saddam Hussein should and did pay for his occupation of Kuwait. We are still a
considerable distance from that goal, although in the meantime the
extraordinary unbowed bravery of all Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank
has in effect politically and morally defeated Sharon, who will lose his seat
in the not too distant future. But, that in two decades his armies can invade
Arab cities at will, killing and sowing destruction without so much as a
collective Arab peep speaks reams for the Arab world's leaders.
<P>Lastly, what the various Arab rulers who are so delicately silent now while
Palestine is being raped on TV think they are doing, I don't know, but I can
imagine that deep in their souls they must feel no small amount of shame and
disgrace. Powerless militarily, politically, economically and above all
morally, they have little credibility and no real standing, except as obedient
pawns on the American-Israeli chessboard. Perhaps they feel they are playing a
waiting game. Perhaps. But they (like Arafat and his men) haven't learned the
power of systematically disseminated information as a way of protecting their
people from the onslaughts of those who consider all Arabs militant,
extremist, terrorist fanatics. The good news is that the time for that sort of
irresponsible and contemptible behavior is very short. Will the new generation
do any better?
<P>It is for a whole new attitude toward secular education to decide the
answer, whether collectively we go down again to disorganisation, corruption
and mediocrity or whether at last we can become a nation.
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