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Today's
Stories
September
25, 2003
David
Krieger
The
Second Nuclear Age
September 24, 2003
Stan Goff
Generational
Casualties: the Toxic Legacy of the Iraq War
William
Blum
Grand Illusions About Wesley Clark
David
Vest
Politics
for Bookies
Jon Brown
Stealing Home: The Real Looting is About to Begin
Robert Fisk
Occupation and Censorship
Latino
Military Families
Bring Our Children Home Now!
Neve Gordon
Sharon's
Preemptive Zeal
Website
of the Day
Bands Against Bush
September
23, 2003
Bernardo
Issel
Dancing
with the Diva: Arianna and Streisand
Gary Leupp
To
Kill a Cat: the Unfortunate Incident at the Baghdad Zoo
Gregory
Wilpert
An
Interview with Hugo Chavez on the CIA in Venezuela
Steven
Higgs
Going to Jail for the Cause--Part 2: Charity Ryerson, Young and
Radical
Stan Cox
The Cheney Tapes: Can You Handle the Truth?
Robert
Fisk
Another Bloody Day in the Death of Iraq
William S. Lind
Learning from Uncle Abe: Sacking the Incompetent
Elaine
Cassel
First They Come for the Lawyers, Then the Ministers
Yigal
Bronner
The
Truth About the Wall
Website
of the Day
The
Baghdad Death Count
Recent
Stories
September
20 / 22, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Silliest Show in Town
Alexander
Cockburn
Lighten
Up, America!
Peter Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Execution of Robert Emmet
Anne Brodsky
Return
to Afghanistan
Saul Landau
Guillermo and Me
Phan Nguyen
Mother Jones Smears Rachel Corrie
Gila Svirsky
Sharon, With Eyes Wide Open
Gary Leupp
On Apache Terrorism
Kurt Nimmo
Colin
Powell: Exploiting the Dead of Halabja
Brian
Cloughley
Colin Powell's Shame
Carol Norris
The Moral Development of George W. Bush
Bill Glahn
The Real Story Behind RIAA Propaganda
Adam Engel
An Interview with Danny Scechter, the News Dissector
Dave Lindorff
Good Morning, Vietnam!
Mark Scaramella
Contracts and Politics in Iraq
John Ross
WTO
Collapses in Cancun: Autopsy of a Fiasco Foretold
Justin Podur
Uribe's Desperate Squeals
Toni Solo
The Colombia Three: an Interview with Caitriona Ruane
Steven Sherman
Workers and Globalization
David
Vest
Masked and Anonymous: Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America
Ron Jacobs
Politics of the Hip-Hop Pimps
Poets
Basement
Krieger, Guthrie and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Ted Honderich:
Terrorism for Humanity?
September
19, 2003
Ilan Pappe
The
Hole in the Road Map
Bill Glahn
RIAA is Full of Bunk, So is the New York Times
Dave Lindorff
General Hysteria: the Clark Bandwagon
Robert Fisk
New Guard is Saddam's Old
Jeff Halper
Preparing
for a Struggle Against Israeli Apartheid
Brian J. Foley
Power to the Purse
Clare
Brandabur
Hitchens
Smears Edward Said
Website of the Day
Live from Palestine
September
18, 2003
Mona Baker
and Lawrence Davidson
In
Defense of the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
Wayne
Madsen
Wesley
Clark for President? Another Neo-Con Con Job
Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Wesley Clark and Waco
Muqtedar Khan
The Pakistan Squeeze
Dominique
de Villepin
The
Reconstruction of Iraq: This Approach is Leading Nowhere
Angus Wright
Brazilian Land Reform Offers Hope
Elaine
Cassel
Payback is Hell
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Leavitt
for EPA Head? He's Much Worse Than You Thought
Website
of the Day
ALA Responds to Ashcroft's Smear
September 17, 2003
Timothy J. Freeman
The
Terrible Truth About Iraq
St. Clair / Cockburn
A
Vain, Pompous Brown-noser:
Meet the Real Wesley Clark
Terry Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Moore on Gen. Wesley Clark
Mitchel Cohen
Don't Be Fooled Again: Gen. Wesley Clark, War Criminal
Norman Madarasz
Targeting Arafat
Richard Forno
High Tech Heroin
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Website of the Day
The Ultimate Palestine Resource Site!
September 16, 2003
Rosemary and Walt Brasch
An
Ill Wind: Hurricane Isabel and the Lack of Homeland Security
Robert Fisk
Powell
in Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
Imperial Sociopaths
M. Shahid Alam
The Dialectics
of Terror
Ron Jacobs
Exile at Gunpoint
Christopher Brauchli
Bush's War on Wages
Al Krebs
Stop Calling Them "Farm Subsidies"; It's Corporate
Welfare
Patrick Cockburn
The
Iraq Wreck
Website of the Day
From Occupied Palestine
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 15, 2003
Stan Goff
It Was
the Oil; It Is Like Vietnam
Robert Fisk
A Hail of Bullets, a Trail of Dead
Writers Bloc
We
Are Winning: a Report from Cancun
James T. Phillips
Does George Bush Cry?
Elaine Cassel
The Troublesome Bill of Rights
Cynthia McKinney
A Message to the People of New York City
Matthew Behrens
Sunday Morning Coming Down: Reflections on Johnny Cash
Uri Avnery
Assassinating
Arafat
Hammond Guthrie
Celling Out the Alarm
Website of the Day
Arnold and the Egg
September 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
Hot Stories
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
September
25, 2003
Dignity,
Solidarity and the Penal Colony
By EDWARD SAID
[An Excerpt from The
Politics of Anti-Semitism, edited by Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair]
Aside from the obvious physical discomforts, being
ill for a long period of time fills the spirit with a terrible
feeling of helplessness, but also with periods of analytic lucidity,
which, of course, must be treasured. For the past three months
now I have been in and out of the hospital, with days marked
by lengthy and painful treatments, blood transfusions, endless
tests, hours and hours of unproductive time spent staring at
the ceiling, draining fatigue and infection, inability to do
normal work, and thinking, thinking, thinking.
But there are also the intermittent passages
of lucidity and reflection that sometimes give the mind a perspective
on daily life that allows it to see things (without being able
to do much about them) from a different perspective. Reading
the news from Palestine and seeing the frightful images of death
and destruction on television, it has been my experience to be
utterly amazed and aghast at what I have deduced from those details
about Israeli government policy, more particularly about what
has been going on in the mind of Ariel Sharon. And when, after
the recent Gaza bombing by one of his F-16s in which nine children
were massacred, he was quoted as congratulating the pilot and
boasting of a great Israeli success, I was able to form a much
clearer idea than before of what a pathologically deranged mind
is capable of, not only in terms of what it plans and orders
but, worse, how it manages to persuade other minds to think in
the same delusional and criminal way. Getting inside the official
Israeli mind is a worthwhile, if lurid, experience.
In the West, however, there's been such
repetitious and unedifying attention paid to Palestinian suicide
bombing that a gross distortion in reality has completely obscured
what is much worse: the official Israeli, and perhaps the uniquely
Sharonian evil that has been visited so deliberately and so methodically
on the Palestinian people. Suicide bombing is reprehensible but
it is a direct and, in my opinion, a consciously programmed result
of years of abuse, powerlessness and despair. It has as little
to do with the Arab or Muslim supposed propensity for violence
as the man in the moon. Sharon wants terrorism, not peace, and
he does everything in his power to create the conditions for
it. But for all its horror, Palestinian violence, the response
of a desperate and horribly oppressed people, has been stripped
of its context and the terrible suffering from which it arises:
a failure to see that is a failure in humanity, and that context
doesn't make the violence any less terrible but at least situates
it in a real history and real geography.
Yet the location of Palestinian terror-of
course it is terror-is never allowed a moment's chance to appear,
so remorseless has been the focus on it as a phenomenon apart,
a pure, gratuitous evil which Israel, supposedly acting on behalf
of pure good, has been virtuously battling in its variously appalling
acts of disproportionate violence against a population of three
million Palestinian civilians. I am not speaking only about Israel's
manipulation of opinion, but its exploitation of the American
equivalent of the campaign against terrorism without which Israel
could not have done what it has done. (In fact, I cannot think
of any other country on earth that, in full view of nightly TV
audiences, has performed such miracles of detailed sadism against
an entire society and gotten away with it.) That this evil has
been made consciously part of George W. Bush's campaign against
terrorism, irrationally magnifying American fantasies and fixations
with extraordinary ease, is no small part of its blind destructiveness.
Like the brigades of eager (and in my opinion completely corrupt)
American intellectuals who spin enormous structures of falsehoods
about the benign purpose and necessity of US imperialism, Israeli
society has pressed into service numerous academics, policy intellectuals
at think tanks, and ex-military men now in defense-related and
public relations business, all to rationalize and make convincing
inhuman punitive policies that are supposedly based on the need
for Israeli security.
Israeli security is now a fabled beast.
Like a unicorn it is endlessly hunted and never found, remaining,
everlastingly, the goal of future action. That over time Israel
has become less secure and more unacceptable to its neighbors
scarcely merits a moment's notice. But then who challenges the
view that Israeli security ought to define the moral world we
live in? Certainly not the Arab and Palestinian leaderships,
who for 30 years have conceded everything to Israeli security.
Shouldn't that ever be questioned, given that Israel has wreaked
more damage on the Palestinians and other Arabs relative to its
size than any country in the world, Israel with its nuclear arsenal,
its air force, navy and army limitlessly supplied by the US taxpayer?
As a result the daily, minute occurrences of what Palestinians
have to live through are hidden and, more important, covered
over by a logic of self-defense and the pursuit of terrorism
(terrorist infrastructure, terrorist nests, terrorist bomb factories,
terrorist suspects-the list is infinite) which perfectly suits
Sharon and the lamentable George Bush. Ideas about terrorism
have thus taken on a life of their own, legitimized and re-legitimized
without proof, logic or rational argument.
Consider for instance the devastation
of Afghanistan, on the one hand, and the "targeted"
assassinations of almost 100 Palestinians (to say nothing of
the many thousands of "suspects" rounded-up and still
imprisoned by Israeli soldiers) on the other: nobody asks whether
all these people killed were in fact terrorists, or proved to
be terrorists, or were about to become terrorists. They are all
assumed to be dangers by acts of simple, unchallenged affirmation.
All you need is an arrogant spokesman or two, like the loutish
Ranaan Gissin, Avi Pazner or Dore Gold, and in Washington a non-stop
apologist for ignorance and incoherence like Ari Fleischer, and
the targets in question are just as good as dead. Without doubts,
questions or demurral. No need for proof or any such tiresome
delicacy. Terrorism and its obsessive pursuit have become an
entirely circular, self-fulfilling murder and slow death of enemies
who have no choice or say in the matter.
With the exception of reports by a few
intrepid journalists and writers such as Amira Hass, Gideon Levy,
Amos Elon, Tanya Leibowitz, Jeff Halper, Israel Shamir and a
few others, public discourse in the Israeli media has declined
terribly in quality and honesty. Patriotism and blind support
for the government has replaced skeptical reflection and moral
seriousness. Gone are the days of Israel Shahak, Jakob Talmon
and Yehoshua Leibowitch. I can think of few Israeli academics
and intellectuals-men like Zeev Sternhell, Uri Avnery and Ilan
Pappe, for instance-who are courageous
enough to depart from the imbecilic and debased debate about
"security" and "terrorism" that seems to
have overtaken the Israeli peace establishment, or even its rapidly
dwindling left opposition. Crimes are being committed every day
in the name of Israel and the Jewish people, and yet the intellectuals
chatter on about strategic withdrawal, or perhaps whether to
incorporate settlements or not, or whether to keep building that
monstrous fence (has a crazier idea ever been realized in the
modern world, that you can put several million people in a cage
and say they don't exist?) in a manner befitting a general or
a politician, rather than in ways more suited to intellectuals
and artists with independent judgment and some sort of moral
standard. Where are the Israeli equivalents of Nadine Gordimer,
Andre Brink, Athol Fugard, those white writers who spoke out
unequivocally and with unambiguous clarity against the evils
of South African apartheid? They simply don't exist in Israel,
where public discourse by writers and academics has sunk to equivocation
and the repetition of official propaganda, and where most really
first-class writing and thought has disappeared from even the
academic establishment.
But to return to Israeli practices and
the mind-set that has gripped the country with such obduracy
during the past few years, think of Sharon's plan. It entails
nothing less than the obliteration of an entire people by slow,
systematic methods of suffocation, outright murder and the stifling
of everyday life. There is a remarkable story by Kafka, In
the Penal Colony, about a crazed official who shows off a
fantastically detailed torture machine whose purpose is to write
all over the body of the victim, using a complex apparatus of
needles to inscribe the captive's body with minute letters that
ultimately causes the prisoner to bleed to death. This is what
Sharon and his brigades of willing executioners are doing to
the Palestinians, with only the most limited and most symbolic
of opposition. Every Palestinian has become a prisoner. Gaza
is surrounded by an electrified wire fence on three sides; imprisoned
like animals, Gazans are unable to move, unable to work, unable
to sell their vegetables or fruit, unable to go to school. They
are exposed from the air to Israeli planes and helicopters and
are gunned down like turkeys on the ground by tanks and machine
guns. Impoverished and starved, Gaza is a human nightmare, each
of whose little pieces of episodes-like what takes place at Erez,
or near the settlements-involves thousands of soldiers in the
humiliation, punishment, intolerable enfeeblement of each Palestinian,
without regard for age, gender or illness. Medical supplies are
held up at the border, ambulances are fired upon or detained.
Hundreds of houses are demolished, and hundreds of thousands
of trees and agricultural land destroyed in acts of systematic
collective punishment against civilians, most of whom are already
refugees from Israel's destruction of their society in 1948.
Hope has been eliminated from the Palestinian vocabulary so that
only raw defiance remains, and still Sharon and his sadistic
minions prattle on about eliminating terrorism by an ever-encroaching
occupation that has continued now for 35 years. That the campaign
itself is, like all colonial brutality, futile, or that it has
the effect of making Palestinians more, rather than less, defiant
simply does not enter Sharon's closed mind.
The West Bank is occupied by 1,000 Israeli
tanks whose sole purpose is to fire upon and terrorize civilians.
Curfews are imposed for periods of up to two weeks, without respite.
Schools and universities are either closed or impossible to get
to. No one can travel, not just between the nine main cities
but within the cities. Every town today is a wasteland of destroyed
buildings, looted offices, purposely ruined water and electrical
systems. Commerce is finished. Malnutrition prevails in half
the number of children. Two-thirds of the population lives below
the poverty level of $2 a day. Tanks in Jenin (where the demolition
of the refugee camp by Israeli armor, a major war crime, was
never investigated because cowardly international bureaucrats
such as Kofi Annan back down when Israel threatens) fire upon
and kill children, but that is only one drop in an unending stream
of Palestinian civilian deaths caused by Israeli soldiers who
furnish the illegal Israeli military occupation with loyal, unquestioning
service. Palestinians are all "terrorist suspects".
The soul of this occupation is that young Israeli conscripts
are allowed full rein to subject Palestinians at checkpoints
to every known form of private torture and abjection. There is
the waiting in the sun for hours; then there is the detention
of medical supplies and produce until they rot; there are the
insulting words and beatings administered at will; the sudden
rampage of jeeps and soldiers against civilians waiting their
turn by the thousands at the innumerable checkpoints that have
made of Palestinian life a choking hell; making dozens of youths
kneel in the sun for hours; forcing men to take off their clothes;
insulting and humiliating parents in front of their children;
forbidding the sick to pass through for no other reason than
personal whim; stopping ambulances and firing on them. And the
steady number of Palestinian deaths (quadruple that of Israelis)
increases on a daily, mostly untabulated basis. More "terrorist
suspects" plus their wives and children, but "we"
regret those deaths very much. Thank you.
Israel is frequently referred to as a
democracy. If so, then it is a democracy without a conscience,
a country whose soul has been captured by a mania for punishing
the weak, a democracy that faithfully mirrors the psychopathic
mentality of its ruler, General Sharon, whose sole idea-if that
is the right word for it-is to kill, reduce, maim, drive away
Palestinians until "they break". He provides nothing
more concrete as a goal for his campaigns, now or in the past,
beyond that, and like the garrulous official in Kafka's story
he is most proud of his machine for abusing defenseless Palestinian
civilians, all the while monstrously abetted in his grotesque
lies by his court advisers and philosophers and generals, as
well as by his chorus of faithful American servants. There is
no Palestinian army of occupation, no Palestinian tanks, no soldiers,
no helicopter gun-ships, no artillery, no government to speak
of. But there are the "terrorists" and the "violence"
that Israel has invented so that its own neuroses can be inscribed
on the bodies of Palestinians, without effective protest from
the overwhelming majority of Israel's laggard philosophers, intellectuals,
artists, peace activists. Palestinian schools, libraries and
universities have ceased normal functioning for months now; and
we still wait for the Western freedom-to-write groups and the
vociferous defenders of academic freedom in America to raise
their voices in protest. I have yet to see one academic organization
either in Israel or in the West make a declaration about this
profound abrogation of the Palestinian right to knowledge, to
learning, to attend school.
In sum, Palestinians must die a slow
death so that Israel can have its security, which is just around
the corner but cannot be realized because of the special Israeli
"insecurity". The whole world must sympathize, while
the cries of Palestinian orphans, sick old women, bereaved communities
and tortured prisoners simply go unheard and unrecorded. Doubtless,
we will be told, these horrors serve a larger purpose than mere
sadistic cruelty. After all, "the two sides" are engaged
in a "cycle of violence" which has to be stopped, sometime,
somewhere. Once in a while, we ought to pause and declare indignantly
that there is only one side with an army and a country: the other
is a stateless, dispossessed population without rights or any
present way of securing them. The language of suffering and concrete
daily life has either been hijacked, or it has been so perverted
as, in my opinion, to be useless except as pure fiction deployed
as a screen for the purpose of more killing and painstaking torture-slowly,
fastidiously, inexorably. That is the truth of what Palestinians
suffer. But in any case, Israeli policy will ultimately fail.
Anyone who believes that the road map
devised by the Bush administration actually offers anything resembling
a settlement or that it tackles the basic issues is wrong. Like
so much of the prevailing peace discourse, it places the need
for restraint and renunciation and sacrifice squarely on Palestinian
shoulders, thus denying the density and sheer gravity of Palestinian
history. To read through the road map is to confront an unsituated
document, oblivious of its time and place.
The road map, in other words, is not
about a plan for peace so much as a plan for pacification: it
is about putting an end to Palestine as a problem. Hence the
repetition of the term "performance" in the document's
wooden prose-in other words, how the Palestinians are expected
to behave, almost in the social sense of the word. No violence,
no protest, more democracy, better leaders and institutions,
all based on the notion that the underlying problem has been
the ferocity of Palestinian resistance, rather than the occupation
that has given rise to it. Nothing comparable is expected of
Israel except that a few small settlements, known as "illegal
outposts" (an entirely new classification which suggests
that some Israeli implantations on Palestinian land are legal)
must be given up and, yes, the major settlements "frozen"
but certainly not dismantled. Not a word is said about what since
1948, and then again since 1967, Palestinians have endured at
the hands of Israel and the US. Nothing about the de-development
of the Palestinian economy as described by the American researcher
Sara Roy in her forthcoming Scholarship and Politics.
House demolitions, the uprooting of trees, the 5000 prisoners
or more, the policy of targeted assassinations, the closures
since 1993, the wholesale ruin of the infrastructure, the incredible
number of deaths and maimings-all that and more passes without
a word.
Nonetheless It may seem quixotic for
me to say, even if the immediate prospects are grim from a Palestinian
perspective, they are not all dark. The Palestinians stubbornly
survive, and Palestinian society-devastated, nearly ruined, desolate
in so many ways-is, like Hardy's thrush in its blast-beruffled
plume, still capable of flinging its soul upon the growing gloom.
No other Arab society is as rambunctious and healthily unruly,
and none is fuller of civic and social initiatives and functioning
institutions (including a miraculously vital musical conservatory).
Even though they are mostly unorganized and in some cases lead
miserable lives of exile and statelessness, Diaspora Palestinians
are still energetically engaged by the problems of their collective
destiny, and everyone that I know is always trying somehow to
advance the cause. Only a minuscule fraction of this energy has
ever found its way into the Palestinian Authority, which except
for the highly ambivalent figure of Arafat has remained strangely
marginal to the common fate. According to recent polls, [in the
early summer of 2003] Fateh and Hamas between them have the support
of roughly 45 percent of the Palestinian electorate, with the
remaining 55 percent evolving quite different, much more hopeful-looking
political formations.
One in particular has struck me as significant
(and I have attached myself to it) inasmuch as it now provides
the only genuine grassroots formation that steers clear both
of the religious parties and their fundamentally sectarian politics,
and of the traditional nationalism offered up by Arafat's old
(rather than young) Fateh activists. It's been called the National
Political Initiative (NPI) and its main figure is Mostapha Barghuti,
a Moscow-trained physician, whose main work has been as director
of the impressive Village Medical Relief Committee, which has
brought health care to more than 100,000 rural Palestinians.
A former Communist Party stalwart, Barghuti is a quiet-spoken
organizer and leader who has overcome the hundreds of physical
obstacles impeding Palestinian movement or travel abroad to rally
nearly every independent individual and organization of note
behind a political program that promises social reform as well
as liberation across doctrinal lines. Singularly free of conventional
rhetoric, Barghuti has worked with Israelis, Europeans, Americans,
Africans, Asians, Arabs to build an enviably well-run solidarity
movement that practices the pluralism and co-existence it preaches.
NPI does not throw up its hands at the directionless militarization
of the intifada. It offers training programs for the unemployed
and social services for the destitute on the grounds that this
answers to present circumstances and Israeli pressure. Above
all, NPI, which is about to become a recognized political party,
seeks to mobilize Palestinian society at home and in exile for
free elections-authentic elections which will represent Palestinian,
rather than Israeli or US, interests. This sense of authenticity
is what seems so lacking in the path cut out for Abu Mazen.
The vision here isn't a manufactured
provisional state on 40 percent of the land, with the refugees
abandoned and Jerusalem kept by Israel, but a sovereign territory
liberated from military occupation by mass action involving Arabs
and Jews wherever possible. Because NPI is an authentic Palestinian
movement, reform and democracy have become part of its everyday
practice. Many hundreds of Palestine's most notable activists
and independents have already signed up, and organizational meetings
have already been held, with many more planned abroad and in
Palestine, despite the terrible difficulties of getting around
Israel's restrictions on freedom of movement. It is some solace
to think that, while formal negotiations and discussions go on,
a host of informal, un-coopted alternatives exist, of which NPI
and a growing international solidarity campaign are now the main
components.
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 March 16 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
Maria 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 materialize. As expected, the Israel 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, which were subsequently published in the London 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 road map 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 to them by the
combined might of the US and Israel. It is that extraordinary
fact that is the reason for the existence of a road map and all
the numerous so-called peace plans before it, not at all some
conviction on the part of the US and Israel and the international
community 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 minimize, 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
or ever to admit that their rights were 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 road map 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 recognized, 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 recognized the world over. In the past six months I have
lectured in 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 both during the Porto Alegre anti-globalization meetings
as well as during the Davos and Amman meetings, both poles of
the world-wide political spectrum. Simply because our fellow
citizens in this country are fed an atrociously biased diet of
ignorance and misrepresentation by the media, where the occupation
is never referred to in lurid descriptions of suicide attacks,
where the apartheid wall 25 feet high, five feet thick and 350
kilometers long that Israel is building is never even shown on
the networks (or so much as referred to in passing throughout
the lifeless prose of the road map), and where the crimes of
war, the gratuitous destruction and humiliation, maiming 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 took the administration directly 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 who cynically
invented and manipulated "facts" about WMD 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
irresponsibly and almost single-handedly created there. However
else one blames Saddam Hussein as a vicious tyrant, which he
was, he had 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.
With the extraordinary fear of seeming
anti-Semitic by criticizing Israel for its daily crimes of war
against innocent, unarmed Palestinian civilians, or seeming anti-American
for criticizing the US government for its illegal war and its
dreadfully run military occupation, it is no wonder, then, 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, unmodernized
and deeply reactionary. Here is where dignity and critical historical
thinking must be mobilized to see what is what and to disentangle
truth from propaganda.
No one would deny that most Arab countries
today are ruled by unpopular regimes and that vast numbers of
poor, disadvantaged young Arabs are exposed to the 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; the satellite channels are bursting with opinions
of 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 1000
NGO's and it is this vitality and this kind of activity that
has kept society going. 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, organizations
have their meetings, and people continue to live, which seems
to be an offense to Sharon and the other extremists who simply
want Palestinians either imprisoned or driven away altogether.
The military solution hasn't worked at all, 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, organized 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
which can't be easily caricatured as just one seething mass of
violent fanaticism. The Palestinian struggle for justice is especially
something with which one must express solidarity, rather than
endless criticism and exasperated, frustrating discouragement,
or 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 which are supposed to be the property exclusively
of cultures 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 than has occurred in any other
culture.
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, the Islamic world
hardly a fraction of it. Behind all of that specious, unscientific
nonsense about wrong and right civilizations, there 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 civilizations battling against each other forever.
But Huntington is dead wrong on every point he makes. No culture
or civilization exists by itself; none is made up of things like
individuality and enlightenment that are exclusive to it; and
none exists without the basic human attributes of community,
love, value for life and all the others. To suggest otherwise
as he does is the purest invidious racism of the same stripe
as that of 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 Arabs and
Muslims, and we must be very firm as to not even go 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 that are expressed by
Arabs and Muslims in their unique cultural style, and those 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, theater, 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 today 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 self-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 to the 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 in nerve,
in dignity, in 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 religions? 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
the embrace of George Bush, the man whose war destroyed an Arab
country gratuitously, by the combined leadership of the major
Arab countries. Was there no one who had the guts to remind George
W. that he has brought more suffering to the Arab people than
anyone before him? 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 foreign ministers
preaching to the Palestinians to mind their ways, avoid violence
and keep at the peace negotiations, even though it has been so
obvious that Sharon's interest in peace is just about 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 authorized
by the State Department.
Perhaps the one 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 organizer, or anything really except
a dutiful aide to Yasser Arafat, and because I am afraid they
see in him a man who will do Israel's bidding. 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 speaks about Jewish suffering
but then amazingly says 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-respect 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 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 behavior 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, since those
aspirations 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
is made up of the members of the National Political Initiative;
they are grassroots 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, the young intellectuals
and activists, the teachers, doctors, lawyers, 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 programs,
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 must be elected freely to replace
the cronies, the outdated perspectives and the ineffectiveness
that have plagued Palestinian leaders for the past century.
Only if we respect ourselves as Arabs
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 realize, as a first step, that they are fighting
for a just and noble cause, and that they have nothing to apologize
for or anything to be embarrassed about? On the contrary, they
should be proud of what their people have done and proud also
to represent them.
Edward Said
is a professor at Columbia University. He is a contributor to
Cockburn and St. Clair's, The
Politics of Anti-Semitism (AK Press).
© Edward W. Said, 2003.
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 20 / 22, 2003
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