The Edward Said Reader

by Edward W. Said

  Since occupying the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israel has acquired approximately a million more Arab subjects. Its record has been no better, but this has not been surprising.50 Indeed, the best introduction to what has been taking place in the Occupied Territories is the testimony of Israeli Arabs who suffered through Israeli legal brutality before 1967. See, for instance, Sabri Jiryis’s The Arabs in Israel or Fouzi al-Asmar’s To Be an Arab in Israel or Elia T. Zwrayk’s The Palestinians in Israel: A Study in Internal Colonialism. Israel’s political goal has been to keep the Arabs pacified, never capable of preventing their continued domination by Israel. Whenever a nationalist leader gains a little stature, he is either deported, imprisoned (without trial), or he disappears; Arab houses (approximately 17,000) are blown up by the army to make examples of nationalist offenders; censorship on everything written by or about Arabs prevails; every Arab is directly subject to military regulations. In order to disguise repression and to keep it from disturbing the tranquillity of Israeli consciousness, a corps of Arab experts—Israeli Jews who understand the Arab “mentality”—has grown up. One of them, Amnon Lin, wrote in 1968 that “the people trusted us and gave us a freedom of action that has not been enjoyed by any other group in the country, in any field.” Consequently,

  [o]ver time we have attained a unique position in the state as experts, and no one dares to challenge our opinions or our actions. We are represented in every department of government, in the Histadrut and in the political parties; every department and office has its “Arabists” who alone act for their minister among the Arabs.51

  This quasi government interprets, and rules the Arabs behind a facade of privileged expertise. When visiting liberals wish to find out about “the Arabs,” they are given a suitably cosmetic picture.52 Meanwhile, of course, Israeli settlements on occupied territories multiply (over ninety of them since 1967); the logic of colonization after 1967 follows the same pattern, resulting in the same displacements of Arabs as before 1948.53

  There are Zionism and Israel for Jews, and Zionism and Israel for non-Jews. Zionism has drawn a sharp line between Jew and non-Jew; Israel built a whole system for keeping them apart, including the much admired (but completely apartheid) kibbutzim, to which no Arab has ever belonged. In effect, the Arabs are ruled by a separate government premised on the impossibility of isonomic rule for both Jews and non-Jews. Out of this radical notion it became natural for the Arab Gulag Archipelago to develop its own life, to create its own precision, its own detail. Uri Avneri put it this way to the Knesset:

  A complete government . . . was created in the Arab sector, a secret government, unsanctioned by law . . . whose members and methods are not known . . . to anyone. Its agents are scattered among the ministries of government, from the Israel Lands Administration to the ministry of education and the ministry of religions. It makes fateful decisions affecting [Arab] lives in unknown places without documents and communicates them in secret conversations or over the telephone. This is the way decisions are made about who goes to the teachers’ seminar, or who will obtain a tractor, or who will be appointed to a government post, or who will receive financial subsidies, or who will be elected to the Knesset, or who will be elected to the local council—if there is one—and so on for a thousand and one reasons.54

  But from time to time there have been inadvertent insights into government for Arabs in Israel given to watchful observers. The most unguarded example was a secret report by Israel Koenig, northern district (Galilee) commissioner of the ministry, written for the then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on “handling the Arabs in Israel.” (The full text was subsequently leaked to Al-Hamishmar on September 7, 1976.) Its contents make chilling reading, but they fulfill the assumptions of Zionism toward its victims, the non-Jews. Koenig frankly admits that Arabs present a demographic problem since unlike Jews, whose natural increase is 1.5 percent annually, the Arabs increase at a yearly rate of 5.9 percent. Moreover, he assumes that it is national policy for the Arabs to be kept inferior, although they may be naturally susceptible to nationalist restlessness. The main thing, however, is to make sure that in areas like Galilee the density of the Arab population, and consequently its potential for trouble, be reduced, contained, weakened. Therefore, he suggested that it is necessary to,

  expand and deepen Jewish settlement in areas where the contiguity of the Arab population is prominent, and where they number considerably more than the Jewish population; examine the possibility of diluting existing Arab population concentrations. Special attention must be paid to border areas in the country’s northwest and to the Nazareth region. The approach and exigency of performance have to deviate from the routine that has been adopted so far. Concurrently, the state law has to be enforced so as to limit “breaking of new ground” by Arab settlements in various areas of the country.

  The quasi-military strategy of these suggestions is very near the surface. What we must also remark is Koenig’s unquestioning view of the Zionist imperatives he is trying to implement. Nothing in his report intimates any qualms about the plainly racial end his suggestions promote; nor does he doubt that what he says is thoroughly consistent with the history of Zionist policy toward those non-Jews who have had the bad luck to be on Jewish territory, albeit in disquietingly large numbers. He goes on to argue—logically—that any Arab leaders who appear to cause trouble should be replaced, that the government should set about to “create” (the word has an almost theological tone very much in keeping with Jewish policy toward Arabs) “new [Arab] figures of high intellectual standard, figures who are equitable and charismatic,” and completely acceptable to the Israeli rulers. Moreover, in “dissipating” the restless nationalist leaders, whose main sin seems to be that they encourage other natives to chafe at their enforced inferiority, the government should form a “special team . . . to examine the personal habits of . . . leaders and other negative people and this information should be made available to the electorate.”

  Not content then with “diluting” and manipulating the Arab citizens of Israel, Koenig goes on to suggest ways for economically “neutralizing” and “encumbering” them. Very little of this can be effective, however, unless there were some method of somehow checkmating the “large population of frustrated intelligentsia forced by a mental need to seek relief. Expressions of this are directed against the Israeli establishment of the state.” Koenig appeared to think it natural enough for Arabs to be kept frustrated, for in reading his suggestions there is little to remind one that Arabs are people, or that his report was written not about Jews by a Nazi during World War II, but in 1976 by a Jew about his Arab co-citizens. The master stroke of Koenig’s plan comes when he discusses the social engineering required to use the Arab’s backward “Levantine character” against itself. Since Arabs in Israel are a disadvantaged community, this reality must be enhanced as follows:

  a) The reception criteria for Arab university students should be the same as for Jewish students and this must also apply to the granting of scholarships.

  A meticulous implementation of these rules will produce a natural selection [the Darwinian terminology speaks eloquently for itself] and will considerably reduce the number of Arab students. Accordingly, the number of low-standard graduates will also decrease, a fact that will facilitate their absorption in work after studies [the plan here is to make certain that young Arabs would easily be assimilated into menial jobs, thus ensuring their intellectual emasculation].

  b) Encourage the channeling of students into technical professions, the physical and natural sciences. These studies leave less time for dabbling in nationalism and the dropout rate is higher. [Koenig’s ideas about the incompatibility between science and human values go C. P. Snow one better. Surely this is a sinister instance of the use of science as political punishment; it is new even to the history of colonialism.]

  c) Make trips abroad for studies easier, while making the return and employment more difficult—this policy is apt to encourage their emigrati
on.

  d) Adopt tough measures at all levels against various agitators among college and university students.

  e) Prepare absorption possibilities in advance for the better part of the graduates, according to their qualifications. This policy can be implemented thanks to the time available (a number of years) in which the authorities may plan their steps.

  Were such ideas to have been formulated by Stalinists or Orwellian socialists or even Arab nationalists, the liberal outcry would be deafening. Koenig’s suggestions, however, seem universally justified by the logic of events pitting a small, valiant Western population of Jews against a vast and amorphous, metastasizing and ruinously mindless Arab population. Nothing in Koenig’s report conflicts with the basic dichotomy in Zionism, that is, benevolence toward Jews and an essential but paternalistic hostility toward Arabs. Moreover, Koenig himself writes from the standpoint of an ideologist or theorist as well as from a position of authority and power within Israeli society. As a ruler of Arabs in Israel, Koenig expresses both an official attention to the well-being of Jews, whose interests he maintains and protects, and a paternalistic, managerial dominance over inferior natives. His position is therefore consecrated by the institutions of the Jewish state; licensed by them, he thinks in terms of a maximum future for Jews and a minimal one for non-Jews. All of these notions are perfectly delivered in the following paragraph from his report:

  Law enforcement in a country with a developing society like that of Israel is a problem to be solved with flexibility, care and much wisdom. At the same time, however, the administrative and executive authority in the Arab sector must be aware of the existence of the law and its enforcement so as to avoid erosion.55

  Between Weizmann and Koenig there exists an intervening period of several decades. What was visionary projection for the former became for the latter a context of actual law. From Weizmann’s epoch to Koenig’s, Zionism for the native Arabs in Palestine had been converted from an advancing encroachment upon their lives to a settled reality—a nation-state—enclosing them within it. For Jews after 1948, Israel not only realized their political and spiritual hopes, it continued to be a beacon of opportunity guiding those of them still living in Diaspora, and keeping those who lived in former Palestine on the frontier of Jewish development and self-realization. For the Arab Palestinians, Israel meant one essentially hostile fact and several unpleasant corollaries. After 1948 every Palestinian disappeared nationally and legally. Some Palestinians reappeared juridically as “non-Jews” in Israel; those who left become “refugees” and later some of those acquired new Arab, European, or American identities. No Palestinian, however, lost his “old” Palestinian identity. Out of such legal fictions as the nonexistent Palestinian in Israel and elsewhere, however, the Palestinian has finally emerged—and with a considerable amount of international attention prepared at last to take critical notice of Zionist theory and praxis.

  The outcry in the West after the 1975 “Zionism is racism” resolution was passed in the United Nations was doubtless a genuine one. Israel’s Jewish achievements—or rather its achievements on behalf of European Jews, less so for the Sephardic (Oriental) Jewish majority—stand before the Western world; by most standards they are considerable achievements, and it is right that they not sloppily be tarnished with the sweeping rhetorical denunciation associated with “racism.” For the Palestinian Arab who has lived through and who has now studied the procedures of Zionism toward him and his land, the predicament is complicated, but not finally unclear. He knows that the Law of Return allowing a Jew immediate entry into Israel just as exactly prevents him from returning to his home; he also knows that Israeli raids killed thousands of civilians, all on the acceptable pretext of fighting terrorism,56 but in reality because Palestinians as a race have become synonymous with unregenerate, essentially unmotivated terrorism; he understands, without perhaps being able to master, the intellectual process by which his violated humanity has been transmuted, unheard and unseen, into praise for the ideology that has all but destroyed him. Racism is too vague a term: Zionism is Zionism. For the Arab Palestinian, this tautology has a sense that is perfectly congruent with, but exactly the opposite of, what it says to Jews.

  Burdened with a military budget draining off 35 percent of its Gross National Product, isolated except for its few and increasingly critical Atlantic friends, beset with social, political, and ideological issues it can deal with only by retreating from them entirely, Israel today faces a grim future. President Sadat’s mission of peace has at last occasioned the semblance of opposition to Begin’s fossilized theological madness, but it is doubtful whether in the absence of a conceptual, much less institutional, apparatus for coming humanely to terms with the Palestinian actualities, any decisive change will come from that quarter. The powerfully influential American Jewish community still imposes its money and its reductive view of things on the Israeli will. Then, too, one must not overlook the even more redoubtable U.S. defense establishment, more than a match for the business sector’s hunger over oil-bloated Arab markets, as it continues to heap advanced weapons on an Israel and now an Egypt primed daily to combat “radicalism,” the Soviet Union, or any other of the United States’ geopolitical bugbears. The net effect in unrestrained Israeli militarism is accurately indicated by a Ha’aretz article (March 24, 1978) celebrating the Lebanese adventure in the following terms:

  What has happened last week, has shown to everyone who has eyes in his head, that the Israeli defense force is today an American Army both in the quantity and quality of its equipment: the rifles, the troop-carriers, the F-15’s, and even the KFIR planes with their American motors, are a testimony that will convince everybody.

  But even this paean to what its author calls Israel’s “overflowing military equipment” is equaled in pernicious influence by Western and Israeli intellectuals who have continued to celebrate Israel and Zionism unblinkingly for thirty years. They have perfectly played the role of Gramsci’s “experts in legitimation,” dishonest and irrational despite their protestations on behalf of wisdom and humanity. Check the disgraceful record and you will find only a small handful—among them Noam Chomsky, Israel Shahak, I. F. Stone, Elmer Berger, Judah Magnes—who have tried to see what Zionism did to the Palestinians not just once in 1948, but over the years. It is one of the most frightening cultural episodes of the century, this almost total silence about Zionism’s doctrines for and treatment of the native Palestinians. Any self-respecting intellectual is willing today to say something about human rights abuses in Argentina, Chile, or South Africa, yet when irrefutable evidence of Israeli preventive detention, torture, population transfer, and deportation of Palestinian Arabs is presented, literally nothing is said. The merest assurances that democracy is being respected in Israel are enough to impress a Daniel Moynihan or a Saul Bellow, for instance, that all is well on the moral front. But perhaps the true extent of this state-worship can only be appreciated when one reads of a meeting held in 1962 between Martin Buber and Avraham Aderet, published in the December 1974 issue of Petahim, an Israeli religious quarterly. Aderet is extolling the army as a character-building experience for young men, and uses as an instance an episode during the 1956 war with Egypt when an officer ordered a group of soldiers simply to kill “any Egyptian prisoners of war . . . who were in our hands.” A number of volunteers then step forward and the prisoners are duly shot, although one of the volunteers avers that “he closed his eyes when he shot.” At this point Aderet says: “There is no doubt that this test can bring a confusion to every man of conscience and of experience of life, and even more so to young boys who stand at the beginning of their lives. The bad thing which happened is not the confusions in which those young men were during the time of the deed, but in the internal undermining which took place in them afterwards.” To this edifying interpretation, Buber—moral philosopher, humane thinker, former binationalist—can say only: “This is a great and true story, you should write it down.” Not one word about th
e story’s horror, or of the situation making it possible.

  But just as no Jew in the last hundred years has been untouched by Zionism, so too no Palestinian has been unmarked by it. Yet it must not be forgotten that the Palestinian was not simply a function of Zionism. His life, culture, and politics have their own dynamic and ultimately their own authenticity.

  from The Question of Palestine

  6

  Islam as News (1980)

  On November 4, 1979, a group of Iranian students occupied the U.S. Embassy in Teheran. Holding fifty-two U.S. government officials hostage, the students demanded that the United States return Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlevi, whom the CIA had installed in power in 1953, to Teheran for trial. The “hostage crisis,” as it came to be known to viewers of prime-time news, lasted four hundred and forty-four days, led to the defeat of Jimmy Carter, the election of Ronald Reagan, the Iran-Contra scandal, and the birth of a cottage industry of think tanks and its so-called terrorist experts who routinely decried the “revival” of the “Islamic threat.” In the mainstream media, Islam became synonymous with everything irrational and anti-Western. In one editorial, for example, The New York Times discoursed on the contents of the “Persian psyche”; the Atlanta Journal Constitution declared that “new barbarians” held power in Iran. Exceptional was the reporter or commentator who viewed the events in Iran in the greater context of U.S. involvement in the overthrow of Mossedegh and the brutality of the U.S. and Israeli-trained Iranian secret police known as SAVAK.