The Edward Said Reader

by Edward W. Said

  Remember that over half the dispossessed Palestinian population—about 3.5 million people—does not reside in the West Bank or Gaza, and according to the peace process, these people have little hope of repatriation or compensation for what they have lost or suffered. Many are stateless refugees eking out a below-subsistence existence in camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, without the right to work or leave. (That they have no place to go is now being painfully illustrated: 35,000 Palestinians just expelled from Libya were barred from Gaza by Israel and wander homeless, rebuffed by Lebanon, as well.) It is argued that Oslo left the fate of these people to final status negotiations, but the damage has already been done. After laboriously constructing the unity of Palestinians everywhere, bringing together the Diaspora and the 800,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel, as well as the residents of the occupied territories, the PLO by a stroke of the pen split the three components apart, accepting the Israeli designation of Palestinians as only the encaged residents of the territories. No other liberation movement in the twentieth century got so little—roughly 5 percent of its territory. And no other leaders of a liberation movement accepted what in effect is permanent subordination of their people.

  Although it now seems that many Palestinians have been demoralized by what faces them in reality, I believe the Palestinian people will continue to want their rights to be equal with those of their neighbors, the Israeli Jewish people. The emergence of Hamas and Islamic Jihad are part of the continuing protest and should be understood as that. Their suicide missions, bomb throwing, and provocative slogans are acts of defiance principally, refusals to accept the crippling conditions of Israeli occupation and Palestinian collaboration. No matter how much secular people like myself lament their methods and their vision (such as it is), there is no doubting the truth that for many Palestinians these people express a furious protest against the humiliations, demeanments, and denials imposed on all Palestinians as a people. It is ironic that Hamas, having been encouraged by Israel in the 1980s as a tool for breaking the PLO and the intifada, should now be elevated to the rank of superdevil.

  Of course, the best response to terrorism is justice, not more repression. The deep tragedy of Palestine is that a whole people’s history and aspirations have been under such comprehensive assault—not only by Israel (with its patron and collaborator the United States) but also by the Arab governments and, since Oslo, by the PLO under Arafat.

  It is necessary here to try to describe the complicated mix of emotions and actualities that govern Palestinian life in the occupied territories today. True, Arafat’s entry into Gaza on July 1, 1994, gave people there the sense that they are no longer as confined as they once were. They can go to the beaches, they do not have to be indoors after sundown, and they enjoy some rapport with a Palestinian (not an Egyptian or Israeli) police force. In every other respect life has become worse. There is a cynical Israeli policy of letting Arafat become as much a petty dictator as is consistent with their interests. Thus, the tolerance for his inflated police force and intelligence services, totaling about 19,000 (Oslo I and a subsequent Cairo agreement limited him to 9,000).

  Arafat’s political arm is his party, Fatah, which now plays the role of enforcer, armed by him throughout the territories. He himself governs unilaterally, in the absence of real laws or constitution. At the urging of Israel and the United States, he has instituted military courts that can arrest, detain, and sentence people without due process. (When Warren Christopher and Al Gore visited the autonomy zones in March they commended Arafat’s decision to establish these courts.) Raji Sourani, the brilliant Gaza lawyer who has spent his whole life defending Palestinians against Israeli measures of this kind, protested Arafat’s fiat, and was arrested and detained for a short period without trial in February. He was recently stripped of the chairmanship of his own human rights group, with the connivance of Arafat’s Palestinian National Authority (PA).

  Having effectively dismembered the PLO—the only organization that Palestinians throughout the Diaspora have had to represent their national aspirations—Arafat now surrounds himself with a formidable network of hangers-on, sycophants, commission agents, spies, and informers. All of his appointments to his Cabinet of eighteen ministers (seventeen of them men) are beholden to him for their budgets, and indeed for their political existence. In some ministries, whose work and authority exist mainly on paper, he continues to appoint deputies (plus about 750 “director-generals” without any known jobs to perform). The total number of people employed directly by Arafat for the PA is estimated at 48,000; this includes the 19,000 police plus about 29,000 members of the civil administration. Whatever money Arafat gets from donors (about $10 million a month), local taxes and taxes collected for him by the Israelis (a total of nearly $30 million a month) is all he has to spend. Little is left over for improving sewage, health services, or employment.

  With all the Palestinian competence in economics and engineering available, Arafat instead consistently engages the services of shady figures like the Moroccan Gabriel Banon and the Lebanese Pierre Rizk, former Phalangist contact for the Mossad in Lebanon, or one Khalid Slam (aka Mohammed Rashid), a Kurd of uncertain background notoriously skilled at arranging quick deals. These are his fixers and advisers, along with a new group of American business consultants, who supposedly function as his economic counselors.

  There is, moreover, no system of financial accountability. According to David Hirst, writing in The Guardian for April 15, Arafat’s attorney general is “a man whom Fatah once sentenced to death for stealing funds destined for the intifada.” Arafat does what he pleases, spends as he likes, disposes how he feels his interests might be served. Above all, as Julian Ozanne wrote in The Financial Times, his pact with Israel “keeps the Palestinian economy largely within Israel’s broad macroeconomic trade and taxation policy, recognizing the dependence of the territories on their neighboring economic giant for the foreseeable future.” All petroleum and petroleum products used by Palestinians come exclusively from the Israeli petroleum authority. Local Palestinians pay an excise tax, the net amount of which is held in Arafat’s name in an Israel bank account. Only he can get to it, and only he can spend it. At a donors’ meeting in Paris this past April, an IMF observer told me that the group voted $18.5 million to the Palestinian people: $18 million was paid directly to Arafat; $500,000 was put in the public treasury. How it shall be disbursed is at Arafat’s discretion alone.

  A group of wealthy Palestinian businessmen (most of whom made their fortunes in the Persian Gulf) have claimed to be fed up with Arafat’s methods and have devised a series of projects for electricity, telecommunications, and the like. These are financed through what they call “public” stock offerings, though the actual public is far too poor to invest in such schemes. These men (who additionally invest in, and profit from, real estate) nevertheless also deal directly with Arafat. They meet with him secretly and are not beholden to anything like a national planning or regulatory authority. They build the way they want, responsible only to themselves.

  Given such activity, Arafat is lucky that the international media have largely spared him their investigations. This comes after dozens of books and articles before Oslo on the PLO’s finances, its support of terrorism, etc. At home, meanwhile, the Palestinian press is not free. Very little that is critical of Arafat appears there. On May 5, al-Hayat reported that the offices of al-Ummah, an opposition paper in Jerusalem, were deliberately burned; the paper’s owner blamed Palestinian police. The opinions of opponents are severely curtailed. Hanan Ashrawi, by now internationally known, cannot be read or seen or read about in the semi-official Palestinian daily al-Quds because she is considered too independent.

  Arafat and his Palestinian Authority have become a sort of Vichy government for Palestinians. Those of us who fought for Palestine before Oslo fought for a cause that we believed would spur the emergence of a just order. Never has this ideal been further from realization than today. Arafat is corrupt. Ham
as and Islamic Jihad are no alternative. And most Palestinian intellectuals have been too anxious to bolster their own case, following Arafat and his lieutenants in the abandonment of their principles and history just to be recognized by the West, to be invited to the Brookings Institution, and to appear on U.S. television.

  The Israelis have clung to their power and their old policies, the Arabs have capitulated and fawned on their victors without a trace of guts or decency. In the long run Israel is not acting wisely. As the Israeli commentator Haim Baram wrote on March 18, 1994 in Kol Ha’ir:

  The concept of a Golda Meir–style territorial compromise is still characteristic of Rabin. His desire to keep the settlements firmly rooted in the territories constitutes an impenetrable roadblock to peace and a prescription for political and military disaster. His desire to bring Rafael Eitan and his friends into the coalition stems directly from this as well. Rabin armed the settlers and for years allowed the Kahanists to go on their rampages in spite of warning from the Shabak (General Security Services). Rabin should retire from the political arena.

  The claim of the doves, that they are just using Rabin’s name to implement the policies of Peres, is proving itself to be worthless for the long term. Peace can only by made openly, by demonstrating both leadership and wisdom. Rabin is simply not able to rise to the occasion. He is a small-minded person, a hawk from the Tabenken school of thought in the Labor movement, who fell into a situation bigger than himself. Everything else is worthless public relations.

  In the end there will be reactions to it that it would not have foreseen, any more than the intifada was foreseen before it happened.

  I do not pretend to have any quick solutions for the situation now referred to as “the peace process,” but I do know that for the vast majority of Palestinian refugees, day laborers, peasants, and town and camp dwellers, those who cannot make a quick deal and those whose voices are never heard, for them the process has made matters far worse. Above all, they may have lost hope. And that is also true of the Palestinian political consciousness in general.

  All of us know that because of its aggressive behavior, its continued policies of occupation, settlement and domination, Israel is not embarked on a course of peace with us, but of protracted hostility in which as countries, cultures, and peoples the Arabs are supposed to submit to Israel’s power. Neither the United States administration, which essentially cooperates in this plan, nor the media, which with the exception of a few reports here and there, drones on about a paradigm of “peace-making” that exists only in their own irrelevant commentaries, has offered very much in the way of real peace. Forbidden to recall their history of dispossession and suffering, the Palestinians today are an orphaned people, a fact gradually being understood not only by themselves but also by the many Egyptians, Jordanians, Syrians, and Lebanese who have gradually awakened to the perfidy and indifference of their leaders. For the first time that I can remember, though, the governments no longer bother to conceal what they really are about. In early April 1995, for instance, Al-Hayat revealed that in 1976 Hafez al-Assad sought and received permission from Mr. Rabin, then Israeli Prime Minister, to send his troops into Lebanon; the go-between was King Hussein. All this at a time when there was supposed to be no communication between such implacable enemies. Well, the Syrian troops are still in Lebanon and, since the Syrian mission for entry into Lebanon at the time was the weakening of the Palestinians, we also know that the Palestinians as a people and leadership have indeed become weaker.

  At a time when people are suffering and shabby leaders are reaping Nobel Prizes that only enable more exploitation, it is crucial to bear witness to the truth. As Palestinians we must ask whether our century of struggle should conclude not with a state and not with a democracy but with an awful caricature of both, extracted by a country that alone in the world has no officially declared borders and manipulated by a man whose methods and patrons resemble those of every other Arab tyrant.

  This policy cannot be an excuse for continuing to misreport and misrepresent the realities. Were it just a matter of the mass media’s laziness or ignorance that would be bad enough. But elite, knowledgeable, authoritative groups like the Council on Foreign Relations and its house organ Foreign Affairs connive in perpetuating the fiction that the Middle East has finally accepted the American paradigm. Consider that the journal ran three articles on “The Palestinian Future” in its July/August 1994 issue; two of them were by Israelis (neither one known for his pacific views), one by a former United States National Security Council official. Earlier (November/ December 1993) it had published two pieces on “aftershocks of the peace plan”; both were by Americans one of whom (the author of the essay on Islamic militants) was a specialist on medieval Iran. Then again two issues partially devoted to “Is Islam a Threat?” and “The Islamic Cauldron” (Spring 1993 and May/June 1995), both contained not one article by a Muslim but were mostly written by poorly informed journalists, publicists, special pleaders.

  Besides there is now an ample supply of alternative sources on what is happening on the ground, all of it in English, and better, more representative, more rounded in its coverage and the range of its detail. In Israel the Alternative Information Center publishes a monthly as well as a weekly bulletin: both provide excellent analysis and reporting. Israel Shahak still produces the most compelling and rigorous reports and translations (with his own trenchant commentaries) from the Hebrew press: they are easily available from the Middle East Data Center in Woodbridge, Virginia. Middle East Mirror does a daily fax report drawn from Arab and Israeli newspapers, magazines, broadcasts. Middle East International is, I think, the best fortnightly magazine on the Middle East. In addition the French, British, and London-based Arab press is full of material, none of it used by the United States media to alter the misleading images attached to the peace process, and its basically retrograde designs.

  The peace process has attempted first to isolate, then to pacify individual Arab states so that Israel, which has obviously figured out that it cannot forever depend on United States aid on such a lavish scale, can become the regional economic and military power, the Arabs providing what little is left of their squandered wealth, and their unlimited manpower. I have been particularly disheartened by the role played in all this by liberal Americans, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, those who have lamented the Holocaust and the massacres in Bosnia, Chechnya, and Rwanda. Silence is not a response, and neither is some fairly tepid endorsement of a Palestinian state, with Israeli settlements and army more or less still there, still in charge. I believe that Israel has no future unless its people are a real part of the Middle East, not its soldiers nor its puppetmasters. I think we have to look beyond exclusivism and separatist nationalism and see that all over the area there are in fact smaller contests for democracy and rights: there is a women’s movement in every Arab country, there is a human rights movement, and most important, there is a secular actuality that willingly engages religious intolerance and extremism of every kind.2 Israelis and their American supporters have a stake in those struggles, not in the distortion of hopes and rightful aspirations that has been called the peace process. And indeed, there is a secular versus religious struggle inside Israel, as well as a danger in Israel, the Occupied Territories and elsewhere, that this might become an overt civil war.

  This peace process must be demystified and spoken about truthfully and plainly. Palestine/Israel is no ordinary bit of geography: it is more saturated in religious, historical, and cultural significance than any place on earth. It is also now the place where two peoples, whether they like it or not, live inextricably linked lives, tied together by history, war, daily contact, and suffering. To speak in grandiose geopolitical terms, or to speak mindlessly about “separating” them is nothing less than to provide prescriptions for more violence and degradation. There is simply no substitute for seeing these two communities as equal to each other in rights and expectations, then proceeding from there to do justice to the
ir living actualities. But whatever one does there is no alternative in my opinion to recognizing that the United States–supported peace process is a process with no real and lasting peace: it has actively harmed Palestinians and Israelis who deserve better. And, in its present form, I am convinced, it will not stand the test of time: it must be completely rethought and put on a more promising course. The so-called Oslo II Agreement provides no such rethinking: it allows Israel to rule the Occupied Territories from the intact settlements and bypassing roads. I urge fellow Palestinians, Arabs, Israelis, Europeans, and Americans not to flinch from the unpalatable truth and to demand a reckoning from the unscrupulous leaders and their minions who have ignored or dismissed the facts and tampered with the lives of far too many decent people.

  from Peace and Its Discontents

  16

  On Writing a Memoir (1999)

  In 1994, three years after Edward Said was diagnosed with leukemia, he began writing his memoir, Out of Place. A subjective account of his early life, his memoir narrates the dislocating currents that formed his experiences in British Mandate Jerusalem, in colonial Cairo, in Lebanon, and in the United States. “To me,” he writes, “nothing more painful and paradoxically sought after characterizes my life than the many displacements from countries, cities, abodes, languages, environments that have kept me in motion all these years.” With undertones of Proust, Out of Place “is a record of an essentially lost or forgotten world.”