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Articoli di Edward W. Said

http://www.edwardsaid.org/?q=node/1
I links non sono aggiornati.

Ibrahim Abu-Lughod

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibrahim_Abu-Lughod

Islamophobia: Media. propaganda & perception

Article collection
compiled by Sheila Musaji

http://www.theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/media_radio_tv_film_print_free_speech/003081

Said: Articoli pubblicati su Le Monde Diplomatique

* 2004
* US: a disputed history of identity
* Eloquent, elegant Arabic
*

* 2003
* The alternative United States
*

* 2001
* Better to know
* Israel-Palestine: a third way
* Palestine has not disappeared

http://mondediplo.com/_Edward-W-Said_

Israel-Palestine: a third way

A REPLY TO ARAB INTELLECTUALS

This summer’s decision by the Israeli government to accelerate settlement of occupied Palestinian territories - and judaise East Jerusalem, confirms the failure of the Oslo accords, if confirmation was needed. The impasse has revived the debate among Arab intellectuals concerning their responsabilities regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Many of them - with some rather rare and brave exceptions - support the French writer, Roger Garaudy, convicted earlier this year for holocaust denial, for defending an Islam now under siege from the West. Edward Said incisively debunks this trend.

by Edward W Said

Now that Oslo has clearly been proven the deeply flawed and unworkable "peace" process that it really was from the outset, Arabs, Israelis and their various and sundry supporters need to think a great deal more, rather than less, clearly. A number of preliminary points seem to suggest themselves at the outset. "Peace" is now a discredited and fraudulent word, and is no guarantee that further harm and devastation will not ensue to the Palestinian people. How, after all the land confiscations, arrests, demolitions, prohibitions, killings that occurred unilaterally because of Israel’s arrogance and power in the very context of the "peace process", can one continue to use the word "peace" without hesitation? (1) It is impossible.

The Roman historian Tacitus says of the Roman conquest of Britain that "they [the Roman army] created a desolation, and called it peace". The very same thing happened to us as a people, with the willing collaboration of the Palestine Authority, the Arab states (with a few significant exceptions), Israel and the United States.

Second, it is no use pretending that we can improve on the current deadlock, which in the Oslo framework as its stands is unbreakable, by returning to golden moments of the past. We can neither return to the days before the war of l967, nor can we accept slogans of rejectionism that in effect send us back to the golden age of Islam. You cannot turn the wheel back. The only way to undo injustice, as Israel Shahak (1) and Azmi Bishara (2) have both said, is to create more justice, not to create new forms of vindictive injustice, i.e. "They have a Jewish state, we want an Islamic state."

On the other hand, it seems equally fatuous to impose total blockades against everything Israeli (now in fashion in various progressive Arab circles)and to pretend that that is the really virtuous nationalist path. There are, after all, one million Palestinians who are Israeli citizens: are they also to be boycotted, as they were during the l950s? What about Israelis who support our struggle? Are they to be boycotted because they are Israeli? Obviously, to do so would be to pretend that the South African triumph over apartheid hadn’t occurred, and to ignore all the many victories for justice that occurred because of non-violent political cooperation between like-minded people on both sides of a highly contested and moveable line. As I said in a recent article (3), we cannot win this struggle by wishing that all the Jews would simply go away, or that we could make everything become Islamic: we need all those on the other side who are partisan to our struggle. And we must cross the line of separation - which has been one of the main intentions of Oslo to erect - that maintains current apartheid between Arab and Jew in historic Palestine. Go across, but do not enforce the line.

Third and perhaps most important, there is a great difference between political and intellectual behaviour. The intellectual’s role is to speak the truth, as plainly, directly and as honestly as possible. No intellectual is supposed to worry about whether what is said embarasses, pleases or displeases people in power. Speaking the truth to power means additionally that the intellectual’s constituency is neither a government nor a corporate or a career interest: only the truth unadorned. Political behaviour principally relies upon considerations of interest - advancing a career, working with governments, maintaining one’s position, etc. In the wake of Oslo, it is therefore obvious that continuing the line propagated by the three parties to its provisions, Arab states, the Palestinian Authority, the Israeli government is political behaviour, not intellectual.

Take, for example, the joint declaration made by Egyptian and Israeli men (mostly men) on behalf of the Cairo Peace Society and Peace Now. Remove all the high-sounding phrases about "peace" and not only do you get a ringing endorsement of Oslo, but also a return to the Sadat-Begin agreements of the late 1970s, which are described as courageous and momentous. Fine. But what does this have to do with Palestinians whose territory and self-determination were removed from those courageous and momentous Camp David documents? Besides, Egypt and Israel are still at peace.

What would people think if a few Israelis and Palestinians got together and issued ringing proclamations about Israeli-Syrian peace that were meant to "appeal" to those two governments? Crazy, most people would say. What entitles two parties, one who oppresses Palestinians and the other who has arrogated the right to speak for them, to proclaim peaceful goals in a conflict that is not between them? Moreover, the idea of appealing to this Israeli government, expecting solutions from it, is like asking Count Dracula to speak warmly about the virtues of vegetarianism.

In short, political behaviour of this sort simply reinforces the hold of a dying succubus, Oslo, on the future of real, as opposed to fraudulent American-Israeli peace. But neither, I must also say, is it intellectually responsible in effect to return to blanket boycotts of the sort now becoming the fashion in various Arab countries. This sort of tactic (it is scarcely a strategy, any more than sticking one’s head in the sand like an ostrich is a strategy) is regressive.

Israel is neither South Africa, nor Algeria, nor Vietnam. Whether we like it or not, the Jews are not ordinary colonialists. Yes, they suffered the holocaust, and yes, they are the victims of anti-Semitism. But no, they cannot use those facts to continue, or initiate, the dispossession of another people that bears no responsibility for either of those prior facts. I have been saying for twenty years that we have no military option, and are not likely to have one anytime soon. And neither does Israel have a real military option. Despite their enormous power, Israelis have not succeeded in achieving either the acceptance or the security they crave. On the other hand, not all Israelis are the same, and whatever happens, we must learn to live with them in some form, preferably justly, rather than unjustly.

The third way avoids both the bankruptcy of Oslo and the retrograde policies of total boycotts. It must begin in terms of the idea of citizenship, not nationalism, since the notion of separation (Oslo) and of triumphalist unilateral theocratic nationalism whether Jewish or Muslim simply does not deal with the realities before us. Therefore, a concept of citizenship whereby every individual has the same citizen’s rights, based not on race or religion, but on equal justice for each person guaranteed by a constitution, must replace all our outmoded notions of how Palestine will be cleansed of the others’ enemies. Ethnic cleansing is ethnic cleansing whether it is done by Serbians, Zionists, or Hamas.

What Azmi Bishara and several Israeli Jews like Ilan Pappé (4) are now trying to strengthen is a position and a politics by which Jews and Palestinians inside the Jewish state have the same rights; there is no reason why the same principle should not apply in the Occupied Territories where Palestinians and Israeli Jews live side by side, together, with only one people, Israeli Jews now dominating the other. So the choice is either apartheid or it is justice and citizenship.

We must recognize the realities of the holocaust not as a blank check for Israelis to abuse us, but as a sign of our humanity, our ability to understand history, our requirement that our suffering be mutually acknowledged. And we must also recognize that Israel is a dynamic society with many currents - not all of them Likud, Labour, and religious - within it. We must deal with those who recognize our rights. We should be willing as Palestinians to go to speak to Palestinians first, but to Israelis too, and we should tell our truths, not the stupid compromises of the sort that the PLO and PA have traded in, which in effect is the apartheid of Oslo.

The real issue is intellectual truth and the need to combat any sort of apartheid and racial discrimination, no matter who does it. There is now a creeping, nasty wave of anti-Semitism and hypocritical righteousness insinuating itself into our political thought and rhetoric. One thing must be clear in my firm opinion: we are not fighting the injustices of Zionism in order to replace them with an invidious nationalism (religious or civil) that decrees that Arabs in Palestine are more equal than others. The history of the modern Arab world - with all its political failures, its human rights abuses, its stunning military incompetences, its decreasing production, the fact that alone of all modern peoples we have receded in democratic and technological and scientific development - is disfigured by a whole series out-moded and discredited ideas, of which the notion that the Jews never suffered and that holocaust is an obfuscatory confection created by the Elders of Zion is one that is acquiring too much, far too much currency.

Why do we expect the world to believe our sufferings as Arabs if (a) we cannot recognize the sufferings of others, even of our oppressors, and (b) we cannot deal with facts that trouble simplistic ideas of the sort propagated by bien-pensants intellectuals who refuse to see the relationship between the holocaust and Israel. Again, let me repeat that I cannot accept the idea that the holocaust excuses Zionism for what it has done to Palestinians: far from it. I say exactly the opposite, that by recognizing the holocaust for the genocidal madness that it was, we can then demand from Israelis and Jews the right to link the holocaust to Zionist injustices towards the Palestinian, link and criticise the link for its hypocrisy and flawed moral logic.

But to support the efforts of Roger Garaudy and his holocaust-denying friends in the name of "freedom of opinion" is a silly ruse that discredits us more than we already are discredited in the world’s eyes for our incompetence, our failure to fight a decent battle, our radical misunderstanding of history and the world we live in. Why don’t we fight harder for freedom of opinions in our own societies, a freedom, no one needs to be told, that scarcely exists?

When I mentioned the holocaust in an article I wrote last November (5), I received more stupid vilification than I ever thought possible; one famous intellectual even accused me of trying to gain a certificate of good behaviour from the Zionist lobby. Of course, I support Garaudy’s right to say what he pleases and I oppose the wretched loi Gayssot under which he was prosecuted and condemned (6). But I also think that what he says is trivial and irresponsible, and when we endorse it, it allies us necessarily with Le Pen and all the retrograde right-wing fascist elements in French society.

No, our battle is for democracy and equal rights, for a secular commonwealth or state in which all the members are equal citizens, in which the concept underlying our goal is a secular notion of citizenship and belonging, not some mythological essence or an idea that derives its authority from the remote past, whether that past is Christian, Jewish or Muslim. As I said, the genius of Arab civilization at its height in, say, Andalusia was its multicultural, multi-religious and multi-ethnic diversity. That is the ideal that should be moving our efforts now, in the wake of an embalmed, and dead Oslo, and an equally dead rejectionism. The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life, as the Bible says. ;

In the meantime, we should concentrate our resistance on combating Israeli settlement with non-violent mass demonstrations that impede land confiscation, on creating stable and democratic civil institutions (hospitals and clinics, schools and universities, now in a horrendous decline, and work projects that will improve our infrastructure), and on fully confronting the apartheid provisions inherent in Zionism.

There are numerous prophecies of an impending explosion due to the stalemate. Even if they turn out to be true, we must plan constructively for our future, since neither improvisation nor violence are likely to guarantee the creation and consolidation of institutions.

http://mondediplo.com/1998/09/04said

‘We’ know who ‘we’ are

Edward Said on Iraq, Palestine and ‘Us’

Lebanon was heavily bombed by Israeli warplanes on 4 June 1982. Two days later the Israeli Army breached the country’s southern border. Menachem Begin was then Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon Minister of Defence. The immediate reason for the invasion was the attempted assassination of the Israeli Ambassador to Britain, blamed by Begin and Sharon on the PLO, whose forces in South Lebanon had been observing a ceasefire for a year. By 13 June, Beirut was under siege, even though the Israeli Government had originally said it planned to go no further into Lebanon than the Awali River, 35 km north of the border. Later, it became all too clear that Sharon was trying to kill Yasir Arafat by bombing everything around him. There was a blockade of humanitarian aid; water and electricity were cut off, and a sustained aerial bombing campaign destroyed hundreds of buildings. By mid-August, when the siege ended, 18,000 Palestinians and Lebanese, most of them civilians, had been killed.

The civil war between right-wing Christian militias and left-wing Muslim and Arab nationalist groups had already lasted seven years. Although Israel sent its Army into Lebanon only once before 1982, it had early been sought as an ally by the Christian militias, who co-operated with Sharon’s forces during the siege. Sharon’s main ally was Bashir Gemayel, leader of the Phalange Party, who was elected President by the Lebanese Parliament on 23 August. The Palestinians had unwisely entered the civil war on the side of the National Movement, a loose coalition of parties that included Amal, a forerunner of Hizbollah (which was to play the major role in finally driving the Israelis out of Lebanon in May 2000). Faced with the prospect of Israeli vassalage after Sharon’s Army had in effect brought about his election, Gemayel seems to have demurred and was assassinated on 14 September. Israeli troops occupied Beirut, supposedly to keep order, and two days later, inside a security cordon provided by the Israeli Army, Gemayel’s vengeful extremists massacred two thousand Palestinian refugees at the camps of Sabra and Shatila.

Under UN and of course US supervision, French troops had entered Beirut on 21 August in the aftermath of the siege and were later joined by US and other European forces. The PLO fighters were evacuated from Lebanon; and by the beginning of September Arafat and a small band of advisers and soldiers had relocated to Tunis. The Taif Accord of 1989 prepared the way for a settlement of the civil war the following year. The old confessional system – under which different religious groups are allocated a specific number of Parliamentary seats – was more or less restored and remains in place today.

Earlier this year Sharon was quoted as regretting his failure to kill Arafat in Beirut. Not for want of trying – dozens of buildings were destroyed, hundreds of people killed. The events of 1982 hardened ordinary Arabs, I think, to the idea that Israel would use planes, missiles, tanks and helicopters to attack civilians indiscriminately, and that neither the US nor the Arab governments would do anything to stop it.

The invasion of Lebanon was the first full-scale contemporary attempt at regime change by one sovereign country against another in the Middle East. I bring it up as a messy backdrop to the current crisis. The main difference between 1982 and 2002 is that the Palestinians are now under siege inside Palestinian territories that have been occupied by Israel since 1967. The main similarity is the disproportionate nature of Israeli actions: the hundreds of tanks and bulldozers used to enter towns and villages like Jenin or refugee camps like Deheisheh, where troops once more set about killing, vandalising, obstructing ambulances and first-aid workers, cutting off water and electricity and so on. All with the support of the US, whose President called Sharon a ‘man of peace’ during the worst assaults of last March and April. Sharon’s purpose went far beyond ‘rooting out terror’: his soldiers destroyed every computer and carried off files and hard drives from the Central Bureau of Statistics and the Ministries of Education, Finance and Health, and vandalised offices and libraries.

I don’t want to rehearse my criticisms of Arafat’s tactics or the failures of his deplorable regime during the Oslo negotiations and thereafter. Besides, as I write, the man is only just hanging onto his life: his crumbling quarters in Ramallah are still besieged and Sharon is doing everything possible to injure him short of actually having him killed. What concerns me, rather, is the idea of regime change as an attractive notion for individuals, ideologies and institutions that are vastly more powerful than their adversaries. It is now, it seems, taken for granted that great military power licenses large-scale political and social change, whatever damage that may entail. And the fact that one’s own side will not suffer many casualties seems only to stimulate more fantasies about surgical strikes, clean war, high technology battlefields, changing the entire map, creating democracy and so on, all of this giving rise to dreams of omnipotence.

In the current American propaganda campaign for regime change in Iraq, the people of that country, the vast majority of whom have suffered from poverty, malnutrition and illness as a result of ten years of sanctions, have dropped out of sight. This is entirely in keeping with US Middle East policy, which is built on two mighty pillars: the security of Israel and plentiful supplies of inexpensive oil. The complex mosaic of traditions, religions, cultures, ethnicities and histories in the Arab world is lost to US and Israeli strategic planners. Iraq is either a ‘threat’ to its neighbours, which, in its currently weakened and besieged condition, is a nonsensical idea, or a ‘threat’ to the freedom and security of the United States, which is still more absurd. I am not even going to bother to add my condemnations of Saddam Hussein: I shall take it for granted that he deserves to be ousted and punished. Worst of all, he is a threat to his own people.

Since the period before the first Gulf War, the image of Iraq as a large, prosperous and diverse Arab country has been replaced in both media and policy discussions by that of a desert land peopled by brutal gangs headed by Saddam. That Iraq’s debasement has nearly ruined the Arab publishing industry because the country provided the largest number of readers in the Arab world; that it was the only Arab state with an educated and competent professional middle class of any size; that it has water and fertile land; that it has always been the cultural centre of the Arab world (the Abbasid Empire with its great literature, philosophy, architecture, science and medicine formed the basis of Arab culture); that its suffering has, like the Palestinian calvary, been a source of continuing sorrow for Arabs and Muslims alike – none of this is ever mentioned. What is mentioned are Iraq’s vast oil reserves – and if ‘we’ took them away from Saddam and got our own hands on them we wouldn’t be so dependent on Saudi oil. Iraq’s oil reserves, second only to Saudi Arabia’s, are worth roughly $1.1 trillion – much of it already promised by Saddam to Russia, France and a few other countries. A good deal of the bargaining between Putin and Bush is over the percentage of that oil US companies would be willing to promise Russia. This is eerily reminiscent of the four billion dollars offered to Russia (via Saudi Arabia) by Bush Senior. Both Bushes are oil businessmen, and care more about such things than about the fine details of Middle Eastern politics – or about the state of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure.

The initial step in the dehumanisation of the Other is to reduce him to a few insistently repeated simple phrases, images and concepts. Thus the word ‘terrorist’ was first employed systematically by Israel to describe any Palestinian act of resistance in the mid-1970s. That has been the rule ever since, effectively depoliticising the reasons for armed struggle. The process of dehumanisation was stepped up after 11 September. Men from the extreme right-wing Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and Center for Security Policy (CSP) populate Pentagon and State Department committees, including the Defense Policy Board, run by Richard Perle (who was appointed by Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz), where Israeli security is equated with US security. According to Jason Vest in the Nation, JINSA spends the ‘bulk of its budget taking a bevy of retired US generals and admirals to Israel’: when they come back, they write op-eds and appear on TV peddling the Likud line.

For his part, Sharon has numbingly repeated that his campaign against Palestinian terrorism is identical with the American war on terrorism. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida, he claims, are part of the same ‘terrorist international’ that includes Muslims all over Asia, Africa, Europe and North America. This ‘link’ is used by Sharon to explain why every major town on the West Bank and in Gaza is occupied by Israeli troops who routinely kill or detain Palestinians on the grounds that they are ‘suspected’ terrorists and militants, and demolish houses and shops with the excuse that they shelter bomb factories, terrorist cells and meeting places for militants. No proof is given, none asked for by the press.

Mystification is everywhere. Terror, fanaticism, violence, hatred of freedom, insecurity and, of course, weapons of mass destruction: these are the words we use to speak of the Arab world; they don’t come up in relation to Israel, Pakistan, India, the UK or the US. Iraq is potentially Israel’s most fearsome enemy because of its economic and human resources; the Palestinians stand in the way of Israeli hegemony and land-occupation. On US TV this summer, Uzi Landau, Israel’s Internal Security Minister (and a member of the Moledet Party, which advocates ‘transferring’ all Palestinians out of Israel and the Occupied Territories), claimed that all talk of ‘occupation’ was nonsense. We are a people coming home, he said. None of this was queried by Mort Zuckerman, host of the programme, who also owns US News and World Report and chairs the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organisations. But Landau’s views seem almost moderate when compared with those of some members of the Bush Administration. The Israeli journalist Alex Fishman described the ‘revolutionary ideas’ of Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld (who also refers to the ‘so-called occupied territories’) as terrifyingly hawkish. Sharon has said that ‘next to our American friends’ Effi Eitam – one of the Israeli Cabinet’s most remorseless hardliners – is a ‘total dove’.

More frightening still is the unchallenged proposition that if ‘we’ don’t pre-empt terrorism (or any other potential enemy), we will be destroyed.[*] This is now the core of US security strategy and is regularly drummed out in interviews and talk shows by Rice, Rumsfeld and Bush himself. The formal statement of this view appeared a short time ago in the National Security Strategy of the United States, an official paper prepared as a manifesto for the Administration’s new, post-Cold War foreign policy. Its presumption is that we live in an exceptionally dangerous world with a network of enemies who possess factories, offices and endless supporters, and whose existence is dedicated to destroying us. The belief that ‘we’ must get them first is what frames and gives legitimacy to the war on terrorism and on Iraq.

Fanatical individuals and groups do exist who are in favour of somehow harming either Israel or the US. On the other hand, Israel and the US are widely perceived in the Islamic and Arab worlds, first, as having created the jihadi extremists of whom bin Laden is the most famous, and second, as ignoring international law and UN Resolutions in the pursuit of their own hostile and destructive policies in those worlds. As David Hirst has pointed out in the Guardian, even Arabs who oppose their own despotic regimes will see any US attack on Iraq as an ‘act of aggression aimed not just at Iraq, but at the whole Arab world; and what will make it supremely intolerable is that it will be done on behalf of Israel, whose acquisition of a large arsenal of weapons of mass destruction seems to be as permissible as theirs is an abomination.’

It should also be made clear that the Palestinian position is not identical either to that of the Iraqis or to that of al-Qaida. Since the mid-1980s, the Palestinians have been at least officially willing to make peace with Israel. Media commentators in the West mix and merge the Palestinians and Iraq so that they become a collective menace. Most of the stories about the Palestinians that appear in influential publications in the US like the New Yorker and the New York Times magazine show them as bombmakers, collaborators, suicide bombers. Neither of these has published anything from the Arab viewpoint since 11 September.

Dennis Ross (in charge of the US team at the Oslo negotiations, but both before and after that associated with the Israeli lobby) keeps saying that the Palestinians turned down a generous Israeli offer at Camp David: in fact, Israel conceded only non-contiguous Palestinian areas which were all to have Israeli security posts and settlements surrounding them. In addition, there was to be no common border between Palestine and any Arab state. Why words like ‘generous’ and ‘offer’ should in any case apply to territory held by an occupying power in contravention of international law and UN Resolutions, no one bothers to ask. But the power of the media to repeat, re-repeat and underline simple assertions, combined with the untiring efforts of the Israeli lobby, means that it is now locked into place that the Palestinians chose ‘terror instead of peace’. Hamas and Islamic Jihad are seen not as a (misguided) part of the struggle to be rid of Israeli military occupation, but as part of the general Palestinian desire to terrorise, threaten and be a menace. Like Iraq.

In any event, with the US Administration’s newest and rather improbable claim that secular Iraq has been harbouring and training the insanely theocratic al-Qaida, the case against Saddam seems to have been closed. The Government consensus is that since UN inspectors cannot ascertain what WMD he possesses, what he has hidden and what he might still do with them, he should be attacked and removed. The whole point of going to the UN, from the US point of view, is to get a Resolution so punitive that it will not matter whether Saddam Hussein complies or not: he will be incriminated with having violated ‘international law’ and his existence will itself be sufficient to warrant regime change. In late September, a unanimous Security Council Resolution (the US abstaining) enjoined Israel to end its siege of Arafat’s Ramallah compound and to withdraw from Palestinian territory illegally occupied since March (Israel’s excuse has been ‘self-defence’). Israel has refused to comply, but in this case the UN is to be ignored – ‘we’ understand that Israel must defend its citizens.

Neologisms such as ‘anticipatory pre-emption’ and ‘preventive self-defence’ are bandied about by Rumsfeld and his colleagues in an attempt to persuade the public that the preparations for war against Iraq or any other state in need of ‘regime change’ (or the rarer euphemism ‘constructive destruction’) are buttressed by the notion of self-defence. The public is kept on tenterhooks by repeated red or orange alerts, people are encouraged to inform the law enforcement authorities of ‘suspicious’ behaviour, and thousands of Muslims, Arabs and South Asians have been detained, in some cases charged, merely on suspicion. All of this is carried out at the President’s behest and is claimed to be an expression of patriotism and love of America.

So powerful is the United States that it can’t be constrained by any international code of conduct. The discussion of whether ‘we’ should go to war against a country seven thousand miles away remains nicely abstract. The great majority of Americans have had no contact with Muslim countries or peoples and therefore have no feeling for the fabric of life that a sustained bombing campaign (as in Afghanistan) would tear to shreds. And since terrorism is explained merely as the result of hatred and envy, it encourages polemicists to engage in extravagant debates from which history and politics seem to have disappeared. At a fervently pro-Israel demonstration in May, Paul Wolfowitz mentioned Palestinian suffering in passing, but was loudly booed and has never referred to it again.

A coherent human rights or free-trade policy that stuck to the endlessly underlined principles that the US is constitutively believed to stand for would be undermined domestically by special interest groups (the ethnic lobbies, the steel and defence industries, the oil cartel, the farming industry, retired people, the gun lobby etc). Every one of the 435 Congressional districts represented in Washington contains a defence or defence-related industry, which explains why Bush Sr’s Secretary of State, James Baker, said before the first Gulf War that the real issue at stake was ‘jobs’. Only around 25 per cent of the members of Congress even have passports (around 15 per cent of Americans have travelled abroad); their views are influenced by lobbyists and by the need to attract campaign funding. Two incumbent House members, Earl Hilliard of Alabama and Cynthia McKinney of Georgia, both of them supportive of the Palestinian right to self-determination and critical of Israel, were recently defeated by relatively obscure candidates who were funded mainly by the Israeli lobby in New York. Where Middle East policy is concerned, the lobby has turned the legislative branch of the US Government into what Jim Abourezk, a former senator, once called ‘Israeli-occupied territory’. The Senate periodically issues unsolicited resolutions that underline and reiterate American support for Israel. There was one such resolution in May, just as Israeli forces were occupying and destroying the major West Bank towns. In the long run all this is damaging to Israel’s future: as Tony Judt has recently argued, Israel cannot remain on Palestinian land and is simply putting off the inevitable withdrawal.

The war against terrorism has permitted Israel and its supporters to commit war crimes against the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza, whose 3.4 million inhabitants have become, as the current jargon has it, ‘non-combatant collateral damage’. Terje Roed-Larsen, the UN’s Special Administrator for the Occupied Territories, has just issued a report charging Israel with causing a humanitarian catastrophe: unemployment has reached 65 per cent, 50 per cent of the population lives on less than two dollars a day, and the economy has been shattered. Schools and universities cannot function. Houses are demolished, people deported, curfews imposed, ambulances prevented from passing roadblocks. Nothing in this list is new, but, like the occupation itself and the dozens of UN Security Council Resolutions condemning it, these depredations are mentioned in the US media only occasionally, as endnotes to long articles about Israeli Government debates, or disastrous suicide bombings. The phrase ‘suspected of terrorism’ is both the justification and the epitaph for whomever Sharon chooses to have killed. The US doesn’t object, except to say, in the mildest terms, that Israel’s actions are ‘not helpful’, which does little to stop the next batch of killings.

Following 11 September, a chilling conjuncture has occurred in which the prejudices of the Christian Right, the Israeli lobby and the Bush Administration’s semi-religious belligerency are rationalised by neo-conservative hawks committed to the destruction of Israel’s enemies, or, as it is sometimes euphemistically put, to redrawing the map by bringing regime change and ‘democracy’ to the Arab countries that pose the most danger to Israel. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Jordan have been threatened, despite the fact that – dreadful regimes though they are – they have been protected and supported by the US since World War Two, as Iraq was until recently.

It seems obvious to anyone who knows anything about the Arab world that its parlous state is likely to get a whole lot worse once the US begins its assault on Iraq. Supporters of the Administration occasionally say vague things about how exciting it will be when we bring democracy to Iraq and the other Arab states, without much consideration for what this will mean for the people who live there. I can’t imagine that there are many Arabs or Iraqis who would not like to see Saddam Hussein removed, but all the indications are that US/Israeli military action would make things much worse on the ground.

It may be that not even the Iraqi Army will lift a finger on Saddam’s behalf, but in a recent Congressional hearing three former generals from the US Central Command expressed serious and, I would say, crippling reservations about the whole adventure. No one in the US has any real idea of what might happen in Iraq, or Saudi Arabia, or Egypt, if a major military intervention takes place. Nor has any thought been given to what would happen after a US ‘victory’: the expatriate Iraqi opposition doesn’t have enough support to form a government and the US Army won’t be keen to step into the gap.

The unconscionable atrocity of 11 September most certainly needs to be confronted, but making a forceful response is the easy part: what happens next has to be considered more carefully. No one could argue today that Afghanistan, even after the rout of the Taliban, is a much better and more secure place for its citizens. Nation-building is clearly not the US Administration’s priority. Besides, how can Americans rebuild a nation with a culture and history as different from their own as Iraq? Both the Arab world and the US are far more complex and dynamic places than the platitudes of war and the resonant phrases about reconstruction would allow.

As someone who has lived my life within the two cultures, I am appalled that the ‘clash of civilisations’, that reductive and vulgar notion so much in vogue, has taken over thought and action. What we need to put in place is a universalist framework for dealing with Saddam Hussein as well as Sharon, the rulers of Burma, Syria, Turkey and a whole host of countries where depredations are endured without sufficient resistance. The only way to re-create or restore this framework is through education, open discussion and intellectual honesty that will have no truck with concealed special pleading or the jargons of war, religious extremism and pre-emptive ‘defence’.

* See ‘Jumping the Gun’, Michael Byers on pre-emptive self-defence (LRB, 25 July).

From the LRB letters page: [ 31 October 2002 ] Sabah Salih [ 14 November 2002 ] F.S. Schwarzbach [ 12 December 2002 ] J.R. Pole.

Edward Said, who died in September 2003, first contributed to the LRB in 1981.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n20/said01_.html

My Guru: Elegy for Ibrahim Abu-Lughod

Edward Said

Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, a former professor of political science at Northwestern University who later became vice-president of Bir Zeit University on the West Bank, died at the age of 72 on 23 May in his Ramallah home, after a long illness. I learned of his death as I was walking out of Tel Aviv airport on my way to see him. He was my oldest and dearest friend, remarkable as an introspective thinker and a charismatic political teacher and leader, whose insight had sustained a friendship that lasted nearly fifty years. There were hundreds of mourners at his funeral in Jaffa, and at the ‘azza – the wake – at his home and the Qattan Centre in Ramallah. Several of his friends spoke at the commemoration, held in a theatre in Ramallah the day after he was buried next to his father in a hillside graveyard overlooking the cove where he used to take his visitors for a swim – always refusing to visit the adjoining Israeli beach café, which looked very inviting just the same. One of the speakers at the funeral in Jaffa was Faisal Husseini, who was to die exactly a week later in a Kuwait hotel room.

In all sorts of ways, Ibrahim’s rich life and his death both reflected and clarified the turbulence and suffering that have been at the core of the Palestinian experience: this is why his life bears scrutiny. So much in it bears out the Palestinian situation in all its irresolution. The one thing that seemed to stand out to everyone at the time of his death was that Abu-Lughod had staged his own private right of return to Jaffa, something that only a person with his extraordinary will could have done. No one failed to comment on the fact of his return to Palestine in 1992, after an absence of 44 years, nor on the decade he spent there rounding out his life as teacher, public intellectual and founder of institutions.

Despite that theatrical conclusion, a vast instability remained. He was still unfulfilled and unsettled. The return didn’t change him, though he was more contented at home than he had been in exile. For him, Palestine was an interrogation that is never answered completely – or even articulated adequately. Everything in his personality confirmed that restlessness, from his gregariousness to his moody introspection, from his optimism and energy to the immobilising sense of powerlessness that has claimed so many of us. His life simultaneously expresses defeat and triumph, abjection and attainment, resignation and resolve. In short, it was a version of Palestine, lived in all its complexity by one of the finest Palestinians of our time.

Ibrahim – a relentlessly articulate man – will be remembered less for his writing, which was relatively sparse, than for his ability to organise people and establish institutions that allowed them to play a more effective role than they could have done as individuals. In America, he was instrumental in founding the AAUG (the Association of Arab-American University Graduates), the United Holy Land Fund, the Institute of Arab Studies, Arab Studies Quarterly and Medina Press. He was the prime mover in the planned Palestinian Open University, which was to have had its headquarters in Beirut until the 1982 war in Lebanon put paid to the idea. On the West Bank, he designed a centre for curricular reform, and then the Qattan Center for Research on Education. Even so, he seemed to know that the struggle for Palestine could not be won either by founding institutions of this kind or even by repatriation and return. They were in the end reflexive, self-referential structures, and would be undermined by dispossession, struggle and unending loss. Like a Conradian hero, Ibrahim seemed always to be trying to rescue meaning and pride from the dramas going on around him, as well as from his own weaknesses.

Consider the dramas that surrounded his life. At the time of his death, a powerful but directionless intifada was unfolding outside his window. In 1982, it had been the siege of Beirut, the results of which were the massacres of Sabra and Shatila and the evacuation from Lebanon (his as well as the PLO’s); in 1948, it had been the fall of Jaffa, his family’s dispersion, the beginning of his long American exile, and his outspokenness in defence of the Palestinian cause; eventually, in 1992, his abrupt return to the West Bank. Nearly every Arab American who fights against racial stereotyping, the ideological racism suffered by Palestinians, and the perennial antagonism to Islam, owes Ibrahim a tremendous debt. He began the fight, and for most of us, he made fight possible in the first place.

After almost forty years of struggle in North America, there was indeed some kind of return – or ‘awda – but it brought Ibrahim back only to a flawed substitute: not to a liberated Palestine but to Oslo’s Area A and, with his American passport, to a Jaffa very much under Israeli control. He would have been the first to note that Palestinian return was subject to Israeli power even at the time of his death (anonymous intelligence personnel threatened to cancel his funeral), just as he was the first to note that in 1988 the Palestine National Council and the PLO had changed themselves from a liberation movement into a national independence movement – a far lesser thing, as Oslo was to reveal.

No one knew better than Ibrahim how to turn the shambles of defeat into some sort of achievement. But he was never satisfied by purely moral triumphs. He was too much the realist in his understanding of raw military power to be taken in, for example, by Arafat’s survival of the cataclysms of Beirut in 1982. ‘We have no tanks,’ he would say, ‘we have no real power. That’s why it was so easy for the Israelis to destroy our institutions and kill all those people.’

I met Ibrahim at Princeton in 1954. There were no foreign undergraduates at the university in those days; no African Americans, no women: only white male upper-crust young men who were given an excellent classical education and made to feel that they were entitled to rule the world. Later, many of them did. A wealthy resident of the town had given the Music Department money to supply graduate students with tickets to Princeton’s quite respectable concert programme. I had been asked to dispense the tickets. One especially hot, slow afternoon in September a young man with a brisk manner, piercing blue-green eyes and a heavy accent came in, asked for tickets, showed me his identity card quickly (I had no chance to see his name, only to register that he was a graduate student), and then, as he was leaving, turned and asked me what I had said my name was. When I told him again he came all the way back into the office and asked me where I was from. I said something like I’m from Egypt now, but formerly I was from Palestine. His face lit up: I’m from Palestine, too, he said, from Jaffa. Ibrahim was studying with Philip Hitti, a Lebanese immigrant who had established a leading department of ‘Oriental Studies’ – meaning mainly Arab history and culture. He introduced me to the other Arab graduate students, and in no time at all I had a small group of older friends with whom I could speak Arabic and lament the Zionist presence in Princeton, which was particularly evident during the Suez crisis.

We both left Princeton in 1957 – he with a PhD, I with a BA – and I returned to Egypt for a year. I saw Ibrahim and his wife Janet regularly in Cairo, where he was working for Unesco. At that stage there was little sign of the political activities that lay in store for us both. I drifted off to graduate school at Harvard and saw the Abu-Lughods less frequently, although I knew that they had returned to the US to start their teaching careers. Then, the thunderbolt of 1967 hit us all, and unexpectedly, Ibrahim sent me a letter asking if I would contribute to a special issue of Arab World, the Arab League monthly published in New York, guest-edited by him, and intended to look at the war from an Arab perspective. I used the occasion to look at the image of the Arabs in the media, popular literature, and cultural representations going back to the Middle Ages. This was the origin of my book Orientalism, which I dedicated to Janet and Ibrahim.

In the years that followed, although the Abu-Lughods lived in Chicago and I was in New York, we became closer, drawn together by politics. We testified in Congress, met with George Shultz in 1988, set up the Institute of Arab Studies in Boston, established Arab Studies Quarterly and attended Palestine National Council sessions in Cairo, Amman and Algiers. During those years of great activity Ibrahim displayed a genius for discovering talented individuals in the US and the Arab world, whom he introduced to one another and helped to work together. In June 1982, after a year in Paris, he moved to Beirut to start up the Palestinian Open University, on which he had worked with Unesco and the PLO. Two days after his arrival, the IDF invaded Lebanon, and almost immediately after that, his new apartment was destroyed by an Israeli rocket. He spent the next two months besieged in Beirut, living in my mother’s house with his good friend Soheil Miarri. We communicated with each other during those difficult weeks on a regular basis, most of the time at the request of Arafat, who used a number of people, including me, as go-betweens with the US Administration.

Beirut was perhaps a more important experience for Ibrahim than any before or after. It taught him first of all that even the best institutions could be undermined by mediocrity and the brutish instability of politics and society in the Middle East. Second, it taught him the real dynamics of power, both as they affect those who have it, and those who do not. Third, and perhaps most important, it taught him that one can always press on, even though failure looms. That was the real Ibrahim: the man who understood that the only thing was to press on, remaining optimistic and loyal to one’s comrades (and making the most of one’s sense of humour, however macabre).

Every so often he would say to me: we’re mediocre Edward, mediocre, and in the end maybe that very mediocrity is what’s going to beat the Israelis, for all their brilliance. But he would always add: we’re a good people, and stubborn too, even if we’re not always very smart. What bothered him so much about Oslo were the indignities it entailed for the Palestinians. Arafat’s obsequious, clownish posturing disturbed us both a great deal, and we were terribly ashamed that we had been taken in by him before Oslo. Unlike me, Ibrahim wanted to be in the part of Palestine that Oslo had excavated and partly prised away from the Israelis – Area A – and it was there that he put himself, his colleagues and his students to work.

Ibrahim believed in scholarly, intellectual standards, whether in Arab culture or in the West. He was elated when he found someone in whom he discerned promise or talent, because that would give him an opportunity to bring out what was hidden and make it shine. There are many people – I am one – who feel that they were discovered, appreciated and subsequently enlisted in the ranks, by Ibrahim. He was the greatest of encouragers, protectors, sponsors. There was nothing quite like a compliment from him (‘you were terrific’), and nothing quite so definitive as when he put someone down (‘he is a jerk,’ the ‘j’ pronounced with a heavy Jaffa downbeat.) As a teacher, he was torn between an urge to influence and dominate, and the wish for equality to prevail. As the father of three talented daughters and the husband of a greatly gifted scholar, he was more tolerant of women than is normal for an Arab, or for a Western man. Even when he was being fatherly, there was a fraternal quality to the monitoring, and you rarely got any sense that he was a tyrant – though he could affect a tyrannical manner, usually to very good purpose. There was a kind heart beneath the roaring certitude.

Like many of us, he never really recovered from the loss of Palestine, and his early days as a refugee marked him indelibly. Memories of that time, though never spelled out, seemed always to be part of his anger with Israel; and he understood that our fight would be long and complex and would not earn us self-determination in our lifetime. In one way or another, ‘the transformation of Palestine’ (the title of his best-known collection of essays and a euphemism for the theft of the country by Zionism) dominated his life’s work, but he wasn’t a mindless militant, rather a fiercely independent, often corrosively critical intellectual. Despite the fact that professionally and personally he was always working for the cause, you could never have described him as a professional. He was too much the amateur, driven by love and commitment.

Ibrahim introduced me to the subject and the experience, as it were, of Palestine. Seven years older than me, and more embedded in the life of Mandatory Palestine, he aroused in me and many others the wish to recapture long-buried memories of our early days, before the nakba changed everything. He had an enormous, fastidiously accumulated and articulated knowledge of our history, as well as a living memory of where everything and everyone came from, where they went, where they were now living, or when they had disappeared.

Jaffa must have been a remarkable place in the 1940s. Ibrahim’s school, the Amariye, produced an astonishing collection of teenagers, who went on as refugees to lead lives of distinction as activists, scholars, businessmen. Ibrahim introduced me to these people and they have become close friends. They include his swashbuckling pal, the PLO stalwart and orator Shafik el-Hout, who never left his post in Beirut, even during the Israeli occupation of the city in the autumn of 1982, but resigned from the Executive Committee as a result of his deep disagreement with Arafat over Oslo; and Abdel Mohsen al Qattan, a successful businessman, who has spent much of his fortune helping Palestinians to build institutions and, like Shafik and Ibrahim, has been outspokenly critical of Oslo.

Ibrahim kept up with their lives with the zeal of a medieval chronicler. At National Council meetings, or during gatherings at the Welfare Association, he would introduce me to an ever-expanding circle of Palestinians, from whose lives he could extract, in the slightly embarrassed presence of the individuals themselves, an amazing amount of learned information and useful homily. Teachers, lawyers, scholars, bank employees and engineers drew expert appreciation from him as a concrete part of the story of Palestine. You could feel him refusing their evanescence as his tale unfolded, another Conradian trait that gave depth to whatever he was saying.

It was Ibrahim who introduced Arabs in America to the world of national liberation struggles and post-colonial politics. Far from being a provincial Palestinian nationalist, he had a wide perspective nurtured by an enviable ambition to see the whole world. He spoke grippingly of places I had never thought about going to, including Peru, China and Russia. He loved being in the big city and often spent time in Paris, Cairo and Chicago. More important, he was alert to the potential – and the limits – of people’s capacity to help the cause of Palestine. A decade before me, for instance, he understood that C.L.R. James saw himself as a Westerner and could not easily identify with the Arabs. By the same token, as the director of Northwestern University’s Program of African Studies, he had an impressive acquaintance with Africa’s liberation movements, many of whose leaders he knew and invited to Northwestern. He was years ahead of his time in appreciating such figures as Amilcar Cabral and Oliver Tambo, in distinguishing their movements and the kind of colonialism or system of oppression they fought against, as well as finding parallels with the situation in Palestine. Through him one also encountered the great figures of Arab nationalist discourse, such as Mohammed Hassanein Haykal and Munif el Razzaz.

It was thanks to Ibrahim that in 1970 I first met Eqbal Ahmad, the other comrade-in-arms whose untimely death has left me so diminished. Like Ibrahim, Eqbal was (to use one of Ibrahim’s highest terms of praise) asil, an ‘authentic’, with the same gift of endlessly fertile, untiring eloquence. To sit up late at night with both of them was to be slowly cowed into silence, as they spun out lengthy disquisitions, learned and even arcane analyses, never entirely free from competitive zeal. Neither of my gurus was ever stingy with his time, and neither – perhaps for the same reason – cared much for the relative parsimony of print. Stylists of the uttered word, pluri-lingual, generous with ideas and stories, they sustained me during my illness in ways that embarrassment prevents me from recounting here. What dismays me is that they should have died before me – particularly now, when their voices would have been so telling and humanely informative.

Writing about Eqbal at the time of his death two years ago, and now about Ibrahim, I have found it hard to give an account of their essentially performative achievements. Both men made a lasting impression on everyone they met; their memorial is not embodied in a body of work, however, but scattered through several societies, groups, associations and families, all of which have been changed visibly, and imperceptibly, by the nature of these men and their achievements.

Both returned for their final years to their countries of origin: Eqbal, a native of Bihar, to Islamabad; Ibrahim, a native of Jaffa, to Ramallah. But they didn’t actually go back home. In trying to capture their memory, one confines and solidifies it, and in this sense betrays it: what these men stood for was energy, mobility, discovery and risk. In the unfolding story of Palestine, Ibrahim, I believe, will remain a model of what it is to have been dedicated to an idea – not as something to bow down to, but to live, and to re-examine constantly. To understand him properly is to re-enact the drama of struggle and principle in which he was engrossed, not by copying it but by living it anew, and in doing so, leaving it open for future revision and critical reflection.

From the LRB letters page: [ 14 January 2002 ] J. Behar [ 9 May 2002 ] N.S. Roseman.

Edward Said, who died in September 2003, first contributed to the LRB in 1981.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n24/said01_.html

Between Worlds

Edward Said

In the first book I wrote, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, published more than thirty years ago, and then in an essay called ‘Reflections on Exile’ that appeared in 1984, I used Conrad as an example of someone whose life and work seemed to typify the fate of the wanderer who becomes an accomplished writer in an acquired language, but can never shake off his sense of alienation from his new – that is, acquired – and, in Conrad’s rather special case, admired home. His friends all said of Conrad that he was very contented with the idea of being English, even though he never lost his heavy Polish accent and his quite peculiar moodiness, which was thought to be very un-English. Yet the moment one enters his writing the aura of dislocation, instability and strangeness is unmistakable. No one could represent the fate of lostness and disorientation better than he did, and no one was more ironic about the effort of trying to replace that condition with new arrangements and accommodations – which invariably lured one into further traps, such as those Lord Jim encounters when he starts life again on his little island. Marlow enters the heart of darkness to discover that Kurtz was not only there before him but is also incapable of telling him the whole truth; so that, in narrating his own experiences, Marlow cannot be as exact as he would have liked, and ends up producing approximations and even falsehoods of which both he and his listeners seem quite aware.

Only well after his death did Conrad’s critics try to reconstruct what has been called his Polish background, very little of which had found its way directly into his fiction. But the rather elusive meaning of his writing is not so easily supplied, for even if we find out a lot about his Polish experiences, friends and relatives, that information will not of itself settle the core of restlessness and unease that his work relentlessly circles. Eventually we realise that the work is actually constituted by the experience of exile or alienation that cannot ever be rectified. No matter how perfectly he is able to express something, the result always seems to him an approximation to what he had wanted to say, and to have been said too late, past the point where the saying of it might have been helpful. ‘Amy Foster’, the most desolate of his stories, is about a young man from Eastern Europe, shipwrecked off the English coast on his way to America, who ends up as the husband of the affectionate but inarticulate Amy Foster. The man remains a foreigner, never learns the language, and even after he and Amy have a child cannot become a part of the very family he has created with her. When he is near death and babbling deliriously in a strange language, Amy snatches their child from him, abandoning him to his final sorrow. Like so many of Conrad’s fictions, the story is narrated by a sympathetic figure, a doctor who is acquainted with the pair, but even he cannot redeem the young man’s isolation, although Conrad teasingly makes the reader feel that he might have been able to. It is difficult to read ‘Amy Foster’ without thinking that Conrad must have feared dying a similar death, inconsolable, alone, talking away in a language no one could understand.

The first thing to acknowledge is the loss of home and language in the new setting, a loss that Conrad has the severity to portray as irredeemable, relentlessly anguished, raw, untreatable, always acute – which is why I have found myself over the years reading and writing about Conrad like a cantus firmus, a steady groundbass to much that I have experienced. For years I seemed to be going over the same kind of thing in the work I did, but always through the writings of other people. It wasn’t until the early fall of 1991 when an ugly medical diagnosis suddenly revealed to me the mortality I should have known about before that I found myself trying to make sense of my own life as its end seemed alarmingly nearer. A few months later, still trying to assimilate my new condition, I found myself composing a long explanatory letter to my mother, who had already been dead for almost two years, a letter that inaugurated a belated attempt to impose a narrative on a life that I had left more or less to itself, disorganised, scattered, uncentred. I had had a decent enough career in the university, I had written a fair amount, I had acquired an unenviable reputation (as the ‘professor of terror’) for my writing and speaking and being active on Palestinian and generally Middle Eastern or Islamic and anti-imperialist issues, but I had rarely paused to put the whole jumble together. I was a compulsive worker, I disliked and hardly ever took vacations, and I did what I did without worrying too much (if at all) about such matters as writer’s block, depression or running dry.

All of a sudden, then, I found myself brought up short with some though not a great deal of time available to survey a life whose eccentricities I had accepted like so many facts of nature. Once again I recognised that Conrad had been there before me – except that Conrad was a European who left his native Poland and became an Englishman, so the move for him was more or less within the same world. I was born in Jerusalem and had spent most of my formative years there and, after 1948, when my entire family became refugees, in Egypt. All my early education had, however, been in élite colonial schools, English public schools designed by the British to bring up a generation of Arabs with natural ties to Britain. The last one I went to before I left the Middle East to go to the United States was Victoria College in Cairo, a school in effect created to educate those ruling-class Arabs and Levantines who were going to take over after the British left. My contemporaries and classmates included King Hussein of Jordan, several Jordanian, Egyptian, Syrian and Saudi boys who were to become ministers, prime ministers and leading businessmen, as well as such glamorous figures as Michel Shalhoub, head prefect of the school and chief tormentor when I was a relatively junior boy, whom everyone has seen on screen as Omar Sharif.

The moment one became a student at VC one was given the school handbook, a series of regulations governing every aspect of school life – the kind of uniform we were to wear, what equipment was needed for sports, the dates of school holidays, bus schedules and so on. But the school’s first rule, emblazoned on the opening page of the handbook, read: ‘English is the language of the school; students caught speaking any other language will be punished.’ Yet there were no native English-speakers among the students. Whereas the masters were all British, we were a motley crew of Arabs of various kinds, Armenians, Greeks, Italians, Jews and Turks, each of whom had a native language that the school had explicitly outlawed. Yet all, or nearly all, of us spoke Arabic – many spoke Arabic and French – and so we were able to take refuge in a common language in defiance of what we perceived as an unjust colonial stricture. British imperial power was nearing its end immediately after World War Two, and this fact was not lost on us, although I cannot recall any student of my generation who would have been able to put anything as definite as that into words.

For me, there was an added complication, in that although both my parents were Palestinian – my mother from Nazareth, my father from Jerusalem – my father had acquired US citizenship during World War One, when he served in the AEF under Pershing in France. He had originally left Palestine, then an Ottoman province, in 1911, at the age of 16, to escape being drafted to fight in Bulgaria. Instead, he went to the US, studied and worked there for a few years, then returned to Palestine in 1919 to go into business with his cousin. Besides, with an unexceptionally Arab family name like Said connected to an improbably British first name (my mother very much admired the Prince of Wales in 1935, the year of my birth), I was an uncomfortably anomalous student all through my early years: a Palestinian going to school in Egypt, with an English first name, an American passport and no certain identity at all. To make matters worse, Arabic, my native language, and English, my school language, were inextricably mixed: I have never known which was my first language, and have felt fully at home in neither, al-though I dream in both. Every time I speak an English sentence, I find myself echoing it in Arabic, and vice versa.

All this went through my head in those months after my diagnosis revealed to me the necessity of thinking about final things. But I did so in what for me was a characteristic way. As the author of a book called Beginnings, I found myself drawn to my early days as a boy in Jerusalem, Cairo and Dhour el Shweir, the Lebanese mountain village which I loathed but where for years and years my father took us to spend our summers. I found myself reliving the narrative quandaries of my early years, my sense of doubt and of being out of place, of always feeling myself standing in the wrong corner, in a place that seemed to be slipping away from me just as I tried to define or describe it. Why, I remember asking myself, could I not have had a simple background, been all Egyptian, or all something else, and not have had to face the daily rigours of questions that led back to words that seemed to lack a stable origin? The worst part of my situation, which time has only exacerbated, has been the warring relationship between English and Arabic, something that Conrad had not had to deal with since his passage from Polish to English via French was effected entirely within Europe. My whole education was Anglocentric, so much so that I knew a great deal more about British and even Indian history and geography (required subjects) than I did about the history and geography of the Arab world. But although taught to believe and think like an English schoolboy, I was also trained to understand that I was an alien, a Non-European Other, educated by my betters to know my station and not to aspire to being British. The line separating Us from Them was linguistic, cultural, racial and ethnic. It did not make matters easier for me to have been born, baptised and confirmed in the Anglican Church, where the singing of bellicose hymns like ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ and ‘From Greenland’s Icy Mountains’ had me in effect playing the role at once of aggressor and aggressed against. To be at the same time a Wog and an Anglican was to be in a state of standing civil war.

In the spring of 1951 I was expelled from Victoria College, thrown out for being a troublemaker, which meant that I was more visible and more easily caught than the other boys in the daily skirmishes between Mr Griffith, Mr Hill, Mr Lowe, Mr Brown, Mr Maundrell, Mr Gatley and all the other British teachers, on the one hand, and us, the boys of the school, on the other. We were all subliminally aware, too, that the old Arab order was crumbling: Palestine had fallen, Egypt was tottering under the massive corruption of King Farouk and his court (the revolution that brought Gamal Abdel Nasser and his Free Officers to power was to occur in July 1952), Syria was undergoing a dizzying series of military coups, Iran, whose Shah was at the time married to Farouk’s sister, had its first big crisis in 1951, and so on. The prospects for deracinated people like us were so uncertain that my father decided it would be best to send me as far away as possible – in effect, to an austere, puritanical school in the north-western corner of Massachusetts.

The day in early September 1951 when my mother and father deposited me at the gates of that school and then immediately left for the Middle East was probably the most miserable of my life. Not only was the atmosphere of the school rigid and explicitly moralistic, but I seemed to be the only boy there who was not a native-born American, who did not speak with the required accent, and had not grown up with baseball, basketball and football. For the first time ever I was deprived of the linguistic environment I had depended on as an alternative to the hostile attentions of Anglo-Saxons whose language was not mine, and who made no bones about my belonging to an inferior, or somehow disapproved race. Anyone who has lived through the quotidian obstacles of colonial routine will know what I am talking about. One of the first things I did was to look up a teacher of Egyptian origin whose name had been given to me by a family friend in Cairo. ‘Talk to Ned,’ our friend said, ‘and he’ll instantly make you feel at home.’ On a bright Saturday afternoon I trudged over to Ned’s house, introduced myself to the wiry, dark man who was also the tennis coach, and told him that Freddie Maalouf in Cairo had asked me to look him up. ‘Oh yes,’ the tennis coach said rather frostily, ‘Freddie.’ I immediately switched to Arabic, but Ned put up his hand to interrupt me. ‘No, brother, no Arabic here. I left all that behind when I came to America.’ And that was the end of that.

Because I had been well-trained at Victoria College I did well enough in my Massachusetts boarding-school, achieving the rank of either first or second in a class of about a hundred and sixty. But I was also found to be morally wanting, as if there was something mysteriously not-quite-right about me. When I graduated, for instance, the rank of valedictorian or salutatorian was withheld from me on the grounds that I was not fit for the honour – a moral judgment which I have ever since found difficult either to understand or to forgive. Although I went back to the Middle East in the holidays (my family continued to live there, moving from Egypt to Lebanon in 1963), I found myself becoming an entirely Western person; both at college and in graduate school I studied literature, music and philosophy, but none of it had anything to do with my own tradition. In the Fifties and early Sixties students from the Arab world were almost invariably scientists, doctors and engineers, or specialists in the Middle East, getting degrees at places like Princeton and Harvard and then, for the most part, returning to their countries to become teachers in universities there. I had very little to do with them, for one reason or another, and this naturally increased my isolation from my own language and background. By the time I came to New York to teach at Columbia in the fall of 1963, I was considered to have an exotic, but somewhat irrelevant Arabic background – in fact I recall that it was easier for most of my friends and colleagues not to use the word ‘Arab’, and certainly not ‘Palestinian’, in deference to the much easier and vaguer ‘Middle Eastern’, a term that offended no one. A friend who was already teaching at Columbia later told me that when I was hired I had been described to the department as an Alexandrian Jew! I remember a sense of being accepted, even courted, by older colleagues at Columbia, who with one or two exceptions saw me as a promising, even very promising young scholar of ‘our’ culture. Since there was no political activity then which was centred on the Arab world, I found that my concerns in my teaching and research, which were canonical though slightly unorthodox, kept me within the pale.

The big change came with the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, which coincided with a period of intense political activism on campus over civil rights and the Vietnam War. I found myself naturally involved on both fronts, but, for me, there was the further difficulty of trying to draw attention to the Palestinian cause. After the Arab defeat there was a vigorous re-emergence of Palestinian nationalism, embodied in the resistance movement located mainly in Jordan and the newly occupied territories. Several friends and members of my family had joined the movement, and when I visited Jordan in 1968, 69 and 70, I found myself among a number of like-minded contemporaries. In the US, however, my politics were rejected – with a few notable exceptions – both by anti-war activists and by supporters of Martin Luther King. For the first time I felt genuinely divided between the newly assertive pressures of my background and language and the complicated demands of a situation in the US that scanted, in fact despised what I had to say about the quest for Palestinian justice – which was considered anti-semitic and Nazi-like.

In 1972 I had a sabbatical and took the opportunity of spending a year in Beirut, where most of my time was taken up with the study of Arabic philology and literature, something I had never done before, at least not at that level, out of a feeling that I had allowed the disparity between my acquired identity and the culture into which I was born, and from which I had been removed, to become too great. In other words, there was an existential as well as a felt political need to bring one self into harmony with the other, for as the debate about what had once been called ‘the Middle East’ metamorphosed into a debate between Israelis and Palestinians, I was drawn in, ironically enough, as much because of my capacity to speak as an American academic and intellectual as by the accident of my birth. By the mid-Seventies I was in the rich but unenviable position of speaking for two, diametrically opposed constituencies, one Western, the other Arab.

For as long as I can remember, I had allowed myself to stand outside the umbrella that shielded or accommodated my contemporaries. Whether this was because I was genuinely different, objectively an outsider, or because I was temperamentally a loner I cannot say, but the fact is that although I went along with all sorts of institutional routines because I felt I had to, something private in me resisted them. I don’t know what it was that caused me to hold back, but even when I was most miserably solitary or out of synch with everyone else, I held onto this private aloofness very fiercely. I may have envied friends whose language was one or the other, or who had lived in the same place all their lives, or who had done well in accepted ways, or who truly belonged, but I do not recall ever thinking that any of that was possible for me. It wasn’t that I considered myself special, but rather that I didn’t fit the situations I found myself in and wasn’t too displeased to accept this state of affairs. I have, besides, always been drawn to stubborn autodidacts, to various sorts of intellectual misfit. In part it was the heedlessness of their own peculiar angle of vision that attracted me to writers and artists like Conrad, Vico, Adorno, Swift, Adonis, Hopkins, Auerbach, Glenn Gould, whose style, or way of thinking, was highly individualistic and impossible to imitate, for whom the medium of expression, whether music or words, was eccentrically charged, very worked-over, self-conscious in the highest degree. What impressed me about them was not the mere fact of their self-invention but that the enterprise was deliberately and fastidiously located within a general history which they had excavated ab origine.

Having allowed myself gradually to assume the professional voice of an American academic as a way of submerging my dif-ficult and unassimilable past, I began to think and write contrapuntally, using the disparate halves of my experience, as an Arab and as an American, to work with and also against each other. This tendency began to take shape after 1967, and though it was difficult, it was also exciting. What prompted the initial change in my sense of self, and of the language I was using, was the realisation that in accommodating to the exigencies of life in the US melting-pot, I had willy-nilly to accept the principle of annulment of which Adorno speaks so perceptively in Minima Moralia:

The past life of emigrés is, as we know, annulled. Earlier it was the warrant of arrest, today it is intellectual experience, that is declared non-transferable and unnaturalisable. Anything that is not reified, cannot be counted and measured, ceases to exist. Not satisfied with this, however, reification spreads to its own opposite, the life that cannot be directly actualised; anything that lives on merely as thought and recollection. For this a special rubric has been invented. It is called ‘background’ and appears on the questionnaire as an appendix, after sex, age and profession. To complete its violation, life is dragged along on the triumphal automobile of the united statisticians, and even the past is no longer safe from the present, whose remembrance of it consigns it a second time to oblivion.

For my family and for myself the catastrophe of 1948 (I was then 12) was lived unpolitically. For twenty years after their dispossession and expulsion from their homes and territory, most Palestinians had to live as refugees, coming to terms not with their past, which was lost, annulled, but with their present. I do not want to suggest that my life as a schoolboy, learning to speak and coin a language that let me live as a citizen of the United States, entailed anything like the suffering of that first generation of Palestinian refugees, scattered throughout the Arab world, where invidious laws made it impossible for them to become naturalised, unable to work, unable to travel, obliged to register and re-register each month with the police, many of them forced to live in appalling camps like Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila, which were the sites of massacres 34 years later. What I experienced, however, was the suppression of a history as everyone around me celebrated Israel’s victory, its terrible swift sword, as Barbara Tuchman grandly put it, at the expense of the original inhabitants of Palestine, who now found themselves forced over and over again to prove that they had once existed. ‘There are no Palestinians,’ said Golda Meir in 1969, and that set me, and many others, the slightly preposterous challenge of disproving her, of beginning to articulate a history of loss and dispossession that had to be extricated, minute by minute, word by word, inch by inch, from the very real history of Israel’s establishment, existence and achievements. I was working in an almost entirely negative element, the non-existence, the non-history which I had somehow to make visible despite occlusions, misrepresentations and denials.

Inevitably, this led me to reconsider the notions of writing and language, which I had until then treated as animated by a given text or subject – the history of the novel, for instance, or the idea of narrative as a theme in prose fiction. What concerned me now was how a subject was constituted, how a language could be formed – writing as a construction of realities that served one or another purpose instrumentally. This was the world of power and representat-ions, a world that came into being as a series of decisions made by writers, politicians, philosophers to suggest or adumbrate one reality and at the same time efface others. The first attempt I made at this kind of work was a short essay I wrote in 1968 entitled ‘The Arab Portrayed’, in which I described the image of the Arab that had been manipulated in journalism and some scholarly writing in such a way as to evade any discussion of history and experience as I and many other Arabs had lived them. I also wrote a longish study of Arabic prose fiction after 1948 in which I reported on the fragmentary, embattled quality of the narrative line.

During the Seventies I taught my courses in European and American literature at Columbia and elsewhere, and bit by bit entered the political and discursive worlds of Middle Eastern and international politics. It is worth mentioning here that for the forty years that I have been teaching I have never taught anything other than the West-ern canon, and certainly nothing about the Middle East. I’ve long had the ambition of giving a course on modern Arabic literature, but I haven’t got around to it, and for at least thirty years I’ve been planning a seminar on Vico and Ibn Khaldun, the great 14th-century historiographer and philo-sopher of history. But my sense of identity as a teacher of Western literature has excluded this other aspect of my activity so far as the classroom is concerned. Ironic-ally, the fact that I continued to write and teach my subject gave sponsors and hosts at university functions to which I had been invited to lecture an excuse to ignore my embarrassing political activity by specifically asking me to lecture on a literary topic. And there were those who spoke of my efforts on behalf of ‘my people’, without ever mentioning the name of that people. ‘Palestine’ was still a word to be avoided.

Even in the Arab world Palestine earned me a great deal of opprobrium. When the Jewish Defence League called me a Nazi in 1985, my office at the university was set fire to and my family and I received innumerable death threats, but when Anwar Sadat and Yasser Arafat appointed me Palestinian representative to the peace talks (without ever consulting me) and I found it impossible to step outside my apartment, so great was the media rush around me, I became the object of extreme left-wing nationalist hostility because I was considered too liberal on the question of Palestine and the idea of co-existence between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. I’ve been consistent in my belief that no military option exists for either side, that only a process of peaceful reconciliation, and justice for what the Palestinians have had to endure by way of dispossession and military occupation, would work. I was also very critical of the use of slogan-clichés like ‘armed struggle’ and of the revolutionary adventurism that caused innocent deaths and did nothing to advance the Palestinian case politically. ‘The predicament of private life today is shown by its arena,’ Adorno wrote. ‘Dwelling, in the proper sense, is now impossible. The traditional residences we grew up in have grown intolerable: each trait of comfort in them is paid for with a betrayal of knowledge, each vestige of shelter with the musty pact of family interests.’ Even more unyieldingly, he continued:

The house is past . . . The best mode of conduct, in the face of all this, still seems an uncommitted, suspended one: to lead a private life, as far as the social order and one’s own needs will tolerate nothing else, but not to attach weight to it as something still socially substantial and individually appropriate. ‘It is even part of my good fortune not to be a house-owner,’ Nietzsche already wrote in the Gay Science. Today we should have to add: it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.

For myself, I have been unable to live an uncommitted or suspended life: I have not hesitated to declare my affiliation with an extremely unpopular cause. On the other hand, I have always reserved the right to be critical, even when criticism conflicted with solidarity or with what others expected in the name of national loyalty. There is a definite, almost palpable discomfort to such a position, especially given the irreconcilability of the two constituencies, and the two lives they have required.

The net result in terms of my writing has been to attempt a greater transparency, to free myself from academic jargon, and not to hide behind euphemism and circumlocution where difficult issues have been concerned. I have given the name ‘worldliness’ to this voice, by which I do not mean the jaded savoir-faire of the man about town, but rather a knowing and unafraid attitude towards exploring the world we live in. Cognate words, derived from Vico and Auerbach, have been ‘secular’ and ‘secularism’ as applied to ‘earthly’ matters; in these words, which derive from the Italian materialist tradition that runs from Lucretius through to Gramsci and Lampedusa, I have found an important corrective to the German Idealist tradition of synthesising the antithetical, as we find it in Hegel, Marx, Lukács and Habermas. For not only did ‘earthly’ connote this historical world made by men and women rather than by God or ‘the nation’s genius’, as Herder termed it, but it suggested a territorial grounding for my argument and language, which proceeded from an attempt to understand the imaginative geographies fashioned and then imposed by power on distant lands and people. In Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, and then again in the five or six explicitly political books concerning Palestine and the Islamic world that I wrote around the same time, I felt that I had been fashioning a self who revealed for a Western audience things that had so far either been hidden or not discussed at all. Thus in talking about the Orient, hitherto believed to be a simple fact of nature, I tried to uncover the longstanding, very varied geographical obsession with a distant, often inaccessible world that helped Europe to define itself by being its opposite. Similarly, I believed that Palestine, a territory effaced in the process of building another society, could be restored as an act of political resistance to injustice and oblivion.

Occasionally, I’d notice that I had become a peculiar creature to many people, and even a few friends, who had assumed that being Palestinian was the equivalent of something mythological like a unicorn or a hopelessly odd variation of a human being. A Boston psychologist who specialised in conflict resolution, and whom I had met at several seminars involving Palestinians and Israelis, once rang me from Greenwich Village and asked if she could come uptown to pay me a visit. When she arrived, she walked in, looked incredulously at my piano – ‘Ah, you actually play the piano,’ she said, with a trace of disbelief in her voice – and then turned around and began to walk out. When I asked her whether she would have a cup of tea before leaving (after all, I said, you have come a long way for such a short visit) she said she didn’t have time. ‘I only came to see how you lived,’ she said without a hint of irony. Another time a publisher in another city refused to sign my contract until I had lunch with him. When I asked his assistant what was so important about having a meal with me, I was told that the great man wanted to see how I handled myself at the table. Fortunately none of these experiences affected or detained me for very long: I was always in too much of a rush to meet a class or a deadline, and I quite deliberately avoided the self-questioning that would have landed me in a terminal depression. In any case the Palestinian intifada that erupted in December 1987 confirmed our peoplehood in as dramatic and compelling a way as anything I might have said. Before long, however, I found myself becoming a token figure, hauled in for a few hundred written words or a ten-second soundbite testifying to ‘what the Palestinians are saying’, and determined to escape that role, especially given my disagreements with the PLO leadership from the late Eighties.

I am not sure whether to call this perpetual self-invention or a constant restlessness. Either way, I’ve long learned to cherish it. Identity as such is about as boring a subject as one can imagine. Nothing seems less interesting than the narcissistic self-study that today passes in many places for identity politics, or ethnic studies, or affirmations of roots, cultural pride, drum-beating nationalism and so on. We have to defend peoples and identities threatened with extinction or subordinated because they are considered inferior, but that is very different from aggrandising a past invented for present reasons. Those of us who are American intellectuals owe it to our country to fight the coarse anti-intellectualism, bullying, injustice and provincialism that disfigure its career as the last superpower. It is far more challenging to try to transform oneself into something different than it is to keep insisting on the virtues of being American in the ideological sense. Having myself lost a country with no immediate hope of regaining it, I don’t find much comfort in cultivating a new garden, or looking for some other association to join. I learned from Adorno that reconciliation under duress is both cowardly and inauthentic: better a lost cause than a triumphant one, more satisfying a sense of the provisional and contingent – a rented house, for example – than the proprietary solidity of permanent ownership. This is why strolling dandies like Oscar Wilde or Baudelaire seem to me intrinsically more interesting than extollers of settled virtue like Wordsworth or Carlyle.

For the past five years I have been writing two columns a month for the Arabic press; and despite my extremely anti-religious politics I am often glowingly described in the Islamic world as a defender of Islam, and considered by some of the Islamic parties to be one of their supporters. Nothing could be further from the truth, any more than it is true that I have been an apologist for terrorism. The prismatic quality of one’s writing when one isn’t entirely of any camp, or a total partisan of any cause, is difficult to handle, but there, too, I have accepted the irreconcilability of the various conflicting, or at least incompletely harmonised, aspects of what, cumulatively, I appear to have stood for. A phrase by Günter Grass describes the predicament well: that of the ‘intellectual without mandate’. A complicated situation arose in late 1993 when, after seeming to be the approved voice of the Palestinian struggle, I wrote increasingly sharply of my disagreements with Arafat and his bunch. I was immediately branded ‘anti-peace’ because I had the lack of tact to describe the Oslo treaty as deeply flawed. Now that everything has ground to a halt, I am regularly asked what it is like to be proved right, but I was more surprised by that than anyone: prophecy is not part of my arsenal.

For the past three or four years I have been trying to write a memoir of my early – that is, pre-political – life, largely because I think it’s a story worthy of rescue and commemoration, given that the three places I grew up in have ceased to exist. Palestine is now Israel, Lebanon, after twenty years of civil war, is hardly the stiflingly boring place it was when we spent our summers locked up in Dhour el Shweir, and colonial, monarchical Egypt disappeared in 1952. My memories of those days and places remain extremely vivid, full of little details that I seem to have preserved as if between the covers of a book, full also of unexpressed feelings generated out of situations and events that occurred decades ago but seem to have been waiting to be articulated now. Conrad says in Nostromo that a desire lurks in every heart to write down once and for all a true account of what happened, and this certainly is what moved me to write my memoir, just as I had found myself writing a letter to my dead mother out of a desire once again to communicate something terribly important to a primordial presence in my life. ‘In his text,’ Adorno says,

the writer sets up house . . . For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live . . . [Yet] the demand that one harden oneself against self-pity implies the technical necessity to counter any slackening of intellectual tension with the utmost alertness, and to eliminate anything that has begun to encrust the work or to drift along idly, which may at an earlier stage have served, as gossip, to generate the warm atmosphere conducive to growth, but is now left behind, flat and stale. In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.

One achieves at most a provisional satisfaction, which is quickly ambushed by doubt, and a need to rewrite and redo that renders the text uninhabitable. Better that, however, than the sleep of self-satisfaction and the finality of death.

Edward Said, who died in September 2003, first contributed to the LRB in 1981.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n09/print/said01_.html

Roots of the West's Fear of Islam

Q&A/Edward Said : Roots of the West's Fear of Islam

By Ken Shulman
Published: Monday, March 11, 1996

Born into a Palestinian Christian family in East Jerusalem in 1935, Edward Said, a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University, has written extensively on Middle East politics. He spoke recently with Ken Shulman in Percoto, Italy.

Q. Has the West's attitude toward Islam improved since you published "Orientalism" in 1978?

A. I don't think it has improved at all. In fact, it has decidedly worsened. If you look at how Islam is represented today in newspapers and on television, you see that it is still considered a threat, something that must be walled out. The Arab world is depicted as a place full of terrorists and fanatics.

Instead of expanding, the West's comprehension of the Arab world is contracting.

Q. What is the history of this anti-Arab prejudice?

A. The prejudice was created at the same time Islam was born, when Islam was a political and economic threat to Europe. It is no coincidence that Dante places Mohammed in the next to last circle of hell in his Divine Comedy, right next to Satan. In the Renaissance, we have the figure of Shylock, but we also have the figure of Othello.

It wasn't just the Jew who was suspect in Christian Europe. It was also the Arab. The Arab who was indolent, diabolic and dishonest. On one hand, this world of the Orient fascinated the Europeans. On the other, it terrorized them.

Q. Is there a hint of truth in the current stereotype of the Arab world?

A. Of course there is, just as there is a hint of truth in all stereotypes. This is what makes it possible for them to be so widely accepted. But the distortions in the stereotype are far greater than the few elements of realism they may contain. Today, the standard view of the Orient is a vestige of 19th-century European colonialism, when anti-Eastern prejudice reached its zenith.

The West's almost obsessive emphasis on terrorism and fanaticism in the Arab world is a form of exorcism. They see it in Islam so they won't have to recognize that the same elements exist in their own societies, and in alarming levels.

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Q. Is the West's prejudice against the Arab world more virulent than its prejudices toward other non-Western cultures?

A. I don't think so. If you read the European political literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries, you will see the same disdain expressed toward India, China and Africa.

Q. How does a nation that has been treated with such persistent scorn view itself?

A. The self-image of the Arab world is often negative, and this can be quite damaging for a people. There is a great component of self-loathing, and of desperation.

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Q. Has the peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians altered the West's perception?

A. Very much so. Once Arafat was portrayed as the most diabolic man on the planet. Now he is supported and invited to appear on mainstream talk shows. Unfortunately, this aperture doesn't apply to all Palestinians. It just applies to the "right" ones, the ones with the "right" ideas. It hasn't led to any greater awareness of the problems and the history of the Palestinian people.

Q. Is there a danger that in using force to maintain order among its own people, the Palestine Liberation Organization will begin to lose some of the sympathy it has gained in the West?

A. I hope so. Because when the current Palestinian authorities jail newspaper editors and torture prisoners, they are merely doing Israel's dirty work. Israel and the Western governments want Arafat to repress certain elements of his society. They want him to be a dictator. The mechanism of the peace accord makes this perfectly clear.

I am for peace. And I am for a negotiated peace. But this accord is not a just peace.

http://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/11/news/11iht-qanda.t.html