Palestinian society -
devastated, nearly ruined, desolate in so many ways - is,
like Hardy's thrush in its blast-beruffled plume, still
capable of flinging its soul upon the growing gloom.
By EDWARD SAID
[An Excerpt from The Politics of Anti-Semitism, edited by
Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair]
Aside from the obvious physical discomforts, being ill
for a long period of time fills the spirit with a
terrible feeling of helplessness, but also with periods
of analytic lucidity, which, of course, must be
treasured. For the past three months now I have been in
and out of the hospital, with days marked by lengthy and
painful treatments, blood transfusions, endless tests,
hours and hours of unproductive time spent staring at the
ceiling, draining fatigue and infection, inability to do
normal work, and thinking, thinking, thinking.
But there are also the intermittent passages of lucidity
and reflection that sometimes give the mind a perspective
on daily life that allows it to see things (without being
able to do much about them) from a different perspective.
Reading the news from Palestine and seeing the frightful
images of death and destruction on television, it has
been my experience to be utterly amazed and aghast at
what I have deduced from those details about Israeli
government policy, more particularly about what has been
going on in the mind of Ariel Sharon. And when, after the
recent Gaza bombing by one of his F-16s in which nine
children were massacred, he was quoted as congratulating
the pilot and boasting of a great Israeli success, I was
able to form a much clearer idea than before of what a
pathologically deranged mind is capable of, not only in
terms of what it plans and orders but, worse, how it
manages to persuade other minds to think in the same
delusional and criminal way. Getting inside the official
Israeli mind is a worthwhile, if lurid, experience.
In the West, however, there's been such repetitious and
unedifying attention paid to Palestinian suicide bombing
that a gross distortion in reality has completely
obscured what is much worse: the official Israeli, and
perhaps the uniquely Sharonian evil that has been visited
so deliberately and so methodically on the Palestinian
people. Suicide bombing is reprehensible but it is a
direct and, in my opinion, a consciously programmed
result of years of abuse, powerlessness and despair. It
has as little to do with the Arab or Muslim supposed
propensity for violence as the man in the moon. Sharon
wants terrorism, not peace, and he does everything in his
power to create the conditions for it. But for all its
horror, Palestinian violence, the response of a desperate
and horribly oppressed people, has been stripped of its
context and the terrible suffering from which it arises:
a failure to see that is a failure in humanity, and that
context doesn't make the violence any less terrible but
at least situates it in a real history and real
geography.
Yet the location of Palestinian terror-of course it is
terror-is never allowed a moment's chance to appear, so
remorseless has been the focus on it as a phenomenon
apart, a pure, gratuitous evil which Israel, supposedly
acting on behalf of pure good, has been virtuously
battling in its variously appalling acts of
disproportionate violence against a population of three
million Palestinian civilians. I am not speaking only
about Israel's manipulation of opinion, but its
exploitation of the American equivalent of the campaign
against terrorism without which Israel could not have
done what it has done. (In fact, I cannot think of any
other country on earth that, in full view of nightly TV
audiences, has performed such miracles of detailed sadism
against an entire society and gotten away with it.) That
this evil has been made consciously part of George W.
Bush's campaign against terrorism, irrationally
magnifying American fantasies and fixations with
extraordinary ease, is no small partof its
blind destructiveness. Like the brigades of eager (and in
my opinion completely corrupt) American intellectuals who
spin enormous structures of falsehoods about the benign
purpose and necessity of US imperialism, Israeli society
has pressed into service numerous academics, policy
intellectuals at think tanks, and ex-military men now in
defense-related and public relations business, all to
rationalize and make convincing inhuman punitive policies
that are supposedly based on the need for Israeli
security.
Israeli security is now a fabled beast. Like a unicorn it
is endlessly hunted and never found, remaining,
everlastingly, the goal of future action. That over time
Israel has become less secure and more unacceptable to
its neighbors scarcely merits a moment's notice. But then
who challenges the view that Israeli security ought to
define the moral world we live in? Certainly not the Arab
and Palestinian leaderships, who for 30 years have
conceded everything to Israeli security. Shouldn't that
ever be questioned, given that Israel has wreaked more
damage on the Palestinians and other Arabs relative to
its size than any country in the world, Israel with its
nuclear arsenal, its air force, navy and army limitlessly
supplied by the US taxpayer? As a result the daily,
minute occurrences of what Palestinians have to live
through are hidden and, more important, covered over by a
logic of self-defense and the pursuit of terrorism
(terrorist infrastructure, terrorist nests, terrorist
bomb factories, terrorist suspects-the list is infinite)
which perfectly suits Sharon and the lamentable George
Bush. Ideas about terrorism have thus taken on a life of
their own, legitimized and re-legitimized without proof,
logic or rational argument.
Consider for instance the devastation of Afghanistan, on
the one hand, and the "targeted" assassinations
of almost 100 Palestinians (to say nothing of the many
thousands of "suspects" rounded-up and still
imprisoned by Israeli soldiers) on the other: nobody asks
whether all these people killed were in fact terrorists,
or proved to be terrorists, or were about to become
terrorists. They are all assumed to be dangers by acts of
simple, unchallenged affirmation. All you need is an
arrogant spokesman or two, like the loutish Ranaan
Gissin, Avi Pazner or Dore Gold, and in Washington a
non-stop apologist for ignorance and incoherence like Ari
Fleischer, and the targ as dead. Without doubts,
questions or demurral. No need for proof or any such
tiresome delicacy. Terrorism and its obsessive pursuit
have become an entirely circular, self-fulfilling murder
and slow death of enemies who have no choice or say in
the matter.
With the exception of reports by a few intrepid
journalists and writers such as Amira Hass, Gideon Levy,
Amos Elon, Tanya Leibowitz, Jeff Halper, Israel Shamir
and a few others, public discourse in the Israeli media
has declined terribly in quality and honesty. Patriotism
and blind support for the government has replaced
skeptical reflection and moral seriousness. Gone are the
days of Israel Shahak, Jakob Talmon and Yehoshua
Leibowitch. I can think of few Israeli academics and
intellectuals-men like Zeev Sternhell, Uri Avnery and
Ilan Pappe, for instance-who are courageous enough to
depart from the imbecilic and debased debate about
"security" and "terrorism" that seems
to have overtaken the Israeli peace establishment, or
even its rapidly dwindling left opposition. Crimes are
being committed every day in the name of Israel and the
Jewish people, and yet the intellectuals chatter on about
strategic withdrawal, or perhaps whether to incorporate
settlements or not, or whether to keep building
that monstrous fence (has a crazier idea ever been
realized in the modern world, that you can put several
million people in a cage and say they don't exist?) in a
manner befitting a general or a politician, rather than
in ways more suited to intellectuals and artists with
independent judgment and some sort of moral standard.
Where are the Israeli equivalents of Nadine Gordimer,
Andre Brink, Athol Fugard, those white writers who spoke
out unequivocally and with unambiguous clarity against
the evils of South African apartheid? They simply don't
exist in Israel, where public discourse by writers and
academics has sunk to equivocation and the repetition of
official propaganda, and where most really first-class
writing and thought has disappeared from even the
academic establishment.
But to return to Israeli practices and the mind-set that
has gripped the country with such obduracy during the
past few years, think of Sharon's plan. It entails
nothing less than the obliteration of an entire people by
slow, systematic methods of suffocation, outright murder
and the stifling of everyday life. There is a remarkable
story by Kafka, In the Penal Colony, about a crazed
official who shows off a fantastically detailed torture
machine whose purpose is to write all over the body of
the victim, using a complex apparatus of needles to
inscribe the captive's body with minute letters that
ultimately causes the prisoner to bleed to death. This is
what Sharon and his brigades of willing executioners are
doing to the Palestinians, with only the most limited and
most symbolic of opposition. Every Palestinian has become
a prisoner. Gaza is surrounded by an electrified wire
fence on three sides; imprisoned like animals, Gazans are
unable to move, unable to work, unable to sell
theirvegetables or fruit, unable to go to school. They
are exposed from the air to Israeli planes
and helicopters and are gunned down like turkeys on the
ground by tanks and machine guns. Impoverished and
starved, Gaza is a human nightmare, each of whose little
pieces of episodes-like what takes place at Erez, or near
the settlements-involves thousands of soldiers in the
humiliation, punishment, intolerable enfeeblement of each
Palestinian, without regard for age, gender or illness.
Medical supplies are held up at the border, ambulances
are fired upon or detained. Hundreds of houses are
demolished, and hundreds of thousands of trees and
agricultural land destroyed in acts of systematic
collective punishment against civilians, most of whom are
already refugees from Israel's destruction of their
society in 1948. Hope has been eliminated from the
Palestinian vocabulary so that only raw defiance remains,
and still Sharon and his sadistic minions prattle on
about eliminating terrorism by an ever-encroaching
occupation that has continued now for 35 years. That the
campaign itself is, like all colonial brutality, futile,
or that it has the effect of making Palestinians more,
rather than less, defiant simply does not enter Sharon's
closed mind.
The West Bank is occupied by 1,000 Israeli tanks whose
sole purpose is to fire upon and terrorize civilians.
Curfews are imposed for periods of up to two weeks,
without respite. Schools and universities are either
closed or impossible to get to. No one can travel, not
just between the nine main cities but within the cities.
Every town today is a wasteland of destroyed buildings,
looted
offices, purposely ruined water and electrical systems.
Commerce is finished. Malnutrition prevails in half the
number of children. Two-thirds of the population lives
below the poverty level of $2 a day. Tanks in Jenin
(where the demolition of the refugee camp by Israeli
armor, a major war crime, was never investigated because
cowardly international bureaucrats such as Kofi Annan
back down when Israel threatens) fire upon and kill
children, but that is only one drop in an unending stream
of Palestinian civilian deaths caused by Israeli soldiers
who furnish the illegal Israeli military occupation with
loyal, unquestioning service. Palestinians are all
"terrorist suspects". The soul of this
occupation is that young Israeli conscripts are allowed
full rein to subject Palestinians at checkpoints to every
known form of private torture and abjection. There is the
waiting in the sun for hours; then there is the detention
of medical supplies and produce until they rot; there are
the insulting words and beatings administered at will;
the sudden rampage of jeeps and soldiers against
civilians waiting their turn by the thousands at the
innumerable checkpoints that have made of Palestinian
life a choking hell; making dozens of youths kneel in the
sun for hours; forcing men to take off their clothes;
insulting and humiliating parents in front of their
children; forbidding the sick to pass through for no
other reason than personal whim; stopping ambulances and
firing on them. And the steady number of Palestinian
deaths (quadruple that of Israelis) increases on a daily,
mostly untabulated basis. More "terrorist
suspects" plus their wives and children, but
"we" regret those deaths very much. Thank you.
Israel is frequently referred to as a democracy. If so,
then it is a democracy without a conscience, a country
whose soul has been captured by a mania for punishing the
weak, a democracy that faithfully mirrors the
psychopathic mentality of its ruler, General Sharon,
whose sole idea-if that is the right word for it-is to
kill, reduce, maim, drive away Palestinians until
"they break". He provides nothing more concrete
as a goal for his campaigns, now or in the past, beyond
that, and like the garrulous official in Kafka's story he
is most proud of his machine for abusing defenseless
Palestinian civilians, all the while monstrously abetted
in his grotesque lies by his court advisers and
philosophers and generals, as well as by his chorus of
faithful American servants. There is no Palestinian army
of occupation, no Palestinian tanks, no soldiers, no
helicopter gun-ships, no artillery, no government to
speak of. But there are the "terrorists" and
the "violence" that Israel has invented sothat
its own neuroses can be inscribed on the bodies of
Palestinians, without effective protest from the
overwhelming majority of Israel's laggard philosophers,
intellectuals, artists, peace activists. Palestinian
schools, libraries and universities have ceased normal
functioning for months now; and we still wait for the
Western freedom-to-write groups and the vociferous
defenders of academic freedom in America to raise their
voices in protest. I have yet to see one academic
organization either in Israel or in the West make a
declaration about this profound abrogation of the
Palestinian right to knowledge, to learning, to attend
school.
In sum, Palestinians must die a slow death so that Israel
can have its security, which is just around the corner
but cannot be realized because of the special Israeli
"insecurity". The whole world must sympathize,
while the cries of Palestinian orphans, sick old women,
bereaved communities and tortured prisoners simply go
unheard and unrecorded. Doubtless, we will be told, these
horrors serve a larger purpose than mere sadistic
cruelty. After all, "the two sides" are engaged
in a "cycle of violence" which has to be
stopped, sometime, somewhere. Once in a while, we ought
to pause and declare indignantly that there is only one
side with an army and a country: the other is a
stateless, dispossessed population without rights or any
present way of securing them. The language of suffering
and concrete daily life has either been hijacked, or it
has been so perverted as, in my opinion, to be useless
except as pure fiction deployed as a screen for the
purpose of more killing and painstaking torture-slowly,
fastidiously, inexorably. That is the truth of what
Palestinians suffer. But in any case, Israeli policy will
ultimately fail.
Anyone who believes that the road map devised by the Bush
administration actually offers anything resembling a
settlement or that it tackles the basic issues is wrong.
Like so much of the prevailing peace discourse, it places
the need for restraint and renunciation and sacrifice
squarely on Palestinian shoulders, thus denying the
density and sheer gravity of Palestinian history. To read
through the road map is to confront an unsituated
document, oblivious of its time and place.
The road map, in other words, is not about a plan for
peace so much as a plan for pacification: it is about
putting an end to Palestine as a problem. Hence the
repetition of the term "performance" in the
document's wooden prose-in other words, how the
Palestinians are expected to behave, almost in the social
sense of the word. No violence, no protest, more
democracy, better leaders and institutions, all based on
the notion that the underlying problem has been the
ferocity of Palestinian resistance, rather than the
occupation that has given rise to it. Nothing comparable
is expected of Israel except that a few small
settlements, known as "illegal outposts" (an
entirely new classification
which suggests that some Israeli implantations on
Palestinian land are legal) must be given up and, yes,
the major settlements "frozen" but certainly
not dismantled. Not a word is said about what since 1948,
and then again since 1967, Palestinians have endured at
the hands of Israel and the US.
Nothing about the de-development of the Palestinian
economy as described by the American researcher Sara Roy
in her forthcoming Scholarship and Politics. House
demolitions, the uprooting of trees, the 5000 prisoners
or more, the policy of targeted assassinations, the
closures since 1993, the wholesale ruin of the
infrastructure, the incredible number of deaths and
maimings-all that and
more passes without a word. Nonetheless It may seem
quixotic for me to say, even if the immediate
prospects are grim from a Palestinian perspective, they
are not all dark. The Palestinians stubbornly survive,
and Palestinian society-devastated, nearly ruined,
desolate in so many ways-is, like Hardy's thrush in its
blast-beruffled plume, still capable of flinging its soul
upon the growing gloom. No other Arab society is as
rambunctious and healthily unruly, and none is fuller of
civic and social initiatives and functioning institutions
(including a miraculously vital musical conservatory).
Even though they are mostly unorganized and in some cases
lead miserable lives of exile and statelessness, Diaspora
Palestinians are still energetically engaged by the
problems of their collective destiny, and everyone that I
know is always trying somehow to advance the cause. Only
a
minuscule fraction of this energy has ever found its way
into the Palestinian Authority, which except for the
highly ambivalent figure of Arafathas remained strangely
marginal to the common fate. According to recent polls,
[in the early summer of 2003] Fateh and Hamas between
them have the support of roughly 45 percent of the
Palestinian electorate, with the remaining 55 percent
evolving quite different, much more hopeful-looking
political formations.
One in particular has struck me as significant (and I
have attached myself to it) inasmuch as it now provides
the only genuine grassroots formation that steers clear
both of the religious parties and their fundamentally
sectarian politics, and of the traditional nationalism
offered up by Arafat's old (rather than young) Fateh
activists. It's been called the National Political
Initiative (NPI) and its main figure is Mostapha
Barghuti, a Moscow-trained physician, whose main work has
been as director of the impressive Village Medical Relief
Committee, which has brought health care to more than
100,000 rural Palestinians. A former Communist Party
stalwart, Barghuti is a quiet-spoken organizer and leader
who has overcome the hundreds of physical obstacles
impeding Palestinian movement or travel abroad to rally
nearly every independent individual and organization of
note behind a political program that promises social
reform as well as liberation across doctrinal lines.
Singularly free of conventional rhetoric, Barghuti has
worked with Israelis, Europeans, Americans, Africans,
Asians, Arabs to build an enviably well-run solidarity
movement that practices the pluralism and co-existence it
preaches. NPI does not throw up its hands at the
directionless militarization of the intifada. It offers
training programs for the unemployed and social services
for the destitute on the grounds that this answers to
present circumstances and Israeli pressure. Above all,
NPI, which is about to become a recognized political
party, seeks to mobilize Palestinian society at home and
in exile for free elections-authentic elections which
will represent Palestinian, rather than Israeli or US,
interests. This sense of authenticity is what seems so
lacking in the path cut out for Abu Mazen.
The vision here isn't a manufactured provisional state on
40 percent of the land, with the refugees abandoned and
Jerusalem kept by Israel, but a sovereign territory
liberated from military occupation by mass action
involving Arabs and Jews wherever possible. Because NPI
is an authentic Palestinian movement, reform and
democracy have become part of its everyday practice. Many
hundreds of Palestine's most notable activists and
independents have already signed up, and organizational
meetings have already been held, with many more planned
abroad and in Palestine, despite the terrible
difficulties of getting around Israel's restrictions on
freedom of movement. It is some solace to think that,
while formal negotiations and discussions go on, a host
of informal, un-coopted alternatives exist, of which NPI
and a growing international solidarity campaign are now
the main components......
A BLACK SHELL
FOUND ON THIS BEACH
his eyes of the black,
incandescent fire,
eyelids open on a deed
that forces reason forward
inch by inch remorseless ;
that care, the slender passage
of the pen,
waiting for no one...
and the waves of the sea,
a cradle for birds,
pulsate within his limits
admitting only the fume of surf
and storm as spirit.
his slow procession now passes
in the printed columns of loss,
slowly as the world
receives the dawn light
the blue diaspora of starlight
fades.
in this inability of his hand
today to lift the heavy curtain
the folds fall among us.
worn volumes of his books
attract my gaze and the
phrase…that
“all the positive things
we want to say about human existence
implicit in this fantastic
stream of pulsating,
organically connected
music….”
IN MEMORIAM EDWARD
SAID.SEPT.2003
j.braddell©
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