The End of the Peace Process, page 28
Looked at from this perspective, the fundamental challenge that Israel poses is to ourselves—our inability to organize, our inability to dedicate ourselves to a basic set of principles from which we do not deviate, our inability to marshal our resources singlemindedly, our inability to devote all our efforts to education and competence, finally, our inability to choose a leadership that is capable of the task. It is no use blaming the failures of the current PLO on a few inadequate and corrupt individuals. The fact is that we now have the leadership we deserve, and until we realize that we are being driven further and further from our goal of self-determination and the recovery of our rights by that leadership which so many of us still serve and respect, we will continue to slide downward. Antonio Gramsci put it very succinctly: pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will. Yes, our situation vis-à-vis Israel is calamitous and under Netanyahu the situation will get worse. But we need to ask what it is that we can do, and then by an act of collective will we must do it. The rest is simply a waste of time. The choice of better leaders is an imperative, but we must also improve our own conditions so that our workers do not have to build Israeli settlements just to put food on their tables, and our students do not have to settle for incredibly backward curricula in an age when our opponents are sending people to the moon, and our people do not have to accept lamentable conditions of tyranny and oppression where dissent is punished and torture is used by our Authority to cow the citizenry, all in the name of national unity. Until we awake from the sleep of reason, we will continue to lose more land and power to Israel. But we cannot fight for our rights and our history as well as for future until we are armed with weapons of criticism and dedicated consciousness. In this we need the support of the Arab intellectual and cultural community, which has devoted too much time to slogans about Zionism and imperialism and not enough to helping us fight the battle against our own failures and incompetence. The struggle of the twenty-first century is the struggle to achieve self-liberation and self-decolonization. And then Israel can be properly addressed.
Al-Hayat, January 12, 1998
Al-Khaleej, January 12, 1998
Panorama, January 16, 1998
Al-Ahram Weekly, January 15, 1998
The Progressive, March 1998
Chapter Thirty-six
The Problem is Inhumanity
TWO CORNERS OF the Arab world have been very much on my mind these past weeks, Algeria and Lebanon. The former was once synonymous with anticolonial resistance and uncompromising toughness; the latter with openness, diversity, and the joy of life. Yet both places have gone through horrendous transformations. The Lebanese civil war lasted for almost twenty years, virtually destroyed the society, produced uncounted thousands of dead innocents mostly killed or massacred because of their religion, and then finally gave birth to a so-called new Lebanon in which many of the old problems have been swept under a carpet of corruption, frenzied environmentally destructive building, and deepening economic crisis. The poor are poorer, the rich richer, and all the old politicians and their supporters remain in place on almost entirely confessional grounds.
Algeria has fared just as badly, but in a different, perhaps more agonizing way. An aging political oligarchy held over from the days of anti-French struggle ruled the country for three decades after 1962, in the process bleeding it dry, extinguishing democracy, giving the army the main role in authority and political life. Then in 1992, after the Islamic Salvation Front in effect won the elections, the results of those elections were nullified by the army, and the Islamists—whose politics I have no love for—were declared outlaws, their leaders jailed, their organizations disbanded. Since that time Algeria has endured wave after wave of massacres, first the killing of intellectuals and artists, then of journalists, most recently of literally hundreds of innocent women and children killed in the most brutal and senseless way. The government’s position is that all the killings are being done by renegade members of FIS or the GAI, whereas independent observers such as Amnesty International have accused the government troops of taking part in the killing, or of not doing anything to stop it, even though in several instances villagers have been slaughtered right next to army posts. To make matters worse, the government has made it almost impossible for foreign journalists to visit Algeria and has turned down several offers of mediation from the Arab League, the European Union, and the United Nations.
Are these two cases unique in the Arab world? Only in degree, not in kind. Those of us who have fought for Palestinian self-determination over the years have been bitterly disappointed in the behavior of Yasir Arafat’s Palestine Authority toward its own ciizens. All the human rights groups have commented on the lawlessness, corruption, and sheer brutality of PA security men, many of whom paradoxically were victims of Israel’s occupation policies. I recall a young man from Gaza, who now worked for one of the security forces in Ramallah, responding to my shocked query about his activities as a spy on, and interrogator of, his fellow students at Bir Zeit university. He said that “they [meaning the Israelis] tortured me; now it’s my turn.” Every Arab country practices what we all denounce in Israel, namely, physical coercion in prisons, and all around Israel the signs of Arab inhumanity to Arabs are plainly evident. Take as a very simple, even trivial case, people arriving at the airport. Almost without exception they are treated harshly and in a hostile manner by their border police, as if it was assumed that they were criminals and not citizens returning to their homes. Wherever one looks, the signs of an absence of humanity in the powerful toward the weaker and the disadvantaged stands out starkly. Torture, massacres, repression, undemocratic practices: this is what we Arabs have become known for.
It is no use simply blaming Israel or imperialism for this situation, even though they can be blamed in some measure. No one denies that Zionism bears an enormous responsibility for the unhappy fate of the Palestinian people since 1948, but Arabs—collectively and individually—also bear responsibility. This was dramatically apparent in a surprisingly frank and humane program broadcast on January 20 by ABC television. Apparently the reporter, Steve Lawrence, was sent to Lebanon to report on the country’s reconstruction but ended up reporting on the 350,000 (or perhaps more) Palestinians now marooned there without residence permits, unable to work (there are ninety-five different kinds of jobs which Palestinians are forbidden by law to undertake), unable to travel, poor, destitute, uncared for, and generally in a pitiable, not to say dreadful state. Lawrence focuses on one refugee family in Shatila camp. They are completely without hope, without health, without money. The father tells how when his one week-old baby son was gravely ill he took the child to a hospital for treatment. That hospital referred him to a charity institution, Hotel Dieu, which had a contract with UNRWA to treat Palestinians. There the poor man was told that he needed to pay $3,000 before the sick baby could be treated. When Lawrence visited the hospital to find out exactly what happened he was first told that the baby was indeed treated free of charge; later, though, a hospital administrator admitted on camera that “it was possible” that the baby had been turned away because he was Palestinian. Desperate, the man took the dying child to Sidon, fifty miles away, but there too he was asked to pay $1,000. Because he started to cry, the hospital person took pity and told him to leave the baby for treatment but to come back with money the next day. Since he had no choice, the father did what he was told; when he returned the next day his child had died but a hospital official refused to give the body back unless he was paid $220. As the disconsolate man and his wife say to Lawrence, death is better than the sort of life we have to lead here.
The story gets worse. The reporter pays a visit to the prime minister who before the cameras says that Lebanon is not responsible for the Palestinians, only Israel is. I quote verbatim from the transcript:
LAWRENCE: Is it fair for the head of the Lebanese government to say it’s not our problem?
PRIME MINISTER: You know, it depends how you put it. It depends how you put it. We cannot integrate them in the society. We cannot give them the Lebanese nationality. We cannot consider them as Lebanese because they are not and, if we did so, we feel that we are implementing the plan of Israel.
LAWRENCE: So the refugees are stuck. Even Yasir Arafat appears to have forgotten them. Financial aid from the PLO has been cut. Contributions from wealthy Arab nations, once generous, are next to nothing now.
It is particularly painful to witness such a scene on American television, which is not known for its compassion for Palestinian refugees. Certainly the brief episodes I have described do not begin to approach the exhaustive account of Palestinian life in Lebanon Too Many Enemies, written by Rosemary Sayigh. But the story she tells is pretty much the same as Lawrence’s, a story for which the usual excuses and explanations will not do. By the terms of Arab political logic what the Lebanese prime minister says is unremarkable, perhaps even acceptable. But by the terms of normal human logic it is profoundly cruel, which is the same attitude to be found in every Arab country with a population of Palestinian refugees who, with the exception of Jordan, are largely treated as nonpersons, barely tolerated, officially stigmatized as Palestinian aliens. The pity and tragedy of it is that even Palestinian leaders seem not to care about the destitute people they claim to be representing in talks with the World Bank or President Clinton.
Or consider Iraq. Understandably, Saddam Hussein does not want to submit to United States bullying. But he did invade and attempt to obliterate Kuwait, he deliberately provoked a costly and ultimately useless war, and by going on as he has, he has caused enormous suffering for his people, the most innocent of whom (children, the sick, and the aged) have paid and continue to pay the price of his folly. Is the safeguarding of Iraq’s totally ineffective military assets worth such inhumanity, such callous disregard of human life, even as more presidential palaces are built and “protected”?
There is a coarse inhumanity to public life in the Arab world that is deeply shocking. We have not paid sufficient attention to the liberal and humanistic education of our young people nor, alas, to the real priorities for our national institutions. The inhumanity of colonialism is replicated, indeed reproduced, in our societies two generations after the end of colonialism. The distortions of Zionism have not been rectified by our various national movements, who have glorified raw power, a blind subservience to authority, and a truly frightening hatred of others into practices that are taking us back inexorably into the middle ages. In the name of what? Certainly not freedom, since we have far less of it now than we did fifty years ago. In the name of sovereignty and national unity? Certainly not: Arabs are more divided than ever. Development and democracy? Of course not. I am afraid to say it, but the conclusion is inescapable: in the name of inhumanity. That is our problem, our inability collectively and individually to treat ourselves as human beings deserve to be treated, as citizens whose lives are intrinsically important and valuable. How is the so-called peace process going to help us achieve this basic level of decency and humanity? Obviously it cannot, since the problem begins at home. The sooner we acknowledge that, the better for us.
Al-Ahram Weekly, January 29, 1998
The Gulf Today, February 4, 1998
Al-Hayat, January 29, 1998
Al-Khaleej, January 29, 1998
Chapter Thirty-seven
Gulliver in the Middle East
GULLIVER’S TRAVELS, published by the great Anglo-Irish writer Jonathan Swift in 1727, is a classic political satire. It is the story of an Englishman, Lemuel Gulliver, who decides to leave England, is shipwrecked, and in the first of the four voyages he recounts, lands on an obscure island, Lilliput, whose inhabitants are tiny people measuring about six inches in height. The second voyage takes Gulliver to Brobdingnag, a country whose residents are enormous giants. So whereas in Lilliput Gulliver describes his adventures as a giant among dwarfs, in Brobdingnag he is a dwarf among giants. Both episodes illustrate the related problems of being too big in one setting or context, and being too small in the other. Despite his immense size in Lilliput, Gulliver is victimized by the Lilliputians, who draw him into their petty intrigues, and finally decide either to kill or banish him; in Brobdingnag he is permamently disadvantaged, a tiny human surrounded by immense creatures who are in danger of crushing him by their sheer size. When he is finally allowed by the king of Brobdingnag to say something in defense of himself and the “normal” human world from which he comes, he launches into a long speech about life in England, with all its peculiarities of class and privilege, its court intrigues, its sordid politics and unprincipled national life, its wars, conspiracies, and general violence. Far from feeling admiration for the pitiful little being who has declaimed the speech, the king concludes instead that Gulliver belongs to “the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”
So disillusioned and harsh is Swift’s view of political life, so uncompromising and unforgiving is its perspective, that it seems to me to be the only one capable of dealing with the recent Iraq-U.S.A. crisis in all its drama, farce, and incongrousness. Despite its immense military, economic, and political power, the United States in the Middle East has had all the success of Gulliver in Lilliput, ultimately trapped in local politics by its own illusions as to its strength and its moral authority. Size and authority are simply not the same thing. Having for years behaved like an international gangster, flouting international law, supporting its clients in the most bloodthirsty exploits, resorting to subversion and insurgency in order to destabilize its enemies, the United States under George Bush suddenly discovered the importance of United Nations resolutions. No other power has resorted to the United Nations with such cynicism and contradictory policies as the United States, which is delinquent in its back payments to the world organization amounting to about $1.3 billion. No other member state has used the veto to defend internationally condemned behavior (in this case, Israel’s) as the United States, which also like no other state, has openly vented its contempt for the world organization. Then it finds that its position vis-à-vis Iraq is best (and opportunely) expressed in a handful of resolutions passed seven years ago, and proceeds to their literal implementation, something that has never happened before in the UN’s history. In the meantime a regime of sanctions has decimated the Iraqi infrastructure, and in effect murdered 1.5 million innocent Iraqi civilians. As recently as a few hours ago Madeline Albright, who lies more shamelessly than any of her predecessors in office and along with Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen acquitted herself disgracefully before a properly unimpressed audience of ordinary American citizens in Columbus, Ohio, proudly proclaimed her “humanity and concern,” while at the same time boasting that the sanctions against Iraq were the most complete and punitive ever imposed in history. Not to be outdone, President Bill Clinton— squirming under a whole series of investigations as to his sexual and financial misadventures—has the remarkable gall to address the Arab people as if they were a collection of morons. The United States, he says, has no quarrel with the people of Iraq; the quarrel is with Saddam Hussein, who of course suffers very little under the sanctions regime while the people of Iraq continue to suffer and die. And this was offered as a justification for a possible military strike.
Nor is this all. For weeks the media have been feeding the public a diet of stories about hidden weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which may have them for all I know, but which are neither a threat to anyone nor, in fact, have been proved by anyone to exist. The United States, reserving for itself the right to stand above all the norms of international behavior, is determined to strike if diplomacy does not work. So a massive armada of American warships, aircraft, land forces—supplemented by a tiny force of British supplies, rushed to the Gulf in an unseemly gesture of slavish solidarity with the United States—has been gathering at a cost of at least $50 million a day, billed directly to the U.S. taxpayer. Never mind that no clear war aim has emerged in the weeks of swaggering and threatening, nor any assurances that even Saddam’s military forces, such as they are, would in fact fight against or be damaged by the strike. No assurances at all, any more than there was a possibility of mustering enough soldiers to attempt Iraq’s dismemberment and occupation with the goal of toppling Saddam’s dreadful regime. The net result of all this has been to reduce the American colossus to Saddam’s stature, to make it plain that rather than a moral authority, the United States in its lawlessness and unilateral arrogance was on Saddam’s level, a regional bully unable to do much more than strut and pose, like Gulliver pinioned by the tiny Lilliputians.
