The End of the Peace Process, page 29
It is equally important to recall that the United States, still strapped inside its crippling Cold War mentality, has gone from one failure to another in its general Middle East policy. Benjamin Netanyahu has wreaked havoc on the remaining tatters of the peace process, which, it is important to remember, is sponsored by the United States. Having just returned from ten days in Palestine, I can testify to the fact that after fifty years of official state existence, the Zionist juggernaut is still in the process of taking Palestinian land, destroying houses, displacing people on a daily basis, nearly all of it started with new vigor after September 1993. The United States has also lost the support of even those Arab and Islamic states who are its supposed allies, so appallingly insensitive and hypocritical has its behavior been in coddling Israel and at the same time demanding compliance from the Arabs. The November Doha summit was a fiasco, as was the more recent attempt to mobilize Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan into anti-Iraq military action. Above all, it is the brazen duplicity of American rhetoric, as embodied in Mrs. Albright, who loses no opportunity to act like a macho thug, that reveals the threadbare principles (such as they are) of U.S. Middle East policy. How official spokesmen still can speak with a straight face of averting violence and condemning terrorism when the United States has a long record of bloody illegal action all over the Third World achieved by no other power simply defies credulity. The United States after all is the country that killed 3 million Vietnamese, that was behind the massacre of roughly 10 percent of the Guatemalan population during the 1950s, that collaborated with the Suharto regime both in the invasion of East Timor and the killing of half a million Indonesians Suharto suspected of being communist, that connives daily in the Turkish attacks on the Kurds, that illegally engaged in the mining of Nicaraguan harbors (for which its was condemned by the World Court) and funded subversives against the Sandianistas throughout the 1980s, that invaded Panama and Granada, that funded Afghanistani fundamentalists, that subsidizes Israeli conquest and pillage virtually without restraint. That it has done and continues to do all this and, at the same time, arrogates for itself the right to speak of international law to the Arabs, is nothing short of stupefying, the modern equivalent of a Gulliver bellowing furiously at the very same tiny Lilliputians whose tactics and presence confuse and finally disable the lumbering giant.
Despite its size and power, then, the United States has been forced to accept the realities of a world it does not and can never completely control. Looking as shamefaced and embarrassed as the local bully who has been shown up by a firm but understated schoolteacher, Bill Clinton has in effect accepted Kofi Annan’s compromise. The details are as yet to be worked out, but all the diplomacy has deterred the great war machine (perhaps only for a short time). But I would guess that the great days of the United States in the Middle East are now definitively over. It is still true that its hegemony remains potent, but that it can continue to pretend that it can be all things to all parties; that pose has been shown for the miserable ruse that it has always been. Like Gulliver before the King of Brobdingnag, its officials boast of its prowess in arms and intrigue, but stand revealed for the hollow sham its policy has now become, manipulated by the Zionist lobby, cajoled by a battery of journalists who still believe in the United States’s imperial mission (Tom Friedman, Jim Hoagland, A. M. Rosenthal, Fouad Ajami etc.) but try to convince themselves that they are right when in fact they have always been proved wrong.
One would wish, however, that our own part of the world had the mettle to benefit from this Gulliverian situation. Saddam, in my opinion, is too discredited and bloodied a leader to be anything more than a nuisance to his neighbors and a horror to his long-suffering people. It seems to me irrelevant whether or not in this latest confrontation he “won” or “lost”: his country destroyed and set back in its development for decades, if not generations, Saddam should do the decent thing and simply quit, although he is too stubborn and cowardly to do anything like that. I fear that many Arabs now hero-worship him, despite his immense profligacy and total incompetence. Like many of his aging counterparts in the Arab world, he will limp along indefinitely until another upstart will unseat him, and start a new process either of recovery or of further slippage. Without democracy or a shared vision, the Arab leaders find themselves reduced to hushed consultations, ritual meetings, financial deals that put off even longer the massive investments needed in education, health, and democratic practices. Faced with similarly depressing actualities, Swift made Gulliver finally confront himself as an unregenerate savage, a Yahoo, as Swift calls him, lectured to not by a wise human being, but by a whinneying horse. In these dark times, it is not hard to go the whole way and condemn ourselves as a people for our congenital inability to get anything right. But, having seen the fortitude of Palestinian peasants and ordinary working people trying to fight more dispossession by Israeli settlers and army, I remain convinced that there is a battle and a cause to be served. Despite us.
Al-Ahram Weekly, February 26, 1998
Al-Hayat, March 3, 1998
Al-Khaleej, March 3, 1998
Dagens Nyheter, April 2, 1998
Chapter Thirty-eight
Making History: Constructing Reality
SEPARATED FROM EACH other by well over three hundred years and the Mediterranean Sea, Ibn Khaldun, who died in 1406 at the age of seventy-four, and Giambattista Vico, the Neopolitan philosopher who died in 1744, nevertheless held astonishingly similar views of history, both of which still have great relevance today. Vico’s book The New Science, published a year after his death, remained relatively unknown until the late eighteenth century, and was then discovered by the French historian Jules Michelet, who translated it into French. Since that time numerous major figures in European thought—Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Croce, Freud, James Joyce, Beckett, and many others—were in some way indebted to Vico’s profound insight that human beings make their own history, a history that can therefore be understood scientifically and according to laws of context, development, and understanding. Thus it would be wrong, Vico said, to judge the primitive world of Homer by the more advanced rational world of Aristotle. Humankind begins in barbarism, moves to sociability as provided by families, and then achieves social solidarity, what Ibn Khladun who identified the same stages called ‘asabiya. The essential point for both men is that the world of human beings is neither the world of nature, nor the sacred world which is made by God, but the world of history, a secular world that can be understood rationally as the result of transformations, stabilities, and upheavals that are governed by observable laws and human actions.
Historical understanding is the comprehension of what human doings do and what they cannot do. In a famous passage Ibn Khaldun makes fun of Mas’udi, who had an entirely fanciful idea of how Alexander first descended into the Mediterranean to frighten sea monsters so that he could then build Alexandria. In other words, historical truth has to be plausible, it must be able to place events in the proper context, it must be free of exaggeration, it must not be partisan, it must focus on what human beings did, and so on. Although this brief summary makes these two great thinkers appear simple enough to accept, the fact is that we are still struggling with the consequences of their profound insights, especially in the Arab world, but elsewhere too. Notions of conspiracy, divine intervention, heroic individuals impede our capacity for understanding that history is made by human effort, not magic or mysterious forces that act mysteriously. This may seem like an unarguable reality, but if we pay close attention to some of the explanations that are passed off today as explanations for, let us say, American and Israeli behavior, we will conclude that these explanations are really quite far from rational, secular, or plausible.
In its dealings with the Arab world the United States has been governed by pressures and interests, and not simply by a Zionist plot, or an immoral disregard for Palestinian rights, which is certainly there. As I have said frequently here, it is one of the most illogical things for Arab leaders to throw themselves on the mercy of the United States just because it is powerful and seems to speak a language of official morality. That, in my opinion, is an example of fantasy, the assumption that some leader somewhere will cast aside the logic of interests and pressures, jump out of a historical context and, embrace the Arabs. A distinguished Arab political scientist in a recent study says that Oslo was simply the result of the balance of power, as if the balance of power were a fact of nature, like a tree or a mountain.
The missing factor here is the role of will in the creation of power in human affairs, which both Vico and Ibn Khaldun well understood. Will operates aggressively as well as defensively. The core idea of Zionism, as Zeev Sternhell shows in an important new book called The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State, was conquest. This is clear in Ben Gurion’s rhetoric. It is also clear in the language of Berl Katznelson, the major theorist of Labor Zionism, who openly proclaimed in 1929 that “the Zionist enterprise is an enterprise of conquest.” He then adds that “it is not by chance that I use military terms when speaking of settlement.” To this end, the Zionist movement sought, consolidated, and deployed power consistently. This was as true in Palestine as it was after 1948, when it was clear that the new state of Israel required sustained support from abroad, especially from the United States. This will to power and conquest must be understood as the conscious, systematic creation of men and women dedicated to keeping hold of a conquered territory. Far from it being a matter of luck, or coincidence, or conspiracy, it was—and still is—announced as the goal of every major Israeli leader of the Right or of the Left: in this respect Netanyahu is cruder, but really no different from Ben Gurion or Rabin. One of the main misunderstandings of those Palestinians who negotiated the Oslo accords was not that they weren’t aware of the balance of power, but that they were ignorant of the detailed circumstances of the Israeli military conquest and occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and Jerusalem. If they had known them, they would have seen clearly that Oslo was designed to get Palestinian approval for an extension of those circumstances into the heart of a formal peace agreement between Israel and the PLO. Everything we now know about what happened in Oslo suggests that the Palestinian leadership believed that it was getting a state, whereas the Israelis in fact were planning exactly the opposite. The question then is if this situation was made by human beings, and is not an act of God or a fact of nature, is there any way of dealing with it that does not perpetuate the injustice?
I think the answer is yes—but once again, by conscious, secular, and rational means, not by waiting for a miracle or a great leader or some unforeseen intervention, none of which can be expected in what Vico and Ibn Khaldun studied as the world of the nations, the secular world, which is governed by human effort that can be analyzed and understood rationally and historically. The influential English cultural critic Raymond Williams once said that no social system, no matter how repressive, can exhaust every social alternative that might contradict or resist it. The same is true of the United States where, despite the power of the Israeli lobby and the converging interests of that lobby with the strategic aims of the United States as characterized by the corporate and defense communities, there is an important sector of the population that is perplexed and angry that Israel should be getting away with so many infractions of what are stated U.S. policies, policies about human rights abuses, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, illegal annexation of territory, and so on. What we need to ask ourselves is why has this alternative constituency never been sysematically addressed by the Arabs and Palestinians. Why have our leaders and renowned inellectuals and political scientists always believed that one should address only the “policy makers” and “senior officials,” and leave the rest of the population unattended to? Never having lived in the West or in a democracy, they do not understand the way power operates, not as the result of military force but as the result of mobilized opinion, the movement of ideas, the relationship between interests and ideas, and between institutions and values. As I said earlier, the Zionists grasped the importance of opinion in the modern world, and sought to influence the largest possible number of people in the West by bombarding them with images of Israel as a pioneering democractic state, built on empty, neglected, or uninhabited land, surrounded by violent Arabs who wanted to drive Jews into the sea. Ninety percent of the Western electorate still does not know that there is a Law of Return only for Jews, that Israel was built on the ruins of Palestinian society, and that only Jews (at the expense of the indigenous inhabitants) can benefit from the institutions of the state, especially so far as landowning is concerned.
Yes, the importance of holding on to our land is crucial, but no less crucial is the need to expose the immorality of Israel’s now almost thirty-two years old, military occupation, which is opposed by many Israelis, as well as supporters of Israel in the West. The enemies of South African apartheid did exactly that by campaigning in universities, churches, corporations, in the media; thus South Africa’s discrimination against nonwhites became a public, moral cause. We have never even tried to organize such a campaign on a mass level, partly because we have not understood its importance, partly also because many of us still refuse to see the connection between power, will, and injustice, and refuse therefore to see the reverse—that power and will can be harnessed to resistance and to the cause of justice.
There is nothing else on the horizon, which is bleak than it has ever been. We are getting weaker, we are slowly being overtaken and forgotten, our resolve is in danger of succumbing to the sullen silence of other defeated native peoples. And yet a proper reading of history teaches us that even though the balance of power is unfavorable, the weaker can overcome the stronger because of the human factor, that is, the will to resist, to seek new and ingenious ways to fight injustice, to be relentless in energy and hope. I think we should draw support from the fact that despite years of oppression and dispossession we continue to exist as a people, and our voice can still be heard. That should encourage us to go on—critically, consciously, creatively. Above all, we must always remember to read history as the record of what men and women did, and what they did not do.
Like success, failure is made, and is not simply an automatic thing: failure has to be constructed and worked at until it becomes a habit and a commitment. It is neither a matter of genes nor of “destiny.” By the same token, we can commit ourselves to changing our situation not by force of arms, which we do not possess and cannot foreseeably possess in requisite strength, but by a mass movement of people determined by political, moral, nonviolent means to prevent our further ghettoization and hopeless drift. There are hundreds of thousands of Palestinians everywhere who are in principle prepared to sound the message everywhere that men and women will listen to and are interested in understanding. Because of its historical, cultural, and religious significance Palestine is a perennially renewed, open-ended symbol of the possibility of diversity, pluralism, and creative balance. To have expected Zionism to rise to Palestine’s challenge on human and political grounds was idealistic, maybe even naive. But I remain convinced that if as Palestinians we make it clear that we are prepared with the Jews of Israel and Arab people in the surrounding region to make a new kind of history based on a politics of integration and inclusion, we can carry the day. It is slow, hard work, but it is doable and, I think, achievable in the best sense. To settle for less would be a terrible mistake whose consequences are evident all around us.
Al-Ahram Weekly, March 12, 1998
Chapter Thirty-nine
Scenes from Palestine
I HAVE JUST RETURNED from two separate trips to Jerusalem and the West Bank, where I have been making a film for the BBC to be shown in England on May 17, and then later in the month on the World Service. The occasion for my film is Israel’s fiftieth anniversary, which I am examining from a personal and, obviously, Palestinian point of view. For our shooting in Palestine we have had an excellent crew: an English director, a young Anglo-Indian woman (whose idea it was to approach me for the film in the first place), a Palestinian cameraman, and an Israeli sound man. We concluded work on the film in New York a few days ago; all that remains is cutting, editing, and assembling the many hours of interviews, scenes from Palestinian life, etc., into a one-hour film. This is obviously the most difficult part of the job since we already have far too much material to be conveniently stuffed into a meagre 55 minutes. But the experience of going around Palestine and recording what I saw was so powerful for me that it seemed worthwhile to reflect here a little on the experience itself. I should say also that director and crew were immensely cooperative and helpful; even the Israeli sound engineer, who is employed by the BBC in Jerusalem, found the actual business of talking to Palestinians and a few Israelis very rewarding and, given his conventional Zionist upbringing (he is a liberal, by no means a dogmatic Zionist), enlightening and a definitive challenge to long-held and unexamined views about Israel’s history. “It is hard to be an Israeli again,” he said at the end of the shoot.
Two completely contradictory impressions override all the others. First, that Palestine and Palestinians remain, despite Israel’s concerted efforts from the beginning either to get rid of them or to circumscribe them so much as to make them ineffective. In this, I am confident in saying, we have proved the utter folly of Israel’s policy: there is no getting away from the fact that as an idea, a memory, and as an often buried or invisible reality, Palestine and its people have simply not disappeared. The more Israel wraps itself in exclusivity and xenophobia toward the Arabs, the more it assists them in staying on, in fighting its injustices and cruel measures. This is specially true in the case of Israeli Palestinians, whose main representative in the Knesset is the remarkable Azmi Bishara. I interviewed him at length for the film and was impressed with the courage and intelligence of his stand, which is invigorating a new generation of young Palestinians, whom I also interviewed. For them, as for an increasing number of Israelis (Professor Israel Shahak in the forefront), the real battle is for equality and rights of citizenship. Contrary to its expressed and implemented intention, therefore, Israel has strengthened the Palestinian presence, even among Israeli Jewish citizens who have simply lost patience with the unendingly shortsighted policy. No matter where you turn, we are there, often only as humble, silent workers and compliant restaurant waiters, cooks, and the like, but often also as large numbers of people—in Hebron, for example—who continuously resist Israeli encroachments on their lives.
