From Oslo To Iraq And The Road Map Part 2

Time to Turn to the Other Front.

Until the intifada is understood in the West as a civilian uprising against colonial oppression, the Palestinians have no chance of obtaining equality and justice.

During the past several weeks, the Israeli government has vigorously pursued policies on two fronts, one on the ground, the other abroad. The first is vintage Sharon or, for that matter, vintage Israeli military. The idea is to hit Palestinians in every way possible, making their lives unbearable and so confined and strangulated as to make them feel that they can no longer endure remaining there. The rationale for this, as the Palestinian scholar Nur Masalha has studied it in three important books, is that Zionism has always wanted more land and fewer Arabs; from Ben-Gurion to Rabin, Begin, Shamir, Netanyahu, Barak, and now Sharon, there is an unbroken ideological continuity in which the Palestinian people is seen as an absence to be desired and fought for.

This is so obvious and, at the same time, so carefully obscured from the international (and even regional) public's view as to require only some additional remarks here. The core idea is that if Jews have all the rights to "the land of Israel," then any non-Jewish people there are ent.i.tled to no rights at all. It is as simple as that, and as ideologically unanimous. No Israeli leader or party has ever considered the Palestinian people as a nation or even as a national minority (after the ethnic cleansing of 1948). Culturally, historically, humanly, Zionism considers Palestinians as lesser or inferior. Even Shimon Peres, who occasionally seems to speak a humane language, cannot bring himself ever to consider the Palestinians as worthy of equality. Jews must remain a majority, own all the land, define the laws for Jews and non-Jews alike, guarantee immigration and repatriation for Jews alone. And though all sorts of inconsistencies and contradictions exist (e.g., why should there be democracy, as it is called, for one people and not for another in a "democratic" state?), Israel pursues its policies- ethnocentric, exclusivist, intolerant-regardless. No other state on earth except Israel could have maintained so odiously discriminatory a policy against a native people only on religious and ethnic grounds, a policy that forbids native people to own or keep land or to exist free of military repression, but for its amazing international reputation as a liberal, admirable, and advanced country.

This brings me to the second front of Israeli policy, which must be seen therefore through a double lens. Even as it besieges Palestinian towns using medieval techniques like ditches and total military blockades, it can do so with the aura of a besieged victim of dangerous, exterminationist violence. Israeli soldiers (called a "defense force") bomb Palestinian homes with helicopter gunships, advanced missiles, and tank barrages; Israeli soldiers kill 400 civilians, cause 12,000 casualties, bring economic life down to a 50 percent poverty level and 45 percent unemployment; Israeli bulldozers destroy 44,000 Palestinian trees, demolish houses, create fortifications that make movement impossible; Israeli planners build more settlements and settlement roads-all this while maintaining the image of a poor, defenseless, and terribly threatened people. How? By a concerted international, especially American, public relations campaign, as cynical as it is effective.

Last week (March 2001) alone Sharon, Peres, and Avraham Burg (Knesset speaker) were in the United States to consolidate the Israeli image as righteously fighting off terrorist violence. The three of them circulated through one influential public platform after another, gaining support and sympathy for Israel's policies every minute. In addition, the media announced that the Israeli government had hired two public relations firms to continue promoting its policies through advertis.e.m.e.nts, concerted lobbying efforts, and Washington congressional liaisons. News of the Palestinian intifada has gradually disappeared from the media. After all, how long can "violence," which seems to be directed neither at long-standing injustice (such as military occupation and collective punishment) nor at a particular policy (such as Israel's adamant refusal to regard Palestinian claims as having any merit whatever), keep hold of reporters whose every deviation from an accepted pro-Israeli editorial policy is punished? It's not only that reporters have no great story to report (such as a ready narrative of Palestinian liberation), it is also that Israel has never been firmly indicted for years and years of ma.s.sive human rights abuses against the entire Palestinian population.

Senator George Mitch.e.l.l's commission of inquiry as well as Mary Robinson's similar set of human rights experts, comprising a distinguished group that includes Richard Falk of Princeton, will doubtless come to similar conclusions. I have read the Robinson report, and it is unequivocally d.a.m.ning of Israel's cruelty and disproportionate military response to what is in effect an anticolonial civilian uprising. But one can be certain that few people will see or be affected by these excellent reports. Israel's public relations machine, in the United States especially, will make certain of that.

Such propaganda campaigns in the United States are far more effective there than they are in the United Kingdom, for instance. Robert Fisk, the excellent Middle East reporter for the Independent, has complained of attacks on him and his paper by the British Israeli lobby, but he continues to write fearlessly. And when the Canadian media tyc.o.o.n Conrad Black tried to stop or censor criticism of Israel in the Daily Telegraph or the Spectator, both of which he owns, a chorus of his own writers and others, like Ian Gilmour, were able to respond to him in his own papers.

This could not happen in the United States, where leading newspapers and journalists for the most part simply do not permit pro-Palestinian editorial comment at all. The New York Times has had only two or three columns like that, as against dozens of "neutral" or pro-Israel commentaries. A similar pattern obtains in every major U.S. newspaper. Thus the average reader is inundated with dozens upon dozens of articles about "violence," as if that violence were somehow equal to, or worse than, Israel's attacks with helicopters, tanks, and missiles. If it is sadly true that one Israeli death appears to be worth many Palestinian deaths on the ground, then it is also true that for all their actual suffering and daily humiliation, Palestinians in the media seem scarcely more human than the c.o.c.kroaches and terrorists to which they have been compared.

The simple fact of the matter is that the Palestinian intifada is unprotected and ineffective so long as it does not appear to be a struggle for liberation in the West. The United States is Israel's strongest supporter at $5 billion a year, and the one thing that Israelis have long understood is the direct value of their propaganda, which in no uncertain terms allows them to do anything at all and still retain an image of serene justice and confident right. As a people, we Palestinians have to do what the South African antiapartheid movement did, that is, gain legitimacy in Europe and especially in the United States, and consequently delegitimize the apartheid regime. The whole principle of Israeli colonialism must be similarly discredited in order for any progress in Palestinian self-determination to be made.

This task can no longer be postponed. During the 1982 siege of Beirut by Sharon's armies, a substantial group of Palestinian businessmen and intellectuals met in London. The idea was to help alleviate Palestinian suffering and also to set up an information campaign in the United States: Palestinian resistance on the ground and the Palestinian image were seen as two equal fronts. But over time the second effort was totally abandoned, for reasons I still cannot completely understand. You don't have to be Aristotle to connect the propaganda framework turning Palestinians into ugly, fanatical terrorists with the ease with which Israel, performing horrendous crimes of war on a daily basis, manages to maintain itself as a plucky little state fighting off extermination, and maintaining unconditional U.S. support paid in full by an uncomprehending American taxpayer.

This is an intolerable situation, and until the Palestinian struggle resolutely focuses on the battle to represent itself as a narrative surviving valiantly against Israeli colonialism, we have no chance at all of gaining our rights as a people. Every stone cast symbolically in support of equality and justice must therefore be interpreted as such and not misrepresented as either violence or a blind rejection of peace. Palestinian information must change the framework, must take responsibility for it, and must do so immediately. There has to be a unified collective goal.

In a globalized world, in which politics and information are virtually equivalent, Palestinians can no longer afford to shirk a task that, alas, the leadership is simply incapable of comprehending. It must be done if the loss of life and property is to be stopped, and if liberation, not unending servitude to Israel, is the real goal. The irony is that truth and justice are on the Palestinian side, but until Palestinians themselves make that readily apparent-to the world in general, to themselves, to Israelis and Americans in particular-neither truth nor justice can prevail. For a people that has already endured a century's injustice, surely a proper politics of information is quite possible. What is needed is a redirected and refocused will to victory over military occupation and ethnically and religiously based dispossession.

Al-Ahram, March 29April 4, 2001.

Al-Hayat, April 4, 2001.

CHAPTER NINE.

These Are the Realities.

Now in its seventh month [April 2001], the intifada has reached the most cruel and, for Palestinians, the most suffocating stage. Israel's leaders are clearly determined to do what they have always done, which is to make life impossible for this unjustly suffering people, and Sharon knows no limits to what he is willing to do, all of it in the name of a "principle" accepted by the United States, which is to refuse to do anything while "violence" continues. This therefore seems to ent.i.tle Sharon to lay siege to an entire population of 3 million people, even as he and Shimon Peres, surely the most dishonest and hypocritical of the lot of them, go around the world complaining of Palestinian terrorism. So let us not waste any time wondering how it is that they get away with such despicable tactics. The fact is that they do and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Having said and admitted that, however, we have no reason to accept the consequences pa.s.sively. Let us therefore look calmly at the situation from a tactical and a strategic point of view. This is what we find: The Palestinian leadership that signed on to Oslo and the ruinous principle of U.S. tutelage, as well as all sorts of miserable concessions (including an ongoing settlement drive), is simply incapable of doing anything more than it is now doing, which is to attack Israel verbally and signal to it under the table that it is willing to return to the old (and useless) negotiations in more or less exactly the same way. Beyond that, it has little power and less credibility. Arafat's sheer genius at surviving has carried him as far as he can go, and even though the end of the line must be obvious to him, he has no intention of letting go. The illusion that he is Palestine and Palestine him stubbornly persists; so long as he is alive he will go on believing that, no matter what happens. The further difficulty is that all of his theoretical successors are lesser men and are likely to make matters worse.

U.S. policy is unaffected by the Palestinian plight, no matter how bad that is. Bush is as pro-Israeli as Clinton, and the Israeli lobby in the United States and Europe is as merciless in its lies and misinformation as it has always been, despite years of effort on the part of the Arabs to try to get close both to the U.S. administration and (surprisingly enough) to the Israeli lobby. And yet there is a great deal of untapped sympathy for the Palestinian cause in the United States and Europe, but there has never been any Palestinian campaign (among African Americans, Latino Americans, most of the churches that are not part of the fundamentalist churches of the South, the academic community, and even, as proved by a remarkable statement by several hundred rabbis supporting Palestinian rights in a paid advertis.e.m.e.nt in the New York Times, among Jewish Americans, many of whom are as aghast at Sharon and Barak as we are) to gain this const.i.tuency in a systematic way.

The Arab states are much less likely to be of more than marginal tactical help to the Palestinians than before. All of them have direct interests that tie them to U.S. policy; none of them has the capacity to be a strategic ally for the Palestinians, as the recent Amman summit proved conclusively. On the other hand, there is a wide gap separating rulers from ruled in the Arab world, and this is encouragement enough for the Palestinian cause, if it is directed toward emanc.i.p.ation and the end of occupation.

The Israelis will not stop their settlement policy nor their besieging of Palestinian life in general. Despite his bl.u.s.ter, Sharon is not a very intelligent or even competent man. He has relied on force and deception throughout his career, flirting with crime and terror most of the time, using it whenever he thought he could get away with it. We have never addressed the Israeli public-particularly those citizens disturbed by current developments, which in effect condemn Israel to unending strife- nor, unfortunately, do we now have anything to say, for example, to the hundreds of reservists who have refused military service during the intifada. There is a const.i.tuency inside Israel that we must find a way to engage, exactly as the ANC made it a point of policy to engage whites in the struggle against apartheid.

The Palestinian situation itself is remediable, since it is human beings who make history and not the other way around. There are enough young Palestinians all over the world and enough older ones who are thoroughly and totally exasperated, dismayed, and sick to heart at a leadership that has gone from one disaster to another without ever being accountable, without ever telling the truth, and without ever being clear about its goals and aims (except for its own survival). As the late Eqbal Ahmad once said, the PLO has historically been very flexible strategically and extremely rigid tactically. In effect, this aphorism is exactly reflected in policy and performance since 1993. Arafat began by accepting UN Resolutions 242 and 338 as the basis of negotiations (strategic), then changed flexibly to accepting one strategic modification after another during the ensuing years; settlements were to be stopped, then they increased, and he accepted that, too. The same with Jerusalem, and the return of all territories. But Arafat never wavered in his tactics, which were to stay in the peace process and rely on the Americans no matter what happened. Strategically flexible, tactically rigid.

Therefore, we now need something that the situation demands but that all the actors resist: a real statement of goals and objectives. These have to include first and foremost the end of Israeli military occupation and the end of settlements. No other way can lead to peace and justice for Palestinians or for Israelis. There is no such thing as an "interim" peace (as Oslo had it all along, to the tremendous detriment of the Palestinian people). Nor are there some rights for Palestinians and not others. That is unacceptable nonsense. One set of laws and rights, one set of goals and objectives. On that basis a new Palestinian peace movement can be organized that must include Israeli and non-Israeli Jews, especially heroic individuals and groups like Rabbis for Human Rights and the movement led by Jeff Halper to end house demolitions.

What then are the objectives for that movement? First of all, an organized movement focused on Palestinian liberation and coexistence, in which everyone is part of a whole, instead of an idle spectator waiting for another Saladin or for orders to come down from above. There has to be concentration on the two other societies whose impact on Palestine is central. One is the United States, which provides Israel with the support without which the actual events taking place today in Palestine wouldn't be possible. After all, the U.S. taxpayer supplies Israel directly with $3 billion in aid, plus a constant resupply of weapons (like the helicopters now bombarding defenseless Palestinian towns and villages) that amounts to a total of almost $5 billion. This aid must be stopped or radically modified. And second, Israeli society, which has gone on either pa.s.sively endorsing racist policies against "inferior" Palestinians or has actively supported it by working in the army, Mossad, and Shin Bet to implement this humanly unacceptable and immoral policy. The wonder of it is that we have stood it for so long, as have many Israeli citizens who need to be involved in changing it.

Although every human rights declaration in the world today (including the UN Charter) gives a people the right to resist by any means when it is under military occupation, and the right for refugees to return to their homes, it is also the case that suicide bombings in Tel Aviv serve no purpose, political or ethical. They too are unacceptable. There's a huge difference between organized disobedience, or ma.s.s protest, on the one hand, and simply blowing up yourself and a few innocents, on the other. This difference has to be stated clearly and emphatically and engraved in any serious Palestinian program once and for all.

The other principles are fairly straightforward. Self-determination for both peoples. Equal rights for both. No occupation, no discrimination, no settlements. Everyone is included. Whatever negotiations are entered into must be on that basis, which must clearly be stated at the outset, and not left unsaid or implied as they were in the U.S.-sponsored Oslo process. The UN has to be the framework. In the meantime, it is up to us as Palestinians, Arabs, Jews, Americans, and Europeans to protect the unprotected and to end war crimes like collective punishment, bombing, and persecution, all of which Palestinians suffer from every day.

These are the realities today, at the heart of which is the enormous asymmetry, the tremendous disparity in power between Israel and the Palestinians. So we must capture the high moral ground immediately, by political means still at our disposal-the power to think, plan, write, and organize. This is true for Palestinians in Palestine, in Israel, in exile. No one is exempt from some obligation to our emanc.i.p.ation. It is sad that the present leadership seems totally incapable of understanding that and therefore must stand aside, which at some point it most certainly will.

Al-Ahram, April 1925, 2001.

Al-Hayat, April 17, 2001.

CHAPTER TEN.

Thinking About Israel.

The word Israel has a quite unusual resonance in English, especially in the United States. To hear politicians repeat the familiar mantra about supporting Israel and keeping it strong is to realize that an actual country or state is not at issue, but rather an idea or talisman of some sort, one that far transcends the status of every other state or country in the world. A few weeks ago Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton publicly declared that she was donating $1,250 to Israeli settlers so that they could buy more gas masks and helmets, all this, she added solemnly, without a trace of irony or of the macabre humor that the situation deserved, as part of her commitment to keeping Israel strong and secure. Naturally enough-at least for those of us who live in the United States-this episode was reported as if it were an unremarkable, as opposed to a bizarre or preposterous, occurrence.

Newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post are filled with columnists such as William Safire and Charles Krauthammer who in any other context would seem completely crazy. Both have taken to crowing over Sharon's tenure as head of Israel's government, not because he has shown a propensity to brute force and, on the whole, stupidly destructive actions, but because they argue with a completely straight face that he is the only figure capable of showing Palestinians the kind of disciplinary reasoning that will set them straight. He proposed magnanimously to give them 42 percent of the West Bank, or maybe a bit more, plus keeping all the settlements for Israel and ringing the Palestinian territories with permanent Israeli fences: this is reasonable and good as a way of solving the intifada. He said in an interview with the Jerusalem Post that after all, "we" have 1 million Arabs in Israel; why can't "they" (the Palestinians) tolerate a few hundred thousand Israeli settlers? And one more thing about Sharon's American defenders. What is fascinating is how they arrogate to themselves as Americans the right to tell Israel what it should be doing and thinking for its own good.

Israel has therefore been internalized as the private personal fantasy of every American supporter, or so the appearances seem to suggest. Yet American Jews have a special relationship that ent.i.tles them to perhaps a greater degree of involvement in telling Israel what it should be, in particular-and this is the most amazing feature of what I am discussing-on matters of security. No one bothers to note that Israeli citizens are the ones doing the fighting and planning, not long-distance diaspora Jews. It's all part of the domestication of Israel that keeps it away from history and the consequences of its actions. When you venture that Israel is laying up hatred and vindictiveness for itself in every Arab breast by virtue of its bombing and collective punishment, you are told in response that you are being anti-Semitic. Justice and wisdom don't enter into it, only what purports to be (in the case of Israel's Arab critics) an insensate, deeply ingrained hatred of Jews.

It is therefore little short of miraculous that despite its years of military occupation, Israel is never identified with colonialism or colonial practices. That seems to me the greatest failing of all, both of Palestinian information and discourse and even of Israeli dissent, when they undertake to be critical of Israeli government policy. There is an excellent a.n.a.lysis of "How Far Will Sharon Go?" in the current New York Review of Books (dated May 17, 2001) by Avishai Margalit, professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University, which is totally unlike American a.n.a.lyses of the situation in that (a) it minces no words about Israeli collective punishment against Palestinians; and (b) it doesn't attempt to dress up the situation with any fancy language about Israeli security, an appalling habit of intellectuals who feel the need to talk as if they are generals in order to take themselves seriously. My only criticism of Margalit is that he doesn't come straight out and call for the end of military occupation and for an Israeli acknowledgment of injustices done against the Palestinian people. That's what intellectuals are supposed to do, rather than go on about politics from the point of view of politicians. Be that as it may, what is very important about Margalit's writing here is that it demystifies Israel's aura, which has been slowly built up and carefully structured over the years so as to eliminate Palestinians from the picture altogether.

I think therefore that what any Palestinian peace effort must accomplish is first of all to connect Israel with its deeds, and to focus on ending those practices, rather than trying to make a deal with them or to have one brokered. One of the gravest flaws in Oslo was for the PLO leadership (i.e., Yasir Arafat) to have ignored what Israel had done as an occupying force, and even to have ignored the fact of occupation itself; one can't make a deal with occupation, which is like cancer in that it continues to expand, unless it is identified, surrounded, and then attacked. Israel's history proves it. For those who say that Israel must be accepted, the only sane response is to ask which Israel, since the country has never had internationally declared borders but continues to tinker endlessly with its own size. No other country since World War II has been in such a position, and there is no reason to let that go on indefinitely. Peace can only be made on the basis of full withdrawal and the end of occupation. These are concrete rather than general matters, which often divert us from our goal as a people seeking self-determination.

Whereas I can understand the Palestinian leadership's desire to do something now to try to end an obviously draining war of attrition, I also think it is grossly immoral and stupid simply to resume the Oslo negotiations as if nothing has happened. In September 1996 a mini-intifada broke out after Israel had provocatively opened a tunnel under the Al-Haram Al-Sharif, but that ended with many Palestinian deaths and nothing changed either on the ground or in the negotiations. Under Barak, as Margalit correctly notes, settlement-building increased along with every imaginable Palestinian difficulty. What is the point of the PLO continuing the unendurable sufferings of its people just for Mr. Arafat to be invited back to the White House? There is no point at all, but what surprises me is the Palestinian Authority's brazen att.i.tude of simply continuing with its talk of resuming negotiations as if four hundred people had not died and thirteen thousand had never been wounded. Do these leaders have no dignity at all, no sense of propriety or even of their own history?

It would therefore seem that Israel's official callousness to the Palestinians has been internalized, not only by extreme American Zionists, the dreadful Ariel Sharon, and the Israeli political establishment, but also by the Palestinian leadership. In his April 27, 2001, Jerusalem Post interview, Sharon kept repeating that the intifada consists only of "terrorism" and therefore reduces all Palestinian action, except ending resistance and rearresting Islamic activists, to that and that only. For Arafat to negotiate peace with Sharon without removing the word "terrorism" from their vocabulary is tantamount to accepting the equation of the Palestinian struggle against occupation with terrorism, yet so far as I know, no concentrated effort is being made through information and addressing Israelis and Americans to restore reality to discourse. The logical a.s.sumption seems to be that Israel = military occupation = Palestinian resistance. So what must become central to Arab efforts now is to disrupt and even destroy the equation, not simply to put forward abstract arguments about the right of return for the Palestinian refugees.

Sharon's reentry into politics has brought with it a quite conscious effort on his part to shift the scene back to 1948, to attempt to restage Israel's conflict with the Palestinians as a battle for Israel's very survival. He seems to have had no difficulty in finding support for this atavistic, extremely regressive view among some (but obviously not all) Israelis, who have responded to the unstated idea that Jews can never live free of persecution and hostility. To an outsider, such a notion seems both improbable and untenable. For surely having established in many respects a powerful and successful state, Israeli Jews would seem now in an excellent position to be both confident and magnanimous in their att.i.tude toward the victims they have so wrongfully treated. But now they continue to reenact the original situation in which they first dispossessed Palestinians, thereby reexperiencing the hostility and consternation that they themselves caused in others, feeling, however, that the trauma was theirs, not the Palestinians'. Sharon exploits this terrible syndrome, as dramatic an example of the neurosis Freud called the compulsion to repeat as one can find: one returns again and again to the scene of one's original trauma, allowing oneself to remain in the grip of a powerful neurotic fear without availing oneself of the solace either of reason or of reality.

Israeli policies therefore have to appear as they are, rather than as their propagandists wish them to seem. For this, we need the combined efforts of Israeli dissenters as well as Arab intellectuals and ordinary citizens. For not only have the corruptions of language and unexamined history infected the peace process fatally, but they seem to have entered the very thinking of leaders whose first responsibility is to the people they lead rather than to their enemies or their supposed patrons (in this case, the United States). The right lessons should be drawn from Colin Powell's remarks to Israel about its invasion of Gaza. He was basically condemning Palestinian resistance, then condemning the Israeli response to that as disproportionate; this is very far from the truth, of course, and it prolongs the distortions of perception that have crippled our arguments as an unjustly wronged people. If we are seen only as disrupters of Israel's presence-which, falsely portrayed as a beleaguered and victimized state, continues to be the image by which our resistance is judged-then we can only aspire to a mutilated solution and an even more ridiculously skewed kind of peace process. It would therefore seem to me that the first political task of any negotiations that stem from the intifada is to labor mightily to correct the initial error and restore Israel to its proper place as a mature colonial power collectively abusing an entire people against the laws both of war and of peace. Even the obdurate and hopelessly disorganized Palestinian leadership must be persuaded of this elementary reality before it goes on to do more damage than it has already.

In other words, as I argued in my last article, we must seize the moral high ground and press our case from there against the injustice of prolonged military occupation. Simply to make a temporary security agreement now is both futile and immoral. Besides, no such agreement can last, so long as Israeli settlements are still being constructed while Palestinians remain locked up in their collective prison. The only negotiations worth anything now must be about the terms of an Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied in 1967. Anything else is a waste of our time as a people.

Al-Ahram, May 39, 2001.

Al-Hayat, May 14, 2001.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

Defiance, Dignity, and the Rule of Dogma.

During the discussion period that followed a lecture of mine at Oxford in 1998, I was stunned by a question put to me by a young woman, whom I later discovered to have been a Palestinian student working for her doctorate at the university. I had been speaking about the events of 1948, and how it seemed to me necessary not only to understand the connection between our history and Israel's but to study that other history as one concerning us as Arabs rather than avoiding or ignoring it totally as has been the case for such a long time. The young woman's question was to raise doubt about my views on the necessity of studying and learning about Israel. "Wouldn't that kind of attention paid to Israel," she said, "be a form of concession to it?" She was asking me if ignorant "nonnormalization" didn't const.i.tute a better approach to a state that had for years made it a point of policy to stand in the way of and deny Palestinian self-determination, to say nothing of having caused Palestinian dispossession in the first place.

I must confess that the thought hadn't occurred to me, even during those long years when Israel was unthinkable in the Arab world and even when one had to use a euphemism like "the Zionist ent.i.ty" to refer to it. After all, I found myself asking in return, two major Arab countries had made formal peace with Israel, the PLO had already recognized it and was pursuing a peace process with it, and several other Arab countries had trade and commercial relations with it. Arab intellectuals had made it a point of honor not to have any dealings with Israel, not to go there, not to meet with Israelis, and so on and so forth, but even they had been silent when, for instance, Egypt signed large deals selling natural gas to Israel and maintained diplomatic relations with the Jewish state during frequent periods of Israeli repression against the Palestinians. How could one possibly oppose a.n.a.lyzing and learning everything possible about a country whose presence in our midst for over fifty years had so influenced and shaped the life of every man, woman, and child in the Arab world?

In this young woman's understanding, therefore, the opposite of conceding was supposed to be defiance, the act of defying, resisting and refusing to bend under the will of a power that one perceived as unjust and unreasonable. That, I took it, was what she suggested we should be practicing toward Israel and not what I was trying to propose, which was a creative engagement with a culture and society that on all significant levels had behaved and (as the ongoing Israeli brutality against the Al-Aqsa Intifada shows) continues to behave with a policy of deliberate dehumanization toward Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular. In this the egregious Ariel Sharon is scarcely distinguishable from Barak, Rabin, and Ben-Gurion (leaving aside the truly vicious racism of many of Sharon's allies like Natan Scharansky, Avigdor Liberman, and Rabbi Ovadia Yousef). What I said in contrast was not only a matter of understanding them but also of understanding ourselves since our history was incomplete without consideration of Israel, what it represented in our lives, how it had done what it had, and so forth. Besides, I continue to believe as an educator that knowledge-any knowledge-is better than ignorance. There is simply no rational justification from an intellectual point of view for having a policy of ignorance, or using ignorance as a weapon in a struggle. Ignorance is ignorance, no more and no less. Always and in every case.

I remained puzzled, dissatisfied with my groping answer, and put off by the question, which has remained with me until the present. But once again it has appeared to challenge me unexpectedly. Let me explain. A short time ago it was revealed in the New York press that Hillary Rodham Clinton had been compelled by federal law to return $7,000 worth of jewelry given to her by Yasir Arafat; according to the same official U.S. government source, Madeline Albright, secretary of state during the second Clinton presidency, had received $17,000 worth of jewelry from the same generous donor. Suddenly it became possible to see the relationships between public and private att.i.tudes in the Arab world and to understand the connection between the young student's defiant ideas about what she considered to be concessions to Israel on the one hand, and, on the other, the Palestinian leadership's abject and profligate generosity to American politicians who are in some measure directly responsible for the woes heaped upon the Palestinian people. Even as I write, American weapons of ma.s.s destruction, which are supplied in unlimited numbers to Israel, are being used illegally according to U.S. law to attack, kill, and maim unprotected Palestinian men, women, and children, to demolish their houses, raze their refugee camps, and make their lives basically unlivable. Yet for some years a policy of trying without reason or dignity to woo American leaders in the most vulgar way possible has been implemented, as if the personal pleasure and satisfaction of Hillary or Madeline, bought at the expense of Palestinian public money, were a form of policy rather than an indecent display of bribery of a sort. The grotesque a.s.sumption has been all along that countries like America and Israel are mirror images of Third World states in which, like Mobutu's Zaire, for instance, policy is made according to the ruler's whim or for his family's enrichment. What is missing here is any apprehension that these are complex, on the whole democratic, countries whose civil societies and their interests play a large, if not decisive, role in each country's behavior. But rather than address and try to change the mood or ideas of their civil societies, our leaders ignore them and concentrate instead on a quick fix: b.u.t.tering up, flattering, or bribing the leader. Anyone who knows anything about either Israel or the United States will tell you that such tricks are absolutely useless; they may gain one a dinner or a scowling handshake from the late General Rabin in the White House, but little more than that.

The proof of what I am saying is plainly evident in the calamitous recent history of our dealings with the United States and Israel during the period since the Oslo accords were signed. Since the Palestinian leadership betrayed its people's trust and sacrifices by entering the Oslo process the way it did in the first place, and remaining in it as a weak and, alas, all-too-willing partner, it has at the same time maintained a public stance that can only be described as defiant-a defiance, one must immediately add, that is princ.i.p.ally rhetorical and completely contradicted by official Palestinian behavior, which has remained (to say the least) mysteriously servile to the United States and to Israel. Unsolicited presents of expensive jewelry to American officials ill.u.s.trate the point all too well. Now while Palestinians, armed with a few rifles and stones, are bravely defying Israel's military, the leadership is still acting like a supplicant in trying to reopen negotiations with Israel and the United States. The same things can be said about the Arab regimes and even their intellectual sectors, who roundly proclaim their enmity toward Israel and the United States while in fact either collaborating with them politically and economically, or loudly and clamorously denouncing normalization. The sad thing is that this contradiction is generally perceived not as a contradiction but as a necessary part of life today. I would have thought that, instead of denouncing Israel from top to bottom, the smarter thing would have been to cooperate with sectors inside the country who stand for civil and human rights, who oppose the settlement policy, who are ready to take a stand on military occupation, who believe in coexistence and equality, who are disgusted with official repression of the Palestinians. For only in this way is there any hope of changing Israeli policy, given the gigantic disparity in military power between all of the Arabs and Israel. I would also have thought it the better part of honesty to have dissociated oneself from crude anti-Semitic attacks such as those emanating from Damascus recently: what do those do except display to the world a mindset that is both sectarian and viciously stupid?

I know perfectly well that pa.s.sions regarding Israeli repression of Palestinians today are genuine and that people everywhere are disgusted with the policies of the Sharon government. But is that pa.s.sion enough of an excuse to abandon rationality altogether, and for intellectuals in particular to flail around incoherently instead of trying in a serious way to come up with a serious political and moral stand based on knowledge rather than uninformed and blind ignorance, which cannot under any circ.u.mstances be described as a political position? Or take the recent campaign against the translation of Arabic books into Hebrew (see Al-Hayat, May 10, 2001). One would have thought that the more Arabic literature was available in Israel, the better able Israelis would be to understand us as a people and to stop treating us as animals or less-than-human. Instead we have the sorry spectacle of serious Arab writers actually denouncing their colleagues for "allowing" themselves to "normalize" with Israel, which is the idiotic phrase used as an accusation for collaborating with the enemy. Isn't it the case, as Julien Benda was the first to say, that intellectuals are supposed to go against collective pa.s.sions instead of trading in them demagogically? How on earth is a Hebrew translation an act of collaboration? Getting translated into a foreign language is always a victory for the writer. Always and in each case. Isn't it a far more intelligent and useful thing than the craven "normalization" of the various countries that have trade and diplomatic relationships with the enemy even as Palestinians are being killed like so many flies by the Israeli army and air force? Aren't Hebrew translations of Arabic literature a way of entering Israeli life culturally, making a positive effect in it, changing people's minds from b.l.o.o.d.y pa.s.sion to reasonable understanding of Israel's Arab Others, especially when it is Israeli publishers who have gone and published the translations as a sign of cultural protest against Israel's barbarous Arab policy?

All these confusions and contradictions I have described are signs of a deeper Arab malaise. When we mistake puerile acts of defiance for real resistance, and when we a.s.sume that know-nothing ignorance is a political act (when in fact it is nothing of the sort), and when we shed all dignity and clamor for American patronage and attention, surely our sense of dignity and self-respect is in tatters. Who hasn't cringed at the memory of Arafat on the White House lawn in 1993 repeating his three thankyous with fawning abjection, and who hasn't felt that our leaders lack a sense of self-esteem when they are unable to decide whether America is the enemy or our only hope? Instead of adhering to a policy based on principles and norms of decent behavior, we wallow instead in futile acts of defiance based on silly, unreflective dogmas about opposition to Israel, while at the same time we only offer our besieged Palestinian compatriots lip service and patriotic formulas. No model helps us to guide our actions. The Arab world today is the triumph of mediocrity and opportunism, but given the leadership's failures on nearly every front, it becomes the intellectual's role to provide honest a.n.a.lyses and indications of what is reasonable and just, instead of joining the chorus of hand-clapping flatterers who decorate the royal and presidential courts and the corporate boardrooms with their oily, unremittingly approving presences.

I shall conclude with a concrete example of what I mean. Amid all the din about normalization, I have noticed one startling absence, namely, the current status of the Palestinian refugees living in every major Arab country, whose condition everywhere-there are no exceptions-is unacceptably miserable. Wherever there are Palestinians in the Arab world, there are rules and regulations forbidding them full status as residents, forbidding them work and travel, requiring them to register with the police on a monthly basis, and so on. It's not only Israel that treats Palestinians badly, it is the Arab countries who do so also. Now see if there is a sustained campaign by Arab intellectuals against this invidious local treatment of the Palestinian refugees: you won't see or hear one. What excuse is there for the horrible refugee camps in which so many of them live, even in places like Gaza and the West Bank; what right do local mokhabarat forces have to hara.s.s them and generally make their lives miserable? And why is there no protracted press campaign to end this appalling state of affairs? Why, because it is much easier (and less risky) to rail against normalization and Hebrew translations than it is to dramatize the unacceptable condition of Palestinian refugees in the Arab world, who are always being told that they cannot be "normalized" because it would implement Israel's design. What rubbish!

We must return to basic values and honesty of discussion. There can be no military solution to what ails us, Arabs and Jews alike. This truth leaves only the power of mind and education to do the job that armies have been unable to accomplish for over half a century. Whether Israeli intellectuals have failed or not in their mission is not for us to decide. What concerns us is the shabby state of discourse and a.n.a.lysis in the Arab world. For that, as citizens, we must take responsibility and try first of all to release ourselves from the jejune cliches and unthinking formulas that clutter our writing and speaking.

Al-Ahram, May 1723, 2001.

Al-Hayat, May 23, 2001.

CHAPTER TWELVE.

Enemies of the State.

Because of Israel's abominable behavior toward Palestinians, most Arabs-myself included-have tended to direct our criticism less on the general situation in the Arab world than we might ordinarily do. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say, however, that once we start to look at what obtains in the Arab world, most of us are fairly appalled by the overall condition of mediocrity and galloping degeneration that seem to have become our lot. In all significant fields (except perhaps for cooking) we have declined to the bottom of the heap when it comes to quality of life. We have become an embarra.s.sment, as much for our powerlessness and hypocrisy (for instance, vis--vis the intifada, for which the Arab states do next to nothing) as for the abysmally poor social, economic, and political conditions that have overtaken every Arab country almost without exception. Illiteracy, poverty, unemployment, and unproductivity have increased alarmingly. And whereas the rest of the world seems to be moving in a democratic direction, the Arab world is going the other way, toward even greater degrees of tyranny, autocracy, and mafia-style rule. As a result more and more of us feel that we should no longer keep silent about this. Yet one scarcely knows where to begin in trying to ameliorate the situation, although honesty about what we have allowed to happen to ourselves is a good way to start.

A small number of instances ill.u.s.trate what I mean more eloquently than lists of facts and figures, all of which, incidentally, would support what I mean here. A short time ago the Egyptian American intellectual Saadedin Ibrahim, professor of sociology at the American University of Cairo and director of the Ibn Khaldun Center there, was sentenced to seven years prison with hard labor by a state security court. And this after two months of solitary confinement consequent on summary arrest, followed by several months of trial for financial misdemeanor, tarnishing Egypt's image, tampering with the election process, stirring up confessional or sectarian sentiment, as well as being an enemy informer. These are major charges, of course, but what seems amazing is that the court rendered its judgment in a matter of hours after hearing evidence for months.

A huge amount of attention has been lavished on the case for obvious reasons. A prominent intellectual had been brought low in a country whose political centrality and size almost guaranteed much commentary and, especially in the liberal West, a great deal of negative judgment against the system that had seemed to be persecuting a man for his independent, if not always widely popular, opinions. The few Arabs who defended him almost uniformly began by saying that they found his views and his methods distasteful: he was known to favor normalization with Israel, he seemed to prosper financially because of what seemed to be his entrepreneurship, and his ideas in general circulated with more success outside than inside the Arab world. Still, it was meant to be clear to everyone that an example was being made of him; he therefore suffered unjustly, despite his on the whole rather special way of life and success.

I must be one of the few people who has followed the case from a distance, but who knew Ibrahim about thirty years ago and has not seen or heard from him since. I have visited Egypt and the American University several times in the last two decades, but his path and mine never crossed. I don't recall reading anything by him, but I did know of his interest in civil society, his cordial relationship with the power elite in Egypt, Jordan, and elsewhere, as well as his interest in elections and minorities. All of this I gleaned at second or third hand, so I am not in a position to say anything about his ideas. Nor do I think they are really relevant, one way or the other. I a.s.sume that he has ideas, and I also a.s.sume that, like all intellectuals, he has generated as much hostility as support. That proves nothing and strikes me as entirely normal.

What seems to be incontrovertibly abnormal, however, is that he has been systematically punished by the state because of his fame and his criticism of several of the state's policies. The lesson seems to be that if you have the temerity to speak out too much and if you displease the powers that be, you will be severely cut down. Many countries in the world are ruled by emergency decree. Without exception such rule must be opposed and condemned. There can be no reason short of absolute natural catastrophe to suspend unilaterally the rule of law and the protection of impartial justice. Even the worst criminals in a society of laws are ent.i.tled to justice and proportional sentence. In the United States, for example, many commentators on the Ibrahim case fail to point out that America (which is not ruled by emergency decree) is one of the worst offenders when it comes to unfair sentencing (usually affecting nonwhites), capital punishment, and a horrible prison system that per capita is the largest and most punitive in the world. In other words, what Egypt does must be looked at from a perspective that includes so-called civilized countries, many of whose journalists have condemned Ibrahim's treatment without also admitting that his case is not unique, neither in the Middle East nor in the West. Thousands of Islamic militants are treated far worse, without much protest from liberal journalists who are pa.s.sionate defenders of Ibrahim (such as Thomas Friedman) and who have nothing to say either about their own countries' human rights abuses, despite the law, or about the fate of less visible Arab victims of state injustice than Saadedin Ibrahim.

The point, of course, is that justice is justice, and injustice injustice, no matter who is indicted and mistreated. The travesty of due process in the Ibrahim case is an offense not because he is rich and famous but because the offense is a serious one no matter who is its victim. And what is so significant about the case is that it speaks volumes about our current malaise and our sense of distorted priorities when it is a.s.sumed that any citizen at all, not just a famous academic, can be subject to the distortions of power in the Arab world. The case tells us that our rulers hold that no one is immune from their wrath and that citizens should maintain a permanent sense of fear and capitulation when it comes to authority, whether secular or religious. When the state is transformed from its role as the people's property and becomes instead the possession of a regime or a ruler, to be used as he/they see fit, we have to admit that as a sovereign people we have been defeated and have entered a phase of advanced degeneration that may be too late to repair or reverse.

Neither a const.i.tution nor an election process has any real meaning if such suspensions of law and justice can take place with the relative acquiescence of an entire people, especially the intellectuals. What I mean is not just that we don't have democracy, but that at bottom we seem to have refused the very concept itself. I became dramatically aware of this eight years ago when, after a lecture I gave in London in which I criticized the Arab governments for their abuse of human freedoms, I was summoned by an Arab amba.s.sador to apologize for my remarks. When I refused even to speak to the man, a friend interceded and arranged for me to have tea with the offended amba.s.sador at my friend's house. What transpired was profoundly revealing. When I repeated my comments, the amba.s.sador lost his temper (he happened also to be a member of the ruling party) and told me in no uncertain terms that, as far as he and his regime were concerned, democracy was little more than AIDS, p.o.r.nography, and chaos. "We don't want that," he kept repeating with almost insensate rage.

Then I understood that so deep has the authoritarianism in us become that any challenge to it is seen as little short of devilish and therefore unacceptable. Not for nothing have so many people turned to an extremist form of religion as a result of desperation and the absence of hope. When democratic rights were first abrogated in Arab countries in the early years of independence because there seemed to be genuine security concerns, no one realized that the "emergency" would continue for half a century while showing no sign at all of abating in the interests of personal freedom. On the contrary, as the security state has become more insecure-after all, what state in our area can actually provide its citizens with the kind of security and freedom from fear and want that they are ent.i.tled to?-the level of repression increases. No one is safe, no one is free of anxiety, no value is preserved by law.

So low has the individual's status sunk that even one's basic right of citizenship, one's right to exist free of personal threat from the state, has all but vanished. As a second instance of what I am describing as a worsening situation, there is the case of the Lebanese journalist Raghida Dergham, a capable woman who has represented Al-Hayat in New York for several years. A fine reporter and commentator with an excellent reputation in America, she has brought credit to her profession and her country for several years. She has now been indicted for high treason in her country because she attended a public Washington meeting and debated Uri Lubrani, an Israeli Mossad operative who was one of (and perhaps the chief of) the supervisors of the occupation regime in South Lebanon. (Before that he had been Israel's connection with the Shah of Iran.) Dergham's pa.s.sport has been withdrawn, and if she returns to her country, she will immediately be arrested. (Another Lebanese journalist, Samir Ka.s.sir, has had his citizenship revoked because something he wrote seems to have angered the authorities.) The Dergham case is an amazing act of perversity that suggests how far conceptions of the "crime" of "normalization"-a stupid concept when overused either to divert attention from Arab indifference to the Palestinians or to attack other Arabs or to promote ignorance, as I argued in my last article-can be taken. In the first place, Dergham's debate with Lubrani was held in public, in the United States. There was nothing secret about it, and it was nothing more than a debate, certainly not a negotiation. To expect a normal-functioning citizen to obey laws that forbid even mentioning Israel's name is mindless, to say the least. Besides, every Arab government that I know of has had dealings with Israel, secret or open. The whole world, and especially Israel's Palestinian victims, knows that Israel, its army, agents, police, and society exist: what earthly use is there in pretending that it doesn't? But to call what Dergham did high treason is not so much to reveal that the notion of treason has been extended beyond reason and normal practice as to show with what radical hostility the state views its own citizens, particularly those who carry out their professional obligations with skill and conscience. Besides, in most countries except ours, open debate is one of the ways by which the Arab viewpoint is made known. How can that be opposed?

But to Arab governments, sad as it may seem, an enlightened view is something they feel that they must oppose, especially if it displeases the ruler. One can understand and even accept that there can be an adversarial relationship between the state and its citizens, but there is now a situation of such profound antagonism, whereby the individual citizen can be threatened with near extinction by government and ruler, that the entire balance between various interests in the state has lost all meaning. Crime is no longer an objective act, governed by recognized, publicly codified procedures of evidence, trial, punishment, and appeal; it has become the prerogative of the state entirely to define and punish it at will.

At issue is the right to free thought and expression and, underlying that, the right to be free of ludicrously enacted restrictions against individual freedom. Both the cases I have cited were brought against well-known personalities who have the resources and connections to draw attention to what was so unjustly done to them. Yet a whole, mostly hidden population of possible victims exists in Arab societies today, against whom similar measures can and have been taken, either individually or collectively. For them such rubrics as h.o.m.os.e.xuality, atheism, extremism, terrorism, and fundamentalism have been overused much of the time without sufficient care or nuance, just so that critics of the ruling groups could be silenced or imprisoned. Torture has been as common in Arab prisons, alas, as it has been in Israeli ones.

Most of us live in fear of such a fate, and this is why many intellectuals keep silent or thank their lucky stars that what has happened to Saadedin Ibrahim and Raghida Dergham hasn't happened to them. And certainly these two individuals have been singled out so that an example could be made of their humiliation and punishment. Foolishly, however, other intellectuals also hope that if they behave, join the chorus of condemnation, and be careful to say only the "right" things, they will not suffer a similar fate. At this point, I do not know which is worse, direct censorship practiced by the government, or the self-censorship of caution exercised by each and every one of us so that we can lead our lives in-offensively without going to jail or disappearing in the night. The other day I met a young Iraqi Kurd who had just escaped from his country. There, he told me, if someone wanted to do you harm, they could report you to the police as an enemy of the state: the likelihood is that you and your family would thereafter just disappear. Of how many countries in the world today is this true, and how many of them are Arab? I am too embarra.s.sed to ask.

As the Arab world spins into further incoherence and shame, it is up to every one of us to speak up against these terrible abuses of power. No one is safe unless every citizen protests what in effect is a reversion to medieval practices of autocracy. If we accuse Israel of what it has done to the Palestinians, we must be willing to apply exactly the same standards of behavior to our own countries. This norm is as true for the American as for the Arab and the Israeli intellectual, who must criticize human rights abuses from a universal point of view, not simply when they occur within the domain of an officially designated enemy. Our own cause is strengthened when we take positions that can be applied to all situations, without conditions such as saying "I disagree with his views, but" as a way of lessening the difficulty and the onus of speaking out. The truth is that, as Arabs, all we have left now is the power of speaking out, and unless we exercise that right, the slide into terminal degeneration cannot ever be stopped. The hour is very late . . .

Al-Ahram, June 2127, 2001.

Al-Hayat, June 28, 2001.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

Sharpening the Axe.

An ominous air is overtaking the Middle East, now that Ariel Sharon has come to and gone from the United States. A striking resemblance to the period before Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon has undoubtedly occurred to anyone with a memory long enough to recall what happened then. The same war criminal, Sharon (who should soon be sharing Slobodan Milosevic's fate in The Hague), came to see then Secretary of State Alexander Haig and then went back with what he informed everyone was an American green light. Thereafter his armies invaded Lebanon. And sure enough, he did the same thing this time with the inexperienced Colin Powell and the intellectually disadvantaged George W. Bush. Both those men have, in the s.p.a.ce of less than a month, totally adopted the Israeli lie that the main problem is "the violence," by which it is automatically a.s.sumed that violence is what Palestinians practice while restraint is Israel's contribution. So all Sharon now has to do is to invade areas under the control of the Palestinian Authority and then claim that it is being done with restraint and U.S. approval in order to safeguard Israeli security. Perhaps Colin Powell's visit to Palestine and his suggestion that international monitors might supervise the truce will complicate matters slightly, but Sharon's mindset doesn't allow for more than invasion and destruction to Palestinians.

By now it has become clear that no Israeli public official can say anything that isn't an out-and-out lie. Last week a major television debate in the United States between Minister Nabil Shaath and Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg confirmed this sad fact and confirmed yet again that for whatever reason the Authority and its spokesmen seem unable to understand what is happening. Burg sat there and brazenly manufactured one falsehood after another-that as a democrat and a peace lover, he was concerned there was no real Palestinian peace camp; that Israel is trying ever so hard to remain calm while Palestinian terrorists (encouraged by the Authority) threaten his daughter, no less, with brutal killing; that Israel has always wanted peace; that Arafat controls everything; that Shaath and he (Burg) are exactly the same except that he, Burg, is able to influence Sharon in restraint but Shaath cannot influence Arafat; and on and on. All of it making the point in the style of cla.s.sical propaganda (to repeat a lie often enough is to believe it) that Israel is victimized by Palestinians, that it wants peace, and that it is waiting for Palestinians to catch up with its magnanimity and restraint.

To this farrago of confections Shaath seemed to have no answer, except to say plaintively that Palestinians also want peace, that they want the Mitch.e.l.l plan (as if that rubbishy piece of AIPAC-constructed nonsense had already become scripture: have Palestinian leaders like Yasir Abed Rabbo, Shaath, Saeb Erekat, and the others forgotten that as senators, George Mitch.e.l.l and Warren Rudman, who were almost half the committee that produced that report, were among the highest-paid members of the Israeli lobby?) Rarely have I seen such a concentration of Israeli mendacity received with such cringing servility by Palestinians, and all this while millions of Palestinians are suffering the worst possible collective punishment.

When people like Shaath get a precious opportunity to deal with a criminal like Burg, they should not once let him forget that Israel is indulging in horrendous war crimes, that people by the million are unable to travel, eat, or get health care, that 500 people have been killed, that 2,000 houses have been demolished, that 50,000 trees have been uprooted, that thousands of acres of land have been confiscated, that settlements continue, that all this has occurred during a "peace process." Even a normally excellent and reliable spokesman like Gha.s.san Khatib has been infected with the virus of talking about violence and the Mitch.e.l.l report and failing totally to mention the occupation, the occupation, the occupation, the occupation. Can't these redoubtable spokesmen of ours concentrate on the daily reality of our people and their suffering, and can't they once speak as human beings instead of as third-rate imitations of Henry Kissinger and Yitzhak Rabin, who seem to have become their role models? What is wrong with us that we can't ever speak concretely about the central fact of our existence, which is that on every level, for over fifty-three years, we have been oppressed by Israel and continue to be oppressed with blockades, sieges, aerial bombardment, missile and helicopter attacks, and that our refugees have not received one penny of compensation or even the hope of repatriation from the state that dispossessed them and has punished them ever since?