From Oslo To Iraq And The Road Map Part 6

What boggles the mind is that no official-no American, Palestinian, Arab, UN, European, or any other-has challenged Israel on this point, which has been threaded through all of the Oslo doc.u.ments, procedures, agreements. Which is why of course after nearly ten years of "peace negotiations" Israel still controls the West Bank and Gaza. These lands are more directly controlled (owned?) by more than a thousand Israeli tanks and thousands of soldiers today, but the underlying principle is the same. No Israeli leader (and certainly not Sharon and his Land of Israel supporters, who are the majority in his government) has either officially recognized the Occupied Territories as occupied territories or gone on to recognize that Palestinians could or might theoretically have sovereign rights, that is, without Israeli control over borders, water, air, security on what most of the world considers Palestinian land. So to speak about the "vision" of a Palestinian state, as has become fashionable, is mere vision, alas, unless the questions of land ownership and sovereignty are openly and officially conceded by the Israeli government. None ever has, and if I am right, none will in the near future. It needs to be remembered that Israel is the only state in the world today that has never had internationally declared borders; the only state that is not the state of its citizens but of the whole Jewish people; the only state where over 90 percent of the land is held in trust for the use only of the Jewish people. That it is also the only state in the world never to have recognized any of the main provisions of international law (as argued recently by Richard Falk) suggests the depth and structural knottiness of the absolute rejectionism that Palestinians have had to face.

This is why I have been skeptical about discussions and meetings about peace, which is a lovely word but in the present context simply means that Palestinians will have to stop resisting Israeli control over their land. It is among the many deficiencies of Arafat's terrible leadership (to say nothing of the even more lamentable Arab leaders in general) that he neither made the decade-long Oslo negotiations ever focus on land ownership, thus never putting the onus on Israel to declare itself const.i.tutively willing to give up t.i.tle to Palestinian land, nor asked that Israel be required to deal with any of its responsibility for the sufferings of his people. Now I worry that he may simply be trying to save himself again, whereas what we really need are international monitors to protect us as well as new elections to a.s.sure a real political future for the Palestinian people.

The profound question facing Israel and its people is this: is it willing juridically to a.s.sume the rights and obligations of being a country like any other, and forswear the kind of impossible land-ownership a.s.sertions for which Sharon and his parents and his soldiers have been fighting since day one? In 1948 Palestinians lost 78 percent of Palestine. In 1967 they lost the last 22 percent. Both times to Israel. Now the international community must lay upon Israel the obligation to accept the principle of real, as opposed to fictional, part.i.tion, and to accept the principle of limiting Israel's untenable extraterritorial claims, those absurd biblically based pretentions, and laws that have so far allowed it to override another people completely. Why is that kind of fundamentalism tolerated unquestioningly? But so far all we hear is that Palestinians must give up violence and condemn terror. Is nothing substantive ever demanded of Israel, and can it go on doing what it has without a thought for the consequences? That is the real question of its existence: whether it can exist as a state like all others, or must always be above the constraints and duties of all other states in the world today. The record is not rea.s.suring.

Al-Ahram, April 1824, 2002.

Al-Hayat, April 21, 2002.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE.

Crisis for American Jews.

A few weeks ago a vociferous pro-Israel demonstration was held in Washington, at roughly the same moment that the siege of Jenin was taking place. All of the speakers were prominent public figures, including several senators, leaders of major Jewish organizations, and other celebrities, each of whom expressed unfailing solidarity with everything Israel was doing. The administration was represented by Paul Wolfowitz, the number-two man at the Department of Defense, an extreme right-wing hawk who has been speaking about "ending" countries like Iraq ever since last September. Also known as a rigorous hard-line supporter of Israel, in his speech he did what everyone else did-celebrated Israel and expressed total unconditional support for it-but unexpectedly referred also in pa.s.sing to "the sufferings of the Palestinians." Because of that phrase, he was booed so loudly and so long that he was unable to continue his speech, leaving the platform in a kind of disgrace.

The moral of this incident is that public American Jewish support for Israel today simply does not tolerate any allowance for the existence of an actual Palestinian people, except in the context of terrorism, violence, evil, and fanaticism. Moreover, this refusal to see, much less hear anything about, the existence of "another side" far exceeds the fanaticism of anti-Arab sentiment among Israelis, who are of course on the front line of the struggle in Palestine. To judge by the recent antiwar demonstration of sixty thousand people in Tel Aviv, the increasing number of military reservists who refuse service in the Occupied Territories, the sustained protest of (admittedly only a few) intellectuals and groups, and some of the polls that show a majority of Israelis willing to withdraw in return for peace with the Palestinians, there is at least a dynamic of political activity among Israeli Jews. But not so in the United States.

Two weeks ago the weekly magazine New York, which has a circulation of about a million, ran a dossier ent.i.tled "Crisis for American Jews," whose theme was that "in New York, as in Israel, [it is] an issue of survival." I won't try to summarize the main points of this extraordinary claim except to say that it painted such a picture of anguish about "what is most precious in my life, the state of Israel," according to one of the prominent New Yorkers quoted in the magazine, that you would think that the existence of this most prosperous and powerful of all minorities in the United States was actually being threatened. One of the other people quoted even went so far as to suggest that American Jews are on the brink of a second holocaust. Certainly, as the author of one of the articles said, most American Jews support what Israel did on the West Bank, enthusiastically; one American Jew said, for instance, that his son is now in the Israeli army and that he is "armed, dangerous and killing as many Palestinians as possible."

Guilt at being well-off in America plays a role in this kind of delusional thinking, but mostly it is the result of an extraordinary self-isolation in fantasy and myth that comes from education and unreflective nationalism of a kind unique in the world. Ever since the intifada broke out almost two years ago, the American media and the major Jewish organizations have been running all kinds of attacks on Islamic education in the Arab world, in Pakistan, and even in the United States. These attacks have accused Islamic authorities, as well as Yasir Arafat's Palestinian Authority, of teaching youngsters hatred of America and Israel, the virtues of suicide bombing, and unlimited praise for jihad. Little has been said, however, of the results of what American Jews have been taught about the conflict in Palestine: that the land was given to Jews by G.o.d, that it was empty, that it was liberated from Britain, that the natives ran away because their leaders told them to, that in effect the Palestinians don't exist except recently as terrorists, that all Arabs are anti-Semitic and want to kill Jews.

Nowhere in all this incitement to hatred does the reality of a Palestinian people exist, and more to the point, there is no connection made between Palestinian animosity and enmity toward Israel and what Israel has been doing to Palestinians since 1948. It's as if an entire history of dispossession, the destruction of a society, the thirty-five-year-old occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, to say nothing of ma.s.sacres, bombardments, expulsions, land expropriations, killings, sieges, humiliations, years of collective punishment, and a.s.sa.s.sinations that have gone on for decades were as nothing, since Israel has been victimized by Palestinian rage, hostility, and gratuitous anti-Semitism. It simply does not occur to most American supporters of Israel to see Israel as the actual author of specific actions done in the name of the Jewish people by the Jewish state, and to connect in consequence those actions to Palestinian feelings of anger and revenge.

The problem at bottom is that as human beings the Palestinians do not exist, that is, as human beings with history, traditions, society, sufferings, and ambitions like all other people. Why this should be so for most but by no means all American Jewish supporters of Israel is something worth looking into. It goes back to the knowledge that there was an indigenous people in Palestine-all the Zionist leaders knew it and spoke about it- but the fact, as a fact that might prevent colonization, could never be admitted. Hence the collective Zionist practice of either denying the fact or, more specially in the United States, where the realities are not so available for actual verification, lying about it by producing a counterreality. For decades it has been decreed to schoolchildren that there were no Palestinians when the Zionist pioneers arrived, and so those miscellaneous people who throw stones and fight occupation are simply a collection of terrorists who deserve killing. Palestinians in short do not deserve anything like a narrative or collective actuality, and so they must be trans.m.u.ted and dissolved into essentially negative images. This is entirely the result of a distorted education, doled out to millions of youngsters who grow up without any awareness at all that the Palestinian people have been totally dehumanized to serve a political-ideological end, namely to keep support high for Israel.

What is so astonishing is that notions of coexistence between peoples play no part in this kind of distortion. Whereas American Jews want to be recognized as Jews and Americans in America, they are unwilling to accord a similar status as Arabs and Palestinians to another people that has been oppressed by Israel since the beginning.

Only if one were to live in the United States for years would one be aware of the depth of the problem, which far transcends ordinary politics. The intellectual suppression of the Palestinians that has occurred because of Zionist education has produced an unreflecting, dangerously skewed sense of reality in which whatever Israel does, it does as a victim: according to the various articles I have quoted above, American Jews in crisis by extension therefore feel the same thing as the most right-wing of Israeli Jews, that they are at risk and their survival is at stake. This has nothing to do with reality, obviously enough, but rather with a kind of hallucinatory state that overrides history and facts with a supremely unthinking narcissism. A recent defense of what Wolfowitz said in his speech didn't even refer to the Palestinians he mentioned but defended President Bush's Middle East policy.

This is dehumanization on a vast scale, and it is made even worse, one has to say, by the suicide bombings that have so disfigured and debased the Palestinian struggle. All liberation movements in history have affirmed that their struggle is about life, not about death. Why should ours be an exception? The sooner we educate our Zionist enemies and show that our resistance offers coexistence and peace, the less able will they be to kill us at will and never refer to us except as terrorists. I am not saying that Sharon and Netanyahu can be changed. I am saying that there is a Palestinian-yes, a Palestinian-const.i.tuency, as well as an Israeli and American one, that needs to be reminded by strategy and tactics that force of arms and tanks and human bombs and bulldozers are not a solution but only create more delusion and distortion, on both sides.

Al-Ahram, May 1622, 2002.

Al-Hayat, May 19, 2002.

CHAPTER THIRTY.

Palestinian Elections Now.

Six distinct calls for Palestinian reform and elections are being uttered now: five of them are, for Palestinian purposes, both useless and irrelevant. Sharon wants reform as a way of further disabling Palestinian national life, that is, as an extension of his failed policy of constant intervention and destruction. He wants to be rid of Yasir Arafat, cut up the West Bank into fenced-in cantons, reinstall an occupation authority- preferably with some Palestinians helping out-carry on with settlement activity, and maintain Israeli security the way he's been doing it. He is too blinded by his own ideological hallucinations and obsessions to see that this will bring neither peace nor security and will certainly not bring the "quiet" he keeps prattling on about. Palestinian elections in the Sharonian scheme are quite unimportant.

Second, the United States wants reform princ.i.p.ally as a way of combating "terrorism," a catchall of a word that takes no account of history, context, society, or anything else. George W. Bush has a visceral dislike for Arafat and no understanding at all of the Palestinian situation. To say that he and his disheveled administration "want" anything is to dignify a series of spurts, fits, starts, retractions, denunciations, totally contradictory statements, sterile missions by various officials of his administration, and about-faces with the status of an overall desire, which of course doesn't exist. Incoherent, except when it comes to the pressures and agendas of the Israeli lobby and the Christian right whose spiritual head he now is, Bush's policy consists in reality of calls for Arafat to end terrorism, and (when he wants to placate the Arabs) for someone, somewhere, somehow to produce a Palestinian state and a big conference, and finally for Israel to go on getting full and unconditional U.S. support, including most probably ending Arafat's career. Beyond that, U.S. policy waits to be formulated, by someone, somewhere, somehow. One should always keep in mind, though, that the Middle East is a domestic, not a foreign, policy issue in America and subject to dynamics within the society that are difficult to predict.

All this perfectly suits the Israeli demand, which wants nothing more than to make Palestinian life collectively more miserable and more unlivable, whether by military incursions or by impossible political conditions that suit Sharon's frenzied obsession with stamping out Palestinians forever. Of course, there are other Israelis who want coexistence with a Palestinian state, as there are American Jews who want similar things: but neither group has any determining power now at all. Sharon and the Bush administration run the show.

Third is the Arab leaders' demand, which as far as I can tell is a combination of several different elements, none of them directly helpful to the Palestinians themselves. First is fear of their own populations, who have been witnessing Israel's ma.s.s and essentially unopposed destruction of the Palestinian territories without any serious Arab interference or attempt at deterrence. The Beirut summit peace plan offers Israel precisely what Sharon has refused, which is land for peace, and it is a proposal without any teeth, much less one with a timetable in it. While it may be a good thing to have it on record as a counterweight to Israel's naked belligerence, we should have no illusions about its real intention, which, like the calls for Palestinian reform, are really tokens offered to seething Arab populations who are quite thoroughly sick with the mediocre inaction of their rulers.

Second is the sheer exasperation of most of the Arab regimes with the whole Palestinian problem. They seem to have no ideological problem with Israel as a Jewish state without any declared boundaries, which has been in illegal military occupation of Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank for thirty-five years, or with Israel's dispossession of the Palestinian people. They are prepared to accommodate nicely those terrible injustices if only Arafat and his people will simply either behave or quietly go away.

Third, of course, is the long-standing desire of the Arab leaders to ingratiate themselves with the United States and, among themselves, to vie for the t.i.tle of most important U.S. Arab ally. Perhaps they are simply unaware of how contemptuous most Americans are of them, and how little understood or regarded is their cultural and political status in the United States.

Fourth in the chorus of reform are the Europeans. But they only scurry around sending emissaries to see Sharon and Arafat, they make ringing declarations in Brussels, they fund a few projects-and more or less leave it at that, so great is the shadow of the United States over them.

Fifth is Yasir Arafat and his circle of a.s.sociates, who have suddenly discovered the virtues (theoretically at least) of democracy and reform. I know that I speak at a great distance from the field of struggle, and I also know all the arguments about the besieged Arafat as a potent symbol of Palestinian resistance against Israeli aggression, but I have come to a point where I think none of that has any meaning anymore. Arafat is simply interested in saving himself. He has had almost ten years of freedom to run a petty kingdom and has succeeded essentially in bringing opprobrium and scorn on himself and most of his team; the Authority has become a byword for brutality, autocracy, and unimaginable corruption. Why anyone for a moment believes that at this stage he is capable of anything different, or that his new streamlined cabinet (dominated by the same old faces of defeat and incompetence) is going to produce actual reform, simply defies reason. He is the leader of a long-suffering people, whom in the past year he has exposed to unacceptable pain and hardship, all of it based on a combination of his absence of a strategic plan and his unforgivable reliance on the tender mercies of Israel and the United States via Oslo. Leaders of independence and liberation movements have no business exposing their unarmed people to the savagery of war criminals like Sharon, against whom there was no real defense or advance preparation. Why then provoke a war whose victims will be mostly innocent people when you have neither the military capacity to fight it nor the diplomatic leverage to end it? Having done this now three times (Jordan, Lebanon, West Bank), Arafat should not be given a chance to bring on a fourth disaster.

He has announced that elections will take place in early 2003, but his real concentration is to reorganize the security services. I have long pointed out in these columns that Arafat's security apparatus was always designed princ.i.p.ally to serve him and Israel, since the Oslo accords were based on his having made a deal with Israel's military occupation. Israel cared only about its security, for which it held Arafat responsible (a position, by the way, he willingly accepted as early as 1992). In the meantime Arafat played the fifteen or nineteen or whatever the right number of groups was against one another, a tactic he perfected in Fakahani [the Beirut neighborhood where the PLO had its offices in the 1970s] and that is patently stupid so far as the general good is concerned. He never really reined in Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which suited Israel perfectly so that it would have a ready-made excuse to use the so-called martyrs' (mindless) suicide bombings to further diminish and punish the whole people. If there is one thing that has done us more harm as a cause than Arafat's ruinous regime, it is this calamitous policy of killing Israeli civilians, which further proves to the world that we are indeed terrorists and an immoral movement. For what gain, no one has been able to say.

Having therefore made a deal with the occupation through Oslo, Arafat was never really in a position to lead a movement to end it. And ironically, he is trying to make another deal now, both to save himself and to prove to the United States, Israel, and the other Arabs that he deserves another chance. I myself don't care a whit for what Bush, or the Arab leaders, or Sharon says: I am interested in what we as a people think of our leader, and there I believe we must be absolutely clear in rejecting his entire program of reform, elections, and reorganizing the government and security services. His record of failure is too dismal and his capacities as a leader too enfeebled and incompetent for him to try yet again to save himself for another try.

Sixth, finally, is the Palestinian people, who are now justifiably clamoring both for reform and for elections. As far as I am concerned, this clamor is the only legitimate one of the six I have outlined here. It's important to point out that Arafat's present administration as well as the Legislative Council have overstayed their original term, which should have ended with a new round of elections in 1999. Moreover, the whole basis of the 1996 elections was the Oslo accords, which in effect simply licensed Arafat and his people to run bits of the West Bank and Gaza for the Israelis, without true sovereignty or security, since Israel retained control of the borders, security, land (on which it doubled and even tripled the settlements), water, and air. In other words, the old basis for elections and reform, which had been Oslo, is now null and void. Any attempt to go forward on that kind of platform is simply a wasteful ploy and will produce neither reform nor any real elections. Hence the current confusion, which causes every Palestinian everywhere to feel chagrin and bitter frustration.

What then is to be done if the old basis of Palestinian legitimacy no longer really exists? Certainly there can be no return to Oslo, any more than there can be to Jordanian or Israeli law. As a student of periods of important historical change, I should like to point out that when a major rupture with the past occurs (like the fall of the monarchy because of the French Revolution, or the demise of apartheid in South Africa before the elections of 1994 took place), a new basis of legitimacy has to be created by the only and ultimate source of authority, namely, the people itself. The major interests in Palestinian society, those that have kept life going, from the trade unions, to health workers, teachers, farmers, lawyers, and doctors, in addition to all the many NGOs, must now become the basis on which Palestinian reform-despite Israel's incursions and the occupation-is to be constructed. It seems to me useless to wait for Arafat, or Europe, or the United States, or the Arabs to do this: it must absolutely be done by Palestinians themselves by way of a const.i.tuent a.s.sembly that contains in it all the major elements of Palestinian society. Only such a group, constructed by the people themselves and not by the remnants of the Oslo dispensation, certainly not by the shabby fragments of Arafat's discredited Authority, can hope to succeed in reorganizing society from the ruinous, indeed catastrophically incoherent condition in which it is to be found. There is one basic job for such an a.s.sembly, which is to construct an emergency system of order that has two purposes. One, to keep Palestinian life going in an orderly way with full partic.i.p.ation for all concerned. Two, to choose an emergency executive committee whose mandate is to end the occupation, not negotiate with it. It is quite obvious that militarily we are no match for Israel. Kalashnikovs are not effective weapons when the balance of power is so lopsided. What is needed is a creative method of struggle that mobilizes all the human resources at our disposal to highlight, isolate, and gradually make untenable the main aspects of Israeli occupation-that is, settlements, settlement roads, roadblocks, and house demolitions. The present group around Arafat is hopelessly incapable of thinking of, much less actually implementing, such a strategy: it is too bankrupt, too bound up in corrupt, selfish practices, too burdened with the failures of the past.

For such a Palestinian strategy to work, there has to be an Israeli component made up of individuals and groups with whom a common basis of struggle against occupation can and indeed must be established. This is the great lesson of the South African struggle: it proposed the vision of a multiracial society from which neither individuals nor groups and leaders were ever deflected. The only vision coming out of Israel today is violence, forcible separation, and the continued subordination of Palestinians to an idea of Jewish supremacy. Not every Israeli believes in these things, of course, but it must be up to us to project the idea of coexistence in two states that have natural relations with each other on the basis of sovereignty and equality. Mainstream Zionism has still not been able to produce such a vision, so it must come from the Palestinian people and their new leaders, whose new legitimacy has to be constructed now, at a moment when everything is crashing down and everyone is anxious to remake Palestine in his own image and according to his own ideas.

We have never faced a worse or, at the same time, a more seminal moment. The Arab order is in total disarray; the U.S. administration is effectively controlled by the Christian right and the Israeli lobby (within twenty-four hours, everything that George W. Bush seems to have agreed to with Egypt's Hosni Mubarak was reversed by Sharon's visit); and our society has been nearly wrecked by poor leadership and the insanity of thinking that suicide bombing will lead directly to an Islamic Palestinian state. There is always hope for the future, but one has to able to look for it and find it in the right place. It is quite clear that in the absence of any serious Palestinian or Arab information policy in the United States (especially in the Congress), we cannot for a moment delude ourselves that Powell and Bush are about to set a real agenda for Palestinian rehabilitation. That's why I keep saying that the effort must come from us, by us, for us. I'm at least trying to suggest a different avenue of approach. Who else but the Palestinian people can construct the legitimacy they need to rule themselves and fight the occupation with weapons that don't kill innocents and lose us more support than ever before? A just cause can easily be subverted by evil or inadequate or corrupt means. The sooner this is put into practice, the better the chance we have to lead ourselves out of the present impa.s.se.

Al-Ahram, June 1319, 2002.

Al-Hayat, June 16, 2002.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE.

One-Way Street.

Even by the terribly low standards of his other speeches, George W. Bush's June 24, 2002, speech to the world about the Middle East was a startling example of how an execrable combination of muddled thought, words with no actual meaning in the real world of living, breathing human beings, preachy and racist injunctions against the Palestinians, and incredible blindness-a delusional blindness, to the realities of an ongoing Israeli invasion and conquest against all the laws of war and peace-all of it wrapped in the smug accents of a moralistic, stiff-necked, and ignorant judge who has arrogated to himself divine privileges, now sits astride U.S. foreign policy. And this, it is important to remember, from a man who virtually stole an election he did not win, and whose record as governor of Texas includes the worst pollution, scandalous corruption, and the highest rates of imprisonment and capital punishment in the world. So this dubiously endowed man of few gifts except the blind pursuit of money and power has the capability to condemn Palestinians not just to the tender mercies of war criminal Sharon but to the dire consequences of his own empty condemnations. Flanked by three of the most venal politicians in the world (Powell, Rumsfeld, and Rice), he p.r.o.nounced his speech with the halting accents of a mediocre elocution student and thereby allowed Sharon to kill or injure many more Palestinians in a U.S.-endorsed illegal military occupation.

It wasn't only that Bush's speech lacked any historical awareness of what he was proposing, but that its capacity for extended harm was so great. It was as if Sharon had written the speech, amalgamating the disproportionate American obsession with terrorism to Sharon's determination to eliminate Palestinian national life under the rubric of terrorism and Jewish supremacy on "the land of Israel." For the rest, Bush's perfunctory concessions to a "provisional" Palestinian state (whatever that may be, perhaps a.n.a.logous to a provisional pregnancy?) and his casual remarks about alleviating the difficulties of Palestinian life brought nothing to this new p.r.o.nouncement that warranted the widespread-I would go so far as to say comically-positive reaction elicited from the Arab leadership, Yasir Arafat leading the pack so far as enthusiasm is concerned.

Over fifty years of Arab and Palestinian dealings with the United States have ended in the rubbish bin, so that Bush and his advisers could convince themselves and much of the electorate that they had a G.o.d-given mission to exterminate terrorism, which meant essentially all the enemies of Israel. A quick survey of those fifty years shows dramatically that neither a defiant Arab att.i.tude nor a submissive one has made any changes in U.S. perceptions of American interests in the Middle East, which remain the quick and cheap supply of oil and the protection of Israel as the two main aspects of its regional dominance. From the days of Abdel Na.s.ser to today's Bashar al-a.s.sad, King Abdullah, and Hosni Mubarak, however, Arab policy has undergone a 180-degree turn, with more or less the same results. First there was a defiant Arab alignment in the postindependence years, inspired by the anti-imperialist, anticold war philosophy of Ban-dung and Na.s.serism. That ended catastrophically in 1967.

Thereafter led by Egypt under Anwar Sadat, the shift took place that brought cooperation between the United States and the Arabs under the totally delusional rubric that the United States controlled 99 percent of the cards. What remained of inter-Arab cooperation slowly withered away from its high point in the 1973 war and the oil embargo to an Arab cold war pitting various states against one another. Sometimes, as in Kuwait and Lebanon, small weak states became the battleground, but for all intents and purposes the official mindset of the Arab state system came to think exclusively in terms of the United States as the pivotal focus for Arab policy. With the first Gulf War (there is soon to be a second) and the end of the cold war, America remained as the only superpower, which instead of prompting a radical reappraisal of Arab policy drove the various states into a deeper individual or rather bilateral embrace of the United States, whose reaction in effect was to take them for granted. Arab summits became occasions less for putting forth credible positions than for expressing derisory contempt. It was soon realized by U.S. policy-makers that Arab leaders barely represented their own countries, much less the whole Arab world; and in addition, one didn't have to be a genius to remark that various bilateral agreements between Arab leaders and the United States were more important to their regimes' security than to the United States. This is not even to mention the petty jealousies and animosities that virtually emasculated the Arab people as a power to be reckoned with in the modern world. No wonder then that today's Palestinian, suffering the horrors of Israeli occupation, is just as likely to blame "the Arabs" as he is the Israelis.

By the early 1980s all parts of the Arab world were ready to make peace with Israel as a way of ensuring U.S. good faith toward them, as for example the Fez plan of 1982, which stipulated peace with Israel in return for withdrawal from all the Occupied Territories. The March 2002 Arab summit replayed the same scene for the second time-this time as farce, it should be added-and with equally negligible effect. And it is precisely from that time two decades ago that U.S. policy on Palestine completely changed its bases, for the worse. As former CIA senior a.n.a.lyst Kathleen Christison points out in an excellent study published in the U.S. biweekly Counterpunch (May 1631, 2002), the old land-for-peace formula was given up by the Reagan administration, then more enthusiastically by Clinton's, just ironically at the same time that Arab policy generally and Palestinian policy in particular had concentrated their energies on placating the United States on as many fronts as possible. By November 1988 the PLO had officially abandoned "liberation" and at the Algiers meeting of the Palestinian National Council (PNC), which I attended as a member, voted for part.i.tion and coexistence for two states; in December of that year Yasir Arafat publicly renounced terrorism, and a PLOUnited States dialogue was begun in Tunis.

The new Arab order that emerged after the Gulf War inst.i.tutionalized the one-way traffic between the United States and the Arabs: the Arabs gave, and the Americans gave more and more to Israel. The Madrid conference of 1991 was based on the premise for the Palestinians that the United States would recognize them and persuade Israel to do the same. I recall vividly that during the summer of 1991 a group of senior PLO figures and independents, including myself, were asked by Arafat to formulate a series of a.s.surances that we required from the United States in order to enter the about-to-be-convened Madrid conference, which would lead (although none of us knew it) to the Oslo process of 1993. In effect Arafat vetoed all our suggestions for U.S. guarantees. He only wanted a.s.surances that he would remain the main negotiator for the Palestinians; nothing else seemed to matter to him, even though a good West Bank Gaza delegation headed by Haidar Abdel Shafi was proceeding with its work in Washington facing a tough Israeli team that had been instructed by Yitzhak Shamir to concede nothing and to extend the talk for ten years if necessary. Arafat's idea was to undercut every one of his own people by offering more concessions, which essentially meant that he made no prior demands on either Israel or the United States, just so he could remain in power.

That, and the prevailing post-1967 environment, has solidified the Palestinian-U.S. dynamic into the by-now-permanent distortions of the Oslo and post-Oslo period. To the best of my knowledge, the United States never called on the Palestinian Authority (nor any other Arab regime) to establish democratic procedures. Quite the contrary, Clinton and Gore both publicly approved the Palestinian state security courts while on visits to Gaza and Jericho respectively, and little emphasis, if any, was placed on ending corruption, monopolies, and the like. I myself had been writing about the problems of Arafat's rule since the mid-1990s, with either indifference or open scorn as reactions to what I had to say (most of which proved to be correct). I was accused of a utopian lack of pragmatism and realism. It was clear that for the Israelis and the Americans, as well as the other Arabs, there was a concert of interests that made the Authority what it was and that kept it in place either as an Israeli police force or, later, as the focus of everything that Israelis loved to hate. No serious resistance to occupation was developed under Arafat, and he continued to allow bands of militants, other PLO factions, and security forces to run rampant across the civil landscape. A great deal of illicit money was made, as the general population lost over 50 percent of its pre-Oslo livelihood.

The intifada changed everything, as did Barak's tenure, which prepared the way for Sharon's reentry on to the scene. And still Arab policy was to placate the United States. A small sign of this is the change in Arab discourse here. Abdullah of Jordan stopped criticizing Israel completely on American TV, referring always to the need for "the two sides" to stop "the violence." Similar language was heard from various other Arab spokesmen from major countries, which is to say that Palestine had become a nuisance to be contained rather than an injustice to be righted.

The most significant thing of all is that between them, Israeli propaganda, American contempt for the Arabs, and Arab (as well as Palestinian) incapacity to formulate and represent the interests of their own people has led to a vast dehumanization of the Palestinians, whose enormous suffering on a daily, indeed hourly and minute-by-minute basis has no status at all. It's as if Palestinians have no existence except when someone performs a terrorist act, and then the entire world media apparatus leaps up and smothers their actual existence as breathing and sentient people with a real history and a real society by holding over them an enormous blanket saying "terrorist." I know of no systematic dehumanization in modern history that even approaches this, despite the occasional dissenting voice here and there.

What concerns me finally is Arab and Palestinian cooperation (collaboration is the better word) in the dehumanization. Our tiny number of representatives in the media at best speak competently and dispa.s.sionately about the merits of the Bush speech or the Mitch.e.l.l plan, but in no way do any of them whom I have seen represent the sufferings of their people, or their history, or actuality. I have spoken often about the need for a ma.s.s campaign against the occupation in the United States but have finally come to the conclusion that for Palestinians under this dreadful, Kafkaesque Israeli occupation, the chances of mounting one are small. Where I think we have a hope is in trying (as I suggested in my last article, on Palestinian elections) to establish a const.i.tuent a.s.sembly at the gra.s.sroots level. We have so long been pa.s.sive objects of Israeli and Arab policy that we do not adequately appreciate how important, and indeed how urgent, it is for Palestinians now to take an independent foundational step of their own, to try to establish a new self-making process that creates legitimacy and the possibility of a better polity for ourselves than now exists. All the cabinet shuffles and projected elections that have been announced so far are ridiculous games played with the fragments and ruins of Oslo. Arafat and his a.s.sembly planning democracy is like trying to put together the pieces of a shattered gla.s.s.

Fortunately, however, the new Palestinian National Initiative announced two weeks ago by its authors, Ibrahim Dakkak, Mustafa Barghuti, and Haidar Abdel Shafi, answers exactly to this need, which springs from the failure both of the PLO and of groups like Hamas to provide a way forward that doesn't depend (ludicrously, in my opinion) on American and Israeli goodwill. The Initiative provides for a vision of peace with justice, coexistence, and, extremely important, secular social democracy for our people that is unique in Palestinian history. Only a group of independent people well grounded in civil society, untainted by collaboration or corruption, can possibly furnish the outlines of the new legitimacy we need. We need a real const.i.tution, not a basic law toyed with by Arafat; we need truly representative democracy that only Palestinians can provide for themselves through a founding a.s.sembly. This is the only positive step that can reverse the process of dehumanization that has infected so many sectors of the Arab world. Otherwise we shall sink in our suffering and continue to endure the awful tribulations of Israeli collective punishment, which can only be stopped by a collective political independence, of which we are still very capable. Colin Powell's goodwill and fabled "moderation" will never do it for us. Never.

Al-Ahram, July 1117, 2002.

Al-Hayat, July 22, 2002.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO.

Slow Death: Punishment by Detail.

A side from the obvious physical discomforts, being ill for a long period of time fills the spirit with a terrible feeling of helplessness, but also with periods of a.n.a.lytic lucidity, which, of course, must be treasured. For the past three months now I have been in and out of the hospital, with days marked by lengthy and painful treatments, blood transfusions, endless tests, hours and hours of unproductive time spent staring at the ceiling, draining fatigue and infection, unable to do normal work, and thinking, thinking, thinking. But there are also the intermittent pa.s.sages of lucidity and reflection that sometimes give the mind a perspective on daily life that allows it to see things (without being able to do much about them) from a different perspective. Reading the news from Palestine and seeing the frightful images of death and destruction on television, I have been utterly amazed and aghast at what I have deduced from those details about Israeli government policy, more particularly about what has been going on in the mind of Ariel Sharon. And when, after the recent Gaza bombing by one of his F-16s in which nine children were ma.s.sacred, he was quoted as congratulating the pilot and boasting of a great Israeli success, I was able to form a much clearer idea than before of what a pathologically deranged mind is capable of, in terms not only of what it plans and orders but, worse, of how it manages to persuade other minds to think in the same delusional and criminal way. Getting inside the official Israeli mind is a worthwhile, if lurid, experience.

In the West, however, there's been such repet.i.tious and unedifying attention paid to Palestinian suicide bombing that a gross distortion in reality has completely obscured what is much worse: the official Israeli, and perhaps the uniquely Sharonian, evil that has been visited so deliberately and so methodically on the Palestinian people. Suicide bombing is reprehensible, but it is a direct and, in my opinion, a consciously programmed result of years of abuse, powerlessness, and despair. It has as little to do with the Arab or Muslim supposed propensity for violence as the man in the moon. Sharon wants terrorism, not peace, and he does everything in his power to create the conditions for it. But for all its horror, Palestinian violence, the response of a desperate and horribly oppressed people, has been stripped of its context and the terrible suffering from which it arises: a failure to see that is a failure in humanity, which doesn't make it any less terrible but at least situates it in a real history and real geography.

Yet the location of Palestinian terror-of course it is terror-is never allowed a moment's chance to appear, so remorseless has been the focus on it as a phenomenon apart, a pure, gratuitous evil that Israel, supposedly acting on behalf of pure good, has been virtuously battling in its variously appalling acts of disproportionate violence against a population of 3 million Palestinian civilians. I am speaking not only about Israel's manipulation of opinion but about its exploitation of the American equivalent of the campaign against terrorism, without which Israel could not have done what it has done. (In fact, I cannot think of any other country on earth that, in full view of nightly TV audiences, has performed such miracles of detailed sadism against an entire society and gotten away with it.) That this evil has been made consciously part of George W. Bush's campaign against terrorism, irrationally magnifying American fantasies and fixations with extraordinary ease, is no small part of its blind destructiveness. Like the brigades of eager (and in my opinion completely corrupt) American intellectuals who spin enormous structures of falsehoods about the benign purpose and necessity of U.S. imperialism, Israeli society has pressed into service numerous academics, policy intellectuals at think tanks, and ex-military men now in defense-related and public relations business, all to rationalize and make convincing inhuman punitive policies that are supposedly based on the need for Israeli security.

Israeli security is now a fabled beast rather like a unicorn. It is always being hunted or looked for and never found, and yet is everlastingly made the goal of future action. That over time Israel has in fact become less secure and more unacceptable to its neighbors scarcely merits a moment's notice. But then who challenges the view that Israeli security ought to define the moral world we live in? Certainly not the Arab and Palestinian leaderships who for thirty years have conceded everything to Israeli security. Shouldn't that ever be questioned, given that Israel has wreaked more damage on the Palestinians and other Arabs relative to its size than any country in the world, Israel with its nuclear a.r.s.enal, its air force, navy, and army limitlessly supplied by the U.S. taxpayer? As a result, the daily, minute occurrences of what Palestinians have to live through are hidden and, more important, covered over by a logic of self-defense and the pursuit of terrorism (terrorist infrastructure, terrorist nests, terrorist bomb factories, terrorist suspects-the list is infinite) that perfectly suits Sharon and the lamentable George W. Bush. Ideas about terrorism have thus taken on a life of their own, legitimized and relegitimized without proof, logic, or rational argument.

Consider for instance the devastation of Afghanistan, on the one hand, and the "targeted" a.s.sa.s.sinations of almost a hundred Palestinians (to say nothing of many thousands of "suspects" rounded up and still imprisoned by Israeli soldiers) on the other: n.o.body asks whether all these people killed were in fact terrorists, or proved to be terrorists, or-as was the case with most of them-about to become terrorists. They are all a.s.sumed to be dangers by acts of simple, unchallenged affirmation. All you need is an arrogant spokesman or two, like the loutish Ranaan Gissin, Avi Pazner, or Dore Gold, and in Washington a nonstop apologist for ignorance and incoherence like Ari Fleischer, and the targets in question are just as good as dead. Without doubts, questions, or demurral. No need for proof or any such tiresome delicacy. Terrorism and its obsessed pursuit have become an entirely circular, self-fulfilling murder and slow death of enemies who have no choice or say in the matter.

With the exception of reports by a few intrepid journalists and writers such as Amira Ha.s.s, Gideon Levy, Amos Elon, Tanya Reinhart, Jeff Halper, Israel Shamir, and a few others, public discourse in the Israeli media has declined terribly in quality and honesty. Patriotism and blind support for the government have replaced skeptical reflection and moral seriousness. Gone are the days of Israel Shahak, Jacob Talmon, and Yehoshua Leibowitch. I can think of few Israeli academics and intellectuals-men like Zeev Sternh.e.l.l, Uri Avnery, and Ilan Pappe, for instance- who are courageous enough to depart from the imbecilic and debased debate about "security" and "terrorism" that seems to have overtaken the Israeli peace establishment, or even its rapidly dwindling left opposition. Crimes are being committed every day in the name of Israel and the Jewish people, and yet the intellectuals chatter on about strategic withdrawal, or perhaps whether to incorporate settlements or not, or whether to keep building that monstrous fence (has a crazier idea ever been realized in the modern world, that you can put several million people in a cage and say they don't exist?), in a manner befitting a general or a politician, rather than in ways more suited to intellectuals and artists with independent judgment and some sort of moral standard. Where are the Israeli equivalents of Nadine Gordimer, Andre Brink, Athol Fugard, those white writers who spoke out unequivocally and with unambiguous clarity against the evils of South African apartheid? They simply don't exist in Israel, where public discourse by writers and academics has sunk to equivocation and the repet.i.tion of official propaganda, and where most really first-cla.s.s writing and thought has disappeared from even the academic establishment.

But to return to Israeli practices and the mindset that has gripped the country with such obduracy during the past few years, think of Sharon's plan. It entails nothing less than the obliteration of an entire people by slow, systematic methods of suffocation, outright murder, and the stifling of everyday life. Intrinsic to this plan is the unrelenting expropriation of Palestinian land through settlements, military areas, and occupied towns and villages: through the Oslo process, Israel conceded only 18 percent of the West Bank and 60 percent of Gaza, both of which now have been reoccupied and redivided many times. There is a remarkable story by Kafka, "In the Penal Colony," about a crazed official who shows off a fantastically detailed torture machine whose purpose is to write all over the body of the victim, using a complex apparatus of needles to inscribe minute letters that ultimately cause the prisoner to bleed to death. This is what Sharon and his brigades of willing executioners are doing to the Palestinians, with only the most limited and most symbolic of opposition. Every Palestinian has become a prisoner. Gaza is surrounded by an electrified wire fence on three sides; imprisoned like animals, Gazans are unable to move, unable to work, unable to sell their vegetables or fruit, unable to go to school. They are exposed from the air to Israeli planes and helicopters and are gunned down like turkeys on the ground by tanks and machine guns. Impoverished and starved, Gaza is a human nightmare, each of whose little pieces of episodes-like what takes place at Erez, or near the settlements-involves thousands of soldiers in the humiliation, punishment, and intolerable enfeeblement of each Palestinian, without regard for age, gender, or illness. Medical supplies are held up at the border, ambulances are fired upon or detained. Hundreds of houses are demolished, and hundreds of thousands of trees and agricultural land are destroyed in acts of systematic collective punishment against civilians, most of whom are already refugees from Israel's destruction of their society in 1948. Hope has been eliminated from the Palestinian vocabulary so that only raw defiance remains, and still Sharon and his s.a.d.i.s.tic minions prattle on about eliminating terrorism by an ever-encroaching occupation that has continued now for thirty-five years. That the campaign itself is, like all colonial brutality, futile, or that it has the effect of making Palestinians more, rather than less, defiant, simply does not enter Sharon's closed mind.

The West Bank is occupied by a thousand Israeli tanks whose sole purpose is to fire upon and terrorize civilians. Curfews are imposed for periods of up to two weeks, without respite. Schools and universities are either closed or impossible to get to. No one can travel, not just between the nine main cities but within the cities. Every town today is a wasteland of destroyed buildings, looted offices, purposely ruined water and electrical systems. Commerce is finished. Malnutrition prevails in half the children. Two-thirds of the population lives below the poverty level of two dollars a day. Tanks in Jenin (where the demolition of the refugee camp by Israeli armor, a major war crime, was never investigated because cowardly international bureaucrats such as Kofi Annan back down when Israel threatens) fire upon and kill children, but that is only one drop in an unending stream of Palestinian civilian deaths caused by Israeli soldiers who furnish the illegal Israeli military occupation with loyal, unquestioning service. Palestinians are all "terrorist suspects." The soul of this occupation is that young Israeli conscripts are allowed full rein to subject Palestinians at checkpoints to every known form of private torture and abjection. There is the waiting in the sun for hours; then there is the detention of medical supplies and produce until they rot; there are the insulting words and beatings administered at will; the sudden rampage of jeeps and soldiers against civilians waiting their turn by the thousands at the innumerable checkpoints that have made of Palestinian life a choking h.e.l.l; making dozens of youths kneel in the sun for hours; forcing men to take off their clothes; insulting and humiliating parents in front of their children; forbidding the sick to pa.s.s through for no other reason than personal whim; stopping ambulances and firing on them. And the steady number of Palestinian deaths (quadruple that of Israelis) increases on a daily, mostly untabulated basis. More "terrorist suspects" plus their wives and children, but "we" regret those deaths very much. Thank you.

Israel is frequently referred to as a democracy. If so, then it is a democracy without a conscience, a country whose soul has been captured by a mania for punishing the weak, a democracy that faithfully mirrors the psychopathic mentality of its ruler, General Sharon, whose sole idea-if that is the right word for it-is to kill, reduce, maim, drive away Palestinians until "they break." He provides nothing more concrete as a goal for his campaigns, now or in the past, beyond that, and like the garrulous official in Kafka's story, he is most proud of his machine for abusing defenseless Palestinian civilians, all the while monstrously abetted in his grotesque lies by his court advisers and philosophers and generals, as well as by his chorus of faithful American servants. There is no Palestinian army of occupation, there are no Palestinian tanks, no soldiers, no helicopter gunships, there is no artillery, no government to speak of. But there are the "terrorists" and the "violence" that Israel has invented so that its own neuroses can be inscribed on the bodies of Palestinians, without effective protest from the overwhelming majority of Israel's laggard philosophers, intellectuals, artists, and peace activists. Palestinian schools, libraries, and universities have ceased normal functioning for months now: and we still wait for the Western freedom-to-write groups and the vociferous defenders of academic freedom in America to raise their voices in protest. I have yet to see one academic organization either in Israel or in the West make a declaration about this profound abrogation of the Palestinian right to knowledge, to learning, to attend school.

In sum, Palestinians must die a slow death so that Israel can have its security, which is just around the corner but cannot be realized because of the special Israeli "insecurity." The whole world must sympathize, while the cries of Palestinian orphans, sick old women, bereaved communities, and tortured prisoners simply go unheard and unrecorded. Doubtless, we will be told, these horrors serve a larger purpose than mere s.a.d.i.s.tic cruelty. After all, "the two sides" are engaged in a "cycle of violence" that has to be stopped, sometime, somewhere. Once in a while we ought to pause and declare indignantly that there is only one side with an army and a country: the other is a stateless disposed population of people without rights or any present way of securing them. The language of suffering and concrete daily life has been either hijacked or so perverted as, in my opinion, to be useless except as pure fiction deployed as a screen for the purpose of more killing and painstaking torture-slowly, fastidiously, inexorably. That is the truth of what Palestinians suffer. But in any case, Israeli policy will ultimately fail.

Al-Ahram, August 814, 2002.

Al-Hayat, August 10, 2002.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE.

Arab Disunity and Factionalism.

Underlying most of the findings in the much-cited 2002 United Nations Human Development Report is the extraordinary lack of coordination among Arab countries. There is considerable irony in the fact that the Arabs are discussed and referred to, both in this report and elsewhere, as a group, even though they seem rarely to function as one, except negatively. Thus the report correctly says that there is no Arab democracy, Arab women are uniformly an oppressed majority, and in science and technology every Arab state is behind the rest of the world. Certainly there is little strategic cooperation among them and virtually none in the economic sphere. As for more specific issues like policy toward Israel, the United States, and the Palestinians, and despite a common front of embarra.s.sed hand-wringing and disgraceful powerlessness, one senses a frightened determination first of all not to offend the United States, not to engage in war or in a real peace with Israel, not ever to think of a common Arab front even on matters that affect an overall Arab future or security. Yet when it comes to the perpetuation of each regime, the Arab ruling cla.s.ses are united in purpose and survival skills.

This shambles of inertia and impotence is, I am convinced, an affront to every Arab. This is why so many Egyptians, Syrians, Jordanians, Moroccans, and others have taken to the streets in support of the Palestinian people undergoing the nightmare of Israeli occupation, with the Arab leadership looking on and basically doing nothing. Street demonstrations are not only demonstrations of support for Palestine but also protests at the immobilizing effects of Arab disunity. An even more eloquent sign of the common disenchantment is the frequent, wrenchingly sad television scene of a Palestinian woman surveying the ruins of her house demolished by Israeli bulldozers, wailing to the world at large, "Ya Arab, ya Arab" ("oh you Arabs, you Arabs"). There is no more eloquent testimony to the betrayal of the Arab people by their (mostly unelected) leaders than that indictment, which is to say: "Why don't you Arabs ever do anything to help us?" Despite money and oil aplenty, there is only the stony silence of an unmoved spectator.

Even on an individual level, alas, disunity and factionalism have crippled one national effort after the other. Take the saddest of all instances, the case of the Palestinian people. I recall wondering during the Amman and Beirut days why it was necessary for somewhere between eight to twelve Palestinian factions to exist, each fighting over uselessly academic issues of ideology and organization while Israel and the local militias bled us dry. Looking back over the Lebanese days that came to a terrible end in Sabra and Shatila, whose purpose did it serve to have the Popular Front, Fateh, and the Democratic Front-to mention only three factions-fighting among one another, to have leaders within Fateh proclaiming needlessly provocative slogans like "the road to Tel Aviv goes through Jounieh," even as Israel allied itself with the right-wing Lebanese militias to destroy the Palestinian presence for its own purposes? And what cause has been served by Yasir Arafat's tactics of creating factions, subgroups, and security forces to war against one another during the Oslo process and of leaving his people unprotected and unprepared for the Israeli destruction of the infrastructure and reoccupation of Area A?

It's always the same thing, factionalism, disunity, the absence of a common purpose for which in the end ordinary people pay the price in suffering, blood, and endless destruction. Even on the level of social structure, it is almost a commonplace that Arabs as a group fight among themselves more than they do for a common purpose. We are individualists, it is said by way of justification, ignoring the fact that such disunity and internal disorganization in the end damage our very existence as a people. Nothing can be more disheartening than the disputes that corrode Arab expatriate organizations, especially in places like the United States and Europe, where relatively small Arab communities are surrounded by hostile environments and militant opponents who will stop at nothing to discredit the Arab struggle. Still, instead of trying to unite and work together, these communities get torn apart by totally unnecessary ideological and factional struggles that have no immediate relevance, no necessity at all so far as the surrounding field is concerned.

A few days ago I was startled by a discussion program on Al-Jazeera television in which the two partic.i.p.ants and a needlessly provocative moderator vehemently discussed Arab American activism during the present crisis. One man, a certain Mr. Dalbah who was identified vaguely as a "political a.n.a.lyst" in Washington (without apparent affiliation or inst.i.tutional connection), spent all of his time discrediting the one serious national Arab-American group, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), which he accused of ineffectiveness and its leaders of egoism, opportunism, and personal corruption. The other gentleman, whose name I didn't catch, admitted that he has been in the United States for only a very few years and didn't seem to know much about what was going on, except of course to argue that he had better ideas than all the other community leaders. Although I only watched the first and last parts of the program, I was thoroughly disillusioned and even disgraced by the discussion. What was the point? I asked myself. In what way is it useful to tear down an organization that has been doing by far the best work in a country where Arabs are outnumbered and outorganized not only by all the many, much larger and extremely well-financed Zionist organizations, but also where the society itself and its media are so hostile to Arabs, Islam, and their causes in general? It is not at all useful, of course, but this one had an instance of the pernicious factionalism by which with almost Pavlovian regularity Arabs try to hurt and impede one another rather than unite behind a common purpose. For if there is little justification for such behavior in the Arab lands themselves, surely there is less reason for it abroad, where Arab individuals and communities are targeted and threatened as undesirable aliens and terrorists.

The Al-Jazeera program was more offensive by its gratuitous inaccuracy and the needless personal harm it did to the late Hala Salam Maksoud, who literally gave her life to the cause of the ADC, and to its current president, Dr. Ziad Asali, a public-spirited physician who voluntarily gave up his medical practice to run the organization on a pro bono basis. Dalbah kept insinuating that both these activists were motivated by reasons of personal monetary gain, and that whatever the ADC did, it did badly. Aside from the scandalous untruth of such allegations, Dalbah's idle and malicious gossip-it was no more than that-harmed the collective Arab cause, leaving anger and more factionalism in its wake. Moreover, it should be noted that given the extremely inhospitable American political setting to the Arab cause, the ADC has been very successful in Washington and nationally as an organization reb.u.t.ting charges against Arabs in the media, protecting individuals from government persecution after 9/11, and keeping Arab Americans involved and partic.i.p.ating in the national debate. Because of this success under Asali, factionalism has infected the organization's employees, who have suddenly embarked on a campaign of personal vilification masked as ideological argument. Of course, everyone has the right to criticize, but why in the face of such threats as those we face in the United States should we splinter and weaken ourselves like this, when it is clear that the only beneficiary is the pro-Israel lobby? Organizations like the ADC are first of all American organizations and cannot function as partisans in struggles of the kind that recall those of Fakahani in the mid-1970s.

Perhaps the main reason for Arab factionalism at every level of our societies, at home and abroad, is the marked absence of ideals and role models. Since Gamal Abdel Na.s.ser's death, whatever one may have thought of some of his more ruinous policies, no figure has captured the Arab imagination or had a role in setting a popular liberation struggle. Look at the disaster of the PLO, which has been reduced from the days of its glory to an old unshaven man, sitting at a broken-down table, in half a house in Ramalla