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CounterPunch
January
25, 2003
When Will Arabs
Resist?
A Panorama of
Desolation
by EDWARD SAID
One opens the New York Times on a daily basis
to read the most recent article about the preparations for war
that are taking place in the United States. Another battalion,
one more set of aircraft carriers and cruisers, an ever-increasing
number of aircraft, new contingents of officers are being moved
to the Persian Gulf area. An enormous, deliberately intimidating
force is being built up by America overseas, while inside the
country, economic and social bad news multiply with a joint relentlessness.
The huge capitalist machine seems to
be faltering, even as it grinds down the vast majority of citizens.
None the less, George Bush proposes another large tax cut for
the 1% of the population that is comparatively rich. The public
education system is in crisis and health insurance for 50 million
Americans simply does not exist. Israel asks for $15bn in additional
loan guarantees and military aid. And the unemployment rates
in the US mount inexorably, as more jobs are lost every day.
Nevertheless, preparations for an unimaginably
costly war continue without either public approval or, at least
until very recently, dramatically noticeable disapproval. A generalised
indifference among the majority of the population (which may
conceal great overall fear, ignorance and apprehension) has
greeted the administration's warmongering and its strangely
ineffective response to the challenge forced on it recently by
North Korea. In the case of Iraq, with no weapons of mass destruction
to speak of, the US plans a war; in the case of North Korea,
it offers economic and energy aid. What a humiliating difference
between contempt for the Arabs and respect for North Korea, an
equally grim and cruel dictatorship.
In the Arab and Muslim worlds, the situation
appears more peculiar. For almost a year American politicians,
regional experts, administration officials and journalists have
repeated the charges that have become standard fare so far as
Islam and the Arabs are concerned. Most of this predates September
11. To today's practically unanimous chorus has been added the
authority of the UN human development report on the Arab world,
which certified that Arabs dramatically lag behind the rest of
the world in democracy, knowledge and women's rights.
Everyone says (with some justification,
of course) that Islam needs reform and that the Arab educational
system is a disaster--in effect, a school for religious fanatics
and suicide bombers funded not just by crazy imams and their
wealthy followers (such as Osama bin Laden) but also by governments
who are the supposed allies of the US.
The only "good" Arabs are those
who appear in the media decrying modern Arab culture and society
without reservation. I recall the lifeless cadences of their
sentences for, with nothing positive to say about themselves
or their people and language, they simply regurgitate the tired
American formulas already flooding the airwaves and pages of
print. We lack democracy, they say, we haven't challenged Islam
enough, we need to do more about driving away the spectre of
Arab nationalism and the credo of Arab unity. That is all discredited,
ideological rubbish. Only what we and our American instructors
say about the Arabs and Islam--vague, recycled Orientalist clichés
repeated by tireless mediocrities such as Bernard Lewis--are
true, they insist. The rest isn't realistic or pragmatic enough.
"We" need to join modernity--modernity in effect being
western, globalised, free marketed, democratic, whatever those
words might be taken to mean. There would be an essay to be written
about the prose style of licensed academics like Fuad Ajami,
Fawwaz Gerges, Kanan Makiya, Shibli Talhami, Mamoon Fandy,
whose very language reeks of subservience, inauthenticity and
the hopelessly stilted mimicry that has been thrust upon them.
The clash of civilisations that George
Bush and his minions are trying to fabricate as a cover for a
pre-emptive oil and hegemony war against Iraq is supposed to
result in a triumph of democratic nation-building, regime change
and forcible modernisation à l'Américaine. Never
mind the bombs and the ravages of the sanctions, which are unmentioned.
This will be a purifying war whose goal is to throw out Saddam
and his men and replace them with a redrawn map of the whole
region. New Sykes Picot. New Balfour. New Wilsonian 14 points.
New world altogether. Iraqis, we are told by the Iraqi dissidents,
will welcome their liberation, and perhaps forget entirely about
their past sufferings. Perhaps.
Meanwhile, the soul-and-body destroying
situation in Palestine worsens all the time. There seems no force
capable of stopping Ariel Sharon and his defence minister Shaul
Mofaz, who bellow their defiance to the whole world. We forbid,
we punish, we ban, we break, we destroy. The torrent of unbroken
violence against an entire people continues.
As I write these lines, I am sent an
announcement that the village of Al-Daba' in the Qalqilya area
of the West Bank is about to be wiped out by 60-tonne American-made
Israeli bulldozers: 250 Palestinians will lose their 42 houses,
700 dunums of agricultural land, a mosque and an elementary school
for 132 children. The UN stands by, looking on as its resolutions
are flouted on an hourly basis. Alas, George Bush identifies
with Sharon, not with the 16-year-old Palestinian kid who is
used as a human shield by Israeli soldiers.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority
offers a return to peacemaking and, presumably, to Oslo. Having
been burned for 10 years, Arafat seems inexplicably to want to
have another go at it. His faithful lieutenants make declarations
and write opinion pieces for the press, suggesting their willingness
to accept anything, more or less. Remarkably, though, the great
mass of this heroic people seems willing to go on, without peace
and without respite, bleeding, going hungry, dying day by day.
They have too much dignity and confidence in the justice of their
cause to submit shamefully to Israel, as their leaders have done.
What could be more discouraging for the average Gazan who goes
on resisting Israeli occupation than to see his or her leaders
kneel as supplicants before the Americans?
In this entire panorama of desolation,
what catches the eye is the utter passivity and helplessness
of the Arab world as a whole. The American government and its
servants issue statement after statement of purpose, they move
troops and material, they transport tanks and destroyers, but
the Arabs individually and collectively can barely muster a bland
refusal. At most they say no, you cannot use military bases in
our territory, only to reverse themselves a few days later.
Why is there such silence and such astounding
helplessness? The largest power in history is about to launch
a war against a sovereign Arab country now ruled by a dreadful
regime, the clear purpose of which is not only to destroy the
Ba'ath regime but to redesign the entire region. The Pentagon
has made no secret that its plans are to redraw the map of the
whole Arab world, perhaps changing other regimes and borders
in the process. No one can be shielded from the cataclysm if
and when it comes. And yet, there is only long silence followed
by a few vague bleats of polite demurral in response. Millions
of people will be affected, yet America contemptuously plans
for their future without consulting them. Do we deserve such
racist derision?
This is not only unacceptable: it is
impossible to believe. How can a region of almost 300 million
Arabs wait passively for the blows to fall without attempting
a collective roar of resistance? Has the Arab will completely
dissolved? Even a prisoner about to be executed usually has some
last words to pronounce. Why is there now no last testimonial
to an era of history, to a civilisation about to be crushed and
transformed utterly, to a society that, despite its drawbacks
and weaknesses, nevertheless goes on functioning?
Arab babies are born every hour, children
go to school, men and women marry and work and have children,
they play and laugh and eat, they are sad, they suffer illness
and death. There is love and companionship, friendship and excitement.
Yes, Arabs are repressed and misruled, terribly misruled, but
they manage to go on with the business of living despite everything.
This is the reality that both the Arab leaders and the US ignore
when they fling empty gestures at the so-called "Arab street"
invented by banal Orientalists.
Who is now asking the existential questions
about our future as a people? The task cannot be left to a cacophony
of religious fanatics and submissive, fatalistic sheep. But that
seems to be the case. The Arab governments--no, most of the Arab
countries from top to bottom--sit back in their seats and just
wait as America postures, lines up, threatens and ships out more
soldiers and F-16s to deliver the punch. The silence is deafening.
Years of sacrifice and struggle, of bones
broken in hundreds of prisons and torture chambers from the Atlantic
to the Gulf, families destroyed, endless poverty and suffering.
Huge, expensive armies. For what?
This is not a matter of party or ideology
or faction: it's a matter of what the great theologian Paul
Tillich used to call ultimate seriousness. Technology, modernisation
and certainly globalisation are not the answer for what threatens
us as a people now. We have in our tradition an entire body of
secular and religious discourse that treats of beginnings and
endings, of life and death, of love and anger, of society and
history. This is there, but no voice, no individual with great
vision and moral authority seems able now to tap into that and
bring it to attention.
We are on the eve of a catastrophe that
our political, moral and religious leaders can only just denounce
a little bit while, behind whispers and winks and closed doors,
they make plans somehow to ride out the storm. They think of
survival, and perhaps of heaven. But who is in charge of the
present, the worldly, the land, the water, the air and the lives
dependent on each other for existence? No one seems to be in
charge.
There is a wonderful expression that
very precisely and ironically catches our unacceptable helplessness,
our passivity and inability to help ourselves now when our strength
is most needed. The expression is: will the last person to leave
please turn out the lights? We are that close to a kind of upheaval
that will leave very little standing and perilously little left
even to record, except for the last injunction that begs for
extinction.
Hasn't the time come for us collectively
to demand and formulate a genuinely Arab alternative to the wreckage
about to engulf our world? This is not only a trivial matter
of regime change, although God knows that we can do with quite
a bit of that. Surely it can't be a return to Oslo, another offer
to Israel to please accept our existence and let us live in peace,
another cringing, crawling, inaudible plea for mercy? Will no
one come out into the light of day to express a vision for our
future that isn't based on a script written by Donald Rumsfeld
and Paul Wolfowitz, those two symbols of vacant power and overweening
arrogance? I hope someone is listening.
Edward Said
is professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia
University, New York. His books include Orientalism and Covering
Islam. His latest work, Parallels and Paradoxes, cowritten with
Daniel Barenboim, will be published by Bloomsbury in March
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January 18
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