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May 19, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Canada,
NAFTA and Kyoto
May 18, 2002
M.G. Piety
Economic Fiction:
From Here to Annuity?
Michael Colby
Bush Fiddled
While
New York Burned
May 17, 2002
Wayne Madsen
Fox News Flashback:
Defending McKinney
James T. Phillips
Ceasefires
and Terrorists
Phillipe Dambournet
The Truth at Last:
Bush as the Energizer Bunny
Lori Berenson
In Defense
of Political Prisoners
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Terrorist Warnings
Hussein Ibish
Clarifying
the Obstacles
to Peace in Palestine
Alexander Cockburn
Israel and "Anti-Semitism"
May 16, 2002
Marylin Robinson
A Garden
in Tent City, But Where Do You Bathe?
Paul de Rooij
Worse than CNN?
The BBC and Israel
David Krieger
The Bush/Putin
Agreement:
Nuclear Dangers Remain
Steve Perry
Unsafe at Any Speed:
Youth, Sex and the Heresies
of Judith Levine
May 15, 2002
Ahmad Faruqui
Revisiting
Camp David
Rick Giombetti
Spiderman v. Pentagon:
Working Class Hero Battles Corrupt Defense Contractors
Stanton / Madsen
When the
War Hits Home:
Planning for Martial Law, Telegovernance and Suspension of Elections
May 14, 2002
Jacob Levich
Leaving the Truth Out?
Alternative Online Publication
Tells the Big Lie about Palestine
Michael Colby
Bush's
Cuba Blunder
Dave Marsh
Scapegoats: the Music Industry's War
on Cassettes
Jensen / Mahajan
US Power
Mideast Power Plays
May 13, 2002
Robert Fisk
Why Does John Malkovich
Want to Kill Me?
Mokhiber / Weissman
IMF
and World Bank:
Out of Control
Dean Baker
Will Darth Vader do Time?
The Enron Saga Continues
Nelson Valdés
American
Democracy:
A Lesson for Cubans
May 12, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Why Is America Acting Like This? A
Letter to European Friends
John Patrick Leary
Aiding Colombia
Kathleen Christison
Israel
and Ethics
May 11, 2002
Joady Guthrie
The Holy Lands:
A Peace Vision
Patrick Cockburn
Bombing
Iraq:
the Pentagon Prepares a Prolonged Campaign
George Sunderland
CounterPunch Special
Our
Vichy Congress: Israel's Stranglehold on Capitol Hill
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Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
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May
19, 2002
Crisis for American Jews
by Edward Said
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
organisations, and other celebrities, each of whom expressed
unfailing solidarity with everything Israel was doing.
The administration was represented by
Paul Wolfowitz, number two at the Department of Defence, 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 in passing 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 60,000 people in Tel Aviv, the increasing
number of military reservists who refuse service in the occupied
territories, the sustained protest of (admitted 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 copies, ran
a dossier entitled "Crisis for American Jews," the
theme being that "in New York, as in Israel, [it is] an
issue of survival." I won't try to summarise 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 as 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
organisations have been running all kinds of attacks on Islamic
education in the Arab world, Pakistan and even in the US. These
have accused Islamic authorities, as well as Arafat's Palestinian
Authority, of teaching youngsters hatred of America and Israel,
the virtues of suicide bombing, 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 it was
given to Jews by God, 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 towards 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 35 year old occupation of the West
Bank and Gaza, to say nothing of massacres, bombardments, expulsions,
land expropriations, killings, sieges, humiliations, years of
collective punishment and assassinations that have gone on for
decades were as nothing, since Israel has been victimised 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 colonisation
could never be admitted. Hence the collective Zionist practice
of either denying the fact or, more specially in the US where
the realities are not so available for actual verification, lying
about it by producing a counter-reality. For decades it has been
decreed to schoolchildren 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 transmuted 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 dehumanised
to serve a political- ideological end, namely to keep support
high for Israel.
What is so astonishing is that notions
of co- existence between peoples play no part in this kind of
distortion. Whereas American Jews want to be recognised 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 US 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 mentioned 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
defence of what Wolfowitz said in his speech didn't even refer
to the Palestinians he was referring to, but defended President
Bush's Middle East policy.
This is de-humanisation 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 co-existence and peace, the less likely
will they be able 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
constituency, 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.
Edward Said
writes a weekly column for the Cairo-based al-Ahram.
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