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June 17, 2002
Dave Marsh
Corporate
Buy Outs and the Decline of Teen Jive
Robert Jensen
Rhetoric
Distorts Realities
June 15 / 16, 2002
Tanweer Akram
A Review
of Noam Chomsky's 9-11
Daniel Wolff
The Day
They Shot a Wolf in the Ghetto and What It Meant
Ralph Nader
A Corporate
Crime State
Alexander Cockburn
Tourism
in Ancient Rome
David Vest
Have You
Been Serviced?
Karl Kraus
A Minor
Detail
Alexander Cockburn
The
Terrorism of Everyday Life
June 14, 2002
Mark Weisbrot
US Trade
Policy:
"Do as We Say, Not as We Did"
Starhawk
The Boy Who Kissed the Soldier
David Krieger
Farewell
to the ABM Treaty
Tom Turnipseed
The Fear Factor to Promote
War and Trample Truth
Steve Perry
How the
Bush Adminstration Buried Coleen Rowley
June 13, 2002
Linda Belanger
Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict:
The Story Behind the Headlines
Amira Hass
Indefinite
Siege
Mokhiber / Weissman
Time to Put Lives Over Patents
Robert Fisk
Bush's Weird
War
Stanton / Madsen
Democracy
in Crisis:
What is to be Done?
Roldan Tomasz Suárez
Venezuela:
Five Facts
About the Coup
June 12, 2002
Fran Shor
Dirty Bombs, Blowback
and Imperial Projections
Dave Marsh
Shelley
Stewart, Radio and the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement
Chris Floyd
Murder, Inc.
June 11, 2002
Omar Barghouti
On Dance, Identity and War
Robert Fisk
The Bush
Afghan Gang:
Murderers, Gangsters, Stooges
Minerva Wright
The Donkeys of the Holy Land
David Krieger
Stopping
a Nuclear War
in South Asia
June 10, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
Executioner's Last Songs
June 8/9, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Mademoiselle
M.
Or Getting Screwed in Paris
Susan Davis
Sleepless
in the Suburbs
Curing Insomnia: a new use for The Nation?
George Sunderland
"Send
in the Weekly
Standard": The Screaming Pundits Assault Corps
June 7, 2002
Michael Colby
Bush to the Nation:
You're All Cops Now
Tanweer Akram
Howard
Zinn's "Terrorism
and War": a review
David Krieger
New Security Challenges
Sam Bahour
The Palestinian
Intifada:
A Very American Struggle
Tom Turnipseed
A Crisis of Confidence
in US Leadership
June 6, 2002
Michael Colby
White House
vs. EPA:
Political Hot Air and
Global Warming
Ron Jacobs
The Indo-Pakistan Conflict:
It's Just a Shot Away
Francis Boyle
Take Sharon
to The Hague:
Prosecute Israeli War Crimes
at Jenin
CounterPunch Bulletin
60 Minutes and President Chavez's
Censored F-Word
Mark Weisbrot
Spying
and Lying:
The FBI's Shameful Past
June 5, 2002
Robert Fisk
Berlusconi the Censor
Danielle Brian
Nuclear
Plants and Terrorism
Ardeshir Cowasjee
For What Do We Fight?
George Monbiot
Kashmir
on the Brink
Michael Neumann
What is Antisemitism?
June 4, 2002
Dave Marsh
Bono the Useful Idiot
William Evan / Francis
Boyle
Kashmir:
Invoking Intl. Law to Avoid Nuclear War
Cockburn / St. Clair
The Future Wellstone Deserves
June 3, 2002
Ramdas / Makhijani
India,
Pakistan and Nukes:
A Road Map to Peace
Fran Shor
Meanwhile, Back in Afghanistan
Neve Gordon
The Caterpillar
Effect
Resources:
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Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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
Environmental Bad Guys
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The
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Al Gore:
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June 17,
2002
Palestinian
Elections Now
by Edward Said
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 Yasser Arafat, cut up
the West Bank into fenced-in cantons, re-install 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 neither bring
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
principally as a way of combating "terrorism," a panacea
of a word that takes no account of history, context, society
or anything else. George 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  over-all 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 US support
including most probably ending Arafat's career. Beyond that,
US 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 co- existence with a
Palestinian state, as there are American Jews who want similar
things, but neither group has any determining power now. 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 mass 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. While
it may be a good thing to have it on record as a counter-weight
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
thoroughly sick with the mediocre inaction of their rulers. Second,
of course, 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 35 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 would
simply either behave or quietly go away. Third, of course, is
the long-standing desire of Arab leaders to ingratiate themselves
with the US and, among themselves, to vie for the title of most
important US 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 US.
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 US over them.
Fifth, is Yasser Arafat and his circle
of associates 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 became 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, 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 US 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 defence or advance preparation.
Why then provoke a war whose victims would be mostly innocent
people when you have neither the military capacity to fight one
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 reorganise
the security services. I have long pointed out in these columns
that Arafat's security apparatus was always designed principally
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 used the 15 or 19 or whatever the right
number of groups was to play each off against the other, a tactic
he perfected in Fakahani, and which is patently stupid so far
as the general good is concerned. He never really reined in Hamas
and Islamic Jihad which suited Israel perfectly: it would have
a ready- made excuse to use the so-called martyr's (mindless)
suicide bombings to further diminish and punish the whole people.
If there is one thing along with Arafat's ruinous regime that
has done us more harm as a cause 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 prove to the
US, 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 programme of reform, elections, reorganising
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 clamouring both for reform and elections.
As far as I am concerned, this clamour 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 were 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 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, anymore 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 occurred (as during the period after the
fall of the monarchy because of the French Revolution, or with
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, 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
US, or the Arabs to do this: it must absolutely be done by Palestinians
themselves by way of a Constituent Assembly 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 re-
organising society from the ruinous, indeed catastrophically
incoherent condition in which it is to be found. The basic job
for such an Assembly is to construct an emergency system of order
that has two purposes. One, to keep Palestinian life going in
an orderly way with full participation 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. Kalishnikoffs are
not effective weapons when the balance of power is so lopsided.
What is needed is a creative method of struggle that mobilises
all the human resources at our disposal to highlight, isolate
and gradually make untenable the main aspects of Israeli occupation
e.g., settlements, settlement roads, roadblocks and house demolitions.
The present group around Arafat is hopelessly incapable of thinking
of, much less 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: that it proposed the vision of
a multi- racial 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 co-existence 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 re-make 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 US administration is effectively controlled by
the Christian Right and the Israeli lobby (within 24 hours, everything
that George Bush seems to have agreed with President 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 realised the better the
chance we have to lead ourselves out of the present impasse.
Edward Said
writes a weekly column for the Cairo-based al-Ahram.
Today's
Features
Dave Marsh
Corporate
Buy Outs and the Decline of Teen Jive
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Rhetoric
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