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CounterPunch
August
20, 2002
Disunity and Factionalism
by Edward Said
What lies behind the Pavlovian regularity with
which Arabs try to hurt and impede each other rather than uniting
behind a common purpose, asks Edward Said
Underlying most of the findings in the
much cited 2002 UNDP Arab Human Development Report is the extraordinary
lack of coordination between 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 between them and virtually none
in the economic sphere. As for more specific issues like policy
towards Israel, the US and the Palestinians, and despite a common
front of embarrassed hand-wringing and disgraceful powerlessness,
one senses a frightened determination first of all not to offend
the US, 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 over-all Arab future or security. Yet when it comes
to the perpetuation of each regime, the Arab ruling classes 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 demonstrations not only of support for Palestine, but also
protests at the immobilising 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 12 Palestinian
factions to exist, each fighting over uselessly academic issues
of ideology and organisation while Israel and the local militias
bled us dry. Looking back over the Lebanese days that came to
a terrible end in Sabra and Shatilla, whose purpose did it serve
to have the Popular Front, Fatah, and the Democratic Front --
to mention only three factions -- fighting among each other,
to have leaders within Fatah 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 Israel's purposes? And
what cause has been served by Yasser Arafat's tactics of creating
factions, subgroups and security forces to war against each other
during the Oslo process and leave his people unprotected and
unprepared for the Israeli destruction of the infrastructure
and re- occupation 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 disorganisation in the end damages our
very existence as a people. Nothing can be more disheartening
than the disputes that corrode Arab expatriate organisations,
especially in places like the US 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
programme on Al-Jazeera television in which the two participants
and a needlessly provocative moderator vehemently discussed Arab-American
activism during the present crisis. One man, a certain Mr Dalbah,
identified vaguely as a "political analyst" in Washington
(without apparent affiliation or institutional connection) spent
all of his time discrediting the one serious national Arab-American
group, the Arab-American 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 only been in the US
for 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 programme, 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 organisation
that has been doing by far the best work in a country where Arabs
are outnumbered and out-organised not only by all the many, much
larger and extremely well- financed Zionist organisations, but
also where the society itself and its media are so hostile to
Arabs, Islam, and their causes in general? None at all, of course.
Yet there remains this pernicious factionalism by which, with
almost Pavlovian regularity, Arabs try to hurt and impede each
other rather than uniting behind a common purpose. 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 programme 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 ADC, and to its current president Dr Ziad Asli,
a public-spirited physician who voluntarily gave up his medical
practice to run the organisation on a pro bono basis. Dalbah
kept insinuating that both these activists were motivated by
reasons of personal monetary gain, and that whatever 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, ADC
has been very successful in Washington and nationally as an organisation
rebutting charges against Arabs in the media, protecting individuals
from government persecution after 9/11, and keeping Arab-Americans
involved and participating in the national debate. Because of
this success under Asli, factionalism has infected the organisation's
employees who suddenly embarked on a campaign of personal vilification
masked as ideological argument. Of course everyone has the right
to criticise but why in the face of such threats as those we
face in the US should we splinter and weaken ourselves like this,
when it is clear that the only beneficiary is the pro-Israel
lobby? Organisations like ADC are first of all American organisations
and cannot function as partisans in struggles of the kind that
recall those of Fakahani in the mid-seventies.
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 Abdel-Nasser'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 Ramallah, trying to survive at any cost, whether or
not he sells out, whether or not he says foolish things, whether
what he says means anything or not. (A couple of weeks ago, he
was quoted as saying that he now accepts the 2000 Clinton plan,
though the only problem is that it is now 2002 and Clinton is
no longer president.) It has been years since Arafat represented
his people, their sufferings and cause, and like his other Arab
counterparts, he hangs on like a much-too-ripe fruit without
real purpose or position. There is thus no strong moral centre
in the Arab world today. Cogent analysis and rational discussion
have given way to fanatical ranting, concerted action on behalf
of liberation has been reduced to suicidal attacks, and the idea
if not the practice of integrity and honesty as a model to be
followed has simply disappeared. So corrupting has the atmosphere
exuded from the Arab world become that one scarcely knows why
some people are successful while others are thrown in jail.
As a terribly shocking instance, consider
the Egyptian sociologist Saadeddin Ibrahim's fate. Released by
a civil court a few months ago, he has now been tried, found
guilty and sentenced to a cruelly unjustified sentence by the
state security court for exactly those "crimes" for
which he was earlier released. Where is the moral justification
for such toying with a person's life, career and reputation?
A matter of months ago, he was a trusted adviser to the government
and on the boards of several Arab institutes and projects. Now
he is considered to be a condemned criminal. Whose interests,
whether by virtue of national unity, or coherent strategy, or
moral imperative, does his gratuitous punishment in this way
serve? More factionalism, more disintegration, more sense of
drift and fear and a pervading sense of frustrated justice.
Arabs have for so long been deprived
of a sense of participation and citizenship by their rulers that
most of us have lost even the capacity of understanding what
personal commitment to a cause bigger than ourselves might mean.
The Palestinian struggle -- that a people should endure such
unremitting cruelty from Israel and still not give up, is a collective
miracle -- but why can't the lessons of living (as opposed to
suicidal, nihilistic) resistance be made clearer, and more possible
to follow? This is the real problem, the absence all over the
Arab world and abroad of a leadership that communicates with
its people, not via communiques that express an impersonal, almost
disdainful disregard of them as citizens, but through the actual
practice of concerted dedication and personal example. Unable
to move the US from its illegal support of Israel's crimes, Arab
leaders simply throw out one "peace" proposal (the
same one) after another, each of which is dismissed derisively
by both Israel and the US. Bush and his psychopathic henchman
Rumsfeld keep leaking news of their impending invasion for "regime
change" in Iraq, and the Arabs have still not communicated
a unified deterrent position against this new American insanity.
When individuals and organisations like ADC try to do something
on behalf of a cause they are gunned down by troublemakers who
have little else to do but destroy and disturb.
Surely the time has come to start thinking
of ourselves as a people with a common history and goals, and
not as a collection of cowardly delinquents. But that is up to
each one, and it's no good sitting back blaming "the Arabs"
since, after all, we are the Arabs.
Edward Said
writes a weekly column for the Cairo-based al-Ahram.
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