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October 26, 2001
Rahul
Mahajan
Poisoning
the Well
Sen. Russ Feingold
Why I Opposed
the
Anti-Terrorism Bill
John Troyer
Put
the War to a Vote
Norman Madarasz
What It
Means to be
Against the War
Patrick
Cockburn
Northern
Alliance Attacks
US Bombing Strategy
Richard Lloyd Parry
Terrible Images
of a "Just" War
October 25, 2001
Ghassan
Andoni
Raid
on Bethlehem
N.D. Jayaprakash
From
Hiroshima to NYC
Evan Schultz
Memo
to Ashcroft:
Read Marbury
The Sunshine
Project
Assault
on the BioWeapons
Convention
Sarah
Turner
Cashing
In on Patriotism
Latin American Colloquium
on Systemology
The Meridia Manifesto
Noam Chomsky
The
New War on Terror
October 24, 2001
Michael
Colby
Radioactive
Mail?
Lori Allen
Life
in an Occupied Land
During Wartime
Peter
Swire
New
Anti-Terrorism Bill
Poses Old Risks
Irina
Malenko
A
Non-Western Voice
David
Vest
Welcome
to Web Hell
Patrick Cockburn
Battle
of Mazar Gets Nasty
October 23, 2001
Steve
Perry
Anthrax,
Cipro and the Bailout of Bayer
Carl Estabrook
Just War
or
The Rule of Lawlessness?
Patrick
Cockburn
Errant
Bombs at Bagram
George
Monbiot
War
and Oil
Robert
Jensen
Crushing
Academic Dissent
October 22, 2001
Hamit
Dardagan
The
New Newspeak
Tom Turnipseed
War
on the Poor
Patrick Cockburn
Killing
Mullah Omar's Child
David
Vest
The
War on Women
Shepherd
Bliss
Advice
from a Vietnam Vet
Hani Shukrallah
Capital
Strikes Back
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October 26,
2001
A Vision to Lift the Spirit
A Way
Out of the Middle East Impasse
By Edward Said
With the bombs and missiles falling on Afghanistan
in the high-altitude US destruction that is Operation Enduring
Freedom, the Palestine question may seem tangential to the altogether
more urgent events in Central Asia. It would be a mistake to
think so -- and not just because Osama Bin Laden and his followers
(no one knows how many there are, in theory or in practice) have
tried to capture Palestine as a rhetorical part of their unconscionable
campaign of terror; for so too has Israel, for its own purposes.
With the killing of Cabinet Minister Rahavam Zeevi on 17 October
as retaliation by the PFLP for the assassination of its leader
by Israel last August, General Sharon's sustained campaign against
the Palestine Authority as Israel's Bin Laden has risen to a
new, semi- hysterical pitch. Israel has been assassinating Palestinian
leaders and militants (over 60 of them to date) for the past
several months, and can't have been surprised that its illegal
methods would sooner or later prompt Palestinian retaliation
in kind. But why one set of killings should be acceptable and
others not is a question Israel and its supporters are unable
to answer. So the violence goes on, with Israel's occupation
the more deadly, and the vastly more destructive, causing huge
civilian suffering: in the period between 18 and 21 October,
six Palestinian towns re-occupied by Israeli forces; five more
Palestinian activists assassinated plus 21 civilians killed and
160 injured; curfews imposed everywhere -- and all this Israel
has the gall to compare with the US war against Afghanistan and
terrorism.
Thus, the frustration and subsequent
impasse in pressing the claims of a people dispossessed for 53
years and militarily occupied for 34 have definitively gone beyond
the main arena of struggle and are willy-nilly tied in all sorts
of ways to the global war against terrorism. Israel and its supporters
worry that the US will sell them out, all the while protesting
contradictorily that Israel isn't the issue in the new war. Palestinians,
Arabs and Muslims generally have felt either uneasiness or a
creeping guilt by association that attaches to them in the public
realm, despite efforts by political leaders to keep dissociating
Bin Laden from Islam and the Arabs: but they, too, keep referring
to Palestine as the great symbolic nexus of their disaffection.
In official Washington, however, George
Bush and Colin Powell have more than once revealed unambiguously
that Palestinian self-determination is an important, perhaps
even a central issue. The turbulence of war and its unknown dimensions
and complications (its consequences in places like Saudi Arabia
and Egypt are likely to be dramatic, if as yet unknown) have
stirred up the whole Middle East in striking ways, so that the
need for some genuinely positive change in the status of the
seven million stateless Palestinians is sure to grow in importance,
even though a number of quite dispiriting things about its present
impasse are evident enough now. The main problem is whether or
not the US and the parties are going to resort only to the stopgap
measures that brought us the disastrous Oslo agreement.
The immediate experience of the Al-Aqsa
Intifada has universalised Arab and Muslim powerlessness and
exasperation to a degree never before magnified as it is now.
The Western media hasn't at all conveyed the crushing pain and
humiliation imposed on Palestinians by Israel's collective punishment,
its house demolitions, its invasions of Palestinian areas, its
air bombings and killings, as have the nightly broadcasts by
Al- Jazeera satellite television, or admirable daily reporting
in Ha'aretz by the Israeli journalist Amira Hass and commentators
like her. At the same time, I think, there is widespread understanding
among Arabs that the Palestinians (and, by extension, the other
Arabs) have been traduced and hopelessly misled by their leaders.
An abyss visibly separates nattily suited negotiators who make
declarations in luxurious surroundings and the dusty hell of
the streets of Nablus, Jenin, Hebron, and elsewhere. Schooling
is inadequate; unemployment and poverty rates have climbed to
alarming heights; anxiety and insecurity fill the atmosphere,
with governments unable or unwilling to stop either the rise
of Islamic extremism or an astonishingly flagrant corruption
at the very top. Above all, the brave secularists who protest
at human rights abuses, fight clerical tyranny, and try to speak
and act on behalf of a new modern democratic Arab order are pretty
much left alone in their fight, unassisted by the official culture,
their books and careers sometimes thrown as a sop to mounting
Islamic fury. A huge dank cloud of mediocrity and incompetence
hangs over everyone, and this in turn has given rise to magical
thinking and/or a cult of death that is more prevalent than ever.
I know it is often argued that suicide
bombings are either the result of frustration and desperation,
or that they emerge from the criminal pathology of deranged religious
fanatics. But these are inadequate explanations. The New York
and Washington suicide terrorists were middle-class, far from
illiterate men, perfectly capable of modern planning, audacious
as well as terrifyingly deliberate destruction. The young men
sent out by Hamas and Islamic Jihad do what they are told with
a conviction that suggests clarity of purpose, if not of much
else. The real culprit is a system of primary education that
is woefully piecemeal, cobbled together out of the Qur'an, rote
exercises based on outdated 50-year-old textbooks, hopelessly
large classes, woefully ill-equipped teachers, and a nearly total
inability to think critically. Along with the oversized Arab
armies -- all of them burdened with unusable military hardware
and no record of any positive achievement -- this antiquated
educational apparatus has produced the bizarre failures in logic,
moral reasoning, and appreciation of human life that lead either
to leaps of religious enthusiasm of the worst kind or to a servile
worship of power.
Similar failures in vision and logic
operate on the Israeli side. How it has come to seem morally
possible, and even justifiable, for Israel to maintain and defend
its 34-year occupation fairly boggles the mind, but even Israeli
"peace" intellectuals remain fixated on the supposed
absence of a Palestinian peace camp, forgetting that a people
under occupation doesn't have the same luxury as the occupier
to decide whether or not an interlocutor exists. In the process,
military occupation is taken as an acceptable given and is scarcely
mentioned; Palestinian terrorism becomes the cause, not the effect,
of violence, even though one side possesses a modern military
arsenal (unconditionally supplied by the US), while the other
is stateless, virtually defenceless, savagely persecuted at will,
herded inside 160 little cantons, schools closed, life made impossible.
Worst of all, the daily killing and wounding of Palestinians
is accompanied by the growth of Israeli settlements and the 400,000
settlers who dot the Palestinian landscape without respite.
A recent report issued by Peace Now in
Israel states the following:
1. At the end of June 2001 there were
6,593 housing units in different stages of active construction
in settlements.
2. During the Barak administration, 6,045
housing units were begun in settlements. In fact, settlement
building in the year 2000 reached the highest since 1992, with
4,499 starts.
3. When the Oslo agreements were signed
there were 32,750 housing units in the settlements. Since the
signing of the Oslo agreements 20,371 housing units have been
constructed, representing an increase of 62 per cent in settlements
units.
The essence of the Israeli position is
its total irreconcilability with what the "Jewish state"
wants -- peace and security, even though everything it does assures
neither one nor the other.
The US has underwritten Israel's intransigence
and brutality: there are no two ways about it -- $92 billion
and unending political support, for all the world to see. Ironically,
this was far truer during, rather than either before or after,
the Oslo process. The plain truth of the matter is that anti-
Americanism in the Arab and Muslim world is tied directly to
the US's behaviour, lecturing the world on democracy and justice
while openly supporting their exact opposites. There also is
an undoubted ignorance about the United States in the Arab and
Islamic worlds, and there has been far too great a tendency to
use rhetorical tirades and sweeping general condemnation instead
of rational analysis and critical understanding of America. The
same is true of Arab attitudes to Israel.
Both the Arab governments and the intellectuals
have failed in important ways on this matter. Governments have
failed to devote any time or resources to an aggressive cultural
policy that puts across an adequate representation of culture,
tradition and contemporary society, with the result that these
things are unknown in the West, leaving unchallenged pictures
of Arabs and Muslims as violent, over-sexed fanatics. The intellectual
failure is no less great. It is simply inadequate to keep repeating
cliches about struggle and resistance that imply a military programme
of action when none is either possible or really desirable. Our
defence against unjust policies is a moral one, and we must first
occupy the moral high ground and then promote understanding of
that position in Israel and the US, something we have never done.
We have refused interaction and debate, disparagingly calling
them only normalisation and collaboration. Refusing to compromise
in putting forth our just position (which is what I am calling
for) cannot possibly be construed as a concession, especially
when it is made directly and forcefully to the occupier or the
author of unjust policies of occupation and reprisal. Why do
we fear confronting our oppressors directly, humanely, persuasively,
and why do we keep believing in precisely the vague ideological
promises of redemptive violence that are little different from
the poison spewed by Bin Laden and the Islamists? The answer
to our needs is in principled resistance, well-organised civil
disobedience against military occupation and illegal settlement,
and an educational programme that promotes coexistence, citizenship
and the worth of human life.
But we are now in an intolerable impasse,
requiring more than ever a genuine return to the all- but-abandoned
bases of peace that were proclaimed at Madrid in 1991: UN Resolutions
242 and 332, land for peace. There can be no peace without pressure
on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories, including
Jerusalem, and -- as the Mitchell report affirmed -- to dismantle
its settlements. This can obviously be done in a phased way,
with some sort of immediate emergency protection for undefended
Palestinians, but the great failing of Oslo must be remedied
now, at the start: a clearly articulated end to occupation, the
establishment of a viable, genuinely independent Palestinian
state, and the existence of peace through mutual recognition.
These goals have to be stated as the objective of negotiations,
a beacon shining at the end of the tunnel. Palestinian negotiators
have to be firm about this, and not use the re-opening of talks
-- if any should now begin, in this atmosphere of harsh Israeli
war on the Palestinian people -- as an excuse simply to return
to Oslo. In the end, though, only the US can restore negotiations,
with European, Islamic, Arab, and African support; but this must
be done through the United Nations, which must be the essential
sponsor of the effort.
And since the Palestinian-Israeli struggle
has been so humanly impoverishing I would suggest that important
symbolic gestures of recognition and responsibility, undertaken
perhaps under the auspices of a Mandela or a panel of impeccably
credentialed peace-makers, should try to establish justice and
compassion as crucial elements in the proceedings. Unfortunately,
it is perhaps true that neither Arafat nor Sharon are suited
to so high an enterprise. The Palestinian political scene must
absolutely be overhauled to represent seamlessly what every Palestinian
longs for -- peace with dignity and justice and, most important,
decent, equal coexistence with Israeli Jews. We need to move
beyond the undignified shenanigans, the disgraceful backing and
filling of a leader who hasn't in a long time come anywhere near
the sacrifices of his long- suffering people. The same is true
of Israelis, who are led abysmally by the likes of General Sharon.
What we need is a vision that can lift the much abused spirit
beyond the sordid present, something that will not fail when
presented unwaveringly as what people need to aspire to. CP
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