From Oslo To Iraq And The Road Map Part 3

What puzzles me is that even after eight years of deception and betrayal, the official Palestinian mind finds itself incapable of saying what a disaster Oslo was and instead wants it brought back. That's like asking the executioner if he wouldn't mind sharpening his axe a little before having another go. Of course, one needs to stay in whatever political game is going on, and of course, one must be able to respond directly to questions about agreements, truces, and so forth. But above all, what I find so dismaying is that our spokespersons show signs of being so totally remote from the daily horrors of life for average Palestinians that they never even mention it.

To them I want to say that no matter the occasion, no matter the question, no matter the newspaper or TV or radio journalist, every question must first be answered with a few basic points about the military occupation that has been in place for thirty-four years since 1967. This is the source of violence, this is the source of the main problems, and it is the reason Israel can never have real peace. Our entire political position must be based on ending the occupation, and this must take precedence over any and every other consideration. When Erekat or Shaath or Hanan Ashrawi or Khatib is asked something, for example, about the Mitch.e.l.l report or the Powell visit, the answer should always begin, "So long as there is a military occupation of Palestine by Israel, there can never be peace. Occupation with tanks, soldiers, checkpoints, and settlements is violence, and it is much greater than anything Palestinians have done by way of resistance." Something like that.

These estimable people have to remember that 99 percent of the people reading newspapers or watching TV news all over the world (including Arabs) have simply forgotten-if they ever knew-that Israel is an illegal occupying power and has been for thirty-four years. So we must remind the world of that over and over. Repeat and repeat and repeat. This is not a difficult task, although it is, I believe, absolutely crucial. To remind everyone repeatedly about the Israeli occupation is a necessary repet.i.tion, much more so than stupidly inconsequential and sentimental Israeli- and American-style remarks about peace and violence. Can we learn, or are we condemned to repeat our mistakes forever?

Al-Ahram, July 1925, 2001.

Al-Hayat, July 6, 2001.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

The Price of Camp David.

In July 2000 Bill Clinton convened a meeting of the Israeli and Palestinian leaders.h.i.+ps at the presidential retreat in Camp David so as to finalize a peace agreement that he thought they were ready for. I emphasize Clinton's role in all this because it was characteristic of the man whom Palestinians had placed their hopes in, greeted in Ramallah and Gaza like a hero, and deferred to on every occasion, that he rushed together the two opponents, locked together for decades in a convoluted struggle, in order to be able for his own selfish purposes to say he had engineered a historical achievement.

Yasir Arafat didn't want to go. Ehud Barak was there mainly to extract a promise from the Palestinians that would end the conflict and, more important, end all Palestinian claims against Israel (including the right of return for refugees) once the Oslo process had been concluded. Clinton had always been an opportunist first and last, a Zionist second, and a clumsy politician third. The Palestinians were the weakest party; they were badly led and poorly prepared. Clinton surmised that because his (and Barak's) terms in office were ending, he could produce a peace ceremony based on Palestinian capitulation, a ceremony that would forever enshrine his presidency by erasing the memory of Monica Lewinsky and the developing scandal of Marc Rich's pardon.

This great plan, of course, failed completely. Even American sources recently made public support the Palestinian argument that Barak's "generous offer" was neither an offer nor generous. Robert Malley, a member of Clinton's White Housebased National Security Council, has published a report on what took place, and although it is critical of Palestinian tactics during the Camp David summit, it makes clear that Israel wasn't even close to offering what the Palestinians' legitimate national aspirations required. But Malley spoke out in July 2001, a full year after the Camp David summit ended and well after Israel's well-oiled propaganda machine launched the by-now-standard chorus that Arafat had mischievously rejected the best imaginable Israeli offer. This chorus was abetted by Clinton's repeated claim that, whereas Barak was courageous, Arafat was only disappointing. And so the thesis has lodged in public discourse ever since, to Palestine's immense detriment. Unnoticed was the observation made by an Israeli information flunky that after Camp David and Taba, no Palestinians played a consistent role disseminating a Palestinian version of the debacle. Thus Israel has had the field to itself, with results in exploitation and backlash that have been virtually incalculable.

I was well aware of the damage being accordingly done to the intifada as a result of Israel's self-portrayal as a rejected peace-lover last autumn and winter. I made phone calls to members of Arafat's entourage urging them to convince their leader of how Israel was making use of Palestinian silence, which it quickly established was the verbal equivalent of Palestinian violence. Word reached me that Arafat was adamant, that he refused to address his people, the Israelis, or the world, no doubt hoping that fate or his own miraculous powers of noncommunication would affect the Israeli disinformation campaign. In any event, my urging did absolutely no good. Arafat and his numerous lackeys remained ineffective, uncomprehending, and of course largely silent.

We must blame ourselves first of all. Neither our leaders.h.i.+p nor our intellectuals seem to have grasped that even a brave anticolonial uprising cannot on its own explain itself, and that what we (and the other Arabs) regard as our right of resistance can be made to seem by Israel like the most unprincipled terrorism or violence. In the meantime, Israel has persuaded the world to forget its own violent occupation and its terrorist collective punishment-to say nothing of its unstoppable ethnic cleansing-against the Palestinian people.

Indeed, we have made matters worse for ourselves by allowing the inadequate Arafat to come and go as he pleases on the question of violence. Every human rights doc.u.ment ever formulated ent.i.tles a people to resistance against military occupation, the destruction of homes and property, and the expropriation of land for the purpose of settlements. Arafat and his advisers seem not to have understood that when they blindly entered Israel's unilateral dialectic of violence and terror-verbally speaking-they had in essence given up their right of resistance. Instead of making clear that any relinquis.h.i.+ng of resistance had to be accompanied by Israel's withdrawal and/or equal relinquis.h.i.+ng of its occupation, the Palestinian people were made vulnerable by their leaders.h.i.+p to charges of terror and violence. Everything Israel did became retaliation. Everything Palestinians did was either violence or terror or (usually) both. The resulting spectacle of a war criminal like Sharon denouncing Palestinian "violence" has been little short of disgusting.

Another consequence of Palestinian inept.i.tude was that it let the so-called Israeli peace activists off the hook, turning that sad collection of camp-followers into silent allies of Israel's lamentable Sharon-led government. A few brave and principled Israelis like some of the New Historians-Jeff Halper, Michel Warschavsky, and their groups-are an exception. How many times have we heard the official "peaceniks" rant on about their "disappointment" at Palestinian "ingrat.i.tude" and violence? How rarely does anyone tell them that their role is to pressure their governments to end the occupation and not (as they always have) to lecture a people under occupation about their magnanimity and disappointed hopes? Would only but the most reactionary French person in 1944 be tolerant of German pleas to be "reasonable" about Germany's occupation of France? No, of course not. But we tolerate the hectoring Israeli "peace" proponents to go on and on about how "generous" Barak has been, without reminding them that every one of their leaders has made his name as a killer or oppressor of Arabs, from 1948 to the present. David Ben-Gurion presided over the Nakbah; Levi Eshkol over the conquests of 1967; Menachem Begin over Deir Ya.s.sin and Lebanon; Yitzhak Rabin over the bone-breaking of the first intifada and, before that, over the evacuation of sixty thousand unarmed Palestinian civilians from Ramleh and Lydda in 1948; Peres over the destruction of Qana; Barak personally took part in the a.s.sa.s.sination of Palestinian leaders; Sharon led the ma.s.sacre of Qibya and was responsible for Sabra and Shatila. The real role of the Israeli peace camp is to do what it has never seriously done, which is to acknowledge all of that and to prevent further outrages by the Israeli army and air force against a dispossessed and stateless people, not to be free and easy with advice to Palestinians or to express hopes and disappointment to the people whom Israel has oppressed for over half a century.

But once the Palestinian leaders.h.i.+p forsook its principles and pretended that it was a great power capable of playing the game of nations, it brought on itself the fate of a weak nation, with neither the sovereignty nor the power to reinforce its gestures or its tactics. So hypnotized is Mr. Arafat with his supposed standing as a president, jumping from Paris to London to Beijing to Cairo on one pointless state visit after another, that he has forgotten that the weapons that the weak and the stateless cannot ever give up are their principles and their people. To occupy and unendingly defend the moral high ground; to keep telling the truth and reminding the world of the full historical picture; to hold on to the lawful right of resistance and rest.i.tution; to mobilize people everywhere rather than to appear with the likes of Jacques Chirac and Tony Blair; and to depend neither on the media nor on the Israelis but on oneself to tell the truth. These are what Palestinian leaders forgot first at Oslo and then again at Camp David. When will we as a people a.s.sume responsibility for what after all is ours and stop relying on leaders who no longer have any idea what they are doing?

Al-Ahram, July 1925, 2001.

Al-Hayat, July 23, 2001.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

Occupation Is the Atrocity.

In the United States, where Israel has its main political base and from which it has received over $92 billion in aid since 1967, the terrible human cost of Thursday's Jerusalem restaurant bombing and Monday's Haifa disaster settles quickly into a familiar explanatory framework. Arafat hasn't done enough to control his terrorists; suicidal Islamic extremists are to be found everywhere, bringing harm on "us" and our strongest allies, driven by sheer human hatred; Israel must defend its security. A thoughtful individual might add: these people have been fighting tirelessly for thousands of years anyway; the violence must be stopped; there's been too much suffering on both sides, although the way Palestinians send their children into battle is another sign of how much Israel has to put up with. And so, exasperated but still restrained, Israel invades unfortified and undefended Jenin with bulldozers and tanks, destroys the Palestine Authority's police buildings plus several others, and then sends out its propagandists to say that it has sent a message to Yasir Arafat to curb his terrorists. In the meantime, he and his coterie are begging for American protection, doubtless forgetting that Israel is the one with U.S. protection and that all he will get, for the six thousandth time, is an injunction to stop the violence.

The fact is that in America, Israel has pretty much won the propaganda war, and America is about to put several million more dollars into a public relations campaign (using stars like Zubin Mehta, Itzhak Perlman, and Amos Oz) to further improve its image. But consider what Israel's unrelenting war against the undefended, basically unarmed, stateless, and poorly led Palestinian people has already achieved. The disparity in power is so vast that it makes you cry. Equipped with the latest in American-built (and freely given) air power, helicopter guns.h.i.+ps, uncountable tanks and missiles, and a superb navy as well as a state-of-the-art intelligence service, Israel is a nuclear power abusing a people without any armor or artillery, without an air force (its one pathetic airfield in Gaza is controlled by Israel) or navy or army, with none of the inst.i.tutions of a modern state. The appallingly unbroken history of Israel's thirty-four-year-old military occupation (the second longest in modern history) of illegally conquered Palestinian land has been obliterated from public memory nearly everywhere, as has been the destruction of Palestinian society in 1948 and the expulsion of 68 percent of its native people, of whom 4.5 million remain refugees today. Behind the reams of newspeak, the stark outlines of Israel's decades-long daily pressure on a people whose main sin is that they happened to be there, in Israel's way, is staggeringly perceptible in its inhuman sadism. The fantastically cruel confinement of 1.3 million people jammed like so many human sardines into the Gaza Strip, plus the nearly 2 million Palestinian residents of the West Bank, has no parallel in the annals of apartheid or colonialism. F-16 jets were never used to bomb South African homelands. They are against Palestinian towns and villages. All entrances and exits to the territories are controlled by Israel (Gaza is completely surrounded by a barbed-wire fence), which also controls the entire water supply. Divided into about sixty-three noncontiguous cantons, completely encircled and besieged by Israeli troops, punctuated by 140 settlements (many of them built under Ehud Barak's premiers.h.i.+p) with their own road network banned to "non-Jews," as Arabs are referred to, along with such unflattering epithets as thieves, snakes, c.o.c.kroaches, and gra.s.shoppers, Palestinians under occupation have now been reduced to 60 percent unemployment and a poverty rate of 50 percent (half the people of Gaza and the West Bank live on less than two dollars a day); they cannot travel from one place to the next; they must endure long lines at Israeli checkpoints, which detain and humiliate the elderly, the sick, the student, and the cleric for hours on end; 150,000 of their olive and citrus trees have been punitively uprooted, 2,000 of their houses demolished, and acres of their land either destroyed or expropriated for military settlement purposes.

Since the Al-Aqsa Intifada began late last September, 609 Palestinians have been killed (four times more than Israeli fatalities) and 15,000 wounded, a dozen times more than on the other side. Regular Israeli army a.s.sa.s.sinations have picked off alleged terrorists at will, most of the time killing innocents like so many flies. Last week fourteen Palestinians were murdered openly by Israeli forces using helicopter guns.h.i.+ps and missiles; they were thus "prevented" from killing Israelis, although at least two children and five innocents were also murdered, to say nothing of many wounded civilians and several destroyed buildings that were part of the somehow acceptable collateral damage. Nameless and faceless, Israel's daily Palestinian victims barely rate a mention on America's news programs, even though-for reasons that I simply cannot understand- Arafat is still hoping that the Americans will rescue him and his crumbling regime.

Nor is this all. Israel's plan is not just to hold land and fill it with dreadful, murderous armed settlers who, defended by the army, wreak havoc on Palestinian orchards, schoolchildren, and homes; it is, as the American researcher Sara Roy has named it, to de-develop Palestinian society, to make life impossible so that they will leave, or give up somehow, or do something crazy like blow themselves up. Since 1967 leaders have been jailed and deported by the Israeli occupation regime, small businesses and farms made unviable by confiscation and sheer destruction, students prevented from studying, universities closed. (In the mid-1980s Palestinian universities on the West Bank were closed for four years.) No Palestinian farmer or business can export to any Arab country directly; their products must pa.s.s through Israel. Taxes are paid to Israel. Even after the Oslo peace process began in 1993, the occupation was simply repackaged, only 18 percent of the land given to the corrupt Vichy-like Authority of Yasir Arafat, whose mandate seems to have been only to police and tax his people for Israel's sake. After eight fruitless immiserating years of the Oslo negotiations, masterminded by an American team of former Israeli lobby staffers like Martin Indyk and Dennis Ross, Israel was still in control, the occupation packaged more efficiently, and the phrase "peace process" given a consecrated halo that allowed more abuses, more settlements, more imprisonments, more Palestinian suffering to go on than before. Including a "judaized" East Jerusalem, with Orient House occupied and its contents looted or carted off (there are invaluable records, land deeds, maps that, in a repet.i.tion of what it did when it stole PLO archives from Beirut in 1982, Israel has simply stolen), Israel has implanted no less than 400,000 settlers on Palestinian land. To call them vigilantes and hoodlums is not an exaggeration.

It is worth recalling that a couple of weeks after Ariel Sharon's gratuitously arrogant visit to Jerusalem's Haram al-Sharif on September 28, 2000, with a thousand soldiers and guards supplied by Prime Minister Barak, Israel was condemned for this action by a unanimous Security Council resolution. Then, as even the merest child could have predicted, the anticolonial rebellion broke out, with eight killed Palestinians its first victims. Sharon was swept to power essentially to "subdue" the Palestinians, teach them a lesson, get rid of them. His record as an Arab-killer goes back thirty years before the Sabra and Shatila ma.s.sacres that his forces supervised in 1982, and for which he has now been indicted in a Belgian court. Still, Arafat wants to negotiate with him and come perhaps to a cozy arrangement with him so as to safeguard the very Authority that Sharon is systematically dismantling, destroying, razing to the ground.

But Sharon isn't a fool, either. With every Palestinian act of resistance, his forces ratchet up the pressure a notch higher, tightening the siege more, taking more land, making more and deeper incursions into Palestinian towns like Jenin and Ramallah, cutting off more supplies, openly a.s.sa.s.sinating Palestinian leaders, making life more intolerable, and redefining the terms of his government's actions: that it once made "generous concessions" while "defending" itself, that it "prevents" terrorism, that it "secures" areas, that it "reestablishes" control, and so on. Meanwhile he and his minions attack and dehumanize Arafat, even saying that he is the "arch-terrorist" (although he literally can't move without Israeli permission), and that "we" have no war with the Palestinian people. What a boon for that people! With such "restraint," why should a ma.s.sive invasion, carefully bruited about to terrorize the Palestinians even more s.a.d.i.s.tically, be necessary? Israel knows that it can retake their buildings at will (witness the wholesale theft of Jerusalem's Orient House, plus nine other buildings, offices, libraries, and archives there and in Abu Dis), just as it has all but eliminated the Palestinians as a people.

This is the real story of Israel's pretended "victimization," constructed with such premeditated care and evil intent for months now. Language has been sundered from reality. Pity not the inept, clumsy, pathetic Arab governments that can and will do nothing to stop Israel: pity the people who bear the wounds in their flesh and in the emaciated bodies of their children, some of whom believe that martyrdom is the only way out for them. And Israel, stuck in a futureless campaign, flailing about mercilessly? As James Cousins, the Irish poet and critic, said in 1925, the colonizer is in the grip of "false and selfish pre-occupations that stand in the way of its attention to the natural evolution of its own national genius and pull[ed] from the path of open rect.i.tude into the twisted byways of dishonest thought, speech, and action, in the artificial defense of a false position." All colonizers have gone that way, learning or stopping at nothing, until at last, as Israel turned tail from its twenty-two-year occupation of Lebanon, they exit the territory, leaving behind an exhausted and crippled people. If this was supposed to fulfill Jewish aspirations, why did it require so many new victims from another people who had nothing to do with Jewish exile and persecution in the first place?

With Arafat and Company in command, there is no hope. What is the man doing, grotesquely fetching up in the Vatican and Lagos and other miscellaneous places, pleading without dignity or even intelligence for imaginary observers, Arab aid, and international support, instead of staying with his people and trying to aid them with medical supplies, morale-boosting measures, and real leaders.h.i.+p? He must go. What we need is a unified leaders.h.i.+p of people who are on the ground, who are actually doing the resisting, and who are really with and of their people-not the fat, cigar-chomping bureaucrats who want their business deals preserved and their VIP pa.s.ses renewed and have lost all trace of decency or credibility. A united leaders.h.i.+p that takes positions and plans ma.s.s actions designed not to return to Oslo (can you believe the folly of that idea?) but to press on with resistance and liberation, instead of confusing people with talk of negotiations and the stupid Mitch.e.l.l plan.

Arafat is finished: why don't we admit that he can neither lead, nor plan, nor do anything that makes any difference except to him and his Oslo cronies who have benefited materially from their people's misery? He is the main obstacle to our people's future. All the polls show that his presence blocks whatever forward movement might be possible. We need a united leaders.h.i.+p to make decisions, not simply to grovel before the pope and the moronic George W. Bush, even as the Israelis are killing his heroic people with impunity. A leader must lead the resistance, reflect the realities on the ground, respond to his people's needs, plan, think, and expose himself to the same dangers and difficulties that everyone experiences. The struggle for liberation from Israeli occupation is where every Palestinian worth anything now stands: Oslo cannot be restored or repackaged as Arafat and Company might desire. It's over for them, and the sooner they pack and get out, the better for everyone.

Al-Ahram, August 1622, 2001.

Al-Hayat, August 20, 2001.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

Propaganda and War.

Never has the media been so influential in determining the course of war as during the Al-Aqsa Intifada, which, as far as the Western media are concerned, has essentially become a battle over images and ideas. Israel has already poured hundreds of millions of dollars into what in Hebrew is called hasbara, or information for the outside world (hence, propaganda). This has included an entire range of efforts: lunches and free trips for influential journalists; seminars for Jewish university students who, over a week in a secluded country estate, can be primed to "defend" Israel on the campus; bombarding congressmen and women with invitations and visits; pamphlets and, most important, money for election campaigns; directing (or, as the case requires, hara.s.sing) photographers and writers of the current intifada into producing certain images and not others; lecture and concert tours by prominent Israelis; training commentators to make frequent references to the Holocaust and Israel's predicament today; many advertis.e.m.e.nts in the newspapers attacking Arabs and praising Israel; and on and on. Because so many powerful people in the media and publis.h.i.+ng business are strong supporters of Israel, the task is made vastly easier.

Although these are only a few of the devices used to pursue the aims of every modern government, whether democratic or not, since the 1930s and 1940s-to produce consent and approval on the part of the consumer of news-no country and no lobby more than Israel's has used them in the United States so effectively and for so long.

Orwell called this kind of misinformation newspeak or doublethink, the intention to cover criminal actions, especially killing people unjustly, with a veneer of justification and reason. In the case of Israel, which has always had the intention to silence or make Palestinians invisible as it robs them of their land, this has been in effect a suppression of the truth, or a large part of it, as well as a ma.s.sive falsification of history. What for the past few months Israel has successfully wanted to prove to the world is that it is an innocent victim of Palestinian violence and terror, and that Arabs and Muslims have no other reason to be in conflict with Israel except for an irreducibly irrational hatred of Jews. Nothing more or less. And what has made this campaign so effective is a long-standing sense of Western guilt for anti-Semitism. What could be more efficient than to displace that guilt onto another people, the Arabs, and thereby feel not only justified but positively a.s.suaged that something good has been done for a much-maligned and harmed people? To defend Israel at all costs-even though it is in military occupation of Palestinian land, has a powerful military, and has been killing and wounding Palestinians in a ratio of four or five to one-is the goal of propaganda. That plus going on with what it does, but seeming to be a victim just the same.

Without any doubt, however, the extraordinary success of this unparalleled and immoral effort has been in large part due not only to the campaign's carefully planned and executed detail but also to the fact that the Arab side has been practically nonexistent. When our historians look back to the first fifty years of Israel's existence, an enormous historical responsibility shall rest d.a.m.ningly on the shoulders of the Arab leaders who have criminally-yes, criminally-allowed this to go on without even the most meager and half-hearted response. Instead, each of them has fought all of the others, or has relied on the hopelessly self-serving theory that by trying to ingratiate themselves with the American government (even becoming clients of the United States), they would a.s.sure themselves of longevity in power, regardless of whether Arab interests were being served or not. So deeply ingrained has this notion become that even the Palestinian leaders.h.i.+p has subscribed to it, with the result that as the intifada rolls on, the average American hasn't the slightest inkling that there is a narrative of Palestinian suffering and dispossession at least as old as Israel itself. Meanwhile Arab leaders come running to Was.h.i.+ngton begging for American protection without even understanding that three generations of Americans have been brought up on Israeli propaganda to believe that Arabs are lying terrorists with whom it is wrong to do business, much less to protect.

Since 1948 Arab leaders have never bothered to confront Israeli propaganda in the United States. All the immense amounts of Arab money invested in military spending (first on Soviet, then on Western arms) have come to naught because Arab efforts have neither been protected by information nor explained by patient, systematic organizing. The result is that literally hundreds of thousands of lost Arab lives have gone for nothing, nothing at all. The world's only superpower's citizens have been led to believe that everything Arabs do and are is wasteful, violent, fanatical, and anti-Semitic. Israel is "our" only ally. And so $92 billion in aid since 1967 has gone unquestioningly from the U.S. taxpayer to the Jewish state. As I said earlier, a total absence of planning and thought vis--vis the U.S. political and cultural arena is hugely (but not exclusively) to blame for the astounding amount of Arab land and lives lost to Israel (subsidized by the United States) since 1948, a major political crime that I hope the Arab leaders one day answer for.

I recall that during the siege of Beirut in 1982, a large nongovernmental group of very successful Palestinian businessmen and prominent intellectuals gathered in London to establish an endowment to help Palestinians on all levels. With the PLO trapped in Beirut and incapable of doing much, it was felt that a mobilization of this sort might help us to help ourselves. I also recall that as the funds were quickly gathered, a decision was made after much discussion that fully half the money would go for information in the West; it was felt that since-as usual-Palestinians were being oppressed by Israel with scarcely a voice lifted in the West to support the victims, it was imperative that money should be spent for advertis.e.m.e.nts, media time, tours, and the like in order to make it more difficult to kill and further oppress Palestinians without complaint or awareness. This was especially important, we felt, in America, where taxpayers' money was being spent in subsidizing Israel's illegal wars, settlements, and conquests. For about two years, this policy was followed; then, for reasons I have never fully understood, efforts to help the Palestinians in the United States were abruptly terminated. When I asked why, I was told by a Palestinian gentleman who had made a fortune in the Gulf that "throwing money away" in America was a waste. The philanthropy now continues exclusively for the Occupied Territories and Lebanon, where this a.s.sociation does much good but very little in comparison with projects funded by the European Union and numerous American foundations.

Some weeks ago the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), by far the largest and most effective Arab American organization in the United States, commissioned a public opinion poll on current American perspectives on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. A very wide and deep sample of the population was polled, with quite startling, not to say disheartening, results. Israelis are still believed to be a pioneering democratic people, even though no Israeli leader did very well in the poll. Seventy-three percent of the American people approve of the idea of a Palestinian state, a very surprising result. The interpretation of that statistic is that when you ask an educated American who watches television and reads elite newspapers whether he/she identifies with the Palestinian struggle for independence and freedom, the answer is mostly yes. But if the same person is asked what his idea is about Palestinians, the answer is almost always negative-violence and terrorism. Images of the Palestinians seem to be that they are uncompromising, aggressive, and "alien," that is, not like "us." Even when asked about the stone-throwing young people, whom we believe are Davids fighting against Goliath, most Americans see aggression rather than heroism. Americans still blame the Palestinians for obstructing the peace process, Camp David most particularly. Suicide bombing is viewed as "inhuman" and is condemned universally.

What Americans think of Israelis is not a great deal better, but there is a much greater identification with them as people. The most disturbing thing is that hardly any of the questioned Americans knew anything at all about the Palestinian story, nothing about 1948, nothing at all about Israel's illegal thirty-four-year-old military occupation. The main narrative model that dominates American thinking still seems to be Leon Uris's 1950 novel Exodus. Just as alarming is the fact that the most negative things in the poll were what Americans thought and said about Yasir Arafat, his uniform (seen as needlessly "militant"), his speech, his presence.

Overall, then, the conclusion is that Palestinians are viewed neither in terms of a story that is theirs, nor in terms of a human image with which people can easily identify. So successful has Israeli propaganda been that it would seem that Palestinians really have few, if any, positive connotations. They are almost completely dehumanized.

Fifty years of unopposed Israeli propaganda in America has brought us to the point where, because we do not resist or contest these terrible misrepresentations in any significant way with images and messages of our own, we are losing thousands of lives and acres of land without troubling anyone's conscience. The correspondent of the Independent, Phil Reeves, writes pa.s.sionately today (August 27, 2001) that Palestinians are dying or being crushed by Israel and the world looks on silently.

It is therefore up to Arabs and Palestinians everywhere to break the silence, in a rational, organized, and effective way, not by shooting off guns or by wailing or complaining. G.o.d knows we have reason to do all of the above, but cold logic is necessary now. In the American mind, a.n.a.logies with South Africa's liberation struggle or with the horrible fate of the Native Americans most emphatically do not occur. We must make those a.n.a.logies above all by humanizing ourselves and thus reversing the cynical, ugly process whereby American columnists like Charles Krauthammer and George Will audaciously call for more killing and bombing of Palestinians, a suggestion they would not dare do for any other people. Why should we pa.s.sively accept the fate of flies or mosquitoes, to be killed wantonly with American backing anytime war criminal Sharon decides to wipe out a few more of us?

To that end, I was pleased to learn from ADC president Ziad Asali that his organization is about to embark on an unprecedented public information campaign in the ma.s.s media to redress the balance and present the Palestinians as human beings-can you believe the irony of such a necessity?-as women who are teachers and doctors as well as mothers, as men who work in the field and are nuclear engineers, as people who have had years and years of military occupation and are still fighting back. (Incidentally, one astounding result of the poll is that less than 3 or 4 percent of the sample had any idea that there was an Israeli occupation in the first place. So even the main fact of Palestinian existence has been obscured by Israeli propaganda.) This effort has never before been made in the United States: there have been fifty years of silence, which is about to be broken.

Even though it is modest, the announced ADC campaign is also a major step forward. Consider that the Arab world seems to be in a state of moral and political paralysis, its leaders enc.u.mbered by their ties both to Israel and, more important, to the United States, their people kept in a state of anxiety and repression. As they and their brave Lebanese comrades did in 1982 when 19,000 were killed by Israeli military power, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are dying not only because Israel has the power to use force with impunity but because, for the first time in modern history, the active alliance between propaganda in the West and military force worked out by Israel and its supporters has enabled the sustained collective punishment of Palestinians with American tax dollars, $5 billion of which go to Israel annually. With neither history nor humanity, media representations of Palestinians show them only as aggressive rock-throwing people of violence and have made it possible for the dimwitted but politically astute George W. Bush to blame the Palestinians for violence. This new ADC campaign sets out to restore history and humanity to the Palestinians, to show them (as they have always been) as people "like us," fighting for the right to live in freedom, to raise their children, to die in peace. Once even the glimmerings of this story penetrate the American consciousness, the truth will, I hope, begin to dissipate the vast cloud of evil propaganda with which Israel has covered reality. Since it is clear that the media campaign can go only so far, the hope is that Arab Americans will feel empowered enough to enter the political battle in the United States to try to break, modify, or fray the link that binds U.S. policy so tightly to Israel. And then we can hope again.

Al-Ahram, August 30September 5, 2001.

Al-Hayat, September 9, 2001.

PART TWO.

September 11, the War on Terror, the West Bank and Gaza Reinvaded.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

Collective Pa.s.sion.

Spectacular horror of the sort that struck New York (and to a lesser degree Was.h.i.+ngton) has ushered in a new world of unseen, unknown a.s.sailants, terror missions without political message, senseless destruction. For the residents of this wounded city, the consternation, fear, and sustained sense of outrage and shock will certainly continue for a long time, as will the genuine sorrow and affliction that such carnage has cruelly imposed on so many. New Yorkers have been fortunate that Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a normally rebarbative and unpleasantly combative, even retrograde figure, known for his virulently Zionist views, has rapidly attained Churchillian status. Calmly, unsentimentally, and with extraordinary compa.s.sion, he has marshaled the city's heroic police, fire, and emergency services to admirable effect and, alas, with huge loss of life. Giuliani's was the first voice to caution against panic and jingoistic attacks on the city's large Arab and Muslim communities, the first to express the common sense of anguish, the first to press everyone to try to resume life after the shattering blows.

Would that that were all. The national television reporting has of course brought the horror of those dreadful winged juggernauts into every household, unremittingly, insistently, not always edifyingly. Most commentary has stressed, indeed magnified the expected and the predictable in what most Americans feel: terrible loss, anger, outrage, a sense of violated vulnerability, a desire for vengeance and unrestrained retribution. There has been nothing to speak of on all the major television channels but repeated reminders of what happened, of who the terrorists were (as yet nothing proven, which hasn't prevented the accusations from being reiterated hour after hour), of how America has been attacked, and so on. Beyond formulaic expressions of grief and patriotism, every politician and accredited pundit or expert has dutifully repeated how we shall not be defeated, not be deterred, not stop until terrorism is exterminated. This is a war against terrorism, everyone says, but where, on what fronts, for what concrete ends? No answers are provided, except the vague suggestion that the Middle East and Islam are what "we" are up against, and that terrorism must be destroyed.

What is most depressing, however, is how little time is spent trying to understand America's role in the world and its direct involvement in the complex reality beyond the two coasts that have for so long kept the rest of the world extremely distant and virtually out of the average American's mind. You'd think that "America" was a sleeping giant rather than a superpower almost constantly at war, or in some sort of conflict, all over the Islamic domains. Usama bin Laden's name and face have become so numbingly familiar to Americans as in effect to obliterate any history that he and his shadowy followers might have had (e.g., as useful conscripts in the jihad raised twenty years ago by the United States against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan) before they became stock symbols of everything loathsome and hateful to the collective imagination. Inevitably then, collective pa.s.sions are being funneled into a drive for war that uncannily resembles Captain Ahab in pursuit of Moby d.i.c.k, rather than what is in fact going on, an imperial power injured at home for the first time, pursuing its interests systematically in what has become a suddenly reconfigured geography of conflict, without clear borders or visible actors. Manichean symbols and apocalyptic scenarios are bandied about, with future consequences and rhetorical restraint thrown to the winds.

Rational understanding of the situation is what is needed now, not more drum-beating. George W. Bush and his team clearly want the latter, not the former. Yet to most people in the Islamic and Arab worlds, the official United States is synonymous with arrogant power, known mainly for its sanctimoniously munificent support not only of Israel but of numerous repressive Arab regimes, and its inattentiveness even to the possibility of dialogue with secular movements and people who have real grievances. Anti-Americanism in this context is not based on a hatred of modernity or on technology envy, as accredited pundits like Thomas Friedman keep repeating; it is based on a narrative of concrete interventions, specific depredations and-in the cases of the Iraqi people's suffering under U.S.imposed sanctions and U.S. support for the thirty-four-year-old Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories-cruel and inhumane policies administered with a stony coldness.

Israel is now cynically exploiting the American catastrophe by intensifying its military occupation and oppression of the Palestinians. Since September 11, Israeli military forces have invaded Jenin and Jericho and have repeatedly bombed Gaza, Ramallah, Beit Sahour, and Beit Jala, exacting great civilian casualties and enormous material damage. All of this, of course, is done brazenly with U.S. weaponry and the usual lying cant about fighting terrorism. Israel's supporters in the United States have resorted to hysterical cries like "we are all Israelis now," making the connection between the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings and Palestinian attacks on Israel an absolute conjunction of "world terrorism," in which Bin Laden and Arafat are interchangeable ent.i.ties. What might have been a moment for Americans to reflect on the probable causes of what took place, which many Palestinians, Muslims, and Arabs have condemned, has been turned into a huge propaganda triumph for Sharon; Palestinians are simply not equipped to defend themselves against both Israeli occupation in its ugliest and most violent forms and the vicious defamation of their national struggle for liberation.

Political rhetoric in the United States has overridden these things by flinging about words like terrorism and freedom, whereas, of course, such large abstractions have mostly hidden sordid material interests, the efficacy of the oil, defense, and Zionist lobbies now consolidating their hold on the entire Middle East, and an age-old religious hostility to (and ignorance of) "Islam" that takes new forms every day. The commonest thing is to get TV commentary, run stories, hold forums, or announce studies on Islam and violence or on Arab terrorism or any such thing, using the predictable experts (the likes of Judith Miller, Fouad Ajami, and Steven Emerson) to pontificate and throw around generalities without context or real history. Why no one thinks of holding seminars on Christianity (or Judaism for that matter) and violence is probably too obvious to ask.

It is important to remember (although this is not at all mentioned) that China will soon catch up with the United States in oil consumption, and it has become even more urgent for the United States to control both Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea oil supplies more tightly: an attack on Afghanistan, including the use of former Soviet Central Asian republics as staging grounds, therefore consolidates a strategic arc for the United States from the Gulf to the northern oil fields that will be very difficult for anyone in the future to pry loose. As pressure on Pakistan mounts daily, we can be certain that a great deal of local instability and unrest will follow in the wake of the events of September 11.

Intellectual responsibility, however, requires a still more critical sense of the actuality. There has been terror, of course, and nearly every struggling modern movement at some stage has relied on terror. This was as true of Mandela's ANC as it was of all the others, Zionism included. And yet bombing defenseless civilians with F-16s and helicopter guns.h.i.+ps has the same structure and effect as more conventional nationalist terror. All terror is especially bad when it is attached to religious and political abstractions and reductive myths that keep veering away from history and sense. This is where the secular consciousness has to step forward and try to make itself felt, whether in the United States or in the Middle East. No cause, no G.o.d, no abstract idea can justify the ma.s.s slaughter of innocents, most particularly when only a small group of people are in charge of such actions and feel themselves to represent the cause without having been elected or having a real mandate to do so.

Besides, as much as Islam has been quarreled over by Muslims, there isn't a single Islam: there are Islams, just as there are Americas. This diversity is true of all traditions, religions, and nations, even though some of their adherents have futilely tried to draw boundaries around themselves and pin down their creeds neatly. Yet history is far more complex and contradictory than is represented by demagogues who are much less representative than either their followers or opponents claim. The trouble with religious or moral fundamentalists is that today their primitive ideas of revolution and resistance, including a willingness to kill and be killed, seem all too easily attached to technological sophistication and what appear to be gratifying acts of horrifying symbolic savagery. (With astonis.h.i.+ng prescience in 1907, Joseph Conrad drew the portrait of the archetypal terrorist, whom he called laconically "the Professor" in his novel The Secret Agent; this is a man whose sole concern is to perfect a detonator that will work under any circ.u.mstances and whose handiwork results in a bomb exploded by a poor boy sent, unknowingly, to destroy the Greenwich Observatory as a strike against "pure science.") The New York and Was.h.i.+ngton suicide bombers seem to have been middle-cla.s.s, educated men, not poor refugees. Instead of getting a wise leaders.h.i.+p that stresses education, ma.s.s mobilization, and patient organization in the service of a cause, the poor and the desperate are often conned into the magical thinking and quick b.l.o.o.d.y solutions that such appalling models provide, wrapped in lying religious claptrap. This remains true in the Middle East generally, in Palestine in particular, but also in the United States, surely the most religious of all countries. It is also a major failure of the cla.s.s of secular intellectuals not to have redoubled their efforts to provide a.n.a.lysis and models to offset the undoubted sufferings of the large ma.s.s of their people, immiserated and impoverished by globalism and an unyielding militarism with scarcely anything to turn to except blind violence and vague promises of future salvation.

On the other hand, immense military and economic power such as the United States possesses is no guarantee of wisdom or moral vision, particularly when obduracy is thought of as a virtue and exceptionalism is believed to be the national destiny. Skeptical and humane voices have been largely unheard in the present crisis, as "America" girds itself for a long war to be fought somewhere out there, along with allies who have been pressed into service on very uncertain grounds and for imprecise ends. We need to step back from the imaginary thresholds that supposedly separate people from each other into supposedly clas.h.i.+ng civilizations and reexamine the labels, reconsider the limited resources available, and decide somehow to share our fates with one another as in fact cultures mostly have done, despite the bellicose cries and creeds.

"Islam" and "the West" are simply inadequate as banners to follow blindly. Some will run behind them, of course, but for future generations to condemn themselves to prolonged war and suffering without so much as a critical pause, without looking at interdependent histories of injustice and oppression, and without trying for common emanc.i.p.ation and mutual enlightenment seems far more willful than necessary. Demonization of the Other is not a sufficient basis for any kind of decent politics, certainly not now, when the roots of terror in injustice and misery can be addressed and the terrorists themselves easily isolated, deterred, or otherwise put out of business. It takes patience and education, but it is more worth the investment than still greater levels of large-scale violence and suffering. The immediate prospects are for destruction and suffering on a very large scale, with U.S. policy-makers milking the apprehensions and anxieties of their const.i.tuencies with cynical a.s.surance that few will attempt a countercampaign against the inflamed patriotism and belligerent warmongering that has for a time postponed reflection, understanding, even common sense. Nevertheless, those of us with a possibility for reaching people who are willing to listen-and there are many such people, in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, at least-must try to do so as rationally and as patiently as possible.

Al-Ahram, September 2026, 2001.

Al-Hayat, September 23, 2001.

Le Monde Supplement, September 27, 2001.

The Observer, September 16, 2001.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

Backlash, Backtrack.

For the 7 million Americans who are Muslims (only 2 million of them Arab) and have lived through the catastrophe and backlash of September 11, it's been a harrowing, especially unpleasant time. Not only were there several Arab and Muslim innocent casualties of the atrocities, but also an almost palpable air of hatred directed at the group as a whole that has taken many forms. George W. Bush immediately seemed to align America and G.o.d with each other, declaring war on the "folks"-who are now, as he says, wanted dead or alive-who perpetrated the horrible deeds. And this means, as no one needs any further reminding, that Usama bin Laden, the elusive Muslim fanatic who represents Islam to the vast majority of Americans, has taken center stage. TV and radio have run file pictures and potted accounts of the shadowy (former playboy, they say) extremist almost incessantly, as they have of the Palestinian women and children caught "celebrating" America's tragedy.

Pundits and hosts refer nonstop to "our" war with Islam, and words like "jihad" and "terror" have aggravated the understandable fear and anger that seem widespread all over the country. Two people (one a Sikh) have already been killed by enraged citizens who seem to have been encouraged by remarks like those of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz to literally think in terms of "ending countries" and nuking our enemies. Hundreds of Muslim and Arab shopkeepers, students, hijab-ed women, and ordinary citizens have had insults hurled at them, while posters and graffiti announcing their imminent death spring up all over the place. The director of the leading Arab American organization told me this morning that he averages ten messages an hour of insult, threat, and bloodcurdling verbal attack. A Gallup poll released yesterday states that 49 percent of the American people said yes (49 percent no) to the idea that Arabs, including those who are American citizens, should carry special identification; 58 percent demand (41 percent don't) that Arabs, including those who are Americans, should undergo special, more intensive security checks in general.

Then the official bellicosity slowly diminishes as George W. discovers that his allies are not quite as unrestrained as he is, as (undoubtedly) some of his advisers, chief among them the altogether more sensible-seeming Colin Powell, suggest that invading Afghanistan is not quite as simple as sending in the Texas militias might have been, even as the enormously confused reality forced on him and his staff dissipates the simple Manichean imagery of good versus evil that he has been maintaining on behalf of his people. A noticeable de-escalation sets in, even though reports of police and FBI hara.s.sment of Arabs and Muslims continue to flood in. Bush visits a Was.h.i.+ngton mosque; he calls on community leaders and the Congress to damp down hate speech; he starts trying to make at least rhetorical distinctions between "our" Arab and Muslim friends (the usual ones-Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia) and the still undisclosed terrorists. In his speech to the joint session of Congress, Bush did say that the United States is not at war with Islam, but he said regrettably nothing about the rising wave both of incidents and rhetoric that has a.s.sailed Muslims, Arabs, and people resembling Middle Easterners all across the country. Powell here and there expresses displeasure with Israel and Sharon for exploiting the crisis by oppressing Palestinians still more, but the general impression is that U.S. policy is still on the same course it has always been on-only now a huge war seems to be in the making.

But there is little positive knowledge of Arabs and Islam in the public sphere to fall back on and balance the extremely negative images that float around: the stereotypes of l.u.s.tful, vengeful, violent, irrational, fanatical people persist anyway. Palestine as a cause has not yet gripped the imagination here, especially not after the Durban conference. Even my own university, justly famous for its intellectual diversity and the heterogeneity of its students and staff, rarely offers a course on the Koran. Philip Hitti's History of the Arabs, by far the best modern one-volume book in English on the subject, is out of print. Most of what is available is polemical and adversarial: the Arabs and Islam are occasions for controversy, not cultural and religious subjects like others. Film and TV are packed with horrendously unattractive, b.l.o.o.d.y-minded Arab terrorists; they were there, alas, before the terrorists of the World Trade Center and Pentagon hijacked the planes and turned them into instruments of ma.s.s slaughter that reeks of criminal pathology much more than of any religion.

There seems to be a minor campaign in the print media to hammer home the thesis that "we are all Israelis now," and that what has occasionally occurred in the way of Palestinian suicide bombs is more or less exactly the same as the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. In the process, of course, Palestinian dispossession and oppression are simply erased from memory; also erased are the many Palestinian condemnations of suicide bombing, including my own. The overall result is that any attempt to place the horrors of what occurred on September 11 in a context that includes U.S. actions and rhetoric is either attacked or dismissed as somehow condoning the terrorist bombardment.

Intellectually, morally, politically, such an att.i.tude is disastrous since the equation between understanding and condoning is profoundly wrong and very far from being true. What most Americans find difficult to believe is that, in the Middle East and Arab world, U.S. actions as a state-unconditional support for Israel; the sanctions against Iraq that have spared Saddam Hussein and condemned hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis to death, disease, and malnutrition; the bombing of the Sudan; the U.S. "green light" for Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon (during which almost 20,000 civilians lost their lives, in addition to the ma.s.sacres of Sabra and Shatila); the use of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf generally as a private U.S. fiefdom; the support of repressive Arab and Islamic regimes-are deeply resented and not incorrectly are seen as being done in the name of the American people. There is an enormous gap between what the average American citizen is aware of and the often unjust and heartless policies that, whether he/she is conscious of them, are undertaken abroad. Every U.S. veto of a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel for settlements, the bombing of civilians, and so forth, may be brushed aside by, say, the residents of Iowa or Nebraska as unimportant events and probably correct, whereas to an Egyptian, Palestinian, or Lebanese citizen these things are wounding in the extreme and remembered very precisely.

In other words, there is a dialectic between specific U.S. actions on the one hand and consequent att.i.tudes toward America on the other that has literally very little to do with jealousy or hatred of America's prosperity, freedom, and all-around success in the world. On the contrary, every Arab or Muslim to whom I have ever spoken expressed mystification as to why so extraordinarily rich and admirable a place as America (and so likable a group of individuals as Americans) has behaved internationally with such callous obliviousness of lesser peoples. Surely also many Arabs and Muslims are aware of the hold on U.S. policy of the pro-Israeli lobby and the dreadful racism and fulminations of pro-Israeli publications like The New Republic and Commentary, to say nothing of bloodthirsty columnists like Charles Krauthammer, William Safire, George Will, Norman Podh.o.r.etz, and A. M. Rosenthal, whose columns regularly express hatred and hostility toward Arabs and Muslims. These are usually to be found in the mainstream media (e.g., the editorial pages of the Was.h.i.+ngton Post), where everyone can read them as such, rather than being buried in the back pages of marginal publications.

So we are living through a period of turbulent, volatile emotion and deep apprehension, with the promise of more violence and terrorism dominating consciousness, especially in New York and Was.h.i.+ngton, where the terrible atrocities of September 11 are still very much alive in the public awareness. I certainly feel it, as does everyone around me.

But what is nevertheless encouraging, despite the appalling general media performance, is the slow emergence of dissent, pet.i.tions for peaceful resolution and action, and a gradually spreading, if still very spotty and relatively small, demand for alternatives to more bombing and destruction. This kind of thoughtfulness has been very remarkable in my opinion. First of all, there have been very widely expressed concerns about what may be the erosion of civil liberties and individual privacy as the government demands and seems to be getting the powers to wiretap telephones, to arrest and detain Middle Eastern people on suspicion of terrorism, and generally to induce a state of alarm, suspicion, and mobilization that could amount to paranoia resembling McCarthyism. Depending on how one reads it, the American habit of flying the flag everywhere can seem patriotic, of course, but patriotism can also lead to intolerance, hate crimes, and all sorts of unpleasant collective pa.s.sions. Numerous commentators have warned about this, and as I said earlier, even the president in his speech said that "we" are not at war with Islam or Muslim people. But the danger is there and has been duly noted by other commentators, I am happy to say.