From Oslo To Iraq And The Road Map Part 4

Second, there have been many calls and meetings to address the whole matter of military action, which, according to a recent poll, 92 percent of the American people seem to want. Because, however, the administration hasn't exactly specified what the aims of this war are ("eradicating terrorism" is more metaphysical than it is actual), nor the means, nor the plan, there is considerable uncertainty as to where we may be going militarily. But generally speaking, the rhetoric has become less apocalyptic and religious-the idea of a crusade has disappeared almost completely- and more focused on what might be necessary beyond general words like "sacrifice" and "a long war, unlike any others." In universities, colleges, churches, and meeting houses there are a great many debates on what the country should be doing in response; I have even heard that families of the innocent victims have said in public that they do not believe that military revenge is an appropriate response. The point is that there is considerable reflection at large as to what the United States should be doing, but I am sorry to report that the time for a critical examination of U.S. policies in the Middle East and Islamic worlds has not yet arrived. I hope that it will.

If only more Americans and others can grasp that the main long-range hope for the world is this community of conscience and understanding, that whether in protecting const.i.tutional rights, or in reaching out to the innocent victims of American power (as in Iraq), or in relying on understanding and rational a.n.a.lysis, "we" can do a great deal better than we have so far. Of course, this won't lead directly to changed policies on Palestine, or to a less skewed defense budget, or to more enlightened environmental and energy att.i.tudes: but where else but in this sort of decent backtracking is there room for hope? Perhaps this const.i.tuency may grow in the United States, but speaking as a Palestinian, I must also hope that a similar const.i.tuency should be emerging in the Arab and Muslim world. We must start thinking about ourselves as responsible for the poverty, ignorance, illiteracy, and repression that have come to dominate our societies, evils that we have allowed to grow despite our complaints about Zionism and imperialism. How many of us, for example, have openly and honestly stood up for secular politics and have condemned the use of religion in the Islamic world as roundly and as earnestly as we have denounced the manipulation of Judaism and Christianity in Israel and the West? How many of us have denounced all suicidal missions as immoral and wrong, even though we have suffered the ravages of colonial settlers and inhuman collective punishment? We can no longer hide behind the injustices done to us, any more than we can pa.s.sively bewail the American support for our unpopular leaders. A new secular Arab politics must now make itself known, without for a moment condoning or supporting the militancy (it is madness) of people willing to kill indiscriminately. There can be no more ambiguity on that score.

I have been arguing for years that our main weapons as Arabs today are not military but moral, and that one reason why, unlike the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, the Palestinian struggle for self-determination against Israeli oppression has not caught the world's imagination is that we cannot seem to be clear about our goals and our methods, and we have not stated unambiguously enough that our purpose is coexistence and inclusion, not exclusivism and a return to some idyllic and mythical past. The time has come for us to be forthright and to start immediately to examine, reexamine, and reflect on our own policies as so many Americans and Europeans are now doing. We should expect no less of ourselves than we should of others. Would that all people took the time to try to see where our leaders seem to be taking us, and for what reason. Skepticism and reevaluation are necessities, not luxuries.

Al-Ahram, September 27October 6, 2001.

Al-Hayat, October 10, 2001.

London Review of Books, October 4, 2001.

CHAPTER NINETEEN.

Adrift in Similarity.

Samuel Huntington's article "The Clash of Civilizations?" appeared in the Spring 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs, where it immediately attracted a surprising amount of attention and reaction. Because the article was intended to supply Americans with an original thesis about "the new phase" in world politics after the end of the cold war, Huntington's terms of argument seemed compellingly large, bold, even visionary. He very clearly had his eye on rivals in the policy-making ranks, theorists such as Francis f.u.kuyama and his "end of history" ideas, as well as the legions who had celebrated the onset of globalism, tribalism, and the dissipation of the state. But they, he allowed, had understood only some aspects of this new period. He was about to announce the "crucial, indeed a central aspect" of what "global politics is likely to be in the coming years." Unhesitatingly he pressed on: "It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the princ.i.p.al conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate world politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future."(22) Most of the argument in the pages that followed relied on a vague notion of something Huntington called "civilization ident.i.ty," and "the interactions among seven or eight [sic] major civilizations," of which the conflict between two of them, Islam and the West, gets the lion's share of his attention. In this belligerent kind of thought, he relies heavily on a 1990 article by the veteran Orientalist Bernard Lewis, whose ideological colors are manifest in the t.i.tle "The Roots of Muslim Rage." In both articles, the personification of enormous ent.i.ties called "the West" and "Islam" is recklessly affirmed, as if hugely complicated matters like ident.i.ty and culture existed in a cartoonlike world where Popeye and Bluto bash each other mercilessly, with one always more virtuous pugilist getting the upper hand over his adversary. Certainly neither Huntington nor Lewis has much time to spare for the internal dynamics and plurality of every civilization, or for the fact that the major contest in most modern cultures concerns the definition or interpretation of each culture, or for the unattractive possibility that a great deal of demagogy and downright ignorance is involved in presuming to speak for a whole religion or civilization. No, the West is the West, and Islam Islam. The challenge for Western policy-makers, says Huntington, is to make sure that the West gets stronger and fends off all the others, Islam in particular.

More troubling is Huntington's a.s.sumption that his perspective, which is to survey the entire world from a perch outside all ordinary attachments and hidden loyalties, is the correct one, as if everyone else were scurrying around looking for the answers that he has already found. In fact, Huntington is an ideologist, someone who wants to make "civilizations" and "ident.i.ties" into what they are not, shut-down, sealed-off ent.i.ties that have been purged of the myriad currents and countercurrents that animate human history and that over centuries have made it possible for that history to contain not only wars of religion and imperial conquest but also exchange, cross-fertilization, and sharing. This far less visible history is ignored in the rush to highlight the ludicrously compressed and constricted warfare that "The Clash of Civilizations?" argues is the reality. When he published his book by the same t.i.tle in 1996, he tried to give his argument a little more subtlety and many, many more footnotes; all he did, however, was to confuse himself and demonstrate what a clumsy writer and inelegant thinker he is. The basic paradigm of the West vs. the rest (the cold war opposition reformulated) remained untouched, and this is what has persisted, often insidiously and implicitly, in discussions since the terrible events of September 11.

The carefully planned ma.s.s slaughter and horrendous, pathologically motivated suicide bombing by a small group of deranged militants has been turned into proof of Huntington's thesis. Instead of seeing it for what it is, the capture of big ideas (I use the word loosely) by a tiny band of crazed fanatics for criminal purposes, international luminaries from former Pakistani prime minister Ben.a.z.ir Bhutto to Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi have pontificated about Islam's troubles, and the latter has used Huntington to rant on about the West's superiority, how "we" have Mozart and Michelangelo and they don't. (He has since made a half-hearted apology for his insult to "Islam.") But why not instead see parallels, admittedly less spectacular in their destructiveness, for Usama bin Laden and his followers in cults like the Branch Davidians or the disciples of Reverend Jim Jones at Guyana or the j.a.panese Aum s.h.i.+nrikyo? Even the normally sober British weekly The Economist, in its issue of September 2228, can't resist reaching for the vast generalization and praises Huntington extravagantly for his "cruel and sweeping, but nonetheless acute" observations about Islam. "Today," the journal says with unseemly solemnity, Huntington writes that "the world's billion or so Muslims are 'convinced of the superiority of their culture, and obsessed with the inferiority of their power.'" Did he canvas 100 Indonesians, 200 Moroccans, 500 Egyptians, 50 Bosnians? Even if he did, what sort of sample is that?

Uncountable are the editorials in every American and European newspaper and magazine of note adding to this vocabulary of gigantism and apocalypse, each use of which is plainly designed not to edify but to inflame the reader's indignant pa.s.sion as a member of the "West" and to instruct what we need to do. Churchillian rhetoric is used inappropriately by self-appointed combatants in the West's, and especially America's, war against its haters, despoilers, and destroyers, with scant attention to complex histories that defy such reductiveness and that have seeped from one territory into another, in the process overriding the boundaries that are supposed to separate us all into divided armed camps.

This is the problem with unedifying labels like Islam and the West: they mislead and confuse the mind, which is trying to make sense of a disorderly reality that won't be pigeonholed or strapped down as easily as all that. I remember a man who rose from the audience after a lecture I had given at a West Bank university in 1992 and started to attack my ideas as "Western," as opposed to the strict Islamic ones he espoused. I interrupted him: "Why are you wearing a suit and tie?" was the first simpleminded retort that came to mind. "They're Western, too." He sat down with an embarra.s.sed smile on his face, but I recalled the incident when information on the September 11 terrorists started to come in, how they had mastered all the technical details required to do their homicidal evil on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the aircraft they had commandeered. Where does one draw the line between "Western" technology and, as Berlusconi declared, "Islam's" inability to be a part of "modernity"?

One cannot easily do so, of course, but how finally inadequate are the labels, generalizations, cultural a.s.sertions. At some level, for instance, primitive pa.s.sions and sophisticated knowhow converge in ways that give the lie to a fortified boundary not only between "West" and "Islam" but also between past and present, us and them, to say nothing of the very concepts of ident.i.ty and nationality about which there is literally unending disagreement and debate. A unilateral decision to draw lines in the sand, to undertake crusades, to oppose their evil with our good, to extirpate terrorism, and in Paul Wolfowitz's nihilist vocabulary, to end nations entirely doesn't make the supposed ent.i.ties any easier to see; rather, it speaks to how much simpler it is to make bellicose statements for the purpose of mobilizing collective pa.s.sions than to reflect, examine, sort out what it is we are dealing with in reality, the interconnectedness of innumerable lives, "ours" as well as "theirs."

In a remarkable series of three articles published between January and March 1999 in Dawn, Pakistan's most respected weekly, the late Eqbal Ahmad, writing for a Muslim audience, a.n.a.lyzed what he called the roots of the religious right, coming down very harshly on the mutilations of Islam by absolutists and fanatical tyrants whose obsession with regulating personal behavior promotes "an Islamic order reduced to a penal code, stripped of its humanism, aesthetics, intellectual quests, and spiritual devotion." And this "entails an absolute a.s.sertion of one, generally de-contextualized, aspect of religion and a total disregard of another. The phenomenon distorts religion, debases tradition, and twists the political process wherever it unfolds." As a timely instance of this debas.e.m.e.nt, Ahmad proceeds first to present the rich, complex, pluralist meaning of the word jihad, then goes on to show that, in the word's current confinement to indiscriminate war against presumed enemies, it is impossible "to recognize . . . Islamic religion, society, culture, history or politics as lived and experienced by Muslims through the ages." The modern Islamists, Ahmad concludes, are "concerned with power not with the soul, with the mobilization of people for political purposes rather than with sharing and alleviating their sufferings and aspirations. Theirs is a very limited and time bound agenda." What has made matters worse is that similar distortions and zealotry occur in the "Jewish" and "Christian" universes of discourse.

It was Joseph Conrad, more powerfully than any of his readers at the end of the nineteenth century could have imagined, who understood that the distinctions between civilized London and "the heart of darkness" quickly collapsed in extreme situations, and that the heights of European civilization could instantaneously reverse into the most barbarous practices without preparation or transition. And it was Conrad also in The Secret Agent (1907) who described terrorism's affinity for abstractions like "pure science" (and by extension for "Islam" or "the West"), as well as the terrorist's ultimate moral degradation.

For there are closer ties between apparently warring civilizations than most of us would like to believe, and as both Freud and Nietzsche showed, the traffic across carefully maintained, even policed boundaries moves with often-terrifying ease. But then such fluid ideas, full of ambiguity and skepticism about notions that we hold on to, scarcely furnish us with suitable, practical guidelines for situations such as the one we face now; hence the altogether more rea.s.suring battle orders (a crusade, good versus evil, freedom against fear, etc.) drawn out of Huntington's opposition between Islam and the West, from which in the first days official discourse drew its vocabulary. There's since been a noticeable de-escalation in that discourse, but to judge from the steady amount of hate speech and actions, plus reports of law enforcement efforts, directed against Arabs, Muslims, and Indians all over the country, the paradigm stays on.

One further reason for its persistence is the increased presence of Muslims all over Europe and the United States. Think of the populations today of France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Britain, America, and even Sweden, and you must concede that Islam is no longer on the fringes of the West but at its center. But what is so threatening about that presence? Buried in the collective culture are memories of the first great Arab-Islamic conquests that began in the seventh century and that, as the celebrated Belgian historian Henri Pirenne wrote in his landmark book Mohammed and Charlemagne (1939), shattered once and for all the ancient unity of the Mediterranean, destroyed the Christian-Roman synthesis, and gave rise to a new civilization dominated by northern powers (Germany and Carolingian France), whose mission, he seemed to be saying, was to resume defense of the "West" against its historical-cultural enemies. What Pirenne left out, alas, was that in the creation of this new line of defense the West drew on the humanism, science, philosophy, sociology, and historiography of Islam, which had already interposed itself between Charlemagne's world and cla.s.sical antiquity. Islam was inside from the start, as even Dante, great enemy of Muhammad, had to concede when he placed the Prophet at the very heart of his Inferno.

Then there is the persisting legacy of monotheism itself, the Abrahamanic religions, as Louis Ma.s.signon aptly called them. Beginning with Judaism and Christianity, each is a successor haunted by what came before: for Muslims, Islam fulfills and ends the line of prophecy. There is still no decent history or demystification of the many-sided contest among these three followers-not one of them by any means a monolithic, unified camp-of the most jealous of all G.o.ds, even though the b.l.o.o.d.y modern convergence on Palestine furnishes a rich secular instance of what has been so tragically irreconcilable about them. Not surprisingly, then, Muslims and Christians speak readily of crusades and jihads, both of them eliding the Judaic presence with often sublime insouciance. Such an agenda, says Eqbal Ahmad, "is very rea.s.suring to the men and women who are stranded in the middle . . . between the deep waters of tradition and modernity."

But we are all swimming in those waters, Westerners and Muslims and others alike. And since the waters are part of the ocean of history, trying to plow or divide them with barriers is futile. These are tense times, but it is better to think in terms of powerful and powerless communities, the secular politics of reason and ignorance, and universal principles of justice and injustice, than to wander off in search of vast abstractions that may give momentary satisfaction but little self-knowledge or informed a.n.a.lysis. The "clash of civilizations" thesis is a gimmick like The War of the Worlds, better for reinforcing defensive self-pride than for critical understanding of the bewildering interdependence of our time.

Al-Ahram, October 1117, 2001.

Al-Hayat, October 12, 2001.

The Nation, October 22, 2001.

CHAPTER TWENTY.

A Vision to Lift the Spirit.

With the bombs and missiles falling on Afghanistan in the high-alt.i.tude U.S. destruction wrought by Operation Enduring Freedom, the Palestine question may seem tangential to the altogether more urgent events in Central Asia. But it would be a mistake to think so, and not just because Usama 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. But so too has Israel, for its own purposes. With the killing of cabinet minister Rehavam Ze'evi on October 17 as retaliation by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine for the a.s.sa.s.sination of its leader by Israel last August, General Sharon's sustained campaign against the Palestinian Authority as Israel's Bin Laden has risen to a new, semihysterical pitch. Israel has been a.s.sa.s.sinating Palestinian leaders and militants (more than sixty of them to date) for the past several months and couldn'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. And 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 October 18 and 21, six Palestinian towns were reoccupied by Israeli forces; five more Palestinian activists were a.s.sa.s.sinated, plus twenty-one civilians killed and 160 injured; curfews were imposed everywhere, and all this Israel has the gall to compare with the U.S. war against Afghanistan and terrorism.

Thus the frustration and subsequent impa.s.se in pressing the claims of a people dispossessed for fifty-three years and militarily occupied for thirty-four years have definitively gone beyond the main arena of struggle and are w.i.l.l.y-nilly tied in all sorts of ways to the global war against terrorism. Israel and its supporters worry that the United States 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 either felt uneasiness or a creeping guilt by a.s.sociation 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, George W. 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 7 million stateless Palestinians is sure to grow in importance, even though a number of quite dispiriting things about the present impa.s.se are evident enough now. The main problem is whether or not the United States 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 universalized Arab and Muslim powerlessness and exasperation to a degree never before as magnified as it is now. The Western media hasn't at all conveyed the crus.h.i.+ng 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 Ha.s.s 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 h.e.l.l 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 either incapable of stopping or unwilling to stop the rise of Islamic extremism or an astonis.h.i.+ngly 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, una.s.sisted 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 the result either of frustration and desperation or of the criminal pathology of deranged religious fanatics. But these are inadequate explanations. The New York and Was.h.i.+ngton suicide terrorists were middle-cla.s.s, far-from-illiterate men, perfectly capable of modern planning of 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 from the Koran, rote exercises based on outdated fifty-year-old textbooks, hopelessly large cla.s.ses, 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 and moral reasoning, as well as the insufficient appreciation of human life, that lead either to leaps of religious enthusiasm of the worst kind or to a servile wors.h.i.+p of power.

Similar failures in vision and logic operate on the Israeli side. How it has come to seem morally possible, or even justifiable, for Israel to maintain and defend its thirty-four-year-old 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 a.r.s.enal (unconditionally supplied by the United States), the other is stateless, virtually defenseless, savagely persecuted at will, and 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 by the 400,000 settlers who dot the Palestinian landscape without respite.

A recent report issued by Peace Now in Israel states the following: At the end of June 2001 there were 6593 housing units in different stages of active construction in settlements.

During the Barak administration 6045 housing units were begun in settlements. In fact settlement building in the year 2000 reached the highest since 1992, with 4499 starts.

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% in settlement units.

The essence of the Israeli position is its total irreconcilability with what the Jewish state wantspeace and security, even though everything it does a.s.sures neither one nor the other.

The United States has underwritten Israel's intransigence and brutality: there are no two ways about it-$92 billion and unending political support, all for 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 worlds is tied directly to the United States' behavior, 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 a.n.a.lysis and critical understanding of America. The same is true of Arab att.i.tudes toward 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 Arab and Muslim 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, overs.e.xed fanatics. The intellectual failure is no less great. It is simply inadequate to keep repeating cliches about struggle and resistance that imply a military program of action when none is either possible or really desirable. Our defense 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 United States, something we have never done. We have refused interaction and debate, disparagingly calling them only normalization 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 lies in principled resistance, well-organized civil disobedience against military occupation and illegal settlement, and an educational program that promotes coexistence, citizens.h.i.+p, and the worth of human life.

But we are now in an intolerable impa.s.se, requiring more than ever a genuine return to the all-but-abandoned bases of peace that were proclaimed at Madrid in 1991, UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, land for peace. There can be no peace without pressure on Israel to withdraw from the Occupied Territories, including Jerusalem, and-as the Mitch.e.l.l 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 s.h.i.+ning at the end of the tunnel. Palestinian negotiators have to be firm about this and not use the reopening 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 United States can restore negotiations, with European, Islamic, Arab, and African support, but it 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 impoveris.h.i.+ng, 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 peacemakers, should try to establish justice and compa.s.sion as crucial elements in the proceedings. Unfortunately, it is perhaps true that neither Arafat nor Sharon is 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 experiencing 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.

Al-Ahram, October 2531, 2001.

Al-Hayat, November 10, 2001.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE.

Suicidal Ignorance.

The extraordinary turbulence of the present moment during the U.S. military campaign against Afghanistan, now in the middle of its second month, has crystallized a number of themes and counterthemes that deserve some clarification here. I shall list them without too much discussion and qualification as a way of broaching the current stage of development in the long and terribly unsatisfactory history of relations.h.i.+ps between the United States and Palestine.

We should start by perhaps restating the obvious, that every American I know (including myself, I must admit) firmly believes that the terrible events of September 11 inaugurated a rather new stage in world history. Even though numerous Americans know rationally that other atrocities and disasters have occurred in history, there is still something unique and unprecedented in the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings. A new reality, therefore, seems to proceed from that day, most of it focused on the United States itself, its sorrow, its anger, its psychic stresses, its ideas about itself. I would go so far as saying that today almost the least likely argument to be listened to in the United States in the public domain is one that suggests that there are historical reasons why America, as a major world actor, has drawn such animosity to itself by virtue of what it has done; this is considered simply to be an attempt to justify the existence and actions of Bin Laden, who has become a vast, overdetermined symbol of everything America hates and fears: in any case, such talk is and will not be tolerated in mainstream discourse for the time being, especially not in the mainstream media or in what the government says. The a.s.sumption seems to be that American virtue or honor in some profoundly inviolate way has been wounded by an absolutely evil terrorism, and that any minimizing or explanation of that is an intolerable idea even to contemplate, much less to investigate rationally. That such a state of affairs is exactly what the pathologically crazed world-vision of Bin Laden himself seems to have desired all along-a division of the universe into his forces and those of the Christians and Jews-seems not to matter.

As a result of that, therefore, the political image that the government and the media-which have mostly acted without independence from the government, although certain questions are being asked and criticism articulated about the conduct of the war itself, not its wisdom or efficacy-wish to project is American "unity." There really is a feeling being manufactured by the media and the government that a collective "we" exists and that "we" all act and feel together, as witnessed by such perhaps unimportant surface phenomena as flag-flying and the use of the collective "we" by journalists in describing events all over the world in which the United States is involved. We bombed, we said, we decided, we acted, we feel, we believe, etc., etc. Of course this has only marginally to do with the reality, which is far more complicated and far less rea.s.suring. There is plenty of unrecorded or unregistered skepticism, even outspoken dissent, but it seems hidden by overt patriotism. So American unity is being projected with such force as to allow very little questioning of U.S. policy, which in many ways is heading toward a series of unexpected events in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the meaning of which many people will not realize until too late. In the meantime, American unity needs to state to the world that what America does and has done cannot brook serious disagreement or discussion. Just like Bin Laden, Bush tells the world, you are either with us, or you are with terrorism and hence against us. So on the one hand America is not at war with Islam but only with terrorism, and on the other hand in complete contradiction with that, since only America decides who or what Islam and terrorism are, "we" are against Muslim terrorism and Islamic rage as "we" define them. That there has been so far an effective Lebanese and Palestinian demurral at the American condemnation of Hizbollah and Hamas as terrorist organizations is no a.s.surance that the campaign to brand Israel's enemies as "our" enemies will stop.

In the meantime, both George W. Bush and Tony Blair have realized that indeed something needs to be done about Palestine, even though I believe there is no serious intention of changing U.S. foreign policy to accommodate what is going to be done. In order for that to happen, the United States must look at its own history, just as its media flacks such as the egregious Thomas Friedman and Fouad Ajami keep preaching at Arab and Muslim societies that that is what they must do, but of course never consider that that is something that everyone, including Americans, needs also do. No, we are told over and over, American history is about freedom and democracy, and only those: no mistakes can be admitted, or radical reconsiderations announced. Everyone else must change their ways; however, America remains as it is. Then Bush declares that the United States favors a Palestinian state with recognized boundaries next to Israel and adds that this has to be done according to UN resolutions, without specifying which ones and refusing to meet Yasir Arafat personally.

This may seem like a contradictory step also but in fact it isn't. For the past six weeks there has been an astonis.h.i.+ngly unrelenting and minutely organized media campaign in the United States more or less pressing the Israeli vision of the world on the American reading and watching public, with practically nothing to counter it. Its main themes are that Islam and the Arabs are the true causes of terrorism, Israel has been facing such terrorism all its life, Arafat and Bin Laden are basically the same thing, and most of the United States' Arab allies (especially Egypt and Saudi Arabia) have played a clear negative role in sponsoring anti-Americanism, supporting terrorism, and maintaining corrupt, undemocratic societies. Underlying the campaign has been the (at best) dubious thesis that anti-Semitism is on the rise. All of this adds up to a near promise that anything to do with Palestinian (or Lebanese) resistance to Israeli practices-never more brutal, never more dehumanizing and illegal than today-has to be destroyed after (or perhaps while) the Taliban and Bin Laden have been destroyed. That this also happens to mean, as the Pentagon hawks and their right-wing media machine keep reminding Americans relentlessly, that Iraq must be attacked next, and indeed all the enemies of Israel in the region along with Iraq must totally be brought low, is lost on no one. So brazenly has the Zionist propaganda apparatus performed in the weeks since September 11 that very little opposition to these views is encountered. Lost in this extraordinary farrago of lies, bloodthirsty hatred, and arrogant triumphalism is the simple reality that America is not Israel, and Bin Laden not the Arabs or Islam.

This concentrated pro-Israeli campaign, over which Bush and his people have little real political control, has kept the U.S. administration from anything like a real rea.s.sessment of U.S. policies toward Israel and the Palestinians. Even during the opening rounds of the American counter-propaganda campaign directed to the Muslim and Arab world, there has been a remarkable unwillingness to treat the Arabs as seriously as all other peoples have been treated. Take as an example an Al-Jazeera discussion program a week ago in which Bin Laden's latest video was played in its entirety. A hodgepodge of accusations and declarations, it accused the United States of using Israel to bludgeon the Palestinians without respite; Bin Laden of course crazily ascribed this to a Christian and Jewish crusade against Islam, but most people in the Arab world are convinced-because it is patently true-that America has simply allowed Israel to kill Palestinians at will with U.S. weapons and unconditional political support in the UN and elsewhere. The Doha-based moderator of the program then called on a U.S. official, Christopher Ross, who was in Was.h.i.+ngton, to respond, and then Ross, a decent but by no means remarkable or even fluent Arabic speaker, read a long statement whose message was that the United States, far from being against Islam and the Arabs, was really their champion (e.g., in Bosnia and Kosovo), plus the fact that the United States supplied more food to Afghanistan than anyone else, upheld freedom and democracy, and so on.

All in all, it was standard U.S. government issue. Then the moderator asked Ross to explain why, given everything that he said about U.S. support for justice and democracy, the United States backed Israeli brutality in its military occupation of Palestine. Instead of taking an honest position that respected his listeners and affirmed that Israel is a U.S. ally and "we" choose to support it for internal political reasons, Ross chose instead to insult their basic intelligence and defended the United States as the only power that has brought the two sides to the negotiating table. When the moderator persisted in his questioning about U.S. hostility to Arab aspirations, Ross persisted in his line, too, more or less claiming that only the United States had the Arabs' interests at heart. As an exercise in propaganda, Ross's performance was poor, of course; but as an indication of the possibility of any serious change in U.S. policy, Ross (inadvertently) at least did Arabs the service of indicating that they would have to be fools to believe in any such change.

Whatever else it says, Bush's America remains a unilateralist power, in the world, in Afghanistan, in the Middle East, everywhere. It shows no sign of having understood what Palestinian resistance is all about, or why Arabs resent its horrendously unjust policies in turning a blind eye to Israel's maleficent sadism against the Palestinian people as a whole. It still refuses to sign the Kyoto convention, or the War Crimes Court agreement, or the antiland mine conventions, or pay its UN dues. Bush can still stand up and lecture the world as if he were a schoolmaster telling a bunch of unruly little vagrants why they must behave according to American ideas.

In short, there is absolutely no reason at all why Yasir Arafat and his ever-present coterie should grovel at American feet. Our only hope as a people is for Palestinians to show the world that we have our principles, we occupy the moral high ground, and we must continue an intelligent and well-organized resistance to a criminal Israeli occupation, which no one seems to mention anymore. My suggestion is that Arafat should stop his world tours and come back to his people (who keep reminding him that they no longer really support what he does: only 17 percent say they back what he is doing) and respond to their needs as a real leader must. Israel has been destroying the Palestinian infrastructure, destroying towns and schools, killing innocents, invading at will, without Arafat paying enough serious attention. He must lead the nonviolent protest marches on a daily, if not hourly, basis and not let a group of foreign volunteers do our work for us.

It is a self-sacrificing spirit of human and moral solidarity with his people that Arafat's leaders.h.i.+p so fatally lacks. I am afraid that this terrible absence has now almost completely marginalized him and his ill-fated and ineffective Authority. Certainly Sharon's brutality has played a major role in destroying it, too, but we must remember that before the intifada began, most Palestinians had already lost their faith, and for good reason. What Arafat never seems to have understood is that we are and have always been a movement standing for, symbolizing, getting support for, and embodying principles of justice and liberation. This alone will enable us to free ourselves from Israeli occupation, not the covert maneuvering in the halls of Western power, where until today Arafat and his people are treated with contempt. Whenever, as in Jordan, Lebanon, and during the Oslo process, he has behaved as if he and his movement were just like another Arab state, he has always been defeated; only when he finally understands that the Palestinian people demand liberation and justice, not a police force and a corrupt bureaucracy, will he begin to lead them. Otherwise he will flounder disgracefully and will bring disaster and misfortune on us.

On the other hand, and I shall conclude with this now, leaving the subject for my next article to develop in detail, we must not as Palestinians or Arabs fall into an easy rhetorical anti-Americanism. It is not acceptable to sit in Beirut or Cairo meeting halls and denounce American imperialism (or Zionist colonialism, for that matter) without a whit of understanding that these are complex societies not always truly represented by their governments' stupid or cruel policies. We have never addressed the currents in Israel and America that it is possible, and indeed vital, for us to address and in the end to come to an agreement with. In this respect, we need to make our resistance respected and understood, not hated and feared as it is now by virtue of suicidal ignorance and indiscriminate belligerence.

One more thing. It is also far too easy for a small group of unexceptional expatriate Arab academics in America to keep appearing on the media here in order to denounce Islam and the Arabs, without having the courage or the decency to say these things in Arabic to the Arab societies and peoples they so easily rail against in Was.h.i.+ngton and New York. Neither is it acceptable for Arab and Muslim governments to pretend to be defending their people's interests at the United Nations and in the West generally, while doing very little for their people at home. Most Arab countries now wallow in corruption, the terror of undemocratic rule, and a fatally flawed educational system that still has not faced up to the realities of a secular world.

But I shall leave that all until my next article.

Al-Ahram, November 1521, 2001.

Al-Hayat, November 22, 2001.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO.

Israel's Dead End.

The world is closing on us, pus.h.i.+ng us through the last pa.s.sage, and we tear off our limbs to pa.s.s through." Thus Mahmoud Darwish, writing in the aftermath of the PLO's exit from Beirut in September 1982. "Where shall we go after the last frontiers, where should the birds fly after the last sky?" Nineteen years later what was happening then to the Palestinians in Lebanon is happening to them in Palestine. Since the Al-Aqsa Intifada began last September, Palestinians have been sequestered by the Israeli army in no fewer than 220 discontinuous little ghettos and subjected to intermittent curfews often lasting for weeks at a stretch. No one, young or old, sick or well, dying or pregnant, student or doctor, can move without spending hours at barricades, manned by rude and deliberately humiliating Israeli soldiers. As I write, two hundred Palestinians are unable to receive kidney dialysis, because for "security reasons" the Israeli military won't allow them to travel to medical centers. Have any of the innumerable members of the foreign media covering the conflict done a story about these brutalized young Israeli conscripts, trained to punish Palestinian civilians as the main part of their military duty? I think not.

Yasir Arafat was not allowed to leave his office in Ramallah to attend the emergency meeting of the Islamic Conference foreign ministers on December 10 in Qatar; his speech was read by an aide. The airport fifteen miles away in Gaza and Arafat's two aging helicopters had been destroyed the previous week by Israeli planes and bulldozers, with no one and no force to check, much less prevent, the daily incursions of which this particular feat of military daring was a part. Gaza airport was the only direct port of entry into Palestinian territory, the only civilian airport in the world wantonly destroyed since World War II. Since last May, Israeli F-16s (generously supplied by the United States) have regularly bombed and strafed Palestinian towns and villages, Guernica-style, destroying property and killing civilians and security officials (there is no Palestinian army, navy, or air force to protect the people); Apache attack helicopters (again supplied by the United States) have used their missiles to murder seventy-seven Palestinian leaders, for alleged terrorist offenses, past or future. A group of unknown Israeli intelligence operatives have the authority to decide on these a.s.sa.s.sinations, presumably with the approval on each occasion of the Israeli cabinet and, more generally, that of the United States. The helicopters have also done an efficient job of bombing Palestinian Authority installations, police as well as civilian. During the night of December 5, the Israeli army entered the five-story offices of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics in Ramallah and carried off the computers, as well as most of the files and reports, thereby effacing virtually the entire record of collective Palestinian life. In 1982 the same army under the same commander entered West Beirut and carted off doc.u.ments and files from the Palestinian Research Center, before flattening its structure. A few days later came the ma.s.sacres of Sabra and Shatila.

The suicide bombers of Hamas and Islamic Jihad have of course been at work, as Sharon knew perfectly well they would be when, after a ten-day lull in the fighting in late November, he suddenly ordered the murder of the Hamas leader Mahmoud Abu Hanoud: an act designed to provoke Hamas into retaliation and thus allow the Israeli army to resume the slaughter of Palestinians. After eight years of barren peace discussions, 50 percent of Palestinians are unemployed and 70 percent live in poverty on less than two dollars a day. Every day brings with it unopposable land grabs and house demolitions. The Israelis even make a point of destroying trees and orchards on Palestinian land. Although five or six Palestinians have been killed in the last few months for every one Israeli, the old warmonger has the gall to keep repeating that Israel has been the victim of the same terrorism as that meted out by Bin Laden.

The crucial point in all this is that Israel has been in illegal military occupation since 1967; it is the longest such occupation in history and the only one anywhere in the world today: this is the original and continuing violence against which all the Palestinian acts of violence have been directed. On December 10, for instance, two children aged three and thirteen were killed by Israeli bombs in Hebron, yet at the same time an EU delegation was demanding that Palestinians curtail their violence and acts of terrorism. Five more Palestinians were killed on December 11, all of them civilian, victims of helicopter bombings of Gaza's refugee camps. To make matters worse, as a result of the September 11 attacks, the word terrorism is being used to blot out legitimate acts of resistance against military occupation, and any causal or even narrative connection between the dreadful killing of civilians (which I have always opposed) and the thirty-plus years of collective punishment is proscribed.

Every Western pundit or official who pontificates about Palestinian terrorism needs to ask how forgetting the fact of the occupation is supposed to stop terrorism. Arafat's great mistake, a consequence of frustration and poor advice, was to try to make a deal with the occupation when he authorized "peace" discussions between scions of two prominent Palestinian families and the Mossad in 1992 at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge. These discussions only discussed Israeli security; nothing at all was said about Palestinian security, nothing at all, and the struggle of his people to achieve an independent state was left to one side. Indeed, Israeli security to the exclusion of anything else has become the recognized international priority that allows General Anthony Zinni and Javier Solana to preach to the PLO while remaining totally silent on the occupation. Yet Israel has scarcely gained more from these discussions than the Palestinians have. The Israeli mistake has been to imagine that by conning Arafat and his coterie into interminable discussions and tiny concessions, Israel would get a general Palestinian quiescence. Every official Israeli policy thus far has made things worse rather than better for Israel. Ask yourself: is Israel more secure and more accepted now than it was ten years ago?

The terrible and, in my opinion, stupid suicide raids against civilians in Haifa and Jerusalem over the weekend of December 1 should of course be condemned, but in order for these condemnations to make any sense, the raids must be considered in the context of Abu Hanoud's a.s.sa.s.sination earlier in the week, along with the killing of five children by an Israeli b.o.o.by-trap in Gaza-to say nothing of the houses destroyed, the Palestinians killed throughout Gaza and the West Bank, the constant tank incursions, the endless grinding away of Palestinian aspirations, minute by minute, for the past thirty-five years. In the end, desperation only produces poor results, none worse than the green light that George W. and Colin Powell seem to have given Sharon when he was in Was.h.i.+ngton on December 2 (all too reminiscent of the green light Al Haig gave Sharon in May 1982). With their support went the usual ringing declarations turning the people under occupation and their hapless, inept leader into worldwide aggressors who had to "bring to justice" their own criminals even as Israeli soldiers were systematically destroying the entire Palestinian police structure that was supposed to do the arresting!

Arafat is hemmed in on all sides, an irony of his bottomless wish to be all things Palestinian to everyone, enemies and friends alike. He is at once a tragically heroic figure and a b.u.mbling one. No Palestinian today is going to disavow his leaders.h.i.+p, for the simple reason that despite all his wafflings and mistakes, he is being punished and humiliated because he is a Palestinian leader, and in that capacity his mere existence offends purists (if that's the right word) like Sharon and his American backers. Except for the health and education ministries, both of which have done a decent job, Arafat's Palestinian Authority has not been a brilliant success. Its corruption and brutality stem from Arafat's apparently whimsical, but actually very meticulous, way of keeping everyone dependent on his largesse; he alone controls the budget, and he alone decides what goes on the front pages of the five daily newspapers. Above all, he manipulates and sets up against one another the twelve or fourteen-some say nineteen or twenty-independent security services, each of which is structurally loyal to its own leaders and to Arafat at the same time without being able to do much more for its people than arrest them when enjoined to do so by Arafat, Israel, and the United States. The 1996 elections were designed for a term of three years, but Arafat has s.h.i.+lly-shallied with the idea of calling new ones, which would almost certainly challenge his authority and popularity in a serious way.

He and Hamas have had a well-publicized entente of sorts since the latter's June bombings: Hamas wouldn't go after Israeli civilians if Arafat left the Islamic parties alone. Sharon killed off the entente with Abu Hanoud's a.s.sa.s.sination: Hamas retaliated, and there was nothing to stop Sharon squeezing the life out of Arafat, with American support. Having destroyed Arafat's security network, his jails and offices, and having physically imprisoned him, Sharon has made demands that he knows can't be met (even though Arafat, with a few cards up his sleeve, has managed, astonis.h.i.+ngly, to half-comply). Sharon stupidly believes that, having dispensed with Arafat, he can make a series of independent agreements with local warlords and divide 40 percent of the West Bank and most of Gaza into several noncontiguous cantons whose borders would be controlled by the Israeli army. How this is supposed to make Israel more secure eludes most people, but not, alas, the ones with the relevant power.

That still leaves out three players, or groups of players, two of whom in his racist way Sharon gives no weight to. First, the Palestinians themselves, many of whom are far too intransigent and politicized to accept anything less than unconditional Israeli withdrawal. Israel's policies, like all such aggressions, produce the opposite effect to the one intended: to suppress is to provoke resistance. Were Arafat to disappear, Palestinian law provides for sixty days of rule by the speaker of the a.s.sembly (an unimpressive and unpopular Arafat hanger-on called Abu 'Ala, much admired by Israelis for his "flexibility"). After that, a succession struggle would ensue between other Arafat cronies such as Abu Mazen and two or three of the leading (and capable) security chiefs-notably, Jibril Rajoub of the West Bank and Mohammed Dahlan in Gaza. None of these people have Arafat's stature or anything resembling his (perhaps now lost) popularity. Temporary chaos is the likely result: we must face it, Arafat's presence has been an organizing focus for Palestinian politics, in which millions of other Arabs and Muslims have a very large stake.

Arafat has always tolerated, indeed supported, a plurality of organizations that he manipulates in various ways, balancing them against one another so that no one predominates except his Fateh. New groups are emerging, however, secular, hardworking, committed, dedicated to a democratic polity in an independent Palestine. Over these groups the Palestinian Authority has no control at all. But it should also be said that no one in Palestine is willing to accede to the Israeli-U.S. demand for an end to "terrorism," although it will be difficult to draw a line in the public mind between suicidal adventurism and actual resistance to the occupation, as long as Israel continues its bombings and oppression of all Palestinians, young and old.

The second group are the leaders in the rest of the Arab world who have a vested interest in Arafat, despite their evident exasperation with him. He is cleverer and more persistent than they are, and he knows the hold he has on the popular mind in their countries, where he has cultivated two separate Arab const.i.tuencies, the Islamists and the secular nationalists. Both feel under attack, even though the latter has hardly been noticed by the vast number of Western experts and Orientalists who take Bin Laden-rather than the much larger number of Muslim and non-Muslim secular Arabs who detest what Bin Laden stands for and what he has done-to be the paradigmatic Muslim. In Palestine, for example, recent polls have found that Arafat and Hamas are now about equal in popularity (both hover between 20 and 25 percent), with the majority of citizens favoring neither. (But even as he has been cornered, Arafat's popularity has shot up.) The same division, with the same significant plague-on-both-your-houses majority, exists in the Arab countries, where most people are put off either by the corruption and brutality of the regimes or by the reductiveness and extremism of the religious groups-most of which are more interested in the regulation of personal behavior than in matters like globalization or producing electricity and jobs.

Arabs and Muslims might well turn against their own rulers were Arafat seen as being choked to death by Israeli violence and Arab indifference. So he is necessary to the present landscape. His departure would seem natural only when a new collective leaders.h.i.+p emerged among a younger generation of Palestinians. When and how that will happen is impossible to tell, but I'm quite certain that it will happen.

The third group of players includes the Europeans, the Americans, and the rest, and frankly, I don't think they know what they're doing. Most of them would gladly be rid of Palestine as a problem and, in the spirit of Bush and Powell, would not be unhappy if the vision of a Palestinian state were somehow realized, as long as someone else did it. Besides, they would find functioning in the Middle East difficult if they didn't have Arafat to blame, snub, insult, prod, pressure, or give money to. The mission of the European Union and General Zinni seems senseless and will have no effect on Sharon and his people. The Israeli politicians have concluded correctly that the Western governments are, in general, on their side, and they can continue what they do best, regardless of Arafat and his people's fruitless begging to negotiate. A slowly emerging group of Palestinians, both in Palestine and in the diaspora, is beginning to learn and use tactics that solidly place a moral onus on the West and Israel to address the issue of Palestinian rights, not just of the Palestinian presence. In Israel, for example, an audacious Knesset member, the Palestinian Azmi Bishara, has been stripped of his parliamentary immunity and will soon be on trial for incitement to violence. Why? Because he has long stood for the Palestinian right of resistance to occupation, arguing that, like every other state in the world, Israel should be the state of all its citizens, not just of the Jewish people. For the first time, a major Palestinian challenge on Palestinian rights is being mounted inside Israel (not on the West Bank), with all eyes on the proceedings. At the same time, the Belgian Attorney General's Office has confirmed that a war crimes case against Sharon can go forward in that country's courts. A painstaking mobilization of secular Palestinian opinion is under way and will slowly overtake the Palestinian Authority. The moral high ground will soon be reclaimed from Israel, as the occupation becomes the focus of attention and as more and more Israelis realize that there is no way to continue indefinitely a thirty-five-year-old occupation. Besides, as the U.S. war against terrorism spreads, more unrest is almost certain; far from closing things down, U.S. power is likely to stir them up in ways that may not be containable. It's no mean irony that the renewed attention on Palestine came about because the Americans and Europeans need to maintain the anti-Taliban coalition.

Al-Ahram, December 2026, 2001.

Al-Hayat, December 20, 2001.

London Review of Books, January 3, 2002.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE.