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OCCUPATION IS THE ATROCITY
by Professor Edward Said
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"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, international support..."
"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?"
"The fact is that in America, Israel has pretty
much won the propaganda war, and America
is where it's about to put several more million
dollars into a public relations campaign (using
stars like Zubin Mehta, Yitzhak Pearlman,
and Amos Oz) to further improve its image."
MID-EAST REALITIES © - MER - www.MiddleEast.Org - Washington - 8/24/2001:
As usual there is no serious introspection and self-criticism here. Arab and
Palestinian Americans have failed miserably over a very long period of time to even
establish viable organizations and publications. Moreover they have no lobbying and
professional presence even worth discussion in the crucial capital of Washington, DC,
even today. As usual, there is no much needed analysis of the "client regimes" who
are very much complicitous with both the US and Israel in what has been happening in
the Gulf regarding Iraq and in the once Holy Land regarding the Palestinians. Without
these Western-sponsored regimes in Riyadh, in Amman, in Cairo the "peace process"
would never have evolved as it did, Arab weakness and incompetence would not be as
they are, and every effort at the U.N. and elsewhere to actually do something would
not be so easily twisted and aborted. These matters are all very much inter-related
and have a long complicated history. As brilliant and accomplished as Professor
Edward Said is, his continual failure to realize how he himself has been partially
co-opted by his own is another very significant part of the huge puzzle that explains
how a very small country like Israel continues to be able to outmanuever and overpower
the entire Arab and Muslim worlds.
OCCUPATION IS THE ATROCITY
by Professor Edward Said
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 tiresomely for
thousands of years anyway; the violence must be stopped; there has 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 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 US protection and that all he will
get, for the 6,000th 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 where it's about to put several more million dollars into a
public relations campaign (using stars like Zubin Mehta, Yitzhak Pearlman, 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 gunships, 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 armour or artillery, no air force (its
one pathetic airfield in Gaza is controlled by Israel) or navy or army, none of the
institutions of a modern state. The appallingly unbroken history of Israel's
34-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 per
cent 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 two
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 used against Palestinians 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 63 non-contiguous cantons, completely encircled and
besieged by Israeli troops, punctuated by 140 settlements (many of them built under
Ehud Barak's premiership) with their own road network banned to "non-Jews," as Arabs
are referred to, along with such unflattering epithets as thieves, snakes, cockroaches
and grasshoppers, Palestinians under occupation have now been reduced to 60 per cent
unemployment and a poverty rate of 50 per cent (half the people of Gaza and the West
Bank live on less than $2 a day); they cannot travel from one place to the next; they
must endure long lines at Israeli checkpoints that 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; 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 assassinations have
picked off alleged terrorists at will, most of the time killing
innocents like so many flies. Last week, 14 Palestinians were murdered openly by
Israeli forces using helicopter gunships 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 -- part of the somehow acceptable collateral damage.
Nameless and faceless, Israel's daily Palestinian victims barely
rate a mention on America's news programmes, 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 the Palestinians 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-'80s 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 pass through Israel. Taxes
are paid to Israel. Even after the Oslo peace process began in 1993, the occupation
was simply re-packaged, only 18 per cent of the land given to the corrupt Vichy-like
Authority of 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, 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 "Judaised" East Jerusalem, with Orient House occupied and its
contents looted or carted off (there are invaluable records, land deeds, maps, that in
a repetition 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 28 September,
with 1,000 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 anti-colonial 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 30 years, before the Sabra and Shatila
massacres 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 he 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 a habit of more and deeper incursions into Palestinian towns like Jenin and
Ramallah, cutting off more supplies, openly assassinating Palestinian leaders, making
life more intolerable, 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 "re-establishes" control, and so on. Meanwhile he and
his minions attack and dehumanise 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 massive invasion, carefully bruited about to terrorise the Palestinians
even more sadistically, 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, 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 "victimisation," constructed with such
premeditated care and evil intent for months now. Language has
been sundered from reality. Pity not the inept Arab governments who can and will do
nothing to stop Israel: pity the people who bear the wounds in their flesh and 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 coloniser 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 rectitude into the twisted byways of dishonest thought, speech,
and action, in the artificial defense of a false position." All
colonisers have gone that way, learning or stopping at nothing, until at last, as
Israel turned tail from its 22 year occupation of Lebanon, they
exit the territory, leaving behind an exhausted and crippled people. If this was
supposed to fulfil 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,
international support, instead of staying with his
people, trying to aid them with medical supplies, morale- boosting measures and real
leadership? What we need is a unified leadership of people who are on the ground, who
are actually doing the resisting, who are really with and of their people, not the
fat, cigar-chomping bureaucrats who want their
business deals preserved and their VIP passes renewed, and who have lost all trace of
decency or credibility. A united leadership that takes positions
and plans mass 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 Mitchell 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? All the polls show that his
presence blocks whatever forward movement might be possible. We need a united
leadership 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 re-packaged 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, Al-Hayat column,
August 2001)
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MID-EAST REALITIES © - MER - www.MiddleEast.Org - Washington - 8/24/2001
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