File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2000/bhaskar.0011, message 38


Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2000 01:55:37 +0100
From: Jan Straathof <janstr-AT-chan.nl>
Subject: BHA: <fwd>Edward Said - American Zionism (3)


Greetings Friends,

This article by Said is a must read.  Please read it and forward it
to other Lists - K. Samman
----------------------------------------------------------


http://163.121.116.16/weekly/2000/506/op2.htm

American Zionism (3)
By Edward Said
The events of the past four weeks in Palestine have been
a near-total triumph for Zionism in the United States for
the first time since the modern re-emergence of the
Palestinian national movement in the late 1960s. Political
as well as public discourse has so definitively transformed
Israel into the victim during the recent clashes, that even
though 140 Palestinian lives were lost and close to 5,000
casualties have been reported, it is still something called
"Palestinian violence" that has disrupted the smooth
and orderly flow of the "peace process."

There is now a small litany of phrases that every editorial
commentator either repeats verbatim or relies on as an
unspoken assumption: these have been engraved in ears,
minds, and memories as a guide for the perplexed, a
manual or machine for turning out phrases that have
clogged the air for at least a month. I can recite most of
them by heart: Barak offered more concessions at Camp
David than any Israeli prime minister before him (90 per
cent of the territories and partial sovereignty over East
Jerusalem); Arafat was cowardly and lacked the necessary
courage to accept Israeli offers to end the conflict;
Palestinian violence, directed by Arafat, has threatened
Israel (all sorts of variations on this, including the wish
to eliminate Israel, anti-Semitism, suicidal rage in order
to get on television, putting children in the front lines so
that they would become martyrs) and proved that an
ancient "hatred" of the Jews motivates Palestinians;
Arafat is a weak leader who allows his people to attack
Jews and incite against them by releasing terrorists and
producing schoolbooks that deny Israel's existence.

There are probably one or two more formulae that I have
not cited, but the general picture is that Israel is so
surrounded by rock-throwing barbarians that even the
missiles, tanks and helicopter gunships that have been
used to "defend" Israelis from the violence are simply
warding off a terrible force. Bill Clinton's injunctions
(dutifully parroted by his secretary of state) for Palestinians
to "pull back" goes a long way to suggest that it is
Palestinians who are encroaching on Israeli territory, not
the other way
round.

It is also worth mentioning that so successful has this
Zionisation of the media been that not a single map has
been published or shown on television to remind American
viewers and readers -- notoriously ignorant of both
geography and history -- that Israeli encampments,
settlements, roads and barricades crisscross Palestinian
land in Gaza and the West Bank. Moreover, as happened
in Beirut in 1982, there is a veritable Israeli siege of
Palestinians, including of Arafat and his men. Completely
forgotten, if it was ever at all understood, is the system of
Areas A, B, and C by which the military occupation of 40
per cent of Gaza and 60 per cent of the West Bank
continues, and which the Oslo peace process was never
really designed to end, much less totally modify.

As suggested by the absence of geography in this most
geographical of conflicts, the resulting void is a vitally
important point since the pictures that are either shown
or described are without context at all. I think the omission
by the Zionised media was a deliberate one at the outset
and has now become automatic. It has allowed phony
commentators like Thomas Friedman to peddle his wares
shamelessly, droning on about American even-handedness,
Israeli flexibility and generosity and his own perspicacious
pragmatism with which he berates Arab leaders and stuns
his bored readers. It has the result not only of permitting
the completely preposterous notion of a Palestinian attack
on Israel to prevail, but it also further dehumanises
Palestinians as being beasts without sentience or motive.
Thus little wonder that when the figures of the dead and
wounded are recited no nationalities are given: this lets
Americans assume that the suffering is equally divided
between the "warring parties," and in fact elevates Jewish
suffering and reduces or eliminates Arab feelings entirely,
except of course for rage. Rage and its cognates remain
as the only and certainly the defining Palestinian emotion.
It explains the violence, and indeed, it reifies it so that Israel
has come to represent a decency and democracy that is
forever surrounded by rage and violence. No other process
can logically explain the stone throwers and the stalwart
Israeli "defence."

Nothing is said of house demolitions, land expropriations,
illegal arrests, torture and the like. Nothing is cited about
what is (except for the Japanese occupation of Korea) the
longest military occupation in modern times; nothing about
UN resolutions; nothing about Israeli contraventions of
all the Geneva Conventions; nothing about the sufferings of
one entire people and the obduracy of another. Forgotten
are the catastrophe of 1948, ethnic cleansing and massacres,
the devastation of Qibya, Kafr Qassem, Sabra and Shatila,
the long years of military government for non-Jewish Israeli
citizens to say nothing of their continued oppression as a
persecuted 20 per cent minority within the Jewish state.
Ariel Sharon at best is a provocation, never a war criminal,
Ehud Barak a statesman, never the assassin of Beirut.
Terrorism is always on the Palestinian side of the
ledger, defence on the Israeli.

What Friedman and pro-Israeli "peaceniks" fail to mention
when they extol Barak's unprecedented generosity is the
real substance of it. We are not reminded that his commitment
to a third withdrawal (of about 12 per cent) made at Wye 18
months ago has never occurred. Of what value then are more
such "concessions?" We are told that he was willing to
give back 90 per cent of the territory. What gets left out is
that the 90 per cent is of what Israel has no intention of giving
back. Greater Jerusalem is well over 30 per cent of the West
Bank; large settlements to be annexed are another 15
per cent; military roads of areas have yet to be determined.
So after all this is deducted, 90 per cent of the balance isn't
so much after all.

As for Jerusalem: the Israel concession was principally in
being willing to discuss and maybe, just maybe, to offer
shared authority over the Haram Al-Sharif. The breathtaking
dishonesty of the matter is that all of West Jerusalem
(principally Arab in 1948) was already conceded by Arafat,
plus most of a vastly expanded East Jerusalem. One detail
further: Palestinians' firing by small arms on Gilo is routinely
made to seem like gratuitous violence, whereas no one
mentions that Gilo itself sits on land confiscated from Beit
Jala, the place from which the firing emanates. Besides,
Beit Jala was disproportionately shelled by Israeli helicopters
using missiles to destroy civilian houses.

I have made a survey of the major newspapers. Ever since
28 September, there have been anywhere between one and
three opinion articles per average day in the New York Times,
the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los
Angeles Times and the Boston Globe. With the exception
of perhaps three articles written from a pro-Palestinian point
of view in the Los Angeles Times, and two (one by an Israeli
lawyer, Alegra Pacheco, the other by a pro-Oslo liberal Jordanian
journalist, Rami Khoury) in the New York Times, all the
articles -- (including those by regular columnists like Friedman,
William Safire, Charles Krauthammer and others like them),
have been in support of Israel, the US-sponsored peace
process, and the idea that Palestinian violence, Arafat's lack
of cooperation, and Islamic fundamentalism are to blame. The
writers have been former US military as well as civilian officials,
Israeli apologists and officials, think tank specialists and
experts, officials of pro-Israeli lobbies and organisations.
In other words, the total blanketing of the mainstream has
taken place on the assumption that no Palestinian or Arab
or Islamic position on such matters as Israeli terror tactics
against civilians, settler-colonialism, or military occupation
exists at all, or is worth hearing from. This is simply
without precedent in the annals of US journalism, and is
a direct reflection of a Zionist mind-set that makes Israel
the norm in human behaviour, thereby excluding from
equal consideration the existence of 300 million Arabs
and 1.2 billion Muslims. In the long run this is of course
a suicidal position for Zionists to be in, but such is the
arrogance of power that the thought seems not to have
occurred to anyone.

The mind-set I have described is truly staggering in its
recklessness and, were it not very much a practical as
well as actual distortion of reality, one could quite easily
be talking about a form of private mental derangement.
But it corresponds very closely to the official Israeli policy
of dealing with Palestinians not as a people with a
history of dispossession for which in large measure Israel
is directly responsible, but as a periodic nuisance for
whom force, and neither understanding nor full
accommodation, is the only possible response.
Everything else is literally unthinkable. This astonishing
blindness is compounded in the United States since
Arabs and Muslims are scarcely paid attention to except
as (I have said in an earlier article) the butt of every
aspiring politician. A few daysago Hillary Clinton
announced in a gesture of the most revolting hypocrisy
that she was returning a $50,000 donation from an
American-Muslim group because, she said, they supported
terrorism; this in fact was an outright lie, since the group in
question had only said that it supported Palestinian
resistance against Israel during the current crisis, not
in itself an untoward position but criminalised in the
American system only because a totalitarian Zionism
requires that any -- and I mean literally any -- criticism
of what Israel does is simply intolerable and the rankest
anti-Semitism. And this despite the fact that (again
literally) the entire world has criticised Israel's
policies of military occupation, disproportionate violence,
and the siege of the Palestinians. In America you
must refrain from any criticism, otherwise you are
hounded as an anti-Semite requiring the severest
opprobrium.

The further peculiarity of American Zionism, which is a
system of antithetical thought and Orwellian distortion, is
that it is impermissible to speak of Jewish violence, or
Jewish actions when it comes to Israel, even though
everything done by Israel is done in the name of the
Jewish people, for and by a Jewish state. That such
a state is a misnomer, since almost 20 per cent of
the population is not Jewish, is never mentioned and this
too accounts for the amazing, entirely deliberate discrepancy
between what the media calls "Israeli Arabs" and "the
Palestinians:" no reader or viewer could possibly know
that they are the same people in fact divided by Zionist
policy, or that both communities represent the result of
Israeli policy -- apartheid in one case, military occupation
and ethnic cleansing in the other.

In fine, American Zionism has made any serious public
discussion of Israel, by far the largest ever recipient of US
foreign aid, its past and its future, a taboo not be broken
in any circumstance. To call this literally the last taboo in
American discourse is by no means an exaggeration.
Abortion, homosexuality, the death penalty, even the
sacrosanct military budget have been talked about with
some freedom (although always within limits). The
American flag can be burned in public, whereas the
systematic continuity of Israel's 52-year-old treatment
of the Palestinians is virtually unimaginable, a narrative
with no permission to appear.

This consensus might be somehow tolerable were
it not for the fact that it makes the continuing punishment
and dehumanisation of the Palestinian people an actual virtue.
There is simply no people in the world today whose killing
on television screens seems to be considered by most
American viewers to be acceptable as well-deserved
punishment. This is the case with Palestinians whose
daily loss of life in the past month is herded under the rubric
"the violence on both sides," as if the stones and slings
of young men thoroughly tired of injustice and repression
were a major offense rather than the courageous resistance
to a demeaning fate meted out to them not just by Israeli
soldiers armed by America, but by a peace process
designed to coop them up in Bantustans and reservations
fit for animals.

That the US supporters of Israel could have plotted for
seven years to produce a document designed essentially
to cage people like inmates in an asylum or prison -- that
is the real crime. And that this could be passed off as
peace instead of the desolation that it really has been all
along, that surpasses my powers to understand or
adequately describe as anything less than untrammelled
immorality. The worst thing of all is that so iron-like is
the wall protecting American discourse about Israel that
no questions can be put to the minds that produced
Oslo and that for seven years have been passing off
their scheme to the world as peace. One scarcely
knows which is more pernicious, the mentality that
thinks of Palestinians as not entitled even to express
a sense of injustice (they are too low a form for that)
or the one that continues to plot their further enslavement.

Were this the whole it would be bad enough. But our
miserable status as far as US Zionism is concerned is
compounded by the absence of any institution here or
in the Arab world ready and able to produce an alternative.
I fear that the coverage of those stone-throwing protesters
in Bethlehem, Gaza, Ramallah, Nablus and Hebron may
not be adequately reflected in the dithering Palestinian
leadership, unable either to retire or to go forward. That is
the ultimate pity of it.


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