Date: Fri, 08 Jan 1999 12:07:05 -0000
Subject: Re: Edward W. Said: An Incitement to Revolt (fwd)


Isn't this for the poco list? 

r
---
http://ernie.bgsu.edu/~radhik

On Thu, 7 Jan 1999 13:58:40    Spoon Collective wrote:
>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>Date: Thu, 7 Jan 1999 02:03:22 -0700 (MST)
>From: Muhammad Deeb <mdeeb-AT-gpu.srv.ualberta.ca>
>To: arabic-info <arabic-info-AT-dartmouth.edu>,
>    Arab Nationalist <arab_nationalist-AT-makelist.com>,
>    Egypt-net <Egypt-net-AT-cs.sunysb.edu>, Freedom <freedom-AT-alquds.net>,
>    Palestine Net <pnet-AT-alquds.org>, Iraq-L <Iraq-l-AT-interlink-bbs.com>,
>    Post Colonial Lists <postcolonial-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU>
>Cc: "Dr. M. Deeb" <Mdeeb-AT-gpu.srv.ualberta.ca>
>Subject: Edward W. Said: An Incitement to Revolt 
>
>
>An Incitement to Revolt
>By Edward Said
>http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/1998/410/op1.htm
>
>	Bill Clinton's two-day visit to Gaza, Bethlehem and Israel was
>intended to save the peace process and to make him look more noble to his
>impeachers.  It's too early to tell about the second mission, though I must
>say that his speech to the Palestinians for the first time expressed a
>humane sympathy for what they have endured; the first was a dismal failure,
>despite the media-hype (more misleading than usual) and the super-ignorant
>gushing by media commentators. As soon as Clinton arrived, Benjamin
>Netanyahu announced that there would be no further Israeli army troop
>redeployment as stipulated by the Wye River Plantation Accords of last
>October. Since in any event Israel was to redeploy from a minuscule amount
>of land (five per cent from Israeli-controlled Area C to jointly-controlled
>area B, which is under Israeli security anyway), the snub was just that,
>designed to humiliate both the Palestinians and Clinton.
>
>	  The "unrest" reported in the Occupied Territories for the past
>several weeks was provoked both by Israeli cynicism in releasing only about
>100 car thieves and common criminals (the agreement having been that 750
>political prisoners would be freed), and by Palestinian anger at Arafat's
>limitless appetite for concessions and a careless, not to say heedless,
>negotiating style. (Several members of his team in the past weeks have
>threatened to resign for that reason). Far from peace being assured,
>therefore, the combination of Netanyahu's arrogance, Clinton's
>vulnerability, and Arafat's by now non-existent support wasn't alleviated by
>the picturesque, hokey ceremonies patched together by the Americans and
>Palestinians, bagpipes, flower maidens, Mrs Arafat and all. 
>
>	  What puzzles me is how many times Arafat can bring himself and some
>of his people to go through the motions of repealing the notorious Charter
>just to satisfy Israeli demands. There was of course no real PNC meeting,
>since in effect that body lost its legitimacy and independence when Arafat
>returned to Gaza in l994. He brought a bunch of people together in l996 to
>change the Charter, but this time only made a perfunctory effort to round up
>officials, businessmen, and some hangers-on for the great occasion. 
>
>	  I was invited (by mistake) to attend when a fax from the Arafat-run
>Palestinian Commercial Services Company came to my office asking me to
>present myself at Amman Airport at a given time, then to link up with a
>special charter flight to Gaza, to attend the meeting, then to come back by
>charter the same evening. I had resigned my membership in 1991. So much for
>the idea of a legitimate quorum and roll call. At the same time, I was also
>invited to a meeting of the opposition led by George Habash and Nayef
>Hawatmeh in Damascus; through the ever-efficient rumour mills (one of the
>few things that still work in Palestinian politics), it was widely reported
>that I was in attendance. 
>
>	  The low comedy of the Gaza proceedings -- which elicited a
>rapturously ill-informed piece by the Times's new Israel correspondent
>Deborah Sontag about how much nicer and more democratic life is for
>Palestinians than for other Arabs -- was belied by what was going on
>outside. In the first place, the expropriation of Arab land through Israeli
>colonisation continues at a furious pace as old settlements grow and new
>ones expand rapidly. About 40 per cent of Gaza is held by settlers and the
>Strip itself is surrounded on three sides by an Israeli electronic fence
>(side four is the Israeli-patrolled sea). Clinton seems not to have noticed
>how his security was assured. 
>
>	  According to the authoritative Washington-based Report on Israeli
>Settlement, "diplomacy fails to address Israel's transformation of the
>Occupied Territories"; thus Israel's settlement policy all through the peace
>process "is well on its way toward achieving an objective pursued by a
>succession of Israeli leaders during the last three decades:  to obstruct
>the creation of an independent, truly sovereign Palestinian political entity
>west of the Jordan River. Israel's objective, on the face of it, is the
>antithesis of popular notions about the goal of the negotiations begun at
>Oslo in l993." (September/October 1988). 
>
>	  Each time one of the much touted summits occurs, the Palestinians
>fail at curtailing Israeli settlement drives; Wye was no exception, as Lamis
>Andoni shows in Middle East International (11 December l998), since there
>the negotiators failed to grasp that "Israel only agreed not to carry out
>the expansion of settlements until all current construction had been
>completed, which means that 'contiguous areas' [accepted by the
>Palestinians] could end up including hundreds and hundreds of acres." A
>chilling account of how one such settlement, Efrat, near Bethlehem, is
>expanding and choking off every Arab village in its vicinity is found in
>Ha'aretz (27 November); I filmed there last February, but villages like Wad
>Rahal and Khadr have since lost most of their land. 
>
>	  Second, the economics of peace have driven Palestinians into
>poverty, as Sara Roy shows in an impressive new study just published by the
>Emirates Center for Strategic Studies, "The Palestinian Economy and the Oslo
>Process: Decline and Fragmentation". At all levels of society, productivity
>is down, markets have shrunk, there is greater dependency on Israel.
>Unemployment is now at an all-time high yet Arafat's Authority, with its 14
>or so security services, its bloated bureaucracy, its thousands of informers
>and enforcers is the largest, and the least productive, employer. Each
>ministry now employs hundreds of managers and directors who do absolutely
>nothing except draw down handsome salaries.  The World Bank figure for
>Arafat's labour force is 120,000 people, which, multiplied by the number of
>dependents, accounts for almost half the Palestinian residents of the West
>Bank and Gaza directly in thrall to Arafat. But discontent rages anyway. 
>Thousands of refugees demonstrated in Syria and Lebanon. Four Palestinians
>were wounded by Israeli forces when the latter made a group of Palestinian
>labourers crawl on the ground.  And the Palestinian rock-throwing and
>Israeli shooting with "rubber bullets"  continue. Still, Netanyahu rants on
>about incitement when a Palestinian holds up a sign demanding free access to
>holy sites in Jerusalem, which is off limits to West Bank and Gaza
>Palestinians (as described by Ha'aretz, 14 December). 
>
>	  The main burden of the Wye Accord, therefore, was neither to give
>Palestinians more freedom, nor to allow the US and Israel to "help"
>Palestinian independence, but quite the contrary: with the Authority's help,
>to increase the restrictions and conditions under which Palestinians live so
>that they remain docile and taken care of in the best colonial manner. A
>perfect symbolic example of this is the promulgation on 19 November of a
>presidential decree by Arafat entitled "to strengthen national unity and
>forbid incitement".  Obviously the result of Netanyahu's remorseless
>obsession with Israeli security (and Arafat's reciprocal neglect of
>Palestinian security), the decree states that its legal references and
>precedents derive, among others, from "the Palestinian penal code number 74
>for 1936 and its amendments". 
>
>	  For the uninitiated, this code is nothing less than the Emergency
>Defence Regulations issued by the British Mandatory Authority as a way of
>punishing Palestinian resistance; it was then adopted by the Israelis after
>1948 for the same purpose. And now Mr Arafat uses it to threaten his own
>people. For what? To interdict incitement to violence, insults, racism. The
>decree also forbids "illegal organisations" as well as "undermining the
>quality of life, agitating the masses to bring about change by illegal
>methods of force, incitement to civil strife, incitement to violate
>agreements made between the PLO and Arab and foreign countries".
>Implementing this remarkable new law will be a committee made up equally of
>Palestinians, Israelis and (the number varies according to reports) one or
>more Americans who might, or might not be members of the CIA. Their mandate
>is nothing less than every utterance -- written, spoken, printed or
>broadcast -- made by Palestinians and, as a West Bank friend explained it to
>me, his voice alternately sad and cheerful, school text books, newspapers,
>and magazines. 
>
>	  This bizarre document has yet to be noted by the US, Arab, or
>European media, who are falling all over each other in prophesying the
>advent of Palestinian statehood. Never mind of course the total absence of
>territorial contiguity for areas of Palestinian self-rule. Never mind that
>Arafat has refused to ratify either the constitution or the basic law
>proposed by his Legislative Council. Never mind, that thanks to US and
>Israeli pressure, Palestinian life is governed by state security courts
>which forbid the presence of witnesses, defence lawyers, or audience.  Never
>mind that the large sums of money pledged by European and American donors
>are still controlled by Arafat, who answers and is accountable to no one,
>despite widespread evidence of massive corruption. But that Israel and the
>US should require Palestinians to submit fawningly to a law against
>incitement -- with a Stalinist-type committee to decide unilaterally what is
>or is not incitement: this is scarcely a forward step in the search for
>peace or Palestinian self-determination. 
>
>______________________________________________________________________________
>
>			Source: Al-Ahram Weekly
>			URL: http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/
>			Email: weeklyweb-AT-ahram.org.eg
>			Updated every Saturday at 11.00 GMT, 2pm local time
>			Issue: No. 410; 31 December 1998- 6 January 1999
>
>
>
>
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