File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_2000/postcolonial.0007, message 195


Date: Sat, 22 Jul 2000 22:04:29 -0600 (MDT)
From: Muhammad Deeb <mdeeb-AT-gpu.srv.ualberta.ca>
Subject: Edward Said: Dark at the end of the tunnel 



Dark at the end of the tunnel  

By Edward Said  

The media has been bursting with all sorts of rumours, speculation, and
some news about the Camp David summit, its progress, outcome, and meaning.
Whatever happens as an immediate result of the negotiations, one thing
seems quite clear: that despite any arrangements that will be made with
regard to territory, borders, the status of Jerusalem, refugees, water and
sovereignty, the underlying issue is whether or not the Palestinians will
agree to terminate the conflict with Israel, and to declare the past to be
null and void so far as the present and future are concerned. This
declaration is, I think, the big prize that Yasser Arafat -- remember that
even with his army of assistants in Camp David, only he has final
authority -- has it in his power to bestow on Israel, and it is precisely
this that Israel wants more than anything else.

Therefore, even Jerusalem and the refugees' right of return are less
significant by comparison with some kind of declaration, voluntarily given
by the Palestinians, that they foresee an end to all their claims against
Israel, plus an end to any further struggle against the state that
effectively stripped them collectively and individually of their
historical patrimony, land, houses, property, well-being, and all. What
has concerned me all along with Arafat's tactic (or is it a strategy?) of
threatening to declare a state is the danger that his state might quickly
be recognised as in effect the equivalent of granting the Palestinians the
fulfillment of their self-determination, perhaps only on paper, but
granting it nevertheless. No country like Israel is likely to tolerate the
existence, much less assisting at the birth, of another country in whose
structure might lie an unfulfilled or incomplete past. In return for
accepting a state of Palestine then, Israel is quite within reason to
demand also that the new state must forego any claims about the past,
which this new state by definition is, I believe, going to be seen as
having fulfilled.

In other words, the existence of a demilitarised and necessarily truncated
Palestinian state, no matter how disadvantaged territorially,
economically, or politically, is going to be designed, constituted,
founded, and built out of a negation of the past. In Israel's view the
past in question is entirely and exclusively a Palestinian past (and not a
Palestinian-Israeli one), since in Israel's case no one forecasts the end
or termination of Jewish claims against persecutors of Jews in the past.  
Torn from its context of struggle and dispossession, its long trail of
suffering, exile, displacement and massive loss, this real Palestinian
past will be declared null and void in return for which the Palestinian
people will be said to have achieved statehood.

This will not be a merely formal matter but something that is designed to
get at the very roots of Palestinian identity. Already Oslo has taken a
toll out of Palestinian history as taught to young children through
Palestinian Authority textbooks. In the new order of things Palestinians
are represented as people who happen now to be in Nablus, Ramallah and
Jericho; how they got there, how some of them came to these places as a
result of 1948 and 1967, and how Tiberias and Safad were once
preponderantly Arab, all these inconvenient bits of information have
simply dropped out of the textbooks. In a grade six history book Arafat is
referred to only as President of the Palestine Authority; his history as
PLO Chairman, to say nothing of the Amman, Beirut and Tunis days has just
been effaced. In another book, Palestine is presented to Palestinian
children as a blank rectangle: they are asked to fill in the spaces which,
once the peace deal is concluded, will be studded only with the names of
places that are considered Palestinian according to Camp David.

Now there is a great difference between disliking or being annoyed by the
past on the one hand, and, on the other, refusing to recognise it as the
past, even the past that some people believe in. The reason so many
official Palestinian representatives have been so anxious to refer to UN
Resolution 194 (Right of Return) or even 242 (territory returned) is that
scant and telegraphic though they may be, these resolutions represent
distillations of Palestinian history that seem to be acknowledged by the
world community. As such then, they have a validity independent of any one
party's whim. The danger of Camp David is that it will nullify, explicitly
or implicitly, this very quality. History is to be rewritten not according
to the best efforts historians have made to try to determine what
occurred, but according to what the greatest powers (the US and Israel)
say is allowable as history.

The same brushing away of the past, and its claims on the future, will
surely apply to the Israeli occupation which began in 1967. We now have a
full record of what damages to the economy occurred and, I am sure, a full
record of what deliberate destruction occurred in agriculture, municipal
affairs, and private property. Deaths, woundings, and the like are also
recorded. I am certainly not arguing for holding a permanent grudge
against the perpetrators, but I am for remembering that three decades of
occupation should not simply be blown away like so many specks of dust on
a gleaming surface. Iraq is still paying Kuwait for the few months of its
occupation in 1990 and 1991, and that restitution is as it should be. Why
then is Israel miraculously exempt of restitution for all its past
malfeasance? How can southern Lebanese citizens be expected to forgive and
forget the 22-year-old occupation of their territory, and not least the
horrors of Khiam prison, with its torture, dreadful solitary confinements,
and inhuman conditions, all of it supervised and maintained by Israeli
experts and their Lebanese mercenaries?

These matters, I believe, require much deliberation, reflection and
considered evaluation. In due course perhaps even a South African-style
Truth and Reconciliation Commission might be convened. But I do not
believe so awesomely weighty and dense a matter as the Palestinian history
of injustice at Israeli hands, and even the whole question of Israeli
responsibility itself, can be settled in the form of a backroom deal done
relatively quickly, bazaar-style. There are truth, and dignity, and
justice to be fairly considered, without which no arrangement can be fully
concluded, no matter how politically expedient or clever.

As a minimum guarantee that some such consideration be given peace of the
kind aimed for at Camp David, a Palestinian plebiscite or referendum is
therefore essential, if it is democratically fair. For once, in this whole
shabbily unsatisfactory Oslo process, Mr Arafat and his supporters have a
chance to save a small part of what has been left us as a people -- in no
small part because of years of misrule, dishonesty, and indignity. Can
they go at least some of the way toward partially redeeming themselves?


------------------------------------------------------------------------
			Al-Ahram Weekly 20 - 26 July 2000, Issue No. 491




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