File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_2001/postcolonial.0104, message 80


Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2001 03:37:28 -0600 (MDT)
From: Muhammad Deeb <mdeeb-AT-gpu.srv.ualberta.ca>
Subject: Edward Said: "Time to turn to the other front"



Time to turn to the other front
Edward Said, Apr. 7 2001

UNTIL the Intifada is understood in the West as a civilian uprising
against colonial oppression, the Palestinians have no chance of
obtaining equality and justice. During the past several weeks, the
Israeli government has vigorously pursued policies on two fronts, one on
the ground, the other abroad. 

The first is vintage Sharon, or for that matter, vintage Israeli military. 
The idea is to hit Palestinians in every way possible, making their lives
unbearable and so confined and strangulated as to make them feel that they
can no longer endure remaining there. 

The rationale for this, as the Palestinian scholar Nur Masalha has studied
it in three important books, is that Zionism has always wanted more land
and fewer Arabs; from Ben-Gurion to Rabin, Begin, Shamir, Netanyahu, Barak
and now Sharon, there is an unbroken ideological continuity in which the
Palestinian people is seen as an absence to be desired and fought for. 

This is so obvious and, at the same time, so carefully obscured from the
international (and even regional) public's view as to require only some
additional remarks here. The core idea is that if Jews have all the rights
to "the land of Israel," then any non-Jewish people there are entitled to
no rights at all. It is as simple as that, and as ideologically unanimous. 
No Israeli leader or party has ever considered the Palestinian people as a
nation or even as a national minority (after the ethnic cleansing of
1948). Culturally, historically, humanly, Zionism considers Palestinians
as lesser or inferior. 

Even Shimon Peres, who occasionally seems to speak a humane language,
cannot bring himself ever to consider the Palestinians as worthy of
equality. Jews must remain a majority, own all the land, define the laws
for Jews and non-Jews alike, guarantee immigration and repatriation for
Jews alone. And, though all sorts of inconsistencies and contradictions
exist (e.g. why should there be democracy, as it is called, for one people
and not for another in a "democratic" state?), Israel pursues its policies
- ethnocentric, exclusivist, intolerant - regardless. 

No other state on earth except Israel could have maintained so odiously
discriminatory a policy against a native people only on religious and
ethnic grounds, a policy that forbids native people to own or keep land or
to exist free of military repression, but for its amazing international
reputation as a liberal, admirable and advanced country. 

This brings me to the second front of Israeli policy, which must be seen
therefore through a double lens. Even as it besieges Palestinian towns
using mediaeval techniques like ditches and total military blockades, it
can do so with the aura of a besieged victim of dangerous,
exterminationist violence. Israeli soldiers (called a "defence force") 
bomb Palestinian homes with helicopter gunships, advanced missiles, and
tank barrages; Israeli soldiers kill 400 civilians, cause 12,000
casualties, bring economic life down to a 50 per cent poverty level and 45
per cent unemployment; Israeli bulldozers destroy 44,000 Palestinian
trees, demolish houses, create fortifications that make movement
impossible; Israeli planners build more settlements and settlement roads -
all this while maintaining the image of a poor, defenceless and terribly
threatened people. How? By a concerted international, especially American,
public relations campaign, as cynical as it is effective. 

Last week alone Sharon, Peres, and Abraham Burg (Knesset speaker) were in
the United States to consolidate the Israeli image as righteously fighting
off terrorist violence. The three of them circulated through one
influential public platform after another, gaining support and sympathy
for Israel's policies every minute. In addition, the media announced that
the Israeli government had hired two public relations firms to continue
promoting its policies through advertisements, concerted lobbying efforts,
and Washington congressional liaisons. 

News of the Palestinian Intifada has gradually disappeared from the media. 
After all, how long can "violence," which seems to be directed neither at
long-standing injustice (such as military occupation and collective
punishment) nor at a particular policy (such as Israel's adamant refusal
to regard Palestinian claims as having any merit whatever), keep hold of
reporters whose every deviation from an accepted pro-Israeli editorial
policy is punished? It's not only that reporters have no great story to
report (such as a ready narrative of Palestinian liberation), it is also
that Israel has never been firmly indicted for years and years of massive
human rights abuses against the entire Palestinian population. 

Senator George Mitchell's commission of inquiry as well as Mary Robinson's
similar set of human rights experts, comprising a distinguished group that
includes Professor Richard Falk of Princeton, will doubtless come to
similar conclusions. I have read the Robinson report and it is
unequivocally damning of Israel's cruelty and disproportionate military
response to what is in effect an anti-colonial civilian uprising. But one
can be certain that few people will see or be affected by these excellent
reports.
 
Israel's public relations machine, in the US especially, will make certain
of that.Such propaganda campaigns in the US are far more effective there
than they are in the UK, for instance. Robert Fisk, the excellent Middle
East reporter for the Independent, has complained of attacks on him and
his paper by the British Israeli lobby, but he continues to write
fearlessly. And when the Canadian media tycoon, Conrad Black, tried to
stop or censor criticism of Israel in the Daily Telegraph or the
Spectator, both of which he owns, a chorus of his own writers and others,
like Ian Gilmour, were able to respond to him in his own papers. 

This could not happen in the US, where leading newspapers and journalists
for the most part simply do not permit pro-Palestinian editorial comment
at all. The New York Times has only had two or three columns like that, as
against dozens of "neutral" or pro-Israel commentaries. A similar pattern
obtains in every major US newspaper. Thus, the average reader is inundated
with dozens upon dozens of articles about "violence," as if that violence
was somehow equal to, or worse than, Israel's attacks with helicopters,
tanks and missiles. 

If it is sadly true that one Israeli death appears to be worth many
Palestinian deaths on the ground, then it is also true that for all their
actual suffering and daily humiliation, Palestinians in the media seem
scarcely more human than the cockroaches and terrorists to which they have
been compared. 

The simple fact of the matter is that the Palestinian Intifada is
unprotected and ineffective so long as it does not appear to be a struggle
for liberation in the West. 

The US is Israel's strongest supporter at $5 billion a year, and the one
thing that Israelis have long understood is the direct value of their
propaganda, which in no uncertain terms allows them to do anything at all,
and still retain an image of serene j ustice and confident right. As a
people, we Palestinians have to do what the South African anti-apartheid
movement did - gain legitimacy in Europe and especially in the US, and
consequently de-legitimize the apartheid regime. The whole principle of
Israel i colonialism must be similarly discredited in order for any
progress in Palestinian self-determination to be made. 

This task can no longer be postponed. During the 1982 siege of Beirut by
Sharon's armies, a substantial group of Palestinian businessmen and
intellectuals met in London. The idea was to help alleviate Palestinian
suffering, and also to set up an information campaign in the US: 
Palestinian resistance on the ground and the Palestinian image were seen
as two equal fronts. But over time, the second effort was totally
abandoned, for reasons I still cannot completely understand. You don't
have to be Aristotle to connect the propaganda framework turning
Palestinians into ugly, fanatical terrorists with the ease with which
Israel, performing horrendous crimes of war on a daily basis, managed to
maintain itself as a plucky little state fighting off extermination, and
maintaining unconditional US support paid in full by an uncomprehending
American taxpayer. 

This is an intolerable situation, and until the Palestinian struggle
resolutely focuses on the battle to represent itself as a narrative
surviving valiantly against Israeli colonialism, we have no chance at all
of gaining our rights as a people. Every stone cast symbolically in
support of equality and justice must therefore be interpreted as such, and
not misrepresented as either violence or a blind rejection of peace. 
Palestinian information must change the framework, must take
responsibility for it and must do so immediately. There has to be a
unified collective goal. 

In a globalized world, in which politics and information are virtually
equivalent, Palestinians can no longer afford to shirk a task which, alas,
the leadership is simply incapable of comprehending. It must be done if
the loss of life and property is to be stopped, and if liberation, not
unending servitude to Israel, is the real goal. 

The irony is that truth and justice are on the Palestinian side, but until
Palestinians themselves make that readily apparent - to the world in
general, to themselves, to Israelis and Americans in particular - neither
truth nor justice can prevail. For a people that has already endured a
century's injustice, surely a proper politics of information is quite
possible. What is needed is a re-directed and re-focused will to victory
over military occupation and ethnically and religiously based
dispossession.

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		ScholarsBase: http://msanews.mynet.net/Scholars/Said/
		----------------------------------------------------



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