Date: Tue, 02 Apr 2002 18:17:43 -0800
Subject: Re: What Price Oslo?-Edward Said 
From: Matthew Shenoda <shenoda-AT-sfsu.edu>


I read it in Al Ahram Weekly...
M


> Omar,
> 
> Where did this appear?
> 
> Priti.
> 
> At 02:30 PM 4/2/2002 -0800, you wrote:
>> Another thoughtful, passionate piece by E. Said,
>> though as usual disheartening ...
>> Omar
>> 
>> 
>> March 24 - March 30, 2002
>> 
>> What Price Oslo?
>> By Edward Said
>> 
>> The television images on Al-Jazeera have been
>> burningly clear. There is a
>> kind of Palestinian heroism in evidence there that
>> makes this the story of
>> our time. An entire army, navy, and air force supplied
>> munificently and
>> unconditionally by the United States have been
>> wreaking destruction on the
>> 18 per cent of the West Bank and 60 per cent of Gaza
>> afforded Palestinians
>> after ten years of negotiations with Israel and the
>> US.
>> 
>> Palestinian hospitals, schools, refugee camps and
>> civilian residences have
>> been at the receiving end of a merciless, criminal
>> assault by Israeli
>> troops huddled inside their helicopter gun-ships,
>> F-16's and Merkavas, and
>> still the poorly armed resistance fighters take on
>> this preposterously
>> more powerful force undaunted and unyielding.
>> 
>> In the US, CNN and newspapers like The New York Times
>> fail, to their
>> discredit, to ever mention that "the violence" is
>> uneven and that there
>> aren't two sides involved here, but only one state
>> turning all its great
>> power against a stateless, repeatedly refugeed, and
>> dispossessed people,
>> bereft of arms and real leadership, with the aim of
>> destroying this
>> people, "dealing them a terrible blow" as the war
>> criminal who leads
>> Israel shamelessly put it.
>> 
>> As an index of how deranged Sharon has become, I might
>> quote here what he
>> said to Ha'aretz on 5 March: "The PA is behind the
>> terror, it's all
>> terror. Arafat is behind the terror. Our pressure is
>> aimed at ending the
>> terror. Don't expect Arafat to act against the terror.
>> We have to cause
>> them heavy casualties and then they'll know they can't
>> keep using terror
>> and win political achievements."
>> 
>> Besides symptomatically revealing the workings of an
>> obsessed mind bent on
>> destruction and sheer, unadulterated hatred, Sharon's
>> words indicate the
>> failures of reason and criticism loosed on the world
>> since last September.
>> Yes, there was a terrorist outrage, but there's more
>> to the world than
>> terror. There is politics, and struggle, and history,
>> and injustice, and
>> resistance and yes, state terror as well. With
>> scarcely a peep from the
>> American professorate or intelligentsia, we have all
>> succumbed to the
>> promiscuous misuse of language and sense, by which
>> everything we don't
>> like has become terror and what we do is pure and
>> simple good -- fighting
>> terror, no matter how much wealth, and lives, and
>> destruction is involved.
>> 
>> Swept away are all the Enlightenment precepts by which
>> we attempt to
>> educate our students and our-fellow citizens, replaced
>> by a
>> disproportionate orgy of vindictiveness and
>> self-righteous wrath of the
>> kind that only the wealthy and the powerful, it would
>> seem, have the right
>> to use and act upon. No wonder then that a fourth-rate
>> thug like Sharon
>> feels entitled (by emulation and derivation) to do
>> what he does when in
>> the greatest democracy on earth, laws, constitutional
>> rights, writs of
>> habeas corpus and reason itself are consigned to the
>> rubbish bin in the
>> pursuit of terror and terrorism.
>> 
>> As educators and as citizens, we have failed in our
>> mission by allowing
>> ourselves to be bamboozled in this way, without so
>> much as an organised
>> public discussion about a defence budget that has shot
>> up to $400 billion
>> while 40 million people remain without health
>> insurance.
>> 
>> Israelis, Arabs and Americans are told that love of
>> country requires such
>> expenditures and such destruction because a good cause
>> is at stake.
>> Nonsense. What is at stake are material interests that
>> keep rulers in
>> power, corporations making profits, people in a state
>> of manufactured
>> consent, just so long as they don't get up one morning
>> and start to think
>> about where, in this mad technologised rush to bomb
>> and kill, we are
>> going.
>> 
>> Israel is now waging a war against civilians, pure and
>> simple, although
>> you will never hear it put that way in the US. This is
>> a racist war, and
>> in its strategy and tactics, a colonial one as well.
>> People are being
>> killed and made to suffer disproportionately because
>> they are not Jews.
>> What an irony!
>> 
>> Yet CNN never refers to "occupied" territories (always
>> rather to "violence
>> in Israel" as if the main battlefields are the concert
>> halls and cafes of
>> Tel Aviv and not in fact the ghettoes and besieged
>> refugee camps of
>> Palestine that have already been surrounded by 150
>> illegal Israeli
>> settlements). For the past ten years, the great fraud
>> of Oslo was foisted
>> on the world by the US, with hardly an awareness that
>> only 18 per cent of
>> the West Bank were given up, and 60 per cent of Gaza.
>> No one knows
>> geography and it's better not to know, since the
>> reality on the ground is
>> so astonishing, considering the verbal hoopla and
>> self-congratulation.
>> 
>> And that pseudo-pundit -- the insufferably conceited
>> Thomas Friedman --
>> still has the gall to say that "Arab TV" shows
>> one-sided pictures, as if
>> "Arab TV" should be showing things from Israel's
>> point-of-view the way CNN
>> does, with "Mid-East violence" the catch-all word for
>> the ethnic cleansing
>> that Israel is wreaking on the Palestinians in their
>> ghettoes and camps.
>> Has Friedman (or CNN for that matter) ever tried to
>> point out the
>> difference between an attacking army fighting a
>> colonial war on the
>> territory of the people it has occupied for 35 years,
>> and the people
>> defending themselves against that butchery? Of course
>> not, for indeed why
>> should Friedman ever bother to say honestly that there
>> is no Palestinian
>> occupation, there are no Palestinian F-16's, no Apache
>> helicopters, no
>> gunboats, no Merkava tanks, in short, no Palestinian
>> occupation of Israel.
>> 
>> So much for Friedman's credentials as an honest
>> commentator and reporter
>> who has utterly failed, in unadorned terms, to explain
>> the US view or to
>> understand the Arab and Palestinian cause. Can he not
>> see that he and his
>> writings are part of the problem, that in their
>> maundering
>> self-justifications and the dishonesty in which he
>> shows no sign of the
>> self- criticism he keeps hectoringly expecting of
>> others, he actually
>> aggravates the ignorance and the misperceptions rather
>> than reducing them?
>> Poor journalist and educator, he.
>> 
>> The picture you get here is that Israelis are battling
>> for their lives
>> instead of for their settlements and military bases on
>> the occupied lands
>> of Palestine. No maps have been run for months in the
>> American media. On 8
>> March, hitherto the bloodiest day for Palestinians of
>> the 16-month
>> Intifada, CNN's main evening news specified the death
>> of 40 "people" and
>> failed even to mention the death of several Red
>> Crescent workers killed
>> while their ambulances were prevented by Israeli tanks
>> from getting to the
>> wounded. Just "people," and no pictures of the hell
>> they've been living in
>> this the 35th year of military occupation. Tul Karm is
>> undergoing a siege
>> of sieges with 24 hour curfews, electricity and water
>> cut-off, systematic
>> round-ups and the removal of 800 young men, the wanton
>> smashing of refugee
>> houses, wholesale destruction of property (and I'm not
>> speaking of
>> nightclubs or sports facilities but of shacks and
>> lean-tos that furnished
>> twice displaced refugees with hovels for bare
>> subsistence) and limitless
>> cases of sadistic cruelty to unarmed and undefended
>> civilians who are
>> pushed and beaten and left to bleed to death, women
>> allowed to give birth
>> to stillborn babies while they wait needlessly at
>> Israeli road-blocks, old
>> men made to strip and take off their shoes and walk
>> barefoot for a
>> gum-chewing 18-year-old waving around an M-16 that my
>> taxes have paid for.
>> 
>> Bethlehem, its town center and university destroyed,
>> flattened at 5,000
>> feet by valiant Israeli bombers swooshing in with
>> their marvelous F-16's
>> which I've paid for too. Balata camp, Aida and
>> Dheheisheh and Azza Camps,
>> the tiny villages of Khadr and Husam, all battered
>> into rubble without
>> even a mention by the US press, whose New York editors
>> so obviously have
>> no problems with it, with a few exceptions here and
>> there.
>> 
>> The uncounted dead and wounded, the unburied and
>> unassisted, to say
>> nothing of the hundreds of thousands of lives maimed,
>> distorted,
>> catastrophically marked by wantonly caused suffering,
>> all of it ordered at
>> a safe distance from the action in leafy, calm West
>> Jerusalem by men for
>> whom the West Bank and Gaza are distant rat holes
>> filled with insects and
>> rodents that must be "subdued" and driven out, taught
>> a lesson in the
>> accepted jargon of Israel's superb military.
>> 
>> On Tuesday, in the biggest attack of all, Ramallah has
>> been invaded and is
>> being ravaged by 140 Israeli tanks, thus completing
>> Israel's re-conquest
>> of the already-occupied Palestinian territories.
>> 
>> The Palestinian people are paying the heavy, heavy
>> unconscionable price of
>> Oslo, which after 10 years of negotiating left them
>> with bits of land
>> lacking coherence and continuity, security
>> institutions designed to assure
>> their subservience to Israel, and a life that
>> impoverished them so that
>> the Jewish state could thrive and prosper.
>> 
>> In vain during those 10 years did some of us warn that
>> the distance
>> between the US-Israeli language of peace and the
>> appalling realities on
>> the ground was never bridged, never even intended to
>> be bridged. Words and
>> phrases like "peace process" and "terrorism" took hold
>> without reference
>> to any real referent. Land confiscations were either
>> overlooked or
>> referred to as "bilateral negotiations" that were
>> taking place between a
>> state consolidating its hold on territory it wanted at
>> all costs, and a
>> mediocre set of uninformed negotiators whom it took
>> four years to acquire,
>> much less use, a reliable map of the land they were
>> negotiating over.
>> 
>> The worst misrepresentation of all is that in the 54
>> years since 1948,
>> never has a narrative of Palestinian heroism and
>> suffering been allowed to
>> emerge. We are all depicted as violent fanatic
>> extremists who are little
>> more than the terrorists that George Bush and his
>> cabal have imposed on
>> the consciousness of a stunned and systematically
>> misinformed population,
>> aided and uncritically abetted by an entire army of
>> commentators and media
>> stars -- the Blitzers, Zahns, Lehrers, Rathers,
>> Brokaws, Russerts, and
>> their ilk. The Israeli lobby is scarcely needed with
>> such faithful
>> disciples trailing happily in its ranks.
>> 
>> But now that the Saudi peace proposal has become the
>> point of discussion
>> and of hope, it is necessary, I think, to put it in
>> its real, as opposed
>> to its supposed, context. First of all, this is the
>> re-cycled Reagan plan
>> of 1982, the Fahd Plan of 1983, the Madrid plan of
>> 1991, and so on: in
>> other words, it follows a series of plans many times
>> put forward which in
>> the end both Israel and the US have not only refused
>> to implement, but
>> have actively torpedoed.
>> 
>> The way I see it, the only negotiations worth having
>> should be on the
>> phases of a total Israeli withdrawal and not, as was
>> the case with Oslo,
>> bargaining over what pieces of land Israel was willing
>> very grudgingly to
>> give up. There's been too much Palestinian blood
>> spilled, too much Israeli
>> contempt and racist violence dispensed for any serious
>> return to
>> Oslo-style negotiations brokered by that most biased
>> of honest brokers,
>> the United States. Everyone is aware, however, that
>> the old Palestinian
>> negotiators haven't given up on their dreams and
>> illusions, and that
>> meetings have been occurring throughout the raids and
>> bombings.
>> 
>> But I would argue that due weight be given to decades
>> of Palestinian
>> suffering and the real human costs of Israel's
>> destructive policies before
>> any negotiations accord undue status to Israeli
>> governments that have
>> trampled on Palestinian rights the way they have
>> demolished our houses and
>> killed our people. Any Arab-Israeli negotiations that
>> do not factor in
>> history -- and for this task a team of historians,
>> economists, and
>> geographers with a conscience are needed -- are not
>> worth having, just as
>> Palestinians must now elect a new set of negotiators
>> and representatives
>> in the hope of salvaging something from the present
>> calamity.
>> 
>> In short, in whatever meetings that now occur between
>> Israeli and
>> Palestinian representatives, the gravity of Israeli
>> depredations against
>> our people has to be given attention and not simply
>> brushed aside as so
>> much past history. Oslo, in effect, pardoned the
>> occupation, excusing it
>> for all the buildings and lives destroyed over the
>> first 25 years of
>> occupation. After so much further suffering, Israel
>> cannot be excused and
>> allowed to walk away from the table with not even a
>> rhetorical demand that
>> it needs to atone for what it did.
>> 
>> I will be told that politics is about what is
>> possible, not about what is
>> desired, and that we should be grateful to get even a
>> small Israeli
>> pullback. I disagree strongly. Negotiations can only
>> be about when the
>> total withdrawal will take place, not what percentage
>> Israel is willing to
>> concede. A conqueror and a vandal cannot concede
>> anything: he must simply
>> return what he's taken and pay for the abuses that are
>> his responsibility
>> to bear, just as Saddam Hussein should and did pay for
>> his occupation of
>> Kuwait.
>> 
>> We are still a considerable distance from that goal,
>> although in the
>> meantime the extraordinary unbowed bravery of all
>> Palestinians in Gaza and
>> the West Bank has in effect politically and morally
>> defeated Sharon, who
>> will lose his seat in the not too distant future. But,
>> that in two decades
>> his armies can invade Arab cities at will, killing and
>> sowing destruction
>> without so much as a collective Arab peep speaks reams
>> for the Arab
>> world's leaders.
>> 
>> Lastly, what the various Arab rulers who are so
>> delicately silent now
>> while Palestine is being raped on TV think they are
>> doing, I don't know,
>> but I can imagine that deep in their souls they must
>> feel no small amount
>> of shame and disgrace. Powerless militarily,
>> politically, economically and
>> above all morally, they have little credibility and no
>> real standing,
>> except as obedient pawns on the American-Israeli
>> chessboard. Perhaps they
>> feel they are playing a waiting game.
>> 
>> Perhaps.
>> 
>> But they (like Arafat and his men) haven't learned the
>> power of
>> systematically disseminated information as a way of
>> protecting their
>> people from the onslaughts of those who consider all
>> Arabs militant,
>> extremist, terrorist fanatics. The good news is that
>> the time for that
>> sort of irresponsible and contemptible behavior is
>> very short. Will the
>> new generation do any better?
>> 
>> It is for a whole new attitude toward secular
>> education to decide the
>> answer, whether collectively we go down again to
>> disorganisation,
>> corruption and mediocrity or whether at last we can
>> become a nation.
>> 
>> 
>> ====>> "There are insistent questions that we all have to ask and that make it
>> clear to us that it is not possible to study simply for the sake of
>> studying. As if we could study in a way that really had nothing to do with
>> that distant, strange world out there."
>> - Paulo Freire, in 'Pedagogy of Freedom'
>> 
>> __________________________________________________
>> Do You Yahoo!?
>> Yahoo! Tax Center - online filing with TurboTax
>> http://taxes.yahoo.com/
>> 
>> 
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> 
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Priti Joshi
> Department of English
> University of Puget Sound
> 1500 North Warner St, #1045
> Tacoma, WA 98416-1045
> Phn: (253) 879-3286
> Fax: (253) 879-3500
> email: pjoshi-AT-ups.edu
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> 
> 
> 
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