In this commentary by Edward Said, he centers his attack against the
betrayal of the European Left historically, along with its latest
manifestation in Lebanon.
However, the "bad faith and duplicity" of the Left extends to the
American Left, too.
And left unmentioned, is the passive acquiescence of the American and
European Lefts over the last 1/4 century, as Western Imperialism
reconstructed a new support network after the fall of The Shah of Iran.
A support network to continue its robbery of petroleum from the Third
World.
First, the US led imperialists tilted toward Saddam Hussein, to use to
beat back the Iranian Revolution. Hardly a whisper was heard from
the Western Left. It was more than igorance, it was acquiescence
in US activities in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
Then, the US government "betrayed" Hussein, and began its bombing
attacks against Iraq. A brief burst of protest was followed by a
virtual disengagement from the issue for several years. As the Left
began to almost passively reinvolve itself with concern for the genocide
inflicted on Iraq, it then swung off under the sway of the Western
propaganda machine, into passive-to-active acceptance of bombing
Yugoslavia.
The net result of Western Left activities over the last 25 years?
The US led imperialist alliance has been able to reconstruct a new
mechanism of regional controls throughout the oil producing regions.
This time, with Turkey and ex-Soviet Bloc states moving into the picture
as the preferred client states, along with old timers like Saudi Arabia,
Israel, and the paid-for Egypt.
Most of the Western Left remains disengaged from building antiwar
activities.
Tony Abdo
..........................................................
Al-Ahram Weekly
2 - 8 March 2000
Issue No. 471 Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875
The gap grows wider
By Edward Said
On his visit to Birzeit University, Lionel Jospin had the gall to speak
of the Hizbullah fighters as terrorists, also expressing his
"understanding" of Israel's actions against Lebanon. As is now widely
known, he was greeted after his speech by many hundreds of students, who
stoned his car and that of his escort, Minister Nabil Shaath. Jospin's
visit to the Palestinian territories (still under occupation by Israel,
which is aided in its occupation by the Palestinian Authority) was under
the supposed auspices of the Authority, which was exposed for its
unpopularity and incompetence.
Embarrassed and angry, the Palestinian boss, Yasser Arafat, condemned
the attack, paying no heed to the justice of what the students were
saying, which was that there was one common front of resistance against
Israeli occupation from Beirut to Birzeit, and using his security forces
to beat the students and perhaps later imprison and torture some of
them.
Threatened by the wave of discontent, the panicky Birzeit administration
closed the university for three days, more or less acting under the
Authority's injunctions.
Like dictators everywhere, Arafat has no real support anymore and has
lost sight of what it is he is supposed to be doing, namely liberating
his people. Far from that, he is colluding with Israel to confine them
still more, all the while fattening himself and his cronies on the
ill-gotten gains provided by his monopolies, casinos,
skimmed-off-the-top businesses, extortion and protection money.
Without any law or real civil institutions Arafat is the perfect partner
for Israel and the US, who now have a native sub-contractor in the
oppression of Palestinians and in the furtherance of their interests:
therefore, they could not be happier. Even though "peace" isn't a step
closer to realisation than under Netanyahu -- in fact, I had predicted
that Barak would be a good deal worse, and he has confirmed that by
allowing or encouraging more settlement building than his predecessor --
the various rulers and "peace" professionals seem not to have taken
notice of a widening gap between the people ruled and the
justly-maligned process.
Typically though, it isn't the seasoned politicians or the intellectuals
who have taken the lead in opposing the enslavement of the so-called
peace, but rather the students. In Beirut, at the American University,
students have been demonstrating against US policy, which is nothing
less than full support for Israel's bombing of civilian targets, a crime
punishable according to the Fourth Geneva Convention.
But whereas the US government and organisations like Human Rights Watch
have been agitating to bring Saddam Hussein to trial for crimes against
humanity (few deserve it more, by the way), nothing is said about
Sharon, Barak, Peres, and all the other leaders whose routine assaults
on civilian and human rights constitute the longest-standing and
longest-unpunished set of war crimes in history.
These go back to 1948, when Palestine was ethnically cleansed. The
invidiousness of such a policy enraged the Beirut students, and they
made life a little difficult for the US ambassador, who was attending
some public function at the AUB. One would wish there was a similar
policy of peaceful resistance taken against those rulers in the Arab
countries who either take no favorable notice of the demonstrations or
who pander openly to the Israelis and the Americans.
As for Lionel Jospin, he follows in the long tradition of bad faith and
duplicity of the European Left, which has always actively supported
Zionism with scarce regard for the tenets of socialism, much less of
liberal humanism. It is a strange thing indeed, but the Western Left has
basically been blind to what Zionism did to the Palestinians, so
carefully did the publicists of that movement cultivate the totally
fraudulent notion that Zionism was essentially a socialist and
progressive movement.
In fact, as several Israeli historians have shown, Zionism was
profoundly anti-socialist, and was very much in favour of capitalism so
long as it could be put to what was then characterised as "Jewish"
purposes and aims in Palestine. This was as true of Ben Gurion as it was
of Weizmann, as it was of all their followers in the Israeli Labour
Party. It is a breathtaking prevarication, this pretence of socialism,
but has been sustained successfully for almost a century: Israel's
Labour Party is a member of the Socialist International; the kibbutz,
which was a sort of window-dressing operation constituting less than one
per cent of the population, became the symbol of socialist Zionism; and
a whole generation of European politicians from Crossman to Jospin have
followed along unquestioningly.
In Jospin's case, he is a member of the Protestant minority and likely
to feel pangs of identification with Israeli Jews (forgetting totally
the Palestinian minority, for racist reasons), as well as some sense of
collective guilt for the Holocaust. As to why it should be allowable for
Israel to bomb Lebanon as an aspect of its illegal occupation of the
South, that is left unexplained. Perhaps it is also worth mentioning
that Jospin's sudden expression of enthusiasm was kindled by the fact
that ElAl, the Israeli airline, is in the process of refurbishing its
fleet of aircraft, and Aerospatiale, the French producers of the AirBus,
are Boeing's chief competitor for the enormous, multi-billion dollar
deal. Jospin must have accordingly felt that a little cost-free French
support (I think he and Mrs Albright call it "understanding") for
Israeli bombing would be an extra incentive for ElAl to buy French
products.
Besides, he supposed, where more convincingly could he make his point
sincerely than under Palestinian noses, so to speak. They would never
object, poor little brown people that they are. French racism and
condescension, hand in hand.
Thank heavens for the students, who were more courageous than their
professors and their so-called leaders, who probably (I have no
information) just sat on their hands politely and let the villainous
Jospin blather on. But that has been the Arab elite habit for some time
now: taking it imperturbably on the chin when a white man insults and
humiliates them, all of this abjection as a way of demonstrating to the
world that we are not the terrorists and fanatics that we have sometimes
seemed to be.
Boss Arafat and Nabil Shaath, who was at Birzeit and was pummeled by the
students as a symbol of collaboration, went out of their way to express
anger at the students, instead of refusing to speak to Jospin at all.
Any other leadership worth its salt would have done exactly that. But
ours is too far gone to notice that "peace" to most people is a cynical
game and the shameless pandering to Israel's bankrupt and ruthlessly
arrogant leadership will get them no further than exactly as far as they
have come to date, which isn't much of a distance at all.
Thus the gap between the interests of the preponderant majority of the
people and the ruling juntas (Arab as well as Israeli) increases. In
whose interest exactly is Israel's quasi-insane military spending?
Certainly not that of the urban masses or the Mizrahim, who are forced
to swallow insult upon insult, to say nothing of grinding poverty and
discrimination, while the Ashkenazi elites go on their merry way
regardless, acquiring bigger cars and apartments while the majority
suffers.
This is not to mention the present suicidal course of Israel's foreign
policy, whose result is to lay up more and more hatred among Arabs who
are conceived of as only "understanding the language of force." What
blindness and what moral obtuseness this is, as if more and more
gratuitous punishment and humiliation of the Arabs will make Israel more
acceptable and more popular instead of more hated and more likely to be
the target of indiscriminate Arab violence.
The Israelis seem to have learned nothing from the history of cruelty,
which simply breeds counter-responses that prolong the dialectic of
force, instead of the other way round.
They are no less unwise than their Arab counterparts, who somehow
doggedly believe that the Americans will protect them in the long run
from the wrath of their long-suffering people. There will be no escape
from that so long as the gap widens between the rhetoric and
institutions of the false peace, on the one hand, and the appalling
distortions of reality on the other. Peace in the Palestinian world has
meant more land taken, houses demolished, corruption, continued
political prisoners and torture, despotism, and no land really liberated
to speak of.
At this point it doesn't matter who does the oppressing, Israeli or
Palestinian security men. Torture can't be justified if it is done by a
Palestinian policeman, any more than it could be justified when an
Israeli did it. Torture is torture, occupation is occupation. And above
all, injustice is injustice and will be perceived as such, whether it is
uttered by a French politician or an Arab one. As Fanon said, it cannot
be the aim of liberation simply to replace a white policeman by a
non-white policeman. Liberation must go a great deal further.
The important thing for now is to keep hammering away at the phony
rhetoric and promises of the peace process, showing relentlessly not
only that it hasn't worked and has created a gap between rulers and
ruled, but also, and more importantly, that in its present form it
cannot work. Human, political and civil rights are indivisible: they
cannot be partially achieved by one people and fully enjoyed by another
living in the same territory. This is the deep flaw of Oslo.
The only way to overcome it is to raise the cry "equality or nothing,
for Arabs and Jews". If one people enjoys a right of return, the other
one must also. Otherwise the conflict continues -- in the real interests
of no one at all. No one, not even those who seem to be profiting in the
short run.
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