(American Zionism -- the real problem (1
By Edward Said
This is the first article in a series on the
misunderstood and misjudged role of American Zionism in the question of
Palestine. In my opinion, the role of organised Zionist groups and
activities in the United States has not been sufficiently addressed during
the period of the "peace process," a neglect that I find absolutely
astonishing, given that Palestinian policy has been essentially to throw our
fate as a people in the lap of the United States without any strategic
awareness of how US policy is in effect dominated, if not completely
controlled, by a small minority of people whose views about Middle East
peace are in some way more extreme than even those of the Israeli Likud.
Let me give a small example. A month ago, the Israeli
newspaper Ha'aretz sent over a leading columnist of theirs, Ari Shavit, to
spend several days talking with me; a good summary of this long conversation
appeared as a question-and-answer interview in the August 18 issue of the
newspaper's supplement, basically uncut and uncensored. I voiced my views
very candidly, with a major emphasis on right of return, the events of 1948,
and Israel's responsibility for all this. I was surprised that my views were
presented just as I voiced them, without the slightest editorialising by
Shavit, whose questions were always courteous and un-confrontational.
A week after the interview there was a response to it by
Meron Benvenisti, ex-deputy mayor of Jerusalem under Teddy Kollek. It was
disgustingly personal, full of insults and slander against me and my family.
But he never denied that there was a Palestinian people, or that we were
driven out in 1948. In fact he said, we conquered them, and why should we
feel guilty? I responded to Benvenisti a week later in Ha'aretz: What I
wrote was also published uncut. I reminded Israeli readers that Benvenisti
was responsible for the destruction (and probably knew about the killing of
several Palestinians) of Haret Al-Magharibah in 1967, in which several
hundred Palestinians lost their homes to Israeli bulldozers. But I did not
have to remind Benvenisti or Ha'aretz readers that as a people we existed
and could at least debate our right of return. That was taken for granted.
Two points here. One is that the whole interview could not
have appeared in any American paper, and certainly not in any
Jewish-American journal. And if there had been an interview the questions to
me would have been adversarial, hectoring, insulting, such as, why have you
been involved in terrorism, why will you not recognise Israel, why was Hajj
Amin a Nazi, and so on. Second, a right-wing Israeli Zionist like
Benvenisti, no matter how much he may detest me or my views, would not deny
that there is a Palestinian people which was forced to leave in 1948. An
American Zionist for a long time would say that no conquest took place or,
as Joan Peters alleged in a now-disappeared and all but forgotten 1984 book,
From Time Immemorial (that won all the Jewish awards when it appeared here),
there were no Palestinians with a life in Palestine before 1948.
Every Israeli will readily admit and knows perfectly well
that all of Israel was once Palestine, that (as Moshe Dayan said openly in
1976) every Israeli town or village once had an Arab name. And Benvenisti
says openly that "we" conquered, and so what? Why should we feel guilty
about winning? American Zionist discourse is never straight out honest that
way: it must always go round and talk about making the desert bloom, and
Israeli democracy, etc., completely avoiding the essential facts about 1948,
which every Israeli has actually lived. For the American, these are mostly
fantasies, or myths, not realities. So removed from the actualities are
American supporters of Israel, so caught in the contradictions of diasporic
guilt (after all what does it mean to be a Zionist and not emigrate to
Israel?) and triumphalism as the most successful and most powerful minority
in the US, that what emerges is very often a frightening mixture of
vicarious violence against Arabs and a deep fear and hatred of them, which
is the result, unlike Israeli Jews, of not having any sustained direct
contact with them.
For the American Zionist, therefore, Arabs are not real
beings, but fantasies of nearly everything that can be demonised and
despised, terrorism and anti-Semitism most specially. I recently received a
letter from a former student of mine, who has had the benefit of the finest
education available in the United States: he can still bring himself to ask
me in all honesty and courtesy why as a Palestinian I let a Nazi like Hajj
Amin still determine my political agenda. "Before Hajj Amin," he argued,
"Jerusalem wasn't important to Arabs. Because he was so evil he made it an
important issue for Arabs just in order to frustrate Zionist aspirations
which always held Jerusalem to be important." This is not the logic of
someone who has lived with and knows something concrete about Arabs. It is
that of a person who speaks an organised discourse and is driven by an
ideology that regards Arabs only as negative functions, as the embodiment of
violent anti-Semitic violent passions. As such, therefore, they are to be
fought against and if possible disposed of. Not for nothing was Dr Baruch
Goldstein, the appalling murderer of 29 Palestinians who were quietly
praying in the Hebron mosque, an American, as was Rabbi Meir Kahane. Far
from being aberrations that have embarrassed their followers, both Kahane
and Goldstein are revered today by others like them. Many of the most
zealous far-right settlers sitting on Palestinian land, remorselessly
speaking about "the land of Israel" as being theirs, hating and ignoring the
Palestinian owners and residents all round them, are also American-born. To
see them walking through the streets of Hebron as if the Arab city was
entirely theirs is a frightening sight, aggravated by the defiance and
contempt they display openly against the Arab majority.
I bring all this up here to make one essential point. When
after the Gulf War the PLO took the strategic decision -- already settled on
by two major Arab countries before the PLO -- to work with the American
government and if possible with the powerful lobby that controls discussion
of Middle Eastern politics, they had made the decision (as had the two Arab
states before them) on the basis of vast ignorance and quite extraordinarily
mistaken assumptions. The idea, as it was expressed to me shortly after 1967
by a senior Arab diplomat, was to surrender in effect, and say, we are not
going to struggle any more. We are now willing to accept Israel and also to
accept the US's determining role in our future. There were objective reasons
for such a view at the time, as there are now, as to why continuing the
fight as the Arabs had done historically would lead to further defeat and
even disaster. But I firmly believe that it was a mistaken policy simply to
throw Arab policy into the lap of the US and, since the major Zionist
organisations are so influential everywhere in the United States, into their
lap as well, saying, in effect, we won't fight you, let us join you, but
please treat us well. The hope was that if we conceded and said, we are not
your enemies, as Arabs we would become their friends.
The problem is with the disparity in power that remained.
From the viewpoint of the powerful, what difference does it make to your own
strategy if your weak adversary gives up and says I have nothing further to
fight for, take me, I want to be your ally, just try to understand me a bit
better and then perhaps you will then be fairer? A good way of answering
this question in practical and concrete terms is to look at the latest turn
of events in New York's senatorial race, where Hillary Clinton is competing
with Republican Ric Lazio for the seat now held by Daniel Patrick Moynihan
(D), who is retiring. Last year Hillary said that she favoured the
establishment of a Palestinian state and, on a formal visit to Gaza with her
husband, embraced Soha Arafat. Since entering the senatorial race in New
York she has outdone even the most right-wing Zionists in her fervour for
Israel and opposition to Palestine, even going so far as to advocate moving
the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and (more extreme) advocating
leniency for Jonathan Pollard, the Israeli spy convicted for espionage
against the US and now serving a life sentence. Her Republican antagonists
have tried to embarrass her by depicting her as an "Arab-lover" and by
releasing a photograph of her actually embracing Soha. Since New York is the
citadel of Zionist power, attacking someone with such labels as "Arab-lover"
and "friend of Soha Arafat" is tantamount to the worst possible insult. All
this despite the fact that Arafat and the PLO are openly declared American
allies, recipients of US military and financial aid, and in the security
field the beneficiaries of CIA security support. In the meantime, the White
House released a photo of Lazio shaking hands two years ago with Arafat. One
blow clearly deserves another.
The real fact is that Zionist discourse is a discourse of
power, and Arabs in that discourse are the objects of power -- despised
objects at that. Having thrown in their lot with this power as its
surrendered former antagonist, they can never expect to be on equal terms
with it. Hence the degrading and insulting spectacle of Arafat (always and
forever the symbol of enmity to the Zionist mind) being used in an entirely
local contest in the US between two opponents who are trying to prove who of
the two is the most pro-Israeli. And neither Hillary Clinton nor Ric Lazio
is even Jewish.
What I shall discuss in my next article is how the only
possible political strategy for the US so far as Arab and Palestinian policy
are concerned is neither a pact with the Zionists here nor one with US
policy, but a mobilised mass campaign directed at the American population on
behalf of Palestinian human, civil and political rights. All other
arrangements, whether Oslo or Camp David, are doomed to failure because, put
simply, the official discourse is totally dominated by Zionism and, except
for a few individual exceptions, no alternatives to it exist. Therefore all
peace arrangements undertaken on the basis of an alliance with the US are
alliances that confirm rather than confront Zionist power. To submit
supinely to a Zionist-controlled Middle East policy, as the Arabs have done
for almost a generation now, will neither bring stability at home nor
equality and justice in the US.
Yet the irony is that there exists inside the US a vast body
of opinion ready to be critical both of Israel and of US foreign policy. The
tragedy is that the Arabs are too weak, too divided, too disorganised and
ignorant to take advantage of it. I shall discuss the reasons for that as
well in my next article since my hope is to try to reach a new generation
that may be both puzzled and discouraged by the miserable, denigrated place
in which our culture and people are now located, and the constant sense of
indignant but humiliating loss that all of us experience as a result.
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