(American Zionism (3
By Edward Said
The events of the past four weeks in Palestine have been a
near-total triumph for Zionism in the United States for the first time since
the modern re-emergence of the Palestinian national movement in the late
1960s. Political as well as public discourse has so definitively transformed
Israel into the victim during the recent clashes, that even though 140
Palestinian lives were lost and close to 5,000 casualties have been
reported, it is still something called "Palestinian violence" that has
disrupted the smooth and orderly flow of the "peace process."
There is now a small litany of phrases that every editorial
commentator either repeats verbatim or relies on as an unspoken assumption:
these have been engraved in ears, minds, and memories as a guide for the
perplexed, a manual or machine for turning out phrases that have clogged the
air for at least a month. I can recite most of them by heart: Barak offered
more concessions at Camp David than any Israeli prime minister before him
(90 per cent of the territories and partial sovereignty over East
Jerusalem); Arafat was cowardly and lacked the necessary courage to accept
Israeli offers to end the conflict; Palestinian violence, directed by
Arafat, has threatened Israel (all sorts of variations on this, including
the wish to eliminate Israel, anti-Semitism, suicidal rage in order to get
on television, putting children in the front lines so that they would become
martyrs) and proved that an ancient "hatred" of the Jews motivates
Palestinians; Arafat is a weak leader who allows his people to attack Jews
and incite against them by releasing terrorists and producing schoolbooks
that deny Israel's existence.
There are probably one or two more formulae that I have not
cited, but the general picture is that Israel is so surrounded by
rock-throwing barbarians that even the missiles, tanks and helicopter
gunships that have been used to "defend" Israelis from the violence are
simply warding off a terrible force. Bill Clinton's injunctions (dutifully
parroted by his secretary of state) for Palestinians to "pull back" goes a
long way to suggest that it is Palestinians who are encroaching on Israeli
territory, not the other way round.
It is also worth mentioning that so successful has this
Zionisation of the media been that not a single map has been published or
shown on television to remind American viewers and readers -- notoriously
ignorant of both geography and history -- that Israeli encampments,
settlements, roads and barricades crisscross Palestinian land in Gaza and
the West Bank. Moreover, as happened in Beirut in 1982, there is a veritable
Israeli siege of Palestinians, including of Arafat and his men. Completely
forgotten, if it was ever at all understood, is the system of Areas A, B,
and C by which the military occupation of 40 per cent of Gaza and 60 per
cent of the West Bank continues, and which the Oslo peace process was never
really designed to end, much less totally modify.
As suggested by the absence of geography in this most
geographical of conflicts, the resulting void is a vitally important point
since the pictures that are either shown or described are without context at
all. I think the omission by the Zionised media was a deliberate one at the
outset and has now become automatic. It has allowed phony commentators like
Thomas Friedman to peddle his wares shamelessly, droning on about American
even-handedness, Israeli flexibility and generosity and his own
perspicacious pragmatism with which he berates Arab leaders and stuns his
bored readers. It has the result not only of permitting the completely
preposterous notion of a Palestinian attack on Israel to prevail, but it
also further dehumanises Palestinians as being beasts without sentience or
motive. Thus little wonder that when the figures of the dead and wounded are
recited no nationalities are given: this lets Americans assume that the
suffering is equally divided between the "warring parties," and in fact
elevates Jewish suffering and reduces or eliminates Arab feelings entirely,
except of course for rage. Rage and its cognates remain as the only and
certainly the defining Palestinian emotion. It explains the violence, and
indeed, it reifies it so that Israel has come to represent a decency and
democracy that is forever surrounded by rage and violence. No other process
can logically explain the stone throwers and the stalwart Israeli "defence."
Nothing is said of house demolitions, land expropriations,
illegal arrests, torture and the like. Nothing is cited about what is
(except for the Japanese occupation of Korea) the longest military
occupation in modern times; nothing about UN resolutions; nothing about
Israeli contraventions of all the Geneva Conventions; nothing about the
sufferings of one entire people and the obduracy of another. Forgotten are
the catastrophe of 1948, ethnic cleansing and massacres, the devastation of
Qibya, Kafr Qassem, Sabra and Shatila, the long years of military government
for non-Jewish Israeli citizens to say nothing of their continued oppression
as a persecuted 20 per cent minority within the Jewish state. Ariel Sharon
at best is a provocation, never a war criminal, Ehud Barak a statesman,
never the assassin of Beirut. Terrorism is always on the Palestinian side of
the ledger, defence on the Israeli.
What Friedman and pro-Israeli "peaceniks" fail to mention
when they extol Barak's unprecedented generosity is the real substance of
it. We are not reminded that his commitment to a third withdrawal (of about
12 per cent) made at Wye 18 months ago has never occurred. Of what value
then are more such "concessions?" We are told that he was willing to give
back 90 per cent of the territory. What gets left out is that the 90 per
cent is of what Israel has no intention of giving back. Greater Jerusalem is
well over 30 per cent of the West Bank; large settlements to be annexed are
another 15 per cent; military roads of areas have yet to be determined. So
after all this is deducted, 90 per cent of the balance isn't so much after
all.
As for Jerusalem: the Israel concession was principally in
being willing to discuss and maybe, just maybe, to offer shared authority
over the Haram Al-Sharif. The breathtaking dishonesty of the matter is that
all of West Jerusalem (principally Arab in 1948) was already conceded by
Arafat, plus most of a vastly expanded East Jerusalem. One detail further:
Palestinians' firing by small arms on Gilo is routinely made to seem like
gratuitous violence, whereas no one mentions that Gilo itself sits on land
confiscated from Beit Jala, the place from which the firing emanates.
Besides, Beit Jala was disproportionately shelled by Israeli helicopters
using missiles to destroy civilian houses.
I have made a survey of the major newspapers. Ever since 28
September, there have been anywhere between one and three opinion articles
per average day in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street
Journal, the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe. With the exception of
perhaps three articles written from a pro-Palestinian point of view in the
Los Angeles Times, and two (one by an Israeli lawyer, Alegra Pacheco, the
other by a pro-Oslo liberal Jordanian journalist, Rami Khoury) in the New
York Times, all the articles -- (including those by regular columnists like
Friedman, William Safire, Charles Krauthammer and others like them), have
been in support of Israel, the US-sponsored peace process, and the idea that
Palestinian violence, Arafat's lack of cooperation, and Islamic
fundamentalism are to blame. The writers have been former US military as
well as civilian officials, Israeli apologists and officials, think tank
specialists and experts, officials of pro-Israeli lobbies and organisations.
In other words, the total blanketing of the mainstream has taken place on
the assumption that no Palestinian or Arab or Islamic position on such
matters as Israeli terror tactics against civilians, settler-colonialism, or
military occupation exists at all, or is worth hearing from. This is simply
without precedent in the annals of US journalism, and is a direct reflection
of a Zionist mind-set that makes Israel the norm in human behaviour, thereby
excluding from equal consideration the existence of 300 million Arabs and
1.2 billion Muslims. In the long run this is of course a suicidal position
for Zionists to be in, but such is the arrogance of power that the thought
seems not to have occurred to anyone.
The mind-set I have described is truly staggering in its
recklessness and, were it not very much a practical as well as actual
distortion of reality, one could quite easily be talking about a form of
private mental derangement. But it corresponds very closely to the official
Israeli policy of dealing with Palestinians not as a people with a history
of dispossession for which in large measure Israel is directly responsible,
but as a periodic nuisance for whom force, and neither understanding nor
full accommodation, is the only possible response. Everything else is
literally unthinkable. This astonishing blindness is compounded in the
United States since Arabs and Muslims are scarcely paid attention to except
as (I have said in an earlier article) the butt of every aspiring
politician. A few days ago Hillary Clinton announced in a gesture of the
most revolting hypocrisy that she was returning a $50,000 donation from an
American-Muslim group because, she said, they supported terrorism; this in
fact was an outright lie, since the group in question had only said that it
supported Palestinian resistance against Israel during the current crisis,
not in itself an untoward position but criminalised in the American system
only because a totalitarian Zionism requires that any -- and I mean
literally any -- criticism of what Israel does is simply intolerable and the
rankest anti-Semitism. And this despite the fact that (again literally) the
entire world has criticised Israel's policies of military occupation,
disproportionate violence, and the siege of the Palestinians. In America you
must refrain from any criticism, otherwise you are hounded as an anti-Semite
requiring the severest opprobrium.
The further peculiarity of American Zionism, which is a
system of antithetical thought and Orwellian distortion, is that it is
impermissible to speak of Jewish violence, or Jewish actions when it comes
to Israel, even though everything done by Israel is done in the name of the
Jewish people, for and by a Jewish state. That such a state is a misnomer,
since almost 20 per cent of the population is not Jewish, is never mentioned
and this too accounts for the amazing, entirely deliberate discrepancy
between what the media calls "Israeli Arabs" and "the Palestinians:" no
reader or viewer could possibly know that they are the same people in fact
divided by Zionist policy, or that both communities represent the result of
Israeli policy -- apartheid in one case, military occupation and ethnic
cleansing in the other.
In fine, American Zionism has made any serious public
discussion of Israel, by far the largest ever recipient of US foreign aid,
its past and its future, a taboo not be broken in any circumstance. To call
this literally the last taboo in American discourse is by no means an
exaggeration. Abortion, homosexuality, the death penalty, even the
sacrosanct military budget have been talked about with some freedom
(although always within limits). The American flag can be burned in public,
whereas the systematic continuity of Israel's 52-year-old treatment of the
Palestinians is virtually unimaginable, a narrative with no permission to
appear.
This consensus might be somehow tolerable were it not for
the fact that it makes the continuing punishment and dehumanisation of the
Palestinian people an actual virtue. There is simply no people in the world
today whose killing on television screens seems to be considered by most
American viewers to be acceptable as well-deserved punishment. This is the
case with Palestinians whose daily loss of life in the past month is herded
under the rubric "the violence on both sides," as if the stones and slings
of young men thoroughly tired of injustice and repression were a major
offence rather than the courageous resistance to a demeaning fate meted out
to them not just by Israeli soldiers armed by America, but by a peace
process designed to coop them up in Bantustans and reservations fit for
animals.
That the US supporters of Israel could have plotted for
seven years to produce a document designed essentially to cage people like
inmates in an asylum or prison -- that is the real crime. And that this
could be passed off as peace instead of the desolation that it really has
been all along, that surpasses my powers to understand or adequately
describe as anything less than untrammelled immorality. The worst thing of
all is that so iron-like is the wall protecting American discourse about
Israel that no questions can be put to the minds that produced Oslo and that
for seven years have been passing off their scheme to the world as peace.
One scarcely knows which is more pernicious, the mentality that thinks of
Palestinians as not entitled even to express a sense of injustice (they are
too low a form for that) or the one that continues to plot their further
enslavement.
Were this the whole it would be bad enough. But our
miserable status as far as US Zionism is concerned is compounded by the
absence of any institution here or in the Arab world ready and able to
produce an alternative. I fear that the coverage of those stone-throwing
protesters in Bethlehem, Gaza, Ramallah, Nablus and Hebron may not be
adequately reflected in the dithering Palestinian leadership, unable either
to retire or to go forward. That is the ultimate pity of it.
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