ZGram - 11/18/2001 - "American Zionism: The Real Problem"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

November 18, 2001


Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

This article was originally from the Sept. 21-27, 2000 issue of the
Al-Ahram Weekly No.500, but the ideas remain relevant.  Al-Ahram is an
influential Arab language paper, often closely reflecting the thoughts of
Egypt's governing elite.  It is read all over the Arab world.

Professor Edward Said lives in America and is American-educated, frequently
seen on American TV over the years.  His thoughts deserve attention and
reflection.

[START]

 American Zionism: The Real Problem

 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.

[END]

 This article originally appear in the 21 - 27 September 2000 issue of
Al-Ahram Weekly ( No. 500).

=====

Thought for the Day:

"We fight not to enslave but to set a country free, and to make room upon
the earth for honest men to live in."

(Thomas Paine, 1737-1809)