Re: BHA: <fwd>Edward Said - American Zionism (3)

[lynne engelskirchen <lhengels@xxxxxxx>]

Jan --

Thanks for this post.

Howard


At 01:55 AM 11/10/00 +0100, you wrote:
>Greetings Friends,
>
>This article by Said is a must read.  Please read it and forward it
>to other Lists - K. Samman
>----------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>http://163.121.116.16/weekly/2000/506/op2.htm
>
>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 daysago 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 offense 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.
>
>
> Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
>
>
>
>
>     --- from list bhaskar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
>


     --- from list bhaskar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---