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

["Caroline New" <c.new@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I've just read the Said article referred to by several on the list.   As
someone said, he is  understandably very angry.  There is a lot to be angry
about. The Palestineans are under military occupation, the proto-State which
is being denied them is in any case barely viable, their teenagers are being
killed and their lives are being destroyed in other ways too, and the real
power differential is being misrepresented.  This has been going on a long
time and shows no sign of ending.  Said is furious with the US press, which
from his account is certainly much worse than the UK press - and that is
believable.  But as critical realists we need to say more than that: there
is little analysis in Said's article.  What there is concerns the media
representations, which it is certainly valid to address, but which amounts
to criticism rather than explanatory critique.  He makes Zionism a monolith
in a way that I find disturbing, using phrases like 'the Zionised media' as
if he had identified a single generative mechanism with enormous enduring
causal powers. I don't know that much about Zionism, but I know that the
term has been used to cover many positions - from the position that the
Israelis now have the right to live in the disputed land (though not in a
way that continues to oppress Palestineans), that they can't now be deported
(where to?), that a two state solution must be found, as the first step to
something better (a position I'd hold), to fundamentalist religious
positions about 'The Land of Israel' held by many of the settlers.  And many
in between or different.  I don't know that much about Jews in the US, but I
can't believe they are that monolithic.  Now, it's not necessarily Said's
job to figure out Zionism in its several guises as a bourgeois liberation
movement, as a settler movement etc. But as critical realists desperately
upset about what's happening in the Middle East, if we want to understand
why most (but not all) Israelis and many (but by no means all) diaspora Jews
FEEL as if the Israelis are powerless where they are the oppressors, we have
to understand something about psychodynamics, about how oppression is
internalised and how oppressed people may take on some of the
characteristics of their oppressors.  The Jews were abandoned during the
Third Reich.  The State of Israel came directly out of that abandonment.  In
the historical psyche, that is just yesterday - you can't expect sudden
feelings of trust in a benign international community. The Jews' failure
successfully to resist the death camps (although there was some resistance)
has been used against them by anti-Semites and is something many younger
Israelis feel as a historical humiliation. Said mentions 'mental
derangement' - he is right, people can be driven mad by their history.  That
is happening to the Palestineans too.  The role Israel plays in relation to
the US is not unlike the role of Jewish agents for landowners in the 18th
century, and Jews in many historical periods invited into a country to play
a particular role on which their survival was made to depend, and then used
as scapegoats to protect the ruling class from attack.
Said rightly hates the trick of pretending that any criticism of Israeli
government policies and actions is anti-Semitic.  I hate that too.  But I
have come across anti-semitism on the left many times.  One example is when
Jews are expected to dissociate themselves from Israel in a way no other
people, culturally or ethnically linked to a country, are expected to
dissociate themselves from it IN ORDER TO BE CONSIDERED OKAY.
I do believe a solution is possible, but it will have to consider the
historical hurts of both sides (even though the Palestineans are not
responsible for what happened to the Jews in Europe, the causal powers of
those policies of extermination won't go away). I certainly wish the US
would stop feeding terrible (and self-destructive) Israeli policies.  But
why should it?
All the best, Caroline


----- Original Message -----
From: "Jan Straathof" <janstr@xxxxxxx>
To: <bhaskar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, November 10, 2000 12:55 AM
Subject: BHA: <fwd>Edward Said - American Zionism (3)


> 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
>
>
>
>
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