Edward Said on Iraq, Palestine and 'Us' (London Review of Books)

[Jim Farmelant <farmelantj@xxxxxxxx>]

'We' know who 'we' are

Edward Said on Iraq, Palestine and 'Us'

Lebanon was heavily bombed by Israeli warplanes on 4 June 1982.
Two days later the Israeli Army breached the country's southern border.
Menachem Begin was then Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon Minister of Defence.
 The immediate reason for the invasion was the attempted assassination
of the Israeli Ambassador to Britain, blamed by Begin and Sharon on the
PLO, whose forces in South Lebanon had been observing a ceasefire for
a year. By 13 June, Beirut was under siege, even though the Israeli
Government had originally said it planned to go no further into Lebanon
than the Awali River, 35 km north of the border. Later, it became all too

clear that Sharon was trying to kill Yasir Arafat by bombing everything
around him. There was a blockade of humanitarian aid; water and
electricity were cut off, and a sustained aerial bombing campaign
destroyed hundreds of buildings. By mid-August, when the siege
ended, 18,000 Palestinians and Lebanese, most of them civilians,
had been killed.

The civil war between right-wing Christian militias and left-wing
Muslim and Arab nationalist groups had already lasted seven years.
Although Israel sent its Army into Lebanon only once before 1982,
it had early been sought as an ally by the Christian militias, who
co-operated with Sharon's forces during the siege. Sharon's main
ally was Bashir Gemayel, leader of the Phalange Party, who was
elected President by the Lebanese Parliament on 23 August. The
Palestinians had unwisely entered the civil war on the side of the
National Movement, a loose coalition of parties that included Amal,
a forerunner of Hizbollah (which was to play the major role in finally
driving the Israelis out of Lebanon in May 2000). Faced with the
prospect of Israeli vassalage after Sharon's Army had in effect brought
about his election, Gemayel seems to have demurred and was
assassinated on 14 September. Israeli troops occupied Beirut,
supposedly to keep order, and two days later, inside a security
 cordon provided by the Israeli Army, Gemayel's vengeful extremists
massacred two thousand Palestinian refugees at the camps of
Sabra and Shatila.

Under UN and of course US supervision, French troops had entered
 Beirut on 21 August in the aftermath of the siege and were later
joined by US and other European forces. The PLO fighters were
evacuated from Lebanon; and by the beginning of September
Arafat and a small band of advisers and soldiers had relocated to
Tunis. The Taif Accord of 1989 prepared the way for a settlement
of the civil war the following year. The old confessional system - under
which different religious groups are allocated a specific number of
Parliamentary seats - was more or less restored and remains in place
today.

Earlier this year Sharon was quoted as regretting his failure to kill
Arafat in Beirut. Not for want of trying - dozens of buildings were
destroyed, hundreds of people killed. The events of 1982 hardened
ordinary Arabs, I think, to the idea that Israel would use planes,
missiles, tanks and helicopters to attack civilians indiscriminately,
and that neither the US nor the Arab governments would do
anything to stop it.

The invasion of Lebanon was the first full-scale contemporary attempt
at regime change by one sovereign country against another in the
Middle East. I bring it up as a messy backdrop to the current crisis.
The main difference between 1982 and 2002 is that the Palestinians
are now under siege inside Palestinian territories that have been
occupied by Israel since 1967. The main similarity is the
disproportionate nature of Israeli actions: the hundreds of tanks
and bulldozers used to enter towns and villages like Jenin or refugee
camps like Deheisheh, where troops once more set about killing,
vandalising, obstructing ambulances and first-aid workers, cutting
off water and electricity and so on. All with the support of the US,
whose President called Sharon a 'man of peace' during the worst
assaults of last March and April. Sharon's purpose went far beyond
'rooting out terror': his soldiers destroyed every computer and carried
off files and hard drives from the Central Bureau of Statistics and the
Ministries of Education, Finance and Health, and vandalised
offices and libraries.

I don't want to rehearse my criticisms of Arafat's tactics or the
failures of his deplorable regime during the Oslo negotiations
and thereafter. Besides, as I write, the man is only just hanging
onto his life: his crumbling quarters in Ramallah are still besieged
and Sharon is doing everything possible to injure him short of actually
having him killed. What concerns me, rather, is the idea of regime
change as an attractive notion for individuals, ideologies and
institutions
that are vastly more powerful than their adversaries. It is now, it
seems,
taken for granted that great military power licenses large-scale
political
and social change, whatever damage that may entail. And the fact that
one's own side will not suffer many casualties seems only to stimulate
more fantasies about surgical strikes, clean war, high technology
battlefields, changing the entire map, creating democracy and so on,
all of this giving rise to dreams of omnipotence.

In the current American propaganda campaign for regime change in
Iraq, the people of that country, the vast majority of whom have suffered
f
rom poverty, malnutrition and illness as a result of ten years of
sanctions,
have dropped out of sight. This is entirely in keeping with US Middle
East
policy, which is built on two mighty pillars: the security of Israel and
plentiful supplies of inexpensive oil. The complex mosaic of traditions,
religions, cultures, ethnicities and histories in the Arab world is lost
to
US and Israeli strategic planners. Iraq is either a 'threat' to its
neighbours,
which, in its currently weakened and besieged condition, is a nonsensical

idea, or a 'threat' to the freedom and security of the United States,
which is
still more absurd. I am not even going to bother to add my condemnations
of Saddam Hussein: I shall take it for granted that he deserves to be
ousted
and punished. Worst of all, he is a threat to his own people.

Since the period before the first Gulf War, the image of Iraq as a large,

prosperous and diverse Arab country has been replaced in both media
and policy discussions by that of a desert land peopled by brutal gangs
headed by Saddam. That Iraq's debasement has nearly ruined the Arab
publishing industry because the country provided the largest number of
readers in the Arab world; that it was the only Arab state with an
educated
and competent professional middle class of any size; that it has water
and fertile land; that it has always been the cultural centre of the Arab

world (the Abbasid Empire with its great literature, philosophy,
architecture,
science and medicine formed the basis of Arab culture); that its
suffering
has, like the Palestinian calvary, been a source of continuing sorrow for

Arabs and Muslims alike - none of this is ever mentioned. What is
mentioned
are Iraq's vast oil reserves - and if 'we' took them away from Saddam and

got our own hands on them we wouldn't be so dependent on Saudi oil.
Iraq's oil reserves, second only to Saudi Arabia's, are worth roughly
$1.1 trillion - much of it already promised by Saddam to Russia,
France and a few other countries. A good deal of the bargaining between
Putin and Bush is over the percentage of that oil US companies would
be willing to promise Russia. This is eerily reminiscent of the four
billion
dollars offered to Russia (via Saudi Arabia) by Bush Senior. Both Bushes
are oil businessmen, and care more about such things than about the
fine details of Middle Eastern politics - or about the state of Iraq's
civilian infrastructure.

The initial step in the dehumanisation of the Other is to reduce him to
a few insistently repeated simple phrases, images and concepts.
Thus the word 'terrorist' was first employed systematically by Israel
to describe any Palestinian act of resistance in the mid-1970s.
That has been the rule ever since, effectively depoliticising the
reasons for armed struggle. The process of dehumanisation was
stepped up after 11 September. Men from the extreme right-wing
Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and Center for
Security Policy (CSP) populate Pentagon and State Department
committees, including the Defense Policy Board, run by Richard
Perle (who was appointed by Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy
Paul Wolfowitz), where Israeli security is equated with US security.
According to Jason Vest in the Nation, JINSA spends the 'bulk of
its budget taking a bevy of retired US generals and admirals to
Israel': when they come back, they write op-eds and appear
on TV peddling the Likud line.

For his part, Sharon has numbingly repeated that his campaign
against Palestinian terrorism is identical with the American war
on terrorism. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida, he claims, are
part of the same 'terrorist international' that includes Muslims
all over Asia, Africa, Europe and North America. This 'link' is
used by Sharon to explain why every major town on the West Bank
and in Gaza is occupied by Israeli troops who routinely kill or detain
Palestinians on the grounds that they are 'suspected' terrorists and
militants, and demolish houses and shops with the excuse that
they shelter bomb factories, terrorist cells and meeting places for
 militants. No proof is given, none asked for by the press.

Mystification is everywhere. Terror, fanaticism, violence, hatred of
freedom, insecurity and, of course, weapons of mass destruction:
these are the words we use to speak of the Arab world; they don't
come up in relation to Israel, Pakistan, India, the UK or the US.
Iraq is potentially Israel's most fearsome enemy because of its
economic and human resources; the Palestinians stand in the
way of Israeli hegemony and land-occupation. On US TV this summer,
Uzi Landau, Israel's Internal Security Minister (and a member of the
Moledet Party, which advocates 'transferring' all Palestinians out of
Israel and the Occupied Territories), claimed that all talk of
'occupation'
was nonsense. We are a people coming home, he said. None of this
was queried by Mort Zuckerman, host of the programme, who also
owns US News and World Report and chairs the Conference of
Presidents of Major Jewish Organisations. But Landau's views
seem almost moderate when compared with those of some
members of the Bush Administration. The Israeli journalist Alex
Fishman described the 'revolutionary ideas' of Cheney, Rice and
Rumsfeld (who also refers to the 'so-called occupied territories')
as terrifyingly hawkish. Sharon has said that 'next to our American
friends' Effi Eitam - one of the Israeli Cabinet's most remorseless
hardliners - is a 'total dove'.

More frightening still is the unchallenged proposition that if 'we' don't

pre-empt terrorism (or any other potential enemy), we will be destroyed.*

This is now the core of US security strategy and is regularly drummed
out in interviews and talk shows by Rice, Rumsfeld and Bush himself.
The formal statement of this view appeared a short time ago in the
National Security Strategy of the United States, an official paper
prepared
as a manifesto for the Administration's new, post-Cold War foreign
policy.
Its presumption is that we live in an exceptionally dangerous world with
a network of enemies who possess factories, offices and endless
supporters, and whose existence is dedicated to destroying us.
The belief that 'we' must get them first is what frames and gives
legitimacy to the war on terrorism and on Iraq.

Fanatical individuals and groups do exist who are in favour of somehow
harming either Israel or the US. On the other hand, Israel and the US
are widely perceived in the Islamic and Arab worlds, first, as having
created the jihadi extremists of whom bin Laden is the most famous,
and second, as ignoring international law and UN Resolutions in the
pursuit of their own hostile and destructive policies in those worlds.
As David Hirst has pointed out in the Guardian, even Arabs who
oppose their own despotic regimes will see any US attack on Iraq as
an 'act of aggression aimed not just at Iraq, but at the whole Arab
world;
and what will make it supremely intolerable is that it will be done on
behalf of Israel, whose acquisition of a large arsenal of weapons of
mass destruction seems to be as permissible as theirs is an abomination.'

It should also be made clear that the Palestinian position is not
identical
either to that of the Iraqis or to that of al-Qaida. Since the mid-1980s,

the Palestinians have been at least officially willing to make peace
with Israel. Media commentators in the West mix and merge the
Palestinians and Iraq so that they become a collective menace.
Most of the stories about the Palestinians that appear in influential
publications in the US like the New Yorker and the New York Times
magazine show them as bombmakers, collaborators, suicide bombers.
Neither of these has published anything from the Arab viewpoint
since 11 September.

Dennis Ross (in charge of the US team at the Oslo negotiations,
but both before and after that associated with the Israeli lobby)
keeps saying that the Palestinians turned down a generous Israeli
offer at Camp David: in fact, Israel conceded only non-contiguous
Palestinian areas which were all to have Israeli security posts and
settlements surrounding them. In addition, there was to be no
common border between Palestine and any Arab state. Why words
like 'generous' and 'offer' should in any case apply to territory held
by an occupying power in contravention of international law and UN
Resolutions, no one bothers to ask. But the power of the media to
repeat, re-repeat and underline simple assertions, combined with
the untiring efforts of the Israeli lobby, means that it is now locked
into place that the Palestinians chose 'terror instead of peace'.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad are seen not as a (misguided) part
of the struggle to be rid of Israeli military occupation, but as part
of the general Palestinian desire to terrorise, threaten and be a
menace. Like Iraq.

In any event, with the US Administration's newest and rather
improbable claim that secular Iraq has been harbouring and
training the insanely theocratic al-Qaida, the case against
Saddam seems to have been closed. The Government consensus
is that since UN inspectors cannot ascertain what WMD he possesses,
what he has hidden and what he might still do with them, he should
be attacked and removed. The whole point of going to the UN, from
the US point of view, is to get a Resolution so punitive that it will not

matter whether Saddam Hussein complies or not: he will be
incriminated with having violated 'international law' and his existence
will itself be sufficient to warrant regime change. In late September,
a unanimous Security Council Resolution (the US abstaining)
enjoined Israel to end its siege of Arafat's Ramallah compound
and to withdraw from Palestinian territory illegally occupied since
March (Israel's excuse has been 'self-defence'). Israel has refused
to comply, but in this case the UN is to be ignored - 'we' understand
that Israel must defend its citizens.

Neologisms such as 'anticipatory pre-emption' and 'preventive
self-defence' are bandied about by Rumsfeld and his colleagues
in an attempt to persuade the public that the preparations for war
against Iraq or any other state in need of 'regime change' (or the rarer
euphemism 'constructive destruction') are buttressed by the notion of
self-defence. The public is kept on tenterhooks by repeated red or
orange alerts, people are encouraged to inform the law enforcement
authorities of 'suspicious' behaviour, and thousands of Muslims,
Arabs and South Asians have been detained, in some cases charged,
merely on suspicion. All of this is carried out at the President's behest

and is claimed to be an expression of patriotism and love of America.

So powerful is the United States that it can't be constrained by any
international code of conduct. The discussion of whether 'we' should go
to war against a country seven thousand miles away remains nicely
abstract. The great majority of Americans have had no contact with
Muslim countries or peoples and therefore have no feeling for the fabric
of life that a sustained bombing campaign (as in Afghanistan) would tear
to shreds. And since terrorism is explained merely as the result of
hatred
and envy, it encourages polemicists to engage in extravagant debates
from which history and politics seem to have disappeared. At a fervently
pro-Israel demonstration in May, Paul Wolfowitz mentioned Palestinian
suffering in passing, but was loudly booed and has never referred to it
again.

A coherent human rights or free-trade policy that stuck to the
endlessly underlined principles that the US is constitutively believed
to stand for would be undermined domestically by special interest
groups (the ethnic lobbies, the steel and defence industries, the oil
cartel, the farming industry, retired people, the gun lobby etc). Every
one of the 435 Congressional districts represented in Washington
contains a defence or defence-related industry, which explains why
Bush Sr's Secretary of State, James Baker, said before the first Gulf
War that the real issue at stake was 'jobs'. Only around 25 per cent
of the members of Congress even have passports (around 15 per
cent of Americans have travelled abroad); their views are influenced
by lobbyists and by the need to attract campaign funding. Two
incumbent House members, Earl Hilliard of Alabama and Cynthia
McKinney of Georgia, both of them supportive of the Palestinian right
to self-determination and critical of Israel, were recently defeated by
relatively obscure candidates who were funded mainly by the Israeli
lobby in New York. Where Middle East policy is concerned, the lobby
 has turned the legislative branch of the US Government into what
Jim Abourezk, a former senator, once called 'Israeli-occupied territory'.

The Senate periodically issues unsolicited resolutions that underline
and reiterate American support for Israel. There was one such
resolution in May, just as Israeli forces were occupying and destroying
the major West Bank towns. In the long run all this is damaging to
Israel's future: as Tony Judt has recently argued, Israel cannot remain
on Palestinian land and is simply putting off the inevitable withdrawal.

The war against terrorism has permitted Israel and its supporters to
commit war crimes against the Palestinian population of the West
Bank and Gaza, whose 3.4 million inhabitants have become, as the
current jargon has it, 'non-combatant collateral damage'. Terje
Roed-Larsen, the UN's Special Administrator for the Occupied
Territories, has just issued a report charging Israel with causing
a humanitarian catastrophe: unemployment has reached 65 per
cent, 50 per cent of the population lives on less than two dollars a
day, and the economy has been shattered. Schools and universities
cannot function. Houses are demolished, people deported, curfews
imposed, ambulances prevented from passing roadblocks. Nothing
in this list is new, but, like the occupation itself and the dozens of UN

Security Council Resolutions condemning it, these depredations are
mentioned in the US media only occasionally, as endnotes to long
articles about Israeli Government debates, or disastrous suicide
bombings. The phrase 'suspected of terrorism' is both the justification
and the epitaph for whomever Sharon chooses to have killed. The
US doesn't object, except to say, in the mildest terms, that Israel's
actions are 'not helpful', which does little to stop the next batch of
killings.

Following 11 September, a chilling conjuncture has occurred in
which the prejudices of the Christian Right, the Israeli lobby and
the Bush Administration's semi-religious belligerency are rationalised
by neo-conservative hawks committed to the destruction of Israel's
enemies, or, as it is sometimes euphemistically put, to redrawing the
map by bringing regime change and 'democracy' to the Arab countries
that pose the most danger to Israel. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria and
Jordan have been threatened, despite the fact that - dreadful regimes
though they are - they have been protected and supported by the US
since World War Two, as Iraq was until recently.

It seems obvious to anyone who knows anything about the Arab world
that its parlous state is likely to get a whole lot worse once the US
begins
its assault on Iraq. Supporters of the Administration occasionally say
vague things about how exciting it will be when we bring democracy to
Iraq and the other Arab states, without much consideration for what this
will mean for the people who live there. I can't imagine that there are
many Arabs or Iraqis who would not like to see Saddam Hussein
removed, but all the indications are that US/Israeli military action
would make things much worse on the ground.

It may be that not even the Iraqi Army will lift a finger on Saddam's
behalf,
but in a recent Congressional hearing three former generals from the US
Central Command expressed serious and, I would say, crippling
reservations about the whole adventure. No one in the US has any real
idea of what might happen in Iraq, or Saudi Arabia, or Egypt, if a major
military intervention takes place. Nor has any thought been given to
what would happen after a US 'victory': the expatriate Iraqi opposition
doesn't have enough support to form a government and the US Army
won't be keen to step into the gap.

The unconscionable atrocity of 11 September most certainly needs to be
confronted, but making a forceful response is the easy part: what
happens next has to be considered more carefully. No one could
argue today that Afghanistan, even after the rout of the Taliban, is a
much better and more secure place for its citizens. Nation-building
is clearly not the US Administration's priority. Besides, how can
Americans rebuild a nation with a culture and history as different
from their own as Iraq? Both the Arab world and the US are far more
complex and dynamic places than the platitudes of war and the
resonant phrases about reconstruction would allow.

As someone who has lived my life within the two cultures, I am
appalled that the 'clash of civilisations', that reductive and vulgar
notion so much in vogue, has taken over thought and action.
What we need to put in place is a universalist framework for dealing
with Saddam Hussein as well as Sharon, the rulers of Burma, Syria,
Turkey and a whole host of countries where depredations are
endured without sufficient resistance. The only way to re-create or
restore this framework is through education, open discussion and
intellectual honesty that will have no truck with concealed special
pleading or the jargons of war, religious extremism and pre-emptive
'defence'.

Footnotes

* See 'Jumping the Gun', Michael Byers on pre-emptive
self-defence (LRB, 25 July).

Edward Said's Reflections on Exile, a collection of essays, many of them
written for this paper, is published by Granta. A memoir, Out of Place,
came out in 1999

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