Re: "Read Edward Said" Re: ADC Mourns Passing of Prof. Edward Said

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

Lou Paulsen wrote:

> Instead I found my spontaneous utterances on Dr. Said's death being
> tossed back at me as a brickbat.
<snip>
> Since we are talking at the moment, I will withdraw the reference to
> you as a 'liberal'.

I didn't intend to use the name of Edward Said (who was, btw, a
liberal humanist, not in the pejorative sense, but in the sense of
being a steadfast upholder of the finest achievements of liberal
education, of which he was one of the best products) like "a
brickbat."  I do think, though, that Said had a vision of change in
Palestinian politics.  I'm not sure if the current of secular
humanist thought and politics in Palestine that gave Said a ray of
hope has a real chance of reshaping Palestinian politics in the near
future, away from Arafat and the PA on one hand and Islamist
organizations on the other hand, but I am interested in encouraging
solidarity activists -- including Marxists among them -- to take a
desire for radical change articulated by a number of Palestinians --
Edward Said among them -- seriously.

Said was trying to tell us the need to break out of the iron
political cage created by the quartet of Israeli and Palestinian
political leaders:

(A) Labor (the Zionist Left)     (B) Likud (the Zionist Right)

(A') the Palestinian Authority    (B') Hamas, Islamic Jihad, & Other Islamists

Oslo paired (A) and (A'), the second intifada, (B) and (B').  Both
pairs, in one crucial respect, produced the same result for
Palestinian masses in the occupied territories: more confiscation of
Palestinian land.

[Noam Chomsky's reminder: "Resolutions 242 and 338 call for the right
of all states in the region to 'live in peace within secure and
recognized boundaries.'  This condition had been endorsed by the PLO
in January 1976 in those very words, and repeatedly since.  But the
PLO
had always added a 'qualification.'  It also insisted upon those U.N.
resolutions that recognize the right of the Palestinians to national
self-determination in a state alongside of Israel," _Necessary
Illusions_, 1989, Appendix V, Segment 16/33,
<http://zena.secureforum.com/Znet/chomsky/ni/ni-c10-s16.html>.]
* The Gulf War and its aftermath forced the PLO to accept the
US-imposed Oslo Process, which initiated the de-facto negation of the
two-state solution, in 1993.
* Dispossession and displacement of Palestinians continued during the
so-called Peace Process, sowing the seeds of anger and despair that
erupted into the second Intifada.  Between September 1993 and
September 2001, the number of housing units in the illegal Jewish
settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip "rose from 20,400 to
31,400 -- an increase of approximately fifty-four percent. . . . The
sharpest increase during this period was recorded in 2000, under the
government headed by Ehud Barak," B'Tselem documents in its report
"Land Grab: Israel's Settlement Policy in the West Bank" (May 2002,
<http://www.btselem.org/Download/Land_Grab_Eng.pdf>, pp. 15-16).  The
total area under the control of the settlements has come to the
shocking 41.9% of the West Bank ("Land Grab," p. 112, Table 9).
* The Apartheid Wall -- the so-called "security fence" in the Israeli
parlance -- is estimated to "annex 50% of the West Bank" to Israel,
leaving "only 12% of historic Palestine" to the Palestinian
population in the occupied territories (Stop the Wall, "the
Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign Fact Sheet: The Apartheid Wall,"
<http://www.stopthewall.org/downloads/pdf/FS-General-mr.pdf>); in
other words, the Wall definitively annexes to Israel the area that
came to be controlled by the settlements before and during the Oslo
Process.

Said's argument is that Palestinians and solidarity activists (in
Israel, the USA, and the rest of the world) must break out of the
iron political cage of the Israeli and Palestinian quartet, fostering
principled alternatives to (A), (A'), (B), and (B').

> > *****   78% of Palestinians believe the US roadmap for peace is
> > dead, yet a vast majority (85%) want a mutual ceasefire, according
> > to a new opinion poll released by the Palestinian Center for Policy
> > and Survey Research (PSR) in Ramallah.
> >
> > If the two sides agree on a mutual cessation of violence, 59%
> > (compared to 50% last June) would support taking measures by the PA
> > to prevent attacks on Israelis.
>
> But what does this have to do with the discussion?

Palestinian support for particular instances of deliberate and
indiscriminate attacks on civilians inside the Green Line is _thin
and passive_, rather than deep and active -- a way of saying Fuck You
to the Israeli government, no more and no less; and a vast majority
of Palestinians are saying that they would not only cease expressing
any support for such attacks but would go so far as to support taking
measures to control and restrain the organizers of attacks, as soon
as a viable course of action that can bring them practical
improvement, to say nothing of sovereignty, opens up for them.

> (2) What do Palestinians believe to be the CAUSE of the violence of
> which they are tired?  Do they believe, as you do, that it is the
> fault of bad, cynical leaders and "organizers of violence" who have
> no strategy and are just feeding the best of their youth into the
> meat grinder?

The primary cause is (1a) the Israeli occupation of the West Bank,
Gaza, and East Jerusalem, (1b) US support for the Israeli occupation,
and (1c) US solidarity activists' inability to expand support for
Palestinian rights beyond usual suspects and to build a mass movement
to end US aid to Israel.

The secondary cause is (2a) the absence of effective Palestinian
leadership and (2b) the lack of democracy in predominantly Arab
nations.

I believe that most Palestinians would agree with me on this assessment.

In this and related threads, I have mainly discussed (1c) and (2a),
especially because we can take practical actions to begin to change
(1c), in the course of which we must be clear and honest about the
causes and consequences of (2a); but that doesn't mean that I'll
focus on (1c) and (2a) in public more than (1a), (1b), and (2b),
which should go without saying in conversations among Marxists at
least.

> They may, in fact, believe, with regard to the tactical mix of the
> second intifada as a whole, that it (i) has imposed serious costs on
> Israel, has damaged Israel's economy, caused capital flight,
> impacted on the life of the ordinary Israeli who supports Sharon but
> has to worry about riding the bus, etc., and, THUS, (ii) has made it
> more likely that they will get a peace which will be livable instead
> of the crap they got out of the Oslo process, since in the real
> world the kind of agreement you can get with your enemy is related
> to the costs you can impose on the enemy if they don't make an
> agreement.  They may also believe (iii) that counter-civilian
> actions have served as reprisals for Israel's truly indiscriminate
> violence against civilians (The Beit Yisrael attack of March 2,
> 2002, for example, was a reprisal for the attacks on the Jenin and
> Balata camps of March 1 which caused many civilian casualties
> including children), and are thus (iv) morally justified as
> retribution in kind and (v) possibly even, in the medium run, cause
> the Sharon government to be less indiscriminate in their own use of
> violence.

The idea of retribution may be certainly appealing to some
Palestinians, but other than a fleeting psychological satisfaction,
what did deliberate and indiscriminate attacks on civilians inside
the Green Line accomplish?  It is debatable whether economic
downturns in Israel owe much to the intifada, as such downturns have
been widespread in the global economy (see my posting on "Re:
Economic effects on Israel of the 2nd intifada. . .").  The sense of
being under siege that has gripped Israelis helps to shore up the
Sharon government.  Far from becoming less indiscriminate in the use
of violence, Sharon has escalated the scope and intensity of
violence: e.g., the April 2002 invasion of Palestinian areas; attacks
on Hamas' political (rather than military) leaders; and a strike
against Syria.

Whither Palestinians?  I submit that more of the same can't be the
solution to the Palestinian predicament.
--
Yoshie

* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/>
* Calendars of Events in Columbus:
<http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>,
<http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/>
* Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/>
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/>
* Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio>
* Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>


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