Edward Said, a brilliant representative of the national aspirations of the Palestinian people, is a man who has rendered enormous service in exposing the brutality and injustice of the Israeli occupation and, recently, the hollowness of the so-called peace process, which he has rightly characterized as a process of Palestinian surrender…
The present situation of the Palestinian people is a grim one indeed. The Israelis have maintained a deadly repression, a reign of terror, have sliced up Palestinian territory and created impotent Bantustans. They have choked off all avenues of Palestinian economic development, deprived Palestinians of vital water supplies and have prevented the productive use of the land. Jewish settlements steadily encroach on ever-dwindling Palestian land and those settlements have accelerated since the peace accords.
The present situation quite naturally gives rise to despair, especially since the Palestinian Authority, rather than resisting the Israeli policy of destruction is facilitating that destruction. Sadly, some Palestinians have emerged for whom the goal of genuine self-determination, an independent Palestinian state, the goal of creating an economy capable of satisfying the people’s needs, now seems utterly unrealizable. They despair of the ability of their people to stop the Israeli juggernaut, backed by the might of the United States. But despair is a poor counselor. In the political arena, it is a sure recipe for
defeat, and so it must be condemned, it must be fought.
In the January 10 issue of the New York Times, Edward Said renounces his previous advocacy of a Palestinian state and returns to an earlier dream of a “one-state” solution, “Palestinians and Israelis living as equal citizens under one flag.” The basic reason he cites for shifting his position has been the failure of the peace process which “has in fact put off the real reconciliation that must occur if the hundred-year war between Zionism and the Palestinian people is to end.”
To begin with, the timetable of reconciliation may be a long one, but an independent Palestinian state need not be constructed on such a timetable. The peoples of India and Pakistan, having parted fifty years ago, have still not reconciled. But they each manage to maintain viable independent states. By the way, it is interesting to note the wave of breakaways from former unitary states, such as in the Balkans, which have received the full backing of NATO, in fact, being imposed by NATO, including the United States, all in the name of democracy, human rights, and the right to national self-determination. What a contrast with their policy toward Palestine!
There are many Palestinians who remain unreconciled to the Zionist seizure and destruction of their villages inside present-day Israel, unreconciled to their expulsion from their homes and the Israeli refusal to allow them to return to those homes. They have nevertheless been forced to recognize political realities — bitter realities — and now place their hopes in a state which, though considerably truncated, will be their own, will allow them to breathe free, will allow them to resume their march on the road of national development.
On the other side of the coin, even without Israeli reconciliation there are many factors which make a Palestinian state possible. For example, a Palestinian state may be set up if there is sufficient international pressure to force Israel to abandon its intransigence (we have just cited the Balkan example), or if Palestinian resistance reaches a point where Israeli intransigence becomes too politically and/or economically costly. A Palestinian state may come about as a result of a change in the world balance of forces, say between Europe and the United States. Or it may be facilitated by the development of a split within Israeli society sufficient to significantly tip the balance — all of these operating separately or in some combination. So let us discard the unnecessary precondition of “reconciliation.”
Prof. Said tells us that “Oslo set the stage for separation, but real peace can come only with a binational Israeli-Palestinian state.” Actually, Oslo did not set the stage for separation. Oslo, as Prof. Said himself has abundantly made clear on numerous occasions, set the stage for Palestinian Bantustans, set the stage for the destruction of the Palestinian nation. The Oslo accords were not a program for peace, could not be a program of peace. Oslo set in motion a “peace process” which its authors understood quite well meant submission to Israeli (and U.S.) diktat. So Prof. Said presents a choice to the Palestinian people: Oslo or a single binational state. This is a false choice. For Oslo is a hoax; and a bi-national state lies somewhere over the rainbow. Actually, there is no choice. The Palestinians, pessimists to the contrary, will never choose submission, so this leaves an independent state as the only option.
Noting the growing oppression of Palestinians within Israel, Prof. Said claims, first, that this demonstrates that “the principle of separation between a demographically mixed, irreversibly connected Arab population without sovereignty and a Jewish population with it is unworkable.” Sadly, this unequal arrangement, this state of oppression of the Palestinian within Israeli’s borders, has proved quite workable for half a century.
States in which a portion of their population are oppressed, enjoying less than full citizenship or none at all, not only are viable but, unfortunately, are the rule in history, right up to the present day. There are few countries today where ethnic, religious or national minorities enjoy equality with the majority population. Today, the US “bestrides the world like a colossus” despite the genocidal treatment of its African-American population. What is true, of course, is that in oppression lie the seeds of conflict which, in some cases, can indeed threaten the viability of the state. But that is by no means a given.
Palestinian self-determination in a separate state has proven unworkable, says Prof. Said. But he has not given us any reasons why. It is true that the Palestinian state is having a difficult delivery. This is not because a Palestinian state is “not viable, unworkable,” but simply because the Israelis have sufficient military superiority to prevent it and because Israel is protected by the US shield.
Continues Prof. Said, “…the idea of a state for ‘ourselves’ simply flies in the face of the facts: short of ethnic cleansing or ‘mass transfer,’ as in 1948, there proves no way for Israel to get rid of the Palestinians or for Palestinians to wish Israelis away.”
As a matter of fact, the idea of ethnic cleansing remains very much an option for an important section of Israeli ruling circles. It is demonstrated by the relentless erection of Jewish settlements, the expulsion of Palestinians from East Jerusalem, the expansion of Israeli settlements there, and the creation of conditions in the West Bank and Gaza in which it is hoped that Palestinians will be starved out. The 1948 expulsion of a million Palestinians has never been repudiated by the Zionists. Certainly there has been no attempt to allow those expelled to return to their homes.
On the other side, the Palestinians remain determined to resist a life of enslavement, and they understand this cannot be obtained by wishing but by struggle.
Again, Prof. Said: “Neither side has a viable military option against the other, which, I am sorry to say, proves why both opted for a peace that so patently tries to accomplish what war couldn’t.” At present, Israel’s military might, together with the full backing of the U.S. Government, has been quite sufficient to continue its oppression of the Palestinian people, to continue its program for a “Greater Israel.” And the fact that the Palestinians have no present military option against Israeli domination only argues for the need to build up that option understanding, however, that political victories come about not solely on the basis of relative military strength but on the basis of a whole series of factors that go into the political equation — capacity to carry out painful blows on the enemy, raising morale and the political consciousness of one’s people, strengthening international support, capitalizing on divisions within Israel.
The Oslo accords were not entered into because there was some kind of military stalemate, as Prof. Said suggests. They were engineered by Washington which, having destroyed Iraq and obtained a clear hegemony in the region, decided it was time for Mideast stability and for a regulation of the “Palestinian problem,” a regulation not in the sense of satisfying the national aspirations of the Palestinian people but in the sense of throwing a bone to the Palestinian bourgeoisie at the expense of the Palestinian masses, as well as to some extent at the expense of maximum Zionist demands.
Much fantasy is spun in Prof. Said’s scheme of a unified Palestinian-Israeli state, along with moralistic exhortations. All that his dreams require is “the initial acknowledgement of the other as an equal…” But Israel has no intention of entering into an agreement between equals, has never done so in the 50 years of its existence. As a matter of fact the Zionist philosophy is predicated on the fundamental belief in the inherent inferiority of Palestinians. The Zionist philosophy assumes that Palestinian rights are of no consequence.
So what does Prof. Said propose? That Israel be asked to go much further and not only recognize an arms-length equality with the Palestinians, but bring them into their bosom and end the Jewish state, thus destroying the fruits of a hundred years of Zionist struggle.
Yes, there is opposition in Israel to continued land-grabbing, as Mr. Said notes. There is an Israeli peace movement.
On February 2nd, The Times reported an appeal by 146 Israeli artists and intellectuals in support of an independent Palestinian state in all of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and a shared Jerusalem. That movement needs encouragement, not sabotage. And Prof. Said’s demand of those Israelis seeking genuine accommodation with the Palestinians that they renounce Zionism as the price for such accommodation means precisely to sabotage that movement.
Prof. Said says that “the Establishments in both communities are too tied to present ‘pragmatic’ currents of thought…to venture anything more risky, but a few others (Palestinian and Israeli) have begun to formulate radical alternatives to the status quo.” The problem is that Palestinian leaders such as Arafat are not being pragmatic, or if they are being pragmatic, it is a pragmatism that consults only the narrow and selfish interest of the ruling group. On the contrary, nothing could be less pragmatic and more suicidal for the Palestinian people than the course adopted by the Authority. And the “radical alternative” – is not the will-o-the-wisp of Said’s fantasy but the total rejection of a phony peace process and the resumption of mass struggle for freedom. How is it possible for such a brilliant mind as Edward Said, an always sober and accurate assessor of the Palestinian drama, to have slipped into such utopianism, to become entangled in such wishful thinking and to run afoul of even elementary logic? How is it possible for him to say, in effect, “Since the Israeli buyer refuses to pay $5 for what I wish to sell, let us raise the price to $50”? It is despair and only despair.
Some express their despair through defeatism. Prof. Said does it by escaping into a beautiful fantasy, beautiful but meretricious, a fantasy that plays into the hands of the Israeli ultras and diverts the Palestine liberation movement from the only path capable of leading to justice and real peace: an independent Palestinian state. But the Palestinian masses through all their trials, thankfully, maintain their common sense. And they shall stay the course.
