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
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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.


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