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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 June 1999 Issue No. 433 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 June 1999 Issue No. 433
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Books Living Travel Sports Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Really, now -- what's next?
By Edward Said
Young King Abdullah of Jordan was in the United States earlier this month, selling Jordan very effectively as a point of stability and investment in the Middle East. He has little pomposity (there is even a suggestion of a sense of humour), and he can handle himself well before a crowd of fawning Americans who love to keep prefacing every question or comment with "Your Majesty". (This somewhat puzzles me since, as citizens of a republic established in defiance of royalty, they should be anti-monarchical, as I certainly am; but they just love the idea of kingship somehow and saying "Your Majesty" seems for them to be the ultimate in snobbish appeal)!
Be that as it may, one of Abdullah's themes was the importance of getting the Palestinian-Israeli peace process going "in the right direction", even before anything much happens between Israel and Syria. To this end, he flew straight from the US to Gaza, in order, apparently, to assure Yasser Arafat that he would work with the Palestinian Authority in furthering that not very attractive aim. Clearly, he was also proposing that Jordan would be the key intermediary between the two sides, as well as between Israel, the United States, and Syria, a role aspired to by his late father.
There was of course no mistaking the implication in all this: that what the US wants, the Arabs are prepared to give. More explicitly as concerns the Oslo-Wye agreements, it is absolutely clear that, whether or not these agreements have actually helped or hindered Palestinian self-determination, no leader at all is prepared in any way to forego, modify, or renege on them. Netanyahu tried but was voted out for his pains. Ehud Barak, everyone's new hero of the hour, has been passing himself off as the peace candidate, an almost meaningless phrase, but given his background and what he has so far said, I am certain that his ideas are hardly different from Netanyahu's when it comes to substance. For Barak, Jerusalem remains basically non-negotiable (except for giving Palestinians authority over a few sacred places in the old city and allowing Abu Dis to become their new Jerusalem); the settlements for the most part will stay, as will the by-pass roads that now criss-cross the territories; sovereignty, borders, over-all security, water and air rights will be Israel's; refugees will have to look elsewhere for help. Other than that there can be a Palestinian state and the Authority can continue its, at best, flawed rule.
I suppose it is churlish to mention that Barak is likely to retain Ariel Sharon as his foreign minister, and that the two men are scarcely distinguishable when it comes to what is euphemistically called their military and security background. Both are confirmed Arab-killers, both are clearly contemptuous of Arabs except as second- or perhaps even third-rate aliens tolerated in what both consider to be the land of Israel, and neither Barak nor Sharon is much given to visions of coexistence or equality between Palestinians and Israeli Jews. Perhaps Barak is in fact different and is capable of some tremendous about-face, but very little points that way, except official Palestinian euphoria and the hopefulness of a few left-liberal Zionists, Israeli and non-Israeli alike.
The disparity in power between Israel and the Arabs is so great that there is no room for optimistic speculation of the kind that will suddenly make everyone happy. Barak is a cautious man who seems actively to be seeking an unambitious Israeli consensus which, almost by definition, has a very low tolerance for real Palestinian independence and real self-determination. What he is being promised by the Arabs in return for his basically cost-free cooperation is full normalisation, full peace, full opening of markets. He'd have to be a fool not to accept and go along with Wye, and even a de-fanged little Palestinian statelet. If there is anything the last five years have taught Israelis, it is that Arafat can be trusted to do the job of policing and demoralising his people far better than the Israeli Civil Administration ever could -- so why stop short of letting him call his skimpy areas, 60 per cent of Gaza included, a Palestinian state? If Clinton can force himself to do it, so can Barak and the rest.
None of this makes for pleasant days ahead. But failing a credible Palestinian opposition -- which seems slowly to be forming -- the main matter before us all is what sort of strategy and tactics to follow. In the first place, I see no way of stopping Arafat and his people from continuing pretty much the same way, in business dealings, civil rights, or peace negotiations. They have no choice, either because none is really offered them by their weakness vis-à-vis Israel, the other Arabs and the US, or because constitutively and structurally they are incapable of anything else. Habits are habits and in addition, they are there doing what they do because it suits their "peace partners" perfectly. The real question is how much damage this peace process will do to the long-term interests of the Palestinian people, insofar as there is still a strong desire for true self-determination. I myself think there is that desire: 51 years of oppression and bad, not to say disastrous leadership haven't dimmed its flame, even though it seems occasionally abated by the sheer number of enemies, difficult obstacles, and detours.
There is of course the strong possibility that Palestinians will be Red Indianised forever, but demography and the sheer counter-productiveness and stupidity of Israel's official arrogance are likely (though not certain) to prevent that. People tend to resist efforts to marginalise and dehumanise them the more these efforts are made. Palestinians are no different, especially given the fact that by 2010 Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews will be equal in number on the land of historical Palestine. Yet caution enjoins adding that we cannot absolutely guarantee success: history, alas, is a cruel arbiter of the fate of small, disproportionately weak peoples, so the role of will and purpose assume greater significance for us.
A certain number of things do not require repetition, e.g., the centrality of civil institutions like universities, trade unions, economic development, and the crucial emergence of democracy. No one who has written or spoken about Palestinian or Arab society in the last century has ever failed to talk about those matters, so I don't want to do so here. I agree with all of it. What is less obvious is what I'd like to concentrate on at this time, namely, the specific political goal towards which Palestinian and Arab societies in general must try to move, and second, the relationship between the Arabs, Palestinians included, and the rest of the modern, globalised world. Let me take these up in order.
One of the calculations made by proponents of the Oslo peace process is that sheer persistence and the longevity of the process itself will wear down resistance to it. This is true, even though for the most part a majority of Palestinians in the working class and rural sectors have actually seen their conditions worsen since Oslo. It is their land that is being taken, their jobs lost, their standard of living reduced dramatically. They are the dissatisfied ones. They are the majority. A small number of businessmen and speculators have prospered, however, are written about in the international press, and are organisers of conferences with the Israelis and the Americans to further business and investment opportunities in the area. All that is well known, as is the massive corruption that still bedevils the Authority, its stooges and hangers-on. What is less well-known is that professionals, members of the better-off middle class and many in positions of leadership have, if not prospered, then made an accommodation with the status quo. Let me say at the outset that it's easy to be critical if one doesn't have to worry about the future of one's family, job, and overall livelihood. So I can perfectly well understand the need felt by Palestinian doctors, engineers, academics and economists, living through the tribulations, punishments and anxieties of years and years of occupation and uncertainty and desperation, to make the best of a bad situation. And it really is a bad situation, with Israel on one side and the coarse rule of the Authority on the other. Very little reporting has been done on the day-to-day problems of Palestinians, so one has the impression that everyone manages. The question is how, and in what context.
Without at all wishing to underestimate the difficulties faced, I'd like to suggest that the professional class in particular -- the class, that is, which supplies the Palestinian elite with its officers, teachers, physicians, architects, lawyers, engineers, journalists, and economists -- has in effect made its peace with the present situation. The readiness of funders like members of the European Union, the Ford Foundation and countless others like them have made ample money available to establish a large number of research institutes, study centres, women's and professional groups, all of which are extremely productive and do important work as (mostly) NGOs. The sad fact is that the Palestinian Authority and its various spokespersons have made no secret of their animosity toward these NGOs, which they see correctly as rivals both in patronage and influence; over the past four years, various attempts have been made by the Authority to try to close them down, acquire or at least siphon off their budgets, and generally make their life difficult. Still, the NGOs go on so long as the funding and the will and determination of their members do not waver. That is a positive development.
Yet the question I raise here concerns the long-range strategy of these groups and the kind of thing they do. Put very simply, are they a substitute for a political movement, and can they ever become one? No, most certainly not, since each operates in a bilateral relationship with the funders, each of which makes it clear that money for work on democracy, health care, education -- all of them important things -- is forthcoming only within the overall framework of the current peace process. At least that is the implicit assumption. And these NGOs, necessary though they are to keep Palestinian life going, themselves become the goal, instead of, for instance, liberation or ending the occupation or changing Palestinian society. The leadership vacuum, the absence of a political vision for the future, the general quiescence of Palestinian life with everyone more or less fending for his/herself have placed such secondary tasks as assuring oneself of funding, keeping the office staff at work, setting up meetings in Europe and elsewhere, ahead of the main task facing us as a people, which can be nothing less than liberating ourselves from our legacy of occupation, dispossession and undemocratic rule. This substitution of a short-range nationalism for a longer-range social movement is one of the intended effects of Oslo, in effect, to depoliticise Palestinian society and set it squarely within the main current of American-style globalisation, where the market is king, and everything else irrelevant or marginal. Just to have a Palestinian Institute of Democracy or a Palestinian university or a Palestinian medical association is therefore not enough, any more than nationalism is not enough. Fanon was right when he said to Algerians in 1960 that just to substitute an Algerian policeman for a French one is not the goal of liberation: a change in consciousness is. And the likelihood of that change is slowly being eroded in the current vogue for seminars, funding missions, and project reports. We need to concentrate on the collective destiny of the Palestinian people, however utopian and irrelevant it may now seem. Unless the collective spirit remains fixed on the attainment of real liberation and real self-determination -- which themselves need to be clarified -- we can quite easily drown in the global market with our flag proudly flying over us.
The second problem of the present impasse is consequent on the first. Being or remaining Palestinian is scarcely an end in itself. I still find it pathetic to see those TV pictures of honour guards and parades in Gaza, as if uniforms and the flying of a flag are anything more than empty symbols. They cannot be, and it is perfectly in keeping with the colonial spirit of the peace process that Israel and the US are at bottom delighted to give us all that, while withholding sovereignty, the right of return for refugees, economic self-sufficiency and relative independence. I have always felt that the meaning of Palestine is something more substantial than that. The struggle for Palestinian rights is first and above all a modern secular struggle to be a full, participating member in the modern world of nations, from which we have long been excluded. It is not about returning to the past, or establishing a parochial little entity whose main purpose is to give the world another airline or bureaucracy or a handsome set of coloured postage stamps.
Because the struggle against Jewish nationalism is so complex and difficult I have also always felt that what we contribute toward Palestine is synonymous with a new sense of modernity, that is, a mission for getting beyond the horrors of the past into a new relationship with the whole world, not just with Israel and the Arabs, but India, China, Japan, Africa, Latin America and of course Europe and North America. For this we require more, not less sophistication and knowledge, and especially an expansive inquiring attitude toward other peoples and other histories. Only this can enable Palestinians to transcend themselves as a small people and enter the ranks of the human vanguard along with the modern South Africans, who did so with such effect because they linked their struggle for justice to the entire world. For all sorts of reasons, we have lost that sense of confidence and worldliness, partly because we have had incapable, small leaders, and partly because we have become content with mere survival and the symbolic achievements I mentioned above. Our only hope is to be found among my children's generation, young people lucky enough to be crippled neither by the limitations imposed by the Nakba nor by the dreadful lack of freedom and enlightenment prevailing in the Arab world today. Otherwise, we might as well say that we already have a Palestinian state (declared, you will remember, in l988) and so why bother?
Thus the next phase with Ehud Barak and the others negotiating away happily will go forward as planned. There's no point in being too enthusiastic about its narrowly ungenerous results, which are already clearly mapped out. Beyond that, the process is considerably slower and longer-range. As I have tried to characterise it, it is where emphasis needs to be placed as much in terms of awareness as in terms of concrete steps. What needs more reflecting on is the relationship between this process in its Palestinian form and similar currents in the Arab context, where once again the longer-term view is far more important and hopeful than anything the next political phase might succeed in fulfilling. But that is a subject for another article.
