Seeing Palestine in Iraq
At a lecture in Cairo, Edward Said talks about the frightening parallels between Iraq and Palestine. Omayma Abdel-Latif listened in
The American University in Cairo's Ewart Hall was packed on Monday for the appearance of renowned scholar and political writer Edward Said, who was scheduled to deliver a lecture entitled "Memory, Inequality and Power: Palestine and the Universality of Human Rights". Greeted with a standing ovation, Said's talk ended up drawing "frightening parallels" between the Palestinian and Iraqi issues.
Said chose not to speak as a political commentator but rather -- as he eloquently put -- as "one of us", someone who has "no power but a moral duty" to oppose the unjust use of military, economic and political power. As the Arab world braced itself for yet another calamity in Iraq, and with resentment of American policies on the rise, every time Said referred to signs of Palestinian endurance, the diverse audience, composed of a spectrum of political persuasions and age groups, applauded him.
For an hour, Said offered insight into the present state of affairs. He spoke of the immensely powerful and the pitifully powerless, dismissing the notion that talking about Palestinian human rights was irrelevant within the context of an impending war on Iraq.
He also spoke of the "other America" which is opposing the war -- including the anti-war demonstrators, and the 125 municipal councils that voted against the war. He was keen to dispel the notion prevailing in the Arab world that this was "America's war against Iraq". It is rather, he said, a war driven by "a tiny number of the members of the Bush administration... planned for many reasons... [including] resources and strategic control".
In Said's view, such a wasteful deployment of human and military resources in itself represents "an abuse of human values", making it essential to assert the universal applicability of human rights for both the Palestinian and the Iraqi people. Said stressed that there was a worldwide consensus after World War II that each individual -- regardless of his or her colour, religion or culture -- is to be protected from such horrors as starvation, torture, religious and ethnic discrimination, extra judicial political assassination, and land appropriation. "No people can be singled out as exceptions to those rules," he insisted, explaining how the moral and political solidarity that has been building all over the world in response to the war, has helped to assert the connection between America's invasion of Iraq and Israel's war on Palestine.
But even with such a bleak picture dominating the scene, Said gave his audience reason for hope. While the Palestinians are still stateless, and for the most part in exile, Said also said that they have remained "the most visible and most universal case of human rights abuse". This is, for the most part, due to the force of memory and the power of images. The Palestinian flag, for example, has become a symbol expressing universal anti-colonial defiance, the protest of those who believe that their native rights have been abused by a foreign ruler, or, in Said's words, a wrong that must be righted. Palestine has become one of the few communal symbols that cross religious, ethnic and national lines.
The manifestations of this visibility, according to Said, can be found in the full acknowledgement of Palestinian cinema, literature, legal and political discourse, and above all, Palestinian style. "The transnational visibility of a Palestinian person is something which was unthinkable some decades ago," he said, made possible despite the vast efforts to erase it.
In this, Said sees an excellent way of characterising the overall human achievement of the Palestinian people since 1948. "Some 7.5 million Palestinians -- whether as citizens of Israel, under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza or refugees scattered all over the world -- have finally developed political and moral solidarity with each other and with other people. In the past, Israel had the status of a progressive cause, but now the Palestinians have taken this position, and Israel has been transformed into a symbol of oppression."
Comparing the situation with South Africa, where the black population was once made invisible, Said asked where "the genius of Mandela" could be found. The answer, he said was simple: instead of renouncing violence, Mandela defined the struggle on a higher plane than that of his enemy. Historically, the Arabs have done that, said Said, "but neither the people of Palestine nor the people of Israel have been blessed with a Mandela or a de Klerk."
According to Said, although the Palestinians have become the victims of a former victim, ignorance of the other cannot be a survival strategy. "You have to be able to address your enemy... in a mobilised and organised way and [with] a profound knowledge of the other's culture. The Arabs have done this for hundreds of years but now they recoiled. There is another Israel, another America, another Europe," insisted Said.
At the same time, he acknowledged that -- with the current situation -- Arabs are less likely to see this other side. "The great failure in what the US is doing is that it tries to win a battle through military power and brutality," Said concluded. "But history has a way of coming back, and it is the role of the intellectual to bring it back."
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 20 - 26 March 2003 (Issue No. 630)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/630/eg3.htm