>The gap grows wider
>By Edward Said
>(Al-Ahram Weekly, March 2-8)
>
>On his visit to Birzeit University, Lionel Jospin had the gall to speak of
>the Hizbullah fighters as terrorists, also expressing his "understanding"
>of Israel's actions against Lebanon. As is now widely known, he was greeted
>after his speech by many hundreds of students, who stoned his car and that
>of his escort, Minister Nabil Shaath. Jospin's visit to the Palestinian
>territories (still under occupation by Israel, which is aided in its
>occupation by the Palestinian Authority) was under the supposed auspices of
>the Authority, which was exposed for its unpopularity and incompetence.
>
>Embarrassed and angry, the Palestinian boss, Yasser Arafat, condemned the
>attack, paying no heed to the justice of what the students were saying,
>which was that there was one common front of resistance against Israeli
>occupation from Beirut to Birzeit, and using his security forces to beat
>the students and perhaps later imprison and torture some of them.
>Threatened by the wave of discontent, the panicky Birzeit administration
>closed the university for three days, more or less acting under the
>Authority's injunctions.
>
>Like dictators everywhere, Arafat has no real support anymore and has lost
>sight of what it is he is supposed to be doing, namely liberating his
>people. Far from that, he is colluding with Israel to confine them still
>more, all the while fattening himself and his cronies on the ill-gotten
>gains provided by his monopolies, casinos, skimmed-off-the-top businesses,
>extortion and protection money. Without any law or real civil institutions
>Arafat is the perfect partner for Israel and the US, who now have a native
>sub-contractor in the oppression of Palestinians and in the furtherance of
>their interests: therefore, they could not be happier. Even though "peace"
>isn't a step closer to realisation than under Netanyahu -- in fact, I had
>predicted that Barak would be a good deal worse, and he has confirmed that
>by allowing or encouraging more settlement building than his predecessor --
>the various rulers and "peace" professionals seem not to have taken notice
>of a widening gap between the people ruled and the justly-maligned process.
>Typically though, it isn't the seasoned politicians or the intellectuals
>who have taken the lead in opposing the enslavement of the so-called peace,
>but rather the students.
>
>In Beirut, at the American University, students have been demonstrating
>against US policy, which is nothing less than full support for Israel's
>bombing of civilian targets, a crime punishable according to the Fourth
>Geneva Convention. But whereas the US government and organisations like
>Human Rights Watch have been agitating to bring Saddam Hussein to trial for
>crimes against humanity (few deserve it more, by the way), nothing is said
>about Sharon, Barak, Peres, and all the other leaders whose routine
>assaults on civilian and human rights constitute the longest-standing and
>longest-unpunished set of war crimes in history. These go back to 1948,
>when Palestine was ethnically cleansed. The invidiousness of such a policy
>enraged the Beirut students, and they made life a little difficult for the
>US ambassador, who was attending some public function at the AUB. One would
>wish there was a similar policy of peaceful resistance taken against those
>rulers in the Arab countries who either take no favorable notice of the
>demonstrations or who pander openly to the Israelis and the Americans.
>
> As for Lionel Jospin, he follows in the long tradition of bad faith and
>duplicity of the European Left, which has always actively supported Zionism
>with scarce regard for the tenets of socialism, much less of liberal
>humanism. It is a strange thing indeed, but the Western Left has basically
>been blind to what Zionism did to the Palestinians, so carefully did the
>publicists of that movement cultivate the totally fraudulent notion that
>Zionism was essentially a socialist and progressive movement. In fact, as
>several Israeli historians have shown, Zionism was profoundly
>anti-socialist, and was very much in favour of capitalism so long as it
>could be put to what was then characterised as "Jewish" purposes and aims
>in Palestine. This was as true of Ben Gurion as it was of Weizmann, as it
>was of all their followers in the Israeli Labour Party. It is a
>breathtaking prevarication, this pretence of socialism, but has been
>sustained successfully for almost a century: Israel's Labour Party is a
>member of the Socialist International; the kibbutz, which was a sort of
>window-dressing operation constituting less than one per cent of the
>population, became the symbol of socialist Zionism; and a whole generation
>of European politicians from Crossman to Jospin have followed along
>unquestioningly. In Jospin's case, he is a member of the Protestant
>minority and likely to feel pangs of identification with Israeli Jews
>(forgetting totally the Palestinian minority, for racist reasons), as well
>as some sense of collective guilt for the Holocaust. As to why it should be
>allowable for Israel to bomb Lebanon as an aspect of its illegal occupation
>of the South, that is left unexplained. Perhaps it is also worth mentioning
>that Jospin's sudden expression of enthusiasm was kindled by the fact that
>ElAl, the Israeli airline, is in the process of refurbishing its fleet of
>aircraft, and Aerospatiale, the French producers of the AirBus, are
>Boeing's chief competitor for the enormous, multi-billion dollar deal.
>Jospin must have accordingly felt that a little cost-free French support (I
>think he and Mrs Albright call it "understanding") for Israeli bombing
>would be an extra incentive for ElAl to buy French products. Besides, he
>supposed, where more convincingly could he make his point sincerely than
>under Palestinian noses, so to speak. They would never object, poor little
>brown people that they are. French racism and condescension, hand in hand.
>
>Thank heavens for the students, who were more courageous than their
>professors and their so-called leaders, who probably (I have no
>information) just sat on their hands politely and let the villainous Jospin
>blather on. But that has been the Arab elite habit for some time now:
>taking it imperturbably on the chin when a white man insults and humiliates
>them, all of this abjection as a way of demonstrating to the world that we
>are not the terrorists and fanatics that we have sometimes seemed to be.
>Boss Arafat and Nabil Shaath, who was at Birzeit and was pummeled by the
>students as a symbol of collaboration, went out of their way to express
>anger at the students, instead of refusing to speak to Jospin at all. Any
>other leadership worth its salt would have done exactly that. But ours is
>too far gone to notice that "peace" to most people is a cynical game and
>the shameless pandering to Israel's bankrupt and ruthlessly arrogant
>leadership will get them no further than exactly as far as they have come
>to date, which isn't much of a distance at all.
>
>Thus the gap between the interests of the preponderant majority of the
>people and the ruling juntas (Arab as well as Israeli) increases. In whose
>interest exactly is Israel's quasi-insane military spending? Certainly not
>that of the urban masses or the Mizrahim, who are forced to swallow insult
>upon insult, to say nothing of grinding poverty and discrimination, while
>the Ashkenazi elites go on their merry way regardless, acquiring bigger
>cars and apartments while the majority suffers. This is not to mention the
>present suicidal course of Israel's foreign policy, whose result is to lay
>up more and more hatred among Arabs who are conceived of as only
>"understanding the language of force." What blindness and what moral
>obtuseness this is, as if more and more gratuitous punishment and
>humiliation of the Arabs will make Israel more acceptable and more popular
>instead of more hated and more likely to be the target of indiscriminate
>Arab violence. The Israelis seem to have learned nothing from the history
>of cruelty, which simply breeds counter-responses that prolong the
>dialectic of force, instead of the other way round.
>
>They are no less unwise than their Arab counterparts, who somehow doggedly
>believe that the Americans will protect them in the long run from the wrath
>of their long-suffering people. There will be no escape from that so long
>as the gap widens between the rhetoric and institutions of the false peace,
>on the one hand, and the appalling distortions of reality on the other.
>Peace in the Palestinian world has meant more land taken, houses
>demolished, corruption, continued political prisoners and torture,
>despotism, and no land really liberated to speak of. At this point it
>doesn't matter who does the oppressing, Israeli or Palestinian security
>men. Torture can't be justified if it is done by a Palestinian policeman,
>any more than it could be justified when an Israeli did it. Torture is
>torture, occupation is occupation. And above all, injustice is injustice
>and will be perceived as such, whether it is uttered by a French politician
>or an Arab one. As Fanon said, it cannot be the aim of liberation simply to
>replace a white policeman by a non-white policeman. Liberation must go a
>great deal further.
>
>The important thing for now is to keep hammering away at the phony rhetoric
>and promises of the peace process, showing relentlessly not only that it
>hasn't worked and has created a gap between rulers and ruled, but also, and
>more importantly, that in its present form it cannot work. Human, political
>and civil rights are indivisible: they cannot be partially achieved by one
>people and fully enjoyed by another living in the same territory. This is
>the deep flaw of Oslo. The only way to overcome it is to raise the cry
>"equality or nothing, for Arabs and Jews". If one people enjoys a right of
>return, the other one must also. Otherwise the conflict continues -- in the
>real interests of no one at all. No one, not even those who seem to be
>profiting in the short run.
>
>
>Louis Proyect
>
>(The Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org)


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