-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">
</A> -Cui Bono?-
From
http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/2000/471/op2.htm
{{<Begin>}}
The gap grows wider
By Edward Said
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 histor
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