http://www.counterpunch.org/
March 16, 2001
Freud, Zionism,
and Vienna
By Edward Said
This is a parable worth a few lines here, although it derives from a rather
peculiar personal experience of mine which has attracted unusual, if
undeserved, media and public attention. Ordinarily, I don't use myself as an
example, but because this one has been so misrepresented and also because it
might illuminate the context of the Palestinian-Zionist struggle it took
place in, I have permitted myself to use it.
In late June and early July 2000, I made a personal family visit to Lebanon,
where I also gave two public lectures. Like most Arabs, my family and I were
very interested to visit South Lebanon to see the recently evacuated
"security zone" militarily occupied by Israel for 22 years, from which troops
of the Jewish state were unceremoniously expelled by the Lebanese resistance.
Our visit took place on 3 July, during which day-long excursion we spent time
in the notorious Khiam prison, built by the Israelis in 1987, in which 8,000
people were tortured and detained in dreadful, bestial conditions. Right
after that we drove to the border post, also abandoned by Israeli troops, now
a deserted area except for Lebanese visitors who come there in large numbers
to throw stones of celebration across the still heavily fortified border. No
Israelis, neither military nor civilians, were in sight.
During our 10-minute stop I was photographed there without my knowledge
pitching a tiny pebble in competition with some of the younger men present,
none of whom of course had any particular target in sight. The area was empty
for miles and miles.
Two days later my picture appeared in newspapers in Israel and all over the
West. I was described as a rock-throwing terrorist, a man of violence, and so
on and on, in the familiar chorus of defamation and falsehood known to anyone
who has incurred the hostility of Zionist propaganda.
Two ironies stand out. One was that although I have written at least eight
books on Palestine and have always advocated resistance to Zionist
occupation, I have never argued for anything but peaceful coexistence between
us and the Jews of Israel once Israel's military repression and dispossession
of Palestinians has stopped. My writings have circulated all over the world
in at least 35 languages, so my positions are scarcely unknown, and my
message is very clear. But, having found it useless to refute the facts and
arguments I have presented and, more important, having been unable to prevent
my work from reaching larger and larger audiences, the Zionist movement has
resorted to shabbier and shabbier techniques to try to stop me.
Two years ago they hired an obscure Israeli-American lawyer to "research" the
first ten years of my life and "prove" that even though I was born in
Jerusalem I was never really there; this was supposed to show that I was a
liar who had misrepresented my right to return, even though -- and this is
the stupidity and triviality of the argument -- the invidious Israeli Law of
Return allows any Jew anywhere the "right" to come to Israel and live,
whether or not they had even set foot in Israel before.
Besides, so crude and inaccurate were this lawyer's methods of investigation
that many people whom he interviewed wrote in and contradicted what he said;
none of the journals, except one, that he approached for publication accepted
his article because of its misrepresentations and distortions.
Not only was this campaign an effort to discredit me personally (the editor
of the journal that published it said openly that he had printed the silly
rubbish produced by this hired gun simply because he wanted to discredit me
personally precisely because I have a lot of readers) but quite amazingly it
was meant to show that all Palestinians are liars and cannot be believed in
their assertions about a right to return.
Fast upon the heels of this orchestrated effort there came the business of
the stone-throwing. And here is the second irony. Despite Israel's 22-year
devastation of south Lebanon, its destruction of entire villages, the killing
of hundreds of civilians, its use of mercenary soldiers to plunder and
punish, its deplorable use of the most inhuman methods of torture and
imprisonment in Khiam and elsewhere -- despite all that, Israeli propaganda,
aided and abetted by a corrupt Western media, chose to focus on a harmless
act of mine, blowing it up to monstrously absurd proportions that suggested
that I was a violent fanatic interested in killing Jews. The context was left
out, as were the circumstances, i.e. that I simply threw a pebble, that no
Israeli was anywhere present, that no physical injury or harm was threatened
to anyone. More bizarrely still, a whole, again orchestrated campaign was
mounted to try to get me dismissed from the university where I have taught
for 38 years. Articles in the press, commentary, letters of abuse and death
threats were all used to intimidate or silence me, including those by
colleagues of mine who suddenly discovered their allegiance to the state of
Israel.
The comedy of it all, the total lack of logic that tried to connect a trivial
incident in South Lebanon to my life and works, was to no avail, however.
Colleagues rallied to my side, as did many members of the public. Most
important, the university administration magnificently defended my right to
my opinions and actions, and noted that the campaign against me wasn't at all
about my having thrown a stone (an act rightly characterised as protected
speech), but about my political positions and activity that resisted Israel's
policy of occupation and repression.
The latest episode in all this Zionist pressure is in some ways the saddest
and most shameful. In late July 2000, I was contacted by the director of the
Freud Institute and Museum in Vienna to ask if I would accept an invitation
to deliver the annual Freud lecture there in May 2001. I said yes, and on 21
August received an official letter from the Institute's director inviting me
to do so in the name of the board. I promptly accepted, having written about
Freud and for many years been a great admirer of his work and life.
(Incidentally, it should be noted that Freud was an early anti-Zionist but
later modified his view when Nazi persecutions of European Jews made a Jewish
state seem like a possible solution to widespread and lethal anti-Semitism.
But I believe that his position vis-a-vis Zionism was always an ambivalent
one.)
The topic I proposed for my lecture was "Freud and the
Non-European" in which I intended to argue that although
Freud's work was for and about Europe, his interest in
ancient civilisations like those of Egypt, Palestine, Greek
and Africa was an indication of the universalism of his
vision and the humane scope of his work. Moreover, I
believed that his thought deserved to be appreciated for its
anti-provincialism, quite unlike that of his contemporaries who denigrated
other non-European cultures as lesser or inferior.
Then without warning on 8 February of this year, I was
informed by the Institute's chairman, a Viennese sociologist by the name of
Schulein, that the board had decided to cancel my lecture, because (he said)
of the political situation in the Middle East "and the consequences of it."
No other explanation was given. It was a most unprofessional and lamentable
gesture very much in contradiction with the spirit and the letter of Freud's
work. In over 30 years of lecturing all over the world this had never
happened to me, and I immediately responded by asking Schalein in a
one-sentence letter to explain to me how a lecture on Freud in Vienna had
anything to do with "the political condition in the Middle East." I have of
course received no answer.
To make matters worse, the "New York Times" published a story on 10 March
about the episode, along with a grotesquely enlarged version of the famous
photograph in South Lebanon last July, an event that had taken place well
before the Freud people had invited me in late August.
When Schalein was interviewed by the "Times", he had the gall to bring up the
photo and say what he never had the courage to say to me, that it (as well as
my criticism of Israel's occupation) was the reason for the cancellation,
given, he added, that it might offend Viennese Jewish sensitivities in the
context of Jorg Haider's presence, the Holocaust, and the history of Austrian
anti-Semitism. That a respectable academic should say such rubbish beggars
the imagination, but that he should do so even as Israel is besieging and
killing Palestinians mercilessly on a daily basis -- that is indecent.
What in their appalling pusillanimity the Freudian gang did
not say publicly was that the real reason for the unseemly
cancellation of my lecture was that it was the price they paid to their
donors in Israel and the US. An exhibition of Freud's papers mounted by the
Institute has already been in Vienna and New York; now the hope is that it
will be put on in Israel. The potential funders seem to have demanded that
they would pay for the exhibition in Tel Aviv if my lecture were cancelled.
The spineless Vienna board caved in, and my lecture was cancelled
accordingly, not because I advocate violence and hatred, but because I do not!
I said at the time that Freud was hounded out of Vienna by the Nazis and the
majority of the Austrian people. Today those same paragons of courage and
intellectual principle ban a Palestinian from lecturing. So low has this
particularly unpleasant brand of Zionism sunk that it cannot justify itself
by open debate and genuine dialogue. It uses the shadowy mafia tactics of
threat and extortion to exact silence and compliance. So desperately does it
seek acceptance that it reveals itself in Israel and through its supporters
elsewhere, alas, to be in favour of effacing the Palestinian voice entirely,
whether by choking Palestinian villages like Bir Zeit, or by shutting down
discussion and criticism wherever it can find collaborators and cowards to
carry out its reprehensible demands. No wonder that in such a climate Ariel
Sharon is Israel's leader.
But in the end these thuggish tactics backfire, since not everyone is afraid,
and not every voice can be silenced. After 50 years of Zionist censorship and
misrepresentation, the Palestinians continue their struggle. And everywhere,
despite poor media coverage, despite the venality of institutions like the
Freud Society, despite the cowardice of intellectuals who put their
consciences to sleep, people speak up for justice and peace. Immediately
after Vienna cancelled my invitation, the London Freud Museum invited me to
deliver the lecture I was to have given in Vienna. (After being driven from
Vienna in 1938, Freud spent the last year of his life in London.) Two
Austrian institutions, the Institute for the Human Sciences and the Austrian
Society for Literature invited me to lecture in Vienna at a date of my
choosing. A group of distinguished psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic critics
(including Mustafa Safouan) wrote a letter to the Freud Institute protesting
the cancellation. Many others have been shocked at such naked bullying and
have said so in public. Meanwhile, Palestinian resistance continues
everywhere.
I still believe it is our role as a people seeking peace
with justice to provide an alternative vision to Zionism's,
a vision based on equality and inclusion, rather than on
apartheid and exclusion. Each episode such as the one I have described here
augments my conviction that neither Israelis nor Palestinians have any
alternative to sharing a land that both claim. I also believe that the
Al-Aqsa Intifada must be directed towards that end, even though political and
cultural resistance to Israel's reprehensible occupation policies of siege,
humiliation, starvation and collective punishment must be vigourously
resisted. The Israeli military causes immense damage to Palestinians day
after day: more innocent people are killed, their land destroyed or
confiscated, their houses bombed and demolished, their movements
circumscribed or stopped entirely.
Thousands of civilians cannot find work, go to school, or receive medical
treatment as a result of these Israeli actions. Such arrogance and suicidal
rage against the Palestinians will bring no results except more suffering and
more hatred, which is why in the end Sharon has always failed and resorted to
useless murder and pillage. For our own sakes, we must rise above Zionism's
bankruptcy and continue to articulate our own message of peace with justice.
If the way seems difficult, it cannot be abandoned. When any of us is
stopped, ten others can take his or her place. That is the genuine hallmark
of our struggle, and neither censorship nor base complicity with it can
prevent its success.
