Those Who Forget the Past (56 page)

EDWARD SAID

A Desolation, and They Called It Peace

NOW THAT OSLO has clearly been proven the deeply flawed and unworkable “peace” process that it really was from the outset, Arabs, Israelis, and their various and sundry supporters need to think a great deal more, rather than less, clearly. A number of preliminary points seem to suggest themselves at the outset. “Peace” is now a discredited and fraudulent word, and is no guarantee that further harm and devastation will not ensue to the Palestinian people. How, after all the land confiscations, arrests, demolitions, prohibitions, killings that occurred unilaterally because of Israel's arrogance and power in the very context of the “peace process,” can one continue to use the word “peace” without hesitation? It is impossible. The Roman historian Tacitus says of the Roman conquest of Britain that “they [the Roman army] created a desolation, and called it peace.” The very same thing happened to us as a people, with the willing collaboration of the Palestinian Authority, the Arab states (with a few significant exceptions), Israel, and the United States.

Second, it is no use pretending that we can improve on the current deadlock, which in the Oslo framework as it stands is unbreakable, by returning to golden moments of the past. We can neither return to the situation before the war of 1967, nor can we accept slogans of rejectionism that in effect send us back to the golden age of Islam. You cannot turn the wheel back. The only way to undo injustice, as Israel Shahak and Azmi Bishara have both said, is to create more justice, not to create new forms of vindictive injustice, i.e., “They have a Jewish state, we want an Islamic state.” On the other hand, it seems equally fatuous to impose total blockades against everything Israeli (now in fashion in various progressive Arab circles) and to pretend that that is the really virtuous nationalist path. There are, after all, one million Palestinians who are Israeli citizens: are they also to be boycotted, as they were during the 1950s? What about Israelis who support our struggle, but are neither members of the slippery Peace Now or Meretz or of the “great” Israeli Labor Party, led by Ehud Barak, widely presumed to be the murderer of Kamal Nasser and Abu Iyad? Should they— artists, free intellectuals, writers, students, academics, ordinary citizens—be boycotted because they are Israelis?

Obviously, to do so would be to pretend that the South African triumph over apartheid hadn't occurred, and to ignore all the many victories for justice that occurred because of non-violent political cooperation between like-minded people on both sides of a highly contested and moveable line. As I said in a recent article, we cannot win this struggle by wishing that all the Jews would simply go away, or that we could make everything become Islamic: we need the other
wilaya
s and the people within them who are partisan to our struggle. And we must cross the line of separation—which has been one of the main intentions of Oslo to erect—that maintains current apartheid between Arab and Jew in historic Palestine. Go across, but do not enforce the line.

Third and perhaps most important: there is a great difference between political and intellectual behavior. The intellectual's role is to speak the truth, as plainly, directly, and as honestly as possible. No intellectual is supposed to worry about whether what is said embarrasses, pleases, or displeases people in power. Speaking the truth to power means additionally that the intellectual's constituency is neither a government nor a corporate or a career interest: only the truth, unadorned. Political behavior principally relies upon considerations of interest —advancing a career, working with governments, maintaining one's position, etc. In the wake of Oslo it is therefore obvious that continuing the line propagated by the three parties to its provisions, Arab states, the Palestinian Authority, and the Israeli government, is political, not intellectual, behavior. Take for example the joint declaration made by Egyptians and Israelis (mostly men) on behalf of the Cairo Peace and Peace Now. Remove all the high-sounding phrases about “peace” and not only do you get a ringing endorsement of Oslo, but also of the Sadat–Begin agreements of the late '70s, which are described as courageous and momentous. Fine. But what does this have to do with Palestinians whose territory and self-determination were removed from those courageous and momentous Camp David documents? Besides, Egypt and Israel are still at peace. What would people think if a few Israelis and Palestinians got together and issued ringing proclamations about Israeli-Syrian peace that were meant to “appeal” to those two governments? Crazy, most people would say. What entitles two parties, one who oppresses Palestinians and the other who has arrogated the right to speak for them, to proclaim peaceful goals in a conflict that is not between them? Moreover, the idea of appealing to Israeli government, expecting solutions from it, is like asking Count Dracula to speak warmly about the virtues of vegetarianism.

In short, political behavior of this sort simply reinforces the hold of a dying succubus, Oslo, on the future of real, as opposed to fraudulent, American-Israeli peace. But neither, I must also say, is it intellectually responsible in effect to return to blanket boycotts of the sort now becoming the fashion in various Arab countries. As I said earlier, this sort of tactic (it is scarcely a strategy, any more than sticking one's head in the sand like an ostrich is a strategy) is regressive. Israel is neither South Africa, nor Algeria, nor Vietnam. Whether we like it or not, the Jews are not ordinary colonialists. Yes, they suffered the Holocaust, and yes, they are the victims of anti-Semitism. But no, they cannot use those facts to continue, or initiate, the dispossession of another people that bears no responsibility for either of those prior facts. I have been saying for twenty years that we have no military option, and are not likely to have one any time soon. Nor does Israel have a real military option. Despite their enormous power, Israelis have not succeeded in achieving either the acceptance or the security they crave. On the other hand, not all Israelis are the same, and, whatever happens, we must learn to live with them in some form, preferably justly rather than unjustly.

Therefore the third way avoids both the bankruptcy of Oslo and the retrograde policies of total boycotts. It must begin in terms of the idea of citizenship, not nationalism, since the notion of separation (Oslo) and of triumphalist unilateral theocratic nationalism, whether Jewish or Muslim, simply does not deal with the realities before us. Therefore, a concept of citizenship whereby every individual has the same citizen's rights, based not on race or religion, but on equal justice for each person guaranteed by a constitution, must replace all our outmoded notions of how Palestine will be cleansed of the others' enemies. Ethnic cleansing is ethnic cleansing, whether it is done by Serbians, Zionists, or Hamas. What Azmi Bishara and several Israeli Jews like Ilan Pape are now trying to strengthen is a position and a politics by which Jews and those Palestinians already inside the Jewish state have the same rights; there is no reason why the same principle should not apply in the Occupied Territories, where Palestinians and Israeli Jews live side by side, together, with only one people, Israeli Jews, now dominating the other. So the choice is either apartheid or it is justice and citizenship. We must recognize the realities of the Holocaust not as a blank check for Israelis to abuse us, but as a sign of our humanity, our ability to understand history, our requirement that our suffering be mutually acknowledged. And we must also recognize that Israel is a dynamic society with many currents—not all of them Likud, Labor, and religious—within it. We must deal with those who recognize our rights. We should be willing as Palestinians to go to speak to Palestinians first but to Israelis too, and we should tell our truths, not the stupid compromises of the sort that the PLO and PA have traded in, which in effect is the apartheid of Oslo.

The real issue is intellectual truth and the need to combat any sort of apartheid and racial discrimination, no matter who does it. There is now a creeping, nasty wave of anti-Semitism and hypocritical righteousness insinuating itself into our political thought and rhetoric. One thing must be clear, in my firm opinion: we are not fighting the injustices of Zionism in order to replace them with an invidious nationalism (religious or civil) that decrees that Arabs in Palestine are more equal than others. The history of the modern Arab world—with all its political failures, its human rights abuses, its stunning military incompetences, its decreasing production, the fact that, alone of all modern peoples, we have receded in democratic and technological and scientific development—is disfigured by a whole series of outmoded and discredited ideas, of which the notion that the Jews never suffered and that the Holocaust is an obfuscatory confection created by the elders of Zion is one that is acquiring too much, far too much, currency.

Why do we expect the world to believe our sufferings as Arabs if a) we cannot recognize the sufferings of others, even of our oppressors, and b) we cannot deal with facts that trouble simplistic ideas of the sort propagated by
bien-pensant
intellectuals, who refuse to see the relationship between the Holocaust and Israel? Again, let me repeat that I cannot accept the idea that the Holocaust excuses Zionism for what it has done to Palestinians: far from it. I say exactly the opposite, that by recognizing the Holocaust for the genocidal madness that it was, we can then demand from Israelis and Jews the right to link the Holocaust to Zionist injustices toward the Palestinians, link and criticize the link for its hypocrisy and flawed moral logic.

But to support the efforts of Garaudy and his Holocaust-denying friends in the name of “freedom of opinion” is a silly ruse that discredits us more than we already are discredited in the world's eyes for our incompetence, our failure to fight a decent battle, our radical misunderstanding of history and the world we live in. Why don't we fight harder for freedom of opinion in our own societies, a freedom, no one needs to be told, that scarcely exists? When I mentioned the Holocaust in an article I wrote here last November I received more stupid vilification than I ever thought possible; one famous intellectual even accused me of trying to gain a certificate of good behavior from the Zionist lobby. Of course I support Garaudy's right to say what he pleases and I oppose the wretched Gayssot Law under which he was prosecuted and condemned. But I also think that what he says is trivial and irresponsible, and, when we endorse it, it allies us necessarily with Le Pen and all the retrograde right-wing fascist elements in French society.

No, our battle is for democracy and equal rights, for a secular commonwealth or state in which all the members are equal citizens, in which the concept underlying our goal is a secular notion of citizenship and belonging, not some mythological essence or an idea that derives its authority from the remote past, whether that past is Christian, Jewish, or Muslim. The genius of Arab civilization at its height in, say, Andalusia was its multicultural, multi-religious, and multi-ethnic diversity. That is the ideal that should be moving our efforts now, in the wake of an embalmed and dead Oslo, and an equally dead rejectionism. The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life, as the Bible says.

In the meantime, we should concentrate our resistance on combating settlement (as described in an article I wrote [recently]) with non-violent mass demonstrations that impede land confiscation, on creating stable and democratic civil institutions (hospitals and clinics, schools and universities, now in a horrendous decline, and work projects that will improve our infrastructure), and on fully confronting the apartheid provisions inherent in Zionism. There are numerous prophecies of an impending explosion due to the stalemate. Even if they turn out to be true, we must plan constructively for our future, since neither improvisation nor violence is likely to guarantee the creation and consolidation of democratic institutions.

DANIEL GORDIS

Take Off That Mask

Jerusalem, Israel

Dear Jill,

When
The New York Times
carries a story about a student newspaper at the Jewish Theological Seminary refusing to print a D'var Torah,
³⁵
something of interest is clearly happening. So, curious, I dug around the web a bit, found your submission, and read it with interest.

Given that JTS—hardly a bastion of rabid Zionism these days—had refused to publish it, I expected something really outrageous. But on the surface, it wasn't nearly as troubling as I'd expected. You're concerned about the fair treatment of Israeli Arabs. So am I. You're deeply troubled by the deaths of Palestinian civilians. So am I. You want Israel to be better. So do I.

So do many Israelis, Jill. Many of us are troubled by precisely the things that trouble you. That's why, for a while, I found myself feeling that the whole thing was a tempest in a teapot. OK, so it was a bit political for a D'var Torah, and a bit left. But still, why the outcry?

But I read it again, and again. And over a couple of days, I found it making me more and more uncomfortable. So I asked myself, given that there is so much that I, like many Israelis, actually agree with in your piece, why does it leave me with such a feeling of discomfort? There are, I think, three dimensions of the epistle that strike me as troubling. I'd like to tell you why.

Before I do so, though, let me assure you that the critique that follows isn't about you. We've never met, though I look forward to doing so. My comments here aren't personal at all, but rather, are directed at a certain form of public discourse about Israel, which, I think, is reflected in your D'var Torah. What I'm addressing is a way of speaking about Israel that is found in the public utterances of groups like “Rabbinical Students for a Just Peace” (which you represent) and the American Jewish radical left, in general. Please read my letter in that spirit.

The first thing that troubles me about your piece is your certainty that Israel is simply wrong. Your tone implies that Israel has alternatives that are readily apparent to anyone with even a modicum of moral sophistication. Where I live, we muse on our predicament all the time; but unlike you, none of us can seem to think of any easy answers.

When the army accidentally killed two Jewish security personnel last week in a torrent of bullets, both the press and many of our friends began to wonder what that says about the behavior of the army in cases that we don't hear about, when the people being pursued are Palestinian, not Jews. The people we talked to over Shabbat (religious, and by no means anywhere near “left,” if that will help dispel any stereotypes here) were deeply concerned. They were sad, perplexed.

But Jill, there's an enormous difference between our friends who live here and the American Jewish left you represent. Here in Jerusalem, we have those conversations in full knowledge that the alternative to this IDF “full court press” in the hills just outside our neighborhoods isn't obvious. For when the army lets up, our buses explode. When security measures are loosened just a bit, our children don't make it home from school. So we struggle, and we agonize.

But I don't feel any struggle in what you write. And your colleagues certainly don't agonize. You just assume that we're callous, that we're comfortable with all the results of our actions. You write as if Israel has made a choice to be evil. No, you don't say that, but that's what you imply. You imply that we're motivated by hate, by disregard for Arab life. Perhaps that's true of a small percentage of radical-fringe Israelis, but it's not the case for the overwhelming majority. Most of us are animated these days by something completely different.

This week is Purim. Today, the last school day before the Purim school vacation, thousands of kids went to school in costume. It's an amazing scene when you think about it—an entire city filled with dressed-up kids in the middle of one war, and on the eve of another [in Iraq]. But it's also a scene that infuriates me. Why? Because the police have told kids that they can't wear their Purim costume masks out on the streets—the possibility that a terrorist will use Purim as a chance to wear a disguise and blend into the city is too great. And because as I was driving across town today, there were hundreds of police guarding the kids on their parades, and closer to home, I saw my daughter's (high school) friends stationed with rifles along the street, also guarding their younger brothers' and sisters' class parades so that they're not blown up for the simple crime of trying to enjoy Purim.

Do you have any idea what the awareness, day after day, that someone is trying to gun down your kids does to you? No, you don't. Because if you did, you'd never have been able to write “I spent time sitting in cafés, having dinner with friends and former teachers, and wandering the streets of Jerusalem. Enjoying myself in West Jerusalem, I could easily forget about the difficult lives of Palestinians, Israeli Arabs, foreign workers and Jewish minorities.” West Jerusalem is Disneyland, and East Jerusalem is hell, right?

No, Jill, wrong. True, there is much too much suffering in East Jerusalem and other Palestinian communities, but West Jerusalem is not the picnic your tourist visa led you to see. Raise children here. Send them off to school every day fully cognizant that someone out there is gunning for them, hoping against hope that the security forces get the “bad guys” (for that's exactly what they are, they're evil—or do you believe they're “freedom fighters”?) before they get our kids. Do that for a couple of years and then see if you can be in West Jerusalem and “easily forget about difficult lives.” It's amazing what a few months of reality can do to Upper West Side idealism. Try to raise kids here for a few months, and then see how easy it is for you to write with such certainty that we're so obviously wrong, or that we have any real alternatives here.

If your certainty is my first concern, your naïveté is second. There's a small facet of this conflict that seems to have escaped your attention—this war isn't about territories, or settlements, or the Green Line. It's about Israel's existence. That's why the issue of refugees wasn't resolved at Camp David or in Taba. Israel couldn't compromise, because that would mean the end of a Jewish state. And the Palestinians wouldn't compromise, because the end of the Jewish state was exactly what they wanted.

And that's why I find myself bristling at your concern that your “visit [to Israel] would signal a tacit endorsement of the current Israeli government and of Israel's ongoing human rights violations.” What's wrong with saying that? What's wrong is that it's dangerous and myopic.

Yes, it's dangerous. For the language of “ongoing human rights violations” is the language that the world used about South African apartheid, about Milosevic's Serbia and its ethnic cleansing, and now uses about Saddam's Iraq. And the world destroyed the first two, and is about to destroy the third. Is that what you want to happen to Israel? If it isn't, then it's time to recognize that the language you choose puts Israel into a category in which she doesn't belong, but to which the world is all too anxious to add her. In this world climate, responsible Jewish leadership requires watching the words you choose very carefully. Does your rabbinical school spend any time talking about responsible leadership?

Whatever you intend, you will be quoted and cited as evidence. Are you aware that you're featured and quoted on
www.freepalestine.com?
Do you really want to play into the hands of the French politically correct anti-Semites? Or the barbarian colonialist Belgians who have now decided to be the world's conscience? Do you really want to give tacit justification to the Norwegians who boycott Israeli goods, the British who refuse to invite Israeli academics to conferences, or the Italians who will not have Israeli artists (even politically left-wing performers) on their stages? Is that the tacit message you want to convey?

But lest you respond that I'm advocating that you hide the truth because the truth is dangerous in this case, rest assured that I mean nothing of the sort. Because what you and your colleagues write is not only dangerous; it is also myopic.

What strikes you as the moral high ground, as righteousness born of Jewish learning, strikes me as a wholly dysfunctional read of the situation on the ground. Has Israel done a variety of things in the past two and a half years that are not pleasant? Yes. Have grave mistakes been made? Absolutely. The army itself issued a report last week in which it stated that 18 percent of Palestinians killed in the conflict have been civilians. That's of deep concern to many people here.

But “Israel's ongoing human rights violations”? Do you really mean to compare Israel to South Africa and to Serbia? Did the apartheid regime publish statistics about the performance of its security forces? Did Milosevic? Where is your sense of balance, of proportion?

Yes, you and your “Rabbinical Students for a Just Peace” colleagues regularly and perfunctorily decry Palestinian terrorism. We've all read those pro forma utterances. But are you not aware that you've been sucked into a shocking sort of moral equivalency? Remember, if you can, whom we're fighting and what we haven't done. Have we blown up their restaurants in order to kill as many unarmed civilians as possible? Targeted their public transportation? Celebrated on our campuses after we blew their pizza parlors to high heaven? Rewarded the families of homicide bombers, and turned murderers into religious icons? Have we lynched, to the glee of hundreds standing outside, Palestinians who have made their way into Israel? Have we destroyed their religious sites as they did to Joseph's Tomb and Jericho's Shalom Al Yisrael Synagogue?

No matter how grievous some of the mistakes that the IDF may have made, and yes, there have been too many, do you really want to make this comparison? Do you really believe that it is a policy from the “top” that civilians are to be systematically killed? And be careful before you answer. Even if the policy is to play very serious hardball with the terror organizations in the knowledge that civilians will inevitably be killed, that's not the same thing as consciously and purposefully seeking to kill civilians. Don't we have the right to assume that future Jewish leaders will have the ethical and intellectual nuance needed to make this distinction?

No, I guess not. I suppose that it's of no interest to you that even the committed Israeli left has had to rethink its views in light of this war. Take Benny Morris, for example. Morris, one of the key figures among the Israeli New Historians, has done more than almost anyone to document the roles of the Hagganah and the early IDF in the expulsions of Arabs from their villages (among many other phenomena) during the War of Independence. In doing so, he has aroused the ire of many centrist and right-wing Israelis. He, if anyone, would seem to be a committed leftist, devoted to settling this conflict and giving the Palestinians the home they deserve, right?

Right, except he looks around and realizes that there's no chance for that now. He reads the situation and realizes that this isn't about fairness, it's about our destruction. So, he's bagged that hope. Listen to him in his own words: “I have yet to see even a peace-minded Palestinian leader, as Sari Nusseibeh seems to be, stand up and say: ‘Zionism is a legitimate national liberation movement, like our own. And the Jews have a just claim to Palestine, like we do.' . . . I don't believe that Arafat and his colleagues mean or want peace—only a staggered chipping away at the Jewish state.” What would it take, Jill, to get the future leadership of the American Jewish community to understand what the Israeli left has had to learn?

The third quality of your D'var Torah that saddens me is the most subtle, but it may be the most important. I'll be personal here. When I read
Black Dog of Fate,
Peter Balakian's superb book about the Armenian genocide, I was sickened and appalled. There are scenes from that book that I still remember vividly, several years after having read it. The same with Philip Gourevitch's
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will
Be Killed with Our Families,
about the horrific genocides of Rwanda. I couldn't put either of those books down, and I think about them both, often.

But I'll be honest. They disgusted me and appalled me, but they didn't make me cry. Yet narratives from the Shoah do. Why? Was our suffering greater? I'm not a big believer in quantifying or comparing suffering. No, it's not that. I don't believe for a moment that our suffering matters more, or that our lives are more sacred. It's just that stories about my people, my family, my narrative, and yes—my country—move me more powerfully and intimately than stories about others.

Does that make me a lesser human being? I hope not. I think that it's simply a matter of—to use the phrase that Avishai Margalit uses so eloquently in his
The Ethics of Memory
—the difference between thick and thin relations. I have a much thicker set of relations with Jews—no matter where they are and who they are—than I do with Armenians or Rwandans. Most human beings are that way. It's part of the way we love, and it's part of the way we cope. We couldn't bear life if every human tragedy cut to the core of our being.

To my sadness, though, I don't feel that thickness of relationship when you write about your love for Israel. You say you love Israel, true, but in the very next sentence, you write that you could not “in good conscience, agree to preach unconditional support of a government that has long oppressed another people.” Is that how you think of what's going on here? Of the myriad responsibilities the government has, and in the midst of everything the Jewish people is facing in this hour, that's your read of what Israel is? Your basic, instinctive reaction is that this country is now in the business of oppressing another people? You have every right to believe that, I suppose, but I see it in the business of trying to stay alive. If you see it as simply about oppression, then I see little difference between you and the rest of the world that would do us in, with no regard for the history that created us, or for the dream—however insufficiently fulfilled—that this homeland represents for us.