Memory, Inequality, and Power: Palestine and the Universality of Human Rights Author(s): Edward W.

Said Source: Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, No. 24, Archeology of Literature: Tracing the Old in the New / ,)4002( pp. 15-33 Published by: Department of English and Comparative Literature, American University in Cairo and American University in Cairo Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4047418 Accessed: 06/07/2010 21:06
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Memory, Inequality, and Power: Palestine and the Uniuersality of Human Rights* Edward W. Said

This is a very fraught moment to be speaking about human rights and the Middle East, and the human rights of the Palestinian but people in particular; it does seem to be in some ways a symbolically useful time for the purposesof my lectureand what I have to say. I I should also say immediatelythat I am not a political commentator; am not a political scientist;I don't teach Middle Easternstudiesor any of that, so I speak as one of us. The United States of America has alreadysent a hugely intimidating military forces to various Arab and non-Arabcountriesin the regions surrounding Iraq. The frankly imperial idea which my President[GeorgeW. Bush] can barely articulateis thatthey are there to disarmIraqforcibly and also to change its dreadfulregime. The rest of the international community,not least most of the Arabcountriesof the region as well as the other permanentmembers of the Security Council, have been expressing varying degrees of disquiet and occasionally urgent disapprovalas is the case with France. Certainlyit is the case that no one outside of Iraqhas suggested any concern about SaddamHussein and his government. It is the people of Iraqwho stand to suffer the most and whose doubly and triply miserablefate is of the deepest interestto people all over the world. I am sorry to say that none of this has had the slightest effect on what is a granitic will on the part of a tiny number of members of George Bush's administration go forwardwith plans to for a war among whose statedimperialintentionsis the unilateralwish to bring American style democracy to Iraq and the Arab world, redrawingmaps,overturning governmentsand statesand modes of life on a fantasticallywide scale in the process. Thatall of this has very lit*

This article is based on the transcription a lecture Edward Said delivered at of Ewart Hall, The American University in Cairo, on March 17, 2003. He was not able-because of his illness-to send Alif the final version he promised.

Alif 24 (2004)

15

tle in the final analysis to do with the enhancementsof humanrights and democracy,in a partof the world especially rife with their abuse, is patently obvious. Were Iraq to have been the world's largest exporterof orangesand apples,therewould have been no concernover its purported possession of weapons of mass destructionor its extraordinarily cruel and tyrannicalregime. This is a war planned for many reasons;amongthem I would say the most important resourcesand are strategic control. And when it occurs, the United States would have then asserted its strategic dominance over the center of the world's largest known energy reserves from the Gulf to the CaspianSea. And it plans to reshape the area by pacifying threatsto its dominance in Syria, Iran,and elsewhere in the Gulf. To threatenand soon to prosecute war with such belligerence and such a wasteful deploymentof humanand militaryresourcesis an abuse of humantoleranceand humanvalues. That it might in the end turn out to be only a display, ratherthan an actual use of force, only deepens the anxiety aboutthe kind of world we are moving toward.By the end of the decade China will be importing as much oil as the United States and by 2025, the United States will need to importa full 75% of its oil needs from the Gulf region principally.As againstthose facts, when a people are preventedfrom getting an education,or from being allowed to move, express themselves, organize freely without fear eitherof intimidation,collective punishment,or straightout assassination may seem therefore like relatively humdrumif not trivial issues, but they do pertainwith a frighteningparallelismto both the people of Palestineand the people of Iraq.In eitherandboth cases, my point here is to assert first of all the universal applicabilityof human rightsto those people-given thatsince WorldWarII, therehas grown up an impressive, even formidable,world-wide consensus that each individualor collectivity, no matterhis or her color, ethnicity,religion, or culture,is to be protectedfrom such horrificpracticesas starvation, torture,forced transferof populations,religious and ethnic discrimination, humiliation,extra-judicial political assassination,land expropriation and all mannerof similarcruel and unusualpunishment. I want to affirm also that no power, no matterhow special or how developed or how strongor how urgentits claims of past victimization, is exempt from accusation and judgment if that government practices such things; and finally no people or individualscan be singled out as exceptions to these generalrules, so as to be consideredin fact liable for such abrogationof human rights as those I have men16 Alif 24 (2004)

tioned. We live in a secularhistoricalworld. History is the productof human labor, choice and will. Nothing, in my opinion, nothing transcendental or divine can supersede that truth or suspend the consequences that flow from its application.There simply is no convincing way to assert special claims whose origin is the divine whetherthat is done by Israel or by the United States-claims that supposedlylegitimate high altitudeor smartbombing or the use of 60-ton bulldozersto demolish the houses of poor and defenseless people who don't happen to belong to the correct religion or race. Yesterday, we had a tragic case of a house demolition in Gaza by a 60-ton bulldozer in which a heroic Americanwoman [Rachel Corrie]witnessed by giving her life to thatbarbaricact. Just as I feel as an Americanthatthe United States has not been divinely endowed with a special errandinto the wildernessnor have its practicesbeen endorsedby God, I feel it is my moral and intellectual duty to oppose the unjust use of its immense military economic and political power abroadfor what it claims falsely to be its nationalsecurity interests.I have no power so I have to resortto the tools of education, to writingand speaking.By the same token, I want to reiteratemy conviction here that it is this specific case of the denial of the human rights of the Palestinianpeople by the state of Israel which is at the core of the Middle East conflict. This cannot at all be justified on any of the groundsroutinelyacceptedby far too manyindividualsandgovernmentswho would be the first to object to similarbehaviorin other cases. So, far from Israel and the Palestiniansbeing a special case of unusualexceptionalcircumstances,I thinkthe exact opposite is truethatbecause Palestineis perhapsof all places on earththe most densely saturatedwith cultural and religious significance, precisely that reality makes it an instance of universalitythwartedand flouted. The universality of human co-existence, the human acceptance of the Other, and the humanconstructionof a just and fair society for alland certainlynot only for some of its residents-are all relevantprinciples. The point is that no State, no State at all, is in my opinion entitled legitimatelyto object to these formulationsandcertainlyno leader can state unarguably, example as George Bush has, thatthe United for States is good and its enemies evil. Or as General Sharon has announcedand I quote here that "we are placing no restrictionon our operations [in the Palestinianterritories].Israel is underno pressure. No one is criticizingus or has the right to do so." I would submitthat such sweeping statementof higher purpose Alif 24 (2004) 17

and extraordinary impunitymustbe opposedand intellectuallydismantled for the fuggish balderdashthat such pronouncements really are, specially if they are intendedto cover or explainor excuse or somehow devastationand vast ruin. Yet the contrastbetween the justify barbaric immenselypowerfulandthe relativelypowerless,such as we are,is not so simple since the greatoutcryall over the world againstunilateral US war, and the felt need by even US governmentspokespeopleto reiterate a general Americancommitmentto democracyand humanrights, does in fact reveal a profoundawarenessthat, aside from comfortand convenience, human beings all over the world today expect to be respected,theirrequirements a decent life met, theirwish not to be for tortured detainedunlawfullyin any countryin the worldrecognized, or their concern for their childrenand their livelihoods accepted despite the supposedlyhigher prioritiesassertedby great power. All these in theory at least are rarely challenged head on and considered to be humanentitlement.Even if such terribleabstractions such as national interest,nationalunity,andnationalsecurityareaffirmedas being more important than individualrights, I don't thinkthey are;I think exactly the opposite. Humanrights of the individualare much more important in the end thannationalinterest,nationalunity, and nationalsecurity,I felt this all of my life and I still feel it. This unacceptable unattracand tive argumentthat nationalsecurityis the most importantthing in the world certainlynow prevails in the US where for example the education of young people in the subjectof historyhas become a profoundly ideological battlegroundbetween proponentsof a kind of primitive heroic white Americannationalismand the much more sensible advocates of a multi-cultural, multi-racial reality-stressed, for instance,in his work by the prominentradicalhistorianHowardZinn. This other American history includes, which is I think the real history, a bitter legacy of domestic slavery, imperial conquest, and terrible class inequality. The universally wide-spreadconviction that everyone on earth deserves a modicum of human rights is only a symbolic moral power perhapstoo ill-endowed to take on so redoubtablea force as Americanglobal reachandits all too numerouslocal henchmanandthe fearsomelyneo-conservativespokesmenwho want Americanvalues to rule the world-resistance and objectionsnot withstanding. I want to tell you today, having just arrived yesterday from America, please do not be misled into thinking that this is a war by America against Iraq.It is a war of a small cabal, a putsch within the Bush administration because it is clear to me-having crisscrossedthe 18 Alif 24 (2004)

US in the last three months lecturingand speakingand writing everywhere-this is perhapsthe most unpopularwar in American history also andwhatis tremendously important is thatthis is the firstwar since WWII that has been opposed before the war, not duringthe war, as is the case with Vietnam, or after the war; but before it actually takes place. Please also note that over at least 125 municipalcouncils in the United States, most of the large cities including New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles have voted overwhelminglyagainstthe war. And the the demonstrations, popularoutcry, the massive assault by pro-peace activistson the populationat large,I thinkwill complicatethingsfor the Bush administration despitethe obvious appeal,which will soon appear in grotesquemanners,thatthis is a war for patriotismand the safety of the United States and so on and so forth.So I thinkit is very important to keep in mind thateven huge powers can still be divided up into differentsectorsamongwhich we must be able to discriminate underand stand them separatelyfrom the center of power. In this case, as I say, the centerhas illegally appropriated sweeping powers to itself-thanks to the dormantCongress,which has allowed the Presidentto do this, in the wake of 9/11, and which it shouldnot have done. To speaknow aboutthe Palestinianrightsin such a context may seem essentially quixotic and irrelevant and certainly the current impressionthatIsraeland the United Stateshave borneall before them in their hostility to full Palestinian self-determinationreinforces the superficialimpressionof irrelevance,but I want to arguethat is not at all thereis to the whole truth.The processes of historyand politics are much more complicated than superficial, vulgar media sound bites. There are accomplishmentsand realities also to be noted with positive approvaland admiration.During my lifetime, Palestinians,since the climatic events of 1948 and the establishmentof Israelhave gone from the statusof non-personsto thatof a universallyacknowledgednational collectivity, that is, a people, by virtue not simply of force of arms but of othermeans some of which I want to talk abouthere. If for now the Palestiniansare still stateless, dispossessed, and for the most part exiled, it is because by those very unmilitarymeans some of which are the mobilized force of memory, the power of images, and the heroism andingenuityof sheerpersistence-by all of this, Palestiniansembody perhaps the most visible and certainly the most universal case of humanrights abuses on earthtoday. There is no desire on my partto be competitive about such a claim. There are many oppressedpeoples in the world today and I am not saying that the Palestiniansare the Alif 24 (2004) 19

most oppressed; but I am saying they are most visible, and partly because of their own activity they lay a special claim on, not only Arab, but universal attention.I want also to be able to talk about the visibility not only of their presence as victims of injustice and human rights denial, but of the equal force they present,they representon the world stage, of a wrong that must be righted. In an extremely suggestive lecture, the British philosopherand political scientist Ken Booth draws attention to the existence of a moral and political growing numberof what he calls "trans-cultural solidarities"that have acted the part of what he calls "agentsbeyond sovereignty,"thatis to say act as institutionsnot boundby the borders between countriesthat set the internationalsystem since the peace of Westphalia in the seventeenth century. That focus seems to be an excellent way of characterizing overall humanachievementof the the Palestinianpeople in the period after 1948 until the present.Note that in all the many amazinglydifferentplaces, conditionsand polities that the approximately7.5 million Palestiniansnow live in as citizens of Israel, as under military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, as refugees and stateless persons in several Arabcountriesincludingthis one [Egypt], as refugees with various acquirednationalitiesscattered all over the world, and as members of a dispossessed people-they have developed a political and moral solidarity with each other and with other people. Nothing less, in fact than a nationalidentity and a political constituency all over the world that it has been the goal of Israel to deny, obliterateand refuse to acknowledge. To argue backwardsfor a moment, let me site only one recent example of what I mean by denial and a refusalto acknowledge.It was precisely thatrefusal that flawed the Oslo process from the momentit was undertakenin 1993. In this, I think, the Israelis and the United States were planningnot to restorebut to furtherpostpone and deflect the fulfillmentof Palestinianaspirations.I said so at the time; nobody believed me. They said: "give it a chance,"but if you read the documents you would have seen that neither Israel nor the United States was moved by an acknowledgmentof past injusticesnor by a spiritof contrition or of reconciliation with their batteries of legal experts backedby the disproportional militaryweight of both countriesand at the same time as more than double the pre-existingnumberof settlements were being createdon Palestinianland and more humanrights abused. Israel and the United States divided and subdivided everdiminishingbits of Palestinianterritoriesinto smaller and less viable 20 Alif 24 (2004)

Palestinianauthorityto take over and misrule, units for the unfortunate all underthe misleading-not to say willfully deceptive-rubric of the "peaceprocess."Was there ever any other intention?No, not peace at all but pacificationfor a time and, I think,we are in for thatnow in the case of Iraq.The Oslo accordswere too much of a whole with several prior decades of Palestinian dispossession, house demolitions, land expropriationand attacks on civil society. As against that, there has been, as I said, a moral and political solidaritybuilding up between Palestiniansall over the world-some of it has been evident in the past weeks of worldwideprotestsagainstthe war in Iraq.People have made the connection between war by the United States against Iraq and Israel's war against the Palestinianpeople. This is absolutelycorrect; and in many countriesof the world-in Europe,in the Middle East, in parts of Africa and Latin America and to some degree in America, in some of the big demonstrations that took place, for example, in New York in the middle of February,in California,where in San Francisco three or four hundred thousand people turned up-the issue of Palestine was connected with the issue of Iraq. One of the manifestations,and perhapsnot its most significant one, is that today for example, there are such things openly acknowlvisiedged as a Palestiniancinema and with it a kind of transnational bility of a Palestinianperson that would have been unthinkablethree decades ago. In late January,to give a very simple example, at my University [Columbia], the head of the Middle East Studies Departmentwho is an Iranian,Hamid Dabashi, decided-because he wrote a book on cinema; he's very interestedin Iraniancinema-it would be a greatidea if we had a festival of Palestinianfilms. This festival began on a Thursday night and between Thursday night and Sundaynight about74 films were shown in perhaps15 or 16 sessions. Every single one of them was full; you could not get in for miles around,and now half a dozen more universitiesaroundthe countryare trying to do the same thing all of which attests to the power of Palestine and the visibility of the Palestinianindividual as he or she appearsin films. Of course, with the films went the usual threats,the picketers,the flooding of e-mails. As one of the speakersat the festival, I would get 5000 e-mail messages every day to put my e-mail out of commission. But, of course, this did not have any effect at all; people still went on and the showing of the films were all fully attended. So visual symbols have played an extraordinarily important role in the if you like of the Palestinian individual after years of reappearance Alif 24 (2004) 21

nationaleffacement. absence and programmed I don't want to go over the steps taken by Israel inside former Palestine to obliteratesystematicallythe centuries-oldArab presence along with its symbols and structures.I have describedsome of these on the juridicallevel so far as the takingover of land and propertywas concernedin my book TheQuestionof Palestine which appearedmore than 20 years ago, but the overall plan was to startIsrael as if afresh, a state rising from nothing, to take its place among the nations. In the affirmationof its renewedmillennialidentity,Israelmanagedfor quite a while to remove the traces of Palestinianlife for the most part,even though, of course, a large numberof these traces,remainingas a remnantof the people despite the expulsions of 1948, were thereas a humbled and scarcely perceptiblehuman presence ruled by military governmentinside Israel until 1966. Even so, apparentlyinnocent a discipline such as archeology, which is one of course of the prides of Egypt, was used in Israel and was made complicit in the makingover of the land and its markers,as if there had never been any Arabs or any other civilizations there except Israel and the Israelites.This is very well describedby a young Palestiniananthropologist Nadia Abu El-Hajin her recentbook called Facts on The Ground:Archeological Practice and TerritorialSelfFashioning in Israeli Society (2002). Her argument is that in the process of providingIsraelwith an ancientobjectivizedhistoryvisible in archeological evidence, the traces of other more just as historical histories were ignored or simply moved away by trucks and bulldozers. What remainedbecame for Israeli archeology evidence of a kind of essential "Israeliness" which gave the state an unassailablepedigree in a long distantpast with the interveningculturesand peoples; myriads of people and cultureswere simply pushed aside and ignored. Moreoverin a trilogy of powerful books entitledA Land without People, The Expulsion of the Palestinians and the third one ImperialIsrael and the Palestinians: ThePolitics of Expansion19672000, the Palestinian/Israeli scholar Nur Masalhahas unearthedboth the theoryand practiceof emptyingthe land of Israelof its indigenous inhabitants.Much of the pre-state Zionist ideology that mobilized EasternEuropeancommunitiesfor the trekto mandatory Palestinewas premised on the virtual absence of inhabitants,on what was often depicted as either completely empty or hopelessly arid land awaiting redemptionby Jewish pioneers. Lateron, or in some cases simultaneously with that, when the discovery of actual Palestinians could no 22 Alif 24 (2004)

longer be deferred or denied there was a concerted effort to devise ways of getting rid of them; it was called transferand is still called transfer.Half the members of the present Israeli cabinet openly say thatthe only solution is to transferthe Arabsout of Palestine.The war of 1948 provided field commandersand Ben Gurion himself with a to rich opportunity do so. These are amply attestedto in the Israelimilitary archive as combed assiduouslyby a numberof Jewish as well as includingMasalhahimself. Since 1967 the numerousArabresearchers desire to efface and/orrepress what has remainedof an institutionalized Palestinianlife in the cities and villages of the West Bank and Gaza has remainedan often explicitly statedIsraeligoal hidden inside the polemics of a war for Israel's survival and the defense against But extremistterrorism. whetherits new Jewish citizens liked it or not, Israel has always been encumberedby Palestinianmemory which is one of my themes here today. It is not as if a whole existence of a people can be easily wiped away like a footprintin the sand. The sheer banalityof such a possibility is too obvious to requiremore comment and whetherthis was meant to put a stop to Palestiniannationallife, just short of full ethnic cleansing, I don't want to speculate on. But such proceduresare of a piece with claims thatIsraelis fighting for its life and thatin occupying and destroyingeverythingpossible by tanks, bulldozers,F16s and Apache helicopters,it is defending itself against terroristswho happento have no army or viable defense or means of waging war of any description-that seems totally obvious. In any event the great narrativeof Palestinianlife has not yet been achieved,or for thatmatterwritten,any more thanthe fulfillment of its logical nationalaspirations have been fulfilled. Althoughit seems as obvious despite Oslo, despite what the leadershave said, there just is no regression,no hesitationamong Palestinianseverywhereon the drivetowardsself-determination. Palestinian A nationexiled or in waiting has emerged with an unmistakableoutline and personalityof its own. The vast network of institutions-groups scatteredall over the world that sustains the continuity of Palestiniannational life-is an amazing thing. It is drawn not only on the mobilized energy of Palestinianseverywherebut also on the dazzlingly wide-spreadcommitmentto themof theirfriends,allies andcomradesall over the world. The sheer inequality between the average Palestinian and the and average Israeli is breathtaking, this has been completely shielded from the world outside. We know aboutit as Arabs,as Palestinians,as neighborsif you like in the Middle East, but in the West you have no Alif 24 (2004) 23

idea for example when you watch a CNN broadcast-which is quite differentfrom the CNN you watch here [Egypt] which is international CNN. But if in America you watch a broadcastabout what's happened on the West Bank-let's say yesterday's events-you'll never know that there is a military occupation going on, that's never mentioned. It is simply taken out of the context. So the great inequalitybetween the averagePalestinianand the averageIsraeliis simply unknown.People will then say somethingdisapprovingabout those terrible suicide bombers. I always encounter and that-saying well, "whataboutthe suicidebombers?" I'll agree.I say but "yes,it's terrible"; thenone has to addhow manyIsraelishave hadto live throughthe demolitionby bulldozingof entire villages, blocks of How many Israelishave had to enduremissile flats, shoppingdistricts? or attacks Apachehelicopters rocketsfromAmericanmadeF16 fightby and at erjets? How manyIsraelishave hadto be stripped searched checkpointson an hourlybasis?None at all. Duringthe firstthreeweeks of the Intifada,this Intifada,one million bullets were fired by Israelimilitary in For personnelat Palestinians. those of you interested historicalcomparisons,neitherIndiansdemonstrating against the British, nor South Africanblacks fightingagainstapartheid, ever faced anythinglike this, nor for that matterdid they have to reckon with missiles, hundredsof tanks,helicoptersandFl6s androcketattacksfiredinto civilianareasas well as refugeecampswith no defensesor armswhatever. Consider this-and I did this as a quick example on the internet-on Januarythe 23rd, 2003 you read: 836 Muslim pilgrims to Mecca from Gaza were denied permission to leave. The Palestinian Catholiccardinalwas detainedat Tel Aviv airport.Some towns on the West bank have alreadysustained214 days of curfew. 150 dunumsof fertile agricultural land were destroyedin Gaza. Three people, two of them civilians were killed. Six homes demolished. This is all in one 62 day in late January. shops in Nazlit Isa were flattenedto the ground, and that,literally,thousandsof people many of them pregnantwomen, sick and aged men and women, childrentrying to get to school, doctors hoping to reachtheirpatientstheirhospitals,professorsandundergraduatestrying to get to their classes with 3 universitiesclosed, and ordinaryhuman beings shopping, looking for food or work-all of them detainedby the endless numberof checkpoints.Over 300 checkpoints in the West Bank punctuatethe existence of Palestiniansin the Occupied Territories.Two or three days ago, 12 Palestinians were killed as a result of an Israeli incursion into Gaza. Today more were 24 Alif 24 (2004)

killed, dozens injured,tens of houses demolishedin varyingdegreesof severityandbrutality.This sort of thing has been going on thereeveryday for 35 years. The Israeli occupationis now the longest in modem history, the longest military occupation rivaled only by the Japanese occupationof Korea. And the settlementsincrease:they crowd every availablehilltop. There is one otherthing I want to mentionaboutthe occupation which makes it difficult to recall or actuallysee, not only for outsiders so to speak but even for Israelis themselves. As AmiraHass writes in Haaretz,and I quote her: "a personcould travelthe length and breadth of the West Bank withoutever knowing, not only the names of the villages and cities whose lands were confiscatedto build the Jewish settlements and neighborhoods,but even the fact that they exist at all." I don't know how many of you have been to the OccupiedTerritories. I wish you would all go, you have to see it-I'll talk about that laterbut the point I am tryingto make is, you have no idea of, for example, the system of roads that the Israelis have built with Americanmoney. We are talking about 780 miles of roads throughoutan area that is about the size of Cairobasically, I mean greaterCairo. Roads that are for Jews only. They've built roads, what Jeff Halpercalls "a matrixof control," so that they connect the settlements with each other. They ban Arabs and they make it, as Amira Hass says, impossible to even see the Arabs. "Most of the names of the Arab towns," I quote her again, "cannotbe found on the road signs." From a distance, the calls of the mu'azzinand the streetsthat are empty of people; afterall there is nothingto go out and look for. It seems like an aestheticdecoration. A Jew traveling on the almost empty roads of the West Bank would think that there are no longer any Arabs. The Arabs do not travel on the wide roads used by Jews. When I went to SouthAfrica for the first time in 1991 before the end of apartheid-although Mandelahadjust been releasedfromjail a few months earlier-you could drive from white centers like Cape Town to Stellenbosch,a distanceof about 80 miles and never see anything of the black South Africa. It was entirely white; why? Because the road curved aroundin such a way that the townships, where you would occasionally see a large light, but the rest of the black population was simply made invisible. This is one of the ways that colonialism has of dissipatingthe existence of the otherpeople. In additionto that now, again with the full supportof the United States, the Israelis are building a wall between themselves and the Palestinians-a wall Alif 24 (2004) 25

which separatesvillages from their lands, so that now they don't even have to, not only just see them, but they don't have to deal with the fact thattheirvisual presencemight be a problem,and all this with the support of the United States-135 billion dollars given by us. This tremendousassault on memory, to say nothing about reality, is quite withoutprecedentor analogy in our post-moderntimes. Not in former Yugoslavia, not in Africa, nor elsewhere in Asia and Australia.By contrast,I want to say that none of these efforts have achieved their goal. In every possible way, the diverse affirmationsof Palestinian identity, far from being a negative or passive thing have grown first and foremosta cultureof humanrightsanddemocraticprocesses at the grass roots level that has included a sensitive.registerof the claims of memory, the demand for attention and justice, despite the world's indifferenceand a healthy awarenessof the ironies of unequalpower. The otherthing I'd like to note is thateven thoughin the United States and partsof WesternEuropethe notion of Palestineis associated only with violence and terror;there is, as I said earlier, a serious contradictionto that superficialassociation in an ongoing and recognized Palestiniannationallife with a quite peculiartenacity. There is today a Palestinianliteraturewhich is studied,not only in Palestinian schools and universities but in European, American, African, and Latin American countries. There is a Palestinian legal political and scholarlydiscourse,a Palestiniancinema, a Palestiniantheatre,an oral tradition,a large number of Palestiniangrass roots organizationsall over the world. In short,thereis a Palestinianstyle thatinvigoratesand informs all aspects of this community's existence. Moreover-this is what I think is most encouraging-this Palestinianstyle is situatedin contemporaryawareness in all sorts of interesting and noteworthy ways. The habitof consideringeverythingaboutPalestinianidentityas basically anti-Israeldoes an extreme disservice to the richness of the achievement I have been discussing. As Rashid Khalidi has pointed out, in his book called Palestine and the Palestinians, therehas been a coherent Palestinian national life well before the onset of Zionism which despite the nakba [disaster],and the years of dispossession, has never really been broken. Moreover,the universalityof the drive for Palestinian self-determinationhas acquiredan unbudgeableplace in the world's agenda for liberation,sustainabilityand resistance.Every majorUN conferencefor the past two decades,whetherconcerningthe place of women, the environment, racism,humanrights,disarmament, health, or humandevelopmenthas had an importantplace in it for the 26 Alif 24 (2004)

question of Palestine. Paradoxically,the Davos meetings for governmental and corporateleaders of globalizationhave an importantcomponent of their agenda devoted to Palestine while exactly at the same time, at the other end of the world at Porto Alegre in Brazil, the antiglobalization meetings have featured the presence of a large Palestiniandelegation whose presence assures an additionalprogressive dimensionto the debatesthere. Any discussion of Middle East peace, and you notice that even in Blair's comments, two days ago [March 15, 2003], as the going expressionhas it, turnsout inevitably to be mainly aboutthe question of Palestine.If in the period after 1948, as partof the postwarreemergence of Europe,Israelhad the statusof a progressivecause, it is now Palestinethat has taken thatplace. One need only thinkof the support Israel had duringthe 1950s and 1960s from such people as Jean-Paul Sartreand Simone de Beauvoir to gage how far from that position it has fallen today. As some of Israel's own internalcritics like Amos Elon and Avishai Margalithave noted sadly since the first Intifadaof dramaticallyall over the world into 1987, Israel has been transformed a symbol of oppressionand injustice,lumpedtogetherwith the United States for its arrogance,its supremacistattitudesand for its inhuman policies towardsthe Palestiniansover which it has ruled for so long. Divestment campaigns in American universities-including mine [Columbia], Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, Chicago-all the major universities of America are now conducting divestment cammovement of the 1970s and paigns reminiscentof the anti-apartheid the 1980s that is to say to have university endowments divest themselves of stocks in American companies that do business or supply Israel with militaryequipment.This raises a whole raft of new questions about the post-cold-warpolitical order that are quite unique in their density and difficulty. So in conclusion, I want to talk about three such problems. I don't have pragmaticanswersto these questionswhateverthatmeans, but I'll talk about them from the perspective that I can bring as a humanistand an intellectualwho is deeply engaged in the matter,but who is independentand I would like to thinkas free of doctrinalor ideological hubbles as it is practicallypossible to be. Of the three issues I want to talk about the first one is the notion of victimhood. I mean there is a great deal of talk now all over the world of what do we do about the victims of the past. For a Palestinian,like myself, who has had the most fortunateand the most luxurious of lives-compared Alif 24 (2004) 27

with the overwhelming number of my refugee compatriotsor those who had to live underIsraeli rule for decades and decades-it is still difficult for me to minimize how much more Palestinianshave been sinned againstthan as a whole they have sinned, how much they have sufferedterriblyin an unacknowledgedsilence even today. As of this moment,not a single majorIsraelipolitical or intellectualfigure, not a single one-certainly no political figure of any importance-has articulated any serious contritionthe way for example Japanhas expressed contritionfor what it did to Chinaand Korea.Not one Israelipolitician of any staturehas expressedany contritionto say nothingof accepting any responsibilityat all for the disastersand sustainedhuman suffering of the Palestinianpeople. I know nothing at all in contemporary history quite like this amazing stone wall of obduracyand denial and yet I must also say that the legacy of persecution,genocide, and antiSemitism thatis so much a partof Israel's historyis a background that we mustacknowledgeandcontendwithjust the same.Two communities of suffering,I have called them that in the past but one must, I think, make clear, that at the present time, one communityhas the tremendous balance of power in its favor (Israel and the Jews), the other is, so to speak, the victim of the formervictim. Israelipolicies as well as the meditationof many western liberalswho feel a collective guilt for Christianand Europeananti-Semitism,nevertheless, must be able to distinguish and disentangle the past from the present to make very clear distinctions between respecting the appalling past injustices heapedon Jews historicallyon the one handin Christiancountries,and on the other simply excusing what the State of Israel and the State of the Jews has done to the entire Palestinianpeople ever since. There is simply no earthly or divine dispensation that would excuse a State or a people for wreakinghavoc upon anotherone while pleadingthe travailsof its own past as an excuse. Sharon'sideas are at least clear in that he believes, like George [W.] Bush, that his people owns the land for historical,biblical reasonsand that,in makingevery effort to appropriate of it at present and retrospectively,Israel is all neitherbound nor restrained ordinaryconventionsof properjustice by and proportionality.My argumenthere has been to state that such claims don't at all correspond with universalismor the idea thathuman rights cannot be manipulatedto accommodate what is a record of patent brutality and cruelty. Palestinians have been displaced, they have had their society shattered,they have had to live undermilitary occupation, their lands and lives are today systematicallytorn apart. 28 Alif 24 (2004)

There are no two ways about it I believe, which is not to say that we must simply overlook the tragichistoryof the Jews. On the contrary,I would always want to say that as a Palestinian,as an Arab, I should make my case to defenders of Israel on the basis of, and taking full accountof, making due acknowledgmentof the history of discrimination against Jews. That kind of policy, I would want to add, should never ever be visited on anyone for any reason at all, least of all by Jews in the name of their safety and independence. The second problemthat needs examinationhas recently taken the form of the supposed clash of civilizations especially in the Arab in world where SamuelHuntington-formerly a mediocrecold warrior republicanand democratic administrations-found a new career for himself in formulatingthis extremely vulgar and reductive idea that civilizationsclash. This and the stridentlybellicose rhetoricthatseems to form from it has been given a woefully inadequateformulationby politicians and demagogues within the Arab world and the Islamic world since the events of September11th, 2001. I have always found these formulasextremelystupid,not only because they falsify and distortthe notion thatbecause culturesand nationsseem to have a visible identity,they also musthave rigidlypoliced, enforced,and definedborders and rules within them and thereforewars across those borders become inevitable.This sort of thing is completely untenableon both historical and philosophical grounds. Cultures,peoples, civilizations are not water tight inert, unchangingthings. Exactly the opposite is true.And if thereis such a thingas cultureor nationhoodat all, it is that each is, and always will be, tied in, constantlyinteractingand intertwined, with other cultures and nations. Allowing for differences in kind, countries cannot really be separateand stand apartfrom their environment.It was historically one of the great failures of British imperialismthat in the Indiansubcontinent, Palestine,in Cyprus,in in Africa, in Ireland,it adoptedthe practiceof partition,or as it has been called "divideandquit."Therebyleaving mattersworse off thanbefore the separation. Buildingwalls, therefore,is a kind of folly thatoughtto be exposed for exactly what it is, namely a delusionthatcan neitherbe made fully to work in theoryor in practice. Ignoranceof the other is not a strategyfor survival.All nationalisms at their most feverish fail this crucial test of awareness.A failure by no means limited to so-called underdevelopedor fanaticalideologies, culturesor religions. Historically,for example, Palestine is a palimpsest;a composite of an enormous numberof people and civiAlif 24 (2004) 29

lizations-each of them has left traces and effects that last for many centuries. It must be said again and again that everything we know about ancient Palestine speaks to a rich multiplicity of peoples and tribes, not just the Israelitesbut also of the Canaanites,the Philistines, the Jebusites,the Moabites and many others.To extrapolatefrom that history, say thatonly one people dominatedand is thereforeentitledto lay exclusive claim to Palestine today, is simply a tragic misinterpretationandbetrayalof somethingfar more interestingandrich. One can therefore interprethistory inclusively giving rise to complexity and universalismor far more narrowlyone could interprethistory as the exclusive possession of only one people and one culture and one power who prefer unending war against others to mutualrecognition and coexistence. I think this is the problem that we face today with the United States, those of us who live there.Is Americagoing to be the unilateralist power that enters and does what it wants in the world simply because it is more powerful or, as many people, including a majority of Americans,believe that we are part of the world and have to live with the world andwithin the world as citizens of the worldratherthan as a superpower. Civil wars are much more bitterand unyieldingthan any other kind. I think that is the essence of the problemthat we face today, namely, whether some believe Palestine or America or any other country ought to become and therefore remain the principal homeland of just one dominantpeople or whether all these countries can become the homelandof the people who actuallylive thereregardless of race and religion, even though for the time being they seem to be locked in mortalcombat.I don't know the shorttermanswerto that question but it seems to me that there potentiallylies the universality of the appeal for Palestinianhuman rights. Now a second-class, dispossessed, and downtrodden people for the past centuryand a half, the Palestinianshave been strugglingfor equalityin thatland much as the non-white people of South Africa waged the battle for liberationand equality there. It is not a matterof partition,of dividing the land. It is a matterof sharingit with equality. I will not lie to you here and say that in all the ways they have resistedtheirdifficult fate, Palestinianshave had coexistence and sharing in mind-very far from it. For in this tale there is abundant vengeance, brutality, hatred and exterminism. Still, there is a great deal more than that as I have been arguinghere. And I will say confidently that the logic of that strugglehas always been inclusive against 30 Alif 24 (2004)

injusticeand inequalityfor coexistence and equality and in this region of the world-the genius of this region of the world-is the fact thatit is the home of many peoples and that many cultureshistoricallyhave coexisted here throughout history and throughout geography. Of course there will be disagreementsover how and what sort of equality, in form and method, must be achieved but that it is the desired result is as far as I am concernedthe great truthof our undiminished energies as a people that has simply refused to go underand give up. The final point I would like to mentionis the antithesisbetween presentbitterantagonismand futurereconciliation.Antagonismis the that today binds Palestiniansand otherArabs with Israelisin structure the land and in the diaspora. Neither people, neither the people of Israelnor the people of Palestine,has been blessed with a Mandelanor even a De Klerk.We are very far from a truthand reconciliationcomthoughtsthat mission. The numberof visionarieswho have articulated go beyond a wretchedimpoverishedoppositionis tiny, if they exist at all. Yes, there have been Israelis and Palestinians who have tried togetherto work againstinjusticeand intolerancebut they are a minorminoritywith very limited influence ity, a beleagueredout-numbered now. But that need not always be so. There are many models besides belligerence and civil strife between peoples. One model is the model of historical Andalusia where three cultures, three religions-all monotheistic-managed to coexist, with friction, with struggle, with antipathyin some cases, but always in a kind of precariousharmony, but coexisting just the same. And I would want to say that both in the Arabworld andin Israeltherehas been a tendencyto drawan iron curtain in frontof one and say "theyare the enemy, we are the people who are the victims, we have to be able to resist."I thinkin generalit's true, people do want to resist, but look at the great resisters of the pastsomebody who is alive today: Mandela! What was the genius of Mandela?The genius of Mandela was to understandthat in order to win the struggle for liberation in South Africa, the struggle against it apartheid, was necessaryfirst of all to formulatea strategyand a goal that never changed. It never changed for the season; it never changed during the cold war, or after the cold war. The goal was always the same: one person, one vote. Black, white, mixed, colored: one person, one vote. That is the principalof humanrights and that is the strategy of a people strugglingfor equality and self-determination. Now the second part of the strategy which was so important about South Africa and about Mandela was that he realized that in Alif 24 (2004) 31

orderto implementthis he could never win the battlemilitarily.I mean I could give you a lecture for the next four hours on the insufficiency of military power, that military power never wins battles; I mean it wins battles but it never wins wars. I believe this passionately;that what gave the popularstrugglein South Africa its ultimatevictory-it is much more complicatedobviously but allow me to simplifyjust for the sake of time-what gave the battle in South Africa its victory, was the moral high ground, that is to say, the moral high ground that Mandelaand the ANC took. It was not a matterof renouncingterrorism and it was not a matterof renouncingviolence; they never did that by the way. People say to the Palestinians "renounce violence, renounceterrorism." Poor old Arafat,time after time, renouncingterrorism (sometimes it sounds like tourism), but that's not the answer. Mandela,just for the record,never renouncedviolence, he still hasn't renouncedviolence to this day, but he won the Nobel peace prize. I mean a lot of shits have won the Nobel peace prize. But the idea was to define the struggleon a higher plane than that of your enemy. Historically, Palestiniansand Arabs have always done so, but unfortunately they have lost the battlebecause they triedto redefineit in terms of military confrontationin which in the end we are always going to lose. Our territoryis first of all the land and it's very important that there has been significant cooperation between Jews and Palestiniansin trying to preservethe land, in preventinghouse demolitions. I mean, thatis where the collective struggleis; and second, the other place is in the moral principleof 'one person, one vote,' that is to say humanequalitybased on the full realizationof humanrightsand that-that is the final point I wantto make-can never takeplace without two things. One, being able directly to addressyour enemy as Mandeladid from the court house which sent him to prison for 27 years and then again from the parliamentbuilding in 1994 when he addressed the entire nation. Always to talk to the Other. In our part of the world talking to the Other means tanazulat [compromises]. It does not mean that; it means you defend your point of view in a moral way, to overcome the resistance of the Other to the moral argumentthat you present with organization.And the second thing, of course, you can't do it just by talking, you have to do it in a mobilized and organized way, not by a group of poor people who are given arms and told to go fight while the officers sit at home and sip tea and watch television-that's immoral. Everybody is mobilized in the struggle and 32 Alif 24 (2004)

this is beginning to happennow, not only in Palestine but all over the world against the American war and the American Empire. The second componentis knowledge. Now, I don't thinkit's an accident that I speak here as an educator;you cannot deal with the Otherwithout a profoundknowledge of his or her culture,society and history. And I think this is the most importantthing for us, as Arabs, who historicallyhave had a greatcivilization and a greatculturebased upon the discovery of others. Think of Ibn Battuta,think of the discovery of Ceylon, Sarandib in Arabic;the word serendipityand discovery come from Arabs who were the great geographersof the east, of Africa, of Europeoriginally.But therehas been for the last one hundred years a recoil; say that if we are afraidof Occidentosis, we are afraidto confrontthe Otherbecause we might get an istighrab [westernization],by being too close to the Other.That's complete nonsense. You can look at the Other in many differentways, one is to emulate the Otherand to try to imitatehim, the mimic men, to try to be like one in of these characters Naipaul's novels who arejust little monkeysimitating their masters.But the other way is to understand Otherbetthe ter than the Otherknows himself or herself. As I said about America, about Israel, there is anotherIsrael, there is anotherAmerica, there is anotherEuropeand thatis up to us to decide to have an exchange with on the basis of morality,on the basis of humanrights, on the basis of collective coexistence, on the basis of sustainability. My last point, the greatfailurein my opinion of what the United States is about to do in Iraq, to my great sorrow and shame as an Americanand as an Arab, and what Israel has been doing for the last 53 or 54 years as many Israelishave realized,is to try and win the battle throughthe power and militarybrutality.It can never work because you cannot destroy the will of a people and you can never destroythe power of an idea. And what is the idea? The idea is equality, coexistence, sustainable life, whether it's in the case of the environment, whetherit's in the case of the land, whetherit's in the case of society-those are the principlesthatwe must live in and struggleby, rather than ephemeralthings or illusions about returningto the past or finding the golden age somewhere else. The present is our battleground and knowledge is our main weapon.

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