october 2004
Edward Said: American Zionism -- the real problem:
> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6852.htm
>
09/27/2000
"AL-AHRAM" -- This is the first article in a
series on the misunderstood and misjudged role of
American Zionism in the question of Palestine. In my
opinion, the role of organised Zionist groups and
activities in the United States has not been sufficiently
addressed during the period of the "peace
process," a neglect that I find absolutely
astonishing, given that Palestinian policy has been
essentially to throw our fate as a people in the lap of
the United States without any strategic awareness of how
US policy is in effect dominated, if not completely
controlled, by a small minority of people whose views
about Middle East peace are in some way more extreme than
even those of the Israeli Likud.>
> Let me give a small example. A month ago, the Israeli newspaper
> Ha'aretz sent over a leading columnist of theirs, Ari Shavit, to
> spend several days talking with me; a good summary of this long
> conversation appeared as a question-and-answer interview in the
> August 18 issue of the newspaper's supplement, basically uncut and
> uncensored. I voiced my views very candidly, with a major emphasis
> on right of return, the events of 1948, and Israel's responsibility
> for all this.................................
> A week after the interview there was a response to it by Meron
> Benvenisti, ex-deputy mayor of Jerusalem under Teddy Kollek. It was
> disgustingly personal, full of insults and slander against me and my
> family. But he never denied that there was a Palestinian people, or
> that we were driven out in 1948. In fact he said, we conquered them,
> and why should we feel guilty? I responded to Benvenisti a week
> later in Ha'aretz: What I wrote was also published uncut. I reminded
> Israeli readers that Benvenisti was responsible for the destruction
> (and probably knew about the killing of several Palestinians) of
> Haret Al-Magharibah in 1967, in which several hundred Palestinians
> lost their homes to Israeli bulldozers. But I did not have to remind
> Benvenisti or Ha'aretz readers that as a people we existed and could
> at least debate our right of return. That was taken for granted.
>
> Two points here. One is that the whole interview could not have
> appeared in any American paper, and certainly not in any Jewish-
> American journal. ...............Second, a right-wing
> Israeli Zionist like Benvenisti, no matter how much he may detest me
> or my views, would not deny that there is a Palestinian people which
> was forced to leave in 1948. An American Zionist for a long time
> would say that no conquest took place or, as Joan Peters alleged in
> a now-disappeared and all but forgotten 1984 book, From Time
> Immemorial (that won all the Jewish awards when it appeared here),
> there were no Palestinians with a life in Palestine before 1948.
>
> Every Israeli will readily admit and knows perfectly well that all
> of Israel was once Palestine, that (as Moshe Dayan said openly in
> 1976) every Israeli town or village once had an Arab name. And
> Benvenisti says openly that "we" conquered, and so what? Why should
> we feel guilty about winning? American Zionist discourse is never
> straight out honest that way: it must always go round and talk about
> making the desert bloom, and Israeli democracy, etc., completely
> avoiding the essential facts about 1948, which every Israeli has
> actually lived. For the American, these are mostly fantasies, or
> myths, not realities. So removed from the actualities are American
> supporters of Israel, so caught in the contradictions of diasporic
> guilt (after all what does it mean to be a Zionist and not emigrate
> to Israel?) and triumphalism as the most successful and most
> powerful minority in the US, that what emerges is very often a
> frightening mixture of vicarious violence against Arabs and a deep
> fear and hatred of them, which is the result, unlike Israeli Jews,
> of not having any sustained direct contact with them.
>
> For the American Zionist, therefore, Arabs are not real beings, but
> fantasies of nearly everything that can be demonised and despised,
> terrorism and anti-Semitism most specially. ....................This is not the logic of (those)
> who have lived with and know something concrete about Arabs. It is
> that of (those) who speaks an organised discourse and are driven by
> an ideology that regards Arabs only as negative functions, as the
> embodiment of violent anti-Semitic violent passions. As such,
> therefore, they are to be fought against and if possible disposed
> of. Not for nothing was Dr Baruch Goldstein, the appalling murderer
> of 29 Palestinians who were quietly praying in the Hebron mosque, an
> American, as was Rabbi Meir Kahane. Far from being aberrations that
> have embarrassed their followers, both Kahane and Goldstein are
> revered today by others like them. Many of the most zealous far-
> right settlers sitting on Palestinian land, remorselessly speaking
> about "the land of Israel" as being theirs, hating and ignoring the
> Palestinian owners and residents all round them, are also American-
> born. To see them walking through the streets of Hebron as if the
> Arab city was entirely theirs is a frightening sight, aggravated by
> the defiance and contempt they display openly against the Arab
> majority.
>
> .......................................The real fact is that Zionist discourse is a discourse of power, and
> Arabs in that discourse are the objects of power -- despised objects
> at that. Having thrown in their lot with this power as its
> surrendered former antagonist, they can never expect to be on equal
> terms with it.
>
> What I shall discuss in my next article is how the only possible
> political strategy for the US so far as Arab and Palestinian policy
> are concerned is neither a pact with the Zionists here nor one with
> US policy, but a mobilised mass campaign directed at the American
> population on behalf of Palestinian human, civil and political
> rights. All other arrangements, whether Oslo or Camp David, are
> doomed to failure because, put simply, the official discourse is
> totally dominated by Zionism and, except for a few individual
> exceptions, no alternatives to it exist. Therefore all peace
> arrangements undertaken on the basis of an alliance with the US are
> alliances that confirm rather than confront Zionist power. To submit
> supinely to a Zionist-controlled Middle East policy, as the Arabs
> have done for almost a generation now, will neither bring stability
> at home nor equality and justice in the US.
>
> Yet the irony is that there exists inside the US a vast body of
> opinion ready to be critical both of Israel and of US foreign
> policy.
> More on American Zionism (2)
>
> By Edward Said
>.............................................. On the very
> eve of Clinton's inauguration in January 1993, it was announced that
> Martin Indyk, born in London, and an Australian citizen, had been
> sworn in as an American citizen at the president-elect's express
> wishes. Proper procedures were not followed: it was an act of
> peremptory executive privilege, so that, after having gained US
> citizenship, Indyk could immediately thereafter become a member of
> the National Security Council staff responsible for the Middle East.
> .......................................before he came to the very heart of
> the US government in a top and largely secretly run position, Indyk
> was the head of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a
> quasi-intellectual think-tank that engaged in active advocacy on the
> part of Israel, and coordinated its work with that of AIPAC (the
> American Israel Public Affairs Committee), the most powerful and
> feared lobby in Washington. It is worth noting that before he came
> to the Bush administration Dennis Ross, the State Department
> consultant who has been leading the American peace process, was also
> the head of the Washington Institute, so the traffic between Israeli
> lobbying and US Middle East policy is extremely regular, and yes,
> regulated.
>
> AIPAC has for years been so powerful not only because it draws on a
> well-organised, well-connected, highly visible, successful, and
> wealthy Jewish population but because for the most part there has
> been very little resistance to it. There is a healthy fear and
> respect for AIPAC all over the country, but especially in
> Washington, where in a matter of hours almost the entire Senate can
> be marshalled into signing a letter to the president on Israel's
> behalf. Who is going to oppose AIPAC and continue to have a career
> in Congress, or to stand up to it on behalf of, say, the Palestinian
> cause when nothing concrete can be offered by that cause to anyone
> who stands up to AIPAC? In the past one or two members of Congress
> have resisted AIPAC openly but soon after their re-election was
> blocked by the many political action committees controlled by AIPAC,
> and that was that. The only senator who had anything remotely like
> an oppositional stand to AIPAC was James AbuRezk, but he did not
> want to be re-elected and, for his own reasons, resigned after his
> single six-year term ended.
>
> There is now no political commentator who is absolutely clear and
> open in his/her resistance to Israel in the US. A few liberal
> columnists like Anthony Lewis of the New York Times do occasionally
> write in criticism of Israeli occupation practices, but nothing is
> ever said about 1948 and the whole issue of the original Palestinian
> dispossession that is at the root of Israel's existence and
> subsequent behaviour. In a recent article, the former State
> Department official Henry Pracht has noted the staggering unanimity
> of opinion in all sectors of the American media, from film, to
> television, radio, newspapers, weeklies, monthlies, quarterlies and
> dailies: everyone more or less toes the official Israeli line, which
> has also become the official American line. This is the coincidence
> American Zionism has achieved in the years since 1967, and which it
> has exploited in most public discourse about the Middle East. Thus
> US policy equals Israeli policy, except on the very rare occasions
> (ie, the Pollard case) where Israel oversteps the limit and assumes
> that it has a right to help itself to what it wishes.
>
>................................. Thus, to take a recent example,
> the Zionist Organisation of America (ZOA), a small but very
> vociferous group of zealots, paid for an advertisement in the New
> York Times on 10 September that addressed Ehud Barak as if he was an
> employee of American Jews, reminding him that six million of them
> outnumber the five million Israelis who had decided to negotiate on
> Jerusalem. The language of the advertisement was not only
> admonitory, it was almost threatening, saying that Israel's prime
> minister had undemocratically decided to undertake what was anathema
> to American Jews, who were displeased with his behaviour. It's not
> at all clear who mandated this small and pugnacious group of zealots
> to lecture the Israeli prime minister in these tones, but ZOA feels
> it has the right to intervene in everybody's business. They
> routinely write or telephone the president of my university to ask
> him to dismiss or censure me for something I said, as if
> universities were like kindergartens and professors to be treated as
> under-age delinquents. Last year they mounted a campaign to get me
> fired from my elected post as president of the Modern Language
> Association, whose 30,000 members were lectured by ZOA as so many
> morons. This is the worst sort of Stalinist bullying, but is typical
> of organised American Zionism at its worst and most zealous.
>
>
>
>................. American Zionism has now reached the level of almost pure fantasy in
> which what is good for American Zionists in their fiefdom and their
> mostly fictional discourse is good for America and Israel, and
> certainly for the Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians, who seem to be
> little more than a collection of negligible nuisances. Anyone who
> defies or dares to challenge them (especially if he/she is either an
> Arab or a Jew critical of Zionism) is subject to the most awful
> abuse and vituperation, all of it personal, racist and ideological.
> They are relentless, totally without generosity or genuine human
> understanding.
>
> In other words, an alliance with them, such as the Arab states and
> the PLO have tried to forge since the Gulf War, is the stupidest
> kind of ignorance. They are unalterably opposed to everything the
> Arabs, Muslims and, most especially, Palestinians stand for and
> would sooner blow things up than make peace with us. Yet it is also
> true that most ordinary citizens are often puzzled by the vehemence
> of their tone, but unaware really of what is behind it. Whenever you
> speak to Americans who are not Jewish or Arab, and who have no
> expertise on the Middle East, there is routinely a sense of wonder
> and exasperation at the relentlessly hectoring attitude, as if the
> whole Middle East was theirs for the taking. Zionism in America, I
> have concluded, is not only a fantasy built on very shaky
> foundations, it is impossible to make an alliance or to expect
> rational exchange with it. But it can be outflanked and defeated.
> Ever since the mid-1980s I had proposed to the PLO leadership and to
> every Palestinian and Arab I met that the PLO quest for the
> president's ear was a total illusion since all recent presidents
> have been devoted Zionists, and that the only way to change US
> policy and achieve self-determination was through a mass campaign on
> behalf of Palestinian human rights, which would have the effect of
> out-flanking Zionists and going straight to the American people.
> Uninformed and yet open to appeals for justice as they are,
> Americans would have reacted as they did to the ANC campaign against
> apartheid, which finally changed the balance inside South Africa. In
> fairness here, I should mention that James Zogby, then an energetic
> human rights activist .....was one of the originators
of the idea.
But it also became very clear to me that the PLO would never do it
for several reasons. It would require work and dedication. Second,
it would mean espousing a political philosophy that was really based
on democratic grass-roots organisation. Third, it would have to be a
movement rather than a personal initiative on behalf of the present
leaders. And lastly, it required a real, as opposed to a
superficial, knowledge of US society. Besides, I felt that the
conventional cast of mind that kept getting us in one bad position
after another was very difficult to change, and time proved me
right. The Oslo accords were the unimaginative acceptance by the
Palestinians of Israeli-US supremacy rather than an attempt to
change it.
In any case, any alliance or compromise with Israel in the present
circumstances, where US policy is totally dominated by American
Zionism, is doomed to roughly the same results for Arabs generally
and Palestinians in particular. Israel must dominate, Israel's
concerns are primary, and Israeli systemic injustice will be
prolonged. Unless American Zionism is taken on and made to change --
not a very difficult task, as I shall try to show in my next
article -- the results will be the same: dismal and discrediting for
us as Arabs.
Professor Edward Said. Professor Said is a Palestinian/American
world leading public intellectual. He was born in Palestine in 1935
and died in United States on 25th September 2003
The Edward Said Archive: http://www.edwardsaid.org/modules/news/