American Zionism (1)
By Edward Said
Posted: 13 Sha'ban 1421, 10 November 2000
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 organized
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. I was surprised that my views were presented just as
I voiced them, without the slightest editorializing by Shavit, whose questions were always
courteous and un-confrontational.
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. And if there had been an
interview the questions to me would have been adversarial, hectoring, insulting, such as,
why have you been involved in terrorism, why will you not recognize Israel, why was Hajj
Amin a Nazi, and so on. 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 every Israeli town or village
once had an Arab name...For the American, these are mostly fantasies, or myths, not
realities. |
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 demonized and despised, terrorism and anti-Semitism most specially.
I recently received a letter from a former student of mine, who has had the benefit of the
finest education available in the United States: he can still bring himself to ask me in
all honesty and courtesy why as a Palestinian I let a Nazi like Hajj Amin still determine
my political agenda. "Before Hajj Amin," he argued, "Jerusalem wasn't
important to Arabs. Because he was so evil he made it an important issue for Arabs just in
order to frustrate Zionist aspirations which always held Jerusalem to be important."
This is not the logic of someone who has lived with and knows something concrete about
Arabs. It is that of a person who speaks an organized discourse and is 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.
When...the PLO took the strategic
decision...to work with the American government and if possible with the powerful lobby
that controls discussion of Middle Eastern politics, they had made the decision...on the
basis of vast ignorance and quite extraordinarily mistaken assumptions. |
I bring all this up here to make one essential point. When after the Gulf War the PLO
took the strategic decision -- already settled on by two major Arab countries before the
PLO -- to work with the American government and if possible with the powerful lobby that
controls discussion of Middle Eastern politics, they had made the decision (as had the two
Arab states before them) on the basis of vast ignorance and quite extraordinarily mistaken
assumptions. The idea, as it was expressed to me shortly after 1967 by a senior Arab
diplomat, was to surrender in effect, and say, we are not going to struggle any more. We
are now willing to accept Israel and also to accept the US's determining role in our
future. There were objective reasons for such a view at the time, as there are now, as to
why continuing the fight as the Arabs had done historically would lead to further defeat
and even disaster. But I firmly believe that it was a mistaken policy simply to throw Arab
policy into the lap of the US and, since the major Zionist organizations are so
influential everywhere in the United States, into their lap as well, saying, in effect, we
won't fight you, let us join you, but please treat us well. The hope was that if we
conceded and said, we are not your enemies, as Arabs we would become their friends.
The problem is with the disparity in power that remained. From the viewpoint of the
powerful, what difference does it make to your own strategy if your weak adversary gives
up and says I have nothing further to fight for, take me, I want to be your ally, just try
to understand me a bit better and then perhaps you will then be fairer? A good way of
answering this question in practical and concrete terms is to look at the latest turn of
events in New York's senatorial race, where Hillary Clinton is competing with Republican
Ric Lazio for the seat now held by Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D), who is retiring. Last year
Hillary said that she favored the establishment of a Palestinian state and, on a formal
visit to Gaza with her husband, embraced Soha Arafat. Since entering the senatorial race
in New Yorshe has outdone even the most right-wing Zionists in her fervour for Israel and
opposition to Palestine, even going so far as to advocate moving the US embassy from Tel
Aviv to Jerusalem and (more extreme) advocating leniency for Jonathan Pollard, the Israeli
spy convicted for espionage against the US and now serving a life sentence. Her Republican
antagonists have tried to embarrass her by depicting her as an "Arab-lover" and
by releasing a photograph of her actually embracing Soha. Since New York is the citadel of
Zionist power, attacking someone with such labels as "Arab-lover" and
"friend of Soha Arafat" is tantamount to the worst possible insult. All this
despite the fact that Arafat and the PLO are openly declared American allies, recipients
of US military and financial aid, and in the security field the beneficiaries of CIA
security support. In the meantime, the White House released a photo of Lazio shaking hands
two years ago with Arafat. One blow clearly deserves another.
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. Hence the degrading and insulting spectacle of Arafat (always and forever
the symbol of enmity to the Zionist mind) being used in an entirely local contest in the
US between two opponents who are trying to prove who of the two is the most pro-Israeli.
And neither Hillary Clinton nor Ric Lazio is even Jewish.
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 mobilized 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. The tragedy is that the Arabs are too
weak, too divided, too disorganized and ignorant to take advantage of it. I shall discuss
the reasons for that as well in my next article since my hope is to try to reach a new
generation that may be both puzzled and discouraged by the miserable, denigrated place in
which our culture and people are now located, and the constant sense of indignant but
humiliating loss that all of us experience as a result.
[From Al-Ahram
Weekly Online (21 - 27 September 2000)]
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