Where will Sharon take
Israel?
By Edward W. Said
Dawn (Pakistan), February 8,
2001
THE story is told of the celebrated writer, Guy de Maupassant,
who shortly after the Eiffel Tower was built in mid-nineteenth
century Paris, would go around the city complaining endlessly
about how much he disliked the great structure. And yet, he would
nevertheless unfailingly go to the Tower's restaurant for lunch
every single day. When his attention was drawn to the paradox in
his behaviour, Maupassant coolly answered, "I go there because
being inside it is the only place in Paris where you don't
actually have to look at or even see the Tower."
My general impression is that for most Israelis, their country
is invisible. Being in it means a certain blindness or inability
to see what it is and what has been happening to it, and just as
remarkably, an unwillingness to understand what it has meant for
others in the world and specially in the Middle East. By the time
these lines will appear in print, the Israeli elections will have
taken place and, perhaps, as has been supposed for several weeks
now, Ariel Sharon will have become prime minister.
Just as happened in the months before and immediately after
Ehud Barak's elections, a great deal of US media attention has
been focused on Sharon in attempts to make him seem like a
plausible, or at least not so bizarre and outrageous a candidate.
I do not think that anyone outside Israel is really convinced, but
it is stunningly odd that a majority of Israelis would consider
turning to the unregenerate old killer of Palestinians after four
months under Ehud Barak of uselessly spilling Palestinian blood
and collectively punishing several million Arab residents of the
West Bank, Gaza, and Israel proper, without anything having been
achieved.
According to the polls, Israelis have opted for a man who will
bring them more rather than less violence, which, it must be added
at once, makes Israel's own future relations with the
Palestinians, the Arab states and the Muslim world even less
likely to be peaceful and less free of difficulty. The question is
how people could contemplate so obviously counter-productive a
choice unless they simply had no idea what the world thought of
them to begin with, no idea that such destruction and such cruelty
will earn further alienation and dislike, and hence,
insecurity.
Flirting with Sharon now is therefore a turning further
inwards, a resolute dismissal of the outside world in favour of
the old and thoroughly discredited policy of bashing Arabs that
has made Israel a more and more isolated and discredited country
than it has ever been. Of course, life goes on within it just as
it does everywhere else, and in all sorts of ways, it should be
obvious that most Israelis are normal people who want to live
normal lives, bring up their families, prosper in their work, and
carry on without fear of catastrophe or war. Yet, as a people,
their collective history has been very much an unwelcome part of
modern Arab history and, for Palestinians in particular, an almost
unmitigated disaster.
And, so it has gone for over fifty years, life in one community
has meant frustration and suffering in the other, measure for
measure, tit for tat, inexorably and remorselessly. No Palestinian
needs reminding that every Israeli triumph has been a symmetrical
Palestinian loss.
Even after 1967, when Israelis and Palestinians were thrown
together demographically more than ever before, the distance and
difference between the two worlds deepened and widened in spite of
the total proximity between them. Military occupation never made
for understanding, and so the post-Oslo years provided for little
mutuality, except where the relatively small and privileged group
of security people and the negotiators were concerned.
Rather than trying to connect the Israeli policy of military
occupation with the intifada as cause and effect, many Israelis
now seem to want Sharon to "deal with the Arabs," as if "the
Arabs" were so many flies or a swarm of annoying bees.What seems
never to have occurred even to Israeli peaceniks was that the
incredibly slow and tortured pace of Israeli steps in ceding
territory here and there, plus the thousands of conditions and the
many, many hours that went into negotiating all the unimaginably
complicated conditions that Israel attached to every little step
it took such as moving some troops from one side of the West Bank
to the other, plus the constant building of new settlements, plus
the new subdivisions and roads that cut up Gaza and the West Bank
more and more, plus the frequent closures, the continued use of
torture, the settler violence in places like Hebron, plus the fact
that under Barak no territory at all was given up, as if all this
which made matters worse, not better, was something that the
pro-peace camp in Israel had not absorbed or understood.
Even though it must be said that Palestinians have behaved as
all colonized people in history have behaved towards the
colonizer: they rebelled in protest. What is so difficult or
obscure about that, and why do so evidently well endowed a people
as the Israelis resist understanding the most elementary aspects
of human behaviour?
But, consider that if one allows for a moment that all those
things being done to Palestinians as part of a peace process were
supposed to be making things better, - yes, better - then one must
have the strangest possible sense of oneself, the weirdest
imaginable psychology. What does this inverted sense of cause and
effect reveal about the person? What does it suggest to believe
that punishment and sadism will actually improve relationships
between people?
This is pure punitive sadism: it serves no security or
long-range purpose except to make life a hell for all Palestinians
who spend most of their time on the roads in the normal course of
their lives, enduring endless delays, detours, searches,
humiliations, interrogations and, much of the time, failing to
reach their destinations just because of Israeli caprice. How can
that possibly help anyone, and how can anyone, except someone so
hopelessly out of touch with reality believe otherwise?
I can quite easily imagine that Israelis who were in favour of
such procedures were, when it came to all other aspects of life,
quite like other people. It was only when and where Arabs were
concerned that things were believed to be different. Not once, to
my knowledge, did an Israeli leader stop and say, for example, 'we
have wronged these people, we have driven them out of their homes,
we have destroyed their society and dispossessed them, let us at
least remember that and try to make things easier for them now'.
Never during the long and tortuous negotiating sessions of the
peace process was it so much as whispered to the press that an
Israeli official had said something magnanimous or had intimated
that he felt some twinge of conscience for what had been done in
the name of Israel to an entire people.
All we heard was that every inch of land that was discussed was
released to Palestinians with thousands of conditions attached,
that an already divided Palestine was subdivided three, four, and
more times in order to keep it just out of Palestinian reach, and
so that Palestinians would have more hurdles to jump over and more
years to wait before they could reach anything like a viable state
of autonomy. And still hundreds of political prisoners were kept
in their cells, and still Israel's Palestinian citizens were kept
in their impoverished villages, their sub-standard schools and
municipalities, unable to buy or lease land for religious and
ethnic reasons just so that Israel could maintain a Jewish
majority in lordly style, so that Israeli Jews could bully and
oppress another people without having to think about them or even
see too much of them.
You don't have to have the gifts either of Aristotle or de
Gaulle to realize that Israel's policy of official blindness was
never going to bring victory, any more than Sharon's policy in
Lebanon was a success, or Barak's "peace" policy was going to
bring peace or end the Aqsa intifada. Like de Maupassant in the
Eiffel Tower restaurant, an Israel led by a hawkish general is
going deeper and deeper into a place from which it can neither
escape nor win the battle. Far from really withdrawing into
itself, it is making certain on the contrary that it will remain
connected to the Arab world in the worst way via its army,
settlers, conquerors, and ranting ideologues, while its citizens,
its artists, its ordinary people are paralyzed by visions of
escape and a clean slate that have no more chance of realization
now than they ever did.
Fanciful ideas of Israeli power today as embodied in the people
who like Sharon are at best a postponement, and a bloody one at
that, of the inevitable realization that apartheid can only work
if two peoples accept the notion of separation with inferiority
that the strong imposes on the weak. But since that is not the
case (and has never happened in history), it will always be
unlikely that people will cheerfully accept their enslavement. Why
are Israelis en masse fooling themselves into thinking that it
will work in so small an area and so historically saturated a
geography as Palestine's?
It is difficult to believe that so long as they believe in the
miracle of an Israel miraculously separated from its circumstances
and environment - a bizarre notion which Sharon's election
campaign has encouraged - Israeli Jews resemble members of a cult
rather than citizens of a modern secular state. And, in some ways,
it is true that Israel's early history as a pioneering new state
is that of a utopian cult, sustained by people much of whose
energy was in shutting out their surroundings while they lived the
fantasy of a heroic and pure enterprise.
Copyright Edward W. Said, 2001
