Edward Said Attacks Both Israeli Government and Palestinian Authority

by John Dirlik

Prominent Palestinian academic Edward Said delivered a scathing attack on both the Netanyahu government and the Palestinian Authority to a packed auditorium at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

Speaking shortly after the opening of the archeological tunnel in Jerusalem which sparked bloody riots in the West Bank and Gaza, Said denounced the Israeli move as an act of “arrogant triumphalism, a sort of rubbing of Palestinian and Muslim noses in the dirt.”

The tunnel opening was just the latest expression of Israeli dominance over Jerusalem and was clearly intended to show the world that “we can do what we want,” he said. It was “a profoundly ugly gesture,” he maintained, calculated to humiliate Palestinians and underscore their powerlessness.

The former member of the Palestine National Council who teaches comparative literature at Columbia University also described as “inadequate” and “pathetic” the Palestinian and Arab response to what he called Israel’s “unceasing attempt to Judaicize” Palestine. “Conferences, ringing declarations and promises of money have done nothing to blunt the Israeli juggernaut in Jerusalem,” he said.

Challenging conventional wisdom on the so-called peace process, Said bitterly denounced the Oslo accords as a clever formula designed to effectively legitimize Israeli occupation. “Oslo gave them [Palestinians] limited autonomy but no sovereignty,” he said. “It’s true that Yasser Arafat was allowed to return and set up a truncated regime controlled by the Israelis,” but that is no substitute for genuine self-determination, he maintained.

Said described the Oslo agreements as a “bizarre amalgam of historically discarded solutions by white colonialists to the problems of native peoples.” He remined his audience of one of the 19th century models of British and French rule in Africa: this was to bestow upon a native chief some status and privileges in order to extract a measure of local acceptability, while at the same time maintaining a firm grip over its dominion. “Arafat is the late 20th century equivalent of the 19th century [African] chief,” he said.

Better known for his academic credentials than for his talent as a stand-up comedian, Said nevertheless provoked laughter when he mimicked Arafat in Washington accepting the crumbs from Israel’s table with “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

The laughter, however, did little to erase the underlying tone of skepticism and disillusionment that rang throughout Said’s lecture. “Oslo is built on the fact that Israel won the contest” with the Palestinians, he said. “And the terrible thing,” he added, “is how some Palestinians trusted Israeli intentions particularly at a time when Arab governments were so weak and villainous in their hypocrisy and mendacity.” Said also lashed out at Arafat for setting up a Palestine Authority that is “corrupt and dictatorial” and which has “transformed the barely discernable outline of Palestinian self-determination into a premature replica of countries like Iraq.”

Despite the cynicism and the bitter recriminations, Said expressed an unshakable faith in the Palestinians as a people. “No human being can endure this grotesque injustice for very long,” he said. For Said, the riots following the opening of the tunnel were directed not only at Israel but “against the texts and maps of the Oslo accords and against their planners.”

Said expressed hope that this manifestation of Palestinian discontent would perhaps compel Arafat “at long last to turn to his suffering people and tell them the bitter truth,” which is that the final status envisaged by Oslo “is likely to be as dismal” as the status quo.

“The present crisis may be a glimmer of the end of the two-state solution whose unworkability Oslo perhaps unconsciously embodies,” he said. “Israelis and Palestinians are too intertwined with each other to separate even though each proclaims the need for separate statehood,” he concluded.

Alluding to a bi-national state not unlike the one dreamt of by the PLO in its early days, Said proclaimed that “the challenge for the future in the very long run is to find a peaceful way to coexist as equal citizens in the same land.”