May 2002

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

What Israel Has Done

Edward W. Said is University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. The following, excerpted from Said's article in Al Ahram Weekly (Egypt), April 19, was also reprinted in The Nation dated May 6, 2002.

Marching in Boston, April 20 © Ellen Shub

.....There are reported to be hundreds buried in the rubble, which Israeli bulldozers began heaping over the camp's ruins after the fighting ended. Are Palestinian civilian men, women and children no more than rats or cockroaches that can be attacked and killed in the thousands without so much as a word of compassion or in their defense? And what about the capture of thousands of men who have been taken off by Israeli soldiers, the destitution and homelessness of so many ordinary people trying to survive in the ruins created by Israeli bulldozers all over the West Bank, the siege that has now gone on for months and months, the cutting off of electricity and water in Palestinian towns, the long days of total curfew, the shortage of food and medicine, the wounded who have bled to death, the systematic attacks on ambulances and aid workers that even the mild-mannered Kofi Annan has decried as outrageous? Those actions will not be pushed so easily into the memory hole. Its friends must ask Israel how its suicidal policies can possibly gain it peace, acceptance and security....

The monstrous transformation of an entire people by a formidable and feared propaganda machine into little more than militants and terrorists has allowed not just Israel's military but its fleet of writers and defenders to efface a terrible history of injustice, suffering and abuse in order to destroy the civil existence of the Palestinian people with impunity. Gone from public memory are the destruction of Palestinian society in 1948 and the creation of a dispossessed people; the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza and their military occupation since 1967; the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, with its 17,500 Lebanese and Palestinian dead and the Sabra and Shatila massacres; the continuous assault on Palestinian schools, refugee camps, hospitals, civil installations of every kind. What antiterrorist purpose is served by destroying the building and then removing the records of the ministry of education; the Ramallah municipality; the Central Bureau of Statistics; various institutes specializing in civil rights, health, culture and economic development; hospitals, radio, and TV stations? Isn't it clear that Sharon is bent not only on breaking the Palestinians but on trying to eliminate them as a people with national institutions?...

In such a context of disparity and asymmetrical power, it seems deranged to keep asking the Palestinians, who have no army, air force, tanks, or functioning leadership, to renounce violence, and to require no comparable limitation on Israel's actions. It certainly obscures Israel's systematic use of lethal force against unarmed civilians, copiously documented by all the major human rights organizations. Even the matter of suicide bombers, which I have always opposed, cannot be examined from a viewpoint that permits a hidden racist standard to value Israeli lives over the many more Palestinian lives that have been lost, maimed, distorted, and foreshortened by longstanding military occupation and the systematic barbarity openly used by Sharon against Palestinians since the beginning of his career....

This is why I have been skeptical about discussions and meetings about peace, which is a lovely word but in the present context usually means Palestinians are told to stop resisting Israeli control over their land....

Surprised by Palestinian Anger Excerpt from Haaretz, 4/8/02, "Beyond the hills of darkness," by Aviv Lavie In general, the Israeli media is showing no interest in what the Palestinian people is experiencing. It may be said in the media's defense that the public is also not congregating outside the broadcasting studios, clamoring to hear about the experiences of Jenin residents... For years, the Israeli media has failed to provide the public with the tools for understanding--in its profound sense--the other side. It's hardly a wonder that we find ourselves surprised time after time, intifada after intifada, suicide bomber after suicide bomber, shocked by the level of frustration, anger, hate, and despair. Anyone who spoke with Palestinians during recent days could easily sense that they are experiencing a national trauma that will provide tales of heroism for many years, while generating, to the same extent, hatred for Israel and Israelis and a thirst for vengeance. As usual, we'll be surprised about all this, and then it will be too late to ask Ma'ariv, Yedioth Ahronoth, Channels 1 and 2, Reshet Bet and Army Radio why they didn't tell us in time.

The profound question facing Israel and its people is this: Is it willing to assume the rights and obligations of being a country like any other, and forswear the kind of impossible colonial assertions for which Sharon and his parents and soldiers have been fighting since day one? In 1948 Palestinians lost 78 percent of Palestine. In 1967 they lost the remaining 22 percent. Now the international community must lay upon Israel the obligation to accept the principle of real, as opposed to fictional, partition, and to accept the principle of limiting Israel's extraterritorial claims, those absurd, biblically-based pretensions and laws that have so far allowed it to override another people. Why is that kind of fundamentalism unquestioningly tolerated? But so far all we hear is that Palestinians must give up violence and condemn terror. Is nothing substantive ever demanded of Israel, and can it go on doing what it has without a thought for the consequences? That is the real question of its existence, whether it can exist as a state like all others, or must always be above the constraints and duties of other states. The record is not reassuring.

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