by EDWARD SAID
(The following article by late Edward Said first appeared in the New Left Review of September/October 2001. Ed.)
In the United States, where Israel has its main political base and from which it has received over $92 billion in aid since 1967, Palestinian victims remain nameless and faceless, barely rating a mention on national news programmes. Matters are different with the Jewish dead. The terrible human cost of the suicide bombings in Haifa or Jerusalem settled quickly into a familiar explanatory framework. Arafat hadn’t done enough to control his terrorists; their hatred threatens incalculable harm to ‘us’ and our strongest ally; Israel must firmly defend its security. Thoughtful observers will add: these people have been fighting tiresomely for thousands of years anyway; there has been too much suffering on both sides, and the violence must be stopped; although the way Palestinians send their children into battle is yet another sign of how much Israel has to put up with. So, exasperated but still restrained, Israel invaded unfortified Jenin with bulldozers and tanks. In America, Israel has so far won the public relations war that it might seem scarcely necessary for it to put several more million dollars into a media campaign—using ‘stars’ like Zubin Mehta, Itzhak Perlman and Amos Oz—to further improve its image.
…
That is what explains the desperate expedients to which its friends in the United States have resorted, as they thrash about in search of a way to extricate Israel from the impasse of its attempts to suppress the new Intifida. Edward Luttwak, of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, exulted in ‘the display of uniquely advanced military capabilities’ by Israel that allowed the IDF to decapitate Mustafa Zibri in Ramallah and murder scores more Palestinian leaders at will. [3] Graham Fuller, former Vice-Chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA, urged the construction—literally—of a Berlin Wall round the occupied territories, patrolled from within by ‘international forces’, to incarcerate the Palestinians. [4] Thomas Friedman, star columnist of the New York Times, opined that ‘the only solution may be for Israel and the US [sic] to invite NATO to occupy the West Bank and Gaza and set up a NATO-run Palestinian state, à la Kosovo and Bosnia’. [5] What all these brutal and senseless schemes betrayed was a fear that Israel was losing. A real Palestinian leadership would have known how to expose this. The appalling events of September 11th, however, will now doubtless reconfigure the political geography of the Muslim and Arab worlds in unforeseen and dangerous new ways—for all concerned.
New Left Review for more