Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/1998/05/27/sad_sad_said.php
Wednesday, May 27, 1998
'The Israeli and US governments are our enemies,' declared Edward Said, an American citizen and member of the Palestinian National Council, in a 1989 interview with the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Qabas. 'The United States is not the great white father. . . . It is a party to the conflict and supports Israel. Without US support, Israel cannot pursue its barbaric practices, its massacres.'
In his May 19th lecture in 105 Dartmouth Hall, Said, also a professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University, called on his own account of history, mostly fictitious and self-serving.
A twisted, hyperbolic view of reality is characteristic of Said. In an April 29, 1996 Los Angeles Times editorial, Said explained that 'Israel can roll its tanks across borders and bomb civilians at will, while its propagandists fill the Western media with their lies about self-defense and the war against terrorism.'
At the same time, Said wrote, 'Arabs are totally powerless.' Never mind that Arab countries control a substantial portion of the world's oil supply. Never mind that there exist twenty-one Arab states whose territory is double that of the US while Israel is about the size of New Jersey. Never mind that those states initiated six wars against Israel; imposed a naval, air, and sea blockade; instituted economic and trade boycotts; launched diplomatic and political harassment through the United Nations (Israel being the only member of that body that must defend its right to exist annually); and initiated terror attacks against Israeli civilians. And, above all, forget those killed in the Palestinian intifadeh. The intifadeh was important, said Said, because it 'confirmed our peoplehood.'
Said continually referred to 'the catastrophe of 1948,' in which he 'lost a country.' Yet, in his own book, Orientalism, Said concedes that the Palestinians did not develop their own national consciousness until 1967. Indeed, UN literature printed before 1967 uses the phrase 'Palestinian' to refer to anyone living in the area called Palestine — Arabs and Jews alike. Moreover, Palestine was never a 'country.'
Prior to 1948, Palestine was a British territory, as it had been since the Allies conferred on Britain a Mandate to govern Palestine, which had been part of the Ottoman Empire, after World War I.
In his speech, Said asserted, 'Palestine is now Israel.' In a 1994 article in The Nation, he was so bold as to proclaim that 'Israel is now in sole possession' of what was Palestine. However, the British Mandate over Palestine included land both east and west of the Jordan River.
The League of Nations confirmed the Mandate in 1922, incorporating Britain's commitment to provide a homeland for Jews in Palestine, the 1917 Balfour Declaration. The Mandate did not call for a homeland for Arabs living there, though it guaranteed their 'civil and religious' rights.
Two months after the approval of the Mandate, however, Britain established the Emirate of Transjordan and installed the Hashemite Abdullah as Emir of all the territory east of the Jordan River, thus appeasing Abdullah, who had been refused the Kingdom of Iraq, and avoiding conflict with the French in Syria.
Transjordan, which occupied about 80 percent of Palestine was not freed from the Mandate. Residents of the East Bank still held Palestinian passports, were subject to British control, and were considered Palestinians. In fact, according to Sir Alec Kirkbride, the British representative in the area, Transjordan was 'intended to serve as a reserve of land for use in the resettlement of Arabs once the National Home for the Jews in Palestine, which [Britain was] pledged to support, became an accomplished fact. There was no intention at that stage of forming the territory east of the River Jordan into an independent Arab state.'
British Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill convinced the Zionists to suspend Jewish immigration to the East Bank, claiming that such an action would appease West Bank Arabs and make a Jewish state west of the Jordan easier to establish. Clearly, the Palestinian Arabs of the West Bank were not placated.
1n 1946, Britain transformed Palestine east of the Jordan River into the Kingdom of Transjordan. On May 16, 1948, the day after Israel declared its independence, Transjordan attacked Israel and seized and annexed the West Bank, renaming itself the Kingdom of Jordan. In 1967, King Hussein of Jordan attacked Israel and lost the land his grandfather Abdullah had annexed.
Nevertheless, Jordan still occupies 77 percent of the original Palestine and, unlike Israel, its population is a majority Palestinian: well over two-thirds of Jordan's population consists of Palestinian Arabs. Fully three-fourths of Jordan's government appointments are held by Palestinians. Half of its Prime Ministers since 1950 have been Palestinian. A majority of the Jordanian army is Palestinian and 70 percent of its businesses are owned by Palestinians. The New York Times once called Jordan's capital, Amman, 'the greatest Palestinian city in the world.' Jordan's status as a majority Palestinian state is not likely to be threatened, moreover, since the sale of land to a Jew remains a capital crime there.
Edward Said advocates a partition of Palestine, a 'two-state solution.' Yet, there already has been a partition of Palestine. There is a Palestinian state in historical Palestine: it's called Jordan. That Jordan is ruled by a Hashemite King, Hussein, who severed all ties to the West Bank in the 1970s and refuses to absorb Palestinian refugees should be ten times more odious to Palestinian Arabs than the establishment of Israel.
King Hussein is a Hashemite ruler who seeks to maintain dominance over an overwhelmingly Palestinian state. That Palestinian efforts are directed solely at Israel illuminates the fact that their aims are much more anti-Israel than they are pro-Palestinian. Indeed, in violation of numerous peace accords, the charter of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) still calls, in at least fourteen places, for the destruction of the state of Israel.
In his lecture, Said lamented that Palestinian Arabs are 'forced to live in refugee camps.' What he failed to mention, however, was that Israel has built nine residential projects in Gaza, housing some 70,000 Palestinian refugees. However, since 1971, the UN General Assembly, led by a coalition of 21 Arab states and 10 Muslim states, has annually adopted resolutions opposing Israel's resettlement of Palestinian refugees. The PLO instructs refugees not to leave the camps. That way, they could be used to elicit public sympathy.
In truth, the Arab states and PLO leadership are not interested in Palestinian well-being. Rather, they have used the Palestinians as political pawns in their plan to destroy Israel politically.
In 1948, Arab governments rejected a UN plan to partition Israel, 20 percent of the original Mandate, into two states—one Jewish, one Arab. They then told the Palestinian Arabs living in Israel to leave temporarily to make way for invading armies so they could return as conquerors. 600,000 left. The subsequent failure of Arab war plans is what created the refugee problem.
'We left our land on the strength of false promises by crooked leaders in the Arab states,' reads a May 30, 1955 editorial in the Jordanian daily Falastin. 'They promised us that our absence would not last more than two weeks, a kind of promenade, at the end of which we would return.' Yet while Israel absorbed the 800,000 Jews driven out of Arab states in 1948, the Arab states abandoned the Palestinians. Somehow, Palestinian leaders have let their hatred of Israel override their very real grievances with Arab states.
The PLO National Covenant claims that the Palestinian Arabs are an integral part of the Arab nation. Yet, Arab states have taken little action to help alleviate the refugee problem. In fact, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia expelled Palestinians during and after the Gulf War.
'The leaders of the Arab states, when they cry about the poor fate of the Palestinians,' complained one Arab refugee camp resident to reporters, 'remind me of the child who killed his father and then cried for pity because he was an orphan.'
Despite its limited resources, Israel contributed 12 million dollars between 1950 and 1991 to the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which was established to aid Palestinian refugees.
Israel's contribution amounts to two million dollars more than Jordan's and three times that of Syria. Despite vast oil revenue, Arab states have taken little action to naturalize the Palestinian refugees or to promote naturalization elsewhere. By perpetuating the refugee problem, Arab governments exploit the refugees as a tool for keeping the Israeli-Arab conflict alive.
In citing the 'forced' consignment of Palestinians to refugee camps, then, Said was not only deceitful in purpose, but self-defeating in effect because he neglected the true interests of Palestinian refugees, simply invoking their image to win himself political points. Said is concerned with denouncing Israel before establishing any constructive dialogue.
In 1983, when Yassir Arafat was orchestrating terrorist attacks and preaching the eradication of Israel, Said labeled him 'a major leader' who had shaped Palestinians into 'a national community' and 'made the PLO a genuinely representative body.' Yet, after he signed the 'ill-considered and stupid' Oslo accords with Israel, Arafat suddenly became, in Said's eyes, dictatorial and remote. So much so, in fact, that he, and much of the PLO leadership, 'should step aside.'
Said regards the peace process as 'an extension of Israel's long-standing policy to dominate the Arabs militarily and economically.' Such a notion is patently absurd, especially given the fact that the PLO has failed to carry out any of its responsibilities: changing the Palestine National Charter to recognize Israel's right to exist, dismantling the terror apparatus in the West Bank and Gaza, keeping the Palestinian Authority police under a ceiling of 18,000, and closing the PLO's illegal offices in Jerusalem.
At the same time, due to Israeli concessions, of the 2,300,000 Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank, 2,250,000 now live under the rule of Yassir Arafat and the Palestinian Authority.
The PLO's continual failure to meet its obligations while demanding more concessions from Israel is indicative of their unbroken hostility toward the Jewish state.
'[We seek] at first, a small state,' declared Abu Iyad, Arafat's second-in-command, 'and with Allah's help, it will be made large, and expand to the east, west, north, and south . . . I am interested in the liberation of Palestine, step by step.'
While the Arab states have turned a blind eye toward Palestinian misfortune, Israel remains at the negotiating table, albeit with many reservations. Palestinians ought to abandon the Arab-Israeli dichotomy implicit in the historical interpretation and vitriolic rhetoric of Said and others. Until they do that and until they acknowledge Israel's own right to exist, constructive dialogue and real progress will remain elusive.