Memory, Inequality, and Power: Palestine and the Universality of Human RightsAuthor(s): Edward W. SaidSource: Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, No. 24, Archeology of Literature: Tracing theOld in the New / (2004) جفريات األكب اقتفاء أثر القكيم في الجكيك, pp. 15-33Published by: Department of English and Comparative Literature, American University inCairo and American University in Cairo PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4047418Accessed: 06/07/2010 21:06

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Memory, Inequality, and Power: Palestine and the Uniuersality of Human Rights*

Edward W. Said

This is a very fraught moment to be speaking about human rights and the Middle East, and the human rights of the Palestinian people in particular; but it does seem to be in some ways a symboli- cally useful time for the purposes of my lecture and what I have to say. I should also say immediately that I am not a political commentator; I am not a political scientist; I don't teach Middle Eastern studies or any of that, so I speak as one of us.

The United States of America has already sent a hugely intimi- dating military forces to various Arab and non-Arab countries in the regions surrounding Iraq. The frankly imperial idea which my President [George W. Bush] can barely articulate is that they are there to disarm Iraq forcibly and also to change its dreadful regime. The rest of the international community, not least most of the Arab countries of the region as well as the other permanent members of the Security Council, have been expressing varying degrees of disquiet and occa- sionally urgent disapproval as is the case with France. Certainly it is the case that no one outside of Iraq has suggested any concern about Saddam Hussein and his government.

It is the people of Iraq who stand to suffer the most and whose doubly and triply miserable fate is of the deepest interest to people all over the world. I am sorry to say that none of this has had the slight- est effect on what is a granitic will on the part of a tiny number of members of George Bush's administration to go forward with plans for a war among whose stated imperial intentions is the unilateral wish to bring American style democracy to Iraq and the Arab world, redrawing maps, overturning governments and states and modes of life on a fantastically wide scale in the process. That all of this has very lit- *

This article is based on the transcription of a lecture Edward Said delivered at Ewart Hall, The American University in Cairo, on March 17, 2003. He was not able-because of his illness-to send Alif the final version he promised.

Alif 24 (2004) 15

tle in the final analysis to do with the enhancements of human rights and democracy, in a part of the world especially rife with their abuse, is patently obvious. Were Iraq to have been the world's largest exporter of oranges and apples, there would have been no concern over its purported possession of weapons of mass destruction or its extraor- dinarily cruel and tyrannical regime. This is a war planned for many reasons; among them I would say the most important are resources and strategic control. And when it occurs, the United States would have then asserted its strategic dominance over the center of the world's largest known energy reserves from the Gulf to the Caspian Sea. And it plans to reshape the area by pacifying threats to its dominance in Syria, Iran, and elsewhere in the Gulf.

To threaten and soon to prosecute war with such belligerence and such a wasteful deployment of human and military resources is an abuse of human tolerance and human values. That it might in the end turn out to be only a display, rather than an actual use of force, only deepens the anxiety about the kind of world we are moving toward. By the end of the decade China will be importing as much oil as the United States and by 2025, the United States will need to import a full 75% of its oil needs from the Gulf region principally. As against those facts, when a people are prevented from getting an education, or from being allowed to move, express themselves, organize freely without fear either of intimidation, collective punishment, or straight out assas- sination may seem therefore like relatively humdrum if not trivial issues, but they do pertain with a frightening parallelism to both the people of Palestine and the people of Iraq. In either and both cases, my point here is to assert first of all the universal applicability of human rights to those people-given that since World War II, there has grown up an impressive, even formidable, world-wide consensus that each individual or collectivity, no matter his or her color, ethnicity, religion, or culture, is to be protected from such horrific practices as starvation, torture, forced transfer of populations, religious and ethnic discrimina- tion, humiliation, extra-judicial political assassination, land expropria- tion and all manner of similar cruel and unusual punishment.

I want to affirm also that no power, no matter how special or how developed or how strong or how urgent its claims of past victim- ization, is exempt from accusation and judgment if that government practices such things; and finally no people or individuals can be sin- gled out as exceptions to these general rules, so as to be considered in fact liable for such abrogation of human rights as those I have men-

16 Alif 24 (2004)

tioned. We live in a secular historical world. History is the product of human labor, choice and will. Nothing, in my opinion, nothing tran- scendental or divine can supersede that truth or suspend the conse- quences that flow from its application. There simply is no convincing way to assert special claims whose origin is the divine whether that is done by Israel or by the United States-claims that supposedly legiti- mate high altitude or smart bombing or the use of 60-ton bulldozers to demolish the houses of poor and defenseless people who don't happen to belong to the correct religion or race. Yesterday, we had a tragic case of a house demolition in Gaza by a 60-ton bulldozer in which a heroic American woman [Rachel Corrie] witnessed by giving her life to that barbaric act.

Just as I feel as an American that the United States has not been divinely endowed with a special errand into the wilderness nor have its practices been endorsed by God, I feel it is my moral and intellectual duty to oppose the unjust use of its immense military economic and political power abroad for what it claims falsely to be its national secu- rity interests. I have no power so I have to resort to the tools of educa- tion, to writing and speaking. By the same token, I want to reiterate my conviction here that it is this specific case of the denial of the human rights of the Palestinian people by the state of Israel which is at the core of the Middle East conflict. This cannot at all be justified on any of the grounds routinely accepted by far too many individuals and gov- ernments who would be the first to object to similar behavior in other cases. So, far from Israel and the Palestinians being a special case of unusual exceptional circumstances, I think the exact opposite is true- that because Palestine is perhaps of all places on earth the most dense- ly saturated with cultural and religious significance, precisely that reality makes it an instance of universality thwarted and flouted. The universality of human co-existence, the human acceptance of the Other, and the human construction of a just and fair society for all- and certainly not only for some of its residents-are all relevant prin- ciples. The point is that no State, no State at all, is in my opinion enti- tled legitimately to object to these formulations and certainly no leader can state unarguably, for example as George Bush has, that the United States is good and its enemies evil. Or as General Sharon has announced and I quote here that "we are placing no restriction on our operations [in the Palestinian territories]. Israel is under no pressure. No one is criticizing us or has the right to do so."

I would submit that such sweeping statement of higher purpose

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and extraordinary impunity must be opposed and intellectually disman- tled for the fuggish balderdash that such pronouncements really are, specially if they are intended to cover or explain or excuse or somehow justify barbaric devastation and vast ruin. Yet the contrast between the immensely powerful and the relatively powerless, such as we are, is not so simple since the great outcry all over the world against unilateral US war, and the felt need by even US government spokespeople to reiter- ate a general American commitment to democracy and human rights, does in fact reveal a profound awareness that, aside from comfort and convenience, human beings all over the world today expect to be respected, their requirements for a decent life met, their wish not to be tortured or detained unlawfully in any country in the world recognized, their concern for their children and their livelihoods accepted despite the supposedly higher priorities asserted by great power. All these in theory at least are rarely challenged head on and considered to be human entitlement. Even if such terrible abstractions such as national interest, national unity, and national security are affirmed as being more important than individual rights, I don't think they are; I think exactly the opposite. Human rights of the individual are much more important in the end than national interest, national unity, and national security, I felt this all of my life and I still feel it. This unacceptable and unattrac- tive argument that national security is the most important thing in the world certainly now prevails in the US where for example the educa- tion of young people in the subject of history has become a profoundly ideological battleground between proponents of a kind of primitive heroic white American nationalism and the much more sensible advo- cates of a multi-cultural, multi-racial reality-stressed, for instance, in his work by the prominent radical historian Howard Zinn. This other American history includes, which is I think the real history, a bitter legacy of domestic slavery, imperial conquest, and terrible class inequality. The universally wide-spread conviction that everyone on earth deserves a modicum of human rights is only a symbolic moral power perhaps too ill-endowed to take on so redoubtable a force as American global reach and its all too numerous local henchman and the fearsomely neo-conservative spokesmen who want American values to rule the world-resistance and objections not withstanding.

I want to tell you today, having just arrived yesterday from America, please do not be misled into thinking that this is a war by America against Iraq. It is a war of a small cabal, a putsch within the Bush administration because it is clear to me-having crisscrossed the

18 Alif 24 (2004)

US in the last three months lecturing and speaking and writing every- where-this is perhaps the most unpopular war in American history and what is tremendously important also is that this is the first war since WWII that has been opposed before the war, not during the war, as is the case with Vietnam, or after the war; but before it actually takes place. Please also note that over at least 125 municipal councils in the United States, most of the large cities including New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles have voted overwhelmingly against the war. And the demonstrations, the popular outcry, the massive assault by pro-peace activists on the population at large, I think will complicate things for the Bush administration despite the obvious appeal, which will soon appear in grotesque manners, that this is a war for patriotism and the safety of the United States and so on and so forth. So I think it is very important to keep in mind that even huge powers can still be divided up into dif- ferent sectors among which we must be able to discriminate and under- stand them separately from the center of power. In this case, as I say, the center has illegally appropriated sweeping powers to itself-thanks to the dormant Congress, which has allowed the President to do this, in the wake of 9/11, and which it should not have done.

To speak now about the Palestinian rights in such a context may seem essentially quixotic and irrelevant and certainly the current impression that Israel and the United States have borne all before them in their hostility to full Palestinian self-determination reinforces the superficial impression of irrelevance, but I want to argue that is not at all there is to the whole truth. The processes of history and politics are much more complicated than superficial, vulgar media sound bites. There are accomplishments and realities also to be noted with positive approval and admiration. During my lifetime, Palestinians, since the climatic events of 1948 and the establishment of Israel have gone from the status of non-persons to that of a universally acknowledged nation- al collectivity, that is, a people, by virtue not simply of force of arms but of other means some of which I want to talk about here. If for now the Palestinians are still stateless, dispossessed, and for the most part exiled, it is because by those very unmilitary means some of which are the mobilized force of memory, the power of images, and the heroism and ingenuity of sheer persistence-by all of this, Palestinians embody perhaps the most visible and certainly the most universal case of human rights abuses on earth today. There is no desire on my part to be competitive about such a claim. There are many oppressed peoples in the world today and I am not saying that the Palestinians are the

Alif 24 (2004) 19

most oppressed; but I am saying they are most visible, and partly because of their own activity they lay a special claim on, not only Arab, but universal attention. I want also to be able to talk about the visibility not only of their presence as victims of injustice and human rights denial, but of the equal force they present, they represent on the world stage, of a wrong that must be righted.

In an extremely suggestive lecture, the British philosopher and political scientist Ken Booth draws attention to the existence of a growing number of what he calls "trans-cultural moral and political solidarities" that have acted the part of what he calls "agents beyond sovereignty," that is to say act as institutions not bound by the borders between countries that set the international system since the peace of Westphalia in the seventeenth century. That focus seems to be an excellent way of characterizing the overall human achievement of the Palestinian people in the period after 1948 until the present. Note that in all the many amazingly different places, conditions and polities that the approximately 7.5 million Palestinians now live in as citizens of Israel, as under military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, as refugees and stateless persons in several Arab countries including this one [Egypt], as refugees with various acquired nationalities scattered all over the world, and as members of a dispossessed people-they have developed a political and moral solidarity with each other and with other people. Nothing less, in fact than a national identity and a political constituency all over the world that it has been the goal of Israel to deny, obliterate and refuse to acknowledge.

To argue backwards for a moment, let me site only one recent example of what I mean by denial and a refusal to acknowledge. It was precisely that refusal that flawed the Oslo process from the moment it was undertaken in 1993. In this, I think, the Israelis and the United States were planning not to restore but to further postpone and deflect the fulfillment of Palestinian aspirations. I said so at the time; nobody believed me. They said: "give it a chance," but if you read the docu- ments you would have seen that neither Israel nor the United States was moved by an acknowledgment of past injustices nor by a spirit of contrition or of reconciliation with their batteries of legal experts backed by the disproportional military weight of both countries and at the same time as more than double the pre-existing number of settle- ments were being created on Palestinian land and more human rights abused. Israel and the United States divided and subdivided ever- diminishing bits of Palestinian territories into smaller and less viable

20 Alif 24 (2004)

units for the unfortunate Palestinian authority to take over and misrule, all under the misleading-not to say willfully deceptive-rubric of the "peace process." Was there ever any other intention? No, not peace at all but pacification for a time and, I think, we are in for that now in the case of Iraq. The Oslo accords were too much of a whole with several prior decades of Palestinian dispossession, house demolitions, land expropriation and attacks on civil society. As against that, there has been, as I said, a moral and political solidarity building up between Palestinians all over the world-some of it has been evident in the past weeks of worldwide protests against the war in Iraq. People have made the connection between war by the United States against Iraq and Israel's war against the Palestinian people. This is absolutely correct; and in many countries of the world-in Europe, in the Middle East, in parts of Africa and Latin America and to some degree in America, in some of the big demonstrations that took place, for example, in New York in the middle of February, in California, where in San Francisco three or four hundred thousand people turned up-the issue of Palestine was connected with the issue of Iraq.

One of the manifestations, and perhaps not its most significant one, is that today for example, there are such things openly acknowl- edged as a Palestinian cinema and with it a kind of transnational visi- bility of a Palestinian person that would have been unthinkable three decades ago. In late January, to give a very simple example, at my University [Columbia], the head of the Middle East Studies Department who is an Iranian, Hamid Dabashi, decided-because he wrote a book on cinema; he's very interested in Iranian cinema-it would be a great idea if we had a festival of Palestinian films. This fes- tival began on a Thursday night and between Thursday night and Sunday night about 74 films were shown in perhaps 15 or 16 sessions. Every single one of them was full; you could not get in for miles around, and now half a dozen more universities around the country are trying to do the same thing all of which attests to the power of Palestine and the visibility of the Palestinian individual as he or she appears in films. Of course, with the films went the usual threats, the picketers, the flooding of e-mails. As one of the speakers at the festi- val, I would get 5000 e-mail messages every day to put my e-mail out of commission. But, of course, this did not have any effect at all; peo- ple still went on and the showing of the films were all fully attended. So visual symbols have played an extraordinarily important role in the reappearance if you like of the Palestinian individual after years of

Alif 24 (2004) 21

absence and programmed national effacement. I don't want to go over the steps taken by Israel inside former

Palestine to obliterate systematically the centuries-old Arab presence along with its symbols and structures. I have described some of these on the juridical level so far as the taking over of land and property was concerned in my book The Question of Palestine which appeared more than 20 years ago, but the overall plan was to start Israel as if afresh, a state rising from nothing, to take its place among the nations. In the affirmation of its renewed millennial identity, Israel managed for quite a while to remove the traces of Palestinian life for the most part, even though, of course, a large number of these traces, remaining as a rem- nant of the people despite the expulsions of 1948, were there as a hum- bled and scarcely perceptible human presence ruled by military gov- ernment inside Israel until 1966.

Even so, apparently innocent a discipline such as archeology, which is one of course of the prides of Egypt, was used in Israel and was made complicit in the making over of the land and its markers, as if there had never been any Arabs or any other civilizations there except Israel and the Israelites. This is very well described by a young Palestinian anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj in her recent book called Facts on The Ground: Archeological Practice and Territorial Self- Fashioning in Israeli Society (2002). Her argument is that in the process of providing Israel with an ancient objectivized history visible in archeological evidence, the traces of other more just as historical histories were ignored or simply moved away by trucks and bulldoz- ers. What remained became for Israeli archeology evidence of a kind of essential "Israeliness" which gave the state an unassailable pedigree in a long distant past with the intervening cultures and peoples; myri- ads of people and cultures were simply pushed aside and ignored.

Moreover in a trilogy of powerful books entitled A Land with- out People, The Expulsion of the Palestinians and the third one Imperial Israel and the Palestinians: The Politics of Expansion 1967- 2000, the Palestinian/Israeli scholar Nur Masalha has unearthed both the theory and practice of emptying the land of Israel of its indigenous inhabitants. Much of the pre-state Zionist ideology that mobilized Eastern European communities for the trek to mandatory Palestine was premised on the virtual absence of inhabitants, on what was often depicted as either completely empty or hopelessly arid land awaiting redemption by Jewish pioneers. Later on, or in some cases simultane- ously with that, when the discovery of actual Palestinians could no

22 Alif 24 (2004)

longer be deferred or denied there was a concerted effort to devise ways of getting rid of them; it was called transfer and is still called transfer. Half the members of the present Israeli cabinet openly say that the only solution is to transfer the Arabs out of Palestine. The war of 1948 provided field commanders and Ben Gurion himself with a rich opportunity to do so. These are amply attested to in the Israeli mil- itary archive as combed assiduously by a number of Jewish as well as numerous Arab researchers including Masalha himself. Since 1967 the desire to efface and/or repress what has remained of an institutional- ized Palestinian life in the cities and villages of the West Bank and Gaza has remained an often explicitly stated Israeli goal hidden inside the polemics of a war for Israel's survival and the defense against extremist terrorism. But whether its new Jewish citizens liked it or not, Israel has always been encumbered by Palestinian memory which is one of my themes here today. It is not as if a whole existence of a peo- ple can be easily wiped away like a footprint in the sand. The sheer banality of such a possibility is too obvious to require more comment and whether this was meant to put a stop to Palestinian national life, just short of full ethnic cleansing, I don't want to speculate on. But such procedures are of a piece with claims that Israel is fighting for its life and that in occupying and destroying everything possible by tanks, bulldozers, F16s and Apache helicopters, it is defending itself against terrorists who happen to have no army or viable defense or means of waging war of any description-that seems totally obvious.

In any event the great narrative of Palestinian life has not yet been achieved, or for that matter written, any more than the fulfillment of its logical national aspirations have been fulfilled. Although it seems just as obvious despite Oslo, despite what the leaders have said, there is no regression, no hesitation among Palestinians everywhere on the drive towards self-determination. A Palestinian nation exiled or in wait- ing has emerged with an unmistakable outline and personality of its own. The vast network of institutions-groups scattered all over the world that sustains the continuity of Palestinian national life-is an amazing thing. It is drawn not only on the mobilized energy of Palestinians everywhere but also on the dazzlingly wide-spread com- mitment to them of their friends, allies and comrades all over the world.

The sheer inequality between the average Palestinian and the average Israeli is breathtaking, and this has been completely shielded from the world outside. We know about it as Arabs, as Palestinians, as neighbors if you like in the Middle East, but in the West you have no

Alif 24 (2004) 23

idea for example when you watch a CNN broadcast-which is quite different from the CNN you watch here [Egypt] which is internation- al CNN. But if in America you watch a broadcast about what's hap- pened on the West Bank-let's say yesterday's events-you'll never know that there is a military occupation going on, that's never men- tioned. It is simply taken out of the context.

So the great inequality between the average Palestinian and the average Israeli is simply unknown. People will then say something dis- approving about those terrible suicide bombers. I always encounter that-saying well, "what about the suicide bombers?" and I'll agree. I say "yes, it's terrible"; but then one has to add how many Israelis have had to live through the demolition by bulldozing of entire villages, blocks of flats, shopping districts? How many Israelis have had to endure missile attacks by Apache helicopters or rockets from American made F16 fight- er jets? How many Israelis have had to be stripped and searched at check- points on an hourly basis? None at all. During the first three weeks of the Intifada, this Intifada, one million bullets were fired by Israeli military personnel at Palestinians. For those of you interested in historical com- parisons, neither Indians demonstrating against the British, nor South African blacks fighting against apartheid, ever faced anything like this, nor for that matter did they have to reckon with missiles, hundreds of tanks, helicopters and Fl6s and rocket attacks fired into civilian areas as well as refugee camps with no defenses or arms whatever.

Consider this-and I did this as a quick example on the inter- net-on January the 23rd, 2003 you read: 836 Muslim pilgrims to Mecca from Gaza were denied permission to leave. The Palestinian Catholic cardinal was detained at Tel Aviv airport. Some towns on the West bank have already sustained 214 days of curfew. 150 dunums of fertile agricultural land were destroyed in Gaza. Three people, two of them civilians were killed. Six homes demolished. This is all in one day in late January. 62 shops in Nazlit Isa were flattened to the ground, and that, literally, thousands of people many of them pregnant women, sick and aged men and women, children trying to get to school, doc- tors hoping to reach their patients their hospitals, professors and under- graduates trying to get to their classes with 3 universities closed, and ordinary human beings shopping, looking for food or work-all of them detained by the endless number of checkpoints. Over 300 check- points in the West Bank punctuate the existence of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Two or three days ago, 12 Palestinians were killed as a result of an Israeli incursion into Gaza. Today more were

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killed, dozens injured, tens of houses demolished in varying degrees of severity and brutality. This sort of thing has been going on there every- day for 35 years. The Israeli occupation is now the longest in modem history, the longest military occupation rivaled only by the Japanese occupation of Korea. And the settlements increase: they crowd every available hilltop.

There is one other thing I want to mention about the occupation which makes it difficult to recall or actually see, not only for outsiders so to speak but even for Israelis themselves. As Amira Hass writes in Haaretz, and I quote her: "a person could travel the length and breadth of the West Bank without ever knowing, not only the names of the vil- lages and cities whose lands were confiscated to build the Jewish set- tlements and neighborhoods, but even the fact that they exist at all." I don't know how many of you have been to the Occupied Territories. I wish you would all go, you have to see it-I'll talk about that later- but the point I am trying to make is, you have no idea of, for example, the system of roads that the Israelis have built with American money. We are talking about 780 miles of roads throughout an area that is about the size of Cairo basically, I mean greater Cairo. Roads that are for Jews only. They've built roads, what Jeff Halper calls "a matrix of control," so that they connect the settlements with each other. They ban Arabs and they make it, as Amira Hass says, impossible to even see the Arabs. "Most of the names of the Arab towns," I quote her again, "cannot be found on the road signs." From a distance, the calls of the mu'azzin and the streets that are empty of people; after all there is nothing to go out and look for. It seems like an aesthetic decoration. A Jew traveling on the almost empty roads of the West Bank would think that there are no longer any Arabs. The Arabs do not travel on the wide roads used by Jews.

When I went to South Africa for the first time in 1991 before the end of apartheid-although Mandela had just been released from jail a few months earlier-you could drive from white centers like Cape Town to Stellenbosch, a distance of about 80 miles and never see any- thing of the black South Africa. It was entirely white; why? Because the road curved around in such a way that the townships, where you would occasionally see a large light, but the rest of the black popula- tion was simply made invisible. This is one of the ways that colonial- ism has of dissipating the existence of the other people. In addition to that now, again with the full support of the United States, the Israelis are building a wall between themselves and the Palestinians-a wall

Alif 24 (2004) 25

which separates villages from their lands, so that now they don't even have to, not only just see them, but they don't have to deal with the fact that their visual presence might be a problem, and all this with the support of the United States-135 billion dollars given by us. This tremendous assault on memory, to say nothing about reality, is quite without precedent or analogy in our post-modern times. Not in former Yugoslavia, not in Africa, nor elsewhere in Asia and Australia. By contrast, I want to say that none of these efforts have achieved their goal. In every possible way, the diverse affirmations of Palestinian identity, far from being a negative or passive thing have grown first and foremost a culture of human rights and democratic processes at the grass roots level that has included a sensitive.register of the claims of memory, the demand for attention and justice, despite the world's indifference and a healthy awareness of the ironies of unequal power.

The other thing I'd like to note is that even though in the United States and parts of Western Europe the notion of Palestine is associat- ed only with violence and terror; there is, as I said earlier, a serious contradiction to that superficial association in an ongoing and recog- nized Palestinian national life with a quite peculiar tenacity. There is today a Palestinian literature which is studied, not only in Palestinian schools and universities but in European, American, African, and Latin American countries. There is a Palestinian legal political and scholarly discourse, a Palestinian cinema, a Palestinian theatre, an oral tradition, a large number of Palestinian grass roots organizations all over the world. In short, there is a Palestinian style that invigorates and informs all aspects of this community's existence. Moreover-this is what I think is most encouraging-this Palestinian style is situated in contemporary awareness in all sorts of interesting and noteworthy ways. The habit of considering everything about Palestinian identity as basically anti-Israel does an extreme disservice to the richness of the achievement I have been discussing. As Rashid Khalidi has pointed out, in his book called Palestine and the Palestinians, there has been a coherent Palestinian national life well before the onset of Zionism which despite the nakba [disaster], and the years of dispossession, has never really been broken. Moreover, the universality of the drive for Palestinian self-determination has acquired an unbudgeable place in the world's agenda for liberation, sustainability and resistance. Every major UN conference for the past two decades, whether concerning the place of women, the environment, racism, human rights, disarmament, health, or human development has had an important place in it for the

26 Alif 24 (2004)

question of Palestine. Paradoxically, the Davos meetings for govern- mental and corporate leaders of globalization have an important com- ponent of their agenda devoted to Palestine while exactly at the same time, at the other end of the world at Porto Alegre in Brazil, the anti- globalization meetings have featured the presence of a large Palestinian delegation whose presence assures an additional progres- sive dimension to the debates there.

Any discussion of Middle East peace, and you notice that even in Blair's comments, two days ago [March 15, 2003], as the going expression has it, turns out inevitably to be mainly about the question of Palestine. If in the period after 1948, as part of the postwar reemer- gence of Europe, Israel had the status of a progressive cause, it is now Palestine that has taken that place. One need only think of the support Israel had during the 1950s and 1960s from such people as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir to gage how far from that position it has fallen today. As some of Israel's own internal critics like Amos Elon and Avishai Margalit have noted sadly since the first Intifada of 1987, Israel has been transformed dramatically all over the world into a symbol of oppression and injustice, lumped together with the United States for its arrogance, its supremacist attitudes and for its inhuman policies towards the Palestinians over which it has ruled for so long. Divestment campaigns in American universities-including mine [Columbia], Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, Chicago-all the major universities of America are now conducting divestment cam- paigns reminiscent of the anti-apartheid movement of the 1970s and the 1980s that is to say to have university endowments divest them- selves of stocks in American companies that do business or supply Israel with military equipment. This raises a whole raft of new ques- tions about the post-cold-war political order that are quite unique in their density and difficulty.

So in conclusion, I want to talk about three such problems. I don't have pragmatic answers to these questions whatever that means, but I'll talk about them from the perspective that I can bring as a humanist and an intellectual who is deeply engaged in the matter, but who is independent and I would like to think as free of doctrinal or ide- ological hubbles as it is practically possible to be. Of the three issues I want to talk about the first one is the notion of victimhood. I mean there is a great deal of talk now all over the world of what do we do about the victims of the past. For a Palestinian, like myself, who has had the most fortunate and the most luxurious of lives-compared

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with the overwhelming number of my refugee compatriots or those who had to live under Israeli rule for decades and decades-it is still difficult for me to minimize how much more Palestinians have been sinned against than as a whole they have sinned, how much they have suffered terribly in an unacknowledged silence even today. As of this moment, not a single major Israeli political or intellectual figure, not a single one-certainly no political figure of any importance-has artic- ulated any serious contrition the way for example Japan has expressed contrition for what it did to China and Korea. Not one Israeli politician of any stature has expressed any contrition to say nothing of accepting any responsibility at all for the disasters and sustained human suffer- ing of the Palestinian people. I know nothing at all in contemporary history quite like this amazing stone wall of obduracy and denial and yet I must also say that the legacy of persecution, genocide, and anti- Semitism that is so much a part of Israel's history is a background that we must acknowledge and contend with just the same. Two communities of suffering, I have called them that in the past but one must, I think, make clear, that at the present time, one community has the tremen- dous balance of power in its favor (Israel and the Jews), the other is, so to speak, the victim of the former victim. Israeli policies as well as the meditation of many western liberals who feel a collective guilt for Christian and European anti-Semitism, nevertheless, must be able to distinguish and disentangle the past from the present to make very clear distinctions between respecting the appalling past injustices heaped on Jews historically on the one hand in Christian countries, and on the other simply excusing what the State of Israel and the State of the Jews has done to the entire Palestinian people ever since.

There is simply no earthly or divine dispensation that would excuse a State or a people for wreaking havoc upon another one while pleading the travails of its own past as an excuse. Sharon's ideas are at least clear in that he believes, like George [W.] Bush, that his people owns the land for historical, biblical reasons and that, in making every effort to appropriate all of it at present and retrospectively, Israel is neither bound nor restrained by ordinary conventions of proper justice and proportionality. My argument here has been to state that such claims don't at all correspond with universalism or the idea that human rights cannot be manipulated to accommodate what is a record of patent brutality and cruelty. Palestinians have been displaced, they have had their society shattered, they have had to live under military occupation, their lands and lives are today systematically torn apart.

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There are no two ways about it I believe, which is not to say that we must simply overlook the tragic history of the Jews. On the contrary, I would always want to say that as a Palestinian, as an Arab, I should make my case to defenders of Israel on the basis of, and taking full account of, making due acknowledgment of the history of discrimina- tion against Jews. That kind of policy, I would want to add, should never ever be visited on anyone for any reason at all, least of all by Jews in the name of their safety and independence.

The second problem that needs examination has recently taken the form of the supposed clash of civilizations especially in the Arab world where Samuel Huntington-formerly a mediocre cold warrior in republican and democratic administrations-found a new career for himself in formulating this extremely vulgar and reductive idea that civilizations clash. This and the stridently bellicose rhetoric that seems to form from it has been given a woefully inadequate formulation by politicians and demagogues within the Arab world and the Islamic world since the events of September 11th, 2001. I have always found these formulas extremely stupid, not only because they falsify and dis- tort the notion that because cultures and nations seem to have a visible identity, they also must have rigidly policed, enforced, and defined bor- ders and rules within them and therefore wars across those borders become inevitable. This sort of thing is completely untenable on both historical and philosophical grounds. Cultures, peoples, civilizations are not water tight inert, unchanging things. Exactly the opposite is true. And if there is such a thing as culture or nationhood at all, it is that each is, and always will be, tied in, constantly interacting and inter- twined, with other cultures and nations. Allowing for differences in kind, countries cannot really be separate and stand apart from their environment. It was historically one of the great failures of British imperialism that in the Indian subcontinent, in Palestine, in Cyprus, in Africa, in Ireland, it adopted the practice of partition, or as it has been called "divide and quit." Thereby leaving matters worse off than before the separation. Building walls, therefore, is a kind of folly that ought to be exposed for exactly what it is, namely a delusion that can neither be made fully to work in theory or in practice.

Ignorance of the other is not a strategy for survival. All nation- alisms at their most feverish fail this crucial test of awareness. A fail- ure by no means limited to so-called underdeveloped or fanatical ide- ologies, cultures or religions. Historically, for example, Palestine is a palimpsest; a composite of an enormous number of people and civi-

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lizations-each of them has left traces and effects that last for many centuries. It must be said again and again that everything we know about ancient Palestine speaks to a rich multiplicity of peoples and tribes, not just the Israelites but also of the Canaanites, the Philistines, the Jebusites, the Moabites and many others. To extrapolate from that history, say that only one people dominated and is therefore entitled to lay exclusive claim to Palestine today, is simply a tragic misinterpre- tation and betrayal of something far more interesting and rich. One can therefore interpret history inclusively giving rise to complexity and universalism or far more narrowly one could interpret history as the exclusive possession of only one people and one culture and one power who prefer unending war against others to mutual recognition and coexistence.

I think this is the problem that we face today with the United States, those of us who live there. Is America going to be the unilater- alist power that enters and does what it wants in the world simply because it is more powerful or, as many people, including a majority of Americans, believe that we are part of the world and have to live with the world and within the world as citizens of the world rather than as a super power. Civil wars are much more bitter and unyielding than any other kind. I think that is the essence of the problem that we face today, namely, whether some believe Palestine or America or any other country ought to become and therefore remain the principal homeland of just one dominant people or whether all these countries can become the homeland of the people who actually live there regard- less of race and religion, even though for the time being they seem to be locked in mortal combat. I don't know the short term answer to that question but it seems to me that there potentially lies the universality of the appeal for Palestinian human rights. Now a second-class, dis- possessed, and downtrodden people for the past century and a half, the Palestinians have been struggling for equality in that land much as the non-white people of South Africa waged the battle for liberation and equality there. It is not a matter of partition, of dividing the land. It is a matter of sharing it with equality.

I will not lie to you here and say that in all the ways they have resisted their difficult fate, Palestinians have had coexistence and shar- ing in mind-very far from it. For in this tale there is abundant vengeance, brutality, hatred and exterminism. Still, there is a great deal more than that as I have been arguing here. And I will say confi- dently that the logic of that struggle has always been inclusive against

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injustice and inequality for coexistence and equality and in this region of the world-the genius of this region of the world-is the fact that it is the home of many peoples and that many cultures historically have coexisted here throughout history and throughout geography. Of course there will be disagreements over how and what sort of equali- ty, in form and method, must be achieved but that it is the desired result is as far as I am concerned the great truth of our undiminished energies as a people that has simply refused to go under and give up.

The final point I would like to mention is the antithesis between present bitter antagonism and future reconciliation. Antagonism is the structure that today binds Palestinians and other Arabs with Israelis in the land and in the diaspora. Neither people, neither the people of Israel nor the people of Palestine, has been blessed with a Mandela nor even a De Klerk. We are very far from a truth and reconciliation com- mission. The number of visionaries who have articulated thoughts that go beyond a wretched impoverished opposition is tiny, if they exist at all. Yes, there have been Israelis and Palestinians who have tried together to work against injustice and intolerance but they are a minor- ity, a beleaguered out-numbered minority with very limited influence now. But that need not always be so. There are many models besides belligerence and civil strife between peoples. One model is the model of historical Andalusia where three cultures, three religions-all monotheistic-managed to coexist, with friction, with struggle, with antipathy in some cases, but always in a kind of precarious harmony, but coexisting just the same. And I would want to say that both in the Arab world and in Israel there has been a tendency to draw an iron cur- tain in front of one and say "they are the enemy, we are the people who are the victims, we have to be able to resist." I think in general it's true, people do want to resist, but look at the great resisters of the past- somebody who is alive today: Mandela! What was the genius of Mandela? The genius of Mandela was to understand that in order to win the struggle for liberation in South Africa, the struggle against apartheid, it was necessary first of all to formulate a strategy and a goal that never changed. It never changed for the season; it never changed during the cold war, or after the cold war. The goal was always the same: one person, one vote. Black, white, mixed, colored: one person, one vote. That is the principal of human rights and that is the strategy of a people struggling for equality and self-determination.

Now the second part of the strategy which was so important about South Africa and about Mandela was that he realized that in

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order to implement this he could never win the battle militarily. I mean I could give you a lecture for the next four hours on the insufficiency of military power, that military power never wins battles; I mean it wins battles but it never wins wars. I believe this passionately; that what gave the popular struggle in South Africa its ultimate victory-it is much more complicated obviously but allow me to simplify just for the sake of time-what gave the battle in South Africa its victory, was the moral high ground, that is to say, the moral high ground that Mandela and the ANC took. It was not a matter of renouncing terror- ism and it was not a matter of renouncing violence; they never did that by the way. People say to the Palestinians "renounce violence, renounce terrorism." Poor old Arafat, time after time, renouncing ter- rorism (sometimes it sounds like tourism), but that's not the answer. Mandela, just for the record, never renounced violence, he still hasn't renounced violence to this day, but he won the Nobel peace prize. I mean a lot of shits have won the Nobel peace prize. But the idea was to define the struggle on a higher plane than that of your enemy.

Historically, Palestinians and Arabs have always done so, but unfortunately they have lost the battle because they tried to redefine it in terms of military confrontation in which in the end we are always going to lose. Our territory is first of all the land and it's very impor- tant that there has been significant cooperation between Jews and Palestinians in trying to preserve the land, in preventing house demo- litions. I mean, that is where the collective struggle is; and second, the other place is in the moral principle of 'one person, one vote,' that is to say human equality based on the full realization of human rights and that-that is the final point I want to make-can never take place with- out two things.

One, being able directly to address your enemy as Mandela did from the court house which sent him to prison for 27 years and then again from the parliament building in 1994 when he addressed the entire nation. Always to talk to the Other. In our part of the world talking to the Other means tanazulat [compromises]. It does not mean that; it means you defend your point of view in a moral way, to overcome the resistance of the Other to the moral argument that you present with organization. And the second thing, of course, you can't do it just by talking, you have to do it in a mobilized and organ- ized way, not by a group of poor people who are given arms and told to go fight while the officers sit at home and sip tea and watch tele- vision-that's immoral. Everybody is mobilized in the struggle and

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this is beginning to happen now, not only in Palestine but all over the world against the American war and the American Empire.

The second component is knowledge. Now, I don't think it's an accident that I speak here as an educator; you cannot deal with the Other without a profound knowledge of his or her culture, society and history. And I think this is the most important thing for us, as Arabs, who historically have had a great civilization and a great culture based upon the discovery of others. Think of Ibn Battuta, think of the dis- covery of Ceylon, Sarandib in Arabic; the word serendipity and dis- covery come from Arabs who were the great geographers of the east, of Africa, of Europe originally. But there has been for the last one hun- dred years a recoil; say that if we are afraid of Occidentosis, we are afraid to confront the Other because we might get an istighrab [west- ernization], by being too close to the Other. That's complete nonsense. You can look at the Other in many different ways, one is to emulate the Other and to try to imitate him, the mimic men, to try to be like one of these characters in Naipaul' s novels who are just little monkeys imi- tating their masters. But the other way is to understand the Other bet- ter than the Other knows himself or herself. As I said about America, about Israel, there is another Israel, there is another America, there is another Europe and that is up to us to decide to have an exchange with on the basis of morality, on the basis of human rights, on the basis of collective coexistence, on the basis of sustainability.

My last point, the great failure in my opinion of what the United States is about to do in Iraq, to my great sorrow and shame as an American and as an Arab, and what Israel has been doing for the last 53 or 54 years as many Israelis have realized, is to try and win the bat- tle through the power and military brutality. It can never work because you cannot destroy the will of a people and you can never destroy the power of an idea. And what is the idea? The idea is equality, coexis- tence, sustainable life, whether it's in the case of the environment, whether it's in the case of the land, whether it's in the case of socie- ty-those are the principles that we must live in and struggle by, rather than ephemeral things or illusions about returning to the past or find- ing the golden age somewhere else. The present is our battleground and knowledge is our main weapon.

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