Now that all is Said and Done

Now that all is Said and Done
Achin Vanaik
The Telegraph, 30 September 2003

Phyllis Bennis Remembering Edward W. Said
The Edward Said archives

No one was more
effective in arguing for the Palestinian cause
nor more accurate in his criticism of US and
Israeli iniquities than Edward Said

In the Indian media, Edward Said's demise has
brought forth deserved encomiums for a remarkable
Renaissance-like personality of multiple talents
who was also one of the world's outstanding
public intellectuals, never afraid of speaking
the truth and exposing the lies, deceits and
hypocrisies of the powerful and their hangers-on.
Of course, given the times we live in, we can
fully expect some pro-Hindutva and pro-Zionist
voices to express their veiled or not-so-veiled
contempt for Said.

This article will not aim to add to the encomiums
that have already covered all facets of Said's
life. I will only seek to elucidate Edward Said's
vision of the Palestinian struggle, its goal, its
strategy, its prospects. He was, without doubt,
the single most important spokesperson (outside
of the formal political leadership) for the
Palestinian cause. No one was more effective in
expounding the justice of this struggle nor
anyone more accurate and penetrating in their
criticism of the iniquitous behaviour of the
United States of America and Israeli governments
towards Palestinians and their attempts (abetted
by house intellectuals and a largely supine
Western media) to cover this up.

The loss from Said's death is simply inestimable.
From the Seventies, his tireless efforts in
print, speech or through television appearances
and documentary-making made him such a
pre-eminent public pedagogue and spokesperson.
After 1994, he had the courage (virtually alone
at the beginning) to stand up and oppose the Oslo
and then the Wye Accords and to expose them for
what they always were - a sham and a disgrace to
any genuine process of seeking a truly just and
fair peace settlement. The Indian government, the
overwhelming majority of Indian media
commentators, and almost the whole of the
strategic establishment still wish for the
Palestinian issue to somehow go away.

Any peace settlement, as long as it lasts, is
good enough. Hence the earlier refrain about the
unfortunate collapse of the Oslo accords and
today's constant clamour about salvaging the
utterly fraudulent US-backed "roadmap to peace".

Said did more than simply demolish the case for
the accords through his systematic and detailed
analysis of their deceitful terms and
extraordinarily limited concessions, and his
descriptions of what the everyday brutal reality
of occupation during the "peace process" meant to
ordinary Palestinians. He also highlighted the
disastrous strategic-political mistake made by
Yasser Arafat in deciding that after the collapse
of the Soviet Union and the Kuwait War, the only
chance of getting a reasonably fair two-state
settlement was by relying on the US to play the
role of an honest broker willing to persuade the
Israeli government to accept this "final
solution".

Instead, as Said was the first to point out, this
farcical "peace process", controlled by a US
government that was never interested in playing
fair, was meant to impose a final Bantustan-type
solution. That is to say, effectively allowing
substantial and formally sanctified usurpation by
Israel of a great part of even the occupied
territories, as well as ensuring through such a
final settlement the permanently
institutionalized military, strategic, economic
and political subordination of Palestine
("limited sovereignty" dressed up as independent
statehood) to Israel. Arafat cannot bring himself
to acknowledge his fatal strategic mistake. Hence
his continued attempts to restore the peace
process with US help. Arafat could also never
bring himself to fully betray the Palestinian
cause when he realized that the only settlement
on offer would have meant precisely this. That is
why today, both the US and Israel have turned
against him and sought an even more pliant
Palestinian leadership. While Tel Aviv discusses
whether it should assassinate Arafat, Washington
asks it to avoid such talk publicly and merely
vilifies Arafat.

Said not only criticized Arafat (while always
respecting his earlier historic role as leader or
symbol of Palestinians), he provided his own
distinctive strategic vision. His own long-term
goal had shifted from advocating the two-state
solution to that of a bi-national unified
territorial state with full and equal rights for
both Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs - the end
of Zionism rather than co-existence with it. What
was more important was Said's prescription for
how either of these two goals could be achieved.
To those who argued in the name of a so-called
realism that the only alternative available was
abandoning the search for either a two-state or
bi-national type, and accepting a Bantustan in
all but name, he presented a firm no. The final
goal of a just peace must never be compromised
upon, though the means to achieving it could
certainly involve compromises.

Behind this insistence lay a deep understanding
of the real meaning of political struggle far
removed from the understandings of most strategic
experts for whom politics is, above all,
statecraft that must obey the golden rule of
respecting the existing "relationship of forces"
between various contenders. For Said, political
struggle was ultimately a clash of wills not of
arms or of economic strength in which one side
seeks to impose its will on the other. If
Palestinians retained the will to insist on a
just peace then, in the long run, Israel (and the
US) could be politically defeated as the
experiences of Vietnam and the end of apartheid
in South Africa showed.

What was required then was a different
political-strategic perspective that no longer
relied on either Israeli or US good intentions or
behaviour but prioritized the building of a new,
much more democratic and non-corrupt Palestinian
leadership, not the mafia led by Arafat and
others. To be truly democratic, such a leadership
would have to establish political structures
giving voice to representatives of the four
million strong Palestinian diaspora outside the
occupied territories. Second, it would have to
give up the morally untenable and strategically
counter-productive path of attacking Israeli
civilians and even military confrontation, though
the Israeli government would certainly continue
with its institutionalized brutality, murder and
violence against ordinary Palestinians since that
was the only way to sustain its occupation.
Three, while engagement with the US, Israeli,
European and other governments was tactically
necessarily, strategically the focus had to be on
engaging, in a much more determined and
sophisticated manner, the broader public in civil
societies everywhere, but especially in the US,
by playing the Palestinians' greatest trump card.
This has always been the moral strength and
integrity of their case against the dishonest and
increasingly threadbare pretence of Zionism that
Israelis, not Palestinians, are the real victims.

Finally, this leadership's main focus has to be
on sustaining the morale and determination of
Palestinians to continue resisting non-violently
(and all the more effective for being peaceful)
by building precisely those links that promote
grassroots democracy, welfare and development for
ordinary Palestinians everywhere.

The greatest tribute to Edward Said would be to
recognize his wisdom by endorsing his
concentration on the development of the internal
moral-political resources of the Palestinians and
simultaneously expanding international solidarity
with Palestinians as the best way to change
decisively the overall "relationship of forces"
in their favour. For theirs is the last and
longest running anti-colonial struggle of modern
history. History is not on the side of the US and
Israel. By internalizing this profound insight,
the Palestinian leadership can be strongly
optimistic of making history happen.

Copyright 2003 The Telegraph