[A-List] American Zionism - The Real Problem

[Bill Totten]

by Edward Said

Al-Ahram Weekly On-line, Issue No 500 (September 21-27 2000)

This is the first article in a series on the misunderstood and misjudged
role of American Zionism in the question of Palestine. In my opinion,
the role of organised Zionist groups and activities in the United States
has not been sufficiently addressed during the period of the "peace
process", a neglect that I find absolutely astonishing, given that
Palestinian policy has been essentially to throw our fate as a people in
the lap of the United States without any strategic awareness of how US
policy is in effect dominated, if not completely controlled, by a small
minority of people whose views about Middle East peace are in some way
more extreme than even those of the Israeli Likud.

Let me give a small example. A month ago, the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz
sent over a leading columnist of theirs, Ari Shavit, to spend several
days talking with me; a good summary of this long conversation appeared
as a question-and-answer interview in the August 18 issue of the
newspaper's supplement, basically uncut and uncensored. I voiced my
views very candidly, with a major emphasis on right of return, the
events of 1948, and Israel's responsibility for all this. I was
surprised that my views were presented just as I voiced them, without
the slightest editorialising by Shavit, whose questions were always
courteous and un-confrontational.

A week after the interview there was a response to it by Meron
Benvenisti, ex-deputy mayor of Jerusalem under Teddy Kollek. It was
disgustingly personal, full of insults and slander against me and my
family. But he never denied that there was a Palestinian people, or that
we were driven out in 1948. In fact he said, we conquered them, and why
should we feel guilty? I responded to Benvenisti a week later in
Ha'aretz: What I wrote was also published uncut. I reminded Israeli
readers that Benvenisti was responsible for the destruction (and
probably knew about the killing of several Palestinians) of Haret
Al-Magharibah in 1967, in which several hundred Palestinians lost their
homes to Israeli bulldozers. But I did not have to remind Benvenisti or
Ha'aretz readers that as a people we existed and could at least debate
our right of return. That was taken for granted.

Two points here. One is that the whole interview could not have appeared
in any American paper, and certainly not in any Jewish-American journal.
And if there had been an interview the questions to me would have been
adversarial, hectoring, insulting, such as, why have you been involved
in terrorism, why will you not recognise Israel, why was Hajj Amin a
Nazi, and so on. Second, a right-wing Israeli Zionist like Benvenisti,
no matter how much he may detest me or my views, would not deny that
there is a Palestinian people which was forced to leave in 1948. An
American Zionist for a long time would say that no conquest took place
or, as Joan Peters alleged in a now-disappeared and all but forgotten
1984 book, From Time Immemorial (that won all the Jewish awards when it
appeared here), there were no Palestinians with a life in Palestine
before 1948.

Every Israeli will readily admit and knows perfectly well that all of
Israel was once Palestine, that (as Moshe Dayan said openly in 1976)
every Israeli town or village once had an Arab name. And Benvenisti says
openly that "we" conquered, and so what? Why should we feel guilty about
winning? American Zionist discourse is never straight out honest that
way: it must always go round and talk about making the desert bloom, and
Israeli democracy, etc, completely avoiding the essential facts about
1948, which every Israeli has actually lived. For the American, these
are mostly fantasies, or myths, not realities. So removed from the
actualities are American supporters of Israel, so caught in the
contradictions of diasporic guilt (after all what does it mean to be a
Zionist and not emigrate to Israel?) and triumphalism as the most
successful and most powerful minority in the US, that what emerges is
very often a frightening mixture of vicarious violence against Arabs and
a deep fear and hatred of them, which is the result, unlike Israeli Jews,
of not having any sustained direct contact with them.

For the American Zionist, therefore, Arabs are not real beings, but
fantasies of nearly everything that can be demonised and despised,
terrorism and anti-Semitism most specially. I recently received a letter
from a former student of mine, who has had the benefit of the finest
education available in the United States: he can still bring himself to
ask me in all honesty and courtesy why as a Palestinian I let a Nazi
like Hajj Amin still determine my political agenda. "Before Hajj Amin",
he argued, "Jerusalem wasn't important to Arabs. Because he was so evil
he made it an important issue for Arabs just in order to frustrate
Zionist aspirations which always held Jerusalem to be important". This
is not the logic of someone who has lived with and knows something
concrete about Arabs. It is that of a person who speaks an organised
discourse and is driven by an ideology that regards Arabs only as
negative functions, as the embodiment of violent anti-Semitic violent
passions. As such, therefore, they are to be fought against and if
possible disposed of. Not for nothing was Dr Baruch Goldstein, the
appalling murderer of 29 Palestinians who were quietly praying in the
Hebron mosque, an American, as was Rabbi Meir Kahane. Far from being
aberrations that have embarrassed their followers, both Kahane and
Goldstein are revered today by others like them. Many of the most
zealous far-right settlers sitting on Palestinian land, remorselessly
speaking about "the land of Israel" as being theirs, hating and ignoring
the Palestinian owners and residents all round them, are also
American-born. To see them walking through the streets of Hebron as if
the Arab city was entirely theirs is a frightening sight, aggravated by
the defiance and contempt they display openly against the Arab majority.

I bring all this up here to make one essential point. When after the
Gulf War the PLO took the strategic decision - already settled on by two
major Arab countries before the PLO - to work with the American
government and if possible with the powerful lobby that controls
discussion of Middle Eastern politics, they had made the decision (as
had the two Arab states before them) on the basis of vast ignorance and
quite extraordinarily mistaken assumptions. The idea, as it was
expressed to me shortly after 1967 by a senior Arab diplomat, was to
surrender in effect, and say, we are not going to struggle any more. We
are now willing to accept Israel and also to accept the US's determining
role in our future. There were objective reasons for such a view at the
time, as there are now, as to why continuing the fight as the Arabs had
done historically would lead to further defeat and even disaster. But I
firmly believe that it was a mistaken policy simply to throw Arab policy
into the lap of the US and, since the major Zionist organisations are so
influential everywhere in the United States, into their lap as well,
saying, in effect, we won't fight you, let us join you, but please treat
us well. The hope was that if we conceded and said, we are not your
enemies, as Arabs we would become their friends.

The problem is with the disparity in power that remained. From the
viewpoint of the powerful, what difference does it make to your own
strategy if your weak adversary gives up and says I have nothing further
to fight for, take me, I want to be your ally, just try to understand me
a bit better and then perhaps you will then be fairer? A good way of
answering this question in practical and concrete terms is to look at
the latest turn of events in New York's senatorial race, where Hillary
Clinton is competing with Republican Ric Lazio for the seat now held by
Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D), who is retiring. Last year Hillary said
that she favoured the establishment of a Palestinian state and, on a
formal visit to Gaza with her husband, embraced Soha Arafat. Since
entering the senatorial race in New York she has outdone even the most
right-wing Zionists in her fervour for Israel and opposition to
Palestine, even going so far as to advocate moving the US embassy from
Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and (more extreme) advocating leniency for
Jonathan Pollard, the Israeli spy convicted for espionage against the US
and now serving a life sentence. Her Republican antagonists have tried
to embarrass her by depicting her as an "Arab-lover" and by releasing a
photograph of her actually embracing Soha. Since New York is the citadel
of Zionist power, attacking someone with such labels as "Arab-lover" and
"friend of Soha Arafat" is tantamount to the worst possible insult. All
this despite the fact that Arafat and the PLO are openly declared
American allies, recipients of US military and financial aid, and in the
security field the beneficiaries of CIA security support. In the
meantime, the White House released a photo of Lazio shaking hands two
years ago with Arafat. One blow clearly deserves another.

The real fact is that Zionist discourse is a discourse of power, and
Arabs in that discourse are the objects of power - despised objects at
that. Having thrown in their lot with this power as its surrendered
former antagonist, they can never expect to be on equal terms with it.
Hence the degrading and insulting spectacle of Arafat (always and
forever the symbol of enmity to the Zionist mind) being used in an
entirely local contest in the US between two opponents who are trying to
prove who of the two is the most pro-Israeli. And neither Hillary
Clinton nor Ric Lazio is even Jewish.

What I shall discuss in my next article is how the only possible
political strategy for the US so far as Arab and Palestinian policy are
concerned is neither a pact with the Zionists here nor one with US
policy, but a mobilised mass campaign directed at the American
population on behalf of Palestinian human, civil and political rights.
All other arrangements, whether Oslo or Camp David, are doomed to
failure because, put simply, the official discourse is totally dominated
by Zionism and, except for a few individual exceptions, no alternatives
to it exist. Therefore all peace arrangements undertaken on the basis of
an alliance with the US are alliances that confirm rather than confront
Zionist power. To submit supinely to a Zionist-controlled Middle East
policy, as the Arabs have done for almost a generation now, will neither
bring stability at home nor equality and justice in the US.

Yet the irony is that there exists inside the US a vast body of opinion
ready to be critical both of Israel and of US foreign policy. The
tragedy is that the Arabs are too weak, too divided, too disorganised
and ignorant to take advantage of it. I shall discuss the reasons for
that as well in my next article since my hope is to try to reach a new
generation that may be both puzzled and discouraged by the miserable,
denigrated place in which our culture and people are now located, and
the constant sense of indignant but humiliating loss that all of us
experience as a result.

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2000/500/op2.htm

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6852.htm

Professor Edward Said was a Palestinian/American world leading public
intellectual. He was born in Palestine in 1935 and died in United States
on 25th September 2003

The Edward Said Archive: http://www.edwardsaid.org/modules/news/


Please also see:-

"More on American Zionism (2)" by Edward Said
Al-Ahram Weekly On-line, Issue No 502 (October 05-11 2000)
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2000/502/op2.htm

"American Zionism (3)" by Edward Said,
Al-Ahram Weekly On-line, Issue No 506 (November 02-08 2000) http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2000/506/op2.htm

"To be Intimidated is to be an Accomplice:
Notes on Anti-Semitism, Zionism and Palestine"
by Tariq Ali, Information Clearing House (March 04 2004)
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6853.htm

"AIPAC's Power, or America's Cowardice?" 
by Charley Reese Antiwar.com (September 13 2004)
http://www.antiwar.com/reese/?articleid=3551


Bill Totten     http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/