What Israel Has Done by Edward Said

Can Israel be a state like all others? That is the true
question of its existence, writes Edward Said.

Despite Israel's effort to restrict coverage of its
extraordinarily destructive invasion of the West Bank's
Palestinian towns and refugee camps, information and
images have nevertheless seeped through. The Internet
has provided hundreds of verbal as well as pictorial
eyewitness reports, as has Arab and European TV
coverage, most of it unavailable or blocked or spun out
of existence from the mainstream US media. That
evidence provides stunning proof of what Israel's
campaign has actually (has always) been about: the
irreversible conquest of Palestinian land and society.
The official line (which the US, along with nearly
every American media commentator has basically
supported) is that Israel has been defending itself by
retaliating for the suicide bombings that have
undermined its security and even threatened its
existence. That claim has gained the status of an
absolute truth moderated neither by what Israel has
done nor by what in fact has been done to it.

Plucking out the terrorist network, destroying the
terrorist infrastructure, attacking terrorist nests
(note the total dehumanisation involved in every one of
these phrases): the words are repeated so often and so
unthinkingly that they have therefore given Israel the
right to do what it has wanted to do, which in effect
is to destroy Palestinian civil life with as much
damage, as much sheer wanton destruction, killing,
humiliation, vandalism, purposeless but overwhelming
technological violence as possible. No other state on
earth could have done what Israel has done with as much
approbation and support as the US has given it. None
has been more intransigent and destructive, less out of
touch with its own realities, than Israel.

There are signs, however, that the amazing, not to say
grotesque, nature of these claims (its "fight for
existence") is slowly being eroded by the harsh and
nearly unimaginable devastation wrought by the Jewish
state and its homicidal prime minister, Ariel Sharon.
Take this front-page report, "Attacks Turn Palestinian
Plans Into Bent Metal and Piles of Dust" by the New
York Times's Serge Schmemann (no Palestinian
propagandist) on 11 April: "There is no way to assess
the full extent of the damage to the cities and towns
-- Ramallah, Bethlehem, Tulkarm, Qalqilya, Nablus, and
Jenin -- while they remain under a tight siege, with
patrols and snipers firing in the streets. But it is
safe to say that the infrastructure of life itself and
of any future Palestinian state -- roads, schools,
electricity pylons, water pipes, telephone lines -- has
been devastated." By what inhuman calculus did Israel's
army, using 50 tanks, 250 missile strikes a day, and
dozens of F-16 sorties, besiege Jenin's refugee camp
for over a week, a one square kilometre patch of shacks
housing 15,000 refugees and a few dozen men armed with
automatic rifles and with no defences whatever, no
leaders, no missiles, no tanks, nothing, and call it a
response to terrorist violence and the threat to
Israel's survival? There are reported to be hundreds
buried in the rubble Israeli bulldozers are now trying
to heap over the camp's ruins.

Are Palestinian civilians, men, women, children, no
more than rats or cockroaches that can be killed and
attacked in the thousands without so much as a word of
compassion or in their defence? And what about the
capture of thousands of Palestinian men who have been
taken off by Israeli soldiers without a trace, the
destitution and homelessness of so many ordinary people
trying to survive in the ruins created by Israeli
bulldozers all over the West Bank, the siege that has
now gone on for months and months, the cutting off of
electricity and water in all Palestinian towns, the
long days of total curfew, the shortage of food and
medicine, the wounded who have bled to death, the
systematic attacks on ambulances and aid workers that
even the mild-mannered Kofi Annan has decried as
outrageous? Those actions will not be pushed so easily
into the memory hole. Its friends must ask Israel how
its suicidal policies can possibly gain it peace,
acceptance and security.

A monstrous transformation of an entire people by the
most formidable and feared propaganda machine in the
world into little more than "militants" and
"terrorists" has allowed not just Israel's military but
its fleet of writers and defenders to efface a terrible
history of suffering and abuse in order to destroy the
civil existence of the Palestinian people with
impunity. Gone from public memory are the destruction
of Palestinian society in 1948 and the creation of a
dispossessed people; the conquest of the West Bank and
Gaza and their military occupation since 1967; the
invasion of 1982 with its 17,500 Lebanese and
Palestinian dead and the Sabra and Shatila massacres;
the continuous assault on Palestinian schools, refugee
camps, hospitals, civil installations of every kind.
What anti-terrorist purpose is served by destroying the
building and then removing the records of the Ministry
of Education, the Ramallah Municipality, the Central
Bureau of Statistics, various institutes specialising
in civil rights, health and economic development,
hospitals, radio and television stations? Is it not
clear that Sharon is bent not only on "breaking" the
Palestinians, but on trying to eliminate them as a
people with national institutions?

In such a context of disparity and asymmetrical power,
it seems deranged to keep asking the Palestinians, who
have neither army, nor air force, nor tanks, nor
defences of any kind, nor functioning leadership, to
"renounce" violence, and to require no comparable
limitation on Israel's actions. Even the matter of
suicide bombers, which I have always opposed, cannot be
examined from a view point that permits a hidden racist
standard to value Israeli lives over the many more
Palestinian lives that have been lost, maimed,
distorted and foreshortened by long- standing Israeli
military occupation, and the systematic barbarity
openly used by Sharon against Palestinians from the
beginning of his career in the 1950s until now.

There can be no conceivable peace, in my opinion, that
does not tackle the real issue: Israel's utter refusal
to accept the sovereign existence of a Palestinian
people that is entitled to rights over what Sharon and
most of the people supporting him consider exclusively
to be the land of Greater Israel, i.e. the West Bank
and Gaza. A profile of Sharon in the 6-7 April issue of
the Financial Times concluded with this extremely
telling extract from his autobiography, which the FT
prefaced with "he has written with pride of his
parents' belief that Jews and Arabs could live side by
side." Then the relevant quote from Sharon's book: "But
they believed without question that only they had
rights over the land. And no one was going to force
them out, regardless of terror or anything else. When
the land belongs to you physically... that is when you
have power, not just physical power but spiritual
power."

In l988, the PLO made the concession that the partition
of historical Palestine into two states would be
acceptable. This was reaffirmed on numerous occasions
and certainly again in the Oslo documents. But only the
Palestinians explicitly recognised the notion of
partition. Israel never has. This is why there are now
over 170 settlements on Palestinian lands, why a 300-
mile network of roads connecting them to each other and
totally impeding Palestinian movement exists (according
to Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House
Demolition, it has cost $3 billion and has been funded
by the US), why no Israeli prime minister, from Rabin
on, has ever conceded any real Palestinian sovereignty
to the Palestinians, and why of course the settlements
have increased on an annual basis. The merest glance at
a recent map of the territories reveals what Israel has
been doing throughout the peace process, and what the
consequent geographical discontinuity and shrinkage in
Palestinian life has been. In effect, then, Israel
considers itself and the Jewish people to own the land
of Israel in its entirety: there are land ownership
laws in Israel itself guaranteeing this, but on the
West Bank and Gaza the network of settlements, roads,
and no concessions whatever on sovereign land rights to
the Palestinians serve the same function.

What boggles the mind is that no official -- US,
Palestinian, Arab, UN, European, or anyone else -- has
challenged Israel on this point, which has been
threaded through all of the Oslo documents, procedures
and agreements. That is why, of course, after nearly 10
years of "peace negotiations," Israel still controls
the West Bank and Gaza. They are more directly
controlled (owned?) by over 1,000 Israeli tanks and
thousands of soldiers today, but the underlying
principle is the same. No Israeli leader (and certainly
not Sharon and his Land of Israel supporters who are
the majority in his government) has either officially
recognised the occupied territories as occupied
territories or gone on to recognise that Palestinians
could or might theoretically have sovereign rights --
that is, without Israeli control over borders, water,
air, security on what most of the world considers
Palestinian land. So to speak about the "vision" of a
Palestinian state, as has become fashionable, is mere
vision alas, unless the question of land ownership and
sovereignty is openly and officially conceded by the
Israeli government. No Israeli government ever has made
this concession and, if I am right, none will in the
near future. It needs to be remembered that Israel is
the only state in the world today that has never had
internationally declared borders; the only state not
the state of its citizens but of the whole Jewish
people; the only state where over 90 per cent of the
land is held in trust for the exclusive use of the
Jewish people. That it is also the only state in the
world never to have recognised any of the main
provisions of international law (as argued recently in
these pages by Richard Falk) suggests the depth and
structural knottiness of the absolute rejectionism that
Palestinians have had to face.

This is why I have been sceptical about discussions and
meetings about peace, which is a lovely word but in the
present context simply means that Palestinians will
have to stop resisting Israeli control over their land.
It is among the many deficiencies of Arafat's terrible
leadership (to say nothing of the even more lamentable
Arab leaders in general) that he never made the decade-
long Oslo negotiations focus on land ownership, and
thus never put the onus on Israel to declare itself
constitutively willing to give up title to Palestinian
land; nor did he ever ask that Israel be required to
deal with any of its responsibility for the sufferings
of his people. Now I worry that he may simply be trying
to save himself again, whereas what we really need are
international monitors to protect us, as well as
elections to assure a real political future for the
Palestinian people.

The profound question facing Israel and its people is
this: is it willing juridically to assume the rights
and obligations of being a country like any other, and
forswear the kind of impossible land ownership
assertions for which Sharon and his parents and his
soldiers have been fighting since day one? In 1948
Palestinians lost 78 per cent of Palestine. In 1967
they lost the last 22 per cent, both times to Israel.
Now the international community must lay upon Israel
the obligation to accept the principle of real, as
opposed to fictional, partition, and to accept the
principle of limiting Israel's untenable extra-
territorial claims, those absurd Biblically-based
pretensions, and laws that have so far allowed it to
override another people completely. Why is that kind of
fundamentalism tolerated unquestioningly? But so far
all we hear is that Palestinians must give up violence
and condemn terror. Is nothing substantive ever
demanded of Israel? Can it go on doing what it has
without a thought for the consequences? That is the
real question of its existence: whether it can exist as
a state like all others, or must always be above the
constraints and duties of all other states in the world
today. The record is not reassuring.

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