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| Crisis for American Jews |
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| Saturday, May 18 2002 @ 02:12 AM GMT |
By Edward Said
A few weeks ago, a vociferous pro-Israel demonstration was held in
Washington at roughly the same moment that the siege of Jenin was
taking place.
All of the speakers were prominent public figures, including several
senators, leaders of major Jewish organisations, and other
celebrities, each of whom expressed unfailing solidarity with
everything Israel was doing.
The administration was represented by Paul Wolfowitz, number two at
the Department of Defence, an extreme right-wing hawk who has been
speaking about "ending" countries like Iraq ever since last September.
Also known as a rigorous hard- line supporter of Israel, in his speech
he did what everyone else did -- celebrated Israel and expressed total
unconditional support for it -- but unexpectedly referred in passing
to "the sufferings of the Palestinians." Because of that phrase, he
was booed so loudly and so long that he was unable to continue his
speech, leaving the platform in a kind of disgrace.
The moral of this incident is that public American Jewish support for
Israel today simply does not tolerate any allowance for the existence
of an actual Palestinian people, except in the context of terrorism,
violence, evil and fanaticism. Moreover, this refusal to see, much
less hear anything about, the existence of "another side" far exceeds
the fanaticism of anti-Arab sentiment among Israelis, who are of
course on the front line of the struggle in Palestine. To judge by the
recent antiwar demonstration of 60,000 people in Tel Aviv, the
increasing number of military reservists who refuse service in the
occupied territories, the sustained protest of (admitted only a few)
intellectuals and groups, and some of the polls that show a majority
of Israelis willing to withdraw in return for peace with the
Palestinians, there is at least a dynamic of political activity among
Israeli Jews. But not so in the United States.
Two weeks ago the weekly magazine New York, which has a circulation of
about a million copies, ran a dossier entitled "Crisis for American
Jews," the theme being that "in New York, as in Israel, [it is] an
issue of survival." I won't try to summarise the main points of this
extraordinary claim except to say that it painted such a picture of
anguish about "what is most precious in my life, the state of Israel,"
according to one of the prominent New Yorkers quoted in the magazine,
that you would think that the existence of this most prosperous and
powerful of all minorities in the United States was actually being
threatened. One of the other people quoted even went as far as to
suggest that American Jews are on the brink of a second holocaust.
Certainly, as the author of one of the articles said, most American
Jews support what Israel did on the West Bank, enthusiastically; one
American Jew said, for instance, that his son is now in the Israeli
army and that he is "armed, dangerous and killing as many Palestinians
as possible."
Guilt at being well-off in America plays a role in this kind of
delusional thinking, but mostly it is the result of an extraordinary
self-isolation in fantasy and myth that comes from education and
unreflective nationalism of a kind unique in the world. Ever since the
Intifada broke out almost two years ago, the American media and the
major Jewish organisations have been running all kinds of attacks on
Islamic education in the Arab world, Pakistan and even in the US.
These have accused Islamic authorities, as well as Arafat's
Palestinian Authority, of teaching youngsters hatred of America and
Israel, the virtues of suicide bombing, unlimited praise for jihad.
Little has been said, however, of the results of what American Jews
have been taught about the conflict in Palestine: that it was given to
Jews by God, that it was empty, that it was liberated from Britain,
that the natives ran away because their leaders told them to, that in
effect the Palestinians don't exist except recently as terrorists,
that all Arabs are anti-Semitic and want to kill Jews.
Nowhere in all this incitement to hatred does the reality of a
Palestinian people exist, and more to the point, there is no
connection made between Palestinian animosity and enmity towards
Israel and what Israel has been doing to Palestinians since 1948. It's
as if an entire history of dispossession, the destruction of a
society, the 35 year old occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, to say
nothing of massacres, bombardments, expulsions, land expropriations,
killings, sieges, humiliations, years of collective punishment and
assassinations that have gone on for decades were as nothing, since
Israel has been victimised by Palestinian rage, hostility and
gratuitous anti-semitism. It simply does not occur to most American
supporters of Israel to see Israel as the actual author of specific
actions done in the name of the Jewish people by the Jewish state, and
to connect in consequence those actions to Palestinian feelings of
anger and revenge.
The problem at bottom is that as human beings the Palestinians do not
exist, that is, as human beings with history, traditions, society,
sufferings and ambitions like all other people. Why this should be so
for most but by no means all American Jewish supporters of Israel is
something worth looking into. It goes back to the knowledge that there
was an indigenous people in Palestine -- all the Zionist leaders knew
it and spoke about it -- but the fact as a fact that might prevent
colonisation could never be admitted. Hence the collective Zionist
practice of either denying the fact or, more specially in the US where
the realities are not so available for actual verification, lying
about it by producing a counter-reality. For decades it has been
decreed to schoolchildren there were no Palestinians when the Zionist
pioneers arrived and so those miscellaneous people who throw stones
and fight occupation are simply a collection of terrorists who deserve
killing. Palestinians, in short, do not deserve anything like a
narrative or collective actuality, and so they must be transmuted and
dissolved into essentially negative images. This is entirely the
result of a distorted education, doled out to millions of youngsters
who grow up without any awareness at all that the Palestinian people
have been totally dehumanised to serve a political- ideological end,
namely to keep support high for Israel.
What is so astonishing is that notions of co- existence between
peoples play no part in this kind of distortion. Whereas American Jews
want to be recognised as Jews and Americans in America, they are
unwilling to accord a similar status as Arabs and Palestinians to
another people that has been oppressed by Israel since the beginning.
Only if one were to live in the US for years would one be aware of the
depth of the problem which far transcends ordinary politics. The
intellectual suppression of the Palestinians that has occurred because
of Zionist education has produced an unreflecting, dangerously skewed
sense of reality in which whatever Israel does it does as a victim:
according to the various articles I have mentioned above, American
Jews in crisis by extension therefore feel the same thing as the most
right-wing of Israeli Jews, that they are at risk and their survival
is at stake. This has nothing to do with reality obviously enough, but
rather with a kind of hallucinatory state that overrides history and
facts with a supremely unthinking narcissism. A recent defence of what
Wolfowitz said in his speech didn't even refer to the Palestinians he
was referring to, but defended President Bush's Middle East policy.
This is de-humanisation on a vast scale, and it is made even worse,
one has to say, by the suicide bombings that have so disfigured and
debased the Palestinian struggle. All liberation movements in history
have affirmed that their struggle is about life, not about death. Why
should ours be an exception? The sooner we educate our Zionist enemies
and show that our resistance offers co-existence and peace, the less
likely will they be able to kill us at will, and never refer to us
except as terrorists. I am not saying that Sharon and Netanyahu can be
changed. I am saying that there is a Palestinian, yes a Palestinian
constituency, as well as an Israeli and American one that needs to be
reminded by strategy and tactics that force of arms and tanks and
human bombs and bulldozers are not a solution, but only create more
delusion and distortion, on both sides.
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