From Oslo To Iraq And The Road Map Part 1

From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map.

Edward W. Said.

FOREWORD.

When Edward Said died in September 2003, after a decade-long battle against leukemia, he was probably the best-known intellectual in the world. Orientalism, his controversial account of the appropriation of the East in modern European thought and literature, has sp.a.w.ned an academic subdiscipline in its own right: a quarter of a century after its first publication it continues to generate irritation, veneration, and imitation. Even if its author had done nothing else, confining himself to teaching at Columbia University in New York-where he was employed from 1963 until his death-he would still have been one of the most influential scholars of the late twentieth century.

But he did not confine himself. From 1967, and with mounting urgency and pa.s.sion as the years pa.s.sed, Edward Said was also an eloquent, ubiquitous commentator on the crisis in the Middle East and an advocate for the cause of the Palestinians. This moral and political engagement was not really a displacement of Said's intellectual attention-his critique of the West's failure to understand Palestinian humiliation closely echoes, after all, his reading of nineteenth-century scholars.h.i.+p and fiction in Orientalism and subsequent books (notably Culture and Imperialism, published in 1993). But it transformed the professor of comparative literature at Columbia into a very public intellectual, adored or execrated with equal intensity by many millions of readers.

This was an ironic fate for a man who fitted almost none of the moulds to which his admirers and enemies so confidently a.s.signed him. Edward Said lived all his life at a tangent to the various causes with which he was a.s.sociated. The involuntary "spokesman" for the overwhelmingly Moslem Arabs of Palestine was an Episcopalian Christian, born in 1935 to a Baptist from Nazareth. The uncompromising critic of imperial condescension was educated in some of the last of the colonial schools that had trained the indigenous elite of the European Empires; for many years he was more at ease in English and French than in Arabic and an outstanding exemplar of a Western education with which he could never fully identify.

Edward Said was the idolized hero of a generation of cultural relativists in universities from Berkeley to Bombay, for whom "orientalism" underwrote everything from career-building exercises in "post-colonial" obscurantism ("writing the other") to denunciations of "Western Culture" in the academic curriculum. But Said himself had no time for such nonsense. Radical anti-foundationalism, the notion that everything is just a linguistic effect, struck him as shallow and "facile": human rights, as he observed on more than one occasion, "are not cultural or grammatical things, and when violated they are as real as anything we can encounter."1 As for the popular account of his thought which has Edward Said reading (Western) writers as mere by-products of colonial privilege, he was quite explicit: "I do not believe that authors are mechanistically determined by ideology, cla.s.s, or economic history." Indeed, when it came to the business of reading and writing Said was an unabashedly traditional humanist, "despite the scornful dismissal of the term by sophisticated post-modern critics."2 If there was anything that depressed him about younger literary scholars it was their over familiarity with "theory" at the expense of the art of close textual reading. Moreover, he enjoyed intellectual disagreement, seeing the toleration of dissent and even discord within the scholarly community as the necessary condition for the latter's survival-my own expressed doubts about the core thesis of Orientalism were no impediment to our friends.h.i.+p. This was a stance that many of his admirers from afar, for whom academic freedom is at best a contingent value, were at a loss to comprehend.

This same, deeply felt humanistic impulse put Edward Said at odds with another occasional tic of engaged intellectuals, the enthusiastic endors.e.m.e.nt of violence-usually at a safe distance and always at someone else's expense. The "Professor of Terror," as his enemies were wont to characterize Said, was in fact a consistent critic of political violence in all its forms. Unlike Jean-Paul Sartre, a comparably influential intellectual for the previous generation, Said had some firsthand experience of physical force-his university office was vandalized and sacked, and both he and his family received death threats. But whereas Sartre did not hesitate to advocate political murder as both efficacious and cleansing, Said never identified with terrorism, however much he sympathized with the motives and sentiments that drove it. The weak, he wrote, should use means that render their oppressors uncomfortable-something that indiscriminate murder of civilians can never achieve.3 The reason for this was not that Edward Said was placid or a pacifist, much less someone lacking in strong commitments. Notwithstanding his professional success, his pa.s.sion for music (he was an accomplished pianist, a close friend and sometime collaborator of Daniel Barenboim), and his gift for friends.h.i.+p, he was in certain ways a deeply angry man-as the essays in this book frequently suggest. But despite his identification with the Palestinian cause and his inexhaustible efforts to promote and explain it, Said quite lacked the sort of un-interrogated affiliation to a country or an idea that allows the activist or the ideologue to subsume any means to a single end.

Instead he was, as I suggested, always at a slight tangent to his affinities. In this age of displaced persons he was not even a typical exile, since most men and women forced to leave their country in our time have a place to which they can look back (or forward): a remembered-more often mis-remembered-homeland that anchors the transported individual or community in time if not in s.p.a.ce. Palestinians don't even have this. There never was a formally-const.i.tuted Palestine, and Palestinian ident.i.ty thus lacks that conventional anterior reference.

In consequence, as Said tellingly observed just a few months before his death, "I still have not been able to understand what it means to love a country." That, of course, is the characteristic condition of the rootless cosmopolitan. It is not very comfortable or safe to be without a country to love: it can bring down upon your head the anxious hostility of those for whom such rootlessness suggests a corrosive independence of spirit. But it is liberating: the world you look out upon may not be as rea.s.suring as the vista enjoyed by patriots and nationalists, but you see further. As Said wrote in 1993, "I have no patience with the position that 'we' should only or mainly be concerned with what is 'ours.' "4 This is the authentic voice of the independent critic, speaking the truth to power . . . and supplying a dissenting voice in conflicts with authority: as Said wrote in Al-Ahram in May 2001, "whether Israeli intellectuals have failed or not in their mission is not for us to decide. What concerns us is the shabby state of discourse and a.n.a.lysis in the Arab world." It is also the voice of the free-standing "New York intellectual," a species now fast approaching extinction-thanks in large measure to the same Middle Eastern conflict in which so many have opted to take up sides and identify with "us" and "ours."5 Edward Said, as the reader of these essays will discover, was by no means a conventional "spokesman" for one party in that conflict.

The Munich daily Die Sddeutscher Zeitung headed its obituary of Said: Der Unbequeme, "the Uncomfortable Man." But if anything his lasting achievement was to make others uncomfortable. For the Palestinians Edward Said was an under-appreciated and frequently irritating Ca.s.sandra, berating their leaders for incompetence-and worse. To his critics Said was a lightning rod, attracting fear and vituperation. Implausibly, this witty and cultivated man was cast as the very devil: the corporeal incarnation of every threat-real or imagined-to Israel and Jews alike. To an American Jewish community suffused with symbols of victimhood he was a provocatively articulate remembrancer of Israel's very own victims. And by his mere presence here in New York, Edward Said was an ironic, cosmopolitan, Arab reminder of the parochialism of his critics.

The essays in this book cover the period December 2000 through July 2003. They thus take us from end of the Oslo decade, the onset of the second intifada and the final breakdown of the "peace process," through the Israeli re-occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the ma.s.sacres of September 11, 2001, the American retaliation in Afghanistan and the long run-up to the U.S. attack on Iraq-a distinctly turbulent and murderous thirty-two months. During this time Edward Said wrote copiously and urgently about the alarming state of affairs in the Middle East, contributing at least one article a month, often more, despite his worsening medical condition (to which there is no reference in these writings until August 2002, and then only a casual, pa.s.sing allusion).

All but one of the pieces collected here were contributed to an Arab-language outlet, the Cairo newspaper Al-Ahram. These writings are thus an opportunity for Edward Said's Western readers to see what he had to say to an Arab audience. What they show is that Said in his final years was consistently pursuing three themes: the urgent need to tell the world (above all Americans) the truth about Israel's treatment of the Palestinians; the parallel urgency of getting Palestinians and other Arabs to recognize and accept the reality of Israel and engage with Israelis, especially the Israeli opposition; and the duty to speak openly about the failings of Arab leaders.h.i.+p.

Indeed, Said was above all concerned with addressing and excoriating his fellow Arabs. It is the ruling Arab regimes, especially that of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, who come in for the strongest criticism here: for their cupidity, their corruption, their malevolence and incredulity. This may seem almost unfair-it is, after all, the United States that has effective power, and Israel that was and is wreaking havoc among Edward Said's fellow Palestinians-but Said seems to have felt it important to tell the truth to and about his own people, rather than risk indulging "the fawning elasticity with regard to one's own side that has disfigured the history of intellectuals since time immemorial" (December 2000).

In the course of these essays Said recounts checklists of Israeli abuses (see e.g., "Palestinians Under Siege" in December 2000; "Slow Death: Punishment by Detail" in August 2002; or "A Monument to Hypocrisy" in February 2003), a grim, depressing reminder of how Ariel Sharon's government is squeezing the lifeblood from the quarantined Palestinian communities: abuses against civilians that were once regarded as criminal acts even in wartime are now accepted behavior by a government ostensibly at peace. But in Edward Said's account these abuses are not the accidental, unfortunate by-product of the return to power of a belligerent, irredentist general, but rather the predictable-and in Said's case, predicted-consequence of the Palestinians' engagement in the late, unlamented "peace process" itself.

For those of us who welcomed the Oslo process and watched hopefully as it developed over the course of the nineties, Said's disenchanted critique is depressing. But in retrospect it is difficult to deny that he got it right and we were wrong. As imagined by the Israeli peace party and welcomed by many others-Palestinians included-the Oslo process was supposed to build confidence and trust between the two sides. Contentious issues-the governance of Jerusalem, the right of return for Palestinian refugees, the problem of the Jewish settlements-would be dealt with "later," in "final status negotiations." Meanwhile the PLO would gain experience and credibility in the administration of autonomous Palestinian territory, and Israelis would live in peace. Eventually, two states-one Jewish, one Palestinian-would live in stable proximity, their security underwritten by the international community.

This was the premise behind the Declaration of Principles signed on the White House Lawn in September 1993. But the whole thing was deeply flawed. As Said reminds us, there were not two "sides" to these negotiations: there was Israel, an established modern state with an awesome military apparatus (by some estimates the fourth strongest in the world today), occupying land and people seized thirty years earlier in war. And there were the Palestinians, a dispersed, displaced, disinherited community with neither an army nor a territory of its own. There was an occupier and there were the occupied. In Said's view, the only leverage that the Palestinians had was their annoying facticity: they were there, they wouldn't go away, and they wouldn't let the Israelis forget what they had done to them.

Having nothing to give up, the Palestinians had nothing to negotiate. To "deal" with the occupier, after all, is to surrender-or collaborate. That is why Said described the 1993 Declaration as "a Palestinian Versailles"6 and why he resigned in antic.i.p.ation from the Palestinian National Council. If the Israelis needed something from the Palestinians, Said reasoned, then the things that the Palestinians wanted-full sovereignty, a return to 1967 frontiers, the "right of return," a share of Jerusalem-should be on the table at the outset, not at some undetermined final stage. And then there was the question of Israel's "good faith."

When the initial Declaration was signed in 1993 there were just 32,750 Jewish housing units in settlements on the West Bank and in Gaza. By October 2001 there were 53,121-a 62 percent increase, with more to come. From 1992 to 1996, under the Labor governments of Yitzhak Rabin and s.h.i.+mon Peres, the settler population of the West Bank grew by 48 percent, that of Gaza by 61 percent. To put it no stronger, this steady Israeli takeover of Palestinian land and resources hardly conformed to the spirit of the Oslo Declaration, whose Article 31 (Clause 7) explicitly states that "Neither side shall initiate or take any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending the outcome of the permanent status negotiations."

Meanwhile, even as the PLO was authorized to administer the remaining Palestinian districts, Israel was constructing a network of "Jewish" roads crisscrossing those same regions and giving settlers and other Israelis exclusive access to far-flung housing units (and scarce aquifers) protected by permanent military installations.7 The whole exercise was driven forward partly by an anachronistic Israeli conflation of land with security; partly by a post-1967 irredentist eschatology (with the Old Testament invoked as a sort of real estate contract with a partisan G.o.d); and partly by longstanding Zionist enthusiasm for territorial enlargement as an end in itself. From the Palestinian point of view the effect was to make the Oslo process an agonizing exercise in slow strangulation, with Gaza in particular transformed into a virtual prison under Palestinian warders, the Israeli army standing guard just outside the perimeter fence.

And then, in the year 2000, came the long-postponed "permanent status negotiations" themselves: first at Camp David and then, desperately, at Taba in the Sinai. Edward Said, of course, had no time for the conventional American view that President Clinton and Prime Minister Ehud Barak virtually gave away the farm and that even then the ungrateful PLO and its leader Yasir Arafat refused the gift. This is not because Said had any sympathy for Arafat but because the original Camp David offer was-as Tanya Reinhart described it in the Israeli daily Yediot Aharanot on July 8, 2000-so palpably a "fraud." The Palestinians were to get 50 percent of their own land, chopped into separate and often noncontiguous cantons; Israel was to annex 10 percent of the land; and the remaining 40 percent was to be left "undecided"-but under indefinite Israeli rule.

Five months later, at Taba, the Palestinians were offered an improved territorial deal, certainly the best they could ever have hoped for from an Israeli government. But the resulting Palestinian state would still have been utterly dependent on Israel and vulnerable to its whims; the grievances of Palestinian refugees were never fully addressed; and on the contentious issue of sovereignty over Jerusalem the Israelis would not budge. Indeed, even the last-minute Israeli concessions were still enc.u.mbered with what Said nicely terms "conditions and qualifications and entailments (like one of the endlessly deferred and physically un.o.btainable estates in a Jane Austen novel) . . ."

Meanwhile Barak had continued to expand the population of the very settlements that his own negotiators recognized as a major impediment to agreement. Even if the PLO leaders had wanted to sell the Taba agreements to their const.i.tuents, they might have had difficulty doing so: the second intifada that burst out following Sharon's meticulously timed visit to the Temple Mount has been a disaster for the Palestinians, but it was born out of years-the Oslo years-of frustration and humiliation. On these grounds, as well as for reasons of his own, Arafat instructed the Palestinians not to sign.

Taba, and especially Camp David, were the bitter fruits of Oslo, and in Edward Said's view the PLO's error in engaging the process in the first place was well ill.u.s.trated by its inevitable rejection of the outcome, retroactively discrediting the whole strategy of negotiations. In a June 2002 article, Said is scathingly unforgiving of the PLO apparatchiks and their leader, who for a while did rather well out of the power they exercised as the "Vichy-like" governors of occupied Palestine under Israel's benign oversight. They were and are "a byword for brutality, autocracy and unimaginable corruption" ("Palestinian Elections Now," Al-Ahram, June 1319, 2002).

In other contributions to the same newspaper Said writes that Arafat and his circle "have made our situation worse, much worse." "Palestinians (and by extension other Arabs) have been traduced and hopelessly misled by their leaders," who have neither high principles nor practical, pragmatic strategies. "It has been years since Arafat represented his people, their sufferings and cause, and like his other Arab counterparts, he hangs on like a much too-ripe fruit without real purpose or position" ("Arab Disunity and Factionalism," Al-Ahram, August 1521, 2002).

What, then, is to be done? If the Palestinian leaders.h.i.+p is corrupt and incompetent; if Israeli governments won't even keep faith with their own stated commitments, much less the desires of their interlocutors; if there is so much fear and loathing on all sides, how should the two-state solution be implemented, now that Israelis, Palestinians and the international community-even the Americans-all at last accept it in principle? Here, once again, Edward Said was at odds with almost everyone.

In 1980, when he first publicly pressed for a two-state solution, Said was attacked and abused from all sides, not least by Arafat's own Al Fateh movement. Then, in 1988, the Palestinian National Council belatedly conceded that the best possible outcome was indeed the division of Palestine into two states-one Israeli, one Palestinian-echoing Said's insistence that there was no alternative to reciprocal territorial self-determination for Jews and Arabs alike.8 But as the years went by, with half of the occupied territories expropriated; with the Palestinian community in shambles and the putative Palestinian territory a blighted landscape of isolated enclaves, flattened olive groves and ruined houses, where humiliated adults were fast losing the initiative to angry, alienated adolescents, Said drew the increasingly irresistible conclusion.

Israel was never going to quit the West Bank, at least not in any way that would leave it in a coherent, governable condition. What kind of a state could the West Bank and Gaza ever const.i.tute? Who but a criminal mafia would ever want to take on the task of "governing" it? The "Palestine" of PLO imaginings was a fantasy-and a rather unappealing one at that. For good or ill there was only going to be one real state in the lands of historic Palestine: Israel. This was not utopia; it was merely hard-headed pragmatism shorn of illusion. The genuinely realistic approach lay in accepting this fact and thinking seriously about how to make the best of it. "Much more important than having a state is the kind of state it is."9 For the last decade of his life Edward Said was an unbending advocate of a single, secular state for Israelis and Palestinians.

What grounds did Edward Said have for his faith in a single-state solution, a non-exclusive, secular, democratic alternative to the present impa.s.se? In the first place, the status quo is awful and getting worse: two peoples, each sustained by its exclusive victim narrative, competing indefinitely across the dead bodies of their children for the same tiny piece of land. One of them is an armed state, the other a stateless people, but otherwise they are depressingly similar: what, after all, is the Palestinian national story if not a reproachful mirror to Zionism, a tale of expulsion, diaspora, resurrection, and return? There is no way to divide the disputed "homeland" to mutual satisfaction and benefit. Little good can come of two such statelets, mutually resentful, each with an influential domestic const.i.tuency committed to the destruction and absorption of its neighbor.

In the second place, something fundamental has changed in the Palestinian condition. For four decades millions of Palestinian Arabs-in Israel, in the occupied territories, in refugee camps across the Arab world and in exile everywhere-had been all but invisible. Their very existence was long denied by Israeli politicians; their memory of expulsion had been removed from the official record and pa.s.sed unmentioned in history books; the record of their homes, their villages, and their land was expunged from the very soil itself. That, as Said, noted, was why he kept on telling the same story: "There seems to be nothing in the world that sustains it; unless you go on telling it, it will just drop and disappear." And yet "it is very hard to espouse for five decades, a continually losing cause." It was as though Palestinians had no existence except when someone committed a terrorist atrocity-at which point that is all they were, their provenance uncertain, their violence inexplicable. 10 That is why the "right of return" had so central a place in all Palestinian demands-not because any serious person supposed that Israel could take "back" millions of refugees and their descendants, but from the deeply felt need for acknowledgement: a recognition that the initial expulsion took place, that a primordial wrong was committed. That is what so annoyed Said about Oslo: it seemed to excuse or forgive the Israelis for the occupation and everything else. But "Israel cannot be excused and allowed to walk away from the table with not even a rhetorical demand [my emphasis] that it needs to atone for what it did." ("What Price Oslo?" Al-Ahram, March 1420, 2002). Attention must be paid.

But attention, of course, is now being paid. An overwhelming majority of world opinion outside of the United States sees the Palestinian tragedy today much as the Palestinians themselves see it. They are the natives of Israel, an indigenous community excluded from nationhood in its own homeland: dispossessed and expelled, illegally expropriated, confined to "Bantustans," denied many fundamental rights and exposed on a daily basis to injustice and violence. Today there is no longer the slightest pretence by well-informed Israelis that the Arabs left in 1948 of their own free will or at the behest of foreign despots, as we were once taught. Benny Morris, one of the leading Israeli scholars on the subject, recently reminded readers of the Israeli daily newspaper Ha'aretz that Israeli soldiers did not merely expel Palestinians in 194849, in an early, incomplete attempt at ethnic cleansing; they committed war crimes along the way, including the rape and murder of women and children.11 Of course Morris notoriously sees nothing wrong in this record-he treats it as the collateral damage that accompanies state building.12 But this brings us to the third ground for thinking Said may be right about the chances for a single state. Just as the Palestinian cause has begun to find favor in public opinion, and is gaining the moral upper hand, so Israel's international standing has precipitately collapsed. For many years the insuperable problem for Palestinians was that they were being expelled, colonized, occupied, and generally mistreated not by French colons or Dutch Afrikaners but, in Edward Said's words, by "the Jewish citizens of Israel, remnants of the n.a.z.i Holocaust, with a tragic history of genocide and persecution."

The victim of victims is in an impossible situation-not made any better, as Said pointed out, by the Arab propensity to squeeze out from under the shadow of the Holocaust by minimizing or even denying it.13 But when it comes to mistreating others even victims don't get a free pa.s.s for ever. The charge that Poles often persecuted Jews before, during, and after World War II can no longer be satisfactorily deflected by invoking Hitler's three million Polish victims. Mutatis mutandis, the same now applies to Israel. Until the military victory of 1967, and even for some years afterwards, the dominant international image of Israel was the one presented by its left-Zionist founders and their many admirers in Europe and elsewhere: a courageous little country surrounded by enemies, where the desert had been made to bloom and the indigenous population air-brushed from the picture.

Following the invasion of Lebanon, and with gathering intensity since the first intifada of the late 1980s, the public impression of Israel has steadily darkened. Today it presents a ghastly image: a place where sneering eighteen-year-olds with M16 carbines taunt helpless old men ("security measures"); where bulldozers regularly flatten whole apartment blocks ("collective punishment"); where helicopters fire rockets into residential streets ("targeted a.s.sa.s.sination"); where subsidized settlers frolic in gra.s.s-fringed swimming pools, oblivious of Arab children a few meters away who fester and rot in the worst slums on the planet; and where retired generals and cabinet ministers speak openly of bottling up the Palestinians "like drugged roaches in a bottle" (Rafael Eytan) and cleansing the land of its Arab cancer.14 Israel is utterly dependant on the United States for money, arms, and diplomatic support. One or two states share common enemies with Israel; a handful of countries buy its weapons; a few others are its de facto accomplices in ignoring international treaties and secretly manufacturing nuclear weapons. But outside Was.h.i.+ngton, Israel has no friends- at the United Nations it cannot even count on the support of America's staunchest allies. Despite the political and diplomatic incompetence of the PLO (well doc.u.mented in Said's writings); despite the manifest shortcomings of the Arab world at large-"lingering outside the main march of humanity";15 despite Israel's own sophisticated efforts to publicize its case, the Jewish state today is widely regarded as a- the-leading threat to world peace. After thirty-seven years of military occupation, Israel has gained nothing in security; it has lost everything in domestic civility and international respectability; and it has forfeited the moral high ground forever.

The newfound acknowledgement of the Palestinians' claims and the steady discrediting of the Zionist project (not least among many profoundly troubled Israelis) might seem to make it harder rather than easier to envisage Jews and Arabs living harmoniously in a single state. And just as a minority of Palestinians may always resent their Jewish neighbors, there is a risk that some Israelis will never, as it were, forgive the Palestinians for what the Israelis have done to them. But as Said understood, the Palestinians' aggrieved sense of neglect and the Israelis' insistence on the moral rect.i.tude of their case were twin impediments to a resolution of their common dilemma. Neither side could, as it were, "see" the other. As Orwell observed in his "Notes on Nationalism," "If one harbors anywhere in one's mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, though in a sense known to be true, are inadmissible."

Today, in spite of everything, there is actually a better appreciation by some people on both sides of where-quite literally-the other is coming from. This, I think, arises from a growing awareness that Jews and Arabs occupy the same s.p.a.ce and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Their fates are hopelessly entangled. Fence or no fence, the territory now ruled by Israel can only be "cleansed" of its Arab (or its Jewish) residents by an act of force that the international community could not countenance. As Said notes, "historic Palestine" is now a lost cause-but so, for the same reasons, is "historic Israel." Somehow or other, a single inst.i.tutional ent.i.ty capable of accommodating and respecting both communities will have to emerge, though when and in what form is still obscure.

The real impediment to new thinking in the Middle East, in Edward Said's view, was not Arafat, or Sharon, nor even the suicide bombers or the ultras of the settlements. It was-and is-the United States. The one place where official Israeli propaganda has succeeded beyond measure, and where Palestinian propaganda has utterly failed, is in America. American Jews (rather like Arab politicians) live in "extraordinary self-isolation in fantasy and myth" ("Crisis for American Jews," May 2002). Many Israelis are terribly aware of what occupation of the West Bank has done to their own society (if somewhat less sensitive to its effect on others): "Rule over another nation corrupts and distorts Israel's qualities, tears the nation apart, and shatters society" (Haim Guri).16 But most Americans, including virtually every American politician, have no sense of any of this.

That is why Edward Said insists in these essays upon the need for Palestinians to bring their case to the American public rather than just, as he puts it, imploring the American president to "give" them a state. American public opinion matters, and Said despaired of the uninformed anti-Americanism of Arab intellectuals and students: "It is not acceptable to sit in Beirut or Cairo meeting halls and denounce American imperialism (or Zionist colonialism for that matter) without a whit of understanding that these are complex societies not always truly represented by their governments' stupid or cruel policies." But as an American he was frustrated above all at his own country's political myopia: only America can break the murderous deadlock in the Middle East, but "what the U.S. refuses to see clearly it can hardly hope to remedy."17 Whether the United States will awaken to its responsibilities and opportunities remains unclear. In view of the green light given to Ariel Sharon by President Bush in April 2004 to retain occupied land on the West Bank and ignore international laws and boundaries, there is little ground for optimism. In any event, we in the United States must engage a debate about Israel and the Palestinians that many people would prefer to avoid, even at the cost of isolating America-with Israel-from the rest of the world. In order to be effective, this debate has to happen in America itself, and it must be conducted by Americans. That is why Edward Said was so singularly important. Over three decades, virtually single-handed, he wedged open a conversation in America about Israel, Palestine, and the Palestinians. In so doing he performed an inestimable public service at considerable personal risk. His death opens a yawning void in American public life. He is irreplaceable.

Tony Judt.

March 2004.

PART ONE.

The Second Intifada Begins, Clinton's Failure.

CHAPTER ONE.

Palestinians Under Siege.

Since September 29, 2000, the day after Ariel Sharon, guarded by about a thousand Israeli police and/or soldiers, visited Jerusalem's Haram al-Sharif (the n.o.ble Sanctuary) in a gesture designed explicitly to a.s.sert his right as an Israeli to visit the Muslim holy place, a conflagration has erupted that continues as I write in mid-November. Sharon himself is unrepentant, blaming the Palestinian Authority for "deliberate incitement" against Israel "as a strong democracy" whose "Jewish and democratic character" the Palestinians wish to change. He says that he went there "to inspect and ascertain that freedom of wors.h.i.+p and free access to the Temple Mount is granted to everyone," although he mentions neither the huge swarm of guards he took with him nor that the area was sealed off before, during, and after his visit, which scarcely a.s.sures freedom of access (Wall Street Journal, October 4, 2000). He also neglects to say that on the twenty-ninth the Israeli army shot eight Palestinians dead, or that Israel unilaterally annexed East Jerusalem in June 1967 and that it is therefore under military occupation, which according to international law its natives are ent.i.tled to resist by any means possible: it was this truth that triggered the new intifada. Besides, the Temple Mount is supposed by archaeologists to lie beneath two of the oldest and greatest Muslim shrines in the world going back a millennium and a half, a convergence of religious topoi that it would take more than a heavy-booted visit by a notoriously brutal and right-wing Israeli general with Palestinian blood on his hands from, among other ma.s.sacres that began during the 1950s, Sabra, Shatila, Qibya, and Gaza, to sort out.

The Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees says that as of November 7, 170 people have been killed, 6,000 wounded: this does not include 14 Israeli deaths (8 of them soldiers) and a slightly larger number of wounded. (A few days later the figure for the dead climbed to over 200.) The earlier figures come from the Israeli organization B'tselem. The Palestinian deaths include at least 22 boys under the age of fifteen and, says B'tselem, 13 Palestinian citizens of Israel who were killed by the Israeli police in demonstrations inside Israel. Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have issued reports sternly upbraiding Israel for the disproportionate use of force against civilians and, according to Phil Reeves in the Independent (November 12, 2000), Amnesty has published another report condemning Israel for hara.s.sment, torture, and illegal arrests of Arab children in Israel and Jerusalem. Gideon Levy in Ha'aretz (November 12) notes with alarm that most of the handful of Arab Knesset members have been punished for their vociferous objections to Israel's policy toward Palestinians; some have been relieved of committee a.s.signments, others are facing trial, still others are undergoing police interrogation, all this, he concludes, as part of "the process of demonization and delegitimization being conducted against the Palestinians," inside Israel as well as in the Occupied Territories.

Normal life (the phrase is somewhat oxymoronic) for Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank and in the Gaza Strip has disappeared. Even those three hundred or so privileged Palestinians with peace process designated VIP status have lost that status, and like the rest of the approximately 3 million people who endure the double burden of life under the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli occupation regime-to say nothing of the brutality of thousands of Israeli settlers, some of whom turn into the rampaging vigilantes terrorizing Palestinian villages and large towns like Hebron-they are subject to the closures, encirclements, and barricaded roads that impede all movement for them. Yasir Arafat himself is not immune from the indignity of having to ask permission to leave or enter the West Bank or Gaza, where his airport is opened and closed summarily by the Israelis and his headquarters have been bombed punitively by Israeli missiles fired from helicopter guns.h.i.+ps. As for the flow of goods into and out of the territories, to say nothing of workers, ordinary travelers, tourists, students, the aged, and the sick: they have been immobilized or, to put it more concretely, imprisoned. According to the UN Special Coordinator's Office in the Occupied Territories, Palestinian trade with Israel accounts for 79.8 percent of total trade transactions; Jordan, which is next, accounts for 2.39 percent, a very low figure directly ascribable to Israel's control of the entire Palestine-Jordan frontier (in addition of course to the Syrian, Lebanese, and Egyptian borders). With Israel's closure, therefore, the Palestinian economy has lost three times the amount of money taken in from donor sources during the first six months of 2000; the losses average $19.5 million per day (Al-Hayat, November 9, 2000). For an impoverished and colonized population dependent on the Israeli economy-thanks to the economic agreements signed by the PLO under the Oslo accords-this is a severe hards.h.i.+p.

What hasn't slowed down is the rate of Israeli settlement-building, which under the supposedly pro-peace regime of Ehud Barak has increased by 96 percent over the past few years, according to the authoritative Report on Israeli Settlement in the Occupied Territories (RISOT). It adds, "1,924 settlement units have been started" since Barak took office in July 1999. This figure does not take into account the enormous and ongoing program of road-building, the constant expropriation of land that that requires, in addition to systematic deforestation, ravaging, and despoiling of Palestinian agricultural land undertaken both by the army and by the settlers. The Gaza-based Palestinian Committee on Human Rights has meticulously doc.u.mented the "sweepings" of olive groves and vegetable farms by the Israeli army (or, as it prefers to be known, Israeli Defense Force) near the Rafah border, for example, and on either side of the Gush Katif settlement block, which is part of the 20 percent of Gaza still occupied illegally by a few thousand settlers, who can water their lawns and fill their swimming pools while the million Palestinian inhabitants of the Strip (80 percent of them refugees from former Palestine) live in a parched water-free zone. In fact, Israel controls all the water supply of the Occupied Territories, uses 80 percent of it for the personal use of its Jewish citizens, rationing the rest for the Palestinian population: this issue was never seriously negotiated during the Oslo peace process.

What of the much-vaunted peace process itself? What have been its accomplishments, and why, if indeed it was a peace process, has the loss and the miserable condition of Palestinian life become so much greater than before the Oslo accords were signed in September 1993? And why is it, as William Orme Jr. of the New York Times noted on November 5, that "the Palestinian landscape is now decorated with the ruins of projects that were predicated on peaceful integration"? And what does it mean to speak of peace if Israeli troops and settlements still exist in such large numbers? Again, according to RISOT, 110,000 Jews lived in illegal settlements in Gaza and the West Bank before Oslo; the number has increased to 195,000 in 2000, a figure that doesn't include the over 150,000 Jews who have been added as residents to annexed (also illegally) Arab East Jerusalem. Has the world been deluded, or has the overwhelmingly preponderant rhetoric of "peace" been in essence a gigantic fraud?

The answer to these questions has been there all along, although either buried in reams of doc.u.ments signed by the two parties under American auspices, and therefore basically unread except for the small handful of people who negotiated them, or simply ignored by the media and the governments whose job it now appears was to press on with disastrous information, investment, and enforcement policies regardless of what horrors were taking place on the ground. A few people, myself included, have tried faithfully to chronicle what has been taking place from the initial Palestinian surrender at Oslo until the present, but in comparison with the mainstream media and the governments, not to mention huge funding agencies like the World Bank, the European Union, and many private foundations, Ford princ.i.p.ally, who have played along with the deception, our voices have had a negligible effect except, sadly, to prophesy what is now taking place. Such complicity and cruelty on such a scale would require the talents of a Swift to dissect.

In any case, the disturbances of the past few weeks have not been confined to Palestine and Israel. Not since 1967 has the Arab and Islamic world been as rocked by demonstrations and displays of anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiment as now. Angry street demonstrations are a daily occurrence in Cairo, Damascus, Casablanca, Tunis, Beirut, Baghdad, and Kuwait; literally millions of people have expressed their support of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, as it has been dubbed, as well as their outrage at the cringing submissiveness of their governments. The Arab summit in Cairo in October 2000 produced the usual ringing denunciations of Israel and a few more dollars for Arafat's Authority, but even the diplomatic minimum-the recall of amba.s.sadors-was not enacted. On the day after the summit, the American-educated Abdullah of Jordan, whose knowledge of the Arabic language is reported to have progressed to the secondary school level, flew off to Was.h.i.+ngton to sign a trade agreement with the United States, Israel's chief supporter. Hosni Mubarak of Egypt is too dependent on the $2 billion in annual U.S. aid for him so much as to demur at U.S. policy. Like the others, he needs the United States to protect him from his people far too much for him to oppose Clinton and his peacemaking team of former Israeli lobby officials. Meanwhile the sense of Arab anger, humiliation, and frustration continues to build up, whether because the regimes are so undemocratic and unpopular or because all the basic elements of human life-employment, income, nutrition, health, education, infrastructure, transportation, environment-have so fallen beneath tolerable limits that only appeals to Islam and generalized expressions of outrage will do, instead of a sense of citizens.h.i.+p and partic.i.p.atory democracy. This bodes ill for the future, the Arabs' as well as Israel's.

Popular wisdom in policy and foreign affairs circles during the last quarter century has had it that Palestine as a cause is essentially dead, that pan-Arabism is a mirage, and that the handful of mostly discredited and unpopular leaders of the Arab countries have seen the light, accepted Israel and the United States as partners, and in the process of shedding their Arab nationalism have settled for a modernizing, pragmatic, deregulated, and privatized globalization, whose early prophet was Anwar al-Sadat and whose influential drummer boy has been the New York Times columnist and Middle East expert Thomas Friedman. When this important commentator happened in late October to find himself trapped in Ramallah, besieged and bombed by the Israeli army, he suddenly woke up for the first time, in more than seven years of columns praising the Oslo peace process, to the fact that "Israeli propaganda that the Palestinians mostly rule themselves in the West Bank is fatuous nonsense. Sure, the Palestinians control their own towns, but the Israelis control all the roads connecting these towns and therefore all their movements. Israeli confiscation of Palestinian land for more settlements is going on to this day-seven years into Oslo." He concludes that only "a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank" can bring peace, but of course he neglects to say anything about what kind of state it would be, and about ending military occupation, which the Oslo doc.u.ments rather precisely also said nothing about (New York Times, October 31, 2000). Why he never discussed this in the hundreds of columns he wrote since September 1993, and why even now he doesn't say that Oslo's c.u.mulative logic has been to produce today's b.l.o.o.d.y results, defies common sense but is typical of the racism and hypocrisy of discourse on the subject.

In the meantime the Panglossian optimism of those who took it upon themselves to make sure that Palestinian misery was kept out of the news seems to have disappeared in a cloud of dust, including and above all the "peace" on which the United States and Israel have worked so hard to consolidate in their own narrow interests. Moreover, the old frameworks that survived the cold war have slowly crumbled as the Arab leaders.h.i.+ps have aged, without viable successors in sight. Egypt's Mubarak has refused even to appoint a vice-president, Arafat has no clear successor, and as in the case either of Iraq's and Syria's "democratic socialist" Ba'ath republics or Jordan's kingdom, the rulers' sons have taken or will take over with the merest fig leaf of legitimacy to cover their dynastic autocracy.

A turning point has been reached, however, and for this the Palestinian intifada is a significant marker. For not only is it an anticolonial rebellion of the kind that has been seen periodically in Setif, Sharpeville, Soweto, and elsewhere, it is also part of the general malaise against the new economic order that brought us the events of Seattle and Prague. And for most of the world's Muslims, its costly human sacrifices belong in the same columns as Sarajevo, Mogadishu, Baghdad under U.S.-led sanctions, and Chechnya. What must be clear to every ruler, including Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak, is that the period of stability guaranteed under the Israeli-U.S.local Arab regimes' dominance is now genuinely threatened by vast popular forces of uncertain magnitude, unknown direction, unclear vision. Business as usual, which had long meant increasing the distance between citizen and a controlling power felt to be either alien or a minority of some sort in order to enhance the fortunes of a tiny group of people, has been brought to a standstill for the time being. A rough beast whose hour has come around at last is struggling to be born in a shape that cannot now be accurately forecast. But that it will somehow belong to the unofficial culture of the dispossessed, the silenced, and the scorned, deferred or buried for several decades, seems like a strong likelihood, and that it will bear in itself the distortions of years of past official policy seems equally strong.

Ironically enough, it has been the actual geographical map of the peace process that most dramatically shows the kinds of distortions that have been building up while the measured discourse of peace and bilateral negotiations have systematically disguised the realities. Just as ironically, though, in literally none of the many dozens of news reports and television stories broadcast since the present crisis began has there been a map shown to indicate where and why the conflict has taken the exact form in which it has been unfolding. I think it is correct to say that most people hearing phrases such as "the parties are negotiating," and "let's get back to the negotiating table," and "you are my peace partner" have a.s.sumed that there is parity between Palestinians and Israelis who, thanks to the brave souls from each side who met secretly in Oslo, have been finally settling the questions that "divide" them, as if each side had a side, a piece of land, a territory from which to face the other. This is a seriously, indeed mischievously misleading mental picture, designed whether through inadvertence or continued propagandistic repet.i.tion to disguise the bizarre disproportion between the sides.

That this skewed picture is kept in place as a result of human effort, consider the following: citing an Anti-Defamation League survey of editorials published in the mainstream U.S. press, Ha'aretz on October 25 said that there was "a pattern of support for Israel [that] expressed sympathy for its plight," with nineteen newspapers expressing support for Israel in 67 editorials, seventeen giving "balanced a.n.a.lysis," and only nine "voicing criticism against Israeli leaders (particularly Ariel Sharon), whom they accused of responsibility for the conflagration." Fairness and Accuracy in Media (FAIR) on November 3 noted that the three major networks broadcast 99 stories about the intifada between September 28 and November 2, yet only four of the 99 mentioned the "occupied territories." The same report said that phrases such as "Israel . . . again feeling isolated and under siege," "Israeli soldiers under daily attack," and in a place where soldiers were forced back, "Israelis have surrendered territory to Palestinian violence," and "the ever-widening eruptions of violence in Israel" are threaded through the commentary, obscuring the facts of occupation and military imbalance. (The Israeli Defense Force has been using tanks, American- and British-supplied Cobra and Apache attack helicopters, missiles, mortars, and heavy machine guns, none of which the Palestinians possess.

Moreover, the American newspaper of record, the New York Times, has run only one op-ed piece written by a Palestinian or Arab individual (and he happens to be a supporter of Oslo) in a literal blizzard of editorial comment basically supporting the U.S. and Israeli positions; the Wall Street Journal has not even done that, nor has the Was.h.i.+ngton Post. On November 12 the most-watched television program 60 Minutes broadcast a segment effectively designed to let the Israeli army "prove" that the killing of twelve-year-old Muhammad al-Durrah, who became the icon of Palestinian suffering during the intifada, was mounted theatrically by the Palestinian Authority; this included planting the boy's father before Israeli guns, and even the French TV crew that filmed the forty-minute episode recording the horrifying event, in such a way as to prove an ideological point.

Granted that the U.S. media and, by extension, U.S. popular opinion are the choice battlefield, and granted that the media situation in Europe reveals a more balanced picture: it is nonetheless true, I believe, that the real geographical bases of the current b.l.o.o.d.y events have been deliberately obscured in this most geographical of contests. No one can be expected to follow or, more important, retain a c.u.mulatively accurate picture of the positively Kafkaesque provisions on the ground of the mostly secret negotiations between Israel and a disorganized, premodern, and tragically incompetent Palestinian team, dictatorially under Arafat's thumb. In two books-Peace and Its Discontents (1996) and The End of the Peace Process (2000)-I have followed these in some detail, but it may be useful here to summarize them with maps-maps, I should add, that have long been available but that, to the best of my knowledge, have never accompanied the news reports and television pictures proliferating in the world's media. Forgotten, because marginalized by Israel and especially by the United States, have been the relevant UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, which stipulate unequivocally that land acquired by Israel through the war of 1967 must be given back in return for peace. The Oslo peace process began by trampling all over those resolutions, practically consigning them to the rubbish bin.

Nowhere has this egregious tampering with accepted international conventions been so crucial as during the aftermath of the failed Camp David summit that took place last July. Since that time it has been popular wisdom that, as Clinton and Barak have tirelessly but falsely claimed, the Palestinians were the ones to blame, not the Israelis, whose opening position has always been that the 1967 territories were not going to be returned. The U.S. press, for example, has gone on relentlessly about Israel's "generous" offer, and that Barak was willing to concede part of East Jerusalem and anywhere between 90 and 94 percent of the West Bank to the Palestinians. Yet no commentary in the United States and Europe has even tried to establish what precisely was "offered" or what the territory was in the West Bank that he was offering 90 percent of. All of that in fact was chimerical nonsense, as Tanya Reinhart showed in an article that appeared on July 13 in Israel's largest daily, Yediot Aharonot, ent.i.tled "The Camp David Fraud": she says that the Palestinians were offered 50 percent in separated cantons, 10 percent was to be annexed by Israel, and no less than 40 percent was to be left "under debate," to use the euphemism for continued Israeli control. For if you annex 20 percent, refuse (as he did) to dismantle or stop settlements, refuse over and over again to return to the 1967 lines and give back East Jerusalem, then decide to keep whole areas like the Jordan Valley and so completely encircle the Palestinian territories as to let them have no borders with any state except Israel, in addition to retaining the notorious "bypa.s.sing" roads and the adjacent areas, the 90 percent is quickly reduced to something like 50 or 60 percent, the greater part of which being projected for sometime in the very distant future, given that even the last Israeli redeployment, agreed to at the Wye River Plantation meetings of 1998 and reconfirmed at Sharm el Sheikh in 1999, has still not occurred. (It bears repeating that Israel is still the only state in the world with no officially declared borders.) And when we see what part that 50 to 60 percent const.i.tutes of the former Palestine from which Palestinians were driven in 1948 and that is now Israel, we suddenly realize that it isn't 90 percent but about 12 percent that is really the area being "conceded." Even "conceded" is the wrong word, since these were territories taken by conquest and hence were only very partially being returned, an altogether different matter.

To begin with, let us recall some facts. In 1948 Israel took over what was historical or Mandatory Palestine (destroying and depopulating 531 Arab villages in the process. Two-thirds of the population were driven out: they are the 4 million refugees of today) except for the West Bank and Gaza, which went to Jordan and Egypt respectively. Both were subsequently lost to Israel in 1967, which controls them to this day except for a few areas under a highly qualified and circ.u.mscribed Palestinian autonomy, in effect an economically dependent colonial zone for the Israeli economy, its size and contours decided unilaterally by Israel during the period of the interim accords according to the Oslo process. Few people realize that even under the Oslo process the Palestinian areas that have this autonomy or self-rule do not have sovereignty, which is not to be decided until the final status negotiations settle the matter. In short, Israel took 78 percent of Palestine in 1948, the remaining 22 percent in 1967. It is only the 22 percent that is in question now, even excluding West Jerusalem (of whose 19,325 dunams Jews owned 4,830, Arabs 11,190; state land was 3,305 dunams. The sources for this are in an indispensable book edited by Salim Tamari, Jerusalem 1948: The Arab Neighborhoods and Their Fate in the War, published in 1999 in Jerusalem by the Inst.i.tute Jerusalem Studies and the Badil Resource Center), all of which Arafat conceded in advance to Israel at Camp David.

But what land has in fact been returned by Israel so far? Would that it could be described in a straightforward way because it cannot-by design. This is part of Oslo's malign genius, that even Israel's "concessions" were so heavily enc.u.mbered with conditions and qualifications and entailments (like one of the endlessly deferred and physically un.o.btainable estates in a Jane Austen novel) that they could not be enjoyed by the Palestinians in any way resembling self-determination; on the other hand, they could be described as a kind of concession, thus making it possible for everyone (including the Palestinian leaders.h.i.+p) to say that actual territory was under (mostly) Palestinian control. The device itself was to redivide and subdivide an already divided Palestinian territory into three subzones, Areas A, B, and C, in ways entirely devised and controlled by the Israeli side since, I have pointed out for several years, the Palestinians until only quite recently had neither any maps of their own nor, among the negotiating team, any individuals who were familiar enough with the actual geography to contest decisions or to provide alternative plans. One result of the latter situation was the bizarre arrangement for subdividing Hebron after the Ibrahimi mosque ma.s.sacre of twenty-nine Palestinians by Dr. Baruch Goldstein that took place in February 1994. Map One here shows how the core of the Arab town (120,000), 20 percent of it in fact, is under the control of about four hundred Jewish settlers about 0.03 percent of the total protected by the Israeli army!

Foundation for Middle East Peace Map Two shows the first of what was to be a series of Israeli pullbacks that were made in widely separated, noncontiguous areas. Gaza is separated from Jericho by miles and miles of Israeli-held land, but both belong to Area A, which, in the West Bank, was limited to 1.1 percent of the whole, not a slice at all. Area A in Gaza is much larger mainly because Gaza, with its arid land and overpopulated and rebellious ma.s.ses, was always considered a net liability for the Israeli occupation, which was happy-except for the choice agricultural land at its heart, the Gush Katif settlements, retained until now by Israel along with the harbor, the borders, and the entrances and exits-to be rid of it.

Maps Two, Three, and Four (which are what was presented by Israel as an optimal withdrawal map at the Camp David summit, though announced in May) show the snail's pace and the parsimony by which Israel allowed the hapless Palestinian Authority to take over large population centers (Area A), and at the same time allowed the Authority in Area B to help police the main village areas, near where settlements were being built all the time. But even then Israel held all the real security in its hands (despite the joint patrols between Palestinian and Israeli officers), and in Area C it kept about 60 percent of the territory for itself, there to build more settlements, open up more roads, and establish military areas, all of which-in Jeff Halper's words-were intended to set up a matrix of control from which the Palestinians would never be free. (Along with the work of the Dutch geographer Jan de Jong, Jeff Halper has written the most impressive studies of Israeli territorial planning during the Oslo process, and these, of course, have appeared in journals with a very small circulation. Thus, for instance, his study of the trans-Israel highway in "The Road to Apartheid" (News From Within, May 2000) and his "The 94 Percent Solution: A Matrix of Control" (Middle East Report 216, Fall 2000).

But the point of these various zones, as a quick look at any of the maps reveals, is that the various parts of Area A are not only separated from one another but are surrounded by Area B and, more important, Area C. In other words, the closures and encirclements that have turned the Palestinian areas into besieged spots on the map (and that are the core of Barak's racist policy of "separation") have been long in the making and, worst of all, have been conspired in by the Palestinian Authority, which has signed all the relevant doc.u.ments since 1994. To make matters still worse, as Amira Ha.s.s, the courageous Ha'aretz correspondent in the Palestinian territories who has single-handedly been reporting things as they have been taking place (rather than as Israeli propaganda was trying to make them seem), wrote on October 18: The two sides [in 1993] agreed on a period of five years for completion of the new deployment and the negotiations on a final agreement. The Palestinian leaders.h.i.+p agreed again and again to extend its trial period, in the shadow of Hamas terrorist attacks and the Israeli elections. The "peace strategy" and the tactic of gradualism adopted by the leaders.h.i.+p were at first supported by most of the Palestinian public, which craves normalcy [and, I would have thought, the real ending of the occupation, which, to repeat, was nowhere mentioned in any of the Oslo doc.u.ments]. The Fatah (the main faction of the PLO) was the backbone of support for the concept of gradual release from the yoke of military occupation. Its members were the ones who kept track of the Palestinian opposition, arrested suspects whose names were given to them by Israel [summarily tried in secret and without defense attorneys in the State Security Courts, warmly endorsed by Vice President Al Gore and President Bill Clinton as part of their support for "peace"], imprisoned those who signed manifestoes claiming that Israel did not intend to rescind its domination over the Palestinian nation. The personal advantage gained by some of these Fatah members [in the regime of VIP pa.s.ses that I referred to above] is not enough to explain their support of the process: for a long time they really and truly believed that this was the way to independence.

But, she goes on to say, even these men were members of "the Palestinian nation," and they had wives, children, and siblings who suffered the results of Israeli occupation and were quite ent.i.tled to ask whether support for the peace process did not also mean support for the occupation. She concludes: More than seven years have gone by, and Israeli security has administrative control of 61.2 percent of the West Bank and about 20 percent of the Gaza Strip (Area C), and security control over another 26.8 percent of the West Bank (Area B).

This control is what has enabled Israel to double the number of settlers in 10 years, to enlarge the settlements, to continue its discriminatory policy of cutting back water quotas for three million Palestinians [remember that the main aquifers for Israel's water supply are on the West Bank], to prevent Palestinian development in most of the area of the West Bank, and to seal an entire nation [minus the 4 or 4.5 million refugees who are categorically denied their right of return to their homes even as any Jew anywhere still has absolute and unrestricted right of "return" at any time] into restricted areas, imprisoned in a network of bypa.s.s roads meant for Jews only. During these days of strict internal restriction of movement in the West Bank [and in and out of Gaza], one can see how carefully each road was planned: So that 200,000 Jews [plus the 150,000 in Jerusalem] have freedom of movement, about three million Palestinians are locked into their Bantustans until they submit to Israeli demands.

More details can be added. The Palestinian Authority is locked into this astonis.h.i.+ngly ingenious, if in the long run utterly stupid, arrangement via security committees made up of the Mossad, the CIA, and the Palestinian security services, of whom there are at least fifteen (some say nineteen) components. By way of compensation, Israel and high-ranking members of the Authority operate lucrative monopolies on building materials, tobacco, oil, and so on, the profits of which are deposited in Israeli banks. Not only are Palestinians subject to hara.s.sments from Israeli troops, but they have also watched their own men partic.i.p.ating in this abuse of their rights along with hated alien agencies. These largely secret security committees also have a mandate to survey books, media, public statements, and general rhetoric on the Palestinian side, to rule on what const.i.tutes "incitement" against Israel, and then to get it deleted or circ.u.mscribed. Palestinians of course have no such right against American or Israeli incitements. As for the slowness of the pace of this unfolding process, which rather resembles one of the hugely complicated devices for remorselessly wearing down the individual's patience in Kafka or Borges, the argument offered by the United States and Israel is that Israel's security is being safeguarded; never have I heard anything said about Palestinian security. Clearly then we must conclude, as Zionist discourse has always stipulated, that the very existence of Palestinians, no matter how circ.u.mscribed, confined, and stripped of power, const.i.tutes a racial, religious threat to Israel's security. All