From Oslo To Iraq And The Road Map Part 9

I am convinced that in nearly every way this was a rigged, and neither a necessary nor a popular, war. The deeply reactionary Was.h.i.+ngton "research" inst.i.tutions that sp.a.w.ned Wolfowitz, Perle, Abrams, Feith, and the rest provide an unhealthy intellectual and moral atmosphere. Policy papers circulate without real peer review, adopted by a government requiring what seems to be rational (even moral) justification for a dubious, basically illicit policy of global domination. Hence the doctrine of military preemption, which was never voted on either by the people of this country or by their half-asleep representatives. How can citizens stand up against the blandishments offered the government by companies like Halliburton, Boeing, and Lockheed? And as for planning and charting a strategic course for what is by far the most lavishly endowed military establishment in history, one that is fully capable of dragging us into unending conflicts, that task is left to the various ideologically based pressure groups, such as the fundamentalist Christian leaders like Franklin Graham, who have been unleashed with their Bibles on dest.i.tute Iraqis, the wealthy private foundations, and such lobbies as AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, along with its a.s.sociated think tanks and research centers.

What seems so monumentally criminal is that good, useful words like democracy and freedom have been hijacked, pressed into service as a mask for pillaging, muscling in on territory, and settling scores. The American program for the Arab world is the same as Israel's. Along with Syria, Iraq theoretically represents the only serious long-term military threat to Israel, and therefore it had to be put out of commission for decades. What does it mean to liberate and democratize a country when no one asked you to do it, and when in the process you occupy it militarily and, at the same time, fail miserably to preserve public law and order? The mix of resentment and relief at Saddam's cowardly disappearance that most Iraqis feel has brought with it little understanding or compa.s.sion either from the United States or from the other Arab states, who have stood by idly quarreling over minor points of procedure while Baghdad has burned. What a travesty of strategic planning when you a.s.sume that "natives" will welcome your presence after you've bombed and quarantined them for thirteen years. The truly preposterous mindset about American beneficence, and with it that patronizing Puritanism about what is right and wrong, has infiltrated the minutest levels of the media coverage. In a story about a seventy-year-old Baghdad widow who ran a cultural center from her house-wrecked in the U.S. raids-and is now beside herself with rage, New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins implicitly chastises her for having had "a comfortable life under Saddam Hussein" and then piously disapproves of her tirade against the Americans, "and this from a graduate of London University."

Adding to the fraudulence of the weapons that weren't there, the Stalingrads that didn't occur, the formidable artillery defenses that never happened, I wouldn't be surprised if Saddam disappeared suddenly because a deal was made in Moscow to let him out with his family and money in return for the country. The war had gone badly for the United States in the south, and Bush couldn't risk more of the same in Baghdad. On April 6 a Russian convoy left Baghdad. U.S. National Security adviser Condoleezza Rice appeared in Russia on April 7. Two days later, on April 9, Baghdad fell. Draw your own conclusions, but isn't it possible that as a result of discussions with the Republican Guard mentioned by Rumsfeld, Saddam bought himself out in return for abandoning the whole thing to the Americans and their British allies, who could then proclaim a brilliant victory?

Americans have been cheated, Iraqis have suffered impossibly, and Bush looks like the moral equivalent of a cowboy sheriff who has just led his righteous posse to a victorious showdown against an evil enemy. On matters of the gravest importance to millions of people, const.i.tutional principles have been violated and the electorate lied to unconscionably. We are the ones who must have our democracy back. Enough of smoke and mirrors and smooth-talking hustlers.

Al-Ahram, April 2430, 2003.

Al-Hayat, April 28, 2003.

The Observer, April 20, 2003.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR.

The Arab Condition.

My impression is that many Arabs today feel that what has been taking place in Iraq over the last two months is little short of a catastrophe. True, Saddam Hussein's regime was a despicable one in every way and deserved to be removed. Also true is the sense of anger many feel at how outlandishly cruel and despotic that regime was, and how dreadful has been the suffering of Iraq's people. There seems little doubt that far too many other governments and individuals connived at keeping Saddam Hussein in power, looking the other way as they went about their business as usual. Nevertheless, the only thing that gave the United States the license to bomb the country and destroy its government was neither a moral right nor a rational argument but rather sheer military power. Having for years supported Ba'athist Iraq and Saddam Hussein himself, the United States and Britain arrogated to themselves the right to negate their own complicity in his despotism, then to state that they were liberating Iraq from his hated tyranny. And what now seems to be emerging in the country, both during and after the illegal Anglo American war against the people and civilization that are the essence of Iraq, represents a very grave threat to the Arab people as a whole.

It is therefore of the utmost importance that we recall in the first instance that, despite their many divisions and disputes, the Arabs are in fact a people, not a collection of random countries pa.s.sively available for outside intervention and rule. There is a clear line of imperial continuity that begins with Ottoman rule over the Arabs in the sixteenth century until our own time. After the Ottomans in World War I came the British and the French, and after them, in the period following World War II, came America and Israel. One of the most insidiously influential strands of thought in recent American and Israeli Orientalism, evident in American and Israeli policy since the late 1940s, is a virulent, extremely deep-seated hostility to Arab nationalism and a political will to oppose and fight it in every possible way. The basic premise of Arab nationalism in the broad sense is that, with all their diversity and pluralism of substance and style, the people whose language and culture are Arab and Muslim (call them the Arab-speaking peoples, as Albert Hourani did in his last book) const.i.tute a nation and not just a collection of states scattered between North Africa and the western boundaries of Iran. Any independent articulation of that premise was openly attacked, as in the 1956 Suez War, the French colonial war against Algeria, the Israeli wars of occupation and dispossession, and the campaign against Iraq, a war whose stated purpose was to topple a specific regime but whose real goal was the devastation of the most powerful Arab country. And just as the French, British, Israeli, and American campaign against Gamal Abdel Na.s.ser was designed to bring down a force that openly stated as its ambition the unification of the Arabs into a very powerful independent political force, the American goal today is to redraw the map of the Arab world to suit American, and not Arab, interests. U.S. policy thrives on Arab fragmentation, collective inaction, and military and economic weakness.

One would have to be foolish to argue that the nationalism and doctrinaire separateness of individual Arab states, whether the state is Egypt, Syria, Kuwait, or Jordan, is a better thing, a more useful political actuality, than some scheme of inter-Arab cooperation in economic, political, and cultural spheres. Certainly I see no need for total integration, but any form of useful cooperation and planning would be better than the disgraceful summits that have disfigured our national life, say, during the Iraq crisis. Every Arab asks the question, as does every foreigner: why do the Arabs never pool their resources to fight for the causes that officially, at least, they claim to support, and that, in the case of the Palestinians, their people actively, indeed pa.s.sionately, believe in?

I will not spend time arguing that everything that has been done to promote Arab nationalism can be excused for its abuses, its shortsightedness, its wastefulness, repression, and folly. The record is not a good one. But I do want to state categorically that, since the early twentieth century, the Arabs have never been able to achieve their collective independence as a whole or in part exactly because of the designs on the strategic and cultural importance of their lands by outside powers. Today no Arab state is free to dispose of its resources as it wishes, or to take positions that represent that individual state's interests, especially if those interests seem to threaten U.S. policies. In the fifty-plus years since America a.s.sumed world dominance, and more so after the end of the cold war, it has run its Middle East policy based on two principles, and two principles alone: the defense of Israel and the free flow of Arab oil, both of which involved direct opposition to Arab nationalism. In all significant ways, with few exceptions, American policy has been contemptuous of and openly hostile to the aspirations of the Arab people, and with surprising success: since Na.s.ser's demise it has had few challengers among Arab rulers, who have gone along with everything required of them.

During periods of the most extreme pressure on one or other of them (e.g., the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the sanctions against Iraq that were designed to weaken the people and the state as a whole, the bombings of Libya and Sudan, the threats against Syria, the pressure on Saudi Arabia), the collective weakness of the Arab states has been little short of stunning. Neither their enormous collective economic power nor the will of their people has moved the Arab states to make even the slightest gesture of defiance. The imperial policy of divide and rule has reigned supreme, since each government seems to fear the possibility that it might damage its bilateral relations.h.i.+p with America. That consideration has taken precedence over any contingency, no matter how urgent. Some countries rely on American economic aid, others on American military protection. All, however, have decided that they do not trust one another any more than they care strongly for the welfare of their own people (which is to say, they care very little), preferring the hauteur and contempt of the Americans, who have gotten progressively worse in their dealings with the Arab states as the only superpower's arrogance has developed over time. Indeed, it is remarkable that the Arab countries have fought one another far more readily than they have fought the real aggressors from the outside.

The result today, after the invasion of Iraq, is an Arab nation that is badly demoralized, crushed, and beaten down, less able to do anything except acquiesce in announced American plans to gesture and posture in all sorts of efforts to redraw the Middle East map to suit American and obviously Israeli interests. Even that extraordinarily grandiose scheme has yet to receive the vaguest collective answer from the Arab states, who seem to be hanging around waiting for something new to happen, as Bush, Rumsfeld, Powell, and the others lurch from threat to plan to visit to snub to bombing to unilateral announcement. What makes the whole business especially galling is that whereas the Arabs have totally accepted the American (or Quartet) road map that seems to have emerged from George W. Bush's waking dream, the Israelis have coolly withheld any such acceptance. How does it feel for a Palestinian to watch a second-rank leader like Abu Mazen, who has always been Arafat's faithful subordinate, embrace Colin Powell and the Americans when it is clear to the youngest child that the road map is designed (a) to stimulate a Palestinian civil war and (b) to offer Palestinian compliance with Israeli-American demands for "reform" in return for nothing much at all? How much further do we sink?

And as for American plans in Iraq, it is now absolutely clear that what is going to happen is nothing less than an old-fas.h.i.+oned colonial occupation, rather like Israel's since 1967. Bringing in American-style democracy to Iraq means basically aligning the country with U.S. policy, that is, a peace treaty with Israel, oil markets for American profit, and civil order kept to a minimum that permits neither real opposition nor real inst.i.tution-building. Perhaps even the idea is to turn Iraq into civil-war Lebanon. I am not certain. But take one small example of the kind of planning that is being undertaken. It was recently announced in the U.S. press that a thirty-two-year-old a.s.sistant professor of law, Noah Feldman, at New York University, would be responsible for producing a new Iraqi const.i.tution. It was mentioned in all the media accounts of this major appointment that Feldman was an extraordinarily brilliant expert in Islamic law, had studied Arabic since he was fifteen, and grew up as an Orthodox Jew. But he has never practiced law in the Arab world, has never been to Iraq, and seems to have no real practical background in the problems of postwar Iraq. What an open-faced snub, not only to Iraq itself, but also to the legions of Arab and Muslim legal minds who could have done a perfectly acceptable job in the service of Iraq's future. But no, America wants it done by a fresh young fellow, so as to be able to say, "We have given Iraq its new democracy." The contempt is thick enough to cut with a knife.

The seeming powerlessness of the Arabs in the face of all this is what is so discouraging, and not only because no real effort has been expended on fas.h.i.+oning a collective response to it. To someone who reflects on the situation from the outside, as I do, I find it amazing that in this moment of crisis, there has been no evidence of any sort of appeal from the rulers to their people for support in what needs to be seen as a collective national threat. American military planners have made no secret of the fact that what they plan is radical change for the Arab world, a change that they can impose by force of arms and because there is little that opposes them. Moreover, the idea behind the effort seems to be nothing less than to destroy the underlying unity of the Arab people once and for all, changing the bases of their lives and aspirations irremediably.

To such a display of power, I would have thought that an unprecedented alliance between Arab rulers and people represented the only possible deterrence. But that, clearly, would require an undertaking by every Arab government to open its society to its people, bring them in so to speak, remove all the repressive security measures in order to provide an organized opposition to the new imperialism. A people coerced into war, or a people silenced and repressed, will never rise to such an occasion. What we must have are Arab societies released finally from their self-imposed state of siege between ruler and ruled. Why not instead welcome democracy in the defense of freedom and self-determination? Why not say, we want each and every citizen willing to be mobilized in a common front against a common enemy? We need every intellectual and every political force to pull together with us against the imperial scheme to redesign our lives without our consent. Why must resistance be left to extremism and desperate suicide bombers?

As a digression, I might mention here that when I read the 2002 United Nations Human Development Report on the Arab world, I was struck by how little appreciation there was in it for imperialist intervention in the Arab world, and how deep and long-standing its effect has been. I certainly don't think that all our problems come from the outside, but I wouldn't want to say that all our problems are of our own making. Historical context and the problems of political fragmentation play a very great role, to which the report itself pays little attention. The absence of democracy is partially the result of alliances made between Western powers on the one hand, and minority ruling regimes or parties on the other, not because the Arabs have no interest in democracy but because democracy has been seen as a threat by several actors in the drama. Besides, why adopt the American formula for democracy (usually a euphemism for the free market, with little attention paid to human ent.i.tlement and social services) as the only one? This is a subject that needs considerably more debate than I have time for here. So let me return to my main point.

Consider how much more effective today the Palestinian position might have been under the U.S.-Israeli onslaught had there been a common show of unity instead of an unseemly scramble for positions on the delegation to see Colin Powell. I have not understood over the years why it is that Palestinian leaders have been unable to develop a common unified strategy for opposing the occupation and for avoiding getting diverted into one or another Mitch.e.l.l, Tenet, or Quartet plan. Why not say to all Palestinians, we face one enemy whose design on our lands and lives is well known and must be fought by us all together? The root problem everywhere, and not just in Palestine, is the fundamental rift between ruler and ruled that is one of the distorted offshoots of imperialism, this basic fear of democratic partic.i.p.ation, as if too much freedom might lose the governing colonial elite some favor with the imperial authority. The result, of course, is not only the absence of real mobilization of everyone in the common struggle, but the perpetuation of fragmentation and petty factionalism. As things now stand, there are too many uninvolved, non-partic.i.p.ating Arab citizens in the world today.

Whether they want to or not, the Arab people today face a wholesale attack on their future by an imperial power, America, that acts in concert with Israel to pacify, subdue, and finally reduce us to a bunch of warring fiefdoms whose first loyalty is not to their people but to the great superpower (and its local surrogate) itself. Not to understand that this is the conflict that will shape our area for decades to come is willingly to blind oneself. What is now needed is a breaking of the iron bands that tie Arab societies into sullen knots of disaffected people, insecure leaders, and alienated intellectuals. This is an unprecedented crisis. Unprecedented means are therefore required to confront it. The first step then is to realize the scope of the problem, and then go on to overcome what reduces us to helpless rage and marginalized reaction, a condition by no means to be accepted willingly. The alternative to such an unattractive condition promises a great deal more hope.

Al-Ahram, May 2228, 2003.

Al-Hayat, May 26, 2003.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE.

Archaeology of the Road Map.

Early in May, while Colin Powell was on his visit to Israel and the Occupied Territories, he met with Mahmoud Abbas, the new Palestinian prime minister, and separately with a small group of civil society activists, including Hanan Ashrawi and Mustafa Barghuti. According to Barghuti, Powell expressed surprise and mild consternation at the computerized maps of the settlements, the eight-meter-high fence, and the dozens of Israeli army checkpoints that have made life so difficult and the future so bleak for Palestinians. Powell's view of Palestinian reality is, to say the least, defective, despite his august position, but he did ask for materials to take away with him, and more important, he rea.s.sured the Palestinians that the same effort put in by Bush on Iraq was now going into implementing the road map. Much the same point was made in the last days of May by Bush himself in the course of interviews he gave to the Arab media, although as usual he stressed generalities rather than anything specific. He met with the Palestinian and Israeli leaders in Jordan and, earlier, with the major Arab rulers, excluding Syria's Bashar Al-a.s.sad, of course. All this is part of what now looks like a major American push forward. That Ariel Sharon has accepted the road map (with enough reservations to undercut his acceptance) seems to augur well for a viable Palestinian state.

Bush's vision (the word strikes a weird dreamy note in what is meant to be a hard-headed, definitive, and three-phased peace plan) is supposed to be achieved by a restructured Palestinian Authority, the elimination of all violence and incitement against Israelis, and the installation of a government that meets the requirements of Israel and the so-called Quartet that auth.o.r.ed the plan. Israel for its part undertakes to improve the humanitarian situation, easing restrictions and lifting curfews, though where and when are not specified. By June 2003 Phase One is also supposed to see the dismantling of the last sixty hilltop settlements (so-called "illegal outposts" established since March 2001), though nothing is said about removing the others, which account for the 200,000 settlers on the West Bank and Gaza, to say nothing of the 200,000 more in annexed East Jerusalem. Phase Two, described as a transition to run from June to December 2003, is to be focused, rather oddly, on the "option of creating an independent Palestinian state with provisional borders and attributes of sovereignty"-none are specified-culminating in an international conference to approve and then "create" a Palestinian state, once again with "provisional borders." Phase Three is to end the conflict completely, also by way of an international conference, whose job it will be to settle the th.o.r.n.i.e.s.t issues of all: refugees, settlements, Jerusalem, borders. Israel's role in all this is to cooperate; the real onus is placed on the Palestinians, who must keep coming up with the goods in rapid succession, while the military occupation remains more or less in place, though eased in the main areas invaded during the spring of 2002. No monitoring element is envisioned, and the misleading symmetry of the plan's structure leaves Israel very much in charge of what-if anything-will happen next. As for Palestinian human rights, at present not so much ignored as suppressed, no specific rectification is written into the plan: apparently it is up to Israel whether to continue as before or not.

For once, say all the usual commentators, Bush is offering real hope for a Middle East settlement. Calculated leaks from the White House have suggested a list of possible sanctions against Israel if Sharon gets too intransigent, but this was quickly denied and then disappeared. An emerging media consensus presents the doc.u.ment's contents-many of them from earlier peace plans-as the result of Bush's new-found confidence after his triumph in Iraq. As with most discussions of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, manipulated cliches and far-fetched suppositions, rather than the realities of power and lived history, shape the flow of discourse. Skeptics and critics are brushed aside as anti-American, while a sizable portion of the organized Jewish leaders.h.i.+p has denounced the road map as requiring far too many Israeli concessions. But the establishment press keeps reminding us that Sharon has spoken of an "occupation," which he never conceded until now, and has actually announced his intention to end Israeli rule over 3.5 million Palestinians. But is he even aware of what he proposes to end? The Ha'aretz commentator Gideon Levy wrote on June 1, 2003, that, like most Israelis, Sharon knows nothing "about life under curfew in communities that have been under siege for years. What does he know about the humiliation of checkpoints, or about people being forced to travel on gravel and mud roads, at risk to their lives, in order to get a woman in labor to a hospital? About life on the brink of starvation? About a demolished home? About children who see their parents beaten and humiliated in the middle of the night?"

Another chilling omission from the road map is the gigantic "separation wall" now being built in the West Bank by Israel: 347 kilometers of concrete running north to south, of which 120 have already been erected. It is twenty-five feet high and ten feet thick; its cost is put at $1.6 million per kilometer. The wall doesn't simply divide Israel from a putative Palestinian state on the basis of the 1967 borders: it actually takes in new tracts of Palestinian land, sometimes five or six kilometers at a stretch. It is surrounded by trenches, electric wire, and moats; there are watchtowers at regular intervals. Almost a decade after the end of South African apartheid, this ghastly racist wall is going up with scarcely a peep from the majority of Israelis or their American allies who, whether they like it or not, are going to pay most of its cost. The forty thousand Palestinian inhabitants of the town of Qalqilya in their homes are on one side of the wall; the land they farm and actually live off of is on the other. It is estimated that when the wall is finished-presumably as the United States, Israel, and the Palestinians argue about procedure for months on end- almost 300,000 Palestinians will be separated from their land. The road map is silent about all this, as it is about Sharon's recent approval of a wall on the eastern side of the West Bank, which will, if built, reduce the amount of Palestinian territory available for Bush's dream state to roughly 40 percent of the area. This is what Sharon has had in mind all along.

An unstated premise underlies Israel's heavily modified acceptance of the road map and the United States' evident commitment to it: the relative success of Palestinian resistance. This is true whether or not one deplores some of its methods, its exorbitant cost, and the heavy toll it has taken on yet another generation of Palestinians who have not wholly given up in the face of the overwhelming superiority of Israeli-U.S. power. All sorts of reasons have been given for the emergence of the road map: that 56 percent of Israelis back it, that Sharon has finally bowed to international reality, that Bush needs an Arab-Israeli cover for his military adventures elsewhere, that the Palestinians have finally come to their senses and brought forth Abu Mazen (Abbas's much more familiar nom de guerre, as it were), and so on. Some of this is true, but I still contend that were it not for the fact of the stubborn Palestinian refusal to accept that they are "a defeated people," as the Israeli chief of staff recently described them, there would be no peace plan. Yet anyone who believes that the road map actually offers anything resembling a settlement or that it tackles the basic issues is wrong. Like so much of the prevailing peace discourse, it places the need for restraint and renunciation and sacrifice squarely on Palestinian shoulders, thus denying the density and sheer gravity of Palestinian history. To read through the road map is to confront an unsituated doc.u.ment, oblivious of its time and place.

The road map, in other words, is not about a plan for peace so much as a plan for pacification: it is about putting an end to Palestine as a problem. Hence the repet.i.tion of the term "performance" in the doc.u.ment's wooden prose-in other words, how the Palestinians are expected to behave, almost in the social sense of the word. No violence, no protest, more democracy, better leaders and inst.i.tutions, all based on the notion that the underlying problem has been the ferocity of Palestinian resistance rather than the occupation that has given rise to it. Nothing comparable is expected of Israel, except that the small settlements I spoke of earlier, known as "illegal outposts" (an entirely new cla.s.sification that suggests that some Israeli implantations on Palestinian land are legal), must be given up and, yes, the major settlements "frozen" but certainly not removed or dismantled. Not a word is said about what since 1948, and then again since 1967, Palestinians have endured at the hands of Israel and the United States. Nothing about the de-development of the Palestinian economy, as described by the American researcher Sara Roy in a forthcoming book.18 House demolitions, the uprooting of trees, the five thousand prisoners or more, the policy of targeted a.s.sa.s.sinations, the closures since 1993, the wholesale ruin of the infrastructure, the incredible number of deaths and maimings-all that and more pa.s.s without a word.

The truculent aggression and stiff-necked unilateralism of the American and Israeli teams are already well known. The Palestinian team inspires scarcely any confidence, made up as it is of recycled and aging Arafat cohorts. Indeed, the road map seems to have given Yasir Arafat another lease on life, for all the studied efforts by Powell and his a.s.sistants to avoid visiting him. Despite the stupid Israeli policy of trying to humble him by shutting him up in a badly bombed compound, he is still in control of things. He remains Palestine's elected president, he has the Palestinian purse strings in his hands (the purse is far from bulging), and as for his status, none of the present "reform" team (who with two or three significant new additions are reshuffled members of the old team) can match the old man for charisma and power.

Take Abu Mazen for a start. I first met him in March 1977 at my first Palestine National Council meeting in Cairo. He gave by far the longest speech, in the didactic manner that he must have perfected as a secondary school teacher in Qatar, and explained to the a.s.sembled Palestinian parliamentarians the differences between Zionism and Zionist dissidence. It was a noteworthy intervention, since most Palestinians had no real notion in those days that Israel was made up not only of fundamentalist Zionists, who were anathema to every Arab, but of various kinds of peaceniks and activists as well. In retrospect, Abu Mazen's speech launched the PLO's campaign of meetings, most of them secret, between Palestinians and Israelis who had long dialogues in Europe about peace and some considerable effect in their respective societies in shaping the const.i.tuencies that made Oslo possible.

Nevertheless, no one doubted that Arafat had authorized Abu Mazen's speech and the subsequent campaign, which cost brave men like Issam Sartawi and Said Hammami their lives. And while the Palestinian partic.i.p.ants emerged from the center of Palestinian politics (i.e., Fateh), the Israelis were a small marginalized group of reviled peace supporters whose courage was commendable for that very reason. During the PLO's Beirut years between 1971 and 1982, Abu Mazen was stationed in Damascus, but he joined the exiled Arafat and his staff in Tunis for the next decade or so. I saw him there several times and was struck by his well-organized office, his quiet bureaucratic manner, and his evident interest in Europe and the United States as arenas where Palestinians could do useful work promoting peace with Israelis. After the Madrid conference in 1991, he was said to have brought together PLO employees and independent intellectuals in Europe and turned them into teams to prepare negotiating files on subjects such as water, refugees, demography, and boundaries in advance of what were to become the secret Oslo meetings of 1992 and 1993, although to the best of my knowledge none of the files were used, none of the Palestinian experts were directly involved in the talks, and none of the results of this research influenced the final doc.u.ments that emerged.

In Oslo, the Israelis fielded an array of experts supported by maps, doc.u.ments, statistics, and at least seventeen prior drafts of what the Palestinians would end up signing, while the Palestinians unfortunately restricted their negotiators to three completely different PLO men, not one of whom knew English or had a background in international (or any other kind of) negotiation. Arafat's idea seems to have been that he was fielding a team mainly to keep himself in the process, especially after his exit from Beirut and his disastrous decision to side with Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War. If he had other objectives in mind, then he didn't prepare for them effectively, as has always been his style. In Abu Mazen's memoir19 and in other anecdotal accounts of the Oslo discussions, Arafat's subordinate is credited as the "architect" of the accords, though he never left Tunis; Abu Mazen goes so far as to say that it took him a year after the Was.h.i.+ngton ceremonies (where he appeared alongside Arafat, Rabin, Peres, and Clinton) to convince Arafat that he hadn't gotten a state from Oslo! Yet most accounts of the peace talks stress the fact that Arafat was pulling all the strings just the same. No wonder then that the Oslo negotiations made the overall situation of the Palestinians a good deal worse. The American team led by Dennis Ross, a former Israeli lobby employee-a job to which he has now returned-routinely supported the Israeli position, which, after a full decade of negotiation, consisted in handing back 18 percent of the Occupied Territories to the Palestinians on highly unfavorable terms, with the Israeli Defense Force left in charge of security, borders, and water. Naturally enough, the number of settlements more than doubled.

Since the PLO's return to the Occupied Territories in 1994, Abu Mazen has remained a second-rank figure, known universally for his "flexibility" with Israel, his subservience to Arafat, and his total lack of any organized political base, although he is one of Fateh's original founders and a long-standing member and secretary general of its central committee. So far as I know, he has never been elected to anything, and certainly not to the Palestinian Legislative Council. The PLO and the Palestinian Authority under Arafat are anything but transparent. Little is known about the way decisions are made or how money gets spent, where it is, and who besides Arafat has any say in the matter. Everyone agrees, however, that Arafat, a fiendish micromanager and control freak, remains the central figure in every significant way. That is why Abu Mazen's elevation to the status of reforming prime minister, which so pleases the Americans and Israelis, is thought of by most Palestinians as, well, a kind of joke, the old man's way of holding on to power by inventing a new gimmick, so to speak. Abu Mazen is thought of generally as colorless, moderately corrupt, and without any clear ideas of his own, except that he wants to please the white man.

Like Arafat, Abu Mazen has never lived anywhere except the Gulf, Syria, Lebanon, Tunisia, and now occupied Palestine; he knows no languages other than Arabic, and he isn't much of an orator or public presence. By contrast, Mohammed Dahlan, the new security chief from Gaza-the other much-heralded figure in whom the Israelis and Americans place great hope-is younger, cleverer, and quite ruthless. During the eight years that he ran one of Arafat's fourteen or fifteen security organizations, Gaza was known as Dahlanistan. He resigned last year, only to be re-recruited for the job of "unified security chief" by the Europeans, the Americans, and the Israelis, even though of course he too has always been one of Arafat's men. Now he is expected to crack down on Hamas and Islamic Jihad-one of the reiterated Israeli demands behind which lies the hope that there will be something resembling a Palestinian civil war, a gleam in the eyes of the Israeli military.

In any event, it seems clear to me that, no matter how a.s.siduously and flexibly Abu Mazen "performs," he is going to be limited by three factors. One, of course, is Arafat himself, who still controls Fateh, which in theory is also Abu Mazen's power base. Another is Sharon (who will presumably have the United States behind him all the way). In a list of fourteen "remarks" about the road map published in Ha'aretz on May 27, Sharon signaled the very narrow limits on anything that might be construed as flexibility on Israel's part. The third is Bush and his entourage; to judge by their handling of postwar Afghanistan and Iraq, they have neither the stomach nor the competence for the nation-building that surely will be required. Already Bush's right-wing Christian base in the South has remonstrated noisily against putting pressure on Israel, and already the high-powered American pro-Israel lobby, with its docile adjunct, the Israeli-occupied U.S. Congress, have swung into action against any hint of coercion against Israel, even though it will be crucial now that a final phase has begun.

It may seem quixotic for me to say, but even if the immediate prospects are grim from a Palestinian perspective, they are not all dark. I return to the stubbornness I mentioned above, and the fact that Palestinian society-devastated, nearly ruined, desolate in so many ways-is, like Hardy's thrush in its blast-beruffled plume, still capable of flinging its soul upon the growing gloom. No other Arab society is as rambunctious and healthily unruly, and none is fuller of civic and social initiatives and functioning inst.i.tutions (including a miraculously vital musical conservatory). Even though they are mostly unorganized and in some cases lead miserable lives of exile and statelessness, diaspora Palestinians are still energetically engaged by the problems of their collective destiny, and everyone I know is always trying somehow to advance the cause. Only a minuscule fraction of this energy has ever found its way into the Palestinian Authority, which except for the highly ambivalent figure of Arafat has remained strangely marginal to the common fate. According to recent polls, Fateh and Hamas between them have the support of roughly 45 percent of the Palestinian electorate, with the remaining 55 percent evolving quite different, much more hopeful-looking political formations.

One in particular has struck me as significant (and I have attached myself to it), inasmuch as it now provides the only genuine gra.s.sroots formation that steers clear both of the religious parties and their fundamentally sectarian politics, and of the traditional nationalism offered up by Arafat's old (rather than young) Fateh activists. It's been called the Palestinian National Initiative (PNI), and its main figure is Mustafa Barghuti, a Moscow-trained physician whose main work has been as director of the impressive Village Medical Relief Committee, which has brought health care to more than 100,000 rural Palestinians. A former Communist Party stalwart, Barghuti is a quiet-spoken organizer and leader who has overcome the hundreds of physical obstacles impeding Palestinian movement or travel abroad to rally nearly every independent individual and organization of note behind a political program that promises social reform as well as liberation across doctrinal lines. Singularly free of conventional rhetoric, Barghuti has worked with Israelis, Europeans, Americans, Africans, Asians, and Arabs to build an enviably well-run solidarity movement that practices the pluralism and coexistence it preaches. The PNI does not throw up its hands at the directionless militarization of the intifada. It offers training programs for the unemployed and social services for the dest.i.tute on the grounds that this answers to present circ.u.mstances and Israeli pressure. Above all, the PNI, which is about to become a recognized political party, seeks to mobilize Palestinian society at home and in exile for free elections-authentic elections that will represent Palestinian, rather than Israeli or U.S., interests. This sense of authenticity is what seems so lacking in the path cut out for Abu Mazen.

The vision here isn't a manufactured provisional state on 40 percent of the land, with the refugees abandoned and Jerusalem kept by Israel, but a sovereign territory liberated from military occupation by ma.s.s action involving Arabs and Jews wherever possible. Because the PNI is an authentic Palestinian movement, reform and democracy have become part of its everyday practice. Many hundreds of Palestine's most notable activists and independents have already signed up, and organizational meetings have already been held, with many more planned abroad and in Palestine, despite the terrible difficulties of getting around Israel's restrictions on freedom of movement. It is some solace to think that, while formal negotiations and discussions go on, a host of informal, uncoopted alternatives exist, of which the PNI and a growing international solidarity campaign are now the main components.

Al-Ahram, June 1218, 2003.

Al-Hayat, June 15, 2003.

London Review of Books, June 19, 2003.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX.

Dignity and Solidarity.

In early May I was in Seattle lecturing for a few days. While there, I had dinner one night with Rachel Corrie's parents and sister, who were still reeling from the shock of Rachel's murder on March 16 in Gaza by an Israeli bulldozer. Mr. Corrie told me that he had himself driven bulldozers, although the one that killed his daughter deliberately because she was trying valiantly to protect a Palestinian home in Rafah from demolition was a sixty-ton behemoth especially designed by Caterpillar for house demolitions, a far bigger machine than anything he had ever seen or driven. Two things struck me about my brief visit with the Corries. One was the story they told about their return to the United States with their daughter's body. They had immediately sought out their U.S. senators, Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, both Democrats, told them their story, and received the expected expressions of shock, outrage, and anger and promises of investigations. After both women returned to Was.h.i.+ngton, the Corries never heard from them again, and the promised investigation simply didn't materialize. As expected, the Israeli lobby had explained the realities to them, and both women simply begged off. An American citizen willfully murdered by the soldiers of a client state of the United States without so much as an official peep or even the de rigueur investigation that had been promised her family.

But the second and far more important aspect of the Rachel Corrie story for me was the young woman's action itself, heroic and dignified at the same time. Born and brought up in Olympia, a small city sixty miles south of Seattle, she had joined the International Solidarity Movement and gone to Gaza to stand with suffering human beings with whom she had never had any contact before. Her letters back to her family are truly remarkable doc.u.ments of her ordinary humanity that make for very difficult and moving reading, especially when she describes the kindness and concern shown her by all the Palestinians she encounters who clearly welcome her as one of their own, because she lives with them exactly as they do, sharing their lives and worries, as well as the horrors of the Israeli occupation and its terrible effects on even the smallest child. She understands the fate of refugees, and what she calls the Israeli government's insidious attempt at a kind of genocide by making it almost impossible for this particular group of people to survive. So moving is her solidarity that it inspires an Israeli reservist named Danny who has refused service to write her and tell her, "You are doing a good thing. I thank you for it."

What s.h.i.+nes through all the letters she wrote home, which were subsequently published in the London Guardian, is the amazing resistance put up by the Palestinian people themselves, average human beings stuck in the most terrible position of suffering and despair but continuing to survive just the same. We have heard so much recently about the road map and the prospects for peace that we have overlooked the most basic fact of all, which is that Palestinians have refused to capitulate or surrender even under the collective punishment meted out to them by the combined might of the United States and Israel. It is that extraordinary fact that is the reason for the existence of a road map and all the numerous so-called peace plans before them, not at all because the United States and Israel and the international community have been convinced for humanitarian reasons that the killing and the violence must stop. If we miss that truth about the power of Palestinian resistance (by which I do not at all mean suicide bombing, which does much more harm than good), despite all its failings and all its mistakes, we miss everything. Palestinians have always been a problem for the Zionist project, and so-called solutions have perennially been proposed that minimize, rather than solve, the problem. The official Israeli policy, no matter whether Ariel Sharon uses the word "occupation" or whether he dismantles a rusty, unused tower or two, has always been not to accept the reality of the Palestinian people as equals nor ever to admit that their rights were scandalously violated all along by Israel. Whereas a few courageous Israelis over the years have tried to deal with this other concealed history, most Israelis and what seems like the majority of American Jews have made every effort to deny, avoid, or negate the Palestinian reality. This is why there is no peace.

Moreover, the road map says nothing about justice or about the historical punishment meted out to the Palestinian people for too many decades to count. What Rachel Corrie's work in Gaza recognized, however, was precisely the gravity and the density of the living history of the Palestinian people as a national community, not merely as a collection of deprived refugees. That is what she was in solidarity with. And we need to remember that that kind of solidarity is no longer confined to a small number of intrepid souls here and there but is recognized the world over. In the past six months I have lectured on four continents to many thousands of people. What brings them together is Palestine and the struggle of the Palestinian people, which is now a byword for emanc.i.p.ation and enlightenment, regardless of all the vilification heaped on them by their enemies.

Whenever the facts are made known, there is immediate recognition and an expression of the most profound solidarity with the justice of the Palestinian cause and the valiant struggle by the Palestinian people on its behalf. It is an extraordinary thing that Palestine was a central issue this year both during the Prto Alegre antiglobalization meetings and during the Davos and Amman meetings, both poles of the worldwide political spectrum. Just because our fellow citizens in the United States are fed an atrociously biased diet of ignorance and misrepresentation by the media-the occupation is never referred to in lurid descriptions of suicide attacks, the apartheid wall twenty-five feet high, five feet thick, and 350 kilometers long that Israel is building is never even shown on CNN or the networks (or is so much as referred to in pa.s.sing throughout the lifeless prose of the road map), and the crimes of war, the gratuitous destruction and humiliation, maiming, house demolitions, agricultural destruction, and death imposed on Palestinian civilians are never shown for the daily, completely routine ordeal that they are-one shouldn't be surprised that Americans in the main have a very low opinion of Arabs and Palestinians. After all, please remember that all the main organs of the establishment media, from left liberal all the way over to fringe right, are unanimously anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Palestinian. Look at the pusillanimity of the media during the buildup to an illegal and unjust war against Iraq, and look at how little coverage there was of the immense damage against Iraqi society done by the sanctions, and how relatively few accounts there were of the immense worldwide outpouring of opinion against the war. Hardly a single journalist except Helen Thomas has taken the administration to task for the outrageous lies and confected "facts" that were spun out about Iraq as an imminent military threat to the United States before the war, just as now the same government propagandists, whose cynically invented and manipulated "facts" about WMD are now more or less forgotten or shrugged off as irrelevant, are let off the hook by media heavies in discussing the awful, the literally inexcusable, situation for the people of Iraq that the United States has now single-handedly and irresponsibly created there. However else one blames Saddam Hussein as a vicious tyrant, which he was, he provided the people of Iraq with the best infrastructure of services like water, electricity, health, and education of any Arab country. None of this is any longer in place.

It is no wonder, then-with the extraordinary fear of seeming anti-Semitic by criticizing Israel for its daily crimes of war against innocent unarmed Palestinian civilians or criticizing the U.S. government and being called "anti-American" for its illegal war and its dreadfully run military occupation-that the vicious media and government campaign against Arab society, culture, history, and mentality that has been led by Neanderthal publicists and Orientalists like Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes has cowed far too many of us into believing that Arabs really are an underdeveloped, incompetent, and doomed people, and that with all the failures in democracy and development, Arabs are alone in this world in being r.e.t.a.r.ded, behind the times, unmodernized, and deeply reactionary. Here is where dignity and critical historical thinking must be mobilized to see what is what and to disentangle truth from propaganda.

No one would deny that most Arab countries today are ruled by unpopular regimes and that vast numbers of poor, disadvantaged young Arabs are exposed to ruthless forms of fundamentalist religion. Yet it is simply a lie to say, as the New York Times regularly does, that Arab societies are totally controlled, and that there is no freedom of opinion, that there are no civil inst.i.tutions, no functioning social movements for and by the people. Press laws notwithstanding, you can go to downtown Amman today and buy a Communist Party newspaper as well as an Islamist one; Egypt and Lebanon are full of papers and journals that suggest much more debate and discussion than these societies are given credit for; the satellite channels are bursting with diverse opinions in a dizzying variety; civil inst.i.tutions are, on many levels having to do with social services, human rights, syndicates, and research inst.i.tutes, very lively all over the Arab world. A great deal more must be done before we have the appropriate level of democracy, but we are on the way.

In Palestine alone there are more than a thousand NGOs, and it is this vitality and this kind of activity that has kept society going, despite every American and Israeli effort made to vilify, stop, or mutilate it on a daily basis. Under the worst possible circ.u.mstances, Palestinian society has neither been defeated nor crumbled completely. Kids still go to school, doctors and nurses still take care of their patients, men and women go to work, organizations have their meetings, and people continue to live, which seems to be an offense to Sharon and the other extremists who simply want Palestinians either imprisoned or driven away altogether. The military solution hasn't worked at all and never will work. Why is that so hard for Israelis to see? We must help them to understand this, not by suicide bombs but by rational argument, ma.s.s civil disobedience, and organized protest, here and everywhere.

The point I am trying to make is that we have to see the Arab world generally and Palestine in particular in more comparative and critical ways than superficial and dismissive books like Lewis's What Went Wrong? and Paul Wolfowitz's ignorant statements about bringing democracy to the Arab and Islamic world even begin to suggest. Whatever else is true about the Arabs, there is an active dynamic at work because as real people they live in a real society with all sorts of currents and crosscurrents that can't be easily caricatured as just one seething ma.s.s of violent fanaticism. The Palestinian struggle for justice is especially something with which one expresses solidarity rather than endless criticism, exasperated, frustrating discouragement, and crippling divisiveness. Remember the solidarity here and everywhere in Latin America, Africa, Europe, Asia, and Australia, and remember also that there is a cause to which many people have committed themselves, difficulties and terrible obstacles notwithstanding. Why? Because it is a just cause, a n.o.ble ideal, a moral quest for equality and human rights.

I want now to speak about dignity, which of course has a special place in every culture known to historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and humanists. I shall begin by saying immediately that it is a radically wrong Orientalist and indeed racist proposition to accept that, unlike Europeans and Americans, Arabs have no sense of individuality, no regard for individual life, no values that express love, intimacy, and understanding, which are supposed to be the property exclusively of cultures such as those of Europe and America, which had a Renaissance, a Reformation, and an Enlightenment. Among many others, it is the vulgar and jejune Thomas Friedman who has been peddling this rubbish, which has, alas, been picked up by equally ignorant and self-deceiving Arab intellectuals- I don't need to mention any names here-who have seen in the atrocities of 9/11 a sign that the Arab and Islamic worlds are somehow more diseased and more dysfunctional than any other, and that terrorism is a sign of a wider distortion than has occurred in any other culture.

We can leave to one side that, between them, Europe and the United States account for by far the largest number of violent deaths during the twentieth century, the Islamic world hardly a fraction of it. And behind all of that specious, unscientific nonsense about wrong and right civilizations is the grotesque shadow of the great false prophet Samuel Huntington, who has led a lot of people to believe that the world can be divided into distinct civilizations battling against each other forever. On the contrary, Huntington is dead wrong on every point he makes. No culture or civilization exists by itself; none is made up of things like individuality and enlightenment that are completely exclusive to it; and none exists without the basic human attributes of community, love, value for life, and all the others. To suggest otherwise, as he does, is the purest invidious racism of the same stripe as people who argue that Africans have naturally inferior brains, or that Asians are really born for servitude, or that Europeans are a naturally superior race. This is a sort of parody of Hitlerian science directed uniquely today against Arabs and Muslims, and we must be very firm so as not even to go through the motions of arguing against it. It is the purest drivel. On the other hand, there is the much more credible and serious stipulation that, like every other instance of humanity, Arab and Muslim life has an inherent value and dignity, which are expressed by Arabs and Muslims in their unique cultural style, and those expressions needn't resemble or be a copy of one approved model suitable for everyone to follow.

The whole point about human diversity is that it is in the end a form of deep coexistence between very different styles of individuality and experience that can't all be reduced to one superior form: this is the spurious argument foisted on us by pundits who bewail the lack of development and knowledge in the Arab world. All one has to do is to look at the huge variety of literature, cinema, theater, painting, music, and popular culture produced by and for Arabs from Morocco to the Gulf. Surely that needs to be a.s.sessed as an indication of whether Arabs are developed, and not just how on any given day statistical tables of industrial production either indicate an appropriate level of development or show failure.

The more important point I want to make, though, is that there is a very wide discrepancy today between our cultures and societies and the small group of people who now rule these societies. Rarely in history has such power been so concentrated in so tiny a group as the various kings, generals, sultans, and presidents who preside today over the Arabs. The worst thing about them as a group, almost without exception, is that they do not represent the best of their people. This is not just a matter of the absence of democracy. It is that they seem to radically underestimate themselves and their people in ways that close them off, that make them intolerant and fearful of change, frightened of opening up their societies to their people, terrified most of all that they might anger big brother, that is, the United States. Instead of seeing their citizens as the potential wealth of the nation, they regard them all as guilty conspirators vying for the ruler's power.

This is the real failure, how during the terrible war against the Iraqi people, no Arab leader had the self-dignity and confidence to say something about the pillaging and military occupation of one of the most important Arab countries. Fine, it is an excellent thing that Saddam Hussein's appalling regime is no more, but who appointed the United States to be the Arab mentor? Who asked the United States to take over the Arab world allegedly on behalf of its citizens and bring it something called "democracy," especially at a time when the school system, the health care system, and the whole economy in America are degenerating into the worst levels since the 1929 Depression? Why was the collective Arab voice not raised against the flagrantly illegal U.S. intervention, which did so much harm and inflicted so much humiliation upon the entire Arab nation? This is truly a colossal failure in nerve, in dignity, in self-solidarity.

With all the Bush administration's talk about guidance from the Almighty, doesn't one Arab leader have the courage just to say that, as a great people, we are guided by our own lights and traditions and religion? But nothing, not a word, as the poor citizens of Iraq live through the most terrible ordeals and the rest of the region quakes in its collective boots, each one petrified that his country may be next. How unfortunate the embrace of George W. Bush, the man whose war destroyed an Arab country gratuitously, by the combined leaders.h.i.+p of the major Arab countries last week. Was there no one there who had the guts to remind George W. what he has done to humiliate and bring more suffering to the Arab people than anyone before him, and must he always be greeted with hugs, smiles, kisses, and low bows? Where is the diplomatic and political and economic support necessary to sustain an antioccupation movement on the West Bank and Gaza? Instead all one hears is that foreign ministers preach to the Palestinians to mind their ways, avoid violence, and keep at the peace negotiations, even though it has been so obvious that Sharon's interest in peace is just about zero. There has been no concerted Arab response to the separation wall, or to the a.s.sa.s.sinations, or to collective punishment, only a bunch of tired cliches repeating the well-worn formulas authorized by the State Department.

Perhaps the one thing that strikes me as the low point in Arab inability to grasp the dignity of the Palestinian cause is expressed by the current state of the Palestinian Authority. Abu Mazen, a subordinate figure with little political support among his own people, was picked for the job by Arafat, Israel, and the United States precisely because he has no const.i.tuency, because he is not an orator or a great organizer or anything really except a dutiful aide to Yasir Arafat, and because, I am afraid, they see in him a man who will do Israel's bidding. But how could even Abu Mazen stand there in Aqaba to p.r.o.nounce words written for him, like a ventriloquist's puppet, by some State Department functionary, in which he commendably speaks about Jewish suffering but then amazingly says next to nothing about his own people's suffering at the hands of Israel? How could he accept so undignified and manipulated a role for himself, and how could he forget his self-dignity as the representative of a people that has been fighting heroically for its rights for over a century, just because the United States and Israel have told him he must? And when Israel simply says that there will be a "provisional" Palestinian state, without any contrition for the horrendous amount of damage it has done, the uncountable war crimes, the sheer s.a.d.i.s.tic, systematic humiliation of every single Palestinian, man, woman, and child, I must confess to a complete lack of understanding as to why a leader or representative of that long-suffering people doesn't so much as take note of it. Has he entirely lost his sense of dignity?

Has he forgotten that he is not just an individual but also the bearer of his people's fate at an especially crucial moment? Is there anyone who was not bitterly disappointed at this total failure to rise to the occasion and stand with dignity-the dignity of his people's experience and cause-and testify to it with pride, without compromise, without ambiguity, without the half-embarra.s.sed, half-apologetic tone that Palestinian leaders take when they are begging for a little kindness from some totally unworthy white father?

But that has been the behavior of Palestinian rulers since Oslo and indeed since Haj Amin, a combination of misplaced juvenile defiance and plaintive supplication. Why on earth do they always think it absolutely necessary to read scripts written for them by their enemies? The basic dignity of our life as Arabs in Palestine, throughout the Arab world, and here in America, is that we are our own people, with a heritage, a history, a tradition, and above all a language that is more than adequate to the task of representing our real aspirations, since those aspirations derive from the experience of dispossession and suffering that has been imposed on each Palestinian since 1948. Not one of our political spokespeople-the same is true of the Arabs since Abdel Na.s.ser's time-ever speaks with self-respect and dignity of what we are, what we want, what we have done, and where we want to go.

Slowly, however, the situation is changing, and the old regime, made up of the Abu Mazens and Abu Ammars [Arafats] of this world, is pa.s.sing and will gradually be replaced by a new set of emerging leaders all over the Arab world. The most promising is made up of the members of the Palestinian National Initiative; they are gra.s.sroots activists whose main activity is not pus.h.i.+ng papers on a desk, or juggling bank accounts, or looking for journalists to pay attention to them, but who come from the ranks of the professionals, the working cla.s.ses, the young intellectuals and activists, the teachers, doctors, lawyers-working people who have kept society going while also fending off daily Israeli attacks. Second, these are people committed to the kind of democracy and popular partic.i.p.ation undreamed of by the Authority, whose idea of democracy is stability and security for itself. Lastly, they offer social services to the unemployed, health care to the uninsured and the poor, and proper secular education to a new generation of Palestinians who must be taught the realities of the modern world, not just the extraordinary worth of the old one. For such programs, the PNI stipulates that getting rid of the occupation is the only way forward and that in order to do that, a representative national unified leaders.h.i.+p must be elected freely to replace the cronies, the outdated, and the ineffectiveness that have plagued Palestinian leaders for the past century.

Only if we respect ourselves as Arabs and Americans and understand the true dignity and justice of our struggle, only then can we appreciate why, almost despite ourselves, so many people all over the world, including Rachel Corrie and the two young people wounded with her from the International Solidarity Movement, Tom Hurndall and Brian Avery, have felt it possible to express their solidarity with us.

I conclude with one last irony. Isn't it astonis.h.i.+ng that all the signs of popular solidarity that Palestine and the Arabs receive occur with no comparable sign of solidarity and dignity from ourselves-that others admire and respect us more than we do ourselves? Isn't it time we caught up with ou