|
Literary Review
My land, my people
|
The End of the Peace Process is a collection of 65 essays written between 1995 and 2002 in protest against the Oslo Peace Agreement. It is a continuation of what Said has been doing for so long with zeal for his land and his people, says M.S. NAGARAJAN.
|
Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Sir Walter Scott
UNQUESTIONABLY Edward W. Said is a man of many parts. Those who know him as a postcolonial critic know only a small part of his many-sidedness. This may be because his early work, his magnum opus, Orientalism (1978), caused such a mighty stir among academics that it spearheaded a school of criticism that has been labelled postcolonialism. Which is why Gayatri Spivak calls him a "groundbreaker in our discipline". This book — the pioneering postcolonial text — established his reputation as a public intellectual, the major spokesman for what has now come to be called the "third world". What may not be so well known to students of literature is Said's total commitment to the cause of Palestine, his homeland. As an astute and amazingly introspective thinker, he has been waging a lonely battle, tirelessly advocating the cause of the Palestinians, albeit opposition from powerful lobbies.
The End of the Peace Process, the result of his enterprising historical research on West Asia, is a continuation of what he has been doing so long and with such unremitting zeal for his land and his people. What he wishes to do in this mighty book, a collection of 65 periodical, provocative, political essays written between 1995 and 2002, mostly for Arab and European newspapers, in response to and protest against the Oslo peace agreement of 1993 between Israel and Palestine, is to awaken the consciousness of his countrymen, to what he considers the harsh realities of the bad bargain that has failed to resolve the long-standing issues. "Collective memory is a people's heritage and also its energy; it does not merely sit there inertly, but it must be activated as part of a people's identity and sense of its own prerogative... to understand who we are and what we are doing. Without it we are simply lost, as indeed it seems we really are" (pp.158-159). As a mark of protest, Said declined the invitation from the White House to the ceremony of the signing of the Oslo accord on September 14, 1993.
Oslo, the capital of Norway, one of the three places where the Nobel award is presented every year in December, was the location where the "peace" negotiations between the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and the representatives of Israel were held. Said's contention is that the Oslo accord is a fraud foisted upon the peace-hungry Palestinians, with the blaring TV and mass media verbal hoopla (misrepresenting facts) making it appear, with their "onslaught of irrelevance and gross distortion of reality", that all is well with the world and the accord would take Palestine to the promised land of honey and milk. In the "peace" juggernaut the interests of Palestine have been pawned, nay, sold out. Through his writings he wants to mobilise public opinion and support against Israel's territorial aggression on and usurpation of the property of the Arabs (flouting all U.N. resolutions and in collusion with U.S. imperialism) thus impoverishing the country, dispossessing the people of their rightful holding, unleashing unmitigated violence, expelling a whole nation from its own land. Palestinians fall upon the thorns of life. They bleed. This is the human side of the major problem that needs universal attention. As a visionary and intellectual, Said would engage in a crusade, articulating this problem loudly and boldly and expose to the international community at large the fraud perpetrated by the Israelites.
The historic region Palestine — the focal point three major religions of the world, Judaism, Christianity and Islam — has always been ridden with feud, strife and turmoil, political, religious and ethnic. And this has been deemed the holiest of holy places. Did not King Henry, in Shakespeare's play, take a vow to go on a pilgrimage "to chase these pagans in those holy fields/ Over whose acres walked those blessed feet"? Recent events tell us that in the domain of Palestine, Israel was established as a separate Jewish state in 1948 during the British administration. This small Jewish state is surrounded on all sides by Arab and Islamic countries. Consequent upon the establishment of the Nazi regime in Germany, there was an exodus of the Jewish population which migrated in large numbers to Israel. Public sympathy is always in favour of the Jews who had suffered during the holocaust. Apart from the power and pelf that Israel held over Palestine, after it became a Jewish state, there has been such a successful construction of European discourse in its favour (helped, of course, by the holocaust and its aftermath) that Palestine got totally obliterated out of public memory. Politicians and intellectuals like Truman, Roosevelt, Churchill and artists and musicians were all on the side of Israel and there was none of the calibre of these men to balance the public opinion in favour of Palestine. How sad! There is what is called a "Law of Return" in operation by which any Jew, living in any part of the world, can emigrate to Israel and claim citizenship rights. Lands originally owned by the Palestinians have been expropriated (on account of absentee landlordism) and given over to Jews. According to Said, Israel is the only state in the world that does not have internationally recognised borders. Palestinians are being constantly discriminated against, segregated and rendered disadvantaged because they have become a minority in their own country. Aided and abetted by the U.S. arsenal, Palestinians are being subjected to untold miseries. To prove his point, Said supplies us with details, documentary evidences, records from archives, statistical data. All these go to prove that Palestinian Arabs are being extirpated from the face of Palestine. The Oslo Peace accord granted limited Palestinian self-rule and autonomy in Israeli territories but in spirit it is more honoured in the breach than the observance. The sham accord is "dead and embalmed".
Said's language, especially when directed against the U.S., is insolent and abusive. He calls the U.S. "an international gangster, flouting international law, supporting its clients in the most bloodthirsty exploits, resorting to subversion and insurgency in order to destabilize its enemies" (p.240). Equally impudent and unsparing is his criticism of the egregiously incompetent leadership of the sickly and senile autocrat, Yasir Arafat. "With his corruption he has stripped his own people of their resources, squandered their wealth, abused their lives further. What right does he claim to do all this while robbing his people, forcing them to accept monopolies, allowing himself to be accountable to no one as he bribes, bullies, corrupts everyone in his way... Yasir Arafat neither has the vision nor courage to lead anyone anywhere except into more poverty and despondency" (pp.180-181).
Said is quite practical-minded in his belief that there can be no military solution to the Palestinian question. The Palestinians do not simply have the necessary arms to indulge in a regular war with their aggressor Israel; nor would it be right to think along those lines. What can and should be done under the prevailing circumstances is to gather a mass movement of determined people by political, moral and non-violent means. There should be peaceful rallies, demonstrations against Israel's policy of expansion and confiscation of property. There should be a regular campaign against the settlements of Israel. This would, at least, prevent further damage rather than allow things to drift along a meaningless course. Otherwise a time may come when the Palestine natives are swamped from the face of the earth — a fate that has befallen the native Red Indians. Said has in mind the example of the South Africans who could fight against apartheid by such means. The ideal thing would be for the two peoples to live in harmony with mutual respect, following the policy of live and let live. In ancient times, Arab civilisation was characterised by its tolerance, its acceptance of multicultural, multireligious, and multiethnic diversity. What is needed today is peaceful coexistence, genuine reconciliation and real self-determination. Thus Said: "But I remain convinced that if as Palestinians we make it clear that we are prepared with the Jews of Israel and Arab people in the surrounding region to make a new kind of history based on a politics of integration and inclusion, we can carry the day. It is slow, hard work, but it is doable and, I think, achievable in the best sense. To settle for less would be a terrible mistake whose consequences are evident all around us" (p.248).
There are scores of debunkers of Said who — besides questioning his credentials — have attacked him scathingly and scurrilously for his anti-Oslo writings and dubbed him the false prophet of Palestine. His abusive, "absolutist rhetoric", his failure to articulate positive alternatives and provide a tangible, negotiable agenda: these have come in for censure.
The ill-fated Palestine is not alone in its sufferings. Many others — Tibet, Ireland, parts of northwest India and, most recently, Iraq, for instance — face the scourge of gratuitous violence and treacherous territorial aggression. Only they do not have a spokesman like Edward Said. And that makes all the difference!
The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After, Edward Said, Penguin Books, 2003, p.418, Rs.350.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
|
