American Zionism -- the real problem (1)
By Edward Said
09/27/2000 "AL-AHRAM" -- This is the first article in a series on the misunderstood and misjudged role of American Zionism in the question of Palestine. In my opinion, the role of organised Zionist groups and activities in the United States has not been sufficiently addressed during the period of the "peace process," a neglect that I find absolutely astonishing, given that Palestinian policy has been essentially to throw our fate as a people in the lap of the United States without any strategic awareness of how US policy is in effect dominated, if not completely controlled, by a small minority of people whose views about Middle East peace are in some way more extreme than even those of the Israeli Likud.
Let me give a small example. A month ago, the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz sent over a leading columnist of theirs, Ari Shavit, to spend several days talking with me; a good summary of this long conversation appeared as a question-and-answer interview in the August 18 issue of the newspaper's supplement, basically uncut and uncensored. I voiced my views very candidly, with a major emphasis on right of return, the events of 1948, and Israel's responsibility for all this. I was surprised that my views were presented just as I voiced them, without the slightest editorialising by Shavit, whose questions were always courteous and un-confrontational.
A week after the interview there was a response to it by Meron Benvenisti, ex-deputy mayor of Jerusalem under Teddy Kollek. It was disgustingly personal, full of insults and slander against me and my family. But he never denied that there was a Palestinian people, or that we were driven out in 1948. In fact he said, we conquered them, and why should we feel guilty? I responded to Benvenisti a week later in Ha'aretz: What I wrote was also published uncut. I reminded Israeli readers that Benvenisti was responsible for the destruction (and probably knew about the killing of several Palestinians) of Haret Al-Magharibah in 1967, in which several hundred Palestinians lost their homes to Israeli bulldozers. But I did not have to remind Benvenisti or Ha'aretz readers that as a people we existed and could at least debate our right of return. That was taken for granted.
Two points here. One is that the whole interview could not have appeared in any American paper, and certainly not in any Jewish-American journal. And if there had been an interview the questions to me would have been adversarial, hectoring, insulting, such as, why have you been involved in terrorism, why will you not recognise Israel, why was Hajj Amin a Nazi, and so on. Second, a right-wing Israeli Zionist like Benvenisti, no matter how much he may detest me or my views, would not deny that there is a Palestinian people which was forced to leave in 1948. An American Zionist for a long time would say that no conquest took place or, as Joan Peters alleged in a now-disappeared and all but forgotten 1984 book, From Time Immemorial (that won all the Jewish awards when it appeared here), there were no Palestinians with a life in Palestine before 1948.
Every Israeli will readily admit and knows perfectly well that all of Israel was once Palestine, that (as Moshe Dayan said openly in 1976) every Israeli town or village once had an Arab name. And Benvenisti says openly that "we" conquered, and so what? Why should we feel guilty about winning? American Zionist discourse is never straight out honest that way: it must always go round and talk about making the desert bloom, and Israeli democracy, etc., completely avoiding the essential facts about 1948, which every Israeli has actually lived. For the American, these are mostly fantasies, or myths, not realities. So removed from the actualities are American supporters of Israel, so caught in the contradictions of diasporic guilt (after all what does it mean to be a Zionist and not emigrate to Israel?) and triumphalism as the most successful and most powerful minority in the US, that what emerges is very often a frightening mixture of vicarious violence against Arabs and a deep fear and hatred of them, which is the result, unlike Israeli Jews, of not having any sustained direct contact with them.
For the American Zionist, therefore, Arabs are not real beings, but fantasies of nearly everything that can be demonised and despised, terrorism and anti-Semitism most specially. I recently received a letter from a former student of mine, who has had the benefit of the finest education available in the United States: he can still bring himself to ask me in all honesty and courtesy why as a Palestinian I let a Nazi like Hajj Amin still determine my political agenda. "Before Hajj Amin," he argued, "Jerusalem wasn't important to Arabs. Because he was so evil he made it an important issue for Arabs just in order to frustrate Zionist aspirations which always held Jerusalem to be important." This is not the logic of someone who has lived with and knows something concrete about Arabs. It is that of a person who speaks an organised discourse and is driven by an ideology that regards Arabs only as negative functions, as the embodiment of violent anti-Semitic violent passions. As such, therefore, they are to be fought against and if possible disposed of. Not for nothing was Dr Baruch Goldstein, the appalling murderer of 29 Palestinians who were quietly praying in the Hebron mosque, an American, as was Rabbi Meir Kahane. Far from being aberrations that have embarrassed their followers, both Kahane and Goldstein are revered today by others like them. Many of the most zealous far-right settlers sitting on Palestinian land, remorselessly speaking about "the land of Israel" as being theirs, hating and ignoring the Palestinian owners and residents all round them, are also American-born. To see them walking through the streets of Hebron as if the Arab city was entirely theirs is a frightening sight, aggravated by the defiance and contempt they display openly against the Arab majority.
I bring all this up here to make one essential point. When after the Gulf War the PLO took the strategic decision -- already settled on by two major Arab countries before the PLO -- to work with the American government and if possible with the powerful lobby that controls discussion of Middle Eastern politics, they had made the decision (as had the two Arab states before them) on the basis of vast ignorance and quite extraordinarily mistaken assumptions. The idea, as it was expressed to me shortly after 1967 by a senior Arab diplomat, was to surrender in effect, and say, we are not going to struggle any more. We are now willing to accept Israel and also to accept the US's determining role in our future. There were objective reasons for such a view at the time, as there are now, as to why continuing the fight as the Arabs had done historically would lead to further defeat and even disaster. But I firmly believe that it was a mistaken policy simply to throw Arab policy into the lap of the US and, since the major Zionist organisations are so influential everywhere in the United States, into their lap as well, saying, in effect, we won't fight you, let us join you, but please treat us well. The hope was that if we conceded and said, we are not your enemies, as Arabs we would become their friends.
The problem is with the disparity in power that remained. From the viewpoint of the powerful, what difference does it make to your own strategy if your weak adversary gives up and says I have nothing further to fight for, take me, I want to be your ally, just try to understand me a bit better and then perhaps you will then be fairer? A good way of answering this question in practical and concrete terms is to look at the latest turn of events in New York's senatorial race, where Hillary Clinton is competing with Republican Ric Lazio for the seat now held by Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D), who is retiring. Last year Hillary said that she favoured the establishment of a Palestinian state and, on a formal visit to Gaza with her husband, embraced Soha Arafat. Since entering the senatorial race in New York she has outdone even the most right-wing Zionists in her fervour for Israel and opposition to Palestine, even going so far as to advocate moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and (more extreme) advocating leniency for Jonathan Pollard, the Israeli spy convicted for espionage against the US and now serving a life sentence. Her Republican antagonists have tried to embarrass her by depicting her as an "Arab-lover" and by releasing a photograph of her actually embracing Soha. Since New York is the citadel of Zionist power, attacking someone with such labels as "Arab-lover" and "friend of Soha Arafat" is tantamount to the worst possible insult. All this despite the fact that Arafat and the PLO are openly declared American allies, recipients of US military and financial aid, and in the security field the beneficiaries of CIA security support. In the meantime, the White House released a photo of Lazio shaking hands two years ago with Arafat. One blow clearly deserves another.
The real fact is that Zionist discourse is a discourse of power, and Arabs in that discourse are the objects of power -- despised objects at that. Having thrown in their lot with this power as its surrendered former antagonist, they can never expect to be on equal terms with it. Hence the degrading and insulting spectacle of Arafat (always and forever the symbol of enmity to the Zionist mind) being used in an entirely local contest in the US between two opponents who are trying to prove who of the two is the most pro-Israeli. And neither Hillary Clinton nor Ric Lazio is even Jewish.
What I shall discuss in my next article is how the only possible political strategy for the US so far as Arab and Palestinian policy are concerned is neither a pact with the Zionists here nor one with US policy, but a mobilised mass campaign directed at the American population on behalf of Palestinian human, civil and political rights. All other arrangements, whether Oslo or Camp David, are doomed to failure because, put simply, the official discourse is totally dominated by Zionism and, except for a few individual exceptions, no alternatives to it exist. Therefore all peace arrangements undertaken on the basis of an alliance with the US are alliances that confirm rather than confront Zionist power. To submit supinely to a Zionist-controlled Middle East policy, as the Arabs have done for almost a generation now, will neither bring stability at home nor equality and justice in the US.
Yet the irony is that there exists inside the US a vast body of opinion ready to be critical both of Israel and of US foreign policy. The tragedy is that the Arabs are too weak, too divided, too disorganised and ignorant to take advantage of it. I shall discuss the reasons for that as well in my next article since my hope is to try to reach a new generation that may be both puzzled and discouraged by the miserable, denigrated place in which our culture and people are now located, and the constant sense of indignant but humiliating loss that all of us experience as a result.
More on American Zionism (2)
By Edward Said
A small, potentially embarrassing episode has occurred since I wrote my last article on this subject two weeks ago. Martin Indyk, US ambassador (for the second time during the Clinton administration) to Israel, has abruptly been stripped of his diplomatic security clearance by the State Department. The story put about is that he used his laptop computer without using proper security measures, and therefore may have disclosed information or released it to unauthorised persons. As a result, he now cannot enter or leave the State Department without an escort, cannot remain in Israel, and must now submit to a full investigation.
We may never find out what really happened. But what is public knowledge and has nevertheless not been discussed in the media is the scandal of Indyk's appointment in the first place. On the very eve of Clinton's inauguration in January 1993, it was announced that Martin Indyk, born in London, and an Australian citizen, had been sworn in as an American citizen at the president-elect's express wishes. Proper procedures were not followed: it was an act of peremptory executive privilege, so that, after having gained US citizenship, Indyk could immediately thereafter become a member of the National Security Council staff responsible for the Middle East. All this, I believe, was the real scandal, not Indyk's subsequent carelessness or indiscretion or even his complicity in ignoring official codes of conduct. For before he came to the very heart of the US government in a top and largely secretly run position, Indyk was the head of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a quasi-intellectual think-tank that engaged in active advocacy on the part of Israel, and coordinated its work with that of AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), the most powerful and feared lobby in Washington. It is worth noting that before he came to the Bush administration Dennis Ross, the State Department consultant who has been leading the American peace process, was also the head of the Washington Institute, so the traffic between Israeli lobbying and US Middle East policy is extremely regular, and yes, regulated.
AIPAC has for years been so powerful not only because it draws on a well-organised, well-connected, highly visible, successful, and wealthy Jewish population but because for the most part there has been very little resistance to it. There is a healthy fear and respect for AIPAC all over the country, but especially in Washington, where in a matter of hours almost the entire Senate can be marshalled into signing a letter to the president on Israel's behalf. Who is going to oppose AIPAC and continue to have a career in Congress, or to stand up to it on behalf of, say, the Palestinian cause when nothing concrete can be offered by that cause to anyone who stands up to AIPAC? In the past one or two members of Congress have resisted AIPAC openly but soon after their re-election was blocked by the many political action committees controlled by AIPAC, and that was that. The only senator who had anything remotely like an oppositional stand to AIPAC was James AbuRezk, but he did not want to be re-elected and, for his own reasons, resigned after his single six-year term ended.
There is now no political commentator who is absolutely clear and open in his/her resistance to Israel in the US. A few liberal columnists like Anthony Lewis of the New York Times do occasionally write in criticism of Israeli occupation practices, but nothing is ever said about 1948 and the whole issue of the original Palestinian dispossession that is at the root of Israel's existence and subsequent behaviour. In a recent article, the former State Department official Henry Pracht has noted the staggering unanimity of opinion in all sectors of the American media, from film, to television, radio, newspapers, weeklies, monthlies, quarterlies and dailies: everyone more or less toes the official Israeli line, which has also become the official American line. This is the coincidence American Zionism has achieved in the years since 1967, and which it has exploited in most public discourse about the Middle East. Thus US policy equals Israeli policy, except on the very rare occasions (ie, the Pollard case) where Israel oversteps the limit and assumes that it has a right to help itself to what it wishes.
Criticism of Israel's practices is therefore strictly limited to occasional sorties that are so infrequent as to be almost literally invisible. The overall consensus is virtually impregnable and is so powerful as to be enforceable everywhere within the accepted mainstream. This consensus is made up of unassailable truths concerning Israel as a democracy, its basic virtue, the modernity and reasonableness of its people and its decisions. Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, a respected American liberal cleric, once said that Zionism was the secular religion of the American Jewish community. This is supported visibly by various American organisations whose role it is to police the public realm for infractions, even as many other Jewish organisations run hospitals, museums, research institutes for the good of the whole country. This duality is like an unresolved paradox in which noble public enterprises coexist with the meanest and most inhumane ones. Thus, to take a recent example, the Zionist Organisation of America (ZOA), a small but very vociferous group of zealots, paid for an advertisement in the New York Times on 10 September that addressed Ehud Barak as if he was an employee of American Jews, reminding him that six million of them outnumber the five million Israelis who had decided to negotiate on Jerusalem. The language of the advertisement was not only admonitory, it was almost threatening, saying that Israel's prime minister had undemocratically decided to undertake what was anathema to American Jews, who were displeased with his behaviour. It's not at all clear who mandated this small and pugnacious group of zealots to lecture the Israeli prime minister in these tones, but ZOA feels it has the right to intervene in everybody's business. They routinely write or telephone the president of my university to ask him to dismiss or censure me for something I said, as if universities were like kindergartens and professors to be treated as under-age delinquents. Last year they mounted a campaign to get me fired from my elected post as president of the Modern Language Association, whose 30,000 members were lectured by ZOA as so many morons. This is the worst sort of Stalinist bullying, but is typical of organised American Zionism at its worst and most zealous.
Similarly for the past few months various right-wing Jewish writers and editors (for example, Norman Podhoretz, Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol, to mention only a few of the more strident propagandists) have been critical of Israel for essentially displeasing them, as if they had more title to it than anyone else. Their tone in these and other articles is dreadful, an unappetising combination of brazen arrogance, moral preachiness, and the ugliest form of hypocrisy, all of it done with an air of complete confidence. They assume that because of the power of the Zionist organisations that back and support their reprehensible rantings they can get away with their appalling verbal excesses, but it is mostly because most Americans are either ignorant of what they are saying or cowed into silence that they can get away with this sort of nonsense, very little of it having much to do with the real political actualities of the Middle East. Most sensible Israelis regard them with distaste.
American Zionism has now reached the level of almost pure fantasy in which what is good for American Zionists in their fiefdom and their mostly fictional discourse is good for America and Israel, and certainly for the Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians, who seem to be little more than a collection of negligible nuisances. Anyone who defies or dares to challenge them (especially if he/she is either an Arab or a Jew critical of Zionism) is subject to the most awful abuse and vituperation, all of it personal, racist and ideological. They are relentless, totally without generosity or genuine human understanding. To say that their diatribes and analyses are Old Testament-like in manner is to insult the Old Testament.
In other words, an alliance with them, such as the Arab states and the PLO have tried to forge since the Gulf War, is the stupidest kind of ignorance. They are unalterably opposed to everything the Arabs, Muslims and, most especially, Palestinians stand for and would sooner blow things up than make peace with us. Yet it is also true that most ordinary citizens are often puzzled by the vehemence of their tone, but unaware really of what is behind it. Whenever you speak to Americans who are not Jewish or Arab, and who have no expertise on the Middle East, there is routinely a sense of wonder and exasperation at the relentlessly hectoring attitude, as if the whole Middle East was theirs for the taking. Zionism in America, I have concluded, is not only a fantasy built on very shaky foundations, it is impossible to make an alliance or to expect rational exchange with it. But it can be outflanked and defeated.
Ever since the mid-1980s I had proposed to the PLO leadership and to every Palestinian and Arab I met that the PLO quest for the president's ear was a total illusion since all recent presidents have been devoted Zionists, and that the only way to change US policy and achieve self-determination was through a mass campaign on behalf of Palestinian human rights, which would have the effect of out-flanking Zionists and going straight to the American people. Uninformed and yet open to appeals for justice as they are, Americans would have reacted as they did to the ANC campaign against apartheid, which finally changed the balance inside South Africa. In fairness here, I should mention that James Zogby, then an energetic human rights activist (before he threw in his lot with Arafat, the US government and the Democratic Party), was one of the originators of the idea. That he abandoned it totally is a sign of how he changed, rather than a nullification of the idea itself.
But it also became very clear to me that the PLO would never do it for several reasons. It would require work and dedication. Second, it would mean espousing a political philosophy that was really based on democratic grass-roots organisation. Third, it would have to be a movement rather than a personal initiative on behalf of the present leaders. And lastly, it required a real, as opposed to a superficial, knowledge of US society. Besides, I felt that the conventional cast of mind that kept getting us in one bad position after another was very difficult to change, and time proved me right. The Oslo accords were the unimaginative acceptance by the Palestinians of Israeli-US supremacy rather than an attempt to change it.
In any case, any alliance or compromise with Israel in the present circumstances, where US policy is totally dominated by American Zionism, is doomed to roughly the same results for Arabs generally and Palestinians in particular. Israel must dominate, Israel's concerns are primary, and Israeli systemic injustice will be prolonged. Unless American Zionism is taken on and made to change -- not a very difficult task, as I shall try to show in my next article -- the results will be the same: dismal and discrediting for us as Arabs.
Professor Edward Said. Professor Said is a Palestinian/American world leading public intellectual. He was born in Palestine in 1935 and died in United States on 25th September 2003
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