The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After Edward W. Said (Vintage, 2001)
reviewed by Torgun Bullen
Edward W. Said (born November 1 1935; died September 25 2003) was Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He was a Palestinian New Yorker who wrote passionately about the plight of the Palestinians, emphasising all the while the need for a peaceful, secular solution to the Israeli/Palestinian problem as well as equal citizenship and peaceful co-existence between Arabs and Jews.
The so-called Middle East 'peace process' began secretly in Oslo and was signed on the White House lawn in September 1993. The interim agreements were concluded in October 1998, in the Wye Plantation a few miles from Washington.
The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After is a collection of essays outlining what was achieved by both sides, Israeli and Palestinian - pitifully little for the Palestinians, according to Said.
Said addresses the general ignorance in the West about the origin of the situation in Israel, due to the silence of most Western intellectuals on what happened in Palestine in 1948 and the effects of an extremely efficient American and Israeli propaganda machine. The view is widespread in the West that the Zionists settled in a largely uninhabited land in 1948 and that they 'made the desert bloom'. Nothing could be further from the truth, Said says. About 750,000 Palestinians, 70 % of the population, were forcefully made to flee their homes and became refugees in surrounding countries. Before 1948, only about 7% of the land in Palestine was owned by Jews. This increased to about 50% after 1948. In 1967, the Israelis annexed East Jerusalem and occupied the rest of historic Palestine.
Palestinian Arabs had been settled on their land for thousands of years when the Zionists made them flee. The ones still living in the occupied territories are in fact living in disjointed Bantustans with Israelis firmly in control of land, water, roads, entries and exits to townships and security. One of the founding fathers of Zionism is supposed to have remarked that their plan was to acquire all the land in Palestine 'acre by acre, goat by goat', and this is more or less what has happened and is happening, through house occupations, bulldozing of homes, expropriation of land, deceptive property purchases and the like.
Said makes the comparison again and again with the way the American Indians were treated and with the apartheid system and Bantustans in South Africa. As far as the occupied territories go, in Gaza land confiscated by Jewish settlers now amounts to 40% and in Jerusalem and in the West Bank 75%.
All Jews worldwide are covered by the so-called 'Law of Return' which means that a Jew from, say, Belgrade with no recent ties to Palestine or Israel, has an automatic right to settle in Israel, while Palestinian Arabs within Israel or the occupied territories, whose families have been there for generations, have no right to land.
Said doesn't spare Arafat and his hangers-on in the Palestinian Authority, listing their undemocratic, corrupt and brutal practices, including the widespread use of torture. Arafat surrounds himself by several security apparatuses (nobody knows how many). Gaza is a virtual concentration camp surrounded by a security fence on three sides and the sea on the fourth. A human rights lawyer working there estimates that in Gaza there are 20,000 security men for 1 million residents - the highest police per capita ratio in the world. Said launches stinging attacks on the general patriarchal and autocratic style of leadership in the Arab world.
Said makes the case that the Israelis are not 'ordinary oppressors', in that many Jews living in Israel are the survivors of the Holocaust. This does not give them right to oppress others, he says, at the same time he distances himself from other Arabs who think the Holocaust is not their problem. Said expresses sympathy for all human suffering and is a strong spokesman for dialogue with sympathetic Israelis, which is frowned upon in much of the Arab world as 'normalization' with Israel.
Although the Palestinians seem to be steadily losing out to the settlers and Israel, in one respect they have the advantage: by 2010 it is estimated that Palestinians will achieve demographic parity with Jews - what then? asks the author.
Said sees the folly of believing that a Palestinian 'state' is going to be a solution for the Palestinians - after all, Arafat regularly declares such a 'state', and all the while the land occupations and the bulldozing of homes continues. Beyond that, Said does not question 'statehood' per se. What he would like to see for the Palestinians is equal rights with Jews and others within Israel on a secular basis - a modern Western style liberal 'democracy' for all Israeli citizens.
Summing up the achievements of the 'peace process', he says (p. 19): 'The newly redrawn areas of the West Bank and Gaza gave Palestinians limited autonomy (but no sovereignty) in 3% of the former and about 60% of the latter, which the Israelis were glad to get rid of anyway'.
The positive thing about Said is his insistence on Israelis and Palestinians solving their problems together, as equals. History cannot be undone, what happened, happened, and there is only one platform to work from: the one where Jews and Arabs live side by side. He is an advocate for dialogue with sympathetic and 'enlightened' Israelis, and does not discount such attempts as 'fraternising with the enemy', or 'collaborating'. He is also unequivocal in his insistence on the equal role that should be played by women in any democracy and highlights their subordinate role in the region.
The disappointing side to his argument is that, in spite of pointing out the brutality and corruption of Arafat and the Palestinian leadership again and again, he still makes appeals for them to change. Said's hope for the Palestinians and the Middle East is a Western style 'democracy'. He is more or less saying that the style of leadership in the Middle East is still somewhat medieval and pre-capitalist - all power is in the hands of powerful, often despotic, patriarchal leaders from ruling families. Seen from that standpoint the more powerful role of government and the state in Western Europe, for example, must seem more attractive - with schools, universities and health care funded from the state purse, and with some limited freedom of expression.
What Said, along with the majority of 'enlightened' intellectuals, does not see is that within the confines of states, capitalism and private property, these problems are going to perpetuate themselves indefinitely. Tensions and rivalry are built into the capitalist system; one group of leaders replacing another turn out to be, like in Orwell's 1984 , just another lot of pigs at the trough. It cannot be any other way. The state is there to serve the interests of the capitalist class, to give to the capitalists as much as they can without risking social unrest and to take from the workers as much as they will allow.
Only when workers realise they have no country to owe allegiance to, and that the reliance on leaders leads them nowhere but down a blind ally, will we start to make progress.