Edward Said
I first visited South Africa in May 1991: a dark, wet, wintry period, when
Apartheid still ruled, although the ANC and Nelson Mandela had been freed. Ten
years later I returned, this time to summer, in a democratic country in which
Apartheid has been defeated, the ANC is in power, and a vigorous, contentious
civil society is engaged in trying to complete the task of bringing equality and
social justice to this still divided and economically troubled country. But, the
liberation struggle that ended Apartheid and instituted the first democratically
elected government on 27 April 1994, remains one of the great human achievements
in recorded history. Despite the problems of the present, South Africa is an
inspiring place to visit and think about, partly because for Arabs, it has a lot
to teach us about struggle, originality, and perseverance.
I
came here this time as a participant in a conference on values in education,
organised by the Ministry of Education. Qader Asmal, the minister of education,
is an old and admired friend whom I met many years ago when he was in exile in
Ireland. I shall say more about him in my next article. But, as a member of the
cabinet, a longtime ANC activist, and a successful lawyer and academic, he was
able to persuade Nelson Mandela (now 83, in frail health, and officially retired
from public life) to address the conference on the first evening. What Mandela
said then made a deep impression on me, as much because of Mandela’s enormous
stature and profoundly affecting charisma, as for the well-crafted words he
uttered. Also a lawyer by training, Mandela is an especially eloquent man who,
in spite of thousands of ritual occasions and speeches, always seems to have
something gripping to say.
This
time it was two phrases about the past that struck me in a fine speech about
education, a speech which drew unflattering attention to the depressed present
state of the country’s majority, “languishing in abject conditions of
material and social deprivation.” Hence, he reminded the audience,
“our struggle is not over,” even though — here was the first phrase
— the campaign against Apartheid “was one of the great moral
struggles” that “captured the world’s imagination.” The second
phrase was in his description of the anti-Apartheid campaign not simply as a
movement to end racial discrimination, but as a means “for all of us to
assert our common humanity.” Implied in the words “all of us” is
that all of the races of South Africa, including the pro-Apartheid whites, were
envisaged as participating in a struggle whose goal finally was coexistence,
tolerance and “the realisation of humane values.”
The
first phrase struck me cruelly: why did the Palestinian struggle not (yet)
capture the world’s imagination and why, even more to the point, does it not
appear as a great moral struggle which, as Mandela said about the South African
experience, received “almost universal support… from virtually all
political persuasions and parties?”
True,
we have received a great deal of general support, and yes, ours is a moral
struggle of epic proportions. The conflict between Zionism and the Palestinian
people is admittedly more complex than the battle against Apartheid, even if in
both cases one people paid and the other is still paying a very heavy price in
dispossession, ethnic cleansing, military occupation and massive social
injustice. The Jews are a people with a tragic history of persecution and
genocide. Bound by their ancient faith to the land of Palestine, their
“return” to a homeland promised them by British imperialism was
perceived by much of the world (but especially by a Christian West responsible
for the worst excesses of anti-Semitism) as a heroic and justified restitution
for what they suffered. Yet, for years and years, few paid attention to the
conquest of Palestine by Jewish forces, or to the Arab people already there who
endured its exorbitant cost in the destruction of their society, the expulsion
of the majority, and the hideous system of laws — a virtual Apartheid — that
still discriminates against them inside Israel and in the occupied territories.
Palestinians were the silent victims of a gross injustice, quickly shuffled
offstage by a triumphalist chorus of how amazing Israel was.
After
the reemergence of a genuine Palestinian liberation movement in the late ’60s,
the formerly colonised people of Asia, Africa and Latin America adopted the
Palestinian struggle, but in the main, the strategic balance was vastly in
Israel’s favour; it has been backed unconditionally by the US ($5 billion in
annual aid), and in the West, the media, the liberal intelligentsia, and most
governments have been on Israel’s side. For reasons too well known to go into
here, the official Arab environment was either overtly hostile or lukewarm in
its mostly verbal and financial support.
Because,
however, the shifting strategic goals of the PLO were always clouded by useless
terrorist actions, were never addressed or articulated eloquently, and because
the preponderance of cultural discourse in the West was either unknown to or
misunderstood by Palestinian policymakers and intellectuals, we have never been
able to claim the moral high ground effectively. Israeli information could
always both appeal to (and exploit) the Holocaust as well as the unstudied and
politically untimely acts of Palestinian terror, thereby neutralising or
obscuring our message, such as it was. We never concentrated as a people on
cultural struggle in the West (which the ANC early on had realised was the key
to undermining Apartheid) and we simply did not highlight in a humane,
consistent way the immense depredations and discriminations directed at us by
Israel. Most television viewers today have no idea about Israel’s racist land
policies, or its spoliations, tortures, systematic deprivation of the
Palestinians just because they are not Jews. As a black South African reporter
wrote in one of the local newspapers here while on a visit to Gaza, Apartheid
was never as vicious and as inhumane as Zionism: ethnic cleansing, daily
humiliations, collective punishment on a vast scale, land appropriation, etc.,
etc.
But,
even these facts, were they known better as a weapon in the battle over values
between Zionism and the Palestinians, would not have been enough. What we never
concentrated on enough was the fact that to counteract Zionist exclusivism, we
would have to provide a solution to the conflict that, in Mandela’s second
phrase, would assert our common humanity as Jews and Arabs. Most of us still
cannot accept the idea that Israeli Jews are here to stay, that they will not go
away, any more than Palestinians will go away. This is understandably very hard
for Palestinians to accept, since they are still in the process of losing their
land and being persecuted on a daily basis. But, with our irresponsible and
unreflective suggestion in what we have said that they will be forced to leave
(like the Crusades), we did not focus enough on ending the military occupation
as a moral imperative or on providing a form for their security and
self-determinism that did not abrogate ours. This, and not the preposterous hope
that a volatile American president would give us a state, ought to have been the
basis of a mass campaign everywhere. Two people in one land. Or, equality for
all. Or, one person one vote. Or, a common humanity asserted in a binational
state.
I
know we are the victims of a terrible conquest, a vicious military occupation, a
Zionist lobby that has consistently lied in order to turn us either into
non-people or into terrorists — but what is the real alternative to what I’ve
been suggesting? A military campaign? A dream. More Oslo negotiations? Clearly
not. More loss of life by our valiant young people, whose leader gives them no
help or direction? A pity, but no. Reliance on the Arab states who have reneged
even on their promise to provide emergency assistance now? Come on, be serious.
Israeli
Jews and Palestinian Arabs are locked in Sartre’s vision of hell, that of
“other people.” There is no escape. Separation can’t work in so tiny a
land, any more than Apartheid did. Israeli military and economic power insulates
them from having to face reality. This is the meaning of Sharon’s election, an
antediluvian war criminal summoned out of the mists of time to do what: put the
Arabs in their place? Hopeless. Therefore, it is up to us to provide the answer
that power and paranoia cannot. It isn’t enough to speak generally of peace. One
must provide the concrete grounds for it, and those can only come from moral
vision, and neither from “pragmatism” nor “practicality.” If
we are all to live — this is our imperative — we must capture the imagination
not just of our people, but that of our oppressors. And, we have to abide by
humane democratic values.
Is
the current Palestinian leadership listening? Can it suggest anything better
than this, given its abysmal record in a “peace process” that has led
to the present horrors?