The Edward Said Reader

by Edward W. Said

  Last week I was invited to the Israeli Army Radio program Correct Till Now to speak about the historical backgrounds of Armenian terrorism. Against their usual custom, the editors insisted on taping the talk beforehand. Afterwards, I understood why. I was asked if the Armenian holocaust really occurred. I answered: “There is no doubt that genocide occurred. For thousands of years people lived on its land, and suddenly it was no more. This is genocide,” or words to that effect. The Israeli Army Radio refused to broadcast the talk. They were ready to do it only on condition that I should change the text, and say, “There was a massacre, which perhaps approaches genocide.”7

  He concludes that “perhaps it was the great mistake of the last Jewish generation which caused it. It should have been forbidden to Jews to treat the concept of ‘genocide’ as applying to them alone. It should be told in every Israeli school that many other peoples were, and still are, expelled and massacred.”

  Conversely, Israelis are told by Chaim Herzog that when Israel fosters good relations with Right Wing regimes which practice racial discrimination and kill their own people, the only criterion ought to be: “Is it good for the Jews?” A related sentiment was expressed by a Jewish-Israeli resident of upper Nazareth about his Israeli-Arab neighbors: “Love is more dangerous than hate. It’s dangerous to our existence.”

  The Palestinian narrative has never been officially admitted to Israeli history, except as that of “non-Jews,” whose inert presence in Palestine was a nuisance to be ignored or expelled. With the exception of a small and marginal group of Israelis, most of Israel has as a result not found it difficult to get over the story of the Lebanese war and its subsequent horrors. Take Abba Eban—liberal, humane, judicious. In his introduction to the Israeli Kahan Commission report, published as a book in the West, he praises the “meticulous” analysis that, in a sense, exonerates Israel: yet in so doing he nowhere mentions such things as the explicitly fascist nature of Israel’s chief allies, the Lebanese Phalanges, or the fact—which doesn’t speak for itself—that the Palestinians in Lebanon were not ipso facto “terrorists,” as the report has it, but were there because they had been driven out of Palestine in implementation of an admitted policy of expulsion.

  Thus, as much as Begin and Sharon, Eban refuses to consider the PLO as more than a gang of terrorists. Indeed, he makes it seem that the PLO and the Phalangists, both of whom are “the chief agents of the tragedy,” are equally culpable for killing the Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila. As to whether “terrorism” is adequately defined simply by ascribing it to Palestinians because of Israeli deaths (the figures are interesting—between 1967 and 1982, 290 Israelis were killed in Palestinian attacks, whereas Lebanese police, UN, and Red Cross figures put Israeli-caused Arab casualties at 20,000 deaths for July and August 1982 alone), or whether any act of Palestinian resistance is terrorism, Eban does not say. Yet the other Israeli report on Sabra and Shatila is perfectly clear on Israeli responsibility for, and even complicity with, what took place: I refer here to the Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk’s powerfully concise book, Sabra et Chatila: Enquête sur un massacre, which has still found no established British or American publisher.

  Facts do not at all speak for themselves, but require a socially acceptable narrative to absorb, sustain, and circulate them. Such a narrative has to have a beginning and an end: in the Palestinian case, homeland for the resolution of its exiles since 1948. But, as Hayden White has noted in a seminal article, “narrative in general, from the folk tale to the novel, from annals to the fully realized ‘history,’ has to do with the topics of law, legality, legitimacy, or, more generally, authority.”8 Now there are numerous UN resolutions certifying the Palestinians as a people, their struggle as a legitimate one, their right to have an independent state as “inalienable.” Such resolutions, however, do not have the authority of which White speaks. None has drawn any acknowledgment from Israel or the United States, which have restricted themselves to such nonnarrative and indefinite formulae as—in the language of lackadaisical U.S. pronouncements—“resolution of the Palestinian problem in all its aspects.”9

  No television watcher could have had any doubts that the Israelis were savage and ruthless during the siege of Beirut. Yet a campaign has been waged in the media attacking the media for a pro-PLO slant. It got started, well before the Israeli invasion, in pro-Zionist publications like The New Republic, and it continues long after in Encounter, Commentary, and Policy Studies, as well as on college campuses where lectures entitled “NBC in Lebanon: A Study in Misrepresentation” are regularly given. The basic line is that the media have taken liberties with language, that analogies between Warsaw and Beirut are wrong, that any images showing Israeli troops engaged in bombing plainly civilian targets are anti-Semitic, that the millions of feet of newsreel are less trustworthy than the impressions of a supporter of Israel who spent a day in Lebanon touring the place as a guest of the Israeli army. Underlying all attacks on the media is the allegation that the PLO has intimidated or seduced journalists into partisan, anti-Semitic, and anti-Western attacks on Israel, a charge grandiloquently pronounced by Norman Podhoretz in his imitation of Zola, “J’Accuse.”10

  The repetition and accumulation of these claims amount to a virtual orthodoxy, setting limits, defining areas, asserting pressures, and the Chancellor incident of July 1982 stands as something of a monument to the process. John Chancellor is a leading American television commentator who arrived in Beirut during the siege and witnessed the destruction brought about by the indiscriminate bombing that was taking place all around him. The report he produced in full view of a vast national audience included references to “savage Israel,” “an imperialist state that we never knew existed before.” Yet a week later he reappeared in Jerusalem more or less retracting his remarks from Beirut: what he had seen there, he now said, was a “mistake,” Israel did not intend the city’s siege but had “bumbled into it.” Commenting on this volte-face, Richard Poirier wrote in Raritan Review that “the feelings aroused in Chancellor (and in millions of viewers presumably) by the television footage simply had no place to go outside the program.” Far from just changing his mind from one week to the next, Chancellor:

  unwittingly exposed the degree to which the structure of the evening news depends on ideas of reality determined by the political and social discourse already empowered outside the newsroom. Feelings about the victims of the siege could not, for example, be attached to an idea for the creation of a Palestinian homeland, since, despite the commitments, muffled as they are, of the Camp David accords, no such idea has as yet managed to find an enabling vocabulary within what is considered “reasonable” political discourse in this country.11

  What needs to be added to Poirier’s astute comments is that the “idea” of a Palestinian homeland would have to be enabled by the prior acceptance of a narrative entailing a homeland. And this has been resisted as strenuously on the imaginative and ideological level as it has been politically.

  While it is true that the ideological dimension is always important in political contests, the oddity here is that the physical distance from the territory aspired to, and the heavily saturated significance of that territory, make crucial the need for antecedent ideological projection in narrative form in the West. For Palestine is a privileged site of origin and return for both Judaism and Christianity—all the more so given the fact that Palestine for one and a half millennia had been in non-Jewish and non-Christian hands. It figures prominently in such momentous events as the Crusades, the nineteenth-century imperial conflicts, in Zionism, and in a whole congerie of major cultural texts from Augustine’s autobiography, to Dante’s vision, to Shakespeare’s dramatic geography, and Blake’s apocalypse. In more material and mundane terms, Palestine has also been important to the Arab and Muslim experience: a comparative study of that experience with the Judaic and Christian would be of extraordinary interest. The point I’m trying to make is that insofar as the West has complementarily endowed Zi
onism with a role to play in Palestine along with its own, it has stood against the perhaps humble narrative of native Palestinians once resident there and now reconstituting themselves in exile in the Occupied Territories.

  With this background in mind, the current disapproval of terrorism can more easily be understood. As first articulated during the late months of the Carter administration on, and amplified in such books as The Terror Network and The Spike, as unrestrainedly used by Israel—and now by American—officials to describe “enemies,” terrorism is the biggest and yet for that reason the most precise of concepts. This is not at all to say that terrorism does not exist, but rather to suggest that its existence has occasioned a whole new signifying system as well. Terrorism signifies first, in relation to “us,” the alien and gratuitously hostile force. It is destructive, systematic, and controlled. It is a web, a network, a conspiracy run from Moscow, via Bulgaria, Beirut, Libya, Tehran, and Cuba. It is capable of anything. One fervent anti-Communist Israeli has written a book revealing the Sabra and Shatila massacres to be a plot engineered by Moscow and the PLO to kill Palestinians (using Germans) in order to frame democratic Israel. Most of all, terrorism has come to signify “our” view of everything in the world that seems inimical to our interests, army, policy, or values.

  As such, it can be used retrospectively (as in the cases of Iran and Lebanon) or prospectively (Grenada, Honduras, Nicaragua) to justify everything “we” do and to delegitimize as well as dehumanize everything “they” do. The very indiscriminateness of terrorism, actual and described, its tautological and circular character, is antinarrative. Sequence, the logic of cause and effect as between oppressors and victims, opposing pressures—all these vanish inside an enveloping cloud called “terrorism.” Israeli commentators have remarked that the systematic use by Begin, Sharon, Eytan, and Arens of the rubric “terrorist” to describe Palestinians made it possible for them to use phrases like “terrorists’ nest,” “cancerous growth” and “two-legged beasts” in order to bomb refugee camps. An Israeli paratrooper said that “every Palestinian is automatically a suspected terrorist and by our definition of the term it is actually true.” One should add that Likud’s antiterrorist language and methods represent only an increase in intensity over previous Israeli policies, which were no less callous about Palestinians as real people with a real history.

  No wonder, then, that “facts” and the truth of a consecutive historical experience stand very little chance of wide acceptance or distribution in this wilderness of mirrors. To know, for example, that Shamir’s Stern Gang collaborated with the Nazis,12 or that everything the Israelis now do to Palestinians constitutes brutality and oppression easily rivaling the deeds of the Polish or South African regimes, is also sadly to know that antiapartheid activists regularly avoid discussion of Israel when they criticize one of its chief allies, South Africa, or that American journalists do not report the details of daily life on the West Bank with the tenacity they bring to reports about daily life behind the Iron Curtain, or that leaders of the antinuclear movement have nothing to say about the Israeli nuclear threat. Worse yet, there is every chance that ignorance about Israel’s attitude toward Palestinians will keep pace with sustained encomiums on Israel’s pioneering spirit, democracy, and humanism. On the uprooting of Palestinian orchards in Gaza in 1972 to make way for settlements, Chomsky notes here: this is “what is called in technical terms ‘making the desert bloom.’”13

  There have been refugees before. There have been new states built on the ruins of old. The unique things about this situation is Palestine’s unusual centrality, which privileges a Western master narrative, highlighting Jewish alienation and redemption—with all of it taking place as a modern spectacle before the world’s eyes. So that when Palestinians are told to stop complaining and to settle elsewhere like other refugees before them, they are entitled to respond that no other refugees have been required systematically to watch an unending ceremony of public approbation for the political movement, army, or country that made them refugees and occupied their territory. Occupying armies, as Chomsky observes, do not as a rule “bask in the admiration of American intellectuals for their unique and remarkable commitment to ‘purity of arms.’”14 To top it all, Palestinians are expected to participate in the dismantling of their own history at the same time.

  As long as discussions of Palestine and Israel are conducted on this level, the superior force of the ideological consensus I have been describing will prevail. Palestinians will initially have to play the major role in changing the consensus and, alas, characteristically, they have not been very successful. I recall during the siege of Beirut obsessively telling friends and family there, over the phone, that they ought to record, write down their experiences; it seemed crucial as a starting point to furnish the world some narrative evidence, over and above atomized and reified TV clips, of what it was like to be at the receiving end of Israeli “antiterrorism,” also known as “Peace for Galilee.” Naturally, they were all too busy surviving to take seriously the unclear theoretical imperatives being urged on them intermittently by a distant son, brother, or friend. As a result, most of the easily available written material produced since the fall of Beirut has in fact not been Palestinian and, just as significant, it has been of a fairly narrow range of types:15 a small archive to be discussed in terms of absences and gaps—in terms either prenarrative or, in a sense, antinarrative. The archive speaks of the depressed condition of the Palestinian narrative at present.

  This does not, however, make any of the works in question less valiant, less indicative of a new moral isolation enveloping Israel— for all the absence of a Palestinian narrative. Each functions on some inevitably primitive level as valuable testimonial, as raw information for a setting, Europe and America, where definitions of the Middle East serve to screen the reality of Israeli actions. Jonathan Randal—a senior American foreign correspondent, veteran of Vietnam, Cuba, and Algeria—like John Bulloch of the Daily Telegraph, like Kapeliouk, like Salim Nassib and Caroline Tisdall, like Tony Clifton, is a journalist writing what is in effect surplus reportage, as if the constraints of newspaper columns could not contain what was seen. This is an interesting phenomenon, perhaps a new journalistic mode. Each of these writers, except Chomsky, tells a story sympathetic to the Palestinians, if not always in political agreement with them; there is also a solidarity with those Lebanese who have suffered for decades the unmitigated stupidity of their leaders and foreign friends. All of these writers chronicle the relentless brutality of the siege, the outrage felt at the unctuous language of military communiqués glossing over massacres and heroism. Although their works overlap in many ways, each contributes a piece to the larger picture attempted in his redoubtably encyclopedic way by Chomsky.

  As straight narrative of the battle culminating in Beirut between Israel and the PLO, Bulloch’s book is difficult to better, though it is dotted with careless errors (Said Aql for Basil Aql). Its economy of line and unsparingly harsh perspective allow a clear but circumscribed picture to emerge of what forces were engaged together; his conclusion is that Israel lost the war. But even though he makes an effort at describing the momentum of Palestinian nationalism, its lopsided anomalous achievements in Lebanon, its inevitably messy involvement in Lebanese and Syrian politics, its better than expected efforts to cope with circumstances too complex for anyone to overcome, he writes as an outsider, and there is little in his narrative to prepare one for the continuing drama of the PLO, or for the bloody Israeli occupation of South Lebanon, or for the unfolding national catastrophe that has been Lebanon since August 1982.

  Bulloch is of the school which thinks of Lebanon’s history as the time-honored story of zaims (or semifeudal patrons), factions, and loyalties. He follows Lebanon’s leading historian, Kamal Salibi, in this,16 although unlike Elie Salem (Lebanon’s current foreign minister), Bulloch hasn’t concluded that Lebanon’s sudden modern prosperity was ever, or could ever be, maintained without disastrous up
heaval—Salem’s prediction, as recently as twelve years ago.17 It would be hard to be more unfortunately wrong. Not that anyone was more correct in predicting the two-decade cataclysm, first of wealth, then of civil war, which is tearing Lebanon apart.

  David Gilmour’s first chapter exposes the jungle that was “the old Lebanon” with merciless precision, and his last chapter presciently lays for the scenario now being enacted. His account of the overwhelming mess unleashed by piratical commerce, governmental incompetence, regional and ideological confusions, tremendous demographic change, and utter cynicism is unique. It gives one a compelling rationale for the emergence of the PLO inside (rather than its “invasion” of) Lebanon, where among a largely destitute and confined refugee population no one could survive at all without some form of political organization for protection. One senses in Gilmour’s book, however, some frustration at the recalcitrant, non-narrative character of Lebanon’s problems. No other modern society has torn itself apart with that crazy mixture of brutality and style. Few countries have concentrated within their borders so impossibly heterogeneous a collection of interests, most of them having coarse domination, profit, and manipulation as their goal. Some adumbration of this is conveyed in the American title of Randal’s book—Going All the Way—and much of its substance similarly delivers the irrationality of Lebanon: the relentless Lebanese willingness to see yet another car bomb (surely, at this “post-political” stage, an art form), the stupid, opportunistic ideological fantasies constructed by different factions. There are cultural and intellectual roots to the things that move Maronites, Sunni, and Shia Muslim, Greek Orthodox Christians and Druze in Lebanon, and these Randal does not explore. A pity, since, as he notes, for a corps of Western journalists afflicted with too rapid and frequent a turnover in complicated places like Lebanon, there is by now a specialist literature that ought not to be ignored: the pioneering studies of Lebanon and Syria by Albert Hourani and Domnique Chevalier have been elaborated in the work of younger colleagues and students. Instead Randal relies on his instinct for relevant observation. His sketches of the checkmating, of the multiple “negations,” between communities on which modern Lebanon has rested are good, as is his portrait of U.S. ignorance, bumbling, and mistimed and misplaced pressures.