Reappraisals

by Tony Judt

  Edward Said was the idolized hero of a generation of cultural relativists in universities from Berkeley to Bombay, for whom “orientalism” underwrote everything from career-building exercises in “postcolonial” obscurantism (“writing the other”) to denunciations of “Western Culture” in the academic curriculum. But Said himself had no time for such nonsense. Radical antifoundationalism, the notion that everything is just a linguistic effect, struck him as shallow and “facile”: Human rights, as he observed on more than one occasion, “are not cultural or grammatical things, and when violated they are as real as anything we can encounter.”1

  As for the popular account of his thought that has Edward Said reading (Western) writers as mere by-products of colonial privilege, he was quite explicit: “I do not believe that authors are mechanistically determined by ideology, class, or economic history.” Indeed, when it came to the business of reading and writing, Said was an unabashedly traditional humanist, “despite the scornful dismissal of the term by sophisticated post-modern critics.”2 If there was anything that depressed him about younger literary scholars it was their overfamiliarity with “theory” at the expense of the art of close textual reading. Moreover, he enjoyed intellectual disagreement, seeing the toleration of dissent and even discord within the scholarly community as the necessary condition for the latter’s survival—my own expressed doubts about the core thesis of Orientalism were no impediment to our friendship. This was a stance that many of his admirers from afar, for whom academic freedom is at best a contingent value, were at a loss to comprehend.

  This same, deeply felt humanistic impulse put Edward Said at odds with another occasional tic of engaged intellectuals, the enthusiastic endorsement of violence—usually at a safe distance and always at someone else’s expense. The “Professor of Terror,” as his enemies were wont to characterize Said, was in fact a consistent critic of political violence in all its forms. Unlike Jean-Paul Sartre, a comparably influential intellectual for the previous generation, Said had some firsthand experience of physical force—his university office was vandalized and sacked, and both he and his family received death threats. But whereas Sartre did not hesitate to advocate political murder as both efficacious and cleansing, Said never identified with terrorism, however much he sympathized with the motives and sentiments that drove it. The weak, he wrote, should use means that render their oppressors uncomfortable—something that indiscriminate murder of civilians can never achieve.3

  The reason for this was not that Edward Said was placid or a pacifist, much less someone lacking in strong commitments. Notwithstanding his professional success, his passion for music (he was an accomplished pianist, a close friend and sometime collaborator of Daniel Barenboim), and his gift for friendship, he was in certain ways a deeply angry man—as the essays in his posthumous book frequently suggest.11 But despite his identification with the Palestinian cause and his inexhaustible efforts to promote and explain it, Said quite lacked the sort of uninterrogated affiliation to a country or an idea that allows the activist or the ideologue to subsume any means to a single end.

  Instead he was, as I suggested, always at a slight tangent to his affinities. In this age of displaced persons he was not even a typical exile, since most men and women forced to leave their country in our time have a place to which they can look back (or forward): a remembered—more often misremembered—homeland that anchors the transported individual or community in time if not in space. Palestinians don’t even have this. There never was a formally constitutedPalestine, and Palestinian identity thus lacks that conventional anterior reference.

  In consequence, as Said tellingly observed just a few months before his death, “I still have not been able to understand what it means to love a country.” That, of course, is the characteristic condition of the rootless cosmopolitan. It is not very comfortable or safe to be without a country to love: It can bring down upon your head the anxious hostility of those for whom such rootlessness suggests a corrosive independence of spirit. But it is liberating: The world you look out upon may not be as reassuring as the vista enjoyed by patriots and nationalists, but you see farther. As Said wrote in 1993, “I have no patience with the position that ‘we’ should only or mainly be concerned with what is ‘ours.’”4

  This is the authentic voice of the independent critic, speaking the truth to power . . . and supplying a dissenting voice in conflicts with authority: As Said wrote in Al-Ahram in May 2001, “whether Israeli intellectuals have failed or not in their mission is not for us to decide. What concerns us is the shabby state of discourse and analysis in the Arab world.” It is also the voice of the freestanding “New York intellectual,” a species now fast approaching extinction—thanks in large measure to the same Middle Eastern conflict in which so many have opted to take up sides and identify with “us” and “ours.”5 Edward Said, as the reader of these essays will discover, was by no means a conventional “spokesman” for one party in that conflict.

  The Munich daily Die Süddeutscher Zeitung headed its obituary of Said “Der Unbequeme”—the Uncomfortable Man. But if anything his lasting achievement was to make others uncomfortable. For the Palestinians Edward Said was an underappreciated and frequently irritating Cassandra, berating their leaders for incompetence—and worse. To his critics Said was a lightning rod, attracting fear and vituperation. Implausibly, this witty and cultivated man was cast as the very devil: the corporeal incarnation of every threat—real or imagined—to Israel and Jews alike. To an American Jewish community suffused with symbols of victimhood, he was a provocatively articulate remembrancer of Israel’s very own victims. And by his mere presence here in New York, Edward Said was an ironic, cosmopolitan, Arab reminder of the parochialism of his critics.

  The essays in this book cover the period December 2000 through March 2003. They thus take us from end of the Oslo decade, the onset of the Second Intifada and the final breakdown of the “peace process,” through the Israeli reoccupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the massacres of September 11, 2001, the American retaliation in Afghanistan, and the long run-up to the U.S. attack on Iraq—a distinctly turbulent and murderous twenty-eight months. During this time Edward Said wrote copiously and urgently about the alarming state of affairs in the Middle East, contributing at least one article a month, often more, despite his worsening medical condition (to which there is no reference in these writings until August 2002, and then only a casual, passing allusion).

  All but one of the pieces collected here were contributed to an Arab-language outlet, the Cairo newspaper Al-Ahram. These writings are thus an opportunity for Edward Said’s Western readers to see what he had to say to an Arab audience. What they show is that Said in his final years was consistently pursuing three themes: the urgent need to tell the world (above all Americans) the truth about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians; the parallel urgency of getting Palestinians and other Arabs to recognize and accept the reality of Israel and engage with Israelis, especially the Israeli opposition; and the duty to speak openly about the failings of Arab leadership.

  Indeed, Said was above all concerned with addressing and excoriating his fellow Arabs. It is the ruling Arab regimes, especially that of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, that come in for the strongest criticism here: for their cupidity, their corruption, their malevolence and incredulity. This may seem almost unfair—it is, after all, the U.S. that has effective power, and Israel that was and is wreaking havoc among Edward Said’s fellow Palestinians—but Said seems to have felt it important to tell the truth to and about his own people, rather than risk indulging “the fawning elasticity with regard to one’s own side that has disfigured the history of intellectuals since time immemorial” (December 2000).

  In the course of these essays Said recounts checklists of Israeli abuses (see, e.g., “Palestinians Under Siege” in December 2000; “Slow Death: Punishment by Detail” in August 2002; or “A Monument to Hypocrisy” in February 2003), a grim, depressing reminder of how Arie
l Sharon’s government is squeezing the lifeblood from the quarantined Palestinian communities: Abuses against civilians that were once regarded as criminal acts even in wartime are now accepted behavior by a government ostensibly at peace. But in Edward Said’s account these abuses are not the accidental, unfortunate by-product of the return to power of a belligerent, irredentist general, but rather the predictable—and in Said’s case, predicted—consequence of the Palestinians’ engagement in the late, unlamented “peace process” itself.

  For those of us who welcomed the Oslo process and watched hopefully as it developed over the course of the nineties, Said’s disenchanted critique is depressing. But in retrospect it is difficult to deny that he got it right and we were wrong. As imagined by the Israeli peace party and welcomed by many others—Palestinians included—the Oslo process was supposed to build confidence and trust between the two sides. Contentious issues—the governance of Jerusalem, the right of return for Palestinian refugees, the problem of the Jewish settlements—would be dealt with “later,” in “final status negotiations.” Meanwhile the PLO would gain experience and credibility in the administration of autonomous Palestinian territory, and Israelis would live in peace. Eventually, two states—one Jewish, one Palestinian—would live in stable proximity, their security underwritten by the international community.

  This was the premise behind the Declaration of Principles signed on the White House Lawn in September 1993. But the whole thing was deeply flawed. As Said reminds us, there were not two “sides” to these negotiations: There was Israel, an established modern state with an awe-some military apparatus (by some estimates the fourth strongest in the world today), occupying land and people seized thirty years earlier in war. And there were the Palestinians, a dispersed, displaced, disinherited community with neither an army nor a territory of its own. There was an occupier and there were the occupied. In Said’s view, the only leverage that the Palestinians had was their annoying facticity: They were there, they wouldn’t go away, and they wouldn’t let the Israelis forget what they had done to them.

  Having nothing to give up, the Palestinians had nothing to negotiate. To “deal” with the occupier, after all, is to surrender—or collaborate. That is why Said described the 1993 Declaration as “a Palestinian Versailles”6 and why he resigned in anticipation from the Palestinian National Council. If the Israelis needed something from the Palestinians, Said reasoned, then the things that the Palestinians wanted—full sovereignty, a return to 1967 frontiers, the “right of return,” a share of Jerusalem—should be on the table at the outset, not at some undetermined final stage. And then there was the question of Israel’s “good faith.”

  When the initial Declaration was signed in 1993 there were just 32,750 Jewish housing units in settlements on the West Bank and in Gaza. By October 2001 there were 53,121—a 62 percent increase, with more to come. From 1992 to 1996, under the Labor governments of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, the settler population of the West Bank grew by 48 percent, that of Gaza by 61 percent. To put it no stronger, this steady Israeli takeover of Palestinian land and resources hardly conformed to the spirit of the Oslo Declaration, whose Article 31 (Clause 7) explicitly states that “Neither side shall initiate or take any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending the outcome of the permanent status negotiations.”

  Meanwhile, even as the PLO was authorized to administer the remaining Palestinian districts, Israel was constructing a network of “Jewish” roads crisscrossing those same regions and giving settlers and other Israelis exclusive access to far-flung housing units (and scarce aquifers) protected by permanent military installations.7 The whole exercise was driven forward partly by an anachronistic Israeli conflation of land with security; partly by a post-’67 irredentist eschatology (with the Old Testament invoked as a sort of real estate contract with a partisan God); and partly by long-standing Zionist enthusiasm for territorial enlargement as an end in itself. From the Palestinian point of view the effect was to make the “Oslo process” an agonizing exercise in slow strangulation, with Gaza in particular transformed into a virtual prison under Palestinian warders, the Israeli army standing guard just outside the perimeter fence.

  And then, in 2000, came the long-postponed “permanent status negotiations” themselves: first at Camp David and then, desperately, at Taba in the Sinai. Edward Said, of course, has no time for the conventional American view that President Clinton and Prime Minister Ehud Barak virtually gave away the farm and that even then the ungrateful PLO and its leader Yassir Arafat refused the gift. This is not because Said has any sympathy for Arafat but because the original Camp David offer was—as Tanya Reinhart described it in the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot on July 8, 2000—so palpably a “fraud.” The Palestinians were to get 50 percent of their own land, chopped into separate and often noncontiguous cantons; Israel was to annex 10 percent of the land; and the remaining 40 percent was to be left “undecided”—but under indefinite Israeli rule.

  Five months later, at Taba, the Palestinians were offered an improved territorial deal, certainly the best they could ever have hoped for from an Israeli government. But the resulting Palestinian state would still have been utterly dependent on Israel and vulnerable to its whims; the grievances of Palestinian refugees were never fully addressed; and on the contentious issue of sovereignty over Jerusalem the Israelis would not budge. Indeed, even the last-minute Israeli concessions were still encumbered with what Said nicely terms “conditions and qualifications and entailments (like one of the endlessly deferred and physically unattainable estates in a Jane Austen novel). . . .”

  Meanwhile Barak had continued to expand the population of the very settlements that his own negotiators recognized as a major impediment to agreement. Even if the PLO leaders had wanted to sell the Taba agreements to their constituents, they might have had difficulty doing so—the second intifada that burst out following Sharon’s meticulously timed visit to the Temple Mount has been a disaster for the Palestinians, but it was born out of years—the Oslo years—of frustration and humiliation. On these grounds, as well as for reasons of his own, Arafat instructed the Palestinians not to sign.

  Taba, and especially Camp David, were the bitter fruits of Oslo, and in Edward Said’s view the PLO’s error in engaging the process in the first place was well illustrated by its inevitable rejection of the outcome, retroactively discrediting the whole strategy of negotiations. In an Al-Ahram article of June 2002 Said is scathingly unforgiving of the PLO apparatchiks and their leader, who for a while did rather well out of the power they exercised as the “Vichyite” governors of occupied Palestine under Israel’s benign oversight. They were and are “a byword for brutality, autocracy and unimaginable corruption” (“Palestinian Elections Now,” Al-Ahram June 2002).

  In other contributions to the same newspaper Said writes that Arafat and his circle “have made our situation worse, much worse.” “Palestinians (and by extension other Arabs) have been traduced and hopelessly misled by their leaders,” who have neither high principles nor practical, pragmatic strategies. “It has been years since Arafat represented his people, their sufferings and cause, and like his other Arab counterparts, he hangs on like a much too-ripe fruit without real purpose or position” (“Arab Disunity and Factionalism,” Al-Ahram, August 2002).

  What, then, is to be done? If the Palestinian leadership is corrupt and incompetent; if Israeli governments won’t even keep faith with their own stated commitments, much less the desires of their interlocutors; if there is so much fear and loathing on all sides, how should the two-state solution be implemented, now that Israelis, Palestinians, and the international community—even the Americans—all at last accept it in principle? Here, once again, Edward Said was at odds with almost everyone.

  In 1980, when he first publicly pressed for a two-state solution, Said was attacked and abused from all sides, not least by Arafat’s own Al Fatah movement. Then, in 1988, the Palestinian National Coun
cil belatedly conceded that the best possible outcome was indeed the division of Palestine into two states—one Israeli, one Palestinian—echoing Said’s insistence that there was no alternative to reciprocal territorial self-determination for Jews and Arabs alike.8 But as the years went by, with half of the occupied territories expropriated; with the Palestinian community in shambles and the putative Palestinian territory a blighted landscape of isolated enclaves, flattened olive groves, and ruined houses, where humiliated adults were fast losing the initiative to angry, alienated adolescents, Said drew the increasingly irresistible conclusion.

  Israel was never going to quit the West Bank, at least not in any way that would leave it in a coherent, governable condition. What kind of a state could the West Bank and Gaza ever constitute? Who but a criminal mafia would ever want to take on the task of “governing” it? The “Palestine” of PLO imaginings was a fantasy—and a rather unappealing one at that. For good or ill there was only going to be one real state in the lands of historic Palestine: Israel. This was not utopia; it was merely hardheaded pragmatism shorn of illusion. The genuinely realistic approach lay in accepting this fact and thinking seriously about how to make the best of it. “Much more important than having a state is the kind of state it is.”9 For the last decade of his life Edward Said was an unbending advocate of a single, secular state for Israelis and Palestinians.

  What grounds did Edward Said have for his faith in a single-state solution, a nonexclusive, secular, democratic alternative to the present impasse? In the first place, the status quo is awful and getting worse: Two peoples, each sustained by its exclusive victim narrative, competing indefinitely across the dead bodies of their children for the same tiny piece of land. One of them is an armed state, the other a stateless people, but otherwise they are depressingly similar: What, after all, is the Palestinian national story if not a reproachful mirror to Zionism, a tale of expulsion, diaspora, resurrection, and return? There is no way to divide the disputed “homeland” to mutual satisfaction and benefit. Little good can come of two such statelets, mutually resentful, each with an influential domestic constituency committed to the destruction and absorption of its neighbor.