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EDWARD SAID: Not to hold back my conclusion, which is roughly the same as

Noams, I want to say also that my feeling is that the two-state solution for the

Palestinian-Israeli conflict is, I think, a hopeless one, and some form of bi-

nationalism, which Ill try to get to at the end of my comments, seems to me to be

the only hope, and hence the reason for talking about it more in this country. Ive

just come back a couple of weeks ago from a trip where I spent some time in Israel,as well as, of course, in the Palestinian territories, and spoke about this to some

degree of response from Israelis I mean, Israeli Jews and, of course, Israeli

Palestinians.

But what I want to do today is to talk a little bit about the importance, the

continuing importance, of 1948 for the present moment. And in a sense, I want to

talk about something quite different than what youve heard from Noam Chomsky.

That is to say, I want to talk about the Palestinian experience as a human

evolving human thing, trajectory, and how it feeds into the current impasse and

where it might, if looked at honestly within the Arab and international context,

might give one some hope for the future, which I think is the most important thing.

I might as well begin by speaking personally about 1948, particularly at a moment

when the media is focusing so much on the faces and the bodies and general

appalling plight of Kosovar refugees, and what it meant for many of the people

around me. My own immediate family was spared the worst ravages of what we call

the catastrophe, or Nakba, of 1948. We had a house and my father, a business in

Cairo, so even though we were in Palestine during most of 1947, when we left in

December of that year, the wrenching cataclysmic quality of the collective

experience, when 780,000 Palestinians two-thirds of the population were

literally driven out of the country by the Zionist forces of the time, this was not one

we had to go through in as traumatic a form as most others did.

I was 12 at the time, so I had only a somewhat attenuated and certainly no more

than a semi-conscious awareness of what was happening. Only this narrow

awareness was available to me, but I do distinctly recall some things with special

lucidity. One was that every member of my family, on both sides, became a refugee

during the period. No one remained in our Palestine, that is, that part of the

mandatory territory controlled by the British Mandate. That didnt include the

West Bank, which was in 1948 annexed to Jordan. Therefore, those of my relatives

who lived in cities like Jaffa, Safed, Haifa and West Jerusalem, which is where I was

born, were suddenly made homeless, in many instances penniless, disoriented

and scarred forever.

I saw most of them again after the fall of Palestine, but all were greatly reduced in

circumstances their faces stark with worry, ill health, despair. My extended

family lost all its property and residence, and like so many Palestinians of the time,

bore the travail not so much as a political, but as a natural tragedy. This etched

itself on my memory with lasting results, mostly because of the faces which I had

once remembered as content and at ease, but which now were lined with the cares of


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exile and homelessness, which is the condition of most Palestinians today. Many

families and individuals had their lives broken, their spirits drained, their

composure destroyed forever in the context of seemingly unending serial dislocation.

This was, and still is, for me of the greatest poignancy. One of my uncles went from

Palestine to Alexandria, to Cairo, to Baghdad, to Beirut, and now, in his eighties,

lives a sad, silent man in Seattle. Neither he nor his immediate family ever trulyrecovered.

This is emblematic of the larger story of loss and dispossession which continues

today. And I think it ought to be mentioned that ever since 1948, the United Nations

just as NATO is saying today and the United States along with it ever since

1948, the United States with the United Nations has voted a yearly resolution saying

that the Palestinians can go back.

The second thing I recall was that, for the one person in my family who somehow

managed to pull herself together in the aftermath of the catastrophe, my aunt,

Palestine meant service to the unfortunate refugees, many thousands of whom endedup penniless, jobless, destitute and disoriented in Egypt. She devoted her life to

them in the face of government obduracy and sadistic indifference. From her, I

learned that whereas everyone is willing to pay lip service to the cause, to the

humanitarian cause, only a very few people were willing to do anything about it. As

a Palestinian, therefore, she took it as her lifelong duty to set about helping the

refugees. This was in the days before UNICEF and USAID and all of those other

things, getting people and children into schools, getting them doctors, getting them

treatment and medicine, finding the men jobs, and so on and so forth. She remains

an exemplary figure for me, a person against whom any effort thereafter is always

measured and always found wanting. The job for us in my lifetime was to be

literally unending. Its now 51 years. And because it derives from a human tragedy

so profound, so extraordinary and saturating, both the formal as well as the

informal life of its people, down to the smallest detail has been and will continue to

be recalled, testified, remedied. For Palestinians, a vast collective feeling of injustice

continues to hang over our lives with undiminished weight.

If theres been one thing, one particular delinquency committed by the present

group of Palestinian leaders for me, it is their gifted power of forgetting. When one

of them was asked recently this appeared on the front page of the New York

Times last October what he felt about Ariel Sharons accession to Israels foreign

ministry, given that Sharon was responsible for the shedding of so much Palestinian

blood, this leader said blithely, "We are prepared to forget history." And this is a

sentiment I neither can share nor, I hasten to add, easily forgive.

Its therefore important to recall what Israelis themselves have said about the

country they conquered in 1948. Heres Moshe Dayan, 1969, April, just about 30

years ago today: "We came to this country which was already populated by Arabs,

and we are establishing a Hebrew, that is a Jewish state here. In considerable areas

of the country" the total area of the country that hes talking about was only six


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percent "we bought the lands from the Arabs. Jewish villages were built in the

place of Arab villages. You do not even know" he was talking to an Israeli

audience. "You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not

blame you, because these geography books no longer exist; not only do the books not

exist, the Arab villages are not there either." In the events of 1948, 400 villages were

destroyed and effaced from history. "Nahalal," which is Dayans own village, hesays, "arose in the place of Mahalul, Gevat in the place of Jibta, [Kibbutz] Sarid

in the place of Haneifs and Kefar Yehoshua in the place of Tell Shaman.

There is not" this is the last sentence of his intervention: "There is not one place

built in this country that did not have a former Arab population."

Looking back on the reactions in the aftermath of 1948, what strikes me now is how

largely unpolitical they were, as it must be the case for people going through what

some of the refugees are going through today. For 20 years after 1948, Palestinians

were immersed in the problems of everyday life, with little time left over for

organizing, analyzing and planning. Israel, to most Arabs, for at least 20 years after

'48, and to Palestinians, except for those who remained, was a cipher: its languageunknown, its society unexplored, its people and the history and their movement

largely confined to slogans, catch-all phrases, negation. We saw and experienced its

cruelty towards us, but it took us a long while to understand what we saw and what

we experienced. The overall tendency throughout the Arab world and this is one

of he most important consequences of 1948, as I'm sure it will be in regions of the

world that are going through the same process today is that a vast militarization

took over every society, almost without exception, as it did also take over Israel.

Coup in the Arab world, military coups, succeeded each other more or less

unceasingly. And worse yet, every advance in the military idea brought an equal

and opposite diminution in social, political and economic democracy.

Looking back on it now, the rise to hegemony of Arabic nationalism allowed for

very little in the way of democratic civil institutions, mainly because the concepts

and the language of that nationalism devoted little attention to the role of

democracy in the evolution of these societies. Until now, the presence of a putative

danger to the Arab world has engendered a permanent deferral of such things as an

open press, unpoliticized universities, or freedoms to research, travel in and explore

new realms of knowledge. No massive investment was ever made in the quality of

education despite, on the whole, successful policies by some governments, including

the Egyptian government, to lower the rate of illiteracy. It was thought that given

the perpetual state of emergency caused by Israel, such matters, which could only be

the result of long-range planning and reflection, were luxuries that were ill-

afforded. Instead, arms procurement on a huge scale took the place of genuine

human development, with negative results that we live until today. Its worth

mentioning that 60 percent of the worlds arms are now bought by Arab countries.

Along with the militarization went the wholesale persecution of communities

preeminently, but not exclusively, the Jewish ones in the Arab world and, of course,

the Arab ones inside Israel. And this idea of homogenizing societies to create, in the


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case of Israel, a Jewish state, in the case of the various Arab states, entirely Arab

states, whether theyre called Syria, Jordan, Egypt, etc., has had the most wasteful

and, in my opinion, terrible results, one of the tragedies of the politics of identity

which ensued. The expulsion of whole communities as a result of 1948, which set in

process a system of distortion within the societies, whether it was inside Israel or in

the Arab world, most of it encouraged by U.S. policy at the time, seems to me tohave led to every conceivable disaster in the way of human formations and social

institutions.

Nor was this all. In the name of military security, in countries like Egypt, there was

a bloody-minded, imponderably wasteful campaign against dissenters, mostly on the

left, but independently minded people too, whose vocation as critics and skilled men

and women was brutally terminated in prisons, fatal torture and summary

executions. As one looks back at those things in the context of 1948, its the immense

panorama of waste and cruelty that stands out as the immediate result of the war

itself.

AMY GOODMAN: Youre listening to Edward Said, professor of English and

comparative literature at Columbia University and author of, among other books,

Out of Place: A Memoir, the story of his life as a Palestinian. You are listening to

Pacifica Radios Democracy Now! Well be back in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We continue with Columbia University Professor Edward Said

the latest book of his works is called The Edward Said Reader leading

Palestinian American scholar and activist on this day of the emergency Middle East

summit in Sharm el-Sheikh. This is a speech he gave, along with Noam Chomsky,

last year at Columbia University.

EDWARD SAID: Along with that went a scandalously poor treatment of the

refugees themselves. This is a kind of a micro-history of some of the things that

Noam was talking about. Its still the case, for example, that 40,000 to 50,000

Palestinian refugees who are resident in Egypt must report to a local police station

every month. Vocational, educational and social opportunities for them are

curtailed, and the general sense of not belonging adheres to them despite their Arab

nationality and language.

In Lebanon, the situation is worse still. Almost 400,000 Palestinian refugees have

had to endure not only the massacres of Sabra, Shatila, Tel al-Zaatar, Dbeyeh and

elsewhere, but have remained confined in hideous quarantine for almost two

generations. They have no legal right to work in at least 60 occupations. They are

not adequately covered by medical insurance. They cannot travel and return. They

are objects of suspicion and dislike. In part, they have inherited the mantle of

opprobrium, draped around them by the PLOs presence there, and thus they


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remain in the eyes of many ordinary Lebanese a sort of house enemy to be warded

off and/or punished from time to time.

A similar situation in kind, if not in degree, exists in Syria. As for Jordan, it was, to

its credit, the only country where Palestinians were given naturalized status. A

visible fault line exists between that disadvantaged majority of Palestinians and theJordanian establishment.

I might add, however, that for most of these situations where Palestinian refugees

exist in large groups within one or another Arab country, all of them as a direct

consequence of 1948, 51 years ago, no simple, much less elegant or just, solution

exists in the foreseeable future. Its also worth mentioning or rather, asking

why it is that a destiny of confinement and isolation has been imposed on a people

who quite naturally flocked to neighboring countries when driven out of theirs,

countries which everyone thought would welcome and sustain them.

Inside Israel, the treatment of the Arab minority that was left over 120,000, thathave now become 1,000,000, a little over a million today, Arab citizens or

Palestinian citizens of Israel they were subject to military government until 1966.

Since that time, they are treated as aliens, although theyre citizens of the state, non-

Jews in the juridical classification by which Israel tries to be a Jewish state,

unsuccessfully. And essentially, they live in a state of inferior rights. Much less is

spent on their villages and schooling and municipal facilities than comparable

groups within the Jewish community. And most important, they are denied

fundamental rights like those of immigration and citizenship rights that are enjoyed

by Jews outside of Israel. Israel has become unique in the sense that its the only

state in the world that is not the state of its citizens, but the state of the entire Jewish

people, which means that roughly a million-point-two of its citizens are somehow

or not somehow, but are definitely inferior.

In the Occupied Territories, to continue this sad litany of the condition of

Palestinians, until the Oslo Accords, Palestinians were ruled as an occupied

population with great, by the way I remember with great admiration by

people in this country. I remember in the early 70s there was a visit to this campus

by an Israeli military officer in charge of some aspect of the occupation, and it was a

closed seminar, and somehow I wormed my way into it to listen to him say it. And

what struck me was the admiration, not to say deference, shown him by faculty

members colleagues of mine, in some instances who were going on about how

benign the occupation was and how miraculous it was that Israel was able to rule a

population, which it has now ruled for 32 years, with such a small amount of

brutality. Well, the fact is, of course, that the brutality has continued in all sorts of

ways from the beginning, even after Oslo.

To this day, land is continually taken from Palestinians, both inside the Occupied

Territories and inside Israel itself. That is to say, since land is held in trust 90

percent of the land 92 percent of the land of Israel is held in trust for the Jewish


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people Arabs cannot buy land, sell it or lease it, and their land is continually

confiscated. Last fall, for example, the village of Umm al-Fahm, which is the second-

largest Palestinian village inside Israel I mean, the second-largest city lost

approximately 10,000 dunams, which is about 3,000 acres, because Israel

unilaterally decided to take them for use as a military target practice area. So this

continues all the time. And on the West Bank in Gaza, ruled under militaryoccupation until Oslo, there have been, in Gaza, about a thousand laws passed,

occupiers laws, restricting movement, restricting occupations, restricting such

things as whether you can plant certain plants or not, whether you can build or not

all aspects of life controlled minutely by the Israeli occupation, 1,400 laws of that

sort on the West Bank, creating in fact a vast prison. Since Oslo I will come back

to it in a minute since Oslo, the situation has gotten worse, in ways that I want to

describe in a moment.

So what happened then after 1948 was the creation and I want to talk a little bit

about the parallelism between the developments inside the Arab world, and

particularly as they affected Palestinians, and the development in developmentsinside Israel. There was, of course, in the Arab world a cult of the army, following

on the general militarization that I was talking about earlier. This implied that there

were only military solutions to political problems, and it was so prevalent a view

that it overshadowed the axiom that successful military action had to derive from a

motivated, bravely led, politically integrated and educated force, and this could only

issue from a citizen society. Such a desideratum was never the case in the Arab

world, rarely practiced or articulated.

In addition, there was consolidated a kind of nationalist culture that encouraged,

rather than mitigated, Arab isolation from the rest of the modern world. Israel was

soon perceived not only as a Jewish but as a Western state, which, in part, it was,

and as such, was completely rejected even as a suitable intellectual pursuit for those

who were interested in finding out about the enemy. And what then developed was a

kind of dual system. On the one hand, you had the official Arab position towards

Israel, which was rejection, which was "this is the enemy, we have to attack," and so

on and so forth, and another system, perfectly typified in that of the Hashemites, but

also not limited to them. That is to say, Abdel Nasser, we know, was in contact with

the Israelis searching for terms of peace. Really, all through the 50s and right up to

and certainly after the 67 War, the Hashemites were in constant touch with the

Israelis and developed an alliance that was never officially accepted or recognized,

but it existed and came into play, as Noam mentioned, in 1970 during the Black

September days between in the war between the Palestinian resistance movement

and the Jordanian army.

At the same time, Israel, in its extraordinary and compared to the Arab efforts, I

mean, far superior efforts at international propaganda, was putting out a tissue

of ideological fictions, which were never countered and never properly addressed by

the Arabs, so that the rhetorical conflict was a consequence of 1948 and amplified

well beyond it anything like anywhere else in the world. For part of the time, it took


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on some of the vehemence and prominence of the Cold War, which framed it for

almost 30 years.

What was strange about it is, like the events of 1948 themselves, there was no real

Palestinian representation at all until 1967. We were always referred to as "The

Arabs." And the subsequent I mean, after '67 and the subsequent emergence ofthe PLO, things began to change. Until then, we were simply known as the Arab

refugees who fled because their leaders told them to, even after some research in the

early 60s utterly disputed the validity of those claims and proved the existence of

Plan Dalet, which was the Israeli army, or the Haganah, a plan to rid Palestine of its

inhabitants during the fighting of 1948, in which the aforementioned Rabin, General

Rabin, was responsible for the evacuation-forced eviction of 60,000 people from the

towns of Lydd and Ramla, which now are part of Tel Aviv Airport. So when you go

there, you might remember that these used to be Arab cities that were emptied in

1948. These stories about the heroic independence and liberation forces of the

Zionists continue to be traded in. Worse yet, those Palestinians who remained

behind in Israel after 1948 acquired a solitary status as Israeli Arabs that'swhat they were called shunned by other Arabs, treated by Israeli Jews under a

whip, the military administration, and until 1966 stringent emergency laws applied

and assigned to them as non-Jews.

One of the most unfortunate aspects of this state of affairs is that even the word

"peace" acquires a sinister, uncomfortable meaning for the Arabs at just the time

that Israeli publicists used it at every opportunity, as, again, the United States did in

formulating this notion of a peace process. The Israelis would constantly appear

people like Abba Eban and others in the West, saying, "We want peace with the

Arabs." And sure enough, the echo went around that Israel fervently desired peace,

while the Arabs ferocious, vengeful, gratuitously bent on violence did not. In

fact, what was at issue and I want to emphasize this between Israelis and

Palestinians was never peace, but the possibility for Palestinians of restitution of

property, nationhood, identity, all of them blotted out by the new Jewish state.

Moreover, it appeared to Palestinians that peace with Israel was a form of

exterminism that left us without political existence. It meant accepting as definitive

and unappealable the events of 1948, the two the loss of our society and

homeland.

So, even more alienated from Israel and everything it stood for, the whole idea of

separation between the two peoples acquired a life of its own, though it meant

different things for each: Israelis wanted it in order to live in a purely Jewish state,

freed from its non-Jewish residents, both in memory and in actuality; Palestinians

wanted it as a method for getting back to their original existence as the Arab

possessors of Palestine. The logic of separation has operated since 1948 as a

persistent motif and has now reached its apogee and its logical conclusion in the

helplessly skewed and unworkable Oslo Accords, that are still celebrated by the

media and many bien pensants in this country. At only the very rarest of moments

did either Palestinians or Israelis try to think their histories and cultures


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inextricably linked, for better or for worse, together, contrapuntally, rather than in

mutually exclusive terms.

The sheer distortion in views both of history and of the future that has resulted is

breathtaking and requires some example and analysis now. I dont think anyone can

honestly disagree that since 1948 the Palestinians have been the victims, Israelis thevictors. No matter how much one tries to dress up or prettify this rather bleak

formulation, its truth shines through the murk just the same. The general argument

from Israel and its supporters has been that the Palestinians brought it on

themselves: Why did they leave? Why did the Arabs declare war? Why did they not

accept the 1947 plan of partition? And so on and so on. None of this, it should be

clear, justifies Israels subsequent official behavior, both toward itself and its

Palestinian victims, where a hard cruelty, a dehumanizing attitude and an almost

sadistic severity in putting down the Palestinians has prevailed over all the years.

The much-vaunted Israeli and general Jewish feeling that Israel is in serious peril

and that Jews will always be targets of anti-Semitic opportunity, that is buttressedby appeals to the Holocaust, to centuries of Christian anti-Semitism and to Jewish

exiles, this is a potent and, in many ways, a justifiable sentiment. Ive gone on record

as saying that it is justified for Jews, even for American Jews whose experiences

have been nowhere near as traumatic as their European counterparts, to feel the

agonies of the Holocaust as their own, even into the present. But I keep asking

myself whether the use of that feeling to keep Palestinians in more or less permanent

submission can repeatedly be justified on those grounds alone. And are Netanyahus

intemperate harangues about Israeli security justified, given what a miserable lot

has been the Palestinians? Are the huge numbers of soldiers you must think that

in Israel every young person, man or woman, between the ages of 18 and 25, is

required to serve in the army a lot of that service is policing Palestinians.

AMY GOODMAN: Edward Said is a leading Palestinian American scholar and

activist. He is a university professor of English and comparative literature at

Columbia University. His latest book, The Edward Said Reader, well-known for his

books called Culture and Imperialism and Orientalism. His memoir is called Out of

Place. Youre listening to Pacifica Radios Democracy Now! Well be back in a

minute.

edward said palestinin exp

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