Edward Said: For Palestinian Independence
Edward W. Said is the author, most recently, of Culture and
Imperialism (Knopf). The themes of this essay were first set out in
articles he published in Arabic in Al-Hayat, distributed in London
and the Arab world.
RALLY AND RESIST
For Palestinian Independence
EDWARD W. SAID
The crisis in Palestinian ranks deepens almost daily. Security
talks between Israel and the P.L.O. are advertised as a "break-
through" one day, stalled and deadlocked the next. Deadlines
previously agreed upon come and go, with no other timetable
proposed, while Israel increases the number of its soldiers in the
occupied territories, as well as the killings, the building of settle-
ment residences, the demolition of Palestinian houses, the punitive
measures keeping Palestinians from leaving the territories and
entering Jerusalem.
The September 13 Declaration of Principles, once described
as marvelous, has now been fully revealed as an interpreter's
nightmare, a patchwork of old Israeli and American drafts, incom-
plete procedural suggestions, deliberate ambiguities and obfus-
cations. In one section, for example, the Israeli army is said to
withdraw; in another it is characterized as redeploying. Israel,
never compelled to admit it is an occupying power, has been
further bolstered in that peculiar denial by the U.S. government.
Secretary of State Warren Christopher does not consider it "help-
ful" to state categorically that the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem
are "occupied" territories, thereby perhaps salving whatever
conscience as may exist in an Administration that continues to
provide some $5 billion in annual support while saying nothing
about the worsening conditions. Together Israel and its patron are
doing all they can--notwithstanding the high-sounding principles
of last fall--to make the likelihood of a truly independent Pales-
tine more and more remote.
And the Palestinian response? Yasir Arafat cries
betrayal, though he effectively acquiesced to the leverage Israel
now exerts when he signed the Oslo declaration without establish-
ing any plan for proceeding and without getting much in return
but a grudging recognition of the P.L.O. as the representative of
the Palestinian people. In Gaza and elsewhere, local leaders resign
from the P.L.O., and its cadres grow more disaffected. No one has
anything but complaints about Arafat's leadership; numerous
petitions, missions (such as the one led by Haidar Abdel-Shafi to
Tunis) and articles in the press have kept up a fairly constant
pressure on Arafat to reform, change his autocratic ways, open up
the decision-making process to talent and proven ability.
None of these petitions, these appeals for reform, have had
the slightest effect. Nor will they ever. You cannot change an
elephant into a lion by sending it a letter. Yet what we have is an
intolerable mess; it cannot be allowed to continue. At this point
Palestinians, both in the occupied territories and in diaspora, must
face up to two central challenges--that of leadership and of
serious planning through collective action--or else be resigned to
a life of permanent oppression, without land, without a voice in
shaping the future, without hope, even without pride, as the
leadership stumbles from incoherence to incompetence and worse.
It could not be clearer that the P.L.O. hierarchy, including
Fatah and its associated parties, as well as its creatures in the
occupied territories and elsewhere, should step aside. The leader-
ship has so misunderstood its own people that there is now a
simmering--and frequently open--revolt more or less everywhere
that Palestinians gather and live. No leadership can expect forever
to be in sole control of money and political authority, and to dole
these out according to its whims. Some 500 schools and eight
universities, as well as 11,000 education workers in the occupied
territories languish without a budget and no guidance at all (to
say nothing of hospitals without medicine). More than most people,
Palestinians have been the victims of abuses by every govern-
ment--Arab and non-Arab--in whose jurisdiction they have lived.
Why should they stand for similar practices from leaders who have
neither been freely elected nor shown a spirit of self-sacrificing
austerity? Why should hard-pressed Palestinians in refugee camps
in Lebanon and Gaza accept corruption, Parisian shopping sprees
and continued bumbling among a handful of officials directed from
Tunis? How long can Arafat simply assert his prerogative to be in
exclusive control of building contracts, foreign aid, lucrative
appointments? Are quick profit and a history of servile loyalty the
only criteria for service?
Consider, too, the information policies of this leadership. (I
refrain from saying anything about its negotiating strategies with
Israel, since those seem to be known only to Yasir Arafat and
Nabil Shaath.) It has yet to tell Palestinians in the territories,
Jordan and Lebanon the full truth about the present situation.
Yes, of course, people want an independent state, but--assuming
Israel, with the de facto collaboration of Arafat and his courtiers,
has not already foreclosed that prospect--what sort of state is it
to be? Nothing is said. Is there to be resistance to the occupation
or not? No word. Are there to be consultative assemblies or not?
No word. What do we tell the world--about where we are in our
history, about the killings of our own people, and on and on? No
word. What is Palestine's real economic policy (beyond the silly
slogan about making Palestine into another Singapore)? No one
seems to know.
I have little doubt that despite the present impasse the
P.L.O. will make a security agreement with Israel, on Israeli terms
of course. After that the present P.L.O. leadership can have very
little to say and even less to offer. Palestinians should thank the
men in Tunis for their past contributions, but we should then
take the next logical step and demand that they resign. Their
apex was the Declaration of Principles, which, whether we like it
or not, is their legacy to us.
"And yet," one hears the timorous voices rising, "what is
the alternative?" This would be a good question were it not so
often asked rhetorically. Are we to be ruled so totally by prede-
termined fact? As it happens, alternatives don't drop from trees;
they develop when a place is vacated. The intifada is evidence of
that; it began because a distant leadership had grown bankrupt of
ideas and strategies. By chance, the uprising reinvigorated that
leadership temporarily. But the lesson of the intifada is also the
challenge Palestinians face today; that is, that responsibility for
what happens next must be a collective one.
Palestinians have to regard the present situation as expos-
ing a much more serious cultural and moral crisis than mere
incompetence and corruption among P.L.O. chiefs. What I have in
mind is our historical tendency as a people to avoid focusing on a
set of national goals and single-mindedly pursuing them with
methods and principles that are adequate to those goals. We have
been unable so far even to undertake a census of our own people.
We rely on Israel for facts about land and water, and to this day
have rarely produced our own sources of reliable information. Is
there an adequate and usable Palestinian map of the West Bank,
Gaza, Jerusalem?
Since the beginning, the struggle over Palestine has been a
battle over territorial sovereignty: "another dunum, another goat"
was the motto of the Zionist settlers under Chaim Weizmann. Israel
is now in sole possession of the territory of historical Palestine,
although a relatively large population of Palestinians--including
the 800,000 Arab citizens of Israel--is also resident there. The
Zionist idea has always been to coordinate specific concrete steps
with a guiding principle that doesn't change. Thus, the Israelis
assert sovereignty and they build settlements, they take land and
water, build roads, deploy armed forces. Obviously, they also have
the monopoly on legitimized violence; I do not mean to suggest
that there is anything resembling a balance of power between the
Israelis and the Palestinians. Nevertheless, it bears consideration
that the official political technique pursued by one Arab govern-
ment (including the P.L.O.) after another has always been to make
very large general assertions, and then hope that the concrete
details will somehow work out later. The P.L.O. accepted the
Declaration of Principles on the grounds that Palestinian autonomy
would somehow lead to independence if enough rhetorical state-
ments about an independent Palestinian state were made. When it
came to negotiating the details (what parts of Jericho and Gaza
were in question?), we had neither the plans nor the actual facts.
They had the plans, the territory, the maps, the settlements, the
roads; we have the wish for autonomy and Israeli withdrawal, with
few details, and little power to change anything very much. What
is needed is a discipline of detail.
A general idea like "limited autonomy" might lead to inde-
pendence or it might equally well lead to further domination. In
either case, the main task for Palestinians is to know and under-
stand the overall map of the territories that the Israelis have
been creating, and then devise a concrete tactics of resistance.
(In the history of colonial invasion maps are always first drawn
by the victors, since maps are instruments of conquest; once
projected they are then implemented. Geography is therefore the
art of war but can also be the art of resistance if there is a
countermap and a counterstrategy.) The essence of the Israeli
plan for territorial domination, both in theory and in fact, is (a)
effective control over the land within its pre-1967 boundaries; and
(b) the prevention of real Palestinian autonomy by maintaining an
ever-expanding united Jerusalem as the center of a web extending
into the West Bank. Israeli plans for and practices in Jerusalem
are therefore central to the future of Palestinians.
To the best of my knowledge, Jerusalem has never been the
focus of a concentrated Palestinian strategy, nor has there ever
been a campaign systematically to resist Israeli control over the
city and its surroundings. "Gaza-Jericho" thus seems ever more
like a trap or a kind of elaborate distraction, so that Palestinian
energies will be absorbed in administering the peripheries, while
the core is left to the Israelis. As outlined by Jan de Jong, a
Dutch geographer who has been studying Israeli policies for
Jerusalem for the past eight years, the Israeli idea is to take "the
last open spaces that...might be claimed by Palestinians...to square
the circle around the Old City." He describes two rings of settle-
ments that will be the site of Israeli building efforts over the
next three years: the first, mainly in annexed Jerusalem; the
second, enclosing the first and extending ultimately into most of
the central West Bank, from Bir Zeit in the north to the outskirts
of Hebron in the south. Within these eighty-five square miles or
so Israel will be largely unchallenged, although there and else-
where in the territories Palestinians will be allowed autonomy "in
separated territorial units."
Already the whole of the West Bank and Gaza has been
divided into ten or eleven cantons by some fifty-seven road
barriers. Rabin's government is proceeding with a $600 million
road system for the occupied territories; it is to be controlled by
Israel and will connect the settlements to one another, to Jerusa-
lem and to Israel, bypassing Arab areas and completing the
territories' cantonization. Meanwhile, land confiscation continues at
a stunning pace: More than 9,000 acres in the West Bank were
forcibly taken and declared Israeli military zones in December
alone. It has even been suggested by Ra'anan Weiz, a Labor
stalwart and former head of the Jewish Agency's Department of
Rural Settlement, that Israel build a new capital city for Palestin-
ians near Hizma (in the desert, well beyond the two circles) as a
substitute for Jerusalem.
De Jong's main point, however, is that whereas the Israelis
are planning, settling and controlling, the Palestinians have still
not even formulated a strategy to resist these moves, whether by
initiating collective public building projects or by making metro-
politan Jerusalem the center of a national development plan. In
both instances, since the Israeli vision is to divide the Palestinian
population into "islands, cantons, small spheres of containment,"
de Jong suggests that in response Palestinians "should consider
themselves part of a bigger unit," of which Jerusalem is not just
one district or one main street but a city "from [such disparate
East Jerusalem neighborhoods as] al-Azzariah to Beit-Hanina and
Shuafat, and then to think how we can make a prospective for
development there." To discuss that as an alternative, with visible
efforts made on its behalf, "will cause people to believe in it," and
can then become the basis for collective action.
There has been much talk recently of handing over to
"experts"--Palestinian and non-Palestinian--responsibility for
where we go from here in terms of the impending "transfer of
authority" to a new Palestinian administration. This notion is
seconded by the World Bank, the European Community and the
United States, which emphasize the need for objective and apoliti-
cal (i.e., subservient and free-market) strategists. I am unmoved
by their arguments ideologically (where development has been
dictated from the outside the net result has been to pauperize the
majority and keep those countries even more politically and
economically dependent on the developed countries) and practical-
ly, since in any case Arafat, designating himself Boss, can exercise
arbitrary authority over even the most enlightened experts. Some
of Arafat's disaffected (but opportunistic) associates openly favor
calling in the "professionals," often proposing themselves as
replacements for Arafat.
In this situation experts who sit in Washington or Paris can
fix very little: A plan drawn up by the most brilliant yet faraway
intellect cannot be implemented on the ground unless there is a
common national will, as well as a national sense of urgency and
mobilization. Likewise, freelance Palestinian experts and entrepre-
neurs cannot be trusted to act for the common good. Throughout
the Arab world, Europe and the United States there are extraordi-
narily large numbers of gifted and successful Palestinians who
have made a mark in medicine, law, banking, planning, architec-
ture, journalism, industry, education, contracting. Most of these
people have contributed only a tiny fraction of what they could
contribute to the Palestinian national effort. Compared with the
Jewish communities in the West, we have done next to nothing,
although I am convinced that there is a great potential there.
Perhaps the greatest failure of the P.L.O. was not that it signed
an ill-considered and stupid Declaration of Principles but that it
has failed, both before and after Oslo, to mobilize the vast poten-
tial of its own people.
Palestinians today are separated by geography and by
Israel's designs to keep us fragmented and isolated from one
another; people in Palestine and those outside it lead different
lives, with far too little communication between them. To survive
as a nation, it is not enough to repeat slogans, or only to insist
that Palestinian identity will survive. The first thing is to grasp
as concretely and as precisely as possible what the facts on the
ground really are, not in order to be defeated by them but to
invent ways of countering them with our own facts and institu-
tions, and finally of asserting our national presence, democratical-
ly and with mass participation.
The Palestine National Council must now convene, despite the
P.L.O.'s opposition. Instead of sitting back and waiting for some-
thing to happen, Palestinians can, indeed must, also call assemblies
wherever large populations exist (Jordan, Lebanon, North America,
England) with enough clout, resources and potential for contribu-
tions that will make a difference. In the territories, divisiveness
and factionalism have compounded the situation of helplessness
and resentment in which most Palestinians find themselves. Sys-
tematic attempts must be made to bridge the distance between the
diaspora and those Palestinians. Networks are forming, as are
ever-expanding groups of citizens dissatisfied with the P.L.O.'s
ineptitude. But the key thing is to stop thinking that Arafat and
Co. can be reformed, and to begin an open and unafraid discus-
sion about the alternatives, the need to go forward as a nation
and, most important, a strategy to end Israeli occupation.
If Jerusalem is the heart of our predicament with Israel, it
is also therefore the heart of the solution. As the settlement
process continues, Palestinians have to muster the resources and
the will to prevent unilateral Israeli control. To do this, Palestin-
ians must start thinking collectively and stop reacting individual-
ly. And the major question, of which Jerusalem is the symbol, is
how to resist, not how to profit. The Israelis must somehow be
convinced that there can be no real peace unless they leave the
Palestinian land they now occupy illegally in Jerusalem and their
West Bank and Gaza settlements. Yet if they are to be persuaded
it will only be by a people that to a man and woman feels itself to
be part of a national effort dedicated to real, not apparent,
independence. Those are the facts. There is no such thing as
partial independence or limited autonomy. Without political inde-
pendence there is neither sovereignty nor real freedom, and
certainly not equality with an Israeli Jewish state that destroyed
Palestine in 1948 and is not anxious to give it another chance in
1994. The challenge is obvious.