A Question of Good Will

...it requires a systematic denial of Palestinian rights...

...Said claims that identifying the very name "Palestinian" with "terrorist," keeping the Occupied Territories "politically illiterate," and a "bloodcurdling . . . list of human indignities" have all served this purpose...

...Regrettably, here he is again employing a sleight of hand...

...This raises a final question: To what extent does Said, a member of the Palestine National Council, represent PLO thinking...

...Several times he notes that "in brute numbers of bodies and property destroyed" its effect has been smaller than what the Zionists have perpetrated (even if this were true, it ignores the crucial fact that terrorism relies on small numbers to strike fear in an entire population...

...Without attempting to debate Said's views point by point, some of his serious flaws need to be mentioned...

...They signaled this first with the idea of a "secular democratic state" in Palestine, then by agreeing to a Palestinian state alongside, not instead of Israel (although this position has never been stated explicitly...

...and the only solution for its evil consequences lies in sincere attempts at mutual toleration and existence...

...diplomatic missions throughout the Moslem world...

...While one hopes that Edward Said's realism and good will are widespread in the PLO, the organization to date has provided very little evidence that this is the case...

...Unlike the Israelis, I think, most Palestinians fully realize that their Other, the Israeli-Jewish people, is a concrete political reality with which they must live in the future...

...Each of these needs further explanation...

...The two entities, Israel and Palestine, must come to terms, recognize each other, learn to tolerate one another...

...Such statements sound particularly strange in the light of the recent actions by the Aya-tollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran, and at U.S...

...He implies that Palestinian nationalist feeling has always existed, but in truth it developed in this century, slowly, in response to Zionism, and it has been powerfully felt only since 1967...

...when they do, Said says, they will be pleasantly surprised to find that since shortly after the 1973 war the Palestinian people have reconciled themselves to Israel's remaining in their midst...

...more important, it quietly finesses the basis of Zionist feeling, the central role of the Land of Israel in Jewish life through many centuries of diaspora (a role that the Palestinian longing for the same land is today coming to resemble...

...To prove this, he quotes the unflattering views of Arabs held by numerous Zionist leaders...

...According to Said, the translation of the Zionist ideal into hard facts turned this attitude into a policy of negating Palestinian Arab identity and nationality...

...His writing bursts with ideas he can barely control...

...more than this, he makes a strong, subtle exposition for the PLO...

...Begin's views he terms "fossilized theological madness...

...thus, looking ahead, he urges its accommodation to an equally permanent Palestinian state...

...author, the forthcoming "Slave Soldiers and Islam " Edward Said presents in this book, for the first time in any European language, a sympathetic, nonvindictive argument for the Palestinian cause...

...Yasir Arafat, in contrast, is "a much misunderstood and maligned political personality," and Fatah's politics are described as "more or less improvisatory, in some cases even family-style...

...He answers Israeli views in terms a Westerner can understand...

...The subject of Palestinian terrorism clearly discomforts Said...

...Zionists must stop denying the Palestinian existence...

...and the Gush Emunim are "a collection of fanatics whose zeal and violence makes the 'Islamic' hordes seem positively gentle...

...His sweetly reasonable contention that "if more people take up the question of Palestine as a matter for the common good of Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews," then the two peoples will soon enough exist together "side by side, in peace and harmony," may either represent a PLO consensus or merely the wishful thoughts of a romantic professor of comparative literature at Columbia University...

...While this gives The Question of Palestine its interest, it also leads occasionally to near incoherence...

...Consequently, "everything positive from the Zionist standpoint looked absolutely negative from the perspective of the native Arab Palestinians...

...The Zionist reality exiled Palestinians from their own land and suppressed their political, geographic and human qualities...

...only "an anachronistic biblical argument" supports Israeli settlements in the West Bank...

...The Zionist adage, "a people without a land for a land without a people," is cited as proof of the feeling that the over half a million non-Jews who were living on that land did not matter...

...He has three main points: Zionism is a specific case of the European worldview he calls Orientalism...

...On the key issue of Jewish immigration to Palestine, Said believes that "all the constitutive energies of Zionism were premised on the excluded presence, that is, the functional absence of 'native people' in Palestine...

...policy he calls "intellectual terrorism...

...The Jewish-American reaction to a U.S...

...The Europeans had little interest in or respect for the Arabs of Palestine, but nothing Said quotes points to a policy of repression or exclusion...

...No brief schema can do justice to the rich chaos of Said's thought...

...Said says, for example, that "Arabs were never admitted as members" to the "completely apartheid" kibbutzim, but instead occupied their own "Arab Gulag Archipelago...

...The author intends The Question of Palestine to give the reader a sense that, despite a long record of outrages directed against them, the Palestinians have accepted Israel and are prepared to come to terms with it...

...But Said accepts that Israel is here to stay...

...Seen in this light, Zionism is not the return of the Jews to the Land of Israel but merely another manifestation of European indifference to a non-Western people: "In formulating the concept of a Jewish nation 'reclaiming' its own territory, Zionism not only accepted the generic racial concepts of European culture, it also banked on the fact that Palestine was actually peopled not by an advanced but by a backward people, over which it ought to be dominant...

...He reduces the historic claim of Jews to Palestine to "a sixty-year Jewish sovereignty over Palestine which had lapsed for two millennia...

...He docs say that "many acts of individual adventure (hijacking, kidnapping, and the like) were acts of unbalanced, finally immoral, and useless destruction" which "horrified" him...

...Occasionally Said slips into a frankly polemical and unrestrained use of language...

...Either Jews kept Arabs out or no Arabs wanted to join at the heart of the Zionist movement...

...Generally, though, he ignores acts of terrorism and other aggression against the Jews, and he finishes this discussion with the amazing argument that "Israel literally produced, manufactured . . . the [Palestinian] terrorist.'" A variety of issues come up in partial, implicit, ultimately unsatisfactory fashion...

...This assertion runs contrary to overwhelming evidence of Jewish rule in Palestine for centuries...

...The implication seems to be that some Arabs wished to join the kibbutzim and were kept out by racial laws...

...Said cannot have it both ways...

...as a result, few paragraphs end recognizably near the topic they started with...

...Not only is this flatly wrong, but it contradicts the author's key point that "no Palestinian, regardless of his political stripe, has ever been able to reconcile himself to Zionism...

...worse, that being excluded from the kibbutzim meant a concentration camp existence...

...And even as he derides the brief years of a Jewish state so long ago, Said neglects to note that Palestinian Arabs never had a slate of their own...

...The Zionists repeatedly stressed their concern for Jews and ignored the Arabs as much as possible: They did not have the wicked ideas the author ascribes to them...

...In a previous work, Orientalism, Said argued that there was a general modern European approach to non-Westerners, one which denied them full humanity and so paved the way for their conquest and subjugation...