A Rejoinder

...One of the doctors, a surgeon, told the story of how an entire hospital staff had been made to stop in its tracks for one whole morning, summoned to discuss the case of an unfortunate baby girl born defective in every imaginable way...

...Speaker after speaker, each with his smile of mockery, each identified by neckerchief, rose before the PLO flag yelling lie after lie, distortion after misrepresentation, psychological insult after historical injury...

...No one tells me what to do...

...Are all to be accepted as Said presents them in his own manifestation of Orientalism-so mindlessly politicized that they can swallow official blood thirstiness without a blink...

...In Jewish discussion, the "human reality" in all its conflict and diversity is habitually paramount, sometimes overwhelming...

...A head wheeled toward him: the most ferocious head I have ever seen, that of a young woman, not unattractive, yet unbearable to look at...

...The Jews, the Jews, the Jews," I heard...

...it filled him, he said, "with cold anger...

...None of this is to suggest that the pragmatic, tactical, defensive, and surely the ethical arguments against?and for-Israeli settlement policies in the West Bank should not be aired...

...Of course, this system of clues doesn't always work...

...I know better now...

...He deplores the obliteration of "the distinctions between the type-the Oriental, the Arab, the Orient????And ordinary human reality...

...Did they pay their own fare to Wannsee...

...It is good to have Hauser's inside information-she depicts herself as "a very active member of the group and a drafter of much of the report"-but it was precisely the report's "fame" I was "covering...

...As if a novelist could have "policies," let alone expansionist and provocative ones, like a Prime Minister...

...Except to name him among Carter's Jewish appointees, my article did not deal with Stuart Eizenstat, whom Neusner accurately identifies as "the principal Presidential adviser on domestic affairs," for that very reason -I was writing about foreign affairs, i.e., attitudes concerning Israel...

...Those debaters who glide from plausibly stringent criticism of Israel's West Bank policies to escapist and illusional imaginings that the PLO will somehow be converted to future rational coexistence with a Jewish state put themselves outside the terms of coherent debate...

...There is no dirty linen in honest debate, and it ought not to matter who is listening...

...The present Administration begins its efforts for re-election with an admirable Israel plank in its platform...

...Lawrence and Gertrude Bell for statements exhibiting "an aura of apartness, definiteness, and collective self-consistency such as to wipe out any traces of individual Arabs with narratable life histories...

...It is interesting, though, that Jewish division and Jewish anger, whether hot or cold, have by and large followed, not preceded, the world's frown...

...In it Said attacks writers and thinkers from Chateaubriand to Kipling to Weizmann, from Lord Cro-nin to Renan to Matthew Arnold, and indicts T.E...

...And what of those bigwigs Heydrich and Eichmann...

...Yet even if I had Professor Neusner's approbation, I am not sure I would want it.I was present in his audience at the 92nd Street Y some months ago when he complained that Israel ought not to take up so much energy and notice in the American Jewish psyche...

...I am entirely willing to take his word for it when he maintains that he pays his own fare to PLO meetings-why not...

...On the contrary-he is a member of one of the highest councils of an organization not simply dedicated to terror as a policy, but founded on the proposition that an existing sovereign state, the majority of whose Jewish inhabitants are refugees from severe political and social and physical oppression in Arab nations, ought to be dismantled...

...I was ignorant of the impact of lies yelled in the public thoroughfare...

...The PLO is now the recognized political and violent arm of that reality, the successor to the organized Arab aggressions of 1921, 1936, 1948, 1967, and 1973...

...the conversation unselfconsciously turned to shop talk, hospital experiences, encounters with patients and their families...

...If, years ago when I was in graduate school, someone had told me that it was possible to be steeped in Joseph Conrad and at the same time be a member of the "National Council" of a world-wide terror organization, I would have doubted this with all the passion for civilization and humane letters that a naive and literature-besotted young person can evidence...

...The next day the London papers reported an attack in Antwerp by Syrian-born Abdel Wahid on a group of Jewish children boarding a bus for summer camp, during which a boy was killed and 20 others were injured...

...No one tells him what to do...

...One of the papers featured a photo of Leila Khaled, the convicted hijacker and terrorist who had attended the UN-sponsored, PLO co-opted Conference on Women in Copenhagen, and who, approached by Shulamit Alo-ni, an Israeli renowned for urging peace with Palestinians, declared for publication: "Speak to the world with words but to Israel only with weapons...

...Yet I confess I wonder about Professor Said's sense of justice...

...The second of these characterizations is accurate, though his acknowledgement comes too late...

...But if one accepts as an irreducible premise that the PLO means to dismantle and crush Israel-And it would be suicidal, on grounds of alert realism, not to accept this premise-then the single Peace Now argument that is inadmissable is the one that declares the settlements to be "an obstacle to peace...

...Hauser further comments: "The [Brookings] report did not urge negotiations with the PLO, as Ozick states: I and several others would not have signed such a document...

...Of course I will extend to Professor Said the apology he seeks-All right, so he pays his own fare...

...The young woman whose terrible gaze had felled me bore a shocking resemblance to Leila Khaled...

...And the world's frown began to focus on the settlements only after the PLO, always on the lookout for a new political opportunity, lighted on them...

...Says the second: What is good for the Jews, quintessential targets that they are, has correspondingly got to be good for America...

...To put it still more pointedly: Blaming the Jews has had its usual psy-chopathological effect of causing insecure Jews to blame themselves...

...So it is certainly not surprising to hear from Professor Lekachman his worries about the effect of "colonial occupation" on "Israel as a democratic community," his fear of erosion of "civil liberties which are a glory of [Israeli] society and an indictment of surrounding enemy states," his argument that "as new settlements multiply, hopes of territorial compromise...

...I cannot find Said's estimate of ordinary human reality at all credible, still less charitable...

...Bookbinder, uneasy at the look of his words in print, now wishes to repudiate them...

...the PLO vigorous in London, placing politics above veracity, or, worse, self-propagandized into true believers-I thought: It is one thing to read Edward W. Said's letters to the New York Times, or accounts of UN speeches full of historical falsifications and Orwellian reversals of simple fact...

...It showed a failure of normality...

...The next afternoon, in London, chance thrust me into the heart of a seething crowd...

...It is hard to believe they were written by the author of Orientalism, a subtle and for the most part persuasive volume intent on documenting Western stereotyping of Eastern peoples, Arabs prominently among them...

...If I have given so much space to Professor's Said's positions, it is to put in necessary perspective the remarks of some other correspondents...

...With regard to my report on diverse views of Israel's settlements policies, Neusner (although he is not alone in this) does not seem to understand the difference between describing a position and taking one...

...But to support the PLO is, as Professor Said knows, to be glad of, or at least indifferent to, assaults on children, whether on the coastal road, or in Antwerp, or in the school at Maalot, or in a crib in a kibbutz nursery...

...Rabbi Joseph Glaser wants to assert the opposite sort of "we"-the Jewish-particularist-prag-matist group, he attests, is the "only Jewish community worth fathoming, if indeed the other is a 'community' at all...

...Thanks to the blandishments of the UN, the Third World, the oil nations, and now nearly every Western country, the opposite is happening...

...I wonder: Has he handed in his resignation yet...

...and it is his own sense of justice that brings him there...

...In the exercise of his own free judgment he is an adviser to the organization "whose aim," in its now sufficiently famous words, "is to liquidate the Zionist entity politically, economically, militarily, culturally, and ideologically...

...The fact that some Begin supporters have found biblical reasons to buttress security reasons has irritated many secularist (or blatantly anti-religious) Jews, both in the United States and in Israel...

...I left that scene in a tremor, panicked, with a broken blood vessel in the eye that had witnessed it all...

...The debate went on and on...

...Until I met his colleagues face to face, I was ignorant of the immediate power of naked hatred...

...I can state flatly that Zbigniew Brzezinski's influence was small indeed...

...The State of Israel, given its various governments' action or inaction, is not to blame for the ferocious will to wipe it out...

...The first is that we heard, world-wide, many fewer condemnations of the settlements when Labor ran the government...

...There is a man who sees the world in proportion...

...In other words, that Jews have lived, and continue to live, west of the Jordan river is neither a local anomaly nor an international atrocity...

...Nevertheless, I, and surely other readers with me, have had our ideas broadened, in some cases deepened, by several highly analytical interlocutors...

...Rita Hauser, a Republican who complains of the "politics tics of accommodation," appears to be be among those "many more American Jews than Ozick hints at" who are "fearful of the near total lack of support world-wide for [Begin's] settlement policy...

...Should I pine for the regard of a man who boasts that he "opposed the Six Day War in a letter to the New York Times," a war begun in anguished self-defense when it appeared that Israel was about to be crushed to instant extinction-And not in the paper trough of a letters column but in bloody actuality...

...One of the lessons I learn from Professor Said is that the study of literature as a means of increasing humane understanding is useless...

...Jewish doctors in Jerusalem laboring compassionately over one little soul, heedless of politics...

...But if Hyman Bookbinder is currently sorry for his words, and Rita Hauser has somehow misremembered what she signed, nothing could be more distracting from the main point-the various threats to Israel from several sides-than Jacob Neusner's amazing contribution...

...I refer Hauser to page 19 of Toward Peace in the Middle East...

...A practical politics can only deal with present reality...

...To top matters off, the Security Council, in its fanciful pursuit of PLO happiness, votes 14-1, with the U.S...

...The PLO's increasing political success-And sophistication-is more to the point...

...Are there no tender mothers and fathers, caring aunts and uncles, grandparents and child-conscious teachers among those 4 million Palestinians...

...he knows that...

...In such merciless circumstances, for Jews to put the whole blame on Jewish policies, wrong-headed or not, is for the blind man gripping the elephant's trunk to blame the elephant for being a viper...

...Four years ago, Carter ran on a similarly admirable plank, with what mixed consequences we know...

...It is inconceivable for any Jew, speaking of other Jews, to plaster things over as Professor Said has done: "We all support...

...Should I long for the approbation of a Distinguished Scholar of Judaic Studies who asserts that he has "not set foot on the West Bank (exclusive of the whole of reunited Jerusalem)"-thereby defining Jerusalem, PLO-style, as part of the West Bank...

...If you regret the message you have sent, be sure to assail the credibility of the messenger...

...The fact that Robert Lekachman is driven to drop quotation marks around plain Hebrew place-names is a measure of how selfconsciously cautious and other-directed many Jews have become in responding to the world's resistance to overt Jewish expression...

...After all, it remains true that there would be a substantial and continuing Jewish community in Hebron today if Moslem zealots had not destroyed that community, through massacre and terror, in 1929-A date marking the first time since antiquity that Hebron became emptied of its Jewish presence...

...What he seems best able to understand is how to spray arrogant scorn, and it is in that admirable condition of expertise I prefer to leave him...

...Murderers...

...Was there yet another such nakedly cruel human face, self-divested of its humanity...

...Rita Hauser writes: "Ozick is wrong in her coverage of the famous 1975 Brookings report...

...alludes to is due to the putative Brzezinski connection...

...The way to peace is not to "accept" the PLO, or to daydream about its reform or reconstruction or transmutation into a civilized corps of nation-founders...

...Why this is I am not exactly sure, but I suspect it has only a little to do with Begin himself, his personality or his views...

...that right action tames...

...No, what will quiet the West Bank, and a good portion of the rest of the Middle East into the bargain, is the diminution of PLO influence...

...After all, an organization as rich as the PLO-said himself speaks of how rich the PLO is in his book The Question of Palestine-could afford to render him the courtesy of travel costs, just as it has splendidly and expensively housed its other well-known New York member, UN observer Zehdi Ha-bib Terzi...

...Though I rather doubt it, I have no evidence...

...We have been and remain liberal," avers the first, in the person of Judge Marvin Frankel -but his "we" by no means includes Professor Edward Alexander, a coruscating derider of liberals...

...Repudiate...

...Jordan while in control of the West Bank went to war against Israel...

...Israeli control over Jerusalem, though it was a position not generally assented to internationally, lay dormant as an object of active dispute for years...

...He begins, sternly enough, by accusing me of being a novelist (a hair-raising crime I wish I could plead guilty to more often than I have...

...There are no divisions in the Palestinian population of 4 million...

...How often is it necessary to remind ourselves that there were no Jews, none at all, whether as occupiers or inhabitants, in that territory for 19years, between 1948-67, and the hostility still did not abate...

...A few paragraphs along, though, we find him blustering, "What have Ozick's expansionist and provocative policies accomplished...

...Could it really have been she in that crowd, en route from Copenhagen to Beirut...

...Edward Said's bedfellows in ideology are terrorists...

...The way to peace is to begin to find the political means to undo the PLO's growing international potency...

...In correctly noting the report's reputation, I described it as "said to have been masterminded by Brzezinski...

...Israel took possession of the West Bank to begin with because of a war waged against it by hostile Arabs who refused, and except for Egypt still refuse, to permit a Jewish state to live in peace, to live at all...

...abstaining, to rebuke the stones of Jerusalem for their ancient and un-witherable bond to the Jewish people...

...Said's colleagues, the PLO gunmen who shot up three members of my family, killing my 14-year-old cousin Imri two years ago on the coastal road between Haifa and Tel Aviv-did they pay the cost of the dinghy that brought them down from Lebanon...

...Should she be saved, to live on with distorted bones and possibly missing mind...

...Professor Neusner reminds me of that bear when, trying so hard to be important, he ends up being funny...

...Is it, one must ask, ordinary human reality for a population of (using the PLO's own figure) 4 million to be all-inclusively, capaciously, collectively, consistently, monolithically of a single mind...

...In saying "We all support the PLO," Said is willing not simply to dissent from his own thesis in defense of Arab individuality and "human reality," but to cut a single ugly and brutal caricature of 4 million people...

...All this delicate and grieving concern was for an Arab child...

...What will quiet the West Bank is not the absence of Jews...

...A sensitive friend of mine, a novelist, terms this phenomenon of remorse "print shame...

...One "possible solution" offered was "the creation of a Palestinian negotiation authority including both the PLO and elements from the West Bank and Gaza...

...That is the second point...

...Her eyes were two black pistols shooting out a living hatred...

...We all support the PLO...

...These may be the most remarkable pair of self-exploding sentences a scholar has ever penned...

...We have met the enemy and he is us" is, in a situation rife with calculating child-killers and their international defenders, a leftover from the wrong scenario, and a delusion among Jews...

...That is the reality...

...he rarely acknowledges in print that his colleagues and bedfellows are engaged in a politics of terror...

...For his part, he explained, what he was thinking about was a friend's sick child, his own children's school activities, his garden, and his dog...

...It is this notion that is the magical substratum beneath many of the arguments against the settlements, however plausible and persuasive those arguments are in themselves...

...It seems to me that there are really only three pertinent comments to be made on the question of Israel's settlements policies-the current policy under Begin, the earlier one under Labor...

...As Hauser suggests, it is basically fear of world criticism that has instigated Jewish self-criticism on the subject of the settlements...

...When he goes to a meeting designed to "liquidate," he high-mindedly pays his own fare (freeing how many petrodollars to buy how many Soviet Kalachnikov rifles of the kind that murdered my young cousin...

...What is good for America has got to be good for the Jews, says the first group...

...James Thurber tells the story of the bear who leaned so far backward that he fell on his face...

...I began to feel displaced in time-was this a Brownshirt demonstration, had I somehow stepped off the El Al plane into the happy Berlin of 1936...

...The report also introduced, in several places, the hoped-for feasibility, as well as the difficulties, of negotiating with the PLO...

...By means of a certain stomach operation, she might yet live some months...

...For that same reason I did tackle Connally's poisoning of the country's political atmosphere via not-so-subtly anti-Jewish oil blackmail-A poisoning from which the Carter Administration has not been immune, as Billy Carter's notorious dealings with Libya, helped by the President's National Security Adviser, amply demonstrate...

...In the middle of wondering about all these matters-the Antwerp assault...

...The timing and source of Jewish protest against the settlements has not been of wholly Jewish origin, in short...

...and for something that is being presented by some Jews as an issue of Jewish conscience-A kind of necessary ethical housecleaning-this aspect, at least, is worrisome...

...All the same, no one ought to object to freedom of argument about the settlements...

...Her wild mouth was frightening...

...No one pays my way to Beirut, and no one tells me what to do," he asserts...

...he is an ideologue who is fully responsible for his acts, words, ideas, and choices...

...When Said speaks of my "psychological distress and ignorance," he is perfectly correct, especially as to the latter...

...Whatever the settlements may be, however damaging they may be seen to be, they are not that, and to say so repeatedly distracts from and falsifies the real obstacle—unmovable hatred of Jewish political independence on the part of the "rejectionists...

...They were there well before the PLO inaugurated its successful agitation over them, just as Jerusalem was functionally and declaratively the capital of Israel years before the PLO achieved its successful agitation about that...

...I have had the "gall," he continues, to put his "political independence" and his "support for Palestinian rights" in "so venal a light...

...If only the context were not so grave, who would not laugh out loud at such a tone of self-congratulation...

...Provocative" or otherwise, the Knesset's vote for Geula Cohen's Jerusalem bill was the retort to the heating up of the issue, not its source...

...Speaking for myself, I object only to those self-deceivers who habitually forget that the enemies of Israel are not the Israelis...

...The PLO swells and swells...

...In all conscience, however, I never intended to suggest that Professor Said might be a mercenary...

...Professor Glazer's comment about the high expense of maintaining the settlements is worth thinking about as well...

...To ask, as Lekachman does, whether a PLO state on the West Bank would "in the long run be a graver menace than an occupied West Bank in incessant and growing turmoil" is to beg the question: A West Bank in incessant and growing turmoil is already a PLO state in infancy, and gives warning of the unappeasable devourer the baby will grow up to be...

...This increases the burden on American Jews actively and exhaustively to clarify the case against the PLO with whatever Administration is in place...

...all that is pointless messianism, if mes-sianism denotes escapism via futurist fantasies...

...Again one hopes they did, or Said might accuse them of the crime of venality...

...Not far from me in the crowd stood a distressed American youth wearing a yarmulka, who began to call out his protests...

...According to Neusner, an ordinary scribbler like myself, living on a distant continent, can cause Israel's inflation rate to climb, its population to emigrate, its messianic delusions to grow-And still there are no flats at a reasonable price...

...With that greater peril in mind, I will refuse to be astonished by Hyman Bookbinder, the American Jewish Committee's Washington representative, when he calls my exact rendering of his words, meticulously set down, not only "garbled" but "pompous...

...But make no mistake: A man who pins "expansionist and provocative policies"-world-influencing power-on a mere wordy novelist, not even a smart one (consider my "emotional state," my "affective processes of reflection," and above all my "incapacity to sustain a single carefully framed argument, or to pursue to its end a coherent problem"), will always merit my profoundest awe...

...It is an instantly recognizable stamp of the present moment that these vying streams have come to center on the West Bank settlements controversy...

...yet for the sake of their heroic moral sensibilities I hope they did: Otherwise someone might be tempted to think them venal...

...Bookbinder denies he scolded me for asking about Brzezinski's handshake with Arafat by saying, "Don't look for exploitation of the insignificant...

...Professor Said has read Heart of Darkness, and it has not educated his heart...

...Not every self-identified Palestinian can be like those savage PLO hate-mongers I saw in London, no matter what Said, in his access of stereotyping, may claim...

...All the same, it goes without saying that Said is no mercenary...

...a smiling speaker, enjoying himself, wearing a neckerchief of instantly recognizable Arafat design, was proclaiming that, as someone who worked for unesco, he could testify to countless examples of Israeli medical atrocities directed at Arabs...

...This raises new questions about the cost of transportation in getting to meetings where the destruction of Jews is contemplated...

...If he really said those things, he declares, he ought to quit or be fired...

...Even before there was a Jewish state, Palestinian Arabs rioted against Zionist settlements and in the streets of the newly building cities...

...A Rejoinder BY CYNTHIA OZICK On my last night in Jerusalem this summer, I found myself in a bookish, tea-drinking room full of doctors-specialists of various kinds, all of them affiliated with major hospitals in that city of biblical hills and technological heights...

...This term must now include the formerly "moderate" Saudi Arabia, whose Crown Prince Fahd last month announced, "the only answer to the Zionist religious and racist arrogance" is Holy War...

...One aspect that has been reinforced is the split between the attitudes I have characterized as "idealist" and "pragmatic...

...and what my article dealt with was, above all, worry over a potential softening of American stands with regard to the PLO...

...At this moment the autonomy talks are at a standstill (Israel's fault, according to Sadat: it said out loud that its capital is its capital), the Saudis have fallen off the wagon of "moderation," and the UN, led by PLO observer Terzi, has just solved everything by ordering Israel to get out of the West Bank and back to its 1967 borders by next November 15...

...Her unhappy parents had brought her into a Jewish-run hospital after Arab doctors -not perhaps without good reason?had given her up and sent her home...

...It is no use amending Professor Neusner's misreadings and misapprehensions...

...Attorney Theodore Mann, the former Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, at the American Jewish Congress Dialogue in Jerusalem last July, told of his visit to a religious settlement...

...Of his own free will he is close to Yasir Arafat, who said only last year that "we will never lay down our guns before reaching Jerusalem...

...We all support the PLO...

...The document Hauser signed spoke of "a process of comprehensive settlement," and proposed a "general settlement at Geneva or elsewhere," to include the Soviet Union-ideas which appeared in Brzezinski's 1975 Foreign Policy article...

...Faced with the PLO, all other matters should fall back into their just proportions...

...For Israelis-who, it will be recalled, speak Hebrew-to say Judea and Samaria is no more insistent than for Americans to prefer not to substitute south-of-Georgia for Florida...

...At its center was a platform with a banner...

...The liberal ideal, when it is willing to believe in volitional evil at all, is that if good men improve themselves still more, evil will be confounded by the example and transformed...

...If you begin by looking at the conclusion of Nathan Glazer's contribution?having spoken of "Jewish interests," he ends by calling them "American interests," and affirms that "fortunately very many Americans, aside from the 2.7 who are Jews, agree"-you will, more or less, be able to predict his opening: "I am one of the American supporters of Peace Now...

...What was the most conscientious course...

...I am a Palestinian," she shrieked at the boy in the yarmulka, "and I say all you Jews are murderers...

...Its surfacing as an immediate red-hot issue is now not quite three months old...

...the decision, finally, was in favor of attempting to keep her alive: The responsibility of healers is to choose life, not to negate it...

...He denies he said, "Everything the Administration has done on the PLO is eminently fair...

...On the other side, Rabbi Glaser sees the types of people who might object to the settlements are "more bound to a particular ideology and socio-political goal which is intrinsically in opposition to the well-being of Israel, and perhaps even to its very existence, than they are to the general set of ideals which true liberals espouse"-And this may may not deal fairly with Nathan Glazer, who is for a strong Israel and, domestically, against ethnic quotas...

...In the same way, perception of the settlements as an international scandal is relatively recent, though it was under Labor that the settlements were initiated, essentially as a security measure...

...Nor is it a scandal reflecting a politically tendentious purpose to call those areas by the terms Judea and Samaria...

...he does not repudiate them...

...1 did not myself ascribe the "masterminding" to him...

...As the only non-Israeli and very nearly the only nonphysician present, I was soon forgotten...

...without it, she would quickly die...

...it is quite another to encounter Professor Said's PLO colleagues face to face, and to hear their voices, and what they are willing to roar in the streets of a city proud of its devotion to unhindered free speech...

...That is the third and main point...

...As she must surely know, the very fame she...