THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW EDWARD SAID
Stevenson, Matthew
THE PROGRESSIVE Interview Edward Said An exile's exile BY MATTHEW STEVENSON Edward Said is an exile's exile. Born in Jerusalem in 1935, he speaks as a Palestinian for Palestinians. His latest...
...SAID: I am, perhaps, an incurable optimist...
...SAID: As much as it possibly can, it has...
...But that isn't to say that he hasn't been very useful to this Administration, in creating a kind of foreign devil, a scapegoat...
...A lot of Jews now say this quite openly: We can't live permanently as an overlord population when the population we are on top of is growing in numbers and is certainly growing in participation and political self-consciousness...
...SAID: It doesn't quite work that way...
...Q: But you have said that Americans have to change the way we think...
...The Jordanian is different from the Lebanese...
...Besides, about 45 per cent of all the Palestinians in the world live in Palestine, so there are natural connections...
...The most likely place where you find a sense of compassion for Jewish suffering and our suffering and for groups in this country who have suffered is with the blacks, various Hispanic Latin groups, and women's groups...
...SAID: You mean Jordan...
...Unfortunately, right now the preponderance of power, of military and economic strength, is so much on the side of the Israelis, who are supported by the United States almost without qualification...
...there are formulas to use for various sorts of bargaining...
...I mean there's an endless series of opposition parties within the Palestinian community, and every Palestinian has his own party, practically...
...In time, the relationship will be closer than that enjoyed between two states that are totally different...
...We are guests in host states that, for the most part, are even more tyrannical with their own subjects...
...I think there is a will...
...It's a tormenting question...
...Jordan is a sovereign state...
...In my opinion, they are unforgivable acts...
...Q: How do Palestinians relate to Lebanon and to Jordan...
...If you look at the ratio of terror—and, of course, one must dot the I's and cross the T's—but infinitely greater amounts of terror have been directed against Palestinians than against Jews or against anybody else in support of Palestinians...
...That cannot be allowed to go on...
...They pale in comparison to the violence visited against Palestinians throughout the Arab world...
...I've never condoned them at all...
...For all of these states, the Palestinians are the source of unrest...
...Obviously the Jews in Israel today are different from the French in Algeria...
...Why does the West after ten, twelve years, after Munich in 1972, still see incidents like those in Karachi and Paris...
...And I think most Israelis now realize that they have no real military option against the Palestinians...
...Qi If there were a Palestinian state on the West Bank, do you think terror as a modern phenomenon, as related to Palestinians, would diminish...
...To them, they are alone and they've got to fight it...
...I'm frequently struck by the extent to which this picture results not only from ignorance but also from avoidance of the Palestinian as a human being...
...SAID: That's a very tough question to ask an Israeli, but I have often asked it...
...How can you, having suffered victimization, in what seems to be with heedless consciences, inflict similar punishments on another people...
...Q: What leadership exists behind Arafat, in what might be the next generation...
...SAID: I don't really know...
...The destruction of houses and property, the collective punishments, village curfews, deportations: There's no comparison...
...Q: How does the United States perceive the Palestinians and why...
...But what political modalities this is going to lead to, I really don't know...
...But they will have to accommodate themselves to the reality of the situation...
...people are the original inhabitants of what used to be called Palestine but is now the territory called Israel, plus the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which were occupied by Israel in 1967...
...That is this: The last permissible racism here—and by permissible, I mean it's okay publicly in the media and elsewhere—is to be racist against Arabs...
...The time will have to come when we will have to deal with it...
...I've always been against that kind of tactic...
...the various informal and international means at the disposal of the community have asserted over and over again that despite divisions and disagreements, the one thing the PLO retains without any shred of doubt in anybody's mind is the sense that they represent the Palestinians...
...The Palestinians have no such thing...
...But be that as it may, it is a representative organization...
...Q: If there were a state, would there be peace in the region...
...In the last couple of years, a series of attacks against Arabs resulting in the deaths of some have occurred...
...We need a Palestinian homeland or state where our connection with the land would be reestablished...
...We haven't been the sinners in this thing...
...But of course it's human to put it off...
...But the idea of a state would make that distinction, between ties—the way an American who is from Ireland feels ties to Ireland but yet has the idea that he or she is an American...
...I could reel out statistics, but there is no comparison...
...Q: Israel is divided on the question of the West Bank, whether it ought to be annexed, whether it ought to be returned to Jordan, whether a Palestinian state ought to be created there...
...We're the people without a state and without a place, and in nearly every country where Palestinians are to be found, their situation is distinguished from the nationals...
...I am fifty-one...
...Not only are you denied your political sovereignty and rights, but also your history is denied and your reality as a suffering human being is pooh-poohed or ignored completely...
...Anti-Arab racism is the last acceptable or respectable racism...
...Does he have any standing in the Palestinian world...
...SAID: I think Jesse Jackson does...
...And that is why, I think, we have this extraordinary phenomenon of religious resurgence...
...The essence, obviously, is mutual recognition...
...We are Protestants...
...It doesn't have a good image...
...But I am not trying to peddle a Pollyanna idea that all problems will be solved...
...Said is Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he has been teaching since 1963...
...They won't leave...
...It's Islamic, it's Christian, it's Jewish, it's all through the region...
...And a lot of people around the world don't think so...
...The other thing is that the countries of this region, in the period since World War II, have developed powerful national self-consciousness...
...And, although a large population of Palestinians lives there—people who came in 1948 and were granted Jordanian citizenship—the notion that Jordan could be a substitute homeland has never satisfied either Jordanians or Palestinians...
...This is terribly important to peace...
...We are responsible for the education of our children despite dispossession and dispersion...
...And that includes the liberals, who are forthright in their condemnation of apartheid...
...SAID: Oh, absolutely...
...There is a strong popular sentiment that, whether we like them or not, the PLO is in fact a national organization of some sort...
...And all of them are different from the Palestinian, who has his own sense of national identity...
...SAID: This is likely a matter of perspective...
...And the leader of one of these Jewish defense groups said in an interview, "As far as we're concerned, Said, anything goes...
...But overall, the Israeli position is basically that of inertia and power...
...Nevertheless, institutions exist, and that impresses me...
...A lot of Palestinians don't think so...
...SAID: I would make a distinction even within the West...
...SAID: I'm not sure that terror is related...
...They are there.' ties, economic injustices and social deformations, that will remain...
...And the third factor, which is very important, is that the Palestinians are seen as an anomaly in some way...
...Q: What are some examples...
...I was visited by the FBI, and the raid was publicly noted...
...The Syrian is different from the Egyptian...
...And there isn't enough of an Arab deterrent of any sort to make the Israelis think they're in a losing position...
...The PLO until today supports the families of people who are killed—orphans and widows and family members...
...Q: What is American policy in the Middle East...
...The lot of the Palestinian is, first, that he is not part of a sovereign state of his own...
...For Said, as for many Palestinians, the Six Day War marked the consummation of exile...
...Even in Arab countries, they are set apart...
...If that's the case, can there ever be a solution...
...There are other problems—poverty and inequi'Most Israelis now realize they have no military option against the Palestinians...
...SAID: No...
...I feel he had to do it, although I also felt it was ill-conceived, that nothing would come of it, so it's a paradox...
...There are daily events...
...SAID: A solution would have to take into account the facts of Palestinian history and present-day reality...
...You are talking about countries in such close proximity to each other, where there are all kinds of ways in which you can actually see into your own past...
...Another factor which is terribly important is that the Israeli foreign-policy establishment, during the middle 1970s, reached a kind of consensus that one way to deal with the Palestinians— this endless problem that won't go away—would be gradually to reduce them to the status of terrorists...
...Q: If that's the case, why wouldn't Palestinian strategy, or tactics, shift away from terror...
...The Palestinians are not all going to be murdered or sent away...
...You read in the pages of The New Republic, in Commentary, and in the more outrageous magazines to the right of them, the most horrible things about the natural depravity of the Arab, the crazed ways of Arab culture, the inability of Islam to tell the truth from falsehood...
...People are killed...
...But they are gone...
...In 1982, he told Palestinians in Beirut they could commit suicide...
...There's a very strong feeling that the idea of a state is the only relief of this acute national problem of homelessness and exile...
...Their problem with Syria is a problem between states, their problem with Egypt is a problem between states...
...And we are your victims now...
...Instead, what we get is a focusing on the desperate acts of Palestinians...
...My office was vandalized and raided a year ago...
...There are 400,000 of them in Lebanon...
...SAID: That's the great question...
...Arafat is obviously the most visible, but there are people who have been around him historically, part of his group, the founding group of the PLO...
...Most people feel, as I do, that the Arab world in general is a pretty despotic and desolate place right now politically...
...Q: Who in your mind should represent the Palestinians at a peace conference or in negotiations...
...Otherwise, there will be killing and endless instability for years to come...
...They are the ones who lead the fights against the Israeli troops, with rocks and burning tires and that sort of thing...
...That is one of the greatest canards of all time...
...it's not a direct relationship...
...And that is a uniquely American phenomenon at this moment, and a terribly frightening one...
...The people of my generation were children in 1948, but we had some experience of Palestine...
...But focusing on them and making them the issue, where in fact they are byproducts, is wrong...
...And we, who think what they have done to us is outrageous and illegitimate and illegal, have to recognize them...
...Q: Can there be peace in the Middle East without a solution to the Palestinian question...
...We are just nomads...
...Q: What do you think is the sentiment within the PLO for peace and for a permanent solution...
...And he is highly controversial even among Palestinians, who tend to debate whether doing this as opposed to that was the right thing, and so on...
...Q: What are the different perceptions of the PLO in the West and among the Palestinians...
...But at bottom, I have a sense of isolation and separation and probably estrangement...
...Over the last few years, really since 1982, I have detected a greater level of intransigence among young Palestinians...
...That they will not sit up and just die, just say we are going to efface ourselves, I know also for a fact...
...Don't forget that until he appeared as a crystallizing figure in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Palestinians were a forgotten people...
...SAID: There's no question that his image in the West is very bad...
...So ignorance is an important factor...
...How would things have to change here to then change over there...
...The Palestinian is distinguished by virtue of greater education and greater political sophistication...
...Yesterday a man was killed in Gaza...
...They worked it out...
...SAID: No...
...We are scattered everywhere, we have no central place...
...SAID: The only representative with any credibility is the Palestine Liberation Organization...
...First, there are distinctions between the perception of the PLO in the Palestinian world, the Arab world, the nonaligned world, the Islamic world, the Third World generally, on the one hand, and the perception in the West, or rather the United States—which is quite different from, say, that of France and England...
...In my opinion, he's a very complex and even tragic figure, because he has had to do a number of things that couldn't win—for example, the business of signing an agreement with Jordan...
...Israeli figures tell you that roughly 250,000 people on the West Bank have been in Israeli jails since the occupation, which is now in its twentieth year...
...His latest book, After the Last Sky, published last year by Pantheon, is a memoir of Palestinian lives in exile...
...SAID: No...
...They are the people always on the fringes...
...That's a popular conception...
...SAID: I don't think so...
...Take the schoolchildren of the West Bank today: They know nothing but the occupation...
...He's an indefensible man...
...You can say the most outrageous things in the most respectable magazines and newspapers and even on the air about Arabs, things you would never dare to say about any other ethnic or racial group...
...Q: That's true also in Israel and in Palestine...
...That is not only racism but murder...
...They try to deny our humanity...
...Does it translate into democratic institutions, into parliaments, into levels of representation...
...There's a small number of people, courageous people, who are doing a lot of tremendously important work—political organizing, testimonials, helping to reduce the strains of the occupation...
...For the Israelis, there is a psychological and even a moral factor associated with the Palestinian that doesn't apply to other Arabs...
...In Israel now the next generation is all post-1967, as in Palestine...
...Q: Does the presence of Israeli settlements on the West Bank make the occupation almost irreversible...
...There's an ugly phenomenon in this country that needs to be underlined and said and resaid...
...I won't say outsiders or pariahs or exiles or outcasts or misfits, although they are seen that way...
...So there's no question...
...This has been documented by some Israeli journalists recently...
...I mean they were buried in the refugee camps or in the poorer places like Tyre and Damascus...
...Does that mean greater chances for war rather than peace...
...Now there is a whole generation of people who grew up under occupation or exile, entirely without any direct contact with Palestine...
...And, within the Christians of the Middle East, we belonged to a minority...
...It is much easier to dehumanize the population than acually to deal with its ambitions...
...I've frequently said to them, "Look what happened to you: You as Jews are the victims of all time, really...
...They are there...
...Q: Is there a connection between the Palestinians, Libya, and Moammar Gadhafi...
...Or is it still the idea of all of Palestine as a secular state...
...As people have said, if the Jews have waited 2,000 years to go back to Zion from exile, it isn't hard to imagine that the Palestinians would find forty years a very short time and wouldn't forget in forty years...
...When you say, will a Palestinian state bring peace, will it by a magic stroke of the pen just change everything...
...That is an unanswerable question for me...
...Is that a policy for the complexities and the tragedies and the density of conflict, history, and tradition of the Middle East...
...Palestinian institutions are on the whole extraordinarily democratic...
...SAID: The invasion of Lebanon in 1982, when at least 19,000 or 20,000 Palestinian people died, and a total of 600 Israeli soldiers were killed in that war...
...These are cliches of popular and public discourse...
...That they are resilient, I have no doubt...
...Since then, they have become people who are either second-class citizens inside Israel, or people who were driven out and are refugees and exiles throughout the Arab world, or people on the West Bank and Gaza Strip who are an occupied population...
...It's very difficult, but it's got to be done...
...Some politicians in Congress—members of the Black Caucus, Paul McCloskey when he was there, Paul Findley when he was there—have made courageous and unusual statements about the Palestinians...
...It does seem to be unified on the question of Jerusalem, that it will never be returned or made an international city...
...It is what puzzles me, and it is why I can't answer your question...
...Second is the fact of dispersion...
...Now recent polls show that isn't the real perception, depending on how you put the question...
...He is a man of the people in that respect...
...I can't answer that...
...But I certainly know that the Israelis owe the Palestinians atonement of some sort...
...There's a sense of impotence, a sense of standing still...
...But the one fact that you mustn't forget about the reality of Palestinian existence in the Arab world is that there is no Palestine...
...The Palestinian is either a faceless refugee or a terrorist...
...Q: Would that include parts of the East Bank as well...
...I think, though, that it is difficult for any Palestinian to overestimate the importance of gaining a sense of resolution, of a just resolution to our problems...
...Since 1967," he said, "when the Arabs were defeated and the remainder of Palestine was occupied by the Israelis, I have felt like a man without a place to which I could return...
...SAID: You can describe it in two simple phrases: Combating terrorism and fighting communism—which add up to no policy at all...
...Palestinians are under Israeli occupation...
...But he has a major achievement: He has crystallized the notion of a Palestinian community despite dispersion...
...Q: Geographically, where should that be...
...Q: Within the Palestinian world, there is a tradition of learning and literature...
...Palestinians are the great self-help community of the Third World...
...Lebanon, for example, is in a state of acute anarchy, but there is still Beirut, a physical capital...
...All of the countries in which I grew up—Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon—I cannot return to for one reason or another...
...What is killing the region right now is a sense of intolerable frustration...
...Its press is obviously not good...
...The Palestinians are the victims of this terrible situation...
...Since 1982, even Lebanon is a place I can't return to, although my mother lives in West Beirut and my wife is Lebanese...
...SAID: The international consensus, the Arab consensus, and I would say even the Palestinian consensus, is the idea of a partitioned state—that is to say partly Israeli, partly Palestinian...
...I'm so out of touch, because we're all scattered...
...Q: Are there any politicians now that you feel have a sense of both sides of the question...
...Q: Has Yassir Arafat been a good envoy from Palestinians to the rest of the world...
...And then this resurgence after 1967, the shaping of the notion of a Palestinian as somebody with an identity and a possible future really is his doing—along with the PLO and, of course, the people...
...Obviously it isn't...
...People who, in the great scale of things, have done you very little harm—except that they were there...
...And it's not entirely Islamic...
...There are financial institutions, there are charitable institutions, and medical and educational ones, that still function...
...And that fact gives our lives its peculiar agony, isolation, and, above all, desperation...
...when I spoke with him recently in New York, he described his past this way: "I became aware of the fact that I was different partly through personal accident...
...What you have is a debate in Israel that is more or less academic...
...This is a true part of being a Palestinian...
...And above all, among the Palestinians, the most articulate of all the Arab communities in the Middle East, there's a sense of tremendous injustice, a sense that they are endlessly being put off by the great powers, principally the United States and its ally Israel...
...We may not like the PLO...
...But the problem between Israel and the Palestinians is much more intimate...
...They have threatened me and others who speak up for Palestinian and Arab rights with death...
...He is one of the most extraordinarily unpopular figures in the Arab world...
...His earlier works include literary criticism and three studies offering the West a broader understanding of the Middle East: Orientalism, The Question of Palestine, and Covering Islam...
...The Palestinians are not all going to be murdered or sent away...
...But in the last three or four years, the notion of a confederation between Jordan and a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza has been discussed...
...Is it a homeland on the West Bank or Jordan...
...There's a huge welfare network, private and official, which keeps the community alive...
...They say the land was empty when they took it...
...My roots are at best metaphorical, or in the past, and that has drawn me to subjects like exile itself and to writers like Conrad and to movements and to ideas about travel—across boundaries, across disciplines, across cultures...
...The Congress now, almost to a man and woman, at the drop of a hat will vote any amount of aid to Israel without any questions asked...
...It's simply no policy at all, and it's tragic...
...Algeria was a department of France...
...The Palestinians feel themselves as a community or a nation to have been dispossessed by that act...
...It was in Algeria for 130 years...
...They have to recognize us...
...The Lebanese is different from the Syrian...
...The same thing would apply to Palestinians...
...What do people want...
...The Palestinian Arab Matthew Stevenson traveled extensively in Jordan and Israel during 1985 and has contributed to a number of publications...
...And they will take positions about Israel and the Middle East that are totally out of keeping with reality...
...The Palestinians and their lives and their styles, their ambitions and their achievements, go on despite the handful of incidents that causes the West to see them as a terrorist community...
...My family is a Christian family, and the Christians are a minority in the Middle East...
...We don't live, of course, in a world of total guilt and total innocence, but in this particular conflict we have been more sinned against than sinning...
...SAID: Well, I think the logical place is the Occupied Territories, which have the largest concentration of Palestinians today...
...The history of anti-Semitism is a millennial fact...
...The Israelis still claim, and Americans in particular listen to them, that we don't exist as a people...
...Should we or should we not...
...Q: What would a solution look like to you...
...The French left...
...SAID: In the United States, particularly in the media, and for all kinds of reasons, the overall perception is extremely slanderous...
...I don't think so...
...There are still many Palestinians inside Israel today—650,000 of them—who are Israeli citizens, and many Palestinians who are originally from parts of Israel, who feel ties to that part of the country...
...Said views himself as a "an outsider, essentially a rootless person," he told me...
...Over the years, I've met with many Israelis, and it's very striking...
...The experience of exile is central...
...Q: Are Israelis able to separate what happened to them in the Holocaust from what is going on now in Palestine...
...Is it feasible for a Palestinian state to fit within Jordan or Lebanon...
...Q: Here in the United States, there is bias not only against Palestinians but also against Arabs in general...
...The polls show this...
...Look at France...
...I think every situation which seems frozen, irreversible, unchanging, adamantly resistant to everything, can be changed...
...Now that cannot continue...
...For every one of us, our identities and our histories were lost...
...Unfortunately, a lot of respectable people cooperate and collaborate in this...
...SAID: I think there would be a greater degree of peace and a greater degree of stability...
...In the United States, the official position is that the PLO is a terrorist organization...
...Exile produces that...
...We need some formula that goes beyond the matter of returning land, one that involves moral restitution...
...I think so...
...There are connections between the people...
...The nascent thing is the discovery, if possible, of the will to change...
...Now, what kind of horizons such people have is a frightening question to contemplate...
Vol. 51 • February 1987 • No. 2
