When will we
resist?
Edward Said: The US is preparing to attack the Arab
world, while the Arabs whimper in submission
--------------------------------------------
One opens the New York Times on a daily basis to read the
most recent article about the preparations for war that
are taking place in the United States. Another battalion,
one more set of aircraft carriers and cruisers, an
ever-increasing number of aircraft, new contingents of
officers are being moved to the Persian Gulf area. An
enormous, deliberately intimidating force is being built
up by America overseas, while inside the country,
economic and social bad news multiply with a joint
relentlessness.
The huge capitalist machine seems to be faltering, even
as it grinds down the vast majority of citizens. None the
less, George Bush proposes another large tax cut for the
1% of the population that is comparatively rich. The
public education system is in crisis and health insurance
for 50 million Americans simply does not exist. Israel
asks for $15bn in additional loan guarantees and military
aid. And the unemployment rates in the US mount
inexorably, as more jobs are lost every day.
Nevertheless, preparations for an unimaginably costly war
continue without either public approval or, at least
until very recently, dramatically noticeable disapproval.
A generalised indifference among the majority of the
population (which may conceal great overall fear,
ignorance and apprehension) has greeted the
administration's warmongering and its strangely
ineffective response to the challenge forced on it
recently by North Korea. In the case of Iraq, with no
weapons of mass destruction to speak of, the US plans a
war; in the case of North Korea, it offers economic and
energy aid. What a humiliating difference between
contempt for the Arabs and respect for North Korea, an
equally grim and cruel dictatorship.
In the Arab and Muslim worlds, the situation appears more
peculiar. For almost a year American politicians,
regional experts, administration officials and
journalists have repeated the charges that have become
standard fare so far as Islam and the Arabs are
concerned. Most of this predates September 11. To today's
practically unanimous chorus has been added the authority
of the UN human development report on the Arab world,
which certified that Arabs dramatically lag behind the
rest of the world in democracy, knowledge and women's
rights.
Everyone says (with some justification, of course) that
Islam needs reform and that the Arab educational system
is a disaster - in effect, a school for religious
fanatics and suicide bombers funded not just by crazy
imams and their wealthy followers (such as Osama bin
Laden) but also by governments who are the supposed
allies of the US.
The only "good" Arabs are those who appear in
the media decrying modern Arab culture and society
without reservation. I recall the lifeless cadences of
their sentences for, with nothing positive to say about
themselves or their people and language, they simply
regurgitate the tired American formulas already flooding
the airwaves and pages of print. We lack democracy, they
say, wehaven't challenged Islam enough, we need to do
more about driving away the spectre of Arab nationalism
and the credo of Arab unity. That is all discredited,
ideological rubbish. Only what we and our American
instructors say about the Arabs and Islam - vague,
recycled Orientalist clichés repeated by tireless
mediocrities such as Bernard Lewis - are true, they
insist. The rest isn't realistic or pragmatic enough.
"We" need to join modernity - modernity in
effect being western, globalised, free marketed,
democratic, whatever those words might be taken to mean.
There would be an essay to be written about the prose
style of licensed academics like Fuad Ajami, Fawwaz
Gerges, Kanan Makiya, Shibli Talhami, Mamoon Fandy, whose
very language reeks of subservience, inauthenticity and
the hopelessly stilted mimicry that has been thrust upon
them.
The clash of civilisations that George Bush and his
minions are trying to fabricate as a cover for a
pre-emptive oil and hegemony war against Iraq is supposed
to result in a triumph of democratic nation-building,
regime change and forcible modernisation à
l'Américaine. Never mind the bombs and the ravages of
the sanctions, which are unmentioned. This will be a
purifying war whose goal is to throw out Saddam and his
men and replace them with a redrawn map of the whole
region. New Sykes Picot. New Balfour. New Wilsonian 14
points. New world altogether. Iraqis, we are told by the
Iraqi dissidents, will welcome their liberation, and
perhaps forget entirely about their past sufferings.
Perhaps.
Meanwhile, the soul-and-body destroying situation in
Palestine worsens all the time. There seems no force
capable of stopping Ariel Sharon and his defence minister
Shaul Mofaz, who bellow their defiance to the whole
world. We forbid, we punish, we ban, we break, we
destroy. The torrent of unbroken violence against an
entire people continues.
As I write these lines, I am sent an announcement that
the village of Al-Daba' in the Qalqilya area of the West
Bank is about to be wiped out by 60-tonne American-made
Israeli bulldozers: 250 Palestinians will lose their 42
houses, 700 dunums of agricultural land, a mosque and an
elementary school for 132 children. The UN stands by,
looking on as its resolutions are flouted on an hourly
basis. Alas, George Bush identifies with Sharon, not with
the 16-year-old Palestinian kid who is used as a human
shield by Israeli soldiers.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority offers a return to
peacemaking and, presumably, to Oslo. Having been burned
for 10 years, Arafat seems inexplicably to want to have
another go at it. His faithful lieutenants make
declarations and write opinion pieces for the press,
suggesting their willingness to accept anything, more or
less. Remarkably, though, the great mass of this heroic
people seems willing to go on, without peace and without
respite, bleeding, going hungry, dying day by day. They
have too much dignity and confidence in the justice of
their cause to submit shamefully to Israel, as their
leaders have done. What could be more discouraging for
the average Gazan who goes on resisting Israeli
occupation than to see his or her leaders kneel as
supplicants before the Americans?
In this entire panorama of desolation, what catches the
eye is the utter passivity and helplessness of the Arab
world as a whole. The American government and its
servants issue statement after statement of purpose, they
move troops and material, they transport tanks and
destroyers, but the Arabs individually and collectively
can barely muster a bland refusal. At most they say no,
you cannot use military bases in our territory, only to
reverse themselves a few days later.
Why is there such silence and such astounding
helplessness? The largest power in history is about to
launch a war against a sovereign Arab country now ruled
by a dreadful regime, the clear purpose of which is not
only to destroy the Ba'ath regime but to redesign the
entire region. The Pentagon has made no secret that its
plans are to redraw the map of the whole Arab world,
perhaps changing other regimes and borders in the
process. No one can be shielded from the cataclysm if and
when it comes. And yet, there is only long silence
followed by a few vague bleats of polite demurral in
response. Millions of people will be affected, yet
America contemptuously plans for their future without
consulting them. Do we deserve such racist derision?
This is not only unacceptable: it is impossible to
believe. How can a region of almost 300 million Arabs
wait passively for the blows to fall without attempting a
collective roar of resistance? Has the Arab will
completely dissolved? Even a prisoner about to be
executed usually has some last words to pronounce. Why is
there now no last testimonial to an era of history, to a
civilisation about to be crushed and transformed utterly,
to a society that, despite its drawbacks and weaknesses,
nevertheless goes on functioning?
Arab babies are born every hour, children go to school,
men and women marry and work and have children, they play
and laugh and eat, they are sad, they suffer illness and
death. There is love and companionship, friendship and
excitement. Yes, Arabs are repressed and misruled,
terribly misruled, but they manage to go on with the
business of living despite everything. This is the
reality that both the Arab leaders and the US ignore when
they fling empty gestures at the so-called "Arab
street" invented by banal Orientalists.
Who is now asking the existential questions about our
future as a people? The task cannot be left to a
cacophony of religious fanatics and submissive,
fatalistic sheep. But that seems to be the case. The Arab
governments - no, most of the Arab countries from top to
bottom - sit back in their seats and just wait as America
postures, lines up, threatens and ships out more soldiers
and F-16s to deliver the punch. The silence is deafening.
Years of sacrifice and struggle, of bones broken in
hundreds of prisons and torture chambers from the
Atlantic to the Gulf, families destroyed, endless poverty
and suffering. Huge, expensive armies. For what?
This is not a matter of party or ideology or faction:
it's a matter of what the great theologian Paul Tillich
used to call ultimate seriousness. Technology,
modernisation and certainly globalisation are not the
answer for what threatens us as a people now. We have in
our tradition an entire body of secular and religious
discourse that treats of beginnings and endings, of life
and death, of love and anger, of society and history.
This is there, but no voice, no individual with great
vision and moral authority seems able now to tap into
that and bring it to attention.
We are on the eve of a catastrophe that our political,
moral and religious leaders can only just denounce a
little bit while, behind whispers and winks and closed
doors, they make plans somehow to ride out the storm.
They think of survival, and perhaps of heaven. But who is
in charge of the present, the worldly, the land, the
water, the air and the lives dependent on each other for
existence? No one seems to be in charge.
There is a wonderful expression that very precisely and
ironically catches our unacceptable helplessness, our
passivity and inability to help ourselves now when our
strength is most needed. The expression is: will the last
person to leave please turn out the lights? We are that
close to a kind of upheaval that will leave very little
standing and perilously little left even to record,
except for the last injunction that begs for extinction.
Hasn't the time come for us collectively to demand and
formulate a genuinely Arab alternative to the wreckage
about to engulf our world? This is not only a trivial
matter of regime change, although God knows that we can
do with quite a bit of that. Surely it can't be a return
to Oslo, another offer to Israel to please accept our
existence and let us live in peace, another cringing,
crawling, inaudible plea for mercy? Will no one come out
into the light of day to express a vision for our future
that isn't based on a script written by Donald Rumsfeld
and Paul Wolfowitz, those two symbols of vacant power and
overweening arrogance? I hope someone is listening.
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· Edward Said is professor of English and comparative
literature at Columbia University, New York. His books
include Orientalism and Covering Islam. His latest work,
Parallels and Paradoxes, cowritten with Daniel Barenboim,
will be published by Bloomsbury in March
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