EDWARD SAID ON PALESTINE
LeftWord
70 pages; Rs 95
It has only been just over a month since "Operation Protective Edge" came to an end in the Holy Land. At least 2,200 (if not more) Gazans died in the 50-day conflict (July 8 to August 26), as did 66 Israeli soldiers and six civilians. Once again, the oldest conflict in West Asia made its way to news headlines across the world in all its ferocity and viciousness.
Edward Said on Palestine is essentially a reaction to these latest tragic events. Published by LeftWord, this slim volume of 70 pages has been produced primarily to express solidarity with the Palestinian people, especially the hapless natives of the Gaza Strip. As the prominent Indian Marxist intellectual Vijay Prashad notes in his introduction: "As a small talisman, here is the work of the great Palestinian intellectual Edward Said (1935-2003). We have chosen two of his essays, both highly critical of the situation of the Palestinians - under Israeli occupation, and a hapless leadership. The details of the suppression are not central to these essays - these are already well-known. The problem is the interpretation. That is why these essays remain as fresh today as they were when they were first written." (Mr Prashad is the Edward Said Chair at the American University of Beirut for 2013-2014.)
"To open space for them, we are printing the Palestinian writer and lawyer Raja Shehadeh's 2014 Edward Said Memorial Lecture. It brings the values of Edward Said into our context," continues Mr Prashad.
Erudite Ramallah lawyer, novelist and writer, Mr Shehadeh's lecture, titled "Advice to the Palestinian Leadership", follows Mr Prashad's two-page introduction. The title is self-explanatory. In his lecture, Mr Shehadeh shines a highly critical light on the Palestinian leadership ever since Mandatory Palestine was partitioned into the Jewish state now called Israel and areas set aside for an Arab state, which have been reduced to today's Palestinian Territories.
The Palestinian leadership, writes Mr Shehadeh, is partly to blame for the misery that the Palestinian people are facing till today. This is because their approach to nation-building, especially defining laws and the pursuit of national goals, is very different from the way Israel approaches the matter. "Israel's struggle takes the form of persistent, low-level administrative actions; the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) - and now the Palestinian Authority - have lofty, abstract aims that have great resonance but are almost empty of practical meaning," he writes.
For instance, he says, nobody from the PLO or the Palestinian Authority took the slightest interest in a study by Al-Haq, the organisation Mr Shehadeh heads, of Israel's illegal Road Plan 50, aimed at linking Israeli settlements on the West Bank, bypassing Palestinian towns and villages. "We made sure that our study reached the PLO, but we never got a response. Perhaps I was naïve to think that resistance to a road plan stood a chance of being noticed when there was the armed struggle to think about."
Mr Shehadeh's thoughts have an uncanny resonance in Said's own writing. In his essay "Dignity, Solidarity and the Penal Colony", which follows Mr Shehadeh's lecture, Said is at his scathing best when it comes to the Palestinian and broader Arab leadership, beside, of course, Israel.
"But that has been the behavior of Palestinian rulers since Oslo and indeed since Haj Amin, a combination of misplaced juvenile defiance and plaintive supplication." These lines sum up Said's wrath against the leadership.
"Dignity ... ", written in 2003, when Said was undergoing treatment for leukaemia, and which is his last published work, also talks about a number of other issues. However, there is a central thread running through it all.
First, to Said, today's Territories are akin to what he describes as a "penal colony". "There is a remarkable story by Kafka, 'In the Penal Colony', about a crazed official who shows off a fantastically detailed torture machine whose purpose is to write all over the body of the victim, using a complex apparatus of needles to inscribe the captive's body with minute letters that ultimately causes the prisoner to bleed to death. This is what Sharon and his brigade of willing executioners are doing to the Palestinians."
Then, there is the theme of dignity and solidarity. As Said notes in one of the last paragraphs of the essay, only if the Palestinians respect themselves as Arabs and understand the true dignity and justice of their struggle will they be able to appreciate that out there, in the wide world, there are many, many people expressing solidarity with their cause.
After all the fire and brimstone of "Dignity … ", we get to see a calmer and more cool-headed side to Said in "Bases for coexistence", the essay he wrote way back in 1997.
Here, Said notes that the Holocaust of the Second World War and the founding of Israel, leading to the sufferings of Palestinians, are inextricably linked and should be acknowledged. (Holocaust deniers in the Arab and Islamic worlds, please take note.)
"Jewish and Palestinian experiences are historically, indeed organically, connected: to break them asunder is to falsify what is authentic about each."
Said also strikes a note of conciliation at the end when he says, "We must think of our histories together so that there be a common future. And that future must include Arabs and Jews together."
Said died in 2003. Eleven years later, the Israel-Palestine question is nowhere near being solved. And perhaps it never will be. However, in these essays, we see one of the greatest minds of the last century passionately defending the rights of his people. A people who have seen the worst, and are seeing it even as I write this. May Said's words and ideas inspire the new generation of Palestinians and egg them on towards their ultimate aim: being able to live and die with dignity in the land of their forefathers.
