Edward Said's March 2001 Op-Ed Endorsing the One State Solution
Al-Ahram Weekly On-line
1 - 7 March 2001
Issue No.523
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The only alternative
I
first visited South Africa in May 1991: a dark, wet, wintry period,
when Apartheid still ruled, although the ANC and Nelson Mandela had been
freed. Ten years later I returned, this time to summer, in a democratic
country in which Apartheid has been defeated, the ANC is in power, and a
vigorous, contentious civil society is engaged in trying to complete
the task of bringing equality and social justice to this still divided
and economically troubled country. But, the liberation struggle that
ended Apartheid and instituted the first democratically elected
government on 27 April 1994, remains one of the great human achievements
in recorded history. Despite the problems of the present, South Africa
is an inspiring place to visit and think about, partly because for
Arabs, it has a lot to teach us about struggle, originality, and
perseverance.
I came here this time as a participant in a conference on values
in education, organised by the Ministry of Education. Qader Asmal, the
minister of education, is an old and admired friend whom I met many
years ago when he was in exile in Ireland. I shall say more about him in
my next article. But, as a member of the cabinet, a longtime ANC
activist, and a successful lawyer and academic, he was able to persuade
Nelson Mandela (now 83, in frail health, and officially retired from
public life) to address the conference on the first evening. What
Mandela said then made a deep impression on me, as much because of
Mandela's enormous stature and profoundly affecting charisma, as for the
well-crafted words he uttered. Also a lawyer by training, Mandela is an
especially eloquent man who, in spite of thousands of ritual occasions
and speeches, always seems to have something gripping to say.
This time it was two phrases about the past that struck me in a
fine speech about education, a speech which drew unflattering attention
to the depressed present state of the country's majority, "languishing
in abject conditions of material and social deprivation." Hence, he
reminded the audience, "our struggle is not over," even though -- here
was the first phrase -- the campaign against Apartheid "was one of the
great moral struggles" that "captured the world's imagination." The
second phrase was in his description of the anti-Apartheid campaign not
simply as a movement to end racial discrimination, but as a means "for
all of us to assert our common humanity." Implied in the words "all of
us" is that all of the races of South Africa, including the
pro-Apartheid whites, were envisaged as participating in a struggle
whose goal finally was coexistence, tolerance and "the realisation of
humane values."
The first phrase struck me cruelly: why did the Palestinian
struggle not (yet) capture the world's imagination and why, even more to
the point, does it not appear as a great moral struggle which, as
Mandela said about the South African experience, received "almost
universal support... from virtually all political persuasions and
parties?"
True, we have received a great deal of general support, and yes,
ours is a moral struggle of epic proportions. The conflict between
Zionism and the Palestinian people is admittedly more complex than the
battle against Apartheid, even if in both cases one people paid and the
other is still paying a very heavy price in dispossession, ethnic
cleansing, military occupation and massive social injustice. The Jews
are a people with a tragic history of persecution and genocide. Bound by
their ancient faith to the land of Palestine, their "return" to a
homeland promised them by British imperialism was perceived by much of
the world (but especially by a Christian West responsible for the worst
excesses of anti-Semitism) as a heroic and justified restitution for
what they suffered. Yet, for years and years, few paid attention to the
conquest of Palestine by Jewish forces, or to the Arab people already
there who endured its exorbitant cost in the destruction of their
society, the expulsion of the majority, and the hideous system of laws
-- a virtual Apartheid -- that still discriminates against them inside
Israel and in the occupied territories. Palestinians were the silent
victims of a gross injustice, quickly shuffled offstage by a
triumphalist chorus of how amazing Israel was.
After the reemergence of a genuine Palestinian liberation
movement in the late '60s, the formerly colonised people of Asia, Africa
and Latin America adopted the Palestinian struggle, but in the main,
the strategic balance was vastly in Israel's favour; it has been backed
unconditionally by the US ($5 billion in annual aid), and in the West,
the media, the liberal intelligentsia, and most governments have been on
Israel's side. For reasons too well known to go into here, the official
Arab environment was either overtly hostile or lukewarm in its mostly
verbal and financial support.
Because, however, the shifting strategic goals of the PLO were
always clouded by useless terrorist actions, were never addressed or
articulated eloquently, and because the preponderance of cultural
discourse in the West was either unknown to or misunderstood by
Palestinian policymakers and intellectuals, we have never been able to
claim the moral high ground effectively. Israeli information could
always both appeal to (and exploit) the Holocaust as well as the
unstudied and politically untimely acts of Palestinian terror, thereby
neutralising or obscuring our message, such as it was. We never
concentrated as a people on cultural struggle in the West (which the ANC
early on had realised was the key to undermining Apartheid) and we
simply did not highlight in a humane, consistent way the immense
depredations and discriminations directed at us by Israel. Most
television viewers today have no idea about Israel's racist land
policies, or its spoliations, tortures, systematic deprivation of the
Palestinians just because they are not Jews. As a black South African
reporter wrote in one of the local newspapers here while on a visit to
Gaza, Apartheid was never as vicious and as inhumane as Zionism: ethnic
cleansing, daily humiliations, collective punishment on a vast scale,
land appropriation, etc., etc.
But, even these facts, were they known better as a weapon in the
battle over values between Zionism and the Palestinians, would not have
been enough. What we never concentrated on enough was the fact that to
counteract Zionist exclusivism, we would have to provide a solution to
the conflict that, in Mandela's second phrase, would assert our common
humanity as Jews and Arabs. Most of us still cannot accept the idea that
Israeli Jews are here to stay, that they will not go away, any more
than Palestinians will go away. This is understandably very hard for
Palestinians to accept, since they are still in the process of losing
their land and being persecuted on a daily basis. But, with our
irresponsible and unreflective suggestion in what we have said that they
will be forced to leave (like the Crusades), we did not focus enough on
ending the military occupation as a moral imperative or on providing a
form for their security and self-determinism that did not abrogate ours.
This, and not the preposterous hope that a volatile American president
would give us a state, ought to have been the basis of a mass campaign
everywhere. Two people in one land. Or, equality for all. Or, one
person one vote. Or, a common humanity asserted in a binational state.
I know we are the victims of a terrible conquest, a vicious
military occupation, a Zionist lobby that has consistently lied in order
to turn us either into non-people or into terrorists -- but what is the
real alternative to what I've been suggesting? A military campaign? A
dream. More Oslo negotiations? Clearly not. More loss of life by our
valiant young people, whose leader gives them no help or direction? A
pity, but no. Reliance on the Arab states who have reneged even on their
promise to provide emergency assistance now? Come on, be serious.
Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs are locked in Sartre's vision
of hell, that of "other people." There is no escape. Separation can't
work in so tiny a land, any more than Apartheid did. Israeli military
and economic power insulates them from having to face reality. This is
the meaning of Sharon's election, an antediluvian war criminal summoned
out of the mists of time to do what: put the Arabs in their place?
Hopeless. Therefore, it is up to us to provide the answer that power and
paranoia cannot. It isn't enough to speak generally of peace. One must
provide the concrete grounds for it, and those can only come from moral
vision, and neither from "pragmatism" nor "practicality." If we are all
to live -- this is our imperative -- we must capture the imagination not
just of our people, but that of our oppressors. And, we have to abide
by humane democratic values.
Is the current Palestinian leadership listening? Can it suggest
anything better than this, given its abysmal record in a "peace process"
that has led to the present horrors?
"The Palestinians are the problem"
Were Israelis Detained on Sept. 11 Spies?
June 21
Millions saw the horrific images of the World Trade Center attacks, and those who saw them won't forget them. But a New Jersey homemaker saw something that morning that prompted an investigation into five young Israelis and their possible connection to Israeli intelligence.
Maria, who asked us not to use her last name, had a view of the World Trade Center from her New Jersey apartment building. She remembers a neighbor calling her shortly after the first plane hit the towers.
She grabbed her binoculars and watched the destruction unfolding in lower Manhattan. But as she watched the disaster, something else caught her eye.
Maria says she saw three young men kneeling on the roof of a white van in the parking lot of her apartment building. "They seemed to be taking a movie," Maria said.
The men were taking video or photos of themselves with the World Trade Center burning in the background, she said. What struck Maria were the expressions on the men's faces. "They were like happy, you know … They didn't look shocked to me. I thought it was very strange," she said.
She found the behavior so suspicious that she wrote down the license plate number of the van and called the police. Before long, the FBI was also on the scene, and a statewide bulletin was issued on the van.
The plate number was traced to a van owned by a company called Urban Moving. Around 4 p.m. on Sept. 11, the van was spotted on a service road off Route 3, near New Jersey's Giants Stadium. A police officer pulled the van over, finding five men, between 22 and 27 years old, in the vehicle. The men were taken out of the van at gunpoint and handcuffed by police.
The arresting officers said they saw a lot that aroused their suspicion about the men. One of the passengers had $4,700 in cash hidden in his sock. Another was carrying two foreign passports. A box cutter was found in the van. But perhaps the biggest surprise for the officers came when the five men identified themselves as Israeli citizens.
‘We Are Not Your Problem’
According to the police report, one of the passengers told the officers they had been on the West Side Highway in Manhattan "during the incident" — referring to the World Trade Center attack. The driver of the van, Sivan Kurzberg, told the officers, "We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem." The other passengers were his brother Paul Kurzberg, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner and Omer Marmari.
When the men were transferred to jail, the case was transferred out of the FBI's Criminal Division, and into the bureau's Foreign Counterintelligence Section, which is responsible for espionage cases, ABCNEWS has learned.
One reason for the shift, sources told ABCNEWS, was that the FBI believed Urban Moving may have been providing cover for an Israeli intelligence operation.
After the five men were arrested, the FBI got a warrant and searched Urban Moving's Weehawken, N.J., offices.
The FBI searched Urban Moving's offices for several hours, removing boxes of documents and a dozen computer hard drives. The FBI also questioned Urban Moving's owner. His attorney insists that his client answered all of the FBI's questions. But when FBI agents tried to interview him again a few days later, he was gone.
Three months later 2020's cameras photographed the inside of Urban Moving, and it looked as if the business had been shut down in a big hurry. Cell phones were lying around; office phones were still connected; and the property of dozens of clients remained in the warehouse.
The owner had also cleared out of his New Jersey home, put it up for sale and returned with his family to Israel.
‘A Scary Situation’
Steven Gordon, the attorney for the five Israeli detainees, acknowledged that his clients' actions on Sept. 11 would easily have aroused suspicions. "You got a group of guys that are taking pictures, on top of a roof, of the World Trade Center. They're speaking in a foreign language. They got two passports on 'em. One's got a wad of cash on him, and they got box cutters. Now that's a scary situation."
But Gordon insisted that his clients were just five young men who had come to America for a vacation, ended up working for a moving company, and were taking pictures of the event.
The five Israelis were held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, ostensibly for overstaying their tourist visas and working in the United States illegally. Two weeks after their arrest, an immigration judge ordered them to be deported. But sources told ABCNEWS that FBI and CIA officials in Washington put a hold on the case.
The five men were held in detention for more than two months. Some of them were placed in solitary confinement for 40 days, and some of them were given as many as seven lie-detector tests.
Plenty of Speculation
Since their arrest, plenty of speculation has swirled about the case, and what the five men were doing that morning. Eventually, The Forward, a respected Jewish newspaper in New York, reported the FBI concluded that two of the men were Israeli intelligence operatives.
Vince Cannistraro, a former chief of operations for counterterrorism with the CIA who is now a consultant for ABCNEWS, said federal authorities' interest in the case was heightened when some of the men's names were found in a search of a national intelligence database.
Israeli Intelligence Connection?
According to Cannistraro, many people in the U.S. intelligence community believed that some of the men arrested were working for Israeli intelligence. Cannistraro said there was speculation as to whether Urban Moving had been "set up or exploited for the purpose of launching an intelligence operation against radical Islamists in the area, particularly in the New Jersey-New York area."
Under this scenario, the alleged spying operation was not aimed against the United States, but at penetrating or monitoring radical fund-raising and support networks in Muslim communities like Paterson, N.J., which was one of the places where several of the hijackers lived in the months prior to Sept. 11.
For the FBI, deciphering the truth from the five Israelis proved to be difficult. One of them, Paul Kurzberg, refused to take a lie-detector test for 10 weeks — then failed it, according to his lawyer. Another of his lawyers told us Kurzberg had been reluctant to take the test because he had once worked for Israeli intelligence in another country.
Sources say the Israelis were targeting these fund-raising networks because they were thought to be channeling money to Hamas and Islamic Jihad, groups that are responsible for most of the suicide bombings in Israel. "[The] Israeli government has been very concerned about the activity of radical Islamic groups in the United States that could be a support apparatus to Hamas and Islamic Jihad," Cannistraro said.
The men denied that they had been working for Israeli intelligence out of the New Jersey moving company, and Ram Horvitz, their Israeli attorney, dismissed the allegations as "stupid and ridiculous."
Mark Regev, the spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington, goes even further, asserting the issue was never even discussed with U.S. officials.
"These five men were not involved in any intelligence operation in the United States, and the American intelligence authorities have never raised this issue with us," Regev said. "The story is simply false."
No ‘Pre-Knowledge’
Despite the denials, sources tell ABCNEWS there is still debate within the FBI over whether or not the young men were spies. Many U.S. government officials still believe that some of them were on a mission for Israeli intelligence. But the FBI told ABCNEWS, "To date, this investigation has not identified anybody who in this country had pre-knowledge of the events of 9/11."
Sources also said that even if the men were spies, there is no evidence to conclude they had advance knowledge of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11. The investigation, at the end of the day, after all the polygraphs, all of the field work, all the cross-checking, the intelligence work, concluded that they probably did not have advance knowledge of 9/11," Cannistraro noted.
As to what they were doing on the van, they say they read about the attack on the Internet, couldn't see it from their offices and went to the parking lot for a better view. But no one has been able to find a good explanation for why they may have been smiling with the towers of the World Trade Center burning in the background. Both the lawyers for the young men and the Israeli Embassy chalk it up to immature conduct.
According to ABCNEWS sources, Israeli and U.S. government officials worked out a deal — and after 71 days, the five Israelis were taken out of jail, put on a plane, and deported back home.
While the former detainees refused to answer ABCNEWS' questions about their detention and what they were doing on Sept. 11, several of the detainees discussed their experience in America on an Israeli talk show after their return home.
Said one of the men, denying that they were laughing or happy on the morning of Sept. 11, "The fact of the matter is we are coming from a country that experiences terror daily. Our purpose was to document the event."
ABCNEWS' Chris Isham, John Miller, Glenn Silber and Chris Vlasto contributed to this report.
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=123885