An Unacceptable Helplessness
by Edward Said
Dissident Voice
January 17, 2003
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. 62,000 more soldiers were transferred to the Gulf last weekend. 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. Nonetheless, George Bush
proposes another large tax cut for the one per cent of the population that is
comparatively rich. The public education system is in a major crisis, and
health insurance for 50 million Americans simply does not exist. Israel asks
for 15 billion dollars 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 and continue without
either public approval or dramatically noticeable disapproval. A generalised
indifference (which may conceal great over-all fear, ignorance and
apprehension) has greeted the administration's war- mongering 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 that country 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, journalists have
repeated the charges that have become standard fare so far as Islam and the
Arabs are concerned. Most of this chorus pre- dates 11 September, as I have
shown in my books Orientalism and Covering Islam. To today's practically
unanimous chorus has been added the authority of the United Nation's 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 (like Osama Bin Laden) but also by governments who are
supposed allies of the United States. 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, we haven't challenged Islam
enough, we need to do more about driving away the specter 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
re- cycled Orientalist clichés of the kind repeated by a tireless mediocrity
like Bernard Lewis -- is true. 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. (If I had the time, there would be an essay to be written about the
prose style of people like Ajami, Gerges, Makiya, Talhami, Fandy et. al.,
academics whose very language reeks of subservience, inauthenticity and a
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 preemptive 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 re-drawn 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 Sharon and 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 entire village of Al-Daba' in
the Qalqilya area of the West Bank is about to be wiped out by 60- ton
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 United Nations stands by, looking on as its resolutions are
flouted on an hourly basis. Typically, 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 the first time, 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 and is unremittingly reiterating its
intention to launch a war against a sovereign Arab country now ruled by a
dreadful regime, a war the clear purpose of which is not only to destroy the
Baathi regime but to re-design the entire region. The Pentagon has made no
secret that its plans are to re-draw the map of the whole Arab world, perhaps
changing other regimes and many borders in the process. No one can be shielded
from the cataclysm when it comes (if it comes, which is not yet a complete
certainty). And yet, there is only long silence followed by a few vague bleats
of polite demurral in response. After all, millions of people will be affected.
America contemptuously plans for their future without consulting them. Do we
reserve 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 and a loud proclamation of an alternative view?
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 fact that both the Arab leaders and the United States
simply ignore when they fling empty gestures at the so-called "Arab
street" invented by mediocre Orientalists.
But 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-16's 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 colloquial
expression in English 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 try to 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.
Edward Said is University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at
Columbia University, and is a leading Palestinian intellectual and activist.
Among his books are The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (Pantheon,
2000), Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East
Peace Process (Vintage, 1996), and Out of Place: A Memoir (Knopf,
1999). This article first appeared in Al-Ahram Weekly (Egypt)