Said and Grossman: Dismayed Humanists, Neil Berry

Said and Grossman: Dismayed Humanists

Neil Berry

Arab News

LONDON, 4 May 2004 — Last September, when news broke of the death of the great Palestinian polemicist, Edward Said, many felt that a light had gone out. Said’s contribution as a literary critic and tireless crusader in the Palestinian cause was as immense as it was distinguished. Who now is capable of making such trenchant public interventions on behalf of the Palestinian people, or of articulating the Arab point of view to such telling effect? At a time when the thuggish outbursts of Israeli leader Ariel Sharon are meeting with a shamingly mute response from Western politicians and intellectuals, Said’s luminous moral eloquence is sorely missed.

Yet in a real sense — through the huge corpus of politico-cultural writing that he left behind — Said’s light shines on. It is safe to say that his seminal deconstruction of Western imperialist stereotypes of the East (the phenomenon that he dubbed “Orientalism”) will go on informing academic discussion for years to come. Nor can there be any doubt that his engagement with the Palestine-Israel conflict will long enjoy exemplary status.

Always prolific, Said became more prolific still following the discovery that he was suffering from leukemia. Latterly indeed, sharply conscious of his own mortality and of the Palestinians’ ever-worsening plight, he poured forth books and articles as though he hadn’t a moment to lose. He gave interviews as though he hadn’t a moment to lose, too, and a voluminous selection of them has now been gathered in the book “Power, Politics and Culture”. They constitute vivid testimony to the missionary zeal and passion for truth and justice that inspired both his writing and his talk.

In the book’s concluding interview, an especially fervent performance dating from 2000, Said discussed with the sympathetic Israeli journalist, Ari Shavit, his emotions about being a displaced Palestinian and his sense of the future of Jews in the Arab world. Said would be appalled by Sharon’s ever more blatant unilateralism, convinced as he was that “until the time comes when Israel assumes moral responsibility for what was done to the Palestinian people, there can be no end to the conflict”. In his eyes, the whole story of Zionism was essentially a continuation of Western colonialism. Though he accepted that, because of the Nazi Holocaust, there was a “felt need” on the part of great numbers of European Jews to turn to the Jewish state, Said was inclined to believe that mass Jewish immigration into Palestine ought never to have taken place, and he blamed the British for encouraging it when they might have accomodated Jews elsewhere.

Confessing to “tremendous anger” about the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948, the eviction from their homes of hundred of thousands of Palestinian people, Said maintained that the “essential folly” of Zionism was to have treated Palestinians as if they were irrelevant and then to have put up “enormous walls of denial” which have become part of the fabric of Israeli society, blinding successive generations of Jews to the repression and coercion practiced in their name.

Not enough Israelis, he insisted, have yet begun to acknowledge that the institutionalized subjugation of the Palestinians was a great wrong, and that as long as they nurse a sense of injustice Palestinian people will never cease to fight for their rights. Ultimately, in Said’s view, the only possible answer to the “complex history of antagonism” between the Jews and Arabs was going to be something like the “Truth and Reconciliation Committee” set up in post-apartheid South Africa.

All this of course seems fantastically remote from what US President George W. Bush recently termed the “facts on the ground”, from the current US-Israeli orthodoxy that the hegemony Jews have acquired over their Arab neighbors is irreversible. But Said, nothing if not a visionary, was apt to take the long view. At the end of his life, he was envisaging a time when, thanks to inexorable demographic trends, Jews have become a minority inside a “binational” Palestinian state, with Israeli sovereignty having yielded to a more generous conception of coexistence.

And after all, he suggested, had there not been lengthy periods in the past when Jews have lived happily as a minority within the predominantly Arab Middle East? Why should this not happen again? Not that he was remotely complacent about how things were destined to turn out. In the course of his interview with Ari Shavit, Said confessed that the question of the fate of the Jews “worried” him a “great deal”.

The Israeli writer David Grossman — who quotes this remark in his compelling collection of dispatches, “Death as a Way of Life” — also worries a great deal about the fate of the Jews. It is worth reading Grossman’s book in tandem with Said’s utterances on the Middle East, for if Said can be regarded as the great conscience of the Palestinians, Grossman is in some ways his Israeli counterpart, a writer of great humanity for whom the rights and wrongs of the Arab-Israeli conflict have become a source of endless moral torment. Horrified by the triumph of Sharon’s brutal realpolitik, this distressed resident of Jerusalem issues news bulletins from the front line which communicate a graphic sense of what years of inter-communal hatred and blood-letting have done to his country’s soul. Though far from absolving Palestinians of blame for the escalation of the conflict, Grossman bears plangent witness to the way Israelis have desensitized themselves to Palestinian suffering. Echoing Said, he portrays them as a people in a state of collective denial, and he laments how a once “young, friendly, bold country” has “undergone mental processes of accelerated aging” and ended up emotionally anaesthetized.

Like Edward Said, David Grossman sees no answer to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis save through negotiation. Yet while there is much that unites these dismayed humanists, they are by no means indistinguishable. A cosmopolitan who divided his time between New York, London and the Middle East, Said joked that he was the “last Jewish intellectual”, the last example of the peripatetic Semitic sage whose only home is the world. Grossman, by contrast, is a true, if anguished, devotee of his native land. Indeed, the thrust of this melancholy book is that, much though its author would prefer to believe otherwise, Israel is embroiled in an interminable nightmare. The thrust of this melancholy book is that, greatly though its author would prefer to believe otherwise, the future of Israel has the aspect of an interminable nightmare.

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank, like a Python. (Alquds,10/25/03).

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