Holloway mourns death of student - The Founder

The Founder | Thursday 15 January 2009
Comment & Debate
7
Spotlight on Gaza
Israeli-Palestinian conflict calls for a return to the ideas and example of one of
Palestine’s finest thinkers
Daniel Whittall
At times of high crisis, it is
often most instructive to
return to ones intellectual
forebears for guidance.
The current situation in Israel-
Palestine is just such a crisis-point,
and in this instance, Edward Said is
just such a shining light of scholarship
and integrity.
Across a range of publications,
Said shone light upon the violence
tearing apart the area we now so
readily term the ‘Middle-East’. Perhaps
his most pointed writings on
the topic, however, were collected
in From Oslo to Iraq and the Roadmap,
published after his death in
2004. In a series of eloquent and
passionate essays, Said struck at the
heart of what he saw as the stickingpoints
between the Israeli state and
the Palestinian people. Unlike many,
he was not afraid to criticise Palestinian
leaders, and was vehement
in his rejection of the militarization
proposed by Hamas and like organisations.
Yet his range of vision saw
beyond this, and beyond the media
fabrications which constructed Palestinians
as ‘terrorists’ and Israeli’s
as ‘victims’.
Latest estimates put the number
of Palestinians killed since Israeli
forces began their assault on the
Gaza strip on 27th December at
around 900. At least 11 ambulances
have been destroyed, 12 medical
workers killed, and another 32 injured
to date, all in what is being
called a campaign against ‘terror’. In
contrast, only thirteen Israeli’s have
died in the same period. In spite
of this, the USA has categorically
refused to sign a UN Declaration
calling for the immediate cessation
of hostilities on both sides; small
wonder, given that prior to the current
violence it was the US government
who supplied both the F-16
fighter jets, and also the GBU-39
‘smart’ bombs which have wreaked
so much havoc in recent weeks, to
the Israeli government. It is notable
also that Barack Obama, Presidentelect
and outspoken critic of the recent
deaths in both Russia’s war in
Georgia and the Mumbai ‘terror’
attacks, has thus far remained silent
on Gaza. The more things change,
the more they stay the same.
Said’s brilliance was to show that
Israeli assaults were always twofold
– at once combining devastating
military assaults with a global propaganda
campaign designed to depict
the most heavily armed country
in the region as a weakened, brutalised
victim, left with no choice other
Protest in San Francisco Flickr/ Steve Rhodes
Flickr/Pooyan
“
We must capture
the imagination
not just of our
people but of our
oppressors. And we
have to abide by
humane democratic
values
”
than to deploy the Israeli ‘Defence’
Force for protection.
And he went further. He saw that
the Palestinian struggle – his struggle
– was an anticolonial one, of a
people deposed from their territory,
walled into separate zones, regularly
restricted under curfew, and
with little or often no freedom to
move between the various ‘zones’ in
which they were allowed to eke out a
highly limited and regulated form of
life. Hamas’ turn to violence may be
reprehensible, but it is by no means
incomprehensible.
So much, in this crisis, rests on
questions of space. Indeed, with the
importance of territory, land, borders
and boundaries in this conflict,
it is no wonder that Said referred
to it as ‘this most geographical of
contests’. Palestinian space became
defined as ‘besieged spots on the
map’. In the recent conflict, and in
many before, these ‘spots’ have been
reified as ‘targets’, either for Israeli
bombs or international humanitarian
aid, rather than as populated and
inhabited spaces of life – and death.
Said’s proposal for a Palestinian
political strategy for the future was
as follows; ‘we must capture the
imagination not just of our people
but of our oppressors. And we have
to abide by humane democratic values’.
In violating the second half of
Said’s proposals, Hamas gave Israel
the excuse it had been looking for
to launch their brutal assault. And
yet, even as the death toll continues
to rise, it appears that the imaginations
of those outside Palestine have
failed yet to be sufficiently captured.
Despite recent mass protests in Britain,
for example, Gordon Brown
and his government have failed to
criticise outright the disproportionate
Israeli response.
But our governments failure is
also our own. They are our representatives,
and what they do is done
in our name. New Labour was responsible
for taking this country
to an unjustifiable war in Iraq, and
they continue to have blood on their
hands in Gaza. Under Blair and now
Brown, they too have provided Israel
with the military hardware responsible
for the deaths of so many
innocent lives. We have a responsibility
to do everything we can to
halt the current reign of death in
Gaza, and we should not stop campaigning
and writing to our political
representatives until they take
heed. For too long have our political
representatives feared criticising the
Israeli condescension towards Palestinian
life.
John Pilger recently called the
current situation ‘the defining moment
of our times’. This, of course,
is too far – there are a number of
crises currently vying for such a
dubious honour. Yet in future we
may well find ourselves defined, in
part at least, by our inaction in allowing
so many innocent people to
die in Gaza. Unless we begin to do
something about it. Responsibility
is always multiple, and in watching
the conflict from a distance we
must recall that although we might
physically be far away, the actions
of our government, and therefore
ourselves, are much more closely
implicated. In drawing lessons from
this, we could do much worse than
to close with Said; ‘The future, like
the past, is built by human beings.
They, and not some distant mediator
or saviour, provide the agency
for change’.