Saree Makdisi is a Professor of English and Comp Lit at UCLA; he also happens to be the nephew of the late Edward Said. Recently, at his
blog he offers up an
analysis of an opinion piece by Hamas' Khaled Mashaal that ran in the
LA Times.
Highlights and reaction below the fold.
No matter what one thinks of Hamas, and no matter whether one reads the piece as nothing more than a political polemic, it at least marks a sea-change from the previous rhetoric of the official Palestinian leadership. Here there is no pathetic bleating about "resuming the Peace Process" or "returning to the Road Map" which leaders like Ahmad Qureia or Mahmoud Abbas would utter from time to time, often under the most surreal circumstances: far too many times, various episodes of Israeli violence--shooting children, blowing up people's homes, plowing the wall (sorry, "security fence") through ancient olive groves, expropriating Palestinian land--would be met with the same hopeless response from the Palestinian leadership: "please let us return to the Road Map." Meshaal revives the language of genuine struggle rather than that of hopelessness and defeat; he relies on the unapologetic rhetoric of national liberation, rather than the tired cliches and bureaucratic language ("performance," "interim status") borrowed from Israeli and American planners.
Well, gee, okay. Clearly neither the sentiment nor the language has fallen far from his late uncle's tree. Both clearly favor statements that sound great and mean nothing, like "the unapologetic rhetoric of national liberation".
And that, of course, is a large part of the problem with so many who wish to influence the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. It is quite easy for Makdisi to speak of the "language of genuine struggle" from the comfort of Los Angeles. He doesn't have to do any struggling. But what he, and his late uncle, and many others fail to recognize is that this `genuine struggle" lacks any measure of hope for the Palestinians. Perhaps if he bothered to talk to Mahmoud Abbas, who spent much of his life in the violent "struggle", he might gain some perspective on that. Did the violent struggle of the 1970s and 80s bring a Palestinian homeland?
Whether or not you believe that the armed Palestinian cause is justified, it is undeniably ineffective. Israel has them outgunned, and always will. Israel has more money than they do, and always will. Right now, we are seeing the end result of that armed struggle, where Israel simply chooses its own borders, and builds a wall to lock the Palestinians out. And that is made possible by the very "genuine struggle" that Makdisi praises. That struggle gives the wall, and Israel's unilateralism, all the justification it needs in the eyes of most of the world.
The time has come for those who claim to be friends of the Palestinians to face up to what has brought gains for the Palestinians, and what has failed them. Leaders such as Qureia and Abbas have brought the Palestinians more promise than all the rhetoric of national liberation of the last fifty years.