From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map : Essays

Rating:
Summary: Some last powerful words from Edward
Review: As the most visible and certainly the most articulate Palestinian in America, the late lamented Dr. Said was a prime target. He mentions a few of the personal attacks in these essays. There was the buffoonery in Commentary trying to prove Said had been lying about his past. . Then there was the hocus pocus of holy horror about Said throwing, along with other Lebanese, a stone into a vast empty space in Israel from Southern Lebanon. Of course, Israel had just spent decades blowing up Lebanese villages and bombing Beirut hideously in 1982 and killing tens of thousands and conducting the hideous Khiyam torture chamber where thousands of Lebanese passed through in almost bestial conditions.

From Israelis, Said justifiably demands a lot. Israelis must realize that the Palestinians under Israeli rule have lived for thirty-seven years where their land massively has been taken away at will and given to the Israeli military or most often Israeli settlers. The settlers live on magisterial estates and steal most of the water while the indigenous inhabitants. Palestinians in large numbers for decades have forced to endure housing expropriation, beatings by Israeli soldiers, arbitrary detention, killings and torture by the racist settlers and soldiers. As Tony Judt observes in his intro to this book, the born again racist Benny Morris now says that major massacres by Israel were the cause of the Palestinian flight in 1948.

Arafat signed the Oslo accords in order to shore up his eroding power base and getting a new power base, that of policing Palestinian population centers for Israel.,. Palestinian land continued to be expropriated. Arafat & co. made little objection to this except when the crude tactics of Netanyahu necessitated a response. The territories were criss-crossed by these new settlements and Jew only roads, which isolated Palestinians into several cantons. This cantonization was essentially the "generous offer" for a state made by Barak in July 2000.

After six weeks of the intifada, the number of Palestinians killed, as Clinton sent Israel its largest helicopter shipment in a decade to use on Palestinian apartment buildings, was about 200 and the number of Israelis was fourteen, about half of them soldiers. "Collective Punishment" of Palestinians accelerated greatly, endless curfews were imposed, houses were blown up more wantonly than before. In October 2001, Israeli cabinet minister Rehavan Ze'evi, a racist thug, was killed in retaliation for the killing of Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) leader two months earlier. Sharon retaliated by, engaging in "targeted assassination" of five more Palestinian leaders and killed twenty-one civilians and injured 160. He notes that the suicide bombings that occurred around December 1 2001 were terrible but should be seen within the context of the assassination of the Hamas leader Mahmoud Abu Hanoud, the killing of five Palestinian children in Gaza, as well the whole horrible human rights abuses of Israel over the decades.. Sharon has accelerated the humanitarian catastrophe by killing on a greater school and cutting off Palestinians even more so from each other and enclosing their agricultural land, cutting it off from their villages, within the Israeli side of the "wall."

As it is Sharon hopes that as he gallantly sends his tanks and missiles and helicopters against Palestinian children and people, armed with rocks and maybe some machine guns--people who have the right to resist under international law the occupation of their land--eventually the Palestinians will be ground down and accept the complete Judaization of Palestine.. Then as Said writes, he, Sharon, can make a deal to set up a rump "state" full of isolated areas controlled by various Palestinian gangsters. The remnants of the Palestinian authority want restored the situation of the 90's where they had their little fiefdoms and could make tons of money with Palestinian resources and real estate. But on the Palestinian side a secular mass movement has arrived led by Haider Abdel Shafi and Mustafa Barghouti. The Palestine National Initiative is based on participatory democracy, coordinated shipments of food and attempting to provide health care to besieged Palestinian villages. The courage of these people is unbelievable; Said writes about them with great power.

In front of a gathering of American Jews, Said notes, when the right wing zionist Paul Wolfowitz, as a representative of the Bush administration was forced to say a few platitudes about "Palestinian suffering" he was booed off the stage. Palestinians are dehumanized; Israel's assertion that Palestinians it kills are terrorists or unfortunate collateral damage in pursuit of them has had wide and ugly acceptance here. He spends a lot of time denouncing the Arab states for their ignorance of Israel. He notes that West originally set up many of these Arab regimes and in particular the United States props up the most brutal of them.

On Iraq, he notes that the great suffering at the hands of the Iraqi people since the Gulf War, with their infrastructure for basic living destroyed, has been largely ignored. Iraqis are a proud people who in spite of Saddam's hideous human rights record, led the Arab world in education and technology before 1990. What right does the U.S, asks Said, have to decide to remove Saddam, when they provided him with so much of the materials to make the weapons that Bush, Cheney & co. have so terrorized the American people with? The Bush regime has used alot of bogus info passed on by Iraqi and Arab exiles who tell the neocons what they want to hear. Said writes that Cheney actually used the authority, of Fouad Ajami to assert that Iraqis would welcome Americans would ticker tape parades and flowers and stuff. Of course, Ajami has spent most of his career and life in the U.S. and really can't know what genuine Iraqis are thinking...Kanan Makiya is another such fraud; Said gives him rough treatment in another essay. Said notes that instead of chosing an Arab/Muslim expert with intimate knowledge of the peculiarities and complexities of Iraq and the region, to head the drawing up Iraq's new constitution but instead they chose Noah Feldman.


Rating:
Summary: said's writing still effect us even after the death
Review: Besides his main writing "orientalism", I never touched his book until his death last year when I began to read "the end of peace process".. I began the book with almost total ignorance of this area(in the end, I am neither a Jew nor an arab), but by the time when I finished the book I was totally into both his writing and the stark reality of the crisis palestine people are facing.. then, by this time for me to read these recent essay that continues "the end of peace process", I have already finished more than 10 books of his..

The attraction of his writing is his appeal to universal humanity(that applies to Jews and arabs alike) and also the courage to criticize the terrible role that our goverment are doing in those so called hypocratic peace process that often ignores basic human right to return ,water problem,security,and etc..America is supporting the peace for the jews,but not for the mutual peace for the jews and arabs alike.. The hypocratic peace that our goverment suports is such peace between the master and the slaves(maybe a bit bad anology) or the peace between the occupier British and the occupied Irish; In the fake peace, there's no trouble or violence between the two sides,but it's only one side that enjoyes truly peaceful for the sake of the other; while the latter suffers great deal of painful contradictory peace..

If I found any of antisemitic comment in his book, I would have already trashed his book..Rather, he believes in democracy,secular nation,universal basic human rights for the occupied and the occupiers alike, and his strong logic is based on all these ideals that We americans have struggled to attain and now take them for granted.


Rating:
Summary: A Badly Needed Viewpoint
Review: Edward Said was (he died in 2003) the best known spokesman for the Palestinian cause in the western world. Here in the US we tend to hear only the Israeli side of the story. And as with all stories, there are definitely two sides.

In this book, which is a series of 46 essays that appeared in various Arabic newspapers, Said reveals information that never finds its way into the American media. As we look at the struggle going on in Iraq, an in depth understanding can only become possible as we look at all the views of the Middle East. Highly Recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Great book
Review: I really recommend this book to everybody who wants to expand his information concerning the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Edward Said has some of the most interesting ideas on how to solve this conflict in a just and humane way for both sides, the occupier and the occupied.

Rating:
Summary: A Lonely Voice
Review: These short essays mostly written for such Arab news outlets such as Al Ahram are an eloquent conclusion to Said's long journey of critique and expose. Critical of both sides in the perennial Arab/Israel conflict, these short but pointed pieces are jolting in their descriptions of what's really going on in the Occupied territories, putting American journalists to shame for their silence and coopted partisanship to the propaganda reign in the mass media. Said's unique perspective will be greatly missed and these short takes on the field of madness make short work of the usual cowering editorials on the collision of Israel and the Palestinians. Said's skepticism from the beginning on the Oslo swindle now seems especially prescient.

Rating:
Summary: Racist propaganda
Review: This set of essays is an exercise in propagandistic alternative history. The questions they raise are not whether what Said comes up with is accurate, but whether they are intended to mislead, taunt, or a little of each.

In my opinion, Ed Said is not the first human being to have ever told a lie, merely the first to have told so many of them. He built up an impeccable reputation for dishonesty, racism, and support for terror over a period of decades. He once wrote, "it is one of the great ironies of history that in the middle of the twentieth century - in the Golden age of peoples' rights to self-determination," something was "dropped from the map of the world." Want to guess what that something was? My guess would have been Tibet. But no! It's the British Mandate! That's like complaining about dropping Gold Coast in favor of Ghana.

Still, there are clear elements of taunting when he constantly calls those who disagree with him liars. Obviously, Israel wants peace. To call the Knesset Speaker a brazen liar for saying so is simply a taunt. And to say that "it's the classic Zionist ploy to defame people by identifying criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism" is a taunt as well.

Said has said that the 1947 Partition Plan was unfair, "based on the minority getting rights equal to those of the majority." Um, wow. That's Said's racism, showing through loud and clear.

Said's favorite targets are those who oppose terror, namely the ones who cooperate with authorities. As Edward Alexander has pointed out, Said has even claimed that "the UN Charter and every other known document or protocol entitles a people under foreign occupation not only to resist but also by extension to deal severely with collaborators."

In the present volume, Said simply spews more of the same trash. He deplores the fact that Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount (which happens to be Judaism's holiest site, is in Israel, and is in Jerusalem, Israel's capital). Said accuses Sharon of trying to establish a right for an Israeli to visit what he misleadingly refers to as a Muslim holy place.

Said has plenty of harsh words for the fact that some Jews live in the disputed West Bank. To him, this is illegal and immoral. But he has no complaints about Arabs living on the same disputed land!

Said has nothing bad to say about the dozens of antizionist United Nations resolutions. Instead, he attacks Israel for "flouting" them!

Said is quick to tell us that little Israel is just too big. Too big? Um, why would that be? Are ten thousand square miles just more than Israelis can afford? Is it just too much land for 6 million Israelis, 5 million of whom are Jewish and are not desired as potential residents of any neighboring states? Is it too much land, given that there are millions of Diaspora Jews, some of whom might want to move there? Said doesn't ask this!

In any case, about four-fifths of the Mandate (35,400 out of 46,300 square miles) in which Jews were given a Right to settle in 1920 by the international community was closed to Jews by the British in 1921, and given to what is now the state of Jordan. That means the Jews have to make do with only a fifth of the land orignally set aside for them. And sure enough, Said does say something about someone losing 78% of the land! But he says the Arabs lost it! That Israel not only stole 78% of that last 10,100 square miles (as if Jewish land is the only land Arabs can live on), but now wants even more of it! Would you care to guess how many square miles of land the Arabs have?

The fact that Israel has any land at all is more than enough justification for Said to call Israel greedy. And he calls it immoral to complain about the terrorist attacks on Israel. After all, as he points out, more Arabs have been dying in these attacks than Jews! Of course, if Arabs didn't rush out to find Jews and attack them, neither side would be fighting or dying.

It's sad that our species includes some bad apples. The author of this book is one of the very worst of them.