After Arafat is a big theme with all the commentators - and the received or as Edward Said might put it "orientalised" wisdom is that Arafat was an obstacle to solving to Palestinian problem. Edward Said was himself a critic of Arafat. Reading some essays in the collection "The End of the Peace Process" 2nd edition published 2002 I was interested in the 2 essays whose publication dates straddled the 11 September 2001... the attack on the World Trade Centre and certainly a turnig point in history if there ever was one...
Al-Ahram Weekly | Opinion | Occupation is the atrocity
Al-Ahram Weekly Online 16 - 22 August 2001 Issue No.547
Al-Ahram Weekly | Opinion | Collective passion
Al-Ahram Weekly Online 20 - 26 September 2001 Issue No.552
My own and only yet visit to Palestine was in late August 2001 a couple of weeks before 9/11. The passage below from the "Occupation is the atrocity" article published a week before I went reflects exactly what the situation in Palestine was on that visit:
... But consider what Israel's unrelenting war against the undefended, basically unarmed, stateless and poorly led Palestinian people has already achieved. The disparity in power is so vast that it makes you cry. Equipped with the latest in American-built (and freely given) air power, helicopter gunships, uncountable tanks and missiles, and a superb navy as well as a state of the art intelligence service, Israel is a nuclear power abusing a people without any armour or artillery, no air force (its one pathetic airfield in Gaza is controlled by Israel) or navy or army, none of the institutions of a modern state. The appallingly unbroken history of Israel's 34-year-old military occupation (the second longest in modern history) of illegally conquered Palestinian land has been obliterated from public memory nearly everywhere, as has been the destruction of Palestinian society in 1948 and the expulsion of 68 per cent of its native people, of whom 4.5 million remain refugees today. Behind the reams of newspeak, the stark outlines of Israel's decades-long daily pressure on a people whose main sin is that they happened to be there, in Israel's way, is staggeringly perceptible in its inhuman sadism. The fantastically cruel confinement of 1.3 million people jammed like so many human sardines into the Gaza strip, plus the nearly two million Palestinian residents of the West Bank, has no parallel in the annals of apartheid or colonialism. F-16 jets were never used to bomb South African homelands. They are used against Palestinians towns and villages. All entrances and exits to the territories are controlled by Israel (Gaza is completely surrounded by a barbed wire fence), which also controls the entire water supply. Divided into about 63 non-contiguous cantons, completely encircled and besieged by Israeli troops, punctuated by 140 settlements (many of them built under Ehud Barak's premiership) with their own road network banned to "non-Jews," as Arabs are referred to, along with such unflattering epithets as thieves, snakes, cockroaches and grasshoppers, Palestinians under occupation have now been reduced to 60 per cent unemployment and a poverty rate of 50 per cent (half the people of Gaza and the West Bank live on less than $2 a day); they cannot travel from one place to the next; they must endure long lines at Israeli checkpoints that detain and humiliate the elderly, the sick, the student, and the cleric for hours on end; 150,000 of their olive and citrus trees have been punitively uprooted; 2,000 of their houses demolished; acres of their land either destroyed or expropriated for military settlement purposes.
Since the Al-Aqsa Intifada began late last September, 609 Palestinians have been killed (four times more than Israeli fatalities) and 15,000 wounded (a dozen times more than on the other side). Regular Israeli army assassinations have picked off alleged terrorists at will, most of the time killing innocents like so many flies. Last week, 14 Palestinians were murdered openly by Israeli forces using helicopter gunships and missiles; they were thus "prevented" from killing Israelis, although at least two children and five innocents were also murdered, to say nothing of many wounded civilians and several destroyed buildings -- part of the somehow acceptable collateral damage. Nameless and faceless, Israel's daily Palestinian victims barely rate a mention on America's news programmes, even though -- for reasons that I simply cannot understand -- Arafat is still hoping that the Americans will rescue him and his crumbling regime.
...
The situation in Palestine - as pretty much everywhere else, starting with Afghanistan - got a whole lot worse after Septmeber 11, a grim September indeed. Said's next article deals with the political situation mostly as you'd expect from a liberal humanities professor in a New York University, that is to say very rationally. Here is his description of how Israel responded:
Rational understanding of the situation is what is needed now, not more drum-beating. George Bush and his team clearly want the latter, not the former. Yet to most people in the Islamic and Arab worlds, the official US is synonymous with arrogant power, known mainly for its sanctimoniously munificent support not only of Israel but of numerous repressive Arab regimes, and its inattentiveness even to the possibility of dialogue with secular movements and people who have real grievances. Anti-Americanism in this context is not based on a hatred of modernity or technology-envy as accredited pundits like Thomas Friedman keep repeating; it is based on a narrative of concrete interventions, specific depredations and, in the cases of the Iraqi people's suffering under US-imposed sanctions and US support for the 34-year-old Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, cruel and inhumane policies administered with a stony coldness.
Israel is now cynically exploiting the American catastrophe by intensifying its military occupation and oppression of the Palestinians. Since 11 September, Israeli military forces have invaded Jenin and Jericho and have repeatedly bombed Gaza, Ramallah, Beit Sahour and Beit Jala, exacting great civilian casualties and enormous material damage. All of this, of course, is done brazenly with US weaponry and the usual lying cant about fighting terrorism. Israel's supporters in the US have resorted to hysterical cries like "we are all Israelis now," making the connection between the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings and Palestinian attacks on Israel an absolute conjunction of "world terrorism," in which Ben Laden and Arafat are interchangeable entities. What might have been a moment for Americans to reflect on the probable causes of what took place, which many Palestinians, Muslims and Arabs have condemned, has been turned into a huge propaganda triumph for Sharon; Palestinians are simply not equipped to defend themselves against both Israeli occupation in its ugliest and most violent forms and the vicious defamation of their national struggle for liberation.
The last statement is the fact which I observed. The way it's written seems to imply (perhaps the basis for any optimism which Said might hold on to) that Palestinians may be equipped to do one or other form of defence, but not both (and that perhaps the latter was the more viable route?). My own reading of it in consonance with what I saw myself would be that they could do neither, which is a deliberate objective of Israeli policy of course and also the effect of American, British, Arab and all other foreign policies - but that they need to (continue to) do both.
I observe also that it is one thing to be a professor in New York and another to be a "terrorist"/"freedom fighter"/"obstacle" trapped in the rubble of Ramallah.
So... what did General Wade ever do for us? :-) Well, together with the building of his roads, the General designed this locally recruited force to pay impoverished highlanders to keep their impoverished and unruly compatriots in line on behalf of the British state... their experience has been put to work on behalf of British imperial and post-colonial adventures ever since - though it's interesting to note that these King's shilling men were specifically not deployed back to the Highlands during the '45... perhaps the butcher Cumberland felt that it would have been too risky to expect them to massacre their own people...
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