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I've been working flat-out since three this morning but I hope to have a chance to read this and the rest of the feature before collapsing in sleep, a process which takes usually takes me about three minutes.
FEATURE STORY | February 4, 2002
A New Current in Palestine
by Edward W. Said
fter sixteen months, the Palestinian intifada has little to show for itself politically, despite the remarkable fortitude of a militarily occupied, poorly armed, poorly led and still dispossessed people who have defied the pitiless ravages of Israel's war machine. In the United States the government and, with a handful of exceptions, the independent media have echoed each other in harping on Palestinian violence and terror, with no attention at all paid to the thirty-five-year-old Israeli military occupation, the longest in modern history. As a result, official US condemnations of Yasir Arafat's Palestinian Authority since September 11 as harboring and even sponsoring terrorism have coldly reinforced the Sharon government's preposterous claim that Israel is the victim and the Palestinians the aggressors in the four-decade war that the Israeli army has waged against civilians, property and institutions without mercy or discrimination. The result today is that the Palestinians are locked up in 220 ghettos controlled by the army; Merkava tanks and American-supplied Apache helicopters and F-16s mow down people, houses, olive groves and fields on a daily basis; schools and universities as well as businesses and civil institutions are totally disrupted; hundreds of innocent civilians have been killed and about 20,000 injured; Israel's assassinations of Palestinian leaders continue; and unemployment and poverty stand at about 50 percent--all this while Gen. Anthony Zinni drones on about Palestinian violence to the wretched Arafat, who can't even leave his office in Ramallah because he is imprisoned there by Israeli tanks, while his several tattered security forces scamper about trying to survive the destruction of their offices and barracks.
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Edward W. Said
Israel
Middle East
To make matters worse, the Palestinian Islamists have played into Israel's relentless propaganda mills and its ever-ready military by occasional bursts of wantonly barbaric suicide bombings that finally forced Arafat in mid-December to turn his crippled security forces against Hamas and Islamic Jihad, arresting militants, closing offices, occasionally firing at and killing demonstrators. Every demand that Sharon makes, Arafat hastens to fulfill, even as Sharon makes still another one, provokes an incident or simply says--with US backing--that he is unsatisfied, that Arafat remains an irrelevant terrorist (whom he sadistically forbade from attending Christmas services in Bethlehem) whose main purpose in life is to kill Jews. To these logic-defying congeries of brutal assaults on the Palestinians, on the man who for better or worse is their leader and on their already humiliated national existence, Arafat's baffling response has been to keep asking for a return to negotiations, as if Sharon's transparent campaign against even the possibility of negotiations weren't actually happening, and as if the whole idea of the Oslo peace process hadn't already evaporated. What surprises me is that except for a small number of Israelis (most recently David Grossman), no one comes out and says openly that Palestinians are being persecuted by Israel....
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