Autonomy of the victim

Palestine has passed the poetic phase. Those familiar images of resistance and martyrdom, of ghost-written history and eternal displacement, have given way to the politics of real estate. Palestine, like any other dispute of the post-War world, is no longer an abstraction wrapped in the worst kind of rhetoric — the `post-colonial’ rhetoric. It’s a visible prototype, worthy of full realisation, worthier than its redeemers — politicians, poets and suicide bombers. Romancing Palestine is remote from realising Palestine.

And it is the idea of Palestine that continues to concentrate the mind of the romantic. This is an idea born out of one of the defining motifs of the twentieth century the exile imagining his homeland. You may still remember the many manifestations of that idea: Yasser Arafat, the world’s most famous wandering statesman without a state, hopping from chancellery to third world chancellery; the terrorist, also known in certain languages as the freedom fighter or the revolutionary, bombing soft targets; stone-throwing children in an uprising against Zionism; the poet planting an olive tree. And Edward W. Said, of course.

Said is the most articulate exponent of the idea that is Palestine. In the intellectual business of conscience-keeping, he is less apocalyptical than Alexander Solzhenitsyn and more convincing than Gunter Grass. Aesthete, literary critic, professional intellectual, Said, a Palestinian in exile, owes his freedom to none, not even to his American citizenship. It is the freedom of the victim, magnified by the responsibility of the intellectual.

Said, as he himself said in his 1993 Reith lecture, Representations of the Intellectual, does not suffer from those reprehensible “habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance”. He has no intention to be moderate, balanced or objective. His is a principled position, not negotiable. “For despite the abuse and vilification that any outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights and self-determination earns for him or herself, the truth deserves to be spoken, represented by an unafraid and compassionate intellectual”.

Then what is the truth according to Edward Said, the fearless, compassionate intellectual? It is a colonial conspiracy, an imperial arrogance. There should not have been a Jewish state at all, though it is an altogether different matter that Said had accepted its existence some time ago. The Oslo accords have not served the cause of Palestine; they have only served the politics of the bloody-minded Israeli peace-maker and the complicit Palestinian.

The present Palestinian Authority is a dictatorship, and Yasser Arafat, the betrayer, should have left the scene long ago. The prevailing Arab leadership is undemocratic. Israel is an artificial state. Palestine is a historical reality. The truth is: it is a lie everywhere, except perhaps in the mind of the intellectual. And it was the same truth that flowed from the Rajiv Gandhi Memorial lecture given by Said in Delhi this Monday: “It is simply unthinkable given the moral lesson (of the decolonising movements of our century) that only one people, the Palestinians, should be willing to accept a life of permanent subaltern status, where according to the retrograde religious authorities now dominant in Israel, they can stay as a barely tolerated, carefully circumscribed minority of aliens.”

No civilised person can disagree with Said on issues like Arab dictatorship and Arafat’s redundancy. But this compassionate intellectual, this victim of the victim, refuses to give the Israelis a history. The history of Israel is not one of colonial or even international — conspiracy. It is the biggest, and the most melancholic, human-interest story of this century.

Only the coldest of intellectual minds can use the Holocaust as a mere reference point in the history of organised dehumanisation. The Holocaust was not incidental. It was not defensive either. In its horror, it was absolute; in its politics, it was an ideologically legitimised certainty.

The homelessness of the Palestinian, unlike the historical tragedy of the Jew, is incidental, and certainly not the result of ruthless Zionism, which continues to be confused with some form of colonialism. As the Israeli writer Amos Oz, no radical but a dissenting liberal who prefers a Chekhovian resolution to a Shakespearean resolution of the Palestinian tragedy, writes, “Wrong diagnosis begets a wrong perception and a wrong treatment.

So I think that Palestinian ideologists, as well as some of the world’s left, should set about revising their concept of Zionism. It is not a form of colonialism, neither is it a form of racism. It is a national liberation movement, it has its own ugly, selfish, narrow-minded and fanatic components.” The Palestinian national movement was a linear progression of fanaticism, terror and sophistry. And it was not the movement of aborigines against the settlers. Rather, in its political as well as militant expressions, it was a struggle which sought to repudiate even the memory of the Jewish tragedy.

This memory is incompatible with the seminar-friendly jargon of post-colonialism and imperialism. The formidable, and engaging, intellect of Said has been reducing the “infinite sadness” of the Palestinian to impersonal arguments. These arguments, so sonorously pleasing to caviar socialists and peanut Marxists, can turn great literature into cultural studies in imperialism. That is why in Said’s analysis, the imagination of Camus only evokes a “negative vitality in which the tragic human seriousness of the colonial effort achieves its last great clarification before ruin overtakes it”. It happens: when you are irredeemably addicted to colonialism, writers as varied as Camus and Conrad can be reduced to inanimate social objects. When you assume that, as Said has famously shown in his Reith lecture, the intellectual activism of this century is purely leftist.

Prof. Edward Said, the wandering intellectual, the most autonomous victim, needs an imperium, a colony, and an exclusive cause. The idea of Palestine serves his purpose. The archetypal conscious-keeper is the embodiment of self-righteousness. He will always have a place to go, even after the last frontier, even after the last sky. The sovereign imperium of the mind, which is always on the left. Of the destination of the Palestinian, let the politician decide, even if he is on the right.