EDWARD SAID and Palestine (1988)
Christopher Sykes
41.7K subscribers
435,452 views Apr 6, 2013
EDWARD SAID (1935-2003). Palestinian-born intellectual and world-famous literary critic. Author of 'Orientalism' and 'The Question of Palestine'. Professor of English Literature at Columbia University, NYC until his death. From the BBC series 'Exiles'. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Said
These chapters are auto-generated
Intro
0:00
Edward Said
0:43
My Mother
6:17
Last British Troops Leave
7:56
Place of Birth
8:41
Palestine is not an ordinary place
9:11
Arab refugees
11:14
zionism
11:39
interview
15:42
war of 67
19:42
the question of Palestine
21:15
the question ofzionism
23:20
how do you justify
27:02
Palestinian black humor
29:39
Terrorism
32:50
End of War
37:06
Beirut
41:03
The Violence Continues
48:18
Exile
52:28
====
Transcript
Intro
0:00
[Music]
0:15
i mean i could say this almost without without qualification right from the moment i arrived
0:20
in the west in in the early 50s until the present initially there's always a sense in which as an arab and obviously as a
0:26
palestinian you feel in some way criminalized or delinquent so powerful
0:33
is the definition of you as somebody who's outside the pale i mean whose soul sort of purpose in life is to
0:40
kill jews
Edward Said
0:56
so
1:09
edward syed is one of america's most distinguished literary scholars and critics he is in
1:15
exile in the very particular sense that the country in which he was born and spent his childhood no longer exists
1:26
although most of his time is devoted to academic work writing and lecturing on literature and music
1:32
saeed's other great preoccupation in exile is the story of palestine and the
1:38
palestinians syed was born in 1935 into a wealthy christian palestinian family
1:45
thirteen years later with the declaration of the state of israel the saeed family gave up their home in
1:51
jerusalem and settled in egypt and then in lebanon edward was sent to
1:56
english schools first in cairo and later in the united states
2:02
he studied at princeton and harvard and went on to become professor of comparative literature at columbia
2:08
university in new york
2:14
syed is a member of the palestine national council and a supporter of the plo
2:20
in march he was invited to washington to advise george schultz on the palestinian question
2:34
i don't have any arab colleagues most of my colleagues are in fact jews or americans who have no connection
2:40
with the middle east and with them i mean my relationships on the whole i would say are thoroughly normal and perfectly pleasant i mean i
2:46
think there's a general sort of way of being in the academic world that tends to reduce conflict so that with jewish
2:52
colleagues who may feel strongly about it we simply never talk about it the worst aspect of it is of course the
2:59
occasional threat of violence i mean my office has been raided and vandalized
3:04
i've received death threats and phone messages that are you know quite unpleasant so there's that i mean
3:10
there's a hint of violence around there and i suppose in general i do feel given the atmosphere
3:16
surrounding palestine and palestinians in new york in particular i do feel whether anything is said overtly or not
3:23
i feel as if i'm a delinquent sort of before anything gets going i am somehow guilty as charged
3:32
along with other left-wing arab and jewish intellectuals syed appears in several academic
3:37
blacklists as an enemy of israel i'm i think to be honest with you my
3:42
first uh inclination is to be vaguely amused by this because i mean we i must say as a group this is supposed
3:48
to be the enemies of israel we seem to to me anyway to be not a very formidable uh you know enemy
3:54
but um but i then you know you get angry because i mean it's obviously meant to be intimidating to threaten you and to obviously you
4:01
know smear your reputation that you're in there's always something there's always something suggestive about it that you're in the pay of
4:07
somebody else or that you're really a terrorist uh you know you're an agent for terrorism or this sort of thing i've
4:12
been called that actually quite frequently by uh by you know polemicists and and
4:17
even other scholars who prefer to do that rather than you know try to engage with my ideas
4:23
but i think the the overall feeling that i have is one when i think about it you know for any length of time is one of
4:29
of you know astonishment that at the sort of injustice of it you know here here i am
4:35
a child of a people that's been sort of kicked out of its own land forbidden uh to return
4:42
i mean that is to say most of the authors of these books for example are sometimes students who are employed by
4:47
these agencies to spy on me and to find out what i say and this sort of thing and if they're jewish just by fact of
4:54
being jewish born in new york of a jewish parent they're entitled to go to israel or
5:02
palestine as i call it become israeli citizens at any time that they wish i was born there my father was born there my grandfather great
5:08
etc and i can't return i don't have the same right i mean the law of return somehow covers them
5:14
and my people my family were kicked out of there and they're writing books about me accusing me of terrorism i mean the
5:21
the sort of the the enormity of the whole thing just baffles me
at the same time that it
5:26
strikes me very strongly
5:44
zionist settlement in palestine gathered momentum after world war one but met with little serious opposition
5:50
from the native population until the 1930s from then on the british government would find its
5:56
mandate increasingly unworkable having made conflicting promises to the jews and to the palestinian arabs
6:04
in 1917 the balfour declaration appeared to safeguard the interests of both
6:10
not so a memorandum written two years later
My Mother
6:18
the four great powers are committed to zionism and zionism be it right or wrong
6:23
good or bad is rooted in age-long traditions in present needs in future hopes of far
6:28
profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the seven hundred thousand arabs who now
6:33
inhabit that ancient land my mother was born and lived in nazareth
6:40
and married my father there in 1932 my father came from jerusalem and it
6:48
wasn't really until about i would say maybe 10 or 15 years ago that she told me it's quite
6:53
extraordinary experience that she had when she married my father they had to register the wedding and together they went to the palestine
7:00
government mandatory office the official there was an englishman
7:06
and my mother said that she watched him sort of rip up her passport
7:13
and he in amazement my mother said why are you doing this he said well now you will travel on your on your
7:19
husband's passport and she said yes but i mean why did i have to lose mine in that way and he said well because
7:27
your place and this card is going to be given to a jewish
7:32
immigrant to palestine and the idea was that her identity was just
7:37
you know just by a simple act of tearing up a piece of paper was taken away from her by a foreigner
7:42
and she lived with the consequences of that for 30 years and then she became in the 50s
7:50
in the late 50s a lebanese citizen and of course she's not lebanese she's
Last British Troops Leave
7:56
palestinian at haifa the last british troops leave palestine and very few of them can have
8:02
been sorry as the tanks and soldiers went aboard the transports the thought that a difficult and thankless job had been
8:08
well done must have mattered much less than the prospect of going home
8:14
the union jack was hauled down and the doors closed for good on the british mandate
8:22
later in the day israel's flag was flying over haifa and the prime minister mr ben-gurion was
8:28
there for the taking over ceremony a sad chapter had closed and the world hopes that you know we'll be able to
8:34
find a satisfactory solution to the palestine problem
Place of Birth
8:42
there's a place on the application that says place of birth so i put down jerusalem palestine then i'd get a passport back saying jerusalem israel
8:49
and then go into the passport office and say look i wasn't born in israel i said where are we in palestine
8:55
palestine doesn't exist anymore so i say yeah but i was born there and pas and israel didn't exist when i was born
9:00
so back and forth until finally i get a passport this says place of birth jerusalem without any country listed i don't think it would work for
9:07
any other city because jerusalem is i suppose a rather special place
Palestine is not an ordinary place
9:26
[Music]
9:33
[Music]
9:42
[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause]
9:48
is [Music]
10:02
is [Music]
10:25
palestine is not an ordinary place i'm sure where oppression occurs like south africa or chilean those are not
10:32
ordinary places either but palestine i think has something more it's a place where religions are manufactured and
10:38
all kinds of revelations are alleged to have occurred and it has a kind of density and resonance that virtually no
10:44
other place in the world has and it's also a very small place and very crowded and that criss-crossing
10:49
that sort of fabric of claims and counter claims interests me a great deal the question i mean the political and
10:55
even philosophical question is why is it you know that
11:01
visions of community in a land that is as dense as this have tended not to triumph and what has
11:07
triumphed instead is visions our visions of exclusivism you know to say it's our country and only as we want to push everybody out
Arab refugees
11:16
the scene is near jericho one of the camps for arab refugees the story is one of destitution for
11:22
these people as the result of the war in palestine have either fled or been expelled from their homes and their livelihood
11:28
moreover the arab refugee problem is a very big one for those in need are said to number over half a million but relief to be
11:35
effective must be speedy it's been very important to try to
zionism
11:41
unders understand for me uh the tremendous appeal of zionism to
11:48
to the european mind and i would say that they're really too very powerful and and
11:55
and compelling reasons for that appeal one of them is the first reason is that
12:01
zionism is a uh appears to be
12:06
a movement um and an ideology that sort of gathered together uh the remnants and the uh the the
12:14
the kind of remains of a shattered a community of people who had historically been oppressed and
12:20
and abused and discriminated and persecuted in the west and gathered them together into a a very
12:26
powerful movement which created a new country
12:32
it had all the elements of a kind of phoenix you know rising from the ashes and it also had the appeal of of the
12:40
creation of a new state which is i think very central to the to the european consciousness
12:46
um because you know a lot like for example the american
12:51
experiment of europe that is to say sending out people to america to create a new country and
12:56
obviously it explains the peculiarly close connection between america and israel there's this tremendously attractive
13:05
idea of starting out afresh of starting with a clean slate of building a new country making the
13:11
desert bloom i mean it has all the elements also of miracle and that's very very
13:16
appealing i think syed's ability to look at the west from
13:22
the east and the east from the west having been educated in both informs the
13:27
themes and arguments of much of his work
13:33
in his best known and most influential book syed examined 19th century western attitudes to the orient and
13:39
oriental society i was struck by the consistency and the
13:45
coherence of pictures or representations of the east or the orient as i called it
13:51
in a lot of european culture you know i say 19th century french paintings by jehong for instance or novelistic
13:59
writing say in the work of people like flaubert and israeli say and sort of scholarly
14:05
writing by linguists and historians and anthropologists and and sociologists the consistency of the
14:12
picture that emerged of something called the orient and um
14:17
the extent to which a lot of this material contributed to creating a kind of unified image of the orient which had a
14:25
very set character which had a particular set of characteristics that keep coming back you know sensuality
14:32
despotism wealth promise cruelty and so i tried to show
14:40
how this collective portrait of the orient grew in the 19th century
14:46
and became as consistent as it as it was and i related it to i think this was one of the things that
14:53
was quite controversial i related it to european power i was saying really there is no such
15:00
thing as the orient the orient is much more complicated much more varied much more
15:05
heterogeneous and above all much more detailed than any of these grand generalizations about well we know
15:10
that orientals tend to think in certain ways that for example one of the things i mentioned in the early part of the book was lord cromer
15:17
who's saying the oriental mind is different from ours it is not capable of grasping western logic
15:24
uh you know an egyptian for example cannot walk on the sidewalk you would say you know he has to walk on the street
15:29
that's a function of the m and i was saying all of that's absolute nonsense you know you can't make these generalizations and then pretend that
15:36
they are factual or scientific generalizations they are rooted in rule what do you think of when you think
interview
15:43
of an arab somebody with a towel on their head camel and maybe some sand
15:52
want to throw a pyramid in there well guess who's here right on our stage this itself
16:00
would not have been possible not long ago edward saeed joins us professor of english plumbing university member of
16:06
the palestinian of the palestine national council to which umbrella organization belongs
16:11
the plo you were born in jerusalem and raged in egypt and palestine you are currently a
16:17
united states citizen kenneth jacobson director of middle eastern affairs for the anti-defamation league of bene brit
16:24
you don't want to talk to mr saeed unless the plo declines or moves away from its
16:30
stated policy of destroying israel if the plo doesn't recognize israel's
16:36
right to exist then i suppose there's some uh some
16:42
passionate uh people who might think you are betraying israel to even appear with a
16:47
man is it that bad out there now it's not that bad out there now it's been bad for a while in the sense that
16:54
you have to have something to talk about when someone says to you his basic assumption and speaking to you is that
17:00
you don't have a right to exist what do you go for it's off-putting yes mr saeed professor saeed how do you respond to
17:06
that no i think the basic thing is whether people want to talk about peace and about the the real issue which is the
17:12
land and whether it can be divided but i think i'm saying he might be willing to discuss that if
17:18
if the plo would acknowledge israel's legitimate right to exist well i mean what about the israeli recognition of
17:24
the palestinian people as a political factor as as a community with a claim i won't marry you unless you love me and
17:30
i won't say unless why not have a mutual recognition in
17:36
which the the people recognize each other
17:43
perhaps we can do something today we have here a wonderful opportunity two moderates from either side
17:49
hopefully you're talking to each other well i mean he doesn't you don't want to be called him i'd be happy to call him moderate but i
17:55
i really question whether anyone who's supporting the plo can be defined as moderate well can i say something
18:04
look i think not here to score points no i mean i think the main point we are here to talk about matters of life
18:11
and death
18:18
yeah look i think the main point is if you want to negotiate some kind of peace with justice you
18:25
cannot legislate in advance who's going to represent whom the israeli position and the position of
18:30
the adl is that we are not only entitled to decide what to talk about but we're going to decide
18:35
who to talk to now the palestinians have their own representatives and that's they've never found nobody has found any
18:41
other representatives for the palestinian except the plo now we don't say we will not talk to the israeli government because they don't
18:46
i mean after all it was the israeli government a that dispossessed the palestinians that destroyed lebanon in 1982
18:52
killed no no i mean
19:00
[Applause]
19:09
why just hang on one second why couldn't the palace why couldn't the plo decline to talk to
19:14
israel because ariel sharon a duly authorized member of the presided over the bombing argument why
19:22
couldn't russia refuse to talk to us because we bombed libya it goes on and on there's no point i'm not saying this is easy but don't we save
19:28
more babies by at least getting into the same room
war of 67
i think the really dramatic change which i again read about was i think 67 uh the war of 67 where the entire map of the arab world changed and for the first time israel which had been confined largely to the small
boundaries of the state had sort of overflowed into jordan taking the west
bank and gaza taken the sinai in the golden heights and
reading about this in america watching on the television almost entirely from the viewpoint of a horrified and shamed victim because then it was perfectly clear that i was an arab
i mean i couldn't go on simply being an undergraduate with this strange to my american friends and colleagues you know the strange cache of being somehow from the arab world maybe from egypt that the whole idea of
being an arab and then beginning to discover that that meant being a palestinian that all really came to the fore in 1967.
i mean that was i would say the great explosion and it had a tremendous effect
on on my sort of psychological and even intellectual processes because
i i discovered then that i had to rethink my my life and my
identity even though it had been so sort of sheltered and built up in this completely artificial
way i had to rethink it from from the start and that was a process that really is
continuing i mean it hasn't ended for me
the question of Palestine
21:26
in his 1979 book the question of palestine Said quotes the israeli general moshe dayan, we came to this country which was already populated by arabs
21:37
and we are establishing a hebrew that is a jewish state here in considerable areas of the country we
21:43
bought the land from the arabs
jewish villages were built in the place of arab villages
21:48
you don't even know the names of these arab villages and i don't blame you because the geography books no longer
21:54
exist not only do the books not exist the arab villages are not there either
22:00
there is not one place built in this country that did not have a former arab population
22:08
the great problem that we face as a people is that we're being told by the israelis that in a certain sense we don't really exist that the continuity of our existence in palestine that our history
22:20
our identity is sort of manageable by israeli historians by propagandists
22:27
by politicians is manageable as something else the arabs of judea and samaria megan used to
22:33
call us uh two-legged beasts terrorists everything but not palestinians
22:41
We were there! i mean you can't do more than that but it it's so indecent and humiliating
22:47
in exercise to have to say that we do exist in that is to say there were villages
22:54
palestinian villages there were palestinian cities there were palestinian there was a palestinian society there
22:59
were palestinian people before 1948 who were arab
23:04
and who formed a society underdeveloped whatever you want to call it but it was there
23:10
which abruptly and dramatically in the mid middle part of 1948 was shattered dismantled
23:17
destroyed by the zionists
there's also a question of how zionism
the question of zionism
23:24
conceives arabs and it has become current for arabs to call zionism a
23:30
racial a racist ideology now what patrick seal is the basis of that charge well uh i know it's the charge
23:37
which created outrage when it was first raised i think the u.n they tried to dub zionism as a
23:42
racist thing but you see unfortunately i think there is something in it i mean much as one hates to say so but if you
23:48
if you just look at some of the statements say of a man like like begin i mean he's always ranting about jewish blood
23:55
and how precious it is with the implication of course that arab blood is much less precious and he says things like
24:01
palestinians are animals walking on two paws or you remember his chief of staff at the time rafal eitan
24:07
talked about palestinians being cockroaches in the bottle now he talks about blood libel against
24:12
the jews or of course his famous phrase at the time of the sabaran shatila massacre he would say he said if gaim killed goeim what
24:18
concern is it of ours now that it seems to me is an absolutely racial remark now of course these are this is
24:24
not the only basis of that evidence and there's a great deal more and particularly of course the treatment
24:29
of jews from arab countries in israel and they would be the first i think to
24:34
say that they had been treated in a racialist way i've just been reading very interesting books
thoroughly disagree with us right and now of course you can
24:42
mention i can give you a list of two dozen other loudmouth generals in israel who have
24:48
said outrageous things but this you can say about every country i mean in this country there are no loudmouth politicians and
24:54
generals surely i would not make generalizations about england on the basis of what a couple of of
24:59
politicians they have said about about the the the west indian immigrants and so forth is taking just a random
25:05
politician or does he represent well begin does not represent the trend begging i think is a is a is a very sad
25:14
consequence of of 40 or 50 years of arab israeli wars about mr begin and about mr rafal that
25:22
you had mentioned i think i would say by way of generalization that the arab extremists um
25:29
who are our worst enemies by the way they have at least already achieved one
25:35
great victory over us in that they have succeeded to infect us or some of us
25:44
with their brutality and their extremism this i think is a consequence of 50 and 60 years of war
25:50
i think what patrick is saying in another way i'd like to reformulate and say that had there been in the united states for
25:58
example uh immigration laws which said that only white anglo-saxon protestants can
26:04
emigrate and get a citizenship then you as a jew and i as a palestinian would object
26:10
now the same law in an inverse formulation of the same law which says that only a jew can emigrate to israel
26:17
uh whereas a palestinian who is born there and can that cannot be
don't forget the
26:22
historical no i'm sure i'm not saying no this law was passed barely five or six years after the gates of auschwitz had closed
26:29
no i understand and everybody had seen that the jews were the only people overthrown in the gas chambers because they were the only people in europe
26:36
who had absolutely no control not even the slightest measure of control over their fate but doesn't the jews convince
26:42
themselves rightly or wrongly that this had happened because they did not have a territory because they did not have any power
26:48
acceptance let's put this question more precisely how exactly do you justify not in 47 or
48 when the auschwitz case seems to be unanswerable but how do you justify
how do you justify
a law of return which entitles a jew from london or from manchester to return to enjoy rights and
citizenship protection in israel which are denied to arabs born in that country born on that territory
try as he or she might a palestinian [Music]
27:22
finds it very difficult i won't say impossible but i think it's very very
27:28
hard and i in this i think most palestinians are like most people it's very hard for the palestinian who
27:34
feels himself or herself to have been the victim of injustice
27:40
by jews israeli jews to sympathize or imaginatively
27:48
incorporate the history of the holocaust and say well
27:53
we forgive them for what they did i mean after all they suffered this enormous this this
28:00
colossal historical tragedy the jews did and the fact that they are evicting us
28:05
from our territory that they are placing us under occupation that they're treating us as third class citizens that
28:10
they are killing our people that they are confining us to camps et cetera et cetera et cetera
28:16
we understand,
look, nobody can understand that, i
28:21
mean you can you can grasp the first fact the fact of the holocaust but you can't translate that into your
28:28
own doom i mean as another person as the
28:33
the doom that is visited on you by those people i mean it's very very hard to do that on the other hand i i really genuinely
28:41
believe that it's in incredibly important for palestinians to try to understand
28:47
to understand what it is that we're what force it is that we're dealing with you know i mean i made a great effort to
28:52
go and see show out you know the landsman film about the the holocaust which was shown recently in new york you know it's nine and a
28:58
half or ten hours and i'm certain that uh that my wife and i were the only two arabs in the
29:03
audience when we saw it um and i i could feel it all you know and i
29:09
understood the enormous horror and i was aghast at it i mean because i understood it as a kind of european or western kind of
29:16
holocaust which it was but then when i when i came to the point of saying,
well what does this mean to me it means to me?
29:23
that this is the legitimization of what has happened to us as a people the palestinians,
and then
29:28
you know it's a paradox you can call it,
you can call it an antinomy you can call it an a tragedy, but it doesn't lessen one's will .and this is the second point it doesn't lessen your will to struggle against it
----
29:59
this is an example of palestinian black humor
it's it's something that was broadcast
30:05
on the israeli radio during the summer of 82 as an instance of how a palestinian
30:10
captured quote-unquote terrorist is interrogated by somebody but it's it was then transcribed by a
30:17
friend given to me and it was played many times on the radio in beirut as a form of entertainment of how
30:22
the palestinian who is in fact the captured turns the table on his uh israeli captor
30:28
who's interrogating him and this is this is what happens on the radio
so the israeli broadcaster says your
30:34
name the captured palestinian says my name is
30:39
the israeli man says what's your movement name my movement name is abu leil father of
30:47
night
tell me mr abu abul to which terrorist organization do you belong
30:52
he responds i belong to the popular front for the liberation tahrir i mean terrorization of palestine
31:00
in arabic
and when did you get involved in the terrorist organization when i first became aware of terrorism
31:07
and what was your mission in south lebanon my mission was terrorism in other words
31:12
we would enter villages and just terrorize and whenever there were women and children we would terrorize
31:18
everything and all we did was terrorism by this time of course the israelis very happy that this man is saying all of
31:24
these things and did you practice terrorism out of belief in a cause or simply for money
31:29
palestinian oh by god just for money what kind of causes this anyway why is there still a cause we sold out a
31:35
long time ago tell me where do the terrorist organizations get their money
31:40
from anyone who spare money for terrorism in other words from the arab regimes that support terrorism of course
31:46
he's now giving him exactly what he wants but i mean to such a degree that it's what's your opinion the israeli says
31:52
what's your opinion of the terrorist arafat i was saying i swear he's the greatest
31:57
terrorist of all he's the one who sold us and the cause out his whole life is terrorism
32:04
what's your opinion of the way the israeli defense forces have conducted themselves palestinian on my honor we thank the
32:11
israeli defense forces for their good treatment to all us terrorists do you have any
32:18
advice for other terrorists who are still terrorizing and attacking the idf palestinian response my advice to them
32:24
is to surrender their arms to the idf and what they'll find there is the best possible treatment
32:31
lastly mr terrorist would you like to send a message to your family palestinian i'd like to assure my family
32:37
and friends that i'm in good health and i'd also like to thank the enemy broadcasting facility for letting me speak out like this
32:44
you mean the call israel the voice of israel yes sir thank you sir naturally sir
Terrorism
32:51
that's of course very amusing and very ironic yeah but i do need to know where you stand on
32:57
this question of terrorism the killing of innocent
33:02
people men women children by palestinians well i think it's uh i think it's a
33:09
horrible thing i'm i've always been against it i've always felt that the
33:14
emphasis on what has been called armed struggle has been uh indiscriminate and
33:22
um sometimes foolishly and in a political sense stupidly relied on
33:29
but i never never will concede that the essence of the palestinian
33:35
struggle as the israelis say is terrorism
i think that the palestinians by and large to a fantastic degree have
33:43
um waged war against a merciless occupier a person a state
33:49
an army an enemy that has dispossessed them and has has done far far worse to palestinians
33:56
than any palestinians have done to israelis and i think one must always make the distinction between terrorism which is
34:01
as i say random and stupid and unpolitical and uh and
34:07
uh the struggle against uh an oppressor
and i think uh in that particular
34:14
distinction
i'm obviously for the latter and totally against the former
34:20
at the same time as i say that i myself have always been made uncomfortable by by by the use of arms in this very ugly
34:28
and long-standing struggle but i certainly must say that i've been much more
34:34
much much more impressed by the cruelty and above all the extent of palestinian suffering uh
34:42
than at the hands of the israelis and than the other way around
i mean the the ratio is is is infinitely greater uh the
34:49
israelis have make no secret of it that they've always killed palestinian civilians sometimes at the rate of a hundred to
one israeli death so i think given that i think the use of the word terrorism is a is a mistake 35:00
that seems very clear but also very cold and unfeeling, one has to say
i'm not sure what you mean i'm feeling
well to say that
35:14
that bombing schools or school buses is
35:21
not political uh no no i mean by that i mean it's it's want and murder
35:27
is what i'm saying uh if that's being cold then i i'm being cold i'm simply saying that it
35:35
all violence of this sort is ugly i don't myself believe in the purifying
35:40
uh quality of violence as it is sometimes alleged to have i don't believe in cults of arms and
35:47
and blood and so on and so forth so that any uh act of that sort horrifies me uh
35:53
and i've grown up in an area which has had more than its share of violence in my lifetime
35:59
but the best that can be said about it is that it's it's it's advanced a political goal i mean
36:05
certainly the zionists have used it and brought it in fact to the area terrorism as we know it today the planning of bombs and marketplaces and
36:11
so on and so forth was in fact introduced into the middle east by the zionists in the 20s
36:16
um so i'm i'm against that but i what i'm also trying to say is that some
36:22
people will say that it advances a political cause i myself don't feel that it does i mean i think it's it
36:28
in this way it simply it attracts attention to it but the net result of zionist uh
36:35
terrorism and violence in the in the first third of the 20th century has brought forth to my mind the the anomaly
36:43
the horrific and unacceptable status in the middle east today of the state of
36:48
israel which is in fact an armed garrison state which now exports more arms and distributes violence all around the
36:54
world vastly disproportionate to its size i mean in that respect i think it's a
36:59
it's it's a horrible cycle of violence but in it all i think the palestinian is the victim there's no question about
End of War
37:06
that
37:16
after two months siege and bombardment by the israel defense forces the surviving plo fighters left west
37:23
beirut to be dispersed in the few arab countries still willing to receive and support them israel had invaded lebanon with the
37:31
aim of destroying the palestinian state within a state which had grown up under the leadership of yasser arafat and the plo
37:38
this was not a purely military matter the plo had established schools hospitals and other institutions which
37:45
the israeli government wished to see removed from lebanon the latter part of august of 1982 i was
37:52
in the whole place of chicago my family my mother
37:57
my sisters my wife's family many many friends were all in beirut
38:04
um so the actual end of the end of the war
38:10
was symbolized by the palestinians uh the plo fighters
38:15
leaving beirut by sea and it was it meant a number of
38:22
very different things
one obviously was the iran the irony of the
38:30
of the situation in which palestinians were put out to sea but in boats and for years
38:38
we had heard it said that we were the ones who were trying to
38:44
drive the jews into the sea and here before the world's eyes could be seen the spectacle of
38:50
palestinians being sent out into the sea further away from the land that they
38:56
came from
the second significance to me watching
39:01
it again at a great distance was that i knew instinctively that this was the end
39:06
of a very important phase of palestinian life and that it would
39:11
never be the same again
because beirut was i mean the palestinian presence in
39:17
beirut from the early 70s for about a decade from the early 70s to the early 80s
39:22
was the first time i would say in our national existence when we had in fact
39:27
constituted a kind of substitute or izzat's palestine in alas a sovereign country
39:35
lebanon and had led a kind of in relatively independent
39:40
existence with institutions and so on and it was the first time that we had in fact constructed
39:46
a kind of palestine um for ourselves
but everyone knew it wasn't in palestine
39:52
it was somewhere else i mean i'd say that's the that's the quintessential uh palestinian irony that we're always
39:58
doing things that we would like to have done in palestine but could but we're doing them somewhere else
40:03
at the wrong time and you know causing a lot of trouble for others i mean
40:09
that's got to be said too
and of course the the main
40:14
significance beyond those two other things is the tremendous sadness of you know of an
40:20
uncertainty of what is to come afterwards knowing for example that
40:26
not one of the arab countries um that arab friends if you like
40:34
were with a very few usually individual exceptions unable to come to the aid of this
40:41
quite i thought quite heroic small force of people who had no heavy arms to speak
40:47
of no air force no navy no tanks none of that stuff who fought off this immense israeli concentration
40:52
usually who depended on sort of phantoms and cluster bombs and things you know remote control devices to
40:59
to to kill you know just kill large concentrations of palestinians
Beirut
41:06
[Music]
41:35
beirut really became it became the last of the places of my early years uh palestine egypt and
41:43
lebanon iii to which i could no longer return and its disappearance was of immense and
41:49
terribly sad significance for me and second it was also the loss of a place that had been immensely
41:55
uh immensely generous and hospitable to a whole generation of arab exiles not
42:00
only palestinians but iraqis and syrians and egyptians and and uh and uh sudanese and so on and it
42:07
was the it was the uh should we say the expatriate capital of the arab world and it was over
42:13
in that respect they were really now stands for kind of nostalgia it represents a kind
42:18
of nostalgia and an intellectual and political and
42:24
personal development which is which is really utterly
42:30
closed shut off in a way that is is so sad to behold particularly as it seems to continue i mean it's not as if it happened and it
42:36
was over but the news of beirut as we hear it and since my mother still lives in beirut is that
42:42
of a city that's sort of chopping itself and bleeding to death
42:50
the state of exile is a pretty serious and unpleasant experience i mean somebody's
42:56
been sent away banished severed from his or her native place
43:01
is a i mean it was traditionally considered to be one of the worst fates i mean you could never return to your
43:07
patria to your place of origin to your country it's on your native soil
43:14
and i think it's right to concentrate therefore on the dispossessions on the diminutions and
43:20
the unhappiness of all that the impermanence the loss and so on on the other hand you know you could say
43:27
well since exile is as i believe it is a permanent state in
43:33
other words it's something that cannot be gotten over it can't be restored you can't restore yourself to a state of
43:39
it's like the fall and from paradise you can't really go back in that case
43:44
what is it that exile affords you that wouldn't be the case for somebody who was who always stayed at home and
43:51
you know went to the daily routine and i think there what the the the
43:57
essential privilege of exile is to have not just one set of eyes but
44:03
half a dozen each of them corresponding to the places you've been and therefore instead of looking at an experience as a single unitary thing
44:10
it's it's always got at least two aspects i mean the aspect of the person who's looking at it and has
44:16
always seen it okay looking at it now and seeing it now and then as you're looking at it now you
44:22
could remember uh what it would have been like to look at something similar in that other place from which you came
44:28
so there's so you can bring the two experiences together and there's always a kind of a a doubleness to that uh to that
44:34
experience and the more places you've been the more displacements you've
44:39
gone through as every exile does because every situation is in you and you start out each day and you
44:45
the more experience seems to be multiple and complex and and composite and interesting for that reason
44:51
[Music]
45:01
good evening tonight we start with an exclusive report from inside the palestinian refugee camp of borges
45:07
albaragne in west beirut it's been under siege since the end of october and women and girls have to run
45:14
a daily gauntlet of sniper fire to get food and medical supplies
45:19
the three main camps are sabra and chatilla where palestinians were massacred by right-wing christian
45:24
militias after the israeli invasion in 1982 and further down in the southern suburbs of
45:30
beirut bourgeoisie covering about a square mile it's been held under siege for over five
45:36
months by amal militiamen and shiite muslims in the lebanese army who don't want the plo to re-establish a
45:43
power base in lebanon like other palestinian refugee camps was
45:49
built by people who fled the new state of israel in 1948 it's always been a sort of state within
45:55
a state itself you become palestinians you become incapable really of reacting further
46:01
you just take it in and and say that's where we are but i think it it encourages me and i i
46:07
think in most palestinians who who have watched or heard about this uh the will to resist further i mean that
46:14
you know we mustn't let this something simply take place and these people be faced we must continue to to fight and uh and
46:22
to struggle towards something that will take us out of this and that bourgeoisney and
46:30
these catastrophes in our histories have to end up somewhere that isn't just another catastrophe
46:37
above all else they know the cost of food that comes from the outside cannot be counted in lebanese pounds it
46:44
is paid for in blood an 18 year old victim of the death passage having paid for bread with her
46:49
life well i think i think to a large degree it is their fault i mean i have no doubt that it's the case that the palestinians
46:56
fault is that they exist and wherever they exist whether they exist in former palestine
47:02
now israel occupied territories jordan syria lebanon egypt and elsewhere
47:08
they are a reminder because they are extremely politically conscious they are people who are simply
47:14
not going to go back on their national demand which is self-determination of a society in a
47:21
place of their own so that by their very existence which is their fault
47:26
technically speaking they are a provocation uh to all the societies in all the
47:32
states in the region and and in the world elsewhere uh who have tried to
47:37
eliminate them or say that these people should be settled elsewhere they should give up on this now we now have israel
47:42
we now have lebanon we are now of jordan let's not have another uh state so the stubborn resistance of
47:48
the palestinian to say no i i mean i'm i'm the one who was driven off the land and dispossessed and dislocated
47:54
uh and just that very fact to say that you're a palestinian today in lebanon or elsewhere is really to incur
48:00
the wrath of uh of uh of your host or whoever thinks of you as a problem uh and i
think it's as simple as that
this is not a war to prevent yasin arafat or the plo from establishing a base
this is a war to exterminate the palestinian national identity it's as simple as that
The Violence Continues
48:18
on the day the talk was supposed to be of peace the violence continued with renewed fury
48:24
the israelis had moved hundreds of additional soldiers and policemen into sensitive areas in an attempt to keep the lid on the
48:30
uprising whilst mr schultz was starting his peace mission they failed they particularly wanted to
48:37
keep jerusalem quiet whilst mr schultz was in the capital that failed too in this incident border
48:43
police clashed with a group of american tourists who berated them for roughing up a passing palestinian youth
48:51
the border police responsible for some of the worst excesses in a lengthening catalogue of israeli brutality
48:57
displayed little regard for the tourists protests they gassed them in hebron with feelings
49:05
running high at the funeral of a man who died of asphyxiation in a cloud of gas earlier in the day
49:10
the soldiers moved in to break up the funeral procession when gas failed to do that live
49:16
ammunition was used and there was fresh evidence that
49:21
despite assurances that they've been given orders to the contrary israeli forces are still meeting out their own summary
49:28
justice this youth sampled it just north of jerusalem
49:33
and outside nablus one of the worst cases of brutality yet witnessed
49:39
the youths had been throwing stones they were caught according to the soldiers orders they
49:44
should have been arrested and detained in fact the soldiers spent 40 minutes systematically beating the youths
49:51
until they'd broken their arms palestinians say this is happening with increasing frequency
49:58
what do these the events of the last few months mean to you i mean i i sensed there first of all
50:03
as one of the people in gaza said that fear has been forbidden i mean nobody
50:08
seems to be afraid of armed israelis and the subsequent beatings and the brutality that have
50:13
been on the screen has not deterred palestinians from a rather disciplined and intelligent
50:20
mass action of one sort or another i mean you know throwing stones are only part of it the other is just endlessly disrupting the
50:26
the occupation in one way or another so that they never know what's coming next and they can never sort of rest assured that they've got control of
50:33
the territory so there's that for us for me i mean as a palestinian is a tremendous amount of attention now focused on the
50:39
palestinians who they are what they're doing etc whereas we had always been kind of secondary and shadowy figures we still
50:44
are to a certain degree most people don't know who i mean they're faceless people but still there's some sense in which you know somebody like myself
50:51
is now called upon frequently to talk about this to express to explain to interpret in a way that hadn't been true before
50:57
there's a there's a kind of heroism here which is which has communicated itself to us all so everybody feels he's willing to
51:03
he or she is willing to make sacrifices shortly before the uprising began saeed
51:10
accepted an invitation to lecture at birzeit university in the israeli-occupied west bank
51:17
i was prepared to go we were all going i was going with my wife and two children we had reserved
51:22
seats on british airways to london and then london to tel aviv and about 10 days ago i i started to get
51:30
signals that i better not come and then three four days ago in
51:36
in mid-march i got a clipping sent to me from davar which is an israeli newspaper
51:41
in which it was suggested that by the prime minister's office that should i appear at the airport i would not be admitted
51:48
so in in in the circumstances it seemed to me rather quixotic to to try because it would
51:56
probably mean you know being sent back so i just didn't but it was it was it was a blow because
52:02
we had looked forward to it and i had wanted my children who have never been there to see it i particularly wanted my
52:07
son who was named after my father to go to the school where i my father both once and george's and see
52:13
his his grandfather's name on the first 11 for cricket and and uh and football you know in 1906 or
52:22
whatever it was but it didn't work out maybe we'll go some later date but it doesn't look too probable now
Exile
52:45
exile the facts of my birth are so distant and strange as to be
52:52
about someone i've heard of rather than someone i know nazareth
52:57
my mother's town jerusalem my father's pictures i see of these places today
53:05
display the same produce presented in the same carelessly plentiful way in the same
53:11
rough wooden cases the same people walk by looking at the same posters and trinkets
53:18
concealing the same secrets searching for the same profits pleasures and goals
53:23
the same as what there's little that i can truly remember about jerusalem and nazareth little that
53:30
is specific little that has the irreducible durability of tactile visual or auditory memories that concede
53:38
nothing to time little that is not confused with pictures i have seen or scenes i've glimpsed elsewhere in the
53:45
arab world palestine is exile dispossession
53:51
the inaccurate memories of one place slipping into vague memories of another
53:56
the story of palestine cannot be told smoothly instead the past like the present
54:04
offers only occurrences and coincidences random
No comments:
Post a Comment