For me, this concept of irreconcilability has always been essential as a way of characterizing the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians. No matter what you say or what you do, you’re dealing with two totally irreconcilable experiences: one premised on the nonexistence of the other, in the case of the Israelis; and in the case of the Palestinians, they are unable to forget, or to let go of what was destroyed. That’s one of the reasons why I’ve taken such a dim view of the whole question of peace as it is being negotiated, which for me seems to negate a quintessential and irreconcilable opposition at the very core of it.
And is this irreconcilability expressed in the putative reconcilation of the Oslo peace process?
Yes, and the fundamental denial of Palestinian rights will continue. While the Israelis continue to circumvent the Oslo agreement, they will attempt to sweeten it. Instead of five percent of the land, they will give them forty percent. There’s no problem giving them more land as it gives them more municipal problems. But it is also clear that security, that borders, that real economic independence will be denied to the Palestinians. As long as the disparity of power is so great between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the Palestinians will continue to suffer, no matter what.
The situation of Palestinians inside Israel is also being exacerbated all the time. There is the problem about what do you do about these basically disenfranchised citizens. There is the problem of movement, the problem of development in the Occupied Territories, the problem of economic stagnation, the problem of unemployment, the problem with refugees. All these will remain unaddressed. No matter what is fed into the economy from the World Bank and from donor nations, the economy still isn’t going to fly. We’re talking about four and a half to five million refugees that the Israelis under no circumstances are going to take back. Palestinians in Lebanon are still disenfranchised. Of course, arrangements will be made as part of the final status negotiations, even to take care of a few refugees here and there. But basically the problem—an unfulfilled nationalism—will remain unsettled.
This unfulfilled nationalism is the important point, which is very much in touch with and fed to a certain degree by civil, social, and economic problems in the various Arab countries. The problems of democracy, the problems of freedom of expression, the problems of the nongovernmental organizations, which is a big issue in Egypt, the problem of press laws in Jordan and Egypt suggest to me a kind of volatility, which the peace process is simply putting off. It’s like putting a finger in a dike. These problems will come back, simply because the pathologies of power, as Eqbal Ahmad called them, in these countries are being consolidated by the peace process. They are not being challenged.
Consider a country like Egypt, where the army is the largest single employer. What happens after the absorptive power of the army ends? How long can they continue to absorb arms that they don’t use? How long can the army and the tiny crust at the top of the financial and economic managers contain such a situation? Huge percentages of the population in a city like Cairo, which has grown six times its original size, remain unemployed, unhoused, unprovided for with basic resources. How long can they continue to hold on? The only way to think of these issues is not piecemeal, that is to say—we’ll deal with the Palestinian issue, we’ll deal with the Syrian issue, we’ll deal with the Lebanese issue, we’ll solve that in a week—you’ve got to take a holistic view because they are all interconnected.
The Arab world, despite what appears to be the failure of Arab nationalism, is still a united world in many ways. They are all connected by electronic communication, by a common language, by travel, by traditions, by religion, and so forth. These are going to be affected. The current system has failed miserably. Production has declined, economic development has declined, illiteracy is stunningly on the rise. The illiteracy rate in countries like Egypt is now approaching fifty percent, a retreat from what had been the earlier achievements of the Egyptian revolution. Unemployment is going up all the time. Above all, the natural resources of the Arab world, which are principally oil, are being depleted. The price of oil has gone down to one third of what it was in the 1970s, if not more. And the spending patterns and the economic plans that have been made are so stupidly and so badly organized that these countries, including Saudi Arabia, are confronting enormous economic obstacles. That’s what we’re facing, not the development of the Middle Eastern common market that Clinton and Peres and others talk about. Whom would that market serve? Large numbers of people are not going to be affected by it. In Jordan, they’re building fifteen new five-star hotels. But they are completely empty. Who are these for? The country is in a state of economic ruin.
Yet despite the irreconcilable nature of the conflict there has been a growing recognition by you and others that the binational solution of an Israeli-Palestinian state is the only legitimate, feasible, and above all just solution for the Palestinians and the Israelis. When and how did you arrive at this conclusion of the binational state? And how would you relate this to the other vision of the Middle East that you have been detailing?
Basically, there are two things. First, the principle of separation and partition has governed Middle Eastern politics since the end of World War II until the present and including the peace process. Largely through the work of my own students who have been interested in partition, like Joe Cleary who worked on partition in Palestine, Ireland, and the Indian subcontinent, I realized that partition hasn’t worked. The problems haven’t gone away in any of these places. On the ground, people are living together in unequal and unfair conditions. The existential reality is that people still live together despite the schemes of partition and separation. The question is can they live together in equality and in a system that is more acceptable than apartheid? This is the Palestinian predicament.
But elsewhere in the Arab world, the whole notion of homogeneous states—the Egyptian state, the Syrian state, the Jordanian state—is an expression of a flawed concept of nationalism. It simply doesn’t answer to the realities of migrant and refugee populations, and of minorities, whether it’s the Kurds, the Shias, the Christians, or the Palestinians. There are different kinds of minorities. The notion of an Egyptian state for the Egyptians, a Jewish state for the Jews, simply flies in the face of reality. What we require is a rethinking of the present in terms of coexistence and porous borders. We can find other models from the past other than the separationist, partition model. If you look at the history of Andalusia and of Palestine as multicultural histories, you’ll find that the models are not simply nationalist and homogeneous, but really multicultural, pluricultural, and plurireligious. Even under the Ottoman empire, communities were allowed to live in coexistence with other communities. Of course, there were inequities. But they lived without this ridiculous notion that every millet has to have its own state. They lived as national communities. Israel hasn’t been able to do that for the Arabs. Arabs in Israel have never been recognized as a national community. Similarly, in Egypt the Copts have never been recognized as a national community. I’m not saying that one should aggravate sectarian sentiment. I’m simply saying that the model of separation, the model of partition, isn’t working.
Is there some other way that one could formulate or conceive of a future that goes beyond those kinds of aggravated sectarianisms? The Lebanese example is a perfect one: fifteen years of civil war fought on sectarian grounds. The war was concluded with the peace of Taif in 1990. Lebanon is still sectarian because the system of government hasn’t evolved. There is a very important intellectual role to be played by the cultural elites, as they have done in Ireland, in Cyprus, in India, and so forth. We haven’t rethought these peculiar partitions and separations in our part of the world.
There is a great reluctance in the Arab world to talk about coexistence with the Israeli Jews. There have been riots in Egypt about this subject, which I think is shameful. I’m not saying that one should normalize with the Israeli government, but there are other forms of norma
lization. You could have relationships with like-minded people on the basis of something other than “you’re a Jew, and I’m a Palestinian” or “I’m an Arab and you’re a Jew.” There are political and class issues that need to be discussed and through those discussions alliances can be made. The hypocrisy of the ruling class is such that they always say that they don’t condone normalization, yet they make peace with Israel. Similarly, Egyptian, Jordanian, and Palestinian intellectuals say they don’t want normalization, yet they want to cooperate with Israelis on the basis of who can help them. Those positions seem to me absolutely foolish because there are other constituencies in these countries with whom they have much more in common, like university students, intellectuals, writers, musicians, labor unions, and minorities. Think of the Sephardic minority, the Mizrahim in Israel. Nobody has ever tried to deal with them. What I’m advocating is an attempt to find out about the other. Consider that in the Arab world today there isn’t a single university that has a department of Israeli or Hebrew studies. It’s not taught. There are about sixty research institutes on the West Bank, none of which are dedicated to the study of Israeli society. Yet how many institutes in Israel are devoted to the study of Arab society? Dozens and dozens. We keep ourselves in a state of inequality and refuse to look beyond an immediate nationalism. We say that all Israelis are really in the end extensions of Netanyahu and Barak, yet we refuse to consider the complexity of what is offered.
Rosemary Sayyigh uses a phrase “too many enemies.” And we’ve had a lot of enemies. Despite that, we’ve been very poorly led, which I suppose is our fault. But we’ve never had the leadership that really understood what they were up against. We’ve never had a consistent and adequate strategy that has attracted our own people to it. We have never been able to mobilize our people properly. Even at the height of the so-called militant phase, during the intifada or before it, during the Amman period and up to and including 1982, only a small percentage of Palestinians was involved in the Palestinian effort. A lot of talents were and are simply untapped.
The fact that we’ve never really had a center, or sovereignty anyplace is part of our predicament. I don’t think we’ve ever had, as the Zionists always did, a strategic partner. In the first place they had the British Empire; after 1948 they had the Americans. We’ve never had anything comparable. In today’s unipolar world, it isn’t as if there’s a big choice. That’s why the current leadership is trying to get close to the Americans. The question is how much space is there in the Israeli-American relationship for Palestinians? It’s not a rhetorical question. The answer is very little. But that’s what the leadership has accepted.
The other crucial point is that we’ve never understood the importance of the United States the way the African National Congress (ANC) did, and we’ve never tried to organize a human rights campaign on a mass basis. The leaders and the elites have decided that their best hope was the oligarchies. They chose to attract the interest of the business community, of the State Department, instead of a wider base. That’s the vision that they have of the future, and the proof of that is the kind of state that is being set up now. It’s basically a police state run by an oligarchy. The question is, where is that going to go?
I don’t think we’ve spent enough time trying to involve segments of the Israeli public in our struggle. The ANC from the very beginning announced that it would include whites in its ranks. We’ve never done that. Even now, sympathetic Israelis are not welcome as equal participants in Palestinian institutions on the West Bank and Gaza. They’re never invited. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a form of normalization going on between Israeli academics and Palestinian academics. That’s going on all the time under the auspices of the Ford Foundation. It’s not the same thing, however, as being involved in a militant common front for liberation.
The nature of our enemy is a very complicated one. It’s not as if we’re fighting white settlers in Rhodesia, in South Africa, or in Algeria. These are people whose moral stature, especially after World War II and the Holocaust, is as victims. But I don’t feel that the struggle is by any means over. We have several generations to go. This apartheid peace that they’ve proposed cannot possibly last. It will be conclusive, and it will end with a peace treaty. There will be a final settlement, but it will be a settlement dictated by Israeli and American power rather than by justice or by the real need for self-determination and liberation for the Palestinians. It’s not a peace that will provide for a real coexistence.
Picking up about what you said about the South African struggles, we want to ask you a question about human rights. “Palestine,” you have written, “is today the touchstone case of human rights, not because the argument for it can be made as elegantly simple as the case for South African liberation, but because it cannot be made simple.” Such a stand relies on a recognition of the universal value of human rights, yet in the same essay you detail how Western liberalism has historically been more than willing to compromise its principles when the details become too difficult or embarrassing for the strong on how they treat the weak (de Tocqueville on Algeria, or Spencer on the Irish or Mill on India). Can we have an enforceable scheme of human rights when the powerful constantly patrol the legitimacy of human rights? Is a “new universalism,” as Partha Chaterjee has called for, possible, particularly with the tainted history of the United Nations in the last few years? And can the Western tradition of human rights, based on the sovereignty of the individual before the idea of community rights, be made to respond to the kind of group abuses that we see today?
Well, I think so. The whole point of the kind of work that I try to do, and many others do it as well, is to extend the notion of human rights to cover everybody, not to restrict the notion. I have no patience at all for the argument that is frequently made in my part of the world and further east that human rights is a Western imperial concept. That’s complete nonsense. Torture is torture. Pain is felt just as much in Singapore as it is in Saudi Arabia, as it is in Israel, as it is in France or the United States.
One has to be absolutely vigilant for the kinds of exceptions that you mentioned, the de Tocqueville example. There’s a new book out now on human rights that was reviewed recently by Jeffrey Robinson, where he talks about every notion and every instance of human rights in the world. He doesn’t mention Palestine. If you’re going to talk about human rights as a universal value, then you have to apply it in all cases. That was part of what I was trying to do during the Kosovo episode, to show how inconsistent and how flawed argument was that was made there, that it wasn’t adequate, either to the particular instance of Kosovo or to parallel instances in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, or Israel.
I think also that there is still a major role to be played in the whole question of humanism. Take the American example, historically. It’s all very well to proclaim the eternal values of humanism, but those values always flounder when it comes, for example, to the treatment of Native Americans, to African Americans, to Arab Americans. The only life that is possible for humanism is if it’s revived in the interest of a universal concept. This is especially needed in this country, with its own views and special history of exceptionalism, “manifest destiny,” and patriotism. This notion of American goodness is the sense that “we Americans” fight altruistic wars, the sense that “we” wage campaigns for the good of the other. That has to be demythologized and replaced with a real critique of power. This is implicit in the work of a lot of dissenters in this country, in the modern period, from William Appleman Williams to Gabriel Kolko to Noam Chomsky. We need to discover a new concept of humanism based of a rejuvenated idea of it, drawing also from the older traditions, including the Islamic tradition.
Everyone thinks, for example, that the notion of humanism originated in Italy in the fifteenth century. But George Makdisi has written an important study called The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West. In it, he says that the origin of the modern system of knowledge that we call huma
nism did not originate as Jacob Burckhardt and many others believed it did in Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth century Renaissance, but rather in the Arab colleges, madrasas, mosques and courts of Iraq, Sicily, Egypt, Andalusia, from the eighth century on. Those places formed the traditions and the curricula of legal, theological, as well as secular learning—the so-called studia abadiya—from which European humanists derived many of their ideas not only about learning itself, but also about the environment of learning where disputation, dissent, and argument were the order of the day. Humanism is a much less exclusive Western concept than a lot of people rather proudly think. It exists in India, in the Chinese tradition, in the Islamic tradition.
I think humanism can be squared with a more humane tradition than Western liberalism, which in my opinion is bankrupt. Look at neoliberalism today, whether of the Clinton or the Blair variety. For them, it means globalization, it means the so-called free market economy, which is deepening the socio-economic and even ethnic differences much more than even classical capitalism did. I’m interested in alternatives that take into account the facts of globalization. Today’s world is smaller, and there is a kind of interdependence that really began with imperialism in the nineteenth century when, for the first time, the whole global scene was made into one economic unit. In the face of that, what kind of humanism is possible? This is the most important question to answer today, when individual instances like Palestine or Ireland still cry out for resolution.
What’s the role of the university in renewing this notion of humanism?
The university, at least the American university, is a kind of utopian place, and I would like to preserve it as a place where certain kinds of things are made possible. The idea that the classroom is a place where certain subjects are studied according to prescriptions other than the investigation of knowledge or truth strikes me as a betrayal of academic freedom. With the emergence of fields like ethnic studies, gay and lesbian studies, with the rise of urgent political or identitarian political issues, this has again become an issue. I have very old-fashioned ideas about these sorts of things. I’m someone who has been very politically engaged, but I also have a quite strong belief in the mission of universities in Newman’s sense of the word.