The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After Edward Said, Granta, £15 strikingly. Reviewed by Susan Moore When I heard Edward Said's new book had been published, I rushed to Bookmarks to get a copy -only to find they had sold out. As Palestine's second Intifada was gathering pace back in November and the Israeli war machine was increasing its deathly response, I was far from the only activist who wanted to see what he had to say. Finally getting my hands on the book a couple of weeks later and reading it rapidly I was far from disappointed.
This volume of essays published in the Arab press between May 1995 and Tanuary 1999 reflects both the strengths and weaknesses of their author's political positions.
His sharp critique of the Arafat leadership and the corruption at the heart of. the Palestinian Authority is built up through a catalogue tions. of examples told in incisive language. This viewpoint is one that desperately needs a wider support if the struggle for self-determination for the Palestinian people is to advance.
Aspects that were new to me included the way that the West Bank is of far more strategic importance to the Israelis than Gaza. While I was conscious that the period since Oslo had meant. a deterioration in the conditions of the Palestinians in the Territories, the detail in London 1995, £6.99) he which Said deals with this brings the reality home very is a sell out of Palestine national interests. Also noteworthy is his insistence that the Palestinians must under- has now established a stand the effects of the Holocaust on Jews - and on the need to differentiate sion agents, spies and between Zionism and the Jews. Nor does he fall into tribal organisation"... the trap, while criticising the strategy of Hammas, of failing to understand what its appeal can be particularly sive network of about amongst the youth.
My favourite essay is probably the one where he goes prospective seekers of to visit his son "On visiting Wadie", in which similar points made in the other pieces are recounted Arafat to get projects through the interaction almost doubles." approved, the number between individuals he makes live on the page..
As Saleh Jaber charts, in a review of two of Said's previous books in International Viewpoint in March 1996, it was the Washington agreement signed between Israel and the PLO in September 1993 which led to a sharp radicalisation in Said's posiBefore that time Said, was extremely thin. best known for his academic work as the author of books such as Culture and Imperialism. From 1977-91 he was a member of the Palestine National Council, albeit a not uncritical one. But it was only after he left the Council that he made public the basis of his disagreements.
In Said's first book after the 1993 agreement, Peace and Its Discontents: Gaza -Jericho 1993-1995 (Vintage, explains that the agreement Writing of Arafat's "Vichy government" he argues "He formidable network of hangers-on, sycophants, commisinformers through Fateh, his non-ideological and "his employees plus their dependants give him an impres- detailed territorial debates.
But to imply that these 350,000 dependants. If you shortcomings are at the root add to that the number of of the leadership's bankruptcy is more probemployment, businessmen lematic. and unscrupulous specula- This reluctance to deal tors who must go through with the core problem about Arafat and Fateh is less surprising when looked at in the context of Said's own This is accurate and vivid history. In 1982 after the material, but its impact, and debacle in Beirut, he wrote a piece in the New York that of companion descriptions in "The End of the Times entitled " Solidly Peace Process" are undercut behind Arafat" in which he argues that though Arafat's to some extent by the weakness of what follows. Said's leadership was "endlessly problematic". "he was attempts to explain why the Fateh leadership and Arafat always open and personally in particular have ended up incorruptible" and that creating Bantustans are "his commitment to his people and cause had no limits On page after page of both It certainly seems from the books, he focuses on Arafat tone of what he has written "technical incompetence" subsequent to 1993 that part rather than trying to analyse of Said's failure to address where the political strategy the substantive errors of he rightly criticises comes strategy stem from the fact that today he tends to perHe points out the astound- sonalise the problem as being down to the individing fact that the PLO has gone into negotiations with ual defects of Arafat and his Israel without their own cronies. In a number of places in maps - particularly given "The End of the Peace. that these exchanges involve need 10 to 20 times more Arafat's collaboration with imperialism flows from more than just personal incompetence Process" Said touches on the context of globalisation which has led to the multiplicity of pacification processes over recent years: not just in the Middle East but in Ireland, in Central America and elsewhere.
In the Introduction, for example, he says "..one of the intended effects of Osio, in effect to depoliticise Palestinian society and set it squarely within the main current of American-style globalisation, where the market is king, everything else irrelevant or marginal."
But the promise of this early introduction is not followed through elsewhere. The next time he deals with the global economy it is to focus on the extent to which the independent media has become more constrained -a true enough statement but not the central problem.
Nor is the problem only analytical - Said is also short on solutions. In the conclusion of "Modernity, Information and Governance", Said poses the problem as follows.
«There is no other way of However the authors put achieving the minimum goals of a decent live without also translating ourselves from a primitive to a modern condition in which for the first time our leaders. are directly accountable to the people". Of course he is completely right that democratic accountability would be an enormous step forward for the Palestinian struggle. But why should their horizons be confined to that of minimum goals?
In "Reflections on the role of the Private Sector", he points out that "the Palestinian Authority - like other such bodies in the Third World - has decided that its allies are businessmen and its enemies are nongovernmental organisations i.e. the institutions that make possible a genuine civil society. It is in opposing this situation that efforts should be placed, and not in unrestrained private investment.
"In other words the real requirements for development is not simply capital but also an awakened social consciousness and a serious interest in national civil institutions".