5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
History has no mercy, April 26, 2006
Edward W. Said's basic principles are that 'human beings make history' and that 'reliable information is the greatest enemy of oppression and secret justice.'
His comments written between 2000 and 2003 are hammerings on the same nails: the Israel-Palestine conflict, the US state of the union and the Arab world.
For the Israel-Palestine conflict he sees no military solution. He castigates relentlessly Israel's discriminatory policies against the native Palestinians, based on religious and ethnic grounds. Its policies forbid native people to own or keep land. It violates basic human rights by killing civilians and stone-throwers. But, he also condemns severily suicide-bombings.
His analysis of the Oslo and Camp David agreements, as well as the roadmap, shows that they are disastrous for the Palestinians. However, his own solution - one secular state of jews and Palestinians - will never be accepted, because demographic trends favour one party.
Said is extremely harsh for the Palestinian authorities, which he calls autocratic, corrupt and hypocrite (only interested in their own power).
Said calls the US a country of lawyers, not laws. Its election system is a 'frightening antiquated, inequitable and undemocratic hodgepodge of rules and regulations designed to keep the poor and the disadvantaged out.' In order to maintain the disproportionalities in wealth (2 % of the population owns 80 % of the total wealth), the majority of the population must be kept under control ideologically through the media and / or be kept out of the system.
The US defense budget attains monstrous heights while 40 million citizens have no health insurance.
For Said, the US is a lethal combination of money and power, controlled by the great corporations and lobbying groups.
The US Middle East policy, e.g. Iraq - an old-fashioned colonial occupation -, is based on the security of Israel and the control of plentiful supplies of inexpensive oil.
The Arab world is in an abysmal state. Most countries wallow in corruption, have undemocratic rules and a fatally flawed education system that still has not faced up to the realities of a secular world. The result is illiteracy, poverty, unemployment, unproductivity, and greater degrees of tyranny and mafia-style rule.
The book ends with a glimmer of hope for an independent Palestinian state.
Said's proud, remarkably free and vehement secular voice will be tragically missed, not only by the Palestinians.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Some last powerful words from Edward, October 22, 2004
This review is from: From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map: Essays (Hardcover)
As the most visible and certainly the most articulate Palestinian in America, the late lamented Dr. Said was a prime target. He mentions a few of the personal attacks in these essays. There was the buffoonery in Commentary trying to prove Said had been lying about his past. . Then there was the hocus pocus of holy horror about Said throwing, along with other Lebanese, a stone into a vast empty space in Israel from Southern Lebanon. Of course, Israel had just spent decades blowing up Lebanese villages and bombing Beirut hideously in 1982 and killing tens of thousands and conducting the hideous Khiyam torture chamber where thousands of Lebanese passed through in almost bestial conditions.
From Israelis, Said justifiably demands a lot. Israelis must realize that the Palestinians under Israeli rule have lived for thirty-seven years where their land massively has been taken away at will and given to the Israeli military or most often Israeli settlers. The settlers live on magisterial estates and steal most of the water while the indigenous inhabitants. Palestinians in large numbers for decades have forced to endure housing expropriation, beatings by Israeli soldiers, arbitrary detention, killings and torture by the racist settlers and soldiers. As Tony Judt observes in his intro to this book, the born again racist Benny Morris now says that major massacres by Israel were the cause of the Palestinian flight in 1948.
Arafat signed the Oslo accords in order to shore up his eroding power base and getting a new power base, that of policing Palestinian population centers for Israel.,. Palestinian land continued to be expropriated. Arafat & co. made little objection to this except when the crude tactics of Netanyahu necessitated a response. The territories were criss-crossed by these new settlements and Jew only roads, which isolated Palestinians into several cantons. This cantonization was essentially the "generous offer" for a state made by Barak in July 2000.
After six weeks of the intifada, the number of Palestinians killed, as Clinton sent Israel its largest helicopter shipment in a decade to use on Palestinian apartment buildings, was about 200 and the number of Israelis was fourteen, about half of them soldiers. "Collective Punishment" of Palestinians accelerated greatly, endless curfews were imposed, houses were blown up more wantonly than before. In October 2001, Israeli cabinet minister Rehavan Ze'evi, a racist thug, was killed in retaliation for the killing of Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) leader two months earlier. Sharon retaliated by, engaging in "targeted assassination" of five more Palestinian leaders and killed twenty-one civilians and injured 160. He notes that the suicide bombings that occurred around December 1 2001 were terrible but should be seen within the context of the assassination of the Hamas leader Mahmoud Abu Hanoud, the killing of five Palestinian children in Gaza, as well the whole horrible human rights abuses of Israel over the decades.. Sharon has accelerated the humanitarian catastrophe by killing on a greater school and cutting off Palestinians even more so from each other and enclosing their agricultural land, cutting it off from their villages, within the Israeli side of the "wall."
As it is Sharon hopes that as he gallantly sends his tanks and missiles and helicopters against Palestinian children and people, armed with rocks and maybe some machine guns--people who have the right to resist under international law the occupation of their land--eventually the Palestinians will be ground down and accept the complete Judaization of Palestine.. Then as Said writes, he, Sharon, can make a deal to set up a rump "state" full of isolated areas controlled by various Palestinian gangsters. The remnants of the Palestinian authority want restored the situation of the 90's where they had their little fiefdoms and could make tons of money with Palestinian resources and real estate. But on the Palestinian side a secular mass movement has arrived led by Haider Abdel Shafi and Mustafa Barghouti. The Palestine National Initiative is based on participatory democracy, coordinated shipments of food and attempting to provide health care to besieged Palestinian villages. The courage of these people is unbelievable; Said writes about them with great power.
In front of a gathering of American Jews, Said notes, when the right wing zionist Paul Wolfowitz, as a representative of the Bush administration was forced to say a few platitudes about "Palestinian suffering" he was booed off the stage. Palestinians are dehumanized; Israel's assertion that Palestinians it kills are terrorists or unfortunate collateral damage in pursuit of them has had wide and ugly acceptance here. He spends a lot of time denouncing the Arab states for their ignorance of Israel. He notes that West originally set up many of these Arab regimes and in particular the United States props up the most brutal of them.
On Iraq, he notes that the great suffering at the hands of the Iraqi people since the Gulf War, with their infrastructure for basic living destroyed, has been largely ignored. Iraqis are a proud people who in spite of Saddam's hideous human rights record, led the Arab world in education and technology before 1990. What right does the U.S, asks Said, have to decide to remove Saddam, when they provided him with so much of the materials to make the weapons that Bush, Cheney & co. have so terrorized the American people with? The Bush regime has used alot of bogus info passed on by Iraqi and Arab exiles who tell the neocons what they want to hear. Said writes that Cheney actually used the authority, of Fouad Ajami to assert that Iraqis would welcome Americans would ticker tape parades and flowers and stuff. Of course, Ajami has spent most of his career and life in the U.S. and really can't know what genuine Iraqis are thinking...Kanan Makiya is another such fraud; Said gives him rough treatment in another essay. Said notes that instead of chosing an Arab/Muslim expert with intimate knowledge of the peculiarities and complexities of Iraq and the region, to head the drawing up Iraq's new constitution but instead they chose Noah Feldman.
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