The butchery in Gaza and Israel continues to shake consciences. The images of death and destruction are shocking, as is the suffering of women and children trapped in a shrunken and terrifying world. I am no less shaken by the cataclysm that struck my little New York intellectual world.
All things considered, the tear between the pro-Palestine and pro-Israel camps and between the anti-Semites and the anti-Muslims is striking in the same way as the sight of bodies and lives eliminated and ruined by the hatred which infects these two peoples, historically at knives drawn. The left as I know it no longer exists. Young radicals at Columbia University were condemned by their elders. These more traditional leftists are outraged by the support of some of their student activists for Hamas’s terrorist methods.
The two open letters signed by different factions of the Columbia teaching staff deserve particular attention in order to understand to what extent the intelligentsia is divided in the face of the horror unleashed on October 7. Signed by more than a hundred professors, the first supported a letter signed by students who, according to these professors, tried to “recontextualize the events of October 7” as a “military response on the part of a people who endured overwhelming and relentless state violence at the hands of an occupying power for many years.”
Published the next day, the second letter gave the floor to nearly 495 professors, who, although claiming to be aware of the “miserable conditions in Gaza”, wrote this: “We are horrified that anyone would celebrate these monstrous attacks or, as members of the Columbia faculty did so in a recent letter, trying to “recontextualize” them to make them a salvo, a right to resist occupation or military action. »
For a long time, my sympathy has been with the more than 700,000 Palestinians driven from their lands in 1948 by Zionist militiamen — and this despite my visceral identification with the more than 100,000 Jews who survived the Holocaust and were trapped in the “displaced persons” camps. who broke through the British blockade in 1945-1948 to enter Palestine. Today I feel isolated. Those whom I consider my pole stars on the Israel-Palestine dispute, IF Stone and Edward Said, have also been isolated because of their positions.
A brilliant journalist, Stone wrote the masterpiece Underground to Palestine, an essential text for understanding the founding of Israel and its moral justification. Even before the war of “independence” that established the Jewish state in 1948, Stone was already advocating a unitary and “binational” state that would respect two “nations”, Arab and Jewish, and two languages, Arabic and Hebrew, without taking into account a majority that could change over time. A left-wing Jew, Stone suffered all the insults, including that of the “self-hating Jew”.
Said, a great scholar from a bourgeois family, both American and Palestinian, pushed me further in my respect for the demands of his exiled people. An English professor at Columbia, Saïd influenced an entire generation of students through his mastery of modern British literature. I met him in 1977 when I was a student at Columbia and a freelancer for a major daily newspaper which sent me to interview him during his appointment to the Palestinian National Council, a kind of “Parliament in exile,” in his words.
At the time, there was talk of appointing him as the Palestinian representative at the Geneva talks. When Saïd opened the door to his apartment for me, I was surprised to see a magnificent grand piano, black and shiny, because I was unaware of his excellence in music. Cosmopolitan, elegant and Protestant, one could not imagine a spokesperson for the Palestinians more different from the caricature of the bearded, Muslim terrorist.
Over the 26 years during which Saïd published texts in Harper’s Magazine, my admiration has only increased, especially for his independence and insight. As if his powers of concentration on a text like Nostromo, the novel by Joseph Conrad, had been transferred to the Gordian knot of Middle East politics. In retrospect, it is remarkable how right Said was to treat Yasser Arafat’s adherence to the 1993 Oslo Accords and the creation of the Palestinian Authority as a capitulation.
Rather than progress toward a Palestinian state, Said concluded that Oslo was a decoy that would mark “the end of the peace process.” Like IF Stone, his heretical view earned him attacks from his Arab compatriots, supported by American President Bill Clinton, whom Said described “like a twentieth-century Roman emperor leading two vassal kings through rituals of reconciliation and reconciliation.” ‘obedience’.
No agreement on the status of Jerusalem; no curbs on illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza; no recognition of Palestinian sovereignty. What purpose will Oslo have been used for, if not the construction of a weak and corrupt government of seven disconnected islets under Israeli aegis? Arafat ended up banning Said’s books in his stronghold. Said eventually adopted IF Stone’s ideal: “The one-state solution.”
Absurd ? Utopian? No more than the two-state solution, which has become a cynical bait advocated by false tokens. No matter what, Arabs and Jews intermingle demographically — there are already two million Palestinian citizens of Israel. Where are the Stones and Saids these days to take honest accounts? Who should I reach out to across this bloody trench?
John R. MacArthur is editor of Harper’s Magazine. His column returns at the start of each month.