From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map: Essays

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.

On September 25th, 2003, the Palestinian people lost their most outspoken, influential, and, perhaps, only voice in the United States when Edward Wadie Said lost his battle with leukemia. I have, regrettably, only recently discovered Professor Said's work so it would be foolish to think that I could possibly draft a fitting obituary. However, the timing and significance of Said's death cannot be overlooked. Within the last three years of Said's life, the world has witnessed the beginning of the Palestinian al-Aqsa intifada, the attacks of September 11th, 2001, and the subsequent US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. It is in this context that the essays within From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map have been written. From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map is a collection of essays written by Mr. Said for the periodicals Al-Ahram, Al-Hayat, and the London Review of Books. The book is aptly split into three sections: * The Second Intifada Begins, Clinton's Failure * September 11, The War on Terror, the West Bank and Gaza Reinvaded * Israel, Iraq, and the United States Because this book is a collection of essays, the reader enjoys the added benefit of being able to view the tumultuous events of the past three years as a collection of snapshots rather than as one larger portrait. For example, in the essay, "Propaganda and War", Said expresses optimism regarding plans by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) to launch a massive public relations campaign on behalf of the Palestinian people: "I was pleased to learn from ADC president Ziad Asali that his organization is about to embark on an unprecedented public information campaign in the mass media to redress the balance and present the Palestinians as human beings, as people who have had years and years of military occupation and are still fighting back. This effort has never before been made in the United States: there have been fifty years of silence, which is about to broken." Unfortunately, "Propaganda and War" was published in Al-Hayat on September 9th, 2001, only two days before those plans were surely scrapped. Said's willingness to break with the conventional wisdom on the topic of Palestinian autonomy has made him quite a controversial figure. From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map is no different. While his criticism of US foreign policy and leadership in the War on Terror are certainly no surprise, it is his scathing indictments of Arab and Palestinian leadership that may be most surprising to a Western reader. At a time when many in the Western world are trying to paint the world, and especially the Middle East, as black and white, Said offers a more complex view. As the world wrestles with the legacy of Yasir Arafat, for example, Said complains in November 2001 that Arafat is neither really a terrorist nor a visionary, but is simply an ineffective leader more concerned with his own grip on power than with the plight of his people: "In short, there is no reason at a

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 horribl

Besides his main writing "orientalism", I never touched his book until his death last year when I began to read "the end of peace process".. I began the book with almost total ignorance of this area(in the end, I am neither a Jew nor an arab), but by the time when I finished the book I was totally into both his writing and the stark reality of the crisis palestine people are facing.. then, by this time for me to read these recent essay that continues "the end of peace process", I have already finished more than 10 books of his.. The attraction of his writing is his appeal to universal humanity(that applies to Jews and arabs alike) and also the courage to criticize the terrible role that our goverment are doing in those so called hypocratic peace process that often ignores basic human right to return ,water problem,security,and etc..America is supporting the peace for the jews,but not for the mutual peace for the jews and arabs alike.. The hypocratic peace that our goverment suports is such peace between the master and the slaves(maybe a bit bad anology) or the peace between the occupier British and the occupied Irish; In the fake peace, there's no trouble or violence between the two sides,but it's only one side that enjoyes truly peaceful for the sake of the other; while the latter suffers great deal of painful contradictory peace.. If I found any of antisemitic comment in his book, I would have already trashed his book..Rather, he believes in democracy,secular nation,universal basic human rights for the occupied and the occupiers alike, and his strong logic is based on all these ideals that We americans have struggled to attain and now take them for granted.

I really recommend this book to everybody who wants to expand his information concerning the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Edward Said has some of the most interesting ideas on how to solve this conflict in a just and humane way for both sides, the occupier and the occupied.