Pen and the Sword

This little book is about 170 pages and made up of about five interviews from between 1987 to 1994 with Edward Said, the leading Palestinian intellectual, interviewed by David Barsamian, the producer and host of "Alternative Radio," famous for his collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky. Said discourses on, among other topics, the role of culture in shaping literature, the pro-imperialist inclinations of V.S. Naipaul, the simultaneous anti-imperialist and anti-liberation outlook of Joseph Conrad, why Albert Camus is portrayed as having been an anti-colonialist when he was, in fact, quite the opposite, Western stereotypes about Arabs, why it is possible to have an honest discussion of Israel's flaws in the Israeli media but not in the United States, and the decline of the American left. Occasionally, he gets, well, a bit recondite, but he is often very interesting and I like him very much.But he is at his best when discussing the Palestinian movement and its leadership, Arafat and the PLO, with whom he was on close terms before the 1993 Oslo accords. The thoughts in this book are from when the "peace process" was in its infancy but not much has changed, in spite of all the new agreements and changes of government in Israel. He discuses the PLO leadership's corruption, opportunism, utter ignorance of the U.S., Israel and anything else outside the Arab world, preference for acceptance into the high society of Washington, London and Paris instead of attending to the grassroots struggles of their people. He points to Arafat's resistance to pressures for internal PLO democracy as the reason for his acceptance of the Oslo accords, which gave the PLO control over a portion of the Gaza strip, which has become an ubelievable hellhole as a result of deliberate Israeli policies (Israel's responsibility for its condition is never noted in the U.S. media, as Said notes), so Israel seized at the chance to give some of it to Arafat; and accepted the Jewish settlements in the occupied territories as "legal", allowed Israel to continue building in Jerusalem and expanding "greater Jeruslem" to include all of the central West Bank, expropriating and robbing Palestinians as they go about it, Israeli retaining complete control over the settlements, the Jordan valley, the water and all the other resources, the economic policies, and a veto over all decisions passed by the Palestinian parliament. Arafat's basic duties are to pick up garbage and arrest and punish all persons whom Israel thinks threaten its "security," a very elastic concept, that includes a great many non-violent persons.It is this "limited autonomy" that the PLO leadership has said, and the quite honest and decent persons who repeat everything that they say, will eventually evolve into a genuine Palestinian nation. Of course, as Said says, it will probably evolve into a state, but only in the same sense that the bantustans of apartheid South Africa were a state for its black inhabitants. This has no