Edward Said on the Prospects of Peace in Palestine and Israel

J. LeBlanc

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137008589
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

John Randolph LeBlanc examines the political oeuvre of critic and activist Edward Said and finds that Said preferred "reconciliation" to segregation in Palestine/Israel. LeBlanc argues that Said's criticism speaks to the importance of negotiating the troubling, proximate, and unsettling presence of our most perplexing others.

Chapter 1

Democratic Aspirations, Democratic Ambiguities

Introduction

Bill Ashcroft articulates the basic difficulty for Said’s work on Palestine/Israel: both “ordinary Israelis and Palestinians are locked into a structure of representations,” he writes, “a binary structure of alterity that originated before the establishment of Israel.”¹ Edward Said’s response, according to Ashcroft, should be seen as a form of “postcolonial transformation” that is, as the “disruption of this binary structure of representation,” accompanied by “a refusal to be located.”² In his work on Palestine/Israel, Edward Said lived a democratic aspiration from the in-between position of the postcolonial.³ As such, he serves as a representative figure for contemporary discussions of democratic practices. There is deep ambiguity in his embrace of the term “democratic” that derives not only from his experience as an articulator of Palestinian experience, long the object of the nondemocratic practices of democratic governments, but also because of his peculiar position as a postcolonial voice speaking from the metropole. He resisted the label “postcolonial” for himself, but he often characterized the Palestine/Israel question as a unique kind of postcolonial situation, so his political work situates him in what might be called a postcolonial space. While he spoke from this space, from that self-claiming position that his pioneering work Orientalism made possible,⁴ he nonetheless sought to move beyond it to an honest engagement with others.

The link between his postcolonial position and his democratic aspirations may be found in the oppositional mode of his voice. He relished speaking, as he put it, “contrapuntally,” that is, from a perspective that takes account of the imperialist dimension of a situation or text and also attends to resistances to it. If the postcolonial figure not only claims a voice, but also demands a place to speak, a democratic environment presumably would facilitate those possibilities. Leela Gandhi, for instance, hoped for the postcolonial project that “it acquire the capacity to facilitate a democratic colloquium between the antagonistic inheritors of the colonial aftermath.”⁵ For his part and our purposes, Said’s understanding of the democratic consists of both what he called a critical democratic humanist perspective and the generation of a facilitative space in which multiple perspectives can be articulated, contested, worked through, and, finally, lived.

Claiming and keeping the democratic affiliation was not easy. Said spoke of the displacement and dispossession of Palestinians to openly hostile audiences who either denied the existence of his people or labeled them “terrorists” and “extremists.” Adding to his difficulty, these audiences were also openly liberal and democratic—and still claim to be. If Said wanted to demonstrate and encourage the democratic character of the Palestinian movement, he would have to do so by confronting Israel, “the only democracy in the Middle East,” and its patron, the United States.⁶ True to a postcolonial ethos, Said used their language before and against its authors in his political and critical work. He deployed the language of democracy and its liberal commitments in an effort to bring in to view a people whom democracies had tried to make disappear, to render invisible. Further, he spoke as a Palestinian to a people who had resisted those democratic (read, “colonialist”) efforts and, despite these Palestinian experiences with people calling themselves democrats and liberals, he held out to Palestinians what he thought would be the fruits of democratic commitments. So, as would be the case with any person situated “in-between,” Said shared with his audiences the assumption that the generation of a democratic environment and a democratic ethos were desirable ends. As a Palestinian, he could not accept wholly the versions offered by to him by Israel and the United States. He remained suspicious of the universal, even salvific, connotations taken on by the term, but he nonetheless deployed the term “democratic” as code for liberation, for the freeing of human(e) possibilities, both Palestinian and Israeli.

From his place in the metropole, Said knew that democracy, when exported from the West, comes with requirements: particular assumptions, particular kinds of institutions, and the like that are not only alien but may in fact be hostile to local customs, traditions, and expectations.⁷ They are the familiar requirements (elections, representative government, etc.) that are expected of any so-called democratic regime and those expectations are often imposed from the West. However, the difficulties in how committed democracies are to those requirements reveal themselves when, for example, the Muslim Brotherhood wins a democratic election in Egypt or, more to the point, when Hamas wins a democratic election in Gaza. Especially in the latter case, we have democratic institutions (elections) functioning to ends not considered democratic by the West.⁸ Setting aside for the moment the deeply problematic assumption that the West is the arbiter of what is and is not democratic, the least that can be gleaned from the case of Hamas is that, by the logic of the democratic West, institutional arrangements are insufficient measures of how democratic an environment may be. The democratic, then, remains an idea, a theory, and as such may take different forms in different environs. In his influential essay “Traveling Theory,” Said demonstrated how theories are transformed as they move in time and space from the environments in which they are initially articulated. On this analysis, as “the democratic” travels to non-Western settings, the term comes with postcolonial baggage deployed by the West in its mission to transform “hostile” or “alien” environments into something more agreeable and meeting appropriate resistance. So the democratic aspiration cannot be unproblematic for Said.

Negotiating the doubleness of the democratic was essential for Said because his own political commitment to the cause of Palestinian autonomy was built on what he called the democratic character of the movement.⁹ The representational character of Said’s work is profoundly political, turning as it does on his having to work between, on the one hand, a raising of voices hitherto silenced—like the Palestinian—which enlarges the polis and forces a rethinking of its terms and, on the other hand, the post–Cold War political reality in which the discourse of democracy becomes a dangerously hegemonic presence frequently failing to live up to its own ideals. In Said’s thought, then, we have “democracy” or “the democratic” functioning as both a caution and a possibility. It is cautionary when functioning as an ideology with a requisite set of institutions and acceptable outcomes—with colonialist and imperialist baggage readily visible and the use of colonialist and imperialist methods a seeming inevitability. It is a possibility when considered as a set of practices not wed to a particular ideology or set of institutions, allowing for trial and error, for mistakes to be made and overcome as a community works out what the democratic means in a particular setting.

What kinds of practices and who decides? Most often in Said, democratic practices find their source in liberal commitments but, as we will see, the universalizing aspirations of liberalism don’t easily fit with the specificity of the “demos” suggested by the term democratic.¹⁰ Thus the question posed by Said’s use of “the democratic”—and the principal focus of this chapter—is whether the distinction between “the democratic” as ideological and prescriptive and “the democratic” as practice and descriptive can yield practices more useful than an idea burdened by its double connotation as a site of both liberation and oppression.

In his last work, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Said argued for a democratic form of criticism to act as mediator between a world attuned to postcolonial realities (voices hitherto silenced) on the one hand and the realities of the world after the end of the Cold War (a nearly hegemonic superpower) on the other.¹¹ His characterization of democratic criticism is telling as to his understanding of the democratic. It would be a mistake to reduce his conception of the democratic to a set of critical practices, but, as we will see, they are illustrative of his sense of what constitutes a democratic ethos and suggest the character of his conception of the democratic. In the introduction to his collection of political essays entitled The Politics of Dispossession, Said described the character of the Palestinian movement as nonexclusivist, secular, democratic, tolerant, and “generally progressive.”¹² This set of ideas bespeaks a general openness to fruitful contact with otherness and a requisite courage in that endeavor that characterize his understanding of the democratic in general. In End of the Peace Process, he invokes compassion, human sympathy, and the obligation to “recoil from the notion of killing for ethnic, religious, or nationalist reasons,”¹³ as part of the democratic ethos.

While we might characterize them as humane—and not without controversy—there is nothing intrinsically democratic about these values. But Said must be counted among those who argue that the democratic is decidedly and necessarily concerned with the human, that is, the ethical. We must and will engage the argument of Chantal Mouffe that this concern with ethics risks taking the very real teeth out of our conception of what is political. But it may be that the foundations that the democratic has must not be political in the sense in which we use the term. Democratic politics requires self-rule and self-rule requires, first, the space to be a self among others and, second, the ability to rule oneself. Implicit in Said’s understanding of the democratic is that, if it is not to fall victim to the tendencies ascribed to it since Plato or to being discredited by the actions of contemporary democracies, learning to conduct oneself as a member of a community, including sharing space with one’s others, is prerequisite to any form of democratic politics. That is, as in the term itself, the conditions amenable to the democratic must come before a politics we can call democratic. The contemporary world is evidence enough that democracy as a set of institutions or even institutionalized practices cannot be saved from the tyranny of its own impulses.

The democratic as we find it in Said is not merely the modern conception of rule by the people through a given set of institutions.¹⁴ Rather, it is a conception influenced, while not being overrun, by an Aristotelian conception of politics wherein people must be capable of ruling themselves—as human beings—before they can speak of, let alone practice, democracy. It is in this sense that Said’s is an ethical conception, a pre-political conception of self-rule, a capacity for living together that is a prerequisite to politics. The democratic, then, is not a form of government or a liberal list of human rights any more than it is reducible to activities like campaigning or voting or contributing to a super-PAC. Rather, as we will see, it is an orientation to the facts and experiences of the political world. It is an openness to a variety of constructions of intellectual, cultural, and political phenomena that is (self-) critical, oppositional, and, above all, suspicious of settled certainty—of ideas or institutions.

Democratic Baggage

“We are a nationalist movement for democratic rights,” Edward Said told an interviewer in 1993, “in a part of the world where there is no democracy.”¹⁵ Said’s repeated invocation of democracy and the democratic in the cause of Palestinian liberation is striking. He is not unmindful of the power of these particular words; they bring promises of individual freedom and free and open institutions, but they also connote Western imperialism and support for Israel. It would be easy to doubt Said’s sincerity in using the democratic in his analyses and assessments of the prospects for Palestinians in particular and the Middle East in general. There is, after all, an undeniable utility to the usage. Said is aware that the term and all its peripherals are familiar and comforting to his Western audiences. The term can become the vehicle by which an unpopular set of arguments (e. g., the basics of Said’s political fight for Palestinian rights) are brought into serious conversation in a Western world not used to reflecting seriously on these matters. Still, it would be unfair to charge Said with disingenuousness in his use of democracy and the democratic, for they are a persistent touchstone in his political analyses across time and circumstance.

In his own political work, the democratic helps Said situate the Palestinian movement in the context of other liberation movements. An inheritance from the West during the World Wars, the democratic became part of the language of liberation, a discursive political position it maintains. It is a mantra whose utterance even now is used to justify military actions—including selective unilateral superpower intervention—and it is a flag the flying of which lends nearly instant credibility to resistance movements, at least from the perspective of the West.¹⁶ While Marxist terminology had been the preference of “Third World” liberation movements—including the Palestinian—the use of that language now, as then, puts a movement at odds with the West. Consequently, the democratic emerged as the post–Cold War choice. To align a liberation movement with the democratic is to make two claims to largely Western audiences. First, “the people” want self-determination in order to be at liberty to govern themselves. Second, this aspiration for democratic self-determination means (to the outside world) that “the people” are of sufficient political self-awareness and “maturity” so their liberation should be supported and, generally, seen as a good thing. These assumptions and the way they are greeted are run through with paternalism but, as Said’s work shows, they are clearly important to furthering liberatory possibilities.¹⁷ Of interest to us in the present case is that these two assumptions—problematic as they are—have largely been missing from the representation of the Palestinians in the West. In part, at least, Said’s invocation of the democratic was a deliberate counter to the misrepresentation of Palestinians.

Said’s linking of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination to liberation movements through the use of the democratic is not without difficulties, specifically its vulnerability to the exclusivist assumptions of nationalism, suggesting that we have not ventured so far from the Greek origins of the idea as we might surmise.¹⁸ Democracy seems not to be separated from the idea o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Chapter 1  Democratic Aspirations, Democratic Ambiguities
• Chapter 2  Unsettling Attachments and Unsettled Places
• Chapter 3  Separation and the “Exile as Potentate”
• Chapter 4  The “Exile as Traveler”: Exodus and Reconciliation
• Chapter 5  Articulating Presence, Narrating Detachment
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index