Conversations with Edward W. Said. Interviews by David Barsamian. South End Press. 2003
From page 15
After you visited Israel, you went to Egypt, where you encountered some parochialism. Did that take you by surprise?
No, because I confronted it before. That is to to say, what you notice amongst Palestinians, whether inside Israel or on the West Bank and Gaza, is a sense of isolation. There's no question that they live under the shadow of Israeli power. What is missing is easy and natural contact with the rest of the Arab world. As a Palestinian, you can't get to any place in the Arab world from Israel or the West Bank and Gaza without going through a fairly complicated procedure, which causes you to think three or four times before you do: crossing the border, you need permits, you go through endless customs. I must say, for Palestinians traveling throughout the Arab world - and this is also true of me, and I have an American passport, but the fact that it says on it that I was born in Jerusalem means that I'm always put to one side - you're automatically suspected. So traveling and being in contact with the Arabs in the Arab world for Palestinains is very difficult.
More important even that is that very few Arabs who are not Palestinians come into Palestinian territories, and hardly any at all, practically none, go to Israel. One of the themes - and this is kind of complicated thing to explain, amongst the nationalist and radical intellectuals of most Arab countries, which would include the Gulf people, it certainly includes Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan - has been the opposition to what they called "normalization," tatbee in Arabic, meaning the normalization of life between Israel and, in the case of Jordan and Egypt, Arab states who have made formal peace with Israel. The peace with Egypt is described, as it is with Jordan, as a cold peace. The peace with Egypt is described,a s it is with Jordan, as a cold peace. In other words, ordinary Jordanians or Egyptians, don't go to Israel, have nothing to do with Israelis. Israeli tourists go to Jordan and Egypt and visit the historic sites in buses for short periods of time. But beyond that, there's very little in the way of the kind of intercourse, say, exchanges between universities, learned societies, businesses, and so on, that occur between European countries or neighboring countries otherwise at peace in any other part of the world. One of the reasons for this has been the general refused, as an act of solidarity with Palestinians, of these intellectuals to have anything to do with Israel.
The problem this poses for Palestinians, trying to build institutions, is they are being cut off from the kind of help they can get from Arabs. For example, physicians and other medical professionals from Egypt, Syrian, Lebanon or Jordan could come and assist Palestinians in setting up clinics and hospitals. They could be involved in a whole range of activities from administration to the production of pharmaceuticals. But it doesn't happen because of this stance against normalization. Similarly, university students who read important scholars, journalists, writers, and poets from various Arab countries don't get the opportunity to meet them.
When I now encounter Arabs and go to those Arab countries, I say to them, especially to to the Egyptians, you can go to Palestine. You can go through Israel, because Israel and Egypt are at peace. You can take advantage of that to go to Palestinians and go to their institutions and help them, appearing, speaking, being there for some time, training them. No, they say, we can't possibly allow our passports to be stamped. We won't go to the Israeli embassy and get visas. We won't submit to the humiliation of being examined by Israeli policemen at the border or their barrier.
I find this argument vaguely plausible on one level but really quite cowardly on the othe. It would seem to me that if they took their pride out of it, if they did go through an Israeli checkpoint or barricade or border, they would be doing what other Palestinians do every day and see what it's like. Second, as I keep telling them, by doing that it's not recognizing Israel or giving Israel any credit. On the contrary, it's going through that in order to demonstrate and be with Palestinians and help them. For example, as Palestinians face the Israeli bulldozers as they expropriate land and destroy houses for settlements, it would be great if there were a large number of Egyptians and Jordanians and others who could be there with Palestinians confronting this daily, minute-by-minute threat. And the same in universities. Well-known writers, intellectuals, historians, philosophers, film starts could go, but they say, We don't want to have to request visas from the Israeli consulate in Cairo. I said, You don't even have to do that. You can ask the Palestinian Authority, which has an ambassador in Cairo, to give you an invitation to go to Gaza, and then you can go to the West Bank.
So there are ways of getting around it. It's not so much only parochialism as also a kind of laziness, a kind of sitting back and expecting somebody else to do it. I think that's our greatest enemy, the absence of initiative [my emphasis]. We're always expecting that the Israelis are out there, the Americans, concocting conspiracies, the Ford Foundtion. Many people want to work with these people groups but are afraid to do it publicly. They do it surreptitiously. And in public they express opposition and say, We are going to remain untouched by this. We are not going to normalize. We refuse to have anything to do with imperialism. We refuse to sit down and plan something that could actually help Palestinians and actually deal with Israel, not as a fictional entity but as a real power that is in many ways negatively affecting Arab life.
For me, the great symbol of this is the fact that in no university that I know if in the Arab world - none of these universities are free in any case, they're all highly politicized and there are all kinds of pressures on professors and students, which is quite obvious - but in no important Arab university is there, for example, a department of Israeli studies, nor do people study Hebrew. And this is true even of Palestinian universities, where again, you can understand it is a kind of defense against this great power which has intervened in all of our lives, that we don't want to have anything to do with it. But for me the only salvation is in fact to encounter it head-on, learn the language, as so many Israeli political scientists and sociologists and Orientalists and intelligence people spend time studying Arab society. Why shouldn't we study them? It's a way of getting to know your neighbor, your enemy, if that's what it is, and it's a way of breaking out of the prison which suits the Israelis perfect to have Arabs in, whether Palestinians or others.
...
One of the things that I try to do , in a very uncompromising and quite open way, is to say, We have to break that attitude. We have to break out of our self-constructed mind-forged manacles and look at the rest of the world and deal with it as equals. There's too much defensiveness, too much sense of aggrieved, unfulfilled whatever. This is in part account for the absence of democracy. It's not just the despotism of the rulers, not just the plots if imperialism, it's not just the corrupt regimes, not just the secret police. It's our intellectuals' lack of citizenship and keep insisting on. For myself, since there is little that I can do at this distance, whether in person or through my writing, is to keep making that point. The only way to change a situation is oneself doing it, reading, asking, encountering, breakout of the prison.
From page 23
Daniel Barenboim is a world-famous pianist and conducted who was born in Argentina, grew up as an Israeli. You've had some interesting musdical interactions with him.
We met seven or eight years ago and quite surprisingly we've become close friends. He travels a great deal, as do I. Sometimes our paths have crossed. We've tried to do things. We've had public discussions, not political ones so much, because he's not a politician any more than I am, but we talk about things like music and culture and history. He's very interested as an Israeli or Jewish musician in the work of people like Wagner, who represents you might say, the total negation of Jews but was a great musician. So he's interested in that paradox whereby culture and music work in parallel and create contradictions at the same time. We're doing a book together based on that theme. But he's also very dissatisfied, as I, with the prevailing orthodoxy in his own community. He hasn't lived in Israel recently, and last year refused to do anything with the Israel Philharmonic for the fiftieth anniversary of Israel. He is very much opposition to the occupation of the West Bank. He speaks openly about a Palestinian state. He's a man of courage, an unorthodox personality. Music connects us, but also the facts of biography. He arrived in Palestine, or Tel Aviv, which is where his family lived, roughly about the time that my family was evicted.
We have a very warm and cordial relationship. I arranged recently for him, in fact last week, the first time ever, to play a recital at Bir Zeit, the leading West Bank university. It was a great gesture on his part. Bir Zeit was shut down by the Israelisfor four years during the Intifada. The president had been deported for twenty years, between 1974 and 1994. Only a couple of months ago, a student was killed by Israeli troops near the campus. There's this long history of animosity and hostility between Bir Zeit and the Israelis.
So it was difficult to accept at first the idea of an Israeli coming to play there. But it worked over time, and it was a fantastic success. It was one of the great events of my life, and if I can speak for him, of his life, that he was able to do this and transcend in an act that was purely cultural but also a human act of solidarity and friendship, offering his services, which God knows in any concert hall in the world would be in tremendous demand and are very costly. He's at the very top of the musical profession as a great pianist and a great conductor. He came simply as an individual to play. He brought his own piano with him, since there are no pianos that are any good there, to play a recital for an essentially Palestinian audience, ironically, in the hall in the university called Kamal Nasser Hall, named after a cousin of the president, who has been assassinated in Beirut in 1973. He was a very good friend of mine, and I was there when it happened. The assassination team was led by Ehud Barak, who is today a leader of the Labor Party and was an intelligence commando officer at the time.
All of that gave the evening a very high emotional and I would say cultural resoncnce that was lost on absolutely no one there. Zubin Mehta came, a great friend of Dnaiel's. He's the conducted of the Israel Philharmonic. He's an Indian. He's avidly pro-Israeli. He'd never been to the West Bank. But he came. Tears were streaming down his face. It was an event of considerable important, precisely because it wasn't political in the overt sense. Nobody was trying to make a milling, score a point. It was just a humane gesture, an act of solidarity based on the friendship between myself and Barenboim and a gradually expanding group of Palestinian friends who admire and like him and with whom he likes to be. He's taken the position, I think quite correctly, that if Israel is going to continue to exist it has to to exist in relations of friendship and equality with Arabs and Muslims [my emphasis]. He's desperately anxious to learn Arabic. He's a very unusual, remarkable, advanced case of a prophetic genius. There aren't too many of them around. I hope we can sustain this kind of activity over time.
From page 15
After you visited Israel, you went to Egypt, where you encountered some parochialism. Did that take you by surprise?
No, because I confronted it before. That is to to say, what you notice amongst Palestinians, whether inside Israel or on the West Bank and Gaza, is a sense of isolation. There's no question that they live under the shadow of Israeli power. What is missing is easy and natural contact with the rest of the Arab world. As a Palestinian, you can't get to any place in the Arab world from Israel or the West Bank and Gaza without going through a fairly complicated procedure, which causes you to think three or four times before you do: crossing the border, you need permits, you go through endless customs. I must say, for Palestinians traveling throughout the Arab world - and this is also true of me, and I have an American passport, but the fact that it says on it that I was born in Jerusalem means that I'm always put to one side - you're automatically suspected. So traveling and being in contact with the Arabs in the Arab world for Palestinains is very difficult.
More important even that is that very few Arabs who are not Palestinians come into Palestinian territories, and hardly any at all, practically none, go to Israel. One of the themes - and this is kind of complicated thing to explain, amongst the nationalist and radical intellectuals of most Arab countries, which would include the Gulf people, it certainly includes Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan - has been the opposition to what they called "normalization," tatbee in Arabic, meaning the normalization of life between Israel and, in the case of Jordan and Egypt, Arab states who have made formal peace with Israel. The peace with Egypt is described, as it is with Jordan, as a cold peace. The peace with Egypt is described,a s it is with Jordan, as a cold peace. In other words, ordinary Jordanians or Egyptians, don't go to Israel, have nothing to do with Israelis. Israeli tourists go to Jordan and Egypt and visit the historic sites in buses for short periods of time. But beyond that, there's very little in the way of the kind of intercourse, say, exchanges between universities, learned societies, businesses, and so on, that occur between European countries or neighboring countries otherwise at peace in any other part of the world. One of the reasons for this has been the general refused, as an act of solidarity with Palestinians, of these intellectuals to have anything to do with Israel.
The problem this poses for Palestinians, trying to build institutions, is they are being cut off from the kind of help they can get from Arabs. For example, physicians and other medical professionals from Egypt, Syrian, Lebanon or Jordan could come and assist Palestinians in setting up clinics and hospitals. They could be involved in a whole range of activities from administration to the production of pharmaceuticals. But it doesn't happen because of this stance against normalization. Similarly, university students who read important scholars, journalists, writers, and poets from various Arab countries don't get the opportunity to meet them.
When I now encounter Arabs and go to those Arab countries, I say to them, especially to to the Egyptians, you can go to Palestine. You can go through Israel, because Israel and Egypt are at peace. You can take advantage of that to go to Palestinians and go to their institutions and help them, appearing, speaking, being there for some time, training them. No, they say, we can't possibly allow our passports to be stamped. We won't go to the Israeli embassy and get visas. We won't submit to the humiliation of being examined by Israeli policemen at the border or their barrier.
I find this argument vaguely plausible on one level but really quite cowardly on the othe. It would seem to me that if they took their pride out of it, if they did go through an Israeli checkpoint or barricade or border, they would be doing what other Palestinians do every day and see what it's like. Second, as I keep telling them, by doing that it's not recognizing Israel or giving Israel any credit. On the contrary, it's going through that in order to demonstrate and be with Palestinians and help them. For example, as Palestinians face the Israeli bulldozers as they expropriate land and destroy houses for settlements, it would be great if there were a large number of Egyptians and Jordanians and others who could be there with Palestinians confronting this daily, minute-by-minute threat. And the same in universities. Well-known writers, intellectuals, historians, philosophers, film starts could go, but they say, We don't want to have to request visas from the Israeli consulate in Cairo. I said, You don't even have to do that. You can ask the Palestinian Authority, which has an ambassador in Cairo, to give you an invitation to go to Gaza, and then you can go to the West Bank.
So there are ways of getting around it. It's not so much only parochialism as also a kind of laziness, a kind of sitting back and expecting somebody else to do it. I think that's our greatest enemy, the absence of initiative [my emphasis]. We're always expecting that the Israelis are out there, the Americans, concocting conspiracies, the Ford Foundtion. Many people want to work with these people groups but are afraid to do it publicly. They do it surreptitiously. And in public they express opposition and say, We are going to remain untouched by this. We are not going to normalize. We refuse to have anything to do with imperialism. We refuse to sit down and plan something that could actually help Palestinians and actually deal with Israel, not as a fictional entity but as a real power that is in many ways negatively affecting Arab life.
For me, the great symbol of this is the fact that in no university that I know if in the Arab world - none of these universities are free in any case, they're all highly politicized and there are all kinds of pressures on professors and students, which is quite obvious - but in no important Arab university is there, for example, a department of Israeli studies, nor do people study Hebrew. And this is true even of Palestinian universities, where again, you can understand it is a kind of defense against this great power which has intervened in all of our lives, that we don't want to have anything to do with it. But for me the only salvation is in fact to encounter it head-on, learn the language, as so many Israeli political scientists and sociologists and Orientalists and intelligence people spend time studying Arab society. Why shouldn't we study them? It's a way of getting to know your neighbor, your enemy, if that's what it is, and it's a way of breaking out of the prison which suits the Israelis perfect to have Arabs in, whether Palestinians or others.
...
One of the things that I try to do , in a very uncompromising and quite open way, is to say, We have to break that attitude. We have to break out of our self-constructed mind-forged manacles and look at the rest of the world and deal with it as equals. There's too much defensiveness, too much sense of aggrieved, unfulfilled whatever. This is in part account for the absence of democracy. It's not just the despotism of the rulers, not just the plots if imperialism, it's not just the corrupt regimes, not just the secret police. It's our intellectuals' lack of citizenship and keep insisting on. For myself, since there is little that I can do at this distance, whether in person or through my writing, is to keep making that point. The only way to change a situation is oneself doing it, reading, asking, encountering, breakout of the prison.
From page 23
Daniel Barenboim is a world-famous pianist and conducted who was born in Argentina, grew up as an Israeli. You've had some interesting musdical interactions with him.
We met seven or eight years ago and quite surprisingly we've become close friends. He travels a great deal, as do I. Sometimes our paths have crossed. We've tried to do things. We've had public discussions, not political ones so much, because he's not a politician any more than I am, but we talk about things like music and culture and history. He's very interested as an Israeli or Jewish musician in the work of people like Wagner, who represents you might say, the total negation of Jews but was a great musician. So he's interested in that paradox whereby culture and music work in parallel and create contradictions at the same time. We're doing a book together based on that theme. But he's also very dissatisfied, as I, with the prevailing orthodoxy in his own community. He hasn't lived in Israel recently, and last year refused to do anything with the Israel Philharmonic for the fiftieth anniversary of Israel. He is very much opposition to the occupation of the West Bank. He speaks openly about a Palestinian state. He's a man of courage, an unorthodox personality. Music connects us, but also the facts of biography. He arrived in Palestine, or Tel Aviv, which is where his family lived, roughly about the time that my family was evicted.
We have a very warm and cordial relationship. I arranged recently for him, in fact last week, the first time ever, to play a recital at Bir Zeit, the leading West Bank university. It was a great gesture on his part. Bir Zeit was shut down by the Israelisfor four years during the Intifada. The president had been deported for twenty years, between 1974 and 1994. Only a couple of months ago, a student was killed by Israeli troops near the campus. There's this long history of animosity and hostility between Bir Zeit and the Israelis.
So it was difficult to accept at first the idea of an Israeli coming to play there. But it worked over time, and it was a fantastic success. It was one of the great events of my life, and if I can speak for him, of his life, that he was able to do this and transcend in an act that was purely cultural but also a human act of solidarity and friendship, offering his services, which God knows in any concert hall in the world would be in tremendous demand and are very costly. He's at the very top of the musical profession as a great pianist and a great conductor. He came simply as an individual to play. He brought his own piano with him, since there are no pianos that are any good there, to play a recital for an essentially Palestinian audience, ironically, in the hall in the university called Kamal Nasser Hall, named after a cousin of the president, who has been assassinated in Beirut in 1973. He was a very good friend of mine, and I was there when it happened. The assassination team was led by Ehud Barak, who is today a leader of the Labor Party and was an intelligence commando officer at the time.
All of that gave the evening a very high emotional and I would say cultural resoncnce that was lost on absolutely no one there. Zubin Mehta came, a great friend of Dnaiel's. He's the conducted of the Israel Philharmonic. He's an Indian. He's avidly pro-Israeli. He'd never been to the West Bank. But he came. Tears were streaming down his face. It was an event of considerable important, precisely because it wasn't political in the overt sense. Nobody was trying to make a milling, score a point. It was just a humane gesture, an act of solidarity based on the friendship between myself and Barenboim and a gradually expanding group of Palestinian friends who admire and like him and with whom he likes to be. He's taken the position, I think quite correctly, that if Israel is going to continue to exist it has to to exist in relations of friendship and equality with Arabs and Muslims [my emphasis]. He's desperately anxious to learn Arabic. He's a very unusual, remarkable, advanced case of a prophetic genius. There aren't too many of them around. I hope we can sustain this kind of activity over time.
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