There are two contradictory realities on the ground on which Clinton’s Washington talks will founder. One is that the energies released by the intifa… - Edward Said

Everything I have written in these lectures underlines the importance to the intellectual of passionate engagement, risk, exposure, commitment to principles, vulnerability in debating and being involved in worldly causes. For example, the difference I drew earlier between a professional and an amateur intellectual rests precisely on this, that the professional claims detachment on the basis of a profession and pretends to objectivity, whereas the amateur is moved neither by reward nor by the fulfillment of an immediate career plan but by a committed engagement with ideas and values in the public sphere.

I shall conclude with a concrete example of what I mean. Amid all the din about normalization, I have noticed one startling absence, namely, the current status of the Palestinian refugees living in every major Arab country, whose condition everywhere—there are no exceptions—is unacceptably miserable. Wherever there are Palestinians in the Arab world, there are rules and regulations forbidding them full status as residents, forbidding them work and travel, requiring them to register with the police on a monthly basis, and so on. It’s not only Israel that treats Palestinians badly, it is the Arab countries who do so also. Now see if there is a sustained campaign by Arab intellectuals against this invidious local treatment of the Palestinian refugees: you won’t see or hear one. What excuse is there for the horrible refugee camps in which so many of them live, even in places like Gaza and the West Bank; what right do local mokhabarat forces have to harass them and generally make their lives miserable? And why is there no protracted press campaign to end this appalling state of affairs? Why, because it is much easier (and less risky) to rail against normalization and Hebrew translations than it is to dramatize the unacceptable condition of Palestinian refugees in the Arab world, who are always being told that they cannot be “normalized” because it would implement Israel’s design. What rubbish!

Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs are locked in Sartre’s vision of hell, that of “other people.” There is no escape. Separation can’t work in so tiny a land, any more than apartheid did. Israeli military and economic power insulates Israelis from having to face reality. This is the meaning of Sharon’s election, an antediluvian war criminal summoned out of the mists of time to do what: put the Arabs in their place? Hopeless. Therefore it is up to us to provide the answer that power and paranoia cannot. It isn’t enough to speak generally of peace. One must provide the concrete grounds for it, and those can only come from moral vision, and neither from “pragmatism” nor “practicality.” If we are all to live—this is our imperative—we must capture the imagination not just of our people but of our oppressors. And we have to abide by humane democratic values.
Is the current Palestinian leadership listening? Can it suggest anything better than this, given its abysmal record in a “peace process” that has led to the present horrors?