Last night at Columbia University Norman Finkelstein and Peter Weiss defended the findings of the Goldstone Report with slashing and witty speeches, but I felt the news was made by Rashid Khalidi in his analysis of Gaza in the context of the Arab revolutions. So I’m going to reprise a lot of his speech to capture his point: that Gaza is central to the Arab revolutions.
First a word about the optics. Over 300 people had come out for the event, they made a line through the lobby of the International Affairs building and signed petitions to the U.N. on the Sri Lanka genocide and filled out postcards to be taken to Gaza. There were a couple of pro-Israel cranks, but their presence felt very cranklike. Old guys. The left is here in force. Finkelstein and Khalidi are stars and as for Weiss, well he is a longtime leftwing lawyer who I believe is on the board of Peace Now. And Bashir Abu-Manneh who introduced the troika gave a very strong speech savaging the purported “glamour” of Tzipi Livni and describing Palestinians as a people “expelled and dispossessed for the last 63 years” and Weiss later spoke kindly of him. I sense this is just another demonstration of the fact that as Rebecca Vilkomerson has said, once you open the door on the Palestinian condition, you can’t limit your consciousness, you just get deeper and deeper in.
Khalidi. The professor first spoke of several Gazan realities he said were largely unknown in the U.S. mainstream, where Gaza is described only as a “terrorist entity.”
— Most of the 1.6 million people of Gaza are “not there because God put them there, they’re there because they were driven from their homes [n 1948] to which they were not allowed to return.”
–Levels of support for Hamas run from the low 20s to the 40s. So most people don’t even support Hamas in the so-called terrorist entity.
— The Palestinian Authority has had no legal standing since 1999, when its writ expired under Oslo.
–the blockade is an illegal form of collective punishment against a population most of whom are women and children, 44 percent of them under 14 years old.
In the rest of the world, “what I call the real world,” he said to laughter, much of this reality is well known. Arabs are especially well informed. They have a lot of “competition” (more laughter) among their media, they see Russian television, American television, French TV and the BBC, and you would be surprised how many of them know English and most people over 40 in Palestine have some familiarity with Hebrew. With passion did Khalidi bring his hammer down on the iron bights of Arabophobia that bind the American soul!
The Arab revolutions are inward-directed demands inside their societies for personal dignity but also outward-directed, seeking to restore their collective dignity as Arabs. The word karama or dignity was a refrain in all the revolutions. The revolutions began with an affront to personal dignity—the fruit vendor slapped by a police woman in that provincial city in Tunisia—and have continued in this manner, Khalidi said angrily, with Basher ‘Assad having the temerity to laugh as he saw thugs attack his people in Darra.
“But something else was being demanded by these revolutions, collective dignity of a people and of Arab people as a whole. And this is where Palestine and Gaza fit in. …. Palestine and in particular the issue of Gaza are at the heart, the center of this demand for dignity.”
You must understand the role of Egypt as the heart of the Arab world, he said. When Egypt is in eclipse, the entire Arab world is in eclipse. And the condition of Palestine and Egypt’s role in those conditions has put Egypt in eclipse. There were hundreds and hundreds of Palestinian flags in Tahrr Square.
“The complicity of the [Mubarak regime in the blockade of Gaza] was perceived by the vast majority of Egyptians as humiliating, constituting servile submission to the United States and Israel.”
One of the first acts of the new government in February was to ease the crossing of Palestinians into Gaza at the Rafah crossing, and now the Egyptian role in the reconciliation of Fatah and Hamas must be seen as a revolutionary benefit. For four years it had been Mubarak enforcer Omar Suleiman’s role to reconcile the two sides and for four years nothing had happened. Then Suleiman was removed from his job and two months later reconciliation took place. This is because it was Israeli and US policy to block the reconciliation.
“These may be mysteries to the consumer of American media, but the Egyptina pople understand them well.”
And while a cottage industry has developed in the US to argue that Arabs don’t care about Palestine, this can only truly be said of the autocrats for the last 50 and 60 years. At the end of these democratic uprisings, we will see more democratic governments, more responsive to the wishes of their people. There will no longer be “Arab cover” for the assault on the dignity of the Palestinian people.
And while the Goldstone retraction seems to have encouraged Israel to think that it might reprise Cast Lead in Gaza, the fall of Israel’s best friends, Ben Ali, Suleiman and Mubarak, thanks to the Arab revolutions, will help to protect Gaza from further barbarity.
Perhaps, Khalidi concluded, the revolutions can go further, and bring an end to the conflict, with peace and justice.
Wild applause.
