When in last week's New Statesman, Medhi Hasan wrote about "the need for a Palestinian (and an Israeli) Gandhi figure," Christopher Hitchens found himself in such strong disagreement that he actually wrote a letter — or, more precisely, an email. According to Hasan:
Now Christopher Hitchens has emailed me to say that I may be focusing on the wrong role model - it is a Nelson Mandela that the Palestinians need, not a Mohandas Gandhi. He writes:
"Edward Said used to talk and write about the need for a Palestinian Mandela. I think that might lead you - and such Israelis and Jews as will listen - in a better direction than Gandhi. But the ANC wasn't pacifist in name or in fact, despite the Mahatma's early input."
The Prisoner! Nelson Mandela wearing a university blazer, borrowed from the University of Fort Hare's gallery. Past graduates who have distinguished themselves in politics include Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Govan Mbeki, Mangosuthu Buthelezi and Robert Mugabe. It's no exaggeration to say that the battle for Southern African independence was won on the playing fields of Fort Hare.
Well, as Hitch is fond of exclaiming when he's confronted with embarrassing analogues, A isn't B. If he can shamelessly declare that Iraq isn't Vietnam, Haditha isn't My Lai and God isn't Great, the least one can do is point out is that India isn't South Africa and neither place is even in the same ballpark as Palestine. The problem with the latter is that it really is far too small for either the Israelis or the Palestinians to give up an inch of it.
When the British acceded to the demands for Indian independence, the 200,000 Sahibs and Memsahibs of the Raj had their damp and dingy home country to return to. When the White Bwanas of South Africans gave up political control of the country, they were able to retain economic power and retire to gated community enclaves much more expansive than the entire State of Israel dotted throughout the lush Veldt.
The Israelis don't have the luxury of either choice. If their national project goes belly up, it's back to the diaspora for them. Hence, they can't afford to loose their struggle, and for that same reason they can't afford to allow the appearance of a charismatic leader who can personify the struggle for the Palestinians.
Cheeky Arabs! Edward Said and his sister in Palestine in 1940.
Not to take anything away from Gandhi and Mandela, but they both had almost unbroken runs of good international press in their time. No Palestinian leader is going to get that kind of publicity because Israel is controlled by a group I will call (for the sake of brevity) the Zionists, and the Zionists are also — how can I put this without offending anybody's sensibilities? — they are extremely influential in the mass media and so adept at branding their adversaries as monsters in human form that there is a slim chance of any Palestinian leader developing the international aura of sainthood required to achieve the necessary moral authority to make the Israelis sit down and sign a fair and binding settlement of the Palestine issue.
Even the late Edward Said, who wouldn't hurt a fly and was one of the most refined, reasonable and humane people one could ever hope to come across, attracted plenty of contemptuous criticism and even claims that he was not who he purported to be, merely because he became known as a morally upright yet powerful advocate for the right to self-determination for the people of Palestine.
For example, There is an ample precedent for the Obama birth certificate non-scandal in the slime-job that Commentary magazine tried to pull on Edward's reputation. In particular, read now the whinings of Justus Weiner, described by Christopher Hitchens as "an essay of extraordinary spite and mendacity."
Now in Burmese magazines you'd expect to discover that Aung San Suu Kyi is a bat-faced whore, and when watching Chinese State TV or reading Hitch on Tibet, you'd be sorely disappointed to be treated to an unbiased appraisal of the Dalai Lama, while it's no surprise that Nelson Mandela didn't get such a good press inside old South Africa as he did outside. But neither the Burmese nor the Chinese nor the Afrikaners have sufficient wherewithal to blacken the names of their opponents in the minds of the masses worldwide and make it stick. But "Defamation, Zionist-style", to use the title of Said's own essay, is a very different kettle of fish. No major critic or adversary of the State of Israel can ever hope to be portrayed fairly, honestly or sympathetically by the scribes and recorders of the Zionist media and nobody who reads or watches the news in this "Free World" can hope not to be exposed to the biases of that media.
Had Gandhi or Mandela been principally fighting for Palestinian rights, they might well be renowned the world over for beating their wives or raping their daughters. At the very least, we would have been fed the meme that the Mahatma was an anti-Semite, Nelson was a Jew-baiter and the pair of them were sick to their empty core with Jew-hatred. As Weiner wrote in reply to Hitchens, "[t]he issue here is credibility, a man with an international reputation who made himself into a poster boy for Palestine." That, apparently, is all it takes to justify destroying the man's reputation.
Yasser Arafat was such a good-looking (in a Peter Lorre way) young man who had ample potential to become a Gandhi or a Mandela. Whatever went wrong?
Which brings me on to Yasser Arafat, who was such a let down as a Palestinian Mandela, let alone as a Gandhi. Had he followed the course of either of these luminaries, I submit that he would have failed totally in his mission and been eliminated from the game at much earlier date. If he eventually became monstrous — and I think he probably did — doubtless he was made monstrous by fighting for so long against impossible enemies, impossible allies and impossible odds, and his reputation was made more monstrous yet at the hands of the Zionist propaganda machine.
This eventually happens to almost everybody who fights against the Zionists and certainly to anybody who becomes "a poster boy for Palestine". Which is why I'd advise anyone who wants to fight the Zionists to think three times about the consequences.
To give Christopher the last word, here's an apposite quotation from his obituary of Arafat from November 2004:
But has any national movement ever been so appallingly led? Edward Said asked many times, in public and private, where the Mandela of Palestine could be. In rather bold contrast to this decent imagination, Arafat managed to be both a killer and a compromiser (Mandela was neither), both a Swiss bank-account artist and a populist ranter (Mandela was neither), both an Islamic "martyrdom" blow-hard and a servile opportunist, and a man who managed to establish a dictatorship over his own people before they even had a state (here one simply refuses to mention Mandela in the same breath).
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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