Edward Said on Oslo: The Morning After

Five weeks after the Declaration of Principles was signed on the White House lawn, the London Review of Books published Edward Said’s response. Almost every other commentator, Palestinian and otherwise, was calling the agreement a breakthrough. Said wrote as an insider who had left: he discloses in the essay that in the late 1970s Secretary of State Cyrus Vance had asked him to persuade Arafat to accept Resolution 242 with a reservation on Palestinian national rights, in exchange for immediate US recognition of the PLO, and that Arafat refused. His argument is not that a deal was wrong but that this one was the worst of the deals that had been available.

The essay opens by refusing the vocabulary before it argues about the terms — the same move Palestinian critics of every subsequent negotiation would make:

“So first of all let us call the agreement by its real name: an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles.”

Its central charge is asymmetry, and Said prosecutes it by counting. Israel conceded essentially one thing, recognition of the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people. Against that he sets the PLO’s renunciations: the Palestinian National Charter, armed struggle, and every relevant UN resolution other than 242 and 338 — which, he points out, say nothing at all about Palestinians, their rights or their aspirations. Set aside with them, by implication, were the resolutions that since 1948 had established refugee rights to compensation or repatriation, and the international findings that had censured Israeli settlement and annexation. He quotes the Israeli novelist Amos Oz describing the agreement, in a BBC interview, as the second biggest victory in the history of Zionism.

The prediction that made the essay durable concerns land. Postponing sovereignty and territory to final-status negotiations did not freeze the situation, Said argued; it licensed its continuation. He counts more than two hundred settlements, sited on hills, promontories and strategic points, linked to Israel by a separate road system that breaks the contiguity of Palestinian population centres; he estimates the land taken and designated for expropriation at more than half of the occupied territories, and notes that Israel had by then tapped every West Bank aquifer. He observes that Israel held all the data on settlements, land and water and had shared almost none of it with the Palestinian side. And he identifies the concession that no clause in the document states: by agreeing to postpone the question, the Palestinians had in practice discounted their internationally acknowledged claim to the West Bank and Gaza, which now became, in the language of the process, disputed territories.

The last movement of the essay is about narrative rather than law. Watching the ceremony, Said wrote, Palestinians saw their own history recast — the expulsions of 1948, the destroyed villages, the bombardments in Lebanon, twenty-six years of occupation reduced retrospectively to terrorism to be renounced. Even in the matter of wording, he noted, Israel received a gift. Rabin, he observed acidly, “in effect gave the Palestinian speech while Arafat pronounced words that had all the flair of a rental agreement.” Thirty years on, the essay reads less as dissent than as an itemised forecast.

Sources

• Edward Said, “The Morning After,” London Review of Books vol. 15 no. 20, 21 October 1993 — full text