From Edward Said, New York-based Palestinian and probably the world's most famous literary critic, comes a bleak, passionate and necessarily repetitive book, gathering together essays and reviews on the Middle East since the signing of the Oslo Accord in 1993. Since Oslo, Said argues, the condition of ordinary Palestinians - plus the status of Palestine as a multi-cultural civic space in a region littered with fundamentalist regimes - has worsened dramatically.
For Said, the agreement reinforces the huge military and economic disparity between the Israelis, supported ("unconditionally", according to Al Gore) by the Americans, and a demoralised Palestinian people led by the corrupt Arafat. Oslo, he claims, postponed the hard issues - Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, borders and sovereignty - foregrounding instead meaningless Israeli declarations about recognition which actually hinder the Palestinian quest for self-determination and liberation. Said's rhetoric and criticism is thus both inspiringly lofty and relentlessly detailed: his commitment to a democratic and secular Palestinian state is expressed with characteristic eloquence. No one reading this book could doubt his desire for peace through co-existence and equality. But because Palestinians are virtually non-existent as a moral cause in the West, western liberalism, he argues, has remained incapable of confronting a Jewish state for whom Palestine was a potentially lethal idea that had to be extinguished.
Oslo thus becomes one further refinement in the basic Zionist ideology, succinctly expressed by Golda Meir: "there are no Palestinians". To this day, with a blindness that resonates in Ireland, Israeli school textbooks make no mention of Palestinians, while even a revered liberal intellectual such as Isiah Berlin could remain till his death an unrepentant Zionist. Because the Holocaust dwarfed all other instances of 20th-century injustice and illegality, the Palestinians, Said maintains, became victims of the period's most tragic victims.
His answer is not to combat Zionism with an equally aggressive Islamic nationalism, but to promote and develop the kind of citizenship and democratic rights the Palestinians ask for themselves. The questions posed are thus based not on exceptionalism but logic and consistency: if military intervention and crippling economic sanctions are applied against Saddam Hussein after Kuwait, why not punish Israel for breaching UN resolutions in Palestine? If Jewish Holocaust victims have money robbed by the Nazis returned by Swiss banks, why can't Israel compensate evicted Palestinians? What is the moral difference between Serbian ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and the activities of armed religious fundamentalists backed by the Israeli army in the occupied territories? Reading Said's detailed account of these atrocities, one wonders what a Primo Levi would make of some of this month's activities of the Israeli military.
The problem with Said's belief in citizenship for the Middle East is, of course, the mostly appalling record of the Arab world on education, social welfare, women's rights, all those planks which construct civil society. Said's books have been banned by Arafat since the early 1990s. If his scathing criticisms of Arafat are correct, and there is much documented evidence from UN bodies to suggest they are, no institution or individual should donate money to charities under Arafat's control until full and independently audited accounts are available.
The scale of the financial corruption and incompetence detailed throughout the book is breathtaking. At present, the reality of a Palestinian state is 75,000 administrators appointed by the PLO leader's cronies while arbitrary imprisonment and censorship ensure Arafat's people remain unmobilised, uneducated, under-represented. One reason, Said suggests, why Israel tolerates Arafat's regime: Arafat is the most purposeful and efficient subordinator of his own people.
Said makes the same point throughout these essays. Whether the recent violence confirms his gloomy prognostications remains to be seen: but his general point remains a valid one - peace and justice require individuals and states to look beyond ethnic and religious criteria. And to achieve that, a secular civil democracy, with a fully developed notion of citizenship, is one good route to take.
Ray Ryan is editor of Bullan: An Irish Studies Journal, and of Writing in the Irish Republic: Literature, Culture, Politics, 1949- 1999, to be published this month by Macmillan