Edward Said on Sadat's Peace
Excerpted from p.192 of Said's Question of Palestine, 1979.
No one [media and government in the west] commented that Camp
David failed to deal with -- failed even to mention-- the Israeli
settlements in the west bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights. It went
without a comment that during the Knesset debate on Camp David,
Begin's presentation was made explicitly to depend on an exchange,
a deal, which was better for Israel than for Egypt and "the Arabs":
Sinai would be returned to Egypt while Israel would keep the other
territories. No suggested that the PLO, as well as every single
Palestinian, had a reason to denounce the so-called autonomy plan.
It was not even a deception, but an overt plan to put the Palestinians
under Israeli military authority forever in a Bantustan, the whole
principle of which in Africa, for example, the United States had
denounced as being inconsistent with self-determination. True the
suggestion was made during and after the Camp David negotiations
(appearing coyly in what was were clearly authorized "backgrounders"
staged for the press) that the autonomy plan was the first step in an
"irreversible" process leading ultimately to Palestinian self determination.
And yet the Camp David documents, and Sadat, the self-styled
Palestinian champion himself, made no mention of this in the text of the
agreements, but only in a set of letters adjunct to the accords, letters
canceled by Israeli letters nullifying the west bank and Palestinian hopes
for independence. (A pattern which began with Sadat's visit to Israel had
crystallized: his acting foreign minister had been told by Dayan during
the car ride from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to delete any mention of the PlO
from his Knesset speech. During the signing ceremonies on March 26,
1979, Sadat simply left out of his spoken comments any mention of the
Palestinians for fear that it might "irritate" the Israelis.) Wherever there
was clarity on what the autonomy plan was supposed to be for the
Palestinians, it was >Israeli< clarity and much more conclusively, Israeli
action on the ground. On the day that "peace" was being signed, Israel
announced twenty new settlements on the West Bank, which was
already dotted with seventy-seven such settlements.
