Ha'aretz insists that even if the "Understandings" are not adopted as is, they will form the framework in which all future deals will be made. Israel will be unable to escape and evade them. (I fear Ha'aretz may be correct.)

What the Geneva Understandings prove is that the Israeli Left still lives in fatasy bubbles and still seeks to lead the country into national suicide, no matter how undemocratically this goal must be pursued. The Left's agenda is to impose on the country the "ideas" of the most extreme leftist 5% of the population, regardless of how the other 95% feel.

Meanwhile, the previous successes of Yossi Beilin and his band were on display when a 21st person died as a result of the suicide bombing of the restaurant in Haifa and also in the revelation that Israeli Arabs were the ones who assisted and planted the suicide bomber there. Of course, Beilin is convinced that once the Geneva Understandings are implemented, such things will no longer be possible and also that the sea near Haifa will turn itself into tasty lemonade.

And when has Yossi Beilin ever been wrong about anything?  

Steven Plaut is professor of economics at Haifa University.

Edward Said, longtime professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, prolific author of "cultural" literary criticism and political polemic, former member of the Palestine National Council and advisor to Yasser Arafat, died in New York on September 25, 2003 at age 67.

If enormous influence in the academic world is a reliable indicator of intellectual distinction, then Said merited his reputation as one of America's intellectual eminences; but if reputation attests mainly to the irresistible attraction of foolish ideas, he did not. Said taught a whole generation of English professors to search for racism in writers (like Jane Austen) who did not think as the professors do. He induced a generation of Middle East scholars not only to believe that "since the time of Homer...every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist" but to ridicule "speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings, sabotage commercial airliners and poison water supplies" as "highly exaggerated [racial] stereotyping" (this in a statement of 1997). By Said the Israel "specialists" in the political science departments were taught that "Immediately after the state of Israel was declared in 1948, every major Arab state -- Syria, Jordan, Egypt -- petitioned Israel for peace" and that after 1967 "Israel's occupation increased in severity and outright cruelty, more than rivalling all other military occupations in modern history."

His acolytes also found meat and drink in Said's pristinely ignorant and intellectually violent pronouncements about Jews.

They are not, he claimed, really a people at all because Moses was an Egyptian (he wasn't) and because Jewish identity in the Diaspora is entirely a function of external persecution. The Holocaust (which destroyed most of the potential citizens of a Jewish state) was in Said's estimation a great boon to Jews because it served to "protect" Palestinian Jews "with the world's compassion." Prior to 1948, he asserted, "the historical duration of a Jewish state [in "Palestine"] was a sixty-year period two millennia ago." (In fact, as any normally attentive Sunday-school student knows, Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel lasted a thousand years.) Said's recitation of preposterous falsehoods about Judaism and Israel, so far from alienating Jewish liberals, seemed to be a magnet for them.

Indeed, no troubler of Zion has ever been more justified than Said in claiming that many (at times it seemed all) of his best friends were Jews, ranging from the Israeli pianist Daniel Barenboim to the apoplectic scribbler of anti-Israel diatribes, Noam Chomsky.

Said's pronouncements about his fellow Arabs were also widely influential. While bewailing the racist stereotyping of Arabs by Western "Orientalists" Said insisted that "there are no divisions in the Palestinian population of four million. We all support the PLO." Said wrote this while he was still a member of the Palestine National Council, the leading spokesman for the PLO in the American news media, and one of the closest advisors of Yasser Arafat, whom he praised for "his microscopic grasp ... of politics, not as grand strategy, in the pompous Kissingerian sense, but as daily, even hourly movement of people and attitudes, in the Gramscian or Foucauldian sense." But at the same time that Said insisted that "every Palestinian...is up in arms" against Israel, that they all belonged to a monolithic body with one will, acting and thinking in perfect unison, he felt it necessary to urge the murder of Arab "collaborators" with Israel.

Indeed, he insisted that "the UN Charter and every other known document or protocol" sanctions such

Outpost               - 8 -               November 2003