The Mideast
About 1980, you, Eqbal Ahmad [Pakistani scholar and activist, and
professor at Hampshire College] and Edw ard Said [noted author,
Palestinian activist and professor at Columbia] had a meeting w ith
some top PLO officials. You’ve said you found this meeting rather
revealing.
R evealing, but not surprising. It confirmed some very critical
comments I’d made about the PLO in left journals a few years
earlier, and w hich there w as a big dispute over. T he meeting w as an
attempt to make the PLO leadership, w hich happened to be visiting
New York, aw are of the view s of a number of people w ho w ere
very sympathetic to the Palestinians but quite critical of the PLO.
T he PLO leadership w asn’t interested. It’s the only T hird World
movement I’ve ever had anything to do w ith that made no effort to
build any kind of solidarity movement here, or to gain sympathy in
the U S for its goals.
It w as extremely hard to get anything critical of Israel published,
let alone distributed. T he PLO could easily have helped, simply by
buying books and sending them to libraries, but they w ere
completely unw illing to do anything. T hey had huge amounts of
money—they w ere brokering big deals betw een Kuw ait and Hungary
and w ho know s w ho else—but it w as a very corrupt organization.
T hey insisted on portraying themselves as flaming
revolutionaries, w aving guns...w hich of course is going to alienate
everyone. If they’d portrayed themselves as w hat they actually
w ere—conservative nationalists w ho w anted to make money and
maybe elect their ow n mayors—it w ould have increased the support
in the U nited States for a Palestinian state from about 2 to 1 to
about 20 to 1.
I think they believed that politics isn’t about w hat the general
population thinks or does, but about deals you make in back rooms
w ith pow erful people. (Incidentally, I heard much harsher criticisms
of the PLO from activists and leaders in the Occupied Territories
w hen I w as there a few years later.)
If, as you’ve said, Israel is the local cop on the beat in the Mideast,