Edward W. Said | The Nation

Reviews three books. "Late Beethoven: Music, Thought, Imagination," by Maynard Solomon; "Beethoven's Ninth: A Political History," by Esteban Buch; "Beethoven: The Music and the Life," by Lewis Lockwood.

The author focuses on the repression of Palestinians by Israel where more than 90 percent of the land is held in trust for the use only of the Jewish people and is a case of disparity and asymmetrical power and systematically flouting international law. The real issue is Israel's utter refusal to accept the sovereign existence of Palestinian people, that is entitled to rights over what Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and most of his supporters consider to be the land of Greater Israel, i.e., the West Bank and Gaza. The author is skeptical about discussions and meetings about peace, which in the present context usually means Palestinians are told to stop resisting Israeli control over their land.

The article focuses on the Palestinian intifada, which has achieved little political significance even after the people's defiance to the Israeli onslaughts. This has caused a stir in the United States media, who have failed to focus on the Israeli military occupation. The Palestinian Islamists have played into Israel's propaganda mills and its ever-ready military by occasional bursts of barbaric suicide bombings that finally forced Yasir Arafat to turn his crippled security forces against Hamas and Islamic Jihad. It showcases a new secular nationalist current that is emerging rapidly.

Samuel Huntington's article "The Clash of Civilizations?" appeared in the Summer 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs, where it immediately attracted a surprising amount of attention and reaction. Because the article was intended to supply Americans with an original thesis about "a new phase" in world politics after the end of the cold war, Huntington's terms of argument. The challenge for Western policy-makers, says Huntington, is to make sure that the West gets stronger and fends off all the others, Islam in particular. The basic paradigm of West versus the rest remained untouched, and this is what has persisted, often insidiously and implicitly, in discussion since the terrible events of September 11.