Absent voices
By Jonathan Cook, Al-Ahram Weekly on-line 14 - 20 August 2003
As Sharon manoeuvers in the shadow of the roadmap, the shortcomings of the mainstream Israeli peace camp have never been more evident -- This Saturday a convoy of Jewish and Arab Israeli peace activists will venture into the olive groves of Anin, a Palestinian village in the northern West Bank close to the pre-1967 border with Israel. They will be there to help Anin's farmers prepare for the autumn harvest, hoping to use their Israeli citizenship to defy military restrictions and reach more than 2,500 acres of fields that have been off-limits to the villagers since Israel recently erected its apartheid wall. The trip is not without risk: only two weeks ago, international demonstrators who joined the villagers to protest against the wall were shot by Israeli police and soldiers. Five foreign activists were injured, including an American who had his thigh punctured. But confronting -- and infuriating -- the authorities is the name of the game for Taayush (Arabic for "Partnership"). Established within weeks after the September 2000 of Al-Aqsa Intifada, the group is one of the newest and most vigorous in Israel's peace camp. Over the past three years the joint Jewish- Arab group, committed to direct action to provide humanitarian relief and show solidarity with the Palestinians, has been at the centre of many headline-grabbing clashes with the Israeli military authorities......But while Taayush represents Israel's peace movement at its most confrontational, it also reveals its essential weakness: the group can probably claim no more than 1,000 active members. On Saturday, its leaders will be pleased if they can muster 150 people to help Anin's farmers -- and most will be from the country's Arab minority, not Jews. The peace movement in Israel, say its critics, has effectively evaporated since the failure of the Camp David 2000 talks. Its biggest protests in Tel Aviv barely scrape together a few thousand demonstrators.
Loop-the-loop logic
By Doron Rosenblum, Ha'aretz 8/16/2003
Whether the hudna continues or not, whether the quiet on the Lebanese border is maintained or violated, the current strategic situation of Israel is reminiscent of the unforgettable scene in Quentin Tarantino's movie "Reservoir Dogs," where a bunch of tough guys find themselves in a kind of "deterrent loop." They all stand there in a circle with their guns drawn, each one aiming at the next guy. One slight move, or even a blink that signals an intent to shoot, is enough to get someone to pull the trigger and set off a domino effect that leaves the whole gang in a heap. How did Israel's famed "power of deterrence" get into this bind of being simultaneously neutralized and about to blow - both in our dealings with the Palestinians and Hezbollah? The ones who should be answering that are the geniuses who invented the concept of "consciousness-searing." One of them - Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon - was seen bending over backward this week in an attempt to resell us the shopworn existential theory that there "is no connection" between the operation in which the IDF killed militants in Nablus and the revenge attacks that came right afterward. According to Ya'alon, the perpetrators of these attacks were just members of an "insubordinate group," just some Arabs who felt like blowing themselves up one fine day, in tune with the chaos of the universe.This scholarly theory was quickly demolished by a philosopher of the masses from the opposing school - a Palestinian who told television reporters with down-to-earth bluntness: "If you hadn't killed those guys in Nablus, we wouldn't have done what we did in Ariel and Rosh Ha'ayin. You give me a whack, I'll give you two! You sit still, I'll sit still!"
Colonial blindness: Seeing ‘natives’ as one’s own image
By Tamim al-Barghouti, Daily Star 8/16/2003
When William of Tyre wrote his account of the Crusades, he kept referring to Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem as The Temple of the Lord. The texts of the Koran which are written almost on every wall of the mosque and the dome seemed to go unseen by that famous historian of the Crusades. In a lecture at Harvard University, Bernard Lewis described the political system of the Islamic Republic of Iran as a church, and Khomeini’s theory of Velayat-e Faqih as some sort of Christianizing Islam. During the first month of the American occupation of Iraq, an American soldier appeared on TV dancing and clapping to the rhythm of Shiites hitting their chests commemorating the death of Hussein. In Egypt there is a proverb that says “Where is your ear, Joha?” Joha being a semi-imaginary wise fool known in Arabic and Turkish cultures, who, when asked to point to his left ear, would stretch his right hand over his head and touch the upper tip of his left ear rather than use his left hand. The proverb is said to describe unnecessary complications that happen while performing simple tasks. When Evelyn Baring, commonly known as Lord Cromer, Britain’s strongman in Egypt during the first phase of the British occupation, once asked an Egyptian peasant to touch his left ear, the peasant stretched his right hand over his head just like Joha. The peasant, stunned at the absurdity and weirdness of Cromer’s request, most probably was making bitter fun of him. Of course, Cromer came to the due conclusion from his “scientific experiment:” The Egyptian race was one whose intellectual abilities were inferior to that of the Anglo-Saxons! These are not sporadic instances of misinterpretations of cultural difference. Rather, they are instances of a calculated blindness that is characteristic of every discourse held by a group of people seeking to subjugate another group, for behind any form of colonialism hides some sort of racism. To legitimize domination one must assume some sort of natural or cultural superiority, whether that superiority is called development, modernity, civilization, democracy or simply “the white man’s burden.”
Paying Iraq’s Jews back, and the Palestinians less
By Michael R. Fischbach, Daily Star 8/16/2003
The American occupation of Iraq has already opened up various legal and historical files, including issues such as war crimes tribunals and what to do about the country’s Kurdish minority. A less well-known development is that former Iraqi Jews are seeking compensation for property frozen by the Iraqi government in the 1950s, when the emigrants left the country. Moves have already been made in this direction now that the US controls Iraq, affecting not only Iraqi reconstruction but also the future of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. The Jewish property claims date back over half a century. As a result of inter-communal tensions stemming from the conflict between Zionism and the Arabs of Palestine, a majority in Iraq’s ancient Jewish community emigrated under duress after 1948, especially in 1950-51. Most of them settled in Israel. The Iraqi Parliament passed a law in 1951 freezing the property of Jews who had renounced their Iraqi citizenship, which was a condition for emigration. The issue became enmeshed in the wider Arab-Israeli conflict when Israel announced in 1951 that it would deduct the value of the frozen property from any compensation it paid for the property of Palestinian refugees it had confiscated. The Israeli government undertook several campaigns to persuade Iraqi Jewish immigrants to register their property claims, most notably in 1955 when a special semi-governmental commission was established. To the government’s disappointment, only 3,000-4,000 of the 37,000 Iraqi Jews in Israel bothered to register claims in the last campaign.
Curricular and extra-curricular battles
By Joseph Massad, Al-Ahram Weekly on-line 14 - 20 August 2003
Physician heal thy self: On US/Israeli exhortations to the Arabs to overhaul their educational curricula -- One of the bitter ironies of the last few years is the continuous calls issued from the United States, by official and unofficial channels, that school curricula across the Arab (and Muslim) worlds should be changed in order to reflect the American (and Israeli) view of the world. America's extra-curricular Arab targets for such change are the occupied Palestinian Authority, occupied Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. While few in the Arab world would question the need to overhaul school curricula across Arab countries to eliminate the biases that each regime injects them against myriad national and international causes, including historical inaccuracies, the position of religion in civic life, sectarian biases, gender biases, ethnic biases, and the like, most are astonished that such calls would be issued by the United States and its local subsidiary in the Middle East, Israel. The amazement is due to the fact that the school curricula and textbooks which the United States and Israel both use are in need of equally, if not more, major overhauling, to come close to objective, or at least more inclusive, representations of reality. In the case of the United States, its official history remains taught in school and university curricula, is propagated throughout media venues, and reiterated ad absurdum by government representatives and ideologues. The main claim of such uncritical self-view is that the United States has been a democracy for well over 200 years. This claim is paraded time and again across the educational system (school and university) and in popular culture so much that most Americans are shocked to the level of disbelief when it is pointed out to them that the first 100 years of their political system were years, not of democracy, but of legal slavery while the second 100 years were years of legal racial apartheid. The fact that women did not have suffrage for the first century and a half of the republic or that only white property owning men could vote in the first half century seem immaterial to such conceptualisation.
72 Difficult Hours
By Jihad Al Khazen, Al-Hayat 8/16/2003
Mahmoud Abbas tried his best to control the situation and prevent the truce from collapsing, after the Israelis killed Mohamad Sader, a local leader of an Islamic Jihad faction. However, the information I received right until yesterday indicate that the Jihad is insisting on taking revenge and refuses that its men become open targets for the Israelis under the pretext of truce.The Palestinian Premier faced 72 extremely difficult hours, which he would rather forget, as the Americans are making almost impossible demands and holding the Palestinians responsible for what happened; in fact, the meeting with the U.S. Under Secretary of State, William Burns was intense, and the latter took a very severe stance, even though he is one of the most understanding American leaders towards the Palestinian position. Then came the assassination of Mohamad Sader to jeopardize the truce, and Al Jihad announced its intention to avenge him. Abbas tried to contain the situation, especially since Mohamad Dahlan had held a fair meeting with the Israeli Minister of Defense, Shaul Mofaz, during which he asked him to withdraw from four other Palestinian cities, and Mofaz promised to transfer the message to Sharon, with a possibility of an agreement. All this was taking place as Abbas was meeting with the staff of the PLO in Tunis, to review their achievements and discuss future ones, before he returns to negotiate with Al Jihad leaders in Gaza.I contacted Abbas in Tunisia, and as his cell phone was being taken to him, I heard him raise his voice, which is unusual for him, so I asked him what was going on, and he said that he had to do everything as if there were no one but him on the scene.
Creative activism
Ammiel Alcalay, Al-Ahram Weekly on-line 14 - 20 August 2003
The Third International Black Panther Film Festival provided a rare opportunity for politics and imagination to intermingle -- Much of the global media's attention on the anti-war movement and dissent in the United States has focussed on a very small range of opinion and experience, usually discussing whether or not American citizens support or do not support the Bush administration's policies regarding Iraq, or how people feel about the erosion of what are generally called civil liberties. Much less attention gets paid to the core of long-time activists, former or current political prisoners, and younger grass-roots community activists for whom things like US Middle East policies and the introduction of the Patriot Act are simply extensions, expansions and continuities of long standing issues that continue to disenfranchise poor, working class, and largely black and Latino communities. The Third International Black Panther Film Festival (www.pantherfilmfest.com), held at City College, Columbia University, and the Studio Museum of Harlem in New York from 31 July to 4 August, provided an all-too-rare opportunity for activism and creativity to meet a wider public, where issues, activists and art could all be showcased together. With charismatic Hollywood star and activist Danny Glover serving as honorary chair, the festival managed to combine both larger and smaller productions into a cohesive whole. While the scope of the festival, like the thrust of the Black Panther Party itself, was certainly international, the feeling was very local and immediate. As Kathleen Cleaver, one of the primary organisers of the festival, put it: "Demonstrations against the war in Iraq were key to a greater public acknowledgement of a war that hadn't ever really stopped. I got the sense from people at this year's festival that their decision to come was made as a conscious political act, and this was somewhat different from the previous festivals."
Newsweek is spreading hate
By Abid Ullah Jan, Media Monitors Network 8/12/2003
Criticizing the Qur'an has been the norm among non-Muslims since day one. All those who do not believe in it are entitled to question its validity and prove it wrong. In a free market place of ideas, anyone may say almost anything about the Qur'an and Islam. However, it is the way one presents his views that makes it worthy of objective debate or turns it into a pure insulting and misleading work - only good for burning bridges of trust, compassion and understanding within a volatile global order.The latest high-profile assault on the authenticity of the Qur'an came from one of the main organs of the so-called mainstream media. Recent issue of Newsweek, July 28, 2003 has published an article titled "Challenging the Qur'an." A closer look reveals the main problem lies as much with the unrecognized group of German scholars dedicated to producing a "new interpretation of the Qur'an," as it lies with the Newsweek.There can be two kind of responses to the Newsweek's article. One, to respond to the ways in which it challenges the authenticity of the Qur'an and two, to see how Newsweek has taken the responsibility of this assault on the Qur'an and spreading hate on its shoulders.As far as the chief hypothesis of Luxenberg et al -- that the original language of the Qur'an was not Arabic but something closer to Aramaic -- is concerned even a short response from Dr. Maher Hathout is sufficient to shot it down before it could take off. [1] Luxenberg argues, "Arabic did not turn up as a written language until 150 years after Muhammad's [PBUH] death." A cursory research may reveal, the Arabic script evolved from the Nabataean Aramaic script. It has been used since the 4th century AD, but the earliest document, an inscription in Arabic, Syriac and Greek, dates from 512 AD, whereas Muhammad (PBUH) was born around 570 AD.[2] The earliest manifestation of a script form, which can be identified as Arabic, is on a tombstone at Nemara in the Syrian desert, dated A.D. 328. [3]
Intentional hype?
By Azmi Bishara, Al-Ahram Weekly on-line 14 - 20 August 2003
The only accomplishment of the roadmap so far has been the release of detainees -- at best a dubious achievement. The real issues might be forgotten -- Inexplicably, the way a defeatist mindset challenges reality is by denying its very existence. Either it sees any attempt to deal with actual circumstances as capitulation -- as an internalisation of defeat -- or, under the guise of pragmatism, it retreats in the face of power, and thus heightens the arrogance of the powerful. Some Palestinians and Arabs promote defeatism, acting as though what we have is a conflict between evenly matched armies and forces, as though the struggle against occupation were not a just cause, and as though Israel were already the victor. Some Palestinians justify the truce by saying "We have been defeated." Those who say that we have been "defeated" are just as wrong as those who declared that we "triumphed" against Sharon in Beirut in 1982. Those who claim that we were "defeated" basically agree with Minister Shaul Mofaz when he claims that the Palestinians accepted the truce because Israel was victorious owing to its resolve to make the Palestinians understand that it was better for them to give in. But one mustn't read much into the military advantage occupiers have over those living under occupation. Defeatists go out of their way to point out achievements, and, in doing so, they rewrite the nation's goals. They forget all about the people and the cause that gives the political quest any meaning. However, that does not change the simple facts: our land has been stolen, our people live under occupation and our cause is liberation. Now, you may want to turn the discussion to behind the scenes talk and the US fascination with this or that personality, and the occasion in which the US president smiled or even laughed. You may want to focus on how the US reacts differently to the matter of the wall in the presence of Palestinian and Israeli guests. But all that only takes you away from the real issue. The legitimacy of a political dialogue, undertaken under conditions of occupation, is lost amid the hype. A party has been thrown, the band is playing, and the dance floor is full, but what exactly is the occasion?
Erecting a barrier to peace
By Daniel Seidemann, Miftah 8/16/2003
Late last month the Israeli military posted seizure notices in Sur Bahir, a village in southeast Jerusalem. The government is taking a narrow corridor a little less than two miles long and 40 to 70 yards wide, but the impact of this seizure will be huge: It portends the starkest change in the delicate and volatile ecosystem in East Jerusalem since 1967. If pending plans are implemented, a security wall/fence will, within as little as three months, sever not only Sur Bahir but all of East Jerusalem from its environs in the West Bank. Right now, within a 12-mile radius of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem's Old City, there reside 650,000 Israelis and 650,000 Palestinians, in two disparate but intersecting urban grids. The barrier will leave 300,000 Palestinians on the "Israeli" side of the wall. It will sever the delicate weave of arteries and veins that connect the Palestinian sectors in the Jerusalem metropolis. Parents will be cut off from their children, children from their schools, sick people from hospitals and workers from the sources of their livelihoods. In Jerusalem, more often than not, the barrier will separate Palestinian from Palestinian rather than Palestinian from Israeli.
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