Edward Said's journey to Ithaka
By Joseph Massad, Al-Ahram Weekly on-line 9 - 15 October 2003
"Joseph, are you still sleeping, it's 8am already?" These are the first words I would hear upon picking up the phone three, four times a week. Edward's powerful teasing voice on the other side goading me to emulate his work regimen: "I have been up since 5:30." I would scramble the words to justify that I had just woken up half an hour earlier and was having my morning coffee. "I am not so sure about that. You sound like you're still in bed!"
How is one to deal with a legacy of a great man like Edward Said? How can the life of Edward Said, that exemplary public intellectual, teach us how to continue our journey? He always seemed heading somewhere, towards an important goal. He was always on the lookout for a place with which he could identify, not necessarily a physical place, in fact precisely not a physical place, but one where he could feel at ease, even perhaps at home. Last Fall, at Cambridge, where he spent a few weeks lecturing, Edward seemed so happy to be in a different intellectual and political space, free from the arrogance of American Empire, constantly on display in the United States, and far from the increasing mediocrity afflicting intellectual life in America after 11 September. I saw him regularly there as I was spending my sabbatical at the University of London. We shared a fantasy of moving to Britain permanently where we could escape the increasingly frightening developments in the United States. At the end of the day, however, despite the temptation of a new physical place, Edward's search was for something else, for somewhere else.
Sharon's road to more vengeance
By H.D.S. Greenway, Boston Globe 10/10/2003
IN GILLO Pontecorvo's brilliant film reenactment of "The Battle of Algiers," there is a scene in which some Muslim women in the Casbah put on European clothes and have their hair cut short in the European manner. It is 1957, and the Arabs of Algeria are up in arms, intifadah-like, against their French colonial masters. The Arab women are each given a package to take into the European quarter, and each leaves her parcel in a crowded cafe, which then explodes in mayhem as scores of French men and women are blown to bits.
It seems that Hanadi Jaradat, 27, a Palestinian woman and a lawyer, followed the same course, donning Western dress so she could pass more easily among Israelis on her way from the West Bank to Haifa. There she killed 19 Israelis, some of them Arabs, not with a bomb left behind, as in Algiers, but strapped to her waist, the new symbol of resistance for the Palestinians, of terror for the Israelis.
And what carnage she caused on the eve of the day most sacred to Jews. How many circles of ruined lives rippled out from that dreadful deed? Who could not feel sorrow for these victims of unending violence?
Hanadi's father would not speak of his own pain. But he did say: "I can tell you that our people believe that what Hanadi has done is justified. Imagine watching the Israelis kill your son, your nephew, destroying our house -- they are pushing our people into a corner, they are provoking actions like these by our people." Hanadi had been distraught over the death of her brother, shot dead four months ago in an Israeli sweep.
Symptoms of decay
By Azmi Bishara, Al-Ahram Weekly on-line 9 - 15 October 2003
Separating the private and public domains is the first step toward the elimination of graft -- When people make personal gains out of public posts, this is called corruption. When officials carry out public business in a manner detached from, or even harmful to, public interest, this too is called corruption. In general, corruption is the erosion of barriers between the public and private spheres, between public and private wealth. Proper public administration, we all know, requires that decisions are made rationally and in the interest of the public. High-ranking as they may be, government officials do not embody -- in person, mood, or wealth -- the public interest. Officials have private lives, and whenever the latter clash with their public duties, their private affairs become public. This is why the public is entitled to know certain things about the personal life and leanings of people in high places. Generally speaking, the public and private spheres should remain separate and the private interests of government officials, and of their families and friends, should be segregated from their public functions.
Public employees -- whether elected or appointed -- are expected to make decisions or recommend policy in a rational and transparent manner, not according to their personal preferences and attachments. A public official should not let his own desires, his family's financial needs, or his children's financial ambitions affect his decisions on matters such as public health, roads, industrial zones, selling of public land, government contracts, key appointments, punishment of crimes, and exemption from military service. Partisan considerations and electoral compromises tend to affect public decisions. Beyond a certain degree, however, this could lead to corruption even within established democracies. This latter type of corruption is a structural flaw of democracy for which correction efforts are continually made. Democracy cannot survive without parties and elections, and even in established democracies, it is common for major companies to try and win over elected officials by "contributing" to their campaigns.
Sharon's target is not Arafat, but Palestinian solidarity
By Martin Woollacott, The Guardian 10/10/2003
Until Hamas is drawn into a political role there can be no peace -- Not long after Bush's big speech last summer, in which he called for two states, Israeli and Palestinian, living side by side in peace, important negotiations began. There were the talks between the US, the EU, Russia, and the UN which produced the "road map" for progress towards a final settlement between Israelis and Palestinians. But there were also more clandestine and equally critical encounters between the two main political and military forces in Palestinian life, Fatah and Hamas.
The compelling reason for these two movements to come together was that otherwise any progress towards what outsiders, and the Israelis, would call peace would produce a civil war among Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority under Yasser Arafat had never had the means (nor, the Israelis would say, the intention) of suppressing, as opposed to occasionally harassing, Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Even less capable of such action was the new Palestinian government under Mahmoud Abbas, which later emerged in the first phase of the application of the road map. This was partly because Arafat denied him full control of the security forces and partly because he, in any case, thought it would be madness, as well as fratricide, to take on Hamas.
The October War and U.S. Policy
By William Burr, National Security Archive 10/7/2003
Thirty years ago, on 6 October 1973 at 2:00 p.m. (Cairo time), Egyptian and Syrian forces launched coordinated attacks on Israeli forces in the Sinai and the Golan Heights. Known variously as the October War or the Yom Kippur War, this conflict lasted until late October when Washington and Moscow, working through the United Nations, forced a cease-fire on the warring parties. The October war had a fundamental impact on international relations not only by testing the durability of U.S.-Soviet dιtente but also by compelling the United States to put the Arab-Israeli conflict on the top of its foreign policy agenda. The threat of regional instability, energy crises, and superpower confrontation, made a U.S. hands-on role in the region inescapable. Since the fall of 1973, Washington has played a central role in the protracted, if checkered, effort to address the conflicting security and territorial objectives of Arabs and Israelis. Recently declassified U.S. archival material, unearthed by the National Security Archive, provides critically important information on American policies, perceptions, and decisions during the conflict.
Lessons in Civility
By Paul Krugman, New York Times 10/10/2003
It's the season of the angry liberal. Books like Al Franken's "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them," Joe Conason's "Big Lies" and Molly Ivins's "Bushwhacked" have become best sellers. (Yes, I've got one out there, too.) But conservatives are distressed because those liberals are so angry and rude. O.K., they admit, they themselves were a bit rude during the Clinton years that seven-year, $70 million investigation of a tiny money-losing land deal, all that fuss about the president's private life but they're sorry, and now it's time for everyone to be civil.
Indeed, angry liberals can take some lessons in civility from today's right.
Consider, for example, Fox News's genteel response to Christiane Amanpour, the CNN correspondent. Ms. Amanpour recently expressed some regret over CNN's prewar reporting: "Perhaps, to a certain extent, my station was intimidated by the administration and its foot soldiers at Fox News." A Fox spokeswoman replied, "It's better to be viewed as a foot soldier for Bush than as a spokeswoman for Al Qaeda."
And liberal pundits who may be tempted to cast personal aspersions can take lessons in courtesy from conservatives like Charles Krauthammer, who last December reminded TV viewers of his previous career as a psychiatrist, then said of Al Gore, "He could use a little help."
Sharon widens the field
By Graham Usher, Al-Ahram Weekly on-line 9 - 15 October 2003
Israel attacked Syria because it says it backs groups like Islamic Jihad. Arabs fear Washington stands behind Israel in this assessment -- On 5 October Israeli warplanes launched their first attack inside Syria since the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Syria responded by tabling a resolution at the UN Security Council condemning the "Israeli aggression", while playing down its regional significance.
The raid was "an attempt by the Israeli government to extract itself from crisis [in Israel and the occupied territories] by trying to terrorise Syria and drag it and the region into other wars because this [Israeli] government is one of war and war is the justification of its existence," Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad told Al- Hayat newspaper on 7 October.
It is difficult to share this analysis. The reality is that for the first time in 30 years Israel has extended its long attritional war with Syria over the occupied Golan Heights beyond the "theatres" of the occupied territories and Lebanon to Syria itself. Moreover it received explicit American endorsement in doing so.
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