qunfuz

Shifting to www.qunfuz.com

2009-06-17T15:45:00.000-07:00

I am posting new articles and most of the old stuff on this blog over at www.qunfuz.com Please join me there.

The Green Still Resists

2009-06-17T08:07:00.000-07:00

In one of the most contentious sections of his thoroughly contentious Cairo speech, Obama declared: “Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It’s a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end. It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered.”

It’s difficult to know where to start with this. Perhaps by registering just how insulting it is for the representative of the imperial killing machine – responsible directly and indirectly for millions of deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, Somalia – to lecture the dispossessed and massacred Palestinians on their occasional attempts to strike back. We can be sure that the sleeping children Obama is concerned with here are the Israeli children who live on the stolen land of Palestine, not the unsleeping, traumatised children of Gaza, several hundred of whom were burnt and dismembered six months ago. Then it’s worth remarking how the erudition and intelligence shown in Obama’s pre-presidential book 'Dreams from my Father' have been immediately crushed on his assumption of the presidency. How otherwise could his historical vision be so partial and simplistic? There was certainly a key non-violent aspect to the struggle for civil rights in the United States, but pretending that violence played no role in the process makes it necessary to ignore the American Civil War (half a million dead), Nat Turner, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers and rioting Chicago. Violence, or the threat of violence, was important in South Africa and India too, and certainly in Obama’s ancestral Kenya, and was the dominant anti-imperial strategy in Vietnam and Algeria.

In the Palestinian context, it is essential to emphasise once again that while Palestinians have a right to violent resistance, most resistance to the extreme violence of Zionism has been, and continues to be, non-violent. A small minority of Palestinians fight in the militias, but most Palestinians have participated in tax strikes, unarmed demonstrations, non-cooperation with Israeli bureaucracy, and similar actions. Penned in with US-made and granted weaponry, and ignored by the Western media, these tactics have not yet done the Palestinians any good.

Yet the act of resisting, when it becomes a habit, makes the actor stronger than he was before, and changes him, so that each of his acts becomes infused with resistance. The great Palestinian thinker Edward Said said, “Culture is a way of fighting extinction and obliteration.” For 61 years Palestinians have engaged in cultural resistance, in the widest sense. This means farmers continuing to farm even when their trees are slated for uprooting. It means couples building a house of their own even when they know it will be bulldozed. It means giving birth to children even though it is forbidden to dream of their future. It explains why Palestinian children in Damascus, Dubai and San Diego still speak Arabic in the Palestinian dialect, and in the accent of a village not even their parents have seen.

Students resist by studying. Palestinians are among the world’s best educated people, despite the school closures and curfews, the bombs and enforced poverty. Raja Shehadeh resists by walking in the hills, which themselves seem to rise up against the weight of settlements and military roads. Mourid Barghouti writes in “I Saw Ramallah”: “There is less green now. Israel has been stealing the water since 1967, but even so the green still resists.”

Most persistently, Palestinians resist by remembering. The refugee camp alleyways are named after the raped villages their inhabitants fled. Refugee families keep the keys to their homes on hooks or framed in their temporary shelters. A giant key hangs over the entrance to the Aida camp in Bethlehem, and many Palestinians are named Ayid (Returner), or Jaffra or Falasteen (both mean Palestine), or Bisan (a city in Palestine). Perhaps the most characteristic Palestinian name is Sumood, which means endurance and remaining.

A common motif of Palestinian art is an olive tree wreathed in barbed wire. Another is the crucified Christ (Jesus is surely the most famous Palestinian of all, even if the American Christians haven’t worked it out). Hanzala, assassinated Naji al-Ali’s cartoon creation – eternally eight years old because that was Naji’s age when he was driven from his home, and always with his back to the world because the world has turned its back on Palestine – stands on almost every wall. The body of Mahmoud Darwish, Palestine’s ‘national poet’ who died last summer but who is obviously not yet dead, is imprinted in the marketplace and near the checkpoint. In every café and sitting room stories are told of the struggle and the land and the days before.

These memories are the symbols of Palestine and also Palestine’s first weapon of refusal, because the destroyers of Palestine insist on forgetfulness. This is why stones are stolen from the walls of old Jerusalem and used to build houses for Jews, to give them an air of age and authenticity. This is why archeology in Israel is a matter of military security. This is why the Palestinians with Israeli citizenship are described as ‘Arab-Israelis’, as if they’ve recently arrived from Algeria or Kuwait. It is why Zionist-compliant media never explained that the refugees in Gaza come from Ashkelon and Sderot.

Memory is related to truth and justice, and constitutes a fundamental challenge to the Zio-Disney version of the Holy Land, and to any oppressive system. Yet memory can also burn the oppressed.

The danger of memory, particularly traumatic memory, is that it freezes the rememberer in eternal retrospection. The flow of the present coagulates in him, and he dies. But the Palestinians are focused on the present moment too, on today’s existence and endurance. When their land calls to them it calls with immediacy. The refugees don’t want to return to the past; they want to return to their land today, they want their rights today.

And right now there is an explosion of Palestinian expression which more than compensates for the deaths of Darwish and Edward Said. Palestinian films are now the most sophisticated in the Arab world, and the most accessible to global audiences. Paradise Now, for instance, was shortlisted for an Oscar for best foreign film. Palestinian hip hop is powerful and distinctive and has an international fan base. A new crop of poets completely at ease with contemporary mass media include Tamim Barghouti, Suheir Hammad and Nathalie Handal. Politically, websites like the Palestine Chronicle and Ali Abunimah’s Electronic Intifada are signs of the beginning of an effective lobby.

It would be difficult to find a nation more alive. The Palestinians are solidifying and prospering as a nation – an imagined community – even as the earth disappears under their feet. Mourid Barghouti says, “The long Occupation has succeeded in changing us from children of Palestine to children of the idea of Palestine.”

Ideas can be more fertile even than bank accounts. Eventually, they can prove more powerful than anything. The apartheid Wall is painted with Palestinian identity, and with messages of solidarity in any language you can think of.

This changes the equation in the long term, and the equation needs to be changed. All that we can currently hope for is that Obama is as radical as Carter has become. In other words, all we can hope for is a bantustan on bits of the West Bank and Gaza. Israel will continue to be a sectarian settler state which disenfranchises its Palestinian citizens. It will continue to hold Jerusalem. Palestinian refugees will have their moral and legal right to return to their land denied.

No self-respecting people would acquiesce in this, least of all the Palestinians, with their thousands of years of history and their enormous cultural momentum.

Entering Palestine

2009-06-12T15:32:00.000-07:00

I love it when Arab Christians have names like Omar. It shows, on their fathers’ part, a rejection of the sectarianism which cripples us. I know of a Christian family in Beirut which named its eldest son Jihad, and Muslim families with sons called Fidel and Guevara. Omar is not merely a specifically Muslim name; it’s more particularly a Sunni name, disliked by some Shia for theological-historical reasons. Omar is not a good name to have written on your ID card while driving through a Shia-militia-controlled area of Baghdad. But I know an Iraqi Shia woman whose brother is called Omar, because her father rejected the whole sorry sectarian business.

By and large, the Palestinians have avoided the curse. It’s still the case that if you ask a Palestinian whether he’s Muslim or Christian he responds, “Palestinian!” I mention this because our guide from Amman to the Allenby Bridge was a Palestinian Christian called Omar, and because the Palestinians, unlike their enemies, are proud of their diversity and pluralism.

Swaying in the bus aisle, Omar explained that Jordanian officers would check our passports but would not stamp them. “The Jordanian government has recognised Israel, but not Israeli control over the West Bank. Why are there Israeli police on the border and not Palestinians? Jordan recognises this as a crossing, but not a border.”

Surely Omar was pleased that, since the peace agreement, he could visit his family in Bethlehem? Not really: “Jordan allows every Israeli to come here. They get visas automatically when they come in. But we have to apply at the Israeli embassy, where they treat us badly, and 95% of applications are refused. I tried to go in for my uncle’s funeral, but they wouldn’t let me. This is the balanced peace we have with our neighbours.”

The Jordanian side of the crossing takes less than ten minutes. Omar collects our passports to flash at an officer while we drink water in the shade. Then back onto the bus, without Omar, and over the bridge.

On the Israeli side there are even more flags than in an Arab country, and a sign offering ten million dollars for information concerning two Israeli soldiers gone missing during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

Ten million dollars! For men missing for 27 years, who must be dead. I exclaim aloud, and Ahdaf remarks that the sign’s true purpose is to demonstrate Israel’s commitment to its people, and the money in its hands.

We give our bags to a Palestinian worker. They will be given back when we’ve been processed through the border. Past plainclothes men with sunglasses and fingers on the triggers of enormous guns (I’ve never seen guns the size of the guns I saw hanging off Israeli backs – science fiction guns, guns from the film Men in Black) and into a queue. When I reach the girl in the booth she gets on the walkie-talkie and sticks a green sticker on my passport. Another girl arrives and tells me to wait on a bench.

A couple of minutes later I’m taken into a separate room, by yet another girl, and my first questioning begins. Why are you here? Are you married? Do you have children? What are their names? Where is your father from? Have you been to Syria? When was the last time? Where will you visit in Israel? Where will you stay in Jerusalem? Why do you have a new passport? Do you have any other passports? What kind of writer are you? Do you have a weapon?

It took ten minutes. Then I was told to stand inside a machine which blows wind over your body to pick up any forgotten traces of explosive. And I was waved on.

I thought I’d done it then. But around the white-walled corner the process began in earnest. Maybe eight windows processing eight queues. Our Palfest group dominated two of them. Victoria Britain was at the front showing the British Council letter of invitation with all our names. Slowly we moved up, interspersing Arabs with Anglos, to dilute the Arabs in the consciousness of the Israelis. Jamal got through with no trouble. But Suheir was turned back. Victoria suggested I join the other queue. “That window seems more tolerant,” she said. “I’ve been comparing.” Her harsher official was a prettyish Sephardic girl. Mine was very white. Which made no difference. When my turn came I was directed to a bench which already seated a mainly Palestinian crowd, including Suheir. In total four of our group, all with Arab or Muslim names, were stopped.

I sat down to begin the wait. I wished I’d taken a book from my bag before handing it over, and perhaps a nicotine mint. If I’d been told that I had a five-hour period of stillness ahead I might have meditated. But I was in a place of noise and distress, peppered with distractors. I observed the Israelis as they flitted or slouched, expecting one of them to call my name. During this long time I was oppressed by their low-slung trousers. I mean, maybe it works for people with the right kind of buttocks, I don’t know. But I’m sure it doesn’t work for Israeli kid-soldiers.

After three hours a slight young man in short-sleeved casuals summoned me quietly to a second interview. I told him I was part of a group of writers and that I planned to do a reading in Jerusalem.

“How many editions of your novel are there?”

“Only one, I’m afraid.”

“And what is the plot?”

“You should buy it,” I grin. “If you buy it it might run into a second edition.”

His smile has gone.

“No. I was hoping for a PDF.”

The European holding me at the border of Arab Palestine wants me to send him a PDF of my novel.

I gave an inevitably partial account of the plot. He nodded, and then smiled again. “I know you’ve been waiting a while already. It’ll only be another couple of minutes.”

It took another couple of hours.

As well as playing psychology, I think they were googling us. My interviewer had suddenly asked, “Why is Suheir with you? She isn’t a writer. She’s an actress.” Suheir is an actress, most recently in Salt of this Sea, but she and her interviewer had only talked poetry. And then there was George, a neatly dressed young American of Egyptian origin. He waited from nine in the morning to four in the afternoon, when a very aggressive Israeli came at him with a document. “Sign this or you go!” she sirened. The document forbade George entry to ‘Palestinian-controlled’ areas on pain of immediate deportation and the denial of entry visas for a decade. “I can’t sign this,” he told her. Her answer was nearly a scream: “So you go back to Jordan!”

“What’s their problem with you?” I asked George. “You have an American passport and a Christian name.” “I’m a pro-Palestine activist in the States,” he explained. “They haven’t said a word about it, but I presume they looked me up.”

So the visit began with intimidation, and continued the same way. I wouldn’t say I was ever scared in Palestine, but part of my brain was constantly occupied with sizing up the occupied landscape – finding the Wall on the horizon, judging vehicles and the distance and mood of soldiers, being aware of the positions of towers and checkpoints.

It’s worse, of course, for the Palestinians. Several of them were held all day at the border, including a sad-faced woman in late middle age. The Israelis regarded her with open disdain. Her demeanour made me wonder if she had a funeral to go to. At one point she begged, and when she was finally allowed through she asked God to bless her tormentors.

Suheir was asked this question: Why did your father leave? A survey of the others on the bench established that it’s a routine question for Palestinians from the lands occupied in 1948. Of course, you won’t get through if you tell the truth: He left because he was driven out at gunpoint, because his sister was terrified of being molested, because there had been a massacre in the town, because he feared for his life. That won’t work. So for the purposes of the crossing, the correct answer is: I don’t know. He died, and I never asked. Or perhaps, He left because this place was a desert before you came; he wanted to live somewhere more civilised.

Your visit must begin with a lie.

For us internationals with our semi-official backing, it was a difficult entry, but not a forced entry. Obviously not. At the many borders the Israelis have constructed I surprised myself with my capacity for calm, good grace and repartee. I worried beforehand that I would find it impossible to remain polite, but the reality is something different. My aim was to pass, to enter, and I played my role to make the entry smooth.

And all this talk of entry, difficult and forced, reminds me of the Arabic word used to describe assaulted Palestine and its hundreds of bulldozed villages: al-mughtusiba, which means both ‘usurped’ and ‘raped’. The alleys of the Azzeh camp in Bethlehem, for instance, have wall signs announcing their names, which are the names of the villages the refugees fled. I took a photo of one which reads: Al-Menshiyeh, two kilometres north east of Akka (Acre), population 810, occupied and raped 14/5/1948.

Obama (who I will call Osama since his ‘clash of civilisations’ Cairo speech), and the proponents of normalisation, forgetting and ‘balance’, believe that peace will be achieved when raper and rapist are taught to smile into each other’s eyes. I disagree. I believe the rape should be stopped, and the Zionist borders – between Jordan and Palestine, between the villages and towns in Palestine, between 1948 Palestine and 1967 Palestine, between a farmer and his land, as well as the borders in the minds of Israeli Jews which produce these physical manifestations – should be torn down.

From Vanunu to the New Jew

2009-06-06T15:39:00.000-07:00

“I cannot keep silent … Disaster follows disaster; the land lies in ruins … My people are fools; they do not know me.” Jeremiah 4:19

Mordechai Vanunu is a Moroccan Jew, born in Marrakesh. Today he credits his humanity to having been born in an Arab country rather than in the Jewish state. He was nine when he was taken to Israel. He attended an ultra orthodox school, and after his military service became a nuclear technician at the Dimona plant. At this time his anti-Zionist politics developed. Later he flirted with Buddhism, converted to Christianity, and in London in 1986 told the Sunday Times what he knew of Israel’s nuclear weapons programme, backing his claims with photographic evidence.

He was then caught in a ‘honey trap’, lured by a beautiful woman from London to Italy, drugged and kidnapped in Rome by Mossad (with the connivance of British, French and Italian intelligence services), and brought back to Israel, where he served 18 years in prison for his truth-telling, twelve of them in solitary confinement. He says he survived because of his strong will (“the first thing I did in prison was give up smoking”), and by playing opera records. He refused to converse with the only human beings available – his guards. His lawyer describes him as “the most stubborn, principled, and tough person I have ever met.”

Out of prison, Vanunu is still imprisoned, forbidden to leave the state he so loathes, and not allowed to meet or even email foreigners. When I and several other foreigners met him in an east Jerusalem restaurant, I asked him, “Can I say we’ve met you? Will you get in trouble?” He thrust his arm skyward in a very Moroccan way: “Yes! Yes, I will have trouble. I don’t care about trouble. Let them make trouble!”

This was the end of an incredibly emotional week. I was physically and mentally exhausted from late nights, early mornings, and the slow absorption of what I was experiencing. I’d been weeping in the streets on a couple of occasions, and I’m not a particularly weepy kind of guy. Tonight our final Palfest event, at the Palestine National Theatre, had been closed down by Israeli troops, we’d relocated to read at the British Council garden, and then we’d eaten and danced. And another early start tomorrow – but Vanunu was across the table. Like everything else during my visit to occupied Palestine, meeting Vanunu was an experience worth being awake for.

I ordered another Taybeh beer and we started talking. Before long I was sitting next to him, putting my arm around his shoulders and telling him I wished I could have held his hand during those years when he was alone.

Vanunu is a proud Christian. His discourse is unrelentingly harsh on ‘the Jewish’, for their opposition to democracy, their brutality, their lack of humanity. Gently, indirectly, I hinted he might be wrong to generalise so. I mentioned Ilan Pappe and the Neturei Karta – fine examples, secular and religious, of Jewish opposition to Zionism. Next to us was a French Jew, a very intelligent academic, who had earlier said the obvious very clearly: Zionism has to be defeated, by force if necessary.

Vanunu liked the people I mentioned, but still didn’t like ‘the Jewish’. In awe of the man’s suffering, knowing that he has been tortured by the self-proclaimed Jewish state, I didn’t argue further.

It made me consider the tragedy of this people, the Israeli Jews, who have driven themselves into such a dark corner. The notable exceptions – people like Amira Hass, Gideon Levy, Jeff Halper – really are exceptions; and then there are the rest, over 90%, who support Israel’s right to be an ethno-state on the ruins of the pluralistic, ancient society that was here before, and who believe regular massacres of Arabs to be necessary.

I didn’t visit the theatre in Tel Aviv or have dinner in Ashkelon, so I don’t claim to be an Israel expert; but what I saw of the Israeli Jews in east Jerusalem, and manning the checkpoints in the West Bank, was quite unlike what I’ve seen of Jews elsewhere. These people were ugly, physically speaking. The Jews are not renowned for ugliness. But these people looked like oppressors, and they looked like oppressors who know what they are.

Vanunu refuses to speak Hebrew. He lives alone, in east Jerusalem. Israeli Jewish society considers him a traitor. Only one member of his large family will speak to him. The Palestinians are friendly to him and often invite him into their homes, but he politely refuses, explaining that he can’t tell who is a collaborator and who isn’t. He knows the state is following him, and he knows there are many Palestinians who – for money or drugs or to keep the silence of a blackmailer – help the state. What he does all day, every day, is walk – “from the checkpoint to the wall, from the wall to the checkpoint.”

Suheir Hammad told me it took her several visits to Palestine before she summoned enough courage to visit her family’s town, Lydda, one of the towns ethnically cleansed in 1948. But once in Israel proper she relaxed a little. When she saw how badly Israeli Jews treat each other, it became less personal. For they too are suffering: you can’t be happy when you torture others, not really happy. Wifebeaters may look happy in the pub, but they aren’t. According to a British Pakistani friend, someone who worked at a West Bank university and spent plenty of time in Tel Aviv, the only glue holding Israeli Jews together is their hatred of the natives. His argument is repeated by Eva Figes, whose ‘Journey to Nowhere’ I’ve just read. This compulsive memoir of a German Jewish family’s forced migration to London is eloquent in its denunciation of Zionism, and also of American pro-Zionist but anti-Jewish immigration policy following World War Two. The family’s housemaid Edith, a survivor of Nazi Berlin, spends a decade in Palestine-Israel before coming to London. Why had she left? Because in Israel, “everyone hates everyone else.”

Eva Figes writes: “The New Jew looked like someone out of a Leni Riefenstahl film, handsome in a Hellenic sort of way. The New Jew struck out first, was secretly ashamed of those who had allowed themselves to be killed without a struggle, and so rejected them, even though using them for his own political ends. The ideals of the New Jew who set out to create Israel after the war were remarkably similar to his mirror image, the old Nazi. Not a good omen for the future.”

Deborah Moggach and Sousan Hammad write about Palfest here.

Jeremy Harding writes about the workshop he and I ran at Bir Zeit here.

Jeremy's LRB diary piece on the wall and the web is here, and another one on cultural liberation is here.

At the end of this post there are links to four of my photo albums from Palestine.

Suheir Hammad

2009-06-05T08:13:00.000-07:00

Suheir Hammad is one of the Palfest participants who deserves a post to herself. A Palestinian-American, Suheir was born to refugee parents in Amman. She spent her first years in civil war Beirut before moving to Brooklyn, where drugs and gang wars raged. She is a poet, prosewriter and actress. Her poetry erases any distance between the personal and political, and is humane, passionate and particular. Greatly influenced in its rhythm, diction and pacing by New York hip hop, it fits snugly into the tradition of Palestinian oral delivery exemplified by the late poet Mahmoud Darwish.

Suheir stars in the film Salt of this Sea, but it is surely time someone directed her in a poetry performance DVD. You have to hear her read to really appreciate what she does. A good place to start is the poem First Writing Since, which concerns 9/11. Here is We Spend the Fourth of July in Bed. And one for Rachel Corrie. Here is part one and part two of an al-Jazeera International interview, and here she is reading for Palfest in Ramallah. I hope the Palfest film-makers have more to come. The most powerful part of her reading in Ramallah – powerful enough to bring the audience to tears – was her series of poems for Gaza.

Jeremy Harding describes Suheir as "a younger, image-conscious, thoughtful militant for Palestine, one of a new generation who do the writing, while the Israelis oblige by extending the wall."

Ali Abunimah on Obama's Lecture

2009-06-05T07:22:00.000-07:00

Personally, I found it unpleasant to see Obama lecturing the Arabs, and the handpicked audience clapping as ecstatically as trained apes whenever the President (rather like Napoleon in Cairo) made an Islamic allusion. No matter that he said 'hajib' intead of 'hijab'. Most depressingly, Obama’s address was heavily influenced by the Bernard Lewis school of Orientalism – Arab and Muslim anger is caused by the cultural trauma of modernity and a “self-defeating focus on the past,” rather than by very present realities, such as the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the destabilisation of Pakistan and Somalia, the unwelcome military bases in the Muslim world, and the support of dictatorial regimes such as Mubarak’s. Obama’s assumptions repeated falsities, such as the notion that Arab regimes focus on Palestine to distract the people from their own failings. In fact the Arab regimes do everything they can to take the focus off Palestine, as the Palestinian tragedy is the key symbol of the bankruptcy of the client regimes. And Obama mocked violent resistance while not saying a word about the 1400 just killed in Gaza or the million slaughtered in Iraq.

The best response I've seen to the speech is by Ali Abunimah, who studies Obama’s phrases well: “Suffered in pursuit of a homeland? The pain of dislocation? They already had a homeland. They suffered from being ethnically cleansed and dispossessed of it and prevented from returning on the grounds that they are from the wrong ethno-national group. Why is that still so hard to say?” Ali goes on:

Once you strip away the mujamalat – the courtesies exchanged between guest and host – the substance of President Obama’s speech in Cairo indicates there is likely to be little real change in US policy. It is not necessary to divine Obama’s intentions – he may be utterly sincere and I believe he is. It is his analysis and prescriptions that in most regards maintain flawed American policies intact.

Though he pledged to “speak the truth as best I can”, there was much the president left out. He spoke of tension between “America and Islam” – the former a concrete specific place, the latter a vague construct subsuming peoples, practices, histories and countries more varied than similar.

Labelling America’s “other” as a nebulous and all-encompassing “Islam” (even while professing rapprochement and respect) is a way to avoid acknowledging what does in fact unite and mobilise people across many Muslim-majority countries: overwhelming popular opposition to increasingly intrusive and violent American military, political and economic interventions in many of those countries. This opposition – and the resistance it generates – has now become for supporters of those interventions, synonymous with “Islam”.

It was disappointing that Obama recycled his predecessor’s notion that “violent extremism” exists in a vacuum, unrelated to America’s (and its proxies’) exponentially greater use of violence before and after September 11, 2001. He dwelled on the “enormous trauma” done to the US when almost 3,000 people were killed that day, but spoke not one word about the hundreds of thousands of orphans and widows left in Iraq – those whom Muntazer al-Zaidi’s flying shoe forced Americans to remember only for a few seconds last year. He ignored the dozens of civilians who die each week in the “necessary” war in Afghanistan, or the millions of refugees fleeing the US-invoked escalation in Pakistan.

As President George Bush often did, Obama affirmed that it is only a violent minority that besmirches the name of a vast and “peaceful” Muslim majority. But he seemed once again to implicate all Muslims as suspect when he warned, “The sooner the extremists are isolated and unwelcome in Muslim communities, the sooner we will all be safer.”

Nowhere were these blindspots more apparent than his statements about Palestine/Israel. He gave his audience a detailed lesson on the Holocaust and explicitly used it as a justification for the creation of Israel. “It is also undeniable,” the president said, “that the Palestinian people – Muslims and Christians – have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation.”

Suffered in pursuit of a homeland? The pain of dislocation? They already had a homeland. They suffered from being ethnically cleansed and dispossessed of it and prevented from returning on the grounds that they are from the wrong ethno-national group. Why is that still so hard to say?

He lectured Palestinians that “resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed”. He warned them that “It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered.”

Fair enough, but did Obama really imagine that such words would impress an Arab public that watched in horror as Israel slaughtered 1,400 people in Gaza last winter, including hundreds of sleeping, fleeing or terrified children, with American-supplied weapons? Did he think his listeners would not remember that the number of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians targeted and killed by Israel has always far exceeded by orders of magnitude the number of Israelis killed by Arabs precisely because of the American arms he has pledged to continue giving Israel with no accountability? Amnesty International recently confirmed what Palestinians long knew: Israel broke the negotiated ceasefire when it attacked Gaza last November 4, prompting retaliatory rockets that killed no Israelis until after Israel launched its much bigger attack on Gaza. That he continues to remain silent about what happened in Gaza, and refuses to hold Israel accountable demonstrates anything but a commitment to full truth-telling.

Some people are prepared to give Obama a pass for all this because he is at last talking tough on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. In Cairo, he said: “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.”
These carefully chosen words focus only on continued construction, not on the existence of the settlements themselves; they are entirely compatible with the peace process industry consensus that existing settlements will remain where they are for ever. This raises the question of where Obama thinks he is going. He summarised Palestinians’ “legitimate aspirations” as being the establishment of a “state”. This has become a convenient slogan to that is supposed to replace for Palestinians their pursuit of rights and justice that the proposed state actually denies. Obama is already on record opposing Palestinian refugees’ right to return home, and has never supported the right of Palestinian citizens of Israel to live free from racist and religious incitement, persecution and practices fanned by Israel’s highest office holders and written into its laws.

He may have more determination than his predecessor but he remains committed to an unworkable two-state “vision” aimed not at restoring Palestinian rights, but preserving Israel as an enclave of Israeli Jewish privilege. It is a dead end.

There was one sentence in his speech I cheered for and which he should heed: “Given our interdependence, any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail.”

• Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of One Country, A Bold Proposal to end the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse.

Editor’s note, 5 June 2009: This article originally included a sentence saying “the last suicide attack targeting civilians by a Palestinian occurred in 2004″. This was incorrect and Ali Abunimah posted a clarification here in the discussion thread.

Visit Palestine

2009-06-01T16:00:00.000-07:00

I have just returned from a physically, mentally and emotionally exhausting week in Palestine. I was a participant in Palfest 09, the second Palestine Festival of Literature. It was a great honour to be in the company of writers like Michael Palin and Debborah Moggach, and Claire Messud, MG Vassanji, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Ahdaf Soueif and Jamal Mahjoub, the lawyer for Guantanamo Bay prisoners Ahmad Ghappour, Palestinian poets Suheir Hammad and Nathalie Handal, and all the others. I’ll do a post at some point on everybody there. It was an even greater honour to meet Palestinian academics, students, and people on the streets and in the camps, to witness their incredible resilience and creative intelligence. Something fearless in them slipped into me, and gave me optimism. A people like this can not be kept down indefinitely.

They will stand up, even if I can’t tell how they possibly can. What I saw in Palestine confirmed me in my belief that a two-state solution is impossible, but also made me very pessimistic about the only real solution, the one-state solution – such is the level of Zionist hatred and arrogance, so deeply entrenched is Zionist settlement on the landscape and Zionist assumptions in the minds of Israeli Jews.

There was inspiration and conversation. There were great meals. At one I harangued Mahmoud Abbas’s chief of staff (Rafik Husseini took it like the gentleman he clearly is), and at another I was talking to the heroic Mordechai Vanunu. There was a walk in the beautiful, Zionist-vandalised hills outside Ramallah, in a thin gap of olive trees between the thick scars of occupation. There was even dancing. But there was weeping too. For me, two afternoons of weeping, in the Aida camp in Bethlehem and in the old city of Hebron/ al-Khalil. And I’m not such a weepy person. I will write about all of this in the coming weeks.

What I can tell you in brief is that the tragedy is much worse than we imagine. I didn’t learn anything new in terms of the facts. I’d already seen videos of the brutal settlers of Hebron. I knew already that most Palestinian children need psychological treatment because their homes are fired on from snipers in the panopticon towers which shadow villages and camp alleyways, because they’ve had their front doors kicked in at night and seen their fathers beaten and dragged away. But to see it with your own eyes, to experience the humiliation of the checkpoints and the walls yourself, to be held for five hours at the border, to breathe the air of oppression – this is very different from what my happy imagination could produce.

I’ve been fascinated by Palestine for 25 years. My aunt’s house in Beirut was destroyed by Zionist planes. I have a Palestinian brother-in-law, and I don’t know how many wonderful Palestinian friends. I’ve read books and articles, I’ve listened to music, I’ve watched films, I’ve written about it. But this was my first visit. I always said I wouldn’t go unless I had a real reason to go, unless I would be doing some good. Plus as a Syrian (although my only passport is British) I’m not allowed to go. Yet I think I was wrong to wait so long. The Palestinians need our solidarity, and we need to see what is being done on the eastern Mediterranean with the support of our media, governments and money. Therefore I would advise everybody to visit Palestine. Not only because it is worthy to do so, but also because visiting Palestine is a fascinating, inspiring, unforgettable experience.

There are organisations which can arrange tours of West Bank towns and meetings with Palestinian NGOs, teachers, and ordinary people. Organisations suggested to me by American Christians in Hebron include Jeff Halper’s Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, the Friends of Sabeel, and the Christian Peacemaker Teams. I’m sure there are many more.

The first and last nights of the Festival were supposed to have happened at the Palestinian National Theatre in Jerusalem, but on both occasions heavily armed Israelis closed the theatre and forced people out. Here’s the Guardian report on the the first night, and here’s Karl Sabbagh’s letter to the Guardian:

I was at the opening of the Palestine literary festival in Jerusalem on Saturday night, when heavily armed police pushed their way into the midst of talks by Michael Palin, Deborah Moggach, and Henning Mankell, along with many of their readers from Palestine, Israel and elsewhere. The police had come to close the festival down, and in another PR debacle of the type for which Israel is becoming famous, their clumsy actions drew far more attention to Israel's oppression of the Palestinians than if they'd allowed the event to continue.

The sight of the expelled participants and audience as we filed down East Jerusalem's main street, some people carrying dishes of canapes, to the new and hastily organised venue at the French Cultural Institute might have seemed merely odd or amusing. In fact, it was a vivid reminder of Israel's fear of anything which might suggest that Palestinians are as cultured, civilised and deserving of respect as their Israeli neighbours.

Karl Sabbagh.

Much more to come.

Click here to see my photo album of people.

Click here to see my photo album of walls.

Click here to see my photo album of al-Khalil/ Hebron.

Click here to see my photo album of Ramallah, Bethlehem and Jerusalem.

Please read the captions.

Muslim Writer

2009-05-21T08:07:00.000-07:00

Something for the Muslim Writers Awards:

Am I a Muslim writer? American Jews and Russian Christians are what I read when I write. I like Syrian poets and Egyptian novelists too, but it would be difficult to argue that Nizar Qabbani is more ‘Muslim’ than he is ‘Arab’ or ‘Modernist’.

Is Islam a defining part of my personality? To be honest, it depends on the year. And what determines Muslim belonging anyway? Geography? Ideology? Linguistics? Surely not skin colour. Should Muslim writing be halal, and avoid beer and heresy? Should it intend to prevent vice and promote virtue? – if so, late Tolstoy was a Muslim writer.

It happens that my novel discusses tawheed, and that its most balanced character is a prayerful Muslim who wears hijab. I used the ideas and characters I found before me. But if I set my next novel amongst anarchist philosophers in the Ukraine, will I still be doing Muslim writing? It’s problematic, certainly.

I suppose if you can have Black writing and Gay writing and London writing you can have Muslim writing too. The label, like any other, is limiting if it’s used as a box, but liberating if we use it as a springboard. The point is, that as Muslims in Britain, many fictions are being written about us. Many are presented as fact. The Muslim label already looms large in the cultural imagination, and is skilfully brought into play by everyone from Martin Amis to Madonna. So we should write back. We – and I mean nothing more definite by ‘we’ than those who share a few key Islamic references, who don’t see Islam as foreign – have a million tales to tell. In Britain we are immigrants and natives, black and white and brown, rich and poor, taraweeh-praying and whisky-swilling, and mixtures of the above. For us to be heard in our variety is important, because heard voices empower. Voices heard through novels also work against ignorance, because novels, unlike the BBC, humanise. They deal in characters instead of abstractions, and raise questions, and so provide the human texture which the most well-intentioned news media cannot.

As Muslims in a non-Muslim or even Islamophobic society, I think we have something especially strong to contribute. We possess not only a fresh stock of stories and a range of new cultural forms, but also the enriched perspective and impatience with assumption that otherness and in-betweenness give you. To see all lands as foreign, through the eyes of a musafir – there is something in this which Islam and novel-writing share.

Syria's Tolstoy

2009-04-25T06:58:00.000-07:00

A book review for the Guardian:

Syria, more than most, is a land of stories and storytellers. The farmers and shopkeepers describe early Islamic battles or episodes from the Crusades as if they’d attended in person. A gathering of friends is quickly elevated into group performance of jokes, laments, myths, and conspiracies. Even the Syrians’ surnames suggest stories: there are families called The-Milk’s-Boiled, Sip-The-Yoghurt, and Undone-Belt. “The deeper you swim into our stories,” a village rhetorician once told me, “the more you understand that they have no floor.”

Yet Syria is better known for its poets, and its TV dramas, than for its novelists. Egypt, with its unending metropolis, is the home of the Arabic novel, and Egypt produced the Arabs’ master of fiction, Naguib Mahfouz. But a flame equally bright now burns from Damascus, via Germany. Here is the Great Syrian Novel, and its author Rafik Schami.

In “The Dark Side of Love” Schami exploits all the resources of the classic realist novel and then goes a little further, forging a new form out of Syrian orality. His basic unit is not chapter or paragraph, but story; a thousand bejewelled anecdotes and tales are buried here, ready to spring, but each is sculpted with such dazzling surety into the whole that reading the book is always compulsive. In its final, self-exposing passage, Schami compares his method to mosaic work, in which every shiny object is a beauty of itself, yet which in combination, at a distance, reveal a still greater beauty. The novel is even Tolstoyan in its marrying of the personal, social and political spheres, of private with national life.

It starts with an unsolved murder. “Knowledge is a lock,” says a policeman, “and the key to it is a question, but we’re not allowed to ask questions in this country…which is why there isn’t a single good crime novel in Syria. Crime novels feed on questions.”

Commissioner Barudi dares to ask. The answer is an epic of violent enmity between families, and between clashing ideas of love. The first idea is easily stated: “Love in Arabia depends more on what your identity card says than the feelings of your heart.”

‘Identity card’ means religion and sect and, more fundamentally, the all-powerful clan – that haven of solidarity and comfort which “saved the Arabs from the desert, and at the same time enslaved them.” In the mountain village of Mala, the Catholic Mushtaks and the Orthodox Shahins feud and kill for honour and revenge. In nearby Damascus, Farid Mushtak and Rana Shahin prefer the approach of Syria’s greatest Sufi saint, Ibn Arabi, who cried, “Love is my religion!” Like Romeo and Juliette, or Majnun and Laila, Farid and Rana’s romance shines secretly, ill-fatedly. It is a compelling and complete love story.

Schami’s Mala is on a par with Marquez’s Macondo for colour and resonance, although nothing more magical than real life happens here – only seductions and insanities, a visit by a dangerously drunk president, a peasant uprising, a bandit siege.

Damascus, “a lost luggage office” refined and trampled by 40 civilisations over 8,000 years, is experienced through its cafes, hammams and family homes, its puppet shows, Eid festivals, and hunger riots, via the underground press, a boxing match, and a brothel. The canvas is vast and closely painted. It feels encyclopedic, in psychological observation as well as social breadth.

There are no faux-magical pyrotechnics in the telling, but richly detailed characters working through real situations, characters whose inherited wounds the reader comes to care deeply about. Each is vividly drawn, with quiet and acute intelligence. The patriarch George Mushtak is an elemental force. So too is his philandering, repenting son, Elias. Farid, who we know best of all, grows by enduring a tyrannous father, Israeli bombs, and a ‘political’ prison camp.

“The Dark Side of Love” is a fiction which accurately (if selectively) documents Syrian social history. Its sweep reaches from 1907 to 1970, through the French occupation, the chaotic coup years, the rise of the Ba’ath, and the disastrous June war. Farid and Rana swim on the great currents of 20th Century Syrian thought – Communism, feminism, nationalism, Islamism – and witness the poisoning of the waters. Farid’s torture scenes are painfully, brilliantly narrated. Relations between Christians, Jews and Muslims, between the countryside and the city, between men and women, and between political factions, are explored with subtlety and honesty.

It is translated very well from the German, although annoying Germanic orthography remains – so that Yusuf is written ‘Jusuf’ and the Damascus quarter Muhajireen becomes ‘Muhayirin’. And perhaps a glossary of dictators’ names would have been useful. Schami disguises the actual characters with names whose comic impact will be lost on those who don’t speak Arabic. Abdul Nasser, for instance, is called Satlan, which means ‘stoned’.

The weakest part of the book is its title. “The Dark Side of Love” illumines almost every side of love, as well as fear, longing, cruelty and lust. Darkness and light alternate like the basalt and marble stripes on Damascene walls, and the novel’s structure is as strong. A book like this requires a less limiting title. I suggest something as expansive, as comprehensive, as ‘War and Peace’.

Rant against Hypocrisy

2009-04-23T11:38:00.000-07:00

I don’t quite know why, but hypocrisy is the element in political discourse which catalyses my most murderous responses. Perhaps it’s because I like language, or respect it, and believe it shouldn’t be raped.

I remember Tony Blair making a speech in Gaza in November 2001. This is when I realised for certain that he was not a mere fool but a dangerous and filthy murderer. Away from the hall and its selected attendees, for the visiting dignitary’s comfort, a demonstration against British Zionism was being violently suppressed. And at that very moment British warplanes were ravaging Afghan villages. And Blair lectured his audience, representatives of those who’d been hounded and attacked for six decades, in the following terms: What you people must understand, he squeaked, is that no cause, however just you think it may be, justifies violence. Not a flicker of irony nor a trace of self-doubt wrinkled his ugly face.

Let me be clear about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He is the president of a state which has achieved a mild but relatively remarkable degree of economic independence, and which leads a principled opposition to imperialism in the region. Compared with its neighbours, it is prosperous and free. But the Islamic Republic also interferes in its citizens’ personal business by trying to enforce dress codes and the like. Its rate of judicial murder is higher even than America’s. Corruption is endemic, as it is almost everywhere, and hypocrisy bedevils the religious establishment as much as it does politicians in the West. Ahmadinejad is a populist demagogue in the mode of Berlusconi or Jack Straw; his function is to distract from his regime’s failures by means of a grandiose and imprecise rhetoric. This means he often ends up with his foot in his mouth. “We don’t have homosexuals like in your country,” he informed Columbia University, “We don’t have this phenomenon.” He may or may not have meant that Iran has a different cultural approach to sexual categories, and his claim was certainly no less absurd than the university president’s claim that Ahmadinejad was a “dictator”, but his words were clumsy at very best. It almost seemed that he’d made a deal with Fox News to play the oriental buffoon. Ahmadinejad often doesn’t seem very clever. Iran is a clever country full of clever people, and it deserves better.

In a 2006 interview with Der Spiegel, Ahmadinejad said, “..there are two opinions .. in Europe. One group of scholars or persons, most of them politically motivated, say the Holocaust occurred. Then there is the group of scholars who represent the opposite position and have therefore been imprisoned for the most part.” This may or may not be outright Holocaust denial, but it looks very much like it, and his comments occasioned criticism from within the Iranian establishment, including from the Supreme Leader. The two-fingers aspect of such flourishes goes down well with some less thoughtful Muslims; the glee of it is in trampling the Western taboo. But it remains ignorant and offensive. It’s particularly offensive to the memory of those Jews slaughtered by fascism who were not Zionists – the majority – people slaughtered not for any political crime but because Hitler thought they were Semites and therefore subhuman. It’s personally offensive to such children of Holocaust survivors as Norman Finkelstein, who has done so much to oppose Zionism. Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial, or near-denial, wounds the Palestinian cause because it fails to understand the larger structure of European racism which permitted both the Holocaust and the Nakba. And it plays into the hands of Zionists who shout, “these filthy Semites hate us because they are anti-Semitic.” This obscures the truth, which is simple: We don’t hate them for their race, and only a hysterical few of us hate them for their religion. We hate them – from a deep and blackly bubbling well – because they are thieves and murderers and racists and liars. A Zionist is a Zionist, whether he’s a Jew like Olmert or a WASP like Bush. And some of the greatest, most heroic enemies of Zionism are Jews, people like Ilan Pappe, Jeff Halper, Israel Shahak, the Neturei Karta, Philip Weiss.

Yet we must also remember that Ahmadinejad has been slandered, mistranslated and misrepresented. He is not a puppet tyrant in the Mubarak mould but a democratically elected leader who exercises his powers according to a constitution. Of course, Iranian democracy is by no means perfect; it is formally limited by the Council of Guardians, just as American democracy is formally limited by the corporations. But Iran is certainly more democratic than Israel, a state which allows the full benefits of citizenship to only half of the people under its rule. When Ahmadinejad quoted Khomeini’s opinion that “the regime occupying Jerusalem would be wiped from the page of history” – an event any decent human being should hope for – he was interpreted as calling for the genocide of Israeli Jews. The neo-cons also had a field day with their entirely false story about Nazi-style yellow badges to be worn by Iran’s Jews. The real blood-and-soil racists amused themselves by inventing Persian Hitlers.

When considering Ahmadinejad’s spirited comments on Israel we must remember not only the disgust an informed person feels over the theft of Palestine but also that the Zionist state has nuclear missiles targetted at Iran, a country which has not attacked anyone in 300 years. We must remember too that Zionism has recently helped engineer the destruction of Iran’s western neighbour.

In any case, in his speech to the Durban Review Conference on Racism, Ahmadinejad seemed to have learnt his lesson. Perhaps mindful of the hadeeth “A true jihad is a word of truth spoken before an unjust ruler,” he steered clear of Holocaust denial and argued instead that Jewish suffering had been used as a pretext for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the establishment of an apartheid state. And this is the plain unvarnished truth. Because how can Germany’s murder of six million Jews possibly justify the dispossession of the ancient Canaanite-Arab Palestinian people, the descendants of the Biblical patriarchs? It can’t. No more than the legacy of trans-Atlantic slavery can justify the creation of a blacks-only state in Finland. No more than the Holocaust and continuing persecution of the Gypsies justifies the establishment of Gypsy rule over the people of France. Should the poor Tutsis be granted Belgium, and the Belgians driven into camps, and massacred? I’m not talking about Tutsi immigration to Belgium, or even the founding of a Tutsi defence force in the country. I have no problem with that, and I have no problem with Jewish immigration to Palestine. I have a problem with Tutsis expelling Belgians from Belgium.

The examples above seem immediately absurd, but the Palestinian case, to many in the West, doesn’t. I wonder why? But I don’t wonder very much. Finland, France and Belgium are white European countries with advanced capitalist economies. The Palestinians, on the other hand, are not proper human beings. They are brown people, Arabs, Muslims, people of the South. That’s why. It’s only recently that the official West has accepted that Palestinians even exist.

Ahmadinejad called Israel a racist state. This view is considered controversial or, according to an American spokesman, “hateful.” But Israel was created by an act of massive ethnic cleansing. That means murdering and expelling on the grounds of ethnicity, of race, of religion. Today Israel’s absurdly-named Law of Return allows automatic citizenship to anyone of Jewish origin anywhere. Meanwhile millions of Palestinian refugees are refused the genuine return which is their legal and moral right. Those Palestinians who currently hold Israeli passports (but not for much longer if Israel’s fascist foreign minister has his way) are concentrated in deprived zones, intimidated, kept out of all coalition governments by Jewish agreement, and their houses demolished. Recently an Israeli Jewish policeman was given six months community service for shooting dead an unarmed Palestinian Israeli. Israel also rules over millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza who have voting rights only to a non-existent ‘authority’, who are concentrated in refugee camps and townships, who are forbidden to travel on Jews-only roads, who are trapped by walls, whose drinking taps run dry while the Jews on the hilltops keep their swimming pools topped up, whose schools are closed, whose hospitals bombed, whose mothers die in labour at checkpoints, whose children’s brains can’t grow for the micronutrient deficiencies deliberately planned by the siege.

If Israel is not a racist state, if Zionism is not a racist ideology, then I do not speak English.

A gaggle of white delegates walked out during Ahmadinejad’s speech. Britain’s envoy pigeon-toed it from the hall wearing an inbred public-school jowliness which he perhaps thought was manly. One genitally-challenged weasel took the revolutionary action of shaking his fist in the President’s direction, for all the world as if his fist and all its blood and hypocrisy were not, like the rest of him, too obscene to be put on public show.

The countries which walked out, or refused to attend, are Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, the UK, the US, and the Zionist terror state. Half of these states were founded on genocide, and the rest have been guilty of it. All are complicit in the six-decade-long ethnic cleansing of Palestine – the actual, not imagined, destruction of a nation. The self-righteous hypocrisy of these criminals is nauseating.

None of them walk out of speeches by their mass-murdering darling Shimon Peres. All of them will shake Avigdor Lieberman’s repulsive hand. Their response to the massacre in Gaza was to help Israel tighten the seige. And it is no surprise that Israeli war crimes strike them as morally correct, for they themselves have committed enormities in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The outrage expressed by the criminals and drones who walked away from Ahmadinejad’s speech is proof, if proof were needed, of the hopeless racism of our world system, and proof too that the system will fall. How long can the earth be ruled by people who rape their own languages? What human depth or stability is there in a discourse founded on dishonesty? These are people who maim, starve and kill in the name of human rights, who bolster apartheid in the name of anti-racism. Changez Khan and Attila were a league ahead in civilisational terms, and so too is Mahmoud Amadinejad.

Writer Talk

2009-04-20T18:28:00.000-07:00

Notes for a talk to the Dumfries Writers Group tonight. It’s pretty narcissistic, but narcissism is what I do. I’ll also talk about the practicalities of finding an agent and a publisher, and about blogging.

Where does the urge to write come from?

It comes from the fear of death. From where all human effort beyond eating comes from. Maybe eating too. But the fear of death is only one way to say it. Writing is the attempt to control what can’t be controlled, to impose pattern on confusion, to battle time by recording it, to immortalise thought and sensation, and so to make them sacred. A vain but very human enterprise.

The film director Werner Herzog said, “I believe you can discover a very deep, ecstatic truth by fabricating.” I’m not sure what this means, but I’m sure I agree with it.

Also, for me, fabrication is a channel for passion which might otherwise express itself as anger.

But to be more specific, about my own case: I returned to Oman from Sri Lanka with tropical bacteria eating their way up my leg. I was hospitalised for two weeks. The leg was nearly amputated.

While I was lying there, reading Bellow’s Augie March, worrying about my rotting body, about death, I decided to start writing. Just to write. I’d always wanted to be a writer, because I’d grown up with the idea, probably learnt from my grandfather, that writers were the most valid type of human being, most worthy of fame and respect, the most honest, the ones who see most clearly. The ones who win immortality. Proper Writers.

But I’d never written. Not in a sustained way. So I started, and discovered something remarkable: a writer is someone who writes.

It is. You see, I’d thought a writer was a culture hero. I’d dreamt about being rather than about doing. Dreaming about being a writer but not being one made me very depressed, with the insignificance of my job and with my life in general. Once I started doing the writing, however, I became much happier. Writing became an action, a process, and no longer an impossible ideal. The glory of it is the constant engagement and struggle, not the book in the shop window. The book in the shop window was actually something of an anti-climax, although I remember an hour-long drugs-free cocaine rush on the hot pavements of Souq al-Khoud the night my agent called to say she’d sold the novel.

To make a novel you need characters and you need a journey, because the human Ur-plot is a journey – of departure, initiation, and return. This is how we understood life when we were hunter gatherers, and this is how we understand our lives now.

The journey can be enacted on any scale. It could be: depart to the pub, argue with girlfriend, return home changed. It could be depart up the Congo, see the heart of darkness, return home with wiser eyes.

Plot – the mechanics of the journey – arises from conflict, and from the character itself. “Character is plot,” F. Scott Fitzgerald said. The conflict could be between characters, or within the heart of a character, or between the character and some greater power.

When I started I had two characters, a man and a woman. They had no distinctive features, no history, no identity. But they came into focus as I worked. It seemed the more I wrote the more I uncovered them and their story. As if it was all pre-existent, and I just had to chip away to reveal it. Chipping away, that’s what writing is like. A struggle to chip away at your own limitations and blindnesses, at the layers of cliché and received thinking built up inside.

In my novel the conflict is between the main protagonist and his wife, and between the protagonist’s parents, and between atheism and Islam. The protagonist’s journey is from belief in atheist and nationalist myths towards an Islamically-tinged agnosticism, from denying and ignoring an unwelcome piece of information towards accepting and digesting it, and from being a bad human being towards being a better one. The novel is also in some very partial way a glimpse of the world’s journey towards September 11th and what followed. In some novels, the world is a very important character.

It is amazing to watch your words slip your conscious control and take on their own life. I belatedly discovered I had written about some of my own life issues, without planning to. For instance, I was a teacher (a good teacher), and the novel is filled with bad, or strange, teachers. Also some of the father stuff looks suspiciously like my relationship with my father, although mine is a very different character. And it’s astonishing to see the characters behave according to their own logic, and not yours. Whenever I bent the characters to my will I failed. It would have been a better novel if I’d allowed them more freedom.

Do I enjoy writing? Not so much enjoy as thereby feel justified in existing. I have bad justification anxiety. When I’m not writing I worry: what’s the point of me? or What’s the point of the universe? Or more positively, I sense that the universe, and my chance to glimpse it, has a point, but the chance is passing me by. I am wasting my time. It is all waste – until I start writing. Writing helps me to stay awake, to notice, to engage. Perhaps I feel I cheat time by recording it. Otherwise, I can’t explain why it’s good, other than to say that writing like praying is beneficial to my mental health. And the exhilaration that you experience when you write a good sentence is like nothing else. The whole process is wonderful. Except when it hurts. When you write a bad sentence, or chapter, or book, or when you fail to write at all. And when it hurts it hurts as much as a wayward child. All that investment. The late nights and early mornings. The emotion. The sense of potential. When you see it going off the rails, when it reads back flat, you feel anger, terror and despair.

But more on the process: After a lot of writing – by hand – and a lot of crossing out, I could see something of a structure. Structure was the product of a million tiny decisions rather than the imposition of a single decision from above. I did a year of part-time writing before I saw a novel in it. Then I moved to the computer (always keeping a pen nearby to work through knots) and started laying it out chapter by chapter. Within each chapter, I worked scene by scene. The writing became much easier at that stage.

Editing is a difficult stage, or at least a different stage. It doesn’t have the same flow to it as writing on a blank page, but it can be very stimulating. I did most of the editing when I still had three chapters to write. Or to complete. Surprisingly, the tension increased as I reached the end. I could see a hundred little things to do on the way, and I couldn’t relax until the job was finished.

In retrospect, I have ideas on what’s wrong with the novel, or what I would like to do differently. The first thing is, when it moves beyond the main two characters, the novel’s dominant genre is satire. And satire is the easiest thing to write. I’d like to write prose just as exciting but calmer, if you know what I mean.

Second, the last third of the book becomes very digressive. Allan Massie in the Scotsman was kind enough to call the book ‘remarkable’, but felt that it could lose fifty pages. One reason I kept those late chapters in was simply that I liked them. By the time I wrote them I’d become much more fluent and exuberant, and I was proud of myself. Another reason, more serious, was to set up belief systems to parallel the main two that concern my characters – Islam and atheism. So I have episodes to show other religions such as pyramid-scheme capitalism, reductive brain science, black nationalism and art-as-spirituality. I don’t particularly regret the structure, even if a straightforward plot movement would have sold more books. Damn, I like Thomas Pynchon as well as I like Truman Capote. But I recognise that my novel is more of a narrative than a novel, and I would like to be able to deliver a nicely tied together plot, with suspense and pay off and the rest. I’d like to understand how to do that.

Anita Sethi in the TLS also liked the book, but wrote that the style at times degenerates into ‘theoretical disquisition.’ I think this is true, and those sections and word choices look ugly to me now. For that reason I wish I’d put it in a drawer for six months after I’d finished writing.

And now for the ‘difficult second novel’, which contains at this point much more difficulty than novel.

D.H.Lawrence said this: “Publishers take no notice of a first novel. They know that nearly anybody can write one novel, if he can write at all, because it’s about himself. A second novel’s a step farther. It’s the third that counts, though...If [a novelist] can get over that ass’s bridge he’s a writer, he can go on.”

It took Nadeem Aslam a decade to write his beautiful second novel Maps for Lost Lovers. Zadie Smith, so I hear, considered getting a real job while failing to write her second. Ralph Ellison never finished his.

Here are some of my problems. Nine months ago I moved from Muscat to Castle Douglas. This change has thrown me in every direction. The time in Scotland feels like a pregnancy, and I feel that now something new is being born. Whether human child or demon I know not.

Another problem is the self-consciousness that comes with being published. I ask myself the useless questions a Proper Writer is expected to ask, like What kind of a writer am I? and What kind of writer should I be? Some questions help, but not these. Because I don’t have answers to them, I feel less qualified to write a novel now than I did five years ago. Five years ago I didn’t ask the questions.

I might have told myself that as a published Proper Writer I could now choose what to write about. This might be wrong. Perhaps I should only write about what I must. Perhaps there is no should.

In my failed attempts at a second novel I was trying to do too much, and trying to do contradictory things. I wanted to do something brisk and pared down, yet also felt I had to be flowery, like a Proper Writer. I wanted to write something concerned with memory and timelessness, but also something locked urgently into time. I wanted my setting to be both Edenic and apocalyptic. Perhaps I’ll be able to tie these contradictions into an artful tension when I’ve written a few more novels, but not yet. I’m not capable.

I wrote what seemed to be two thirds of a novel, and then started again, in the first person. That time I wrote about half a novel, whatever ‘half a novel’ means, before I came to a halt.

And come to a halt I have. It stopped being fun. The flow stopped. This has been tremendously depressing, as if the Scottish dark wasn’t enough. But I feel I am just out of the trough. I’m reading a lot, and scribbling little nonsenses in notebooks. I have a couple of ideas, which may or may not lead to products. I may skip the second novel and move directly to the third, or I may revisit the second. Maybe I’ll never achieve another finished product. But I remind myself that it doesn’t really matter: writing, like life, is a process, and it’s only the process that counts.

(Since I'm linking to reviews, you'd better read the best, by the lovely Aamer Hussein.)

The Gulf Between Us

2009-03-21T03:55:00.000-07:00

Another book review, fairly horribly edited by the Guardian. Here's the unedited version:

The Arab world’s bestselling novel of recent years has been Alaa Al Aswany’s “Yacoubian Building”, which features a gay journalist, a corrupt minister, and sexual abuse in police cells. The very grown-up film of the book has reached a huge audience. Arabic novels on sale in the Gulf discuss taboos from pre-marital romance to sectarian conflict and slavery. Meanwhile, Al-Jazeera broadcasts from Qatar, offering the Arabs a range of political debate which shames the BBC, and which would have been unthinkable twenty years ago. Satellite and the internet have effectively finished the Arab age of censorship. As for books in English, the ‘Arab World’ sections of many Gulf bookshops could be renamed ‘Harem Fantasy for Whites’, concentrating disproportionately on more or less fraudulent revelations of the “Princess” variety. So long as it sells, very nearly anything goes.

Given the new level of official Arab tolerance, it was surprising to hear that Geraldine Bedell’s “The Gulf Between Us”, a romantic comedy narrated by a middle-aged Englishwoman, had been banned from the International Festival of Literature in Dubai, and this because the novel contains a ‘gay shaikh’. Both author and publisher cried censorship, plunging the festival – Dubai’s first – into a swamp of bad publicity. Margaret Atwood cancelled her appearance.

A few days after the damage had been done, the truth came out: the book hadn’t been banned. Like many others, it was not selected in the first place. Maragaret Atwood regretted her cancellation.

The phantom censorship drama may help sales, but does a disservice to Bedell, whose novel treats the Gulf with affection and understanding. The protagonist, Annie Lester, is single parent to three unruly sons in the fictional emirate of Hawar. Annie thinks her eldest son’s wedding is the most disruption she has a right to expect, but another son has a secret to reveal, and her childhood boyfriend – now a sexy film star – has arrived at the reception. One thing leads very cleverly, with great pace, to another, until Annie’s future in the emirate, and the safety of her sons, hangs in the balance. The story unfolds in the months leading up to the 2003 Iraq invasion. The metaphorical temperature constantly rises.

Hawar (the word means ‘discussion’) is obviously based on Bahrain, with its pearl divers, Sunni-Shia tensions and barely concealed royal disputes, but is a recognisable portrait of any Gulf state: – “an affluent bubble in a cloudless sky, confected in a few decades from desert subsistence into cities, hotels and high rises.” Bedell skillfully sketches the enbubbled communities of the Gulf – Western, Arab, Asian – and their internal stratifications of class, status and tribe. She is as good on human commonalities as she is at communal distinctions.

Her treatment of attitudes to gays is balanced and accurate. Her homophobes are as likely to be Anglos as Arabs. Indeed the book’s serious theme is prejudice of all varieties, secular and religious, political and sexual, anti-Arab and anti-Western. The novel has a generosity of spirit which the allegations of censorship do not.

Most impressively, “The Gulf Between Us” offers a living breathing portrait of a family, not just the individual characters but also their continual, understated effect on each other. In considering the ramifications of each event on her sons as well as herself, Annie sounds like an entire family talking. In plot terms, her romance is nicely interwoven with her sons’ ardent adventures. The novel has stirring climaxes and endless twists, and is all gripping stuff, even if comic realism slides into genre formula towards the unconvincing end. But at its worst it’s still great escapism: light, finely-observed, funny and reflective.

Stranger to History

2009-03-14T16:55:00.000-07:00

A book review of Aatish Taseer's “Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands” for the Guardian.

Aatish Taseer grew up in secular, pluralist India. His early influences included his mother’s Sikhism, a Christian boarding school, and He-Man cartoons. Nagging behind this cultural abundance, however, was an absence: of his estranged father, the Pakistani politician Salmaan Taseer.

The best of “Stranger to History” is the “Son’s Journey” of the subtitle: the movement towards – and away from – his father’s world. Taseer describes the embarrassment, frustration and occasional joy of meeting his father and half-siblings, and of approaching a cultural and national identity which painfully excludes him. Alternating with this story is a more generalised journey into Islam, from the Leeds suburb which produced the 7/7 bombers, through Istanbul, Damascus and Mecca, to Iran and Pakistan. On the way Taseer observes the ‘cartoon riots’, is interrogated by Iranian security officials, and watches the response in his father’s Lahore home to Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. The writing is elegant and fluent throughout, the characters skillfully drawn.

In Pakistan Taseer concentrates on particularities, and here his writing is particularly good. His descriptions of rural Sind and the troubled feudal landowner he finds there are unforgettable. By depicting the homes deserted by the Hindu middle class and the crumbling shrines where Hindus and Muslims once prayed together, he makes his parents’ separation an image of the rupture of partition, one of the two great ethnic cleansings of 1947 whose effects still plague us all. For Taseer, unified, diverse India becomes a father-sized absence.

Another absence is traditional, diverse Islam. The religion, in its varied manifestations, was once “a whole system of belief, complete with ideas of politics, law and behaviour.” What we see now, whether in corrupt police states or in the ‘revived’ Islamic regimes, are the signs of the loss of that older society. Beyond population transfers, Islamic modernity, like its European predecessor, has often brought a fierce homogenisation of culture and belief.

Taseer diagnoses the loss of tradition and some of its symptoms – indeed the book is a lament for what has gone – but once out of the subcontinent and into the more abstract search for Islamic identity, his journey is less compelling.

It is unfortunate that this more media-driven section of his journey (for his assumptions and concerns here are those of the Western media) begins by meeting the high-profile British ‘Islamist’ Hassan Butt, recently exposed as a “professional liar” who told the media “what the media wanted to hear.”

Further east on his self-limiting (and, one suspects, publisher-imposed) search for ‘transnational Islam’, Taseer misses the diversity which does still exist. The angry unreflective Islamism he meets in Syria is only one aspect of the country’s multicultural life, and by no means the most obvious. He presents a unidimensional picture of his transit lands, sometimes verging on the paranoid. He is too often “chilled” by what he hears, and he too often leaps to the worst conclusions. Syrians certainly know how to avoid political taboos, but Taseer’s assertion that they only talk politics in the privacy of their cars couldn’t be further from the truth. The Syrian Mufti is awarded the epithet “ferocious”, but Mufti Badr Hassoun is a liberal Muslim of Sufi background who repeatedly condemns terrorism and sectarianism, and campaigns against honour killing.

Ironically, Taseer’s secular perspective would benefit from a dose of materialism. In Syria he recognises an amorphous Muslim sense of ‘grievance’, but not the millions of Iraqi and Palestinian refugees. A native informant in Iran explains the causes of the Islamic revolution rather too simply: “we had nothing better to do.” Taseer describes the growing “demand for a literal Islam” in Pakistan without mentioning the 11,000 dead in the spillover of America’s war into the Pakistani tribal areas. The only time the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are mentioned, the O word is bracketed between inverted commas, as if it were no more than a Muslim fantasy.

There is at times a certain clumsiness in definition – is the Muslims’ problem an obsession with or a denial of history? – and there are clumsy mistakes, as when Taseer drastically mistranslates an Arabic slogan.

These weaknesses perhaps say more about our publishing and reading culture than they do about Taseer. After all, how seriously would we take a cultural analysis of Britain written by someone who speaks no English? Writers such as Pankaj Mishra and William Dalrymple offer much more interesting insights into modernity’s cruel impact on traditional Islam, but “Stranger to History” shines when Taseer concentrates on what he knows best: the scar across the subcontinent, and across his own heart.

(link to article on Hassan Butt: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/10/islam-uksecurity-hassan-butt The quotes in paragraph 6 are taken from this Inayat Bunglawala article.)

Deconstructing the War on Terror

2009-02-18T10:55:00.000-08:00

Here's a link to my talk on Afghanistan and Pakistan. Forgive the screwed-up face. It's the fault of those Palestinians that took me dancing -
http://www.truveo.com/Deconstructing-the-war-on-terror-robin-yassin/id/3953073108

I wrote the following for a Norwegian newspaper to introduce "Deconstructing the War on Terror", a seminar at Chateau Neuf (Storsalen), Slemdalsveien 11, Oslo, from 12-7pm Sunday 22nd February. George Galloway, Massoud Shadjareh, Yvonne Ridley and Dr Erik Fosse will speak. I'm giving a talk on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Did the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001 provoke an unprecedented rupture in American relations with the rest of the world, specifically the Muslim world? Was that day really the day everything changed, as much of the media tells us?

Almost immediately after the attacks a taboo was imposed – most strongly in the US itself, but also in Europe – on serious debate concerning the motivations of the terrorists. (This is the same taboo Israeli society has imposed on itself since 1947). In the new rhetorical climate, to ask why was to justify. “You’re either with us or against us,” announced President Bush in typical Global War on Terror language. Indeed, the control of language has been the most distinctive domestic tool of the GWOT, working by simplification, generalisation, and suspicion of critical thought.

So what were the causes of September 11th? First, ‘blowback’ from America’s longstanding alliance with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its Wahhabi-nihilist stooges – useful idiots who had contained the Soviet Union and then revolutionary Iran on America’s behalf but in the name of ‘jihad’. Second, Arab and Muslim rage at unconditional American military, financial and political support for Israel’s steady colonisation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Third, tremendous anger at the suffering of the Iraqi people under the US-led sanctions regime, which two assistant secretary generals of the UN described as ‘genocidal.’

None of these American policies changed fundamentally in the Bush years. America gave up its alliance with the Afghan Taliban, but continues to work with the Saudi dictatorship and to fund Wahhabi extremists from Iranian Baluchistan to Lebanon. In fact, America has been more wholehearted than before in its support for a Sunni extremist world view, encouraging its Arab clients to sectarian rabble-rousing and scaremongering over an imaginary ‘Persian-Shia crescent’.

US (and European) support for Israel solidified even as the last chance for the two state solution was strangled, and as Israel launched murderous onslaughts on Lebanon and Gaza. The mainstream American media equated America’s amorphous war with Israel’s war on the Palestinian people. The torture tactics of Abu Ghraib and Bagram were refined for Muslim victims by Israeli ‘expert’ input. Neoconservative ‘Israel-firsters’ ran policy from Washington.

Sanctions against Iraq were replaced by an invasion which resulted in the disintegration of the country’s ancient social fabric. At least a million Iraqis have died as a result of the war. At least four million are now refugees. Many Iraqi cities and villages have been ethnically cleansed.

There was a fourth factor behind September 11th: America’s support for brutal dictatorships across the Muslim world. This was less of a taboo issue; ‘democracy’ was belatedly adopted as justification for the Iraq war, and Condoleezza Rice even made a few speeches about the need for Arab democratic reform. Again, however, all that really changed after September 11th, and only for a few years, was the rhetoric. Dictators in places like Egypt continue to rely on American money and miltary bases for protection, despite increasing repression of their people. Israel and the West demanded elections in Palestine, but then refused to accept the results. Shamefully, Europe has been fully complicit in the ongoing seige of Gaza, sanctioning not the occupiers but the occupied, the repeat-refugees who have dared to exercise their democratic rights.

So what came after September 11th was more an intensification of existing trends than a radical break. In that respect, GWOT was an illusion. Its importance was as discourse, as culture, as myth.

No less a figure than former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski writes that “constant reference to a ‘war on terror’ … stimulated the emergence of a culture of fear. Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of the policies they want to pursue.”

The terror threat to the West is real, but vastly exaggerated. In its name military budgets swell and potential dissenters are intimidated. There were 498 terrorist incidents in Europe in 2006, only one of which was attributed to Muslims, yet half of terrorism-related arrests were of Muslim suspects. In Britain the Prevention of Terrorism Act, particularly its criminalising of the ambiguous ‘glorification of terrorism’, has led to many abuses. In the US, the Patriot Act’s curtailment of civil liberties was smoothly accepted by a terrified populace while organisations like Campus Watch rooted out anti-Israel dissent in academia. A dragooned ‘popular culture’ endlessly represented images of evil, irrational Muslim terrorists in conflict with the forces of good.

With the election of Obama, the most extreme rhetoric of GWOT seems to have had its day. (It may be to Israel’s long term cost that it used GWOT rhetoric to package the recent massacre in Gaza, just at the moment when GWOT had been discredited in the West.) But if fundamental pro-Zionist and imperialist policies did not in fact change during the Bush years, not much will change, practically, in the post-Bush years. The passing of the War on Terror is as illusory as its sudden birth after September 11th. It is likely that economic decline will now limit the scope of Western intervention in the Muslim world, but the same old policies are set to continue with minor adjustments under Obama’s leadership. Linguistically, morally, and militarily, we continue headlong into disaster.

Four Solutions

2009-02-15T09:04:00.000-08:00

This was published at The Palestine Chronicle.

“I do not hate (Israelis) for being Jewish or Israeli but because of what they have done to us. Because of the acts of occupation. It is difficult to forget what was done to us. But if the reason for the hate will not exist, everything is possible. But if the reason remains, it is impossible to love. First we must convince in general and in principle that we have been wronged, then we can talk about 67 or 48. You still do not recognize that we have rights. The first condition for change is recognition of the injustice we suffered.”

– Said Sayyam, martyred in Gaza January 2009, to Ha’aretz, November 1995.

All Palestine is controlled by Zionism. The Palestinians (not counting the millions in exile) are half the population of Israel-Palestine, but they are victims of varying degrees of apartheid. The Jewish state has already lost its Jewish majority, and is more hated by the Arab peoples than at any time in its brief, violent history. Let’s take it as given that continuation of the present situation is untenable for everyone concerned. We need a solution.

There are four solutions. The first is for the Arabs to push the Jews into the sea. On the surface this seems like a reasonably just solution. It is, after all, what the Algerians and Vietnamese did with the French, what the Kenyans and Indians did with the British, what the Chinese did with the Japanese: they expelled their oppressive colonist class in order to achieve national independence. In the Palestinian context, all Jews who arrived with the waves of Zionist invasion would be sent home. And this is what most Palestinians understood by the ‘democratic secular state’ which the PLO called for until the 1980s.

There are two problems. The first is that most Israeli Jews don’t have a home to be sent to. They captured their colony not only out of desire for plunder, but also out of the trauma of displacement and genocide. Several generations of Hebrew-speaking Israeli Jews have now been born in the colony. They have their own distinct culture and national identity. In these respects they are similar to the Afrikaans-speaking Boers of South Africa, to contain whom the British invented the concentration camp.

The second problem with the Swimming Jews Solution is that ‘the Jewish state’ possesses a vast fleet of war planes, massive financial, political and military support from the rich white world, and nuclear bombs. It is quite impossible for any combination of Arab or Muslim forces to physically annihilate the settlers without large chunks of the Arab world also being annihilated.

The second solution is called in Israel ‘transfer’. It means pushing the Arabs into the sea. This solution is difficult to distentangle from the present situation, as a slow ethnic cleansing – through destruction of homes, disruption of education, massacres, land confiscation, theft of water resources – has continued after the mass expulsions of 47/ 48 and 67. The ‘transfer’ solution involves another mass expulsion, of the Palestinians in the ‘occupied territories’ or of those in ‘Israel proper’, or of both. Open proponents of transfer now have more seats in the Knesset than the Labour Party. (This means that the ‘centre-left’ of the Israeli spectrum is occupied by those responsible for the Gaza massacre.) Avigdor Lieberman’s ‘no loyalty, no citizenship’ slogan points to Zionism’s growing discomfort with its existential demographic crisis. Inside ‘Israel proper’ Palestinians are 20% of the population, and more fertile than the Jewish population. If circumstances (such as a major regional war) permit, these Arabs could be driven out. If circumstances don’t permit, the Jewish state will have to intensify its concentration of these people and turn partial into total disenfranchisement. The heads of Likud, Labour and Kadima all called for Arab parties to be banned from the recent elections. The high court didn’t allow it this time, but it’s a sign of things to come. It goes without saying that a further mass expulsion will be vigorously resisted by all forces in the region. It is unlikely that even Zionised America would stand for it.

Disenfranchisement and the concentration of populations into ghettos brings us to the third solution: partition. And this looks like the consensus solution. Olmert, Barak and Livni support it. All the Arab states support it. George Bush and Tony Blair support it. Liberal ‘peace activists’ the world over support it. Abbas and Dahlan support it. Since the late 80s the PLO and then the Palestinian Authority have repeatedly declared that they would accept a state on 22% of Palestine. Hamas too has repeatedly expressed its willingness to abide by any solution accepted by the people, and has said specifically that the conflict would become ‘cultural’ if the occupation of the territories captured in 1967 ends.

22% of their own country. Has any other people throughout history made such a compromise? But the best the Palestinians have ever been offered (at Camp David 2) was 16%. According to Ali Abunimah, the Israeli offer

“...depicted a Palestinian ‘state’ in 76.6% of the West Bank, broken into pieces, with all the major settlements remaining in place under Israeli sovereignty. Israel would annex 13.3% outright and continue to occupy the remaining 10.1% for a period of up to thirty years, during which time there would be no restriction on Israel continuing to build settlements and infrastructure....It should be noted that even before these percentages were calculated, the Israelis already subtracted East Jerusalem and the territorial waters of the Dead Sea, so, in fact, the 76% offer was based not on 100% of the occupied territories, but only on those parts that Israel was prepared to discuss. Leaving aside the disjointed nature of this ‘state’, its territory would amount to just 16% of historic Palestine..”

When Arafat turned this down, Israelis including the pretend peace camp, with the help of Bill Clinton and the western media, trotted out the old propaganda line about the Palestinians never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Everyone that mattered agreed that there would never again be such a generous Israeli offer. The unofficial Beilin/ Yasser Abd Rabbo Geneva Plan – which excited liberal peacelovers so much – didn’t dramatically change the shape of the imagined ‘state’: Palestinian cities would be cramped between annexed settlement blocks and so would have no room for growth. Palestinians would have non-sovereign autonomy over little bits, following the South African bantustan model. Whatever the rhetoric, every partition plan centres on securing Palestinian agreement to bantustan autonomy.

There will never be two sovereign states peacefully coexisting between the Jordan and the sea. Gaza – cramped behind a wall, impoverished and traumatised, cut off from its natural markets – is a better image of what the two state solution would look like.

Partition would involve tremendous pain for both Jews and Arabs. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers would have to be moved. Jews would never be able to live next to their holy sites on the West Bank. (The West Bank has far greater historical and religious significance to Jews than the coastal plain where the Jewish population is currently concentrated). Palestinian refugees would never be able to return to their villages and cities in the Jewish state.

Even if the will was there, a viable partition is no longer possible. Israel-Palestine has one highly integrated transport and water infrastructure. It’s a great infrastructure; the problem is that many roads are for Jews only, and the water for settler swimming pools rather than for Palestinians to drink.

And even if partition was possible, if there was a sovereign state on all of the 67 lands and no return of refugees to Israel proper, Israel’s demographic crisis would continue to grow. Even with two states, solution number two, the transfer solution, would become inevitable.

Unless we think creatively – which means thinking beyond the dominant forms of Zionism. It means thinking of the fourth solution, which is in fact the only solution: one binational state, in which Jews, Muslims and Christians have equal rights and responsibilities, in which both Arab and Jewish histories and identities are respected and protected. It’s hard to imagine, but we can start by thinking of Israel-Palestine as it is now, but without walls, fences and checkpoints, without Jews-only roads and Jews-only settlements, without discriminatory laws. The state would still house a thriving Hebrew culture, but it would also allow a Levantine Arab culture to fully express itself.

Israeli Jews worry that, as a minority, they would be oppressed or expelled. The answer is that the constitution of the state would have to guarantee communal as well as individual rights. The constitution could in turn be guaranteed by the United Nations and a collection of superpowers. An American threat of force to defend a democratic constitution would make a lot more sense than current American threats to defend apartheid and ethnic cleansing.

It isn’t easy for a settler society to get over its fear of the oppressed. F. W. de Klerk said,

“For white South Africans acceptance of a one-man, one-vote solution evoked very much the same fears and reaction that could be expected from Israelis were they ever asked to consign their fate to a one-man, one-vote election in a greater Israel/ Palestine in which they would be heavily outnumbered.”

But still in South Africa the settler society, when faced with native resistance and international sanctions, managed to confront its fears and to move to a better future.

Israeli Jews may also worry that Palestinians intend to build an Islamic state. After all, didn’t the Palestinians vote for Hamas? This fear betrays ignorance of the Palestinian people, who voted for Hamas in protest against Fatah’s corruption and collaboration with the occupation. Many Palestinians are strict Muslims, but opinion polls show that only 3% support the establishment of an authoritarian Islamic state. Hamas knows this, which is why it has made no moves to impose sharia law since it came to power. In any case, if Islamist ideas strengthen in the future, creative thinking offers ways of allowing religious and secular, Islamic and Jewish communities to coexist. There are already three education systems available to Israeli Jews: secular, orthodox and ultra-orthodox.

Before Zionism, not very long ago, relations between Jews and Arabs were generally good. Sometimes Arab sectarianism targetted Jews (and sometimes Shia and other groups), but the more representative story is of Jews living safely and prosperously in the Arab world. Nothing remotely resembling Hitler’s racist genocide or the Russian pogroms happened to Arab Jews. On several occasions Arab and Muslim powers gave sanctuary to Jews fleeing European persecution. Even after the bitterness of this conflict, Jews and Arabs could be friends again, and more than friends. A state with a large and powerful Jewish population would no more offend its Arab neighbours than a state with a large and powerful Christian population (Lebanon) or a large and powerful Shia population (Iraq). And once Palestinians receive the rights they deserve, they will have no reason to be angry and resentful. Recognise them as equals, seek to understand them, and your fear will dissolve.

This was a response to Ali Abunimah’s excellent little book “One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian impasse.”

Non-Violence? Finkelstein and Gandhi

2009-02-07T14:07:00.000-08:00

(This was published at The Palestine Chronicle)

When Western liberals call on the Palestinians to renounce violence and to adopt Gandhian passive resistance instead, I usually become enraged. My first response is, they’ve tried non-violence, and you failed to notice. For the first two decades after the original ethnic cleansing of 1947 and 48, almost all Palestinian resistance was non-violent. From 1967 until 1987 Palestinians resisted by organising tax strikes, peaceful demonstrations, petitions, sit-down protests on confiscated lands and in houses condemned to demolition. The First Intifada was almost entirely non-violent on the Palestinian side; the new tactic of throwing stones at tanks (which some liberals consider violent) was almost entirely symbolic. In every case, the Palestinians were met with fanatical violence. Midnight arrest, beatings, and torture were the lot of most. Many were shot. Yitzhak Rabin ordered occupation troops to break the bones of the boys with stones. And despite all this sacrifice, Israeli Jews were not moved to recognise the injustice of occupation and dispossession, at least not enough to end it. The first weeks of the Second Intifada were also non-violent on the Palestinian side. Israel responded by murdering tens of unarmed civilians daily, and the US media blamed the victims. Then the Intifada was miltarised.

Was it really, or only, non-violence which liberated India? In colonised India there were hundreds of thousands of Indians to each British officer, so the cause of independence had sheer numbers on its side as well as time. The British people certainly came to love Gandhi and to respect the moral courage of his non-violent strategy, but the British officials who counted could also see the tide of violent anti-imperialism rising behind Gandhi, a tide that would dominate if Gandhi’s method failed. Likewise in the American civil rights struggle: behind Martin Luther King stood Malcolm X. It’s a lot easier to deal with the nice guy when you see the nasty guy rolling up his sleeves.

My third point: I’ll listen to the call for non-violence if it comes from the mouth of a genuine pacifist. From someone who believes, as Ghandi did, that Nazism could have been better resisted non-violently. From someone who would himself engage only in peaceful action after seeing his own child killed, his own flat bombed. And of course from someone who realises that Palestinian violence is as nothing when put next to the staggering violence of Zionism.

Another problem is that not all Palestinians are capable of suppressing their desire for revenge. I’m not insulting them; God knows that I, comfortable in front of my screen many miles away from the trouble, am thirsting for revenge. In the Palestinians’ circumstances, violence is natural. So if the Palestinians have to prove they deserve justice by acting nice, there will never be justice. We have to get beyond condemning the inevitable violence of a traumatised refugee population to condemning the causes of the violence – dispossession, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, occupation, massacre.

Norman Finkelstein’s reading of Gandhi (I’ve never read Gandhi, so I’ll have to trust Finkelstein) settles many of my reservations. Gandhi argues that violent resistance is acceptable by the conventional moral standards of our times. He says that an oppressed and humiliated population must resist its oppressors violently if it is incapable of non-violent resistance. According to Gandi, the worst of failures is to submit.

With specific reference to Palestine, Gandhi said this in 1938:

“Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French…What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct…If (the Jews) must look to the Palestine of geography as their national home, it is wrong to enter it under the shadow of the British gun. A religious act cannot be performed with the aid of the bayonet or the bomb. They can settle in Palestine only by the goodwill of the Arabs…As it is, they are co-sharers with the British in despoiling a people who have done no wrong to them. I am not defending the Arab excesses. I wish they had chosen the way of non-violence in resisting what they rightly regard as an unacceptable encroachment upon their country. But according to the accepted canons of right and wrong, nothing can be said against the Arab resistance in the face of overwhelming odds.”

In his lecture, which can be watched or read here, Finkelstein suggests what could be done:

“A massive mobilization of Palestinians building on the non-cooperation tactics of the first intifada (commercial and tax strikes, popular committees) could again make the Israeli occupation ungovernable. Is it so far-fetched to imagine an “army” of Palestinian satyagrahis converging on the Wall, their sole “weapons” a pick in one hand and a copy of the ICJ opinion in the other? The ICJ stated that the Wall was illegal and must be dismantled. The Palestinians would only be doing what the world should already have done a long time ago. Who could fault them for enforcing the law? No doubt Israel would fire on Palestinians and many would be killed. But if their supporters in North America and Europe publicized the ICJ opinion, and if Palestinians found the inner wherewithal to persevere nonviolently, it seems probable that far, far fewer than 5,000 Palestinians would be killed before Israel were forced to desist. No one writing abroad from the comfort and safety of his study can in good conscience urge such a strategy that entails so much death. But Gandhi’s point nonetheless stands: if Palestinians have repeatedly shown a willingness to pay the ultimate price, doesn’t it make sense for them to pursue a strategy that has a better likelihood of success at a smaller human price?”

Dismantling the wall. Gazans dismantling the border fence. Marches of Return from the West Bank and Gaza and Jordan, Syria and Lebanon to the border fences and the Israeli bullets. The numbers would have to be huge, and the coordination with the world's official and alternative media incredibly efficient. It would require a mobilisation that neither the corrupt and collaborative PA nor the hunted and secretive Hamas could command. It would take a concerted simultaneous effort by the Palestinian people and their supporters around the world to shine the light on Israel and on Palestinian history. As Palestinians marched and died, people in the West would have to boycott and divest. It seems farfetched in the present blood-soaked bitterness, but it's worth thinking about.

The latest massacre has changed things. Perhaps the world is ready to see now. Perhaps.

I don’t agree with Finkelstein’s desire to limit discussion to the two state solution, although I understand his tactics. For reasons that I will write of later, reasons of justice but more importantly of pragmatism, I am a supporter of some kind of one state solution. I speculate a world in which a non-violent campaign against the wall spawns a non-violent campaign for Israeli passports.

In any case, I support bringing injustice into the light. 94% of Israeli Jews supported the Gaza massacre. 40% – an incredible statistic – believe Jews were a majority in Palestine at the end of the 19th Century. We have to engage Israeli ignorance and paranoia, the dark products of Zionist indoctrination. The 6% of Israeli Jews who can think more critically could be our allies in this.

I continue to believe that Zionism is the enemy, but by Zionism I mean the Iron Wall Zionism of Jabotinsky that has come to determine the character of the mainstream, from the Labour Party to the openly fascist fringe. Those Zionists, however, who are interested in a cultural home and refuge in Palestine on terms of equality and brotherhood with the Palestinians – those could be allies.

I feel something has snapped in mind and heart since December 27th. I’m trying to get beyond the snapping. I find the concluding paragraph of Finkelstein’s lecture both educative and humbling:

“The Caribbean poet Aimé Césaire once wrote, “There’s room for everyone at the rendezvous of victory.” Late in life, when his political horizons broadened out, Edward Said would often quote this line. We should make it our credo as well. We want to nurture a movement, not hatch a cult. The victory to which we aspire is inclusive, not exclusive; it is not at anyone’s expense. It is to be victorious without vanquishing. No one is a loser, and we all are gainers if together we stand by truth and justice. “I am not anti-English; I am not anti-British; I am not anti-any government,” Gandhi insisted, “but I am anti-untruth—anti-humbug, and anti-injustice.”(188) Shouldn’t we also say that we are not anti-Jewish, anti-Israel or, for that matter, anti-Zionist? The prize on which our eyes should be riveted is human rights, human dignity, human equality. What, really, is the point of ideological litmus tests such as, Are you now or have you ever been a Zionist? Indeed, it is Israel’s apologists who thrive on and cling to them, bogging down interlocutors in distracting and endless intellectual sideshows—What is a Jew? Are the Jews a nation? Don’t Jews have a right to national liberation? Shouldn’t we use a vocabulary that registers and resonates with the public conscience and the Jewish conscience, winning over the decent many while isolating the diehard few? Shouldn’t we instead be asking, Are you for or against ethnic cleansing, for or against torture, for or against house demolitions, for or against Jews-only roads and Jews-only settlements, for or against discriminatory laws? And if the answer comes, against, against and against, shouldn’t we then say, Keep your ideology, whatever it might be—there’s room for everyone at the rendezvous of victory?

May we all, seekers of truth, fighters for justice, yet live to join the people of Palestine at the rendezvous of victory.”

Akiva Eldar on Israeli perceptions of the conflict.

Sectarian Rabble-Rousing

2009-02-04T03:19:00.000-08:00

Al-Ahram Weekly, the English language twin of the Arabic daily, is an Egyptian state organ. The Weekly has a broader range of opinion than the tame daily, and does often contain interesting articles. The great Palestinian thinker Azmi Bishara, for instance, can be found in the Weekly. Unfortunately, however, Egyptian regime nonsense concerning the Persian-Shia ‘threat’ is also fed into the mix. This article by Galal Nassar is a sad example. Below is my response to his piece:

Dear Mr Nassar

I am not a Shia Muslim. If I were, I would not be a supporter of the velayat-e-faqih system. I agree with you entirely that the velayat-e-faqih concept is a perversion of traditional Shia ideas. I also agree that velayat-e-faqih leads to authoritarian government, to the detriment of Iranian society.

If it is authoritarianism that bothers you, however, I wonder why you single out Iran, which is at least a semi-democracy. The dictatorship in Egypt seems a much better target, especially after the mass arrests of recent weeks. Another good target is the barbaric dictatorship in Saudi Arabia. As a Sunni Muslim, I am outraged by the Wahhabi perversion of Islam that holds sway in that country.

Your argument leaves logic behind when you write of the Egyptian Ikhwan, “I simply fail to understand why a group with such a long history of suffering, apparently in defence of Islam and Muslims, subscribes to the concept of velayat-e faqih. Cannot they see that all Iran wants is to establish sectarian governments everywhere and use them as satellites of a revived Persian Empire? Haven’t we learned anything from the events in Iraq, Lebanon and Gaza?”

The Ikhwan do not subscribe to the velayet-e-faqih concept. Of course they do not, as a Sunni movement, aim to import Shia heresies. What Mahdi Akef said is that he does not fear Iranian influence in the region, and in this he is entirely correct. The idea that Egyptian or Syrian or Palestinian Sunnis are about to convert en masse to Shi’ism, or to begin obeying every whim of Khamenei, is quite absurd. So is the implication that Hizbullah or Hamas are Iranian creations. Both of these movements are rooted in their own societies. It is true that Iran, to its honour, has helped these movements (and also true that Hizbullah, as a representative of Lebanese Shia, chooses to identify itself with the Iranian revolution). If the Egyptian dictatorship offered help to Hamas and Hizbullah, as the Egyptian people would like it to, then there would be no need to seek help from further afield. I do not approve of everything that Iran has done in Iraq (nor of everything that Saudi Arabia has done there), but I am not so blind to the history of that country as to believe that the Shia revival has nothing to do with Ba’athist suppression of the Iraqi Shia.

I wonder if you can really believe that the imaginary ‘Persian empire’ is more of a problem than the very real American empire, with its military bases in almost every country in the region, and its near-total control over the foreign policies of key Arab states, Egypt included. The real division in the region is between those forces who are supine before American imperialism and Zionism, and those forces, much more democratic, that believe in resistance. Sectarian rabble-rousing serves as a distraction from this division, and it is extremely dangerous to the health of our societies.

Yours sincerely

Robin Yassin-Kassab

After the Massacre 1 – Palestine and Israel

2009-02-01T09:08:00.000-08:00

(A version of this was published at The Electronic Intifada)

Hamas isn’t Hizbullah, and Gaza isn’t Lebanon. The resistance in Gaza – which includes leftist and nationalist as well as Islamist forces – doesn’t have mountains to fight in. It has no strategic depth. It doesn’t have Syria behind it to keep supply lines open; instead it has Mubarak’s goons and Israel’s wall. Lebanese civilians can flee north and east; the repeat-refugees of Gaza have no escape. The Lebanese have their farms, and supplies from outside; Gaza has been under total siege for years. What else? Hizbullah has remarkable discipline. It is surely the best-trained, best-organised army in the region, perhaps in the world (I’m not talking of weapons, but of men and women). Hamas, on the other hand, though it has made great strides, is still undisciplined. Crucially, Hizbullah has air-tight intelligence control in Lebanon, while Gaza contains collaborators like maggots in a corpse.

But Hamas is still standing. On the rare occasions when Israel actually fought – rather than just called in air strikes – its soldiers reported “ferocious” resistance. Hamas withstood 22 days of the most barbaric bombing Zionism has yet stooped to, and did not surrender, and continues to fire rockets.

Let’s put this in context. In 1947 and 48 Zionists drove out over 800, 000 Palestinians without too much trouble. In 1967 it took Israel six days to destroy the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian armies, and to capture the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula. In 1982 it took Israel a week to reach Beirut. That was Zionism’s last victory, if it was a victory.

The long and bloody occupation of Lebanon gave birth to new forms of resistance. Where Arab states and armies had failed, popular resistance removed American and French forces from Beirut, and then steadily rolled back the Israelis. The first suicide bomber of the conflict was a Marxist woman of Christian background. The human bomb was a tactic to which Israeli troops had no answer. Hizbullah formed, and developed into the power that would drive Israel from almost all of Lebanon by 2000. In 2006 Israel returned, in an effort to finish the resistance once and for all. What happened was a historic turnaround: for five weeks Israeli troops bled in the border villages, and failed to move beyond them. For the first time, the hi-tech, first-world savagery of the Zionist army, supposedly the fourth strongest army in the world, was kept at bay. Israel of course killed far more civilians than Hizbullah did, and performed its usual rampage against civilian infrastructure, but in terms of the soldiers in battle, casualties were roughly equal. A lot of rubbish is talked, especially by Arab collaborators, about Hizbullah being an Iranian proxy. While Iran does, to its great honour, assist Hizbullah with weapons and funds, the Lebanese resistance is Lebanese, the creation of the villagers of the south and the families of the Dahiyyeh. It was the people themselves who turned Zionism back.

One reason given for this latest massacre in Gaza (it’s by no means the first) was Israel’s desire to restore its deterrence after the 2006 debacle. Certainly the Arabs now know (as if they didn’t know before) that any whisper of resistance will be met by the most fanatical violence. Certainly Hamas and others will have to factor this into their tactical decisions. But in strategic terms the Israeli deterrent looks even shoddier than it did a month ago. The Arabs are no longer scared of Israel, whatever Israel throws at them. A psychological tipping point has been passed, and this, in the long term, counts for more than nuclear bombs.

I have already written a little about the incredible devastation unleashed on Gaza. The siege continues, even as Western and Zionist officials grin and hug, and the people in Gaza are now facing starvation. I don’t intend to belittle this suffering, or to pretend to know the political ramifications it will eventually have for the resistance. Thus far, however, the suffering seems to have strengthened the resistance, as you would expect. The communities of south Lebanon and south Beirut, those which suffered most in 2006, have redoubled their loyalty to Hizbullah. Our friend who lost 42 family members in Aita ash-Shaab adores Shaikh Nasrallah with a burning passion.

According to Angry Arab, ‘from a very reliable source in Beirut’, Hamas has lost only 5% of its military capacity. In Palestine, and throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds, Hamas and the resistance option it represents is immeasurably stronger. The ridiculous no-longer-president-of-anything Abbas, and the Dahlan gangs, are much weaker. It wasn’t Abbas but Khaled Misha’al who represented Palestine at the Doha summit. While the Abbas-Dahlan traitors arrested Hamas activists, and tried (and largely failed) to suppress solidarity demonstrations on the West Bank, the resistance was standing firm against Zionist terror.

In solidarity with the resistance, the so-called ‘Arab-Israelis’ organised the biggest demonstrations in their history. There is no doubt to which nation these Palestinians belong, especially in the eyes of the main Israeli political parties – which sought to ban Arab parties from standing in the approaching elections on the grounds of ‘disloyalty’ to the apartheid state.

What now? Enough nonsensical talk of peace processes. Peace might be nice, but it isn’t, and never has been, on the agenda. It is time to build a new PLO, as elected as possible, to represent all Palestinians, both Islamist and secular, from the lands stolen in 48, the lands stolen in 67, and outside. The PA should be abolished; and the Oslo/Road Map farce officially abandoned. Then Palestinians have to decide what their aims and strategies will be. I suggest that the two state solution is no solution, but I’ll write more about that at a later time. There is a huge amount of work to do. All Palestinians should agitate for the new organisation.

Now Israel.

This massacre was never about Hamas rockets. The rockets were a minimal, if growing, threat, and the rockets stopped during the ceasefire. Israel broke the ceasefire by entering Gaza and killing six people, and by besieging the prison territory. If Israel had wanted to stop rockets it could have stopped besieging Gaza. The real aim of the massacre was to destroy the will and political identity of the Palestinian people. Beyond that, Zionism intends to make of Gaza an international basket case, run by gangs, begging for aid from Europe. This is why over 50% of agricultural land in the prison territory was blasted beyond repair.

The fact that a sheepish Jewish-Israeli public swallows the rockets propaganda, that even when a hundred caged Palestinians are killed for each Israeli, they still feel like the victim, that the Zionist leadership is only now beginning to realise, with shock and surprise, how much this massacre has turned world public opinion against them, points to a deep psychosis. Most Israeli Jews are mentally, morally and spiritually sick. It is to be hoped that one day they will find health. Until then, talk of peace with them is as absurd as talk of peace with the Nazi party or al-Qa’ida.

Why the psychosis? One reason is their need to repress knowledge of the truth: that the land is not theirs, that they have stolen their homes from the people who now live in refugee camps in Gaza, Lebanon, Jordan and elsewhere. When the whining inhabitants of Sderot complain about the occasional projectile, they know somewhere in their dark hearts that the man who fired the projectile himself comes from Sderot, or more properly, from the bulldozed village upon which Sderot is built. The settlers and cleansers must shout ever louder of their victimhood and righteousness, precisely because they know their own guilt. This is the way white Americans used to behave, all of a righteous fury, when the remnants of the native tribes fired an occasional arrow their way.

Another reason for the madness is the sad story of European Jewish history. The Holocaust, specifically. “The place of the non-Jew in the Jewish imagination is a complex affair growing out of generations of Jewish fear,” the Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld told Philip Roth. The endless comparisons of Arab or Muslim leaders – Abdul Nasser, Arafat, Saddam Hussain, Ahmedinejad – to Hitler, and calling the victims of genocide genocidal, is not merely propaganda to dazzle the Western world. Many Israeli Jews actually believe this delusional nonsense, as a result of Holocaust trauma. Trauma freezes the psyche in the moment of pain; many Jews are frozen in the 1940s. Of course, most actual Holocaust survivors have died by now, and over half of Israel’s Jews are Arabs. But Zionist education creates new generations of Zionists by erasing distance from the Holocaust. It’s happening today! screams Israeli culture. The Arab is the German! The Muslim is the fascist! That impoverished refugee in his breezeblock hovel is a Gestapo man pointing to the gas chamber!

European oppression of the Jews generated Jewish fear, and also Jewish envy of the Gentile. Zionists accuse anti-Zionist Jews of self-hatred, but it’s the other way round. In Israel’s early years, Aharon Appelfeld said, “ ‘Never again like sheep to the slaughter’ thundered from loudspeakers at every corner.”

Not like sheep. Rather, like the slaughterer. We’ve gone wild, gone mad! they exult, overjoyed at their own violence, living the image of the fat-fisted anti-Semite.

And Jewish anti-Semitism found in raped Palestine a newly externalised target: the Palestinians. The Palestinians are, after all, Semitic descendants of the ancient Israelites and Judeans. The Palestinian is religious, bound to tradition, obedient to dietary prohibitions, dark-eyed, bearded, heavily-nebbed. The Palestinian is, most of all, weak – the very picture of the ghetto Jew.

The best part of it is that European Jews and European Gentiles could now agree on a target. This is how they ‘healed’ the wounds of the Holocaust, in a brotherhood of oppression directed at the filthy hook-nosed irrational Arab, whose women wear headscarves, who breed too much.

According to opinion polls, over 90% of Israeli Jews supported the Gaza massacre. The Israelis are so convinced of their righteousness they can’t believe that anyone reasonable would consider them wrong, in anything. Zionist education has produced a generation which is not only wrong, but now profoundly irrational. What they’ve just done is like a man humiliated by a smaller man in a bar (Hizbullah, 2006) who goes out into the street and finds a small child to beat to a pulp. When he’s finished, he feels strong again. He can’t understand why passers-by give him funny looks (of course, none of them stop him). This is psychodrama, not strategy. It’s as insane as Abu Musab az-Zarqawi. And, in a very very sad and frightening way, it’s encouraging. Zionism is now in its insane age, its mind broken by its own insane contradictions, and it is slowly but surely dying.

Letters

2009-01-24T03:09:00.000-08:00

(Please visit, and link to your favourites, P U L S E, a new website which I help to run. It's a great source of information and opinion.)

I've recently written to Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Khaled Mahmood MP to complain about their positions on the massacre in occupied Palestine. I've also written to Gerald Kaufman and Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, to praise their calls for an arms embargo on the apartheid state. And I walked into the office of my local MP, Russell Brown, and spoke to Mr Brown's assistant. A few days later I received a letter from Mr Brown which repeats the usual rubbish about 'peace' and the need to disarm the resistance so the oppressor can sleep more soundly at night. At least he bothered to send me a letter. I received responses from Brown, Cameron, Clegg and Kaufman too, but none from Khaled Mahmood. Mr Mahmood was quoted by the Guardian as "dismissing" calls for sanctions and an arms embargo. Mahmood is a Birmingham MP who no doubt receives a lot of votes because he has a Muslim name. Not only is he betraying his Muslim voters who would like to see their representatives develop a peaceful strategy of resisting the murderous British-Zionist alliance, he isn't even capable of replying promptly to letters.

Here's my response to Russell Brown's letter. I won't publish his letter because I don't have permission and because it's on paper, but I quote some of it. You can imagine the rest - it's the standard New Labour magical incantation.

Dear Mr Brown

Thank you for your letter in response to my conversation with Cameron concerning the situation in occupied Palestine.

You write: "It is not difficult to understand the frustration, fear and anger of those Israelis who are the targets of Hamas rocket attacks, and the pressure on Israel's democratic government to take action." You then state the government position, and that of the European Union Presidency, that Israel's use of force is "disproportionate."

With respect, I believe that your analysis of the situation is plain wrong. Firstly, the Hamas rockets almost entirely stopped during the six-month ceasefire. The ceasefire was broken specifically by an Israeli incursion into Gaza which killed six people, and more generally by the siege of Gaza. Before the latest massacre, a Red Cross report described “progressive deterioration in food security for up to 70 per cent of Gaza’s population.” It went on: “Chronic malnutrition is on a steadily rising trend and micronutrient deficiencies are of great concern.” The reason for this seige is that the Palestinians voted 'the wrong way.' It's a bit rich in these circumstances for you to talk about the pressures on Israel's 'democratic' government. What about the pressures on Palestine's democratic government? And I question your description of Israel as a democracy. Israel is an apartheid democracy, in which Jews have full democratic rights, the 'Arab Israelis' are third class citizens, and the people of the West Bank and Gaza are under de facto (and very obvious) Israeli rule but only able to vote for a non-existent authority.

The massacre in Gaza was not a disproportionate response to rockets. The rockets could have been stopped by a renewed ceasefire and the opening of border crossings, as the head of Shin Bet confirmed. But Israel didn't want this. The massacre was all about "searing into Palestinian consciousness that they are a defeated people." Israel began its attack when children were leaving school, it bombed UN food stores, schools, hospitals and ambulances. This is not an accident, and it is not new. In Qana in south Lebanon in 1996 Israel massacred civilians in a UN shelter, and it did exactly the same thing at exactly the same place in 2006. I strongly recommend a book by the Israeli scholar Avi Shlaim called "The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World." The book shows how terrorising civilians and rejecting peace negotiations has been basic to Zionism from the very start.

You write, "Violence is not the answer." For more than six decades, the ancient Canaanite-Palestinian people have been ethnically cleansed, made the victims of apartheid, and repeatedly massacred. Anyone who tells them not to resist must offer an alternative path to liberation. In brief, what has been called in the West a 'peace process' is in fact a pacification process in the old colonial sense. Not for one day in the Oslo years did settlement expansion, cantonisation and confiscation stop. The Palestinians would not need to fight by all means necessary if people around the world boycotted and sanctioned Israel. Yet you reject these peaceful methods of protest.

You write, "The UK does not approve any defence related exports if it is judged that there is a risk that they will be used for external aggression or internal repression." What an Orwellian sentence! In terms of external aggression, Israel illegally occupies Syrian and Lebanese territory. In 2006 it launched a blitzkrieg against Lebanon's civilian infrastructure. As for internal repression, I don't need to repeat myself. Yet the UK still deals in arms with Israel. This reality, and the bureaucratic use of strange sentences like yours, reinforces Britain's growing reputation around the world for hypocrisy and short-sightedness.

I'm sure I'm tiring you, so I won't go on. Thank you again for responding to me. I must say, however, that your response is profoundly unsatisfactory. Standing by and repeating propagandistic narratives while an eastern Mediterranean population is slowly (and now quickly) murdered is immoral, bad for the UK, bad for the Jews, and of course bad for the Arabs. As a result, I won't be voting for you. Instead, I will vote Liberal Democrat, and encourage my friends to do the same, as Nick Clegg has bravely called for an arms embargo on Israel.

Yours Sincerely

Robin Yassin-Kassab

Everyone should watch this. The bulldozing of entire villages is reminiscent of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, in which at least 485 villages were razed. It is hard to comprehend the horror of what has been done in the last month, let alone over the last six decades. Zionism must be defeated. Anyone with a heart and mind and conscience must dedicate themselves to fighting this monstrous ideology.

Israel Must Lose

2009-01-16T13:24:00.000-08:00

I was one of 300 writers and academics who signed this excellent letter, which was published in the Guardian. The letter was an informal effort over only 48 hours. More writers and academics are signing at Znet.

The massacres in Gaza are the latest phase of a war that Israel has been waging against the people of Palestine for more than 60 years. The goal of this war has never changed: to use overwhelming military power to eradicate the Palestinians as a political force, one capable of resisting Israel's ongoing appropriation of their land and resources.

Israel's war against the Palestinians has turned Gaza and the West Bank into a pair of gigantic political prisons. There is nothing symmetrical about this war in terms of principles, tactics or consequences. Israel is responsible for launching and intensifying it, and for ending the most recent lull in hostilities.

Israel must lose. It is not enough to call for another ceasefire, or more humanitarian assistance. It is not enough to urge the renewal of dialogue and to acknowledge the concerns and suffering of both sides. If we believe in the principle of democratic self-determination, if we affirm the right to resist military aggression and colonial occupation, then we are obliged to take sides... against Israel, and with the people of Gaza and the West Bank.

We must do what we can to stop Israel from winning its war. Israel must accept that its security depends on justice and peaceful coexistence with its neighbours, and not upon the criminal use of force.

We believe Israel should immediately and unconditionally end its assault on Gaza, end the occupation of the West Bank, and abandon all claims to possess or control territory beyond its 1967 borders. We call on the British government and the British people to take all feasible steps to oblige Israel to comply with these demands, starting with a programme of boycott, divestment and sanctions.

Against 'Peace' and 'Moderation'

2009-01-08T10:42:00.000-08:00

(I'll be talking about Palestine at the Taking Soundings meeting, Room H302, Leeds Metropolitan University Civic Quarter. Wednesday January 21st, 6 - 8 pm. Please come.)

The numbers of the dead don’t mean much any more. It was round about the five hundred mark when I realised the impact of death on my mind was lightening. There are pictures on the internet – burning half bodies, a head and torso screaming, corpses spilt in a marketplace like unruly apples, all the tens and tens of babies and children turned to outraged dust – but how many pictures can you keep in your heart? How much anguish can you feel? Enough anguish to mourn 500 human beings? And of what quality can your anguish be? Can it be as intense as the anguish a bystander to the murder would feel? As intense as that of a friend of a victim, or of a father? What about the fathers who have seen all their children burn?

I remember the days when I was outraged if ten were killed in one go. Ah, happy days! Ten in one go would be good. But of course, this is what the enemy wants: the enemy wants us to value Arab life as little as it does. It wants us to stay in our numbness, to descend deeper in. It wants us to forget.

I use the word 'enemy' consciously. I don’t mean the Jews, or even Israeli Jews per se, but Zionism, and therefore Zionists and their collaborators from all ethnic groups. Large scale Zionist massacres have occurred every few years since the initial ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, and Zionism has not been held culpable. Two and a half years ago Zionism murdered 1100 Lebanese, the great majority of them civilians, and Zionism was not held culpable. 763 have been murdered so far in starving Gaza, and thousands maimed, out of a population of one and a half million. Again, the great majority are civilians, and again, Zionism is not held culpable. In one incident, Zionist forces ordered a hundred men, women and children of the as-Samouni clan into a house, which they then shelled, killing 30. Israel has bombed Gaza’s university, ambulances, an ‘American-style private school’, residential tower blocks, mosques, students and shoppers in the streets, and schoolchildren on their way home. The murdered ‘Hamas forces’ include hundreds of ordinary policemen.

The first reason for all this is tactical. “For us being cautious means being aggressive,” an Israeli officer told Ha’aretz. “It will take many years in order to restore this area to what it was before. When we suspect that a Palestinian fighter is hiding in a house, we shoot it with a missile and then with two tank shells, and then a bulldozer hits the wall. It causes damage but it prevents loss of life among soldiers.”

This tactic is acceptable to the West so long as it’s not thought about, because this is the way the West habitually deals with non-Western races. It’s what happens in Iraq and Afghanistan; it’s what happened in the traditional colonial period. But it mustn’t be thought about, especially not these days when people like to imagine they’ve internalised the concept of human equality, because to think about it is to realise that it’s the same thing as ‘terrorism’ – murdering as many civilians as you like if you might hit one enemy operative – and that the only difference between this terror and the terror of the non-state actors is a difference of scale. Western terror, Israeli terror, is much much worse.

The second reason for such massacres is strategic. The Zionist bombing is often random and sometimes specifically targets places of civilian refuge, in order to show the people that they have nowhere to hide and to persuade them to turn against the resistance. Although Zionist terror has only ever solidified anti-Zionist resistance, the strategy follows an old pattern, from Lebanon and Palestine. Yitzhak Rabin ordered his soldiers to suppress the non-violent protests of the First Intifada by holding Palestinian youths down and breaking their limbs with rocks. (Rabin is the man who won the Nobel Peace Prize). In the Second Intifada, a high proportion of the unarmed civilians murdered by Israel were shot in the head or upper body. These include boys playing football and women sweeping their balconies. Extreme violence against civilians in order to influence political reality is a textbook definition of terrorism, so the Western and client Arab media has to keep blatant Israeli statements of this policy – such as Vilnai’s call for “a Holocaust” on Gaza or an IDF chief’s 2006 declaration that his aim was to take Lebanon back to the stone age – as quiet as possible. But the terror policy is obvious if you care to look.

Two days ago Zionism bombed one of the three UN schools it’s hit, and murdered 46 civilians who were sheltering there. Zionist propaganda is repeated in the Western media: Israel believed a Hamas gunman fired from the school gates. Even if the presence of a gunman could justify such slaughter, all the civilian witnesses say Israel's story is a lie. The UN says it is “99.9% certain” that no gunmen were present in the building, that it had informed Israel of the school’s co-ordinates and that displaced civilians were sheltering there, and that it wants an international investigation. But Zionism will not be held culpable. This was a war crime which made a day of bad news for the Zionist media to manage. And nothing else; as there was nothing else after the massacres at Qana in Lebanon, where civilians sheltering in a UN building were slaughtered in 1996, and again in 2006. As there is never anything else for the Palestinian people – the victims of seven decades of ethnic cleansing, occupation, apartheid and butchery. The Arab client regimes, the US, Europe, and their media, are complicit in this ongoing crime.

There is no peace process. There never was. When politicians repeat ‘peace process’ they repeat the incantation of a dream. They are bad illusionists. Yitzhak Shamir announced when he went to Madrid that he’d initiate a ‘process’ to last decades while the colonisation of Palestine continued. The Oslo process was one of cantonisation and pacification, not peace. Land confiscation and settlement expansion didn’t stop for one day. When Arafat was hurried against his will to Camp David (though Arafat was culpable of stupidity and greed for accepting such a ‘process’ in the first place), he was offered a cantonised sub-sovereign state on less than the 22% of Palestine stolen in 1967, with no solution for the refugees or for the ancient Canaanite-Arab city of Jerusalem. Israel would control water, borders and security, and it wouldn’t recognise responsibility for the ethnic cleansing of 1948. In return, Arafat had to declare the conflict resolved for eternity. In the West the Israeli narrative, as usual, has become an orthodoxy: that Arafat turned down a great offer. That the Palestinians ‘never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity’. O yes, the cleansing of an ancient people from their land throws up witty, polished phrases.

Another polished phrase is ‘moderate Arab state’. There are no ‘moderate Arab states’, not unless dictatorship and gangsterism are 'moderate'. Not unless banning Bibles and public floggings and the mass arrests of political opposition and the routine anal rape of detained young men are 'moderate'. It is time to speak plainly. Iran is in many respects a tyranny, but it’s far more democratic than any of the ‘moderate’ Arab states. Syria is a Christian as well as Muslim country, a secular and socially liberal state, but it isn’t considered ‘moderate’ in the way that Saudi Arabia, the home of al-Qa’ida, is. What ‘moderate Arab state’ in fact means is ‘client Arab state’ – a state whose regime obeys America and Israel in return for guns and money.

All the Arab states, ‘moderate’ and otherwise, have repeatedly offered a full peace with Israel in return for a full withdrawal from the lands captured in 67 and a vague ‘solution’ to the refugee issue. Israel has repeatedly ignored them. Hamas has said it will accept a settlement on the 67 border if the Palestinian people accept it. Hamas observed a ceasefire with Israel, and Israel violated it by murder and siege.

Israel is not interested in peace. Even these Amos Ozes and David Grossmans who are trotted out to repeat Zionist propaganda in a more humane tone are not interested in peace.

What, then, can be done? To start with, we can see and speak clearly. We can hold Israel, state and society, culpable. We can stop pretending that peace is on the cards. We can stop the charade of ‘recognising’ the apartheid state’s ‘legitimacy’ or ‘right to exist’. The Zionist state has no more ‘right to exist’ than the apartheid state in South Africa had.

Zionism is based on the premise that one people is worth more than another people, in currency of lives and comfort and imagination. Zionism says that one people’s dream justifies and even necessitates the destruction of another, inferior, people. Zionism is indeed, as the old UN General Assembly resolution had it, racism. Zionism itself is the enemy. The great post-Zionist Israeli Ilan Pappe writes: “We have to try and explain not only to the world, but also to the Israelis themselves, that Zionism is an ideology that endorses ethnic cleansing, occupation and now massive massacres. What is needed now is not just a condemnation of the present massacre but also delegitimization of the ideology that produced that policy and justifies it morally and politically. Let us hope that significant voices in the world will tell the Jewish state that this ideology and the overall conduct of the state are intolerable and unacceptable, and as long as they persist, Israel will be boycotted and subject to sanctions.”

Novelist and critic John Berger’s statement:

“We are now spectators of the latest - and perhaps penultimate - chapter of the 60 year old conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people. About the complexities of this tragic conflict billions of words have been pronounced, defending one side or the other.

Today, in face of the Israeli attacks on Gaza, the essential calculation, which was always covertly there, behind this conflict, has been blatantly revealed. The death of one Israeli victim justifies the killing of a hundred Palestinians. One Israeli life is worth a hundred Palestinian lives.

This is what the Israeli State and the world media more or less - with marginal questioning - mindlessly repeat. And this claim, which has accompanied and justified the longest Occupation of foreign territories in 20th C. European history, is viscerally racist. That the Jewish people should accept this, that the world should concur, that the Palestinians should submit to it - is one of history’s ironic jokes. There’s no laughter anywhere. We can, however, refute it, more and more vocally.

Let’s do so.”

John Berger
27 December 2008

Misha'al (and Clegg)

2009-01-07T04:28:00.000-08:00

The media love to 'balance' the occupied with the occupier. But if there was really balance, Khalid Misha'al, the leader of Hamas, would have as much airtime as Livni, Barak and Olmert. I congratulate the Guardian for publishing this excellent article by Misha'al. I republish it here because everybody should read it, and because I agree with it.

I do so with reservations, however. Although I support Hamas's resistance, and although I think the Palestinians should be represented by the people they voted for and not by collaborators, I believe Hamas to be a flawed organisation. It is anti-Semitic, for a start; there's no point pretending otherwise. It's understandable that a population brutalised in the name of the Jews might latch on to ready-made racist generalisations about the Jews, but quoting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the Hamas constitution is not only morally wrong, but also stupid. It hampers clear analysis of the situation, and of the enemy. I wrote about that here: http://qunfuz.blogspot.com/2008/03/what-hamas-should-do.html

And I have a reservation to my reservation: the anti-Semitism of Hamas cannot be compared to the anti-Palestinianism of Zionism. Hamas fumes for justice. If justice comes, Palestinians will fume less. Zionism, meanwhile, has destroyed Palestine, and is doing its best to destroy the Palestinians. It is being helped by Europe, the US, and the client dictatorships of the Arab world. It is time to listen to, and to actively support, the victims.

This Brutality Will Never Break our Will to be Free

For six months we in Hamas observed the ceasefire. Israel broke it repeatedly from the start

Khalid Mishal

For 18 months my people in Gaza have been under siege, incarcerated inside the world's biggest prison, sealed off from land, air and sea, caged and starved, denied even medication for our sick. After the slow death policy came the bombardment. In this most densely populated of places, nothing has been spared Israel's warplanes, from government buildings to homes, mosques, hospitals, schools and markets. More than 540 have been killed and thousands permanently maimed. A third are women and children. Whole families have been massacred, some while they slept.

This river of blood is being shed under lies and false pretexts. For six months we in Hamas observed the ceasefire. Israel broke it repeatedly from the start. Israel was required to open crossings to Gaza, and extend the truce to the West Bank. It proceeded to tighten its deadly siege of Gaza, repeatedly cutting electricity and water supplies. The collective punishment did not halt, but accelerated - as did the assassinations and killings. Thirty Gazans were killed by Israeli fire and hundreds of patients died as a direct effect of the siege during the so-called ceasefire. Israel enjoyed a period of calm. Our people did not.

When this broken truce neared its end, we expressed our readiness for a new comprehensive truce in return for lifting the blockade and opening all Gaza border crossings, including Rafah. Our calls fell on deaf ears. Yet still we would be willing to begin a new truce on these terms following the complete withdrawal of the invading forces from Gaza.

No rockets have ever been fired from the West Bank. But 50 died and hundreds more were injured there last year at Israel's hands, while its expansionism proceeded relentlessly. We are meant to be content with shrinking scraps of territory, a handful of cantons at Israel's mercy, enclosed by it from all sides.The truth is Israel seeks a one-sided ceasefire, observed by my people alone, in return for siege, starvation, bombardment, assassinations, incursions and colonial settlement. What Israel wants is a gratuitous ceasefire.

The logic of those who demand that we stop our resistance is absurd. They absolve the aggressor and occupier - armed with the deadliest weapons of death and destruction - of responsibility, while blaming the victim, prisoner and occupied. Our modest, home-made rockets are our cry of protest to the world. Israel and its American and European sponsors want us to be killed in silence. But die in silence we will not.

What is being visited on Gaza today was visited on Yasser Arafat before. When he refused to bow to Israel's dictates, he was imprisoned in his Ramallah headquarters, surrounded by tanks for two years. When this failed to break his resolve, he was murdered by poisoning.

Gaza enters 2009 just as it did 2008: under Israeli fire. Between January and February of last year 140 Gazans died in air strikes. And just before it embarked on its failed military assault on Lebanon in July 2006, Israel rained thousands of shells on Gaza, killing 240. From Deir Yassin in 1948 to Gaza today, the list of Israel's crimes is long. The justifications change, but the reality is the same: colonial occupation, oppression, and never-ending injustice. If this is the "free world" whose "values" Israel is defending, as its foreign minister Tzipi Livni alleges, then we want nothing to do with it.

Israel's leaders remain in the grip of confusion, unable to set clear goals for the attacks - from ousting the legitimately elected Hamas government and destroying its infrastructure, to stopping the rockets. As they fail to break Gaza's resistance the benchmark has been lowered. Now they speak of weakening Hamas and limiting the resistance. But they will achieve neither. Gaza's people are more united than ever, determined not to be terrorised into submission. Our fighters, armed with the justice of their cause, have already caused many casualties among the occupation army and will fight on to defend their land and people. Nothing can defeat our will to be free.

Once again, Washington and Europe have opted to aid and abet the jailer, occupier and aggressor, and to condemn its victims. We hoped Barack Obama would break with George Bush's disastrous legacy but his start is not encouraging. While he swiftly moved to denounce the Mumbai attacks, he remains tongue-tied after 10 days of slaughter in Gaza. But my people are not alone. Millions of freedom-loving men and women stand by its struggle for justice and liberation - witness daily protests against Israeli aggression, not only in the Arab and Islamic region, but worldwide.

Israel will no doubt wreak untold destruction, death and suffering in Gaza. But it will meet the same fate in Gaza as it did in Lebanon. We will not be broken by siege and bombardment, and will never surrender to occupation.

• Khalid Mish'al is the head of the Hamas political bureau

And here's an excellent interview from the Counterpunch newsletter, in which Misha'al gives good answers to the 'terrorism' and 'not recognising Israel' questions:

Khaled Meshal, leader of Hamas, on the Palestinian Resistance, the Occupation, and Israel’s downward path

In mid-May of 2008, CounterPunchers Alexander Cockburn and Alya Rea were among a group of Americans who sat down in a house in a Damascus suburb for two hours with Khaled Meshal, chairman of the political bureau of Hamas. Significant portions of the exchange follow.
Meshal: We, as Palestinians, have the honor of representing a just issue. We have endured atrocities and occupation. Because of the Israeli occupation, half of the Palestinian people live under occupation inside Palestine, and the other half is living without homes outside. Today we, as a Palestinian people, a Palestinian nation, are looking only to live in a peace without occupation. We reject the occupation. We reject the atrocities. And we reject being without a home and away from home. We have no problems with any religion in the world, nor any race in the world. We learned very well that the almighty god Allah created human beings with different races and different religions and he asked us to accommodate these diversities. Hence, we request the same with the nations all over the world to accommodate this just issue.
Our problem is with unfair policies in the international community: pre-eminently the policies of the American administration. And, of course, we do not consider the people of America responsible for that. I have visited America many times. And I know very well that the American people are very kind people. But our problem is with the foreign policies of successive American administrations. We accepted a state of Palestine on the borders of 1967. The international community failed to pressure Israeli to do the same. So, what is left for Palestinians to do, except resist? For our part, we prefer the peaceful path. But we find the peaceful path blocked. Hence, the Palestinians are left with no option but the resistance. And this is what explains why the Palestinian people elected Hamas and why, amid famine and hunger and siege inflicted on the Palestinian people today, you find the same thing- the Palestinian people are supporting Hamas.

Gaza is the biggest detention camp in history. Remember Newton’s law that to every action there is always an equal opposing reaction. The Israeli occupation is the action, and resistance is the reaction. Whenever you increase the level of atrocities in an occupation, at the same level you increase the reaction of the resistance. So our rockets come within this formula. If the atrocities and occupation stopped, the rockets would stop.

Israel’s habit is to set its own agenda, to put its match to the fire any time it wants and to stop the fire anytime it wants. They don’t want a reciprocal commitment. You know why? Because they feel that the Arabs are weak. Why should they respect them? Why should they manufacture any reciprocal formula with them? Hence, I say that the peace cannot be made between a weak party and a strong one. Peace is manufactured by strong parties. We are ready for peace, but one forged from competition and reciprocity, without atrocities and without occupation.

AC: What do you think Israel’s ultimate strategy or vision is? What is its idea of a solution?
Meshal: I believe that Israel wants to keep the land of Palestine. Gaza is an exceptional case. Because of Gaza’s high population density and size, it was OK for the Israelis to leave. But because of religious considerations, issues of access to water, military outposts, Israel will never surrender the West Bank. Yes, they may offer to withdraw from 60 or 70 per cent of it. Sometimes they offer 40 or 50 per cent of the land. But this is a temporary tactic in order to win time, to build or to establish a "reality on the ground," to expand settlements, and chop up the land in such a way that it is impossible build any national entity. In any peace proposal, Israel always wants to keep four settlement blocs on the West Bank. The biggest is the one surrounding Jerusalem; the second bloc is the northern area of the West Bank. The third is in the southern area of the West Bank and the fourth in the Jordan Valley. So, what is left of the West Bank then?

When former President Carter visited over here, I told him that the circumstances surrounding the Camp David peace agreement between Egypt and Israel no longer exist. In those days, Israel was compelled or pressured to sign the agreement for two reasons. First, the war of 1973. By then, the Israelis understood that Egypt was not an easy country to defeat. The second reason is that the then Prime Minister Begin saw that Israel had a major interest in isolating Egypt from the general Arab constituency. Today, Israel is not under the weight of any such compulsions. We told former President Carter that the Palestinian resistance is the only power to force Israel to move.

Q. Would you accept a single state?

Meshal: The problem is not with what

the Palestinians or the Arabs might accept. The Palestinians have accepted many things. And the Arabs have accepted many things. But Israel refused. Even what the Israelis did endorse, under the auspices of the Americans, the American organizations, Israel did not abide by. The main question is: is Israel going to accept or not? The mistake in Arab strategy and in the strategy of the former Palestinian leadership consists in the various easy offers, duly rejected by the Israelites. We will not adopt that track. Israel has to offer. They have to propose what they want to accept. Then we will respond.

AC: You’ve said that force and the ability to resist is the only thing that Israel and its backers will understand. How will this resistance continue and unfold under the leadership of Hamas?
Meshal: The resistance in Palestine is living in a very abnormal situation. Under classical conditions of resistance, there should be no resistance in Palestine. There’s no international party, which supports us. The Arab neighborhood and the regional neighborhood do not welcoming the resistance, though there are some regional parties who collaborate with the resistance. So, from a holistic perspective, the "whole" wins against the resistance. So, what is the secret behind the steadfastness of the resistance? First of all, the ferocity of the occupation. Hence, with such pressure there is a reaction from the people, which is the resistance. The second element is Israeli intransigence. The Palestinians have tried the negotiation option, and they gave chance for the peace process to succeed: with Oslo agreements, its aftermath, with 1991 and the Madrid conference. The Palestinian people tracked the peace process, the negotiations, and the result was negative. Hence, the Palestinian people understood that all other paths are blocked. This reality has pushed the Palestinians to steadfastness in their resistance. Third, there is no other party internationally that the Palestinians can depend on. An American administration could pressure the Israelis, but they don’t do so. When we talk about the international community, they are helpless in front of Israel.

Hence, the Palestinian people consider resistance not as an option or as an alternative but as a way of life, a way to survive. Now, does this resistance have a future or is time against it? I would say that the future is for the resistance and the future is for the Palestinian people. Today, Israel refuses the proposals offered by the Arabs and the Palestinians: it’s Israel’s loss because the future is not in its favor.

Q: Is Hamas willing to accept a two-state solution if Israel withdraws to the ’67 borders?
Meshal: In order to unify the Palestinian position politically, we agreed on one political platform in 2006, in a document we signed. We called it the National Conciliation Document. And we said in it that we accepted a state of Palestine on the basis of the borders of 1967, including Jerusalem, without settlements and with the right of return to the refugees. This is a platform we agreed upon. But we, in Hamas, have a very important issue and that is not to recognize Israel. But not recognizing it does not imply war with Israel. What we want is a state of Palestine on the borders of 1967. Then, there will be a cease-fire between us and Israel. We say that international relations between states are not always established on the basis of reciprocal recognition. And when a Palestinian state is established, it will specify the level of relation with Israel. The big challenge for all of us today is to give a chance to Palestinians to live in peace. The problem today is that the Palestinian people are the victim. Half live under Israeli occupation amid deadly conditions. The rest are refugees in the camps, without a homeland. And so the victim here – the Palestinian people – is being asked to recognize Israel? This is unfair.

Q: You mean, they’re saying, "Recognize Israel now." They’re asking the Palestinians to say, "It’s okay to go ahead and steal our land, we forgive you."
Meshal: Of course.

AC: If we’d been having this conversation 30 years ago, there would’ve been a mention of the U.N., but no one here today has mentioned the U.N. Do you think now the U.N. is purely an instrument of the United States?

Meshal: Unfortunately, United Nations is rendered a joke.

Q: You’re with the Israelis on that point.

AC: Earlier you said the future of Israel is not that good, not that bright. Could you elaborate on that?

Meshal: When we tried to read the future, we read it with the perspective of the past and the present. And we read it with the measurements of the nation’s values and the people. Is there any future for occupation and settlement? Is there any nation in the history of the world that insisted to establishing its own rights and failed to do so? Third question: since 1948, if we want to draw a curve of Israel’s progress, do you think that this curve is still heading up, or maybe is at a plateau, or is heading down? I believe that the curve is now in descent. And today, the military might of Israel is not capable of concluding matters to Israel’s satisfaction.

Since 1948, you may notice that Israel has defeated 7 armies. In ’56 they defeated Egypt. In ’67 they defeated 3 countries: Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. In ‘73, the war was somewhat equal 0n both sides between Egypt and Israel; if not for Nixon’s airlift to Israel’s forces at that time, the map of the world would be different. In ’82 Israel defeated the PLO in Beirut. But since ’82, 26 years ago, Israelis has not won any war. They did not defeat the Palestinian resistance, and they did not defeat the Lebanese resistance. Since that time, Israel has not expanded but has contracted. They have withdrawn from southern Lebanon and from Gaza.

These are indicators that the future is not favorable to Israel. Then today Israel, with all its military capabilities – conventional and unconventional – are not enough to guarantee Israel’s security. Today, with all these capabilities, they can’t stop a simple rocket from being launched from Gaza.

Hence the big question is, can military might ensure security? Hence, we may say that when Israel refusing the Arab and the Palestinian offer, a state of Palestine on the border of 1967, Israel is losing a big opportunity. Some years down the road, a new Palestinian generation, new Arab generations, may not accept those conditions, because the balance of power may not be in Israel’s favor.

Alya R.: My question is about using violent means. When people use violent means, inevitably innocent people suffer, in particular children – not only on the Palestinian side, but Israeli children too. What do you think about the use of violence?

Meshal: Good question. We do not like to see any victim, such as a child or a woman, even on the Israeli side, even though at the start it was the Israelis who attacked us. But, unfortunately, the insistence on violent repression by our assailants leads to innocent blood on the street. Since 1996, 12 years ago, we have proposed to exclude civilian targets from the conflict (on both sides). Israel did not respond to that. When Israel insists on killing our kids, our elders and senior citizens and women, and bombard houses with the guns ships, F16s and Apaches, when Israel continues these attacks, what is left for the Palestinians to do? They are defending themselves with whatever they have. If the situation was such that we had a smart missile, we would never launch it, unless at a military target. But our missiles and rockets are very crude. Hence we fire it, within its own capabilities, in reaction to Israeli atrocities. And we do not know specifically what it will target. Had it been that we had smart missiles – and we wish that some countries could give us these – rest assured that we will never aim at anything except the military targets. CP

From Misha'al to Nick Clegg, leader of Britain's Liberal Democrats, who has called for an arms embargo on Israel and for suspension of the EU cooperation agreement with Israel. He is the only British party leader to have suggested that Israel should be punished in some way, that Israel is culpable, and he's the only one to call for practical action against the aggressor. Clegg is unlikely to win an election (Britain is stuck in a two-party charade, like America), but his position at least shifts the debate a little. And that's enough for me: I'll be voting Liberal Democrat from now on, and I encourage everybody else to do so too. I will post Clegg's statement below. I don't agree with his obligatory attachment of the 'terrorist' label to Hamas, or his comments about the Qassam rockets, but for a mainstream British politician this is remarkable:

We Must Stop Arming Israel

Nick Clegg

Article from The Guardian, 7th January 2009

Brown has to stop sitting on his hands, halt British weapons exports and insist the EU do the same

The world watched in horror yesterday as the conflict in Gaza claimed its latest innocent victims in the rubble of a UN school. Any hopes of reconciliation are being snuffed out as anger spills into protests around the world.

The past two weeks have been a telling indictment of the international community. We have an outgoing US president sanctioning Israel’s military response and an aching silence from the president-elect. We have a European Union encumbered by clumsy decision-making and confused messages.

And at home we have a prime minister talking like an accountant about aid earmarked for Gaza without once saying anything meaningful about the conflict’s origins. Gordon Brown, like Tony Blair, has made British foreign policy effectively subservient to Washington. But waiting for a change of heart in Washington is intolerable given the human cost.

Of course, Israel has every right to defend itself. It is difficult to imagine what it must be like to live with the constant threat of rocket attacks from a movement which espouses terrorist violence and denies Israel’s right to exist. But Israel’s approach is self-defeating: the overwhelming use of force, the unacceptable loss of civilian lives, is radicalising moderate opinion among Palestinians and throughout the Arab world. Anger in the West Bank will make it virtually impossible for Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, to continue to talk to Israeli ministers.

Brown must stop sitting on his hands. He must condemn unambiguously Israel’s tactics, just as he has rightly condemned Hamas’s rocket attacks. Then he must lead the EU into using its economic and diplomatic leverage in the region to broker peace. The EU is by far Israel’s biggest export market, and by far the biggest donor to the Palestinians. It must immediately suspend the proposed new cooperation agreement with Israel until things change in Gaza, and apply tough conditions on any long-term assistance to the Palestinian community.

Brown must also halt Britain’s arms exports to Israel, and persuade our EU counterparts to do the same. The government’s own figures show Britain is selling more and more weapons to Israel, despite the questions about the country’s use of force. In 2007, our government approved £6m of arms exports. In 2008, it licensed sales 12 times as fast: £20m in the first three months alone.

There is a strong case that, given the Gaza conflict, any military exports contravene EU licensing criteria. Reports, though denied, that Israel is using illegal cluster munitions and white phosphorus should heighten our caution. I want an immediate suspension of all arms exports from the EU, but if that cannot be secured, Brown must act unilaterally.

Finally, the world’s leaders must accept that their response to the election of Hamas has been a strategic failure. The removal of the EU presence on the Egypt border in response to Hamas’s election, for example, has made it easier for the rockets being fired at Israel to get into Gaza in the first place. An EU mission with a serious mandate and backing from Egypt and Israel would help Israel deal proportionately and effectively with the threat from weapons smuggling.

Attempts to divide and rule the Palestinians by isolating and punishing Gaza will not succeed. To secure peace in the Middle East, Hamas must turn its back on terrorism, and help create Palestinian unity. Only unified leadership in the West Bank and Gaza can offer Israel the security guarantees that it rightly seeks.

My proposals to stay Israel’s hand in this conflict may be unwelcome to some, but they have the country’s long term interest at heart. No terrorist organisation has ever been defeated by bombs alone. Only a new approach will secure lasting peace for Israel itself.

Dear Prime Minister

2009-01-03T10:22:00.000-08:00

Dear Prime Minister

I am very pleased that you have been calling for an immediate ceasefire in Israel-Palestine. This marks a clear difference from the statements not only of President Bush but also of Tony Blair during the 2006 assault on Lebanon. Your stand shows some degree of British independence, and I thank you for it.

I am much less pleased to read this Downing Street statement: “We are working urgently with international partners to address the underlying causes of the conflict, including trafficking of arms into Gaza. Moderation must prevail.”

‘Trafficking of arms into Gaza’ is a symptom of the conflict, as you must know, and not an underlying cause. And ‘moderation must prevail’ seems a much less useful statement than ‘occupation must stop.’

The ceasefire was not broken by Gaza’s homemade rockets, but by Israeli attacks on the West Bank and Gaza, and Israel's refusal to allow economic activity in the Strip. Jews for Justice in the Middle East report, “Israeli forces have carried out an average of 33 incursions, 42 arrests or detentions, 12 woundings and 0.84 killings a week in the West Bank during the ceasefire.”

You will put your calls for moderation down to ‘balance’, which sounds very fair to people who know nothing of the conflict. I would ask how useful (or useful to whom?) is ‘balance’ for treating a situation in which the two sides are so very unequal? At the time of writing, 440 Palestinians and 4 Israelis have been killed. This is the immediate context. Expanding the perspective just a little bit, before the latest massacre Gaza was, according to the Red Cross, suffering “chronic malnutrition.” To punish the Palestinians for electing Hamas, Israel has worked to destroy Gaza’s economic infrastructure and social fabric over the last eighteen months. It is remarkable that a population on the Mediterranean is being quite literally starved with not a murmur from Europe. Indeed, European governments have collaborated in this crime as much as the client Arab dictatorships usually called ‘moderate’. Europe imposed sanctions on the occupied. As the siege bit deeper, the EU upgraded its relations with the occupier.

Before the siege, Gaza, 80% of whose inhabitants are refugees, was already impoverished and brutalised by occupation. Israel was born in ethnic cleansing and has continued through occupation and apartheid. (According to Bishop Tutu, Israeli apartheid is “worse” than the apartheid regime in South Africa.) Even people who sympathise with the causes of Zionism should be able to recognise this: in Palestine the natives have been ethnically cleansed and occupied by a much more powerful incoming population. This is the root of the conflict. Decades of imaginary ‘peace processes’ have not changed the base reality one jot.

It is time to abandon ‘balance’ and speak plainly. To speak, at least. Real peace will only come with honesty and justice. Continuation of the current diplomatic charade will eventually seal the doom of Israeli Jews as well as Palestinian Arabs, and will solidify the current Western-Muslim divide.

Yours sincerely

Action

2008-12-30T08:16:00.001-08:00

I haven't used this blog for activism before, and I may not again. But for now, there is information below on how to demonstrate, donate, and write letters. The Zionist propaganda machine has won as usual in the West: Hamas are portrayed as the aggressors; western governments justify the slaughter; nobody talks about the root of the problem: Zionist apartheid and ethnic cleansing. Can you do anything except work up to a heart attack? See below. Please send this information on to others.

This site has information on demonstrations: http://www.palestinecampaign.org/index2b.asp

and on boycotting Israeli goods: http://www.palestinecampaign.org/Index7b.asp?m_id=1&l1_id=4&l2_id=24&Content_ID=192

These demos will happen in LONDON:

Tuesday 30 December, 2 - 4pm outside Israeli Embassy, Kensington High Street, London, W4. Nearest tube Kensingston High Street (turn right out of tube station and walk along the main road.

Wednesday 31 December, 2 - 4pm outside Israeli Embassy

Thursday 1 January 2 - 4pm outside Israeli EmbassyFriday

2 January 2 - 4 pm. Outside the Egyptian Embassy, . 26 South Street, London, W1K 1DW. Call for Egypt to open the border immediately.

SATURDAY 3 JANUARY. DEMONSTRATION AND RALLY. Assemble 2pm Parliament Square, W1. Nearest tube Westminster.

If you would like to donate money, Interpal is a good charity. You can sponsor an orphan or a family in Palestine: http://www.interpal.info/ Medical Aid for Palestine is also good: http://www.map-uk.org/

I expect letters have only a small effect, but they only take two minutes to do. At least give those in charge the sense that somebody cares. Here are addresses, below. There’s also an open letter from Jews for Justice for Palestine which you could email to the PM, foreign secretary, your MP, etc, with a line saying that you endorse it. It may be important to point out that Hamas did not break the ceasefire; Israel did, by beseiging and staging incursions into Gaza, and that all talk of ceasefires is anyway a diversion. We should be talking about liberating Palestine, either according to the one state or two state solution.

If you are in the UK, you can find your MP's details on this site: http://www.writetothem.com/ Just enter your postcode.

If you are in Europe write to your MEP http://www.europarl.europa.eu/members.do

If you are in the UK you can Write to:

(a) the Labour Party using this online form:http://www.labour.org.uk/contact

(b) the leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron camerond@parliament.uk (You could mention you are appalled that he has been on the BBC calling for restraint on all sides when nearly 300 Palestinians have been killed.)

British Consulate Jerusalem+972 (02) 541 410010. British Embassy Tel Aviv+972 (02) 3510 1167 / +972 (03) 527 1572 Call them.

Fax the office of the UK Prime Minister - Gordon Brown -on +44 20 7925 0918

The Jews for Justice for Palestinians letter, which you can use:

Dear Prime Minister

At the time of writing, almost 300 Gazans are dead, hundreds more wounded. The air strikes appear to be aimed indiscriminately at both civilian and military targets. Israel is using its extensive military power to wreak carnage on innocent civilians. This is a condemnable act of mindless violence, and we call upon you and the international community to intervene immediately.

Claiming that this is an action to stop rocket fire is a wholly unpersuasive argument. The six-month ceasefire has been squandered by Israel . The populations of Sderot, Ashkelon and southern Israel have been left unprotected by their own government, which has failed to either build shelters or make a more lasting agreement. The Israeli government is exploiting the understandable fear of their own citizens as an excuse for today’s strikes.The Israeli government steadily sought to break down the ceasefire, not just in Gaza since early November, but also in the West Bank . Israeli forces have carried out an average of 33 incursions, 42 arrests or detentions, 12 woundings and 0.84 killings a week in the West Bank during the ceasefire. The tactic has been to continue attacking Hamas and other militants in the West Bank, provoking responses in Gaza , and to use the responses as the pretext for the massive attacks of the last 24 hours.

On 23rd December Hamas offered to renew the ceasefire if Israel would undertake to open border crossings for supplies of aid and fuel, and halt incursions. For those of us appalled at the collective punishment involved in the ongoing siege, and concerned that Israelis should not fear death or injury from Qassam rockets, that seems a truly reasonable response. For Israel to reject it bespeaks a bankrupt body politic especially since the army and the politicians are acting against the wishes of the Israeli public. It is after all the civilians on both sides who will bear the brunt of this dangerous folly.You regard yourself as a strong friend of Israel . When a friend crosses acceptable lines of behaviour as Israel has again done, one has a responsibility to intervene.

Yours sincerely

Sylvia Cohen, International Liaison
Diana Neslen, Campaigns Co-ordinatorfor Jews for Justice for Palestinians

Shift the framing of Israel's actions in the media by phoning into a talk show or writing a letter to the editor.

Sign the petition in support of UN General Assembly President Father Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/IJAN_Brockmann_BDS/ He has spoken out to condemn Israeli Apartheid and called for boycott, divestment and sanctions.

Palestinians - It's time to build a new PLO, as elected as possible, to represent both Islamist and secular Palestinians in the lands stolen in 48, the lands stolen in 67, and outside. The PA should be abolished; and the Oslo/Road Map farce officially abandoned. Then Palestinians have to decide what their aims and strategies will be. All Palestinians should agitate for the new organisation.

And the Arabs: it’s easy for me to talk big from my workstation in the UK, but it’s a fact that nothing is going to improve for the Palestinians until the more disgusting client regimes are shaken. If there were a regime like Syria’s in Egypt (surely not much to ask) Hamas would have support, as Hizbullah did. What has Mubarak’s gangster-capitalism client state done for anyone, in terms of economy, public health and education, culture, rights, or anything else?

Everybody, it is important to speak truth. Hadeeth: A true jihad is a word of truth spoken to an unjust leader. Here is what the writer and critic John Berger has to say:

"We are now spectators of the latest - and perhaps penultimate - chapter of the 60 year old conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people. About the complexities of this tragic conflict billions of words have been pronounced, defending one side or the other.

Today, in face of the Israeli attacks on Gaza, the essential calculation, which was always covertly there, behind this conflict, has been blatantly revealed. The death of one Israeli victim justifies the killing of a hundred Palestinians. One Israeli life is worth a hundred Palestinian lives.

This is what the Israeli State and the world media more or less - with marginal questioning - mindlessly repeat. And this claim, which has accompanied and justified the longest Occupation of foreign territories in 20th C. European history, is viscerally racist. That the Jewish people should accept this, that the world should concur, that the Palestinians should submit to it - is one of history's ironic jokes. There's no laughter anywhere. We can, however, refute it, more and more vocally.

Let's do so."

John Berger
27 December 2008

Besieged

2008-12-27T11:11:00.000-08:00

This morning’s assault on Gaza and the massacre of 205 Palestinians (so far) was easy to foresee. First came the official lapse of the six-month ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Then an Israeli incursion, and the Gazan response: firing dozens of home-made Qassam missiles at southern Israel. A little bit of damage was done to property as a result. Meanwhile, Hamas leaders said they’d be pleased to work out a renewed ceasefire deal. According to Haaretz, Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin understood this clearly enough: “Make no mistake, Hamas is interested in continuing the truce, but wants to improve its terms. It wants us to lift the siege, stop (IDF) attacks, and extend the truce to include Judea and Samaria (the West Bank),” he said.

Extending the truce, and letting the Gazans live, seem not to be on Israel’s agenda. It’s election time, and the mood for stamping out resistance has taken Israel in its arms.

In other circumstances it might seem strange that a population on the Mediterranean coast is being besieged and starved without a murmur from the rest of the world. But this is Gaza, Palestine, and the victims suffer alone. Reports say Mubarak had given his assent to a ‘limited blow’ before today’s blood; he’s been keeping the Egyptian border with Gaza sealed, keeping the ugly oppressed in their cage very effectively since they briefly broke out last January. Tony Blair – who should be in prison but is instead poncing about in Ramallah and Jerusalem – has been winking to Israeli journalists about necessary change in Gaza. No response to today’s crime is likely in Lebanon, or Jordan, or Egypt. The peoples of Europe and America are, by and large, silent.

This, in the land of Crusades, is a medieval siege. Gaza is walled in. Nothing passes in or out. More than fifty percent of the population are officially unemployed. The banks have closed. The strip’s only power station has shut down. The people are starved quite literally: most bakeries have closed for lack of heating oil. A Red Cross report describes “progressive deterioration in food security for up to 70 per cent of Gaza’s population.” It goes on: “Chronic malnutrition is on a steadily rising trend and micronutrient deficiencies are of great concern.” Which means, amongst other things, that this generation of children in Gaza are not receiving the nutrients they need for healthy brain development.

I quote from the Independent: “The report paints a bleak picture of an increasingly impoverished and indebted lower-income population. People are selling assets, slashing the quality and quantity of meals, cutting back on clothing and children’s education, scavenging for discarded materials – and even grass for animal fodder – that they can sell, and are depending on dwindling loans and handouts from slightly better-off relatives. In the urban sector, in which about 106,000 employees lost their jobs after the June 2007 shutdown, about 40 per cent are now classified as “very poor,” earning less than 500 shekels (£87) a month to provide for an average household of seven to nine people.

This is a deliberate, cruelly organised crime. And nobody notices.

This morning, with children in school, people on the streets and in offices, policemen at a graduation ceremony, the sky screamed and roared. There are reports of general panic, and of roads clogged with corpses.

I know the writing becomes a whine when these simple sentiments are expressed: but, again; imagine you are living, or dying, with your children, in such a place. And imagine that the world ignores you.

The Second Intifada was valiant, and to start with showed signs of succeeding. Like the First Intifada it was a spontaneous mass movement in which all sections of society participated. Not provided with any organisation from the top, the Intifada was self-mobilising, rapidly generating new organisations, leaders and methods of resistance. Marwan Barghouti proved himself a principled and intelligent leader, a more-than-worthy successor to Arafat. (Like the best of Palestinian leaders who are still alive, Barghouti is now held in an Israeli prison).

I don’t condemn the Palestinians for militarising the Intifada. In many respects, the armed struggle had become, again, inevitable. The Oslo ‘peace process’ had, according to its careful design, eaten up still more of Palestine and made a genuine two-state solution unviable. In the first weeks of protest after Sharon’s visit to al-Aqsa, hundreds of stone-throwing youths (and other civilians not throwing stones) were gunned down. The US media, meanwhile, wondered why Palestinian mothers didn’t love their children. What would you expect the shot-upon to do? Passive resistance doesn’t get you very far if neither the oppressor nor his friends have a conscience.

And attacks inside Israel brought the war to the enemy in a way that had never happened before. Whatever the morality of attacks on civilian targets (and I rankle at the moralising against the Palestinians, when Israel murders vastly higher numbers, when the Palestinians, the aggrieved party, have tried peace), and whatever effect calling these attacks ‘Islamic’ may have on Muslim and non-Muslim perceptions of Islam (AbdulAziz ar-Rantissi hinted at this when he said “In this conflict many red lines have been crossed, by both sides”), the attacks did what they intended to: Israel became, for a year or two, a country ‘occupied’ by fear. Many Israelis left; many avoided restaurants and markets; the economy slumped. Tourism stopped.

Globally, the Intifada sparked a new generation’s interest in Palestine. In the Muslim world this fed into the growing Islamist passion, and also into popular initiatives to boycott American goods. There were huge demonstrations in support of Palestine even in places where demonstrating was a new and illegal activity. In the West blogs and websites like the Electronic Intifada became alternative news sources for activists, and new Palestinian diasporic figures like Ali Abunimeh arrived on the scene. The Intifada at first shifted opinion in Europe, where there was a sense that something at last had to be done, that the contagious wound of Palestine had to be doctored.

Then came September 11th, then Afghanistan and Iraq, and the specific issue of Palestinian dispossession was overshadowed by the generalities of the ‘war on terror’. Israel and its friends worked very hard to transfer the medieval-Islamic-terror label to the Palestinians and Lebanese, to cast the struggle against ethnic cleansing, expulsion, occupation and apartheid as an atavistic spouting of anti-freedom bile.

Wahhabi-nihilists obligingly played their part: A non-client in power in Riyadh would have dramatically changed the balance in Palestine’s favour, but al-Qa’ida atrocities kept the al-Sauds in power after the invasion of Iraq. Massacres of commuters in London and Madrid, and the mindless barbarism of sectarian warfare in Iraq, convinced the mainstream European media of the Israeli narrative: Muslim violence has no relation to political causes, but is culturally inherent. Civilisation can only enwall and frighten these people.

Europe like America has accepted this now.

Israel destroyed the Palestinian Authority and fought its way back into the cities it had vacated during the Oslo years. It conducted mass arrests and made travel between West Bank villages not much easier than travel beyond the solar system. It built a huge barrier through communities on the West Bank, and entrenched the settlement system.

The Second Intifada was defeated, but not comprehensively. In its wreckage Palestinian society is poorer, less educated, more traumatised, more splintered. A collaborative class polices the West Bank on Israel’s behalf, thousands of young men are locked in Israeli prison camps. And Gaza starves.

The paradoxical victory is in Gaza; not much of a victory of course, perhaps just a hint at the possibility of victory. A popularly-mandated resistance organisation has kept control of the territory in the most difficult of conditions, and has started to transform itself into a guerrilla organisation, taking Hizbullah as its model. It remains to be seen if Israel will attempt a full ground invasion. If it does, it will be interesting to see how Hamas holds ground.

And if Israel reoccupies Gaza, what then? It was resistance that made it leave before, and resistance will be more ferocious now. Hamas, meanwhile, is constantly developing its missile capacities. The resistance may fall. If it doesn’t, it will grow in strength. Then both sides will be beseiged, the Israelis by time.

Malnutrition: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/chronic-malnutrition-in-gaza-blamed-on-israel-1019521.html

Sara Roy on the seige: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n01/roy_01_.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5osk2toY1E&eurl=http://www.juancole.com/

Shoes and Bullets

2008-12-15T03:52:00.000-08:00

George Bush has had shoes thrown at him in Baghdad. As he threw the first, Muntadar az-Zaidi shouted, “This is a goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, dog.” As he threw the second, he added, “This is for the widows and orphans and all those killed in Iraq.” It was gratifying to see the Iraqi journalist’s human response to one of the destroyers of his country, even if it was woefully inadequate. In a just world, Bush would be imprisoned for the rest of his life (I oppose capital punishment even in the most deserving of cases).

Meanwhile the empire’s top criminals continue to spout self-justifying vomit. What do you say about a Condoleezza Rice? In an interview with the Wall Street Journal she says her regime removed the Taliban, but doesn’t say that America helped bring the Taliban to power in the first place, nor that the new Taliban is now winning against the occupation and its warlord/ druglord Afghan allies. She doesn’t say that Pakistan’s previously peaceful borderlands are controlled by the Pakistani Taliban, that hundreds of thousands have been displaced from these areas, that there are regular bomb attacks in Pakistan’s major cities, or that Pakistan faces the real possibility of collapse.

She gloats that the Palestinian intifada has been defeated, noting as if it’s a victory “that last year Bethlehem was the site of a huge investment conference, hosted by Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayad, aided by Israel.” Fayad is an unelected moneyman. The West Bank is governed by collaborators, and split from the flawed but elected and independent government in Gaza. There is no end in sight to the unbearable apartheid reality of the West Bank, and Gaza is, quite literally, starving. This is how the empire likes things.

Most grotesquely, Rice describes ethnically-cleansed, sectarian, splintered, brutalised, cholera-ridden Iraq as “a multiethnic, multiconfessional democracy that isn’t threatening its neighbors.” The woman needs a lot more than shoes in her face.

Multiethnic? On the last day of Eid, Arab and Kurdish leaders were meeting in a Kirkuk restaurant to negotiate the future of the city. A bomb killed 55 of them. Throughout northern Iraq, Kurdish Peshmerga jostle against Turkman and Arab militia. Throughout the country, Gypsy villages have been burned to the ground.

Multiconfessional? All major political forces in Iraq are sectarian. The Arab tribes, and even families, have split into Sunni and Shia components. Walls and barbed wire divide Baghdad neighbourhoods. Sectarian murder is at nothing like the level it reached in the apocalyptic days of 2006 and 2007, but the few families who dare to return to their homes in areas controlled by the other sect are most likely to be murdered. Millions of Iraqis are internal or external refugees. The fires of sectarian hatred, fanned by America’s Arab clients, threaten to burn the entire region. At least half of Iraq’s ancient Christian community is now in Syria.

Democracy? Well, that’s a quarter true, but no thanks to the American occupation. The original US plan was for US-appointed caucuses to elect a government. It was Ayatullah Sistani’s mobilisation of the street that put paid to that idea. There is perhaps greater freedom of expression than there was under Saddam Hussein, and the potential for future democratic developments, but democracy is not much use to people who are scared to cross the nearest bridge, who can’t afford to buy more than bread.

Not threatening its neighbours? Saddam’s worst external crime was his attack on Iran and the bombardment of Iranian cities with poison gas. All through the long Iraq-Iran war, the Ba’athist regime was supported politically, funded and armed by the West. US ambassador April Glaspie gave a green light for Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. Today Iraq is in no position to threaten its neighbours by war because Iraq is no longer a coherent power, but Iraq’s terrorists and militias, its sectarianism, the prostitution and drugdealing its impoverished people are forced into, do indeed threaten its neighbours. And the occupying forces use Iraq as a springboard for aggression into neighbouring countries; the American terrorist attack on Syria in October is a case in point.

I wonder what Rice would say to my very good Iraqi friends M and F, who now live in exile. These are the kind of Iraqis the country needs if it is ever to stand on its feet again – highly educated, moral people who firmly opposed Saddam Hussain and what he represented. Both of them lost family members in Saddam’s torture chambers; both believe that ‘liberated’ Iraq is immeasurably worse than the Saddamist police state. M is Sunni; F is Shii. It would be dangerous for him to live in her home area, and dangerous for her to live in his home area. It would be dangerous for him to return to his job as a professor of Arabic. Before they left, academics – Sunni and Shia – were being regularly and professionally assassinated, by sniper bullet through their windscreens and cleanly into the brain.

Many people blame Iran for the assassination campaign. I don’t know, of course, but I find it unlikely that Iran would want to kill pro-Iranian Iraqi academics as well as those who oppose Iran. Some might say that Iran will find it easier to dominate Iraq if Iraq’s educated class has left. Again, I don’t think Iran is so stupid. The clerical regime probably does want a pliable Iraq; I’m sure it doesn’t want a permanent state of explosive chaos on its border. Much more likely is an Israeli-US effort to keep Iraq, and the entire region, in turmoil.

More to come in part two.

Mossad hit squads?: http://www.williambowles.info/iraq/2006/0506/mossad_hit_squads.html
The shoe event: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNlqPH1NEvY
The Rice interview: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122904339882300339.html

At The Empire’s Edge

2008-11-22T01:55:00.000-08:00

Here’s a piece I wrote for the National about Arabs on Hadrian’s Wall. Here’s the link:
http://www.thenational.ae/article/20081122/TRAVEL/310465036/-1/SPORT

Beyond the fleeting days of summer, Hadrian’s Wall in the north of England is a cold place to be. I stood on a high ridge looking down the line of the Wall at black cloud building over the ruins of Housesteads fort. I was fully exposed to the wind, which carried small seeds of rain, and the mud covering my clothes seeped slowly towards my heart. For a moment I dreamt myself into the skin of an ancient soldier, one come here from warmer climes to serve his empire, and I shivered to my frozen toes. Then my son grinned, turned towards the fort, and with a delighted scream charged downwards, slaying imagined barbarians as he went.

We had set out early in the brisk morning from our home in south west Scotland, over bridges and past floods in low-lying fields. Streams gurgled in roadside ditches; pond-sized puddles occupied town centres. There’s enough water here to produce the illusion of hopping island to island through a vast archipelago.

We crossed the invisible border into England near Carlisle, and drove east through the county of Cumbria, the Lake District to the south, into Northumberland. At Greenhead we left the main road and joined the old Stangate, originally a Roman road, running alongside the Wall as it rises and falls over crags. Livestock is more suited to this rugged, sunless landscape than crops, and we progressed through field after field of fat sheep and lazing oblivious cows. We continued until our well-signposted destination on the mid-point of the wall.

What remains of Housesteads, one of 12 permanent fortifications built to guard the furthest frontier of the Roman empire, are the foundations and drainage systems of baths, granaries, a hospital and a commanding officer’s house, all surrounded by a wall which in turn meets the great Wall constructed by order of the emperor in 122AD. Hadrian’s Wall was Rome’s most heavily fortified border, garrisoned by up to 10,000 soldiers from Germany, Spain, and even further afield. (The empire’s eastern border, contested by the Persians, was in the unwalled deserts of Arabia.) The Wall’s purpose was to guard against raids from the unconquered Pictish north, to tax goods passing through the frontier, and to symbolise imperial power. It stretched for 73 miles, from the mouth of the River Tyne in the east to the Solway Firth in the west, and today it is the largest ancient site in northern Europe, dotted with forts, museums, youth hostels and country hotels. The Wall is an easy day trip from Newcastle, Edinburgh or Manchester.

The Housesteads visitor centre has a basket full of imitation Roman clothing to help children imagine themselves back through the millenia, and Ibrahim had soon transformed himself into a particularly excited legionnaire. His costume, and perhaps something in the blustery wind, made play-fighting with ghosts and even slipping repeatedly in the mud seem like sensible things for me to be doing. Housesteads is built on a sweeping escarpment which offers a typically extensive view of raw, weather-bitten countryside: coal-coloured earth, sinewy grass clumps, brief patches of forest. Walking out along the Wall stirred the imagination.

I was walking in the steps of ancient Syrians. A tombstone found at Housesteads depicts an archer armed with an oriental-style recurved bow. Texts found elsewhere show that a cohort of 500 bowmen from the Syrian city of Hama served in Britain, and spent some of their time on the Wall, perhaps shooting game for the garrison to eat.

To me, this was of more than academic interest. We moved only recently to this area from Oman, and we still lack a sense of belonging. Castle Douglas, our damp little town, seems very monocultural, and my family, being multicultural – my wife is Syrian, from Damascus and perhaps originally Palmyra, and I am an Anglo-Syrian mix – seem correspondingly out of place. Yet all those centuries ago there had been Syrians here, and north Africans, and Europeans of all descriptions. I wanted to learn more, so after crisps and coffee at the Housesteads café we drove on to visit the Roman ruins at Corbridge, where Barathes died.

Before my grandfather died he told me that a Syrian soldier was buried on the Wall. Clutching at straws in my Scottish isolation, I trawled the internet for information on this lost countryman. I didn’t find a soldier but an itinerant Syrian merchant, Barathes, entombed just south of the Wall in Corbridge. My wife was particularly pleased with my discovery, for Barathes was, like her, originally from Palmyra. The presence of a Palmyran at this northern fort means the Syrian archers were not alone; there were Syrian businessmen and even Syrian religious officials in Roman Britain. An altar dedicated to Syrian Goddesses has been excavated at Catterick in Yorkshire, bearing the inscription: “For the Goddesses of the city of Hama, Sabinus has made this.” And in some strange way in cold Castle Douglas, Barathes’s proximity made us feel that we too were not alone.

It took half an hour from Housesteads to Corbridge. The old Stanegate road used to end here, at the fort built in 79AD when Emperor Agricola was campaigning into Scotland. But Corbridge was more town than fort; there were temples, markets and an acqueduct as well as a barracks.

And Barathes the Palmyran would have been here for trade, even if his white hair (he was 68 when he died – a venerable age in Roman times) qualified him for a restful retirement. He was a trader of ensigns, a flag salesman, and apparently a wealthy man. A fragment of his gravestone, enough to tell his name, age, origin and occupation, was found recycled as building material in the wall of a nearby house. Today it’s on show in Corbridge’s museum.

I pitied this lonely Arab who had so narrowly escaped historical oblivion. What must it have been like for Levantine men to work at what was then the remotest edge of the earth? Although Phoenicians from Carthage (in modern Tunisia) had come to buy British tin in the fourth century BC, until the Roman invasion many in the ancient world refused to believe that the misty isles of the far north west even existed. I remembered standing on the Wall beyond Housesteads, looking into the raw, dark moorscape of crag and rock and black water, and feeling to my bones how the British frontier was a bad luck posting. The kind of fabled land a Syrian would have used to scare his children into obedience. Finish your soup or we’ll send you to northern Britain!

After exploring the ruins we sat in a café in modern Corbridge and looked through the window onto the elegant village houses, wondering how many chunks of Roman masonry had gone into their construction. As I drank my soup (tomato, and tasty) I read the Corbridge guidebook, and learnt there had been more to Barathes’s old age than icy winds. He had commissioned the tombstone of a British woman called Regina, who was buried at Arbeia, the easternmost fort on the Wall.

This was too good to be true. I had to visit Arbeia.

So we drove on, past farmhouses and walls whose stones I now suspected had been plundered. But the traffic thickened after Corbridge, and soon we weren’t any longer in the wild countryside. Our route took us into the high stone centre of Newcastle, bridged the River Tyne to Gateshead, and then led all the way to the sea at South Shields. Along the road are signs of a more contemporary Arab presence: halal butchers, kebab restaurants, women in hijab. There’s been a community of Yemenis in South Shields since sailors recruited from British Aden started settling here in the 1890s. In 1977 the American boxer Muhammad Ali Clay – he had come to raise money for a boys boxing club – had his third marriage blessed in a local mosque.

And here, overlooking the mouth of the Tyne, stood Arbeia. The low, bare ruins of the fort are bordered by redbrick terraced houses and a school. There is an impressively reconstructed Roman gateway, and down the road a little is a view of the sea.

The name Arbeia means ‘place of the Arabs’. In the site museum I was surprised to discover that these Arabs weren’t Syrian but Iraqi – “boatmen of the Tigris” to be precise. In a strange historical reversal, Iraqis serving a global empire once helped to police North Sea shipping, as the British Navy patrols the Shatt el-Arab today. The Iraqis were in charge of sea supplies for the garrisons stationed on Hadrian’s Wall. The Semitic goddess Astarte (or Ishtar) was worshipped here, beside the gods of Spanish soldiers. There was even a maghrebi presence: the museum contains the tomb of 20-year-old Victor, a freed slave “of the Moorish nation”.

But it was Regina’s story that crowned the visit. At a very young age Regina became a slave, and at some point she was purchased by Barathes. Later he declared her a freedwoman, and then married her. Regina died at the age of 30, and her grieving Palmyran husband spared no expense on her tombstone. She is sculpted holding her spinning and a jewellery box, and wearing a Romano-British dress. As well as the Latin, there is an inscription in Aramaic, the language of Barathes which is still spoken in a few Syrian villages today. It reads, simply and poignantly: “Regina, the freedwoman of Barathes, alas.” The tombstone is in fine condition except for Regina’s head, which has fallen away; she has a name and a sketchy biography, but no face.

I was delighted by this: a multicultural romance predating that of my parents by eighteen hundred years. But I can’t claim that Regina was an English woman like my mother; she lived centuries before the Anglo-Saxon tribes invaded from Germany, driving the British natives into the highlands of Wales and Scotland. She was a member of the Cattuvellauni, a tribe of southern Britain and of similar stock to all the Celtic tribes of north west Europe.

Ironically, the very fact of a Syrian-British marriage on Hadrian’s Wall shows walls and frontiers to be infinitely malleable things, and national definitions to be partial at best. It’s reasonable to imagine Barathes and Regina having children; in which case, some little quantity of Palmyran blood may run in the veins of northern Britons today. Arbeia is next to Gateshead, where my mother’s family are from. Perhaps my ancestors on that side too have a touch of Syria.

So I have had to revisit my description of our adoptive home as monocultural. My neighbours are the descendants of Picts and Gaels, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings, and of the hidden progeny of Barathes and Regina too. British multiculturalism clearly isn’t as shockingly recent as some believe. In Newcastle and South Shields today mosques coexist with churches, the English language with Bengali and Urdu. And two thousand years ago, Celtic languages babbled alongside Latin, German, and Aramaic.

Many British people are surprised to learn that Syria was ever part of the Roman empire, and many Arabs have no idea that Rome’s influence stretched this far west. Perhaps this matters, because to know yourself you have to know the other. As we drove back west and north through the long autumnal evening, into the Pictish lands, with dusk slowly turning the high trees at the roadside into ghosts, I considered this.

I tend to assume that my multicultural family is unusual, at least up here in our northern exile, but of course it’s not as simple as that. Everywhere there are secret histories and strange ancestries to be uncovered, if only you sniff about enough. Put in historical context, my family isn’t unusual at all. I wish somebody would tell this to the people who think my wife’s features and hijab are too foreign for Scotland.

As strategists trumpet the clash of civilisations – as if a civilisation is something which grows in a box – as Europe bristles against immigrants, as new walls are built between Baghdad neighbourhoods or to separate Palestinians from ‘Jews-only’ roads, it’s good to remember that barriers always fail in the end. Hadrian’s Wall was never impermeable. And today the Picts visit it for a pleasant day out with their families, in whose veins runs the blood of all the world.

At All Costs

2008-11-13T05:13:00.000-08:00

A short story published in Five Dials. It's only the second short story I've written, and I don't know if I should be proud or ashamed of it. Here's the link. It includes an interview with Noam Chomsky:
http://fivedials.com/files/fivedials_no4.pdf

Abdu, masterful and charismatic, was holding forth above a long table which supported a debris of pastes and salads, when he registered, like a disturbance on a radar screen, a burst of cruel hilarity erupting from a couple of the younger guests. Abdu didn’t slow down; instead he increased his volume and amplified the movements of his hands. It was important that as few people as possible noticed the teenagers’ disrespect, and that nobody noticed that he had noticed. To notice it was to grant it value, and that he must not do.

This was his 60th birthday meal. At the climax of his life, after decades of sustained effort, he’d won the right to celebrate birthdays, like Europeans do, and also to be considered a right-living patriot. That is, an embodiment of modern success. No woman at the table wore a headscarf, and neither, of course, was any alcohol served. His young dyed-blonde wife presided quietly at his side. She wore a cream-coloured jacket and trousers from Paris. He wore a new, blue suit. All eyes were upon him. This was essential. If they didn’t recognise him correctly now, he would be ruined in his own eyes.

So the teenagers made his stomach lurch with the shock of impending disaster, but he breathed it away, and kept on talking. Perhaps he had interpreted wrongly. Perhaps his loss of control extended only to losing the boys’ attention, and they were only giggling at something private and inconsequential, not at the jinn story he was relating with so many careful insinuations and suggestive gaps. Continuing to talk gave him time to observe and analyse and, if need be, to limit the damage. Already he was making evasive manoeuvres so retreat could be more smoothly effected, subtracting mystery from his face and voice and adding light irony in its place.

The change in tone made it necessary to revise the story itself. Specifically, the old man of his tale, the one he’d consulted on the means of communicating with the jinn, would have to be a more ridiculous figure, and the punchline would be a joke at this primitive’s expense. He’d spend more time describing the poverty of the shaikh’s surroundings, his wheezy breathing, the rottenness of his teeth. He wouldn’t end, as he always had before, with the implication that he, Abdu, had become proficient in jinn lore. He wouldn’t refer to the jinn as ‘our friends’ and then lapse into abrupt and evocative silence.

Silence. Behind the strain of performance, Abdu remembered the years of his poverty. Remembered the silence of death that inhabited his mother when she fell to the floor at the climax of her trance. Little Abdu ran forward from the shadows to tug at her dress, but was restrained by the other women. “Leave her, boy. Leave her, habibi. She’ll come back now and be well.” And his fear receded, for he knew it was so. It had happened before. She had fallen like this, and after a few shivery moments she had risen again, happier than she’d been for weeks, crying happy tears, a phoenix rising from ashes.

In the days before they went to the zar she was ashen-faced and shuffling. She wept steadily as she swept the floor or made the bread. She didn’t reply when Abdu or any of his brothers or sisters spoke to her. To their father she only responded yes or no, and he, understandably, spent even the little time he had for resting out of their rooms, elsewhere. Abdu’s mother would occupy this depression for such long stretches that Abdu couldn’t remember its beginning. Her happiness was like his babyhood, a clouded dream. But when she gathered him, the youngest one, and walked with the neighbour women to the place of the zar, he knew that relief was about to rain upon them.

At the zar there were too many women for him to count, and some round-eyed, world-shocked infants like himself too tired to bother shouting. But the women did shout, though not in their usual directed fashion. They began in a circle, each woman swaying and twisting, moaning the name of God, making their voices plunge and rise like beaten drums, like waves beating on rocks, like blood in your ears when you run too hard towards home, and two or three of the women would strike at the daf, the homemade tambourines, and then more would beat at their breasts, the chant rising, becoming screams and wails and tremors, until the circle broke, women clawing the cloths from their heads, hiding their eyes with their arms, and his mother trembling, shrieking and falling. “What’s happened to her?” he cried. “What’s happened to mama?” And after he’d asked six or seven times a panting woman would tell him, “akhath-ha al-haal, habibi – the trance has taken her,” and then, “Leave her, habibi. She’ll come back. She’ll be well.” And always she did come back, as if she had died and then been resurrected. Brought back to life, given a fresh, smiling face.

The memory was an embarrassment. People nowadays were so much more grown up. These days, only drunkards and hasheesh smokers would allow their inner feelings to overspill so promiscuously. But back then it was as if everybody drank and smoked; they were weak vessels containing huge emotions. In Lebanon during the passion plays Shia villagers would lynch the man playing the murderer of Hussain, if they managed to get their hands on him. Not a popular role for the actors. But people progressed and developed. By the late 60s, by the time Abdu was an engineer and a respected man, people’s understanding of role-playing had developed so far that film baddies became superstars. There was a cinema in every city, and only the dying generation wept and wailed at the zar.

Abdu talked, and grinned a grin of well-kept teeth. His eyes glanced beadily across the faces of his peers, from police officer to doctor, from businessman to party official, and across the white and painted expanses of their wives’ faces, and returned again to the young people, the children of his own upwardly mobile generation, children who could take it all for granted. Who hadn’t had to struggle. Their heads were pointed towards him but they couldn’t quite look into his eye. They were smirking still; it was quite clear. On closer examination, they were older than teenagers, probably already returned from foreign studies. In fact, it was possible they owned import licenses and car dealerships, mobile phone franchises, land development rights. These were the men he should be establishing relationships with if he didn’t want to slip from the place he had climbed to. New men. Smirking, complacent, too comfortable. Dangerous.

He remembered a fairground game he’d played once in England. A white woman was holding his shoulder, taller than him, and the air smelled of rain and fish and chips deep fried. The game itself involved smirking plastic rabbits popping out of holes, and him wielding a plastic hammer to bang them back in place. All the teeth and the spinning lights and English people expecting him to be confused and clumsy; and the rabbits speed up, as he remembers, until sooner or later, but inevitably, you can’t keep them all down any longer.

“Ha!” He finished off the anecdote with a flash of noise and a triumphant bucking of his forehead. “The man didn’t have any people to talk to, but he did have the jinn! His friends the jinn! Ha!” He was a little breathless, and glad to have finished. With the hand kept concealed under the table’s surface he clutched and crumpled a serviette. Tears of sweat were pooling in his eyebrows. As soon as somebody else began speaking he would mop his brow. For now the guests were laughing, and nodding at him as they did so. Everything as it should be. He felt his wife’s grateful simpering.

What had disgusted him most in England was the London Carnival that a woman had made him visit – its single surging communal body – and all the whites and blacks losing themselves in reggae music and smoke. In that mire of limbs and colours and odours he lost the woman for a few minutes. When he found her again she was delirious, forgetful of herself. But Abdu, he’s done so much work on his self, he will protect it at all costs.

The laughter went on, and Abdu wiped his nose, looking graciously outward. But the two that concerned him most were laughing at a different pace to the others, too slowly, and for each other’s benefit, not his. One swarthy and snake-thin; the other plump and pale, with a brownish fuzz of beard around the mouth in the style they called sek-sooki, like the English word sexy. They disrupted everything. Abdu’s fixed grin fell, bringing relief to his cheeks and throat but an immediate tension to the table – which perked up the older guests. Their laughter scattered and stopped, Abdu’s temporary allies still enacting appreciation with nods and smiles and wrinklings around the eyes, collaborating with him, keeping it going. But what would they say to each other in their cars as they drove home, in their offices, on the telephone?

“And do you talk to them too, Uncle, the jinn?” The swarthy one with slicked-back hair had spoken. The sneer in his tone was unmistakeable.

What do you do to reply to this? He’d like to reach over and slap these two, show them the strength he had left. He’d like to shake them until they whimpered for him to stop. He’d like to squeeze their necks. He felt great power stirring. But it wouldn’t be safe. He realised suddenly that he didn’t know whose sons they were. Their names escaped him. They must be someone to be here at the table. He should have taken more care of these things. Had he relaxed too much? Had he fallen asleep?

Whoever they were, he had to restrain himself. Screeching in abandon is not religion. The country had built schools and hospitals. Those willing to work hard had become educated. Abdu especially had become an educated man, looked up to, a pillar of respectable society. He wasn’t rubbish. He wasn’t people in the slums plugging their toilets against rats, sharing meals with cockroaches.

Nevertheless, he felt himself angering, like bubbles and fizz escaping from a half-uncorked bottle. He heard cracks, buzzes, whinings in his head, air squeezed through tiny skull tubes, traffic through hidden tunnels. He bit back on it. This kind of emotion is better kept indoors, better targetted at the children. Better a door or two away even from the socially advantageous wife. Come, gather yourself, for he’d done well until now, negotiating party men when the Resurrection came to power, negotiating the sects and each individual’s prickliness, dominating those he could and submitting when he’d had to. He’d developed a good technique in garrulousness, and he understood the codes of success. Live a sedentary life. Make yourself likable. Know the rules.

A certain amount of deception was necessary, it went without saying. It was true that isolation was the price of control. And it was also true that, out of necessity, he had returned to that world which still nobody denied, not even the petty boys before him, the realm of the beings of fire, which the Qur’an, after all, describes. Let them deny the jinn, and publicly prove themselves unbelievers! Abdu, even if he knew it was forbidden to seek their company, he had learnt to deal with the jinn. He wouldn’t be ashamed. The jinn became his friends. His servants, really, for he didn’t go to them moaning and shaking, but as one in command. His order for them was always the same, just applied to different people: “Show me x’s true face. Tell me what is in his inner heart. What his body hides.” What he’d been shown had given him an edge.

Yet now, in the restaurant, Abdu realised with mild shock that he had lost the struggle. He was on his feet, and his throat was open. “Do you know who I am?” he roared. “Do you know what I have achieved?” Anger unleashed contradictory currents, of domination and submission both at once. He frightened the world; he gave in to himself. His fist struck the table so the pillaged dishes jumped. Masks flopped from the guests’ faces. Some of them, too, showed anger – a clean and righteous anger targetting Abdu, because rules had been broken. The wives shrank into expert disdain.

Abdu’s voice, now wordless, bellowed louder. He screamed. He sounded like his mother at the zar before the silence. His voice sounded distant, further and further away. He saw his body from afar and forgot that it was his. Yet he didn’t mind. For once, bodies didn’t matter, and inside he was blank.

Hair for the Observer

2008-11-08T16:30:00.000-08:00

Here is an unedited version of an article published in the Observer Woman magazine. http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/nov/02/8

When I first saw my wife she was seated in the middle of a crowded room, she had her eyes fixed on me, and she had a luxuriously unruly cascade of hair. We started talking, and from then on her hair’s startling blackness seemed emblematic of the force of her character.

I enjoyed seeing her hair fanned out around her moonsliver face. I enjoyed touching it, either its natural curliness or its hair-dryered straightness. In a city where half the women covered their hair in public, and just because she had such beautiful hair, Rana’s hair became for me her sign, the feature by which I’d pick her out at a distance, my symbol for understanding her and what she meant to me.

So when, five years into our marriage, Rana decided to cover her hair, I was somewhat bothered. In the meantime we’d moved from Syria via Morocco to Saudi Arabia, we’d had children, and Rana had worked as a teacher and TV presenter. She’d always been an elegantly modest dresser, but here, amid the compulsory dress codes of Saudi Arabia – which annoyed both of us – she’d decided to introduce something new. I grasped for a response.

The hijab bothered me not just for the personal, tactile reasons hinted at above, and not just as a result of me being only slightly religious: I didn’t necessarily agree that it was Islamically required. While most Muslims have interpreted Qur’anic guidance on women’s dress to require head covering, the text itself is open to interpretation. “And tell the believing women,” it says, “to lower their gaze and to be mindful of their chastity, and not to display their charms (in public) beyond what may (decently) be apparent thereof; hence, let them draw their headcoverings over their bosoms.” In my favourite translation, Muhammad Asad notes that the directive is to cover bosoms, not heads, because in Muhammad’s Arabia both men and women wore head coverings anyway. Beyond that, “what may decently be apparent” is deliberately vague and flexible, to fit various times and social contexts.

I thought the principle of the hijab more important than the piece of cloth, and the principle – of modesty and respect – wasn’t always practised in Arab Muslim society. It often seems that the Muslim woman plays the role of clotheshorse of honour. So long as she wears a hijab, all is good, even if Muslim men, who are also required to “lower their gaze and to be mindful of their chastity”, dress sexily and leer at women in the street. Why would Rana want to go along?

Nevertheless, I bristled when I heard the negative stereotypes of hijab wearers. I knew enough Muslim women to know that the hijjabed were no more nor less likely than the non-hijabbed to be intelligent or outspoken. But supporting the abstract right of my cousins and neighbours to wear hijab was not the same as seeing my own wife put it on. What did it mean? What did it make of me?

My father had been through this with my sisters. He’d spent his life climbing socially and economically, from impoverished coastal Syria to bourgeois comfort in the capital, right to the upper social ranks where girls of good family flaunt big hair at least until they’re married. But when they were still students my sisters chose to cover their charms. It bothered my father. He worried that his daughters sent the wrong class signal.

What really bothered me was people thinking Rana wore it because I forced her to. Like the nice, liberal Englishwoman who nodded empathetically at Rana’s suffering before asking me, carefully, tolerantly, how I would react if she ever dared to take it off.

As in my father’s case, the problem was mainly other people.

The hijab or its absence are symbolic of many different things in the bigger world out there. The cloth has become a flag waved by Islamists and Islamophobes to define each other. A Western-dressed Muslim woman may be stereotyped as a heroically uncaged virgin, or alternatively as the key sign of Muslim cultural loss. A veiled woman may be seen as authentic, or, more usually in the West, as ignorant, backward, repressed and oppressed. To some, Muslim women in headscarves look like unity, power, cultural pride. To others they look like abused cattle. The hijab is compulsory in Saudi Arabia and Iran, and actively discriminated against by the regimes of Tunisia and Turkey. In some Middle Eastern countries, women’s veils have been forcibly removed, quite literally, by soldiers in the street. Removing it, and putting it on, are loaded political acts.

It was all very complex, but Rana, simply put, thought she would feel comfortable wearing hijab. She felt comfortable and proud to be identified as a Muslim woman. So, rather than worrying about other people, I started to listen to her. Now I feel comfortable too. And her hair is still there underneath, and freeflowing in the privacy of our home, as luxurious as it ever was.

Rana's Opinion

Sometimes I feel sorry for my husband. He would prefer it if I didn't wear the hijab. But what can I do? It is my wish. I started thinking about wearing a headscarf after we were married and had my son, our first child. When Robin and I met I was not religious. I did not fast for Ramadan - in fact, whenever my father asked me if I had, I would lie just to please him. I drank alcohol. If I saw someone reading the Koran, I presumed they were superstitious, narrow-minded.
But when my son was born I felt a need to protect him, to believe in something stronger than me. I felt the need for a connection with God. I started reading the Koran and I began to pray regularly.

What amazed me was that I didn't suddenly change my personality. We have all sorts of friends - gay, atheist, Christian, Muslim - and I discovered that I could still be friends with all of them. I didn't become weak or anxious or afraid. In fact, it was a wonderful liberation. I felt I could live without fear in my life.

I don't believe my head is a sexual object, that a man who sees it will be sexually aroused. But I do think that when you believe in God you have to believe in a superior power that knows better than you do.

First I started to dress differently. I stopped wearing short sleeves; I wore more modest clothes. Then one day when Robin was in the UK and I was still in Saudi Arabia I decided. I thought: 'Believing what I do, it will be hypocritical if I go outside without my head covered.' My fear of being a hypocrite far outweighed any embarrassment I felt, or fear of what my husband or friends would think.

For a while my Arab friends changed towards me. They wouldn't tell a dirty joke in my presence - even though they knew I loved dirty jokes. I had to sit them down and say, 'I haven't changed just because I look different.'

Most of all Robin worried that I would suddenly become narrow-minded. To be honest, I feared that, too, deep inside. But when he said: 'I'm not going to allow our daughter to wear a headscarf until she is 18,' I replied: 'Neither will I! She won't be wearing one when she's 50 either, if she doesn't want to!' For me this wasn't about being made to do something I didn't want to do. Over time he's realised that this is what I want and he's given me the freedom to do it.

I usually wear the kind of hijab that women in the Gulf wear - one that covers my head and ties around the front. I have all colours and patterns to match what I'm wearing. Everyone makes a big deal about the head being covered but for me it's not about being covered up, it's about modesty, being humble.

It's been six years since I began wearing the headscarf and it has been liberating. I had not realised how much I had used the way I looked to get me places, be it in a job interview or at a party. The headscarf means I've had to develop my personality instead - my sense of humour, my ability to listen - in order to socialise. It's made me more confident.

We live in Scotland now but it still feels comfortable to wear it. After the 7 July bombings in 2005 I was worried that, when I went to London, people would think I was a terrorist. But in fact it was fine. I realised any fear was more to do with my own paranoia.

• Robin Yassin-Kassab's novel, The Road From Damascus, is published by Hamish Hamilton, £16.99

A Plague on Both their Houses

2008-10-31T18:49:00.000-07:00

The great thing about the forthcoming American presidential election is that Hillary Clinton won’t be the winner. The lamentable thing is that either Barack Obama or John McCain will be.

I have detested Hillary Clinton since she led a New York demonstration against ‘Arab terror’ in the first days of the second Intifada. This was before the Intifada became militarised, when it still centred around stone-throwing crowds and peaceful demonstrations, and when the zionist occupation was murdering dozens of Palestinians every day. This year her campaign website stated: “Hillary Clinton believes that Israel’s right to exist in safety as a Jewish state, with defensible borders and an undivided Jerusalem as its capital, secure from violence and terrorism, must never be questioned.” Just run your eyes over that again. Hillary Clinton doesn’t just believe that the citizens of Israel should be safe, but that Israel “as a Jewish state”, as an apartheid state for Jews only, not for its citizens or for those it has driven out, should be safe. She believes that illegally occupied and illegally colonised east Jerusalem, an ancient Arab city originally built by Canaanite Jebusites, should remain under eternal zionist occupation. And she believes not only that her immoral and stupid positions are right, but that they should never be questioned. Such is the weight of zionism on American political life – as heavy a taboo as God is in the east.

Hillary Clinton voted for the Iraq invasion, which has killed a million Iraqis, destroyed Iraq’s social fabric, flooded Syria and Jordan with refugees, vastly expanded the power of Wahhabi-nihilist groups, and led to atrocities in London and Madrid. She also voted for the Kyl-Lieberman Resolution which categorises the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organisation. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard is the Iranian army, not a shadowy non-state actor, and its role is to defend the second most democratic (after Turkey) society in the Middle East – a society which, unlike the zionist settler state, has never attacked its neighbours. Here is Clinton’s open hand to seventy million Iranians: “In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.” When Ahmadinejad expressed the opinion that the zionist regime would one day be wiped from the page of history, he was mistranslated and misinterpreted as calling for the obliteration of five million Israeli Jews. The western world collapsed into rolling orgasms of righteous fury. But Clinton threatening to “obliterate” the Iranian people, that’s fine.

The Republican McCain’s claim to decency and manliness arises from his participation in the American imperialist massacre of 2 million Vietnamese men, women and children. He chose for his running mate Sarah Palin, a Christian Zionist who believes that creationism should be taught in science classes, that ungodly books should be banned from public libraries, and that environmentalism is a leftist plot. When Obama won the Democratic nomination, Palin allegedly reported the news thus: “So Sambo beat the bitch.”

Why would anyone vote Republican this year? Bush is, as Gore Vidal predicted, the least popular president ever. Under Republican rule America has galloped towards economic, military and diplomatic disaster. For anyone with faith in the American democratic theatre (not me), voting for Obama is the only logical option.

So the Republicans must rely for their votes on deep wells of illogicality and hatred. Hysterical racism has passed largely unchallenged at Republican rallies. Sarah Palin has encouraged it by talking about how “different” Obama is. McCain was praised for bringing an end to this when a supporter described Obama as an Arab, and McCain responded, “No, Ma’am. He’s a decent family man and citizen.” This is bringing racism to an end? If a supporter had shouted “Obama’s a Jew!” would McCain have said, “No, Ma’am. He’s a decent family man” ? Today McCain is saying that Obama attended a “neo-Nazi” meeting with tame Palestinian-American academic Rashid Khalidi.

America is probably about to experience its first black president. Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice have already reached very high office. There are black millionaires and executives. This shows that there is greater social mobility in America than before, and that the ideological overhang of an obsolete economic model – slavery – has lost most of its relevance for most people. Nevertheless, America is still sick with racism. Black people are still much more likely to be poor, imprisoned and badly housed than whites. And there are new-old targets to fit the new imperial age.

A month or so ago 28 million copies of an Islamophobic and racist DVD called “Obsession” were distributed free with 74 newspapers in American swing states, presumably to encourage votes for the ‘security-conscious’ Republicans. The DVD was sponsored by the Clarion Fund, a neo-con and zionist front. Neo-conservatives and zionists, and the potently ignorant Christian Zionists, have shaped and developed American racism for their own ends.

Then there’s Obama. I have to admit Obama excites me. He’s not only very intelligent but, unusually for an American presidential candidate, he’s not afraid to show it. He knows how to use language to good effect. And he’s black, with all the sad knowledge that entails. The world needs a black president of the USA, because it’s difficult for a black American to have a simplistic view of his own country or, therefore, of the world. That Obama is aware there are human beings walking around in Kenya and Indonesia also helps.

Obama once had a meal with Edward Said. He once attended an interesting church (the Reverend Jeremiah Wright does look like a man worth voting for). He didn’t vote for the Iraq war. He once said something favourable about negotiating with Iran and Syria (but not with the democratic representatives of the Palestinians). He’ll close Guantanamo Bay.

Another thing in Obama’s favour is that he isn’t Hillary Clinton.

Or is he?

Obama said the Iranian Revolutionary Guard had “rightly been labeled a terrorist organization.” He’s promised $30 billion in military ‘assistance’ to Israel. And he told AIPAC “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.”

He described last year’s unprovoked Israeli raid on a Syrian military site as an “entirely justified” attempt to stop Syria’s “weapons of mass destruction” program – although anybody who knows anything knows the US-Israeli story about a North Korean reactor in the desert is pure fabrication. The IAEA’s preliminary reports from the bombed site confirm this. No word from Obama on Israel’s real nuclear weapons.

Obama could have fought it over Iran and empire if he’d wanted to. He could have linked the Bush administration’s lies about Syria to its lies about Iraq. Just as he’s managed to reclaim some religiosity from the Republicans, he could have someway reclaimed patriotism from aggressive imperialism. People say Israel and Arabs are subjects too touchy to discuss honestly in America, that Obama has to go through the motions, say the right thing. But what, ultimately, is the point of a democratic election if not to have an honest, informed national conversation?

And Obama hasn’t merely toed the (decadent) imperial line on the ‘War on Terror’; he’s pushed the line rightwards. Obama recommended bombing Pakistan before McCain agreed and Bush made it policy. Does he know what he’s playing with? Shaky, angry, collapsing Pakistan, with its hundreds of thousands of displaced and dead. A vote for Obama is a vote against the concept of national sovereignty. What kind of a system makes decent, progressive people invest energy in a man who wants more war?

People say the man has to do what it takes to be elected, then he can be himself. But what kind of system is it when we have to assume a man is a good liar in order to elect him? And even if Obama is lying through his teeth, that’s not how it works. Obama has made his promises, he’s chosen his friends. Like Joe Biden. Here’s a quote from the running mates’ debate:

Biden: No one in the United States Senate has been a better friend to Israel than Joe Biden. I would have never, ever joined this ticket were I not absolutely sure Barack Obama shared my passion.

Palin: But I’m so encouraged to know that we both love Israel, and I think that is a good thing to get to agree on, Senator Biden. I respect your position on that.

Passion and love, you see. The American-Israel relationship is something quite beyond geo-strategic.

Whether McCain or Obama wins, foreign policy will be about the same: a drawdown of troops from Iraq but no end to the occupation, an expansion of the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The key to the development of American foreign and military policy in coming years is not the man at the top but what happens to American economic power relative to China, Russia and others.

I wouldn’t use the word ‘democracy’ to describe American society, but America is dynamic, fluid, and has great democratic potential. It may be that the energies unleashed by the Obama phenomenon will have long term positive effects. Still, if I were an American, I would vote for Ralph Nader, on the basis that every vote for Nader means a hundred more people have engaged in real conversation, actually thought about the system that enthralls them. I’d vote for Ron Paul too, if he were to run as an independent.

I may just be too cynical. I may be pleasantly surprised. I’ll finish with what Angry Arab (see link top left) imagines we’ll hear in Obama’s acceptance speech:

“My real name is Hasan Husayn Obama, and I am really a Muslim Arab, but did not want to admit that because I would not have been elected. I hereby announce that William Ayers shall be appointed as Director of FBI, and Dennis Kucinich will be appointed as Secretary of Defense. As for Rev. Wright, he shall serve as director of CIA. I would also like to appoint Angry Arab as my special Tsar for the Dismantlement of the Zionist Entity. And Immanuel Wallterstein will serve as Secretary of Treasury. Oh, and I forgot to mention that I have been a committed Marxist-Leninist all my life. Good night.”

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/walsh6.html

http://www.lewrockwell.com/liechty/liechty22.html

Terrorists Strike Syria

2008-10-28T17:57:00.000-07:00

America has already killed a Syrian border guard during its disastrous occupation of Iraq. And now it has sent four helicopter gunships eight kilometres into Syrian territory and killed at least eight Syrian citizens.

A reader of Syriacomment.com sent in this post, which is the best information I’ve heard yet on the raid itself:

“I just spoke on the phone with a doctor in ABou Kamal- He confirmed that the attack happened around sunset. The 4 helicopters came from the East of the township, he saw them coming. The soldiers debarked and shot people who were working in a building under construction on the periphery of the township. 9 people were pronounced dead on arrival to the hospital- Two more are severely wounded and are being operated on right now [he does not expect them to survive]- He has not read the papers (there are none to read at this time of the night) nor listened to the news and there is no internet there….His report was completely spontaneous. I was not able to get the details on the ages of the injured but he described them as poor simple people (Masakeen)from the town.”

And this is from the Guardian:

“Intriguingly, Farhan al-Mahalawi, mayor of the nearby Iraqi border town of Qaim, told the Reuters news agency that the targeted village had been surrounded by Syrian troops.”

It isn’t clear if those killed were a farming family, a family of smugglers, or labourers on a construction site. The Americans, having had a day in which to work out their story, claim that an al-Qa’ida militant was targetted. The sentence from the Guardian (although one wonders how the mayor of al-Qaim would know) suggests the Syrians may have been aware of a militant presence in the area and were keeping their own eye on it. It doesn’t necessarily suggest the people killed were the same militants. (As one would expect, most of the western media have taken American claims more seriously than Syrian reports. In fact, the US military’s description of the attack as “a warning to Syria” was anticipated by western headline writers by 24 hours.)

Even if it turns out that the dead were Wahhabi-nihilists, which I very much doubt, America’s action remains what it was: an unprovoked terrorist attack on a sovereign state. An act of war.

The Syrian-Iraqi border area has often been a zone of confrontation. When I travelled there in the late 90s I found the remains of ancient fortifications along the banks of the Euphrates, sites such as Dura Europos, a Macedonian city garrisoned to hold the line against Sassanid Persians. In more recent times the border was the frontier between two rival wings of the Ba’ath Party, and it was usually closed. Still, car bombs and smuggled goods passed through, because all borders are permeable and this more than most – the people on both sides belong to the same tribes. I saw the border itself from a distance, from a high waterside outside Aal Bukamal, and it was nothing but a tiny Syrian checkpoint, a half kilometre of scrub, and then a tiny Iraqi checkpoint.

There was an obvious mukhabarat presence in Aal Bukamal, watching out for Iraqi infiltrators. My friend and I, like almost everyone else in town, wore gellabiyehs. But we weren’t wearing the known faces of the Bukamal tribe, so we were called over to present our papers and introduce ourselves. I handed over the British passport and explained my strange ancestry. The plainclothes man looked hard into my eyes, then slowly said: “Manaatu…anta shawi min ingeltra.” – “This means…that you’re a Beduin from England.” Everybody laughed and slapped their thighs and the plainclothes man offered tea.

Further north, the dusty souq of Deir ez-Zor, a souq which Damascenes would scorn, was full of swooning Iraqis not believing the luxury, the variety, the quality. By then the Iraqi middle class had been destroyed by sanctions.

Syria had joined the American side in the Kuwait war of 91. This was an enormously unpopular move inside Syria, but it paid off. Syrian troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia, so they didn’t have to shed Arab blood. In the war’s aftermath a Syrian peace prevailed in Lebanon, and Israel was dragged to the negotiating table in Madrid. (This rare moment of American pressure on Israel, applied by George Bush the father, made many Arabs imagine that Bush the son would be a friendly president).

In the last years of the Saddam Hussain regime Syria opened the border. There was a sense at the time that, as far as Iraq was concerned, enough was enough. It was one thing for the Syrians to have their old enemy cut down to size, but quite another to watch a neighbouring Arab society collapse under the brutal sanctions regime.

Syria opposed the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. All the leaderships in the region claimed to be against the invasion, but all except Syria, Turkey and Iran actively aided it. If Syria was on anything like equal military terms with the invader it would have fought to defend its neighbour, just as Britain would defend France or Russia would defend South Ossettia. But Syria could do nothing more than make clear its abhorrence and refusal of an imperialist occupation of Iraq, however bad Iraq’s leader (an American client for years anyway) might be.

And Syria was of course right. Talking about yesterday’s raid, an American military official said, “We took things into our own hands.” Since Americans took things into their own hands in Iraq a million Iraqis have died, and the ancient social fabric of this country that gave the world writing has been ripped to bloody shreds.

As a result of America’s war Syria has had to take in up to two million Iraqi refugees. House prices and rents have rocketed. Prostitution and drug dealing have exploded. Resurgent sectarianism threatens the future.

When ‘shock and awe’ descended on Baghdad, enthusiastic Syrian shabab crossed the border to fight. That’s how shocked and awed they were. I have a friend who joined the general rush. At the time, Syrian border officials were allowing anyone with a valid passport to pass. Fortunately, my friend didn’t have a passport, and returned home before his family realised he was missing. Many like him – with basic military service under their belts – did get through, and found work to do in Iraq. And most of them had nothing to do with al-Qa’ida. My friend was religiously observant but by no means fanatical; he opposed sectarianism and Saddam Hussein’s regime as much as he opposed America and Israel. He says he wanted to fight for nationalist reasons, to defend Syria as much as Iraq, because America would come to eat Syria once it had eaten Iraq.

So Syria didn’t fight America, but it allowed people who may have been fighters to cross the border fairly easily, in both directions. Most of these fighters were indistinguishable from anyone else, because they were also in many cases refugees, or members of the tribes which straddle the border. And there was a point of principle which the people wanted the regime to uphold: why should Syria hold itself responsible for the security of the occupier?

As the war continued in Iraq, however, Syria made much more strenuous efforts to police the border, to the extent that in some places mukhabarat and soldiers outnumbered the locals. Why the change in attitude? Certainly American pressure had a role, but also Iraq had degenerated into civil war, and American policy and Gulf money had made al-Qa’ida a huge threat to everybody in the vicinity. Now there’s a sand barrier for much of the long desert plain frontier. General Petraeus says the Syrian measures have dramatically cut insurgent flow into Iraq, down from 100 a month in 2006 to 20 a month today.

Most of the al-Qa’ida types entering Iraq are Saudis, but America doesn’t bomb its best Arab friend. Britain is watching Salafi nihilists in Birmingham and Manchester, but America doesn’t bomb Britain to deliver “a warning.” Syria’s crime is that it hasn’t yet surrendered to the imperial order (or chaos). So the empire must bomb.

America is said to be specifically upset because Syria won’t resume security cooperation. Syria wants the Americans to send their ambassador back to Damascus first. It’s surely a good thing for human rights in Syria for this standoff to continue; ‘security cooperation’ often meant the Americans subcontracting the torture of unfortunates like Maher Arar to Damascus. On the other hand, Syria provided the US with plenty of usable information on Wahhabi-nihilists after September 11th 2001. It was America that rejected the cooperation.

Perhaps the attack outside Aal Bukamal was ordered by Bush himself, perhaps to help McCain in the election, perhaps in a fit of impotence and spite. Perhaps the attack was carried out by a secret command, some Rumsfeld-dreamed-up unit accountable to none. Perhaps it was designed to kill an initiative (I’m imagining) due to be announced by the Syrian and British foreign ministers after their meeting today. In any case, what is clear is that the empire has given up all pretence at recognising national sovereignty. Very worryingly for those looking forward to an Obama Whitehouse, it was Obama who first called for American attacks on Pakistan. I’ll be very pleasantly astounded if he condemns the raid on Syria.

America’s war is now murdering and displacing civilians across a great swathe of Afro-Asia, in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Somalia.

So why do they hate us? The people of Aal Bukamal have some fresh new answers to that question.

Bomb in Damascus

2008-09-27T15:21:00.000-07:00

This morning a car bomb exploded in Mahlak street, Damascus, at a junction with the airport road and not far from Sitt Zainab. Seventeen are dead and 14 injured. That sounds like a powerful bomb, killing more than it maims.

In 1997 I found myself walking over what appeared to be blood and oil stains in the Victoria area of the city. There were soldiers gathering shards of glass and hosing the street down. Bystanders were subdued, not meeting your eye. I asked someone what had happened and he mumbled something about a gas leak. In fact a bus had been blown up minutes after leaving the old station at Baramkeh, and nine people had been killed. Afterwards there were whispers about Lebanese Maronites (the Lebanese Sunnis still supported Syria) being behind it, and of course Israel was a suspect. But the whole thing was kept as quiet as possible. The deal the regime has made with the people is: allow us corruption and thuggishness if we give you in return a foreign policy which doesn’t shame you and, most fundamentally, a guarantee of security. Exploding buses are a message from whoever sends them to the Syrian people, and the literal translation of the message is: the regime can’t protect you.

In the early eighties the extremist wing of the Muslim Brothers, backed by Ba’athist Iraq, the imperial client in Jordan, and others, fought anyone they considered to be connected to the regime – by family or politics or sect – in the streets. The regime gave as good as it got, or worse, and the Brothers were defeated. In recent years there have been political assassinations and shoot-outs between Wahhabi-nihilists and the security forces, but today’s horror is the first random act of violence targetting civilians in Syria since 1997. Given its position between Palestine, Lebanon, Turkish Kurdistan and Iraq, and given its delicate ethnic and sectarian composition, Syria has indeed remained reasonably secure and stable.

On July 17th 1981, Israel murdered 300 civilians by bombing residential tower blocks in Beirut which may or may not have housed PLO offices. On March 8th 1985, the CIA failed to kill Ayatullah Fadlallah with a car bomb in Beirut, but succeeded in killing 80 of his neighbours. So today’s attack could well have been inspired by the US or Israel – Imad Mughniyeh was killed by a car bomb, and if there was a specific target this morning we will never hear of him if he hasn’t been killed. So close to Sitt Zainab – the shrine of Hussein’s sister venerated by the Shia, and the home of tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees – the target could have been a Sadrist leader, an Iranian official, a Hizbullah man. This means the power with the motive could be the Hakim group, or the CIA, or March 14-linked Lebanese Salafis, or al-Qa’ida in Mesopotamia. Continue the list for your own amusement.

I certainly hope it was Israel, because then there will be some sort of political economy to the violence to come (though 17 dead is pretty damn expensive). I fear that the Salafi connection is more likely, and I dread this. The al-Watan correspondent in Damascus says the car exploded on the way to its target. What if the shrine itself is hit? It would be a catastrophe. If there is a concerted attempt to bring Iraq’s sectarian war to Syria, the near future is going to be very bloody. Allah yastoor.

It could of course be some kind of grand Saudi-Israeli-Salafi plot. Or anything else. This is all speculation – but let’s have a good speculate, friends, because we’re not going to get any closer to the truth than we are now.

And there's one positive note: Syrian TV reported the explosion almost immediately. This is a change from the usual security silence.

Syria was silent on the Israeli attack of September 6th 2007, long enough to allow Israel and America to build their narrative of events. Now early results of an International Atomic Energy Agency investigation into the site bombed say that there is no sign of the North Korean-built plutonium-producing reactor the Americans had imagined.

Why then, if Syria had nothing to hide, did it bulldoze the area? Because the Syrian regime saw the rubble as a visible humiliation which it wished to erase. And because the Syrian regime doesn’t possess even the concept of public relations.

The nuclear explanation was always absurd: if there were any real intelligence that Syria had a nuclear weapons programme you can bet that America and Israel would be making a lot more noise than they are. If Syria did have ambitions to score a strategic balance with nuclear-armed Israel – which wouldn’t be wrong by conventional moral standards – it would make much more sense to have Iran, with its huge spaces and high capabilities, make the bombs. But the Syrians aren’t stupid. They can’t afford nuclear weapons politically or financially. Isn’t Hizbullah much more effective a deterrent anyway?

It seems most likely that the raid on Syria had something to do with Israeli preparations for Iran (the Guardian says this week that the US refused to back Israeli war plans for Iran) – to send a message certainly, and to test Russian warning systems which may be stationed in both Syria and Iran.

Incidentally, Syria's contact with the IAEA, Muhammad Suleiman, was mysteriously assassinated on the beach last month.

We’ll see what tomorrow brings. Khair, insha’allah.

Remembering Chab Hasni

2008-09-26T05:14:00.000-07:00

This was written for the National:

Disturbing a sleeping box of old cassettes the other day, my hand brushed an album by Chab Hasni, and memories rushed in as fluent as music, of the Algerians I’d known in Paris in the early nineties, particularly my friends Qader and Kamel.

In Algeria these two had been ‘hittistes’. That’s a real Algerian word: a French ending tacked onto the Arabic ‘hayit’ meaning ‘wall’. The hittistes were the youths who spent their time leaning against walls, bored, angry, and stoned. They had no jobs and no housing – those young men who did have jobs often slept in their workplaces. They spent their time dodging the fearsome police force.

Life as ‘clandestin’ illegal immigrants in France was not much easier. There too they had to negotiate checkpoints. I remember Kamel spending a fortnight in prison for being stopped ‘without papers’. When at liberty, they peddled hashish on Pigalle and sold the cassettes they lifted from shops. (Still, there was honour amongst thieves. Qader once knocked down a fellow Algerian for stealing from an old man on the metro. “So what if he’s French?” he growled. “He could be your grandfather!”)

We socialised in their attic room too low to stand up in. It contained too many bodies, a haze of smoke and the steam of endless cups of tea. There was a tape deck always playing one of three musicians: in third place, the Walrus of Soul Barry White; in second, the swinging voice of international protest, Bob Marley. And first and foremost, the singer who would bring these tough men to sweet nostalgic tears, Chab Hasni. That’s the French spelling of ‘shab’, as in ‘shabab’ – the lads, the boys. So who was the Boy Hasni?

He was born Hasni Chakroun, one of seven children in a working class home in Gambetta, Oran in 1968. In the extreme harshness of the political environment which dominated headlines after 1992, Hasni’s long, soft face and open smile, and more exactly his inimitable crooning, became representative of another side of Algeria.

In the opinion of Qader and Kamel, Hasni was the supreme, the true and authentic, voice of Rai music. ‘Rai’ is a word meaning ‘opinion’ or ‘perspective’ (several Arab newspapers use the word in their titles), but in colloquial Algerian it also means something like ‘Yes, man!’ or the hip hop ejaculation ‘Word!’ The music’s roots are in the centuries old Maghrebi ‘malhun’ tradition of sung dialectal poetry, but Rai proper sprouted in Oran in the 1920s. This was a time of rapid urbanisation as Beduins displaced by European colonists moved in to the city, where their rural music met Spanish and French genres, especially cabaret and flamenco. Another element in the mix was Gnawa from nearby Morocco, with its drum-based sub-Saharan origins. The Oranaise singers who rose to give their ‘opinion’ fused all these influences. Rai achieved its contemporary form in the seventies and eighties, as producers like Ahmad Baba Rachid incorporated synthesiser and drum machine beats from western pop. The resulting melange of driving rhythms and plaintive voices is one of the most danceable sounds in the world. In recent years, Rai has demonstrated remarkable flexibility in its various crossovers and collaborations with jazz, rap, funk, reggae and rock.

Socially, Rai is similar to Egypt’s populist Sha’abi music, exemplified in the 1970s by Ahmad Adawiya and now by Shaaban Abdurrahim. It uses city slang and word play in the same fashion, and is satirical in tone, providing humorous street commentary on the events of the day. Specifically, Rai’s language is ‘durija’ – Algerian dialect – incorporating Berber expressions, plus literary Arabic, French and some Spanish. This Orani brew reflects North African modernism and cosmopolitanism.

Drawing on both the Sufi madih tradition, in which women sang to other women at shrines and weddings, and the more ribald heritage of the zindani bar songs long associated with prostitution, women singers have always been prominent in Rai. The ‘grandmother of Rai’ was gravel-voiced Cheikha Rimitti, a remarkable woman who soared, during the second world war, from living rough to national stardom, and then to international repute in the 1960s. As an old lady she recorded with the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, and was still making records in her eighties. Chaba Fadela and Chaba Zahouania are the biggest female stars of Rai’s younger generation.

In terms of its lyrics, Rai is a bipolar genre, of party highs and innercity lows. It is the Algerian theme music for hedonism, for mixed dancing, for the mahshasha (hasheesh den) and the bar. Many verses praise these ecstatic escapes, and many more bemoan the real world which deserves to be escaped, in a blunt blues that has always been, directly or not, political. So in the 30s Rai sang of typhus epidemics in the new slums, in the 50s of the national independence struggle, and in the 70s of corruption. Like the Calypsos of the Caribbean, Rai is a rich resource for popular historians.

Predictably, Rai has made many enemies. These include most notably, and in chronological order: the colonial French, the Marxist-nationalists of independence, the regime in its later ideology-free stage, and Islamist extremists – all of whom sanctioned and threatened Rai musicians. At various times, recording, distribution of cassettes, and performances had to happen ‘underground.’ In one hamfisted attempt to stop Rai recordings, the government confiscated all blank cassettes entering the country. The music remained banned from national radio and television until 1985, when French Culture Minister Jack Lang persuaded the regime that Rai was good for Algeria’s image.

During the 1988 riots over the sorry state of the economy, the sound of the barricades was Chab Khaled’s al-Harba, Wayn? (To Flee, But Where To?), which encapsulates that generation’s sense of having no good options, suffering between the rock of a corrupt military regime and the hard place of intolerant Islamism. In either direction lay the state, whoever managed to grapple control of it. Either way: le pouvoir.

“Where has youth gone?
Where are the brave ones?
The rich gorge themselves,
The poor work themselves to death,
The Islamic charlatans show their true face...
You can always cry or complain
Or escape...but where to?”

This was the charged atmosphere in which Chab Hasni pursued his brief career. Instead of politics, he focused on love, or lust. “Why, my eye, have you left me alone?” he plainted. “Your absence has lasted too long, my gazelle!” With such sentimental lyrics and a lush instrumentation, he carved out his niche as the Julio Iglesias of Rai. His catalogue of 400 recorded songs forms the canon of ‘Lover’s Rai.’ And soppiness doesn’t faze a hittiste audience: the hard men of Algiers and Paris were wild for it.

Hasni’s titles and lyrics were in Franco-Arabic. Like: Jamais Nensa Ana les Souvenirs, or I’ll Never Forget the Memories – two words in Arabic and three in French. To Islamists, such speech mockingly celebrated the depth of French cultural penetration, as much as the message of the songs was immoral. Hasni could certainly be transgressive. In his breakthrough 1987 hit al-Beraka, he sang a duet with Chaba Zahouania about drunken sex in a hut. Most of his output was more syrupy gentle, but he also sang about family breakup and, in el-Visa, about migration. The nihilistic voice of that song wants a visa to see his girlfriend, and threatens if he doesn’t get it: “I’ll drink myself stupid and smash everything up.”

But if Islamists saw Rai as an Arab-Muslim surrender to alien values, the cultural pollution was two way: France was borrowing from Algeria too. The cous cous restaurant is to France what the Indian restaurant is to England or the Gulf: an essential part of the scenery. French people of Arab descent, les beurs, had brought Arab food, music, and words to the previous colonists. You could hear Hasni’s cassettes playing in Barbes and Belleville, in the HLM blocks of Marseille and Lyons, in the parks and taxi cabs of Lille and Le Havre, as well as on mainstream French radio.

Chab Khaled and Chab Mami became huge stars in France. Khaled’s Didi was an international hit in 1992. His 1996 song Aisha was France’s first number one sung in Arabic. And Mami won a large Anglo-Saxon audience after collaborating with Sting on Desert Rose in 2000.

Meanwhile in Algeria, social unrest led to the end of one party rule and then elections in December 1991. When the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) convincingly won the first round, the military stepped in, cancelling the next ballot and banning the FIS. At least a hundred and sixty thousand were killed in the civil war which ensued, very many for no apparent reason. Girls were killed for wearing the hijab and girls were killed for not wearing it. Journalists of all stripes, and policemen, and cleaners, and teachers, and nurses were killed. Whole villages were massacred and burnt in the dark, including villages right next to military bases. And the political chaos provided a cover for other forms of violence. Gangsters and feuding families were able to take life without fear of investigation. “To kill your neighbour is the easiest thing to do in Algeria,” said my friend Kamel. “Either the government or the Islamists will be blamed. Nobody will ask about it.” Qader told me that in the first couple of years of the war he had lost “tens of people, on both sides.” That’s why Kamel and Qader were ‘clandestin’ in France: they thought being illegal was better than being dead.

Chab Hasni performed abroad, but he continued to live in Gambetta. When he received Islamist death threats, he sent his wife and son to France. Yet he still chose to stay in the streets he’d grown up in, and he paid for his choice.

On September 29th 1994 Hasni was shot twice in the head at close range. He was walking between his family home (despite his star status, he still lived in his father’s house) and the local cafe when he was killed. He was 26 years old.

It seems very likely that he was assassinated by the Armed Islamic Group, or GIA, a more savage successor to the FIS. Not everybody believed this, though; it’s a measure of the confusion of 90s Algeria that my friends thought it more likely that the regime, le pouvoir, had killed Hasni as a sort of double bluff, to make the Islamists unpopular. “Nobody knows who killed Hasni,” Qader darkly announced. “Only God knows who does what in Algeria. God have mercy on his soul.”

150,000 people attended Hasni’s funeral. The great Rai producer Ahmad Baba Rachid was assassinated the following year. Today Algeria is still not prosperous, but it’s much more peaceful. Rai flourishes there, to the extent that Paris-based singer Rachid Taha complains that censorship of political songs is now worse in the West than in the Arab world.

The last I heard of Kamel he had vanished by night over the Swiss border. And Qader was trying to work out a way to get to Britain. “It’s almost impossible to get in,” he said. “But if you manage, there’s no more trouble with papers and checkpoints. You can just disappear over there.”

I wonder what became of them. They were good men. As I relax and listen to the late Hasni, I know I won’t forget any of it. Jamais nensa ana les souvenirs.

Two Reviews

2008-09-22T17:08:00.000-07:00

Two reviews, one harsh and critical, one brief and bright. Very unfairly.

I met Nadeem Aslam in Southampton, and spent an evening and a morning having wonderful conversations with him. When I told him I’d written a bad review of his latest book (half of it is bad) for the National (in Abu Dhabi) he was not in the least bitter, not even for a moment. I am not such a successful human being. I would have been convulsed with rage and venom for at least three hours, and then ill with it for weeks. He just wanted to know why I didn’t like the book. Well, it’s partly the politics, and quite a lot to do with characterisation. Then my review may be fierce precisely because I think he’s a major writer, and therefore fair game. (But I don’t think he’s fair game after meeting him, such a lovely man he is; I hang my head in shame). The negativity of the review may also have something to do with me responding to my own perceived failures as a writer.

And damn, they pay you to squeeze out an opinion, so opinionate is what you do.

The problem with writing a book review after you’ve had a book published is that it seems as if you’re suggesting you could outwrite the writer you’re criticising. Ironically, now that I should be more qualified to write about novels, I feel less qualified. Or at least worried that I’m setting myself up. Anyway.

The National gave me lots of words. Then tonight I heard that Metro / Amazon Book Club wants an immediate review of The Reluctant Fundamentalist. As I had three minutes to do it, and as it was unpaid, I hacked away at a post I’d done on this blog last December, until I had 250 naked and cheery words. Here’s the original post: http://qunfuz.blogspot.com/2007/12/reluctant-fundamentalist.html

And here’s the 250 words:

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Many treatments of the post-9/l1 situation focus only on Western self-absorption. Not so ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ by Mohsin Hamid, which engages with the darknesses and resentments of the world beyond our narrow conceptions of it.

It is a confessional narrative, told by a Pakistani to an American in a Lahore restaurant. The anguished self-revelation of Hamid’s Changez is reminiscent of Dostoyevsky’s ‘Notes From Underground’, but Changez is a fundamentally balanced character. It’s the times, and the empire, that are out of joint, and Changez’s story is of righting himself by retreating from America. Educated at Princeton and working for a company which values businesses due to be sold off and stripped, Changez finds himself smiling when he sees the twin towers falling. This prompts a deepening examination of his identity, his allegiances, and his relationship with America and his depressed and ‘devoutly glowing’ American girlfriend. Parallels are implied between Muslim countries and the doomed employees of the companies Changez values. The key here is not religion, but traumatic economic change. Changez’s boss Jim says, “We came from places that were wasting away.” He means, on the one hand, Pakistan, and on the other, old industrial America. The title is not very apt. There is very little theology in the book. By the end of the story Changez is not at all an Islamist, but discovers he has to oppose the corporate American empire in order to remain mentally and morally healthy. Provocative, clarifying and immensely readable, this is a book that shouldn’t be missed.

And now here’s the savagery, for which I crave forgiveness:

The Wasted Vigil

“The Wasted Vigil”, the latest novel by acclaimed British-Pakistani writer Nadeem Aslam, is concerned with Afghanistan, that vast human tragedy representing the moral and practical failure of all concerned, Muslim and Christian, Arab and Pakistani, Russian and American. War-torn and occupied Afghanistan is enough to enrage anyone. A novelist, however, must produce more than rage.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11, planned by al-Qa’ida leaders in Afghanistan, affected Nadeem Aslam personally. He told the Independent of his feelings of guilt: “I asked myself whether in my personal life and as a writer I had been rigorous enough to condemn the small scale September 11s that go on every day.”

Detaching 9/11 from its political context, Aslam understood all crimes committed in the name of Islam to be subsumed into one category, and so saw patriarchal bullying within the family or the overbearing social pressure of a suspicious neighbourhood as forms almost of Islamist terrorism, mini September 11s. His highly praised second novel had dealt with precisely these prosaic atrocities. “Maps for Lost Lovers” is a portrait of a tortured and self-tormenting Pakistani community in the north of England. The community calls itself Dasht-e-Tanhaii or Desert of Loneliness; it’s working class and inward looking, bound by secrets and taboos, fearing and hating the white world beyond its walls. The atrocities enacted include an honour killing, a brutal ‘exorcism’, paedophilia in the mosque, and wife beating – each episode based on real events culled from the newspapers. Yet the threat of violence in Aslam’s Lonely Desert is ultimately incapable of holding lovers back from the passion of life. Here is the novel’s great beauty: in the exuberance of individual desire and the capacity of characters to break out of their cages, as well as in the poetry of moths and flowers that cloaks Alsam’s post-industrial town with an Urdu-tinted mantle of transcendence. Elegant and agonising, the novel was perhaps unbalanced in its unrelenting focus on crimes of honour, and failed to show how the meanings of Islam are contested within Muslim communities by liberal, fundamentalist and traditionalist Muslims, by feminists and misogynists, leftists and rightists, but it was written with love and the deep knowledge of an insider. He writes about parents and children in the way we all probably think of our own parents and children – with simultanous compassion, admiration and revulsion. The characters are complex and sympathetic even when their behaviour is cruel, and their cruelty is always subtly contextualised. Each is a breathing individual, deeply human, credible on their own terms whatever the writer’s message may be.

In the same Independent interview, Aslam spoke of the visceral sense of responsibility he felt as a Muslim for the murderous excesses of other Muslims: “We moderate Muslims have to stand up,” he said. “I feel that a game of Hangman is being played on an enormous scale in the world, and that sooner or later I’m going to be asked certain questions, and if I don’t give the right answer somebody is going to get hurt.”

“The Wasted Vigil” concentrates on the murderous excesses of Afghanistan, a land where Muslim violence reaches out of private homes and into the enormous scale of the skies.

What made this violence erupt? The CIA began funding and arming right-wing Islamists in Afghanistan even before the Soviet invasion in December 1979, in an effort to “increase the probability” that the Russians would intervene. In the resulting war perhaps two million Afghans died and up to five million fled the country. Afghanistan lost its infrastructure and its educated class. The Russians were eventually driven out, only to be replaced by squabbling ‘mujahideen’ warlords who terrorised the population in the course of their private vendettas. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, with the approval of the United States, backed the Taliban, who made the roads safer and stopped opium cultivation, but at a huge cost. In a perverse marriage of the worst of the Deobandi and Wahhabi theological traditions, the Taliban’s boy commanders declared an Afghan year zero. Men were imprisoned for having ‘unIslamic haircuts’. Women were forbidden to leave the house unaccompanied. All ‘ungodly innovations’, from kite flying to television, were banned. After 9/11, American policy shifted 180 degrees. A new set of warlords were brought to power and the Kabul bourgeoisie was partially liberated.

Today Afghanistan remains mired in war, corruption and poverty. The latest foreign occupation wants to educate the Afghans out of their barbarism, but doesn’t recognise that every prior foreign occupation has dramatically increased that barbarism. The Taliban, almost universally hated a few years ago, are resurgent in the guise of a national liberation movement.

Nadeem Aslam presents this outrage through the eyes of foreigners whose lives are painfully tied to the country. Marcus Caldwell, an Englishman aged and bearded like “a prophet in wreckage”, welcomes a succession of wounded characters to his house near Tora Bora. These visitors are both connected and divided by bitter secrets, shared loss, and burning questions. What has become of Marcus’s Afghan wife, his daughter, and most brutally, his hand? What of the Russian woman Lara’s brother, a missing Soviet soldier? Or of ex-spy David’s brother, or his lover, Marcus’s daughter, Zameen? And what of David’s son, Marcus’s grandson? The sad answers to these mysteries are revealed gradually throughout a narrative of flashbacks, on a canvas stretching as far as Islamabad, New York and Saint Petersburg.

At its best, “The Wasted Vigil” is a lament for what has been destroyed: the traces of Afghanistan’s Buddhist and Sufi past, its tradition of miniaturist art, its myths and stories, its delicate intermingling of histories like the scents in a blended perfume. And Aslam is at his best when generating startling images and extended metaphors. Perhaps the novel’s key character is the house itself, Marcus’s house in which the art and architecture of each room represents one of the five senses. Books fall in a random literary rain from the ceilings, to which they were nailed by Marcus’s tragedy-maddened wife to save them from the Taliban. The walls are covered in paintings which in turn are covered with mud, to protect them from fundamentalist vandals. But some are visible:

“Several of the lovers on the wall were on their own because of the obliterating impact of the bullets – nothing but a gash or a terrible ripping away where the corresponding man or woman used to be. A shredded limb, a lost eye.”

This blurring of art and reality works well in a context where cultural violence and murder jog hand in hand – the Taliban’s attacks on the Bamyan Buddhas and Sufi shrines, the American tanks crushing the ancient walls of Ur in Iraq. In the lands of America’s wars, genocide is indistinguishable from historicide.

The house hides a secret Buddha underground as Afghanistan hides its Buddhist past. Afghanistan itself is figured as a collapsed building in which “everyone’s life now lies broken at different levels within the rubble.”

Aslam excels in the poetic crossing of borders, whereby the senses leak into each other and an idea may be conveyed by the beating of a butterfly’s wings. (It may be that this fundamental writerly strength of his also causes the category errors of his political thought, in which bombs leak into beatings and honour killing spreads into mass terrorism). He presents the synaesthesia of a stare so strong it verges on sound, a character with “skin the colour of violins,” and the “weather” of people’s souls. The book bubbles with imagery, from the obvious (caged birds) to the inspired (a camel carrying a car’s burnt-out shell).

But “The Wasted Vigil” is handicapped by characters that are not quite fully imagined, not quite precise enough to convince. Almost interchangeably, the three non-Afghan characters speak and think about gemstones, perfumes and the classics of world literature, sometimes apparently only to give Aslam further opportunities to be poetic. Their voices are not distinctively enough individual. All three can sometimes sound suspiciously like post-9/11 Aslam with his committed anti-Islamist hat on.

There is one major Afghan character: Casa. In his horrifyingly wrongheaded interpretations of Islam, this fundamentalist seldom rises above stereotype. His religion is animated by hatred, for non-Muslims of all varieties as well as traditional Muslims, women, blacks and intellectuals. Such bitter, monomaniac characters doubtless exist in the real world, but Aslam (unlike in “Maps for Lost Lovers”) shows us not much more of their inner lives than we see on the TV news. Casa is partially offset by the walk-on Dunia, a spokeswoman for a more liberal Islam. Other minor Afghan characters include two warlords, a wife-murdering cleric and a duplicitous suicide bomber. The reader is told that ordinary Afghans despise the fundamentalists, but rarely sees these people up close in their daily struggles.

“There’s no message in my books,” Aslam told the Independent, but here he appears to have broken his rule. The free indirect style – by which the narrator experiences the world through his characters – breaks down, and the author breaks in, sometimes with thoroughly questionable generalisations (“The religion of Islam at its core does not believe in the study of science”) and orientalist falsehoods (Syria and Egypt suffered cultural collapse when the first Muslims arrived) – although some characters do temper their opinions as the novel progresses. The book’s final act of violence points to how interconnected western and eastern guilt are in Afghanistan, and how mutual the suffering, but the general approach is unbalanced, not allowing enough voices to challenge either fundamentalist or Western stereotypes.

The style can slip to become an overblown parody of itself. Not every image or beautiful phrase fits snugly in place. It seems that Aslam occasionally chugs these out without reason: why call work ‘work’ when you can call it ‘the labours of the world’? A clunky sentence rhythm is sometimes ruined entirely by repetition, and there is at times floweriness without a restraining economy, so that even explosions and executions lose their impact. The novel should make the reader experience Afghanistan as if it is immediately present; all too often it offers an unchallenging exoticism.

Our times call for fiction which challenges the simplistic assumptions of religious fundamentalists and imperialising secularists alike. Novel writing is always an excruciatingly difficult process, much easier to get wrong than to get right. The difficulty only increases when the novelist seeks to represent Muslims to a non-Muslim audience in an Islamophobic climate. It may be here that Aslam has tripped up, disabled by his strange sense of cultural guilt for 9/11 and by the resultant pressure to rail against the easy target of right wing Islamism. He is an immensely gifted writer, capable of great artistry and feeling, who has already won a large audience. It is a shame, therefore, that this novel remains on the shimmering surface of things. Its reportage feels a bit like CNN with poetry added, or like those technically brilliant Iranian films that seem made for Western film festival judges rather than for a real public. As such, “The Wasted Vigil” is a wasted opportunity.

Here, I wrote on this blog in February, more kindly, about Maps for Lost Lovers:
http://qunfuz.blogspot.com/2008/02/maps-for-lost-lovers-and-writerly.html

My Absence, and a Sad Marriage

2008-09-22T15:26:00.000-07:00

I apologise from my absence. I’ve been very busy. I’ll be back soon, but for now I’ll post something from Conflicts Forum. I'll post it because it clarifies the already clear truth that Salafism, whether the Salafis know it or not, has an inherent opposition to genuine resistance in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Below you’ll read about the marriage of Wahhabi nihilism and Arab fascism, and how its purpose is to deepen the Empire's control by encouraging the people to hate each other. And there is further clarification of how very unlike this twisting, thrusting couple (Mr. Salafi and Mr. Fascist - it's a same-sex partnership) are organisations like Hizbullah and Hamas.

The honeymoon after the wedding was remarkable for its dog-gnawed corpses, and for the smiles on the faces of fat businessmen and kings.

(I've added a link to Conflicts Forum at the top left of the screen. I recommend its intelligent and detailed articles. The three-part report on how Hizbullah defeated Israel in 2006 is fascinating.)

http://conflictsforum.org/2008/summary-of-salafist-web-sites-september-16/#more-400

Summary of Salafist web sites
September 16, 2008

Salafist websites this week launched a barrage of stinging attacks on Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Predominantly these attacks came from sites linked with Saudi Arabia.

At the same time that these web sites are attacking these movements, large financial resources are being channeled to the Salafists from Saudi Arabia.

Commentators on the internet suggest that the motivation for this campaign, possibly encouraged by western agencies, is the attempt to divert Sunni Arab anger away from Israel – and to re-direct it to an alternative “enemy”, Iran and its “allies”. “Moderate” Arab leaders are concerned that the growing hostility to Israel undermines their domestic situation by exposing their support for President Abbas as tantamount to collaboration with Israel in oppressing Palestinians living in Gaza. As popular Arab hostility towards Israeli actions directed towards Gaza grows, so street anger towards these regimes rises – and the popularity of Iran, Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah increases: This makes “moderate” leaders feel vulnerable.

Commentators on Islamist sites also see this web campaign as an angry reaction to the recent political achievements of Iran, Syria and Islamist movements that have sidelined Saudi Arabia and Egypt and damaged their prestige as traditional regional leaders. President Mubarak has repeatedly warned of growing Iranian influence within the Arab sphere. The denigration campaign is perceived as part of a wider “moderate” programme to contain Iran and all those who are outside the “moderate” camp.

After the First Gulf War, Saudi Arabia spent heavily on expanding Wahabbi-oriented Madrassas throughout the Sunni world in an earlier (failed) attempt to contain Iranian Shi’i influence. The attacks of the Shi’i and Sunni movements with links to Iran reflects also a concerted attempt to rally Sunni forces in places such as Lebanon where Saudi Arabia is particularly concerned at the repercussions at the defeat of the March 14th forces, and the possibility of fragmentation of the Sunni coalition there – with its possible electoral consequences in the 2009 elections. In Lebanon and elsewhere they are attempting to forge a Sunni “revival” forged from this inspired hostility to the Iranian–Syrian “axis”.

Ibrahim Alturki on Al-Mokhtasar site wrote, for example: “Well Done Hezbollah!”. In this piece, focused on the events of May in Beirut when Hezbollah took over a part of the city, Alturki argues that Hezbollah had revealed the true face of its hostility towards Sunnis after long years of deceit and hypocrisy. He concludes that Hezbollah had demonstrated that its objective was never to fight Israel, but to establish a proxy state in Lebanon belonging to Iran, to remove Sunni control, and to subordinate Sunnis. The author has congratulated Hezbollah in his title, because after the events of May, he seems to think that he needs no further proof to show that Hezbollah is working against the Sunni sect in Lebanon. It has incriminated itself, he asserts.

He invites Sunnis to take basic steps to protect themselves from Hezbollah: Sunnis to unite around the Sunni sect, to commit to the principle of Shura (governing council) to provide a unified leadership. Pursue military preparedness, and to establish Jihadist armed fighting units – as the army had failed to protect them.

He concludes his article by demanding that Arab states act and not hesitate to support the Sunnis in Lebanon militarily, politically and financially - before Iran acts to eliminate them via its Hezbollah proxy.

In a second article by Ibrahim Alturki, entitled “Facts about the Iranian-American Conflict”, he lists twenty two “facts” to show what Iran and America have in common is greater than what separates them. The media accounts of American hostility towards Iran are just a disinformation ploy, he claims, that conceals the truth of a strong alliance between the West, America and Israel to undermine Sunnis, who represent the true target of this coalition. He hints that of the three, Iran poses the greatest danger to Sunnis.

Ahmad Ajaj on Al-Rased attacks Hezbollah over its accord with thirteen Salafi movements. He argues that it was exposed as nothing more than an attempt by Hezbollah to penetrate and weaken the Sunnis. It failed – no thanks to Hariri’s Future movement that demonstrated its weakness – but through the resolve of some Salafists who showed a greater control of the Sunni community than that of its nominal ‘leader’, Sa’ad Hariri.

Al-Hisbah, a site close to al-Qae’da, is focused on the confrontation with Hamas. The site contains a series of articles criticising Hamas’ “abandonment” of resistance in favour of participation in the Palestinian Authority. These essays give “facts” about this “deviation” by Hamas. It points to Hamas attacks on Salafists in Gaza and on its confrontation with Islamic Jihad in Gaza, as well as reminding its readers of what signing on the Oslo Accords requires from Palestinians.

There is significant new targeting of Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah by the Salafist websites (the jihadist Salafist websites and the pro-Saudi Salafist websites), but the pro-Saudi websites focus more on Iran and Hezbollah. In addition, there are numerous studies, books, essays and analyses available over the internet – a number hosted from Jordan as well as Saudi Arabia - warning against Iran, Hezbollah and the Shi’i generally, and exhorting Sunnis to confront these “dangerous projects” everywhere.

Fracturing Authority

2008-09-01T10:01:00.000-07:00

I had great sympathy for Chechnya when it was twice destroyed by Russian forces. The Chechens have been fighting for their independence for more than a hundred and fifty years. But Prime Minister Gordon Brown had no sympathy for Chechnya because, he says, Chechnya is officially part of Russia. The Chechen issue is a matter of Russian ‘territorial integrity.’ I admit that Brown’s position here makes sense. However brutal Russia’s treatment of Chechnya, it isn’t Britain’s business. (It may be the business of concerned British people, but that’s something else).

I don’t have much sympathy for Georgia, however, and none at all for the bleatings of the US, Britain and Germany, including Brown’s ridiculous bleatings in the Guardian. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia relinquished its control of eastern Europe and allowed independence to Caucasian and Central Asian nations. But instead of independence several of these countries became absorbed into the American empire. The fear that some of them had of their huge neighbour was understandable and deeply rooted (though not in Georgia, which had participated in Soviet rule from the Georgian Stalin to the Georgian Shevardnadze). The real fault was the West’s, to so stupidly exploit this fear, and to extend, by hubris, NATO membership and American missiles right to Russia’s borders. Russia in 1991 was too weak to do anything but let power slip, but its tolerance of Western expansion also showed a naivety, an overly-optimistic trust in Western capitalism. The very memory of that naivety is a humiliation to Russians.

The current fighting started when the Georgian president (he is also an American citizen) decided, Milosevic-style, to seize back the breakaway region of South Ossetia. Thousands were killed in the Georgian bombardment, including Russian peace-keepers. South Ossetia, and the province of Abkhazia, have just as much right to secede from Georgia as Kosovo from Yugoslavia. Russia defended them, and took the opportunity to roll back American influence in the Caucasus.

The Monroe doctrine – that no major foreign power can install military bases in Central or South America because this is the United States’ sphere – has stood for 200 years. When the Soviet Union briefly shipped missiles to Cuba in 1962, the world shivered on the brink of nuclear war. But America has been pouring arms and military expertise into Georgia. So too has Israel. The torturers and murderers of the Shin Bet helped teach Saakashvili how to intimidate his opponents. In return, Saakashvili sent 2000 troops to participate in the dismantling of Iraq. He certainly expected more help from the West when his attack on South Ossetia rebounded on him.

In the event, Georgia was very similar to Gaza and Beirut. Despite all the US-Israeli arms, training and money, Georgia-as-client collapsed in hours. It is a sign of the times, these pockets slipping out of the empire’s grasp, one after the other. Imperial authority is fracturing.

Bashaar al-Assad exploited the moment beautifully. He immediately expressed his support for Russia, reminded the Russians again and again of the Israeli role in Georgia, and offered Russia a naval base in Tartus. It is unlikely that the strengthening relationship will give Syria weapons that threaten the Zionist state, but it may help Syria build its air defences against Israeli aggression.

But back to the idiots. In the Guardian, Gordon Brown says: “Twenty years ago, as the Berlin Wall fell, people assumed the end of hostility between East and West, and a new world order founded on common values.”

That was the mistake the Russians so gullibly made, until they discovered what ‘common values’ meant. To people like Brown, they mean American missile batteries in Georgia and the Ukraine. The rape of the Russian economy by anarcho-gangsters (it all happened under the direction of Western economic ‘experts’) brought Russia into the glorious new world order. Russian life expectancy plummeted.

Brown goes on to ask: “How can we best create a rules-based international system that protects our collective security and safeguards our shared values?” He has one answer: “We should continue to strengthen the transatlantic relationship.” Do I need to point out the irony? You’d think not, not after Iraq and Afghanistan, not after Lebanon and Palestine, not after Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay. But obviously, yes, I do, because Brown’s audience does not immediately laugh or vomit when he says such things.

The idiot Miliband insists on extension of NATO membership to Ukraine and Georgia. So does the idiot Cameron, leader of what passes for an opposition in this undemocratic society. If Georgia had been a member of NATO when it attacked South Ossetia, all NATO members, including Britain, would have found themselves at war with Russia. As a Briton, I’m not amused. As a human being, I am a bit: NATO is already losing a war in Afghanistan. What does it think it could do against Russia?

Brown bleating: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/31/russia.georgia

Dawkins or McIntosh

2008-08-21T11:07:00.000-07:00

I am increasingly infuriated by religious claims to certainty and by religious attempts to close down free thought (I’m not talking about high profile attacks on writers or cartoonists here, which have more to do with power politics than theology, but simply the resort to ‘it’s true because God says so’). Although some leftist and anti-imperialist Islamist groups have achieved great things, I find the current fashion for religious politics in the Arab world to be a dead end. Simple-minded slogans like ‘Islam is the solution’ are no solution. An analysis of contemporary disasters based primarily on class and state and corporation could conceivably provide grounds for unity and solidarity; political action based on Sunni or Shia myths will ultimately only help the empire to divide and rule; it will also empower rulers and institutions hiding behind religious cover. It is sad to watch the Muslims becoming more and more religious as they gallop further into social, economic and environmental catastrophe.

The rise of ugly modernist forms of religion is not confined to the Muslim world. Everywhere, the death of traditional religion has spawned a million poor substitutes. Under the pressure of traumatic social change, and almost always of war, traditional forms of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism have morphed into Zionism, neo-conservatism, Bible-belt evangelical-nationalism, fascism, Stalinism, Ba’athism, Wahhabi-nihilism, state-Hindu chauvinism and Maoism. And fundamentalist atheism.

I have many problems with the Dawkins-Dennet-Hitchens crew, and the first is their rudeness. The ‘new atheists’ pretend to be ‘scientific’, and then engage in sweeping generalisations, sensationalist hysteria and a cultural arrogance which sees all religion, and all religious people, as backward and childish. Of course, the rich West is far less religious than the rest of the world, at least according to conventional definitions of religion, and it is unsurprising that Hitchens supports wars of terror against the non-West.

Despite Hitchens’ love of current conflict, the new atheists claim that war is always caused by religion, not by secular struggles for power and resources. I’ll be as patronising here as the new atheists generally are: that’s precisely what I believed when I was a teenager. I grew out of it as I learned more about the world. I saw, for instance, how parties to the conflict in Northern Ireland used a religious vocabulary, and how the British media explained the conflict with such labels. But a slightly closer examination revealed that the fight had nothing to do with the transubstantiation of the body of Christ or the theological meaning of the Papacy; it was about power, empire, land and civil rights. Of course religion always plays a role in conflict because religion is ultimately entangled with social identity; and since people are inherently religious creatures they will always use religious language to express their strongest emotions. But no war in history, not the Crusades nor the Taliban’s fight against NATO occupation, has religion in the abstract as its cause. Certainly not the belief in God. And the biggest wars and genocides in recent times have been started by self-avowed secular (but just as religious as self-avowed religious) regimes: the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge, the United States, and so on. The claim that religion is responsible for all war is as absurd as the claim that religion is responsible for all charity.

The new atheists argue that science disproves religion. It is true that a literal belief in, for instance, the creation of the universe in six twenty-four hour periods, is no longer feasible, but most religious people throughout history have understood that such details are metaphors. It’s only one form of fundamentalism (more common in Christianity than in other religions) that insists on the literal truth of such stories. And the question of whether or not there is a governing intelligence in creation is not a matter of empirical evidence but of interpretation of evidence. Several top-level scientists, especially physicists, are religious.

No doubt some of them have had personal experiences, as many of us have, of the telepathic, or of time getting jumbled, or of meeting strange presences. These experiences are real, whatever causes them. They don’t prove or disprove anything, but they are real. An empirical fundamentalist would deny them, but this denial would be a religious choice. He would say: because I know this thing that I see and hear to be untrue, I will ignore it. A bit like a Bible-belt fundamentalist ignoring the fossil record.

Science and religion are different discourses. Neither can disprove the other. Only fundamentalists, atheist as well as religious, confuse the two. Dawkins believes that someone who believes in the virgin birth of Christ should be disqualified from being a scientist. But the believers in miracles know that a miracle is miraculous precisely because it’s an exception, an anomaly. In any case, a lot of the ‘hard science’ marshalled to prove the non-existence of the soul, or the location of a ‘God-spot’ in the brain which produces visions when tickled, is not in fact very hard. “The Spiritual Brain” by neuro-scientist Mario Beauregard shows how some of the more high profile and more absurdly reductive ‘discoveries’ of recent years are based on experiments that can not replicate their results when conditions are changed to eliminate suggestibility in the subjects.

The new atheists believe science is inherently superior to religion because it doesn’t require suspension of disbelief. Scientists who preserve their sense of wonder in the face of reality, however, whether theists like Max Planck or atheists like Einstein, are not ashamed to admit the seeming illogicality and contradictoriness of their discoveries. Perhaps it was Max Planck who said, “If you understand quantum physics, you haven’t understood it.” In order to work with the theory (and it does work in the real world), you need to in fact suspend disbelief, to ignore the illogicalities. What about a particle being a wave at the same time? According to the basics of logic, this is an impossibility. Anyway, religion doesn’t necessarily require suspension of disbelief; it demands engagement.

It strikes me that the most intelligent response to this strange experience of being here, and to the mysteries of time, matter and life, is awe and humility, which translates to a profound agnosticism, a confession that we don’t and can’t understand. The best of religious people have this realisation underlying their leap of faith. Their belief is not an arrogant assertion of personal certainty but a movement of trust. The worst, or most anguished, of religious people, like the extremist atheist crew, are distinguished by their complacent, egotistical and excessively unawed tone.

Western atheists are often blind to the belief systems current in their own milieu. I’ve already mentioned some political religions. The philosopher John Gray in “Black Mass” has shown how Dawkins etc have a very Christian faith in linear history and progress, even if the hero in the story has become a scientist instead of God. The general urge to belief, and beyond belief to ritual and sacred story, is evident all around us. Narcotic plants, drums and dancing are at the root of Shamanic practice, and we find them in combination in night clubs and dancehalls in every Western town. These are churches. Another of the current religions is Celebritism, and I’m not making a cheap point here. The screen is to us what a stained glass window was to Englishmen in previous centuries: it’s a portal to a higher, more authentic realm. Brad Pitt is a psychic superhero. His screen roles and the rumours of his private life merge, and we wish this man we’ve never met well, we worry about his health, we fantasise about him. Brad Pitt inhabits our dreams. What else? In the West we have faith in the trustworthiness of our leaders, even after they’ve been proved to be liars. (This is a religion which doesn’t exist in the Arab world.) Even if we get sick of one president’s lies, we don’t question the background that has thrown him up. We believe in ‘democracy’ or ‘freedom’ or ‘manifest destiny’ or ‘British fairplay’. We become disillusioned with the spokesmen of these articles of faith, but the faith itself continues. Individual magicians are revealed as charlatans and tricksters, but our faith in their magical theory remains untouched.

The greatest religion, the one which generates our whole way of life and – increasingly – death, is consumerism, the system by which we invest meaning and purpose in our purchases, center our dreams around them, measure our success by them. Interestingly, the capitalist acquisitiveness that we think of as materialistic has exploited our spiritual natures very effectively, albeit in a perverse way, and exploting our capacity for addiction at the same time. Marxism, on the other hand, has been as materialist as it possibly could (I mean theoretical Marxism, not the state religions which grew out of it), and thus has arrived at irrational conclusions about the world. The belief in the historical inevitability of socialism is the Christian belief in divine plan revamped. The rigid explanatory doctrine of economic base and ideological superstructure is simplistic and insensitive to reality. People are motivated by symbol, myth and story, and by local belonging, as much as by immediate economic interest. Marxism’s spiritual vacancy has been a key factor in its failure to mobilise popular energy.

At least the various Islamisms represent an attempt (if failed) to understand and accept the ideological background that contemporary Muslim society has come out of. Dawkins doesn’t seem to be aware that he functions in and is a product of an ideological background. He seems to think that he is magically free of ideological conditioning, that Science has raised him on its silver wings out of the realm of assumption and into a realm of pure sight. In this respect, most Islamism is more progressive than Dawkins.

I’m not suggesting the solution to our trouble is to believe again in our traditional religions because, sadly, this is impossible. To believe in a traditional religion is to live a traditional religion. And it is not possible for us to do that if we have left the village of our fathers for a city, if education and media has made our thinking ‘modern’, if we travel and consume and participate at all in the globalised economy. It is the impossibility of traditional life that led to all the fundamentalisms in the first place. A writer telling a ‘modern’ person to believe in traditional religion is like a doctor telling a patient to stop having cancer.

But we need something. We need something better than what we’re managing presently. Capitalism, certainly in its corporate-consumerist phase, is unsustainable both psychologically and environmentally. I believe this is obvious, and that only deep belief structures stop us all from agreeing on it. Resistance to capitalist-imperialist expansion usually expresses itself religiously, or at least spiritually (whether the icon is Che or the Imam Hussain). Politically and personally, we need spirituality if we are to survive the changes coming. Alastair McIntosh has written an excellent book called “Hell and High Water: Climate Change, Hope and the Human Condition” which suggests some ways in which we might begin. I recommend it not only for its message, information and style, but because McIntosh is a fine example of a scientist still capable of flexible thought and feeling.

Edinburgh

2008-08-18T17:13:00.000-07:00

I read at the Edinburgh Book Festival on August 12th. It was a double event, shared between me and Mohammed Hanif, author of the Booker-longlisted novel “A Case of Exploding Mangoes.” Mohammed’s book is a tragi-comic detective story which references Marquez’s “Chronicle of a Death Foretold”; and the murderee is General Zia ul-Haqq. (General Musharraf quivers between impeachment and exile as I type). It was great to meet Mohammed, not least because he knows several of the journalists I used to work with in Pakistan. One evening he cooked me a chilli-rich meal. I hope we meet again.

The death that has hung heaviest over the last week is not Zia’s but Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s. It was even a death foretold: the Palestine National Theatre was at Edinburgh performing a play based on the Darwish poem “Jiddariyya”, which concerns mortality and the extinction of identity, and which he wrote after heart surgery. It was a new bout of heart surgery which killed him. Such are the Edinburgh crowds that I failed to see the play. I did see Sabry Hafez give a talk on Darwish, and how the extinction of identity is for Palestinians an immediately concrete threat beyond the universal problem of physical death: Darwish was from a family of ‘mutaselaleen’, Palestinians who crept back across the border into ethnically-cleansed Israel in the months following their expulsion in 1948, and as a result his name could not appear on school registers. I wish I’d seen the play. Also sold out was a film on three screens by Iranian director Abbas Kiastorami. It showed, apparently, a Shia passion play, a taaziyeh for the martyrdom of Hussain, performed in an Iranian village.

On these rainy islands, meanwhile, one of the many vibrant religions is minor-celebritism, in whose honour I will now namecheck those I saw scurrying between the damp tents of the Book Festival. Steven Berkoff (seen, from a distance, struggling into the authors’ toilet) was there. Stimulated by my numinous brush with his presence, I later bought a ticket to see his most famous play, “Greek”, performed by EMER Productions. The play retells the Oedipus myth in London’s East End, and examines, in addition to the obvious sexual-psychological issues, the self-hatred of the working class and its twisted British patriotism. It’s very funny, very stirring, and was very well produced by EMER.

Celebrities. TV presenter Gavin Esler brooded imperially in the author’s yurt. I shook the writer-on-Islam Ziauddin Sardar’s hand. At one point my friend Idrees (of http://fanonite.org/) and I were discussing the corruption of the left when it was symbolically enacted before us: Tony Benn was approached by and then warmly shook hands with shaggy-haired patrician-nosed simplistic philosopher AC Grayling.

One minor celebrity that I saw isn’t a celebrity at all (doubtless to her infinite loss). I went to hear Agnes Owens read only because she was introduced by James Kelman, of whom more in a moment. I’d never heard of Agnes Owens in my life. But the three short stories she read were excellent: simply and elgantly told, well observed, funny, each creating from a single bare incident a breathing family or whole society in the hearer’s mind. Kelman’s introduction suggested that the reason I’d never heard of Owens may be related again to the silencing or denial of identity; her characters are Scottish and working class, and her subject matter is prosaic (meaning real). Kelman spoke of the invisible censorship and self-censorship imposed by institutional assumptions of what literature is, in which language it can be expressed, and what it is permitted to talk about. He felt that the problem for Scottish working class writers is most acute in Scotland itself.

And afterwards I shook James Kelman’s hand. I suppose he qualifies for the cult of celebritism because he won the Booker prize in 1994 but, not paying much attention to British arts pages, I hadn’t heard of him until three months ago. I read a review of “Kieron Smith, Boy”, and then read the novel, and was impressed by the consistency of the narrator’s voice. The narrator is a Glaswegian Protestant working class boy between eight and thirteen years old, sympathetic even as he internalises contradictory Scottish-British nationalism, racism, and sectarianism. He also questions what he learns, but not in an abstract way. He worries, because of his Fienian-sounding first name, that he might in fact be a Catholic, and then that God may be angry because he doesn’t cross himself. He worries about being Catholic in the way middle class English boys may worry about being homosexual. The politics in the novel is obvious but not once stated; it’s just life.

Then I read “How Late it Was, How Late”, the novel that won the Booker. It deserved to. The narrator here (although this isn’t simple, because there’s a strange and wonderful shifting between first and third person going on) wakes up blind and amnesiac after a beating by the police. He’s done plenty of time, is paranoid of all authority – very logically, hurts greatly in the most extreme of situations but is never sentimental. Not because Kelman isn’t sentimental but because the character has not an ounce of sentiment. It’s a bit like Kafka and quite a lot like some of Beckett, but for my money still more moving and much funnier. In the next few months I expect to read everything else he’s written. That happens every couple of years: you find a writer who you then must read all of. Tolstoy or Bellow or Kelman.

On my last night I went to a big theatre full of dressed-up people for music by Steve Reich and dancing choreographed by Anne De Keersmaeker. By the end I felt like running and jumping. It’s not often you get such a direct hit from art. Reich is one of the big minimalist composers. In the terms of traditional western classical music his is very repetitive indeed, but if you can learn how to listen you find all kinds of constantly changing rhythms and ideas. It’s like Moroccan drumming, and other African and Asian forms, and like the most intelligent drum and bass. I got lost in it. It had a very powerful but dual effect on the audience. Most were engrossed like me, and gave rapturous applause at the end. But many walked out angrily early on. Walk-outs are unusual in British high culture, are they not? And these walkers seemed the kind of people who, if you laugh in the right place during a Shakespeare play, shush you angrily, with tormented hyperculture expressions on their pale and drawn faces. The tickets were expensive. Did they not find out what they were going to see before they paid? Perhaps not. They clearly had very strong assumptions as to what kind of experience they could expect in the theatre. Which takes us back to Kelman’s point, and even to the attempted erasure of Darwish. Some experiences fit into ideological place; others don’t.

Complex Origins

2008-08-05T06:40:00.000-07:00

From a Muslim perspective, I’m used to seeing Judaism, Christianity and Islam as episodes within the same religion (which is not to deny their differences) – a series of revelations emanating from the same cultural locus. But since so many of the Abrahamic stories are inherited from earlier civilisations, even from the very first to write down stories, it may be that my definition of one religion, or at least one civilisation, should expand to include the earliest myths. Stories so early that we can reasonably guess their roots reach deep into our pre-civilised hunter-gatherer past.

Myth doesn’t mean untruth any more than a great novel does. Myth is heightened truth. A myth is perhaps more ‘true’ than reality because reality unfiltered is unstructured and unexplained. The fact that God uses human myths to talk to humans need not perturb the religious. “wa tilka al-amthal nadribuha lil-nas la’alahum yatafakiroon,” says the Qur’an. “We rehearse these parables to people in order that they may think.” From a religious perspective, the rehearsal of myths in sacred text is proof of God’s understanding of human minds. And where do the myths arise from anyway? From unforgotten events, and from us, from our shared Godstuff.

As Genesis has Adam created in the image of God, so in the Epic of Gilgamesh Enkidu is created from clay “in the image of Anu,” who is the supreme god, the lord of the sky. The word ‘Eden’ is a Sumerian word, meaning ‘open country’. The strange detail in Genesis of Eve being created from Adam’s rib is perhaps prefigured in a Sumerian myth which sees a hero dismembered and then put back together by a group of deities, one deity for each part of the body, including “the lady of the rib.”

Although no archeological evidence has been found of a flood which destroyed all of settled Mesopotamia, smaller floods of the Tigris and Euphrates which inundated key cities were common, and it is from Mesopotamia that the flood story originates. The Noah figure is Ut-Napishtim, who is told by the water goddess Ea to take “the seed of all living creatures” into a ship built according to her specifications. After days and nights of floating, the ark lands on a mountain top, but all around is water. Ut-Napishtim sends out a dove, a swallow, and finally a raven, which finds land. Ut-Napishtim is awarded not prophethood but immortality, the only human to win this prize.

As in the Genesis account, the gods send devastating floods because they are tired of humanity. But while it is human immorality that upsets the Abrahamic God, what annoys the Sumerian pantheon is simply human noise:

… the people multiplied
The earth was bellowing like a bull
The gods were distressed with their uproar (from “Atrahasis”)

The Sumerian flood seems like a cure for population explosion, and when the gods relent they condition their mercy with a series of contraceptive measures:

Let there be among the people bearing women and barren women
Let there be among the people a Pashittu-demon
Let it seize the baby from the mother’s lap

This myth strikes me as particularly resonant for today, when human beings number six and a half billion and environmentalists predict catastrophic flooding as a result of human-provoked global warming.

And here are the mythical origins of King Sargon of Akkad. His mother “set me in a basket of rushes, with bitumen she sealed my lid. She cast me in the river which rose not over me.” The baby was found by a royal gardener, who brought him up until “the goddess Ishtar fell in love with me. Thereafter I exercised royal power.” We are of course reminded of Moses, who was also found by a royal household after his mother abandoned him to the river, and who, like Sargon, was destined to lead a nation and commune with the divine. And also, as stories ripple into each other, of the Egyptian underworld god Osiris. Set locks Osiris in a box and floats him down the river to the sea. The box is caught in the branches of a tree, allowing Osiris to be found and rescued by his wife Isis. (In the next episode Set cuts Osiris into 14 pieces and buries each piece separately. Isis gathers the pieces and puts Osiris back together. Does this echo the ‘lady of the rib’ mentioned above?)

Some of the Code of Hammurabi looks a lot like Judaic law, and some looks like Sharia.

There are endless linguistic similarities with contemporary Arabic. The Assyrian sun god was called Shamash (and ‘sun’ in Arabic is ‘shams’). Levantine months like Tishreen and Temmuz are inherited from ancient Mesopotamia. Temmuz is Dumuzi or Adonis – the shepherd god who dies in autumn and is resurrected in the spring, a source for the risen Christ figure (the mud-red flow of the Syrian Orontes – al-‘Asi – was once thought to be Dumuzi’s redemptive blood, anticipating the Christblood-wine of the Catholic mass). In Akkadian, ‘bait-il’ means house of the gods, and ‘bab-il’ (Babil – Babylon) means gate of the gods. Arabic speakers won’t need my translation.

Even the architecture of the excavated section of Ur resembles an Arab Old City, with alleyways and enclosed courtyards, woodwork and brickwork.

And between the ancient and the contemporary there are intriguing reversals – which are not entirely reversals, if you think about them.

The Akkadian 'Saturday' - 'sabbatu' - was not what we think of as a sabbath, but a day of ill omen. (Like the Muslims, the Akkadians had a lunar calendar, and their day began in the evening).

The temple prostitute brought to tame the Gilgamesh epic's Enkidu is called 'harimtu'. In pre-prophetic times 'haram' meant devoted to the gods and so taboo for secular use.

Enkidu’s taming by woman, his eating of human food, has parallels with the expulsion from Eden. Once he’s made love to a woman, he loses his wildness and connection to nature.

“But the gazelles saw him and ran,
The wild beasts saw him and ran.”

In “Gilgamesh”, this loss is offset by a greater gain: the transition from nature to culture, to agriculture and cities and writing – all the basics of civilisation which were first achieved in southern Iraq. But by the time the book of Genesis is written, the wild, hunter-gathering past looks like Eden, the open land, and its loss is entirely negative. It has become the fall.

These parallels and echoes serve to expand my sense of awe and wonder when I face our key texts. They certainly don’t invalidate religious texts, but they should scare anyone away from simplistic or literalist readings.

Arab London

2008-08-05T03:21:00.000-07:00

This appeared in Gulf Life (Gulf Air's inflight magazine):

It’s August and, as well as the Notting Hill Carnival, west London is seeing its yearly influx of Arab tourists. While the visitors are here they’ll rub shoulders with a varied and well-established Arab community.

Unlike some cities, London is too mixed to be ethnically zoned. When I lived a few years ago on the Harrow Road in west London, my neighbours were Poles, Pakistanis, Trinidadians, Lebanese .. I could go on. In London there are no monocultural ghettoes, but there are cultural concentrations, and my Harrow Road bedsit was in the middle of the Arab one.

At lunchtime I would cross the canal to buy steaming bowls of harira from the Moroccan stallholders on the Golborne Road. North towards Willesden I would meet newly-arrived Iraqi refugees, each with a story. If I walked west to Shepherd’s Bush I found Syrian grocers selling olive oil from the old country, and balls of salty shellal cheese. On the Uxbridge Road I could even eat fetteh, the essential Levantine working man’s food, and I prayed with men of all sects in a basement mosque.

Further south, towards Notting Hill and Kensington, it becomes more glamorous, princes and oil millionaires mingling with the internationally privileged. On the way, commercial activity buzzes on Queensway and the Edgware Road, where there are more shisha bars than pubs, and shops where you can buy za’taar, or Adel Imam comedies, or Libyan or Egyptian newspapers. For a brief term following the destruction of Beirut and before Qatar and the Emirates upped their profiles, London became the capital of the Arab media. It’s still important, still housing such ventures as the independent pan-Arab paper al-Quds al-Arabi.

On Queensway, past Whiteleys shopping centre, popular to bursting with young Gulf tourists in the summer, turn into Westbourne Grove for al-Waha restaurant, one of London’s best, and the famous as-Saqi bookshop and publishers – as influential in its own way as the Madbouli bookshop in Cairo.

All of these Arabs, but against a decidedly non-Arab background, involving a lot of darkness and rain, sometimes even in August. In the winter, I remember the ice freezing on the inside of my bedsit windows (although I’ve been colder in a Syrian January). Yet these days, London is the Arab world too, which is a way of saying the Arabs have become Londoners. In my novel of Arab London, a character remembers visiting the Regent’s Park mosque: “the peculiar Englishness of it .. coats and scarves hung up on hooks, the smell of damp wool, wooden panelling on the walls. Snow through the windows against a red and yellow sky.” If Syria is the Arabs on the Mediterranean and Oman the Arabs on the Indian Ocean, London is the city of the Arabs in the cold north west. Especially in August.

Representation

2008-08-04T09:39:00.000-07:00

Somebody at Channel 4 has been making an effort. A few weeks ago a documentary called “Dispatches: It Shouldn’t Happen to a Muslim” criticised the rising tide of Islamophobia in the British tabloid media and the corresponding rise in physical attacks on Muslims. The presenter brought up a series of stories which I half remembered hearing before, and half remembered feeling vaguely embarrassed about. Like how the NatWest bank got rid of its piggy bank posters to avoid offending over-sensitive Muslims. Like how British hospitals have to rearrange their wards so the beds all face Mecca. Like how a Muslim hate mob vandalised a house in which British soldiers returned from Afghanistan were to be billeted. All of these stories were completely false. The Sun was not charged with incitement to hatred.

The documentary didn’t take on Islamophobia in the so-called ‘quality press’, legal system or government, and beyond references to the July 7th bombs in London it did not give a wider political context for the surge in Muslim hatred. It did, however, point to how serious the problem is becoming. According to opinion polls, which are slippery by nature, 51% of British people believe Islam in general is to blame for the 7/7 attacks. 26% think the presence of any Muslims in the country is a security threat.

A couple of days later there was a great British screen moment. The screen read: After The Qur’an, Big Brother – which blasphemously reminded me of the Islamic “After your mother, your father.” But “The Qur’an” meant a two hour documentary on various ways of reading the text in various social contexts.

Despite the inevitable simplifications (Iranian women are “uniformly dressed in chadors”) the documentary did an admirable job of showing the range and flexibility of Qur’anic interpretation. Space was given to mullahs and Sufis, liberals and conservatives, the hijabbed and the non-hijabbed, to stake their very different claims on Qur’anic meaning. One interviewee said, “The Qur’an is like a supermarket; you can take what you want.” Although the Tesco’s imagery grates, this is of course correct; like the Bible, the Upanishads and Shakespeare, the Qur’an is vast enough to provide succour to almost any world view.

As a corrective to the unreconstructed ‘essentialist’ orientalist discourses we still hear so much from, the documentary shone a healthy light on the changing nature of Muslim societies. The society chosen for exemplification is Egypt, where almost no urban women wore the hijab thirty years ago but where almost all now do. The reason for the change was, I think, correctly diagnosed as “military defeat and economic failure” leading to a new search for identity.

“The Qur’an” spent a great deal of time examining (or at least quoting) verses which seem to encourage, on the one hand, fighting, and on the other, peaceful co-existence, and decided that the text promotes “tolerance and intolerance in equal measure.”

This made me think of the sometimes contradictory names of God: the Merciful and the Tyrant as well as the First and the Last. It made me think of all the strange binaries in the Qur’an. The words for ‘life’ and ‘death’ are each mentioned 145 times. ‘Spending’ and ‘satisfaction’ occur 73 times each. ‘This life’ and ‘the life after’ 115 times each. ‘The misled’ and ‘the dead’ 17 times each. And so on.

The Qur’an aims for totality, to broaden our horizons. It offers us a language to speak, a vocabulary - for instance - for both war and peace. And it describes itself as a ‘furqan’, a test.

The documentary reached a fine and logical conclusion: that in the Qur’an, “one consistent message comes through: think and think.”

But then it made much too big a deal about the Qur’an being originally written without tanqeet (punctuation distinguishing letters) or harekat (vowel markings), as if this was new information. One German professor’s interpretation of the Qur’an with the help of an Aramaic dictionary was interesting but vastly overblown. The dark-eyed maidens awaiting the faithful in paradise are translated by the professor as ‘bunches of grapes’. The documentary played this as if it would shake the foundations of Islam, but the general idea has always been uncontroversial. A clear majority of Muslims have always known that the descriptions of heaven and hell are symbolic images of the ineffable. The Qur’an (2:26) itself stresses this. At this point in the programme it seemed a bit like the writer had run out of things to say. He could have taken two more minutes on Palestine.

On that subject, the documentary stated: “In the last eight years, over 700 Israelis and over 2000 Palestinians have been killed.” While the real numbers are 1057 Israelis and 4862 Palestinians. http://www.ifamericansknew.org/stats/deaths.html#source The documentary also failed to mention the first and basic fact of the conflict: that most of Palestine was ethnically cleansed in 1948 and the remnant occupied and settled from 1967.

This lack of explanation makes the conflict seem like an ideological struggle between two equal parties, both with equal mythic allegiances to the land. This is misleading for two reasons. First, Israel is a nuclear-armed regional superpower while the Palestinians are stateless and very nearly defenceless. Second, although both sides do have strong mythical-religious claims on the land, and although both speak this resonant language when they are suffering or when they seek to mobilise their friends and allies, the conflict is no more about religion than the Northern Irish conflict was about Catholic-Protestant theology. It’s about territory and power and oppression.

If documentaries fail to give this context, who will? Certainly not the evening news.

While celebrating the 60th anniversary of apartheid Israel the Guardian stated that 250,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes in 1948. I emailed to complain, and had to wait for more than a week until I received a reply saying that I wasn’t the only one to have questioned the figure, and that the Guardian was researching it. It took another few days for the hardworking research staff to learn that, since the work of Israeli new historians like Ilan Pappe in the 80s and 90s it has been accepted as historical fact that somewhere between 700 and 800 thousand Palestinian refugees were created in 1948. I wonder why it took so long to uncover this uncontroversial fact? I wonder which ‘research sources’ the Guardian relies on? I wonder how long it would have taken the Guardian to apologise if its front page had underestimated the number of Holocaust victims by two thirds? (No, I’m not suggesting that the two tragedies are analogous, but there is a link, made by the Guardian piece itself when it cast Zionism as the solution to the Holocaust).

No-one is more to blame for poor representations of Muslims and Arabs than Muslims and Arabs themselves. This is part of the general sickness. When I was researching Arab novels in English translation I discovered that none of the Arab culture ministries do anything organised to promote Arab writing and art abroad. Israel had a receptive Western audience for its 60th anniversary celebrations, but it was the efforts of its ministries, ambassadors and friends that allowed it to paint itself as a success story. Meanwhile in Egypt, this year’s Nakba commemorations were banned. (How many people in the West understand the word ‘nakba’? And whose fault is that?) I can understand the clients wanting to keep as quiet as possible, but not a country like Syria. Syria has a just foreign policy and a laudable history of ethnic, sectarian and religious co-existence. It is one of the world’s most generous providers of refuge – to Armenians, Palestinians and Iraqis. Despite being a nation of born storytellers, it has totally failed to tell this story internationally.

A Great Day in the Axis of Evil

2008-08-02T15:56:00.000-07:00

Since Hizbullah rearranged Lebanon in May, the following has happened:

Syria and Israel have engaged in peace negotiations, under Turkish rather than American auspices, and on terms which are not humiliating to the Syrians and Arabs – so far at least. Bashaar al-Assad has also been well received in Paris, signalling a definite end to the period of European ostracism.

Hamas has negotiated a ceasefire with Israel and – so far – the Israelis are respecting it more than they ever respected ceasefires with the Palestinian Authority.

On July 16th, Israel did what it vowed in July 2006 it would not do: it received its prisoners (or their remains) as part of a prisoner-swap deal with Hizbullah. The Lebanese resistance has now succeeded in having all Lebanese prisoners returned home. Contrast the unanswered pleadings of Mahmoud Abbas, whose US-backed administration has failed to have any of the 11,500 Palestinian prisoners released. More prisoners, in fact, are being taken on the West Bank every night. Contrast the supine regimes in Jordan and Egypt, which have made peace with apartheid Israel while Jordanian and Egyptian prisoners in Israeli prisons are still unaccounted for. The lesson is clear: resistance pays. Obedience to US-Israeli hegemony only results in more weakness.

Israel’s war aims in 2006 were to defang the resistance and remove its deterrent power. In the event, the deterrent power that was removed was Israel’s. Far from surging in hours, 1982-style, through the south and the Bekaa, Israel bled for five weeks in the border villages. By all accounts Hizbullah is better armed now than in 2006, and its deterrent power increased.

After the war, Israel and its Western allies aimed to isolate Hizbullah politically in Lebanon, or at least to push it back from the border. There are UNIFIL troops in the south, but Hizbullah is still there on the ground, keeping a low profile, and actually protecting UNIFIL from al-Qa’ida-type attack. As for isolating the resistance on the Lebanese scene, Hizbullah has foiled the attempt to defang it by proxy, and masterfully, with its usual disciplne, clearing out the militias backed by the US and its clients and then immediately handing positions over to the national army. If it had been stupid, Hizbullah could have taken the government. It didn’t, but it did ensure the capabilities of the resistance. Syria and Qatar worked to encourage the compromise, marginalising the Saudi role. Sinyura and Jumblatt are doing a lot of public word-eating. The resistance has outmanouvered the empire politically as well as militarily.

And now a great, if questionable, surprise: the US is reported to be planning to open an interests section in Tehran, which would be the first official diplomatic contact since the revolution that removed the Shah. It looks like a great day in the axis of evil.

I think it’s still too early to say the direct extension of the war to Iran is impossible. The recent friendliness may be a PR exercise aimed to portray America as the flexible partner. America may intend to take control of European-managed talks with Iran merely so as to obstruct compromise. Mujahideen-e-Khalq and an array of ethno-separatist and sectarian opposition militias are still conducting covert operations against Tehran with American funding and direction, often out of bases in American-occupied Iraq.

But it does look as if the tide has turned against war. America and Israel have been at war with themselves for years over Iran. The publication of the National Intelligence Estimate in November 2007, which concluded that Tehran had halted its nuclear weapons research in 2003, is significant. The agencies went public because they wanted to reign in the neoconservatives who have done so much to hasten the financial, military and moral demise of the American empire. Most of the military hierarchy agree. Observers not blinded by arrogance or ideology can see that Iran is strong, and that its response to attack will be considerable.

Iran isn’t as strong as the propaganda suggests – it’s not a rising nuclear-fascist giant, but a deeply troubled country, globally still weak and unsure of itself. But it’s far better organised and better educated, more stable and more free than any other Middle Eastern state, with the possible exception of Turkey, from Pakistan to Algeria. Including, in at least some ways, Israel.

Selective Sentimentality

2008-07-07T05:08:00.000-07:00

Living in Britain again, I am struck anew by the selective sentimentality of government and media, and how popular acceptance of this emotional manipulation results in restrictions on our freedom of expression.

One stirring talking point has been the 15 British soldiers killed in Afghanistan in June, one of them (horror!) a woman. Lots of stuff on TV and in the papers about heroes sacrificing themselves for their country. Not long ago it was revealed (deliberately?) that good prince Harry had been serving in Afghanistan. Disappointing news. A member of the royal family swaggering armed through Asia makes it more difficult to explain away the current British militarism as ‘Blair’s wars’ and not necessarily the British people’s. Harry mumbled patriotically about the wounded ‘heroes’ he’d accompanied back to Britain, and the nation was encouraged to celebrate British toughness rather than question the justification for these pointless wars.

I sympathise with any parent who loses a child, and I sympathise with young working class people who join the army because they can’t see another way to earn a decent wage or develop useful skills. My advice, however, is to keep well away from the army. Joining the military means signing away your individuality – you agree to kill and be killed on behalf of the state. If your country is under attack this may be justifiable, but the wars Britain is now involved in are offensive, unlawful, against the interests of the British people, and doomed to failure. In their classic ‘Black Soldier’, radical proto-rappers The Last Poets discouraged African Americans from fighting in Vietnam, but if you’re white British the sentiment is easily transferred: if you want to fight a noble battle in defence of your community, you should do that at home, as part of your community. Killing the empire’s enemies is not the same as killing yours.

Then there’s the huge fuss over Zimbabwe. I don’t wish to excuse or mitigate the megalomania and criminality of Mugabe’s regime. More than 85 supporters of the opposition have been killed since the election which Mugabe obviously lost, hundreds more have been wounded and tens of thousands displaced. Land redistribution should have started in 1980 when the country achieved independence; it should have been carefully planned and directed to benefit the people socially and economically. Mugabe did it late and theatrically; the process was dictated by crude populism and corruption. Many Zimbabweans today are hungry, and this is in large part the regime’s fault. Drought, AIDS and Anglo-American sanctions are other causes. Africa isn’t helped by geriatric autocrats, and clearly it would be best if Mugabe stood down, or was removed by the people of Zimbabwe.

But let’s keep this in proportion. Saudi Arabia and Egypt are also run by geriatric autocrats, yet I don’t hear the same pulsating of British glands. Egypt arrests and routinely tortures hundreds of opposition members every week. These victims of the American-Mubarak order suffer anal rape and beatings because they are striving to make their own country freer and more dignified – it may be that they deserve the title ‘hero’ more than British boys who travel round the world to blow up the brown people their officers direct them to. Saudi Arabia has never had anything resembling an election. Neither country has an economic policy other than to do what Washington says, and neither, naturally, has an independent foreign policy that represents the interests of the people – which is why the British don’t whimper and whine about such regimes. And I mention only two of the client states.

One person not keeping it in proportion is the ridiculously titled Lord Paddy Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon – the politician who distinguished himself in the run-up to the 1991 Gulf War by camouflaging his face with mud and crawling through TV studios muttering grittily about his SAS experience. Last week he told the Times: “The situation in Zimbabwe could deteriorate to a point where genocide could be a possible outcome – something that looks like [another] Rwanda.” He added that, in that case, international military action, with Britain playing a “delicate role”, would have to be considered.

There COULD be genocide in Zimbabwe, and there could be in Italy. But there isn’t. Talk of ‘delicate roles’ relies on British imperialist amnesia, or worse, an arrogant refusal to recognise that British interference in Africa and Asia has been overwhelmingly destructive. This is why the ‘Britain can go hang’ rhetoric coming from Mugabe will play very well in much of the world. It doesn’t, as the BBC and ITV seem to think, make Mugabe seem ridiculous. Zimbabwe isn’t Britain’s business. Or better put, a Britain informed of its own recent history should feel a little ashamed of itself, a little embarrassed even to say the word ‘Zimbabwe’. When Britain ruled, the country was called Rhodesia after the great colonialist pillager and racist Cecil Rhodes, under whose administration the country’s richest land was seized at gunpoint from its Shona and Ndebele owners.

A government truly interested in human rights, international law and the peaceful cooperation of nations would sanction the state of Israel, with its apartheid system, its continuous ethnic cleansing over the last 60 years, its violations of tens of UN resolutions, its occupation of Syrian and Lebanese land, its holding of eleven thousand political prisoners, and its refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. A lot more Palestinians have been killed since they elected Hamas than Zimbabweans since they voted against Mugabe.

Instead of sanctioning Israel, which it continues to support militarily, economically, politically and culturally, the British government said on Wednesday it was amending a ban on Hizbullah to cover its entire military wing. The Home Office stated: “This means that it will be a criminal offense to belong to, fundraise and encourage support for the military wing of the organization.”

The statement continued: “Hizbullah’s military wing is providing active support to militants in Iraq who are responsible for attacks both on coalition forces and on Iraqi civilians.”

What is certain is that British and American forces are occupying Iraq against the will of its people, and that they provide active support to militias responsible for attacks on both Iraqi civilians and nationalist resistance fighters. It is possible but unproven that Hizbullah is training some anti-occupation Iraqis, but highly improbable that it is supporting attacks on civilians. The sectarian aspect of the war in Iraq potentially weakens Shia Hizbullah’s position in the Sunni Arab world, and Hassan Nasrallah has frequently spoken out against the targetting of Iraqi civilians. On the other hand, of the million Iraqis dead as a result of the invasion and occupation, at least 310,000 have been killed directly by Anglo-American bullets and bombs. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_surveys_of_casualties_of_the_Iraq_War#cite_note-update-77) Perhaps this is Paddy Ashdown’s ‘delicate role.’ Once again, no embarrassment. Not even a sense of irony.

I don’t belong to Hizbullah’s military wing and I’m not involved in fundraising for anybody except myself, but I have to say that I encourage people to support the military wing morally and politically. It is, after all, the only organisation in modern Arab history to have liberated land occupied by zionists. It is the most disciplined, intelligent force in the region. While Israel’s victims are overwhelmingly civilian, Hizbullah’s are overwhelmingly military. I encourage moral and political support for the resistance, but I don’t go so far as to ask Britons to volunteer. British people, meanwhile, can and do go to fight for the IDF.

And why do I ‘have to’ express my support? As a result of my British patriotism. Because Hizbullah is not al-Qa’ida. Hizbullah does not wish to murder British civilians or to annhilate ‘Jews and Crusaders.’ Hizbullah is engaged in a war it did not start, and is fighting for just principles. If people who support the fight feel they cannot speak openly about their politics in Britain, then Britain faces a very grim future.

Leaving Oman

2008-06-30T04:23:00.000-07:00

(This was published in the National newspaper)

Allow me to make a few generalisations, which will be as unfair as generalisations always are.

There are two kinds of Arab country. On the one hand, those with a vast and living history and a social life that makes London feel cold and dead, but where the people contend with too much political and economic pressure to be more than occasionally happy. And on the other, those countries with the comforts and ease provided by the oil economy, but so culturally dislocated, so alienated from themselves, that you feel Year Zero was declared when the oil started flowing. The kind of place where expats drink too much.

Oman, which I left last week, has in some measure the advantages of both kinds of country, perhaps just the right measure, and I love it. I call it my favourite Arab country, which is a high honour with me.

Although everyone meets in Muscat, Oman still has a village society and a working tribal system. Its traditions survive as more than mere tourist brochure selling points. In other words, it feels like a real country and not like an endlessly extended airport. Not many countries these days can claim so much. Like Britain that I’m arriving in, Oman built an empire by way of the sea. As a result, the Omani cultural zone stretches around the Indian Ocean from Iran and Pakistan to Kenya and Tanzania, and the Omani population includes Baluchis, Lawatis, and Swahili-speaking Zanzibaris. So Oman manages to be cosmopolitan – and that’s before its importation of an oil age working and professional class – at the same time as being slow and rural.

It’s as developed as it ever needs to be. There’s a reasonable schools-and-hospitals infrastructure, and more than enough good, fast roads. If you so wished you could shop for brands or watch Hollywood movies in Muscat. But there’s not yet so much of that. Compared to Dubai or Doha, Oman’s lack of glitter is its allure.

Time more than distance makes places foreign. What my English grandfather told me of Britain in his youth – the solidarity, the cooperation between neighbours, the relative absence of crime – reminded me of contemporary Syria, which suggests that key cultural differences are made by social and economic change rather than by religion or language. Syria today is much more similar to contemporary Britain than it was a decade ago. And therefore I wonder, fearfully, how much of Oman’s character will remain whenever I manage to return. I fear that the current 5-star development plan may banalise the country. Just in my half-decade of residence, miles of formerly public beachfront were eaten up by luxury hotels and ‘gated’ residential communities. The recent inflationary surge has also exacerbated already widening class divisions.

But here in Scotland I settle nostalgically on my fixed picture of Oman, whose mountains and deserts seem wild and imperturbable enough to shrug off a few short decades of fast captalism, and already I miss it so much I wonder if I’ve made a huge mistake. I remember the heat like arms around me, while here I am poked by niggling fingers of cold. Under these low, clouded skies I remember the generous clarity of the Omani stars, and how comfortable it was to lie on the rocks or sand underneath them.

I remember too the warmth of the Omanis. Although Omani social life revolves first around the family and then the tribe, which means an outsider certainly doesn’t need to fight off invitations from the locals as he might in Syria or Egypt, the Omanis are such civilised, friendly people that to leave them feels like falling from the earth onto a distant and unkind planet. I remember, back on earth, eating slow-cooked shuwa meat from the same plate as twenty men and then sitting for hours drinking coffee in the majlis. I remember the women who offered us cold water and the men who guided us as we walked through mountain villages. I remember the smiles and cooperative spirit which took us through the aftermath of the Gonu cyclone and floods. I remember shaking hands after the prayer in mosques perfumed by frankincense (I can think of a nearby country where the mosques smell of feet). The Omanis practise a gentle, community-based Islam unwarped by modernist neuroses, and they are at almost all times fundamentally decent.

In Britain there are rougher and colder ways.

I remember Muscat’s foreign residents: my colleagues of thirty nationalities at the university, the Friday night crowds in Ruwi’s little India, the manly Pakistani labourers waiting for work in al-Ghubra, the Egyptians and Filipinos I met in shops. All those Keralan nurses with names like Baby, Girly and Shiny.

Like everywhere else in the region, Oman has its Iraqi refugees, mainly doctors and professors who would be targetted at home. Some of these were our friends, as well as people from Australia, Pakistan, Lebanon, America and Palestine. And it is our friends who we will miss most. For the last two days we ate only food cooked by other people, and were wrapped in their tenderness until we reached the airport.

What else do I miss? The non-human aspect of the place, its vastness. I remember the midnight turtle that crawled onto the beach next to our camp to lay its eggs, the antelope that skipped away as I crested a mountain ridge, the wind-polished rocks that I gathered on the edge of the Empty Quarter. I remember those creatures – like the Egyptian vulture, the Indian roller and the sunbird – whose unusual (but in Muscat, prosaic) beauty forced me to learn their names.

It all makes me sigh. It was easier to live in the Gulf. Here I have the income tax system to understand, and council tax, and car tax. Here I can’t find a man to fix everything in my house for only a couple of riyals. Here, my wife may be the first hijab-wearer on the streets of this little town, my children the most unusual in their school. There will be no Arab community, no Indians, no mosques or halal butchers. It isn’t cosmopolitan.

My children have British passports but have never lived in Britain. My Syrian wife, adaptable and intelligent, has lived in four very different countries, but never outside the Arab world. These factors are enough to make a couple of years in the cold a worthwhile adventure.

And there are certainly benefits to Scotland. It’s green as well as grey. We have a garden. I expect to go for daily walks in the surrounding countryside. I even expect to grow vegetables, and to stand with my children in the rain discussing them. Beyond that, the place we’ve moved to is constructed on a human scale. The high street businesses are family-owned, small scale and high quality: the butcher, the cobbler, the tailor, and so on. People know each other’s names and aren’t afraid of eye contact. They go so far as to shake hands. Thus far, we’ve been warmly welcomed. In that respect, it isn’t too different from Oman.

Advertisements for Myself

2008-06-22T08:02:00.000-07:00

My close associate Robin Yassin-Kassab has written a novel called The Road from Damascus. It was published by Hamish Hamilton on June 5th.

You are strongly advised to invest heavily in this book. Buy Buy Buy! Good for house insulation and firestarting as well as reading.

Clearly it is a great honour to have a book published. The exciting moment was on souq al-Khoud one hot evening more than a year ago, when my agent called to say the book was sold. But the publication itself, seeing the book in the bookshops, has softened the trauma of moving from Oman to rural Scotland.

I was in London for a publication lunch at al-Waha on Westbourne Grove. There was agent, publisher and publicist, good people all, and my friend Giles Coren, and the lovely Melissa Katsoulis. There was the writer Diran Adebayo, who was talking about ‘post-black’ universalism in relation to Obama and a girl who left Diran because she thought he was too preoccupied with black issues. Too old-fashioned. He called a friend and told him: “I’ve just been post-blacked.” There was the very intelligent Boyd Tonkin, literary editor of the Independent, and my brother Ahmad who’s in this country doing a medical attachment. There was my son Ibrahim, who easily won his eating competition with Giles.

The food in al-Waha is excellent, but I didn’t much notice it because I was excited and all was fragmentary.

After the meal I went round bookshops with Penguin people signing books so that the sellers would put ‘author-signed’ stickers on them and display them where people might buy them. Amelia told me how publishers have to pay bookshops to put books on display. Even those staff recommendations you see in some shops are not really staff recommendations at all but books the publisher has paid the seller to display. It wasn’t this way when independent bookshops still ruled.

I was interviewed by Tina Jackson for Metro:

http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/books/article.html?in_article_id=164195&in_page_id=28

and by David Mattin for the National (a paper recently set up by British journalists in Abu Dhabi):

http://www.thenational.ae/article/20080618/ART/173935917/1007

I met Wassim of the Maysaloon blog (see the link above left), and went to the Revenger’s Tragedy with him. I took Ibrahim to the Dr Who exhibition at Earl’s Court, where we were both scared by a dalek. We went to the British Museum, the Natural History Museum, the IMAX 3-D cinema, and Hampstead Heath. I took him to Scotland, stayed a few days, returned to London, where I met some old friends and a new one: Muhammad Idrees of the Fanonite (see link above left), full of ideas.

The book was reviewed by Maya Jaggi in the Guardian:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2285426,00.html

Then by Tim Teeman in the Times:

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/fiction/article4122971.ece

And by Aamer Hussein in the Independent:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-road-from-damascus-by-robin-yassinkassab-850691.html

And in the evil Daily Mail, but I can’t find it online.

Allan Massie in the Scotsman:

http://living.scotsman.com/books/Book-review-Catalytic-converter.4209015.jp

Abu Kareem has been very kind: http://levantdream.blogspot.com/2008/07/on-qunfuzs-road-from-damascus.html

They are good reviews. They contain two main criticisms: the didactic way in which some of the ideas are presented, and having too much crammed in. Fair enough. For the first, I’d say mine is a novel of ideas (I know the term sounds pretentious), and ideas are not that popular. (I mean, Dostoyevsky got away with endless staged fights between religion and anarchism, so why not me? Is it because I is Anglo-Arab?) Beyond that, I tried not to adopt a didactic tone – I tried to banish it to Qunfuzland – but probably did some of the time, due to lack of experience. Sorry. For the second criticism, the overpacked unwieldiness of plot, perhaps I like the massiveness of my novel and the tenousness of some of its plotting. I’m not sure yet. I can’t reread the novel now – to be honest I hate the sight of it. Having written it, having reread it tens of times, having done a final edit and then a proof read, I feel a kind of nausea when I look at it. I suppose I love it, and my nausea is temporary. But it is obviously a first novel, and the novel I’m writing now has started life much more structured. I’ve learnt a lot and I’m still learning. Alan Massie said cut pages, and that’s what I think whenever I read a contemporary novel.

He also said some of the characters are stereotypes. Maya Jaggi called Gabor “a straw man set up to embody a predatory Orientalism.” I hope that Gabor was more than this, although I admit that’s how he ended up. Because of my opposition to stereotype, and because I thought I was working against stereotype when I was writing, I was at first confused by Allan Massie’s comment. But then I saw that it too was fair enough, because behind the central drama of my two main charcters, the backdrop is satiric. This means that the backdrop characters are stereotypical, or at least try to be. So fair enough, again. Nothing wrong with satire, but it is an immature form. If I’m capable of it I would like to get away from it one day. But it’s a lot easier to write satire, at least some of the time, than to write anything else.

My favourite review is the comment someone left after the previous post.

Meanwhile, for those awaiting more opinionated Middle Eastern ranting: fear not. Normal service will be resumed shortly.

Syria – Israel Peace Talks

2008-05-24T12:33:00.000-07:00

This, along with other perspectives, will appear on the forum of the Creative Syria website (see link to the left).

After months of rumours it has been announced that Syria and Israel are engaged in formal peace talks under Turkish auspices. In theory it shouldn’t be difficult for the negotiations to come to a positive conclusion. After all, in 2000 Hafez al-Assad and Ehud Barak came remarkably close to an agreement in which the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel since 1967, would be returned to Syria, and Syria would recognise and establish normal relations with Israel.

Syria would benefit hugely from peace. Apart from the ramifications for national pride, the return of the Golan would constitute a tremendous economic boost. There would be a boom in construction and tourism as well as an easing of water shortages in the Damascus region. An end to military tensions with Israel would make Syria a much more welcoming environment for investors.

Israel would gain a measure of long-term security and some much needed legitimacy (still not nearly enough – that won’t come until Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs live as equals in Palestine). Both countries would be able to cooperate to confront the climate change and overpopulation crises that are likely to bite in the near future.

As well as potential rewards, there are immediate dangers that could be avoided through peace. In Lebanon’s Hizbullah, Israel has met its most serious enemy, a force which can hit back effectively at aggression and which can not be removed. The missiles of Hamas, while currently not much more than an occasionally bloody irritant, are extending their range and power and present a long-term existential threat. Israel also has its ‘demographic problem’ – the land controlled by Israel already contains roughly equal numbers of Arabs and Jews. As a result, the Jewish state’s pretence of being a democracy rather than an apartheid regime wears ever more thin. Peace with Syria would not solve these problems, but it would provide an environment more conducive to the hard thinking and compromise necessary to solve them. Syria, meanwhile, lives from crisis to crisis, with a shattered Iraq on its east, unstable Lebanon and wounded Palestine to the west, with Wahhabi-nihilists threatening to strike, with hostile Western governments ranged against it, and a mushrooming, youthful population that must be employed. Syria needs the space to breathe that a peace treaty would bring.

Unlike the US, Turkey, which is friendly with both countries, is in an excellent position to mediate talks. Furthermore, it appears that Olmert has agreed to fulfill Hafez al-Assad’s demand of a full withdrawal to the coast of the Sea of Galilee.

So conditions seem right and both sides would benefit. This does not mean, however, that peace is on the horizon. I suspect that both leaderships know this, and are playing along for political and PR reasons. Neither wants to be seen as the warmongering side. Bashaar al-Assad wants to cool down the Western heat, especially if he fears the results of the enquiry into Rafiq Hariri’s assassination. Olmert wants a diversion from his domestic failures and the corruption charges against him. If an attack on Iran is being planned, it may be that Israeli and American planners also aim to keep Syria temporarily sweet, for the duration of the bombing.

So why no peace? Israeli foreign minister Tsipi Livni has said it clearly: as a precondition, Syria must distance itself from Iran and cease support for Hizbullah and Hamas. In other words, Syria must sacrifice its independent foreign policy, accept that its alliances will be decided elsewhere, and welcome American-Israeli hegemony in the region. This is an impossible price for the Syrian regime to pay. Like any government, the Syrian rulers govern by consensus as well as by coercion. In general, Syrians like their government’s anti-imperialist line. Better put, Syrians tolerate the regime’s failures for two reasons: domestic stability and dignity in foreign policy.

The Syrian people are at least as nationalist and anti-zionist as their government. The connection to other Arab peoples, especially in the ‘bilad ash-sham’ cultural zone, is not something that Syrians would be willing to give up. Would Israelis accept cutting links with their US friends, because Syrians don’t like American policy? Of course, Syria wouldn’t be so foolish as to ask for this as a precondition for peace. The fact that Israel demands the equivalent from Syria shows that it does not consider Syria as an equal partner, and that there will be no peace.

There are plenty of regimes in the region which substitute US backing for popular support in their own countries. In other words, they fear the displeasure of the patron, which protects them with military bases and cash injections, more than they fear the displeasure of the street. Could Syria flip and become an Egypt or a Saudi Arabia? I think not. For a variety of ideological and strategic reasons, this would be almost impossible in the easiest of conditions, that is, even if the US was waiting with kisses and bags of investment cash. And the US, which calls Syria a member of the axis of evil, is frowning at the current talks.

Sense, Mainly

2008-05-12T06:49:00.000-07:00

The Lebanese government took the first steps towards dismantling Hizbullah’s vital communications network. The opposition closed roads and demonstrated. Pro-government thugs shot at civilians, as they have done many times before. This time, the opposition responded decisively. Disciplined Hizbullah fighters and their unruly allies from Amal and the Syrian Social Nationalist Party quickly took control of West Beirut. Hundreds of Hariri’s Future militia surrendered. In the Shuf, pro-opposition and pro-government Druze forces fought it out, with the opposition winning. The north was messier. In Tripoli the Sunnis fought, Hariri supporters against Omar Karami’s opposition-linked group. Future men ransacked and burnt offices of the Ba’ath Party, of Ayatullah Fadlallah, Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement, and the Syrian Social Nationalists. (This party, by the way, is not Syrian but ‘Greater Syrian’; while the Ba’ath envisages a union of all Arab countries, the SSNP wants a state covering Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Iraq, Kuwait and – believe it or not – Cyprus, a Fertile Crescent state.) At the time of writing, things have calmed down in Tripoli.

So far, it looks like a clear victory for the opposition and a resounding defeat for the government and its Saudi and American backers. Hariri and Junblatt have been humiliated. Sinyura said he would let the army decide on Hizbullah’s communications network. The army accepted the offer and promptly declared that the resistance would be protected. It also announced that the Hizbullah-linked head of airport security would be reinstated. The government (if it is still the government) must be bitter that the army, which it had heralded as the symbol of a neutral state, has shown more understanding for the opposition than for the leaders who provoked it.

Hizbullah has acted with its usual intelligence and restraint. As soon as the opposition took control of pro-government areas it handed them over to the army. It did not perform a coup, as it so easily could have done. It has been careful to include its Sunni and Druze allies in the military action, and to work in concert with its Christian allies politically. All that it has demanded is a return to the status quo before the government orders threatening the resistance’s communications network. It has not even mentioned the third of cabinet seats that it has been negotiating for months. The Shia community, which makes up between 30 and 40% of the people, currently receives only 21% of parliamentary seats. Rather than push for an end to this injustice, Hizbullah is trying to soothe tempers and establish a new consensus around the resistance.

Still, the presence of militia on the streets once again is heartbreaking, and will make consensus very difficult to achieve. There are reports of Amal men entering homes to beat Hariri supporters, stealing jewellery, and chanting sectarian insults. The Future TV building was burnt by SSNP supporters. An Amal supporter turned his fire on a Sunni funeral crowd, killing at least two. And the ‘clean hands’ purity of the resistance has been lost. Hizbullah is the only militia which did not commit massacres against other communities during the country’s civil war. The actions of the last few days may have been necessary, and Hizbullah itself (as opposed to its sometimes embarrassing allies) behaved in a disciplined manner, but Lebanon has now seen Hizbullah using military force against other Lebanese. If sectarianism proves to be stronger than sense in the Sunni community (and the Saudi-run media will do all it can to whip up hatred – al-Arabiyya’s coverage, for instance, has been appallingly one-sided), or if Hizbullah now makes even one mistake, a short term victory for resistance Lebanon could become a defeat, and bankers’ Lebanon could return in force. Or there could be a return of blood and chaos.

There have already been scenes which replay the civil war. Future militiamen lined up and murdered a group of migrant Syrian workers. Junblatt’s militia kidnapped and executed at least two Hizbullah supporters. These are the ‘moderate democratic’ pro-Western forces the US has been funding and training in Jordan (alongside the Badr militia calling itself the Iraqi army and the Dahlan militia pretending to be Palestinian security). Hariri, Sinyura and Junblatt have recognised the current balance of forces, but haven’t recognised the justice of the opposition’s stand. Whether or not they call on their fighters to destabilise the new set-up will depend on the orders they receive from Saudi Arabia and the US. Here, the signs are not good.

Aside from general destruction, the Bush administration has failed in everything it has tried in the Middle East, and may now be getting desperate. The Lebanese events are very reminiscent of Gaza, where America (via the Abrams Plan) armed and then incited its own faction against the resistance. The resistance tried its best to establish a national government but in the end, after grievous provocation, took direct control of Gaza.

1.3 billion dollars of American money was spent propping up the Sinyura government, and not only money. A former head of Mossad observed yesterday that three years of work by Arab and Western intelligence agencies in Beirut had been lost in one night. This is a good thing, surely. Where will we be in a month’s time?

Sect or Sense?

2008-05-09T02:09:00.000-07:00

The Lebanese government wants to remove surveillance cameras at Beirut airport, and has suspended the official in charge of airport security because of his links with Hizbullah. Hassan Nasrallah has responded by warning that the government plans to turn the airport into a base for the CIA and Mossad. For the last two days Hizbullah and Amal supporters have closed roads leading to the airport.

The government aims to dismantle Hizbullah’s communications system, which one minister referred to as “Iran telecom.” Nasrallah describes this move as “a declaration of war,” and he may not be exaggerating. Israeli inability to destroy Hizbullah communications in 2006 meant that Israel was unable to achieve any of its war aims. The destruction of the system now would leave Hizbullah vulnerable to assassinations and full scale military attack from Israel.

Yesterday Hizbullah and the much less disciplined Amal supporters on one side and Sunni pro-government people fought each other on the streets and abused each other in the grossest sectarian terms. At least eleven people died. Nasrallah ominously announced that while the resistance’s weapons would never be used for internal political purposes, the weapons would be used “to protect the resistance’s weapons.” Lebanese have learnt to keep calmer for longer since the 15-year tragedy which destroyed them, and they may yet weather this storm. But Lebanon is now closer to civil war that it has been at any time since 1990.

The context to this is that the country has been split down the middle since the departure of Syrian forces. The government is made up of Sunni parties allied with the small Druze minority, and is led by big businessmen and the traditional heads of big families. The opposition houses the Shia community and is more closely linked to working class Lebanon. The Christians are divided, with the old civil war Phalange fascists supporting the government and Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement backing the opposition. The government, which inaccurately calls itself the ‘majority’, does not represent the Shia at all, who are the country’s largest sect. The two sides are unable to agree on a candidate for president, or on the opposition’s demands for a veto-wielding third of cabinet seats. (This seems to be a reasonable demand, given that Lebanon can only be run by compromise and consensus, and that the opposition represents more than a third of the people). If the opposition is backed by Syria and Iran, the government is backed by Saudi Arabia, America, France and, less directly, Israel.

It is almost certain that the latest provocation has been encouraged by an American administration wanting to bring things to a head before it is replaced. There are some people who pray for Hizbullah to kill Sunni civilians, because this would damage the resistance’s standing in the wider Arab and Muslim worlds. Opinion polls show that Hassan Nasrallah and Bashaar al-Assad are the most popular leaders on the overwhelmingly Sunni Arab street. Outside of Lebanon, sectarianism has not coloured people’s judgement, despite the steady stream of sectarian propaganda from the pro-American regimes and Saudi-owned press and screen media. Arabs generally side with anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist forces, which scares and upsets the clients. In Syria, for instance, Hizbullah is wildly popular even with those Sunnis who are religiously prickly about Shia Islam. You often find the portrait of Nasrallah on the walls of Syrian Christian homes.

Of course, Syrians or Egyptians do not have to live in Lebanon. There are many Lebanese who have justified fears of Hizbullah’s state within a state. There are many who ask why Lebanon should endlessly suffer in confrontation with zionism, for the sake of Syria’s Golan, or Palestine, or for pan-Arab or pan-Islamic ideologies that may never be victorious. After all, Israel has now left Lebanese territory except for the Shebaa Farms, and most Lebanese hostages have been released from Israeli cells. Why not disarm the resistance and let the state rule?

But what is this state in which political disagreements always fracture the country along sectarian lines? (It is upsetting to see working class Sunnis acting as street fighters against the resistance on behalf of millionaire capitalists like Hariri and Sinyora – a perfect example of ‘false consciousness’). What is this state in which the president must be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim and the speaker of parliament a Shii Muslim? This state in which the vote of a Shii farmer is worth about half that of a Maronite businessman? The demand that the national army have a monopoly of armed force would be justifiable if the army were not liable to split into sectarian factions at the first sign of serious trouble. Lebanon is a country in which the sects hate each other, and in which all communities have historically served outside powers in order to gain leverage over their neighbours. For the resistance to maintain its excellence it must maintain its internal unity and its impermeability to Israeli spies. It is doubtful that this would be possible in a ‘national’ framework. It is more than doubtful that Israel would leave Lebanon alone if there were not a strong Lebanese resistance to deter aggression and exploitation.

Is it possible for this state – created by the French from the core of Maronite Mount Lebanon, with Orthodox, Shia, Sunni and Druze areas tacked on – to become a nation? I will outrage many patriotic Lebanese by saying that I suspect not. It would have been better if it had never been peeled away from Syria, which is also a patchwork of sects and ethnic groups, but with a more definite Arab centre of gravity. This is not the same as saying that incorporating today’s Lebanon – which has a vibrant and admirable freedom of speech and lifestyle that no other Arab state can match – into the Ba’athist dictatorship is in any way workable. Syria has to change before the two states could learn to make the border matter less.

In the meantime, a serious attempt should be made to prove pessimists like me wrong, to show that Lebanon could become a true nation. Hizbullah has sought to reassure the other sects by not seeking a one-man one-vote system in Lebanon. They have done this both because they fear the inevitable accusations of seeking Shia dominance, and because they benefit from the confessional system to the extent that they are seen by the Shia as the final guarantor of Shia power and pride. But it is time to rock the boat, and work for real representation. Hizbullah’s recent opening of its military ranks to Sunni and Christian reservists shows that the party possesses the imagination required for this next step.

My aunt owns a house in West Beirut that has been repeatedly damaged by war. Here in Oman we have a Lebanese friend who lost tens of members of her family to the Israeli onslaught in 2006. And those are my nearest links to physical danger in Lebanon. Having established that I don’t have to risk my life for my Lebanese opinions, and that I recognise that I might have different politics if my children went to school in Beirut (but I expect not), I must now express the following:

The Arab world has waited 60 years for an organisation that can stand up militarily to Israel, and longer than that for a force that can hold back the West. Hizbullah is a rare historical occurrence. Without Hizbullah, Israel would not have retreated from its decades-long occupation of South Lebanon. Without Hizbullah, Israel would not be considering any kind of withdrawal from the occupied Golan Heights. Without Hizbullah, the Palestinian resistance would be alone. Without Hizbullah, the poor Shia of south Lebanon and the Beirut suburbs would still be deprived of infrastructure and strong political representation. The existence of a strong and strengthening Hizbullah makes possible a much more wide-ranging Arab victory over Zionism in the future. Hizbullah, furthermore, provides a shining example to all Arabs of what ordinary people – as opposed to police states, bureaucratic armies or nihilist terror groups – can do socially, economically and militarily when armed with commitment, humility and intelligence. It would be a tragedy to lose Hizbullah. Do the Lebanese and Arabs of all sects have the maturity to avoid civil strife and to protect the resistance?

The Angry Arab News Service (see in the links at the top of the page) has some good hour-by-hour commentary on events in Lebanon

The Zanj Revolt

2008-05-08T05:31:00.000-07:00

Here’s a text written not by me but by a character in the novel I’m writing (if you see what I mean). It seems to bear some loose parallells to contemporary events:

Working in intolerably humid conditions clearing the salt marshes of southern Mesopotamia, fed on a poor diet of dates and semolina, frequently racially abused, the ‘Zanj’ east African slaves of 9th Century Iraq rose in their hundreds of thousands in a revolt which lasted for 15 years. They conquered large parts of Iraq, Iran and Bahrain, held the city of Basra for a decade, established their own capital, and even minted their own currency.

As labour intensive activities such as mining and plantation agriculture had expanded in the Muslim empires, so the slave trade had developed, especially the commerce in African slaves. Simultaneously, cultural justifications for the enslavement of Africans multiplied, with many classical writers depicting blacks as slow-witted and bestial. One writer who did not rehearse the stereotype was Jahiz of Basra, himself perhaps of African origin, who wrote: “Everybody agrees that there is no people on earth in whom generosity is as universally well developed as the Zanj. These people have a natural talent for dancing to the rhythm of the tambourine, without needing to learn it. There are no better singers anywhere in the world, no people more polished and eloquent, and no people less given to insulting language. No other nation can surpass them in bodily strength and physical toughness. They are courageous, energetic, and generous, which are the virtues of nobility, and also good-tempered and with little propensity to evil. They are always cheerful, smiling, and devoid of malice, which is a sign of noble character.”

The Zanj rebels appealed to Islam, the common frame of reference of all social classes in the Abbasi empire. The Zanj were mindful that Islam had begun as a revolution of the dispossessed. The freed Syrian slave Zayd was the Prophet’s adopted son and military commander. The man the Prophet appointed to call the faithful to prayer, the first muezzin in Islam, was the freed Ethiopian slave Bilal. Although the Qur’an, like the earlier Abrahamic revelations, does not explicitly ban slavery, it repeatedly calls on believers to ‘emancipate slaves and feed orphans,’ and the position of slaves in Islam was theoretically closer to that of well-treated serfs than that of the chattel-slaves of the Americas. Islamic regulations stated clearly that a slave must be provided with food and clothing equal to his master’s. Slaves could marry and own property. The use of violence against a slave was firmly prohibited. As for racial bases for slavery, in his final sermon the Prophet stated that there is no difference between an Arab and a non-Arab or between a red man and a black man except in God-consciousness. The Zanj revolutionaries saw these precepts betrayed by the merchants and land owners who had enslaved and abused them.

The rebellion was led by Ali ibn Muhammad, a man of mixed Persian and Arab origin, perhaps of African blood too. He claimed to be a descendant of Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law, and employed Shii and Khariji ideas and vocabulary. He was credited with magical powers, and spoke in quasi-prophetic terms: “A cloud cast a shadow upon me. Thunder crackled and lightning flashed, and a voice addressed me, saying, ‘Head for Basra.’” He was followed by some of the local workers and peasants and some Beduin as well as by the Zanj.

Guerrilla tactics and ruthless massacre, as well as the sectarian, tribal and class divisions of the Abbasi state, quickly multiplied Zanj victories. Turkic, Slavic, Persian and Arab slaves flocked to the banner of the revolution and to the maroon city of al-Mukhtara, ‘the Chosen’, so that by the end of the rebellion non-Africans outnumbered ethnic Zanj in the revolutionary ranks.

In its final days, the ‘republic of slaves’ had become as divided by sect, class and competing centres of power as its enemies. It should be noted that Ali ibn Muhammad had promised that the liberated slaves would have slaves of their own. With Zanj unity and moral purity destroyed, it was a matter of time until revitalised Abbasi armies put down the revolt. Ali ibn Muhammad’s skewered head was paraded through Baghdad.

The final defeat of the rebellion resulted not in the reintroduction of mass enslavement but in the incorporation of the rebels into central government forces. Slavery persisted, but there would be no further attempts at mass enslavement in the eastern Arab world until a thousand years later, when Omani-controlled Zanzibar sent slave-produced coconuts and spices to European markets.

I commented indirectly on Oman’s history of slavery here:

http://qunfuz.blogspot.com/2007/03/unsustainable-development.html

Flooding the Swamp

2008-04-27T05:45:00.000-07:00

The metaphor most commonly used to describe terrorism and its backdrop is the one of the mosquitoes and the swamp, in which the mosquitoes are the bombers and the swamp is the much wider public which sympathises with and supports the terrorists, and from which the terrorists recruit. The metaphor is entirely accurate. It is not wishy-washy liberalism but cold logic to state that the only feasible method of defeating anti-Western Islamist terror in the medium to long term is to ‘drain the swamp’, by removing the grievances which inflame hundreds of millions of otherwise reasonable and tolerant Muslims against the West.

This does not mean surrendering Western values to an Islamist agenda, as some hysterically claim, but implementing common sense ‘do as you would be done by’ principles. Westerners too would be infuriated by foreign powers which occupied them, or which peppered their land with unwanted military bases, or laid siege to their elected governments, or propped up dictators who abused them.

If the West stopped violently interfering in the Muslim world, the Muslim world would stop violently replying. Certainly, a tiny hardcore of mosquitoes would continue to desire conquest of the infidels, but with their swamp dry, they would soon die off.

Unfortunately, what America and its allies have done since September 2001 is build a water pipeline direct to the swamp and turn the taps on full. They have vastly exacerbated Wahhabi-nihilist terrorism by their invasions, occupations and attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, by the crimes of their Ethiopian and Israeli proxies in Somalia and the Levant, and by proving the insincerity of their ‘democracy’ rhetoric by their siege of the elected Palestinian government as well as their continued support of the Egyptian regime as it rounds up moderate Islamists and liberal democrats.

These policies may or may not lead to geo-strategic victories in resource wars, but they certainly won’t lead to protecting Western civilians from terror attacks. In the long term, that war seems to have been decisively lost. (I think Wahhabi-nihilism may well be in the process of being defeated by Muslims who realise its reactionary nature - but that's another story.)

In the short term, effective police work, domestically and internationally, is both necessary and legitimate. In Britain, we have known since the London bombs that Islamist violence could explode against civilians at any moment. We know that a tiny minority of British Muslims, having drunk a volatile cocktail of Wahhabi-nihilism, alienation and righteous outrage at British foreign policy, may be prepared to do the killing themselves. These people must be watched and, if necessary, tried and imprisoned. Sadly, even domestic policing of Islamist terrorists has been bungled.

Although the vast majority of policemen are completely sincere in their efforts to protect us from bombers, power in the American-allied West has focused on exploiting public fears to destroy basic freedoms. I won’t discuss here the normalisation of torture and the suspension of habeas corpus in the US, or the remarkable ease with which the unconstitutional Patriot Act was passed. In Britain, freedom of speech has been compromised not only by a rising Islamophobia which too quickly categorises dissenting Muslim voices as pro-terrorist, but more specifically by the idiocies connected to the 2000 Terrorism Act.

Under this legislation, Samina Malik, the 23-year-old self-styled ‘lyrical terrorist’ from Southall, was found guilty of “possessing records likely to be used for terrorism.” Ms. Malik ‘admitted’ visiting the website of hook-handed Abu Hamza and, worse, owning a bracelet bearing the word ‘jihad’. More sinister still, she used the back of WH Smith receipts to doodle jihadist rap, such as: “Let us make jihad/ Move to the front line/ To chop chop head of kuffar swine.” It reminds me of some of my old Schooly D discs. But it doesn’t make me fear taking the tube. We need to ask ourselves if the war on terror is best fought by criminalising Southall fly girls, who are only working hard to be sexy-bad. Fortunately, Ms. Malik was given a suspended sentence.

Not so Atif Siddique. This Scotsman downloaded al-Qa’ida linked material from the internet, including Arabic documents he was unable to read, and designed a website which provided links to such material. Siddique clearly sympathised with Wahhabi-nihilism. His politics appear to be stupid and simplistic, and potentially dangerous. Beyond a virtual flirtation with the terrorist fringes, he doesn’t seem to have had the intelligence or education to do anything creative with his justified fury at Western crimes in the Muslim world. He’s the kind of angry young man who should be kept under surveillance in case he or the people he communicates with actually cross the line and begin plotting real terrorist acts. In the event, he wasn’t kept under surveillance but imprisoned for eight years. As he did not plot or carry out a terrorist act, Atif Siddique has in effect been found guilty of thought crime.

It gets worse. Siddique was represented in court by human rights lawyer Aamer Anwar. Anwar has a false set of front teeth because the originals were kicked out by Strathclyde police when he was a student organiser at Glasgow University. While they were doing the kicking, the police apparently told him, “This is what happens to black boys with big mouths.” Anwar was the first person to win a civil action against the police in Scotland over a racist attack.

Following the guilty verdict against Siddique, Anwar addressed the media. His statement appeared to criticise the court as well as the verdict. He said: “The prosecution was driven by the State, with no limit to the money & resources used to secure a conviction in this case, carried out in an atmosphere of hostility after the Glasgow Airport attack and ending on the anniversary of 9/11. In the end Atif Siddique did not receive a fair trial and we will be considering an appeal.” For this robust expression of discontent, Anwar has been charged with contempt of court.

The case against Aamer Anwar will be heard at the High Court in Edinburgh on Tuesday 29 and Wednesday 30 April. If found guilty, he faces imprisonment or a fine. Most importantly, he will no longer be allowed to practise law.

If an uppity, politicised lawyer like Anwar can be struck off, many more timid lawyers will be dissuaded from speaking out on behalf of ‘political’ clients. To many people, it seems that the aim of the Anwar trial is to silence ‘big mouths’, black or otherwise. This not only undermines the values which the government claims to be defending, but is counterproductive in terms of security. Bullying tactics may silence those Muslims described as ‘moderate’, but will also make them feel much more foreign than they already do. As for those Muslims tempted by the rhetoric and angry certainties of Wahhabi-nihilism, it will make their journey to bomb making even shorter and surer.

Cultural Capital

2008-04-23T04:33:00.000-07:00

One for tourists:

Damascus has been designated the UNESCO Arab cultural capital for 2008. This means different things to different people.

President Bashaar al-Assad, pointing to Syria’s role as the last remaining bastion of Arabism and its unashamed solidarity with Palestinian resistance, says “Damascus is the capital of resistance culture.” This interpretation, while unpopular with neighbouring regimes and the powers that dominate the region, is popular with the Syrian people – even if other aspects of the regime aren’t. And some international visitors this year will come primarily for a little resistance chic. This is the capital which welcomes Hugo Chavez and Hassan Nasrallah with equally widespread arms. Noam Chomsky will be giving a talk. Lebanese and pan-Arab diva Fairouz has already been, to the chagrin of some of her compatriots, to croon patriotic and revolutionary songs.

There will also be lectures and poetry recitals, architectural tours of the old city, theatre and ballet performances, art exhibitions, a film festival, and orchestral, jazz and traditional Arabic music concerts.

Damascus certainly deserves cultural capital status more than some cities that have held the title in previous years. After Beirut and Cairo, Damascus has the best bookshops in the Arab world. Syria has always boasted an impressive range of poets and musicians, and produces TV dramas which are of much higher quality than the Egyptian competition. Its taxi drivers can recite classical and contemporary poetry. Its pop singers sing Nizar Qabbani, the most influential and best loved modern Arab poet. Damascus is a city in which your host is likely to serenade you with his lute after dinner. And it is, as the tourism ministry likes to repeat, the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world.

This city of St. Paul and Saladin is today as dust and smoke-cursed as any other in the Middle East (though still cleaner and more manageable than Cairo or Tehran), but undress it of its crust of Stalinist architecture and the ramshackle results of a newly liberalised economy and you find a supple, surprisingly sensuous body beneath.

My two pieces of advice to anyone who visits are to make of it a correspondingly sensuous experience, and to enjoy the cultural variety that has always been here, even without official events, whatever the political mood of the times.

Start with the city’s sacred heart. The green and gold mosaics of the Umawi mosque show the orchards and mansions and streams of the city the Prophet refused to enter, fearing to commit the sin of believing paradise to be on earth. There is ancient Greek script upside down in the walls, and the ruins of the Temple of Jupiter at the entrance. The courtyard is disconcertingly brilliant with liquid shimmering light and the glancing wings of pigeons. The prayer hall houses a shrine which contains the head of John the Baptist. The previous Pope visited it: the only time a Catholic Pope has entered a mosque.

Saladin’s tomb is just north of the mosque compound, and next to it the tomb of the Algerian freedom fighter (against the French) and Sufi poet AbdulQader al-Jazairi. East of the mosque is the Nafora café, where sometimes a traditional storyteller, with much swishing and clattering of his sword, recounts the city’s resistance against the Crusaders. Don’t sit within range.

Sitt Ruqqiyeh, a Shia shrine, is nearby. So is the Street called Straight, and a church for each Christian sect, and the old Jewish quarter. But as you consider your soul, you should remember your stomach also, for Damascene food culture is as rich as the religious history. Syrian-Lebanese cuisine is one of the best in the world, and the Old City is a fine place to explore its many textured pastes, its Asian-Mediterranean perfume, all the things it does with olive oil, pine kernels and pomegranite juice. There are restaurants in elegant town houses, and there are trendy cafés and bars. Here are opportunities to appreciate the famously beautiful Syrian women (or men, if you like) – white, wheatish or brown-skinned, green or black-eyed, blonde or brunette – who show that Damascus had a past almost as multi-ethnic as London’s present. You can just amble through the Hamidiyeh souq for the same effect.

Amble is a good word for Damascus. Amble and stop. Allow someone to befriend you.
Amble again, past twisting bands of black and white stone, the basalt of the south and the marble of the north, through cobbled and vine-trellised alleyways. Allow yourself to be invited into hidden courtyards, with turtles in the pools, and fig and orange trees providing shade. Watch cats in the daytimes and circling bats at night. Fill your nostrils with the paradoxical smell of jasmine – refined but piercing, ethereal but strong.

You could take a taxi to Shaikh Muhiyedeen and find among the tomb-laden streets the mosque and shrine of Ibn ’Arabi, one of Islam’s greatest theosophical poets. If the magic wills you may meet a contemporary mystic, or you might walk up Mount Qasyoon on slopes pressed in with poor unlicensed housing.

In the evening, according to your taste, you could sit in a beer garden, or on someone’s terrace, drinking araq. You could play chess or the game called ‘table’ in a café, or tug on a water pipe and sip glasses of hot sweet tea with visiting Beduin in Merjeh (see the whores sway past) or with Iraqi refugees in Sitt Zainab. Apparently some tourists these days are coming for the proximity to war. The city groans with the weight of war stories, from over the eastern and western borders, but remains safer than any European capital.

The refugees are another reason why Damascus deserves cultural capital status. Syrian Arabism means that until a few months ago (when stricter measures were put in place to limit numbers of arriving Iraqis) the citizens of Arab states could enter the country without visas. As a result, representatives of all the Arab world’s tragedies are here. As well as 1.5 million Iraqis and the long-established Palestinian refugee population there are, for instance, Algerian, Sudanese and Bahraini exiles, all with their own dialects, cookery and ideas.

Sitt Zainab, the shrine of Ali’s daughter, manifests more of the varied cultural wealth of Islam. It is thronged with troubled Shia pilgrims – Iraqis, Iranians and Pakistanis who bring a tragic euphoria, a stormy murmur of prayer and lamentation. The glittering silver and mirror work is hypnotic, and the final effect is one of awe-filled peace.

And like a good cultural tourist you should visit the national museum, which houses the world’s first alphabet as well as beautiful lapis-eyed statues from Mari, four thousand years old, culturally Sumerian but ethnically Semitic. Afterwards sit in the museum garden, as I used to with my wife, drinking Turkish coffee and reading Nizar Qabbani:

I was born in Damascus,
a city I’m sure you don’t know exists,
for you’ve not quenched your thirst at its waters,
or known the frenzy of its love.
Not in a single flower-market
will you find a rose like Damascus,
not in all the jewellers’ windows
a pearl so inimitable

The official website of Damascus as Cultural Capital:
http://www.damascus.org.sy/index.php

Myth-Making

2008-04-17T09:41:00.000-07:00

We often project our current political concerns backwards in time in order to justify ourselves. I say ‘we’ because everyone does it. Nazi Germany invented a mythical blonde Aryan people who had always been kept down by lesser breeds. The Hindu nationalists in India imagine that Hinduism has always been a centralised doctrine rather than a conglomerate of texts and local traditions, and describe Muslim, Buddhist, Christian, Sikh, Jain and animist influences on Indian history as foreign intrusions. Black nationalists in the Americas depict ancient Africa as a continent not of hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers but as a wonderland of kings and queens, gold and silk, science and monumental architecture. To our current cost, zionists and the neo-cons have been able to reactivate old orientalist myths in the West, myths in which the entirety of Arab and Islamic history has involved the slaughter and oppression of Christians, Jews, Hindus, women, gays, intellectuals .. and so on.

Such retrospective mythmaking frequently goes to the most absurd extremes in young nations conscious of their weakness or of a need for redefinition (America may be one of these). Probably for that reason it is particularly evident in the Middle East.

Many Muslims go beyond adherence to those concepts and taboos that are necessary for religious belief and idolise or demonise historical figures who have nothing to do with the divine revelation. For many Sunnis, the first caliphs were ‘rightly guided’ saints who could do no wrong. During their reign there was no crime, poverty or injustice in the realm of Islam. For many Shia, the same men (apart from Ali) were decadent criminals. These secular figures were not deities or prophets but human beings working in specific contexts, with all the good and bad and moral ambiguity that implies, but Muslims frequently hold religious positions on their worth. The same applies even to later worldly figures like Haroon ar-Rasheed (saint or criminal) and Salahuddeen al-Ayubbi (likewise; as well as Kurdish traitor and hero of Arabism).

It should be a matter of pride for the Turks that they are a linguistic, genetic and cultural mixture, but Ataturk invented for his new nation a mythology of ancient Turkish (or Turanian) glory. Because the Sumerian language was, like Turkish (and like many other languages), agglutinative, kemalists held the Sumerians to be ancient proto-Turks. Ataturk even promoted an absurd ‘sun-language theory’ which claimed that Turks had invented language itself. After the cultural vandalism done to the Ottoman language to strip it of foreign influence, contemporary kemalists will not admit the presence of loan words in modern Turkish. But still the Turkish words for ideas as basic as ‘thing’, ‘ok’, ‘famous’, ‘busy’ and ‘hello’ are from Arabic. The Turkish for library is ‘kutuphane’ – a mix of Arabic and Farsi. Ask a rigid kemalist about the Arabs, Persians or Kurds, and he’ll reply “kultur yok! – No culture!” Fortunately kemalism is finally on the retreat in Turkey.

In Iran I heard someone explain that Islam was a barbaric desert religion until it reached the cultured Iranians, who then civilised it. The philosophical, scientific and artistic glories of Islam, even when these flowered in Andalusia, were Persian achievements.

Zionism has created a myth of continuous Jewish bloodlines linking Israelis back to Roman Palestine, although a more scientific approach suggests that today’s Palestinians are at least as closely linked genetically to the ancient Israelites. Much more ignorant than Israelis, of course, are their supporters in the United States, many of whom believe that the state of Israel, rather than being founded by terror and ethnic cleansing in 1948, has been there since Moses crossed the Red Sea. They don’t know the difference between Syria and Assyria, or between Ahmadinejad and Nebuchadnezzar.

And then there’s someone called Amre el-Abyad, and people like him. I’m not publishing his comments on my blog because they are hysterical, racist and even on occasion personally threatening, but I wouldn’t want to deprive my readers of his point of view. So, if you are curious, you can enjoy his ravings here: http://el-abyad.blogspot.com/

On his blog Mr. el-Abyad says that the great Arab people invented writing, irrigation and cities, built the pyramids, and have been fighting to protect civilisation from Persian barbarians for thousands of years. Although he admits that Persians have been around for thousands of years, he says they aren’t part of the region, which is only Arab. Neither are Turks. We must assume that Turkmen, Kurds, Armenians and other non-Arabs are also foreigners in this pure Arab region.

President Nasser’s Arab nationalism considered any speaker of Arabic to be an Arab. Baathists in Syria and Iraq extended the definition through time to include past speakers of extinct Semitic languages – such as Aramaic, Hebrew, Phoenician and Babylonian – which are related to Arabic. There is no reason why Arabs should not take pride in the history of the peoples who lived in this area before us, and whose culture the Arabs have in some way or other inherited. But we need to keep this pride in perspective. Scientific definitions of peoples are linguistic, not racial, as there is no way to keep tabs on who breeds with who. Today’s Arabs are a mixture of Semitic, Indo-European, Turkic, Mongol and African genes. (So, for that matter, are today’s Iranians). The Sumerians were probably racially very similar to the people who live in southern Iraq today, but their language was not Semitic. It was the Sumerians who invented writing and cities – so you need to stretch reality further than it will comfortably go to say that writing was invented by the Arabs. As for fighting off the barbarians – the first barbarians the Sumerians had to deal with were Semitic barbarians invading the fertile river plains from the desert. These barbarians later became supremely civilised Akkadians. Some centuries later, the Semites of Mesopotamia were fighting off Amorites – more Semitic barbarians from the desert. What is now Iran was also the scene of constant barbarian invasion. The people of present-day Iraq invaded Iran, and the people of Iran invaded Iraq. Sometimes the Iraqis were more civilised than the Iranians, and sometimes it was the other way round. The first documented use of the term ‘Arab’ is in an Assyrian text of the 9th century BC, thousands of years after civilisation rose in Mesopotamia. In this context, a narrative of glorious Arabs in a millenial struggle to hold off Persian barbarians is clearly absurd.

The idea that Arabs built the pyramids is as bad. Ancient Egyptians were not even Semites. The ancient Egyptian language was a member of the Nilo-Saharan family, not the Semitic family (modern Ethiopians who speak Amharic, however, are the speakers of a Semitic language, although they don’t speak Arabic, and so are not considered part of the Arab world). Although Egyptians have often intermarried with Semites, especially since the arrival of Islam, there is still an obvious racial difference between them and their eastern neighbours.

It is good to be proud of the peoples who came before us, and legitimate to use their achievements to remind ourselves that Arabs are not programmed to be weak and subservient. But it is illogical to suppose that Arabs are the only inheritors of these ancient cultures. Agriculture started in the Middle East (maybe not something to be proud of), and ancient Middle Eastern genes spread into Europe and Russia as the first agriculturalists colonised outwards. Culturally, most of the world has inherited irrigation, the alphabet, the gods of the Orontes and the Nile, the stories of Noah and Job.

This isn’t an attack on Arabism or the Arab identity. I am a big supporter of an intelligent Arabism which recognises and celebrates the diversity of the Arab peoples, from Morocco to Oman, as well as their commonalities. I wish there were far more unity of purpose and cooperation between Arabs. This is an attack on intolerant Arabist mythmaking which, like its Turkish variant, is fortunately on the decline. People like Mr. el-Abyad are a very small but noisy minority, given more volume by the current tragedy in Iraq. In Syria the nationalist myths were never aggressively intolerant anyway, unlike in Saddam Hussain’s Iraq. But I ask the surviving dreamers: where has extreme mythical nationalism got anybody? Do you really think it will help to solve our region’s problems? It is possible to hold strong political positions and to desire true independence without being stupidly simplistic. It is possible to be proud of your people without being a fascist.

I previously wrote about Arabism here:
http://qunfuz.blogspot.com/2007/09/end-of-arabs-part-two.html