(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.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Friday, January 16, 2009
Israel Must Lose
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.
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.
Thursday, January 08, 2009
Against 'Peace' and 'Moderation'
(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
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
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
Misha'al (and Clegg)
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.
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.
Saturday, January 03, 2009
Dear Prime Minister
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
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
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Action
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
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
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Besieged
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/
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/
Monday, December 15, 2008
Shoes and Bullets
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
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
Saturday, November 22, 2008
At The Empire’s Edge
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.
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.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
At All Costs
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.
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.
Saturday, November 08, 2008
Hair for the Observer
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
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
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