After prolonged negotiations, the Egyptian government has drafted a law to diminish dramatically the state’s role in labor affairs. Expected to go before Parliament this spring, it gives both private employers and public-sector managers far greater leeway to hire and fire, and to set wages and benefits for future employees. In an explicit quid pro quo for the “right to fire,” the law also legalizes strikes, which have been banned since 1952. It signifies the government’s formal withdrawal from the Nasserist “moral economy,” in which Egyptians came to expect the state to guarantee job security and a living wage in exchange for their contribution to national production.
From the outside, they give a friendly impression, the villages around the small Egyptian city of Mallawi, four hours by train south of Cairo. The Nile waters flow serenely to the north. Only the chatter of the colorfully dressed women doing their laundry together on the riverbank breaks the silence of the countryside. On the unpaved village streets enormous water buffaloes and scrawny cows spend the day, only occasionally frightened off by one of the service taxis.
Discussions of the Israeli-occupied territories generally treat the Golan Heights in terms of strategic significance and water resources, seldom in terms of the 16,500 Syrians living under Israeli rule today. [1] While in some ways their experiences are comparable to those of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, in other ways the Golan occupation illustrates a unique formulation of Israel’s neocolonial ambitions in the region.
I was afraid. Why should I be? But once I stood in front of the young women in the white and blue-striped shirt I was reduced to shivering with a tongue as dry as the Negev. She asked me insistently, “Why are you here?” I had earlier thought of two or three convincing answers, but suddenly I could not decide on any of them and I stood there looking at her with empty eyes, trying to control my sweating hand.
For many Palestinians, the political success or failure of the Palestinian Authority (PA) hinges on its ability to bring rapid economic improvement to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where peoples’ livelihoods have been seriously eroded by the Israeli occupation, the intifada and the repercussions of the Gulf war. Some improvements in basic living standards after 30 years of occupation might stave off political opposition to the agreements sufficiently so as to give them a chance of working.
Usama Halabi, a lawyer, works with the East Jerusalem Quaker Legal Aid Program and is the author of The Druze in Israel: From Sect to Nation (Jerusalem: Golan Academic Association, 1989) [Arabic]. Barbara Harlow interviewed him in Jerusalem in December 1994.
In November, the Israeli military court in Jenin issued a death sentence for a Hamas leader, the first time such a sentence has been issued by a military court in the Occupied Territories. Does this signal a change in policy?
The Declaration of Principles (DOP), signed between Israel and the PLO on September 13, 1993, provided the “agreed framework for the interim period.” [1] This was to be based on the establishment, through elections, of a Palestinian interim self-governing authority for a transitional period not exceeding five years. The jurisdiction of the council was to cover the West Bank and Gaza Strip with the notable exception of Israeli settlements.
The story of the January 1995 strike in a private health clinic in Gaza City was published in only one paper, al-Watan, a new weekly affiliated with Hamas. Neither al-Quds nor al-Nahar, dailies in tune with the Palestinian Authority (PA), reported on the first workers’ strike under Palestinian self-rule.
Not so long ago, to visit the Erez checkpoint on Gaza’s “border” crossing with Israel was to witness a modem slave market. Tens of thousands of Palestinian workers would wake up at 3 am and gather at Erez for the privilege of working in their occupier’s economy, predominantly in construction and agriculture, undertaking the “dirty work” that Jewish workers would not do, for a wage on average a third less than their Jewish peers. At least 30 percent of Gaza’s GNP derived from wages earned in Israel.
Mahmoud Darwish, a well-known Palestinian poet, resigned from the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1993. His most recent book in English is Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 (California, 1995). The following excerpts are from an interview with Mona Naim in Le Monde, March 12-13, 1995.
You have been opposed to the Declaration of Principles, but you have not joined any active opposition to the accord. Why?
Despite Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s August 1992 assurance of a “settlement freeze” in the Occupied Territories, and despite the Declaration of Principles of September 1993, settler population expansion and Israeli land confiscation has continued.
Without quite the same resonance as “new world order” or “end of history,” another set of terms has rapidly become part of the international political discourse: “transition,” “democratization,” “reconstruction” and “building civil society.” Aside from their purely rhetorical uses, these terms describe real and complex political changes following collapses throughout the world of a variety of authoritarian regimes and their replacement by more democratic governments.
We have always been uncomfortable using the phrase “peace process” to refer to the actual dynamic of Palestinian-Israeli relations. The phrase in fact appropriates “peace” to refer exclusively to terms of American-Israeli imposition, and to exclude as “enemies of peace” those who insist that these terms are a recipe for continued conflict.
Afrasiabi, K. L. After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran’s Foreign Policy (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994).
African Rights. Humanitarianism Unbound? Current Dilemmas Facing Multi-Mandate Relief Operations in Political Emergencies (London, 1994).
Boutwell, Jeffrey et al, eds. Lethal Commerce: The Global Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons (Cambridge, MA: Committee on International Security Studies, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1995).
Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine. Palestinian Refugees: Their Problem and Future (Washington, DC, 1994).
Lila Abu-Lughod, Writing Women’s Worlds (California, 1992).
Edmund Burke III, ed., Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East (California, 1993).
“Globalization” is currently fashionable among privileged quarters of American society. It stands as the umbrella term for contemporary trends in culture, production, finance, marketing, technology, consumption, ideas, values and institutions that are variously celebrated, denounced, dissected and deconstructed.
Ghanem Bibi is co-founder and coordinator of the Arab Resource Collective based in Nicosia. ARC generates Arabic-language resources for use in community health and childhood development projects, and serves as a networking resource for Arab NGOs. Julie Peteet spoke with him in August 1994, shortly after an Arab NGO preparatory meeting in Lebanon for the March 1995 UN Social Summit in Copenhagen. Joe Stork spoke with him further in early November 1994.
What was the range of organizations attending the regional preparatory meeting?
