Middle East Research and Information Project: Critical Coverage of the Middle East Since 1971
Samir Hleileh, an economist who teaches at Birzeit University, is deputy director of the Palestinian Technical Committees and a liaison with the World Bank and other international agencies. Joe Stork spoke with him in late October 1993.
The Oslo agreement builds in an Israeli economic component to a surprising degree.
Azmi Bishara, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, teaches at Birzeit University. Joe Stork spoke with him in Jerusalem in late October 1993.
How do you assess the present situation?
For or against the agreement is no longer relevant. But I don’t think there’s anything to celebrate.
So you don’t think it’s any kind of a breakthrough?
Publication of this issue offers the opportunity, and the obligation, to thank the hundreds of readers who responded to the appeal we sent out in October. We said that we needed to raise $20,000 in order to bring together here a range of Palestinian opinion and analysis about the Oslo accord and its implications. We did, thanks to you, raise more than $19,000. And more than half of those who contributed were doing so for the first time. MERIP’s financial difficulties are far from over. But it would be hard to exaggerate how important your response has been to our work, not only in terms of being able to pay printers and the post office, but also in terms of morale. You gave us a terrific new year’s present.
Berch Berberoğlu, The Political Economy of Development: Theory and the Prospects for Change in the Third World (SUNY, 1992).
Timothy Morris, The Despairing Developer: Diary of an Aid Worker in the Middle East (I. B. Tauris, 1991).
“Development” is a quintessentially American concept, smacking of the optimistic faith in change and material progress that characterized US culture from the period of expansion across the continent in the nineteenth century to the expansion around the globe in the twentieth.
When a group of Islamist lawyers filed a suit this summer to divorce a Cairo professor from his wife, against the couple’s wishes and without their knowledge, on the grounds that he was an apostate, the story got attention even in the Western media. But little attention was given to the intellectual work of Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, associate professor in the Arabic Language and Literature Department at Cairo University, which prompted this incredible move.
The US decision to intervene in Somalia in December 1992 came well after the two-year-old crisis had finally hit the headlines. The power vacuum that followed the flight of Siad Barre from Mogadishu in January 1991, and the subsequent civil war in the capital, particularly the fighting between November 1991 and March 1992, attracted little attention despite the country’s collapse into anarchy. [1]
Ahmad and Fatima Abdallah (not their real names) are an Arab professional couple who worked in Saudi Arabia for four years in the 1980s. They discussed their impressions with a Middle East Report editor in September 1993.
Coming from elsewhere in the Arab world, what were your first impressions of Saudi Arabia?
Just within the walls of the old city of Sanaa, southeast of Bab al-Sha‘ub, a large tent has been erected in an open square. People are milling about — mostly children, but also men and women. The candidate is talking to a group of people as one of her opponents drives by in a black Mercedes. The candidate, Ra’ufa Hasan al-Sharqi, has her own white Volvo parked discreetly some distance away.
The neighborhood is a poor one with the walls of all the houses covered with posters for several candidates — but not for al-Sharqi. The independent candidate explains that displaying her posters on residential houses is forbidden, and how could she claim the right to make laws as a deputy if she had broken the law in order to become one.
Candidate registration for Yemen’s first-ever multi-party elections opened on March 29 in a climate of lively polemics against the president’s party, the General People’s Congress (GPC). The GPC’s permanent committee had approved its electoral program on March 27. That same evening it appropriated an hour of television and radio time to present its proposals, shoving aside the law which stipulated that access to the official media was subject to the provisions of the Supreme Elections Committee (SEC) in the framework of equality between the parties. The head of the SEC’s information subcommittee immediately distributed a letter condemning this violation and threatened to resign. The GPC subsequently felt compelled to play by the rules.
Article 19. “Dismantling Civil Society: Suppression of Freedom of Association in Sudan,” Censorship News 27 (August 1993).
Bennis, Phyllis and Michel Moushabeck, eds. Altered States: A Reader in the New World Order (New York: Olive Branch Press, 1993).
Burgat, François and William Dowell. The Islamic Movement in North Africa (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1993).
Campbell, David. Politics Without Principle: Sovereignty, Ethics and the Narratives of the Gulf War (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1993).
"The Closure of the Gaza Strip and West Bank: An Update," Kav La’Oved: Workers' Hotline Newsletter (Tel Aviv, Summer 1993).
Alcalay, Ammiel. After Jews and Arabs (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992).
B’tselem. The Closure of the West Bank and Gaza Strip: Human Rights Violations Against Residents of the Occupied Territories (Jerusalem, 1993).
Connell, Dan. Against All Odds: A Chronicle of the Eritrean Revolution (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Books, 1993).
Hodgson, Marshall. Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam and World History (Cambridge: Cambrdige University Press, 1993).
Hurwitz, Deena, Asher Brauner and Jonathan Boyarin, eds. The Eastern Aspect: Other News from Israel (Santa Cruz, CA: Resource Center for Nonviolence, 1993).
Bent Hansen, Egypt and Turkey: The Political Economy of Poverty, Equity and Growth (World Bank, 1991).
Heba Handoussa and Gilliam Potter, eds. Employment and Structural Adjustment: Egypt in the 1990s (AUC, 1991).
Mustafa Kamil al-Sayyid, “Privatization: The Egyptian Debate,” Cairo Papers in Social Science 13/4 (Winter 1990).
On the last day of May 1993, some 200 Libyan pilgrims alighted from buses that had just crossed from Egypt into the Israeli-occupied Gaza. Strip on the way to Jerusalem. None of the rhetoric in the statement the pilgrims issued at the end of their stay, duly broadcast by the Libyan “Voice of the Great Arab Homeland,” could alter the fact that the visit constituted a de facto Libyan recognition of the state of Israel, and an implicit message to the region and the world that the regime of Muammar Qaddafi no longer threatened to disrupt any eventual political settlement between Israel and its Arab neighbors. [1]
