Managing News
In the Logic textbook that my students use there is a chapter entitled “Managing The News.” Henceforth your lead article “Power Structure of the American Media” (January-February 1993) will become obligatory reading. The guided tour by Joe Stork and Laura Flanders behind the media curtain is as shocking as it is educational. Thank you for the awakening; it was ruder than I anticipated.
Joseph A. Grispino
Orange, CA
Iraqi Nukes
Middle East Report is indispensable. I look forward to every issue for information not to be obtained generally. MER 180 is especially important with its focus on power and the media.
Robert I. Friedman, Zealots for Zion (Random House, 1992).
Palestinians and Israeli leftists shared high hopes at the time of Yitzhak Rabin’s inauguration, but optimism quickly began to fade. Robert Friedman’s new book, published shortly after Rabin took office, participates in that early, post-Likud expectancy. Zealots for Zion examines the settler movement in Israel from its inception after the 1967 war through the fall of the Shamir government. This discussion is bracketed, in opening and closing chapters, by the author’s anticipation of a change in settlement policy under Rabin.
“The rule of repression will fail. The tsars did not succeed in repressing the Russian people’s aspiration for freedom by exiling thousands of its fighting sons to Siberia; the Nazis did not succeed in breaking the enslaved peoples’ spirit of resistance by exiling and destroying the best of their youth. Tyranny based on brute force, however massive, cannot stand before the moral force of a historic freedom movement. The tyrannical rulers of the country will not break the spirit of the owners of this land who are rising up…. The masses…from all political camps and communities must rally to the struggle against this barbarism.”
Gazans stand in the wreckage of their home, destroyed by Israeli anti-tank missiles and dynamite. Some 20 families in the al-Amal quarter of Khan Yunis were made homeless on February 11 when more than 200 Israeli soldiers and border police carried out a 13-hour military assault in search of “terrorists.”
The troops ordered the families to evacuate their homes before dawn. The Palestinian men between ages 15 and 50 were herded into a nearby garage, bound and blindfolded. Troops fired anti-tank rockets and heavy shells into the houses, and then set dynamite charges inside the wreckage.
Sabreen is considered the premier Palestinian musical group performing today. Influenced by Western rock and jazz, their distinctive style blends traditional Arab rhythms and instruments with subtly political lyrics reflecting the current active resistance to Israeli occupation. Two members of Sabreen, lead singer Camelia Jubran and founder and composer Sa‘id Murad, spoke to Kamal Boullata and Joost Hiltermann in Washington. Translated by Dina Jadallah.
Tell us about the history of Sabreen.
Editor’s Note: In preparing this special issue, we asked a number of Jerusalem residents to share their thoughts about the significance of the city to them and about ways of thinking about Jerusalem’s future.
Azmi Bishara
Azmi Bishara teaches philosophy at Birzeit University in the West Bank.
On Saturday night, June 10, 1967, Israeli authorities informed more than 100 families living in the Moroccan Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City that they had three hours to evacuate their homes, where some had lived for generations. As Teddy Kollek, mayor of the western half of the city since 1965, recalled in his 1978 autobiography:
Suad Amiry is coordinator of the Palestinian team for the Jerusalem program at the Smithsonian Institution’s 1993 Folklife Festival in Washington. An architect, Amiry is also a member of the Palestinian delegation to the peace talks with Israel. As Middle East Report was going to press, the Jerusalem program was postponed. The interview begins with Amiry’s explanation of the postponement. She discussed the Festival with Penny Johnson, a contributing editor of this magazine, in Ramallah in April 1993.
Why was the Jerusalem Festival postponed?
Being served a soda or some fresh nuts by an unassuming man in the small, crowded kiosk across from Jerusalem’s central bus station, it would be hard to know that you were in the presence of one of the most powerful and original Hebrew poetic voices alive.
The story of this poet, Yehezkel Kedmi, is just as unlikely, and presents the true anguish of those parts of Jerusalem so often swept under the rug. Living by his wits on the streets since the age of 13, and still homeless, Kedmi depicts the struggle and suffering that shaped a generation of Jews from the Arab world. Through a dramatic, almost epic structure, Kedmi’s language parallels that of the prophets and the great classical medieval Hebrew poets of Andalusia.
Jamila Freij (Umm Sam‘an) was born in 1930 in “new” Jerusalem, what is now called West Jerusalem. Her family had lived in Jerusalem’s Old City for 15 generations until 1925 when her father and his brother built houses in Bak‘a (which means “beautiful area”), then an unpopulated land outside the Old City walls. The family fled their homes just days before the establishment of the state of Israel. They never returned. Umm Sam‘an describes their life in Bak‘a, their flight in 1948 and return to the Christian Quarter of the Old City, and the family&rsuqo;s disintegration.
It is possible to talk of Jerusalem in many ways: as a city where history lives, as a city where history lives, as a city holy to Christians, Jews and Muslims, as a place where people live and work, as a place of pilgrimage. This primer talks of Jerusalem the modern city, the city claimed by both Palestinians and Israelis as their national symbol, Jerusalem the united, Jerusalem the divided. It tells how a thriving Arab city with expanding Jewish-Arab suburbs was transformed into a large Jewish Israeli city in which the Arab residents are not citizens. Finally, it stresses the urgent need for Israelis and Palestinians to negotiate Jerusalem’s future.
We have long wanted to produce an issue dedicated to the proposition that Jerusalem’s political future must be firmly inscribed on the agenda of any Palestinian-Israeli peace talks that presume to be credible. We hope this issue can contribute to a more widespread appreciation among advocates of a negotiated resolution of the conflict that Jerusalem’s importance is not only symbolic or religious but has to do with basic material realities.
Anthro-Power
Helen Winternitz, A Season of Stones: Living in a Palestinian Village (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991).
Gloria Emerson, A Year in the Intifada: A Personal Account from an Occupied Land (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991).
Nader Entessar, Kurdish Ethnonationalism (Lynne Rienner, 1992).
Philip Kreyenbroek and Stefan Sperl, eds., The Kurds: A Contemporary Overview (Routledge, 1992).
Sheri Laizer, Into Kurdistan: Frontiers Under Fire (Zed, 1991).
Martin van Bruinessen, Agha, Shaikh and State: The Social and Political Structures of Kurdistan (Zed, 1992).
