Perhaps the saddest commentary on the situation in Iran is Amnesty International’s recent statement that “some former prisoners of conscience held during the 1970s when the late Shah was in power, for whose unconditional release [Amnesty] then worked, now figure among those with responsibility for the incarceration of prisoners of conscience and for other human rights violations in Iran. Others who were imprisoned in the 1970s for the non-violent expression of their conscientiously held beliefs are once more in prison, and many have been executed.”
These days the mainstream media in the US generally thinks twice before publishing crude slurs against entire ethnic or racial groups. But there remain those whom it is still apparently respectable to denigrate, foremost among them Arabs and Iranians.
My friend Jacques got as far as a screenplay when he died. He was Palestinian (Armenian) from Jerusalem, a photographer by trade, and after his family moved from occupation to Australia, Jacques made his way to the States on a tourist visa. Settling in New York, he found work in a series of custom photo labs where employers were more than willing to overlook his illegal alien status if he was willing to take the midnight shift. At the last job, there was a vague promise that something could be done to get him a green card; in the meantime, he lived his inverted life on the margins of the margins.
All revolutions require aesthetic means for representing changes in consciousness. The French Revolution saw itself as something new and universal, and generated a rich elaboration of aesthetic categories of the sublime (storms of nature, volcanoes, earthquakes), the beautiful (island of calm, meadow after a storm) and the grotesque (metamorphoses) as vehicles for thinking about social change and the future. Most revolutions since then have seen themselves in relation to predecessor revolutions, from which they borrow tactics, organizational forms, strategies, rhetoric, symbols and graphics.
During the summer of 1986,1 spent a month in the West Bank, keen to learn for myself about the effects of Israeli restrictions on Palestinian forms of expression, particularly in the visual arts and local crafts. A quick look at different cultural products indicated that traditional aesthetic values have for some time been rapidly eroding. Alternative aesthetic values were more often than not crudely colored by the reactive rhetoric intrinsic to the cultural ghetto created by the occupation. I set out to explore for myself the process that brings into being products which stir a sense of pride among Palestinians living under occupation, and to understand the components that endow these cultural products with their uniquely Palestinian character.
Hey Jeep, Hey Jeep
Sami Shalom Chetrit
1. Eight kids in an army jeep
Eight soldiers, one major:
eight kids and one minor
2. Hey Jeep, Hey Jeep [1]
3. And his son Ishmael was thirteen years old
at the cutting of his uncircumcised flesh.
4. And eight of his sons in the army jeep
and his son cries to the Lord but no one hears
5. And behold his father running:
Run, Muhammad, run,
your son’s spirit is coming towards you
6. Lord, Lord, where is the lamb for a burnt offering?
Ironically, the latest junkets featuring liberal Israelis and recently domesticated Palestinians threaten to finally collapse the intricate history of Jews and Arabs in the Middle East into two streamlined, easily recognizable blocs: enlightened, idealistic and well-intentioned Zionists (“wounded spirits” as the title of a symposium on Israeli culture in New York had it); and articulate, mild-mannered, well-dressed Palestinians ready to interpret the desires of their less articulate, less well-dressed, stone-wielding and still somehow overly Arab constituents in the occupied territories.
Fatna held up the knot of hair. It was a magic spell. “But what does it mean?” I asked, looking suspiciously at the neatly-tied brown square knot. “And whose hair is it?”
“Why do you think Khadija has been coming over every day? She wants me to marry her brother Muhammad. This is probably her mother’s hair. The mother’s hair is the most powerful.”
“You mean it's to make you fall in love with him?”
“Or to keep me from falling in love with anyone else.” Fatna took back the hair-knot and disappeared into the john, emerging a few minutes later smiling mysteriously. “I pissed on it," she told me.
Discotheques and taxicabs all over Egypt last January were playing the songs of a new pop star. No one knew exactly where “the Earthquake of ’88” (his biographer’s term) had come from, but everyone seemed to think Ali Hemida was a Bedouin. Some said he came from Sinai; others said Libya. His music was unusual, his dialect not Egyptian, and his lyrics ("wearing silk, she’s like a gazelle, henna-painted hands") evoked the life of desert Arabs.
Salman Rushdie’s story of Ismail Najmuddin — the former Bombay lunch-runner turned movie star, screen name Gibreel Farishta, the Muslim who played Hindu gods in numerous “theologicals,” migrant to London, victim of the bombing of flight AI-420, the man who fell from the sky and lived, only to dream of himself as Gibreel the revealing angel and sign over his dream-narratives to a movie mogul — is a tale whose Rabelaisian irreverence towards all fixed authorities, identities and truths offers an appropriate introduction to the question of contemporary popular culture in the Middle East.
The events of the past year demonstrate the great need for independent critical reporting and analysis of the Middle East and US policy there — reporting and analysis that only Middle East Report provides.
The key word is independent. This is what allows Middle East Report to be critical, to speak the truth about Israel’s ferocious effort to crush the Palestinian uprising and at the same time call attention to state violations of human rights in Syria, Jordan, Iran and elsewhere. We can speak frankly about the dilemmas that confront groups like the PLO. And we have no government contracts or corporate advertising which might constrict our scrutiny of US intervention in the region.
I. All states in the region, including a Palestinian state, have the right to independence and security.
US / Israel / PLO / Arab States / USSR / EEC States (bold = support; plain text = opposition)
Eqbal Ahmad
The declaration of the state of Palestine just five days earlier, nearly a year of the intifada, and a paralyzed but uncompromising Israeli politics are the immediate background of the full page El Al advertisement on page 57 of the Sunday New York Times on November 20, 1988. The ad has a rather peculiar content and form, especially given its likely audience — metropolitan New York and surrounds, educated readers across the country, others with a half-Sunday to waste, and the largest Jewish population in the world — people as unlikely as any in the world to have large numbers of children.
James A. Baker III
Secretary of State
In the early 1960s, before the major US escalation of the war in Vietnam, a negotiated settlement to that conflict was in reach. Such a settlement was supported by the leaders of the Soviet Union, China, France, Cambodia and North Vietnam, and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam. The United Nations, through then-Secretary General U Thant, put great effort into setting up negotiations. The essential precondition of such a settlement was recognition of the South Vietnamese people’s right to self-determination, a precondition the United States would not abide. In February 1965, an embittered and frustrated U Thant was moved to comment that
I was describing Tikkun magazine’s “National Conference of Liberal and Progressive Jewish Intellectuals” to a steady political and intellectual comrade of the past 30 years, who is not Jewish. “What would you think,” this friend responded, “about a ’national conference of liberal and progressive gentile intellectuals?’”
The nineteenth session of the Palestine National Council, formally entitled the “intifada meeting,” was momentous and, in many great and small ways, unprecedented. There were fewer hangers-on, groupies and “observers” than ever before. Security was tighter and more unpleasant than during the 1987 PNC session, also held in Algiers; Algeria had just brutally suppressed its own intifada, so the presence of several hundred Palestinians and at least 1,200 members of the press was not especially welcomed by the Ben Jadid government, which paradoxically needed the event to restore some of its tarnished revolutionary luster.
Too Tolerant
In 1970 Cambridge University Press defined the state of Orientalism by publishing The Cambridge History of Islam — a conceptually barren and supremely boring tome whose main claim to distinction may be that Edward W. Said devoted several pages of Orientalism to excoriating it as “an intellectual failure.” It is a measure of the intellectual and political progress in Middle East studies over the last two decades that Albert Hourani, a perceptive critic of The Cambridge History of Islam, was chosen as advisory editor, with Trevor Mostyn as executive editor, for a new Cambridge reference work, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Middle East and North Africa.
