Saturday night I decided to go to a campaign meeting of the Moledet Party in Kfar Shalem, a rough neighborhood in the south of Tel Aviv. In the past, houses there were periodically served with demolition orders by the Tel Aviv municipality; in 1982 one inhabitant pulled a gun on demolition crews who had come to tear down an illegally-built extension to his house. Some people consider the violence of the state in Kfar Shalem as a form of racism against Oriental Jews. The slogan “Askhe-Nazis!” with a swastika beside it appeared on the walls of mainly Ashkenazi (Jews of European origin) neighborhoods of north Tel Aviv, as well as on memorials of the 1948 War of Independence.
The November 1988 Israeli election confirmed a pattern set in 1981 and 1984: the vote was nearly equal between the two large bourgeois parties, the Likud and the Alignment (Labor), and both these parties lost strength to their left and right.
One of the most intriguing questions after a year of the intifada is the paucity of Israeli opposition to the government’s “iron fist” policy. True, dozens of small groups demonstrate against the occupation, the atrocities, the deportations, the mass arrests. There have been many calls for “better Israeli-Palestinian relations,” for “two states for two peoples.” But the cumulative impact of this activity has not been a major force in Israeli society and politics — nothing like the opposition that developed against the war in Lebanon.
The Palestinian uprising has stripped away Israel’s externally oriented masks (propaganda) and its internally oriented masks (defense mechanisms), as political rationality has steadily retreated before the state’s frantic response. Israel’s confrontation with the colonial reality of the occupied territories has led to political polarization which is not contained within existing party boundaries. It has penetrated all the parties and raised real questions which Israeli society must deal with. As the uprising continues, the cleavage in Israeli society becomes deeper over two basic issues: negotiations with the PLO and recognition of the Palestinian right to self-determination, including the establishment of a state.
Dan Almagor personifies Israeli popular culture of the post-1948 period. He is the master lyricist of the modern Hebrew song, with over 600 compositions and 300 translations to his credit. His songs have been performed on many official and semi-official occasions, and he has composed for the Israel Defense Forces troupe and regularly placed his versatile talents at the service of the state and the Zionist movement. Dozens of Almagor’s plays and satirical and musical revues have been performed in Israeli theaters and cabarets, and even on Broadway. His musical about Hasidic life, Ish Hasid Haya, broke all Israeli records for a dramatic performance and was seen by a third of the country.
For well over a year now, the Israeli state has confronted the Palestinian uprising with what Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin calls “the iron fist.” The army’s goal is to restore order, Deputy Chief-of-Staff Ehud Barak said recently, “so that the Israeli government can pursue political initiatives from a position of strength on its own schedule.” In the first month of Year Two, the army’s schedule included, by its own count, 2790 “violent incidents” — an average of precisely 90 each day. At least 26 Palestinians were killed, many with the “non-lethal” plastic and rubber bullets that Israeli troops now routinely employ.
Reopen Palestinian Universities
In my capacity as President of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), I am forwarding to you the following resolution adopted during our recent annual meeting. For your information, MESA is a professional association of Middle East scholars, now numbering nearly 2,000 members. MESA does not take political positions. Because of the scholarly interests of its members, however, it has an obvious concern with issues of academic freedom.
Between 1975 and 1978 a group of scholars in England published three annual issues of the Review of Middle East Studies. This political and intellectual project sought to articulate a radical critique of the dominant paradigms in Middle East studies. ROMES unmasked the relations among modernization theory, Orientalist representation and imperial politics, and placed the search for alternatives on the agenda. The example of ROMES inspired the formation of the Alternative Middle East Studies Seminar on this side of the Atlantic, and its production complemented in many respects the work of MERIP.
Wm. Roger Louis, The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945-1951: Arab Nationalism, The United States and Post-War Imperialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
This rich and highly informative book charts the history of the post-war British Labor government’s policies in the Middle East. It is immensely detailed, but so very well written that the reader will easily follow the main tenor of the author’s arguments. Louis, a well-known and prolific historian of the last years of the British Empire, achieves much of his effect by a judicious mixture of quotation (mostly from British and American diplomatic archives) and comment.
Karen Pfeifer, Agrarian Reform Under State Capitalism in Algeria (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985).
The analysis of contemporary Algerian politics is a matter of considerable controversy. [1] Karen Pfeifer’s excellent study will certainly not put an end to argument; indeed it contributes to the debate. She provides useful and hitherto not accessible empirical evidence concerning agrarian change in Algeria during the 1970s in constructing a more general analysis of the dynamics of “state capitalism.”
Ellis Goldberg, Tinker, Tailor and Textile Worker: Class and Politics in Egypt, 1930-1952 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986).
The critique of modernization theory that began in the late 1960s had an especially significant impact on a new generation of Western scholars who rejected the prevailing academic focus on political elites to the exclusion of other political forces. Not only were elites largely studied in isolation from the masses they dominated, but the masses themselves were not attributed any role in the political process. Today, this younger generation of scholars, working in the political economy paradigm, is beginning to publish the results of its research on the role of the masses in politics.
When King Hussein announced last July that Jordan was severing its political ties with the West Bank, he implicitly acknowledged that his strategy of 20 years, to broaden and deepen his political base there, had been overtaken by the Palestinian uprising. The Palestinian revolt has asserted an independent political identity with such clarity and force as to make it impossible for Jordan to continue to claim to represent the Occupied Territories politically.
The communiqués issued by the Unified National Leadership did not conceal the accumulating enmity towards the regime. They apparently had a personal effect on the king himself, who was deeply disappointed by the “hostile” attitude they expressed.
Passing the Test On October 13, 1988, the Nobel Prize committee in Stockholm announced that the 1988 prize in literature had been awarded to Egyptian novelist and playwright Naguib Mahfouz — the first time an Arab writer had received this honor. In its front-page story on the award, the New York Times hastened to reassure its readers that all was well, because Mahfouz was a “good Arab” — that is, not overly critical of Israel or of US Middle East policy.
A largely ignored byproduct of the Iranian revolution and the Gulf war has been the large influx of refugees into Turkey. The economic benefits of Turkish neutrality during the Gulf war led Ankara to downplay the problem, but the recent arrival of Kurdish refugees has strained regional ties and clouded Turkish hopes for lucrative post-war reconstruction deals. The large Iranian refugee population of a million or more is also causing worries, as struggles among Iranian political groups spill over into Turkey.
By the beginning of the first week of October 1988, as the Palestinian uprising moved into its eleventh month, the Islamic Resistance Movement (Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, known by its Arabic acronym Hamas) had issued its thirtieth communiqué. Hamas appears to be engaged in a competitive race with the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising for direction of the daily struggle of the people of the Occupied Territories. Yet despite the fact that Hamas is six communiqués ahead of the Unified Leadership, it is another matter altogether whether it can command the kind of legitimacy and influence required to direct the Palestinian struggle against occupation.
Dear Comrade,
Surprising as it may be, an Iraqi citizen addresses you through the Western press. I have no guarantees that, if my letter reaches your media, its contents would be passed to the Soviet people.
My message is quite plain: A people in the Middle East is being exterminated. The Soviet public is unaware of what is going on because your press is totally silent on the tragedy and your party and government have not even issued a declaration on the issue. In brief — utter silence in the era of glasnost.
“Roya” is how she wants to be known. She was arrested in Iran in the fall of 1982. She was released four years later and lived in Tehran for 15 months before coming to the US in early 1988. Eric Hooglund spoke with her in Washington in October 1988.
Can you describe the circumstances of your arrest?
One day I was at home alone. Four armed men in civilian clothes came looking for me. They showed me a card from the Revolutionary Prosecutor’s office. They shoved their way in and confiscated all our tapes, books, letters and other personal papers. Then they ordered me to come with them. They pushed me into their car, forced me onto the floor and took me to Evin Prison.
Within weeks of Iran’s surprise acceptance of a ceasefire in its war with Iraq last July, perceptions of the regime in Tehran on the Arab side of the Gulf underwent a radical transformation. Governments in Kuwait, Riyadh and Bahrain pledged to forget past clashes, restore full diplomatic ties and launch a new era of political cooperation. Dollar signs danced in traders’ eyes as they saw a revival of a once booming reexport business with ports on the Persian coast.
What are current relations between Iran and Lebanon? What has been the import of Iran’s revolution on Lebanon’s Shi‘i community? These were the questions we put to Ahmad Baydoun, poet, man of letters and professor of history at the Lebanese University, in Boston in late October.
It is now ten years since the triumph of the Iranian revolution and the assumption of power by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his forces on February 11, 1979. If the revolution itself was a surprise, destroying an apparently strong and capable regime and bringing a most unexpected clerical leadership to power, its subsequent course has also contained quite a few unanticipated elements. In the first place, the Islamic Republic of Iran has survived: The clerical regime has consolidated its hold on the country, crushed its many opponents, greatly reduced external political and economic influence within Iran, and overcome the supreme test of foreign invasion.
