What is Israel’s role in Central America, and why have the nations there sought arms and military advisers from Israel? There seem to be four reasons for this curious relationship. The foremost has to do with the reliability of the main military patron in the region, the United States. At one point or another, Washington has interrupted arms sales to Somoza’s Nicaragua and to the governments of El Salvador and Guatemala. Most recently, Congressional opposition has blocked any acknowledged US military support for the counterrevolutionaries (the contras) fighting the Sandinista government in Managua. Furthermore, Israel provides aid to the police forces of Costa Rica, Guatemala and El Salvador, something Congress has prohibited the US from doing since 1974.
From the May-June 1986 issue of Middle East Report:
Israel’s increasingly visible presence throughout the Third World, including such disparate places as the Philippines, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Zaire, Botswana, El Salvador and Argentina, raises a number of questions about the objectives and character of Israel’s foreign policy, the nature of the Israeli state, and the US-Israeli relationship. One Third World connection — Israel’s involvement in Guatemala — involves several unique aspects, but the basic structure of the tie sheds considerable light on the larger issues.
Noam Chomsky has been active in the movement against US military intervention for many years. His most recent book on the Middle East is The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians (South End, 1986). His latest book, Turning the Tide (South End, 1986), is on US policy toward Central America. Joan Mandell and Zachary Lockman spoke with him in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in late April.
Why Libya and why right now?
When Ronald Reagan ordered US warplanes to attack Libya on April 15, terrorism was the occasion rather than the cause. Like the electronic confetti spewed out to muddle Libyan radar screens, the terrorism issue was snow to disarm and deflect critics of American military intervention. Such intervention is an essential part of the Reagan Administration’s regimen for restoring Washington’s command of global politics.
Let us begin with the dictionary definition of terror — “intense, overpowering fear” — and of terrorism — “the use of terrorizing methods of governing or resisting a government.” This simple definition has the virtue of fairness; it focuses on the use of coercive violence and its effects on the victims of terror without regard to the status of the perpetrator. Terrorism does not refer to the mutual fear of armed adversaries, but only to acts of intimidating and injuring unarmed, presumably innocent civilians. Therein lies the revulsion over terrorist acts. This definition leaves out the question of motivation. Motives have varied, and so have methods. Many terrorists in our time have no identifiable goals.
As the banner on our cover proclaims, spring 1986 is our fifteenth anniversary. In early April, we celebrated with a banquet attended by some 200 hundred readers and friends in Washington. On that occasion, MERIP also honored four individuals whose work has helped inform our own efforts. They were: the French writer and thinker Maxime Rodinson; Richard Butler, who heads the Church World Service, relief agency of the National Council of Churches, and who has consistently raised the Palestine question in church circles; Suad Al Sabah, who has worked to advance human rights and women’s rights in Kuwait and the Arab world; and Eqbal Ahmad, who has long been an articulate advocate of Middle East issues in the United States.
Nuclear Dumping in Sudan and Somalia?
Helen Lackner, P.D.R. Yemen: Outpost of Socialist Development in Arabia, (London: Ithaca Press, 1985).
It is hard to imagine a more timely publishing event than the appearance of Helen Lackner’s new book on the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, given the crisis that engulfed that country this January. Lackner lived in South Yemen for five years in the late 1970s and early 1980s, working as a teacher and conducting the research and interviews that comprise this work. This sympathetic yet critical book stands as the only extended account in English of the accomplishments and shortcomings of the Arab world’s single socialist state.
Alixa Naff, Becoming American: The Early Arab Immigrant Experience, (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985).
Alixa Naff gives us a rare and detailed look into the virtually unknown and now largely forgotten world of the early Arabic-speaking immigrants who made their way to America in the last decades of the 19th century. They hailed from the Ottoman provinces of Syria and Palestine, but mostly from Mount Lebanon and environs. The majority were Christians (Maronite, Melkite and Orthodox); a significant minority were Muslims and Druze. They called themselves “Syrians.”
Before Their Diaspora: A Photographic History of the Palestinians 1876-1948, introduction and commentary by Walid Khalidi, (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1984).
Before Their Diaspora gathers some 400 photographs to present a portrait of Palestine, its people and their culture, from the late 19th century—he last years of Ottoman rule—until the end of the British Mandate in 1948.
Wednesday, February 26. The story was on BBC at eight this morning. Central Security Forces (al-amn al-markazi) mutinied last night at the big camp at Dahshour and at two camps in Giza, on the road to Alexandria. Thousands of conscripts burst out of the camps and burned nearby luxury hotels. The government says that the mutiny was sparked by a false rumor that the conscripts’ tours of duty would be extended from three to four years. Many people believe the rumor was accurate.
After a decade of soaring revenues and frenetic spending, the six “Eldorado” states of the Gulf (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates—the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council) are now in a tight economic and financial squeeze. Experts and analysts in the Gulf and around the world are feverishly studying the consequences of this new phase, including its political implications. Symptoms which began to show up back in 1982 are now quite apparent in the litanies of international experts and the lives of the countries’ six million immigrant workers.
How can social tensions be managed and policy differences resolved by ruling socialist parties in poverty-stricken Third World states? On January 13, 1986, this question defeated the Yemeni Socialist Party in a devastating spasm of civil war. Parallels can be drawn between the South Yemeni trauma and the equally tragic collapse of unity within the New Jewel Movement in Grenada, although the regional conjunctures were different and the geopolitical context of the Yemeni Republic precluded a Reaganite outcome.
Musa (“Moses”) Saleh laughs now at his expectations as a new immigrant to the United States. “We were fooled,” he says, reflecting on the first morning when he prepared for his new job as an apricot picker in California. “We didn’t know what kind of work our Yemeni friends had been doing here…. I dressed up in a suit and necktie and a nice pair of shoes and walked in and everyone started laughing. Well, I saw their clothes. I didn’t have to see anything else. Regular clothes, apricot juice all over them….
Gaza Ghetto, a documentary film about a Palestinian family in the occupied Gaza Strip by MERIP editor Joan Mandell and Swedish filmmakers Pea Holmquist and Pierre Bjorklund, premiered in Stockholm in November 1984. In January 1985, a Palestinian theater company in Jerusalem, El-Hakawati, purchased a copy and screened it for the press. The theater then presented Gaza Ghetto to the Israeli Council for Censorship of Films and Plays, as required of all films before public screening. On February 6, 1985, the council for censorship banned the film in Israel and the Occupied Territories. Israeli lawyer Avigdor Feldman appealed the ban on behalf of El-Hakawati on April 15, but a lower court upheld the decision.
To the Editors: In pain and sorrow, we learn at this late date that our friend Mahmoud al-Mughrabi was killed by the Israeli Air Force during its October 1 bombing raid on Tunisia. Mahmud was born in Jerusalem in 1960. By the age of 16 he had already been under detention 12 times, and he was one of the first who dared to speak in public about the methods of interrogation of Palestinian detainees used by the General Security Services in Israel. He then gave his consent to being publicly identified as an informant for the memorable expose of torture in Israel which appeared in the Sunday Times of June 19, 1977.
Shaul Bakhash, The Reign of the Ayatollahs: Iran and the Islamic Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1984).
After the plethora of books seeking to account for the Iranian revolution, it is refreshing to find a volume which dares to tackle the complexities of the immediate post-revolutionary years and the new institutions and policies of the Islamic Republic.
Mariarosa Dalla Costa, “Reproduction and Emigration,” Zerowork 3 (1984).
Jean Guyot, Ruth Padrun, et al, Des Femmes Immigres Parlent (Paris: L’Harmattan-CETIM, 1977).
Michel Oriol, “Sur la dynamique des relations communautaires chez les immigres d’origine Nord-Africaine,” Peuples Mediterraneens 18 (January-March 1982).
Fredrik Barth, Sohar: Culture and Society in an Omani Town (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1983).
Unni Wikan, Behind the Veil in Arabia: Women in Oman (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1982).
Ali Ghalem, A Wife for My Son (trans. G. Kazolias) (Chicago: Banner Press, 1985).
