This article, by the Lebanese novelist and literary critic, Elias Khoury, appeared in the Beirut daily, al-Safir, on February 18, 1985, immediately following what Israel has termed the first stage of its withdrawal from Lebanon. Khoury highlights the contradictions of the current situation in the region: while the invasion dealt the Palestinian national movement a serious setback, this same invasion created the basis for a major Israeli defeat and the victory of the Lebanese national resistance.
Diplomatic activity on the future of the occupied West Bank and Gaza has again assumed a high profile. The luminaries traveling on this particular mission are jetting around the globe — King Fahd in Washington, Hussein in Algiers, and the US and the Soviet Union in Vienna.
The people at the heart of the discussion, the population of the occupied territories, still suffer from the lull that has gripped the West Bank and Gaza since the war in Lebanon. Initiatives, not to speak of solutions, seem far removed from the curfewed alleyways of Dheisheh refugee camp, the huckster-thronged streets of the Old City of Jerusalem or the solemn night streets of Ramallah and Nablus.
Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian scholar and close observer of PLO affairs, is presently a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center of the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC. He recently completed a book on the PLO experience in Lebanon. Nubar Hovsepian and Joe Stork spoke with him in late January 1985.
How would you describe the balance of forces within the Palestinian movement today?
The PLO stands at a crossroads. The battle of Beirut revealed the valiant and tenacious character of Palestinian nationalism and the corresponding paralysis of the Arab state system, but the forced withdrawal of the PLO from Lebanon presented the organization with the most serious challenge to its cohesion and vitality in its 20 years of existence.
Over the last several years, library subscriptions to MERIP Reports have expanded steadily. We are very pleased at this development, and we are anxious to encourage an even higher rate of growth in library subscriptions. In particular, we would like to see more subscriptions at public libraries, where the Reports are still poorly represented. Library subscriptions are particularly important in bringing MERIP Reports to many readers who might not otherwise see it. For this reason, we ask our readers to request subscriptions at their local public library and/or their university library. Thanks to a donation from a friend of MERIP, we are able to offer a half-price introductory subscription to the first 20 libraries that request it in 1985.
Robert Stookey, South Yemen: A Marxist Republic in Arabia (Boulder: Westview Press, 1982).
Robin Bidwell, The Two Yemens (Boulder: Westview Press, 1983).
Robin Bidwell was a British political officer in Western Aden Protectorate from 1955 to 1959, and has written five other volumes on the Arabian Peninsula. Most of this new work deals with the region subsequent to the British seizure of Aden in 1839, from the standpoint of British imperial interests.
Gudrun Kramer, Minderheit, Millet, Nation? Die Juden in Agypten, 1914-1952 (Minority, Millet, Nation? The Jews in Egypt, 1914-1952) (Wiesbaden, 1982).
Up to now, the history of the Jewish community in Egypt has been known only to a few specialists. Some periods have been analyzed quite well — for instance, the tenth to thirteenth century (S. Goitein) and the nineteenth century (R. Fargeon, J. Landau). Gudrun Kramer has now provided a marvelous study covering the 1914-1952 period. She made extensive use of archival material and numerous interviews from the oral history section of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at Hebrew University, and ones she herself conducted. The selection of secondary sources is quite representative.
Bassam Tibi, Die Krise des modernen Islams: Eine vorindustrielle Kultur im wissenschaftlich-technischen Zeitalter (The Crisis of Modern Islam: A Pre-industrial Culture in the Age of Science and Technology) (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1980).
Amos Gitai, Field Diary (1984).
Rarely has the cinema verité technique, with its false naiveté, been deployed so strategically as in Field Diary. It looks as if it could have been made by your little brother with the family toy camera, and it is even hard to credit filmmaker Amos Gitai with the earlier filmmaking experience that his House testifies to. But Field Diary, gracelessness and all, refuses to leave you when you leave the theater.
Anthony Cordesman, The Gulf and the Search for Strategic Stability: Saudi Arabia, the Military Balance in the Gulf, and Trends in the Arab-Israeli Military Balance (Boulder: Westview Press, 1984).
Occasionally, when an important head of state arrives in Washington for consultation without a previously announced agenda, he is greeted by an embarrassing series of articles and commentaries exposing the cumulative ignorance of American foreign policy analysts. Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd recently visited with President Ronald Reagan and provided just such an example.
I was supposed to set an example. Voluntary Service Overseas was in its second year in 1959 and two of us were here on a pound a week plus keep, to be examples. Nineteen-year-old examples. A year before university, you’ll have a wonderful experience. It was, too.
The students in Form 2A were not what I expected. To start with, half of them were my age or older, one or two were married and had children back in the protectorates, some were even taller than I — six feet, two inches from Eastbourne, Sussex. From Eastbourne Grammar School to Aden College.
“Ahmad” is a representative of the Socialist Labor Party in the Arabian Peninsula. MERIP interviewed him in February 1984.
What were the origins of your party?
“Al-Hamdani” is the nom de guerre of a representative of the Yemeni People's Unity Party. MERIP spoke with him in February 1984.
The contemporary opposition movements in the Arabian Peninsula have their origins in two processes of radicalization in Middle Eastern politics. The first was the rise of radical nationalists, Nasserists and Baathists, and of communist parties in the 1950s and 1960s, and the second is the spread of the radical Islamic groups in the latter part of the 1970s. The political organizations now engaged in opposition politics in the peninsula spring essentially from these two competing trends.
The traveler landing at Kuwait does not have to wait long for signs that the small city-state is in some kind of crisis. While citizens of the six countries belonging to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) proceed swiftly through immigration, the rest of us stand in long, slow-moving lines before submitting to the detailed check of visas, work permits and residences introduced to maintain a tight control over new arrivals. In the city itself, the low walls of concrete blocks around the American Embassy — just like the ones surrounding the White House in Washington — are an ugly reminder of the truck bomb attack by partisans of Iraq’s outlawed Da‘wa Party in December 1983.
In July 1984, the Hunt Oil Company announced it had struck oil in the Yemen Arab Republic. Tests so far suggest that the field will produce a minimum of 75,000 barrels per day (b/d). This would be the threshold for commercial exploitation, given the field’s location nearly 500 kilometers inland and separation from the coast by a 10,000 foot high mountain range. By some estimates, the field has a potential of 300,000 b/d, a considerable margin for export over North Yemen’s present consumption of 17,000 b/d.
The streets of Sanaa, the North Yemeni capital, appear to condense some of the most divergent elements of Third World economic change and political upheaval. Perhaps nowhere else in the Middle East, or indeed elsewhere in the Third World, do the antinomies of combined and uneven development come so dramatically to the surface. The city is full of consumer goods brought in on the emigrants’ remittances and foreign aid that make up nearly all of the country’s foreign exchange earnings. Filipino workers in hardhats are digging up the roads to install sewerage systems. Aid agencies of many stripes are plying their wares and plans.
Over the weekend of February 15-18, there was an unprecedented gathering in a rural camp in New Jersey. Under a call of “Breaking the Silence,” the American Friends Service Committee and the Mobilization for Survival brought together more than 150 persons from across the country who have been active around questions of US policy and intervention in the Middle East. The purpose of the meeting was not to establish any new organization or to pass resolutions. Rather, it was to share information and experience about raising Middle East issues, such as the Gulf war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in local and national organizing.
Robert O. Freedman, ed., The Middle East Since Camp David (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984).
This is the third volume in a series based on papers presented at conferences organized by the Baltimore Hebrew College’s Center for the Study of Israel and the Contemporary Middle East. These papers are mostly descriptive and analytically unimaginative. The authors come mainly from circles uncritical of US policy. Their contributions are useful for providing ready reference to events and issues. But the book is already out of date and has little long-term value.
