Middle East Research and Information Project: Critical Coverage of the Middle East Since 1971
Interview with Hilmi Zaki:
Are you married?
Yes, and my wife is an orphan. I chose an orphan woman so that she struggles with me the way I struggled when I was young. Her father was a lawyer — he died when she was young.
Where do you live?
Interview with Ibrahim Araq:
We would like to begin by asking you the usual questions about your marital status, your salary, your age and so forth.
I am 31, married, but with no children. I work as an accountant at the National Library in Cairo (Dar al-Kutub). My net monthly pay is 29.77 pounds. My wife is a nurse at the Diabetes Institute and makes 28 pounds. I live in Maadi. My rent is 16.55 pounds a month; I pay 6 pounds and my wife 4 pounds for transportation each month. (At the exchange rate of the time, one Egyptian pound was worth $1.78.)
Could you describe your job for us?
The roots of the Egyptian working class reach back into nineteenth century when Muhammed ‘Ali (1805-1849), founder of the dynasty which ruled Egypt until 1952, initiated his abortive industrialization program. Beginning in 1819 his regime built European style factories in three major sectors: Military production, agricultural processing and textiles. The leading element was textiles. With the dramatic expansion of long-staple cotton cultivation after 1820, by the early 1830s 30 cotton mills were in operation with a labor force of 30,000. [1] But a decade later most of these new factories had failed because of inexperienced management, lack of adequate natural resources (especially fuel), peasant resistance to factory discipline and competition from Europe.
In the first part of this essay, not included here, Bennoune notes that in pre-colonial Algeria’s rural sector land was the basic factor of production, consisting of four predominant subsistence activities: agriculture, animal husbandry, fruit tree plantations and horticulture. Ecological conditions fostered a broad regional specialization of production. The precolonial rural population consisted of big landowners, peasant producers, and impoverished, landless cultivators. Both the economic structure and legal system regulating the property relations generated differential access to property before the French conquest. All the urban classes — rulers, merchants, artisans — depended on the land for their food and primary raw materials.
The embryonic proletariat of the towns is in a comparatively privileged position. In capitalist countries, the working class has nothing to lose…. In the colonial countries the working class has everything to lose.
—Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Such are the workers of the Middle East. Considering their lot, one can hardly expect them to act as a unified political force. Their most direct and immediate competition is with each other.
—Manfred Halpern, The Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on the nomination of Gen. Alexander Haig to be Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state were indeed, as the general put it, “a special education.” Henry Kissinger’s former aide, a strong proponent of the notorious Christmas bombing of North Vietnam in 1972, lectured the senators on the need to impose norms of “international civility” on the Soviet Union.
Uri Davis, Israel: Utopia Incorporated (London: Zed Books, 1977).
Ramonda Hawa Tawil, My Home, My Prison (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1979).
This book is the autobiography of a woman in revolt, but whose revolt is accidental. Although its title suggests a high degree of political awareness, the author conveys very little of the depth and impact of the struggle of the Palestinian people under Zionist occupation. The sole virtue of the book is to expose the self-centered elitist political perspective of the author. This is worth something, considering how the occupation authorities and the Western media have, each in their own way, conveyed the impression that she is a militant champion of the Palestinian struggle.
Khartoum, May 1980: Hundreds of Eritreans, Ethiopians and Somalis were rounded up and put in prison in nearby Omdurman when Ethiopian leader Menguistu Hailemariam visited here May 25 to help celebrate the eleventh anniversary of Sudanese President Jaafar al-Numayri’s seizure of power. The purpose of the visit was to consolidate and formalize newly improved relations between the two countries. Sudan and Ethiopia have been at loggerheads since the 1960s, when Sudan provided assistance and haven for the Eritrean liberation movement and Ethiopian dissidents, and Ethiopia became the base for southern Sudanese opposition.
Erez Bitton’s second collection of Hebrew poems, The Book of Mint, appeared in Israel last summer, three years after Moroccan Afternoon. Bitton is an unusual man by any standard. He was born in Oran, Algeria, in 1942 and immigrated to Israel shortly after the establishment of the state in 1948. His parents had come to Oran from an oasis village in the Draa valley of southern Morocco, and their youth and his was imbued with the culture and nostalgia of Moroccan Jewish life, its tastes and smells, and the bite of their Judeo-Arabic dialect.
The revolt of the Black Panthers in 1971 underlined the depth of the ethnic conflicts in Israel’s Jewish population and dramatized the danger that the crystallization of ‘two nations’ could represent for Israeli national unity. Sociologists and study commissions went to work, just as they had after the riots of Wadi Salib in 1959 (Etzioni Commission in 1959; Katz Commission in 1971).
The issue of settlement has been at the center of the political Zionist movement since its inception. The settlers have played a major role in shaping the political fabric of Israel. Since “the conquest of the land” has been intrinsic to political Zionism, the settlers engaged in that process enjoy a particular leverage in relation to their fellow Zionists. The Zionist “minimalists’ have historically stressed the consolidation of a Jewish state on the territory under their control while the “maximalists” have called for a Greater Israel based on the maximum extent of the ancient Hebrew kingdoms.
The Israeli army — or the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) — has assumed since the 1967 war an increasingly prominent role in Israeli society. Today the IDF is the single largest factor in Israel’s economy. Its officer corps, once a highly motivated and ideologically cohesive elite trained in the ideology of Labor Zionism, has lost much of its original character, becoming more privileged and professionalized. Elements in the IDF higher echelons now more openly challenge Israel’s civilian political leaders on a broad range of critical issues, further evidence that a major change has occurred in the status and function of the military in Israeli society.
Israel in mid-1980 was caught in the throes of a crisis whose final consequences cannot yet be foreseen. Manifestations of this crisis include a sharp decline in public support for the government, confusion about the meaning and significance of recent events, and growing uncertainty about the future. The public mood is characterized generally by depression. Quite possibly we are witnessing an important turning-point in the consciousness of many Israelis.
The Iraq-Iran war and the September 12 military coup in Turkey brought our attention to the October travel itineraries of some high-level US military policy planners. Gen. David Jones, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was conveniently in Saudi Arabia to phone Washington for the dispatch of AWACS radar planes and nearly a thousand US military technicians to that country. From there he went on to Oman, Israel and Egypt, while a separate US military mission was visiting Bahrain. Gen. Jones followed close on the heels of Robert Komer, undersecretary of defense for policy.
The following document is edited from the official transcript of a speech by Secretary of Defense Harold Brown to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City on March 6, 1980.
The 1970s closed with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The 1980s opened with the ensuing debate, both in this country and around the world, about how to respond to the invasion. At times confused, at times angry, at times profound, this debate is not yet resolved.
1974
February 28 Kissinger and Sadat, in Cairo, announce US-Egyptian diplomatic relations to resume, following June 1967 rupture.
March 18 State Department announces US Navy will help clear mines from Suez Canal.
April 18 Sadat announces Egypt ending 18 years of reliance on Soviet arms.
April 19 US “senior official” says US has no “current plans” to sell Egypt arms.
May 24 Limited USSR arms shipments reported resumed to Egypt.
June 12-14 Nixon visits Cairo. Communiqué stresses economic aid, nuclear technology exchange.
How would you characterize the situation in Pakistan today?
The most striking thing about the present regime is the extraordinary degree of its isolation. It is a regime which, from one end of the country to another, does not seem to have any popular support. It lacks even the support of vested interests. It is difficult to find people in any social class or among any nationalities, literally anyone, who is willing to defend or justify the existence of the military regime in Pakistan.
For most of the 1970s, the possibility of US military intervention in the Persian Gulf region inspired military training exercises designed to simulate combat experience in a hot, desert environment. The course of events in Iran, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in 1979 has lent a new urgency to these intervention preparations, reflected in the formation of the Rapid Deployment Force. Already in 1980 there have been several large-scale military exercises designed to simulate not only desert fighting conditions, but also the logistical command and control problems that a multi-service project like the RDF entails. I observed two of the largest of these maneuvers, Gallant Eagle at Fort Irwin, California, in March and Operation Red Flag at Nellis Air Base, Nevada, in June.
On Thursday, July 10, a squadron of 12 brown and green camouflaged F-4E Phantom fighter-bombers landed at Cairo West Air Base after a non-stop 13-hour flight from Moody Air Base in Georgia. A week earlier five C-141s and 28 C-5s airlifted some 4 million pounds of equipment and supplies and more than 500 US Air Force personnel from Dover Air Base in Delaware to Cairo West; this was the first Middle East dry run of the Air Force’s “bare base” capability.
