Middle East Research and Information Project: Critical Coverage of the Middle East Since 1971
Following Israel’s intense bombardment in the summer of 2006, Lebanon had to undertake a new reconstruction effort before it had made a dent in paying for rebuilding damage done by the 1975-1990 civil war. The government swore to pursue reconstruction policies that would strengthen the state—an open swipe at the “state within a state” led by Hizballah. Yet Hizballah is carrying out its own rebuilding, and consolidating its political strength as a result.
Surprisingly, what first strikes one upon landing in Dubai is not the skyscrapers going up at a dizzying pace. It is the sheer bustle of humanity.
On February 26, 2007, the Iraqi cabinet passed and recommended for parliamentary approval a new law governing the country’s immense and largely untapped supplies of oil and natural gas. Grasping at straws for any sign of success in Iraq, the law’s international sponsors hailed a major accomplishment for Iraq’s fledgling government. White House spokesman Tony Snow celebrated the oil law’s passage toward Parliament, one of four “benchmarks” the Bush administration has set for the Iraqi government, as a “key linchpin” in Iraq’s recovery. Three months later the oil law is still awaiting parliamentary debate, its ultimate fate in doubt.
On May 26, 2003, L. Paul Bremer declared Iraq “open for business.” Four years on, business is booming, albeit not as the former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority intended. Iraqis find themselves at the center of a regional political economy transformed by war. Instability has generated skyrocketing oil prices, and as US attitudes to Arab investment have hardened in the wake of the September 11 attacks, investors from the oil-producing Gulf countries are seeking opportunities closer to home. This money, together with the resources being pumped in to prop up the US occupation, is fueling an orgy of speculation and elite consumption in the countries surrounding Iraq.
In April, Azmi Bishara, a contributing editor of this magazine and a member of the Israeli Knesset, left Israel and did not return as planned. Toward the end of the month, Israel’s General Security Services (Shabak) announced charges against Bishara of “aiding the enemy” during Israel’s summer 2006 war against Hizballah and Lebanon. Shortly afterward, Bishara submitted his resignation from the Knesset at the Israeli Embassy in Cairo. He maintains his innocence. This commentary by Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, lecturer in Jewish history at Ben Gurion University in Beersheva, Israel, first appeared at Mahsom.com, a Hebrew-language website run by Palestinians from Israel. Raz-Krakotzkin’s article was translated from Hebrew by Robert Blecher.
Both political parties in Washington seem determined not to end the US occupation of Iraq until they are convinced the other party will get blamed for the consequences. It is charmless political theater and grotesque public policy. The occupation cannot end too soon.
Residents of Lebanon might be forgiven for wanting to forget the last 12 months. The month-long Israeli onslaught in the summer of 2006, economic stasis, sectarian street violence, political deadlock and assassinations—most recently that of Future Movement deputy Walid ‘Idu, who perished along with ten others in a June 13 car bomb explosion—have weighed heavily upon the country. It is as if the dismembered corpse of the 1975-1990 civil war—assumed to be safely buried—has been exhumed and reassembled, all the more grotesque. Since May 20, the Palestinians in Lebanon, too, have been made to relive past nightmares.
An outpouring of retrospectives—good, bad and indifferent—has marked the fortieth anniversary of the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Predictably, and perhaps appropriately, most looks backward have also attempted to peer forward, and consequently most have focused on the impasse between Israel and the Palestinians. This question, though predating 1967 and not the only one left unresolved by the war, is nearly synonymous with “the Middle East” in the global media. Plentiful as the 1967 commentary has been, the relative silences have also spoken volumes. Middle East Report asked six critically minded scholars and analysts for their reflections on what has been missing from the conversation about Israel-Palestine occasioned by the passage of 40 years since that fateful June.
Sometime in the late 1990s, employees in the Israeli State Archive unintentionally declassified an array of police documents. Many of the files consisted of the unremarkable personal data of prostitutes, petty thieves and black marketeers, but others dealt with a far more sensitive matter: the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel during the 1950s and 1960s. Though these “Arab files” also contained records of mundane criminal cases, most of the documents concerned the politically explosive subject of Palestinian Arab collaboration with the Jewish state. By means of the mistaken declassification, the actions, methods and goals of multiple Israeli security agencies among the Palestinian Arabs of Israel — in short, the entire history of two decades of espionage directed at a group of Israeli citizens — lay exposed. At the heart of these documents was detailed information about individuals and families and the well-guarded secrets of what they “gave” and what they “got” in return. Many retired collaborators are still alive.
The longest and strongest wave of worker protest since the end of World War II is rolling through Egypt. In March, the liberal daily al-Masri al-Yawm estimated that no fewer than 222 sit-in strikes, work stoppages, hunger strikes and demonstrations had occurred during 2006. In the first five months of 2007, the paper has reported a new labor action nearly every day. The citizen group Egyptian Workers and Trade Union Watch documented 56 incidents during the month of April, and another 15 during the first week of May alone. [1]
“This is a bullet fired at democracy,” snapped Recep Tayyıp Erdoğan, Turkey’s prime minister and chairman of the country’s ruling party, in reaction to the May 1 ruling by the Constitutional Court. The court had validated a maneuver by the opposition party in Parliament to block the nomination of Erdoğan’s foreign minister, Abdullah Gül, to accede to the presidency of the Turkish Republic. To deny the ruling party the quorum it needed to make Gül president, the opposition deputies simply stayed home. The pro-government parliamentarians voted on the candidate anyway, but the Constitutional Court agreed with the opposition’s contention that the balloting was illegal—and thus null and void.
The Palestinians have long sought, and Israel has long resisted, the internationalization of efforts to construct a process that would lead to a durable and comprehensive peace. Independent advocates for a just peace have echoed this call out of the realization that the near monopoly of Washington on stewardship of Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy has hindered — and even obstructed — meaningful progress. Never has this fact been more glaring than during the two administrations of President George W. Bush.
For the last ten years Muhammad ‘Attar, 36, has worked in the finishing department at the gigantic Misr Spinning and Weaving Company complex at Mahalla al-Kubra in the middle of the Nile Delta. He takes home a basic wage of about $30. With profit sharing and incentives, his net pay is about $75 a month. His 33-year-old wife, Nasra ‘Abd al-Maqsoud al-Suwaydi, makes about $70 a month working in the ready-made clothing division of the same firm.
On a quiet, one-way street in Cairo’s middle-class Manial district, two bored security guards sit idly sipping tea. The building behind them houses a small apartment that serves as the main offices of the Muslim Brotherhood, the oldest Islamist group in the Middle East. In Egypt, the Brotherhood is the country’s largest opposition group and its best-organized political force. No one would know it from the headquarters’ modest appearance, but the Brotherhood is likely to be the dominant force in Egyptian politics in the future. Yet the United States stubbornly refuses to deal with the Brotherhood, taking its cue from the sclerotic and hopelessly corrupt regime of Hosni Mubarak.
In late February 2007, Western Saharan nationalists celebrated the thirty-first anniversary of their government, the Saharan Arab Democratic Republic. The official ceremonies did not take place in Laayoune, the declared capital of Western Sahara, but in the small outpost of Tifariti near the Algerian border. This is because most of Western Sahara is under the administration and military occupation of Morocco, which claims the desert land as its own.
B’Tselem. Act of Vengeance: Israel’s Bombing of the Gaza Power Plant and Its Effects (Jerusalem, September 2006).
B’Tselem. Barred from Contact: Violation of the Right to Visit Palestinians Held in Israeli Prisons (Jerusalem,September2006).
Eyal, Gil. The Disenchantment of the Orient: Expertise in Arab Affairs and the Israeli State (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006).
Herring, Eric and Glen Rangwala. Iraq in Fragments: The Occupation and Its Legacy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).
Rachel Bronson, Thicker Than Oil: America’s Uneasy Partnership with Saudi Arabia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006)
Emad Mubarak is a busy man. Director of the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression, and a lawyer with the Hisham Mubarak Law Center, the leftist Mubarak cannot hold a meeting without being interrupted by the ring of his cell phone. The calls these days come from student members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the officially outlawed Islamist group that is Egypt’s largest political movement. The students call to report security service abuses against them on campuses, or to request his legal counsel while they undergo interrogation by university administrators.
On November 9, 2005, over 100,000 protesters—approximately one seventh of the Kingdom of Bahrain’s population—flooded the streets of the capital, Manama. Most of the protesters were Shi‘a demonstrating their resistance to the government’s campaign to implement a codified family law, announced a month earlier. The measure, which is ready to be presented to Bahrain’s parliament newly elected in 2006, would remove adjudication of matters having to do with women and the family from Muslim religious (shari‘a) courts, whose rulings are at the judge’s discretion. Instead, family courts would follow an agreed-upon body of black-letter law and legal precedent.
Enmity for the Shi‘a in Saudi Arabia, never entirely absent, has become increasingly strident in 2006 and early 2007. The empowerment of the Iraqi Shi‘a and the bloody escalation of Sunni-Shi‘i violence in Iraq have intensified sectarian animosity around the Middle East, but in Saudi Arabia the hostility runs particularly deep. Recent anti-Shi‘i rhetoric recalls the 1980s, the most vituperative period of sectarian rancor, when the country’s leaders vilified Shi‘ism as part of a domestic and regional political program to counter the revolutionary message of Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
