Stubborn Stalemate in Western Sahara
No Jordan Option
Middle East Reform: Right Idea, Wrong Plan
Democratic reforms in the Middle East and North Africa are both warranted and wanted—not only among the leaders who gathered earlier this month on Sea Island for the G8 Summit but also by the majority of the region’s citizens.
While there is little agreement on what form change should take, the most shocking dimension of the Bush plan for regional reform, The Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative, or BMEI, is the administration’s continued partnership with authoritarian regimes and the exclusion of democratic reformers.
The Imperial Lament
Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004).
There is something refreshing about British historian Niall Ferguson’s argument “not merely that the United States is an empire, but that it has always been an empire.” For a certain kind of American liberal, the Bush administration's eager invasion of Iraq has been a bad dream. The ignominious departure of US viceroy L. Paul Bremer from Baghdad on June 28, many assume, marks the beginning of the end of a grim, aberrant interlude in an otherwise innocent and idealistic US foreign policy. In contrast, Ferguson cheerily cites the work of the independent Marxist, Harry Magdoff, and the secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Geir Lundestad, to establish that US armed forces were stationed in 64 countries in 1967 and that those forces conducted 168 different overseas military interventions between 1946 and 1965.
Turkey’s Tentative Opening to Kurdishness
Editor’s Picks (Summer 2004)
Abou El Fadl, Khaled et al. Islam and the Challenge of Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
Bird, Christiane. A Thousand Sighs, a Thousand Revolts: Journeys in Kurdistan (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004).
Bozarslan, Hamit. Violence in the Middle East: From Political Struggle to Self-Sacrifice (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2004).
Johnson, Chalmers. The Sorrows of Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003).
Journey Towards a Route in Common
Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel, directed by Michel Khleifi and Eyal Sivan (2003).
A Bloody Stupid War
When a war breaks out people say, “It’s too stupid; it can’t last long.” But though a war may well be “too stupid,” that doesn’t prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.
— Albert Camus, The Plague
Doing Time in the Theater of Occupation
The photograph fetched from a back room in the narrow two-story house on the edge of Bethlehem’s Aida refugee camp shows a precociously handsome adolescent, posing in a baseball cap and sports jacket against a faux backdrop of the Versailles palace gardens. A kaffiyya is tucked around his neck; his smile is mildly self-conscious. “He was 16 when they arrested him; his seventeenth birthday he spent in prison,” says Marwan’s older brother Maher as the picture is passed around. “He liked acting.”
On the Importance of Thugs
From late 2000 to 2004, the most common form of Palestinian resistance to occupation has simply been getting there — refusing to allow Israeli checkpoints and sieges to shut down daily life. The unlikely symbols of that resistance are checkpoint workers — van drivers and porters — whose impromptu services allow other Palestinians to get there.
Acts of Refusal
Rela Mazali, an Israeli writer and feminist peace activist, is a founder of New Profile, a group challenging the militarization of Israeli society and opposing the occupation. Joel Beinin, an editor of Middle East Report, spoke with her in Herzliya, Israel on January 6, 2004 and continued the conversation by e-mail in May 2004.
Your work with New Profile has focused on the relationship between gender and militarism in the context of the occupation. Can you tell us about the status of this relationship, and the historical evolution of feminist anti-occupation activism?
Israeli Constitutional Committee Faces Double Bind
Carving Up the Capital
Samera remembers a time, during the tumultuous and violent years of the first intifada (1987-1993), when her Jerusalem was a place quite different than it is today. Though tens of thousands of Palestinians under Israeli occupation were imprisoned in those years, many of them tortured, a measure of hope and optimism pervaded Palestinian Jerusalem in ways that seem foreign to Samera and other Palestinian Jerusalemites in 2004, over three years into the costly, low-level warfare of the second uprising.
The Challenge to the Two-State Solution
Pakistani Islamists Gamble on the General
In January 2002, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who seized control of the Pakistani government in a 1999 military coup, delivered a major address to the nation—and to the world at large. Mindful of Pakistan’s designation by the global media as a crucial front in the US “war on terrorism,” Musharraf promised to curtail the activities of radical Islamist groups and to reform the curricula of the Islamic schools (madrassas) that had become infamous worldwide as incubators of the Taliban.
From the Editors (Summer 2004)
In Rafah, History Hangs Heavy in the Air
Torture and the Future
There is a popular belief that Western history constitutes a progressive move from more to less torture. Iron maidens and racks are now museum exhibits, crucifixions are sectarian iconography and scientific experimentation on twins is History Channel infotainment. This narrative of progress deftly blends ideas about “time,” “place” and “culture.” In the popular imagination, “civilized societies” (a.k.a. “us”) do not rely on torture, whereas those societies where torture is still common remain “uncivilized,” torture being both a proof and a problem of their enduring “backwardness.”
An Ironic Result in Cyprus
Kerry on Israel: Me Too
In a May 3 address to the Anti-Defamation League's National Leadership Conference, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry reiterated his steadfast support for Israel and assured attendees that, if elected, he would never force Israel to negotiate without a “credible partner.”
Statements supportive of Israel by U.S. leaders are not unusual; particularly during an election year when the candidate is seeking support from a group of prominent American Jews. But Kerry’s remarks are telling about the nature of the upcoming election and bode ill for the future of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.
