Salman Rushdie’s story of Ismail Najmuddin — the former Bombay lunch-runner turned movie star, screen name Gibreel Farishta, the Muslim who played Hindu gods in numerous “theologicals,” migrant to London, victim of the bombing of flight AI-420, the man who fell from the sky and lived, only to dream of himself as Gibreel the revealing angel and sign over his dream-narratives to a movie mogul — is a tale whose Rabelaisian irreverence towards all fixed authorities, identities and truths offers an appropriate introduction to the question of contemporary popular culture in the Middle East.
The events of the past year demonstrate the great need for independent critical reporting and analysis of the Middle East and US policy there — reporting and analysis that only Middle East Report provides.
The key word is independent. This is what allows Middle East Report to be critical, to speak the truth about Israel’s ferocious effort to crush the Palestinian uprising and at the same time call attention to state violations of human rights in Syria, Jordan, Iran and elsewhere. We can speak frankly about the dilemmas that confront groups like the PLO. And we have no government contracts or corporate advertising which might constrict our scrutiny of US intervention in the region.
I. All states in the region, including a Palestinian state, have the right to independence and security.
US / Israel / PLO / Arab States / USSR / EEC States (bold = support; plain text = opposition)
Eqbal Ahmad
The declaration of the state of Palestine just five days earlier, nearly a year of the intifada, and a paralyzed but uncompromising Israeli politics are the immediate background of the full page El Al advertisement on page 57 of the Sunday New York Times on November 20, 1988. The ad has a rather peculiar content and form, especially given its likely audience — metropolitan New York and surrounds, educated readers across the country, others with a half-Sunday to waste, and the largest Jewish population in the world — people as unlikely as any in the world to have large numbers of children.
James A. Baker III
Secretary of State
In the early 1960s, before the major US escalation of the war in Vietnam, a negotiated settlement to that conflict was in reach. Such a settlement was supported by the leaders of the Soviet Union, China, France, Cambodia and North Vietnam, and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam. The United Nations, through then-Secretary General U Thant, put great effort into setting up negotiations. The essential precondition of such a settlement was recognition of the South Vietnamese people’s right to self-determination, a precondition the United States would not abide. In February 1965, an embittered and frustrated U Thant was moved to comment that
I was describing Tikkun magazine’s “National Conference of Liberal and Progressive Jewish Intellectuals” to a steady political and intellectual comrade of the past 30 years, who is not Jewish. “What would you think,” this friend responded, “about a ’national conference of liberal and progressive gentile intellectuals?’”
The nineteenth session of the Palestine National Council, formally entitled the “intifada meeting,” was momentous and, in many great and small ways, unprecedented. There were fewer hangers-on, groupies and “observers” than ever before. Security was tighter and more unpleasant than during the 1987 PNC session, also held in Algiers; Algeria had just brutally suppressed its own intifada, so the presence of several hundred Palestinians and at least 1,200 members of the press was not especially welcomed by the Ben Jadid government, which paradoxically needed the event to restore some of its tarnished revolutionary luster.
Too Tolerant
In 1970 Cambridge University Press defined the state of Orientalism by publishing The Cambridge History of Islam — a conceptually barren and supremely boring tome whose main claim to distinction may be that Edward W. Said devoted several pages of Orientalism to excoriating it as “an intellectual failure.” It is a measure of the intellectual and political progress in Middle East studies over the last two decades that Albert Hourani, a perceptive critic of The Cambridge History of Islam, was chosen as advisory editor, with Trevor Mostyn as executive editor, for a new Cambridge reference work, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Middle East and North Africa.
Tony’s Price A disturbing characteristic of much of US liberal commentary on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the frequency with which, even when its prescriptions are on target, its framework of interpretation and premises are flawed, if not racist. A good example is Anthony Lewis’ column in the New York Times of February 12, 1989. He begins by detailing the heavy human costs which Palestinians in the Occupied Territories have paid for sustaining their uprising: the dead, the wounded, the imprisoned, the deported, the homeless, the repressed. “But,” he goes on to say, “Israel has paid a higher price for its policy [of repression] than have the Palestinians.” In what coin is this “higher price” measured?
On February 16, 1989, the leaders of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and North Yemen signed an agreement forming the Arab Cooperation Council (ACC), a four-country economic trading bloc, and expressed the hope that it would lead to an Arab common market. On the same day, the leaders of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Mauritania agreed to form a Maghrib Union, the first step toward a Maghrib common market.
The last Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan have gone home, clearing the stage around Kabul and other cities for a major showdown between Soviet-supported government forces and their American-supported guerrilla rivals, the mujahideen. Conventional wisdom has it that the mujahideen are now in position to finally topple the Kabul regime. Former President Ronald Reagan based his policy on this premise — that peace in Afghanistan lay beyond a Soviet withdrawal and the overthrow of the Najibullah government. President George Bush, hoping to put his own imprint on what conservatives view as the one solid victory of the Reagan Doctrine, has decided to continue arming the rebels as long as the ruling People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) remains in power.
Once again, world attention is caught by the specter of villainous Arabs, brandishing weapons. In the mid-1970s it was the oil weapon. Today it is chemical weapons. In both cases the weapon is wielded discreetly by the United States itself. In both cases, the main threat is to the people of the Third World.
Ordinary children, women and men, a million and a half of them, have confounded the state of Israel, Washington’s major military ally in the Middle East, with their incredible courage and resourcefulness. Their resounding demand for political independence then prompted the Palestine Liberation Organization to declare unequivocally for a Palestinian state alongside Israel — a resolution based on “possible rather than absolute justice,” as Yasser Arafat put it. [1] More than a hundred governments have officially recognized the new state. Others, such as the major European states, upgraded their relations with the PLO. The combined force of these developments finally led Washington to open formal talks with the PLO.
For all of us in MERIP — the staff, the editorial committee, the board of directors — the past few months have been a poignant and exciting time, a mix of fond regrets and great anticipation. With this page, in this issue, we make it official: Jim Paul, who has worked with us on staff for more than 13 years, is leaving MERIP to pursue other interests.
The Palestinian intifada is proving a headache to Israel’s image managers on American campuses. “Recent events in the territories in Israel have spilled over on to the US university campuses [and] our work has been made harder,” complains a recent book — let from the University Service Department of the American Zionist Youth Foundation. [1] Pro-Israel groups on campus have lost “the initiative,” the booklet warns. Instead of promoting “positive Israel activities” such as Israel fairs and Israel cafe nights, campus groups now find themselves “in the position of defending Israel.”
Sister cities has become one of Berkeley’s most popular means of expressing support for particular communities and opposition to US foreign policy. Berkeley has six sister cities, including Leon in Nicaragua, San Antonio de los Ranchos in El Salvador and the South African Black township of Oukassie. Supporters of Measure J hoped its success would provide some measure of protection to the people of Jabalya. Concern was heightened in the last two days of the campaign when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir announced that Jabalya would be the first camp to be “dispersed” after Likud formed its new government.
The Bay Area’s “progressive” reputation was somewhat tarnished November 8 when voters in San Francisco and Berkeley overwhelmingly rejected pro-Palestinian initiatives on their respective ballots. San Francisco’s Proposition W, which called for the US to recognize a Palestinian state “side by side” with Israel “with guarantees of security for both states” was defeated by 68 to 32 percent. In Berkeley, Measure J would have established the Gaza town and refugee camp of Jabalya as a sister city; it was defeated by a 70-30 margin.
