ahmad had those
wildly intense
eyes that
would stare through you
as he spoke and
would light up
every now and then
as he listened and
would drive me crazy
what
does he want from me?
i remember ahmad
when
he returned from prison
to ya‘bad
and his grandmother
ululated in jubilation
danced in happiness
served coffee to share
her happiness
and it was ahmad
who took me around the village
when i came on
mundane visit
to see all houses
demolished or sealed
in town
recording a history
of occupation
Jesse’s Gyrations on Palestine
The Palestinian human rights monitoring organization, Al-Haq/Law in the Service of Man, the West Bank affiliate of the Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists, marked the first anniversary of the intifada with a comprehensive report on Israel’s violations of human rights in its effort to quell the Palestinian uprising. Punishing a Nation: Human Rights Violations During the Palestinian Uprising, December 1987-December 1988 (Ramallah, PO Box 1413, West Bank, via Israel: Al-Haq, 1988; 355 pages) is a meticulously documented compendium based mostly on sworn affidavits collected by al-Haq’s field workers, five of whom were under administrative detention at the time of publication.
Paul Cossali and Clive Robson, Stateless in Gaza (London: Zed Press, 1986).
Stateless in Gaza comprises interviews with 60 Gazans — from women activists to housewives, from resistance writers to laborers in Israel — who talk about life in the occupied strip. Cossali, a teacher and solidarity activist, and Robson, a development worker, allow Gazans to tell their stories directly, bringing into focus the major issues that confront those who live in this “forgotten corner of Palestine.”
Huri Islamoglu-Inan, ed., The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, and Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 1987).
Şevket Pamuk, The Ottoman Empire and European Capitalism, 1820-1913: Trade, Investment and Production (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
These books, one a collection of 17 articles and the other a monograph, offer a significant new interpretation of Middle Eastern history and, more broadly, contribute to the discussion of the origins of capitalism in the Third World.
Maher Al-Sharif, Al-Shuyu‘iyun wa Qadaya al-Nidal al-Watani al-Rahin [The Communists and Issues in the Current National Struggle] (Damascus: Center for Socialist Research and Study in the Arab World, 1988).
The role of the Palestinian Communist Party (PCP) is one of the most important and least understood aspects of the intifada. When a member of the PCP Political Bureau was elected to a seat on the PLO Executive Committee at the 18th Palestine National Council (PNC) in April 1987, many interpreted it as a sign of Moscow’s role in the process of reuniting the Palestinian factions. But that is an insufficient explanation for the double “cultural revolution” this opening represents.
We were greatly saddened to learn of the death of Ahmad Sadiq Sa‘d — a comrade, collaborator and friend of several members of Middle East Report’s editorial family — in Cairo late last year. Sadiq was one of the intellectuals who stimulated the revival of the Egyptian communist movement in the late 1930s and a leader of the New Dawn/Workers’ Vanguard/Workers’ and Peasants’ Communist Party tendency before the formation of the united Communist Party in 1958. He spent 1959-65 in prison with the other Egyptian communist cadres. But his spirit was not broken, and he continued to struggle and to serve the Egyptian people, guided by a consistent internationalist vision, until the last day of his life.
Voters achieved an historic victory in Cambridge and a section of Somerville, Massachusetts, on November 8, 1988. By a margin of 53 to 47 percent they endorsed Question 5, a non-binding public policy question that called on elected officials to work towards a just settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. (See below.)
Given the same materials and the same opportunities, young chiliren all over the world paint in a similar way. They don’ necessarily paint the jame things. (Eskimo children will saint different animals from the chilIren in the Sudan.) What is similar is :he way young children make intuitive narks on the paper — a question of space, gestures, proportion, even color.
Driving to Salfit through the villages of Yasuf and Iskaka on a sunny fall day is an exhilarating experience. The asphalt road winds like a snake through hill after hill dotted by olive trees whose clusters of tiny, pastel green leaves shimmer in the light breeze. Rich brown earth, freshly turned, is strewn with stones and contoured by terraces. Closer to the road, thorny shrubs, grasses and the lazy, bleached branches of fig trees leisurely soak in the sun, anticipating the impending winter.
One key to understanding how the Israeli economy (malfunctions is that the Histadrut (The General Federation of Workers in Israel; up to 1965 the “Jewish Workers in Israel”) was never simply a trade union.
Saturday night I decided to go to a campaign meeting of the Moledet Party in Kfar Shalem, a rough neighborhood in the south of Tel Aviv. In the past, houses there were periodically served with demolition orders by the Tel Aviv municipality; in 1982 one inhabitant pulled a gun on demolition crews who had come to tear down an illegally-built extension to his house. Some people consider the violence of the state in Kfar Shalem as a form of racism against Oriental Jews. The slogan “Askhe-Nazis!” with a swastika beside it appeared on the walls of mainly Ashkenazi (Jews of European origin) neighborhoods of north Tel Aviv, as well as on memorials of the 1948 War of Independence.
The November 1988 Israeli election confirmed a pattern set in 1981 and 1984: the vote was nearly equal between the two large bourgeois parties, the Likud and the Alignment (Labor), and both these parties lost strength to their left and right.
One of the most intriguing questions after a year of the intifada is the paucity of Israeli opposition to the government’s “iron fist” policy. True, dozens of small groups demonstrate against the occupation, the atrocities, the deportations, the mass arrests. There have been many calls for “better Israeli-Palestinian relations,” for “two states for two peoples.” But the cumulative impact of this activity has not been a major force in Israeli society and politics — nothing like the opposition that developed against the war in Lebanon.
The Palestinian uprising has stripped away Israel’s externally oriented masks (propaganda) and its internally oriented masks (defense mechanisms), as political rationality has steadily retreated before the state’s frantic response. Israel’s confrontation with the colonial reality of the occupied territories has led to political polarization which is not contained within existing party boundaries. It has penetrated all the parties and raised real questions which Israeli society must deal with. As the uprising continues, the cleavage in Israeli society becomes deeper over two basic issues: negotiations with the PLO and recognition of the Palestinian right to self-determination, including the establishment of a state.
Dan Almagor personifies Israeli popular culture of the post-1948 period. He is the master lyricist of the modern Hebrew song, with over 600 compositions and 300 translations to his credit. His songs have been performed on many official and semi-official occasions, and he has composed for the Israel Defense Forces troupe and regularly placed his versatile talents at the service of the state and the Zionist movement. Dozens of Almagor’s plays and satirical and musical revues have been performed in Israeli theaters and cabarets, and even on Broadway. His musical about Hasidic life, Ish Hasid Haya, broke all Israeli records for a dramatic performance and was seen by a third of the country.
For well over a year now, the Israeli state has confronted the Palestinian uprising with what Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin calls “the iron fist.” The army’s goal is to restore order, Deputy Chief-of-Staff Ehud Barak said recently, “so that the Israeli government can pursue political initiatives from a position of strength on its own schedule.” In the first month of Year Two, the army’s schedule included, by its own count, 2790 “violent incidents” — an average of precisely 90 each day. At least 26 Palestinians were killed, many with the “non-lethal” plastic and rubber bullets that Israeli troops now routinely employ.
Reopen Palestinian Universities
In my capacity as President of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), I am forwarding to you the following resolution adopted during our recent annual meeting. For your information, MESA is a professional association of Middle East scholars, now numbering nearly 2,000 members. MESA does not take political positions. Because of the scholarly interests of its members, however, it has an obvious concern with issues of academic freedom.
Between 1975 and 1978 a group of scholars in England published three annual issues of the Review of Middle East Studies. This political and intellectual project sought to articulate a radical critique of the dominant paradigms in Middle East studies. ROMES unmasked the relations among modernization theory, Orientalist representation and imperial politics, and placed the search for alternatives on the agenda. The example of ROMES inspired the formation of the Alternative Middle East Studies Seminar on this side of the Atlantic, and its production complemented in many respects the work of MERIP.
Wm. Roger Louis, The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945-1951: Arab Nationalism, The United States and Post-War Imperialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
This rich and highly informative book charts the history of the post-war British Labor government’s policies in the Middle East. It is immensely detailed, but so very well written that the reader will easily follow the main tenor of the author’s arguments. Louis, a well-known and prolific historian of the last years of the British Empire, achieves much of his effect by a judicious mixture of quotation (mostly from British and American diplomatic archives) and comment.
