Just a few weeks before he died in the plane crash with Zia ul-Haq, even General Akhtar Abd ul-Rahman Khan was anxious over the possibility of a shift in US policy under a new administration. General Khan had engineered and administered the secret war in Afghanistan, first as director of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and then as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. “The outcome of the war in Afghanistan may not be decided by November,” he told us. “We can only hope that the US will continue to see the great benefits of the mujahidin’s victory.”
Before they died in a suspicious plane crash on August 16, President/General Zia ul-Haq and his officer cohorts were looking with dismay at the prospect of a new administration in Washington. Pakistan forged the closest ties ever with the United States during the eight years of Ronald Reagan’s administration. The Soviet military presence in Afghanistan virtually guaranteed Reagan’s blind eye to Islamabad’s nuclear program. Increased military aid and closer intelligence ties boosted the Pakistani military’s dominant political role in the country.
US economic relations with the Arab states have entered a new phase in the last two years, one that reproduces many of the features that characterized the end of the Carter administration. US exports to the region rose by about 13 percent from 1986 to 1987 with shipments to Iraq, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates accounting for most of the increase. But this was more than offset as US imports from the region jumped some 35 percent, largely due to greater imports of crude petroleum. As a result, by the end of 1987 the US trade deficit, which had stood at $179 million the previous year, totalled more than $2.1 billion. Only a doubling in the value of American military sales to the region prevented this figure from ending up even higher.
The air show disaster in West Germany in late August that killed 62 and injured 300 was bad news for the US Air Force, even though Italian jet fighters were involved in the crash. Germans were already nervous in the wake of a series of military jet crashes earlier this year. On a single day in June, for example, three US F-16 fighters crashed on German territory. Two other planes, one French and one American, have crashed near nuclear power plants. The air show disaster became the nightmare some people had said was waiting to happen. But it brought another long-simmering issue to full boil as well.
In the last half of 1987, some 75 US, French, British, Italian, Belgian and Dutch warships steamed into the Persian Gulf in what became the largest peacetime naval operation since World War II. Six NATO countries had joined efforts specifically to police the Gulf, considerably increasing the longstanding but small Western naval presence there. The West German navy helped out by substituting for Belgian and US warships which usually patrol the English Channel and the Mediterranean.
President Reagan came to office with a bold commitment to roll back Soviet gains in the Third World without risking the trauma or cost of another Vietnam-style intervention. The “Reagan Doctrine,” as his policy came to be known, ironically took its cue from Soviet support in the 1970s for leftist insurgencies in Africa and Central America. But the beneficiaries of the Reagan Doctrine were anti-communist resistance and counterrevolutionary insurgencies in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia and Nicaragua.
Throughout the first half of 1988, at every level of the political process in the United States, the longstanding consensus governing policy towards Israel, the Palestinians and the Arab-Israeli conflict was in flux. The explosion of Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation and Israeli repression generated sharp questions about American and Israeli policy in the major media, in polls of public opinion, even in the supposedly monolithic Jewish community.
“The wars are winding down. The streets are heating up.” This was how Baltimore radio commentator Sean Connolly led off his “minimalist news” broadcast one day in mid-September. It is hard to find a more succinct way
to describe the state of the world, the Middle East included, on the cusp of transition from the Reagan years.
Reagan came to office very much in the slipstream of the Iranian revolution, a pivotal political moment decided in the streets but consolidated in the counter-revolutionary war launched by Iraq. That revolution and its confrontational stance towards the US provided much of the political fuel that powered the buildup of US interventionary forces in the early 1980s.
In December 1975, just as the presidential election campaign was getting underway, the Brookings Institution published the report of a study group entitled Toward Middle East Peace. Several members of the group (Zbigniew Brzezinski, Philip Klutznick and William Quandt) joined the Carter administration, and this document reportedly helped shape President Jimmy Carter’s receptivity to the idea of a “Palestinian homeland” in the early months of his presidency. Now, once again on the eve of a presidential election, Brookings has issued a new study group’s report, Toward Arab-Israeli Peace (Washington, DC, 1988). Both reports urge the incoming administration to place Middle East peacemaking high on its foreign policy agenda.
Wedding in Galilee (Michel Khleifi, 1987).
“Al Miskin” is a new Middle East Report column that keeps one eye focused on how the major media cover the Middle East, and the other looking out for choice items that the arbiters of information have buried. Readers should send Al things they would like to see in print: confidential memos that need some fresh air and sunlight; outrageous clips; new political jokes from the Middle East; and all pertinent gossip and scandal.
As in nearly all Western European countries, there are those in Ireland who would have us believe that their country has a special relationship with the Middle East. Some of this has to do with trade, some with the sharing of enemies. But the affinities of Ireland with the Middle East, these Irish claim, are deeper and more binding than that. In the nineteenth century the leadership of the movement for Irish Catholic emancipation within Protestant society supported the parallel movement for Jewish freedom within gentile society. In this century, both Zionist and Arab nationalists have sought to invoke the Irish “example.”
Arab Documentation on Palestinians
I have read a number of reviews of Benny Morris’ The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949, including your own. All give the book the praise which it deserves, but there is one point about Morris' approach to which I have so far seen no reference in reviews.
Zionism made its first entry into global feminist debate at the founding UN Decade for Women conference in Mexico City in 1975. There, during discussions of the introduction to a program of action for the decade, the conference passed wording that called for “the elimination of colonialism and neo-colonialism, foreign occupation, Zionism, apartheid, racial discrimination in all its forms.”
Under normal circumstances, Arabic literature of any kind passes virtually unnoticed in Israel, despite the fact that a few of the most well-known contemporary Arab writers are Israeli citizens. But the publication of “Those Who Pass Between Fleeting Words,” a poem by Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian national poet adopted by the Israeli “peace camp” as a “moderate” (and himself a former Israeli citizen), has sparked a furor across the entire political spectrum.
O those who pass between fleeting words
Carry your names, and be gone
Rid our time of your hours, and be gone
Steal what you will from the blueness of the sea and the sand of memory
Take what pictures you will, so that you understand
That which you never will:
How a stone from our land builds the ceiling of our sky.
O those who pass between fleeting words
From you the sword — from us the blood
From you steel and fire — from us our flesh
From you yet another tank — from us stones
From you tear gas — from us rain
Above us, as above you, are sky and air
So take your share of our blood — and be gone
Go to a dancing party — and be gone
The question of Palestinian leadership in the West Bank and Gaza is one of the key issues in the effort to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Israel has systematically suppressed political expression in the Occupied Territories, deporting or imprisoning local leaders as they emerge. The Palestinians, for their part, insist that the “correct address” of their representatives is the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), based outside the territories.
For many years, for many people, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict consisted primarily of the struggle between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Israel, a struggle waged mainly outside of Palestine. The uprising in the Occupied Territories has firmly fixed the attention of the world on events within Palestine’s frontiers. While the Palestinians inside insist that they have no representative other than the PLO, that they are one with the PLO, they have also shown that they, the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, are fully capable of leading the struggle against the occupation. This marks a new development in the dynamic of relations between Palestinians in the diaspora and those inside the Occupied Territories.
After World War I, the League of Nations (controlled by the leading colonial powers of the time, Britain and France) carved up the territories of the defeated Ottoman Empire. The territory now made up of Israel, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Jordan was granted to Great Britain as a Mandate (a quasi-colonial form of administration). In 1922, Britain established the emirate of Transjordan (east of the Jordan River), still part of its mandate but administratively distinct from Palestine.
When Britain assumed control of Palestine, over 90 percent of its population was Arab. A small indigenous Jewish population had lived there for generations, and a newer, politicized community linked to the Zionist movement had begun to immigrate to Palestine in the 1880s.
Eight months into the intifada, Israel’s occupation appears as unyielding as the rocky hills of Palestine. Bolstered by arms and funds from the United States and supported by a rightward-leaning public, the Israeli political establishment stands utterly intransigent, opposed to any political compromise with the Palestinians. Chances of a settlement appear extremely remote.
Such intransigence fits a historical pattern. This is always the first reaction of an occupying regime to the outbreak of insurrection: The only problem, they are sure, is that they have not used enough force.
