The adversarial relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union, the two great powers of this era, is key to understanding Washington’s and Moscow’s policies in the Middle East. In the Persian Gulf, for instance, Washington’s secret arms sales to Iran and subsequent naval buildup were both prompted by the Reagan administration’s fear of Soviet political advances in the region. And Washington’s strategic interest in the Middle East goes beyond oil and markets, as successive administrations have used war and turmoil there to construct a base structure capable of supporting US military operations in and around the southern part of the Soviet Union.
Bishara Bahbah, Israel and Latin America: The Military Connection (New York: St. Martin’s Press with the Institute for Palestine Studies, 1986).
David Lamb, The Arabs: Journeys Beyond the Mirage (New York: Random House, 1987).
More accessible than academic or political studies, journalism has long been the vehicle for most popular knowledge of the Middle East. Recently, with the increase in the number of foreign correspondents writing full-length books on their experiences in the Arab region, journalistic writings have also supplanted another genre: the once common travelogues of Western Orientalists, tourists and colonial officers. David Lamb’s book falls squarely within this “new” tradition, as even its title proclaims. (The tendency to journalistic history is not limited to the Arab world, as Lamb’s previous book was titled The Africans.)
Grace Halsell, Prophecy and Politics: Militant Evangelists on the Road to Nuclear War (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1986).
While there is nothing particularly new about Christian fascination with the Biblical “holy land,” Grace Halsell provides an important contemporary portrayal of the means by which this has been molded to enhance the political legitimacy of modern Israel. She documents the growth of a “cult of Israel” among the ranks of “born-again” Christians in the United States.
Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986).
Where the United States chooses to intervene actively, as in the Middle East, Central America and southern Africa, American politics can be a matter of life and death. Serious examinations of the American political scene are therefore of more than local interest. This study is a welcome addition to the growing body of critical analyses of American politics.
Laurence Michalak and Jeswald W. Salacuse, eds., Social Legislation in the Contemporary Middle East (Berkeley, CA: IIS, 1986).
Dani Rabinowitz, Ru’ah Sinai (The Sinai Spirit) (Tel Aviv: Adam Publishers, 1987). [Hebrew]
Ever since Israel occupied the Sinai desert in 1967, that piece of earth has consistently made Israeli headlines. Its media presence was only enhanced after Camp David and Israel’s withdrawal in 1979 and 1982. The public’s insatiable interest in the Sinai is today reflected in copious newspaper articles, books both popular and scholarly, expensive coffee-table books, top 40 pop tunes and diverse television programs. Central to this preoccupation is the Israeli fascination with the Bedouins.
The Manhattan telephone directory, like that of any major American city, reflects the United States’ melting pot in action. Flipping through its pages and browsing through the names of a million individuals, one realizes quickly that some of them do not melt very readily. Comparing the directory of 20 years ago and that of today reveals certain changes in the origins of immigrant groups and their meltability. The 1987 Manhattan telephone directory is filled with traditional Jewish names, and there is nothing new about that. But Israeli names are not Jewish, and that is why they stick out in Manhattan and elsewhere in the United States.
Edward W. Said, a contributing editor of this magazine, is Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His 1978 book, Orientalism, has had an enormous impact on Western understanding of the Middle East. His most recent book, with Jean Mohr, is After the Last Sky. James Paul spoke with him in New York in July 1987.
How did Orientalism originate?
The debacle suffered by the Egyptian left at the polls in 1987 — 2 percent of the vote as compared to 4.5 percent in the 1984 parliamentary elections — provoked a soul-searching debate in Tagammu‘, the legal party of the left.
The following article appeared in Kol Ha’ir on May 1, 1987:
As Hadassah Hospital prepares to begin performing heart transplants, it has decided to refrain from transplanting Jewish hearts into Arab bodies, and vice versa. This policy was revealed during a tour which Professor Shmuel Pinhas, the hospital’s director, arranged for members of the Jerusalem city council. Pinhas announced that “the hospital plans to begin carrying out heart transplants in the near future, but in order to avoid problems it will not carry out interethnic transplants.” It was explained that by “interethnic” he meant “between Jews and Arabs.”
Akram Haniyyah was editor of the Jerusalem daily al-Sha‘b, circulation 5,000 in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He was deported on December 28, 1986 to travel on an Algerian passport. He has no place of residence. This article first appeared in the Manchester Guardian Weekly, February 15, 1987.
Reuven Kaminer immigrated to Israel from the United States in the early 1950s and became a prominent figure in Shasi (Israeli Socialist Left). He was a member of the Israeli delegation that met with the PLO in Romania in November 1986. Israeli authorities brought Kaminer and three others to trial for violating a recent law that makes such meetings illegal. Joel Beinin interviewed him in Jerusalem in August 1987.
Where does the legal process of the trial of the four who went to Romania stand now?
The trial will continue at least until December. Nobody is in a hurry. We are not interested in permitting the prosecution to have a quick and easy trial. We want a detailed hearing of our position.
On June 24, 1987, the Palestinian Arab community of Israel conducted a successful countrywide general strike. The “Equality Day” strike was called by the National Committee of Arab Local Council Heads (NCALCH) to demand an end to all forms of racial discrimination against the nearly 700,000 Palestinian Arab citizens who constitute 17 percent of the population within Israel’s pre-1967 borders. As a result of its leadership of the strike, the NCALCH has emerged with enhanced authority as the representative of the entire Palestinian Arab community of Israel.
Since 1967 Israel has operated a military regime in the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank. In 1981 Israel set up a civilian administration as a separate branch of the military government. This further integrated these territories into Israel’s administrative and legal infrastructure.
Unlike the news media, human rights organizations have only limited contact with mass public opinion, but they constitute a primary source of information on human rights conditions around the world. They play a subtle, crucial role in shaping the opinions of political leaders, news commentators and other strata of articulate opinion. Their ability to influence political debate and issues can sometimes lead to startling results, as recently happened when 40 US senators voiced their concern over Indonesian atrocities in East Timor. [1] This achievement was all the more remarkable in that it occurred in the absence of popular outcry and media coverage.
Once the exclusive province of supranational bodies like the UN and small independent watchdog organizations like Amnesty International, concern for human rights has blossomed. Existing institutions have grown, expanding their scope and stepping up their activities, while a new generation of human rights organizations, often quite specialized in narrow areas of concern like censorship, or explicitly political in their aims, has seen the light of day.
By the end of summer, almost all the journalists were gone. They had descended en masse around June 5, the twentieth anniversary of the Israeli military occupation, crowding the streets of the West Bank and Gaza in quest of photogenic unrest. The preceding winter and spring had been tumultuous. Seven young Palestinians were dead and scores injured, with many more detained in clashes with the Israeli army. Now, in June, the towns seemed calm. Only a merchants’ strike and scattered demonstrations marked two decades of occupation. In Ramallah, television crews clustered around shuttered shops to photograph the locks.
On November 19, we received a telegram from Kenny Rogers, the country singer, and his wife Marianne. Our March-April issue, “The Struggle for Food,” they told us, had won first prize along with Scientific American in the 1987 World Hunger Media Awards in the periodicals category. Jim Paul, Martha Wenger and Joe Stork attended the awards ceremony on December 7, at a benefit concert at Carnegie Hall in New York. The Media Awards are part of the work of the World Hunger Year foundation set up by the late singer and activist, Harry Chapin. The sold-out concert, featuring Pete Seeger, Judy Collins, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen and others, was a memorial tribute to Chapin and raised funds for a worldwide Campaign to End Hunger and Homelessness.
Wade R. Goria, Sovereignty and Leadership in Lebanon 1943-1976, (London: Ithaca Press, 1986).
Helena Cobban, The Making of Modern Lebanon, (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985).
