The most striking impression to a casual observer at the Club des Pins Conference Center in Algiers where the Palestine National Council met over April 20-25 was the emotional intensity of the greetings and reunions between long-lost friends among the 2000 or more Palestinians in the corridors outside the main meeting hall. As in Amman in 1984 and Algiers in 1983, the PNC now clearly plays a vital role in bringing together Palestinians in the post-Beirut situation, where there is no longer any center for diaspora politics.
Mohamed Sid-Ahmed is a Contributing Editor of this magazine and Managing Editor of Al-Ahali, the weekly of Egypt’s left opposition party, Tagammu‘. Joe Stork spoke with him in Washington in early May.
You recently attended the Palestine National Council meeting in Algiers. What were your impressions?
A confidential report compiled in October 1966 by the Criminal Investigation office of the Egyptian army accused Ahmad Hasan, former member of parliament and former government-appointed head of his village, of 11 “criminal and terrorist” offenses.
Egypt’s current debt crisis is one of the fruits of Camp David. Much of the principal and interest now in arrears or coming due was contracted in the heady days when oil prices were soaring and the treaty with Israel and military alliance with Washington certified Egypt as a credit-worthy customer for Western banks and governments. The United States in particular stepped up its economic and military lending to Cairo.
Compared with 1984, the atmosphere of the 1987 Egyptian elections was decidedly less free. The outcry of the opposition in 1984 primarily concerned the forged results on election day itself. [1] In 1987, the pressure on the opposition during the campaign was much stronger. The Emergency Law, extended almost routinely every year since Husni Mubarak came to power, offers the regime an array of measures for interfering in the campaign. Administrative detention was used to intimidate opposition militants. A country-wide wave of arrests of Muslim Brothers, particularly prospective poll watchers, started a few days before the elections. According to the Amal Party newspaper, Al-Sha‘b, ten days later more than a thousand were still detained.
Alliance (Tahaluf)
An opposition list formed for the 1987 elections by the Socialist Labor Party, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Socialist Liberals Party. Officially identified as the SLP list, since the Muslim Brotherhood, as a religious organization, cannot legally participate in elections.
If the riots of February 1986 ushered in a year of doubt about the future of Husni Mubarak’s regime, the events of early 1987 appear to indicate that he has consolidated his position both domestically and internationally. [1] Mubarak upstaged the opposition and enhanced his legitimacy by calling new parliamentary elections in which opposition forces were able to significantly increase their representation in the National Assembly. The government party, however, remains firmly in control of the parliament, virtually assuring the president's renomination in the fall for another six-year term, and approval of a new standby loan agreement with the International Monetary Fund.
The People
Nearly 50 million Egyptians live in this flat, hot, dry land the size of Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas combined. Most of them are crowded into a fertile strip along the Nile River and its delta. In greater Cairo, the 17th largest city in the world, population density is an astounding 27,092 people per square kilometer. Egypt‘s population is growing at a rate of 2.52 percent per year; almost half of Egyptian woman are in their childbearing years, marriage is nearly universal and contraception was practiced by only 24 percent of couples in 1982. Egypt is also becoming increasingly urban. By 1976 one-third of its people lived in cities of over 100,000.
Husni Mubarak succeeded Anwar al-Sadat in October 1981 at a time of troubled civil-military relations. Sadat’s pursuit of a separate peace with Israel after the war in 1973 raised important questions about the military’s future role, size and sources of weapons. If Egypt was no longer at war, it would no longer need its huge military establishment. Over the following decade, the number of men under arms declined as Sadat began to convert the military into a rapid strike force that could intervene in the Horn of Africa, the Gulf or Libya.
At the beginning of June, a new, heavily armored Mercedes arrived in Cairo. It had been ordered for the new US ambassador to Egypt, Frank Wisner. Just a week earlier, in the heart of the crowded capital, a group calling itself Egypt’s Revolution had ambushed a car carrying three US Embassy staff, including the chief of embassy security. The attackers raked the car with automatic gunfire. Some good defensive driving allowed the Americans to escape with only superficial wounds. Security experts dispatched from the US described the attack as “very professional” and “well-planned.”
I read Kevin Kelly’s update on Jordan’s plan for the West Bank (MER 144). Although it is hard to argue that the path of relationship between Jordan and the Palestinian movement led by Yasser Arafat was smooth and rosy, it is quite important to consider the reality of the ties that bind Jordanians and Palestinians since even before 1947. From a Jordanian perspective, these historical ties did not only help shape what Jordan stands for today, but will have their long term effects on the nature as well.
Pea Holmquist, Joan Mandell and Pierre Bjorklund, Gaza Ghetto: Portrait of a Palestinian Family, 1948-1984 (Icarus Films, 1984).
Rudolf van den Berg, Stranger at Home (1985).
It is no small compliment to say that Stranger at Home is a film you want to see more than once (and should). Over the years — 19 to be precise — Palestine documentaries have become a veritable genre, but with few exceptions, they have hardly become an art. Rudolf van den Berg’s Stranger at Home is a very different enterprise. Richly nuanced in form and thought, it is a kind of double documentary, at once a film about the exiled Palestinian painter Kamal Boullata and his visit to Jerusalem, and a film about the making of the film, about the multi-layered relationship between Boullata and van den Berg, as friends, visual artists, Palestinian and Jew.
David Shipler, Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in the Promised Land (New York: Times Books, 1986).
Reading this massive 556-page book by David Shipler, the New York Times correspondent in Jerusalem from 1979-1984, is dizzyingly similar to reading 200 Times feature stories in a row. Shipler’s compendium of profiles, interviews and reflections on Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs is structured in the main as a series of miniature stories, linked by Shipler’s own reflections and analysis, both overt and tacit.
Richard Smyth, indicted in May 1985 for illegally exporting nuclear trigger devices to Israel, is now a fugitive. In August 1985, two days before he was scheduled to appear in court, Smyth and his wife sailed his boat to Catalina Island, off the coast of southern California, and disappeared, forfeiting his $100,000 bail. Some US intelligence agents believe Smyth was murdered. Other reports now place him in Israel. “There was no way Israel could afford an appearance by Smyth in court,” said one US operative.
Arie Arnon has been a leading Israeli proponent of political negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, and opponent of the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and Golan. He is currently a member of the Progressive List for Peace, and teaches economics at Beersheva University. Zachary Lockman interviewed him in Jerusalem in February 1987.
What was your political outlook before the June 1967 war?
On June 27, 1967, Arab East Jerusalem was annexed to the State of Israel. With the annexation, 120,000 residents of the Arab sector were joined with the Jewish citizens as equal residents under Israeli law of the united city of Jerusalem.
Hilton Obenzinger is a member of the executive committee of the November 29 Committee for Palestine, and on the staff of their bimonthly, Palestine Focus. His book of poems, This Passover or the Next I Will Never Be in Jerusalem, was reviewed in our February 1982 issue. Joel Beinin interviewed him in San Francisco in February 1987.
Tell us about the kind of organizing work that you’ve been involved in with the November 29 Committee.
Gail Pressberg is the Middle East coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). Joe Stork spoke with her in Washington in late March 1987.
Where is the peace movement at now with regard to Middle East issues?
Jim Zogby is the director of the Arab American Institute in Washington. He was a founder of the Palestine Human Rights Campaign (PHRC) and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC). Joe Stork spoke with him on March 18, 1987.
How did you get engaged in Middle East organizing?
