The streets of Sanaa, the North Yemeni capital, appear to condense some of the most divergent elements of Third World economic change and political upheaval. Perhaps nowhere else in the Middle East, or indeed elsewhere in the Third World, do the antinomies of combined and uneven development come so dramatically to the surface. The city is full of consumer goods brought in on the emigrants’ remittances and foreign aid that make up nearly all of the country’s foreign exchange earnings. Filipino workers in hardhats are digging up the roads to install sewerage systems. Aid agencies of many stripes are plying their wares and plans.
Over the weekend of February 15-18, there was an unprecedented gathering in a rural camp in New Jersey. Under a call of “Breaking the Silence,” the American Friends Service Committee and the Mobilization for Survival brought together more than 150 persons from across the country who have been active around questions of US policy and intervention in the Middle East. The purpose of the meeting was not to establish any new organization or to pass resolutions. Rather, it was to share information and experience about raising Middle East issues, such as the Gulf war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in local and national organizing.
Robert O. Freedman, ed., The Middle East Since Camp David (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984).
This is the third volume in a series based on papers presented at conferences organized by the Baltimore Hebrew College’s Center for the Study of Israel and the Contemporary Middle East. These papers are mostly descriptive and analytically unimaginative. The authors come mainly from circles uncritical of US policy. Their contributions are useful for providing ready reference to events and issues. But the book is already out of date and has little long-term value.
Jonathan Steele, Soviet Power: The Kremlin’s Foreign Policy — Brezhnev to Andropov (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983).
This is the sixth book on international events from one of Britain’s most senior and experienced journalists. His previous works on the USSR and Eastern Europe have shown him to be a sensitive and sympathetic observer of the Soviet scene. Steele starts from the premise that an emphasis on the USSR’s military capabilities alone is likely to produce an over-estimation of Moscow’s ability to intervene or expand its influence abroad. Steele’s aim is to examine the totality of Soviet military preparations, policy statements and political actions to produce a more complete and reliable calculus of Soviet power today.
Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1983).
Lenni Brenner has written a singular book about “the interaction between Zionism and Fascism and Nazism.” It is one of the many ironies of history that Zionism, a movement that claims to be dedicated to assuring the survival of the Jewish people, should have developed in symbiosis with the most murderous Jew-haters of our (or perhaps any) era. Ironies, however, have their logic, and this is what Brenner explores.
Eric Davis, Challenging Colonialism: Bank Misr and Egyptian Industrialization, 1920-1941 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1983).
Eric Davis intends his study to answer a wide range of questions concerning capitalism and industrialization in the Middle East. Two issues in particular are central to his analysis: “what were the social forces behind the formation of the Bank Misr” and “why did the bank experience a period of rapid economic growth only to later face financial collapse?” (p. 5)
On June 5, 1984, voters in Berkeley, California, by a margin of almost 64 percent to 36 percent, defeated a ballot measure calling for the United States to reduce its aid to Israel by the amount Israel spends on its settlements in the occupied territories of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights. What’s going on here? Since the 1960s, Berkeley has had a reputation as the most politically progressive urban community in the country. Civil rights activism on the University of California campus spawned the Free Speech Movement, which in turn set the stage for the early protests and organizing against the US war in Vietnam. When Ronald Reagan was elected governor in 1966, one of his main campaign targets was UC campus radicalism.
Alignment: The dominant party in the Labor Zionist movement was the right social-democratic Mapai. In 1965, a group loyal to Mapai’s historic leader, David Ben-Gurion, split and formed Rafi — a formation characterized by an “activist” military policy and a technocratic/statist outlook. This group included Shimon Peres, Moshe Dayan and Yitzhak Navon. The same year the first Alignment, an electoral coalition and not a merger of forces, was formed between Mapai and Ahdut ha-Avoda, a kibbutz-based party with a tradition of military activism and close links to the military establishment (best represented by Yigal Allon, Deputy Prime Minister under Golda Meir and author of the “Allon Plan” for the occupied territories).
Israel’s latest elections, for the eleventh Knesset, have certified the state of paralysis and polarization that has gripped the country since the Lebanon invasion of 1982. The results of the election, and the failure of the Likud bloc to maintain a decisive plurality, certainly represent one consequence of the Lebanon war. When Menachem Begin resigned as prime minister in the fall of 1983 without any public explanation, many Israelis attributed this move to the Lebanon “tragedy,” as Begin himself referred to the continuing war in a Knesset speech just before his resignation. Clearly a great many Israelis consider the war a failure — even a nightmare.
In the May 1984 general elections in Egypt, the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) won almost 73 percent of the vote. The new Wafd got just above 15 percent. The other three contenders failed to get the eight percent minimum needed for a seat: the Socialist Labor Party (‘Amal) got just over seven percent; the National Progressive Unionist Party (Tagammu‘) got just over four percent; the Socialist Liberal Party (Ahrar) did not exceed one percent. These “lost” votes accrued to the biggest party, the NDP, which thus took 390 seats to the Wafd’s 58 seats. [1]
March 26, 1985, will mark the sixth anniversary of the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, brokered and signed in Washington, the culmination of the “Camp David process.” What have been the consequences of this pact, and where is the peace it was supposed to usher into the region?
We would like to begin this first issue for 1985 with heartfelt thanks to our readers for your very strong support over the past year. Your unprecedented generosity in response to our fundraising appeals was essential to our work, and we appreciate very much the confidence this expresses for MERIP’s future. In this coming year we will continue to count on your help. The need for a strong, critical perspective on US policy in the region will be more important than ever as the Reagan administration begins its second term. We are grateful to know that you are with us. One innovation we are planning for this year is a special newsletter for those who contribute $50 or more to MERIP’s work. The first issue will appear shortly.
Maxine Molyneux, State Policies and the Position of Women Workers in the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, 1966-1977 (Geneva: International Labor Office, 1982).
Juliana S. Peck, The Reagan Administration and the Palestine Question: The First Thousand Days (Washington, DC: Institute of Palestine Studies, 1984).
Steven A. Schneider, The Oil Price Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).
Robert Sherrill, The Oil Follies of 1970-1980: How the Petroleum Industry Stole the Show (New York: Anchor Press, 1983).
Under the Reagan administration, the United States has waged “the second Cold War” with particular forcefulness in the Middle East. Washington has moved combat forces into the region repeatedly since 1981: to engage first Libyan warplanes over the Gulf of Sidra, then Lebanese militias and Syrian forces outside Beirut, and most recently Iranian air and naval patrols in the Persian Gulf. These military operations have accompanied political steps that have moved the US away from an emphasis on close relations with “moderate” Arab regimes in favor of closer strategic ties with Israel. From the administration’s perspective, such policies have provided a coherence to American relations with this part of the world that was lacking during the Carter years.
Fifty thousand troops move across the desert in 100 degree-plus temperatures. F-18 jet fighters scream through the air and strafe the rock and sand below. Tanks maneuver over rough terrain to pound enemy positions. A buzzer goes off in a soldier’s helmet: The computer-guided laser network at the Army National Training Center, Fort Irwin, California, is telling this soldier that in a real war he would be dead.
The policies of the Reagan administration strive to recapture the nearly unlimited US power of the 20 years following World War II. Through the late 1960s and 1970s, US global dominance steadily declined in all but the military realm. This decline occurred during a period of intense global economic integration. Since 1979, in a belated response to this loss of hegemony, US state managers have embraced a radically aggressive and destructive new policy comprising three main elements: monetarism, militarism and markets. In an attempt to reverse recent historical trends, they have embarked upon an adventurist foreign policy while simultaneously attacking the economic wellbeing of both the traditionally high-wage US working class and the disenfranchised poor.
The “deadly connection” — the link between interventionism, conventional warfare and nuclear war — has now become a major issue for the peace movement. This, in turn, has compelled those working on nuclear disarmament questions to begin to deal with the Middle East and US policy there. The reason for this is simple. When we look at specific regions of the world, it is obvious that the Middle East is the area where the connection arises in its most acute and dangerous form — the area where a nuclear war is most likely to break out.
Ronald Reagan’s resounding reelection victory on November 6 represents a daunting challenge to progressive forces in this country, a challenge that would have been awesome enough even if the Democrats had managed to win. Indicative of the dangers that lie ahead was the administration’s fabricated “leak” on election night that Soviet MiG fighter jets were en route to Nicaragua. This assertion proved completely false, but still served the administration’s purpose of whipping up support for greater US military intervention there. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger then tried to maintain the official distortion level by insisting that Nicaragua was importing massive quantities of offensive weapons.
