No one in Cairo seems at all clear about the present direction of Egyptian politics. The signs are contradictory and difficult to read. On the one hand, the press is freer than at any time since 1952 (and perhaps before), there is a wide-ranging public discussion about major issues, and all recognized political groups display considerable energy in the jockeying for position involved in the runup to the 1984 election for the People’s Assembly. On the other hand, President Husni Mubarak’s brief dialogue with what he identified as the country’s “official opposition” is long since over. Major problems, like the attempt to provide a constructive role for the more moderate elements inside the Muslim Brothers, remain.
Visiting Egypt this spring — my first since the assassination of Anwar al-Sadat — I was immediately struck by the extent to which symbols of the Sadat era had already faded or been pushed into oblivion. Only one small, inconspicuous plaque informs the passerby that Cairo’s main square is “Anwar al-Sadat Square.” The shopkeepers, taxi drivers and pedestrians still know it by its old name of “Liberation Square.” Many individuals, though, especially those in opposition groups, are quick to point out that most changes under Husni Mubarak are skin-deep. The basic orientation as well as the problems of the regime remain the same.
The long conflict involving Israel, the Palestinians and neighboring Arab states has revolved around the elementary bonds of people and territory. Water is perhaps the single most important material resource determining the relationship of people to land. From the beginnings of the Zionist project through the wars and occupations of the last two decades to the current negotiations between Israel, Lebanon and Syria, access to and control of water has figured as a primary strategic factor. The centrality of water to Israeli strategy can be summarized in the following points:
Azmi Shuaibi is a dentist and a leading member of al-Bira municipal council, now disbanded by the Israeli military government. He comes from a peasant background, from the village of Dayr Ghassana in the West Bank, and was educated at Cairo University. He was elected to al-Bira municipal council on a pro-Palestine Liberation Organization slate in the 1976 election. Since 1977, he also represented the Ramallah-Bira section of the Palestinian Dentists’ Association. In the city council, he was responsible for the public library and its wide-ranging cultural activity, and for the secondary school committee. Shuaibi has been imprisoned several times for his political activity. Until recently he was under town arrest, which prevented him from leaving al-Bira or the West Bank.
Israeli settlements in the occupied territories have recently become much more central to the whole Israeli-Arab conflict. Massive loss of land by West Bank Palestinians, and an upsurge in Jewish settlements and in the number of settlers, have attracted international attention to Israeli colonization of Palestine — a phenomenon which dates back to the June 1967 war in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights and, before 1982, the Sinai. In Israel proper, this “Judaization” of the land has been a central tenet and practice of Zionism ever since the waves of Jewish immigration began in the late nineteenth century. In the last two years, colonization across the Green Line (Israel’s pre-1967 borders) has shown qualitative as well as quantitative changes.
An interesting instance of the politics of culture is the “Heritage of Islam” exhibit currently on display at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington. The exhibit, which toured a number of US cities over the past year, is a project of the National Committee to Honor the Fourteenth Centennial of Islam. We had been looking forward to its arrival, and our interest was further stimulated by an article in the June 1983 issue of Smithsonian discussing some controversies that had arisen.
Janet Lee Stevens died in Beirut at the age of 32, in the United States Embassy bombing on April 18. More than anyone that I knew, Janet had an extraordinary sensitivity toward the people and cultures of the Middle East. Since the early 1970s she had lived in Tunisia, Egypt and most recently in Lebanon. Her deep understanding of the region came from total immersion and participation in the lives and struggles of the people among whom she lived. Her fluency in Arabic gave her an access to Arab culture that few Westerners share. She mastered the language in all its nuances, through hard work and constant practice. In the end she spoke spontaneously, as if Arabic were her native tongue, and she understood the subtleties of Arab thought and humor.
Rafik Halabi, The West Bank Story (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982).
Rafik Halabi is a Palestinian-Israeli Druze. He writes at times with the viewpoint of an Israeli soldier and a former aide to Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek, sometimes as an Arab villager. The West Bank Story explores several themes. Drawing on his experience covering the occupied territories for Israeli television, Halabi offers a journalistic account of the occupation’s history, its political figures and its radical “Palestinization” (or “de-Jordanization”). Another theme is the impact of the occupation on the occupying society.
Amnon Cohen, Political Parties in the West Bank Under the Jordanian Regime, 1949-1967 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982).
Ariel Sharon: “These Years Have Been Exciting”
What is your assessment of the week? Victory, defeats, the end of a career, of an ambition?
You can make the assessment yourself; there is no doubt that it was tough, but the fact is that I am still a government member.
Is that so important?
Very important. Not the personal aspect but the political implication. I do not deny that these years in the cabinet have been exciting; taking decisions, doing things, creating new situations. But that is not the most important thing. I wanted to remain a member of the government to promote the cause which I regard as most important—the cause of Eretz Israel.
The final report of the Kahan Commission shows the extent to which the Lebanese Phalangists and Major Sa’ad Haddad’s “Free Lebanon” forces are little more than hired hands in the eyes of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and the intelligence agency, Mossad. The Israeli government decides and the Phalangists perform. The Kahan report is quite unambiguous about this hierarchical relationship.
I will begin at the end; I am not satisfied by the report of the commission of inquiry….
I have great respect for the three members of the commission. They did an excellent job. The conclusions were reached according to their conscience and understanding. They added honor to Israeli democracy and to the rule of the law. I say this without reservation.
However, the three could not be and perhaps did not want to be free of certain preconceptions, which guided them. All three are members of the establishment—two supreme court justices and one general in the IDF—and they judged as members of the establishment. When two alternatives lay before them, it appears that more than once they discarded in advance the more severe one.
If politics is the art of the possible, then the impact of the Kahan Commission Report has to be understood as “beyond politics,” Israel’s final victory in the Lebanon war is not the expulsion of the PLO or even the extension of its sovereign reach to challenge Lebanese territorial and political independence. The full measure of Israel’s victory is rather its vindication, despite all, as a moral force in the region—as a superior state, especially as compared to its Arab rivals.
Until the war in Lebanon, official Israeli policy toward the Palestinians under its occupation rested on the premise that the PLO was the only obstacle on the road to what Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir called “the fullest advancement of the process that began in Camp David.” [1] The elimination of the PLO, according to this logic, would produce Palestinians willing to take part in an Israeli-defined autonomy. Through the so- called Civil Administration, then-Defense Minister Ariel Sharon had started the process of extirpating “PLO influence in the territories.”
Jonathan Kuttab works as an attorney in Ramallah. He grew up in the West Bank. After finishing college in the US and getting a law degree from the University of Virginia, he returned to the West Bank in 1979. He recently obtained accreditation from the Israeli bar. He works with Law in the Service of Man, the West Bank affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists, which analyzes the military orders and legal mechanisms used to implement Israeli policy and documents human rights violations. He spoke with Joe Stork in Baltimore on April 12, 1983.
What is the situation in the West Bank since the Lebanon war?
The residual areas of Palestine occupied by Israel in June 1967 (generally referred to as the West Bank and Gaza) contained a population of between 1,300,000 and 1,350,000 Palestinians. At that time, this population represented over half of all the estimated 2,650,000 Palestinians in the world. At present, the number of Palestinians who remain in these zones does not exceed 1,300,000—approximately the same number as lived there 15 years ago. Had the population of 1967 remained in place, natural increase would have yielded a present population in post-1967 occupied Palestine in excess of 2 million. Therefore, we estimate that the June 1967 war and subsequent occupation were responsible for the dispersion from their homeland of over 700,000 additional Palestinians.
George Hazboun is a leading Palestinian trade unionist. He was dismissed from his elected position as deputy mayor of Bethlehem by a January 22 municipal council decision, spearheaded by Mayor Elias Freij, for his alleged abstention from attending council meetings since May 1982. Coming as it did three weeks before the convening of the Palestine National Council in Algeria, this dismissal was interpreted by the national movement as an attempt to clear the ground for pro-Hashemite elements in the West Bank to make their presence known in the Algiers meeting and to mute anti-Jordanian sentiment locally.
Snow fell seven times on the hill towns north of Jerusalem this past winter, and the warmth of spring did not come until after the middle of April. But the welcome spring did not bring relief from the harshness of the Israeli occupation. In the town centers, Israeli troops were a constant reminder of the military authority, fingering their machine guns, one member of the unit holding a radio with an enormous whip antenna, ready to summon further forces at a moment’s notice. There are now more soldiers than before—on the hilltops, on the roads, in the squares, patrolling, lounging, harassing. The fines are higher, the jail sentences are longer, restrictions are tighter on personal movement, censorship of newspapers is more onerous.
Israeli authorities openly acknowledge that the invasion of Lebanon was part of a strategy to break Palestinian resistance in the West Bank and Gaza so that de facto annexation could proceed. Palestinian resistance has not been broken, but Israeli settlement building continues at a rapid pace and occupation policies are harsher than ever. In this issue, we examine the current situation in the occupied territories and the continuing struggle there. Another issue in the near future will complement this one with articles on the economy, water, settlements, land policy and other questions, as well as a bibliography, for which there was not sufficient space here.
Michael Jansen, The Battle of Beirut: Why Israel Invaded Lebanon (London: Zed Books, 1982).
