The fourth year of the Iranian revolution at first sight contained less surprises and reverses of political trend than the three which preceded it. The leading personalities of the regime remained constant, without major divisions or assassinations. Khomeini himself, although apparently physically weaker, continued to exert a strong dominance over those in official positions. There were no major institutional developments, and little progress towards the strengthening of the Islamic Republican Party. Bloody repression and a reign of terror continued, but the opposition sustained its fight against the regime in the main cities and especially in Kurdistan. The war with Iraq dragged on, with immense loss of life on the Iranian side but no great breakthroughs.
Most readers are only too familiar with the litany of harassments endured by Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, from restrictions on personal freedoms to attacks on institutions and confiscation of land. Nonetheless, for the purposes of building campaigns to support Palestinian rights, and for a dearer understanding of the workings of the occupation, it is worth focusing on particular violations that are significant both for the victims and for that much-evoked phantasm, “world public opinion.”
Raja Shehadeh, The Third Way: A Journal of Life in the West Bank (London: Quartet Books, 1982).
My problem with the newspapers is that I can’t settle on the right time to read them. In the morning they darken the day, at noon they kill my appetite, after lunch they make me sick, and in the evening they set the pattern of my nightmares.
Mideast File (Learned Information, Anderson House, Stokes Road, Medford, NJ 08055)
Mideast Press Report (Claremont Research and Publications, 160 Claremont Ave., New York, NY 10027)
Egypt, with the earliest industrial economy in the Middle East, has engaged in some military production for many years, supplying its own armed forces with light arms and small naval ships. Such production remained minor until recently, both in terms of the Egyptian economy and in terms of the arms purchases of the Egyptian armed forces. Now, with encouragement from the United States and other Western governments and arms manufacturers, Egypt is planning a major arms industry. In the past, such investment plans have fallen short in actual implementation. If these plans do materialize, however, Egypt may soon fill much of its domestic arms orders and begin sizable arms exports to other countries in Africa and the Middle East.
President Ronald Reagan had just left Honduras, the last stop on his recent tour of Latin and Central America. Only two days later, on December 6, the red carpet was out again in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital. This time the guest of honor was Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon. The official explanation for Sharon’s three-day visit was “exchanges of views.” The main topic was Honduran armed forces chief Gen. Gustavo Alvarez Martinez’s quest for new sophisticated warplanes. Washington and Paris, it seems, have felt politically constrained from selling Honduras new F-5 or Mirage jets to replace 12 French-made Super-Mystere fighters originally purchased from Israel some years back. [1]
Over the last decade, the Middle East has become a focal point of the world arms buildup. Each year, the regional arsenal grows, as the United States, the Soviet Union, France, Britain and others ship billions of dollars worth of weapons to the countries there. During the 1970s, while the world arms trade doubled, Middle East arms imports rose fourfold (in constant dollars). [1] Today, the region receives over half of all arms deliveries to the Third World, and more than a quarter of all world arms shipments.
For years, US leaders have attempted to muffle opposition to overseas arms sales by arguing that transfers of conventional, non-nuclear munitions reduce the risk of nuclear war. If we provide our allies with adequate conventional defenses, the argument goes, they will not be motivated to acquire nuclear defenses. But conventional arms sales to the Middle East have not reduced the risk of nuclear war. In fact, the opposite is true: Cascading arms sales to the region are making nuclear war more, not less likely.
Under the screen of the arms race in the Middle East, conditions of life under Israeli military rule in the occupied territories have worsened considerably in recent months. Settlements, land expropriations and attacks against West Bank inhabitants have accelerated dramatically. Settler vigilantes abuse Palestinians at will. When Palestinians react with demonstrations, Israeli troops are at the ready. Curfews, beatings, property destruction and arbitrary arrests are more than ever a part of everyday life.
Andrew J. Pierre, The Global Politics of Arms Sales (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982).
Paul Jabber, Not By War Alone: Security and Arms Control in the Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).
Steve Weissman and Herbert Krosney, The Islamic Bomb: The Nuclear Threat to Israel and the Middle East (New York: Times Books, 1981).
The Council of the American Anthropological Association passed two motions concerning the Middle East at its annual meeting on December 5, 1982, in Washington, DC. With 7,500 members, the Association is the principal professional association for anthropologists in the United States.
Motion on Lebanon Whereas the American Anthropological Association has long stood opposed to the destruction of peoples and cultures; and Whereas what is occurring in Lebanon is a massive destruction of the Lebanese and Palestinian peoples and cultures by the Israeli and Lebanese militaries, and militias supported by both governments; and
People here responded to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in a typically quiet fashion. In my day-to-day business contacts with Saudis, the subject of the war rarely came up unless I raised it. One Saudi friend commented, “We don’t yell and shout, but when we’re among ourselves we talk about it and we say that something has to be done about US support for Israel.”
The scene in any one of the country’s Lebanese shops or restaurants was quite different. Radios blared in the background as men argued loudly over the latest reports and rumors. No doubt some Saudis also viewed the war through Palestinian and Lebanese expatriates, although this community has nowhere near the social and political influence it has in Kuwait.
One of the lesser known aspects of Palestinian politics over the last eight years has been the steadily growing contacts between a number of Palestinian and Israeli progressive groups and individuals in the occupied territories. Though unreported, those contacts have not always been clandestine. They have involved a much wider circle than more publicized meetings between the small leftist parties on both sides of the “green line,” such as Matzpen and the Communist Party.
This report summarizes impressions of Soviet foreign policy gained during a study visit to the USSR in July 1982. During this visit, under the auspices of the Oriental Institute of the Academy of Sciences, I was able to meet a wide range of experts working in the institute, as well as journalists and foreign policy analysts attached to other publications and institutes.
Ever since the end of World War II, the world has been sliding in and out of battles which have killed more than 10 million people. Even in the shadow of this bloody chronicle, 1982 represents something of a watershed: In addition to the two major international conflicts in the Falklands/Malvinas and in Lebanon, we witnessed the intensification or expansion of conflicts in Iran-Iraq, Afghanistan, Angola-South Africa, Ethiopia-Somalia and El Salvador. Territorial disputes and a certain level of destructiveness are nothing new to human history. Yet from this recent spate of conflicts we get a sense that some invisible restraint has been breached.
The US Army has recently adopted an aggressive new warfighting doctrine called AirLand Battle. Its precepts now constitute the Army’s basic “how to fight” principles for a decade of “intense, deadly, and costly” battles. The Middle East is one of three major theaters—along with Europe and Korea—in which the Army intends to use its doctrine.
There are two kinds of beaches in US defense planning. The first is the shoreline that US Marines typically storm in a real or rehearsed military intervention. The second belongs to the domain of the nuclear strategists. When their “limited” nuclear war games go astray, simulating escalation into all-out thermonuclear war, the strategists privately label this outcome a “beach,” after the title of Nevil Shute’s popular novel of nuclear apocalypse, On the Beach. In this era, when two military superpowers envelope the globe with the reach of their nuclear weapons, the question inevitably arises: Is it possible for the Rapid Deployment Force to storm the beaches of the Persian Gulf without leaving all of us on the beach of nuclear annihilation?
Judging from events of the past year, the 1980s will be a time for survival. The scale and intensity of “small” wars, the priorities of militarism, the plans for military intervention by the big powers and the escalation of the nuclear arms race afflict virtually the entire planet. These threats grow more acute in the grip of economic crisis.
While I was extremely glad to see a wealth of factual information in your recent issue "Horn of Africa: The Coming Storm" (MER 106), I was bothered by the fact that Halliday, Molyneux and, to a much lesser extent, Gilkes see Ethiopia continuing to move in a revolutionary direction “toward socialism.” But I don’t see that happening, for some fundamental reasons. The point, to me, is that the revolution in Ethiopia is long over.
‘Abdallah Hanna, al-Haraka al-‘Ummaliyya fi Suriya wa Lubnan, 1900-1945 [The Labor Movement in Syria and Lebanon, 1900-1945] (Damascus: Dar Dimashq, 1973).
