On March 28, 2006, Nadia Hilou from the mixed Arab-Jewish city of Jaffa became only the second Palestinian woman to be elected to the Knesset since 1949, the year of Israel’s first national elections. Hilou’s sole predecessor was Husniyya Jabara, who made history in 1999 when she won a seat in the Israeli parliament. Jabara’s election to the Knesset with Meretz, a leftist Zionist party, caught the political system by surprise. Hardly anyone expected an Arab woman to win, much less Jabara, because many other Palestinian women in both Arab and Zionist parties were better known in the media or had longer histories as political and social activists.
Beginning in December 2004, and then every Friday since February 2005, Palestinians, Israelis and internationals have converged on the West Bank village of Bil‘in to demonstrate against the barrier that Israel is building there, as part of the chain of walls and fences (the Wall) that the Israeli government hopes will be Israel’s unilaterally declared eastern border. The protests in Bil‘in have been among the most effective and sustained of any in the Occupied Territories.
During my short flight from Amman to Beirut on July 3, the flight attendant was distributing copies of Jordan’s state-owned newspapers. They are all worthless, I told him. He replied: “Sir, the only page that contains truth is the obituary page.” The steward’s remark succinctly captures the Arab public’s distrust of the pronouncements of their leaders. On July 3, the Arab public was infuriated by Israel’s bombardment and lockdown of the Gaza Strip, following Palestinian militants’ seizure of an Israeli soldier. The US spoke only of Israel’s “right to self-defense”; Arab leaders sat idly by.
Rasha Salti moved back to Beirut from New York on July 11, 2006, the day before Hizballah’s cross-border raid and Israel’s month-long war on Lebanon. We publish here excerpts from several entries in a diary she kept during the war. Her “Siege Notes” can be read in full at www.electroniclebanon.net.
Aarts, Paul and Gerd Nonneman, eds. Saudi Arabia in the Balance: Political Economy, Society, Foreign Affairs (New York: New York University Press, 2005).
Abdul-Ahad, Ghaith, Kael Alford, Thorne Anderson and Rita Leistner. Unembedded: Four Independent Photographers on the War in Iraq (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2005).
Baron, Beth. Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender and Politics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006).
To what extent should national security trump democracy? Since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, this question has been pertinent everywhere, but it is especially pressing in Turkey.
"’Black locusts’ are taking over Morocco!" So ran the September 12, 2005 headline of al-Shamal, an Arabic-language Tangier newspaper, describing the forays of masses of in-transit sub-Saharan Africans trying to scale the security fences separating Morocco from the Spanish-ruled enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. Moroccan authorities immediately banned al-Shamal for employing this racist language, but the press on both sides of the Mediterranean continued to use terms like “massive invasion” and “plague” to denote the sub-Saharan migrants’ repeated attempts in September and early October to escape from Africa into the territory of the European Union.
On October 19, 2005, in a former presidential palace that had been hastily refurbished to resemble a respectable courtroom, Saddam Hussein went on trial.
The pages of US newspapers are full of opinion pieces about Iraq — almost none of them penned by Iraqis. Americans might be forgiven for believing that Iraqi writers are stunned into silence by the chaos enveloping their country, but that is far from the case. Below are two offerings, translated from Arabic by Sinan Antoon, from writers representing important currents — though certainly not the only ones — in contemporary Iraqi opinion.
Labor practices in Iraq are under scrutiny, as contractors hire poor non-Iraqis to work low-wage jobs in a deadly environment. Migrant workers are employed through complex layers of companies working in Iraq. At the top of the pyramid is the US government, which assigned over $24 billion in contracts over 2004–2005. Laborers are often deceived with false promises of lucrative, safe jobs in nations such as Jordan and Kuwait, only to find themselves working in unsafe jobs across the border. Some source countries have banned workers from going to Iraq, but, with little regulation, labor brokers are finding loopholes.
“Life would get better.” Women throughout Iraq told themselves that constantly during the first, cautiously hopeful months of the US-British occupation of their country.
As the electricity blinked on and off, the water stopped running and desert-camouflaged tanks churned up the narrow streets of the ancient capital, women consoled themselves with the thought that these troubles could only be temporary. Especially for women, the Iraqi future was bright.
At a press conference two weeks before the US-led invasion of Iraq, flanked by four “Women for a Free Iraq,” [1] Paula Dobriansky, then undersecretary of state for global affairs, declared: “We are at a critical point in dealing with Saddam
Hussein. However this turns out, it is clear that the women of Iraq have a critical role to play in the future revival of their society.” For the Bush administration, Iraqi women would not only be “helping give birth to freedom” in the post-Saddam
order. [2] US officials spoke publicly about rape, torture and executions of women under Ba‘th Party rule, implicitly linking
The international occupation of Afghanistan is in bad shape. US casualties are up — at times the ratio of killed and wounded to troops deployed is equal to that in Iraq, though of course the total numbers are not. Taliban attacks are intensifying, and now include frequent suicide bombings. Kidnappings are becoming more common. NGOs are being attacked and pulling out. Over 200 schools have been burned down and closed. Each year, fewer roads are safe to travel. The country’s economy lies in ruins and its government is a largely dysfunctional kleptocracy. A new round of aid is coming — at a February 2006 donors’ conference in London, $10.5 billion was pledged through 2011 — but the long-term prognosis looks bad.
To hear American politicians and the commercial news media tell it, the greatest military power in world history hastily launched an ill-conceived invasion because of intelligence failures and wishful fantasies of sweets and flowers. It is as if, to paraphrase a sentiment heard in White House hallways on September 11, 2001, history really did start on that day, and nothing that happened beforehand mattered.
On November 26, 2005, Tom Fox and three other members of the Christian Peacemaker Team (CPT) based in Iraq — James Looney, Harmeet Singh and Norman Kimber — were kidnapped by a previously unknown group calling itself the Swords of Righteousness Brigade. Nearly four months later, on March 10, 2006, Tom’s corpse was found in a ditch. It appeared he had been killed the previous day. On March 23, the other three kidnapped members of the CPT were released unharmed.
Tom’s murder is particularly poignant because CPT’s efforts in Iraq have been focused entirely on supporting the Iraqi people as they determine their own destiny. CPT is a violence reduction group that has sent trained peacemakers to conflict areas such as Palestine, Haiti, Chechnya and Colombia.
Mohamed Sid-Ahmed (1928–2006), a long-serving contributing editor of this magazine, was born in Cairo into a cosmopolitan family whose landed wealth dated to the era of Mehmet Ali. He was a life-long activist in the communist and progressive movements, one of Egypt’s leading political writers and intellectuals, and a person of extraordinary integrity and generosity.
Aghaie, Kamran Scot, ed. The Women of Karbala: Ritual Performance and Symbolic Discourses in Modern Shi‘i Islam (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2005).
Bahgat, Gawdat. Israel and the Persian Gulf: Retrospect and Prospect (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2006).
Balaghi, Shiva. Saddam Hussein: A Biography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005).
