Middle East Research and Information Project: Critical Coverage of the Middle East Since 1971
Lori Allen is to be congratulated for tackling head on the thorny issue of uses and abuses of violence in the Arab-Israeli conflict (“Palestinians Debate ‘Polite’ Resistance to Occupation,” MER 225). But she has missed the mark in crucial areas.
Student demonstrations in December 2002 revealed yet again the depth of public sentiment favoring political and economic reform in Iran. But the loose coalition of reformists under the leadership of President Mohammad Khatami has been unable to harness this “reserve power of revolution” to push its program through to fruition. Crises engendered by the conservatives, a persistent sense of encirclement by foreign enemies and the reformists’ own failures have all contributed to the Iranian impasse.
In sharp contrast to the diplomatic ineptitude that has characterized the Anglo-American march to war against Iraq, military preparations have been systematic, extensive and inexorable. As the military buildup has progressed through the autumn and winter of 2002 and into the succeeding spring, the feelings of Kuwaitis about what virtually all see as an inevitable war have become more and more — ambivalent.
Sipping coffee in downtown Amman, a friend just returned from a three-week stay on a scholarship in the United States surprised me by saying, “I don’t know if I should smoke.” Had she fallen victim to the American anti-smoking frenzy? Not exactly, she continued: “You know, I’m boycotting American products, and there are only Marlboros [for sale] here.” Marlboro cigarettes are but one target of a movement sweeping Jordan and the entire Arab world calling for the boycott of American and British companies which deal with Israel.
An-Na’im, Abdullahi, ed. Islamic Family Law in a Changing World: A Global Resource Book (London: Zed Books, 2002).
Bennis, Phyllis. Before and After: US Foreign Policy and the September 11 Crisis (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2002).
B’tselem. Operation Defensive Shield: Soldiers’ Testimonies, Palestinian Testimonies (Jerusalem, 2002).
Collins, John and Ross Glover, eds. Collateral Language: A Users Guide to America’s New War (New York: New York University Press, 2002).
Dannin, Robert, ed. Arms Against Fury: Magnum Photographers in Afghanistan (New York: powerHouse Books, 2002).
Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled, Being Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh, Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
On May 9, 2002, Tony Judt, professor of history at New York University, began an essay on Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation with a quote from Raymond Aron’s book on the 1954-1962 Algerian War of Independence from French colonial rule. [1] France, Aron argued, could not impose its administration on the Algerians indefinitely nor was it willing to integrate them into French society. Until they left Algeria, Aron argued, the French were harming themselves more than the Algerians.
When an August 2002 opinion poll released by the US-based NGO Search for Common Ground showed that majorities of Palestinians would support a non-violent intifada, many residents of the Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem greeted the results with suspicion. "They're trying to make us be 'polite,'" one leader of the Fatah youth movement laughed bitterly. The poll itself was dangerous, he suggested, possibly part of an insidious effort to convince Palestinians to give up resistance to the Israeli occupation.
The Marwan Barghouti case has been labeled a “political trial” by Israelis and Palestinians alike. In the courtroom, Israel is trying Barghouti for terrorism. In the court of public opinion, the Israeli government is using the prosecution of Barghouti to discredit the Palestinian leadership and Palestinian resistance to occupation. Barghouti, in turn, is using the event to put Israel on trial.
The swift success scored by the US in removing the Taliban regime in Afghanistan was a catalyst for hawks in George W. Bush’s administration to advocate further experiments in regime removal surgery. But hawkish euphoria at this accomplishment may have been conducive to self-deception in Washington. Afghanistan is not the thesis that proves the viability of regime removal in Iraq; it is, in fact, the antithesis.
Never have the gardens of Sarchinar and the slopes of Mount Azmar welcomed so many Kurdish families fleeing the heat of Suleimaniya than during the exceptionally long Indian summer of 2002. Squatting on the ground or sitting around tables, grilling shish-kebabs on improvised barbecues or unpacking home-cooked dishes, women dressed in colorful robes mix with men in traditional attire, listening to the last cassette of the Kurdish crooner Omar Dizai, drinking yogurt mixed with water, tea, beer or raki, while children run around nearby. The crowd revels late into the night, seemingly without a care in the world. "For once," says Azad, an engineer, "we Kurds are on the right side of the fence."
On September 12, 2002, George W. Bush delivered a forceful address to the United Nations General Assembly to rally support for an American campaign against Iraq. Challenging the UN to enforce its own resolutions, Bush warned the assembled delegates that failure to back the US war against Iraq would condemn the institution to irrelevance. While the speech contained little that was new — most notably, it failed to offer the long-promised evidence of Iraqi nuclear weapons — it did succeed in returning the UN to the center of the developing US-Iraqi showdown. Bush received numerous plaudits, even among those who oppose war, mainly for the simple fact that he approached the UN at all.
As many as five million Sudanese displaced by the country’s 19-year civil war live in Egypt, many on the urban margins of Cairo. Mostly poor and unemployed, the Sudanese displaced get by in an environment where no one — the Egyptian government, civil society or the UN — seems willing or able to help them.
