On November 9, 2000, Hussein Abayat and Khalid Salahat, along with around 50 other Palestinians, were visiting one of the seven houses hit by Israeli tank shells the previous night in the West Bank village of Beit Sahour. They then climbed into their Mitsubishi pickup truck to drive back up the hill to the heart of the village. Thirty seconds later, the truck was a smoldering shell, hit by an anti-tank missile launched from an Israeli Apache helicopter. Abayat was killed instantaneously — as were two Palestinian women standing behind his van — and Salahat was severely wounded. The two men were the first victims of an Israeli policy of "initiated" assassinations aimed at taking out the "ground" leadership of the Palestinian intifada.
There has never been anything abstract about the longings of the Palestinians. The object of their longing has always been well defined: the places that had been left behind in 1948. For these places were, and still are, the dominant components of the Palestinian identity. — Danny Rubinstein
Abu-Lughod, Ibrahim, Roger Heacock and Khaled Nashef, eds. Landcapes of Palestine: Equivocal Poetry (Birzeit: Birzeit University Publications, 1999).
Ahmad, Eqbal. Confronting Empire: Interviews with David Barsamian (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000).
Amirahmadi, Hooshang. The Caspian Region at a Crossroads: Challenges of a New Frontier of Energy and Development (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000).
Kuwait
MERIP's Iraq issue (MER 215) represented an opportunity to shape the magazine according to the needs of the new activism challenging Washington's policy towards Iraq-the movement against crippling economic sanctions, thrice-weekly bombings, the undermining of the United Nations and the regional arms race that hamstrings real disarmament.
Texts Reviewed
Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
Joseba Zulaika and William A. Douglass, Terror and Taboo: The Follies, Fables and Faces of Terrorism (New York: Routledge, 1996).
Meredith Turshen and Clotilde Twagiramariya, eds., What Women Do in Wartime: Gender and Conflict in Africa (London: Zed Books, 1998).
Suha Sabbagh, ed., Palestinian Women of Gaza and the West Bank (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998).
Rivka, the tragic protagonist of Amos Gitai's new film Kadosh, is unable to conceive a child. Her anxiety is acute. The ultra-Orthodox community of Me'ah She'arim in West Jerusalem, in which Rivka lives with her husband Meir, is known to ostracize its barren women. Seeking spiritual guidance, she leaves their home one evening to pray. The camera follows Rivka as she walks through the darkened streets of Me'ah She'arim, then cuts to her arrival in the spacious, well-lit courtyard of the Western Wall. Hands pressed against the stones, she seeks salvation.
Tourist destinations are never simply reducible to the sun, sand and sea they offer. The lucrative international trade associated with Third World tourism involves packaging and marketing areas of the world that are most devastated by contemporary economic conditions, essentially creating landscapes of paradise out of realities of poverty. The case of Dahab, a small coastal town in South Sinai, Egypt, offers an example of the processes and power dynamics involved in the production of tourist spaces. What are the political, economic, cultural and moral forces that shape Dahab? Who are the players involved in shaping this local site of tourism, and what are the interests at stake?
The old village of Umm Qays, Jordan, is strategically lo
cated to the south of the Golan Heights, overlooking
the northern part of the Jordan Valley and the southern shore of Lake Tiberias. Biblical Gadara and subsequently one of the cities of the Decapolis in antiquity, it attracts modest numbers of both foreign and Jordanian tourists. From the mid-twentieth century on, Umm Qays residents increasingly abandoned farming for work in the civil service and the army, and a new village began to develop adjacent to the original village.
Under pressure to solve immediate economic problems,
Middle Eastern countries seek to industrialize as
quickly and as cheaply as possible. While developed countries around the world are very slowly adopting technologies and production methods that exert less pressure on the environment, Western industry at the same time sells its old, polluting technologies to less developed countries at cut-rate prices. Too often, the myopic drive for quick economic gains means that destruction is taken for development and deterioration for progress. Greenpeace and other international and local organizations are combating this mindset on several fronts.
Burning Trash
In 1990, citizens of Alexandria organized to fight the loss
of public access to a street in a main downtown square.
The city had given the street to the World Health Organization for a planned expansion of their local offices. In a landmark case against then-governor Ismail al-Gawsaqi, the citizens’ group, Friends of the Environment and Development-Alexandria (FEDA), argued that city authorities had denied the public’s right to “locational memory” and open space in overcrowded Alexandria. Elderly residents testified in court about their memories of promenades on the street. In a piece of effective political theater, group members sitting in court attached flowers to their lapels and laid flowers on the street outside, to symbolize their mourning of the passing of urban space. The group’s tactics were mocked at first. But in the end, the judge ruled that the allocation of the street for the WHO expansion violated the constitutional principle that “public resources should be used in the public interest.” The WHO announced it would move to Cairo, though the offices are still in Alexandria at present.
Around 10,000 of the estimated million people employed
in Egypt’s fishing sector are based in ‘Izbat al-Burg, situated at the northernmost tip of the Nile’s Damietta Branch and bordered on the east by the vast Lake Manzala. As recently as nine years ago, Lake Manzala was a major fishing area and a collective asset for this community. Small-scale fishers used simple, cheap fishing boats and equipment, faring well alongside larger operators working in both lake and sea fishing. But at the turn of the century, the lake is no longer regarded as rizq (a source of livelihood). Increasingly, local fishers have been prevented from fishing in Manzala by state-licensed private enclosures that have virtually sealed off access to the lake’s northwestern shorelines.
Only a decade after the fall of apartheid in South Africa,
after we all thought we had seen the end of that hateful
system, we are witnessing the emergence of another apartheid-style regime, that of Israel over the incipient Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and parts of Jerusalem. This, at least, seems the likely outcome of the “peace process” begun in Oslo and continued, if haltingly, at the July Camp David summit. Whether a Palestinian state actually emerges from the Oslo process or Israel’s occupation becomes permanent, the essential elements of apartheid — exclusivity, inequality, separation, control, dependency, violations of human rights and suffering — are likely to define the relationship between Israel and the Occupied Territories/Palestine.
The right-wing American Enterprise Institute (AEI) — home to Newt Gingrich, Charles Murray and Dinesh
D’Souza — would certainly prefer a Republican presidential candidate who could be distinguished on foreign policy from his Democratic counterpart. But roundtable discussions hosted by the Institute on June 14 and June 22 found that George W. Bush and Al Gore read from basically the same script. What contrasts the panelists did manage to find were not between Bush and Gore but rather between the two candidates and Bill Clinton.
Black clouds off the Nile River hang low over Mandela Camp, ushering in the storms that bring misery to an already wretched existence on the outskirts of Sudan’s capital. The clouds soon open up over the sprawling squatter settlement, and the rain begins its relentless fall. Barnaba Marial Marol, his cheeks hollow with hunger and his eyes heavy with sorrow, begins his story.
On June 7-8, 2000, the Center for Documents and Diplomatic History of the Iranian Foreign Ministry hosted an international conference in Tehran on the subject of “Iran and the Great Powers, 1950-1953,” with the participation of scholars and archivists from several countries.
The 200-page CIA official history of the 1953 coup in Iran, obtained recently by the New York Times, adds considerably to our understanding of the coup. The history, written strictly for the US intelligence community by the late Donald Wilber, a well-known scholar who wrote many books about Iran, chronicles the coup d’état in which a team of CIA officers overthrew Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq. Wilber worked on a part-time basis for the CIA and was deeply involved in planning the coup and overseeing the propaganda campaign that accompanied it. [1]
Ahmad Shamlu, leading Iranian poet, died in Tehran on July 23, 2000 at the age of 74. In many ways, he embodied the Iranian intellectual movement of his generation: an adept adapter of Western ideas, yet often unfamiliar with their underpinnings; steeped in his native tradition, yet poised uncomfortably against it; wielding immense influence, yet subjected to censorship and harassment throughout his career.
Along with his many students, friends, colleagues and relatives, MERIP mourns the death of Hanna Batatu. He died at the age of 74 on June 24, 2000 at Winsted, Connecticut after a struggle with cancer. Batatu, a former MERIP contributing editor, was also the dissertation adviser and long-time colleague of many of the present and past members of MERIP boards and committees. His work shaped many of our political and intellectual perspectives in a profound and lasting manner.
