“A displaced person owns nothing but the spot where he is standing, which is always threatened.” — Murid Barghouti
Israeli power, US backing, Palestinian weakness, Arab complicity — these are the basic ingredients for a coercive settlement of the “refugee problem” based not on refugees’ rights but on their disappearance. The “new Middle East” must be tidied up; states, citizens and borders must correspond; disruptive anomalies must be removed. Because of their centrality to regional instability, eliminating the Palestinian refugees is essential to a pacified Middle East free to fulfill its designated role in the global economy.
Noam Chomsky, commenting on the just released book Remembering Deir Yassin, notes that “the Deir Yassin massacre is a bitter symbol of a long history of terror and repression, to which — to our shame — we have contributed in many substantial ways, and still do. We should not only remember, but also rethink and understand, and more important, act to bring some measure of justice to people who have suffered gravely.”
The struggle over the historical record and popular memory of 1948 has reached the Internet. A number of websites and posted materials devoted to the Palestinian experience in 1948 known as the nakba (national catastrophe) offer a wealth of information to counter the virtual media silence about the victims of Israel’s independence. Two comprehensive nakba websites have been created by the Arab Studies Society in Jerusalem (www.arabstudies.org/mainp.htm) and the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah (www.alnakba.org/), both of which provide historical accounts of the nakba, survivors’ testimonies, chronologies and photo galleries.
A scene toward the end of the documentary film Calling the Ghosts shows two Muslim women from Bosnia, survivors of the Serbian concentration camp of Omarska, looking through a rack of postcards. They have come to The Hague to testify about their experiences at the war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The voiceover is one of the women reading what they wrote to their former Serbian colleagues in the now Muslim-free city of Prijedor: “Greetings from The Hague. Hope to see you here soon.” Those two short sentences speak volumes about modern ethnic hatred, genocidal violence and war crimes such as rape and torture, as well as the survivor spirit and demands for justice.
Abul-Husn, Latif. The Lebanese Conflict: Looking Inward (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998).
Afkhami, Mahnaz and Erika Friedl. Muslim Women and the Politics of Participation: Implementing the Beijing Platform (Syracuse, NY: syracuse University Press, 1997).
Bagader, Abubaker, Ava M. Heinrichsdorff and Deborah S. Akers, eds. Voices of Change: Short Stories by Saudi Arabian Women (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998).
Banuri, Tariq, Shahrukh Rafi Khan and Moazam Mahmood, ed. Just Development: Beyond Adjustment with a Human Face (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Bayat, Asef. Street Politics: Poor People’s Movements in Iran (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
Throughout 1997, mounting restrictions on the press in Jordan reflected the government’s broader agenda of masking the widening divide between the state and its domestic political critics. In May, 1997, six months before the parliamentary elections, the cabinet of Prime Minister ‘Abd al-Salam al-Majali promulgated temporary amendments to the 1993 press and publications law that severely restricted the country’s outspoken independent weekly newspapers. The amendments followed nearly four years of legal action against the weeklies, the primary public outlet for independent views about the October 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaty, the country’s economic performance under IMF-led reform, government corruption and human rights abuses.
Hugh Roberts is a senior research fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a specialist on Algerian political history. Middle East Report recently asked him to give his view on the continuing violence in Algeria and what, if anything, western governments can do about the situation.
Images of same-sex love and sexual dissidence from the heterosexual norm have long been portrayed in literature, theater and cinema in the Arab world. While the explicit depiction of homosexual acts in film has been the subject of strict censorship, cinematic references to gays and lesbians abound, if often in heavily coded forms.
There is a general perception in Egypt today, shared by fans and many critics, that “old” Egyptian films depicted sex more tastefully than recent films. The following passage by critic Hisham Lashin is typical:
Until approximately the middle of the 1960s, the Egyptian cinema treated the subject of sex with extreme caution, without frankly depicting it. There was an exaggerated delicacy, an excessive romanticism, in the way such films as Salah Abu Sayf’s Shabab Imra’a (A Woman’s Youth) dealt with this type of sensitive relationship. [1]
The music of Dana International, a transsexual singer committed to queer issues, often parodies mainstream Israeli culture. Her latest song, “Diva,” was recently selected by the Israeli Broadcasting Authority to represent Israel at this May’s prestigious European song competition, Eurovision. [1] As Dana prepares for Eurovision, Michal Eden, another member of the Israeli queer community, is running in Meretz’ primaries for the Tel Aviv city board elections. Representing Tel Aviv queers in general and Klaf [2] (the Kehila Lesbit Feministit [the Lesbian Feminist Community]) in particular, Eden will run as a member of Meretz, the left Zionist party in Israel.
Few social groups can boast the visibility and media attention that male-to-female transsexuals have received in Turkey in recent years. At one point, hardly a month went by without some feature in a popular magazine or a television interview. The cartoonist Latif Demirci captured this frenzied interest with his depiction of an apartment block in a notorious back street of Istanbul. Through each window, a transsexual could be seen being interviewed, filmed or recorded, while building janitors implored a queue of journalists waiting in the street outside to be patient. A recent book offering vignettes on modern Turkey devoted an entire chapter to an interview with Sisi, a famous transsexual.
“AIDS is God’s punishment for all those who pollute the country with their sins,” writes the Egyptian weekly newspaper al-Liwa$rsquo; al-Islami (The Islamic Banner) under the headline: “To Follow the Path of Islam Is the Best Way Not to Get Infected.”
In the Egyptian media, attacks on people with HIV are common. Those, however, who do not want to sweep the issue of AIDS under the carpet are ready to deal with the 600 officially registered Egyptians who have been “punished by God” since the disease first appeared in Egypt more than 11 years ago. The World Health Organization puts the figure at ten times the official estimate.
According to official statistics from Morocco’s Ministry of Public Health, from the beginning of the AlDS pandemic to 1997, 450 cases of HIV infection had been recorded in the country. At the same time, a minimum of 100,000 new cases of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) such as syphilis, gonorrhea, chancroid and genital herpes are reported annually in Morocco. [1]
Every year, hundreds of women and girls are murdered in the Middle East by male family members. The honor killing — the execution of a female family member for perceived misuse of her sexuality — is a thorny social and political issue. Palestinian activists campaigning for equality find it difficult to stop the killings altogether. Legitimacy for such murders stems from a complex code of honor ingrained in the consciousness of some sectors of Palestinian society.
In early 1993, news of President Clinton’s proposal to end the US military’s ban on service by homosexuals prompted a young Egyptian man in Cairo, eager to practice his English, to ask me why the president wanted “to ruin the American army” by admitting “those who are not men or women.” When asked if “those” would include a married man who also liked to have sex with adolescent boys, he unhesitatingly answered “no.” For this Egyptian, a Western “homosexual” was not readily comprehensible as a man or a woman, while a man who had sex with both women and boys was simply doing what men do.
In his State of the Union address in January 1998, President Clinton won thunderous applause for threatening to force Iraq “to comply with the UNSCOM regime and the will of the United Nations.” Stopping UN chemical and biological weapons inspectors from “completing their mission,” declared the president, defies “the will of the world.” In the next three weeks, the White House ordered a massive show of force in the Gulf. Even traditional hawks, however, realized that a bombing mission could undermine American hegemonic interests in the Gulf that are served by a continuation of the sanctions regime.
