M. Romann and A. Weingrod, Living Together Separately: Arabs and Jews in Contemporary Jerusalem (Princeton, 1991).
After armies come the academics. Usually the first wave comprises archaeologists and historians who wish to legitimize a particular excursion or expansion. These are followed by economists and anthropologists prying open the benefits and exoticism of the conquered areas. Further down the line are the sociologists and community relations scholars who wish to ascertain the progress so far. Israel’s conquest of the remnant of Palestine has been no different.
Algeria’s experience over the past three years has shown that in a Muslim land the process of democratization gives rise to currents that seek to destroy it. But neutralizing these currents by force entails halting the democratization process and encloses society in repression. Society can escape that enclosure only if Islam is depoliticized — that is, if it no longer serves as a political resource in the struggle for power.
Dangerous
For decades, Muhammad Madbouli’s bookshop in the center of Cairo has been one of that city’s — and Egypt’s — major cultural landmarks. Egyptians and foreigners alike knew that Madbouli had the city’s best array of Arabic books of every kind, including those which aroused the ire of the regime of the day, though sometimes “dangerous” books had to be kept in a locked storeroom. Only those whose bona fides Madbouli accepted were granted access. Madbouli also owns an active publishing house.
A “C” rating from the US government credit evaluators, coming after Washington has held up the $10 billion loan guarantee for more than four months, must come as something of a shock for Israel. Only last September Jacob Frenkel, governor of the Bank of Israel, told the Financial Times that a “good borrower like Israel” needed the loan guarantees to “go to the marketplace with an implicit vote of confidence in the economy, its prospects, and in the economic strategy that it has.”
Eighteen-year old Anwar is new to bastat, street peddling. Two days ago his mother bought several crates of corn on the cob, which she boiled for him to sell in Tulkarm refugee camp streets. Recently released from a six-month term at Ansar III detention camp in the Negev desert, Anwar returned home the first day having sold nothing.
“There were problems in the streets,” explains his mother, Umm Jamil. “Anyway, no one goes out as they used to. Something happens, the army comes, and everyone runs. Who will buy?” Tulkarm camp, near the northern West Bank town by that name, is home to nearly 12,000 Palestinians.
In 1988, in the midst of the intifada, American Jews mustered their forces in opposition to an Israeli government policy and forced the government to back down. At issue was the Israeli government’s decision to change the Law of Return to recognize only Orthodox converts to Judaism. The same American Jewish leaders who vigorously denounced and tried to silence any Jew who dared to speak out against the Israeli occupation and its violation of Palestinian human rights lost not a moment in their rush to criticize Israel publicly on what came to be known as the “Who-Is-A-Jew” question. The pressure worked, and the Israeli government retreated.
Sami al-Kilani is a member of the Palestinian delegation to the peace talks. A poet and short-story writer, he has spent several years in Israeli prisons and under town arrest in his home in Ya‘bad in the occupied West Bank. His brother Ahmad was shot dead by Israeli troops in October 1988. Joost Hiltermann interviewed him in Washington, DC, in December 1991.
I understand that members of the delegation held town meetings in the West Bank and Gaza after the Madrid conference.
The Gulf war transformed the political landscape of the Middle East, and thus the politics of the Palestinian question. Saddam Hussein’s promised “linkage” between the Gulf and Palestinian questions was in fact established, as the US sought to preserve its regional allies from a popular backlash, and thus reinforce its project of a “new international order” to encompass this troubled region. This means unblocking the Arab-Israeli stalemate and moving to solve the Palestinian question, generally recognized as the core component of the conflict.
Naomi Chazan is chair of the Truman Institute at Hebrew University, and author of Irridentism and International Policy (Lynne Rienner, 1991). Salim Tamari and Joel Beinin spoke with her in Jerusalem on December 30, 1991.
What are the likely effects of the settlers’ move into Silwan on the peace negotiations?
Since the Gulf war, the Palestinian cause has entered an entirely new phase, one that is not merely a consequence of the war in the narrow sense. The Gulf crisis was the setting for a series of confrontations between local and international forces of such intensity that it is difficult to find a precedent. If the war fit into the formal category of a regional war with foreign intervention, it also had the character of a world war, given the international interests involved.
“America’s Egypt”: A Flawed Critique
Tim Mitchell’s article “America’s Egypt” (MER 169) offers a sweeping critique of USAID, World Bank and other development agencies’ perspectives on and programs for Egyptian agriculture. Although he makes a number of interesting and useful points, his analysis of recent Egyptian agricultural changes is seriously deficient, and cannot withstand serious scrutiny. Mitchell is a political scientist, but his political arguments are equally suspect. His own (and much other) evidence belies his claim that development agencies are unconscious of their political role in Egypt, and throughout the article he adopts what amounts to an instrumentalist view of state action.
Samir Amin, Eurocentrism (trans. Russell Moore) (Monthly Review Press, 1989).
The awakening of the Third World and the formation of nation states in the former colonies has brought about a liberalizing philosophy of cultural affirmation of local traditions. One could conveniently characterize this process as a reaction to Western cultural domination from the colonial era. Samir Amin argues that “Eurocentrism” today operates not only as a form of external domination but also as a mechanism of cultural formation within non-European cultures.
Mary Layoun, Travels of a Genre: The Modern Novel and Ideology (Princeton, 1990).
Issa Boullata, Trends and Issues in Contemporary Arab Thought (SUNY, 1990).
Khaldoun Hasan Al-Naqeeb, State and Society in the Gulf and Arab Peninsula: A Different Perspective (trans. L. M. Kenny and amended Ibrahim Hayani) (Routledge, 1990).
The allied attack on Iraq in January-February 1991, and the hardship inflicted on the civilian population, prompted many UN agencies and non-governmental organizations to mobilize relief efforts in the country. I spent seven weeks in May and June leading a relief team in southern Iraq. Relief work was already underway in the Kurdish north, in the center (Baghdad) and in the largely Shi‘i south.
The continuing public health emergency in Iraq is taking a higher toll in civilian lives than the coalition bombing last January and February. This emergency could have been over by now if the Bush administration and its allies at the United Nations had accepted recommendations on humanitarian needs and monitoring safeguards made by UN relief officials last July.
