the human province

Jeffrey Goldberg has a dishonest account of Tom Segev's review of a book on Haj Amin al-Husseini up. He makes it sound like Segev is only down on the book because it emphasizes Arab extremism, whereas his problems with the book are much more substantial:

The lack of solid evidence is the main problem throughout the book. While the authors do cite prominent scholars like Martin Gilbert, Bernard Wasserstein and Rashid Khalidi, some of the most outrageous quotations come from quite arguable sources. Hitler’s alleged and highly unlikely pledge to Husseini (“The Jews are yours”) is based on a passage in the mufti’s own memoirs. But there is an official German record of his meeting with Hitler that contains no such statement. In fact the mufti did not achieve his major goal: Hitler refused to sign a public statement of support for him.

Then Goldberg makes it sound like Segev is comparing Jewish extremism in mandate Palestine with Husseini's support of Nazi Germany:

Segev compares the Mufti's behavior to that of Yitzhak Shamir, the former prime minister of Israel who was once a terrorist with the Stern Gang, and he criticizes the authors for neglecting to mention Jewish extremism in the time of the Mufti. I'm not sure why a book about pro-Nazi sympathies among certain Arabs need include this...

Actually, what Segev does is remind us, as we can read in his excellent book The Seventh Million that Husseini was not the only anti-British nationalist to make overtures to Nazi Germany for the purpose of throwing off the yoke of British imperialism:

The mufti’s support for Nazi Germany definitely demonstrated the evils of extremist nationalism. However, the Arabs were not the only chauvinists in Palestine looking to make a deal with the Nazis. At the end of 1940 and again at the end of 1941, a small Zionist terrorist organization known as the Stern Gang made contact with Nazi representatives in Beirut, seeking support for its struggle against the British. One of the Sternists, in a British jail at the time, was Yitzhak Shamir, a future Israeli prime minister. The authors fail to mention this episode.

So while it's true that a book on Arabs seeking German support against the British and the Jewish colonialism needn't mention the terrorism of the Irgun or the Stern Gang, it seems dishonest not to include the fact that some of Husseini's local Jewish enemies also sought the support of Nazi Germany.

But that's the whole problem here. The importance accorded to Husseini is meant to conflate anti-Zionism and Arabs with anti-Semitism and Nazis. During World War II, there were many subjects of British imperialism from Ireland to Egypt and beyond who saw the time as ripe to back another European power, not because they were Nazis or anti-Semites, but because they were anti-British and saw Germany as means to the end of breaking British rule over their lands.

We've seen politically expedient but strange bedfellows time and time again, like how many exiled Iraqis supported an American invasion -- not because they were particularly pro-American, but rather because they were anti-Saddam. To argue that the the two are necessarily the same is either obtuse or dishonest.

For reasons I won't go into, I was at the American embassy a couple of times earlier this week. Draconian security measures notwithstanding (you're not allowed to bring a phone or bag onto the premises), the place seemed more Lebanese than American, with Lebanese security guards, Lebanese employees and Lebanese-Americans queued up in the consular section.

Another touch was a world map in the consular section. It is a map with political boundaries, and while I was in the consular waiting room, I took a look at it while trying to recover from the disgusting humidity that all of Beirut's been suffering from this summer. The map is in Arabic, and like most maps in the region, Israel is nowhere to be found. Instead, the map shows Palestine. This wouldn't be surprising, except that it's in the American embassy.

I'm about to leave for a five-week trip seeing East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda), but I wanted to post a link to an execrable op-ed about learning Arabic in the Washington Post by Joel Pollak.

I sent out a hasty letter to the editor, which reads as follows:

Joel Pollak complains that there isn’t enough of an Israeli perspective in Arabic language classes. He then goes on to describe “West Beirut,” a gem of Lebanese cinema that recounts a love story between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl, as a film that casts Christians as “the prime bad guys in Lebanon’s civil war.” Obviously Pollak’s Arabic has not progressed far enough to have understood the movie.

He then assures us that he refused to talk about Abdel Nassar in class. In French courses, one learns about Napoleon as a grand statesman, not a brutal imperial dictator. Likewise in Arabic classes, as well as in much of the third world, Nasser was seen as a hero.

One of the points of language courses is to better understand the culture of the speakers of that language. Since Pollak would obviously prefer to learn about Israeli and Jewish history, one can only assume that mistakenly signed up for Arabic lessons when he was actually looking to learn Hebrew.

In other news, there's this nasty piece calling for collective punishment. I'd have more to say about this last one, except that I'm in a hurry.

I don't know what the internet situation is going to be like in any of the places where I'll be over the next month or so, but I can't imagine that posting will be any slower than it has been in the last month or two. Which means that I'll do my best to step it up considerably.

The US government has had to rescind the Fulbright awards for the 7 students in Gaza who won the awards, because Israel won't let them leave the territory:

The American State Department has withdrawn all Fulbright grants to Palestinian students in Gaza hoping to pursue advanced degrees at American institutions this fall because Israel has not granted them permission to leave.

...The study grants notwithstanding, the Israeli officials argued that the policy of isolating Gaza was working, that Palestinians here were starting to lose faith in Hamas's ability to rule because of the hardships of life.

..."We are fighting the regime in Gaza that does its utmost to kill our citizens and destroy our schools and our colleges," said Yuval Steinitz, a lawmaker from the opposition Likud Party. "So I don’t think we should allow students from Gaza to go anywhere. Gaza is under siege, and rightly so, and it is up to the Gazans to change the regime or its behavior."

Hadeel Abukwaik, a 23-year-old engineering software instructor in Gaza, had hoped to do graduate work in the United States this fall on the Fulbright that she thought was hers. She had stayed in Gaza this past winter when its metal border fence was destroyed and tens of thousands of Gazans poured into Egypt, including her sister, because the agency administering the Fulbright told her she would get the grant only if she stayed put. She lives alone in Gaza where she was sent to study because the cost is low; her parents, Palestinian refugees, live in Dubai.

"I stayed to get my scholarship," she said. "Now I am desperate."

Now I'm no expert on Islamic militancy, but I'm pretty sure that desperation isn't exactly the quickest route to winning hearts and minds.

Another thing that's been bothering me is the fact that Mostaqbal's media outlets were shut down. I won't pretend that part of me doesn't feel a little tinge of delight at the idea of the Mostaqbal thugs getting some comeuppance. But punishing neighborhood thugs who fancy themselves militiamen is one thing, while shutting down media outlets is another. During the 2006 war, Hezbollah was (rightfully, to my mind) outraged by Israel's targeting of their television station, al-Manar. So why is it acceptable to have shut down Future TV?

I'm watching Kalam an-Nass right now, while the head of Future TV is being interviewed. According to him, a Lebanese soldier, in uniform, told them that they had to open the gates or else they'd be killed by Hezbollah militiamen. This is, of course, disconcerting on several levels. First of all, this would mean that a member of the ostensibly neutral Lebanese Army would have helped Hezbollah shut down the media outlet of a competing political party. But regardless of whether or not a soldier helped Hezbollah shut the station down, the latter certainly did disconnect Future TV. This is scandalous, and Hezbollah should be ashamed of itself.

A woman presenter, whose name I can't recall, just came on and gave Hezbollah a piece of her mind. She said that she's spent the last year and a half doing reports on the lot of the people of the south and how they've suffered during the war of 2006 and after. Then she explained how al-Manar reported that the staff of Future TV "fled" the premises, like thieves or criminals, when in fact they were told to leave if they didn't want to die. She said that forgetting the parties and forgetting politics, this kind of treatment and the occupation of Beirut has made regular people, people like her, hate Hezbollah. She said that after people like her who did their best to take in refugees after the war in 2006 are treated like this and accused of being traitors, Hezbollah should be ashamed of itself. Of course a presenter on Future TV isn't exactly representative of the man on the street, but her point is well taken.

I can say, however, that the opposition has lost the sympathy of people who have supported the principles of the resistance, even if they had really ambivalent feelings about the religious and authoritarian form it's taken. And the traitor rhetoric is really hurtful and disgusting to people who support resistance against Israel but don't want to live in a country where the interests of the resistance trump those of the state. Calling people traitors like this smacks of Bush's rhetoric in the "war on terror," where you're either "with us or against us," and doesn't sit well with many Lebanese.

I never thought I'd say this, but there was part of Samir Geagea's speech this afternoon that I agree with. He said that the use of Hezbollah's weapons has delegitimized their very existence. I tend to agree with this idea, because Hezbollah has decided to use its weapons in an internal dispute between Lebanese actors. (Here, it's important to remember that the myth that Hezbollah has never been part of inter-Lebanese fighting fails to include when Amal and Hezbollah fought each the during the civil war.) What has happened is that the March 14 government made a decision that Hezbollah disagreed with, and in reaction to this, they took up arms and occupied half of Beirut. This means that the weapons whose sole purpose is supposed to deter Israeli aggression and defend Lebanon has been used as a blunt political tool to try to force the government to resign, or at the very least, send it a far-from-subtle message. 

The line being taken by the opposition now (at least as far as the talking heads of al-Manar are concerned) is that Hezbollah has helped the state put down militias (namely Mustaqbal, or the Future movement). This position fails to take into consideration, for example, the fact that there are still armed militia members of Amal and the Syrian Social Nationalist Party walking around West Beirut.

Either armed militias are illegal or they aren't. What's happened is that the Army seems to have passively taken the side of Hezbollah, which means that their legitimacy will be decreased or destroyed in the eyes of other Lebanese communities, especially the Sunnis in Saida and Tripoli. It has also sent the message that the most effective political tool is military force. I imagine, then, that the Sunnis in Saida and Tripoli, the pro-government Christians and the Druze loyal to Walid Jumblatt have likely decided that they can no longer count on the Army to be an impartial arbiter for the state. This will surely lead to increased militia training and arming. It wouldn't surprise me if the lesson that the Lebanese Forces and the PSP have taken from the defeat of Mustaqbal (probably the weakest of the pro-government parties/militias, if one of the nastier ones on a local neighborhood level) is that they should be prepared for more of the same in the not-so-distant future.

So where does this leave us? Despite rumors earlier today, it doesn't look like Saniora, or anyone else, will resign from the government. So what? There's still no president, and the fundamental dysfunction of the Lebanese state has only been highlighted, not solved. If this all ends with Hezbollah and its allied militias pulling back to their territory in the next day or so, leaving a humiliating message for the other parties and their militias, we'll be back to where we started. Back to where we started, except a big part of the population will have lost faith in the idea that Hezbollah and its allies can be dealt with within the norms of a democratic system.

Since there is no way that any of these groups can compete with Hezbollah's military forces, look for them to embrace proxies. This might include the Sunnis accepting al-Qaeda militants and other groups hoping for more Israeli intervention. I'm sure that after the disaster that was the war in 2006, the Israeli establishment wouldn't mind taking advantage of the situation for  rematch. In any case, what this situation hasn't done is foster an atmosphere where either side feels like it can compromise. If anything, this whole situation has pushed March 14 further into its corner and inflated the arrogance and confidence of Hezbollah and its allies in the country and abroad. Neither of which bodes well for peace or stability in Lebanon.

Amin Gemayel, whom I can't stand, called Hezbollah's victory a Pyrrhic one (actually, he said it in French, the snooty bastard). I tend to think that, on a national level and in the long term, he's probably right. In any case, it's enough to turn some Lebanese into bitter Mercutios.

I'm a little late for Labor Day, but Human Rights Watch here in Lebanon has begun an awareness campaign for rights of domestic workers entitled Put Yourself in Her Shoes:

The condition of (predominantly women) domestic workers in the Middle East is atrocious. Apparently, the problem is as bad in Israel as it is in Lebanon and even worse in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. According to HRW:

The most common complaints made by domestic workers to embassies and nongovernmental organizations include non-payment or delayed payment of their wages, forced confinement to the workplace, no time off, and verbal, as well as physical, abuse. According to a 2006 survey conducted by Dr. Ray Jureidini of 600 migrant domestic workers, 56 percent said they work more than 12 hours a day and 34 percent have no regular time off. In some cases, workers have died while attempting to escape these conditions, some by jumping from balconies.

...The Lebanese authorities have failed to curb abuses committed by employers and agencies. Lebanese labor laws specifically exclude domestic workers from rights guaranteed to other workers, such as a weekly day of rest, limits on work hours, paid holidays, and workers’ compensation. Immigration sponsorship laws restrict domestic workers’ ability to change employers, even in cases of abuse. An official steering committee created in early 2006 and led by the Ministry of Labor to improve the legal situation of migrant workers in Lebanon has yet to deliver any concrete reforms. This includes a long-discussed standard contract to outline minimum standards for domestic workers’ employment.  

Human Rights Watch called upon the Ministry of Labor and other relevant authorities to amend the labor law to extend equal protection for domestic workers and to sign and ratify the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families. 

 

A few years ago, the Times did a story about Sri Lankan women who go to the Middle East to work as domestic servants.  This picture is of a 20-year-old woman named Thangarasa Jeyanthi who was severely abused in Lebanon. In Lebanese Arabic, the common word for a domestic worker is "Sri Lankan." At one point, I remember hearing a joke about an NGO that was fostering multiculturalism by doing presentations with people from all over world invited to introduce themselves to the audience. The Egyptian man comes and says he works as a concierge. The Syrian says that he's a field hand. And then comes the Ethiopian who introduces herself but forgets to say what her profession is. When reminded that everyone has to say what they do, she replies, "I'm a Sri Lankan."

In the case of Sri Lankan women, the conditions that they live and work in criminally miserable, and their government is actually complicit. There are training programs that teach the women some Arabic and how to do what is expected of them without receiving the beatings that are so common. The government encourages women to go to the Middle East, they provide remittances that help keep the Sri Lankan economy afloat.

An Ethiopian friend of mine here used to work for a big hotel in town, but she wasn't allowed to be hired directly even though she has all of her papers in order. The hotel insists on going through a middle man, who garnishes half of the wages of the foreign women working at the hotel. A salary of $450 is reasonable (and more than twice the pitiful minimum wage), but when some sleazy profiteer gets to pocket half of your salary, it's difficult to survive, especially with the increasing price of living (many food items have nearly doubled in price in the last 9 months).

In contrast with Colombo's policy of encouraging the migration, Ethiopia's government has taken the decision to ban its citizens from coming to Lebanon in search of employment:

ADDIS ABABA: On the occasion of Labor Day, Ethiopia has officially banned its citizens from traveling to Beirut in search of jobs, the African country's Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs has disclosed. Ethiopia passed the bill after it probed the human right violations and domestic violence Ethiopian migrants face behind closed doors in Beirut while employed as maids.

"Suspending work travel to Beirut was the only solution to minimizing the human rights abuses and dangers facing our citizens," said Zenebu Tadesse, deputy minister of state for labor and social affairs.

During the past few years, a number of Ethiopians have died in Lebanon in questionable circumstances.

According to a report published by Ethiopia's official news agency, past human right records show that 67 Ethiopian women have died between 1997 and 1999 alone while working in Beirut.

The ministry said it would take strong action against any employment agency trying to send workers directly to Beirut or through a third country.

So for Labor Day this year, I'd like to remind everyone that Sri Lankan is a nationality, not a profession. And I'd like to remind the Lebanese, many of whom go off to Europe, North America and the Gulf in search of work, that they should have a little solidarity with domestic workers here who are hoping to make so money to create a better life for themselves. As my friend Nadim from HRW says about their media campaign: "Many Lebanese themselves have been forced by wars and hardships to emigrate looking for a better life. We hope that they will see the parallels with the experience of these migrants that came from far away to care for Lebanese families."

(Via my friend A) Carter to be tried for peace crimes, according to The Onion:

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND—An international peace-crimes tribunal commenced legal proceedings against former U.S. President Jimmy Carter for alleged crimes against inhumanity Monday.

"Jimmy Carter's political career includes a laundry list of anti-war-making offenses," said chief prosecutor Charles B. Simmons. "Carter's record of benevolence, diplomacy, and respect for human life is unrivaled in recent geopolitical history. For millions, the very sight of his face evokes memories of his administration's reign of tolerance."

I knew it was only a matter of time before the international community succeeded in bringing his gentle reign of peace-mongering to an end!

The previous post got me to wondering how often the word Nakba had been used in American newspapers and when, so I did a Lexis Nexis search, which showed that the Times has only printed the word in 34 articles, the first of which appeared in 1998 in an article about Israel's 50th anniversary. A double check of the NYT online archives, however, showed two other articles that didn't appear in the Lexis Nexis search (they seem to only have abstracts for pre-1981 articles): one from 1973 on Sadat and another from 1970 on occupied Ramallah.

Here's a quickly drawn up chart that tracks the use of the word in coverage by the New York Times:

 

This shows that up until the 50th anniversary of the Nakba, the Times had referred to it but twice. I have a feeling that before the year is over, 2008 will beat out 2007 for the number of times the term is employed.

It's unclear to me what exactly has caused the general tide of public opinion to start moving (slowly but surely) away from Israeli occupation in the US. (Or perhaps I'm being optimistic and am projecting?) But I get the feeling that there's a  shift happening in American public opinion that will hopefully be reflected by more fair-minded media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

I've been surprised in the last few weeks to see how much attention the Nakba is getting during the run up to the 60th anniversary of the catastrophe and the founding of the Jewish state. While interpretations differ, it has at least been getting mentions in publications like The New Yorker and the New York Times.

That said, I knew it was only a matter of time before something really reactionary and stupid came out in a magazine like Commentary. Well, Efraim Karsh offers up exactly what we needed in his "True Story" of what happened in 1948. Following his recent comments on the "Jordanian option," I recently marveled how someone who is ostensibly a scholar of the region could be so out of touch with Arabs and the Arab political scene, but this latest piece takes the proverbial cake.

According to Karsh, before 1948, the Palestinians never had any problem with the idea of becoming a minority in their own land and otherwise would have been perfectly happy living as a second class majority in a Jewish state. In fact, Zionists wanted nothing more than all Arabs to stay in their homes and live happily ever after in a pastoral paradise. Unfortunately, the evil Jew-hating "Arab leaders" had to dash all these wonderful hopes and spur the Palestinians to war, despite the fact that they wanted nothing more than to live in a Jewish state. Why even Vladimir Jabotinsky wanted nothing more than peaceful Arab-Jewish coexistence: According to Karsh:

The simple fact is that the Zionist movement had always been amenable to the existence in the future Jewish state of a substantial Arab minority that would participate on an equal footing “throughout all sectors of the country’s public life.” The words are those of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founding father of the branch of Zionism that was the forebear of today’s Likud party. In a famous 1923 article, Jabotinsky voiced his readiness “to take an oath binding ourselves and our descendants that we shall never do anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try to eject anyone.”

Eleven years later, Jabotinsky presided over the drafting of a constitution for Jewish Palestine. According to its provisions, Arabs and Jews were to share both the prerogatives and the duties of statehood, including most notably military and civil service. Hebrew and Arabic were to enjoy the same legal standing, and “in every cabinet where the prime minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab and vice-versa.”

It just so happens that this is the same Jabotinsky who thought that the Jewish state should encompass both sides of the Jordan and who in his famous essay, "The Iron Wall," had this to say:

If [the reader] should attempt to seek but one instance of a country settled with the consent of those born there he will not succeed. The inhabitants (no matter whether they are civilized or savages) have always put up a stubborn fight.

...Any native people -- its all the same whether they are civilized or savage -- views their country as their national home, of which they will  always be the complete masters. They will not voluntarily allow, not only a new master, but even a new partner. And so it is for the Arabs. Compromisers in our midst attempt to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked by a softened formulation of our goals, or a tribe of money grubbers who will abandon their birth right to Palestine for cultural and economic gains. I flatly reject this assessment of the Palestinian Arabs. Culturally they are 500 years behind us, spiritually they do not have our endurance or our strength of will, but this exhausts all of the internal differences. We can talk as much as we want about our good intentions; but they understand as well as we what is not good for them. They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie. To think that the Arabs will voluntarily consent to the realization of Zionism in return for the cultural and economic benefits we can bestow on them is infantile. This childish fantasy of our “Arabo-philes” comes from some kind of contempt for the Arab people, of some kind of unfounded view of this race as a rabble ready to be bribed in order to sell out their homeland for a railroad network.

He goes on to say that no voluntary agreement with the Arabs is possible:

Thus we conclude that we cannot promise anything to the Arabs of the Land of Israel or the Arab countries. Their voluntary agreement is out of the question. Hence those who hold that an agreement with the natives is an essential condition for Zionism can now say “no” and depart from Zionism. Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population -- an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.

...All this does not mean that any kind of agreement is impossible, only a voluntary agreement is impossible. As long as there is a spark of hope that they can get rid of us, they will not sell these hopes, not for any kind of sweet words or tasty morsels, because they are not a rabble but a nation, perhaps somewhat tattered, but still living. A living people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions only when there is no hope left. Only when not a single breach is visible in the iron wall, only then do extreme groups lose their sway, and influence transfers to moderate groups. Only then would these moderate groups come to us with proposals for mutual concessions. And only then will moderates offer suggestions for compromise on practical questions like a guarantee against expulsion, or equality and national autonomy.

I am optimistic that they will indeed be granted satisfactory assurances and that both peoples, like good neighbors, can then live in peace. But the only path to such an agreement is the iron wall, that is to say the strengthening in Palestine of a government without any kind of Arab influence, that is to say one against which the Arabs will fight. In other words, for us the only path to an agreement in the future is an absolute refusal of any attempts at an agreement now.

This is what Jabotinsky thought of the Arabs, not just in Palestine but in Jordan as well. To the consternation of modern day Zionists, he saw the Zionist state in explicitly colonial terms, equating it with other European colonial endeavors.  

Now I've got a certain respect for Zionists like Jabotinsky who call a spade a spade. What I don't appreciate are scholars like Karsh who insist on whitewashing the creation of Israel to absolve the state of any wrong-doing. In his world, the Yishuv did nothing wrong; all blame for the problems of Arabs can be squarely placed at the feet of "Arab leaders." He ignores the much more frank assertions of the Zionist leaders themselves, like Ben-Gurion who once asked:

Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country.

In any case, Karsh disagrees with the scholarship done by Israeli "new historians" like Pappe, Morris and Shlaim, who all show that the old myths of Palestinians leaving their homes because of radio broadcasts sent out by their leaders are conveniently simplistic and just not true. While there is some disagreement as to whether the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was pre-planned and deliberate, ad-hoc and hasty or unintentional but finally welcome, the issue is ultimately beside the point when it comes to Palestinians' right of return. Either you believe that one has the unalienable right to leave one's country and return, or you don't.

I've long thought that morally and politically, it would be a great move if the Lebanese government were to invite Lebanese Jews who left during the civil war to Europe and America to come back. And if Beirut were really clever, it would appoint a Lebanese Jew to a ministerial position or as an ambassador to the UN or the US. This would help turn the Lebanese-Israeli conflict into a national one instead of a religious one. In 2006, it would have been a tremendous PR move to have a Jewish minister criticizing the systematic destruction of the Lebanese infrastructure.

In this context, Bahrain has made a really smart move:

A Jewish woman, Huda Ezra Ebrahim Nonoo, is set to become Bahrain's ambassador to Washington, sources close to diplomats told Gulf News on Thursday.

"Huda is Bahrain's nominee for the post and this is of course very good news for Bahrain's deep-rooted values of tolerance and openness," Faisal Fouladh, a Shura Council representative, and Western diplomats said.

Huda, a businesswoman, was the first Jewish woman to sit in the Shura Council, the 40-member upper house of the bicameral legislature, replacing her uncle. A Christian woman, Alice Samaan, also sits on the council which has 11 women, compared with only one woman MP, Lateefa Al Gaood, in the 40-member lower house.

(Via TPM) Ha'aretz reports Benjamin Netanyahu, hawkish Israeli "ally" of the US, as saying that 9/11 was good for Israel:

"We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq," Ma'ariv quoted the former prime minister as saying. He reportedly added that these events "swung American public opinion in our favor."

This actually mirrors comments made by Netanyahu on the day of the attacks:

Asked tonight what the attack meant for relations between the United States and Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister, replied, ''It's very good.'' Then he edited himself: ''Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.'' He predicted that the attack would ''strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we've experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.''

With friends like these, right?

I'm not generally fond of Jeffery Goldberg's work when it comes to the Middle East, so I was pretty skeptical about the Atlantic's big Israel story this week. (I haven't read it yet, so I'll reserve judgment until then.)  One thing that's very interesting though, is that Goldman has dug up some old pieces on Palestine and Zionism that appeared in the Atlantic.

So far, I've only had the time to read William Ernest Hocking's 1930 piece, Palestine: An Impasse? You can tell that these old pieces have been scanned, because there are a few mistakes with indentations, quotes and even a couple of letters ('d' for 'cl'), but this article really warrants being read. Here are a couple of meaty extracts to whet your appetite:

If we in America, Jews and Gentiles, could see things as they are in Palestine, we should recognize as axiomatic three things: (1) That nothing like the full plan of Zionism can be realized without political pressure backed by military force; (2) that such pressure and force imply an injustice which is inconsistent with the ethical sense of Zionism, undermining both its sincerity and its claim; (3) that every increase of pressure now meets with increasingly determined Arab resistance, within and beyond Palestine. Hence the question which political Zionism must answer is whether or not it proposes to-day, as in ancient times, to assert its place in Palestine by aid of the sword.

To many Arabs, the Balfour Declaration, in spite of its careful safeguarding of all existing civil and religious rights, is understood as obliging Great Britain to 'do something' for the Jews. Many Zionists have the same conception. And the Arab mind inquires: What can Great Britain now do for Zionism which is not against the Arabs? What favor can it show which is not favoritism? If the question is capable of an answer, it needs to be a dear answer, plainly spoken. Great Britain is serving Zionism. It is doing so not only by maintaining security and order in the land (with some lapses), but by furnishing the administrative staff without which no such settlement would have been possible, and by creating new opportunities. Under the older Ottoman regime, foreign Jews were at a disadvantage: they—like other foreigners—could acquire land only in the name of Ottoman subjects. These disabilities are now removed; as is often said, Jews are now in Palestine by right, not on sufferance. Why press for more than this equitable opening, when more means a reversed injustice? The rural and industrial centres already founded need no more than an equal legal status for their normal peaceful development. The great Hebrew University on Mount Scopus needs no more than this on the legal side to realize its destiny. And this university, be it said, under the prophetic leadership of Dr. Judah Magnes, is the symbol of all that is best in Zionism. For the true and attainable Zion is the Zion of culture and faith, not the Zion of political nationalism.

It is indeed a bitter thing to the sincere Zionist that his ideal community cannot have in that unique spot of earth its perfect body as well as its perfect soul. What I have to say, I say with deep personal regret. For I went to Palestine seized with the idea of Zionism and warmed by the ardor of Jewish friends to whom this vision is the breath of life, prepared to believe all things possible. I came away saddened, seeing that to strive for the perfect body, as things now are, can only mean the loss of soul and body alike. To pursue any campaign for a more vigorous fulfillment of 'the British promise,' to force cantonization on Palestine and so to repeat the standing grievance of divided Syria, to press for any further favor of the state, is to work blindly toward another bloody struggle involving first the new settlements, then Great Britain, then no one knows what wider area. In this we have been assuming that on the issue of Jewish dominance the Arab mind is irreconcilable. Is this true?

The answer lies partly in the fact that for the Arab, whose local attachments are peculiarly strong, Palestine, beside being his home, is also a holy land. It lies partly in the fact that to his mind Palestine is not a separate province: it is an integral part of Syria, with Damascus as its natural trading and cultural capital, while Syria is an integral part of greater Arabia. In his dream of a free Arab empire, Damascus may have served as capital for the whole; or Syria, together with Palestine, may have constituted an autonomous province. In any case, the new Arabia through Palestine reached the western sea; while Palestine as a part of Syria became a partner in that new and proud political enterprise. The expulsion of Feisal from Damascus by the French was a cruel mutilation of this dream. The mandate for Palestine excludes it from the imagined kingdom and shuts that kingdom from the Mediterranean. Even so, political arrangements may be unmade. But village settlements are a more final obstacle—they build a human barrier and put an end to hope. The progress of Zionist colonization thus becomes for the Arab national outlook a culminating stroke in a series of breaches of faith.

...The two enemies of peace in the Holy Land are fanaticism and fear. The movement of the modern spirit within all creeds is having for one of its beneficent effects the gradual melting of fanaticism without argument. Fixed and antagonistic dogmas are transforming themselves into alternative sets of symbols which can dwell together. But fanaticism is kept alive and sharpened by fear; clashes at the Wailing Wall are symptoms of political rather than religious apprehension. These fears of displacement, of national thwarting, must be put to rest; and they can only be quieted by unequivocal public commitments, renouncing the intention to dominate and to exclude. If there is to be peace within the gates of Jerusalem, the first condition, as I see it, is that Zionism publicly disavow its unholy alliance with Western military power, and therewith (following the lead of a recent resolution within the Jewish Agency) its purpose to dominate in Palestine.

Hocking's solution is finally a binational, or more accurately a multi-religious, state under the mandate of Britain, a solution that is obviously out the question as far as British rule is concerned. Nonetheless, he brings up a fundamental conflict between the Zionist body and the Zionist soul, the latter being crushed by what it would take (has taken) to create a Jewish state -- something Avraham Burg's new book is about.

I'm a little uneasy with the idea he has of keeping Palestine technologically "backward" so as to keep Palestine as a multi-religious spiritual land above all else. But that's a small detail in an otherwise insightful analysis of the situation. To my mind, he really hits the nail on the head when he points out the violent and unjust conditions that would be necessary to create a Jewish majority in Palestine.

Goldberg, for his part claims that Hocking is arguing for "an exclusive Arab right to the territory of Palestine," which is silly when you read the piece. What he does do is analyze the Jewish right to Palestine:

This claim of right, based on a mission which it is felt a religious disloyalty to compromise, cannot be shaken in the Jewish mind by analogies from history or international law. To urge that the same reasoning which leads the Jew to claim Palestine after eighteen hundred years would give the Arab a right to Spain after seven hundred years is quite sound so far as it appeals to the ordinary flux of historic conquest and possession; but it wholly misses the sense of this 'organic indissoluble connection,' this right of destiny. Such a right has the force of a religious conviction for those who have that vision; it has the weakness of subjectivism for those who do not share it.

He, correctly, I think, calls the Jewish right to Palestine a subjective one for those who do not believe in God's covenant with the Jewish people and an ineluctable truth for those who do.

On a completely different note, I know that this blog has been focusing on Israel a lot lately. This reminds me of a woman whom I used to date who was doing her doctoral thesis on Jewish communities in the Middle East. She told me that if I was going to be with her, I'd have to deal with the three following things: "1. I am insanely jealous; 2. I smoke in bed; and 3. I'm obsessed with the Jews."

So at the risk of sounding like I'm obsessed with Israel, I'd just like to say in my defense that with the upcoming 60th anniversary of Israel's independence and the Nakba, there's plenty of material to comment on these days.

UPDATE: Interestingly enough, I just looked at my stat log, and Israel is where a good part of my hits come from, after the US, France and Lebanon. So shalom, dear readers, and happy passover!

When I read this report in Ha'aretz, it was hard for me to believe what I was reading:

Driving along the road from Be'er Sheva to Arad, shortly before the turn toward Darijat, you can see the unrecognized Bedouin village that was home to Manhash al-Baniyat, the Israeli soldier who was killed yesterday in a clash with Palestinian gunmen near the Gaza Strip border, across from Kibbutz Be'eri.

In order to reach the village, you have to travel for several hundred meters along a dirt path, until you come to a few houses, built close together. One of these is the house Manhash built for himself in preparation for his marriage, next month. Since building permits are not granted to Bedouin, he had no choice but to build the house illegally. A demolition order has already been issued. The only water pipe leading to the village is also disconnected. Yesterday, a mourners' tent was added to the already harsh landscape, erected by the army. Now that the army's there, at least there's water, someone remarked half-jokingly.

There are a lot of Israelis or supporters of Israel who say that since Palestinians with Israeli citizenship aren't treated as badly as those in the occupied territories, Israel couldn't possibly be an apartheid state. If that's the case, then I'm not sure how we account for al-Baniyat, who died for the state that's bulldozing his home. His sister puts it well when she says, "Sometimes you feel like belonging to the state, but sometimes you get fed up because you build a house and they come and destroy it."

It just so happens that I read a piece by Roger Cohen today that mentions a video of a black woman during the civil rights movement who sums up the situation perfectly: "If we can’t live in our country and be accepted as free citizens and human beings, then something’s the matter with something — and it isn’t me."

In case you haven't heard, there's a new Israel lobby in town. It's called J-Street and is supposed to be a progressive alternative to the hawkish pro-Likud lobby that is AIPAC et al. Spencer Ackerman has a piece about how the new group wants to reframe the Israel debate:

[Co-founder Daniel] Levy, though a long-time peace negotiator, is eager to debate what it means to be pro-Israel, and draws a comparison between AIPAC and the hard-liners who ended up compromising the Jewish future millennia ago. "We'll say, 'Zealots like you led to the destruction of previous Jewish commonwealths,'" Levy said. "We're not going to be intimidated."

J-Street gives us some examples of the current militant rhetoric surrounding Israel these days and asks if that's what it truly means to be pro-Israel and, more to the point, if these voices truly speak for American Jews:


Ezra Klein weighs in to talk about his experience of being alienated at his synagogue:

I can't recall now if it was the Jenin incursions or the riots at the Temple Mount that set my rabbi off. Or perhaps he was just enraged by one of the obscure convulsions of violence that occur with such regularity as to virtually mark time in the Middle East. What punctures the haze of memory is when he transitioned from sports to politics, telling the assembled alumni that the Jews would be within their rights to forcibly deport and displace the entire Palestinian population. I objected, and we began shouting at each other as my classmates looked on in annoyance. I stormed from the room and it was the last time I set foot in that temple. In my temple.

He later goes on to talk about the link between Judaism and human rights and how, to his mind, this is "no time for silence."

On the other side of the aisle, of course, things are different. In truly predictable style, our favorite philistine Noah Pollak (who once visited "Upper Galilee") is already slamming J-Street. It seems that a pro-peace lobby is just too much to stomach for Pollak, so he makes a big deal of the fact that Avraham Burg is "near the top of its list of [Israeli] supporters." (Note to Pollak, when a list is in alphabetical order, people whose names begin with the letter B will usually be "near the top.") He paints Burg as some sort of a radical but fails to mention that he used to be the Diaspora advisor to the Israeli Prime Minister, chairman of the Jewish Agency, speaker of the Knesset and chair of the World Zionist Organization.

I'm not going to say that Avraham Burg isn't polemical in Israel; he is, and if you're interested in reading his opinions for yourself, Ha'aretz published a fascinating interview with him. But Pollak prefers to brandish a single controversial supporter of J-Street (without even mentioning his former role in the Israeli establishment) and build a strawman in an attempt to discredit an entire movement rather than, say, actually debate the issue on the merits. But that's par for the course for Pollak and his ilk. And by the by, TNR is already preparing a hit piece against J-Street, according to Ackerman.

To my mind, a new lobby will give progressive Jews a chance to have a voice in the Israel/Palestine debate and have a tangible (although much less so than AIPAC) effect on Middle East policy. It seems that, like the Arabs, there's an aversion to public dissension in the ranks, a certain disgust at airing the community's dirty laundry in public. J-Street might just be overcoming this fear to become an avenue for progressive American Jews to have a say in what's being done and said in their name by the likes of AIPAC and Alan Dershowitz.

UPDATE: In another post attacking J-Street, the hilariously yet unintentionally ironic Pollak has this to say:

It seems to me that the J Streeters are never going to be able to escape the fact that, sitting in Washington, they are advocating policies for Israel that are overwhelmingly unpopular among Israelis — and attempting to brand this paternalism as "pro-Israel."

The Economist has a special report on Israel on the occasion of its 60th year. I've been skipping through the various sections of it, and so far it seems fairly interesting, although nowhere near as interesting as Le Monde Diplo's Manière de voir on the subject: "Histoires d’Israël." The latter is put together by Dominique Vidal and includes articles by Edward Said, Avraham Burg, Tom Segev, Samir Kassir, Shimon Peres, Alain Gresh, Amira Hass, and the list goes on.

I'll be reading the Economist report online and the Manière de voir in print - both, I'll add, at home, because while I'm sometimes fond of creating a stink, I'm not sure I've got the balls to bring a blue and white magazine with Israel printed on the front cover to my local café.

If this Reuters report is accurate, then the Israelis have got some explaining to do:

JERUSALEM, April 14 (Reuters) - Israeli leaders shunned former U.S. President Jimmy Carter during a visit because of his plans to meet Hamas and Israel's secret service declined to assist U.S. agents guarding him, U.S. sources said on Monday.

"They're not getting support from local security," one of the sources said, on condition of anonymity.

An American source described as "unprecedented" the lack of Shin Bet cooperation with the U.S. Secret Service, which protects all current and former U.S. presidents, as well as Israeli leaders when they visit the United States.

...American sources close to the matter said the Shin Bet, which helps protect visiting dignitaries and is overseen by Olmert's office, declined to meet the head of Carter's Secret Service detail or provide his team with assistance as is customary during such visits.

Jimmy Carter has the thankless job of being the best friend Israel's ever had. He reminds me of those public service/beer commercials in which some drunken asshole keeps trying to crawl into his truck but his buddy refuses to give him his keys back: Friends don't let friends drink and drive.

The Israelis are spitting on the man who is responsible for brokering the peace deal with Egypt and is now telling Israel some truths that it doesn't want to hear. I suppose it's normal to expect the Israelis to be unhappy about being told not to drive, but I somehow never expected Israeli foolishness to go so far as to refuse to protect Carter.

What would people say if the secret service refused to protect and Barack Obama refused to meet with Benjamin Netanyahu during a future trip to the US? Or better yet, imagine if the Egyptian or Pakistani governments refused to provide security for a former US president. Americans would be up in arms, and it would be a bipartisan contest to see who could yell the loudest for suspending aid to Cairo or Islamabad. This should be a huge scandal in the US, but if I know America at all, reactions will range from disgusted sighs to total silence to rants that Carter is an antisemite and is getting the treatment he deserves.

Last week McClatchey had an important story about the fate of Bedouins in Israel. There is a lot of talk about how Israel is a beacon for democracy in the Middle East, and often even those who admit that the Jewish state's founding myths are untrue and protest the occupation are hesitant to admit that there are many Israeli citizens who are treated unequally by the law. The Bedouins are a case in point. The government is destroying their homes and trying to remove them from their land to make room for Jewish citizens. In any other context, this would be called ethnic cleansing:

Israeli leaders have a $3.6 billion plan to transform the vast Negev desert into prospering Jewish communities. Finesh and 80,000 other Bedouin say the land is theirs, however.

As Israel presses ahead with the development, a Human Rights Watch report released Monday concludes that it's using "discriminatory, exclusionary and punitive" policies to push the aside the Bedouin, who are descendants of Arab tribes that once roamed the Negev.

"Israeli policies have created a situation whereby tens of thousands of Bedouin citizens in the Negev have little or no alternative but to live in ramshackle villages and build illegally in order to meet their most basic shelter needs," the report says.

Since Israel was founded nearly 60 years ago, its leaders have been wrestling with what to do with its small Bedouin minority, now climbing above 160,000.

Israel has pushed about half the Bedouin into sterile, depressed new desert towns, demolished thousands of illegal shanties and transformed their sheep-grazing pastures into dangerous military zones.

About 80,000 Bedouin living in more than three dozen unauthorized shantytowns and villages refuse to move, even though they receive no electricity or water from Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has set up a commission to come up with innovative ways to handle the holdouts.

"The government of Israel understands that it needs to solve the problem of the Bedouin," said Yehuda Bachar, the director general of a newly established government department for Bedouin affairs. "If it is not solved now, it will not be solved for many years."

The intent behind the plans is clear: Israeli leaders want to move the Arab residents to make way for Jewish developments.

The Israeli government is looking to spend $3.6 billion over the next seven years to lure more Jewish residents to the Negev, a triangular desert that makes up more than half of the nation's land.

"The only chance for the development of the Negev is that we bring more Jews," said Shmuel Rifman, the mayor of the local Ramat Negev Regional Council, who supports a trickle-down theory when it comes to the Bedouin.

I'm in Paris this week to surprise my good friend for his birthday and see others whom I've been missing lately,  the city herself my friend's unborn baby girl. I was glad to see that while I was going to be here, I could see Amos Oz and David Grossman at the Centre Pompidou.

It wasn't until I arrived that I realized that the reason Grossman and Oz were in Paris in the first place was the Salon du Livre and the fact that this year, Israel was showcased as the guest of honor. I then found out from some Franco-Algerian friends, who accompanied me to the Pompidou event, that there had been a bomb threat and a boycott. (For a good summary in English of the whole thing, check out Lauren Elkin's account.)

The Oz and Grossman event wasn't at all what I was expecting. I knew that it was ostensibly about their literature but assumed that since both authors are politically active, there would be a fair amount of politics involved also. I was looking forward to this, not least because the only books I've read by either author are political non-fiction. There was a fog of politics that floated above the evening but never settled. Since there was no opportunity for questions, the young swooning moderator, who sounded more like a groupie than a literary critic or writer, and the writers themselves were able to keep to the topic of writing and literature.

One effect of this was that the Holocaust was very much present in the talk, but the Palestinians almost not at all. This was a little disappointing to me, because it's hard for me to imagine Palestinian writing (and this may be the fault of wonderful Mourid Barghouti and Mahmoud Darwish) without a heavy Israeli presence. Also, Oz and Grossman seemed very distant and foreign to me, because of the linguistic barrier. For some reason, I was expecting them to speak in English, but instead they spoke in Hebrew, which was translated into French by one of the best interpreters I've had the pleasure of listening to. His voice was soft and exact, and I felt cradled by his cadence. David Grossman was fairly spontaneous but sometimes a little rambling, whereas Oz spoke like a robot but had more interesting things to say. (It's only fair to mention that a lot of Oz's discourse was canned, as I'd already read close to a third of it in various of his books, interviews and articles.)

It was interesting for me to see Israel in this light: as a state like another. Because in Lebanon, Israel is not only not like other states, it's violent and dangerous. We're waiting for the next war, which will likely be even worse than the last one, so it's difficult to empathize with Israel and its people, even if many of them (like Grossman and Oz) have opinions similar to mine. This reminds me of my trip to the West Bank at the end of the war in 2006. Only rarely did I cross over to Jewish Jerusalem or interact with Israelis. I felt shaken by the bombing of Lebanon and almost afraid to see where those bombs were coming from. I now regret not exploring Tel Aviv or visiting Yad Vashem, which I've wanted to see for a long time. But July 2006 was not the time for that kind of a trip; hopefully I'll have another occasion to go in the not-so-distant future. Or even better, perhaps one day I'll be able to make the short drive to the beach in Tel Aviv from Beirut.

Otherwise, and as per usual, I've taken advantage of Paris to do some book shopping. It seems that Avraham Burg's book, which won't be out in English until October, has been released in French already. I'd like to be able to share it with my Anglophone friends in Beirut, but when I saw it used at Gilbert Joseph, I couldn't pass it up. Otherwise, I also found a used copy of Avi Shlaim's The Iron Wall at my favorite English book store here. Other, non-Israel-related, books include Nerval's Voyage en Orient, Paul Morand's New York (a present from Sebastien) and George Corm's L'Europe et l'Orient. I won't be happy until I find used copies of Samir Kassir's Histoire de Beyrouth and Jean Hatzfeld's Stratégie des Antilopes.

Jeffrey Goldberg has a dishonest account of Tom Segev's review of a book on Haj Amin al-Husseini up. He makes it sound like Segev is only down on the book because it emphasizes Arab extremism, whereas his problems with the book are much more substantial:

The lack of solid evidence is the main problem throughout the book. While the authors do cite prominent scholars like Martin Gilbert, Bernard Wasserstein and Rashid Khalidi, some of the most outrageous quotations come from quite arguable sources. Hitler’s alleged and highly unlikely pledge to Husseini (“The Jews are yours”) is based on a passage in the mufti’s own memoirs. But there is an official German record of his meeting with Hitler that contains no such statement. In fact the mufti did not achieve his major goal: Hitler refused to sign a public statement of support for him.

Then Goldberg makes it sound like Segev is comparing Jewish extremism in mandate Palestine with Husseini's support of Nazi Germany:

Segev compares the Mufti's behavior to that of Yitzhak Shamir, the former prime minister of Israel who was once a terrorist with the Stern Gang, and he criticizes the authors for neglecting to mention Jewish extremism in the time of the Mufti. I'm not sure why a book about pro-Nazi sympathies among certain Arabs need include this...

Actually, what Segev does is remind us, as we can read in his excellent book The Seventh Million that Husseini was not the only anti-British nationalist to make overtures to Nazi Germany for the purpose of throwing off the yoke of British imperialism:

The mufti’s support for Nazi Germany definitely demonstrated the evils of extremist nationalism. However, the Arabs were not the only chauvinists in Palestine looking to make a deal with the Nazis. At the end of 1940 and again at the end of 1941, a small Zionist terrorist organization known as the Stern Gang made contact with Nazi representatives in Beirut, seeking support for its struggle against the British. One of the Sternists, in a British jail at the time, was Yitzhak Shamir, a future Israeli prime minister. The authors fail to mention this episode.

So while it's true that a book on Arabs seeking German support against the British and the Jewish colonialism needn't mention the terrorism of the Irgun or the Stern Gang, it seems dishonest not to include the fact that some of Husseini's local Jewish enemies also sought the support of Nazi Germany.

But that's the whole problem here. The importance accorded to Husseini is meant to conflate anti-Zionism and Arabs with anti-Semitism and Nazis. During World War II, there were many subjects of British imperialism from Ireland to Egypt and beyond who saw the time as ripe to back another European power, not because they were Nazis or anti-Semites, but because they were anti-British and saw Germany as means to the end of breaking British rule over their lands.

We've seen politically expedient but strange bedfellows time and time again, like how many exiled Iraqis supported an American invasion -- not because they were particularly pro-American, but rather because they were anti-Saddam. To argue that the the two are necessarily the same is either obtuse or dishonest.

For reasons I won't go into, I was at the American embassy a couple of times earlier this week. Draconian security measures notwithstanding (you're not allowed to bring a phone or bag onto the premises), the place seemed more Lebanese than American, with Lebanese security guards, Lebanese employees and Lebanese-Americans queued up in the consular section.

Another touch was a world map in the consular section. It is a map with political boundaries, and while I was in the consular waiting room, I took a look at it while trying to recover from the disgusting humidity that all of Beirut's been suffering from this summer. The map is in Arabic, and like most maps in the region, Israel is nowhere to be found. Instead, the map shows Palestine. This wouldn't be surprising, except that it's in the American embassy.

I'm about to leave for a five-week trip seeing East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda), but I wanted to post a link to an execrable op-ed about learning Arabic in the Washington Post by Joel Pollak.

I sent out a hasty letter to the editor, which reads as follows:

Joel Pollak complains that there isn’t enough of an Israeli perspective in Arabic language classes. He then goes on to describe “West Beirut,” a gem of Lebanese cinema that recounts a love story between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl, as a film that casts Christians as “the prime bad guys in Lebanon’s civil war.” Obviously Pollak’s Arabic has not progressed far enough to have understood the movie.

He then assures us that he refused to talk about Abdel Nassar in class. In French courses, one learns about Napoleon as a grand statesman, not a brutal imperial dictator. Likewise in Arabic classes, as well as in much of the third world, Nasser was seen as a hero.

One of the points of language courses is to better understand the culture of the speakers of that language. Since Pollak would obviously prefer to learn about Israeli and Jewish history, one can only assume that mistakenly signed up for Arabic lessons when he was actually looking to learn Hebrew.

In other news, there's this nasty piece calling for collective punishment. I'd have more to say about this last one, except that I'm in a hurry.

I don't know what the internet situation is going to be like in any of the places where I'll be over the next month or so, but I can't imagine that posting will be any slower than it has been in the last month or two. Which means that I'll do my best to step it up considerably.

The US government has had to rescind the Fulbright awards for the 7 students in Gaza who won the awards, because Israel won't let them leave the territory:

The American State Department has withdrawn all Fulbright grants to Palestinian students in Gaza hoping to pursue advanced degrees at American institutions this fall because Israel has not granted them permission to leave.

...The study grants notwithstanding, the Israeli officials argued that the policy of isolating Gaza was working, that Palestinians here were starting to lose faith in Hamas's ability to rule because of the hardships of life.

..."We are fighting the regime in Gaza that does its utmost to kill our citizens and destroy our schools and our colleges," said Yuval Steinitz, a lawmaker from the opposition Likud Party. "So I don’t think we should allow students from Gaza to go anywhere. Gaza is under siege, and rightly so, and it is up to the Gazans to change the regime or its behavior."

Hadeel Abukwaik, a 23-year-old engineering software instructor in Gaza, had hoped to do graduate work in the United States this fall on the Fulbright that she thought was hers. She had stayed in Gaza this past winter when its metal border fence was destroyed and tens of thousands of Gazans poured into Egypt, including her sister, because the agency administering the Fulbright told her she would get the grant only if she stayed put. She lives alone in Gaza where she was sent to study because the cost is low; her parents, Palestinian refugees, live in Dubai.

"I stayed to get my scholarship," she said. "Now I am desperate."

Now I'm no expert on Islamic militancy, but I'm pretty sure that desperation isn't exactly the quickest route to winning hearts and minds.

Another thing that's been bothering me is the fact that Mostaqbal's media outlets were shut down. I won't pretend that part of me doesn't feel a little tinge of delight at the idea of the Mostaqbal thugs getting some comeuppance. But punishing neighborhood thugs who fancy themselves militiamen is one thing, while shutting down media outlets is another. During the 2006 war, Hezbollah was (rightfully, to my mind) outraged by Israel's targeting of their television station, al-Manar. So why is it acceptable to have shut down Future TV?

I'm watching Kalam an-Nass right now, while the head of Future TV is being interviewed. According to him, a Lebanese soldier, in uniform, told them that they had to open the gates or else they'd be killed by Hezbollah militiamen. This is, of course, disconcerting on several levels. First of all, this would mean that a member of the ostensibly neutral Lebanese Army would have helped Hezbollah shut down the media outlet of a competing political party. But regardless of whether or not a soldier helped Hezbollah shut the station down, the latter certainly did disconnect Future TV. This is scandalous, and Hezbollah should be ashamed of itself.

A woman presenter, whose name I can't recall, just came on and gave Hezbollah a piece of her mind. She said that she's spent the last year and a half doing reports on the lot of the people of the south and how they've suffered during the war of 2006 and after. Then she explained how al-Manar reported that the staff of Future TV "fled" the premises, like thieves or criminals, when in fact they were told to leave if they didn't want to die. She said that forgetting the parties and forgetting politics, this kind of treatment and the occupation of Beirut has made regular people, people like her, hate Hezbollah. She said that after people like her who did their best to take in refugees after the war in 2006 are treated like this and accused of being traitors, Hezbollah should be ashamed of itself. Of course a presenter on Future TV isn't exactly representative of the man on the street, but her point is well taken.

I can say, however, that the opposition has lost the sympathy of people who have supported the principles of the resistance, even if they had really ambivalent feelings about the religious and authoritarian form it's taken. And the traitor rhetoric is really hurtful and disgusting to people who support resistance against Israel but don't want to live in a country where the interests of the resistance trump those of the state. Calling people traitors like this smacks of Bush's rhetoric in the "war on terror," where you're either "with us or against us," and doesn't sit well with many Lebanese.

I never thought I'd say this, but there was part of Samir Geagea's speech this afternoon that I agree with. He said that the use of Hezbollah's weapons has delegitimized their very existence. I tend to agree with this idea, because Hezbollah has decided to use its weapons in an internal dispute between Lebanese actors. (Here, it's important to remember that the myth that Hezbollah has never been part of inter-Lebanese fighting fails to include when Amal and Hezbollah fought each the during the civil war.) What has happened is that the March 14 government made a decision that Hezbollah disagreed with, and in reaction to this, they took up arms and occupied half of Beirut. This means that the weapons whose sole purpose is supposed to deter Israeli aggression and defend Lebanon has been used as a blunt political tool to try to force the government to resign, or at the very least, send it a far-from-subtle message. 

The line being taken by the opposition now (at least as far as the talking heads of al-Manar are concerned) is that Hezbollah has helped the state put down militias (namely Mustaqbal, or the Future movement). This position fails to take into consideration, for example, the fact that there are still armed militia members of Amal and the Syrian Social Nationalist Party walking around West Beirut.

Either armed militias are illegal or they aren't. What's happened is that the Army seems to have passively taken the side of Hezbollah, which means that their legitimacy will be decreased or destroyed in the eyes of other Lebanese communities, especially the Sunnis in Saida and Tripoli. It has also sent the message that the most effective political tool is military force. I imagine, then, that the Sunnis in Saida and Tripoli, the pro-government Christians and the Druze loyal to Walid Jumblatt have likely decided that they can no longer count on the Army to be an impartial arbiter for the state. This will surely lead to increased militia training and arming. It wouldn't surprise me if the lesson that the Lebanese Forces and the PSP have taken from the defeat of Mustaqbal (probably the weakest of the pro-government parties/militias, if one of the nastier ones on a local neighborhood level) is that they should be prepared for more of the same in the not-so-distant future.

So where does this leave us? Despite rumors earlier today, it doesn't look like Saniora, or anyone else, will resign from the government. So what? There's still no president, and the fundamental dysfunction of the Lebanese state has only been highlighted, not solved. If this all ends with Hezbollah and its allied militias pulling back to their territory in the next day or so, leaving a humiliating message for the other parties and their militias, we'll be back to where we started. Back to where we started, except a big part of the population will have lost faith in the idea that Hezbollah and its allies can be dealt with within the norms of a democratic system.

Since there is no way that any of these groups can compete with Hezbollah's military forces, look for them to embrace proxies. This might include the Sunnis accepting al-Qaeda militants and other groups hoping for more Israeli intervention. I'm sure that after the disaster that was the war in 2006, the Israeli establishment wouldn't mind taking advantage of the situation for  rematch. In any case, what this situation hasn't done is foster an atmosphere where either side feels like it can compromise. If anything, this whole situation has pushed March 14 further into its corner and inflated the arrogance and confidence of Hezbollah and its allies in the country and abroad. Neither of which bodes well for peace or stability in Lebanon.

Amin Gemayel, whom I can't stand, called Hezbollah's victory a Pyrrhic one (actually, he said it in French, the snooty bastard). I tend to think that, on a national level and in the long term, he's probably right. In any case, it's enough to turn some Lebanese into bitter Mercutios.

I'm a little late for Labor Day, but Human Rights Watch here in Lebanon has begun an awareness campaign for rights of domestic workers entitled Put Yourself in Her Shoes:

The condition of (predominantly women) domestic workers in the Middle East is atrocious. Apparently, the problem is as bad in Israel as it is in Lebanon and even worse in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. According to HRW:

The most common complaints made by domestic workers to embassies and nongovernmental organizations include non-payment or delayed payment of their wages, forced confinement to the workplace, no time off, and verbal, as well as physical, abuse. According to a 2006 survey conducted by Dr. Ray Jureidini of 600 migrant domestic workers, 56 percent said they work more than 12 hours a day and 34 percent have no regular time off. In some cases, workers have died while attempting to escape these conditions, some by jumping from balconies.

...The Lebanese authorities have failed to curb abuses committed by employers and agencies. Lebanese labor laws specifically exclude domestic workers from rights guaranteed to other workers, such as a weekly day of rest, limits on work hours, paid holidays, and workers’ compensation. Immigration sponsorship laws restrict domestic workers’ ability to change employers, even in cases of abuse. An official steering committee created in early 2006 and led by the Ministry of Labor to improve the legal situation of migrant workers in Lebanon has yet to deliver any concrete reforms. This includes a long-discussed standard contract to outline minimum standards for domestic workers’ employment.  

Human Rights Watch called upon the Ministry of Labor and other relevant authorities to amend the labor law to extend equal protection for domestic workers and to sign and ratify the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families. 

 

A few years ago, the Times did a story about Sri Lankan women who go to the Middle East to work as domestic servants.  This picture is of a 20-year-old woman named Thangarasa Jeyanthi who was severely abused in Lebanon. In Lebanese Arabic, the common word for a domestic worker is "Sri Lankan." At one point, I remember hearing a joke about an NGO that was fostering multiculturalism by doing presentations with people from all over world invited to introduce themselves to the audience. The Egyptian man comes and says he works as a concierge. The Syrian says that he's a field hand. And then comes the Ethiopian who introduces herself but forgets to say what her profession is. When reminded that everyone has to say what they do, she replies, "I'm a Sri Lankan."

In the case of Sri Lankan women, the conditions that they live and work in criminally miserable, and their government is actually complicit. There are training programs that teach the women some Arabic and how to do what is expected of them without receiving the beatings that are so common. The government encourages women to go to the Middle East, they provide remittances that help keep the Sri Lankan economy afloat.

An Ethiopian friend of mine here used to work for a big hotel in town, but she wasn't allowed to be hired directly even though she has all of her papers in order. The hotel insists on going through a middle man, who garnishes half of the wages of the foreign women working at the hotel. A salary of $450 is reasonable (and more than twice the pitiful minimum wage), but when some sleazy profiteer gets to pocket half of your salary, it's difficult to survive, especially with the increasing price of living (many food items have nearly doubled in price in the last 9 months).

In contrast with Colombo's policy of encouraging the migration, Ethiopia's government has taken the decision to ban its citizens from coming to Lebanon in search of employment:

ADDIS ABABA: On the occasion of Labor Day, Ethiopia has officially banned its citizens from traveling to Beirut in search of jobs, the African country's Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs has disclosed. Ethiopia passed the bill after it probed the human right violations and domestic violence Ethiopian migrants face behind closed doors in Beirut while employed as maids.

"Suspending work travel to Beirut was the only solution to minimizing the human rights abuses and dangers facing our citizens," said Zenebu Tadesse, deputy minister of state for labor and social affairs.

During the past few years, a number of Ethiopians have died in Lebanon in questionable circumstances.

According to a report published by Ethiopia's official news agency, past human right records show that 67 Ethiopian women have died between 1997 and 1999 alone while working in Beirut.

The ministry said it would take strong action against any employment agency trying to send workers directly to Beirut or through a third country.

So for Labor Day this year, I'd like to remind everyone that Sri Lankan is a nationality, not a profession. And I'd like to remind the Lebanese, many of whom go off to Europe, North America and the Gulf in search of work, that they should have a little solidarity with domestic workers here who are hoping to make so money to create a better life for themselves. As my friend Nadim from HRW says about their media campaign: "Many Lebanese themselves have been forced by wars and hardships to emigrate looking for a better life. We hope that they will see the parallels with the experience of these migrants that came from far away to care for Lebanese families."

(Via my friend A) Carter to be tried for peace crimes, according to The Onion:

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND—An international peace-crimes tribunal commenced legal proceedings against former U.S. President Jimmy Carter for alleged crimes against inhumanity Monday.

"Jimmy Carter's political career includes a laundry list of anti-war-making offenses," said chief prosecutor Charles B. Simmons. "Carter's record of benevolence, diplomacy, and respect for human life is unrivaled in recent geopolitical history. For millions, the very sight of his face evokes memories of his administration's reign of tolerance."

I knew it was only a matter of time before the international community succeeded in bringing his gentle reign of peace-mongering to an end!

The previous post got me to wondering how often the word Nakba had been used in American newspapers and when, so I did a Lexis Nexis search, which showed that the Times has only printed the word in 34 articles, the first of which appeared in 1998 in an article about Israel's 50th anniversary. A double check of the NYT online archives, however, showed two other articles that didn't appear in the Lexis Nexis search (they seem to only have abstracts for pre-1981 articles): one from 1973 on Sadat and another from 1970 on occupied Ramallah.

Here's a quickly drawn up chart that tracks the use of the word in coverage by the New York Times:

 

This shows that up until the 50th anniversary of the Nakba, the Times had referred to it but twice. I have a feeling that before the year is over, 2008 will beat out 2007 for the number of times the term is employed.

It's unclear to me what exactly has caused the general tide of public opinion to start moving (slowly but surely) away from Israeli occupation in the US. (Or perhaps I'm being optimistic and am projecting?) But I get the feeling that there's a  shift happening in American public opinion that will hopefully be reflected by more fair-minded media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

I've been surprised in the last few weeks to see how much attention the Nakba is getting during the run up to the 60th anniversary of the catastrophe and the founding of the Jewish state. While interpretations differ, it has at least been getting mentions in publications like The New Yorker and the New York Times.

That said, I knew it was only a matter of time before something really reactionary and stupid came out in a magazine like Commentary. Well, Efraim Karsh offers up exactly what we needed in his "True Story" of what happened in 1948. Following his recent comments on the "Jordanian option," I recently marveled how someone who is ostensibly a scholar of the region could be so out of touch with Arabs and the Arab political scene, but this latest piece takes the proverbial cake.

According to Karsh, before 1948, the Palestinians never had any problem with the idea of becoming a minority in their own land and otherwise would have been perfectly happy living as a second class majority in a Jewish state. In fact, Zionists wanted nothing more than all Arabs to stay in their homes and live happily ever after in a pastoral paradise. Unfortunately, the evil Jew-hating "Arab leaders" had to dash all these wonderful hopes and spur the Palestinians to war, despite the fact that they wanted nothing more than to live in a Jewish state. Why even Vladimir Jabotinsky wanted nothing more than peaceful Arab-Jewish coexistence: According to Karsh:

The simple fact is that the Zionist movement had always been amenable to the existence in the future Jewish state of a substantial Arab minority that would participate on an equal footing “throughout all sectors of the country’s public life.” The words are those of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founding father of the branch of Zionism that was the forebear of today’s Likud party. In a famous 1923 article, Jabotinsky voiced his readiness “to take an oath binding ourselves and our descendants that we shall never do anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try to eject anyone.”

Eleven years later, Jabotinsky presided over the drafting of a constitution for Jewish Palestine. According to its provisions, Arabs and Jews were to share both the prerogatives and the duties of statehood, including most notably military and civil service. Hebrew and Arabic were to enjoy the same legal standing, and “in every cabinet where the prime minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab and vice-versa.”

It just so happens that this is the same Jabotinsky who thought that the Jewish state should encompass both sides of the Jordan and who in his famous essay, "The Iron Wall," had this to say:

If [the reader] should attempt to seek but one instance of a country settled with the consent of those born there he will not succeed. The inhabitants (no matter whether they are civilized or savages) have always put up a stubborn fight.

...Any native people -- its all the same whether they are civilized or savage -- views their country as their national home, of which they will  always be the complete masters. They will not voluntarily allow, not only a new master, but even a new partner. And so it is for the Arabs. Compromisers in our midst attempt to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked by a softened formulation of our goals, or a tribe of money grubbers who will abandon their birth right to Palestine for cultural and economic gains. I flatly reject this assessment of the Palestinian Arabs. Culturally they are 500 years behind us, spiritually they do not have our endurance or our strength of will, but this exhausts all of the internal differences. We can talk as much as we want about our good intentions; but they understand as well as we what is not good for them. They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie. To think that the Arabs will voluntarily consent to the realization of Zionism in return for the cultural and economic benefits we can bestow on them is infantile. This childish fantasy of our “Arabo-philes” comes from some kind of contempt for the Arab people, of some kind of unfounded view of this race as a rabble ready to be bribed in order to sell out their homeland for a railroad network.

He goes on to say that no voluntary agreement with the Arabs is possible:

Thus we conclude that we cannot promise anything to the Arabs of the Land of Israel or the Arab countries. Their voluntary agreement is out of the question. Hence those who hold that an agreement with the natives is an essential condition for Zionism can now say “no” and depart from Zionism. Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population -- an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.

...All this does not mean that any kind of agreement is impossible, only a voluntary agreement is impossible. As long as there is a spark of hope that they can get rid of us, they will not sell these hopes, not for any kind of sweet words or tasty morsels, because they are not a rabble but a nation, perhaps somewhat tattered, but still living. A living people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions only when there is no hope left. Only when not a single breach is visible in the iron wall, only then do extreme groups lose their sway, and influence transfers to moderate groups. Only then would these moderate groups come to us with proposals for mutual concessions. And only then will moderates offer suggestions for compromise on practical questions like a guarantee against expulsion, or equality and national autonomy.

I am optimistic that they will indeed be granted satisfactory assurances and that both peoples, like good neighbors, can then live in peace. But the only path to such an agreement is the iron wall, that is to say the strengthening in Palestine of a government without any kind of Arab influence, that is to say one against which the Arabs will fight. In other words, for us the only path to an agreement in the future is an absolute refusal of any attempts at an agreement now.

This is what Jabotinsky thought of the Arabs, not just in Palestine but in Jordan as well. To the consternation of modern day Zionists, he saw the Zionist state in explicitly colonial terms, equating it with other European colonial endeavors.  

Now I've got a certain respect for Zionists like Jabotinsky who call a spade a spade. What I don't appreciate are scholars like Karsh who insist on whitewashing the creation of Israel to absolve the state of any wrong-doing. In his world, the Yishuv did nothing wrong; all blame for the problems of Arabs can be squarely placed at the feet of "Arab leaders." He ignores the much more frank assertions of the Zionist leaders themselves, like Ben-Gurion who once asked:

Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country.

In any case, Karsh disagrees with the scholarship done by Israeli "new historians" like Pappe, Morris and Shlaim, who all show that the old myths of Palestinians leaving their homes because of radio broadcasts sent out by their leaders are conveniently simplistic and just not true. While there is some disagreement as to whether the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was pre-planned and deliberate, ad-hoc and hasty or unintentional but finally welcome, the issue is ultimately beside the point when it comes to Palestinians' right of return. Either you believe that one has the unalienable right to leave one's country and return, or you don't.

I've long thought that morally and politically, it would be a great move if the Lebanese government were to invite Lebanese Jews who left during the civil war to Europe and America to come back. And if Beirut were really clever, it would appoint a Lebanese Jew to a ministerial position or as an ambassador to the UN or the US. This would help turn the Lebanese-Israeli conflict into a national one instead of a religious one. In 2006, it would have been a tremendous PR move to have a Jewish minister criticizing the systematic destruction of the Lebanese infrastructure.

In this context, Bahrain has made a really smart move:

A Jewish woman, Huda Ezra Ebrahim Nonoo, is set to become Bahrain's ambassador to Washington, sources close to diplomats told Gulf News on Thursday.

"Huda is Bahrain's nominee for the post and this is of course very good news for Bahrain's deep-rooted values of tolerance and openness," Faisal Fouladh, a Shura Council representative, and Western diplomats said.

Huda, a businesswoman, was the first Jewish woman to sit in the Shura Council, the 40-member upper house of the bicameral legislature, replacing her uncle. A Christian woman, Alice Samaan, also sits on the council which has 11 women, compared with only one woman MP, Lateefa Al Gaood, in the 40-member lower house.

(Via TPM) Ha'aretz reports Benjamin Netanyahu, hawkish Israeli "ally" of the US, as saying that 9/11 was good for Israel:

"We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq," Ma'ariv quoted the former prime minister as saying. He reportedly added that these events "swung American public opinion in our favor."

This actually mirrors comments made by Netanyahu on the day of the attacks:

Asked tonight what the attack meant for relations between the United States and Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister, replied, ''It's very good.'' Then he edited himself: ''Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.'' He predicted that the attack would ''strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we've experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.''

With friends like these, right?

I'm not generally fond of Jeffery Goldberg's work when it comes to the Middle East, so I was pretty skeptical about the Atlantic's big Israel story this week. (I haven't read it yet, so I'll reserve judgment until then.)  One thing that's very interesting though, is that Goldman has dug up some old pieces on Palestine and Zionism that appeared in the Atlantic.

So far, I've only had the time to read William Ernest Hocking's 1930 piece, Palestine: An Impasse? You can tell that these old pieces have been scanned, because there are a few mistakes with indentations, quotes and even a couple of letters ('d' for 'cl'), but this article really warrants being read. Here are a couple of meaty extracts to whet your appetite:

If we in America, Jews and Gentiles, could see things as they are in Palestine, we should recognize as axiomatic three things: (1) That nothing like the full plan of Zionism can be realized without political pressure backed by military force; (2) that such pressure and force imply an injustice which is inconsistent with the ethical sense of Zionism, undermining both its sincerity and its claim; (3) that every increase of pressure now meets with increasingly determined Arab resistance, within and beyond Palestine. Hence the question which political Zionism must answer is whether or not it proposes to-day, as in ancient times, to assert its place in Palestine by aid of the sword.

To many Arabs, the Balfour Declaration, in spite of its careful safeguarding of all existing civil and religious rights, is understood as obliging Great Britain to 'do something' for the Jews. Many Zionists have the same conception. And the Arab mind inquires: What can Great Britain now do for Zionism which is not against the Arabs? What favor can it show which is not favoritism? If the question is capable of an answer, it needs to be a dear answer, plainly spoken. Great Britain is serving Zionism. It is doing so not only by maintaining security and order in the land (with some lapses), but by furnishing the administrative staff without which no such settlement would have been possible, and by creating new opportunities. Under the older Ottoman regime, foreign Jews were at a disadvantage: they—like other foreigners—could acquire land only in the name of Ottoman subjects. These disabilities are now removed; as is often said, Jews are now in Palestine by right, not on sufferance. Why press for more than this equitable opening, when more means a reversed injustice? The rural and industrial centres already founded need no more than an equal legal status for their normal peaceful development. The great Hebrew University on Mount Scopus needs no more than this on the legal side to realize its destiny. And this university, be it said, under the prophetic leadership of Dr. Judah Magnes, is the symbol of all that is best in Zionism. For the true and attainable Zion is the Zion of culture and faith, not the Zion of political nationalism.

It is indeed a bitter thing to the sincere Zionist that his ideal community cannot have in that unique spot of earth its perfect body as well as its perfect soul. What I have to say, I say with deep personal regret. For I went to Palestine seized with the idea of Zionism and warmed by the ardor of Jewish friends to whom this vision is the breath of life, prepared to believe all things possible. I came away saddened, seeing that to strive for the perfect body, as things now are, can only mean the loss of soul and body alike. To pursue any campaign for a more vigorous fulfillment of 'the British promise,' to force cantonization on Palestine and so to repeat the standing grievance of divided Syria, to press for any further favor of the state, is to work blindly toward another bloody struggle involving first the new settlements, then Great Britain, then no one knows what wider area. In this we have been assuming that on the issue of Jewish dominance the Arab mind is irreconcilable. Is this true?

The answer lies partly in the fact that for the Arab, whose local attachments are peculiarly strong, Palestine, beside being his home, is also a holy land. It lies partly in the fact that to his mind Palestine is not a separate province: it is an integral part of Syria, with Damascus as its natural trading and cultural capital, while Syria is an integral part of greater Arabia. In his dream of a free Arab empire, Damascus may have served as capital for the whole; or Syria, together with Palestine, may have constituted an autonomous province. In any case, the new Arabia through Palestine reached the western sea; while Palestine as a part of Syria became a partner in that new and proud political enterprise. The expulsion of Feisal from Damascus by the French was a cruel mutilation of this dream. The mandate for Palestine excludes it from the imagined kingdom and shuts that kingdom from the Mediterranean. Even so, political arrangements may be unmade. But village settlements are a more final obstacle—they build a human barrier and put an end to hope. The progress of Zionist colonization thus becomes for the Arab national outlook a culminating stroke in a series of breaches of faith.

...The two enemies of peace in the Holy Land are fanaticism and fear. The movement of the modern spirit within all creeds is having for one of its beneficent effects the gradual melting of fanaticism without argument. Fixed and antagonistic dogmas are transforming themselves into alternative sets of symbols which can dwell together. But fanaticism is kept alive and sharpened by fear; clashes at the Wailing Wall are symptoms of political rather than religious apprehension. These fears of displacement, of national thwarting, must be put to rest; and they can only be quieted by unequivocal public commitments, renouncing the intention to dominate and to exclude. If there is to be peace within the gates of Jerusalem, the first condition, as I see it, is that Zionism publicly disavow its unholy alliance with Western military power, and therewith (following the lead of a recent resolution within the Jewish Agency) its purpose to dominate in Palestine.

Hocking's solution is finally a binational, or more accurately a multi-religious, state under the mandate of Britain, a solution that is obviously out the question as far as British rule is concerned. Nonetheless, he brings up a fundamental conflict between the Zionist body and the Zionist soul, the latter being crushed by what it would take (has taken) to create a Jewish state -- something Avraham Burg's new book is about.

I'm a little uneasy with the idea he has of keeping Palestine technologically "backward" so as to keep Palestine as a multi-religious spiritual land above all else. But that's a small detail in an otherwise insightful analysis of the situation. To my mind, he really hits the nail on the head when he points out the violent and unjust conditions that would be necessary to create a Jewish majority in Palestine.

Goldberg, for his part claims that Hocking is arguing for "an exclusive Arab right to the territory of Palestine," which is silly when you read the piece. What he does do is analyze the Jewish right to Palestine:

This claim of right, based on a mission which it is felt a religious disloyalty to compromise, cannot be shaken in the Jewish mind by analogies from history or international law. To urge that the same reasoning which leads the Jew to claim Palestine after eighteen hundred years would give the Arab a right to Spain after seven hundred years is quite sound so far as it appeals to the ordinary flux of historic conquest and possession; but it wholly misses the sense of this 'organic indissoluble connection,' this right of destiny. Such a right has the force of a religious conviction for those who have that vision; it has the weakness of subjectivism for those who do not share it.

He, correctly, I think, calls the Jewish right to Palestine a subjective one for those who do not believe in God's covenant with the Jewish people and an ineluctable truth for those who do.

On a completely different note, I know that this blog has been focusing on Israel a lot lately. This reminds me of a woman whom I used to date who was doing her doctoral thesis on Jewish communities in the Middle East. She told me that if I was going to be with her, I'd have to deal with the three following things: "1. I am insanely jealous; 2. I smoke in bed; and 3. I'm obsessed with the Jews."

So at the risk of sounding like I'm obsessed with Israel, I'd just like to say in my defense that with the upcoming 60th anniversary of Israel's independence and the Nakba, there's plenty of material to comment on these days.

UPDATE: Interestingly enough, I just looked at my stat log, and Israel is where a good part of my hits come from, after the US, France and Lebanon. So shalom, dear readers, and happy passover!

When I read this report in Ha'aretz, it was hard for me to believe what I was reading:

Driving along the road from Be'er Sheva to Arad, shortly before the turn toward Darijat, you can see the unrecognized Bedouin village that was home to Manhash al-Baniyat, the Israeli soldier who was killed yesterday in a clash with Palestinian gunmen near the Gaza Strip border, across from Kibbutz Be'eri.

In order to reach the village, you have to travel for several hundred meters along a dirt path, until you come to a few houses, built close together. One of these is the house Manhash built for himself in preparation for his marriage, next month. Since building permits are not granted to Bedouin, he had no choice but to build the house illegally. A demolition order has already been issued. The only water pipe leading to the village is also disconnected. Yesterday, a mourners' tent was added to the already harsh landscape, erected by the army. Now that the army's there, at least there's water, someone remarked half-jokingly.

There are a lot of Israelis or supporters of Israel who say that since Palestinians with Israeli citizenship aren't treated as badly as those in the occupied territories, Israel couldn't possibly be an apartheid state. If that's the case, then I'm not sure how we account for al-Baniyat, who died for the state that's bulldozing his home. His sister puts it well when she says, "Sometimes you feel like belonging to the state, but sometimes you get fed up because you build a house and they come and destroy it."

It just so happens that I read a piece by Roger Cohen today that mentions a video of a black woman during the civil rights movement who sums up the situation perfectly: "If we can’t live in our country and be accepted as free citizens and human beings, then something’s the matter with something — and it isn’t me."

In case you haven't heard, there's a new Israel lobby in town. It's called J-Street and is supposed to be a progressive alternative to the hawkish pro-Likud lobby that is AIPAC et al. Spencer Ackerman has a piece about how the new group wants to reframe the Israel debate:

[Co-founder Daniel] Levy, though a long-time peace negotiator, is eager to debate what it means to be pro-Israel, and draws a comparison between AIPAC and the hard-liners who ended up compromising the Jewish future millennia ago. "We'll say, 'Zealots like you led to the destruction of previous Jewish commonwealths,'" Levy said. "We're not going to be intimidated."

J-Street gives us some examples of the current militant rhetoric surrounding Israel these days and asks if that's what it truly means to be pro-Israel and, more to the point, if these voices truly speak for American Jews:


Ezra Klein weighs in to talk about his experience of being alienated at his synagogue:

I can't recall now if it was the Jenin incursions or the riots at the Temple Mount that set my rabbi off. Or perhaps he was just enraged by one of the obscure convulsions of violence that occur with such regularity as to virtually mark time in the Middle East. What punctures the haze of memory is when he transitioned from sports to politics, telling the assembled alumni that the Jews would be within their rights to forcibly deport and displace the entire Palestinian population. I objected, and we began shouting at each other as my classmates looked on in annoyance. I stormed from the room and it was the last time I set foot in that temple. In my temple.

He later goes on to talk about the link between Judaism and human rights and how, to his mind, this is "no time for silence."

On the other side of the aisle, of course, things are different. In truly predictable style, our favorite philistine Noah Pollak (who once visited "Upper Galilee") is already slamming J-Street. It seems that a pro-peace lobby is just too much to stomach for Pollak, so he makes a big deal of the fact that Avraham Burg is "near the top of its list of [Israeli] supporters." (Note to Pollak, when a list is in alphabetical order, people whose names begin with the letter B will usually be "near the top.") He paints Burg as some sort of a radical but fails to mention that he used to be the Diaspora advisor to the Israeli Prime Minister, chairman of the Jewish Agency, speaker of the Knesset and chair of the World Zionist Organization.

I'm not going to say that Avraham Burg isn't polemical in Israel; he is, and if you're interested in reading his opinions for yourself, Ha'aretz published a fascinating interview with him. But Pollak prefers to brandish a single controversial supporter of J-Street (without even mentioning his former role in the Israeli establishment) and build a strawman in an attempt to discredit an entire movement rather than, say, actually debate the issue on the merits. But that's par for the course for Pollak and his ilk. And by the by, TNR is already preparing a hit piece against J-Street, according to Ackerman.

To my mind, a new lobby will give progressive Jews a chance to have a voice in the Israel/Palestine debate and have a tangible (although much less so than AIPAC) effect on Middle East policy. It seems that, like the Arabs, there's an aversion to public dissension in the ranks, a certain disgust at airing the community's dirty laundry in public. J-Street might just be overcoming this fear to become an avenue for progressive American Jews to have a say in what's being done and said in their name by the likes of AIPAC and Alan Dershowitz.

UPDATE: In another post attacking J-Street, the hilariously yet unintentionally ironic Pollak has this to say:

It seems to me that the J Streeters are never going to be able to escape the fact that, sitting in Washington, they are advocating policies for Israel that are overwhelmingly unpopular among Israelis — and attempting to brand this paternalism as "pro-Israel."

The Economist has a special report on Israel on the occasion of its 60th year. I've been skipping through the various sections of it, and so far it seems fairly interesting, although nowhere near as interesting as Le Monde Diplo's Manière de voir on the subject: "Histoires d’Israël." The latter is put together by Dominique Vidal and includes articles by Edward Said, Avraham Burg, Tom Segev, Samir Kassir, Shimon Peres, Alain Gresh, Amira Hass, and the list goes on.

I'll be reading the Economist report online and the Manière de voir in print - both, I'll add, at home, because while I'm sometimes fond of creating a stink, I'm not sure I've got the balls to bring a blue and white magazine with Israel printed on the front cover to my local café.

If this Reuters report is accurate, then the Israelis have got some explaining to do:

JERUSALEM, April 14 (Reuters) - Israeli leaders shunned former U.S. President Jimmy Carter during a visit because of his plans to meet Hamas and Israel's secret service declined to assist U.S. agents guarding him, U.S. sources said on Monday.

"They're not getting support from local security," one of the sources said, on condition of anonymity.

An American source described as "unprecedented" the lack of Shin Bet cooperation with the U.S. Secret Service, which protects all current and former U.S. presidents, as well as Israeli leaders when they visit the United States.

...American sources close to the matter said the Shin Bet, which helps protect visiting dignitaries and is overseen by Olmert's office, declined to meet the head of Carter's Secret Service detail or provide his team with assistance as is customary during such visits.

Jimmy Carter has the thankless job of being the best friend Israel's ever had. He reminds me of those public service/beer commercials in which some drunken asshole keeps trying to crawl into his truck but his buddy refuses to give him his keys back: Friends don't let friends drink and drive.

The Israelis are spitting on the man who is responsible for brokering the peace deal with Egypt and is now telling Israel some truths that it doesn't want to hear. I suppose it's normal to expect the Israelis to be unhappy about being told not to drive, but I somehow never expected Israeli foolishness to go so far as to refuse to protect Carter.

What would people say if the secret service refused to protect and Barack Obama refused to meet with Benjamin Netanyahu during a future trip to the US? Or better yet, imagine if the Egyptian or Pakistani governments refused to provide security for a former US president. Americans would be up in arms, and it would be a bipartisan contest to see who could yell the loudest for suspending aid to Cairo or Islamabad. This should be a huge scandal in the US, but if I know America at all, reactions will range from disgusted sighs to total silence to rants that Carter is an antisemite and is getting the treatment he deserves.

Last week McClatchey had an important story about the fate of Bedouins in Israel. There is a lot of talk about how Israel is a beacon for democracy in the Middle East, and often even those who admit that the Jewish state's founding myths are untrue and protest the occupation are hesitant to admit that there are many Israeli citizens who are treated unequally by the law. The Bedouins are a case in point. The government is destroying their homes and trying to remove them from their land to make room for Jewish citizens. In any other context, this would be called ethnic cleansing:

Israeli leaders have a $3.6 billion plan to transform the vast Negev desert into prospering Jewish communities. Finesh and 80,000 other Bedouin say the land is theirs, however.

As Israel presses ahead with the development, a Human Rights Watch report released Monday concludes that it's using "discriminatory, exclusionary and punitive" policies to push the aside the Bedouin, who are descendants of Arab tribes that once roamed the Negev.

"Israeli policies have created a situation whereby tens of thousands of Bedouin citizens in the Negev have little or no alternative but to live in ramshackle villages and build illegally in order to meet their most basic shelter needs," the report says.

Since Israel was founded nearly 60 years ago, its leaders have been wrestling with what to do with its small Bedouin minority, now climbing above 160,000.

Israel has pushed about half the Bedouin into sterile, depressed new desert towns, demolished thousands of illegal shanties and transformed their sheep-grazing pastures into dangerous military zones.

About 80,000 Bedouin living in more than three dozen unauthorized shantytowns and villages refuse to move, even though they receive no electricity or water from Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has set up a commission to come up with innovative ways to handle the holdouts.

"The government of Israel understands that it needs to solve the problem of the Bedouin," said Yehuda Bachar, the director general of a newly established government department for Bedouin affairs. "If it is not solved now, it will not be solved for many years."

The intent behind the plans is clear: Israeli leaders want to move the Arab residents to make way for Jewish developments.

The Israeli government is looking to spend $3.6 billion over the next seven years to lure more Jewish residents to the Negev, a triangular desert that makes up more than half of the nation's land.

"The only chance for the development of the Negev is that we bring more Jews," said Shmuel Rifman, the mayor of the local Ramat Negev Regional Council, who supports a trickle-down theory when it comes to the Bedouin.

I'm in Paris this week to surprise my good friend for his birthday and see others whom I've been missing lately,  the city herself my friend's unborn baby girl. I was glad to see that while I was going to be here, I could see Amos Oz and David Grossman at the Centre Pompidou.

It wasn't until I arrived that I realized that the reason Grossman and Oz were in Paris in the first place was the Salon du Livre and the fact that this year, Israel was showcased as the guest of honor. I then found out from some Franco-Algerian friends, who accompanied me to the Pompidou event, that there had been a bomb threat and a boycott. (For a good summary in English of the whole thing, check out Lauren Elkin's account.)

The Oz and Grossman event wasn't at all what I was expecting. I knew that it was ostensibly about their literature but assumed that since both authors are politically active, there would be a fair amount of politics involved also. I was looking forward to this, not least because the only books I've read by either author are political non-fiction. There was a fog of politics that floated above the evening but never settled. Since there was no opportunity for questions, the young swooning moderator, who sounded more like a groupie than a literary critic or writer, and the writers themselves were able to keep to the topic of writing and literature.

One effect of this was that the Holocaust was very much present in the talk, but the Palestinians almost not at all. This was a little disappointing to me, because it's hard for me to imagine Palestinian writing (and this may be the fault of wonderful Mourid Barghouti and Mahmoud Darwish) without a heavy Israeli presence. Also, Oz and Grossman seemed very distant and foreign to me, because of the linguistic barrier. For some reason, I was expecting them to speak in English, but instead they spoke in Hebrew, which was translated into French by one of the best interpreters I've had the pleasure of listening to. His voice was soft and exact, and I felt cradled by his cadence. David Grossman was fairly spontaneous but sometimes a little rambling, whereas Oz spoke like a robot but had more interesting things to say. (It's only fair to mention that a lot of Oz's discourse was canned, as I'd already read close to a third of it in various of his books, interviews and articles.)

It was interesting for me to see Israel in this light: as a state like another. Because in Lebanon, Israel is not only not like other states, it's violent and dangerous. We're waiting for the next war, which will likely be even worse than the last one, so it's difficult to empathize with Israel and its people, even if many of them (like Grossman and Oz) have opinions similar to mine. This reminds me of my trip to the West Bank at the end of the war in 2006. Only rarely did I cross over to Jewish Jerusalem or interact with Israelis. I felt shaken by the bombing of Lebanon and almost afraid to see where those bombs were coming from. I now regret not exploring Tel Aviv or visiting Yad Vashem, which I've wanted to see for a long time. But July 2006 was not the time for that kind of a trip; hopefully I'll have another occasion to go in the not-so-distant future. Or even better, perhaps one day I'll be able to make the short drive to the beach in Tel Aviv from Beirut.

Otherwise, and as per usual, I've taken advantage of Paris to do some book shopping. It seems that Avraham Burg's book, which won't be out in English until October, has been released in French already. I'd like to be able to share it with my Anglophone friends in Beirut, but when I saw it used at Gilbert Joseph, I couldn't pass it up. Otherwise, I also found a used copy of Avi Shlaim's The Iron Wall at my favorite English book store here. Other, non-Israel-related, books include Nerval's Voyage en Orient, Paul Morand's New York (a present from Sebastien) and George Corm's L'Europe et l'Orient. I won't be happy until I find used copies of Samir Kassir's Histoire de Beyrouth and Jean Hatzfeld's Stratégie des Antilopes.

Jeffrey Goldberg has a dishonest account of Tom Segev's review of a book on Haj Amin al-Husseini up. He makes it sound like Segev is only down on the book because it emphasizes Arab extremism, whereas his problems with the book are much more substantial:

The lack of solid evidence is the main problem throughout the book. While the authors do cite prominent scholars like Martin Gilbert, Bernard Wasserstein and Rashid Khalidi, some of the most outrageous quotations come from quite arguable sources. Hitler’s alleged and highly unlikely pledge to Husseini (“The Jews are yours”) is based on a passage in the mufti’s own memoirs. But there is an official German record of his meeting with Hitler that contains no such statement. In fact the mufti did not achieve his major goal: Hitler refused to sign a public statement of support for him.

Then Goldberg makes it sound like Segev is comparing Jewish extremism in mandate Palestine with Husseini's support of Nazi Germany:

Segev compares the Mufti's behavior to that of Yitzhak Shamir, the former prime minister of Israel who was once a terrorist with the Stern Gang, and he criticizes the authors for neglecting to mention Jewish extremism in the time of the Mufti. I'm not sure why a book about pro-Nazi sympathies among certain Arabs need include this...

Actually, what Segev does is remind us, as we can read in his excellent book The Seventh Million that Husseini was not the only anti-British nationalist to make overtures to Nazi Germany for the purpose of throwing off the yoke of British imperialism:

The mufti’s support for Nazi Germany definitely demonstrated the evils of extremist nationalism. However, the Arabs were not the only chauvinists in Palestine looking to make a deal with the Nazis. At the end of 1940 and again at the end of 1941, a small Zionist terrorist organization known as the Stern Gang made contact with Nazi representatives in Beirut, seeking support for its struggle against the British. One of the Sternists, in a British jail at the time, was Yitzhak Shamir, a future Israeli prime minister. The authors fail to mention this episode.

So while it's true that a book on Arabs seeking German support against the British and the Jewish colonialism needn't mention the terrorism of the Irgun or the Stern Gang, it seems dishonest not to include the fact that some of Husseini's local Jewish enemies also sought the support of Nazi Germany.

But that's the whole problem here. The importance accorded to Husseini is meant to conflate anti-Zionism and Arabs with anti-Semitism and Nazis. During World War II, there were many subjects of British imperialism from Ireland to Egypt and beyond who saw the time as ripe to back another European power, not because they were Nazis or anti-Semites, but because they were anti-British and saw Germany as means to the end of breaking British rule over their lands.

We've seen politically expedient but strange bedfellows time and time again, like how many exiled Iraqis supported an American invasion -- not because they were particularly pro-American, but rather because they were anti-Saddam. To argue that the the two are necessarily the same is either obtuse or dishonest.

For reasons I won't go into, I was at the American embassy a couple of times earlier this week. Draconian security measures notwithstanding (you're not allowed to bring a phone or bag onto the premises), the place seemed more Lebanese than American, with Lebanese security guards, Lebanese employees and Lebanese-Americans queued up in the consular section.

Another touch was a world map in the consular section. It is a map with political boundaries, and while I was in the consular waiting room, I took a look at it while trying to recover from the disgusting humidity that all of Beirut's been suffering from this summer. The map is in Arabic, and like most maps in the region, Israel is nowhere to be found. Instead, the map shows Palestine. This wouldn't be surprising, except that it's in the American embassy.

I'm about to leave for a five-week trip seeing East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda), but I wanted to post a link to an execrable op-ed about learning Arabic in the Washington Post by Joel Pollak.

I sent out a hasty letter to the editor, which reads as follows:

Joel Pollak complains that there isn’t enough of an Israeli perspective in Arabic language classes. He then goes on to describe “West Beirut,” a gem of Lebanese cinema that recounts a love story between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl, as a film that casts Christians as “the prime bad guys in Lebanon’s civil war.” Obviously Pollak’s Arabic has not progressed far enough to have understood the movie.

He then assures us that he refused to talk about Abdel Nassar in class. In French courses, one learns about Napoleon as a grand statesman, not a brutal imperial dictator. Likewise in Arabic classes, as well as in much of the third world, Nasser was seen as a hero.

One of the points of language courses is to better understand the culture of the speakers of that language. Since Pollak would obviously prefer to learn about Israeli and Jewish history, one can only assume that mistakenly signed up for Arabic lessons when he was actually looking to learn Hebrew.

In other news, there's this nasty piece calling for collective punishment. I'd have more to say about this last one, except that I'm in a hurry.

I don't know what the internet situation is going to be like in any of the places where I'll be over the next month or so, but I can't imagine that posting will be any slower than it has been in the last month or two. Which means that I'll do my best to step it up considerably.

The US government has had to rescind the Fulbright awards for the 7 students in Gaza who won the awards, because Israel won't let them leave the territory:

The American State Department has withdrawn all Fulbright grants to Palestinian students in Gaza hoping to pursue advanced degrees at American institutions this fall because Israel has not granted them permission to leave.

...The study grants notwithstanding, the Israeli officials argued that the policy of isolating Gaza was working, that Palestinians here were starting to lose faith in Hamas's ability to rule because of the hardships of life.

..."We are fighting the regime in Gaza that does its utmost to kill our citizens and destroy our schools and our colleges," said Yuval Steinitz, a lawmaker from the opposition Likud Party. "So I don’t think we should allow students from Gaza to go anywhere. Gaza is under siege, and rightly so, and it is up to the Gazans to change the regime or its behavior."

Hadeel Abukwaik, a 23-year-old engineering software instructor in Gaza, had hoped to do graduate work in the United States this fall on the Fulbright that she thought was hers. She had stayed in Gaza this past winter when its metal border fence was destroyed and tens of thousands of Gazans poured into Egypt, including her sister, because the agency administering the Fulbright told her she would get the grant only if she stayed put. She lives alone in Gaza where she was sent to study because the cost is low; her parents, Palestinian refugees, live in Dubai.

"I stayed to get my scholarship," she said. "Now I am desperate."

Now I'm no expert on Islamic militancy, but I'm pretty sure that desperation isn't exactly the quickest route to winning hearts and minds.

Another thing that's been bothering me is the fact that Mostaqbal's media outlets were shut down. I won't pretend that part of me doesn't feel a little tinge of delight at the idea of the Mostaqbal thugs getting some comeuppance. But punishing neighborhood thugs who fancy themselves militiamen is one thing, while shutting down media outlets is another. During the 2006 war, Hezbollah was (rightfully, to my mind) outraged by Israel's targeting of their television station, al-Manar. So why is it acceptable to have shut down Future TV?

I'm watching Kalam an-Nass right now, while the head of Future TV is being interviewed. According to him, a Lebanese soldier, in uniform, told them that they had to open the gates or else they'd be killed by Hezbollah militiamen. This is, of course, disconcerting on several levels. First of all, this would mean that a member of the ostensibly neutral Lebanese Army would have helped Hezbollah shut down the media outlet of a competing political party. But regardless of whether or not a soldier helped Hezbollah shut the station down, the latter certainly did disconnect Future TV. This is scandalous, and Hezbollah should be ashamed of itself.

A woman presenter, whose name I can't recall, just came on and gave Hezbollah a piece of her mind. She said that she's spent the last year and a half doing reports on the lot of the people of the south and how they've suffered during the war of 2006 and after. Then she explained how al-Manar reported that the staff of Future TV "fled" the premises, like thieves or criminals, when in fact they were told to leave if they didn't want to die. She said that forgetting the parties and forgetting politics, this kind of treatment and the occupation of Beirut has made regular people, people like her, hate Hezbollah. She said that after people like her who did their best to take in refugees after the war in 2006 are treated like this and accused of being traitors, Hezbollah should be ashamed of itself. Of course a presenter on Future TV isn't exactly representative of the man on the street, but her point is well taken.

I can say, however, that the opposition has lost the sympathy of people who have supported the principles of the resistance, even if they had really ambivalent feelings about the religious and authoritarian form it's taken. And the traitor rhetoric is really hurtful and disgusting to people who support resistance against Israel but don't want to live in a country where the interests of the resistance trump those of the state. Calling people traitors like this smacks of Bush's rhetoric in the "war on terror," where you're either "with us or against us," and doesn't sit well with many Lebanese.

I never thought I'd say this, but there was part of Samir Geagea's speech this afternoon that I agree with. He said that the use of Hezbollah's weapons has delegitimized their very existence. I tend to agree with this idea, because Hezbollah has decided to use its weapons in an internal dispute between Lebanese actors. (Here, it's important to remember that the myth that Hezbollah has never been part of inter-Lebanese fighting fails to include when Amal and Hezbollah fought each the during the civil war.) What has happened is that the March 14 government made a decision that Hezbollah disagreed with, and in reaction to this, they took up arms and occupied half of Beirut. This means that the weapons whose sole purpose is supposed to deter Israeli aggression and defend Lebanon has been used as a blunt political tool to try to force the government to resign, or at the very least, send it a far-from-subtle message. 

The line being taken by the opposition now (at least as far as the talking heads of al-Manar are concerned) is that Hezbollah has helped the state put down militias (namely Mustaqbal, or the Future movement). This position fails to take into consideration, for example, the fact that there are still armed militia members of Amal and the Syrian Social Nationalist Party walking around West Beirut.

Either armed militias are illegal or they aren't. What's happened is that the Army seems to have passively taken the side of Hezbollah, which means that their legitimacy will be decreased or destroyed in the eyes of other Lebanese communities, especially the Sunnis in Saida and Tripoli. It has also sent the message that the most effective political tool is military force. I imagine, then, that the Sunnis in Saida and Tripoli, the pro-government Christians and the Druze loyal to Walid Jumblatt have likely decided that they can no longer count on the Army to be an impartial arbiter for the state. This will surely lead to increased militia training and arming. It wouldn't surprise me if the lesson that the Lebanese Forces and the PSP have taken from the defeat of Mustaqbal (probably the weakest of the pro-government parties/militias, if one of the nastier ones on a local neighborhood level) is that they should be prepared for more of the same in the not-so-distant future.

So where does this leave us? Despite rumors earlier today, it doesn't look like Saniora, or anyone else, will resign from the government. So what? There's still no president, and the fundamental dysfunction of the Lebanese state has only been highlighted, not solved. If this all ends with Hezbollah and its allied militias pulling back to their territory in the next day or so, leaving a humiliating message for the other parties and their militias, we'll be back to where we started. Back to where we started, except a big part of the population will have lost faith in the idea that Hezbollah and its allies can be dealt with within the norms of a democratic system.

Since there is no way that any of these groups can compete with Hezbollah's military forces, look for them to embrace proxies. This might include the Sunnis accepting al-Qaeda militants and other groups hoping for more Israeli intervention. I'm sure that after the disaster that was the war in 2006, the Israeli establishment wouldn't mind taking advantage of the situation for  rematch. In any case, what this situation hasn't done is foster an atmosphere where either side feels like it can compromise. If anything, this whole situation has pushed March 14 further into its corner and inflated the arrogance and confidence of Hezbollah and its allies in the country and abroad. Neither of which bodes well for peace or stability in Lebanon.

Amin Gemayel, whom I can't stand, called Hezbollah's victory a Pyrrhic one (actually, he said it in French, the snooty bastard). I tend to think that, on a national level and in the long term, he's probably right. In any case, it's enough to turn some Lebanese into bitter Mercutios.

I'm a little late for Labor Day, but Human Rights Watch here in Lebanon has begun an awareness campaign for rights of domestic workers entitled Put Yourself in Her Shoes:

The condition of (predominantly women) domestic workers in the Middle East is atrocious. Apparently, the problem is as bad in Israel as it is in Lebanon and even worse in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. According to HRW:

The most common complaints made by domestic workers to embassies and nongovernmental organizations include non-payment or delayed payment of their wages, forced confinement to the workplace, no time off, and verbal, as well as physical, abuse. According to a 2006 survey conducted by Dr. Ray Jureidini of 600 migrant domestic workers, 56 percent said they work more than 12 hours a day and 34 percent have no regular time off. In some cases, workers have died while attempting to escape these conditions, some by jumping from balconies.

...The Lebanese authorities have failed to curb abuses committed by employers and agencies. Lebanese labor laws specifically exclude domestic workers from rights guaranteed to other workers, such as a weekly day of rest, limits on work hours, paid holidays, and workers’ compensation. Immigration sponsorship laws restrict domestic workers’ ability to change employers, even in cases of abuse. An official steering committee created in early 2006 and led by the Ministry of Labor to improve the legal situation of migrant workers in Lebanon has yet to deliver any concrete reforms. This includes a long-discussed standard contract to outline minimum standards for domestic workers’ employment.  

Human Rights Watch called upon the Ministry of Labor and other relevant authorities to amend the labor law to extend equal protection for domestic workers and to sign and ratify the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families. 

 

A few years ago, the Times did a story about Sri Lankan women who go to the Middle East to work as domestic servants.  This picture is of a 20-year-old woman named Thangarasa Jeyanthi who was severely abused in Lebanon. In Lebanese Arabic, the common word for a domestic worker is "Sri Lankan." At one point, I remember hearing a joke about an NGO that was fostering multiculturalism by doing presentations with people from all over world invited to introduce themselves to the audience. The Egyptian man comes and says he works as a concierge. The Syrian says that he's a field hand. And then comes the Ethiopian who introduces herself but forgets to say what her profession is. When reminded that everyone has to say what they do, she replies, "I'm a Sri Lankan."

In the case of Sri Lankan women, the conditions that they live and work in criminally miserable, and their government is actually complicit. There are training programs that teach the women some Arabic and how to do what is expected of them without receiving the beatings that are so common. The government encourages women to go to the Middle East, they provide remittances that help keep the Sri Lankan economy afloat.

An Ethiopian friend of mine here used to work for a big hotel in town, but she wasn't allowed to be hired directly even though she has all of her papers in order. The hotel insists on going through a middle man, who garnishes half of the wages of the foreign women working at the hotel. A salary of $450 is reasonable (and more than twice the pitiful minimum wage), but when some sleazy profiteer gets to pocket half of your salary, it's difficult to survive, especially with the increasing price of living (many food items have nearly doubled in price in the last 9 months).

In contrast with Colombo's policy of encouraging the migration, Ethiopia's government has taken the decision to ban its citizens from coming to Lebanon in search of employment:

ADDIS ABABA: On the occasion of Labor Day, Ethiopia has officially banned its citizens from traveling to Beirut in search of jobs, the African country's Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs has disclosed. Ethiopia passed the bill after it probed the human right violations and domestic violence Ethiopian migrants face behind closed doors in Beirut while employed as maids.

"Suspending work travel to Beirut was the only solution to minimizing the human rights abuses and dangers facing our citizens," said Zenebu Tadesse, deputy minister of state for labor and social affairs.

During the past few years, a number of Ethiopians have died in Lebanon in questionable circumstances.

According to a report published by Ethiopia's official news agency, past human right records show that 67 Ethiopian women have died between 1997 and 1999 alone while working in Beirut.

The ministry said it would take strong action against any employment agency trying to send workers directly to Beirut or through a third country.

So for Labor Day this year, I'd like to remind everyone that Sri Lankan is a nationality, not a profession. And I'd like to remind the Lebanese, many of whom go off to Europe, North America and the Gulf in search of work, that they should have a little solidarity with domestic workers here who are hoping to make so money to create a better life for themselves. As my friend Nadim from HRW says about their media campaign: "Many Lebanese themselves have been forced by wars and hardships to emigrate looking for a better life. We hope that they will see the parallels with the experience of these migrants that came from far away to care for Lebanese families."

(Via my friend A) Carter to be tried for peace crimes, according to The Onion:

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND—An international peace-crimes tribunal commenced legal proceedings against former U.S. President Jimmy Carter for alleged crimes against inhumanity Monday.

"Jimmy Carter's political career includes a laundry list of anti-war-making offenses," said chief prosecutor Charles B. Simmons. "Carter's record of benevolence, diplomacy, and respect for human life is unrivaled in recent geopolitical history. For millions, the very sight of his face evokes memories of his administration's reign of tolerance."

I knew it was only a matter of time before the international community succeeded in bringing his gentle reign of peace-mongering to an end!

The previous post got me to wondering how often the word Nakba had been used in American newspapers and when, so I did a Lexis Nexis search, which showed that the Times has only printed the word in 34 articles, the first of which appeared in 1998 in an article about Israel's 50th anniversary. A double check of the NYT online archives, however, showed two other articles that didn't appear in the Lexis Nexis search (they seem to only have abstracts for pre-1981 articles): one from 1973 on Sadat and another from 1970 on occupied Ramallah.

Here's a quickly drawn up chart that tracks the use of the word in coverage by the New York Times:

 

This shows that up until the 50th anniversary of the Nakba, the Times had referred to it but twice. I have a feeling that before the year is over, 2008 will beat out 2007 for the number of times the term is employed.

It's unclear to me what exactly has caused the general tide of public opinion to start moving (slowly but surely) away from Israeli occupation in the US. (Or perhaps I'm being optimistic and am projecting?) But I get the feeling that there's a  shift happening in American public opinion that will hopefully be reflected by more fair-minded media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

I've been surprised in the last few weeks to see how much attention the Nakba is getting during the run up to the 60th anniversary of the catastrophe and the founding of the Jewish state. While interpretations differ, it has at least been getting mentions in publications like The New Yorker and the New York Times.

That said, I knew it was only a matter of time before something really reactionary and stupid came out in a magazine like Commentary. Well, Efraim Karsh offers up exactly what we needed in his "True Story" of what happened in 1948. Following his recent comments on the "Jordanian option," I recently marveled how someone who is ostensibly a scholar of the region could be so out of touch with Arabs and the Arab political scene, but this latest piece takes the proverbial cake.

According to Karsh, before 1948, the Palestinians never had any problem with the idea of becoming a minority in their own land and otherwise would have been perfectly happy living as a second class majority in a Jewish state. In fact, Zionists wanted nothing more than all Arabs to stay in their homes and live happily ever after in a pastoral paradise. Unfortunately, the evil Jew-hating "Arab leaders" had to dash all these wonderful hopes and spur the Palestinians to war, despite the fact that they wanted nothing more than to live in a Jewish state. Why even Vladimir Jabotinsky wanted nothing more than peaceful Arab-Jewish coexistence: According to Karsh:

The simple fact is that the Zionist movement had always been amenable to the existence in the future Jewish state of a substantial Arab minority that would participate on an equal footing “throughout all sectors of the country’s public life.” The words are those of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founding father of the branch of Zionism that was the forebear of today’s Likud party. In a famous 1923 article, Jabotinsky voiced his readiness “to take an oath binding ourselves and our descendants that we shall never do anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try to eject anyone.”

Eleven years later, Jabotinsky presided over the drafting of a constitution for Jewish Palestine. According to its provisions, Arabs and Jews were to share both the prerogatives and the duties of statehood, including most notably military and civil service. Hebrew and Arabic were to enjoy the same legal standing, and “in every cabinet where the prime minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab and vice-versa.”

It just so happens that this is the same Jabotinsky who thought that the Jewish state should encompass both sides of the Jordan and who in his famous essay, "The Iron Wall," had this to say:

If [the reader] should attempt to seek but one instance of a country settled with the consent of those born there he will not succeed. The inhabitants (no matter whether they are civilized or savages) have always put up a stubborn fight.

...Any native people -- its all the same whether they are civilized or savage -- views their country as their national home, of which they will  always be the complete masters. They will not voluntarily allow, not only a new master, but even a new partner. And so it is for the Arabs. Compromisers in our midst attempt to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked by a softened formulation of our goals, or a tribe of money grubbers who will abandon their birth right to Palestine for cultural and economic gains. I flatly reject this assessment of the Palestinian Arabs. Culturally they are 500 years behind us, spiritually they do not have our endurance or our strength of will, but this exhausts all of the internal differences. We can talk as much as we want about our good intentions; but they understand as well as we what is not good for them. They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie. To think that the Arabs will voluntarily consent to the realization of Zionism in return for the cultural and economic benefits we can bestow on them is infantile. This childish fantasy of our “Arabo-philes” comes from some kind of contempt for the Arab people, of some kind of unfounded view of this race as a rabble ready to be bribed in order to sell out their homeland for a railroad network.

He goes on to say that no voluntary agreement with the Arabs is possible:

Thus we conclude that we cannot promise anything to the Arabs of the Land of Israel or the Arab countries. Their voluntary agreement is out of the question. Hence those who hold that an agreement with the natives is an essential condition for Zionism can now say “no” and depart from Zionism. Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population -- an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.

...All this does not mean that any kind of agreement is impossible, only a voluntary agreement is impossible. As long as there is a spark of hope that they can get rid of us, they will not sell these hopes, not for any kind of sweet words or tasty morsels, because they are not a rabble but a nation, perhaps somewhat tattered, but still living. A living people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions only when there is no hope left. Only when not a single breach is visible in the iron wall, only then do extreme groups lose their sway, and influence transfers to moderate groups. Only then would these moderate groups come to us with proposals for mutual concessions. And only then will moderates offer suggestions for compromise on practical questions like a guarantee against expulsion, or equality and national autonomy.

I am optimistic that they will indeed be granted satisfactory assurances and that both peoples, like good neighbors, can then live in peace. But the only path to such an agreement is the iron wall, that is to say the strengthening in Palestine of a government without any kind of Arab influence, that is to say one against which the Arabs will fight. In other words, for us the only path to an agreement in the future is an absolute refusal of any attempts at an agreement now.

This is what Jabotinsky thought of the Arabs, not just in Palestine but in Jordan as well. To the consternation of modern day Zionists, he saw the Zionist state in explicitly colonial terms, equating it with other European colonial endeavors.  

Now I've got a certain respect for Zionists like Jabotinsky who call a spade a spade. What I don't appreciate are scholars like Karsh who insist on whitewashing the creation of Israel to absolve the state of any wrong-doing. In his world, the Yishuv did nothing wrong; all blame for the problems of Arabs can be squarely placed at the feet of "Arab leaders." He ignores the much more frank assertions of the Zionist leaders themselves, like Ben-Gurion who once asked:

Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country.

In any case, Karsh disagrees with the scholarship done by Israeli "new historians" like Pappe, Morris and Shlaim, who all show that the old myths of Palestinians leaving their homes because of radio broadcasts sent out by their leaders are conveniently simplistic and just not true. While there is some disagreement as to whether the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was pre-planned and deliberate, ad-hoc and hasty or unintentional but finally welcome, the issue is ultimately beside the point when it comes to Palestinians' right of return. Either you believe that one has the unalienable right to leave one's country and return, or you don't.

I've long thought that morally and politically, it would be a great move if the Lebanese government were to invite Lebanese Jews who left during the civil war to Europe and America to come back. And if Beirut were really clever, it would appoint a Lebanese Jew to a ministerial position or as an ambassador to the UN or the US. This would help turn the Lebanese-Israeli conflict into a national one instead of a religious one. In 2006, it would have been a tremendous PR move to have a Jewish minister criticizing the systematic destruction of the Lebanese infrastructure.

In this context, Bahrain has made a really smart move:

A Jewish woman, Huda Ezra Ebrahim Nonoo, is set to become Bahrain's ambassador to Washington, sources close to diplomats told Gulf News on Thursday.

"Huda is Bahrain's nominee for the post and this is of course very good news for Bahrain's deep-rooted values of tolerance and openness," Faisal Fouladh, a Shura Council representative, and Western diplomats said.

Huda, a businesswoman, was the first Jewish woman to sit in the Shura Council, the 40-member upper house of the bicameral legislature, replacing her uncle. A Christian woman, Alice Samaan, also sits on the council which has 11 women, compared with only one woman MP, Lateefa Al Gaood, in the 40-member lower house.

(Via TPM) Ha'aretz reports Benjamin Netanyahu, hawkish Israeli "ally" of the US, as saying that 9/11 was good for Israel:

"We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq," Ma'ariv quoted the former prime minister as saying. He reportedly added that these events "swung American public opinion in our favor."

This actually mirrors comments made by Netanyahu on the day of the attacks:

Asked tonight what the attack meant for relations between the United States and Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister, replied, ''It's very good.'' Then he edited himself: ''Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.'' He predicted that the attack would ''strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we've experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.''

With friends like these, right?

I'm not generally fond of Jeffery Goldberg's work when it comes to the Middle East, so I was pretty skeptical about the Atlantic's big Israel story this week. (I haven't read it yet, so I'll reserve judgment until then.)  One thing that's very interesting though, is that Goldman has dug up some old pieces on Palestine and Zionism that appeared in the Atlantic.

So far, I've only had the time to read William Ernest Hocking's 1930 piece, Palestine: An Impasse? You can tell that these old pieces have been scanned, because there are a few mistakes with indentations, quotes and even a couple of letters ('d' for 'cl'), but this article really warrants being read. Here are a couple of meaty extracts to whet your appetite:

If we in America, Jews and Gentiles, could see things as they are in Palestine, we should recognize as axiomatic three things: (1) That nothing like the full plan of Zionism can be realized without political pressure backed by military force; (2) that such pressure and force imply an injustice which is inconsistent with the ethical sense of Zionism, undermining both its sincerity and its claim; (3) that every increase of pressure now meets with increasingly determined Arab resistance, within and beyond Palestine. Hence the question which political Zionism must answer is whether or not it proposes to-day, as in ancient times, to assert its place in Palestine by aid of the sword.

To many Arabs, the Balfour Declaration, in spite of its careful safeguarding of all existing civil and religious rights, is understood as obliging Great Britain to 'do something' for the Jews. Many Zionists have the same conception. And the Arab mind inquires: What can Great Britain now do for Zionism which is not against the Arabs? What favor can it show which is not favoritism? If the question is capable of an answer, it needs to be a dear answer, plainly spoken. Great Britain is serving Zionism. It is doing so not only by maintaining security and order in the land (with some lapses), but by furnishing the administrative staff without which no such settlement would have been possible, and by creating new opportunities. Under the older Ottoman regime, foreign Jews were at a disadvantage: they—like other foreigners—could acquire land only in the name of Ottoman subjects. These disabilities are now removed; as is often said, Jews are now in Palestine by right, not on sufferance. Why press for more than this equitable opening, when more means a reversed injustice? The rural and industrial centres already founded need no more than an equal legal status for their normal peaceful development. The great Hebrew University on Mount Scopus needs no more than this on the legal side to realize its destiny. And this university, be it said, under the prophetic leadership of Dr. Judah Magnes, is the symbol of all that is best in Zionism. For the true and attainable Zion is the Zion of culture and faith, not the Zion of political nationalism.

It is indeed a bitter thing to the sincere Zionist that his ideal community cannot have in that unique spot of earth its perfect body as well as its perfect soul. What I have to say, I say with deep personal regret. For I went to Palestine seized with the idea of Zionism and warmed by the ardor of Jewish friends to whom this vision is the breath of life, prepared to believe all things possible. I came away saddened, seeing that to strive for the perfect body, as things now are, can only mean the loss of soul and body alike. To pursue any campaign for a more vigorous fulfillment of 'the British promise,' to force cantonization on Palestine and so to repeat the standing grievance of divided Syria, to press for any further favor of the state, is to work blindly toward another bloody struggle involving first the new settlements, then Great Britain, then no one knows what wider area. In this we have been assuming that on the issue of Jewish dominance the Arab mind is irreconcilable. Is this true?

The answer lies partly in the fact that for the Arab, whose local attachments are peculiarly strong, Palestine, beside being his home, is also a holy land. It lies partly in the fact that to his mind Palestine is not a separate province: it is an integral part of Syria, with Damascus as its natural trading and cultural capital, while Syria is an integral part of greater Arabia. In his dream of a free Arab empire, Damascus may have served as capital for the whole; or Syria, together with Palestine, may have constituted an autonomous province. In any case, the new Arabia through Palestine reached the western sea; while Palestine as a part of Syria became a partner in that new and proud political enterprise. The expulsion of Feisal from Damascus by the French was a cruel mutilation of this dream. The mandate for Palestine excludes it from the imagined kingdom and shuts that kingdom from the Mediterranean. Even so, political arrangements may be unmade. But village settlements are a more final obstacle—they build a human barrier and put an end to hope. The progress of Zionist colonization thus becomes for the Arab national outlook a culminating stroke in a series of breaches of faith.

...The two enemies of peace in the Holy Land are fanaticism and fear. The movement of the modern spirit within all creeds is having for one of its beneficent effects the gradual melting of fanaticism without argument. Fixed and antagonistic dogmas are transforming themselves into alternative sets of symbols which can dwell together. But fanaticism is kept alive and sharpened by fear; clashes at the Wailing Wall are symptoms of political rather than religious apprehension. These fears of displacement, of national thwarting, must be put to rest; and they can only be quieted by unequivocal public commitments, renouncing the intention to dominate and to exclude. If there is to be peace within the gates of Jerusalem, the first condition, as I see it, is that Zionism publicly disavow its unholy alliance with Western military power, and therewith (following the lead of a recent resolution within the Jewish Agency) its purpose to dominate in Palestine.

Hocking's solution is finally a binational, or more accurately a multi-religious, state under the mandate of Britain, a solution that is obviously out the question as far as British rule is concerned. Nonetheless, he brings up a fundamental conflict between the Zionist body and the Zionist soul, the latter being crushed by what it would take (has taken) to create a Jewish state -- something Avraham Burg's new book is about.

I'm a little uneasy with the idea he has of keeping Palestine technologically "backward" so as to keep Palestine as a multi-religious spiritual land above all else. But that's a small detail in an otherwise insightful analysis of the situation. To my mind, he really hits the nail on the head when he points out the violent and unjust conditions that would be necessary to create a Jewish majority in Palestine.

Goldberg, for his part claims that Hocking is arguing for "an exclusive Arab right to the territory of Palestine," which is silly when you read the piece. What he does do is analyze the Jewish right to Palestine:

This claim of right, based on a mission which it is felt a religious disloyalty to compromise, cannot be shaken in the Jewish mind by analogies from history or international law. To urge that the same reasoning which leads the Jew to claim Palestine after eighteen hundred years would give the Arab a right to Spain after seven hundred years is quite sound so far as it appeals to the ordinary flux of historic conquest and possession; but it wholly misses the sense of this 'organic indissoluble connection,' this right of destiny. Such a right has the force of a religious conviction for those who have that vision; it has the weakness of subjectivism for those who do not share it.

He, correctly, I think, calls the Jewish right to Palestine a subjective one for those who do not believe in God's covenant with the Jewish people and an ineluctable truth for those who do.

On a completely different note, I know that this blog has been focusing on Israel a lot lately. This reminds me of a woman whom I used to date who was doing her doctoral thesis on Jewish communities in the Middle East. She told me that if I was going to be with her, I'd have to deal with the three following things: "1. I am insanely jealous; 2. I smoke in bed; and 3. I'm obsessed with the Jews."

So at the risk of sounding like I'm obsessed with Israel, I'd just like to say in my defense that with the upcoming 60th anniversary of Israel's independence and the Nakba, there's plenty of material to comment on these days.

UPDATE: Interestingly enough, I just looked at my stat log, and Israel is where a good part of my hits come from, after the US, France and Lebanon. So shalom, dear readers, and happy passover!

When I read this report in Ha'aretz, it was hard for me to believe what I was reading:

Driving along the road from Be'er Sheva to Arad, shortly before the turn toward Darijat, you can see the unrecognized Bedouin village that was home to Manhash al-Baniyat, the Israeli soldier who was killed yesterday in a clash with Palestinian gunmen near the Gaza Strip border, across from Kibbutz Be'eri.

In order to reach the village, you have to travel for several hundred meters along a dirt path, until you come to a few houses, built close together. One of these is the house Manhash built for himself in preparation for his marriage, next month. Since building permits are not granted to Bedouin, he had no choice but to build the house illegally. A demolition order has already been issued. The only water pipe leading to the village is also disconnected. Yesterday, a mourners' tent was added to the already harsh landscape, erected by the army. Now that the army's there, at least there's water, someone remarked half-jokingly.

There are a lot of Israelis or supporters of Israel who say that since Palestinians with Israeli citizenship aren't treated as badly as those in the occupied territories, Israel couldn't possibly be an apartheid state. If that's the case, then I'm not sure how we account for al-Baniyat, who died for the state that's bulldozing his home. His sister puts it well when she says, "Sometimes you feel like belonging to the state, but sometimes you get fed up because you build a house and they come and destroy it."

It just so happens that I read a piece by Roger Cohen today that mentions a video of a black woman during the civil rights movement who sums up the situation perfectly: "If we can’t live in our country and be accepted as free citizens and human beings, then something’s the matter with something — and it isn’t me."

In case you haven't heard, there's a new Israel lobby in town. It's called J-Street and is supposed to be a progressive alternative to the hawkish pro-Likud lobby that is AIPAC et al. Spencer Ackerman has a piece about how the new group wants to reframe the Israel debate:

[Co-founder Daniel] Levy, though a long-time peace negotiator, is eager to debate what it means to be pro-Israel, and draws a comparison between AIPAC and the hard-liners who ended up compromising the Jewish future millennia ago. "We'll say, 'Zealots like you led to the destruction of previous Jewish commonwealths,'" Levy said. "We're not going to be intimidated."

J-Street gives us some examples of the current militant rhetoric surrounding Israel these days and asks if that's what it truly means to be pro-Israel and, more to the point, if these voices truly speak for American Jews:


Ezra Klein weighs in to talk about his experience of being alienated at his synagogue:

I can't recall now if it was the Jenin incursions or the riots at the Temple Mount that set my rabbi off. Or perhaps he was just enraged by one of the obscure convulsions of violence that occur with such regularity as to virtually mark time in the Middle East. What punctures the haze of memory is when he transitioned from sports to politics, telling the assembled alumni that the Jews would be within their rights to forcibly deport and displace the entire Palestinian population. I objected, and we began shouting at each other as my classmates looked on in annoyance. I stormed from the room and it was the last time I set foot in that temple. In my temple.

He later goes on to talk about the link between Judaism and human rights and how, to his mind, this is "no time for silence."

On the other side of the aisle, of course, things are different. In truly predictable style, our favorite philistine Noah Pollak (who once visited "Upper Galilee") is already slamming J-Street. It seems that a pro-peace lobby is just too much to stomach for Pollak, so he makes a big deal of the fact that Avraham Burg is "near the top of its list of [Israeli] supporters." (Note to Pollak, when a list is in alphabetical order, people whose names begin with the letter B will usually be "near the top.") He paints Burg as some sort of a radical but fails to mention that he used to be the Diaspora advisor to the Israeli Prime Minister, chairman of the Jewish Agency, speaker of the Knesset and chair of the World Zionist Organization.

I'm not going to say that Avraham Burg isn't polemical in Israel; he is, and if you're interested in reading his opinions for yourself, Ha'aretz published a fascinating interview with him. But Pollak prefers to brandish a single controversial supporter of J-Street (without even mentioning his former role in the Israeli establishment) and build a strawman in an attempt to discredit an entire movement rather than, say, actually debate the issue on the merits. But that's par for the course for Pollak and his ilk. And by the by, TNR is already preparing a hit piece against J-Street, according to Ackerman.

To my mind, a new lobby will give progressive Jews a chance to have a voice in the Israel/Palestine debate and have a tangible (although much less so than AIPAC) effect on Middle East policy. It seems that, like the Arabs, there's an aversion to public dissension in the ranks, a certain disgust at airing the community's dirty laundry in public. J-Street might just be overcoming this fear to become an avenue for progressive American Jews to have a say in what's being done and said in their name by the likes of AIPAC and Alan Dershowitz.

UPDATE: In another post attacking J-Street, the hilariously yet unintentionally ironic Pollak has this to say:

It seems to me that the J Streeters are never going to be able to escape the fact that, sitting in Washington, they are advocating policies for Israel that are overwhelmingly unpopular among Israelis — and attempting to brand this paternalism as "pro-Israel."

The Economist has a special report on Israel on the occasion of its 60th year. I've been skipping through the various sections of it, and so far it seems fairly interesting, although nowhere near as interesting as Le Monde Diplo's Manière de voir on the subject: "Histoires d’Israël." The latter is put together by Dominique Vidal and includes articles by Edward Said, Avraham Burg, Tom Segev, Samir Kassir, Shimon Peres, Alain Gresh, Amira Hass, and the list goes on.

I'll be reading the Economist report online and the Manière de voir in print - both, I'll add, at home, because while I'm sometimes fond of creating a stink, I'm not sure I've got the balls to bring a blue and white magazine with Israel printed on the front cover to my local café.

If this Reuters report is accurate, then the Israelis have got some explaining to do:

JERUSALEM, April 14 (Reuters) - Israeli leaders shunned former U.S. President Jimmy Carter during a visit because of his plans to meet Hamas and Israel's secret service declined to assist U.S. agents guarding him, U.S. sources said on Monday.

"They're not getting support from local security," one of the sources said, on condition of anonymity.

An American source described as "unprecedented" the lack of Shin Bet cooperation with the U.S. Secret Service, which protects all current and former U.S. presidents, as well as Israeli leaders when they visit the United States.

...American sources close to the matter said the Shin Bet, which helps protect visiting dignitaries and is overseen by Olmert's office, declined to meet the head of Carter's Secret Service detail or provide his team with assistance as is customary during such visits.

Jimmy Carter has the thankless job of being the best friend Israel's ever had. He reminds me of those public service/beer commercials in which some drunken asshole keeps trying to crawl into his truck but his buddy refuses to give him his keys back: Friends don't let friends drink and drive.

The Israelis are spitting on the man who is responsible for brokering the peace deal with Egypt and is now telling Israel some truths that it doesn't want to hear. I suppose it's normal to expect the Israelis to be unhappy about being told not to drive, but I somehow never expected Israeli foolishness to go so far as to refuse to protect Carter.

What would people say if the secret service refused to protect and Barack Obama refused to meet with Benjamin Netanyahu during a future trip to the US? Or better yet, imagine if the Egyptian or Pakistani governments refused to provide security for a former US president. Americans would be up in arms, and it would be a bipartisan contest to see who could yell the loudest for suspending aid to Cairo or Islamabad. This should be a huge scandal in the US, but if I know America at all, reactions will range from disgusted sighs to total silence to rants that Carter is an antisemite and is getting the treatment he deserves.

Last week McClatchey had an important story about the fate of Bedouins in Israel. There is a lot of talk about how Israel is a beacon for democracy in the Middle East, and often even those who admit that the Jewish state's founding myths are untrue and protest the occupation are hesitant to admit that there are many Israeli citizens who are treated unequally by the law. The Bedouins are a case in point. The government is destroying their homes and trying to remove them from their land to make room for Jewish citizens. In any other context, this would be called ethnic cleansing:

Israeli leaders have a $3.6 billion plan to transform the vast Negev desert into prospering Jewish communities. Finesh and 80,000 other Bedouin say the land is theirs, however.

As Israel presses ahead with the development, a Human Rights Watch report released Monday concludes that it's using "discriminatory, exclusionary and punitive" policies to push the aside the Bedouin, who are descendants of Arab tribes that once roamed the Negev.

"Israeli policies have created a situation whereby tens of thousands of Bedouin citizens in the Negev have little or no alternative but to live in ramshackle villages and build illegally in order to meet their most basic shelter needs," the report says.

Since Israel was founded nearly 60 years ago, its leaders have been wrestling with what to do with its small Bedouin minority, now climbing above 160,000.

Israel has pushed about half the Bedouin into sterile, depressed new desert towns, demolished thousands of illegal shanties and transformed their sheep-grazing pastures into dangerous military zones.

About 80,000 Bedouin living in more than three dozen unauthorized shantytowns and villages refuse to move, even though they receive no electricity or water from Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has set up a commission to come up with innovative ways to handle the holdouts.

"The government of Israel understands that it needs to solve the problem of the Bedouin," said Yehuda Bachar, the director general of a newly established government department for Bedouin affairs. "If it is not solved now, it will not be solved for many years."

The intent behind the plans is clear: Israeli leaders want to move the Arab residents to make way for Jewish developments.

The Israeli government is looking to spend $3.6 billion over the next seven years to lure more Jewish residents to the Negev, a triangular desert that makes up more than half of the nation's land.

"The only chance for the development of the Negev is that we bring more Jews," said Shmuel Rifman, the mayor of the local Ramat Negev Regional Council, who supports a trickle-down theory when it comes to the Bedouin.

I'm in Paris this week to surprise my good friend for his birthday and see others whom I've been missing lately,  the city herself my friend's unborn baby girl. I was glad to see that while I was going to be here, I could see Amos Oz and David Grossman at the Centre Pompidou.

It wasn't until I arrived that I realized that the reason Grossman and Oz were in Paris in the first place was the Salon du Livre and the fact that this year, Israel was showcased as the guest of honor. I then found out from some Franco-Algerian friends, who accompanied me to the Pompidou event, that there had been a bomb threat and a boycott. (For a good summary in English of the whole thing, check out Lauren Elkin's account.)

The Oz and Grossman event wasn't at all what I was expecting. I knew that it was ostensibly about their literature but assumed that since both authors are politically active, there would be a fair amount of politics involved also. I was looking forward to this, not least because the only books I've read by either author are political non-fiction. There was a fog of politics that floated above the evening but never settled. Since there was no opportunity for questions, the young swooning moderator, who sounded more like a groupie than a literary critic or writer, and the writers themselves were able to keep to the topic of writing and literature.

One effect of this was that the Holocaust was very much present in the talk, but the Palestinians almost not at all. This was a little disappointing to me, because it's hard for me to imagine Palestinian writing (and this may be the fault of wonderful Mourid Barghouti and Mahmoud Darwish) without a heavy Israeli presence. Also, Oz and Grossman seemed very distant and foreign to me, because of the linguistic barrier. For some reason, I was expecting them to speak in English, but instead they spoke in Hebrew, which was translated into French by one of the best interpreters I've had the pleasure of listening to. His voice was soft and exact, and I felt cradled by his cadence. David Grossman was fairly spontaneous but sometimes a little rambling, whereas Oz spoke like a robot but had more interesting things to say. (It's only fair to mention that a lot of Oz's discourse was canned, as I'd already read close to a third of it in various of his books, interviews and articles.)

It was interesting for me to see Israel in this light: as a state like another. Because in Lebanon, Israel is not only not like other states, it's violent and dangerous. We're waiting for the next war, which will likely be even worse than the last one, so it's difficult to empathize with Israel and its people, even if many of them (like Grossman and Oz) have opinions similar to mine. This reminds me of my trip to the West Bank at the end of the war in 2006. Only rarely did I cross over to Jewish Jerusalem or interact with Israelis. I felt shaken by the bombing of Lebanon and almost afraid to see where those bombs were coming from. I now regret not exploring Tel Aviv or visiting Yad Vashem, which I've wanted to see for a long time. But July 2006 was not the time for that kind of a trip; hopefully I'll have another occasion to go in the not-so-distant future. Or even better, perhaps one day I'll be able to make the short drive to the beach in Tel Aviv from Beirut.

Otherwise, and as per usual, I've taken advantage of Paris to do some book shopping. It seems that Avraham Burg's book, which won't be out in English until October, has been released in French already. I'd like to be able to share it with my Anglophone friends in Beirut, but when I saw it used at Gilbert Joseph, I couldn't pass it up. Otherwise, I also found a used copy of Avi Shlaim's The Iron Wall at my favorite English book store here. Other, non-Israel-related, books include Nerval's Voyage en Orient, Paul Morand's New York (a present from Sebastien) and George Corm's L'Europe et l'Orient. I won't be happy until I find used copies of Samir Kassir's Histoire de Beyrouth and Jean Hatzfeld's Stratégie des Antilopes.

Jeffrey Goldberg has a dishonest account of Tom Segev's review of a book on Haj Amin al-Husseini up. He makes it sound like Segev is only down on the book because it emphasizes Arab extremism, whereas his problems with the book are much more substantial:

The lack of solid evidence is the main problem throughout the book. While the authors do cite prominent scholars like Martin Gilbert, Bernard Wasserstein and Rashid Khalidi, some of the most outrageous quotations come from quite arguable sources. Hitler’s alleged and highly unlikely pledge to Husseini (“The Jews are yours”) is based on a passage in the mufti’s own memoirs. But there is an official German record of his meeting with Hitler that contains no such statement. In fact the mufti did not achieve his major goal: Hitler refused to sign a public statement of support for him.

Then Goldberg makes it sound like Segev is comparing Jewish extremism in mandate Palestine with Husseini's support of Nazi Germany:

Segev compares the Mufti's behavior to that of Yitzhak Shamir, the former prime minister of Israel who was once a terrorist with the Stern Gang, and he criticizes the authors for neglecting to mention Jewish extremism in the time of the Mufti. I'm not sure why a book about pro-Nazi sympathies among certain Arabs need include this...

Actually, what Segev does is remind us, as we can read in his excellent book The Seventh Million that Husseini was not the only anti-British nationalist to make overtures to Nazi Germany for the purpose of throwing off the yoke of British imperialism:

The mufti’s support for Nazi Germany definitely demonstrated the evils of extremist nationalism. However, the Arabs were not the only chauvinists in Palestine looking to make a deal with the Nazis. At the end of 1940 and again at the end of 1941, a small Zionist terrorist organization known as the Stern Gang made contact with Nazi representatives in Beirut, seeking support for its struggle against the British. One of the Sternists, in a British jail at the time, was Yitzhak Shamir, a future Israeli prime minister. The authors fail to mention this episode.

So while it's true that a book on Arabs seeking German support against the British and the Jewish colonialism needn't mention the terrorism of the Irgun or the Stern Gang, it seems dishonest not to include the fact that some of Husseini's local Jewish enemies also sought the support of Nazi Germany.

But that's the whole problem here. The importance accorded to Husseini is meant to conflate anti-Zionism and Arabs with anti-Semitism and Nazis. During World War II, there were many subjects of British imperialism from Ireland to Egypt and beyond who saw the time as ripe to back another European power, not because they were Nazis or anti-Semites, but because they were anti-British and saw Germany as means to the end of breaking British rule over their lands.

We've seen politically expedient but strange bedfellows time and time again, like how many exiled Iraqis supported an American invasion -- not because they were particularly pro-American, but rather because they were anti-Saddam. To argue that the the two are necessarily the same is either obtuse or dishonest.

For reasons I won't go into, I was at the American embassy a couple of times earlier this week. Draconian security measures notwithstanding (you're not allowed to bring a phone or bag onto the premises), the place seemed more Lebanese than American, with Lebanese security guards, Lebanese employees and Lebanese-Americans queued up in the consular section.

Another touch was a world map in the consular section. It is a map with political boundaries, and while I was in the consular waiting room, I took a look at it while trying to recover from the disgusting humidity that all of Beirut's been suffering from this summer. The map is in Arabic, and like most maps in the region, Israel is nowhere to be found. Instead, the map shows Palestine. This wouldn't be surprising, except that it's in the American embassy.

I'm about to leave for a five-week trip seeing East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda), but I wanted to post a link to an execrable op-ed about learning Arabic in the Washington Post by Joel Pollak.

I sent out a hasty letter to the editor, which reads as follows:

Joel Pollak complains that there isn’t enough of an Israeli perspective in Arabic language classes. He then goes on to describe “West Beirut,” a gem of Lebanese cinema that recounts a love story between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl, as a film that casts Christians as “the prime bad guys in Lebanon’s civil war.” Obviously Pollak’s Arabic has not progressed far enough to have understood the movie.

He then assures us that he refused to talk about Abdel Nassar in class. In French courses, one learns about Napoleon as a grand statesman, not a brutal imperial dictator. Likewise in Arabic classes, as well as in much of the third world, Nasser was seen as a hero.

One of the points of language courses is to better understand the culture of the speakers of that language. Since Pollak would obviously prefer to learn about Israeli and Jewish history, one can only assume that mistakenly signed up for Arabic lessons when he was actually looking to learn Hebrew.

In other news, there's this nasty piece calling for collective punishment. I'd have more to say about this last one, except that I'm in a hurry.

I don't know what the internet situation is going to be like in any of the places where I'll be over the next month or so, but I can't imagine that posting will be any slower than it has been in the last month or two. Which means that I'll do my best to step it up considerably.

The US government has had to rescind the Fulbright awards for the 7 students in Gaza who won the awards, because Israel won't let them leave the territory:

The American State Department has withdrawn all Fulbright grants to Palestinian students in Gaza hoping to pursue advanced degrees at American institutions this fall because Israel has not granted them permission to leave.

...The study grants notwithstanding, the Israeli officials argued that the policy of isolating Gaza was working, that Palestinians here were starting to lose faith in Hamas's ability to rule because of the hardships of life.

..."We are fighting the regime in Gaza that does its utmost to kill our citizens and destroy our schools and our colleges," said Yuval Steinitz, a lawmaker from the opposition Likud Party. "So I don’t think we should allow students from Gaza to go anywhere. Gaza is under siege, and rightly so, and it is up to the Gazans to change the regime or its behavior."

Hadeel Abukwaik, a 23-year-old engineering software instructor in Gaza, had hoped to do graduate work in the United States this fall on the Fulbright that she thought was hers. She had stayed in Gaza this past winter when its metal border fence was destroyed and tens of thousands of Gazans poured into Egypt, including her sister, because the agency administering the Fulbright told her she would get the grant only if she stayed put. She lives alone in Gaza where she was sent to study because the cost is low; her parents, Palestinian refugees, live in Dubai.

"I stayed to get my scholarship," she said. "Now I am desperate."

Now I'm no expert on Islamic militancy, but I'm pretty sure that desperation isn't exactly the quickest route to winning hearts and minds.

Another thing that's been bothering me is the fact that Mostaqbal's media outlets were shut down. I won't pretend that part of me doesn't feel a little tinge of delight at the idea of the Mostaqbal thugs getting some comeuppance. But punishing neighborhood thugs who fancy themselves militiamen is one thing, while shutting down media outlets is another. During the 2006 war, Hezbollah was (rightfully, to my mind) outraged by Israel's targeting of their television station, al-Manar. So why is it acceptable to have shut down Future TV?

I'm watching Kalam an-Nass right now, while the head of Future TV is being interviewed. According to him, a Lebanese soldier, in uniform, told them that they had to open the gates or else they'd be killed by Hezbollah militiamen. This is, of course, disconcerting on several levels. First of all, this would mean that a member of the ostensibly neutral Lebanese Army would have helped Hezbollah shut down the media outlet of a competing political party. But regardless of whether or not a soldier helped Hezbollah shut the station down, the latter certainly did disconnect Future TV. This is scandalous, and Hezbollah should be ashamed of itself.

A woman presenter, whose name I can't recall, just came on and gave Hezbollah a piece of her mind. She said that she's spent the last year and a half doing reports on the lot of the people of the south and how they've suffered during the war of 2006 and after. Then she explained how al-Manar reported that the staff of Future TV "fled" the premises, like thieves or criminals, when in fact they were told to leave if they didn't want to die. She said that forgetting the parties and forgetting politics, this kind of treatment and the occupation of Beirut has made regular people, people like her, hate Hezbollah. She said that after people like her who did their best to take in refugees after the war in 2006 are treated like this and accused of being traitors, Hezbollah should be ashamed of itself. Of course a presenter on Future TV isn't exactly representative of the man on the street, but her point is well taken.

I can say, however, that the opposition has lost the sympathy of people who have supported the principles of the resistance, even if they had really ambivalent feelings about the religious and authoritarian form it's taken. And the traitor rhetoric is really hurtful and disgusting to people who support resistance against Israel but don't want to live in a country where the interests of the resistance trump those of the state. Calling people traitors like this smacks of Bush's rhetoric in the "war on terror," where you're either "with us or against us," and doesn't sit well with many Lebanese.

I never thought I'd say this, but there was part of Samir Geagea's speech this afternoon that I agree with. He said that the use of Hezbollah's weapons has delegitimized their very existence. I tend to agree with this idea, because Hezbollah has decided to use its weapons in an internal dispute between Lebanese actors. (Here, it's important to remember that the myth that Hezbollah has never been part of inter-Lebanese fighting fails to include when Amal and Hezbollah fought each the during the civil war.) What has happened is that the March 14 government made a decision that Hezbollah disagreed with, and in reaction to this, they took up arms and occupied half of Beirut. This means that the weapons whose sole purpose is supposed to deter Israeli aggression and defend Lebanon has been used as a blunt political tool to try to force the government to resign, or at the very least, send it a far-from-subtle message. 

The line being taken by the opposition now (at least as far as the talking heads of al-Manar are concerned) is that Hezbollah has helped the state put down militias (namely Mustaqbal, or the Future movement). This position fails to take into consideration, for example, the fact that there are still armed militia members of Amal and the Syrian Social Nationalist Party walking around West Beirut.

Either armed militias are illegal or they aren't. What's happened is that the Army seems to have passively taken the side of Hezbollah, which means that their legitimacy will be decreased or destroyed in the eyes of other Lebanese communities, especially the Sunnis in Saida and Tripoli. It has also sent the message that the most effective political tool is military force. I imagine, then, that the Sunnis in Saida and Tripoli, the pro-government Christians and the Druze loyal to Walid Jumblatt have likely decided that they can no longer count on the Army to be an impartial arbiter for the state. This will surely lead to increased militia training and arming. It wouldn't surprise me if the lesson that the Lebanese Forces and the PSP have taken from the defeat of Mustaqbal (probably the weakest of the pro-government parties/militias, if one of the nastier ones on a local neighborhood level) is that they should be prepared for more of the same in the not-so-distant future.

So where does this leave us? Despite rumors earlier today, it doesn't look like Saniora, or anyone else, will resign from the government. So what? There's still no president, and the fundamental dysfunction of the Lebanese state has only been highlighted, not solved. If this all ends with Hezbollah and its allied militias pulling back to their territory in the next day or so, leaving a humiliating message for the other parties and their militias, we'll be back to where we started. Back to where we started, except a big part of the population will have lost faith in the idea that Hezbollah and its allies can be dealt with within the norms of a democratic system.

Since there is no way that any of these groups can compete with Hezbollah's military forces, look for them to embrace proxies. This might include the Sunnis accepting al-Qaeda militants and other groups hoping for more Israeli intervention. I'm sure that after the disaster that was the war in 2006, the Israeli establishment wouldn't mind taking advantage of the situation for  rematch. In any case, what this situation hasn't done is foster an atmosphere where either side feels like it can compromise. If anything, this whole situation has pushed March 14 further into its corner and inflated the arrogance and confidence of Hezbollah and its allies in the country and abroad. Neither of which bodes well for peace or stability in Lebanon.

Amin Gemayel, whom I can't stand, called Hezbollah's victory a Pyrrhic one (actually, he said it in French, the snooty bastard). I tend to think that, on a national level and in the long term, he's probably right. In any case, it's enough to turn some Lebanese into bitter Mercutios.

I'm a little late for Labor Day, but Human Rights Watch here in Lebanon has begun an awareness campaign for rights of domestic workers entitled Put Yourself in Her Shoes:

The condition of (predominantly women) domestic workers in the Middle East is atrocious. Apparently, the problem is as bad in Israel as it is in Lebanon and even worse in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. According to HRW:

The most common complaints made by domestic workers to embassies and nongovernmental organizations include non-payment or delayed payment of their wages, forced confinement to the workplace, no time off, and verbal, as well as physical, abuse. According to a 2006 survey conducted by Dr. Ray Jureidini of 600 migrant domestic workers, 56 percent said they work more than 12 hours a day and 34 percent have no regular time off. In some cases, workers have died while attempting to escape these conditions, some by jumping from balconies.

...The Lebanese authorities have failed to curb abuses committed by employers and agencies. Lebanese labor laws specifically exclude domestic workers from rights guaranteed to other workers, such as a weekly day of rest, limits on work hours, paid holidays, and workers’ compensation. Immigration sponsorship laws restrict domestic workers’ ability to change employers, even in cases of abuse. An official steering committee created in early 2006 and led by the Ministry of Labor to improve the legal situation of migrant workers in Lebanon has yet to deliver any concrete reforms. This includes a long-discussed standard contract to outline minimum standards for domestic workers’ employment.  

Human Rights Watch called upon the Ministry of Labor and other relevant authorities to amend the labor law to extend equal protection for domestic workers and to sign and ratify the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families. 

 

A few years ago, the Times did a story about Sri Lankan women who go to the Middle East to work as domestic servants.  This picture is of a 20-year-old woman named Thangarasa Jeyanthi who was severely abused in Lebanon. In Lebanese Arabic, the common word for a domestic worker is "Sri Lankan." At one point, I remember hearing a joke about an NGO that was fostering multiculturalism by doing presentations with people from all over world invited to introduce themselves to the audience. The Egyptian man comes and says he works as a concierge. The Syrian says that he's a field hand. And then comes the Ethiopian who introduces herself but forgets to say what her profession is. When reminded that everyone has to say what they do, she replies, "I'm a Sri Lankan."

In the case of Sri Lankan women, the conditions that they live and work in criminally miserable, and their government is actually complicit. There are training programs that teach the women some Arabic and how to do what is expected of them without receiving the beatings that are so common. The government encourages women to go to the Middle East, they provide remittances that help keep the Sri Lankan economy afloat.

An Ethiopian friend of mine here used to work for a big hotel in town, but she wasn't allowed to be hired directly even though she has all of her papers in order. The hotel insists on going through a middle man, who garnishes half of the wages of the foreign women working at the hotel. A salary of $450 is reasonable (and more than twice the pitiful minimum wage), but when some sleazy profiteer gets to pocket half of your salary, it's difficult to survive, especially with the increasing price of living (many food items have nearly doubled in price in the last 9 months).

In contrast with Colombo's policy of encouraging the migration, Ethiopia's government has taken the decision to ban its citizens from coming to Lebanon in search of employment:

ADDIS ABABA: On the occasion of Labor Day, Ethiopia has officially banned its citizens from traveling to Beirut in search of jobs, the African country's Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs has disclosed. Ethiopia passed the bill after it probed the human right violations and domestic violence Ethiopian migrants face behind closed doors in Beirut while employed as maids.

"Suspending work travel to Beirut was the only solution to minimizing the human rights abuses and dangers facing our citizens," said Zenebu Tadesse, deputy minister of state for labor and social affairs.

During the past few years, a number of Ethiopians have died in Lebanon in questionable circumstances.

According to a report published by Ethiopia's official news agency, past human right records show that 67 Ethiopian women have died between 1997 and 1999 alone while working in Beirut.

The ministry said it would take strong action against any employment agency trying to send workers directly to Beirut or through a third country.

So for Labor Day this year, I'd like to remind everyone that Sri Lankan is a nationality, not a profession. And I'd like to remind the Lebanese, many of whom go off to Europe, North America and the Gulf in search of work, that they should have a little solidarity with domestic workers here who are hoping to make so money to create a better life for themselves. As my friend Nadim from HRW says about their media campaign: "Many Lebanese themselves have been forced by wars and hardships to emigrate looking for a better life. We hope that they will see the parallels with the experience of these migrants that came from far away to care for Lebanese families."

(Via my friend A) Carter to be tried for peace crimes, according to The Onion:

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND—An international peace-crimes tribunal commenced legal proceedings against former U.S. President Jimmy Carter for alleged crimes against inhumanity Monday.

"Jimmy Carter's political career includes a laundry list of anti-war-making offenses," said chief prosecutor Charles B. Simmons. "Carter's record of benevolence, diplomacy, and respect for human life is unrivaled in recent geopolitical history. For millions, the very sight of his face evokes memories of his administration's reign of tolerance."

I knew it was only a matter of time before the international community succeeded in bringing his gentle reign of peace-mongering to an end!

The previous post got me to wondering how often the word Nakba had been used in American newspapers and when, so I did a Lexis Nexis search, which showed that the Times has only printed the word in 34 articles, the first of which appeared in 1998 in an article about Israel's 50th anniversary. A double check of the NYT online archives, however, showed two other articles that didn't appear in the Lexis Nexis search (they seem to only have abstracts for pre-1981 articles): one from 1973 on Sadat and another from 1970 on occupied Ramallah.

Here's a quickly drawn up chart that tracks the use of the word in coverage by the New York Times:

 

This shows that up until the 50th anniversary of the Nakba, the Times had referred to it but twice. I have a feeling that before the year is over, 2008 will beat out 2007 for the number of times the term is employed.

It's unclear to me what exactly has caused the general tide of public opinion to start moving (slowly but surely) away from Israeli occupation in the US. (Or perhaps I'm being optimistic and am projecting?) But I get the feeling that there's a  shift happening in American public opinion that will hopefully be reflected by more fair-minded media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

I've been surprised in the last few weeks to see how much attention the Nakba is getting during the run up to the 60th anniversary of the catastrophe and the founding of the Jewish state. While interpretations differ, it has at least been getting mentions in publications like The New Yorker and the New York Times.

That said, I knew it was only a matter of time before something really reactionary and stupid came out in a magazine like Commentary. Well, Efraim Karsh offers up exactly what we needed in his "True Story" of what happened in 1948. Following his recent comments on the "Jordanian option," I recently marveled how someone who is ostensibly a scholar of the region could be so out of touch with Arabs and the Arab political scene, but this latest piece takes the proverbial cake.

According to Karsh, before 1948, the Palestinians never had any problem with the idea of becoming a minority in their own land and otherwise would have been perfectly happy living as a second class majority in a Jewish state. In fact, Zionists wanted nothing more than all Arabs to stay in their homes and live happily ever after in a pastoral paradise. Unfortunately, the evil Jew-hating "Arab leaders" had to dash all these wonderful hopes and spur the Palestinians to war, despite the fact that they wanted nothing more than to live in a Jewish state. Why even Vladimir Jabotinsky wanted nothing more than peaceful Arab-Jewish coexistence: According to Karsh:

The simple fact is that the Zionist movement had always been amenable to the existence in the future Jewish state of a substantial Arab minority that would participate on an equal footing “throughout all sectors of the country’s public life.” The words are those of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founding father of the branch of Zionism that was the forebear of today’s Likud party. In a famous 1923 article, Jabotinsky voiced his readiness “to take an oath binding ourselves and our descendants that we shall never do anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try to eject anyone.”

Eleven years later, Jabotinsky presided over the drafting of a constitution for Jewish Palestine. According to its provisions, Arabs and Jews were to share both the prerogatives and the duties of statehood, including most notably military and civil service. Hebrew and Arabic were to enjoy the same legal standing, and “in every cabinet where the prime minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab and vice-versa.”

It just so happens that this is the same Jabotinsky who thought that the Jewish state should encompass both sides of the Jordan and who in his famous essay, "The Iron Wall," had this to say:

If [the reader] should attempt to seek but one instance of a country settled with the consent of those born there he will not succeed. The inhabitants (no matter whether they are civilized or savages) have always put up a stubborn fight.

...Any native people -- its all the same whether they are civilized or savage -- views their country as their national home, of which they will  always be the complete masters. They will not voluntarily allow, not only a new master, but even a new partner. And so it is for the Arabs. Compromisers in our midst attempt to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked by a softened formulation of our goals, or a tribe of money grubbers who will abandon their birth right to Palestine for cultural and economic gains. I flatly reject this assessment of the Palestinian Arabs. Culturally they are 500 years behind us, spiritually they do not have our endurance or our strength of will, but this exhausts all of the internal differences. We can talk as much as we want about our good intentions; but they understand as well as we what is not good for them. They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie. To think that the Arabs will voluntarily consent to the realization of Zionism in return for the cultural and economic benefits we can bestow on them is infantile. This childish fantasy of our “Arabo-philes” comes from some kind of contempt for the Arab people, of some kind of unfounded view of this race as a rabble ready to be bribed in order to sell out their homeland for a railroad network.

He goes on to say that no voluntary agreement with the Arabs is possible:

Thus we conclude that we cannot promise anything to the Arabs of the Land of Israel or the Arab countries. Their voluntary agreement is out of the question. Hence those who hold that an agreement with the natives is an essential condition for Zionism can now say “no” and depart from Zionism. Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population -- an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.

...All this does not mean that any kind of agreement is impossible, only a voluntary agreement is impossible. As long as there is a spark of hope that they can get rid of us, they will not sell these hopes, not for any kind of sweet words or tasty morsels, because they are not a rabble but a nation, perhaps somewhat tattered, but still living. A living people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions only when there is no hope left. Only when not a single breach is visible in the iron wall, only then do extreme groups lose their sway, and influence transfers to moderate groups. Only then would these moderate groups come to us with proposals for mutual concessions. And only then will moderates offer suggestions for compromise on practical questions like a guarantee against expulsion, or equality and national autonomy.

I am optimistic that they will indeed be granted satisfactory assurances and that both peoples, like good neighbors, can then live in peace. But the only path to such an agreement is the iron wall, that is to say the strengthening in Palestine of a government without any kind of Arab influence, that is to say one against which the Arabs will fight. In other words, for us the only path to an agreement in the future is an absolute refusal of any attempts at an agreement now.

This is what Jabotinsky thought of the Arabs, not just in Palestine but in Jordan as well. To the consternation of modern day Zionists, he saw the Zionist state in explicitly colonial terms, equating it with other European colonial endeavors.  

Now I've got a certain respect for Zionists like Jabotinsky who call a spade a spade. What I don't appreciate are scholars like Karsh who insist on whitewashing the creation of Israel to absolve the state of any wrong-doing. In his world, the Yishuv did nothing wrong; all blame for the problems of Arabs can be squarely placed at the feet of "Arab leaders." He ignores the much more frank assertions of the Zionist leaders themselves, like Ben-Gurion who once asked:

Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country.

In any case, Karsh disagrees with the scholarship done by Israeli "new historians" like Pappe, Morris and Shlaim, who all show that the old myths of Palestinians leaving their homes because of radio broadcasts sent out by their leaders are conveniently simplistic and just not true. While there is some disagreement as to whether the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was pre-planned and deliberate, ad-hoc and hasty or unintentional but finally welcome, the issue is ultimately beside the point when it comes to Palestinians' right of return. Either you believe that one has the unalienable right to leave one's country and return, or you don't.

I've long thought that morally and politically, it would be a great move if the Lebanese government were to invite Lebanese Jews who left during the civil war to Europe and America to come back. And if Beirut were really clever, it would appoint a Lebanese Jew to a ministerial position or as an ambassador to the UN or the US. This would help turn the Lebanese-Israeli conflict into a national one instead of a religious one. In 2006, it would have been a tremendous PR move to have a Jewish minister criticizing the systematic destruction of the Lebanese infrastructure.

In this context, Bahrain has made a really smart move:

A Jewish woman, Huda Ezra Ebrahim Nonoo, is set to become Bahrain's ambassador to Washington, sources close to diplomats told Gulf News on Thursday.

"Huda is Bahrain's nominee for the post and this is of course very good news for Bahrain's deep-rooted values of tolerance and openness," Faisal Fouladh, a Shura Council representative, and Western diplomats said.

Huda, a businesswoman, was the first Jewish woman to sit in the Shura Council, the 40-member upper house of the bicameral legislature, replacing her uncle. A Christian woman, Alice Samaan, also sits on the council which has 11 women, compared with only one woman MP, Lateefa Al Gaood, in the 40-member lower house.

(Via TPM) Ha'aretz reports Benjamin Netanyahu, hawkish Israeli "ally" of the US, as saying that 9/11 was good for Israel:

"We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq," Ma'ariv quoted the former prime minister as saying. He reportedly added that these events "swung American public opinion in our favor."

This actually mirrors comments made by Netanyahu on the day of the attacks:

Asked tonight what the attack meant for relations between the United States and Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister, replied, ''It's very good.'' Then he edited himself: ''Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.'' He predicted that the attack would ''strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we've experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.''

With friends like these, right?

I'm not generally fond of Jeffery Goldberg's work when it comes to the Middle East, so I was pretty skeptical about the Atlantic's big Israel story this week. (I haven't read it yet, so I'll reserve judgment until then.)  One thing that's very interesting though, is that Goldman has dug up some old pieces on Palestine and Zionism that appeared in the Atlantic.

So far, I've only had the time to read William Ernest Hocking's 1930 piece, Palestine: An Impasse? You can tell that these old pieces have been scanned, because there are a few mistakes with indentations, quotes and even a couple of letters ('d' for 'cl'), but this article really warrants being read. Here are a couple of meaty extracts to whet your appetite:

If we in America, Jews and Gentiles, could see things as they are in Palestine, we should recognize as axiomatic three things: (1) That nothing like the full plan of Zionism can be realized without political pressure backed by military force; (2) that such pressure and force imply an injustice which is inconsistent with the ethical sense of Zionism, undermining both its sincerity and its claim; (3) that every increase of pressure now meets with increasingly determined Arab resistance, within and beyond Palestine. Hence the question which political Zionism must answer is whether or not it proposes to-day, as in ancient times, to assert its place in Palestine by aid of the sword.

To many Arabs, the Balfour Declaration, in spite of its careful safeguarding of all existing civil and religious rights, is understood as obliging Great Britain to 'do something' for the Jews. Many Zionists have the same conception. And the Arab mind inquires: What can Great Britain now do for Zionism which is not against the Arabs? What favor can it show which is not favoritism? If the question is capable of an answer, it needs to be a dear answer, plainly spoken. Great Britain is serving Zionism. It is doing so not only by maintaining security and order in the land (with some lapses), but by furnishing the administrative staff without which no such settlement would have been possible, and by creating new opportunities. Under the older Ottoman regime, foreign Jews were at a disadvantage: they—like other foreigners—could acquire land only in the name of Ottoman subjects. These disabilities are now removed; as is often said, Jews are now in Palestine by right, not on sufferance. Why press for more than this equitable opening, when more means a reversed injustice? The rural and industrial centres already founded need no more than an equal legal status for their normal peaceful development. The great Hebrew University on Mount Scopus needs no more than this on the legal side to realize its destiny. And this university, be it said, under the prophetic leadership of Dr. Judah Magnes, is the symbol of all that is best in Zionism. For the true and attainable Zion is the Zion of culture and faith, not the Zion of political nationalism.

It is indeed a bitter thing to the sincere Zionist that his ideal community cannot have in that unique spot of earth its perfect body as well as its perfect soul. What I have to say, I say with deep personal regret. For I went to Palestine seized with the idea of Zionism and warmed by the ardor of Jewish friends to whom this vision is the breath of life, prepared to believe all things possible. I came away saddened, seeing that to strive for the perfect body, as things now are, can only mean the loss of soul and body alike. To pursue any campaign for a more vigorous fulfillment of 'the British promise,' to force cantonization on Palestine and so to repeat the standing grievance of divided Syria, to press for any further favor of the state, is to work blindly toward another bloody struggle involving first the new settlements, then Great Britain, then no one knows what wider area. In this we have been assuming that on the issue of Jewish dominance the Arab mind is irreconcilable. Is this true?

The answer lies partly in the fact that for the Arab, whose local attachments are peculiarly strong, Palestine, beside being his home, is also a holy land. It lies partly in the fact that to his mind Palestine is not a separate province: it is an integral part of Syria, with Damascus as its natural trading and cultural capital, while Syria is an integral part of greater Arabia. In his dream of a free Arab empire, Damascus may have served as capital for the whole; or Syria, together with Palestine, may have constituted an autonomous province. In any case, the new Arabia through Palestine reached the western sea; while Palestine as a part of Syria became a partner in that new and proud political enterprise. The expulsion of Feisal from Damascus by the French was a cruel mutilation of this dream. The mandate for Palestine excludes it from the imagined kingdom and shuts that kingdom from the Mediterranean. Even so, political arrangements may be unmade. But village settlements are a more final obstacle—they build a human barrier and put an end to hope. The progress of Zionist colonization thus becomes for the Arab national outlook a culminating stroke in a series of breaches of faith.

...The two enemies of peace in the Holy Land are fanaticism and fear. The movement of the modern spirit within all creeds is having for one of its beneficent effects the gradual melting of fanaticism without argument. Fixed and antagonistic dogmas are transforming themselves into alternative sets of symbols which can dwell together. But fanaticism is kept alive and sharpened by fear; clashes at the Wailing Wall are symptoms of political rather than religious apprehension. These fears of displacement, of national thwarting, must be put to rest; and they can only be quieted by unequivocal public commitments, renouncing the intention to dominate and to exclude. If there is to be peace within the gates of Jerusalem, the first condition, as I see it, is that Zionism publicly disavow its unholy alliance with Western military power, and therewith (following the lead of a recent resolution within the Jewish Agency) its purpose to dominate in Palestine.

Hocking's solution is finally a binational, or more accurately a multi-religious, state under the mandate of Britain, a solution that is obviously out the question as far as British rule is concerned. Nonetheless, he brings up a fundamental conflict between the Zionist body and the Zionist soul, the latter being crushed by what it would take (has taken) to create a Jewish state -- something Avraham Burg's new book is about.

I'm a little uneasy with the idea he has of keeping Palestine technologically "backward" so as to keep Palestine as a multi-religious spiritual land above all else. But that's a small detail in an otherwise insightful analysis of the situation. To my mind, he really hits the nail on the head when he points out the violent and unjust conditions that would be necessary to create a Jewish majority in Palestine.

Goldberg, for his part claims that Hocking is arguing for "an exclusive Arab right to the territory of Palestine," which is silly when you read the piece. What he does do is analyze the Jewish right to Palestine:

This claim of right, based on a mission which it is felt a religious disloyalty to compromise, cannot be shaken in the Jewish mind by analogies from history or international law. To urge that the same reasoning which leads the Jew to claim Palestine after eighteen hundred years would give the Arab a right to Spain after seven hundred years is quite sound so far as it appeals to the ordinary flux of historic conquest and possession; but it wholly misses the sense of this 'organic indissoluble connection,' this right of destiny. Such a right has the force of a religious conviction for those who have that vision; it has the weakness of subjectivism for those who do not share it.

He, correctly, I think, calls the Jewish right to Palestine a subjective one for those who do not believe in God's covenant with the Jewish people and an ineluctable truth for those who do.

On a completely different note, I know that this blog has been focusing on Israel a lot lately. This reminds me of a woman whom I used to date who was doing her doctoral thesis on Jewish communities in the Middle East. She told me that if I was going to be with her, I'd have to deal with the three following things: "1. I am insanely jealous; 2. I smoke in bed; and 3. I'm obsessed with the Jews."

So at the risk of sounding like I'm obsessed with Israel, I'd just like to say in my defense that with the upcoming 60th anniversary of Israel's independence and the Nakba, there's plenty of material to comment on these days.

UPDATE: Interestingly enough, I just looked at my stat log, and Israel is where a good part of my hits come from, after the US, France and Lebanon. So shalom, dear readers, and happy passover!

When I read this report in Ha'aretz, it was hard for me to believe what I was reading:

Driving along the road from Be'er Sheva to Arad, shortly before the turn toward Darijat, you can see the unrecognized Bedouin village that was home to Manhash al-Baniyat, the Israeli soldier who was killed yesterday in a clash with Palestinian gunmen near the Gaza Strip border, across from Kibbutz Be'eri.

In order to reach the village, you have to travel for several hundred meters along a dirt path, until you come to a few houses, built close together. One of these is the house Manhash built for himself in preparation for his marriage, next month. Since building permits are not granted to Bedouin, he had no choice but to build the house illegally. A demolition order has already been issued. The only water pipe leading to the village is also disconnected. Yesterday, a mourners' tent was added to the already harsh landscape, erected by the army. Now that the army's there, at least there's water, someone remarked half-jokingly.

There are a lot of Israelis or supporters of Israel who say that since Palestinians with Israeli citizenship aren't treated as badly as those in the occupied territories, Israel couldn't possibly be an apartheid state. If that's the case, then I'm not sure how we account for al-Baniyat, who died for the state that's bulldozing his home. His sister puts it well when she says, "Sometimes you feel like belonging to the state, but sometimes you get fed up because you build a house and they come and destroy it."

It just so happens that I read a piece by Roger Cohen today that mentions a video of a black woman during the civil rights movement who sums up the situation perfectly: "If we can’t live in our country and be accepted as free citizens and human beings, then something’s the matter with something — and it isn’t me."

In case you haven't heard, there's a new Israel lobby in town. It's called J-Street and is supposed to be a progressive alternative to the hawkish pro-Likud lobby that is AIPAC et al. Spencer Ackerman has a piece about how the new group wants to reframe the Israel debate:

[Co-founder Daniel] Levy, though a long-time peace negotiator, is eager to debate what it means to be pro-Israel, and draws a comparison between AIPAC and the hard-liners who ended up compromising the Jewish future millennia ago. "We'll say, 'Zealots like you led to the destruction of previous Jewish commonwealths,'" Levy said. "We're not going to be intimidated."

J-Street gives us some examples of the current militant rhetoric surrounding Israel these days and asks if that's what it truly means to be pro-Israel and, more to the point, if these voices truly speak for American Jews:


Ezra Klein weighs in to talk about his experience of being alienated at his synagogue:

I can't recall now if it was the Jenin incursions or the riots at the Temple Mount that set my rabbi off. Or perhaps he was just enraged by one of the obscure convulsions of violence that occur with such regularity as to virtually mark time in the Middle East. What punctures the haze of memory is when he transitioned from sports to politics, telling the assembled alumni that the Jews would be within their rights to forcibly deport and displace the entire Palestinian population. I objected, and we began shouting at each other as my classmates looked on in annoyance. I stormed from the room and it was the last time I set foot in that temple. In my temple.

He later goes on to talk about the link between Judaism and human rights and how, to his mind, this is "no time for silence."

On the other side of the aisle, of course, things are different. In truly predictable style, our favorite philistine Noah Pollak (who once visited "Upper Galilee") is already slamming J-Street. It seems that a pro-peace lobby is just too much to stomach for Pollak, so he makes a big deal of the fact that Avraham Burg is "near the top of its list of [Israeli] supporters." (Note to Pollak, when a list is in alphabetical order, people whose names begin with the letter B will usually be "near the top.") He paints Burg as some sort of a radical but fails to mention that he used to be the Diaspora advisor to the Israeli Prime Minister, chairman of the Jewish Agency, speaker of the Knesset and chair of the World Zionist Organization.

I'm not going to say that Avraham Burg isn't polemical in Israel; he is, and if you're interested in reading his opinions for yourself, Ha'aretz published a fascinating interview with him. But Pollak prefers to brandish a single controversial supporter of J-Street (without even mentioning his former role in the Israeli establishment) and build a strawman in an attempt to discredit an entire movement rather than, say, actually debate the issue on the merits. But that's par for the course for Pollak and his ilk. And by the by, TNR is already preparing a hit piece against J-Street, according to Ackerman.

To my mind, a new lobby will give progressive Jews a chance to have a voice in the Israel/Palestine debate and have a tangible (although much less so than AIPAC) effect on Middle East policy. It seems that, like the Arabs, there's an aversion to public dissension in the ranks, a certain disgust at airing the community's dirty laundry in public. J-Street might just be overcoming this fear to become an avenue for progressive American Jews to have a say in what's being done and said in their name by the likes of AIPAC and Alan Dershowitz.

UPDATE: In another post attacking J-Street, the hilariously yet unintentionally ironic Pollak has this to say:

It seems to me that the J Streeters are never going to be able to escape the fact that, sitting in Washington, they are advocating policies for Israel that are overwhelmingly unpopular among Israelis — and attempting to brand this paternalism as "pro-Israel."

The Economist has a special report on Israel on the occasion of its 60th year. I've been skipping through the various sections of it, and so far it seems fairly interesting, although nowhere near as interesting as Le Monde Diplo's Manière de voir on the subject: "Histoires d’Israël." The latter is put together by Dominique Vidal and includes articles by Edward Said, Avraham Burg, Tom Segev, Samir Kassir, Shimon Peres, Alain Gresh, Amira Hass, and the list goes on.

I'll be reading the Economist report online and the Manière de voir in print - both, I'll add, at home, because while I'm sometimes fond of creating a stink, I'm not sure I've got the balls to bring a blue and white magazine with Israel printed on the front cover to my local café.

If this Reuters report is accurate, then the Israelis have got some explaining to do:

JERUSALEM, April 14 (Reuters) - Israeli leaders shunned former U.S. President Jimmy Carter during a visit because of his plans to meet Hamas and Israel's secret service declined to assist U.S. agents guarding him, U.S. sources said on Monday.

"They're not getting support from local security," one of the sources said, on condition of anonymity.

An American source described as "unprecedented" the lack of Shin Bet cooperation with the U.S. Secret Service, which protects all current and former U.S. presidents, as well as Israeli leaders when they visit the United States.

...American sources close to the matter said the Shin Bet, which helps protect visiting dignitaries and is overseen by Olmert's office, declined to meet the head of Carter's Secret Service detail or provide his team with assistance as is customary during such visits.

Jimmy Carter has the thankless job of being the best friend Israel's ever had. He reminds me of those public service/beer commercials in which some drunken asshole keeps trying to crawl into his truck but his buddy refuses to give him his keys back: Friends don't let friends drink and drive.

The Israelis are spitting on the man who is responsible for brokering the peace deal with Egypt and is now telling Israel some truths that it doesn't want to hear. I suppose it's normal to expect the Israelis to be unhappy about being told not to drive, but I somehow never expected Israeli foolishness to go so far as to refuse to protect Carter.

What would people say if the secret service refused to protect and Barack Obama refused to meet with Benjamin Netanyahu during a future trip to the US? Or better yet, imagine if the Egyptian or Pakistani governments refused to provide security for a former US president. Americans would be up in arms, and it would be a bipartisan contest to see who could yell the loudest for suspending aid to Cairo or Islamabad. This should be a huge scandal in the US, but if I know America at all, reactions will range from disgusted sighs to total silence to rants that Carter is an antisemite and is getting the treatment he deserves.

Last week McClatchey had an important story about the fate of Bedouins in Israel. There is a lot of talk about how Israel is a beacon for democracy in the Middle East, and often even those who admit that the Jewish state's founding myths are untrue and protest the occupation are hesitant to admit that there are many Israeli citizens who are treated unequally by the law. The Bedouins are a case in point. The government is destroying their homes and trying to remove them from their land to make room for Jewish citizens. In any other context, this would be called ethnic cleansing:

Israeli leaders have a $3.6 billion plan to transform the vast Negev desert into prospering Jewish communities. Finesh and 80,000 other Bedouin say the land is theirs, however.

As Israel presses ahead with the development, a Human Rights Watch report released Monday concludes that it's using "discriminatory, exclusionary and punitive" policies to push the aside the Bedouin, who are descendants of Arab tribes that once roamed the Negev.

"Israeli policies have created a situation whereby tens of thousands of Bedouin citizens in the Negev have little or no alternative but to live in ramshackle villages and build illegally in order to meet their most basic shelter needs," the report says.

Since Israel was founded nearly 60 years ago, its leaders have been wrestling with what to do with its small Bedouin minority, now climbing above 160,000.

Israel has pushed about half the Bedouin into sterile, depressed new desert towns, demolished thousands of illegal shanties and transformed their sheep-grazing pastures into dangerous military zones.

About 80,000 Bedouin living in more than three dozen unauthorized shantytowns and villages refuse to move, even though they receive no electricity or water from Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has set up a commission to come up with innovative ways to handle the holdouts.

"The government of Israel understands that it needs to solve the problem of the Bedouin," said Yehuda Bachar, the director general of a newly established government department for Bedouin affairs. "If it is not solved now, it will not be solved for many years."

The intent behind the plans is clear: Israeli leaders want to move the Arab residents to make way for Jewish developments.

The Israeli government is looking to spend $3.6 billion over the next seven years to lure more Jewish residents to the Negev, a triangular desert that makes up more than half of the nation's land.

"The only chance for the development of the Negev is that we bring more Jews," said Shmuel Rifman, the mayor of the local Ramat Negev Regional Council, who supports a trickle-down theory when it comes to the Bedouin.

I'm in Paris this week to surprise my good friend for his birthday and see others whom I've been missing lately,  the city herself my friend's unborn baby girl. I was glad to see that while I was going to be here, I could see Amos Oz and David Grossman at the Centre Pompidou.

It wasn't until I arrived that I realized that the reason Grossman and Oz were in Paris in the first place was the Salon du Livre and the fact that this year, Israel was showcased as the guest of honor. I then found out from some Franco-Algerian friends, who accompanied me to the Pompidou event, that there had been a bomb threat and a boycott. (For a good summary in English of the whole thing, check out Lauren Elkin's account.)

The Oz and Grossman event wasn't at all what I was expecting. I knew that it was ostensibly about their literature but assumed that since both authors are politically active, there would be a fair amount of politics involved also. I was looking forward to this, not least because the only books I've read by either author are political non-fiction. There was a fog of politics that floated above the evening but never settled. Since there was no opportunity for questions, the young swooning moderator, who sounded more like a groupie than a literary critic or writer, and the writers themselves were able to keep to the topic of writing and literature.

One effect of this was that the Holocaust was very much present in the talk, but the Palestinians almost not at all. This was a little disappointing to me, because it's hard for me to imagine Palestinian writing (and this may be the fault of wonderful Mourid Barghouti and Mahmoud Darwish) without a heavy Israeli presence. Also, Oz and Grossman seemed very distant and foreign to me, because of the linguistic barrier. For some reason, I was expecting them to speak in English, but instead they spoke in Hebrew, which was translated into French by one of the best interpreters I've had the pleasure of listening to. His voice was soft and exact, and I felt cradled by his cadence. David Grossman was fairly spontaneous but sometimes a little rambling, whereas Oz spoke like a robot but had more interesting things to say. (It's only fair to mention that a lot of Oz's discourse was canned, as I'd already read close to a third of it in various of his books, interviews and articles.)

It was interesting for me to see Israel in this light: as a state like another. Because in Lebanon, Israel is not only not like other states, it's violent and dangerous. We're waiting for the next war, which will likely be even worse than the last one, so it's difficult to empathize with Israel and its people, even if many of them (like Grossman and Oz) have opinions similar to mine. This reminds me of my trip to the West Bank at the end of the war in 2006. Only rarely did I cross over to Jewish Jerusalem or interact with Israelis. I felt shaken by the bombing of Lebanon and almost afraid to see where those bombs were coming from. I now regret not exploring Tel Aviv or visiting Yad Vashem, which I've wanted to see for a long time. But July 2006 was not the time for that kind of a trip; hopefully I'll have another occasion to go in the not-so-distant future. Or even better, perhaps one day I'll be able to make the short drive to the beach in Tel Aviv from Beirut.

Otherwise, and as per usual, I've taken advantage of Paris to do some book shopping. It seems that Avraham Burg's book, which won't be out in English until October, has been released in French already. I'd like to be able to share it with my Anglophone friends in Beirut, but when I saw it used at Gilbert Joseph, I couldn't pass it up. Otherwise, I also found a used copy of Avi Shlaim's The Iron Wall at my favorite English book store here. Other, non-Israel-related, books include Nerval's Voyage en Orient, Paul Morand's New York (a present from Sebastien) and George Corm's L'Europe et l'Orient. I won't be happy until I find used copies of Samir Kassir's Histoire de Beyrouth and Jean Hatzfeld's Stratégie des Antilopes.

Jeffrey Goldberg has a dishonest account of Tom Segev's review of a book on Haj Amin al-Husseini up. He makes it sound like Segev is only down on the book because it emphasizes Arab extremism, whereas his problems with the book are much more substantial:

The lack of solid evidence is the main problem throughout the book. While the authors do cite prominent scholars like Martin Gilbert, Bernard Wasserstein and Rashid Khalidi, some of the most outrageous quotations come from quite arguable sources. Hitler’s alleged and highly unlikely pledge to Husseini (“The Jews are yours”) is based on a passage in the mufti’s own memoirs. But there is an official German record of his meeting with Hitler that contains no such statement. In fact the mufti did not achieve his major goal: Hitler refused to sign a public statement of support for him.

Then Goldberg makes it sound like Segev is comparing Jewish extremism in mandate Palestine with Husseini's support of Nazi Germany:

Segev compares the Mufti's behavior to that of Yitzhak Shamir, the former prime minister of Israel who was once a terrorist with the Stern Gang, and he criticizes the authors for neglecting to mention Jewish extremism in the time of the Mufti. I'm not sure why a book about pro-Nazi sympathies among certain Arabs need include this...

Actually, what Segev does is remind us, as we can read in his excellent book The Seventh Million that Husseini was not the only anti-British nationalist to make overtures to Nazi Germany for the purpose of throwing off the yoke of British imperialism:

The mufti’s support for Nazi Germany definitely demonstrated the evils of extremist nationalism. However, the Arabs were not the only chauvinists in Palestine looking to make a deal with the Nazis. At the end of 1940 and again at the end of 1941, a small Zionist terrorist organization known as the Stern Gang made contact with Nazi representatives in Beirut, seeking support for its struggle against the British. One of the Sternists, in a British jail at the time, was Yitzhak Shamir, a future Israeli prime minister. The authors fail to mention this episode.

So while it's true that a book on Arabs seeking German support against the British and the Jewish colonialism needn't mention the terrorism of the Irgun or the Stern Gang, it seems dishonest not to include the fact that some of Husseini's local Jewish enemies also sought the support of Nazi Germany.

But that's the whole problem here. The importance accorded to Husseini is meant to conflate anti-Zionism and Arabs with anti-Semitism and Nazis. During World War II, there were many subjects of British imperialism from Ireland to Egypt and beyond who saw the time as ripe to back another European power, not because they were Nazis or anti-Semites, but because they were anti-British and saw Germany as means to the end of breaking British rule over their lands.

We've seen politically expedient but strange bedfellows time and time again, like how many exiled Iraqis supported an American invasion -- not because they were particularly pro-American, but rather because they were anti-Saddam. To argue that the the two are necessarily the same is either obtuse or dishonest.

For reasons I won't go into, I was at the American embassy a couple of times earlier this week. Draconian security measures notwithstanding (you're not allowed to bring a phone or bag onto the premises), the place seemed more Lebanese than American, with Lebanese security guards, Lebanese employees and Lebanese-Americans queued up in the consular section.

Another touch was a world map in the consular section. It is a map with political boundaries, and while I was in the consular waiting room, I took a look at it while trying to recover from the disgusting humidity that all of Beirut's been suffering from this summer. The map is in Arabic, and like most maps in the region, Israel is nowhere to be found. Instead, the map shows Palestine. This wouldn't be surprising, except that it's in the American embassy.

I'm about to leave for a five-week trip seeing East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda), but I wanted to post a link to an execrable op-ed about learning Arabic in the Washington Post by Joel Pollak.

I sent out a hasty letter to the editor, which reads as follows:

Joel Pollak complains that there isn’t enough of an Israeli perspective in Arabic language classes. He then goes on to describe “West Beirut,” a gem of Lebanese cinema that recounts a love story between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl, as a film that casts Christians as “the prime bad guys in Lebanon’s civil war.” Obviously Pollak’s Arabic has not progressed far enough to have understood the movie.

He then assures us that he refused to talk about Abdel Nassar in class. In French courses, one learns about Napoleon as a grand statesman, not a brutal imperial dictator. Likewise in Arabic classes, as well as in much of the third world, Nasser was seen as a hero.

One of the points of language courses is to better understand the culture of the speakers of that language. Since Pollak would obviously prefer to learn about Israeli and Jewish history, one can only assume that mistakenly signed up for Arabic lessons when he was actually looking to learn Hebrew.

In other news, there's this nasty piece calling for collective punishment. I'd have more to say about this last one, except that I'm in a hurry.

I don't know what the internet situation is going to be like in any of the places where I'll be over the next month or so, but I can't imagine that posting will be any slower than it has been in the last month or two. Which means that I'll do my best to step it up considerably.

The US government has had to rescind the Fulbright awards for the 7 students in Gaza who won the awards, because Israel won't let them leave the territory:

The American State Department has withdrawn all Fulbright grants to Palestinian students in Gaza hoping to pursue advanced degrees at American institutions this fall because Israel has not granted them permission to leave.

...The study grants notwithstanding, the Israeli officials argued that the policy of isolating Gaza was working, that Palestinians here were starting to lose faith in Hamas's ability to rule because of the hardships of life.

..."We are fighting the regime in Gaza that does its utmost to kill our citizens and destroy our schools and our colleges," said Yuval Steinitz, a lawmaker from the opposition Likud Party. "So I don’t think we should allow students from Gaza to go anywhere. Gaza is under siege, and rightly so, and it is up to the Gazans to change the regime or its behavior."

Hadeel Abukwaik, a 23-year-old engineering software instructor in Gaza, had hoped to do graduate work in the United States this fall on the Fulbright that she thought was hers. She had stayed in Gaza this past winter when its metal border fence was destroyed and tens of thousands of Gazans poured into Egypt, including her sister, because the agency administering the Fulbright told her she would get the grant only if she stayed put. She lives alone in Gaza where she was sent to study because the cost is low; her parents, Palestinian refugees, live in Dubai.

"I stayed to get my scholarship," she said. "Now I am desperate."

Now I'm no expert on Islamic militancy, but I'm pretty sure that desperation isn't exactly the quickest route to winning hearts and minds.

Another thing that's been bothering me is the fact that Mostaqbal's media outlets were shut down. I won't pretend that part of me doesn't feel a little tinge of delight at the idea of the Mostaqbal thugs getting some comeuppance. But punishing neighborhood thugs who fancy themselves militiamen is one thing, while shutting down media outlets is another. During the 2006 war, Hezbollah was (rightfully, to my mind) outraged by Israel's targeting of their television station, al-Manar. So why is it acceptable to have shut down Future TV?

I'm watching Kalam an-Nass right now, while the head of Future TV is being interviewed. According to him, a Lebanese soldier, in uniform, told them that they had to open the gates or else they'd be killed by Hezbollah militiamen. This is, of course, disconcerting on several levels. First of all, this would mean that a member of the ostensibly neutral Lebanese Army would have helped Hezbollah shut down the media outlet of a competing political party. But regardless of whether or not a soldier helped Hezbollah shut the station down, the latter certainly did disconnect Future TV. This is scandalous, and Hezbollah should be ashamed of itself.

A woman presenter, whose name I can't recall, just came on and gave Hezbollah a piece of her mind. She said that she's spent the last year and a half doing reports on the lot of the people of the south and how they've suffered during the war of 2006 and after. Then she explained how al-Manar reported that the staff of Future TV "fled" the premises, like thieves or criminals, when in fact they were told to leave if they didn't want to die. She said that forgetting the parties and forgetting politics, this kind of treatment and the occupation of Beirut has made regular people, people like her, hate Hezbollah. She said that after people like her who did their best to take in refugees after the war in 2006 are treated like this and accused of being traitors, Hezbollah should be ashamed of itself. Of course a presenter on Future TV isn't exactly representative of the man on the street, but her point is well taken.

I can say, however, that the opposition has lost the sympathy of people who have supported the principles of the resistance, even if they had really ambivalent feelings about the religious and authoritarian form it's taken. And the traitor rhetoric is really hurtful and disgusting to people who support resistance against Israel but don't want to live in a country where the interests of the resistance trump those of the state. Calling people traitors like this smacks of Bush's rhetoric in the "war on terror," where you're either "with us or against us," and doesn't sit well with many Lebanese.

I never thought I'd say this, but there was part of Samir Geagea's speech this afternoon that I agree with. He said that the use of Hezbollah's weapons has delegitimized their very existence. I tend to agree with this idea, because Hezbollah has decided to use its weapons in an internal dispute between Lebanese actors. (Here, it's important to remember that the myth that Hezbollah has never been part of inter-Lebanese fighting fails to include when Amal and Hezbollah fought each the during the civil war.) What has happened is that the March 14 government made a decision that Hezbollah disagreed with, and in reaction to this, they took up arms and occupied half of Beirut. This means that the weapons whose sole purpose is supposed to deter Israeli aggression and defend Lebanon has been used as a blunt political tool to try to force the government to resign, or at the very least, send it a far-from-subtle message. 

The line being taken by the opposition now (at least as far as the talking heads of al-Manar are concerned) is that Hezbollah has helped the state put down militias (namely Mustaqbal, or the Future movement). This position fails to take into consideration, for example, the fact that there are still armed militia members of Amal and the Syrian Social Nationalist Party walking around West Beirut.

Either armed militias are illegal or they aren't. What's happened is that the Army seems to have passively taken the side of Hezbollah, which means that their legitimacy will be decreased or destroyed in the eyes of other Lebanese communities, especially the Sunnis in Saida and Tripoli. It has also sent the message that the most effective political tool is military force. I imagine, then, that the Sunnis in Saida and Tripoli, the pro-government Christians and the Druze loyal to Walid Jumblatt have likely decided that they can no longer count on the Army to be an impartial arbiter for the state. This will surely lead to increased militia training and arming. It wouldn't surprise me if the lesson that the Lebanese Forces and the PSP have taken from the defeat of Mustaqbal (probably the weakest of the pro-government parties/militias, if one of the nastier ones on a local neighborhood level) is that they should be prepared for more of the same in the not-so-distant future.

So where does this leave us? Despite rumors earlier today, it doesn't look like Saniora, or anyone else, will resign from the government. So what? There's still no president, and the fundamental dysfunction of the Lebanese state has only been highlighted, not solved. If this all ends with Hezbollah and its allied militias pulling back to their territory in the next day or so, leaving a humiliating message for the other parties and their militias, we'll be back to where we started. Back to where we started, except a big part of the population will have lost faith in the idea that Hezbollah and its allies can be dealt with within the norms of a democratic system.

Since there is no way that any of these groups can compete with Hezbollah's military forces, look for them to embrace proxies. This might include the Sunnis accepting al-Qaeda militants and other groups hoping for more Israeli intervention. I'm sure that after the disaster that was the war in 2006, the Israeli establishment wouldn't mind taking advantage of the situation for  rematch. In any case, what this situation hasn't done is foster an atmosphere where either side feels like it can compromise. If anything, this whole situation has pushed March 14 further into its corner and inflated the arrogance and confidence of Hezbollah and its allies in the country and abroad. Neither of which bodes well for peace or stability in Lebanon.

Amin Gemayel, whom I can't stand, called Hezbollah's victory a Pyrrhic one (actually, he said it in French, the snooty bastard). I tend to think that, on a national level and in the long term, he's probably right. In any case, it's enough to turn some Lebanese into bitter Mercutios.

I'm a little late for Labor Day, but Human Rights Watch here in Lebanon has begun an awareness campaign for rights of domestic workers entitled Put Yourself in Her Shoes:

The condition of (predominantly women) domestic workers in the Middle East is atrocious. Apparently, the problem is as bad in Israel as it is in Lebanon and even worse in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. According to HRW:

The most common complaints made by domestic workers to embassies and nongovernmental organizations include non-payment or delayed payment of their wages, forced confinement to the workplace, no time off, and verbal, as well as physical, abuse. According to a 2006 survey conducted by Dr. Ray Jureidini of 600 migrant domestic workers, 56 percent said they work more than 12 hours a day and 34 percent have no regular time off. In some cases, workers have died while attempting to escape these conditions, some by jumping from balconies.

...The Lebanese authorities have failed to curb abuses committed by employers and agencies. Lebanese labor laws specifically exclude domestic workers from rights guaranteed to other workers, such as a weekly day of rest, limits on work hours, paid holidays, and workers’ compensation. Immigration sponsorship laws restrict domestic workers’ ability to change employers, even in cases of abuse. An official steering committee created in early 2006 and led by the Ministry of Labor to improve the legal situation of migrant workers in Lebanon has yet to deliver any concrete reforms. This includes a long-discussed standard contract to outline minimum standards for domestic workers’ employment.  

Human Rights Watch called upon the Ministry of Labor and other relevant authorities to amend the labor law to extend equal protection for domestic workers and to sign and ratify the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families. 

 

A few years ago, the Times did a story about Sri Lankan women who go to the Middle East to work as domestic servants.  This picture is of a 20-year-old woman named Thangarasa Jeyanthi who was severely abused in Lebanon. In Lebanese Arabic, the common word for a domestic worker is "Sri Lankan." At one point, I remember hearing a joke about an NGO that was fostering multiculturalism by doing presentations with people from all over world invited to introduce themselves to the audience. The Egyptian man comes and says he works as a concierge. The Syrian says that he's a field hand. And then comes the Ethiopian who introduces herself but forgets to say what her profession is. When reminded that everyone has to say what they do, she replies, "I'm a Sri Lankan."

In the case of Sri Lankan women, the conditions that they live and work in criminally miserable, and their government is actually complicit. There are training programs that teach the women some Arabic and how to do what is expected of them without receiving the beatings that are so common. The government encourages women to go to the Middle East, they provide remittances that help keep the Sri Lankan economy afloat.

An Ethiopian friend of mine here used to work for a big hotel in town, but she wasn't allowed to be hired directly even though she has all of her papers in order. The hotel insists on going through a middle man, who garnishes half of the wages of the foreign women working at the hotel. A salary of $450 is reasonable (and more than twice the pitiful minimum wage), but when some sleazy profiteer gets to pocket half of your salary, it's difficult to survive, especially with the increasing price of living (many food items have nearly doubled in price in the last 9 months).

In contrast with Colombo's policy of encouraging the migration, Ethiopia's government has taken the decision to ban its citizens from coming to Lebanon in search of employment:

ADDIS ABABA: On the occasion of Labor Day, Ethiopia has officially banned its citizens from traveling to Beirut in search of jobs, the African country's Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs has disclosed. Ethiopia passed the bill after it probed the human right violations and domestic violence Ethiopian migrants face behind closed doors in Beirut while employed as maids.

"Suspending work travel to Beirut was the only solution to minimizing the human rights abuses and dangers facing our citizens," said Zenebu Tadesse, deputy minister of state for labor and social affairs.

During the past few years, a number of Ethiopians have died in Lebanon in questionable circumstances.

According to a report published by Ethiopia's official news agency, past human right records show that 67 Ethiopian women have died between 1997 and 1999 alone while working in Beirut.

The ministry said it would take strong action against any employment agency trying to send workers directly to Beirut or through a third country.

So for Labor Day this year, I'd like to remind everyone that Sri Lankan is a nationality, not a profession. And I'd like to remind the Lebanese, many of whom go off to Europe, North America and the Gulf in search of work, that they should have a little solidarity with domestic workers here who are hoping to make so money to create a better life for themselves. As my friend Nadim from HRW says about their media campaign: "Many Lebanese themselves have been forced by wars and hardships to emigrate looking for a better life. We hope that they will see the parallels with the experience of these migrants that came from far away to care for Lebanese families."

(Via my friend A) Carter to be tried for peace crimes, according to The Onion:

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND—An international peace-crimes tribunal commenced legal proceedings against former U.S. President Jimmy Carter for alleged crimes against inhumanity Monday.

"Jimmy Carter's political career includes a laundry list of anti-war-making offenses," said chief prosecutor Charles B. Simmons. "Carter's record of benevolence, diplomacy, and respect for human life is unrivaled in recent geopolitical history. For millions, the very sight of his face evokes memories of his administration's reign of tolerance."

I knew it was only a matter of time before the international community succeeded in bringing his gentle reign of peace-mongering to an end!

The previous post got me to wondering how often the word Nakba had been used in American newspapers and when, so I did a Lexis Nexis search, which showed that the Times has only printed the word in 34 articles, the first of which appeared in 1998 in an article about Israel's 50th anniversary. A double check of the NYT online archives, however, showed two other articles that didn't appear in the Lexis Nexis search (they seem to only have abstracts for pre-1981 articles): one from 1973 on Sadat and another from 1970 on occupied Ramallah.

Here's a quickly drawn up chart that tracks the use of the word in coverage by the New York Times:

 

This shows that up until the 50th anniversary of the Nakba, the Times had referred to it but twice. I have a feeling that before the year is over, 2008 will beat out 2007 for the number of times the term is employed.

It's unclear to me what exactly has caused the general tide of public opinion to start moving (slowly but surely) away from Israeli occupation in the US. (Or perhaps I'm being optimistic and am projecting?) But I get the feeling that there's a  shift happening in American public opinion that will hopefully be reflected by more fair-minded media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

I've been surprised in the last few weeks to see how much attention the Nakba is getting during the run up to the 60th anniversary of the catastrophe and the founding of the Jewish state. While interpretations differ, it has at least been getting mentions in publications like The New Yorker and the New York Times.

That said, I knew it was only a matter of time before something really reactionary and stupid came out in a magazine like Commentary. Well, Efraim Karsh offers up exactly what we needed in his "True Story" of what happened in 1948. Following his recent comments on the "Jordanian option," I recently marveled how someone who is ostensibly a scholar of the region could be so out of touch with Arabs and the Arab political scene, but this latest piece takes the proverbial cake.

According to Karsh, before 1948, the Palestinians never had any problem with the idea of becoming a minority in their own land and otherwise would have been perfectly happy living as a second class majority in a Jewish state. In fact, Zionists wanted nothing more than all Arabs to stay in their homes and live happily ever after in a pastoral paradise. Unfortunately, the evil Jew-hating "Arab leaders" had to dash all these wonderful hopes and spur the Palestinians to war, despite the fact that they wanted nothing more than to live in a Jewish state. Why even Vladimir Jabotinsky wanted nothing more than peaceful Arab-Jewish coexistence: According to Karsh:

The simple fact is that the Zionist movement had always been amenable to the existence in the future Jewish state of a substantial Arab minority that would participate on an equal footing “throughout all sectors of the country’s public life.” The words are those of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founding father of the branch of Zionism that was the forebear of today’s Likud party. In a famous 1923 article, Jabotinsky voiced his readiness “to take an oath binding ourselves and our descendants that we shall never do anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try to eject anyone.”

Eleven years later, Jabotinsky presided over the drafting of a constitution for Jewish Palestine. According to its provisions, Arabs and Jews were to share both the prerogatives and the duties of statehood, including most notably military and civil service. Hebrew and Arabic were to enjoy the same legal standing, and “in every cabinet where the prime minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab and vice-versa.”

It just so happens that this is the same Jabotinsky who thought that the Jewish state should encompass both sides of the Jordan and who in his famous essay, "The Iron Wall," had this to say:

If [the reader] should attempt to seek but one instance of a country settled with the consent of those born there he will not succeed. The inhabitants (no matter whether they are civilized or savages) have always put up a stubborn fight.

...Any native people -- its all the same whether they are civilized or savage -- views their country as their national home, of which they will  always be the complete masters. They will not voluntarily allow, not only a new master, but even a new partner. And so it is for the Arabs. Compromisers in our midst attempt to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked by a softened formulation of our goals, or a tribe of money grubbers who will abandon their birth right to Palestine for cultural and economic gains. I flatly reject this assessment of the Palestinian Arabs. Culturally they are 500 years behind us, spiritually they do not have our endurance or our strength of will, but this exhausts all of the internal differences. We can talk as much as we want about our good intentions; but they understand as well as we what is not good for them. They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie. To think that the Arabs will voluntarily consent to the realization of Zionism in return for the cultural and economic benefits we can bestow on them is infantile. This childish fantasy of our “Arabo-philes” comes from some kind of contempt for the Arab people, of some kind of unfounded view of this race as a rabble ready to be bribed in order to sell out their homeland for a railroad network.

He goes on to say that no voluntary agreement with the Arabs is possible:

Thus we conclude that we cannot promise anything to the Arabs of the Land of Israel or the Arab countries. Their voluntary agreement is out of the question. Hence those who hold that an agreement with the natives is an essential condition for Zionism can now say “no” and depart from Zionism. Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population -- an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.

...All this does not mean that any kind of agreement is impossible, only a voluntary agreement is impossible. As long as there is a spark of hope that they can get rid of us, they will not sell these hopes, not for any kind of sweet words or tasty morsels, because they are not a rabble but a nation, perhaps somewhat tattered, but still living. A living people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions only when there is no hope left. Only when not a single breach is visible in the iron wall, only then do extreme groups lose their sway, and influence transfers to moderate groups. Only then would these moderate groups come to us with proposals for mutual concessions. And only then will moderates offer suggestions for compromise on practical questions like a guarantee against expulsion, or equality and national autonomy.

I am optimistic that they will indeed be granted satisfactory assurances and that both peoples, like good neighbors, can then live in peace. But the only path to such an agreement is the iron wall, that is to say the strengthening in Palestine of a government without any kind of Arab influence, that is to say one against which the Arabs will fight. In other words, for us the only path to an agreement in the future is an absolute refusal of any attempts at an agreement now.

This is what Jabotinsky thought of the Arabs, not just in Palestine but in Jordan as well. To the consternation of modern day Zionists, he saw the Zionist state in explicitly colonial terms, equating it with other European colonial endeavors.  

Now I've got a certain respect for Zionists like Jabotinsky who call a spade a spade. What I don't appreciate are scholars like Karsh who insist on whitewashing the creation of Israel to absolve the state of any wrong-doing. In his world, the Yishuv did nothing wrong; all blame for the problems of Arabs can be squarely placed at the feet of "Arab leaders." He ignores the much more frank assertions of the Zionist leaders themselves, like Ben-Gurion who once asked:

Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country.

In any case, Karsh disagrees with the scholarship done by Israeli "new historians" like Pappe, Morris and Shlaim, who all show that the old myths of Palestinians leaving their homes because of radio broadcasts sent out by their leaders are conveniently simplistic and just not true. While there is some disagreement as to whether the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was pre-planned and deliberate, ad-hoc and hasty or unintentional but finally welcome, the issue is ultimately beside the point when it comes to Palestinians' right of return. Either you believe that one has the unalienable right to leave one's country and return, or you don't.

I've long thought that morally and politically, it would be a great move if the Lebanese government were to invite Lebanese Jews who left during the civil war to Europe and America to come back. And if Beirut were really clever, it would appoint a Lebanese Jew to a ministerial position or as an ambassador to the UN or the US. This would help turn the Lebanese-Israeli conflict into a national one instead of a religious one. In 2006, it would have been a tremendous PR move to have a Jewish minister criticizing the systematic destruction of the Lebanese infrastructure.

In this context, Bahrain has made a really smart move:

A Jewish woman, Huda Ezra Ebrahim Nonoo, is set to become Bahrain's ambassador to Washington, sources close to diplomats told Gulf News on Thursday.

"Huda is Bahrain's nominee for the post and this is of course very good news for Bahrain's deep-rooted values of tolerance and openness," Faisal Fouladh, a Shura Council representative, and Western diplomats said.

Huda, a businesswoman, was the first Jewish woman to sit in the Shura Council, the 40-member upper house of the bicameral legislature, replacing her uncle. A Christian woman, Alice Samaan, also sits on the council which has 11 women, compared with only one woman MP, Lateefa Al Gaood, in the 40-member lower house.

(Via TPM) Ha'aretz reports Benjamin Netanyahu, hawkish Israeli "ally" of the US, as saying that 9/11 was good for Israel:

"We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq," Ma'ariv quoted the former prime minister as saying. He reportedly added that these events "swung American public opinion in our favor."

This actually mirrors comments made by Netanyahu on the day of the attacks:

Asked tonight what the attack meant for relations between the United States and Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister, replied, ''It's very good.'' Then he edited himself: ''Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.'' He predicted that the attack would ''strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we've experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.''

With friends like these, right?

I'm not generally fond of Jeffery Goldberg's work when it comes to the Middle East, so I was pretty skeptical about the Atlantic's big Israel story this week. (I haven't read it yet, so I'll reserve judgment until then.)  One thing that's very interesting though, is that Goldman has dug up some old pieces on Palestine and Zionism that appeared in the Atlantic.

So far, I've only had the time to read William Ernest Hocking's 1930 piece, Palestine: An Impasse? You can tell that these old pieces have been scanned, because there are a few mistakes with indentations, quotes and even a couple of letters ('d' for 'cl'), but this article really warrants being read. Here are a couple of meaty extracts to whet your appetite:

If we in America, Jews and Gentiles, could see things as they are in Palestine, we should recognize as axiomatic three things: (1) That nothing like the full plan of Zionism can be realized without political pressure backed by military force; (2) that such pressure and force imply an injustice which is inconsistent with the ethical sense of Zionism, undermining both its sincerity and its claim; (3) that every increase of pressure now meets with increasingly determined Arab resistance, within and beyond Palestine. Hence the question which political Zionism must answer is whether or not it proposes to-day, as in ancient times, to assert its place in Palestine by aid of the sword.

To many Arabs, the Balfour Declaration, in spite of its careful safeguarding of all existing civil and religious rights, is understood as obliging Great Britain to 'do something' for the Jews. Many Zionists have the same conception. And the Arab mind inquires: What can Great Britain now do for Zionism which is not against the Arabs? What favor can it show which is not favoritism? If the question is capable of an answer, it needs to be a dear answer, plainly spoken. Great Britain is serving Zionism. It is doing so not only by maintaining security and order in the land (with some lapses), but by furnishing the administrative staff without which no such settlement would have been possible, and by creating new opportunities. Under the older Ottoman regime, foreign Jews were at a disadvantage: they—like other foreigners—could acquire land only in the name of Ottoman subjects. These disabilities are now removed; as is often said, Jews are now in Palestine by right, not on sufferance. Why press for more than this equitable opening, when more means a reversed injustice? The rural and industrial centres already founded need no more than an equal legal status for their normal peaceful development. The great Hebrew University on Mount Scopus needs no more than this on the legal side to realize its destiny. And this university, be it said, under the prophetic leadership of Dr. Judah Magnes, is the symbol of all that is best in Zionism. For the true and attainable Zion is the Zion of culture and faith, not the Zion of political nationalism.

It is indeed a bitter thing to the sincere Zionist that his ideal community cannot have in that unique spot of earth its perfect body as well as its perfect soul. What I have to say, I say with deep personal regret. For I went to Palestine seized with the idea of Zionism and warmed by the ardor of Jewish friends to whom this vision is the breath of life, prepared to believe all things possible. I came away saddened, seeing that to strive for the perfect body, as things now are, can only mean the loss of soul and body alike. To pursue any campaign for a more vigorous fulfillment of 'the British promise,' to force cantonization on Palestine and so to repeat the standing grievance of divided Syria, to press for any further favor of the state, is to work blindly toward another bloody struggle involving first the new settlements, then Great Britain, then no one knows what wider area. In this we have been assuming that on the issue of Jewish dominance the Arab mind is irreconcilable. Is this true?

The answer lies partly in the fact that for the Arab, whose local attachments are peculiarly strong, Palestine, beside being his home, is also a holy land. It lies partly in the fact that to his mind Palestine is not a separate province: it is an integral part of Syria, with Damascus as its natural trading and cultural capital, while Syria is an integral part of greater Arabia. In his dream of a free Arab empire, Damascus may have served as capital for the whole; or Syria, together with Palestine, may have constituted an autonomous province. In any case, the new Arabia through Palestine reached the western sea; while Palestine as a part of Syria became a partner in that new and proud political enterprise. The expulsion of Feisal from Damascus by the French was a cruel mutilation of this dream. The mandate for Palestine excludes it from the imagined kingdom and shuts that kingdom from the Mediterranean. Even so, political arrangements may be unmade. But village settlements are a more final obstacle—they build a human barrier and put an end to hope. The progress of Zionist colonization thus becomes for the Arab national outlook a culminating stroke in a series of breaches of faith.

...The two enemies of peace in the Holy Land are fanaticism and fear. The movement of the modern spirit within all creeds is having for one of its beneficent effects the gradual melting of fanaticism without argument. Fixed and antagonistic dogmas are transforming themselves into alternative sets of symbols which can dwell together. But fanaticism is kept alive and sharpened by fear; clashes at the Wailing Wall are symptoms of political rather than religious apprehension. These fears of displacement, of national thwarting, must be put to rest; and they can only be quieted by unequivocal public commitments, renouncing the intention to dominate and to exclude. If there is to be peace within the gates of Jerusalem, the first condition, as I see it, is that Zionism publicly disavow its unholy alliance with Western military power, and therewith (following the lead of a recent resolution within the Jewish Agency) its purpose to dominate in Palestine.

Hocking's solution is finally a binational, or more accurately a multi-religious, state under the mandate of Britain, a solution that is obviously out the question as far as British rule is concerned. Nonetheless, he brings up a fundamental conflict between the Zionist body and the Zionist soul, the latter being crushed by what it would take (has taken) to create a Jewish state -- something Avraham Burg's new book is about.

I'm a little uneasy with the idea he has of keeping Palestine technologically "backward" so as to keep Palestine as a multi-religious spiritual land above all else. But that's a small detail in an otherwise insightful analysis of the situation. To my mind, he really hits the nail on the head when he points out the violent and unjust conditions that would be necessary to create a Jewish majority in Palestine.

Goldberg, for his part claims that Hocking is arguing for "an exclusive Arab right to the territory of Palestine," which is silly when you read the piece. What he does do is analyze the Jewish right to Palestine:

This claim of right, based on a mission which it is felt a religious disloyalty to compromise, cannot be shaken in the Jewish mind by analogies from history or international law. To urge that the same reasoning which leads the Jew to claim Palestine after eighteen hundred years would give the Arab a right to Spain after seven hundred years is quite sound so far as it appeals to the ordinary flux of historic conquest and possession; but it wholly misses the sense of this 'organic indissoluble connection,' this right of destiny. Such a right has the force of a religious conviction for those who have that vision; it has the weakness of subjectivism for those who do not share it.

He, correctly, I think, calls the Jewish right to Palestine a subjective one for those who do not believe in God's covenant with the Jewish people and an ineluctable truth for those who do.

On a completely different note, I know that this blog has been focusing on Israel a lot lately. This reminds me of a woman whom I used to date who was doing her doctoral thesis on Jewish communities in the Middle East. She told me that if I was going to be with her, I'd have to deal with the three following things: "1. I am insanely jealous; 2. I smoke in bed; and 3. I'm obsessed with the Jews."

So at the risk of sounding like I'm obsessed with Israel, I'd just like to say in my defense that with the upcoming 60th anniversary of Israel's independence and the Nakba, there's plenty of material to comment on these days.

UPDATE: Interestingly enough, I just looked at my stat log, and Israel is where a good part of my hits come from, after the US, France and Lebanon. So shalom, dear readers, and happy passover!

When I read this report in Ha'aretz, it was hard for me to believe what I was reading:

Driving along the road from Be'er Sheva to Arad, shortly before the turn toward Darijat, you can see the unrecognized Bedouin village that was home to Manhash al-Baniyat, the Israeli soldier who was killed yesterday in a clash with Palestinian gunmen near the Gaza Strip border, across from Kibbutz Be'eri.

In order to reach the village, you have to travel for several hundred meters along a dirt path, until you come to a few houses, built close together. One of these is the house Manhash built for himself in preparation for his marriage, next month. Since building permits are not granted to Bedouin, he had no choice but to build the house illegally. A demolition order has already been issued. The only water pipe leading to the village is also disconnected. Yesterday, a mourners' tent was added to the already harsh landscape, erected by the army. Now that the army's there, at least there's water, someone remarked half-jokingly.

There are a lot of Israelis or supporters of Israel who say that since Palestinians with Israeli citizenship aren't treated as badly as those in the occupied territories, Israel couldn't possibly be an apartheid state. If that's the case, then I'm not sure how we account for al-Baniyat, who died for the state that's bulldozing his home. His sister puts it well when she says, "Sometimes you feel like belonging to the state, but sometimes you get fed up because you build a house and they come and destroy it."

It just so happens that I read a piece by Roger Cohen today that mentions a video of a black woman during the civil rights movement who sums up the situation perfectly: "If we can’t live in our country and be accepted as free citizens and human beings, then something’s the matter with something — and it isn’t me."

In case you haven't heard, there's a new Israel lobby in town. It's called J-Street and is supposed to be a progressive alternative to the hawkish pro-Likud lobby that is AIPAC et al. Spencer Ackerman has a piece about how the new group wants to reframe the Israel debate:

[Co-founder Daniel] Levy, though a long-time peace negotiator, is eager to debate what it means to be pro-Israel, and draws a comparison between AIPAC and the hard-liners who ended up compromising the Jewish future millennia ago. "We'll say, 'Zealots like you led to the destruction of previous Jewish commonwealths,'" Levy said. "We're not going to be intimidated."

J-Street gives us some examples of the current militant rhetoric surrounding Israel these days and asks if that's what it truly means to be pro-Israel and, more to the point, if these voices truly speak for American Jews:


Ezra Klein weighs in to talk about his experience of being alienated at his synagogue:

I can't recall now if it was the Jenin incursions or the riots at the Temple Mount that set my rabbi off. Or perhaps he was just enraged by one of the obscure convulsions of violence that occur with such regularity as to virtually mark time in the Middle East. What punctures the haze of memory is when he transitioned from sports to politics, telling the assembled alumni that the Jews would be within their rights to forcibly deport and displace the entire Palestinian population. I objected, and we began shouting at each other as my classmates looked on in annoyance. I stormed from the room and it was the last time I set foot in that temple. In my temple.

He later goes on to talk about the link between Judaism and human rights and how, to his mind, this is "no time for silence."

On the other side of the aisle, of course, things are different. In truly predictable style, our favorite philistine Noah Pollak (who once visited "Upper Galilee") is already slamming J-Street. It seems that a pro-peace lobby is just too much to stomach for Pollak, so he makes a big deal of the fact that Avraham Burg is "near the top of its list of [Israeli] supporters." (Note to Pollak, when a list is in alphabetical order, people whose names begin with the letter B will usually be "near the top.") He paints Burg as some sort of a radical but fails to mention that he used to be the Diaspora advisor to the Israeli Prime Minister, chairman of the Jewish Agency, speaker of the Knesset and chair of the World Zionist Organization.

I'm not going to say that Avraham Burg isn't polemical in Israel; he is, and if you're interested in reading his opinions for yourself, Ha'aretz published a fascinating interview with him. But Pollak prefers to brandish a single controversial supporter of J-Street (without even mentioning his former role in the Israeli establishment) and build a strawman in an attempt to discredit an entire movement rather than, say, actually debate the issue on the merits. But that's par for the course for Pollak and his ilk. And by the by, TNR is already preparing a hit piece against J-Street, according to Ackerman.

To my mind, a new lobby will give progressive Jews a chance to have a voice in the Israel/Palestine debate and have a tangible (although much less so than AIPAC) effect on Middle East policy. It seems that, like the Arabs, there's an aversion to public dissension in the ranks, a certain disgust at airing the community's dirty laundry in public. J-Street might just be overcoming this fear to become an avenue for progressive American Jews to have a say in what's being done and said in their name by the likes of AIPAC and Alan Dershowitz.

UPDATE: In another post attacking J-Street, the hilariously yet unintentionally ironic Pollak has this to say:

It seems to me that the J Streeters are never going to be able to escape the fact that, sitting in Washington, they are advocating policies for Israel that are overwhelmingly unpopular among Israelis — and attempting to brand this paternalism as "pro-Israel."

The Economist has a special report on Israel on the occasion of its 60th year. I've been skipping through the various sections of it, and so far it seems fairly interesting, although nowhere near as interesting as Le Monde Diplo's Manière de voir on the subject: "Histoires d’Israël." The latter is put together by Dominique Vidal and includes articles by Edward Said, Avraham Burg, Tom Segev, Samir Kassir, Shimon Peres, Alain Gresh, Amira Hass, and the list goes on.

I'll be reading the Economist report online and the Manière de voir in print - both, I'll add, at home, because while I'm sometimes fond of creating a stink, I'm not sure I've got the balls to bring a blue and white magazine with Israel printed on the front cover to my local café.

If this Reuters report is accurate, then the Israelis have got some explaining to do:

JERUSALEM, April 14 (Reuters) - Israeli leaders shunned former U.S. President Jimmy Carter during a visit because of his plans to meet Hamas and Israel's secret service declined to assist U.S. agents guarding him, U.S. sources said on Monday.

"They're not getting support from local security," one of the sources said, on condition of anonymity.

An American source described as "unprecedented" the lack of Shin Bet cooperation with the U.S. Secret Service, which protects all current and former U.S. presidents, as well as Israeli leaders when they visit the United States.

...American sources close to the matter said the Shin Bet, which helps protect visiting dignitaries and is overseen by Olmert's office, declined to meet the head of Carter's Secret Service detail or provide his team with assistance as is customary during such visits.

Jimmy Carter has the thankless job of being the best friend Israel's ever had. He reminds me of those public service/beer commercials in which some drunken asshole keeps trying to crawl into his truck but his buddy refuses to give him his keys back: Friends don't let friends drink and drive.

The Israelis are spitting on the man who is responsible for brokering the peace deal with Egypt and is now telling Israel some truths that it doesn't want to hear. I suppose it's normal to expect the Israelis to be unhappy about being told not to drive, but I somehow never expected Israeli foolishness to go so far as to refuse to protect Carter.

What would people say if the secret service refused to protect and Barack Obama refused to meet with Benjamin Netanyahu during a future trip to the US? Or better yet, imagine if the Egyptian or Pakistani governments refused to provide security for a former US president. Americans would be up in arms, and it would be a bipartisan contest to see who could yell the loudest for suspending aid to Cairo or Islamabad. This should be a huge scandal in the US, but if I know America at all, reactions will range from disgusted sighs to total silence to rants that Carter is an antisemite and is getting the treatment he deserves.

Last week McClatchey had an important story about the fate of Bedouins in Israel. There is a lot of talk about how Israel is a beacon for democracy in the Middle East, and often even those who admit that the Jewish state's founding myths are untrue and protest the occupation are hesitant to admit that there are many Israeli citizens who are treated unequally by the law. The Bedouins are a case in point. The government is destroying their homes and trying to remove them from their land to make room for Jewish citizens. In any other context, this would be called ethnic cleansing:

Israeli leaders have a $3.6 billion plan to transform the vast Negev desert into prospering Jewish communities. Finesh and 80,000 other Bedouin say the land is theirs, however.

As Israel presses ahead with the development, a Human Rights Watch report released Monday concludes that it's using "discriminatory, exclusionary and punitive" policies to push the aside the Bedouin, who are descendants of Arab tribes that once roamed the Negev.

"Israeli policies have created a situation whereby tens of thousands of Bedouin citizens in the Negev have little or no alternative but to live in ramshackle villages and build illegally in order to meet their most basic shelter needs," the report says.

Since Israel was founded nearly 60 years ago, its leaders have been wrestling with what to do with its small Bedouin minority, now climbing above 160,000.

Israel has pushed about half the Bedouin into sterile, depressed new desert towns, demolished thousands of illegal shanties and transformed their sheep-grazing pastures into dangerous military zones.

About 80,000 Bedouin living in more than three dozen unauthorized shantytowns and villages refuse to move, even though they receive no electricity or water from Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has set up a commission to come up with innovative ways to handle the holdouts.

"The government of Israel understands that it needs to solve the problem of the Bedouin," said Yehuda Bachar, the director general of a newly established government department for Bedouin affairs. "If it is not solved now, it will not be solved for many years."

The intent behind the plans is clear: Israeli leaders want to move the Arab residents to make way for Jewish developments.

The Israeli government is looking to spend $3.6 billion over the next seven years to lure more Jewish residents to the Negev, a triangular desert that makes up more than half of the nation's land.

"The only chance for the development of the Negev is that we bring more Jews," said Shmuel Rifman, the mayor of the local Ramat Negev Regional Council, who supports a trickle-down theory when it comes to the Bedouin.

I'm in Paris this week to surprise my good friend for his birthday and see others whom I've been missing lately,  the city herself my friend's unborn baby girl. I was glad to see that while I was going to be here, I could see Amos Oz and David Grossman at the Centre Pompidou.

It wasn't until I arrived that I realized that the reason Grossman and Oz were in Paris in the first place was the Salon du Livre and the fact that this year, Israel was showcased as the guest of honor. I then found out from some Franco-Algerian friends, who accompanied me to the Pompidou event, that there had been a bomb threat and a boycott. (For a good summary in English of the whole thing, check out Lauren Elkin's account.)

The Oz and Grossman event wasn't at all what I was expecting. I knew that it was ostensibly about their literature but assumed that since both authors are politically active, there would be a fair amount of politics involved also. I was looking forward to this, not least because the only books I've read by either author are political non-fiction. There was a fog of politics that floated above the evening but never settled. Since there was no opportunity for questions, the young swooning moderator, who sounded more like a groupie than a literary critic or writer, and the writers themselves were able to keep to the topic of writing and literature.

One effect of this was that the Holocaust was very much present in the talk, but the Palestinians almost not at all. This was a little disappointing to me, because it's hard for me to imagine Palestinian writing (and this may be the fault of wonderful Mourid Barghouti and Mahmoud Darwish) without a heavy Israeli presence. Also, Oz and Grossman seemed very distant and foreign to me, because of the linguistic barrier. For some reason, I was expecting them to speak in English, but instead they spoke in Hebrew, which was translated into French by one of the best interpreters I've had the pleasure of listening to. His voice was soft and exact, and I felt cradled by his cadence. David Grossman was fairly spontaneous but sometimes a little rambling, whereas Oz spoke like a robot but had more interesting things to say. (It's only fair to mention that a lot of Oz's discourse was canned, as I'd already read close to a third of it in various of his books, interviews and articles.)

It was interesting for me to see Israel in this light: as a state like another. Because in Lebanon, Israel is not only not like other states, it's violent and dangerous. We're waiting for the next war, which will likely be even worse than the last one, so it's difficult to empathize with Israel and its people, even if many of them (like Grossman and Oz) have opinions similar to mine. This reminds me of my trip to the West Bank at the end of the war in 2006. Only rarely did I cross over to Jewish Jerusalem or interact with Israelis. I felt shaken by the bombing of Lebanon and almost afraid to see where those bombs were coming from. I now regret not exploring Tel Aviv or visiting Yad Vashem, which I've wanted to see for a long time. But July 2006 was not the time for that kind of a trip; hopefully I'll have another occasion to go in the not-so-distant future. Or even better, perhaps one day I'll be able to make the short drive to the beach in Tel Aviv from Beirut.

Otherwise, and as per usual, I've taken advantage of Paris to do some book shopping. It seems that Avraham Burg's book, which won't be out in English until October, has been released in French already. I'd like to be able to share it with my Anglophone friends in Beirut, but when I saw it used at Gilbert Joseph, I couldn't pass it up. Otherwise, I also found a used copy of Avi Shlaim's The Iron Wall at my favorite English book store here. Other, non-Israel-related, books include Nerval's Voyage en Orient, Paul Morand's New York (a present from Sebastien) and George Corm's L'Europe et l'Orient. I won't be happy until I find used copies of Samir Kassir's Histoire de Beyrouth and Jean Hatzfeld's Stratégie des Antilopes.

Jeffrey Goldberg has a dishonest account of Tom Segev's review of a book on Haj Amin al-Husseini up. He makes it sound like Segev is only down on the book because it emphasizes Arab extremism, whereas his problems with the book are much more substantial:

The lack of solid evidence is the main problem throughout the book. While the authors do cite prominent scholars like Martin Gilbert, Bernard Wasserstein and Rashid Khalidi, some of the most outrageous quotations come from quite arguable sources. Hitler’s alleged and highly unlikely pledge to Husseini (“The Jews are yours”) is based on a passage in the mufti’s own memoirs. But there is an official German record of his meeting with Hitler that contains no such statement. In fact the mufti did not achieve his major goal: Hitler refused to sign a public statement of support for him.

Then Goldberg makes it sound like Segev is comparing Jewish extremism in mandate Palestine with Husseini's support of Nazi Germany:

Segev compares the Mufti's behavior to that of Yitzhak Shamir, the former prime minister of Israel who was once a terrorist with the Stern Gang, and he criticizes the authors for neglecting to mention Jewish extremism in the time of the Mufti. I'm not sure why a book about pro-Nazi sympathies among certain Arabs need include this...

Actually, what Segev does is remind us, as we can read in his excellent book The Seventh Million that Husseini was not the only anti-British nationalist to make overtures to Nazi Germany for the purpose of throwing off the yoke of British imperialism:

The mufti’s support for Nazi Germany definitely demonstrated the evils of extremist nationalism. However, the Arabs were not the only chauvinists in Palestine looking to make a deal with the Nazis. At the end of 1940 and again at the end of 1941, a small Zionist terrorist organization known as the Stern Gang made contact with Nazi representatives in Beirut, seeking support for its struggle against the British. One of the Sternists, in a British jail at the time, was Yitzhak Shamir, a future Israeli prime minister. The authors fail to mention this episode.

So while it's true that a book on Arabs seeking German support against the British and the Jewish colonialism needn't mention the terrorism of the Irgun or the Stern Gang, it seems dishonest not to include the fact that some of Husseini's local Jewish enemies also sought the support of Nazi Germany.

But that's the whole problem here. The importance accorded to Husseini is meant to conflate anti-Zionism and Arabs with anti-Semitism and Nazis. During World War II, there were many subjects of British imperialism from Ireland to Egypt and beyond who saw the time as ripe to back another European power, not because they were Nazis or anti-Semites, but because they were anti-British and saw Germany as means to the end of breaking British rule over their lands.

We've seen politically expedient but strange bedfellows time and time again, like how many exiled Iraqis supported an American invasion -- not because they were particularly pro-American, but rather because they were anti-Saddam. To argue that the the two are necessarily the same is either obtuse or dishonest.

For reasons I won't go into, I was at the American embassy a couple of times earlier this week. Draconian security measures notwithstanding (you're not allowed to bring a phone or bag onto the premises), the place seemed more Lebanese than American, with Lebanese security guards, Lebanese employees and Lebanese-Americans queued up in the consular section.

Another touch was a world map in the consular section. It is a map with political boundaries, and while I was in the consular waiting room, I took a look at it while trying to recover from the disgusting humidity that all of Beirut's been suffering from this summer. The map is in Arabic, and like most maps in the region, Israel is nowhere to be found. Instead, the map shows Palestine. This wouldn't be surprising, except that it's in the American embassy.

I'm about to leave for a five-week trip seeing East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda), but I wanted to post a link to an execrable op-ed about learning Arabic in the Washington Post by Joel Pollak.

I sent out a hasty letter to the editor, which reads as follows:

Joel Pollak complains that there isn’t enough of an Israeli perspective in Arabic language classes. He then goes on to describe “West Beirut,” a gem of Lebanese cinema that recounts a love story between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl, as a film that casts Christians as “the prime bad guys in Lebanon’s civil war.” Obviously Pollak’s Arabic has not progressed far enough to have understood the movie.

He then assures us that he refused to talk about Abdel Nassar in class. In French courses, one learns about Napoleon as a grand statesman, not a brutal imperial dictator. Likewise in Arabic classes, as well as in much of the third world, Nasser was seen as a hero.

One of the points of language courses is to better understand the culture of the speakers of that language. Since Pollak would obviously prefer to learn about Israeli and Jewish history, one can only assume that mistakenly signed up for Arabic lessons when he was actually looking to learn Hebrew.

In other news, there's this nasty piece calling for collective punishment. I'd have more to say about this last one, except that I'm in a hurry.

I don't know what the internet situation is going to be like in any of the places where I'll be over the next month or so, but I can't imagine that posting will be any slower than it has been in the last month or two. Which means that I'll do my best to step it up considerably.

The US government has had to rescind the Fulbright awards for the 7 students in Gaza who won the awards, because Israel won't let them leave the territory:

The American State Department has withdrawn all Fulbright grants to Palestinian students in Gaza hoping to pursue advanced degrees at American institutions this fall because Israel has not granted them permission to leave.

...The study grants notwithstanding, the Israeli officials argued that the policy of isolating Gaza was working, that Palestinians here were starting to lose faith in Hamas's ability to rule because of the hardships of life.

..."We are fighting the regime in Gaza that does its utmost to kill our citizens and destroy our schools and our colleges," said Yuval Steinitz, a lawmaker from the opposition Likud Party. "So I don’t think we should allow students from Gaza to go anywhere. Gaza is under siege, and rightly so, and it is up to the Gazans to change the regime or its behavior."

Hadeel Abukwaik, a 23-year-old engineering software instructor in Gaza, had hoped to do graduate work in the United States this fall on the Fulbright that she thought was hers. She had stayed in Gaza this past winter when its metal border fence was destroyed and tens of thousands of Gazans poured into Egypt, including her sister, because the agency administering the Fulbright told her she would get the grant only if she stayed put. She lives alone in Gaza where she was sent to study because the cost is low; her parents, Palestinian refugees, live in Dubai.

"I stayed to get my scholarship," she said. "Now I am desperate."

Now I'm no expert on Islamic militancy, but I'm pretty sure that desperation isn't exactly the quickest route to winning hearts and minds.

Another thing that's been bothering me is the fact that Mostaqbal's media outlets were shut down. I won't pretend that part of me doesn't feel a little tinge of delight at the idea of the Mostaqbal thugs getting some comeuppance. But punishing neighborhood thugs who fancy themselves militiamen is one thing, while shutting down media outlets is another. During the 2006 war, Hezbollah was (rightfully, to my mind) outraged by Israel's targeting of their television station, al-Manar. So why is it acceptable to have shut down Future TV?

I'm watching Kalam an-Nass right now, while the head of Future TV is being interviewed. According to him, a Lebanese soldier, in uniform, told them that they had to open the gates or else they'd be killed by Hezbollah militiamen. This is, of course, disconcerting on several levels. First of all, this would mean that a member of the ostensibly neutral Lebanese Army would have helped Hezbollah shut down the media outlet of a competing political party. But regardless of whether or not a soldier helped Hezbollah shut the station down, the latter certainly did disconnect Future TV. This is scandalous, and Hezbollah should be ashamed of itself.

A woman presenter, whose name I can't recall, just came on and gave Hezbollah a piece of her mind. She said that she's spent the last year and a half doing reports on the lot of the people of the south and how they've suffered during the war of 2006 and after. Then she explained how al-Manar reported that the staff of Future TV "fled" the premises, like thieves or criminals, when in fact they were told to leave if they didn't want to die. She said that forgetting the parties and forgetting politics, this kind of treatment and the occupation of Beirut has made regular people, people like her, hate Hezbollah. She said that after people like her who did their best to take in refugees after the war in 2006 are treated like this and accused of being traitors, Hezbollah should be ashamed of itself. Of course a presenter on Future TV isn't exactly representative of the man on the street, but her point is well taken.

I can say, however, that the opposition has lost the sympathy of people who have supported the principles of the resistance, even if they had really ambivalent feelings about the religious and authoritarian form it's taken. And the traitor rhetoric is really hurtful and disgusting to people who support resistance against Israel but don't want to live in a country where the interests of the resistance trump those of the state. Calling people traitors like this smacks of Bush's rhetoric in the "war on terror," where you're either "with us or against us," and doesn't sit well with many Lebanese.

I never thought I'd say this, but there was part of Samir Geagea's speech this afternoon that I agree with. He said that the use of Hezbollah's weapons has delegitimized their very existence. I tend to agree with this idea, because Hezbollah has decided to use its weapons in an internal dispute between Lebanese actors. (Here, it's important to remember that the myth that Hezbollah has never been part of inter-Lebanese fighting fails to include when Amal and Hezbollah fought each the during the civil war.) What has happened is that the March 14 government made a decision that Hezbollah disagreed with, and in reaction to this, they took up arms and occupied half of Beirut. This means that the weapons whose sole purpose is supposed to deter Israeli aggression and defend Lebanon has been used as a blunt political tool to try to force the government to resign, or at the very least, send it a far-from-subtle message. 

The line being taken by the opposition now (at least as far as the talking heads of al-Manar are concerned) is that Hezbollah has helped the state put down militias (namely Mustaqbal, or the Future movement). This position fails to take into consideration, for example, the fact that there are still armed militia members of Amal and the Syrian Social Nationalist Party walking around West Beirut.

Either armed militias are illegal or they aren't. What's happened is that the Army seems to have passively taken the side of Hezbollah, which means that their legitimacy will be decreased or destroyed in the eyes of other Lebanese communities, especially the Sunnis in Saida and Tripoli. It has also sent the message that the most effective political tool is military force. I imagine, then, that the Sunnis in Saida and Tripoli, the pro-government Christians and the Druze loyal to Walid Jumblatt have likely decided that they can no longer count on the Army to be an impartial arbiter for the state. This will surely lead to increased militia training and arming. It wouldn't surprise me if the lesson that the Lebanese Forces and the PSP have taken from the defeat of Mustaqbal (probably the weakest of the pro-government parties/militias, if one of the nastier ones on a local neighborhood level) is that they should be prepared for more of the same in the not-so-distant future.

So where does this leave us? Despite rumors earlier today, it doesn't look like Saniora, or anyone else, will resign from the government. So what? There's still no president, and the fundamental dysfunction of the Lebanese state has only been highlighted, not solved. If this all ends with Hezbollah and its allied militias pulling back to their territory in the next day or so, leaving a humiliating message for the other parties and their militias, we'll be back to where we started. Back to where we started, except a big part of the population will have lost faith in the idea that Hezbollah and its allies can be dealt with within the norms of a democratic system.

Since there is no way that any of these groups can compete with Hezbollah's military forces, look for them to embrace proxies. This might include the Sunnis accepting al-Qaeda militants and other groups hoping for more Israeli intervention. I'm sure that after the disaster that was the war in 2006, the Israeli establishment wouldn't mind taking advantage of the situation for  rematch. In any case, what this situation hasn't done is foster an atmosphere where either side feels like it can compromise. If anything, this whole situation has pushed March 14 further into its corner and inflated the arrogance and confidence of Hezbollah and its allies in the country and abroad. Neither of which bodes well for peace or stability in Lebanon.

Amin Gemayel, whom I can't stand, called Hezbollah's victory a Pyrrhic one (actually, he said it in French, the snooty bastard). I tend to think that, on a national level and in the long term, he's probably right. In any case, it's enough to turn some Lebanese into bitter Mercutios.

I'm a little late for Labor Day, but Human Rights Watch here in Lebanon has begun an awareness campaign for rights of domestic workers entitled Put Yourself in Her Shoes:

The condition of (predominantly women) domestic workers in the Middle East is atrocious. Apparently, the problem is as bad in Israel as it is in Lebanon and even worse in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. According to HRW:

The most common complaints made by domestic workers to embassies and nongovernmental organizations include non-payment or delayed payment of their wages, forced confinement to the workplace, no time off, and verbal, as well as physical, abuse. According to a 2006 survey conducted by Dr. Ray Jureidini of 600 migrant domestic workers, 56 percent said they work more than 12 hours a day and 34 percent have no regular time off. In some cases, workers have died while attempting to escape these conditions, some by jumping from balconies.

...The Lebanese authorities have failed to curb abuses committed by employers and agencies. Lebanese labor laws specifically exclude domestic workers from rights guaranteed to other workers, such as a weekly day of rest, limits on work hours, paid holidays, and workers’ compensation. Immigration sponsorship laws restrict domestic workers’ ability to change employers, even in cases of abuse. An official steering committee created in early 2006 and led by the Ministry of Labor to improve the legal situation of migrant workers in Lebanon has yet to deliver any concrete reforms. This includes a long-discussed standard contract to outline minimum standards for domestic workers’ employment.  

Human Rights Watch called upon the Ministry of Labor and other relevant authorities to amend the labor law to extend equal protection for domestic workers and to sign and ratify the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families. 

 

A few years ago, the Times did a story about Sri Lankan women who go to the Middle East to work as domestic servants.  This picture is of a 20-year-old woman named Thangarasa Jeyanthi who was severely abused in Lebanon. In Lebanese Arabic, the common word for a domestic worker is "Sri Lankan." At one point, I remember hearing a joke about an NGO that was fostering multiculturalism by doing presentations with people from all over world invited to introduce themselves to the audience. The Egyptian man comes and says he works as a concierge. The Syrian says that he's a field hand. And then comes the Ethiopian who introduces herself but forgets to say what her profession is. When reminded that everyone has to say what they do, she replies, "I'm a Sri Lankan."

In the case of Sri Lankan women, the conditions that they live and work in criminally miserable, and their government is actually complicit. There are training programs that teach the women some Arabic and how to do what is expected of them without receiving the beatings that are so common. The government encourages women to go to the Middle East, they provide remittances that help keep the Sri Lankan economy afloat.

An Ethiopian friend of mine here used to work for a big hotel in town, but she wasn't allowed to be hired directly even though she has all of her papers in order. The hotel insists on going through a middle man, who garnishes half of the wages of the foreign women working at the hotel. A salary of $450 is reasonable (and more than twice the pitiful minimum wage), but when some sleazy profiteer gets to pocket half of your salary, it's difficult to survive, especially with the increasing price of living (many food items have nearly doubled in price in the last 9 months).

In contrast with Colombo's policy of encouraging the migration, Ethiopia's government has taken the decision to ban its citizens from coming to Lebanon in search of employment:

ADDIS ABABA: On the occasion of Labor Day, Ethiopia has officially banned its citizens from traveling to Beirut in search of jobs, the African country's Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs has disclosed. Ethiopia passed the bill after it probed the human right violations and domestic violence Ethiopian migrants face behind closed doors in Beirut while employed as maids.

"Suspending work travel to Beirut was the only solution to minimizing the human rights abuses and dangers facing our citizens," said Zenebu Tadesse, deputy minister of state for labor and social affairs.

During the past few years, a number of Ethiopians have died in Lebanon in questionable circumstances.

According to a report published by Ethiopia's official news agency, past human right records show that 67 Ethiopian women have died between 1997 and 1999 alone while working in Beirut.

The ministry said it would take strong action against any employment agency trying to send workers directly to Beirut or through a third country.

So for Labor Day this year, I'd like to remind everyone that Sri Lankan is a nationality, not a profession. And I'd like to remind the Lebanese, many of whom go off to Europe, North America and the Gulf in search of work, that they should have a little solidarity with domestic workers here who are hoping to make so money to create a better life for themselves. As my friend Nadim from HRW says about their media campaign: "Many Lebanese themselves have been forced by wars and hardships to emigrate looking for a better life. We hope that they will see the parallels with the experience of these migrants that came from far away to care for Lebanese families."

(Via my friend A) Carter to be tried for peace crimes, according to The Onion:

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND—An international peace-crimes tribunal commenced legal proceedings against former U.S. President Jimmy Carter for alleged crimes against inhumanity Monday.

"Jimmy Carter's political career includes a laundry list of anti-war-making offenses," said chief prosecutor Charles B. Simmons. "Carter's record of benevolence, diplomacy, and respect for human life is unrivaled in recent geopolitical history. For millions, the very sight of his face evokes memories of his administration's reign of tolerance."

I knew it was only a matter of time before the international community succeeded in bringing his gentle reign of peace-mongering to an end!

The previous post got me to wondering how often the word Nakba had been used in American newspapers and when, so I did a Lexis Nexis search, which showed that the Times has only printed the word in 34 articles, the first of which appeared in 1998 in an article about Israel's 50th anniversary. A double check of the NYT online archives, however, showed two other articles that didn't appear in the Lexis Nexis search (they seem to only have abstracts for pre-1981 articles): one from 1973 on Sadat and another from 1970 on occupied Ramallah.

Here's a quickly drawn up chart that tracks the use of the word in coverage by the New York Times:

 

This shows that up until the 50th anniversary of the Nakba, the Times had referred to it but twice. I have a feeling that before the year is over, 2008 will beat out 2007 for the number of times the term is employed.

It's unclear to me what exactly has caused the general tide of public opinion to start moving (slowly but surely) away from Israeli occupation in the US. (Or perhaps I'm being optimistic and am projecting?) But I get the feeling that there's a  shift happening in American public opinion that will hopefully be reflected by more fair-minded media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

I've been surprised in the last few weeks to see how much attention the Nakba is getting during the run up to the 60th anniversary of the catastrophe and the founding of the Jewish state. While interpretations differ, it has at least been getting mentions in publications like The New Yorker and the New York Times.

That said, I knew it was only a matter of time before something really reactionary and stupid came out in a magazine like Commentary. Well, Efraim Karsh offers up exactly what we needed in his "True Story" of what happened in 1948. Following his recent comments on the "Jordanian option," I recently marveled how someone who is ostensibly a scholar of the region could be so out of touch with Arabs and the Arab political scene, but this latest piece takes the proverbial cake.

According to Karsh, before 1948, the Palestinians never had any problem with the idea of becoming a minority in their own land and otherwise would have been perfectly happy living as a second class majority in a Jewish state. In fact, Zionists wanted nothing more than all Arabs to stay in their homes and live happily ever after in a pastoral paradise. Unfortunately, the evil Jew-hating "Arab leaders" had to dash all these wonderful hopes and spur the Palestinians to war, despite the fact that they wanted nothing more than to live in a Jewish state. Why even Vladimir Jabotinsky wanted nothing more than peaceful Arab-Jewish coexistence: According to Karsh:

The simple fact is that the Zionist movement had always been amenable to the existence in the future Jewish state of a substantial Arab minority that would participate on an equal footing “throughout all sectors of the country’s public life.” The words are those of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founding father of the branch of Zionism that was the forebear of today’s Likud party. In a famous 1923 article, Jabotinsky voiced his readiness “to take an oath binding ourselves and our descendants that we shall never do anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try to eject anyone.”

Eleven years later, Jabotinsky presided over the drafting of a constitution for Jewish Palestine. According to its provisions, Arabs and Jews were to share both the prerogatives and the duties of statehood, including most notably military and civil service. Hebrew and Arabic were to enjoy the same legal standing, and “in every cabinet where the prime minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab and vice-versa.”

It just so happens that this is the same Jabotinsky who thought that the Jewish state should encompass both sides of the Jordan and who in his famous essay, "The Iron Wall," had this to say:

If [the reader] should attempt to seek but one instance of a country settled with the consent of those born there he will not succeed. The inhabitants (no matter whether they are civilized or savages) have always put up a stubborn fight.

...Any native people -- its all the same whether they are civilized or savage -- views their country as their national home, of which they will  always be the complete masters. They will not voluntarily allow, not only a new master, but even a new partner. And so it is for the Arabs. Compromisers in our midst attempt to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked by a softened formulation of our goals, or a tribe of money grubbers who will abandon their birth right to Palestine for cultural and economic gains. I flatly reject this assessment of the Palestinian Arabs. Culturally they are 500 years behind us, spiritually they do not have our endurance or our strength of will, but this exhausts all of the internal differences. We can talk as much as we want about our good intentions; but they understand as well as we what is not good for them. They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie. To think that the Arabs will voluntarily consent to the realization of Zionism in return for the cultural and economic benefits we can bestow on them is infantile. This childish fantasy of our “Arabo-philes” comes from some kind of contempt for the Arab people, of some kind of unfounded view of this race as a rabble ready to be bribed in order to sell out their homeland for a railroad network.

He goes on to say that no voluntary agreement with the Arabs is possible:

Thus we conclude that we cannot promise anything to the Arabs of the Land of Israel or the Arab countries. Their voluntary agreement is out of the question. Hence those who hold that an agreement with the natives is an essential condition for Zionism can now say “no” and depart from Zionism. Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population -- an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.

...All this does not mean that any kind of agreement is impossible, only a voluntary agreement is impossible. As long as there is a spark of hope that they can get rid of us, they will not sell these hopes, not for any kind of sweet words or tasty morsels, because they are not a rabble but a nation, perhaps somewhat tattered, but still living. A living people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions only when there is no hope left. Only when not a single breach is visible in the iron wall, only then do extreme groups lose their sway, and influence transfers to moderate groups. Only then would these moderate groups come to us with proposals for mutual concessions. And only then will moderates offer suggestions for compromise on practical questions like a guarantee against expulsion, or equality and national autonomy.

I am optimistic that they will indeed be granted satisfactory assurances and that both peoples, like good neighbors, can then live in peace. But the only path to such an agreement is the iron wall, that is to say the strengthening in Palestine of a government without any kind of Arab influence, that is to say one against which the Arabs will fight. In other words, for us the only path to an agreement in the future is an absolute refusal of any attempts at an agreement now.

This is what Jabotinsky thought of the Arabs, not just in Palestine but in Jordan as well. To the consternation of modern day Zionists, he saw the Zionist state in explicitly colonial terms, equating it with other European colonial endeavors.  

Now I've got a certain respect for Zionists like Jabotinsky who call a spade a spade. What I don't appreciate are scholars like Karsh who insist on whitewashing the creation of Israel to absolve the state of any wrong-doing. In his world, the Yishuv did nothing wrong; all blame for the problems of Arabs can be squarely placed at the feet of "Arab leaders." He ignores the much more frank assertions of the Zionist leaders themselves, like Ben-Gurion who once asked:

Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country.

In any case, Karsh disagrees with the scholarship done by Israeli "new historians" like Pappe, Morris and Shlaim, who all show that the old myths of Palestinians leaving their homes because of radio broadcasts sent out by their leaders are conveniently simplistic and just not true. While there is some disagreement as to whether the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was pre-planned and deliberate, ad-hoc and hasty or unintentional but finally welcome, the issue is ultimately beside the point when it comes to Palestinians' right of return. Either you believe that one has the unalienable right to leave one's country and return, or you don't.

I've long thought that morally and politically, it would be a great move if the Lebanese government were to invite Lebanese Jews who left during the civil war to Europe and America to come back. And if Beirut were really clever, it would appoint a Lebanese Jew to a ministerial position or as an ambassador to the UN or the US. This would help turn the Lebanese-Israeli conflict into a national one instead of a religious one. In 2006, it would have been a tremendous PR move to have a Jewish minister criticizing the systematic destruction of the Lebanese infrastructure.

In this context, Bahrain has made a really smart move:

A Jewish woman, Huda Ezra Ebrahim Nonoo, is set to become Bahrain's ambassador to Washington, sources close to diplomats told Gulf News on Thursday.

"Huda is Bahrain's nominee for the post and this is of course very good news for Bahrain's deep-rooted values of tolerance and openness," Faisal Fouladh, a Shura Council representative, and Western diplomats said.

Huda, a businesswoman, was the first Jewish woman to sit in the Shura Council, the 40-member upper house of the bicameral legislature, replacing her uncle. A Christian woman, Alice Samaan, also sits on the council which has 11 women, compared with only one woman MP, Lateefa Al Gaood, in the 40-member lower house.

(Via TPM) Ha'aretz reports Benjamin Netanyahu, hawkish Israeli "ally" of the US, as saying that 9/11 was good for Israel:

"We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq," Ma'ariv quoted the former prime minister as saying. He reportedly added that these events "swung American public opinion in our favor."

This actually mirrors comments made by Netanyahu on the day of the attacks:

Asked tonight what the attack meant for relations between the United States and Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister, replied, ''It's very good.'' Then he edited himself: ''Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.'' He predicted that the attack would ''strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we've experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.''

With friends like these, right?

I'm not generally fond of Jeffery Goldberg's work when it comes to the Middle East, so I was pretty skeptical about the Atlantic's big Israel story this week. (I haven't read it yet, so I'll reserve judgment until then.)  One thing that's very interesting though, is that Goldman has dug up some old pieces on Palestine and Zionism that appeared in the Atlantic.

So far, I've only had the time to read William Ernest Hocking's 1930 piece, Palestine: An Impasse? You can tell that these old pieces have been scanned, because there are a few mistakes with indentations, quotes and even a couple of letters ('d' for 'cl'), but this article really warrants being read. Here are a couple of meaty extracts to whet your appetite:

If we in America, Jews and Gentiles, could see things as they are in Palestine, we should recognize as axiomatic three things: (1) That nothing like the full plan of Zionism can be realized without political pressure backed by military force; (2) that such pressure and force imply an injustice which is inconsistent with the ethical sense of Zionism, undermining both its sincerity and its claim; (3) that every increase of pressure now meets with increasingly determined Arab resistance, within and beyond Palestine. Hence the question which political Zionism must answer is whether or not it proposes to-day, as in ancient times, to assert its place in Palestine by aid of the sword.

To many Arabs, the Balfour Declaration, in spite of its careful safeguarding of all existing civil and religious rights, is understood as obliging Great Britain to 'do something' for the Jews. Many Zionists have the same conception. And the Arab mind inquires: What can Great Britain now do for Zionism which is not against the Arabs? What favor can it show which is not favoritism? If the question is capable of an answer, it needs to be a dear answer, plainly spoken. Great Britain is serving Zionism. It is doing so not only by maintaining security and order in the land (with some lapses), but by furnishing the administrative staff without which no such settlement would have been possible, and by creating new opportunities. Under the older Ottoman regime, foreign Jews were at a disadvantage: they—like other foreigners—could acquire land only in the name of Ottoman subjects. These disabilities are now removed; as is often said, Jews are now in Palestine by right, not on sufferance. Why press for more than this equitable opening, when more means a reversed injustice? The rural and industrial centres already founded need no more than an equal legal status for their normal peaceful development. The great Hebrew University on Mount Scopus needs no more than this on the legal side to realize its destiny. And this university, be it said, under the prophetic leadership of Dr. Judah Magnes, is the symbol of all that is best in Zionism. For the true and attainable Zion is the Zion of culture and faith, not the Zion of political nationalism.

It is indeed a bitter thing to the sincere Zionist that his ideal community cannot have in that unique spot of earth its perfect body as well as its perfect soul. What I have to say, I say with deep personal regret. For I went to Palestine seized with the idea of Zionism and warmed by the ardor of Jewish friends to whom this vision is the breath of life, prepared to believe all things possible. I came away saddened, seeing that to strive for the perfect body, as things now are, can only mean the loss of soul and body alike. To pursue any campaign for a more vigorous fulfillment of 'the British promise,' to force cantonization on Palestine and so to repeat the standing grievance of divided Syria, to press for any further favor of the state, is to work blindly toward another bloody struggle involving first the new settlements, then Great Britain, then no one knows what wider area. In this we have been assuming that on the issue of Jewish dominance the Arab mind is irreconcilable. Is this true?

The answer lies partly in the fact that for the Arab, whose local attachments are peculiarly strong, Palestine, beside being his home, is also a holy land. It lies partly in the fact that to his mind Palestine is not a separate province: it is an integral part of Syria, with Damascus as its natural trading and cultural capital, while Syria is an integral part of greater Arabia. In his dream of a free Arab empire, Damascus may have served as capital for the whole; or Syria, together with Palestine, may have constituted an autonomous province. In any case, the new Arabia through Palestine reached the western sea; while Palestine as a part of Syria became a partner in that new and proud political enterprise. The expulsion of Feisal from Damascus by the French was a cruel mutilation of this dream. The mandate for Palestine excludes it from the imagined kingdom and shuts that kingdom from the Mediterranean. Even so, political arrangements may be unmade. But village settlements are a more final obstacle—they build a human barrier and put an end to hope. The progress of Zionist colonization thus becomes for the Arab national outlook a culminating stroke in a series of breaches of faith.

...The two enemies of peace in the Holy Land are fanaticism and fear. The movement of the modern spirit within all creeds is having for one of its beneficent effects the gradual melting of fanaticism without argument. Fixed and antagonistic dogmas are transforming themselves into alternative sets of symbols which can dwell together. But fanaticism is kept alive and sharpened by fear; clashes at the Wailing Wall are symptoms of political rather than religious apprehension. These fears of displacement, of national thwarting, must be put to rest; and they can only be quieted by unequivocal public commitments, renouncing the intention to dominate and to exclude. If there is to be peace within the gates of Jerusalem, the first condition, as I see it, is that Zionism publicly disavow its unholy alliance with Western military power, and therewith (following the lead of a recent resolution within the Jewish Agency) its purpose to dominate in Palestine.

Hocking's solution is finally a binational, or more accurately a multi-religious, state under the mandate of Britain, a solution that is obviously out the question as far as British rule is concerned. Nonetheless, he brings up a fundamental conflict between the Zionist body and the Zionist soul, the latter being crushed by what it would take (has taken) to create a Jewish state -- something Avraham Burg's new book is about.

I'm a little uneasy with the idea he has of keeping Palestine technologically "backward" so as to keep Palestine as a multi-religious spiritual land above all else. But that's a small detail in an otherwise insightful analysis of the situation. To my mind, he really hits the nail on the head when he points out the violent and unjust conditions that would be necessary to create a Jewish majority in Palestine.

Goldberg, for his part claims that Hocking is arguing for "an exclusive Arab right to the territory of Palestine," which is silly when you read the piece. What he does do is analyze the Jewish right to Palestine:

This claim of right, based on a mission which it is felt a religious disloyalty to compromise, cannot be shaken in the Jewish mind by analogies from history or international law. To urge that the same reasoning which leads the Jew to claim Palestine after eighteen hundred years would give the Arab a right to Spain after seven hundred years is quite sound so far as it appeals to the ordinary flux of historic conquest and possession; but it wholly misses the sense of this 'organic indissoluble connection,' this right of destiny. Such a right has the force of a religious conviction for those who have that vision; it has the weakness of subjectivism for those who do not share it.

He, correctly, I think, calls the Jewish right to Palestine a subjective one for those who do not believe in God's covenant with the Jewish people and an ineluctable truth for those who do.

On a completely different note, I know that this blog has been focusing on Israel a lot lately. This reminds me of a woman whom I used to date who was doing her doctoral thesis on Jewish communities in the Middle East. She told me that if I was going to be with her, I'd have to deal with the three following things: "1. I am insanely jealous; 2. I smoke in bed; and 3. I'm obsessed with the Jews."

So at the risk of sounding like I'm obsessed with Israel, I'd just like to say in my defense that with the upcoming 60th anniversary of Israel's independence and the Nakba, there's plenty of material to comment on these days.

UPDATE: Interestingly enough, I just looked at my stat log, and Israel is where a good part of my hits come from, after the US, France and Lebanon. So shalom, dear readers, and happy passover!

When I read this report in Ha'aretz, it was hard for me to believe what I was reading:

Driving along the road from Be'er Sheva to Arad, shortly before the turn toward Darijat, you can see the unrecognized Bedouin village that was home to Manhash al-Baniyat, the Israeli soldier who was killed yesterday in a clash with Palestinian gunmen near the Gaza Strip border, across from Kibbutz Be'eri.

In order to reach the village, you have to travel for several hundred meters along a dirt path, until you come to a few houses, built close together. One of these is the house Manhash built for himself in preparation for his marriage, next month. Since building permits are not granted to Bedouin, he had no choice but to build the house illegally. A demolition order has already been issued. The only water pipe leading to the village is also disconnected. Yesterday, a mourners' tent was added to the already harsh landscape, erected by the army. Now that the army's there, at least there's water, someone remarked half-jokingly.

There are a lot of Israelis or supporters of Israel who say that since Palestinians with Israeli citizenship aren't treated as badly as those in the occupied territories, Israel couldn't possibly be an apartheid state. If that's the case, then I'm not sure how we account for al-Baniyat, who died for the state that's bulldozing his home. His sister puts it well when she says, "Sometimes you feel like belonging to the state, but sometimes you get fed up because you build a house and they come and destroy it."

It just so happens that I read a piece by Roger Cohen today that mentions a video of a black woman during the civil rights movement who sums up the situation perfectly: "If we can’t live in our country and be accepted as free citizens and human beings, then something’s the matter with something — and it isn’t me."

In case you haven't heard, there's a new Israel lobby in town. It's called J-Street and is supposed to be a progressive alternative to the hawkish pro-Likud lobby that is AIPAC et al. Spencer Ackerman has a piece about how the new group wants to reframe the Israel debate:

[Co-founder Daniel] Levy, though a long-time peace negotiator, is eager to debate what it means to be pro-Israel, and draws a comparison between AIPAC and the hard-liners who ended up compromising the Jewish future millennia ago. "We'll say, 'Zealots like you led to the destruction of previous Jewish commonwealths,'" Levy said. "We're not going to be intimidated."

J-Street gives us some examples of the current militant rhetoric surrounding Israel these days and asks if that's what it truly means to be pro-Israel and, more to the point, if these voices truly speak for American Jews:


Ezra Klein weighs in to talk about his experience of being alienated at his synagogue:

I can't recall now if it was the Jenin incursions or the riots at the Temple Mount that set my rabbi off. Or perhaps he was just enraged by one of the obscure convulsions of violence that occur with such regularity as to virtually mark time in the Middle East. What punctures the haze of memory is when he transitioned from sports to politics, telling the assembled alumni that the Jews would be within their rights to forcibly deport and displace the entire Palestinian population. I objected, and we began shouting at each other as my classmates looked on in annoyance. I stormed from the room and it was the last time I set foot in that temple. In my temple.

He later goes on to talk about the link between Judaism and human rights and how, to his mind, this is "no time for silence."

On the other side of the aisle, of course, things are different. In truly predictable style, our favorite philistine Noah Pollak (who once visited "Upper Galilee") is already slamming J-Street. It seems that a pro-peace lobby is just too much to stomach for Pollak, so he makes a big deal of the fact that Avraham Burg is "near the top of its list of [Israeli] supporters." (Note to Pollak, when a list is in alphabetical order, people whose names begin with the letter B will usually be "near the top.") He paints Burg as some sort of a radical but fails to mention that he used to be the Diaspora advisor to the Israeli Prime Minister, chairman of the Jewish Agency, speaker of the Knesset and chair of the World Zionist Organization.

I'm not going to say that Avraham Burg isn't polemical in Israel; he is, and if you're interested in reading his opinions for yourself, Ha'aretz published a fascinating interview with him. But Pollak prefers to brandish a single controversial supporter of J-Street (without even mentioning his former role in the Israeli establishment) and build a strawman in an attempt to discredit an entire movement rather than, say, actually debate the issue on the merits. But that's par for the course for Pollak and his ilk. And by the by, TNR is already preparing a hit piece against J-Street, according to Ackerman.

To my mind, a new lobby will give progressive Jews a chance to have a voice in the Israel/Palestine debate and have a tangible (although much less so than AIPAC) effect on Middle East policy. It seems that, like the Arabs, there's an aversion to public dissension in the ranks, a certain disgust at airing the community's dirty laundry in public. J-Street might just be overcoming this fear to become an avenue for progressive American Jews to have a say in what's being done and said in their name by the likes of AIPAC and Alan Dershowitz.

UPDATE: In another post attacking J-Street, the hilariously yet unintentionally ironic Pollak has this to say:

It seems to me that the J Streeters are never going to be able to escape the fact that, sitting in Washington, they are advocating policies for Israel that are overwhelmingly unpopular among Israelis — and attempting to brand this paternalism as "pro-Israel."

The Economist has a special report on Israel on the occasion of its 60th year. I've been skipping through the various sections of it, and so far it seems fairly interesting, although nowhere near as interesting as Le Monde Diplo's Manière de voir on the subject: "Histoires d’Israël." The latter is put together by Dominique Vidal and includes articles by Edward Said, Avraham Burg, Tom Segev, Samir Kassir, Shimon Peres, Alain Gresh, Amira Hass, and the list goes on.

I'll be reading the Economist report online and the Manière de voir in print - both, I'll add, at home, because while I'm sometimes fond of creating a stink, I'm not sure I've got the balls to bring a blue and white magazine with Israel printed on the front cover to my local café.

If this Reuters report is accurate, then the Israelis have got some explaining to do:

JERUSALEM, April 14 (Reuters) - Israeli leaders shunned former U.S. President Jimmy Carter during a visit because of his plans to meet Hamas and Israel's secret service declined to assist U.S. agents guarding him, U.S. sources said on Monday.

"They're not getting support from local security," one of the sources said, on condition of anonymity.

An American source described as "unprecedented" the lack of Shin Bet cooperation with the U.S. Secret Service, which protects all current and former U.S. presidents, as well as Israeli leaders when they visit the United States.

...American sources close to the matter said the Shin Bet, which helps protect visiting dignitaries and is overseen by Olmert's office, declined to meet the head of Carter's Secret Service detail or provide his team with assistance as is customary during such visits.

Jimmy Carter has the thankless job of being the best friend Israel's ever had. He reminds me of those public service/beer commercials in which some drunken asshole keeps trying to crawl into his truck but his buddy refuses to give him his keys back: Friends don't let friends drink and drive.

The Israelis are spitting on the man who is responsible for brokering the peace deal with Egypt and is now telling Israel some truths that it doesn't want to hear. I suppose it's normal to expect the Israelis to be unhappy about being told not to drive, but I somehow never expected Israeli foolishness to go so far as to refuse to protect Carter.

What would people say if the secret service refused to protect and Barack Obama refused to meet with Benjamin Netanyahu during a future trip to the US? Or better yet, imagine if the Egyptian or Pakistani governments refused to provide security for a former US president. Americans would be up in arms, and it would be a bipartisan contest to see who could yell the loudest for suspending aid to Cairo or Islamabad. This should be a huge scandal in the US, but if I know America at all, reactions will range from disgusted sighs to total silence to rants that Carter is an antisemite and is getting the treatment he deserves.

Last week McClatchey had an important story about the fate of Bedouins in Israel. There is a lot of talk about how Israel is a beacon for democracy in the Middle East, and often even those who admit that the Jewish state's founding myths are untrue and protest the occupation are hesitant to admit that there are many Israeli citizens who are treated unequally by the law. The Bedouins are a case in point. The government is destroying their homes and trying to remove them from their land to make room for Jewish citizens. In any other context, this would be called ethnic cleansing:

Israeli leaders have a $3.6 billion plan to transform the vast Negev desert into prospering Jewish communities. Finesh and 80,000 other Bedouin say the land is theirs, however.

As Israel presses ahead with the development, a Human Rights Watch report released Monday concludes that it's using "discriminatory, exclusionary and punitive" policies to push the aside the Bedouin, who are descendants of Arab tribes that once roamed the Negev.

"Israeli policies have created a situation whereby tens of thousands of Bedouin citizens in the Negev have little or no alternative but to live in ramshackle villages and build illegally in order to meet their most basic shelter needs," the report says.

Since Israel was founded nearly 60 years ago, its leaders have been wrestling with what to do with its small Bedouin minority, now climbing above 160,000.

Israel has pushed about half the Bedouin into sterile, depressed new desert towns, demolished thousands of illegal shanties and transformed their sheep-grazing pastures into dangerous military zones.

About 80,000 Bedouin living in more than three dozen unauthorized shantytowns and villages refuse to move, even though they receive no electricity or water from Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has set up a commission to come up with innovative ways to handle the holdouts.

"The government of Israel understands that it needs to solve the problem of the Bedouin," said Yehuda Bachar, the director general of a newly established government department for Bedouin affairs. "If it is not solved now, it will not be solved for many years."

The intent behind the plans is clear: Israeli leaders want to move the Arab residents to make way for Jewish developments.

The Israeli government is looking to spend $3.6 billion over the next seven years to lure more Jewish residents to the Negev, a triangular desert that makes up more than half of the nation's land.

"The only chance for the development of the Negev is that we bring more Jews," said Shmuel Rifman, the mayor of the local Ramat Negev Regional Council, who supports a trickle-down theory when it comes to the Bedouin.

I'm in Paris this week to surprise my good friend for his birthday and see others whom I've been missing lately,  the city herself my friend's unborn baby girl. I was glad to see that while I was going to be here, I could see Amos Oz and David Grossman at the Centre Pompidou.

It wasn't until I arrived that I realized that the reason Grossman and Oz were in Paris in the first place was the Salon du Livre and the fact that this year, Israel was showcased as the guest of honor. I then found out from some Franco-Algerian friends, who accompanied me to the Pompidou event, that there had been a bomb threat and a boycott. (For a good summary in English of the whole thing, check out Lauren Elkin's account.)

The Oz and Grossman event wasn't at all what I was expecting. I knew that it was ostensibly about their literature but assumed that since both authors are politically active, there would be a fair amount of politics involved also. I was looking forward to this, not least because the only books I've read by either author are political non-fiction. There was a fog of politics that floated above the evening but never settled. Since there was no opportunity for questions, the young swooning moderator, who sounded more like a groupie than a literary critic or writer, and the writers themselves were able to keep to the topic of writing and literature.

One effect of this was that the Holocaust was very much present in the talk, but the Palestinians almost not at all. This was a little disappointing to me, because it's hard for me to imagine Palestinian writing (and this may be the fault of wonderful Mourid Barghouti and Mahmoud Darwish) without a heavy Israeli presence. Also, Oz and Grossman seemed very distant and foreign to me, because of the linguistic barrier. For some reason, I was expecting them to speak in English, but instead they spoke in Hebrew, which was translated into French by one of the best interpreters I've had the pleasure of listening to. His voice was soft and exact, and I felt cradled by his cadence. David Grossman was fairly spontaneous but sometimes a little rambling, whereas Oz spoke like a robot but had more interesting things to say. (It's only fair to mention that a lot of Oz's discourse was canned, as I'd already read close to a third of it in various of his books, interviews and articles.)

It was interesting for me to see Israel in this light: as a state like another. Because in Lebanon, Israel is not only not like other states, it's violent and dangerous. We're waiting for the next war, which will likely be even worse than the last one, so it's difficult to empathize with Israel and its people, even if many of them (like Grossman and Oz) have opinions similar to mine. This reminds me of my trip to the West Bank at the end of the war in 2006. Only rarely did I cross over to Jewish Jerusalem or interact with Israelis. I felt shaken by the bombing of Lebanon and almost afraid to see where those bombs were coming from. I now regret not exploring Tel Aviv or visiting Yad Vashem, which I've wanted to see for a long time. But July 2006 was not the time for that kind of a trip; hopefully I'll have another occasion to go in the not-so-distant future. Or even better, perhaps one day I'll be able to make the short drive to the beach in Tel Aviv from Beirut.

Otherwise, and as per usual, I've taken advantage of Paris to do some book shopping. It seems that Avraham Burg's book, which won't be out in English until October, has been released in French already. I'd like to be able to share it with my Anglophone friends in Beirut, but when I saw it used at Gilbert Joseph, I couldn't pass it up. Otherwise, I also found a used copy of Avi Shlaim's The Iron Wall at my favorite English book store here. Other, non-Israel-related, books include Nerval's Voyage en Orient, Paul Morand's New York (a present from Sebastien) and George Corm's L'Europe et l'Orient. I won't be happy until I find used copies of Samir Kassir's Histoire de Beyrouth and Jean Hatzfeld's Stratégie des Antilopes.