Part 8 (1/2)
Most important, the Initiative-which I am happy to endorse enthusiastically-puts forward the idea of a national unified authority, elected to serve the people and its need for liberation, for democratic freedoms, and for public debate and accountability. These things have been put off for far too long. The old divisions between Fateh, the Popular Front, Hamas, and all the others are meaningless today. We cannot afford such ridiculous posturing since as a people under occupation, we need a leaders.h.i.+p whose main goal is to rid us of Israeli depredations and occupations and to provide us with an order that can fulfill our needs for honesty, national scope, transparency, and direct speech. Arafat has a history of double-talk. Barghuti, on the other hand-I use him as an example here-takes a principled line, whether he addresses Palestinians, Israelis, or the foreign media. He has the respect of his people because of his medical services in the villages, and his honesty and leaders.h.i.+p have inspired everyone who has had contact with him. I also think it is very important that the Palestinian people should be led now by modern, well-educated people for whom the values of citizens.h.i.+p are central to their vision. Our rulers today have never been citizens, they have never stood in line to buy bread, they have never paid their own medical or school bills, they have never endured the uncertainty and cruelty of arbitrary arrest, tribal bullying, conspiratorial power grabs. Barghuti's and Abdel Shafi's examples, as indeed those of all the main figures in the Initiative, speak to our need for independence of mind and responsible, modern citizens.h.i.+p. The old days are over and should be buried as expeditiously as possible.
I conclude by saying that real change can come about only when people actively will that change, make it possible themselves. The Iraqi opposition is making a terrible mistake by throwing its fate into American hands and in so doing is paying insufficient attention to the needs of the actual people of Iraq, who now suffer the terrible persecutions of autocracy and are about to submit to an equally terrible bombing by the United States. In Palestine it should be possible to have elections now, not to reinstall Arafat's ragged crew, but rather to choose delegates for a const.i.tutional and truly representative a.s.sembly. It is a lamentable reality that during his ten years of misrule Arafat actively prevented the creation of a const.i.tution, despite all his ridiculous jibberish about ”Palestinian democracy.” His legacy is neither a const.i.tution nor even a basic law, but only a decrepit mafia. Despite that, and despite Sharon's frantic wish to bring an end to Palestinian national life, our popular and civil inst.i.tutions still function under extreme hards.h.i.+p and duress. Somehow teachers teach, nurses nurse, doctors doctor, and so on. These everyday activities have never stopped, if only because necessity dictates unstinting effort. Now those inst.i.tutions and those people who have truly served their society must bring themselves forward and provide a moral and intellectual framework for liberation and democracy, by peaceful means and with genuine national intent. In this effort, Palestinians under occupation and those in the shatat or diaspora have an equal obligation to make the effort. Perhaps this national initiative may provide a democratic example for other Arabs as well.
Al-Ahram, December 1925, 2002.
Al-Hayat, December 31, 2002.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE.
An Unacceptable Helplessness.
One opens the New York Times on a daily basis to read the most recent article about the preparations for war that are taking place in the United States. Another battalion, one more set of aircraft carriers and cruisers, an ever-increasing number of aircraft, new contingents of officers are being moved to the Persian Gulf area. Sixty-two thousand more soldiers were transferred to the Gulf last weekend. An enormous, deliberately intimidating force is being built up by America overseas, while inside the country economic and social bad news multiplies with a joint relentlessness. The huge capitalist machine seems to be faltering, even as it grinds down the vast majority of citizens. Nonetheless, George Bush proposes another large tax cut for the 1 percent of the population that is comparatively rich. The public education system is in a major crisis, and health insurance for 50 million Americans simply does not exist. Israel asks for $15 billion in additional loan guarantees and military aid. And the unemployment rates in the United States mount inexorably, as more jobs are lost every day.
Nevertheless, preparations for an unimaginably costly war continue and continue without either public approval or dramatically noticeable disapproval. A generalized indifference (which may conceal great overall fear, ignorance, and apprehension) has greeted the administration's warmongering and its strangely ineffective response to the challenge forced on it recently by North Korea. In the case of Iraq, with no weapons of ma.s.s destruction to speak of, the United States plans a war; in the case of North Korea, it offers that country economic and energy aid. What a humiliating difference between contempt for the Arabs and respect for the North Koreans, an equally grim and cruel dictators.h.i.+p.
In the Arab and Muslim worlds, the situation appears more peculiar. For almost a year American politicians, regional experts, administration officials, and journalists have repeated the charges that have become standard fare so far as Islam and the Arabs are concerned. Most of this chorus predates September 11, as I have shown in my books Orientalism and Covering Islam. To today's practically unanimous chorus has been added the authority of the United Nations Human Development Report on the Arab world, which certified that Arabs dramatically lag behind the rest of the world in democracy, knowledge, and women's rights. Everyone says (with some justification, of course) that Islam needs reform and that the Arab educational system is a disaster, in effect, a school for religious fanatics and suicide bombers funded not just by crazy imams and their wealthy followers (like Usama bin Laden) but also by governments who are supposed allies of the United States. The only ”good” Arabs are those who appear in the media decrying modern Arab culture and society without reservation. I recall the lifeless cadences of their sentences for, with nothing positive to say about themselves or their people and language, they simply regurgitate the tired American formulas already flooding the airwaves and pages of print. We lack democracy, they say, we haven't challenged Islam enough, we need to do more about driving away the specter of Arab nationalism and the credo of Arab unity. That is all discredited, ideological rubbish. Only what we, and our American instructors, say about the Arabs and Islam-vague recycled Orientalist cliches of the kind repeated by a tireless mediocrity like Bernard Lewis-is true. The rest isn't realistic or pragmatic enough. ”We” need to join modernity, modernity in effect being Western, globalized, free-marketed, and democratic-whatever those words might be taken to mean. (If I had the time, there would be an essay written about the prose style of people like Fouad Ajami, Fawaz Gerges, Kanan Makiya, Ghada Talhami, Mamom Fandy, et al., academics whose very language reeks of subservience, inauthenticity, and a hopelessly stilted mimicry that has been thrust upon them.) The clash of civilizations that George W. Bush and his minions are trying to fabricate as a cover for a preemptive oil and hegemony war against Iraq is supposed to result in a triumph of democratic nation-building, regime change, and forcible modernization l'americain. Never mind the bombs and the ravages of the sanctions, which are unmentioned. This will be a purifying war whose goal is to throw out Saddam and his men and replace them with a redrawn map of the whole region. New Sykes-Picot. New Balfour. New Wilsonian Fourteen Points. New world altogether. Iraqis, we are told by the Iraqi dissidents, will welcome their liberation and perhaps forget entirely about their past sufferings. Perhaps.
Meanwhile, the soul- and body-destroying situation in Palestine worsens all the time. There seems no force capable of stopping Sharon and Shaul Mofaz, who bellow their defiance to the whole world. We forbid, we punish, we ban, we break, we destroy. The torrent of unbroken violence against an entire people continues. As I write these lines, I am sent an announcement that the entire village of Al-Daba' in the Qalqilya area of the West Bank is about to be wiped out by sixty-ton American-made Israeli bulldozers: 250 Palestinians will lose their 42 houses, 700 dunams of agricultural land, a mosque, and an elementary school for 132 children. The United Nations stands by, looking on as its resolutions are flouted on an hourly basis. Typically, alas, George W. Bush identifies with Sharon, not with the sixteen-year-old Palestinian kid who is used as a human s.h.i.+eld by Israeli soldiers.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority offers a return to peacemaking and, presumably, to Oslo. Having been burned for ten years the first time, Arafat seems inexplicably to want to have another go at it. His faithful lieutenants make declarations and write opinion pieces for the press, suggesting their willingness to accept anything, more or less. Remarkably, though, the great ma.s.s of these heroic people seem willing to go on, without peace and without respite, bleeding, going hungry, dying day by day. They have too much dignity and confidence in the justice of their cause to submit shamefully to Israel, as their leaders have done. What could be more discouraging for the average Gazan who goes on resisting Israeli occupation than to see his or her leaders kneel as supplicants before the Americans?
In this entire panorama of desolation, what catches the eye is the utter pa.s.sivity and helplessness of the Arab world as a whole. The American government and its servants issue statement after statement of purpose, they move troops and material, they transport tanks and destroyers, but the Arabs individually and collectively can barely muster a bland refusal (at most they say, no, you cannot use military bases in our territory), only to reverse themselves a few days later.
Why is there such silence and such astounding helplessness?
The largest power in history is about to launch, and is unremittingly reiterating its intention to launch, a war against a sovereign Arab country now ruled by a dreadful regime, a war the clear purpose of which is not only to destroy the Ba'ath regime but to redesign the entire region. The Pentagon has made no secret that its plans are to redraw the map of the whole Arab world, perhaps changing other regimes and many borders in the process. No one can be s.h.i.+elded from the cataclysm when it comes (if it comes, which is not yet a complete certainty). And yet there is only long silence, followed by a few vague bleats of polite demurral, in response. After all, millions of people will be affected. America contemptuously plans for their future without consulting them. Do we deserve such racist derision?
This is not only unacceptable: it is impossible to believe. How can a region of almost 300 million Arabs wait pa.s.sively for the blows to fall without issuing a collective roar of resistance and a loud proclamation of an alternative view? Has the Arab will been completely dissolved? Even a prisoner about to be executed usually has some last words to p.r.o.nounce. Why is there now no last testimonial to an era of history, to a civilization about to be crushed and transformed utterly, to a society that despite its drawbacks and weaknesses nevertheless goes on functioning. Arab babies are born every hour, children go to school, men and women marry and work and have children, they play and laugh and eat, they are sad, they suffer illness and death. There is love and companions.h.i.+p, friends.h.i.+p and excitement. Yes, Arabs are repressed and misruled, terribly misruled, but they manage to go on with the business of living despite everything. This is the fact that both the Arab leaders and the United States simply ignore when they fling empty gestures at the so-called ”Arab street” invented by mediocre Orientalists.
But who is now asking the existential questions about our future as a people? The task cannot be left to a cacophony of religious fanatics and submissive, fatalistic sheep. But that seems to be the case. The Arab governments-no, most of the Arab countries from top to bottom-sit back in their seats and just wait as America postures, lines up, threatens, and s.h.i.+ps out more soldiers and F-16s to deliver the punch. The silence is deafening.
Years of sacrifice and struggle, of bones broken in hundreds of prisons and torture chambers from the Atlantic to the Gulf, families destroyed, endless poverty and suffering. Huge, expensive armies. For what?
This is not a matter of party or ideology or faction: it's a matter of what the great theologian Paul Tillich used to call ultimate seriousness. Technology, modernization, and certainly globalization are not the answer for what threatens us as a people now. We have in our tradition an entire body of secular and religious discourse that treats of beginnings and endings, of life and death, of love and anger, of society and history. This is there, but no voice, no individual with great vision and moral authority, seems able now to tap into that and bring it to attention. We are on the eve of a catastrophe that our political, moral, and religious leaders can only just denounce a little bit while, behind whispers and winks and closed doors, they make plans somehow to ride out the storm. They think of survival and perhaps of heaven. But who is in charge of the present, the worldly, the land, the water, the air, and the lives dependent on one another for existence? No one seems to be in charge. There is a wonderful colloquial expression in English that very precisely and ironically catches our unacceptable helplessness, our pa.s.sivity and inability to help ourselves, now when our strength is most needed. The expression is: will the last person to leave please turn out the lights? We are that close to a kind of upheaval that will leave very little standing and perilously little left even to record, except for the last injunction that begs for extinction.
Hasn't the time come for us collectively to demand and try to formulate a genuinely Arab alternative to the wreckage about to engulf our world? This is not only a trivial matter of regime change, although G.o.d knows that we can do with quite a bit of that. Surely it can't be a return to Oslo, another offer to Israel to please accept our existence and let us live in peace, another cringing, crawling, inaudible plea for mercy? Will no one come out into the light of day to express a vision for our future that isn't based on a script written by Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, those two symbols of vacant power and overweening arrogance? I hope someone is listening.
Al-Ahram, January 1622, 2003.
Al-Hayat, January 23, 2003.
The Guardian, January 25, 2003.
CHAPTER FORTY.
A Monument to Hypocrisy.
It has finally become intolerable to listen to or look at news in this country. I've told myself over and over again that one ought to leaf through the daily papers and turn on the TV for the national news every evening, just to find out what ”the country” is thinking and planning, but patience and masochism have their limits. Colin Powell's UN speech, designed obviously to outrage the American people and bludgeon the United Nations into going to war, seems to me a new low point in moral hypocrisy and political manipulation. But Donald Rumsfeld's lectures in Munich this past weekend went the b.u.mbling Powell one further, in unctuous sermonizing and bullying derision. For the moment I shall discount George W. Bush and his coterie of advisers, spiritual mentors, and political managers, like Pat Robertson, Franklin Graham, and Karl Rove: they seem to me slaves of power perfectly embodied in the repet.i.tive monotone of their collective spokesman, Ari Fleischer. Bush is, he has said, in direct contact with G.o.d or, if not G.o.d, then at least Providence. Perhaps only Israeli settlers can converse with him. But the secretaries of state and defense seem to have emanated from the secular world of real women and men, so it may be somewhat more opportune to linger for a time over their words and activities.
First, a few preliminaries. The United States has clearly decided on war: there seem to be no two ways about it. Yet whether the war will actually take place (given all the activity started, not by the Arab states- which as usual seem to dither and be paralyzed at the same time-but by France, Russia, and Germany) is something else again. Nevertheless, to have transported 200,000 troops to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, leaving aside smaller deployments in Jordan, Turkey, and Israel, can mean only one thing.
Second, the planners of this war, as Ralph Nader has forcefully said, are chicken hawks-that is, hawks who are too cowardly to do any fighting themselves. Wolfowitz, Perle, Bush, Cheney, and others of that entirely civilian group were to a man in strong favor of the Vietnam War, yet each of them got a deferment based on privilege and therefore never fought or so much as even served in the armed forces. Their belligerence is therefore morally repugnant and, in the literal sense, antidemocratic in the extreme. What this unrepresentative cabal seeks in a war with Iraq has nothing to do with actual military considerations. Iraq, whatever the disgusting qualities of its deplorable regime, is simply not an imminent and credible threat to its neighbors like Turkey, or Israel, or even Jordan (each of which could easily handle it militarily), or certainly to the United States. Any argument to the contrary is simply a preposterous, entirely frivolous proposition. With a few outdated Scuds and a small amount of chemical and biological material, most of it supplied by the United States in earlier days (as Nader has said, we know that because we have the receipts for what was sold to Iraq by U.S. companies), Iraq is, and has easily been, containable, though at unconscionable immoral cost to the long-suffering civilian population. For this terrible state of affairs, I think it is absolutely true to say that there has been collusion between the Iraqi regime and the Western enforcers of the sanctions.
Third, once big powers start to dream of regime change-a process already begun by the Perles and Wolfowitzes of this country-there is simply no end in sight. Isn't it outrageous that people of such a dubious caliber actually go on blathering about bringing democracy, modernization, and liberalization to the Middle East? G.o.d knows that the area needs it, as so many Arab and Muslim intellectuals and ordinary people have said over and over. But who appointed these characters as agents of progress anyway? And what ent.i.tles them to pontificate in so shameless a way when there are already so many injustices and abuses in their own country to be remedied? It's particularly galling that Perle, about as unqualified a person as it is imaginable to be on any subject touching on democracy and justice, should have been an election adviser to Benjamin Netanyahu's extreme right-wing government during the period 199699, in which he counseled the renegade Israeli to sc.r.a.p any and all peace attempts, to annex the West Bank and Gaza, and to try to get rid of as many Palestinians as possible. This man now talks about bringing democracy to the Middle East and does so without provoking the slightest objection from any of the media pundits who politely (abjectly) quiz him on national television.
Fourth, Colin Powell's speech, despite its many weaknesses, its plagiarized and manufactured evidence, its confected audiotapes, and its doctored pictures, was correct in one thing. Saddam Hussein's regime has violated numerous human rights and UN resolutions. There can be no arguing with that and no excuses can be allowed. But what is so monumentally hypocritical about the official U.S. position is that literally everything Powell has accused the Ba'athis of doing has been the stock in trade of every Israeli government since 1948, and at no time more flagrantly than since the occupation of 1967. Torture, illegal detention, a.s.sa.s.sination, a.s.saults against civilians with missiles, helicopters, and jet fighters, annexation of territory, transportation of civilians from one place to another for the purpose of imprisonment, ma.s.s killing (as in Qana, Jenin, Sabra, and Shatila to mention only the most obvious), denial of rights to free pa.s.sage and unimpeded civilian movement, education, medical aid, use of civilians for human s.h.i.+elds, humiliation, punishment of families, house demolitions on a ma.s.s scale, destruction of agricultural land, expropriation of water, illegal settlement, economic pauperization, attacks on hospitals, medical workers, and ambulances, killing of UN personnel, to name only the most outrageous abuses: all these, it should be noted with emphasis, have been carried on with the total, unconditional support of the United States, which has not only supplied Israel with the weapons for such practices and every kind of military and intelligence aid but has also given the country upward of $135 billion in economic aid on a scale that beggars the relative amount per capita spent by the U.S. government on its own citizens.
This is an unconscionable record to hold against the United States and Mr. Powell as its human symbol in particular. As the person in charge of U.S. foreign policy, it is his specific responsibility to uphold the laws of this country and to make sure that the enforcement of human rights and the promotion of freedom-the proclaimed central plank in American foreign policy since at least 1976-is applied uniformly, without exception or condition. How he and his bosses and coworkers can stand up before the world and righteously sermonize against Iraq while at the same time completely ignoring the ongoing American partners.h.i.+p in human rights abuses with Israel defies credibility. And yet no one, in all the justified critiques of the U.S. position that have appeared since Powell made his great UN speech, has focused on this point, not even the ever-so-upright French and Germans. The Palestinian territories today are witnessing the onset of a ma.s.s famine; there is a health crisis of catastrophic proportions; there is a civilian death toll that totals at least a dozen to twenty people a week; the economy has collapsed; hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians are unable to work, study, or move about as curfews and at least three hundred barricades impede their daily lives; and houses are blown up or bulldozed on a ma.s.s basis (sixty just yesterday). And all of it with U.S. equipment, U.S. political support, U.S. finances. Bush declares that Sharon, who is a war criminal by any standard, is a man of peace, as if to spit on the innocent Palestinian lives that have been lost and ravaged by Sharon and his criminal army. And he has the gall to say that he acts in G.o.d's name, and that he (and his administration) act to serve ”a just and faithful G.o.d.” And more astounding yet, he lectures the world on Saddam's flouting of UN resolutions even as he supports a country, Israel, that has flouted at least sixty-four of them on a daily basis for more than half a century.
But so craven and so ineffective are the Arab regimes today that they don't dare state any of these things publicly. Many of them need U.S. economic aid. Many of them fear their own people and need U.S. support to prop up their regimes. Many of them could be accused of some of the same crimes against humanity. So they say nothing and just hope and pray that the war will pa.s.s, allowing them to stay in power as they are.
But it is also a great and n.o.ble fact that for the first time since World War II, there are ma.s.s protests against the war taking place before rather than during the war itself. This is unprecedented and should become the central political fact of the new globalized era into which our world has been thrust by the United States and its superpower status. What this demonstrates is that despite the awesome power wielded by autocrats and tyrants like Saddam and his American antagonists, despite the complicity of a ma.s.s media that has (willingly or unwillingly) hastened the rush to war, and despite the indifference and ignorance of a great many people, ma.s.s action and ma.s.s protest on the basis of human community and sustainability are still formidable tools of human resistance. Call them weapons of the weak, if you wish. But that they have at least tampered with the plans of the Was.h.i.+ngton chicken hawks and their corporate backers, as well as the millions of religious monotheistic extremists (Christian, Jewish, Muslim) who believe in wars of religion, is a great beacon of hope for our time. Wherever I go to lecture or speak out against these injustices, I haven't found anyone in support of the war. Our job as Arabs is to link our opposition to U.S. action in Iraq to our support for human rights in Iraq, Palestine, Israel, Kurdistan, and everywhere in the Arab world-and also to ask others to force the same linkage on everyone, Arab, American, African, European, Australian, and Asian. These are world issues, human issues, not simply strategic matters for the United States or the other major powers.
We cannot in any way lend our silence to a policy of war that the White House has openly announced will include 300 to 500 Cruise missiles a day (800 of them during the first forty-eight hours of the war) raining down on the civilian population of Baghdad in order to produce ”shock and awe,” or even a human cataclysm that will produce, as its boastful planner a certain Mr. (or is it Dr.?) Harlan Ullman has said, a Hiros.h.i.+ma-style effect on the Iraqi people. Note that during the 1991 Gulf War, after forty-one days of bombing Iraq, this scale of human devastation was not even approached. And the United States has six thousand ”smart” missiles ready to do the job. What sort of G.o.d would want this to be a formulated and announced policy for His people? And what sort of G.o.d would claim that this was going to bring democracy and freedom to the people not only of Iraq but to the rest of the Middle East?
These are questions I won't even try to answer. But I do know that if anything like this is going to be visited on any population on earth, it will be a criminal act, and its perpetrators and planners war criminals according to the Nuremberg laws that the United States itself was crucial in formulating. Not for nothing do General Sharon and Shaul Mofaz welcome the war and praise George W. Bush. Who knows what more evil will be done in the name of Good? Every one of us must raise our voices, and march in protest, now and again and again. We need creative thinking and bold action to stave off the nightmares planned by a docile, professionalized staff in places like Was.h.i.+ngton and Tel Aviv and Baghdad. For if what they have in mind is what they call ”greater security,” then words have no meaning at all in the ordinary sense. That Bush and Sharon have contempt for the nonwhite people of this world is clear. The question is, how long can they keep getting away with it?
Al-Ahram, February 1319, 2003.
Al-Hayat, February 25, 2003.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE.
Who Is in Charge?.
The Bush administration's relentless unilateral march toward war is profoundly disturbing for many reasons, but so far as American citizens are concerned, the whole grotesque show is a tremendous failure in democracy. An immensely wealthy and powerful republic has been hijacked by a small cabal of individuals, all of them unelected and therefore unresponsive to public pressure, and simply turned on its head. It is no exaggeration to say that this war is the most unpopular on a world scale of any war in modern history. Before the war has even begun, more people have protested it in this country alone than did so at the height of the antiVietnam War demonstrations during the 1960s and 1970s. Note also that those rallies took place well after the war had been going on for several years: this one has yet to begin, even though of course a large number of overtly aggressive and belligerent steps have already been taken by the United States and its loyal puppy, the UK government of the increasingly ridiculous Tony Blair.
I have been criticized recently for my antiwar position by illiterates who claim that what I say is an implied defense of Saddam Hussein and his appalling regime. To my Kuwaiti critics, do I need to remind them that I publicly opposed Ba'ath Iraq during the only visit I made to Kuwait, in 1985, when in an open conversation with the then minister of education Ha.s.san el-Ibrahim I accused him and his regime of aiding and abetting Arab fascism in their financial support of Saddam Hussein? I was told then that Kuwait was proud to have committed literally billions of dollars to Saddam's war against ”the Persians,” as they were then contemptuously called, and that it was a more important struggle than someone like me could comprehend. I remember clearly warning those Kuwaiti acolytes of Saddam Hussein about him and his ill will against Kuwait, but all to no avail. I have been a public opponent of the Iraqi regime since it came to power in the 1970s: I never visited the place, never was fooled by its claims to secularism and modernization (even when many of my contemporaries either worked for or celebrated Iraq as the main gun in the Arab a.r.s.enal against Zionism, a stupid idea, I thought), never concealed my contempt for its methods of rule and its dreadful fascist behavior. And now when I speak my mind about the ridiculous posturing of certain members of the Iraqi opposition as hapless strutting tools of U.S. imperialism, I am told that I know nothing about life without democracy (about which more later) and am therefore unable to appreciate their n.o.bility of soul! Little notice is taken of the fact that barely a week after extolling President Bush's commitment to democracy, Kanan Makiya is now denouncing the United States and its plans for a post-Saddam military-Ba'ath government in Iraq. When individuals get in the habit of switching G.o.ds whom they wors.h.i.+p politically, there's no end to the number of changes they make before they finally come to rest in utter disgrace and well-deserved oblivion.