Part 9 (1/2)

I am convinced that in nearly every way this was a rigged, and neither a necessary nor a popular, war. The deeply reactionary Was.h.i.+ngton ”research” inst.i.tutions that sp.a.w.ned Wolfowitz, Perle, Abrams, Feith, and the rest provide an unhealthy intellectual and moral atmosphere. Policy papers circulate without real peer review, adopted by a government requiring what seems to be rational (even moral) justification for a dubious, basically illicit policy of global domination. Hence the doctrine of military preemption, which was never voted on either by the people of this country or by their half-asleep representatives. How can citizens stand up against the blandishments offered the government by companies like Halliburton, Boeing, and Lockheed? And as for planning and charting a strategic course for what is by far the most lavishly endowed military establishment in history, one that is fully capable of dragging us into unending conflicts, that task is left to the various ideologically based pressure groups, such as the fundamentalist Christian leaders like Franklin Graham, who have been unleashed with their Bibles on dest.i.tute Iraqis, the wealthy private foundations, and such lobbies as AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, along with its a.s.sociated think tanks and research centers.

What seems so monumentally criminal is that good, useful words like democracy and freedom have been hijacked, pressed into service as a mask for pillaging, muscling in on territory, and settling scores. The American program for the Arab world is the same as Israel's. Along with Syria, Iraq theoretically represents the only serious long-term military threat to Israel, and therefore it had to be put out of commission for decades. What does it mean to liberate and democratize a country when no one asked you to do it, and when in the process you occupy it militarily and, at the same time, fail miserably to preserve public law and order? The mix of resentment and relief at Saddam's cowardly disappearance that most Iraqis feel has brought with it little understanding or compa.s.sion either from the United States or from the other Arab states, who have stood by idly quarreling over minor points of procedure while Baghdad has burned. What a travesty of strategic planning when you a.s.sume that ”natives” will welcome your presence after you've bombed and quarantined them for thirteen years. The truly preposterous mindset about American beneficence, and with it that patronizing Puritanism about what is right and wrong, has infiltrated the minutest levels of the media coverage. In a story about a seventy-year-old Baghdad widow who ran a cultural center from her house-wrecked in the U.S. raids-and is now beside herself with rage, New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins implicitly chastises her for having had ”a comfortable life under Saddam Hussein” and then piously disapproves of her tirade against the Americans, ”and this from a graduate of London University.”

Adding to the fraudulence of the weapons that weren't there, the Stalingrads that didn't occur, the formidable artillery defenses that never happened, I wouldn't be surprised if Saddam disappeared suddenly because a deal was made in Moscow to let him out with his family and money in return for the country. The war had gone badly for the United States in the south, and Bush couldn't risk more of the same in Baghdad. On April 6 a Russian convoy left Baghdad. U.S. National Security adviser Condoleezza Rice appeared in Russia on April 7. Two days later, on April 9, Baghdad fell. Draw your own conclusions, but isn't it possible that as a result of discussions with the Republican Guard mentioned by Rumsfeld, Saddam bought himself out in return for abandoning the whole thing to the Americans and their British allies, who could then proclaim a brilliant victory?

Americans have been cheated, Iraqis have suffered impossibly, and Bush looks like the moral equivalent of a cowboy sheriff who has just led his righteous posse to a victorious showdown against an evil enemy. On matters of the gravest importance to millions of people, const.i.tutional principles have been violated and the electorate lied to unconscionably. We are the ones who must have our democracy back. Enough of smoke and mirrors and smooth-talking hustlers.

Al-Ahram, April 2430, 2003.

Al-Hayat, April 28, 2003.

The Observer, April 20, 2003.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR.

The Arab Condition.

My impression is that many Arabs today feel that what has been taking place in Iraq over the last two months is little short of a catastrophe. True, Saddam Hussein's regime was a despicable one in every way and deserved to be removed. Also true is the sense of anger many feel at how outlandishly cruel and despotic that regime was, and how dreadful has been the suffering of Iraq's people. There seems little doubt that far too many other governments and individuals connived at keeping Saddam Hussein in power, looking the other way as they went about their business as usual. Nevertheless, the only thing that gave the United States the license to bomb the country and destroy its government was neither a moral right nor a rational argument but rather sheer military power. Having for years supported Ba'athist Iraq and Saddam Hussein himself, the United States and Britain arrogated to themselves the right to negate their own complicity in his despotism, then to state that they were liberating Iraq from his hated tyranny. And what now seems to be emerging in the country, both during and after the illegal Anglo American war against the people and civilization that are the essence of Iraq, represents a very grave threat to the Arab people as a whole.

It is therefore of the utmost importance that we recall in the first instance that, despite their many divisions and disputes, the Arabs are in fact a people, not a collection of random countries pa.s.sively available for outside intervention and rule. There is a clear line of imperial continuity that begins with Ottoman rule over the Arabs in the sixteenth century until our own time. After the Ottomans in World War I came the British and the French, and after them, in the period following World War II, came America and Israel. One of the most insidiously influential strands of thought in recent American and Israeli Orientalism, evident in American and Israeli policy since the late 1940s, is a virulent, extremely deep-seated hostility to Arab nationalism and a political will to oppose and fight it in every possible way. The basic premise of Arab nationalism in the broad sense is that, with all their diversity and pluralism of substance and style, the people whose language and culture are Arab and Muslim (call them the Arab-speaking peoples, as Albert Hourani did in his last book) const.i.tute a nation and not just a collection of states scattered between North Africa and the western boundaries of Iran. Any independent articulation of that premise was openly attacked, as in the 1956 Suez War, the French colonial war against Algeria, the Israeli wars of occupation and dispossession, and the campaign against Iraq, a war whose stated purpose was to topple a specific regime but whose real goal was the devastation of the most powerful Arab country. And just as the French, British, Israeli, and American campaign against Gamal Abdel Na.s.ser was designed to bring down a force that openly stated as its ambition the unification of the Arabs into a very powerful independent political force, the American goal today is to redraw the map of the Arab world to suit American, and not Arab, interests. U.S. policy thrives on Arab fragmentation, collective inaction, and military and economic weakness.

One would have to be foolish to argue that the nationalism and doctrinaire separateness of individual Arab states, whether the state is Egypt, Syria, Kuwait, or Jordan, is a better thing, a more useful political actuality, than some scheme of inter-Arab cooperation in economic, political, and cultural spheres. Certainly I see no need for total integration, but any form of useful cooperation and planning would be better than the disgraceful summits that have disfigured our national life, say, during the Iraq crisis. Every Arab asks the question, as does every foreigner: why do the Arabs never pool their resources to fight for the causes that officially, at least, they claim to support, and that, in the case of the Palestinians, their people actively, indeed pa.s.sionately, believe in?

I will not spend time arguing that everything that has been done to promote Arab nationalism can be excused for its abuses, its shortsightedness, its wastefulness, repression, and folly. The record is not a good one. But I do want to state categorically that, since the early twentieth century, the Arabs have never been able to achieve their collective independence as a whole or in part exactly because of the designs on the strategic and cultural importance of their lands by outside powers. Today no Arab state is free to dispose of its resources as it wishes, or to take positions that represent that individual state's interests, especially if those interests seem to threaten U.S. policies. In the fifty-plus years since America a.s.sumed world dominance, and more so after the end of the cold war, it has run its Middle East policy based on two principles, and two principles alone: the defense of Israel and the free flow of Arab oil, both of which involved direct opposition to Arab nationalism. In all significant ways, with few exceptions, American policy has been contemptuous of and openly hostile to the aspirations of the Arab people, and with surprising success: since Na.s.ser's demise it has had few challengers among Arab rulers, who have gone along with everything required of them.

During periods of the most extreme pressure on one or other of them (e.g., the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the sanctions against Iraq that were designed to weaken the people and the state as a whole, the bombings of Libya and Sudan, the threats against Syria, the pressure on Saudi Arabia), the collective weakness of the Arab states has been little short of stunning. Neither their enormous collective economic power nor the will of their people has moved the Arab states to make even the slightest gesture of defiance. The imperial policy of divide and rule has reigned supreme, since each government seems to fear the possibility that it might damage its bilateral relations.h.i.+p with America. That consideration has taken precedence over any contingency, no matter how urgent. Some countries rely on American economic aid, others on American military protection. All, however, have decided that they do not trust one another any more than they care strongly for the welfare of their own people (which is to say, they care very little), preferring the hauteur and contempt of the Americans, who have gotten progressively worse in their dealings with the Arab states as the only superpower's arrogance has developed over time. Indeed, it is remarkable that the Arab countries have fought one another far more readily than they have fought the real aggressors from the outside.

The result today, after the invasion of Iraq, is an Arab nation that is badly demoralized, crushed, and beaten down, less able to do anything except acquiesce in announced American plans to gesture and posture in all sorts of efforts to redraw the Middle East map to suit American and obviously Israeli interests. Even that extraordinarily grandiose scheme has yet to receive the vaguest collective answer from the Arab states, who seem to be hanging around waiting for something new to happen, as Bush, Rumsfeld, Powell, and the others lurch from threat to plan to visit to snub to bombing to unilateral announcement. What makes the whole business especially galling is that whereas the Arabs have totally accepted the American (or Quartet) road map that seems to have emerged from George W. Bush's waking dream, the Israelis have coolly withheld any such acceptance. How does it feel for a Palestinian to watch a second-rank leader like Abu Mazen, who has always been Arafat's faithful subordinate, embrace Colin Powell and the Americans when it is clear to the youngest child that the road map is designed (a) to stimulate a Palestinian civil war and (b) to offer Palestinian compliance with Israeli-American demands for ”reform” in return for nothing much at all? How much further do we sink?

And as for American plans in Iraq, it is now absolutely clear that what is going to happen is nothing less than an old-fas.h.i.+oned colonial occupation, rather like Israel's since 1967. Bringing in American-style democracy to Iraq means basically aligning the country with U.S. policy, that is, a peace treaty with Israel, oil markets for American profit, and civil order kept to a minimum that permits neither real opposition nor real inst.i.tution-building. Perhaps even the idea is to turn Iraq into civil-war Lebanon. I am not certain. But take one small example of the kind of planning that is being undertaken. It was recently announced in the U.S. press that a thirty-two-year-old a.s.sistant professor of law, Noah Feldman, at New York University, would be responsible for producing a new Iraqi const.i.tution. It was mentioned in all the media accounts of this major appointment that Feldman was an extraordinarily brilliant expert in Islamic law, had studied Arabic since he was fifteen, and grew up as an Orthodox Jew. But he has never practiced law in the Arab world, has never been to Iraq, and seems to have no real practical background in the problems of postwar Iraq. What an open-faced snub, not only to Iraq itself, but also to the legions of Arab and Muslim legal minds who could have done a perfectly acceptable job in the service of Iraq's future. But no, America wants it done by a fresh young fellow, so as to be able to say, ”We have given Iraq its new democracy.” The contempt is thick enough to cut with a knife.

The seeming powerlessness of the Arabs in the face of all this is what is so discouraging, and not only because no real effort has been expended on fas.h.i.+oning a collective response to it. To someone who reflects on the situation from the outside, as I do, I find it amazing that in this moment of crisis, there has been no evidence of any sort of appeal from the rulers to their people for support in what needs to be seen as a collective national threat. American military planners have made no secret of the fact that what they plan is radical change for the Arab world, a change that they can impose by force of arms and because there is little that opposes them. Moreover, the idea behind the effort seems to be nothing less than to destroy the underlying unity of the Arab people once and for all, changing the bases of their lives and aspirations irremediably.

To such a display of power, I would have thought that an unprecedented alliance between Arab rulers and people represented the only possible deterrence. But that, clearly, would require an undertaking by every Arab government to open its society to its people, bring them in so to speak, remove all the repressive security measures in order to provide an organized opposition to the new imperialism. A people coerced into war, or a people silenced and repressed, will never rise to such an occasion. What we must have are Arab societies released finally from their self-imposed state of siege between ruler and ruled. Why not instead welcome democracy in the defense of freedom and self-determination? Why not say, we want each and every citizen willing to be mobilized in a common front against a common enemy? We need every intellectual and every political force to pull together with us against the imperial scheme to redesign our lives without our consent. Why must resistance be left to extremism and desperate suicide bombers?

As a digression, I might mention here that when I read the 2002 United Nations Human Development Report on the Arab world, I was struck by how little appreciation there was in it for imperialist intervention in the Arab world, and how deep and long-standing its effect has been. I certainly don't think that all our problems come from the outside, but I wouldn't want to say that all our problems are of our own making. Historical context and the problems of political fragmentation play a very great role, to which the report itself pays little attention. The absence of democracy is partially the result of alliances made between Western powers on the one hand, and minority ruling regimes or parties on the other, not because the Arabs have no interest in democracy but because democracy has been seen as a threat by several actors in the drama. Besides, why adopt the American formula for democracy (usually a euphemism for the free market, with little attention paid to human ent.i.tlement and social services) as the only one? This is a subject that needs considerably more debate than I have time for here. So let me return to my main point.

Consider how much more effective today the Palestinian position might have been under the U.S.-Israeli onslaught had there been a common show of unity instead of an unseemly scramble for positions on the delegation to see Colin Powell. I have not understood over the years why it is that Palestinian leaders have been unable to develop a common unified strategy for opposing the occupation and for avoiding getting diverted into one or another Mitch.e.l.l, Tenet, or Quartet plan. Why not say to all Palestinians, we face one enemy whose design on our lands and lives is well known and must be fought by us all together? The root problem everywhere, and not just in Palestine, is the fundamental rift between ruler and ruled that is one of the distorted offshoots of imperialism, this basic fear of democratic partic.i.p.ation, as if too much freedom might lose the governing colonial elite some favor with the imperial authority. The result, of course, is not only the absence of real mobilization of everyone in the common struggle, but the perpetuation of fragmentation and petty factionalism. As things now stand, there are too many uninvolved, non-partic.i.p.ating Arab citizens in the world today.

Whether they want to or not, the Arab people today face a wholesale attack on their future by an imperial power, America, that acts in concert with Israel to pacify, subdue, and finally reduce us to a bunch of warring fiefdoms whose first loyalty is not to their people but to the great superpower (and its local surrogate) itself. Not to understand that this is the conflict that will shape our area for decades to come is willingly to blind oneself. What is now needed is a breaking of the iron bands that tie Arab societies into sullen knots of disaffected people, insecure leaders, and alienated intellectuals. This is an unprecedented crisis. Unprecedented means are therefore required to confront it. The first step then is to realize the scope of the problem, and then go on to overcome what reduces us to helpless rage and marginalized reaction, a condition by no means to be accepted willingly. The alternative to such an unattractive condition promises a great deal more hope.

Al-Ahram, May 2228, 2003.

Al-Hayat, May 26, 2003.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE.

Archaeology of the Road Map.

Early in May, while Colin Powell was on his visit to Israel and the Occupied Territories, he met with Mahmoud Abbas, the new Palestinian prime minister, and separately with a small group of civil society activists, including Hanan Ashrawi and Mustafa Barghuti. According to Barghuti, Powell expressed surprise and mild consternation at the computerized maps of the settlements, the eight-meter-high fence, and the dozens of Israeli army checkpoints that have made life so difficult and the future so bleak for Palestinians. Powell's view of Palestinian reality is, to say the least, defective, despite his august position, but he did ask for materials to take away with him, and more important, he rea.s.sured the Palestinians that the same effort put in by Bush on Iraq was now going into implementing the road map. Much the same point was made in the last days of May by Bush himself in the course of interviews he gave to the Arab media, although as usual he stressed generalities rather than anything specific. He met with the Palestinian and Israeli leaders in Jordan and, earlier, with the major Arab rulers, excluding Syria's Bashar Al-a.s.sad, of course. All this is part of what now looks like a major American push forward. That Ariel Sharon has accepted the road map (with enough reservations to undercut his acceptance) seems to augur well for a viable Palestinian state.

Bush's vision (the word strikes a weird dreamy note in what is meant to be a hard-headed, definitive, and three-phased peace plan) is supposed to be achieved by a restructured Palestinian Authority, the elimination of all violence and incitement against Israelis, and the installation of a government that meets the requirements of Israel and the so-called Quartet that auth.o.r.ed the plan. Israel for its part undertakes to improve the humanitarian situation, easing restrictions and lifting curfews, though where and when are not specified. By June 2003 Phase One is also supposed to see the dismantling of the last sixty hilltop settlements (so-called ”illegal outposts” established since March 2001), though nothing is said about removing the others, which account for the 200,000 settlers on the West Bank and Gaza, to say nothing of the 200,000 more in annexed East Jerusalem. Phase Two, described as a transition to run from June to December 2003, is to be focused, rather oddly, on the ”option of creating an independent Palestinian state with provisional borders and attributes of sovereignty”-none are specified-culminating in an international conference to approve and then ”create” a Palestinian state, once again with ”provisional borders.” Phase Three is to end the conflict completely, also by way of an international conference, whose job it will be to settle the th.o.r.n.i.e.s.t issues of all: refugees, settlements, Jerusalem, borders. Israel's role in all this is to cooperate; the real onus is placed on the Palestinians, who must keep coming up with the goods in rapid succession, while the military occupation remains more or less in place, though eased in the main areas invaded during the spring of 2002. No monitoring element is envisioned, and the misleading symmetry of the plan's structure leaves Israel very much in charge of what-if anything-will happen next. As for Palestinian human rights, at present not so much ignored as suppressed, no specific rectification is written into the plan: apparently it is up to Israel whether to continue as before or not.

For once, say all the usual commentators, Bush is offering real hope for a Middle East settlement. Calculated leaks from the White House have suggested a list of possible sanctions against Israel if Sharon gets too intransigent, but this was quickly denied and then disappeared. An emerging media consensus presents the doc.u.ment's contents-many of them from earlier peace plans-as the result of Bush's new-found confidence after his triumph in Iraq. As with most discussions of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, manipulated cliches and far-fetched suppositions, rather than the realities of power and lived history, shape the flow of discourse. Skeptics and critics are brushed aside as anti-American, while a sizable portion of the organized Jewish leaders.h.i.+p has denounced the road map as requiring far too many Israeli concessions. But the establishment press keeps reminding us that Sharon has spoken of an ”occupation,” which he never conceded until now, and has actually announced his intention to end Israeli rule over 3.5 million Palestinians. But is he even aware of what he proposes to end? The Ha'aretz commentator Gideon Levy wrote on June 1, 2003, that, like most Israelis, Sharon knows nothing ”about life under curfew in communities that have been under siege for years. What does he know about the humiliation of checkpoints, or about people being forced to travel on gravel and mud roads, at risk to their lives, in order to get a woman in labor to a hospital? About life on the brink of starvation? About a demolished home? About children who see their parents beaten and humiliated in the middle of the night?”

Another chilling omission from the road map is the gigantic ”separation wall” now being built in the West Bank by Israel: 347 kilometers of concrete running north to south, of which 120 have already been erected. It is twenty-five feet high and ten feet thick; its cost is put at $1.6 million per kilometer. The wall doesn't simply divide Israel from a putative Palestinian state on the basis of the 1967 borders: it actually takes in new tracts of Palestinian land, sometimes five or six kilometers at a stretch. It is surrounded by trenches, electric wire, and moats; there are watchtowers at regular intervals. Almost a decade after the end of South African apartheid, this ghastly racist wall is going up with scarcely a peep from the majority of Israelis or their American allies who, whether they like it or not, are going to pay most of its cost. The forty thousand Palestinian inhabitants of the town of Qalqilya in their homes are on one side of the wall; the land they farm and actually live off of is on the other. It is estimated that when the wall is finished-presumably as the United States, Israel, and the Palestinians argue about procedure for months on end- almost 300,000 Palestinians will be separated from their land. The road map is silent about all this, as it is about Sharon's recent approval of a wall on the eastern side of the West Bank, which will, if built, reduce the amount of Palestinian territory available for Bush's dream state to roughly 40 percent of the area. This is what Sharon has had in mind all along.

An unstated premise underlies Israel's heavily modified acceptance of the road map and the United States' evident commitment to it: the relative success of Palestinian resistance. This is true whether or not one deplores some of its methods, its exorbitant cost, and the heavy toll it has taken on yet another generation of Palestinians who have not wholly given up in the face of the overwhelming superiority of Israeli-U.S. power. All sorts of reasons have been given for the emergence of the road map: that 56 percent of Israelis back it, that Sharon has finally bowed to international reality, that Bush needs an Arab-Israeli cover for his military adventures elsewhere, that the Palestinians have finally come to their senses and brought forth Abu Mazen (Abbas's much more familiar nom de guerre, as it were), and so on. Some of this is true, but I still contend that were it not for the fact of the stubborn Palestinian refusal to accept that they are ”a defeated people,” as the Israeli chief of staff recently described them, there would be no peace plan. Yet anyone who believes that the road map actually offers anything resembling a settlement or that it tackles the basic issues is wrong. Like so much of the prevailing peace discourse, it places the need for restraint and renunciation and sacrifice squarely on Palestinian shoulders, thus denying the density and sheer gravity of Palestinian history. To read through the road map is to confront an unsituated doc.u.ment, oblivious of its time and place.

The road map, in other words, is not about a plan for peace so much as a plan for pacification: it is about putting an end to Palestine as a problem. Hence the repet.i.tion of the term ”performance” in the doc.u.ment's wooden prose-in other words, how the Palestinians are expected to behave, almost in the social sense of the word. No violence, no protest, more democracy, better leaders and inst.i.tutions, all based on the notion that the underlying problem has been the ferocity of Palestinian resistance rather than the occupation that has given rise to it. Nothing comparable is expected of Israel, except that the small settlements I spoke of earlier, known as ”illegal outposts” (an entirely new cla.s.sification that suggests that some Israeli implantations on Palestinian land are legal), must be given up and, yes, the major settlements ”frozen” but certainly not removed or dismantled. Not a word is said about what since 1948, and then again since 1967, Palestinians have endured at the hands of Israel and the United States. Nothing about the de-development of the Palestinian economy, as described by the American researcher Sara Roy in a forthcoming book.18 House demolitions, the uprooting of trees, the five thousand prisoners or more, the policy of targeted a.s.sa.s.sinations, the closures since 1993, the wholesale ruin of the infrastructure, the incredible number of deaths and maimings-all that and more pa.s.s without a word.

The truculent aggression and stiff-necked unilateralism of the American and Israeli teams are already well known. The Palestinian team inspires scarcely any confidence, made up as it is of recycled and aging Arafat cohorts. Indeed, the road map seems to have given Yasir Arafat another lease on life, for all the studied efforts by Powell and his a.s.sistants to avoid visiting him. Despite the stupid Israeli policy of trying to humble him by shutting him up in a badly bombed compound, he is still in control of things. He remains Palestine's elected president, he has the Palestinian purse strings in his hands (the purse is far from bulging), and as for his status, none of the present ”reform” team (who with two or three significant new additions are reshuffled members of the old team) can match the old man for charisma and power.

Take Abu Mazen for a start. I first met him in March 1977 at my first Palestine National Council meeting in Cairo. He gave by far the longest speech, in the didactic manner that he must have perfected as a secondary school teacher in Qatar, and explained to the a.s.sembled Palestinian parliamentarians the differences between Zionism and Zionist dissidence. It was a noteworthy intervention, since most Palestinians had no real notion in those days that Israel was made up not only of fundamentalist Zionists, who were anathema to every Arab, but of various kinds of peaceniks and activists as well. In retrospect, Abu Mazen's speech launched the PLO's campaign of meetings, most of them secret, between Palestinians and Israelis who had long dialogues in Europe about peace and some considerable effect in their respective societies in shaping the const.i.tuencies that made Oslo possible.

Nevertheless, no one doubted that Arafat had authorized Abu Mazen's speech and the subsequent campaign, which cost brave men like Issam Sartawi and Said Hammami their lives. And while the Palestinian partic.i.p.ants emerged from the center of Palestinian politics (i.e., Fateh), the Israelis were a small marginalized group of reviled peace supporters whose courage was commendable for that very reason. During the PLO's Beirut years between 1971 and 1982, Abu Mazen was stationed in Damascus, but he joined the exiled Arafat and his staff in Tunis for the next decade or so. I saw him there several times and was struck by his well-organized office, his quiet bureaucratic manner, and his evident interest in Europe and the United States as arenas where Palestinians could do useful work promoting peace with Israelis. After the Madrid conference in 1991, he was said to have brought together PLO employees and independent intellectuals in Europe and turned them into teams to prepare negotiating files on subjects such as water, refugees, demography, and boundaries in advance of what were to become the secret Oslo meetings of 1992 and 1993, although to the best of my knowledge none of the files were used, none of the Palestinian experts were directly involved in the talks, and none of the results of this research influenced the final doc.u.ments that emerged.