Shifting Sands: The Unravelling of the Old Order in the Middle East

by Raja Shehadeh

  In 1967 the long-awaited war with Israel took place: the ensuing disaster changed everything. In the words of Israeli general and Minister of Defence Moshe Dayan, Israel now became an empire. Israel was on the march, colonising more of the occupied Palestinian territories through building Jewish settlements and doing all that was possible to encourage the Palestinians to leave. And yet if the Arab armies had proved highly ineffective in liberating Palestine, their failure did not sever the emotional link between the rest of the Arabs and those suffering under Israeli rule.

  Not only did the Arab world follow the travails of the Palestinians with a profound sense of frustration; it watched in bewilderment the successes of the Israelis, including their effective use of the media to impress on the world Israel’s own mythical and exclusive version of the history of our country. No less disturbing to the ordinary Palestinians and Arabs was the biased, indeed unfettered, support of the United States and Western Europe for Israel, whatever violations of international law it was committing.

  After the 1967 defeat, many Palestinians joined the Palestine Liberation Organisation in its political and military struggle against Israel. The less political, like myself, thought that the struggle for human rights and international law could also open new avenues for justice for Palestine. Both these paths had resonance in the rest of the Arab world: the absence of the rule of law and democracy in many Arab countries had to be addressed. As contributors to this volume have observed, the Arab states, in their colonial origins and their development, have been marked by a lack of legitimacy and a failure to be representative of, or accountable to, their people.

  It took many years before the struggle that the unarmed Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank and Gaza waged against the Israeli army, the strongest in the Middle East, served as an inspiration to the Arab masses, first in Tunisia and then in Egypt. The Arab Spring that began in January 2011 was a time of hope that democracy might be finally sweeping the region. I was transfixed by the power of ordinary people to make change. Several essays in this book described how the revolutions that occurred in the Middle East region released the creativity among the populations of these places that had long been in abeyance. Malu Halasa described how the people of Syria used the internet, cartoons, drama and video to give voice to the Syrian popular opposition, and she also notes the links that emerged between the Syrian poster artists and those of Egypt. There too street art, which had long been prohibited, flourished. If anything this confirms how indomitable is the human spirit. For decades the people of Syria and Egypt have endured oppressive regimes that stifled all forms of creative expression and yet their spirit and aspiration for freedom could not be extinguished. It also indicates how quickly change can happen.

  Four years later, looking around me, listening to the news and travelling through the region, I constantly realise how much it has changed almost beyond recognition. Despair is now the dominant sentiment and optimism is in short supply. Like others, I sometimes feel paralysed by the horrors ordinary people have had to endure now in Syria, Iraq and Egypt.

  From the perspective of occupied Palestine, where I live, the shared taxi ride from Ramallah to Jerusalem tells a larger story of our journey through all these difficult decades to our crisis-ridden present. Part of the story is obvious: the increased physical obstacles and denials of freedom of movement that have made this short journey of ten miles a Palestinian nightmare. But the ride also evokes the political and psychological climate. As a teenager, I always enjoyed riding in a shared taxi, the servees, or the bus, on the journey to Jerusalem. Everyone spoke to everyone else. It is true we all kept away from politics, but there were jokes told, stories shared and loud happy music played. How different it was then, and not simply in the absence of checkpoints and an annexation wall, but also arriving to see Jerusalem’s pastoral beauty, now vanquished by the highways and bridges criss-crossing it, connecting the Jewish settlements to the east with the western Jewish part of the city while largely erasing the Arab part of the city. Later, during the 1980s and particularly during the first Palestinian intifada, the servees served as our Facebook, exchanging news of coming demonstrations and past arrests and tales of our young ‘generation of stones’. During the hard times of the second intifada, passengers and driver simply tried to get to their destination, discussing whether a route through an olive grove or a stone quarry would serve. Today, the passengers are mostly silent in the long wait at checkpoints. What is there to say? Sometimes a taxi driver pontificates with a sigh, ‘Our struggle with the Jews is eternal, so says the Holy Qur’an.’ The small talk that was common and the joyful music that was played have turned to total silence, with everyone lost in their own dim thoughts or concentrating on listening to the Qur’anic readings and recitations coming from the radio. I would attribute this less to an embrace of piety than a loss of hope. So, is there hope for Palestine and the Middle East?

  I still believe that there is, but only if the core problem, the Palestinian problem, is resolved on grounds that allow equality between Israelis and Palestinians and for the Palestinians to enjoy their own state. Only then could the deadly fuse that was ignited more than a hundred years ago and which has been slowly burning further and further afield, setting off many bombs along its route over the large region of the Middle East, be extinguished. Only then could calm return and with it hope for a better future. But in our crisis-ridden times, it is also clear to me that the foundations of a solution to the question of Palestine – equality and an end to exclusivity – must also underlie a new vision of our whole region.

  The possibility would then arise for movement between, and cooperation among, the countries of the region. The Middle East is not meant to be fragmented. As the essays in this book have shown, this was the doing of the colonial powers after the First World War. The different parts of the region complement each other and would derive huge benefits in every sphere from the interaction between them. In some there is capital, in others labour. Here entrepreneurial spirit, there a wealth of business experience. Here empty land, there congestion. Here an excess of educated people, there a need for teachers and professionals. Here excess wealth and run-away consumption; there enormous needs for investment in people and infrastructure. From the interaction would arise many benefits from a rich cultural and religious mix, bringing a new cosmopolitanism rooted in our history. The region would go back to acting as the bridge between East and West as it has done for many centuries in the past.

  None of this can happen as long as the borders remain closed, as long as the Palestinian–Israeli conflict is not resolved and the security of Israel is used as an excuse to continue Western military interventions and restrictions on the people of the region. But this is not all. Much also depends on how the other issues that are troubling the region are understood.

  The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) seems to thrive on the frustration of people facing seemingly insurmountable obstacles in their fight for greater rights and freedom within their own states and the failure of the Palestinians to win the liberation of their land occupied by Israel over four decades earlier through the reliance on peaceful resistance and invocation of the rule of law. The cause of law, whether municipal or international, as a vehicle for peaceful change and transformation was also not furthered by the wide definition US law gave to terrorism that rendered legitimate resistance to occupation and oppression as illegal.

  ISIL seems to have learned dangerous and brutal lessons from the repeated failure of Arab states and armies in their fight against Israel and the Western powers: how to manipulate the media perhaps from Israel’s noted success, how to be cured of illusions about the democracy of the West from the actions of the West itself. Discredited rhetoric about the rule of law and democracy – and the absence of both in the Arab regimes the West has supported – both undermines the states ISIL challenges and leaves people without these powerful tools to fight their own battles against ISIL barbarism. These lessons and legacies
are proving chillingly effective in ISIL’s control of the Syrian and Iraqi territories it has conquered.

  Speaking to the BFM TV in the wake of the January 2015 attacks in France that killed seventeen people, the former French prime minister Dominique de Villepin, who led the opposition to the Iraq War, described the Islamic State as the ‘deformed child’ of Western policy. He wrote in Le Monde that the West’s wars in the Muslim world ‘nourish terrorism among us with promises of eradicating it’. His analysis was right, as was his warning against simplifying these conflicts in the Middle East by ‘seeing only the Islamist symptom’. It is hoped that this book will have made it possible for readers to better understand the issues at stake in the Middle East and to think beyond simplistic paradigms and sound bites.

  As the authors of the essays here have ably demonstrated, writers have an important role to play in bringing about change, not only by analysing what is taking place but also by imagining how things could be different. In this way writers can ultimately tilt the balance and encourage the victory of those with positive creative energy over those who espouse the negative energy of terror and violence. These essays have demonstrated that the energy of creation is still alive, whether in Egypt, Syria or Iraq, even in the darkest of times and the seemingly most desperate of places.

  NOTES

  The Significance of a Screwdriver: Penny Johnson

  1. See Patrick Cockburn, The Jihadis Return: ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising (New York, OR Books, 2014), p. 10.

  2. Mouin Rabbani, ‘The Un-Islamic State’, Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Centre, September 2014.

  3. Slavoj Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously (London, Verso Books, 2012), p. 35.

  The Post-Ottoman Syndrome: Avi Shlaim

  1. T. E. Lawrence, Revolt in the Desert (London, Jonathan Cape, 1927).

  2. George Antonius, The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement (New York, Capricorn Books, 1938), p. 248.

  3. Elie Kedourie, England and the Middle East: The Destruction of the Ottoman Empire, 1914–1921 (London, Bowes and Bowes, 1956), pp. 212–13.

  4. Quoted without an indication of the author in Pierre Salinger with Eric Laurent, Secret Dossier: The Hidden Agenda behind the Gulf War (London, Penguin Books, 1991), p. 14.

  5. Quoted in Michael L. Dockrill and Douglas J. Goold, Peace Without Promise: Britain and the Peace Conferences, 1919–1923 (London, Batsford, 1981), pp. 163–4.

  6. Quoted in David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East, 1914–1922 (London, Penguin Books, 1989), p. 5.

  The Divisive Line: James Barr

  1. British Library, Add. 63039, Bertie to Grey, 30 November 1915.

  2. David Garnett (ed.), The Letters of T. E. Lawrence (London, Jonathan Cape, 1938), pp. 193–4, Lawrence to Hogarth, 18 March 1915.

  3. W. Crooke, review of The Caliph’s Last Heritage in Man, Vol. 17, January 1917, p. 24.

  4. Sudan Archive, Durham, Wingate Papers 135/6, Sykes to Callwell, 1915.

  5. Colonel R. Meinertzhagen, Middle East Diary, 1917–1936 (London, Cresset Press, 1959), p. 26.

  Why Did You Rename Your Son? Salim Tamari

  1. Najib Nassar and Hanna Abu Hanna, Riwayat Mifle al-Ghassani: aw, Safhah min safahatt al-harb al-‘alamiyah (al-Nasirah, Dar al-Sawt, 1981).

  2. Salim Tamari, ‘With God’s Camel in Siberia: The Russian Exile of an Ottoman Officer from Jerusalem’, Jerusalem Quarterly, Vol. 35, 2008, p. 35.

  3. See Salim Tamari, The Year of the Locust: A Soldier’s Diary and the Erasure of the Ottoman Past (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 2011), p. 91.

  A Long View from Baghdad: Justin Marozzi

  1. See www.theguardian.com/world/2003/feb/19/iraq.artsandhumanities.

  2. Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A Study of Iraq’s Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of Its Communists, Ba’athists and Free Officers (London, Saqi Books, 2004), p. 25.

  3. Maha Yahya, ‘Iraq’s Existential Crisis: Sectarianism Is Just Part of the Problem’, Carnegie Middle East Center, 6 November 2014. See carnegie-mec.org/2014/11/06/iraq-s-existential-crisis-sectarianism-is-just-part-of-problem.

  4. Jita Mishra, The NPT and the Developing Countries (New Delhi, Concept Publishing Company, 2008), p. 156.

  5. ‘UN Says Sanctions Have Killed Some 500,000 Iraqi Children’, Reuters report, 21 July 2000. See www.commondreams.org/headlines/072100–03.htm.

  6. Paul Roberts, The Demonic Comedy: Some Detours in the Baghdad of Saddam Hussein (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1997), p. 214.

  7. Yahya, ‘Iraq’s Existential Crisis’.

  Iran: Coming in from the Cold? Ramita Navai

  1. See www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/world/middleeast/human-rights-in-iran-have-worsened-un-investigator-says.html.

  2. See globalvoicesonline.org/2014/09/16/nearly-70-percent-of-young-iranians-use-illegal-internet-circumvention-tools/.

  3. See www.salon.com/2015/01/15/why_porn_is_exploding_in_the_middle_east_partner/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow.

  Living and Writing in Kuwait: Mai al-Nakib

  1. Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York, Pantheon Books, 1994), p. 59.

  2. Abdul-Reda Assiri, Kuwait’s Foreign Policy: City-State in World Politics (Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1990), p. 129.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Robert J. C. Young, ‘Postcolonial Remains’, New Literary History, Vol. 43, No. 1, 2012, p. 33.

  5. Ibid, p. 35.

  6. Jonathan Crary, 24/7 (London, Verso, 2013), pp. 18–19.

  7. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, Vintage, 1978), p. 291.

  Fiction’s Histories: Marilyn Booth

  1. Latifa al-Zayyat, The Open Door, translated by Marilyn Booth (Cairo, American University in Cairo Press, 2000). In Arabic: Al-Bab al-maftuh (Cairo, al-Maktaba al-injiliziyya al-misriyya, 1960).

  2. Hassan Daoud, The Penguin’s Song, translated by Marilyn Booth (San Francisco, City Lights Books, 2014). In Arabic: Ghina’ al-batrik (Beirut, Dar al-Nahar lil-Nashr, 1998).

  3. Zaynab Fawwaz, Riwayat husn al-’awaqib, aw ghadat al-Zahira (Cairo, Matba’at Hindiyya, 1899).

  4. ‘Afifa Karam, Fatima al-badawiyya (New York, Maktabat Jaridat al-Huda al-yawmiyya, n.d.).

  What You Don’t Read About the Syrian Humanitarian Crisis: Dawn Chatty

  1. The millet (which comes from the Arabic milla, meaning religious community or denomination) was a way of managing the affairs of the Ottoman Empire. All Muslims, whether Shia, Sunni, Alawi or Yezidi, belonged to the Muslim millet. Christian and Jewish minority groups of all denominations belonged to separate millets and their personal affairs and all family law were managed by the religious hierarchy of their community, not the Ottoman state.

  Defying the Killers: Malu Halasa

  1. This name of the poster collective is the one that is widely used. As art curator Charlotte Bank first noted, a more strict transliteration would be ‘Al-shaab al-suriyy yarif tariq-hu’.

  2. Freehand spray-painting and stencilling were part of a subculture that had been gaining underground popularity in the region. Saudi graffiti critic Rana Jarbou noted that prior to 2011 the two most replicated images across the Arab world were Mickey Mouse and the murdered black American rapper Tupac Shakur (1971–96).

  3. Even during his short-lived independent newspaper Al-Doumari (‘The Lamplighter’), which existed for a little over two years after Hafez al-Assad’s son Bashar came to power in 2000, Ferzat still trod carefully. In an issue devoted to corruption, the cartoonist drew transparent IV-bags with fish swimming inside to represent a scandal about out-of-date intravenous serums then still in use in Syrian hospitals.

  4. From http://www.englishpen.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/The-Gist-of-It-Short-Stories-by-Rasha-Abbas-Readers-Report-by-Alice-Guthrie.pdf.

  5. ‘Arters’ refers to non-artists using artistic tools and techniques. The word derives from ‘filmers’, as first discu
ssed in Documentary, Witness and Self-Revelation by John Ellis to describe ‘those who routinely produce video material but without the aim of being a film-maker’: Zaher Omareen, lecture and presentation, ‘A Revolution in Syrian Art’, British Museum, 20 June 2014.

  6. Sarah Birke, ‘How ISIS Rules’, New York Review of Books, Vol. 62, No. 2, 5–18 February 2015, p. 27.

  7. The art, photography, film and cartoons featured in Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline (London, Saqi Books, 2014) initially appeared in a 2012–13 touring exhibition, curated by the book’s editors, which was shown in Europe and the UK. In Copenhagen, 39,000 people visited the exhibition during Easter week 2013. The exhibition continues to tour. In Bradford, it appeared as Parallel Republic: The Art of Civil Disobedience in 2014. With Syrian graffiti artist Ibrahim Fakhri, Syria Speaks editors contributed an art installation of stencils of Syrian martyrs to the Disobedient Objects exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Musuem in 2014–15, while the British Museum is using the book as a guide to begin collecting for a new archive of Syrian uprising art.

  CONTRIBUTORS

  Tamim al-Barghouti is a Palestinian poet, political scientist and columnist. He is the author of Benign Nationalism: State Building Under Occupation (2007) and The Umma and the Dawla: Nation State and the Arab Middle East (2008). He received a Ph.D. from Boston University and has taught at the American University in Cairo and Georgetown University, Washington, DC. He currently works with the United Nations organisation ESCWA in Beirut. (The views expressed in his essay are the author’s and do not necessarily represent the United Nations.) His six poetry collections published in both colloquial and classic Arabic, and his public poetry readings to packed audiences in Palestine, Egypt and elsewhere, have made him one of the most acclaimed Arab poets of his generation. His latest book of poetry is Ya Masr, Hanet (Egypt, It’s Close, 2011).