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Prose of a Growing Movement
Yassin Alsalman, The Diatribes of a Dying Tribe. Write or Wrong / Paranoid Arab Boy Publishing, 2011. www.iraqisthebomb.com It’s a good time for a lyric exposé from an Iraqi-Canadian aged 25. Not that there could be such a thing as a bad time for one. With the “Arab Spring” turning the volume up, so to speak, of voices from the Arab world, “Westerners” building new ideas about the “East” are looking for different speakers and new narratives. Increasingly, it’s becoming obvious that Arabs in the diaspora are opening doors for eager spectators looking East while beaming messages West. Those who’ve spent the past two decades living biculturally, daily bridging ...
Keep Reading »The Long and Invisible Road
Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel. Directed by Michel Khleifi & Eyal Sivan. Belgium/France/Germany/UK, 2003 Today Palestinians commemorate the nakba, or day of catastrophe. At the same time, the state of Israel seeks to criminalize this expression of an autonomous Palestinian national consciousness, which threatens to fragment and disrupt Israel’s historical self-narrative. This year, the nakba finds itself in the shadow cast by the Israeli Knesset law, approved on 23 March 2011, which denies state funding to any organization that “undermines the foundations of the state and contradicts its values.” The new law, referred to in popular discourse ...
Keep Reading »Review Roundtable Part I: Goldstone and International Law
The Goldstone Report gained its prominence because of its UN auspices and the high credibility of Richard Goldstone as the Chair of the Fact Finding Mission appointed by the Human Rights Council. Other reputable inquiries (John Dugard’s parallel mission set up by the Arab League, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch), aside from a host of journalistic and credible eyewitness accounts, converged on the overall criminality under international law of Operation Cast Lead. The video reports, together with the 100:1 casualty ratio, reinforced this impression, which has since been further validated by the testimony of IDF soldiers, diaries of persons living in Gaza at the ...
Keep Reading »Review Roundtable Part III: Goldstone in Political Context
The political dymamics surrounding the report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict (commonly known as the Goldstone Report) provide a number of interesting insights into the recent evolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It bears recollection that the report was produced during a period when the Palestinian leadership was engaged in what has been characterized as serious permanent status negotiations with Israel. Yet the vast majority of Palestinians seemed more interested in the deliberations of Judge Richard Goldstone than those of President Mahmoud Abbas. This reflected more than widespread Palestinian indifference to diplomacy ...
Keep Reading »"Budrus": The Potential and Limits of Non-Violent Popular Struggle
Budrus. Directed by Julia Bacha. 2009. Budrus, an award-winning film directed by Julia Bacha and produced by Ronit Avni, documents the struggle of a small West Bank Palestinian village of the same name to prevent Israeli security forces from building the separation wall through its property. Through its struggle, Budrus achieved notoriety as a successful protest movement based almost entirely on non-violence by Palestinians, as well as an early example of cooperation between Palestinian and Israeli anti-occupation activists. The film is a remarkable document of the ongoing struggle for Palestinian rights in the West Bank and succeeds in bringing the audience directly ...
Keep Reading »Aesthetic Uprisings
Signs of the Times: The Popular Literature of Tahrir: Protest Signs, Graffiti & Street Art. Curated by Rayya El Zein and Alex Ortiz. Special Issue of Shahadat, April 2011. Full issue available here. In the heady days that followed the January 25 demonstrations in Egypt, the air seemed to crackle with images from the myriad protests and demonstrations and strikes and uprisings all across the country. For those of us following events from outside, it became part of the daily routine: together with watching the latest reports from al-Jazeera and reading the latest online news, we took in the images being posted (sometimes within minutes of being taken) on ...
Keep Reading »Urge (to Keep) Going
Urge for Going. By Mona Mansour. Directed by Hal Brooks. Through April 17, Public LAB, The Public Theater, New York, NY. Urge for Going, Mona Mansour’s new work in development, is a coming-of-age story built from the outside in. Her 90-minute play follows Jamila, a seventeen-year-old Palestinian preparing to take the Baccalaureate on the eve of her graduation from a UN school in Beirut, Lebanon. Surrounded by her two uncles, her parents, and her brain-damaged brother, Jul, in a Beirut refugee camp, her quest to take the test fights a family’s worth of dysfunction and several generations’ worth of dislocation, frustration, and regret. Mansour’s piece offers a ...
Keep Reading »Roundup on the Goldstone Controversy
![[Justice Richard Goldstone. Image from Getty Images.]](/content_images/3/sm_goldstone_041511.jpg "[Justice Richard Goldstone. Image from Getty Images.]")
While the impact of Justice Goldstone’s op-ed on accountability and justice remains to be seen, one thing has already been made clear: his contentious and vague editorial has worked to place Israel’s Winter 2008/09 offensive back on center stage. Like Israel’s fatal attack on the Mavi Marmara in May 2010 that inspired heated debate on the legality of Israel’s Gaza blockade, Goldstone’s editorial has produced a watershed of commentary on Gaza’s ongoing submission to a debilitating blockade and the escalating drumbeats of a renewed Israeli attack on the 360 square mile Strip. Significantly, this media cycle has been just as intrigued by the editorial’s implications as ...
Keep Reading »At the Table: Sharif Waked's Khumus
![[Sharif Waked, Khumus (2008). Image from artist's archive]](/content_images/3/sm_(K)HUMUS_5-1m.jpg "[Sharif Waked, Khumus (2008). Image from artist's archive]")
Just outside a Palestinian restaurant, named “al-Bayt” in the recently recognized village of Ayn Hawd southeast of Haifa, a table and two chairs stand precariously balanced on a steep slope. From a distance it is a pretty scene that promises the serenity of a picnic. On closer look, there is deformity and fragility. Together they offer an incisive reflection on those many moments when the Palestinian everyday in Israel meets the persistent apprehension and restlessness of memory. Sharif Waked’s installation Khumus tells of the inextricability of two communions—one that is untenable in the present and another in the past that has been made absent. On this slippery slope ...
Keep Reading »Essential Readings: Counterinsurgency
![[U.S. Army Maj. Robert Holbert takes notes and drinks tea with local school administrators during a cordon and search of Nani, Afghanistan in June 2007. Image by Staff Sgt. Michael L. Casteel, U.S. Army.]](/content_images/3/sm_COIN[1].JPG "[U.S. Army Maj. Robert Holbert takes notes and drinks tea with local school administrators during a cordon and search of Nani, Afghanistan in June 2007. Image by Staff Sgt. Michael L. Casteel, U.S. Army.]")
This Essential Readings post is written by Laleh Khalili. [Editors' Note: This is the second in a series of "Essential Readings," in which we ask contributors to choose a list of must-read books, articles, and new media sources on a variety of topics. These are not meant to be comprehensive lists, but rather starting points for readers who want to read more about particular topics.
Keep Reading »A Critique of Reporting on the Middle East
I’ve spent most of the last eight years working in Iraq and also in Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, and other countries in the Muslim world. So all my work has taken place in the shadow of the war on terror and has in fact been thanks to this war, even if I’ve labored to disprove the underlying premises of this war. In a way my work has still served to support the narrative. I once asked my editor at the New York Times Magazine if I could write about a subject outside the Muslim world. He said even if I was ...
Keep Reading »Jadaliyya Review Roundtable on "The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict"
“Reports come and go. This is one of the tragic truths of the literature of human rights violations. Hard-working researchers scour the rubble of war zones for fragments of evidence — of war crimes, crimes against humanity, other violations of life and freedom — only to watch their findings sink into the oblivion of forgotten documents.” So begins the editors’ note to the collection The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict, edited by Adam Horowitz, Lizzy Ratner, ...
Keep Reading »Review Roundtable Part II: Goldstone and Accountability
On December 27, 2008, Israel began aerial strikes on the Gaza Strip, home to 1.5 million Palestinians, three-quarters of whom are refugees, who could not, because of Gaza’s sealed borders, become refugees of war. Within a week, amidst the rubble of hospitals, mosques, government ministries, factories, and schools, Israel initiated a ground offensive that no more distinguished between civilians and combatants than did its “smart” bombs. On the fourteenth day of the offensive, in the run up to a buoyant ...
Keep Reading »From Gun to Pen: The Palestinian Revolution Lives
This Is My Picture When I Was Dead. Directed by Mahmoud Al-Massad. Netherlands/Jordan, 2010. ‘If you don’t know Ma’moun Mreish, you don’t know the history of the Palestinian Revolution.’ This line is key to the mixture of personal and national history presented by director Mahmoud Al-Massad in This Is My Picture When I Was Dead. It begins with the shooting of father and son, Ma’moun and Bashir Mreish, in Athens in 1983, one of many Mossad assassinations of senior PLO cadres. The film then hints, and ...
Keep Reading »Two Films for the Syrian Unraveling
A Flood in Baath Country. Directed by Omar Amiralay. 2003. Tea on the Axis of Evil. Directed by Jean Marie Offenbacher. 2009. As detentions of Syrian activists escalate and reports surface of nearly 500 dead, it is worth recalling that during the throes of Tahrir Square three months ago, all seemed quiet in Syria. Newspapers pronounced Syria “stable” and the risk of large-scale protest “unlikely,” and Bashar al-Assad used a rare interview with the Wall Street Journal to lecture his beleaguered ...
Keep Reading »Essential Viewing: Five Tunisian Films from a Postrevolutionary Perspective
It is impossible to watch a Tunisian film today from an exclusively prerevolutionary perspective. The present historical juncture will stealthily thrust itself to center stage. Besides, the value of film does not reside solely in its appropriateness to its own historical moment of production, but equally in its relevance to other, yet to come, historical moments. It becomes highly productive, not to say inevitable, that we rethink postcolonial Tunisian film through the lenses of the revolutionary and now ...
Keep Reading »Essential Readings: Reading Pakistan
Here are the stripped down facts: Pakistan is roughly 165 million people. Most of us are young: 69 percent of the population is under age 30. And we’re poor. Almost a quarter of the people here live below the poverty line. As I write, the quarter-finals for the cricket world cup are underway. Pakistan’s unpredictable and occasionally magnificent team is playing the West Indies. The sport, which was a kind of civilizing project to teach Victorian mores, has become a national obsession. Beyond ...
Keep Reading »In the Shadow of Words: Le Trio Joubran in Memoriam of Mahmoud Darwish
It is inevitable that a dancer watching a dance performance, a film-maker watching a film, a musician watching a concert will take notice of details and little tricks that are not available to most others. A skilful camera movement, a new interpretation of a well-known choreography, a note that is played with a new insight…But, albeit rarely, there are instances when something happens on the stage or screen so that, in a moment, something flashes from the spectacle with such extreme power that ...
Keep Reading »Essential Readings: Bahrain: Origins of a Crisis
This Essential Readings post is written by Sandy Russell Jones. [Editors' Note: This is the third in a series of "Essential Readings," in which we ask contributors to choose a list of must-read books, articles, and new media sources on a variety of topics. These are not meant to be comprehensive lists, but rather starting points for readers who want to read more about particular topics. Sandy Russell Jones, a Fellow at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis and a lecturer in ...
Keep Reading »"A Space Exodus": A Truly Palestinian Film
Larissa Sansour, A Space Exodus. Video (5' 29"). 2009. “Jerusalem, we have problem,” a woman’s voice says, as female fingers run over the controls of a space ship. “No . . . We are back on track,” she then mutters, breathing heavily; the only response from Jerusalem is a deafening silence. In a white spacesuit bearing her name, a Palestinian flag, and embroidery that looks like traditional tatrizz, the woman lands on the moon and plants a Palestinian flag. “A small step for a Palestinian, a giant ...
Keep Reading »Infomous
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