Jadaliyya Ezine

Artistic Depictions of Arab Women: An Interview with Artist Lalla Essaydi

Thu, 17 May 2012 01:15:00 GMT

The intersection of gender, perception, identity, and space have, for centuries, collided to illustrate a skewed depiction of Arab women. The art of Orientalism brought about imagined scenes of women in harems, hidden in seclusion behind veils and walls. As these images continue to shape Western perception of Arab women, Moroccan-born artist, Lalla Essaydi, reclaims and deconstructs these images. In her exhibit, Lalla Essaydi: Revisions, at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, through her experiences as an Arab woman living in the West, she presents her past.

Samia Errazzouki (SE): What themes does your show Lalla Essaydi: Revisions at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art focus on and how are they reflected through the title?

Lalla Essaydi (LE): The Revisions exhibition is about revising stereotypes and it is the first solo exhibition to bring together works of diverse media. In that holistic context, they display the depth of my engagement with different media, art historical conventions, and diverse cultural histories, as well as my technical mastery of composition and color. It is a retrospective.

SE: How does your work pose questions about gender, identity, and space?

LE: My work is haunted by space, actual and metaphorical, remembered and constructed. My photographs grew out of the need I felt to document actual spaces, especially the space of my childhood. At a certain point, I realized that in order to go forward as an artist, it was necessary to return physically to my childhood home in Morocco and to document this world which I had left in a physical sense, but of course, never fully in any deeper sense.

Women’s sexuality, in the Arab world, has determined the very nature of public and private space. Arab women traditionally occupy a private space, but wherever a woman is, when a man enters that space, he establishes it as public. This separation of public and private is testament to the power of women’s sexuality. It also helps explain how Arab women became sexualized under a Western gaze. In a sense, what the West did was to dissolve the boundaries between public and private, and—here is the important point—the Arab world responded by reinstating those boundaries in a way that would be clear and visible. Behind the veil, an Arab woman maintains a private place, even in public.

SE: Calligraphy has a history of being a substitute for figural representation in Islamic art. What role does calligraphy play in your art?

LE: When I was growing up, calligraphy was not included in the school curriculum, although it could be studied via a private tutor. It has only recently been introduced in Moroccan art schools. I personally have no training in calligraphic art, and approached it as an artist would approach any new artistic medium, attaining skill through practice. I have developed my own method of transcribing my calligraphic text—applying henna via a syringe. The text is written in an abstract, poetic style, so that it acquires a universality which reaches beyond cultural borders. But the text inscribed on the women is deliberately indecipherable, invented forms that allude to kufic calligraphy, but yield little direct access to information. Thus the interplay between graphic symbolism and literal meaning, as well as the European assumption that the written holds the best access to reality, are constantly questioned.

In my mind, since calligraphy, poetry, and architecture are considered high art in Islamic Art as it could be seen though art history, I use it to reclaim the rich tradition of calligraphy and interweaving it with the traditionally female art of henna. I have been able to express, and yet, in another sense, dissolve the contradictions I have encountered in my culture: between hierarchy and fluidity, between public and private space, between the richness and the confining aspects of Islamic traditions.

[Harem #14C by Lalla Essaydi. Image provided by artist]

SE: How have your experiences both in the Middle East/North Africa and the West shaped your perspective as an artist?

LE: As an Arab artist, living in the West, I have been granted an extraordinary perspective from which to observe both cultures, and I have also been imprinted by these cultures. In a sense, I feel I inhabit (and perhaps even embody) a “crossroads,” where the cultures come together—merge, interweave, and sometimes clash. As an artist, I am inhabiting not only a geo-cultural terrain, but also an imaginative one. This space continues to define itself, to unfold and evolve, and as an artist, I feel it is my job (and my passion) to try and understand it, and to make work that flows from this continuing investigation. The different space I inhabit in the West is a space of independence and mobility. It is from there that I can return to the landscape of my childhood in Morocco, and consider these spaces with detachment and new understanding. When I look at these spaces now, I see the two cultures that have shaped me and which are distorted when looked at through the "Orientalist" lens of the West.

SE: What do you seek to do by reproducing the “exotic” and “mysterious” depictions of Arab women from Orientalist harem art?

LE: I am not “reproducing” the “exotic” and “mysterious” depictions of Arab women from Orientalist harem art. I am deconstructing these paintings by using the same stereotypes one finds in these paintings.

My work reaches beyond Islamic culture to include the Western fascination, which we see so powerfully in painting, with the odalisque, the veil, the harem. It’s obvious to anyone who cares to look that images of the harem and odalisque are still pervasive today, and I am using the female body to complicate assumptions and disrupt the Orientalist gaze. I want the viewer to become aware of Orientalism as a projection of the sexual fantasies of Western male artists, in other words, as a voyeuristic tradition, which involves peering into and distorting private space.

SE: Given the growing exposure of your artwork to a Western audience, what role would you like to see your work have as a part of the discourse on Arab women?

LE: It is my hope that this strategy will make viewers aware of their expectations—i.e, of a certain sexual content—found within the orientalist paintings, by confusing these expectations. The result will be to throw viewers back on themselves, so that they begin to see the dynamics of the Orientalist gaze.

But, by invoking the Orientalist tradition in a way that makes the viewer aware of its inherent assumptions, I hope not to provoke some kind of “blame game” but rather to liberate viewers—Arab and Western alike—from the grip of these assumptions. Furthermore, I am not a sociologist, I am an artist, working from a particular vantage point, and as such hope to give full expression to a uniqueness that I hope will resonate with the uniqueness of each viewer.

[Lalla Essaydi’s exhibit, Lalla Essaydi: Revisions, will be at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art until 24 February 2013. Read more about Lalla Essaydi here]

The Andalus Test: Reflections on the Attempt to Publish Arabic Literature in Hebrew

Wed, 16 May 2012 19:30:00 GMT

Should a visitor from another planet happen to arrive here and look around at the reality between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea without the usual lenses of distortion, she would see that in Israel/Palestine—the land stretching from the river to the sea which has been under one rule for over forty years—almost half the population is Palestinian Arab and Arabic is their mother tongue, as well as that of nearly half of the Israeli Jewish population. Should our guest distinguish—as does the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, as well as the Israeli academy and media—between Israeli citizens and occupied Palestinian subjects, she would find that within the category of “Israeli citizens,” the majority is of Arabic-speaking (and to a large extent reading and writing) origin. Our guest would likely notice that Israel is located in the heart of the Arab world and that each and every one of its neighboring countries is Arab.

Out of a desire to familiarize herself with local culture, our guest might walk into a nearby bookshop, where she would expect to find books in Hebrew and Arabic—the two official languages of the state of Israel. But alas, at the first store: Hebrew books only. At the second store: some English books too. The third store, she will find, is dedicated to Russian literature. “There are no Arabs here!” they would all inform her. “This, my dear, is Tel Aviv.” The guest, who has been to Paris and Rome and London and Moscow and Nairobi and Johannesburg and Buenos Aires, might be a bit surprised: “A city without Arabs? Without Arabic? Here? In the center of the Middle East?”

Then our guest might meet up with a friend, also from another planet. Unlike our guest, the friend does not look at reality but rather at its representations. She watches current affairs shows and nightly news on TV; she reads newspapers, especially the “leading liberal daily” Haaretz; she goes to the theatre and the opera; she attends faculty meetings at the university; and, like our guest, she browses bookshops. “Why are you so surprised?” she admonishes our guest, “After all, this is a European country!” This is because by and large the friend only encounters middle-aged secular Ashkenazi men. They are practically the only ones to be seen, heard, and read: the shelves are overflowing with their books, as well as those of their American, French, German, and Spanish counterparts. Our guest does not manage to convince her friend that middle-aged secular Ashkenazi men make up less than ten percent of the land’s people. Nor does she manage to get her to believe that Israel is not in Europe.

It was into this reality, and its representations, that Andalus Publishing was born. But when I launched a publishing house that would specialize in translating Arabic literature into Hebrew, I had the impression that this reality was going to change. It was in the late 1990s, on the eve of the second intifada, and despite my critique of the so-called “peace process,” I hadn’t altogether internalized my own criticism.

Prominent Palestinian intellectuals, including the late Edward Said and former Knesset Member (MK) Azmi Bishara, now in exile, feared that the Oslo process would lead to the formation of Palestinian Bantustans and the consolidation of Israeli Apartheid. Although the Israeli policy of “closure” began in the early 1990s (heralding the “disappearance” of Arabs from Tel Aviv), even the liberal architects of “separation” never imagined the eight-meter high concrete wall. Many of the Oslo critics, myself among them, imagined “closure” as a temporary setback in a framework that nonetheless aimed at reaching historical compromise and “peace.” And even if the word peace was stripped of any meaning, like justice and equality, it seemed the process still pointed toward rapprochement, understanding, and life together, rather than apart.

In the merry Oslo years, alongside the uninhibited construction of new settlements and the paving of bypass roads for Jews only, there was prolific joint Jewish-Arab activity, much of it under the auspices of “people-to-people” type programs aimed at fostering dialogue and funded with European, American, and Japanese money. Concurrently, it seemed as though the dominant Ashkenazi-Zionist ideology that conceives of Israel as a European “bastion of the West in the East” was starting to weaken: the public presence of two historically disempowered and marginalized groups—Palestinian citizens of Israel and Israeli Jews of North African and Middle Eastern origin (Mizrahim)—could be felt loud and clear.

Andalus’ “Declaration of Intentions,” as written in 1999, read in part as follows:

Andalus is a new publishing house that specializes in the translation of Arabic literature and prose into Hebrew. Andalus, the site of the “golden age” of Islamic and Jewish thought, was also an era during which Jewish and Arabic cultures fed and fertilized one another; an epoch known for its literary and intellectual output by some of the greatest Moslem and Jewish philosophers, theologians, and poets. It was a period during which materials were translated from Arabic to Hebrew and vice versa.

Despite Israel’s location in the heart of the Arab world, Hebrew-reading Israelis remain, for the most part, unexposed to Arabic culture in general, and Arabic literature and thought in particular. The quantity and variety of existing translations is insufficient, especially as compared with the wealth of works translated into Hebrew from European languages—since the 1930s less than forty Arabic language titles have been translated into Hebrew.

Our goal is to establish a successful independent publishing house that will produce a dozen translated titles each year, representing a variety of styles: classical and modern literature, journalistic and academic research, poetry, plays, satires, theory and criticism.

Our first move was to identify translators and editors. Palestinian artist Sharif Waked, who has designed all of our books, also helped to choose the first titles for publication. Everyone and anyone with expertise was consulted, and our appeals for advice were met with enthusiastic and generous input. Our first list of publications consisted of ten novels that would give the uninitiated Hebrew reader a good “sampling” of contemporary Arabic literature.

However, our plans changed when in March 2000, then-Minister of Education, Yossi Sarid announced that he would include two poems by the Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish in the high school curriculum. These “poetical not political” poems, to quote Sarid, were to be included in a long list of poems that teachers could choose to assign to their students, but were not, God forbid, to be included in the mandatory reading list. This fact did not prevent Sarid’s decision from triggering pubic hysteria. Prime Minister Ehud Barak declared: “Israeli society is not ripe to study Darwish.” It was much ado about nothing, and still, not a single collection of Darwish’s poems on the Hebrew bookshelf.

The first translator I turned to was the late Muhammad Hamza Ghanaem. Ghanaem dedicated his life to Arabic-Hebrew and Hebrew-Arabic translation. He was devoted to Andalus Publishing as a project and translated three of Darwish’s collections.

When the Darwish “hysteria” broke out in Israel, Ghanaem suggested that we publish Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?, which he had already translated. So our first publication was not a novel, but a collection of poetry. The hysteria only strengthened our conviction that the Hebrew-reading public needed to be exposed to Arabic literature. Within weeks, the publishing house was named, a design plan was conceived, and our first book hit the shelves.

Much to our surprise, when the book was published it received almost no attention. Apparently, people found it easier to talk about Darwish without a book in their hands. Despite the hysteria, Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? did not sell as well as expected—and yet it remains one of our best and most steady sellers. Most of the poems in the collection deal with the 1948 Nakba and the life that preceded it. It turns out that these “materials” have a readership. One such reader was none other than former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. In an interview with Ma'ariv in April 2005, he was quoted as follows:

Have you finished Fontanelle by Meir Shalev?
“I have a few more pages to go. At first, I had a hard time with that book, but as I read on, I discovered that it’s an extraordinary book.”

Meir Shalev is hardly a fan of yours.
“So what? I also read Mahmoud Darwish’s book, and I have spoken about his poem, the one with the horse that was left alone, and how much I envy his description of their connection to the land.”

Mahmoud Darwish addressed the motivation of his Israeli readers before the book was even published, repeating the following sentiment on various occasions: “I would like Israelis to read my poetry, not as a representative of the enemy, not so as to make peace.” In that spirit, Darwish granted us blanket rights to publish his books, refusing any and all form of compensation: “By asking for permission you have surpassed your predecessors. When you start making money from this venture, come back with your offer for remuneration.” With the arrogance and hubris of a first time cultural entrepreneur, I refused to accept what he was telling me. How wrong I was.

Like Andalus’ partners, I too support the position of Palestinian and Arab intellectuals who object to “normalization,” the forging of normal neighborly relations with Israel—economically, politically, culturally—despite ongoing occupation. If you normalize with Israel, you normalize with the occupation. Only on the basis of a just, equal, and viable historical compromise can relations with Israel be normalized, and ending the occupation is but the first condition. Since I founded Andalus, I have recognized the dangers of creating a false sense of "peace-making" and "dialogue" by means of “normalization.” I have always made my objection to normalization publicly known, but more importantly, I have searched for ways to make the translation of Arabic literature into Hebrew a means of resisting the occupation. In our racist reality, where the walls of “separation” loom larger by the day, making Arabic language and culture present in everyday Hebrew life is itself a form of resistance to the rhyme and reason of occupation.

We wanted to publish books on the basis of “purely” cultural considerations (if there is such a thing). We wanted to translate Arabic into Hebrew in accordance with the norms and conventions of the intelligentsia (as opposed to the “intelligence” community—which produces most of the Arabic-Hebrew translations in Israel) and, to the best of our ability, without paternalism and Orientalism.

The Egyptian authors we approached did not share our thinking. Rather, they preferred to ignore our declarations and refused to have their works translated on the grounds of “anti-normalization.” These writers belong to a milieu that avoids any and all contact with Israel as such, even at the price of refusing to visit the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) since, according to them, any contact with Israel, including applying for a visa to cross its borders so as to enter the OPT, constitutes “normalization.” After my initial approach, Andalus came under vicious attack by an Egyptian cultural weekly. This attack was followed by dozens of articles across the Arab world, both supporting and opposing our enterprise.

We were honored to find out that Andalus is privileged to have so many supporters in Arabic literary and intellectual circles. Mahmoud Darwish, Elias Khoury, Edward Said, Mohammed Berrada, Mohamed Choukri, and many others launched a “counter-attack,” lauding Andalus both in theory and in practice. Many of them granted us publication rights free of charge, as a way of expressing partnership and solidarity with our effort. Unsurprisingly, this debate had no echoes in Israel. Just as most Jewish Israelis do not seem to care what Arabs write, they do not care what they think.

I guess Mahmoud Darwish was right. Most Israelis do not care about Arabic literature, and the select few who do want only to “know the enemy” or “make peace” with him. The two novels we published by the Lebanese writer Elias Khoury form an interesting exception. Gate of the Sun (Bab al-Shams) that deals with the Nakba, received a few mentions in the Israeli press over the years, but upon publication in Hebrew it garnered relatively few reviews. Nonetheless, we sold over 5,000 copies (a quarter of which were donated to Israeli public libraries, where they are borrowed frequently). This is Andalus’ bestseller, and the most popular Arabic title ever translated into Hebrew.

In 2005, we published Khoury’s masterpiece Yalo, which does not have to do with the Palestinian narrative per se; rather, like Gate of the Sun, it deals with the intersection of history and memory, this time of a Lebanese prisoner who endures interrogation and torture. We thought the book would surpass its predecessor, especially since the stores showered it with attention, as did the press (sixteen rave reviews in the first month). But alas, Yalo sold just 1,500 copies—far more than most of the titles we have published, which have generally sold five hundred copies or fewer, but nonetheless a disappointment. If this is what a bestseller makes, it seems we have lost the battle for the Hebrew reader’s heart and mind. Our dream of being a self-sufficient, sustainable independent publishing house came to an end.

And then, just as we were forced to freeze our activities, we had a short glimmer of hope. Award-winning Canadian author Naomi Klein—who, like us, resists the normalization of the occupation—asked to publish her latest bestseller The Shock Doctrine in Hebrew via Andalus. Alongside her pointed criticism of the state of Israel, dialogue with Israelis is extremely important to her. So, while like me she has called to support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, the idea was "not to boycott Israelis but rather to boycott the normalization of Israel and the conflict." She thought that Andalus would be the perfect address for this kind of resistance, and we thought salvation had come.

When Klein generously donated all her royalties toward future translations of Arabic writing into Hebrew, we had every reason to believe that following the Hebrew publication of The Shock Doctrine, Andalus would be able to publish several more books—always our primary goal. Sadly, the increased readership we hoped for never materialized: it seems that Israelis cease to care about anti-globalization when it is linked to anti-normalization and calls the occupation into question. Our would-be Northern savior turned out to be a true political friend, but no Santa Claus.

Klein’s book launch and book tour in June 2009 were dedicated to BDS promotion. We did not plan on there being a brutal massacre in an already besieged and beleaguered Gaza just a few months before. We could not have imagined that ninety-five percent of the Israeli-Jewish population would support the brutal killing of four hundred children. In our wildest dreams, we never imagined the first-time (there is always a first time) phenomenon of Israeli families making their Saturday outing to the hills overlooking Gaza to cheer at the shelling and bombing of one and a half million civilians incarcerated in the world’s largest open-air-prison. We did not realize that the walls we have been trying to topple for so many years would become hermetically sealed with self-censorship.

The book launch and book tour for The Shock Doctrine were effectively censored, and most of Klein’s Hebrew followers (from the bestselling No Logo), refusing to hear any political criticism, have boycotted the book. Hence, not only did publishing Naomi Klein not enable us to translate more Arabic titles into Hebrew, it elucidated the fact that the walls we are confronting are more fortified than ever, and that breaking them is a nearly impossible mission.

Nevertheless, after all I have said, Andalus does what it can to prove me wrong, and I hope one day it will. I am continuously reexamining the ways we worked, the choices we made, and the tools we employ to get our books out there. As a cultural enterprise, it has left its illustrious mark: rave reviews, die-hard fans, grateful happenstance readers. As an economic venture, it is a complete failure: supply without demand. Maybe it is not about us, continuous reexamination notwithstanding, but rather about the other publishing houses: in seven years we published twenty-four titles, eighteen of them Arabic literature translated into Hebrew. We increased the numbers of such books by over fifty percent, while the Arabic titles published by other Hebrew publishers in the same period can be counted on a single hand.

And here we must remember our alien guests. How strange it must seem that despite the fact that the majority of the people of the land are Arabic speaking or of Arabic-speaking origin, Arabic is hidden away, and along with it the possibility of al-Andalus—the site of an Arabic-Jewish culture—and of Andalus Publishing. “Our Place in al-Andalus,” wrote Maimonides, yet the number of Israeli Jews who know that Maimonides wrote his finest works in Arabic grows smaller by the day.

At times it seems as though the cultural divide, the mental walls, are deeper and taller than any physical barrier underway. These walls do not just pass between “us and them” (or as former Prime Minister Ehud Barak put it: “We are here and they are there.”). They are erected within ourselves, between our past and our present, between metaphysical fantasy and physical reality, between us and the place where we live.

New Texts Out Now: Past Is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine

Wed, 16 May 2012 13:04:00 GMT

Omar Jabary Salamanca, Mezna Qato, Kareem Rabie, and Sobhi Samour, editors. Past Is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine. Special Issue of settler colonial studies 2.1 (2012).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you put together this special issue?

Editors (E): This open-access (and therefore freely accessible) special issue emerges out of a conference we organized in early March 2011, convened by the SOAS Palestine Society. The impetus for the conference came from two main directions. First, we all work on one aspect of Palestine or another, and each of us has grown distressed by the tendency to treat Palestine as a series of temporal and spatial set pieces. Second, we were perplexed by the ongoing application of ever-newer theoretical approaches that seek to understand the constantly shifting situation on the ground: we feel that, taken together, these discrete approaches tend to undermine holistic, structural analysis. The framework of comparative settler colonialism offers important insights and interventions that, while not all new, provide productive scaffolding for thinking about Palestine. Comparative settler colonialism rejects the exceptionalism that is ascribed to Zionism and Israel, and to Palestine and Palestinians, and it opens the situation to comparison with other contemporary and historical settler colonial cases. It is, for us, a paradigm that is coherent and elastic, and it helps to illuminate characteristics and tendencies that are too often treated in isolation.

J: What particular topics, questions, and literatures does this issue address?

Editors (E): We wanted to encourage the further integration of settler colonial studies into Palestine studies, and we felt the best way to do that would be to show how settler colonial analysis contributes to our understanding of Zionism and the Palestinian experience. It was tough, because this is, by and large, a neglected mode of analysis, and few people in Palestine studies speak or write in these terms in any analytical way; on the other hand, Zionism, Israel, and Palestine are central to comparative settler colonialism. So we decided to curate a set of articles that steps into the fray and helps to bridge that gap, some more tentatively than others.

For example, the articles by Ilan Pappé and David Lloyd both, in different ways, explore the consequences of settler colonial analysis, offering meditations on what is at stake. Zachary Lockman's essay engages Gershon Shafir’s Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914, one of the seminal texts using a settler colonial framework within Palestine studies, and presents an alternative historical narrative of the evolution of the Zionist labor movement, highlighting the coercive power employed by the British colonial state in Palestine against Palestinian Arabs. Shir Hever focuses on the tension between economic exploitation and exclusion that is inherent in Zionist thought and practice, and Magid Shihade describes the social impact of settler colonial practices on Palestinians in Israel. Mansour Nasasra provides a contemporary narrative of the Naqab, highlighting challenges Palestinians have launched against Zionist land grabs and dispossession. We end with pieces by Patrick Wolfe, who asserts that Zionism is not an exceptional case of settler colonialism, but rather an accelerated one; and Waziyatawin, whose essay ruminates on lessons the Palestinian experience could offer other indigenous communities struggling against settler colonialism in North America.

J: Who do you hope will read this special issue, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

E: The settler colonial paradigm was, for many decades, the abiding analytical framework through which Palestinians understood their struggle. Nearly all scholarship, both within the movement and outside it, was predicated on the idea that the struggle in Palestine was against Zionist settler colonialism. We try to highlight the importance of the settler colonial analysis by offering two key examples of how Palestinians have historically utilized it. The first is a pamphlet written for the British public by George Mans ou r, a labor organizer during the Great Revolt of 1936-1939 against British colonial rule and Zionist encroachment. The second is Fayez Sayegh’s powerful 1965 essay, "Zionist Colonialism in Palestine." The astute and precise analysis contained in these classics of Palestinian scholarship is just as relevant today as it was at that time. In order to encourage conversation between scholars in comparative settler colonial studies and scholars in the Arab world, we have also included an Arabic translation of Patrick Wolfe’s crucial essay, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.”

What we hope this special issue does is retrieve settler colonial analysis, build on it, and move it forward. So this special issue is primarily geared to scholars in Palestine studies, and we think that this approach could have a significant impact on how scholarship on Palestine develops, and on what priorities and agenda it sets. We are saying, look, here is a framework that has been around for a long time, why not take a second look, and let’s think about why it was discarded, what that means, and what it still has to offer. We also think settler colonial analysis could lead to positive developments for strategic thinking within the movement, and we offer the issue as a way to open up a broader conversation about decolonization—what does that take, what is its relationship to the solutionist discourse, how do you reform our national movement, and what kinds of solidarities and alignments does a settler colonial approach imply and offer?

Excerpt from Past Is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine

From the Editor’s Introduction

Despite the endurance of Israeli settler colonialism, settler colonial analysis has largely fallen into disuse in Palestine studies. As a framework, settler colonialism once served as a primary ideological and political touchstone for the Palestinian national movement, and informed the intellectual work of many committed activists and revolutionary scholars, whether Palestinians, Israelis, or allies.

Today, research tends to focus on Palestine as an exceptional case constituted in local contexts, in particular the West Bank. But these problems are far from simply the result of shifts in academic knowledge and practice: the Palestinian liberation movement has seen a series of ruptures and changes in emphasis, and in many ways scholarly production accurately mirrors the dynamics of incoherent contemporary Palestinian politics. Recent Palestinian political history has been a long march away from a liberation agenda and towards a piecemeal approach to the establishment of some kind of sovereignty under the structure of the Israeli settler colonial regime. In this environment, it is not surprising that even scholarship written in solidarity with Palestinians tends to shy away from structural questions. Much of the contemporary literature tends to take on micro-political issues or Israeli administrative practices within a given context and prodigiously overwork them. But when did Palestinians ever find themselves in a “post-colonial” condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land and for return become a “postconflict” situation? When did Israel become a “post-Zionist” society? When did indigenous Palestinians in the Galilee (for example) become an “ethnic minority”? And when did the establishment of the Palestinian Authority and the consequent fortification of Palestinian reserves become “state-building”?

Moreover, the trend towards studying the occupation often internalizes it as an ontological category distinct from the larger structures of Israeli settler colonialism. The occupation imposes boundaries on space and time; and categories, discourses, and materialities that are embedded in colonial power relations are operationalized in this literature. The Green Line, the border between Israel and the Palestinian reserves, is one example of this phenomenon: it has become a powerful symbolic and material signifier that enforces, and takes for granted, the fragmentation of the Palestinian polity. With few exceptions, it is a line that is rarely crossed in scholarly accounts of Palestine—in either direction. Different Palestinian populations have come to be represented as isolated, analytically separate, pieces of an impossible puzzle. In addition, the focus on the second stage of colonization, the 1967 occupation, emphasizes settlement by Israelis in the West Bank and absolves previous generations of Zionists and Israel itself of settler colonialism.

“For natives,” as Patrick Wolfe puts it, “the issue is that, at the hands of the settlers, they face [physical and symbolic] elimination.” Given such a threat, the central question for committed scholarship and liberatory movements should be how to develop a praxis that brings back decolonization and liberation as the imperative goal. The advantage of advancing settler colonialism as a relevant interpretative framework for the study of Zionism is not only that it can offer conceptual and political possibilities for how we read Palestine today, but that it also dismantles deep-seeded analyses and assumptions sustaining claims of exceptionalism. It brings Israel into comparison with cases such as South Africa, Rhodesia and French-Algeria, and earlier settler colonial formations such as the United States, Canada or Australia, rather than the contemporary European democracies to which Israel seeks comparison. For Palestine, it means the reiteration of the fact that Palestinians are an indigenous people, and an alignment of Palestine scholarship with indigenous and native studies.

In this context, John Collins notes, the challenge

is to bring all the relevant tools of critically engaged scholarship […] in order to pursue two related objectives: to understand the complex set of structures and processes […] that have combined to produce the intolerable reality evident today; and to think creatively about how this understanding might enable individuals to transform that reality.

Otherwise, settler colonialism remains a descriptive category that does not move beyond sentiment and into strategy. While activists, both in Palestine and outside it, continue to push back against Zionist encroachment, intensify the demand for equal rights, and build a boycott, divestment and sanctions movement aimed at shaming and delegitimizing Israel internationally, the creative offerings of the settler colonial studies paradigm remain underutilized. This lack of rigorous engagement has consequences for movement building. The historic response to settler colonialism has been the struggle for decolonization; in the absence of a settler colonial analysis, Palestinian strategies have tended to target accommodate settler colonial outcomes rather than aiming to decolonize the structure itself.

Equally important, the analysis enabled by the settler colonial paradigm offers a powerful political tool to reorient and recreate genuine bi-directional solidarity alliances and political fraternity. As attested by the cover of this issue, a declaration of solidarity for Palestinians in their struggle against Zionist aggression by the Organization of Solidarity for the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAAL), this convergence is not new. The settler colonial perspective offers the possibility of a new in-gathering of movements, harnessing each other’s strengths for an active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in North America, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere. Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalist approach asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, broader struggles—all anti-imperial, all anti-racist, and all struggling to make another world possible.

Arabian Peninsula Media Roundup (May 15)

Tue, 15 May 2012 15:39:00 GMT

Saudi-Bahrain Proposed Unity

"Gulf states 'need time to study' union plan," an article on the vague proposal of a union among the Gulf states to replace the Gulf Cooperation Council, by Elizabeth Dickinson in The National.

"Gulf unity plan on hold amid Iranian warning," a news report on the proposal of unity among the Gulf states, by Ian Black in The Guardian.

"Saudi-Bahrain unity deal draws fierce criticism," an article on the protests against the proposed unity deal between the two Gulf states, in Al-Akhbar English.

"Saudi Arabia 'to announce union with Bahrain'," a news report on the unity deal between the two Gulf states, in Al-Akhbar English.

US Arms Sales to Bahrain

"US partially resumes arms sales to Bahrain," a report on the latest decision by the Obama administration to resume arms shipment to Bahrain after a temporary suspension, in Al-Jazeera English.

"U.S. to resume some military sales to Bahrain," an article on the implications of arms sales to Bahrain, by Karen DeYoung in The Washington Post.

"US resumes arms shipments to Bahrain despite rights concerns," a news report on the latest decision by the Obama administration to resume arms shipment to Bahrain, in Associated Press.

"Obama administration seeks to bolster Bahraini crown prince with arms sales," an analysis of the arms deal signed by the US and Bahrain's Crown Prince during his visit to the US to attend his son's graduation from American University, by Josh Rogin in Foreign Policy.

US Strikes in Yemen

"'Al-Qaeda fighters' killed in Yemen attacks," a news report on two US drone attacks in Yemen that killed fighters linked to al-Qaeda in Al-Jazeera English.

"Yemen says US drone strikes have killed 11 a-Qaida militants in two days," an article on the implications of the US strike for the stability of some regions in Yemen, by Matt Williams in The Guardian.

Imperialism and the Left

"If You Take My Advice - I'd Repress Them," an excellent article on the role of Britain in supporting and advising the Bahraini royal family over the past 90 years, by Adam Curtis on BBC blogs.

"Bahrain: A New Sectarian Conflict?" an informed article on the Bahraini regime's success in portraying the protests calling for reforms as a plot by the Shia majority to hand the country to Iran, by Joost Hiltermann in The New York Review of Books.

Regional and International Perspectives

"Long-Running Antiterrorism Work With Saudis Led to Airline Plot's Failure," an article describing Saudi Arabia as a crucial partner to the US in the war on terror, by Robert Worth and Eric Schmitt in The New York Times.

"'Pursuit of Terrorists Is Irreversible,' Yemen's President Says," an article on the cooperation between the US and Yemen, by Scott Shane in The New York Times.

"Oman: The Sultan's Dream Roads," an excellent article on the political oppression that lies beneath the surface of Oman's infrastructural boom, by Leah Caldwell in Al-Akhbar English.

"Will UAE and Iran resolve the three islands dispute?" an article on the new strategy used by the UAE to solve the dispute over the three islands, by Nima Khorammi Assl in Al-Jazeera English.

Policy and Reports

"Not guilty plea for Kuwaiti accused of blasphemy on Twitter," a news report on Hamad Al Naqi who is charged with defaming the Prophet and insulting the rulers of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, in The National.

"Yemen pipeline blown up again," a news report on the latest attack on a gas pipeline in eastern Yemen, in Al-Akhbar English.

"Fasting for justice in Dubai," a news report on a Belgian who is on hunger strike to protest bounced-cheque laws in the UAE, in Al-Jazeera English.

"Obama aide in Yemen in anti-al Qaeda drive," a Reuters news report on a visit to Yemen by a senior aide to President Obama.

"UAE: Expanded Crackdown on Islamist Group," a report on the UAE authority's crackdown on peaceful political activists belonging to Islamist associations, by Human Rights Watch.

"Saudi king sacks adviser over gender comments," a news report on the decision of King Abdudllah to sack his adviser, in Al-Jazeera English.

Human Rights Watch

"UAE: Proposed Law to Benefit Domestic Workers," a report on proposed legislation protecting domestic workers, whose provisions are raising concerns, by Human Rights Watch.

"World Report 2012: Saudi Arabia," a damning documentation of human rights in Saudi Arabia in the world report published by Human Rights Watch.

Media

"Bahrain Special: How Regime Supporters Used a New York Times Reporter (Again) to Denounce the Opposition," an article on the techniques used supporters of the regime to discredit the opposition, by Scott Lucas.

"Losing Faith With Protesters in Bahrain," an article on three Western expatriates living in Bahrain expressing disappointment with the protesters and praising reforms promised by the King, by Souad Mekhennet in The New York Times.

Arabic

عين على المخيم

Tue, 15 May 2012 15:33:00 GMT

بلغ عدد اللاجئين المسجلين لدى الانوروا (وكالة الأمم المتحدة لإغاثة وتشغيل اللاجئين الفلسطينيين) نهاية عام 2011، حوالي 5.1 مليون لاجئ فلسطيني، يشكلون ما نسبته 45.6% من مجمل السكان الفلسطينيين في العالم، يتوزعون بواقع 59.1% في كل من الأردن وسوريا ولبنان، و17.1% في الضفة الغربية، و23.8% في قطاع غزة. يعيش حوالي 29.0% من اللاجئين الفلسطينيين في 58 مخيماً. وتمثل هذه التقديرات الحد الأدنى لعدد اللاجئين الفلسطينيين باعتبار وجود لاجئين غير مسجلين.

هذه الصور التقطتها عدسة محمد مواسي في اذار/مارس من العام الجاري في مخيم برج البراجنة. تقوم ”جدلية“ بنشرها للفت الإنتباه والتذكير بمحنة اللاجئين في الذكرى الرابعة والستين للنكبة.

أُنشئ مخيم برج البراجنة في سنة 1948 ويعتبر من أكبر المخيمات في العاصمة اللبنانية بيروت، ويقع على الطريق الرئيسي المؤدي إلى مطار بيروت الدولي. ينتشر فيه البؤس، والفقر، والشوارع الموحلة، ويكتظ بساكنيه…

سروة ونكبة...

Tue, 15 May 2012 15:30:00 GMT

قصة قصيرة

ليلة مقمرة، لا أقل ولا أكثر. وأشجار سرو، كانت تؤرقني كلما تأملتها. كانت تحيط بساحة المدرسة وتبدو لي تافهة مكتوفة الأيدي، غير قادرة على تحريك أغصانها بحرية. وكنت أعتقد ألا نفع منها، لا بثمر ولا بظل، إلا بسهولة رسمها في كراريسنا.

أشجار سرو، تحوطني هذه الليلة ولكن ليس في ساحة المدرسة. تترنح ذات الشمال وذات اليمين، وكأنها تعاكس الريح. أما أنا فكنت بطيء النمو ونحيفاً مثلها وربما هذا ما جعلني أُكثر من تأملها وأنا لم أقطع سنواتي العشر بعد.

كنا ننام أربعتنا، أنا وأختي ندى ووالداي، منذ ليال خمس في كوخ يطقطق المطرعلى صفيحه فينزل على مسامعي كرمي حجارة من السماء. أبي قال إنهم يحيطون بحيفا وآمن لنا أن ننام في البيارات، إلى أن تهدأ الأمور ونعود إلى بيتنا في وداي النسناس.

كنت أحب النوم في أحضان والدي وعندما أحس بشهيقه وزفيره أشعر أن كل شيء سيكون على ما يرام. لم يحدثنا أبي كثيراً عما يحدث قال إننا سنذهب إلى بيارة أحد الأصدقاء ونعود حالما تهدأ الأمور. لكن هذا الهدوء عكره في ليلتي السادسة ما كنت أخشاه طوال الوقت.

نهضت من نومي واكتشف المصيبة التي وقعت. تسللت من فراشي المبلل وخرجت مرعوباً، خوفاً من أن تفيق والدتي وتبدأ بتقريعي ولا أدري عندها ما يمكنني أن أفعل. إعتقدت أن ذلك السرو العملاق، الذي إزداد حجمه حجماً في ليل الخوف والبيارات وكان يتحرك بكل الإتجاهات، سيسقط كالمطرقة فوق كوخنا ويهدمه على رؤوسنا.

- ماذا بك؟

أفزعني سؤال أبي وكان يقف بجانبي ببنطاله المبلل. وخجلت منه لأنني بللت بنطاله وهو نائم بجانبي.

- سينكسر هذا السرو ويسقط فوق الكوخ ويقتلنا... أريد أن أعود إلى وادي النسناس.

ضحك أبي وجلس إلى جانبي يتأمل السرو.

- أتعرف يا إميل أن السرو ينام بالنهار ويفيق بالليل ليحرس البيارات ومن فيها. وهو يتحرك بهذا الشكل كي يخيف الأعداء القادمين من بعيد إلينا.

- صحيح!

- نعم حبيبي لا داعي للخوف يمكنك الآن النوم بهدوء فلن يسقط السرو فوق رؤوسنا...

في الليلة السابعة أصرت أمي على أن أنام على مرتبتي وفرشت تحتي غطاء من النايلون تحسباً لتبولي بفراشي. ولم يكن أمامي غير الخضوع لإصرارها.

فقت في الليل لسماعي خرخشة في الخارج. تحسست بنطالي فكان ناشفاً وشعرت بارتياح شديد. خرجت من الكوخ وكان أبي مقرفصاً أمام الكوخ يجهش.

- لن نتمكن من العودة إلى حيفا الآن. سقطت حيفا...

قالها بصوت مخنوق وأمي تقف بجانبه شديدة الشحوب تبكي بصمت. السرو خلفها لا يتحرك كالعسكر المهزوم وكأن الريح قد ماتت فلا شيء يدفع الأشجار ويحركها لا ذات الشمال ولا ذات اليمين، ورأيت السماء كلها قد سقطت فوق رؤوسنا. وأصبحوا يسمون ذلك اليوم بيوم النكبة.

فضيحة بوعلام صنصال تدغدغ الوجدان الاسرائيلي

Tue, 15 May 2012 15:29:00 GMT

يشارك الكاتب الجزائري الفرنكوفوني بوعلام صنصال في «مهرجان الأدباء العالمي» الذي تعقده مؤسسة «مشكانوت شأنانيم» في القدس بين 13 و18 أيار (مايو) الجاري. وسيظهر خلاله ضمن ندوة ثنائية تجمع بينه وبين الكاتب الإسرائيلي أ. ب. يهوشواع تعقد في 16 الجاري، وسيكون محورها حوار الثقافات. وعشية هذه الندوة سيشترك في لقاء مفتوح مع الجمهور الإسرائيلي يعقد في المعهد الفرنسي في تل أبيب.

وأعرب مدير المؤسسة المنظمة لهذا المهرجان أوري درومي، والذي كان مديراً لدائرة الصحافة الحكومية، عن سروره البالغ لعدم خضوع صنصال للضغوط التي مورست عليه من أجل إلغاء مشاركته، وخصوصاً من جانب حركة «حماس»، لافتاً إلى أنه سيحظى في القدس بحرية في طرح أسئلته الشجاعة التي يفتقدها في الجزائر، لكون إسرائيل «رأس حربة الحرية في الشرق الأوسط».

أبرز الإعلام الإسرائيلي أن كتب بوعلام صنصال محظورة في بلده، على رغم أنها تتصدّر قوائم الكتب الأكثر مبيعاً في أوروبا، وأنه حاز في العام الفائت «جائزة السلام» التي تمنحها جمعية أصحاب المكتبات في ألمانيا سنوياً منذ عام 1950 وتبلغ قيمتها 25 ألف يورو في اختتام معرض الكتاب الدولي في فرانكفورت، وذلك بعد عام واحد من منحها للكاتب الإسرائيلي دافيد غروسمان، وأنه الكاتب الجزائري الثاني الذي يحصل على هذه الجائزة بعد الروائية آسيا جبار التي حصلت عليها في عام 2000.

ونوّه هذا الإعلام بأن لجنة التحكيم سوّغت قرارها منحه الجائزة بمناهضة كتبه للقمع، ودعمها جهود لقاء الحضارات باحترام وتفاهم، وأن الغاية منها أيضاً هي دعم الحركة الديموقراطية في شمال أفريقيا. وأشار إلى أن جمعية أصحاب المكتبات في ألمانيا شدّدت في بيانها على أن صنصال يعارض كل أشكال التضليل والإرهاب والتعسف السياسي بدفاعه العنيد عن الكلمة الحرة والحوار العلني في مجتمع ديموقراطي.

رواية بالعبرية

وصدرت لصنصال في عام 2011 ترجمة عبرية لروايته الخامسة «قرية الألماني أو مذكرات الأخوين شيلر» (ظهرت بالفرنسية في عام 2008) وهي تحكي قصة علاقة ضابط سابق في الجيش النازي بقادة جبهة التحرير الوطني في الجزائر.

وأفادت قراءة للرواية ظهرت في صحيفة «هآرتس»، بأن أهميتها الكبرى عائدة إلى ما تشتمل عليه من نقد صارم يوجهه المؤلف إلى الحركات الإسلامية المتطرفة، والمقارنة التي يعقدها بين ممارساتها وبين الجرائم التي ارتكبتها النازية. وبالتالي فإنها تدغدغ مشاعر الخوف المتأصل لدى الإسرائيليين من الإسلام المتطرّف، ولا سيما عقب آخر التطورات التي أسفرت عنها ثورات «الربيع العربي».

وأعادت قراءة الصحيفة إلى الأذهان أن صنصال سبق أن قال في إحدى مقابلاته الصحافية إن ثمة أوجه شبه كثيرة بين النازيين والمجاهدين الإسلاميين، وإن فكرة إبادة كل من لا يخضع للأيديولوجيا الإسلامية المتطرفة لا تقل خطورة عن فكرة الاحتلال، من حيث استهداف الروح والكينونة.

وفي سياق ذلك، أشير إلى أن هذه ليست المرة الأولى التي يكون فيها صنصال في عين العاصفة في ما يتعلق بتطبيع العلاقات الثقافية مع إسرائيل، إذ سبق أن اشترك في «معرض باريس الدولي للكتاب» (2008)، الذي احتفى بإسرائيل كضيف شرف. ويومذاك برّر اشتراكه قائلاً: «الأدباء ليسوا سياسيين، ولا أرى سبباً لمقاطعتهم»!

وفور ذيوع نبأ اشتراك صنصال في هذا المهرجان وجهت «الحملة الفلسطينية للمقاطعة الأكاديمية والثقافية لإسرائيل» رسالة مفتوحة إليه أكدت فيها أن مشاركته «ستشكل تطبيعاً مع دولة الاحتلال يغذي حصانتها، وبالتالي يساهم في إدامة قدرتها على حرمان الشعب الفلسطيني من حقه غير القابل للتصرف في تقرير المصير». ودعته إلى إلغاء مشاركته كي لا يمنح حريته لمن يحرم الفلسطينيين حريتهم. وتوجهت إليه ككاتب ومثقّف بأن يعبر عن الحد الأدنى من التضامن واتخاذ الموقف المشرف نفسه الذي اتخذه مفكرون وكتّاب عالميون آخرون، مثل نعومي كلاين، وجوديث بتلر، وسارة شولمان، وجون برجر، وهيننغ مانكل، وإيان بانكس، وغيرهم ممن رفضوا استغلال أسمائهم/ ن كأوراق تغطي جرائم إسرائيل.

وأصدر الاتحاد العام للكتاب والأدباء الفلسطينيين بياناً قال فيه إن «مهرجان الأدباء العالمي» في القدس بُرمج ليتزامن مع احتفالات إسرائيل في مناسبة ذكرى استقلالها، ومع إحياء الفلسطينيين الذكرى الرابعة والستين لنكبة 1948. ورأى أن توقيت المهرجان، وعقده في قلب مدينة القدس الجريحة، التي تتواتر محاولات صهينتها يوماً بعد يوم في أشرس حملة لعزلها عن جسدها الفلسطيني، والتمييز العنصري ضد أصحابها العرب، وفي أول بؤرة استيطانية في تاريخ القدس، يبثان للضمير العالمي إشارة واضحة فحواها أن «المؤسسة الثقافية الإسرائيلية» هي جزء لا يتجزأ من «المؤسسة الاستعمارية الصهيونية» - الأولى في حربها على الذاكرة الفلسطينية، والأخرى في حربها على الوجود الفلسطيني.

غرباء وأسوار

وقد أتت الإشارة إلى العروة الوثقى بين المؤسستين من خلال الكشف عن أن إدارة المهرجان طلبت من الأديبين اللذين سيتكلمان في أمسية الافتتاح، المجري لاسلو كراسنــاهـــوركــــاي، والإســـرائيلـــية تسرويا شاليف، تزويدها بكلمتيهما مسبقاً. ونقلت صحيفة «هآرتس» عن عضو إدارة المهرجان طال كريمر قولها إن الهدف من هذه الخطوة هو تجنب تكرار ما حدث لدى افتتاح المهرجان قبل عامين حين ألقى الكاتب الإسرائيلي الشاب نير برعام كلمة قال فيها إن اليهود يتمسكون بصورة الضحية التي فصّلها التاريخ على مقاسهم كي يرتكبوا مظالم بحق غير اليهود في دولة إسرائيل والمناطق المحتلة. وأثارت كلماته حنق رئيس الدولة الإسرائيلية شمعون بيريز، ووزيرة الثقافة ليمور ليفنات، اللذين رعيا الافتتاح.

في الوقت نفسه أشار برعام إلى أن إسرائيل عزلت نفسها وراء الأسوار أكثر فأكثر على مدار العقد المنصرم، وباتت متشددة أكثر في إنشاء بيئة لليهود فقط تلفظ الغرباء وتقصيهم، وتتنكر للحيّز الجيو - سياسي الذي تعيش فيه. والمهمة الأبرز الماثلة أمام جيل الأدباء الشباب في الوقت الحالي هي إسقاط هذه الأسوار، بعد أن مُنيت الأجيال الأدبية السابقة بالفشل في إنجاز ذلك.

ولدى مراجعة وقائع العامين المنصرمين منذ أن نطق برعام بتلك الكلمات، من السهل ملاحظة أن مزيداً من الأسوار قد سيطر على كينونة إسرائيل، وأساساً كردّ على الثورات الشعبية في العالم العربي التي ما زالت غير قادرة على إقناع معظم الإسرائيليين بالنأي عن سبيل التفكير الانعزالي، أو بأن العرب يمكن أن يكونوا ديموقراطيين، وأن يغادروا مستنقع الظلامية.

بيان الاتحاد العام للكتاب والأدباء الفلسطينيين

«على رغم النداءات المتكررة لكتَّاب عالميين دُعوا إلى المشاركة في ما يُعرف بـ «مهرجان الكتاب الدولي - مشكنوت شعنانيم» والمنعقد في القدس (13 - 18 أيار 2012)، واستجابة الكثير منهم، إلا أن بعضهم تجاهل هذه النداءات، وأصر على المجيء للمشاركة في هذا المهرجان الذي بُرمج ليتزامن مع احتفالات دولة الاستعمار الاستيطاني «إسرائيل» بـ «عيد استقلالها»، وإحياء الفلسطينيين الذكرى الرابعة والستين لنكبة عام 1948.

ولم يكتفِ بعض هؤلاء الكتَّاب، من كاسري المقاطعة والراقصين على الجرح الفلسطيني من أمثال الأميركية تريسي شيفلير والبوسني ألكساندر هيمون، بالمجيء على رغم نداءات المقاطعة، بل وطلبوا من المدير العام للمهرجان أوري درومي، ترتيب لقاءات بينهم وبين كتاب فلسطينيين «محليين» في رام الله، وجولات في القدس «الشرقية» لرؤية الفلسطينيين. إن هذه النزعة الاستشراقية في التعرُّف إلى «المحليين،» كموضوعات استعمارية للفُرجة، وعبر وسطاء مستعمِرين، ينبغي أن تواجَه بالإدانة والمقاطعة الصارمة، إذ كان على هؤلاء الاختيار بين الوقوف مع الاحتلال أو مع الحرية، إذ لا توسُّط بينهما. تماماً مثل أنه لا توسُّط بين شعب «يسكن مساكن السلام» (مشكنوت شعنانيم)، وآخر طُرد منها لأنه غير مشمول في نبوءات إشعيا.

إن عقد المهرجان في هذا التوقيت، وفي قلب مدينة القدس الجريحة، التي تتم صهينتها يوماً بعد يوم في أشرس حملة لعزلها عن جسدها الفلسطيني، والتمييز العنصري ضد أصحابها العرب، وفي أول بؤرة استيطانية في تاريخ القدس، ليرسل للضمير العالمي إشارة واضحة بأن «المؤسسة الثقافية الإسرائيلية» هي جزء لا يتجزأ من «المؤسسة الاستعمارية الصهيونية»: الأولى في حربها على الذاكرة الفلسطينية، والأخرى في حربها على الوجود الفلسطيني. كما يبثُّ رسالة مغايرة للدعاية التي يروّجها المهرجان بأنه قائم بهدف «... جعل القدس مدينة للتعددية، والحوار، والتسامح». إن مدينة القدس الأسطورية، واليهودية حتى الملل: من «برج داود» إلى «حيطان سليمان» إلى مشهدية «صحراء يهودا»... التي تروِّج لها دعاية المهرجان؛ ومشاركة «كبار» الكتَّاب الصهاينة من أمثال عاموس عوز وأ. ب. يهوشواع وديفيد غروسمان، إلى جانب كتَّاب متوسطي الحرفة كإتغر كيرت، ومستغربين يكتبون بغير العربية من أمثال سيد قشوع وبوعلام صنصال... يحيل المهرجان إلى كرنفال للمسخرة تنبغي مقاطعته لاعتبارات قيمية وجمالية إضافة إلى الاعتبارات الثقافية والسياسية.

إن الاتحاد العام للكتَّاب والأدباء الفلسطينيين، وهو يحيي مع الشعب الفلسطيني ذكرى النكبة، ويعلي بيرق المواجهة من الشعار إلى خط النار: من تحقيق الدولة إلى تحقيق العودة، ومن تحرير القدس إلى تحرير الأسرى... ليجلُّ عالياً استجابة الكتَّاب العالميين الذين قاطعوا، في غالبيتهم، هذا المهرجان، ويدين بأقسى العبارات مشاركة من أعلنت إدارة المهرجان مشاركتهم على موقعها الإلكتروني وفي نشراتها الإعلامية. ويدعو الاتحاد المثقفين الفلسطينيين والمشتغلين في الحقل الثقافي، كتاباً وأدباء وأكاديميين وصحافيين، إلى مقاطعة المهرجان، وعدم الالتقاء بالمشاركين فيه، إذ هم فوج مقتحم، غير مرحب بهم... إنهم نالوا العار».

[عن جريدة ”الحياة“ اللندنية]

Last Week on Jadaliyya (May 7-13)

Mon, 14 May 2012 21:22:00 GMT

This is a selection of what you might have missed on Jadaliyya last week. It also includes the most read articles. Progressively, we will be featuring more content on our "Last Week on Jadaliyya" series.

Egypt Media Roundup (May 14)

Mon, 14 May 2012 17:41:00 GMT

[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on Egypt and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the Egypt Page Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each week's roundup to egypt@jadaliyya.com by Sunday night of every week.]

“'I'll believe it when I see it': SCAF rule in Egypt approaches its scheduled end”
Dina Ezzat questions SCAF’s promises to step down after the inauguration of Egypt’s next president.

“Government greed: Poor Egyptian farmers pay the price”
Yasmine Fathi investigates cases of uprooting slum dwellers by land-hungry authorities.

“#Monazarat : The Day after the Presidential Debate”
Zenobia comments on the first televised presidential debate in Egypt.

“Female protesters detained in Abbasseya clashes deny facing 'virginity tests'”
Women detainees say there was mistreatment but no virginity tests.

“Saudi to grant Egypt $500mn, deposits $1bn in CBE”
Saudi ambassador announces Riyadh’s financial support “for the revolution.”

“Egypt presidential elections to proceed as planned, SPEC says”
The Supreme Presidential Electoral Commission disregards the administrative court’s ruling that the Commission’s call for election is unconstitutional.

“Abbasseya clashes and new law revive military trials for civilians”
300 civilians arrested during Abbasiya clashes are sent to military courts.

“FJP: Military rulers cannot dissolve Parliament if court rules election invalid”
Freedom and Justice Party leaders claim that only the president has the right to dissolve the Parliament.

“Abu Ismail denies responsibility for Abbasseya violence as supporters leave Tahrir”
Disqualified presidential candidate Hazem Abu-Ismail denies that people involved in the Abbasiya clashes were his supporters.

“Mubarak Still Has His Billions”
A year after the revolution authorities are still far from repatriating funds illegally obtained by the former Egyptian president.

“Egyptian diplomats to monitor El-Gizawi questioning in Saudi”
Egyptian consulate officials will be able to attend the hearing of lawyer whose arrest sparked an Egyptian-Saudi diplomatic crisis.

“UPDATE: Cairo-Alex highway reopens after steel plant workers end their blockade”
Workers at Beshay Steel demand higher wages to match those at Ezz Steel factories.

“Spanish court confirms verdict to extradite Hussein Salem”
Hussein Salem, a businessman close to Mubarak, will be extradited to Egypt to face trial over graft and bribery.

“Egypt’s uncertain road to prosperity: economic challenges to long‐term stability”
Genevieve Theodorakis talks about the challenges that neoliberal policies implemented under Hosni Mubarak will pose to future Egyptian governments.

“New ministers sworn into Ganzouri Cabinet”
El-Ganzouri reshuffles his cabinet, but key ministries unaffected.

“The Egyptian Republic of Retired Generals”
Zeinab Abul-Magd talks about the pervasive occupation of high state administrative and economic positions by retired generals.

“Police raid Iranian Alalam News Cairo office, confiscate equipment”
Egyptian authorities say the Iranian channel has no license to operate in Egypt.

In Arabic:

“فاطمة إمام: يوميات مصرية سوداء”
Fatima Imam writes about her daily struggle being a Nubian woman in Egypt.

“حمدين صباحي الرابح في مناظرة أبو الفتوح وموسى”
Some say Hamdeen Sabahy is the real winner of the first presidential debate between Amr Moussa and Abd El-Moneim Abou El-Fotouh.

“مركز المعلومات: أبو الفتوح يتصدر المرشحين للرئاسة وشفيق الثاني”
A new presidential poll shows Abd El-Moneim Abo El-Fotouh in the lead, followed by Ahmed Shafiq; 40% are still undecided.

“(أخطاء الإخوان) فى مائة يوم من عمر مجلس الشعب”
Tareq El-Bishri reviews the first 100 days since the formation of the Parliament and the initiatives of the Muslim Brotherhood-led majority.

“شاهد عيان من العباسية”
Khaled Dawoud recounts the events that led to the 2 May Abbasiya clashes.

“تحقيقات النيابة في «أحداث ماسبيرو»: مجهولون أطلقوا النار على المتظاهرين والجيش من مراكب نيلية”
New details about the investigation into the Maspero clashes; prosecution says unknown gunmen opened fire on protesters from Nile boats.

“المرشح الثورى وتسليم السلطة”
Rabab El-Mahdy says that the “revolutionary presidential candidate” and “handover of power” are problematic concepts.

“نزع فتيل الصدام بين الجالية المصرية والشرطة السعودية بعد تأخر دفن ثلاث مصريين”
More than a thousand Egyptians gather in front of a police station in Jeddah after the death of 3 Egyptian nationals.

“(العباسية) تفجر الصراع السياسى المكتوم فى مجلس الشعب”
A scuffle erupts in the Egyptian Parliament during deliberations on the Abbasiya clashes.

Recent Jadaliyya articles on Egypt:

The MOD Sit-in: Sometimes with the Islamists, Never with the State...

Egypt's Presidential Duel an Epic Moment (Video)

Bringing the Revolution to Campus: An Interview with March 9 Activist Laila Soueif

Egyptian Parliamentary Protests in Pictures

Suleiman and the Revolution (In both Arabic and English)

ثورة الجسد

جدلية صعود أبو الفتوح وإمكانية استنساخ النموذج الأردوجاني

Shock-and-Awe Nation Building: Iraq's Neo-Liberal Reconstruction

Mon, 14 May 2012 14:45:00 GMT

The Iraqi government’s contractual delivery of Iraqi oil fields to foreign multinationals is perhaps the most consequential long-term economic consequence of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. Contracts have been signed, production rights to massive oil fields sold, and a steady stream of propaganda disseminated about Iraqi oil production eventually rivaling that of Saudi Arabia and Iran. The celebratory narrative of Iraq’s expanding oil production has been marketed as an essential component of Iraq’s re-integration into a world economic system that will, we are told, become increasingly dependent on Iraqi oil, much of it waiting to be tapped.

The de-nationalization of Iraq’s public wealth has been presented to the Iraqi public as a necessity due to Iraq’s destroyed infrastructure and lack of technical expertise after decades of war and economic sanctions, sanctions that are widely recognized to have “de-developed” Iraq. But what does this vision of Iraq’s privatized petro-future, the reversal of decades of social policy predicated on a nationalized public good, portend for Iraq’s people and their livelihoods? And how will reconstruction and “development” proceed in the context of foreign multinationals playing a dominant role in the context of the collapse and fragmentation of the Iraqi state?

If Iraq’s 1958 anti-colonial revolution had national independence as its official aim, the most significant economic component of the nation’s post-colonial independence meant ending foreign control over Iraq’s natural resources and a redistribution of wealth—something almost all of Iraq’s disparate political groups could agree upon. The current Iraqi government’s rhetoric of national development, reconstruction, and future prosperity is dependent on the expansion of oil production and the increases in revenues it brings, and as oil production steadily increases, it has signed numerous contracts with the stated purpose of reconstructing Iraq’s public infrastructure, including plans to build tens of thousands of new housing units throughout the nation, including the construction of satellite cities in Baghdad and Basra.

The Iraqi government’s national development plans today have much in common with mid-century modernization projects in the post-colonial world, projects defined by central government control, top-down planning, the absence of transparency in their planning and execution, and commissions awarded to foreign multi-nationals. The difference for Iraq today is that its re-integration into a neo-liberal world economy occurs under the aegis of an exceptionally weak, corrupt, and fractured central government that lacks the authority to provide even basic security and public services to its population. Under such conditions, multi-billion dollar development projects awarded to foreign multinationals represent not only the neo-liberal, shock-and-awe economic colonization of Iraq, but will have dramatic consequences for the spatial and material organization of Iraq’s population and the spaces they inhabit, a population that has already in the past decade experienced a massively disruptive re-ordering and re-distribution based on sectarian affiliation.

And yet the Iraqi government, despite its inability to provide basic services, continues to announce one grandiose project after another, perhaps hoping that the promise of future prosperity will somehow ameliorate dissatisfaction with the dismal present. Such promises of national development linked to expanding oil production are not new for Iraq. In the 1950s, similar rhetoric accompanied the Iraqi monarchy’s ambitious, concerted development plan for the nation, led by the Iraq Development Board, that sought to modernize Iraq’s cities and infrastructure, and by extension, its people. One of the main sources of anxiety for the Iraqi monarchy and its British and American advisors, eager to prevent Iraq from coming under the influence of the Soviet Union in light of the growing strength of the Iraqi Communist Party, was the presence of slums on the outskirts of Baghdad, inhabited by Shurug, or Sharagwa, a pejorative term originally used to describe peasants from the rice growing regions of southern Iraq centered around the city of ‘Amarah who had migrated to Baghdad in the thousands and built mud huts, sarifas, in the eastern part of the city.

Their migration to Baghdad was principally caused by British land tenure policy, which granted increased power to tribal shaykhs in exchange for their loyalty, thereby transforming Iraqi peasants into veritable slave laborers on land they had worked for centuries. More than the draw of city jobs and city life, the disruptive reorganization of the rural economy in the service of colonial interests motivated their rural to urban migration. For an Iraqi government intent on displaying to the world and to its citizens that it was modernizing, the presence of impoverished peasants living in mud huts on the outskirts of Baghdad and increasingly crowded in apartments in the city center necessitated some form of intervention, which would take shape in the “slum-clearance” programs, a synonym for forced relocation, that were implemented by the state. The threat Baghdad’s urban poor posed to the political order of the city was a constant source of anxiety for the monarchy, often expressed officially through fear of violence, contamination, and disease that the Shurug would spread in the city.

And yet the monarchy took little action to ameliorate the conditions suffered by the urban poor. The monarchy’s development plans were instead highlighted by signature architectural projects commissioned from world-renowned modernist architects including Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Alvaar Alto, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Gio Ponti, among others. The involvement of these architects in shaping the material composition of a distant, non-European city heralded the rise of the global architect as a commodity, foreshadowing the way that buildings by “international” (i.e., “Western”) architects would have the power to create their own tourist industries and would become sites of pilgrimage by well-heeled tourists. Architects with international fame suddenly had the power to design projects that would attract the world’s attention to any city in the world, and could help a city like Baghdad, non-Western and “under-developed,” enter the Western narrative of a cosmopolitan modernity.

Though much attention has been given to these high-profile projects whose goal was ostensibly to put Baghdad on the world map as a modern, cosmopolitan city, a process today replicated by architectural projects in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, the mid 20^th-century urban landscape of Baghdad was altered far more dramatically by the master plan for the city developed by the cold-war urban planner Constantinos Doxiadis, author of the “slum-clearing” programs, who sought to implement in Baghdad his high-modernist vision of using urban planning to fashion new citizens who embraced the free-market and liberal values of the West. After the 1958 coup d’etat that ended the rule of Iraq’s Hashemite monarchy, the nationalist government of ‘Abd al-Karim Qassem dismantled the Iraq Development Board and formed the Ministry of Planning, which rapidly constructed Revolution City (Madinat al-Thawra) to house the thousands of impoverished Iraqis living in sarifas throughout Baghdad. The plan for Revolution City was based on the urban master plan for Baghdad crafted by Doxiadis and an extension of housing developments he designed in the northeast of the city.

Revolution City was built as a city within a city, self-contained, effectively exiling Baghdad’s impoverished peasants far outside the city center to the northeast in an enclosed space. Encased in an urban grid and separated into sectors, with low-lying buildings and wide avenues, the physical layout of Revolution City resulted in the increased ability of the state for surveillance and control of what was regarded as a threatening population, not only politically, but also to the social and economic order of the city. Revolution City, whose inhabitants were predominantly Shi’a, would later be named Saddam City, and after the US invasion of Iraq, Sadr City. Media reports consistently refer to Sadr City as a “sprawling slum,” meant to signify a generic Third World slum—chaotic, unstable, lacking order and stability, impoverished and undisciplined, and ultimately threatening—despite its historical origins as a planned city meant to embody and produce order and instrumentalized rationalism. Sadr City is today a monument to the failed high-modernist 20^th century social engineering projects designed for the urban poor throughout the world.

Mid-20^th century architecture and urban planning projects like Sadr City were part of a much larger historical process exemplifying the intersection of development ideology, modernist architecture, and urban planning. For Iraq today, despite increased revenues from oil production, political instability and violence have limited the extent to which massive urban planning projects have been implemented, though this may change in the near future. The current Iraqi government has signed contracts with South Korean and Turkish firms to build thousands of housing units throughout Iraq, including a city of one hundred thousand units to be developed near Basra, a massive reconstruction of Sadr City, and a satellite city of 100,000 new homes southeast of Baghdad.

If Sadr City was conceived of as a strong central government’s top-down solution to the problems of urban poverty, today Iraq is set to embark upon the neo-liberal model for the satellite city, replicating projects already built on the outskirts of cities like Cairo and Istanbul, designed not for the poor but for the upper-middle classes. As many scholars have observed, these satellite cities exist at the expense of the central city, suctioning away financial and natural resources from the historic center and disseminating them to the periphery, widening social, political, and cultural divisions. For Baghdad, a city in desperate need of reconstruction, projects like the Besmaya project are an extreme representation of the triumph of neo-liberal urban planning and, ultimately, the failure of Iraq’s regime to rebuild Iraq’s shattered cities. The neo-liberal satellite city represents an American-style suburban escape for the Iraqi elite: The low-density model of sprawl—wide streets, massive lawns, and low-density—is unsustainable, requiring infrastructural and natural resources that are, in Iraq, increasingly scarce. Despite the well-established critiques of the negative impact such development projects have on cities, on social cohesion, and on the environment, what Besmaya represents is the further “opening” of Iraq to speculative multinational capitalism and, if implemented, the material re-organization of its spaces and people based on a neo-liberal logic.

Saudi Feminism: Between Mama Amreeka and Baba Abdullah

Mon, 14 May 2012 13:56:00 GMT

On 9 May 2012, Manal al-Sharif was awarded the Havel Prize for Creative Dissent at the Oslo Freedom Forum in Norway. This came shortly after al-Sharif was honored as one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in the World at a Gala in New York City. Such events have given rise to a pattern: just as numerous pictures and videos of activists attending various conferences and receiving numerous awards surface, waves of criticism pour in. Their motives are viewed with suspicion, worthiness is questioned, and a movement’s progress is reassessed.

The most prevalent criticism of Manal al-Sharif was that she was accepting an award for political dissent when she was only, at most, a social activist. This criticism was not meant to undermine her efforts but rather to allocate them a bit further down the activist totem pole, so to speak, in order to remove them from the high pedestal they had been placed on. One ought to note, however, that al-Sharif herself stated at the Forum that, “I don’t consider myself a dissident, I had to actually ask what it was.” So, it seems, she may agree with her critics.

Well then, why was al-Sharif being hailed as a dissident? This is what happens when women’s rights are treated as foreign rights to those of male citizens. We now find ourselves caught in this grey area of whether Manal al-Sharif is a women’s rights advocate or a social or political activist. Is a Saudi woman driving a social act, thus allowing for the regime’s claim that it is a matter to be left to society, or is it a political act, leading to its official dismissal as an outright challenge to the state? To some observers, her act was political. It was in fact a challenge to the state. It is true that there is no written law that bans women from driving, but the act of driving in and of itself nonetheless challenged state authority (and its established status quo). What makes al-Sharif’s critics reluctant, and perhaps rightfully so, to agree with this strictly political portrayal of her acts, is that the rhetoric she chose to accompany her actions was anything but political. In her Youtube videos, she praises the King, emphasized the she was not violating any laws in the Kingdom, and, more importantly, she claimed that female driving was a social taboo that needs to be broken and nothing more. This sort of rhetoric maintains the established child-parent relationship that Saudi women have with the state. While talk of demanding full citizenship, a political demand, did come up in al-Sharif’s campaign, it was still cloaked in a request that was social in nature. The campaign used the King’s face for its Facebook page and most of its official statements began by paying some sort of respect to the Saudi regime. As a result, the issue was reinforced as a social one. It was discussed in newspapers for months, people posted many opinion videos, and tweets were widely circulated, but that was it.

The Right2Dignity campaign made an attempt to turn to the political when it filed a lawsuit against the Saudi Traffic Department for denying Manal al-Sharif her driver’s license despite there being no written law against issuing one to a woman. Another Saudi activist, Samar Badawy, did the same. This was a head-on collision with the state. Both women voiced an outright demand for women’s right to drive—an act that is already technically legal—rather than calling for wishy-washy patrimonial supportive concessions from the regime. Unfortunately, the government has been skilled at bureaucratically stifling this legal maneuver. It also refused to allow any sort of legislation that affirms women’s rights to drive; instead it entertained allegedly scientific and academic studies which argued that driving leads to loss of virginity. Yet, some might wonder why, in the months to follow, women were given the right to join municipal elections, work in lingerie shops, or join the Olympics? It was not contradictory of the Saudi regime to embark on such “reforms” and yet hold back on the decision to allow women to drive; it was actually being rather consistent. This is because “Baba Abdullah,” the nation’s father figure, granted those rights in the form of reforms, all as a method to reaffirm the child-parent relationship with Saudi women and discourage any efforts to make demands in a political manner.

So, does this mean Manal al-Sharif did not earn her prize and that the Right2Dignity campaign was a failure? In truth, I find the question itself to be posed falsely. The fact of the matter is that al-Sharif was an accidental activist. She never intended to be political. Jillian York writes of how al-Sharif originally came up with the idea to post two Youtube videos in support of women driving in Saudi Arabia as simply a birthday dare she had challenged herself to do. Al-Sharif spoke of her unexpected role at the Oslo Freedom Forum in explaining, “Havel said, we never decided to be dissidents, we were transformed into them, without ever quite knowing how. We sometimes ended up in prison, without ever knowing how. There are things in life, you don’t choose them, they choose you.” This sums up her story. Such unplanned action has implications, however, such as the fact that she did not start out with the vision of herself as an activist. Her family’s distress at her sudden arrest, and the amount of hate mail she received—including Shaikhs’ sermons against her—were not consequences she had anticipated as a result of her drive. In such light, I think it would be fair to show her a little compassion in judging the progression of her actions. She had never intended to be a full-on activist, and so she cannot be judged in terms of what characterizes a political dissident.

However, I sense that most of the online criticism directed at al-Sharif and her recent award was not really about her, but about the exclusive focus the media has given her. There is a deep sense of unfairness regarding its selectiveness. There is also a sense of resentment that the award is supposedly for dissent, yet many Saudi dissenters find themselves forgotten in jail cells. There is anger for the political voices that are left unheard because they are not in the safe and social, preferably female and victim-looking, realm of Saudi activism. This blatantly apparent selectiveness in attention to certain types of activism can be viewed as allowing Saudis a “revolt” in a bubble. This bubble is what I labeled as strictly “social,” because it never quite enters the political realm. It still operates within the child-parent relationship, rather than promoting a citizen-state dynamic. It is the permissible revolt, the soft headlines that will not affect the price of oil. Unlike revolts in the Eastern Province which are far removed from this bubble or after prayer protests outside mosques that have led to the imprisonment of many activists. Also unlike revolts in opinion pieces that were considered “a little too much” and soon removed from newspaper sites along with their authors being swiftly silenced, or revolts in politically charged tweets whose authors disappeared shortly afterwards. Further yet, unlike bodily revolts in which stomachs refuse to eat in protest of arbitrary arrest. All these revolts… they are ignored. They do not receive any attention or award, although they deserve it more than any other. While Saudi women’s fight against discriminatory laws is also a revolt, in the specific case of Manal al-Sharif, as I have argued, it was not that of a political dissident. Rather, it was morphed into a revolt within a state-controlled, social bubble.

Is it fair to demand more of Manal al-Sharif? If her cause was not political, does that rid it of all worth? Also, is the method a campaign chooses crucial, or should one be concerned with results alone? The answer to such questions lead to a somewhat heated discussion on Twitter among feminists, debating the implications and effectiveness of al-Sharif’s social action. The different positions taken are crucial in understanding the fragmented Saudi feminist movement. I will loosely characterize each, simplifying their opinions somewhat, in order to show the main trains of thought I have observed by most when considering feminism in the Saudi case.

Madawi Al-Rasheed is an academic; her arguments are typically based on political theory and historical fact. She views the Saudi feminist movement as lacking because it isolates women’s rights from others, and then proceeds by removing itself from the realm of the political altogether. She also views it as compromising its integrity as a local movement when it accepts awards or support in general from the West, a hypocritical act given Western states are the staunchest supporters of the oppressive and discriminatory regimes these women are fighting against. Mona El-Tahawy is a media magnet, her words travel fast and her passion is for what is in the moment. She claims the feminist movement is successful at this point, since it has pointed to the misogyny of men and clerics towards women in Saudi Arabia. Her understanding of the fight for women’s rights essentially consists of affirming women as the Other who faces oppressive forces of misogynic readings of religion and male-dominated culture, and is in need of liberation. This liberation often comes about by demonizing the forces that she deems oppressive and backward, appealing to pathos and sympathy to support women’s efforts in doing so. With the ultimate end goal of liberation, Mona Eltahawy rejects Al-Rasheed’s arguments as the ramblings of a theorist who betrays her noble objective of easing the harsh reality experienced by average Saudi women. The two debated their views on Twitter, the discussion deteriorated into a disagreement over who had lived longer in Saudi Arabia as a “real” Saudi woman, and who was more compassionate despite their later privileged life abroad. At this point Ebtihal Mubarak joined the conversation. She rejected what she sensed as a desire to prioritize political rights or a belittling of Women2Drive in Al-Rasheed’s argument, but also rejecting what she viewed as Eltahawy’s victimization of Saudi women.

I agree with Ebtihal Mubarak’s argument that rights ought not be prioritized. In other words, the demand for the right to drive ought not be dismissed as frivolous since it is still an injustice, but that this demand ought not be framed as a victim’s cry for help. But at the heart of the discussions that later erupted was, first, a question of whether Manal al-Sharif was deserving of such an award, whether her campaign was indeed political and she was actually a “dissident.” Second, there was the question of whether she ought to even accept the award at all, so the question of when is outside support legitimate. I have previously addressed the issue of Manal al-Sharif being given the award. I will now turn to the question of outside support. Madawi Al-Rasheed gave her own view on support from Western powers when she said, “the woman [i.e. the West] who honors you for calling for driving is the same one who kills the dream of women in many Arab countries.” Hutoon al-Rasheed, a member of the Right2Dignity campaign, disagreed. The award was deserved, she claimed, because the act of a woman driving in Saudi Arabia was a sign of defiance. But, this does not answer our questions concerning outside support. It simply takes the award itself out of context. Mainly, is there a requirement to applaud and accept every form of support given, regardless of its underlying meaning and political underpinnings? Shouldn’t one seek to control the narrative forming around her cause as much as possible, as well as how the support received is framed?

Recently I have become painfully aware of the importance of narrative. The means any given campaign is willing to use to reach its ends are of the utmost importance. I admire Madawi Al-Rasheed’s rejection of support from imperialist Western powers as part of a broader objection to governmental alliances. However, I view this stance as running against the fact that governments are amoral creatures, will always be self-interested, and thus it is pointless to expect otherwise of them. Instead, the hypocrisy Al-Rasheed points to can be used to have one governmental power pressure another. But I am also not in favor of Hutoon Al-Rasheed’s acceptance of all forms of support and outside pressure, because some support comes with a cost. This cost, or requirement, has recently been embodied in Mona Eltahawy’s last Foreign Policy article, “Why They Hate Us” (which I wrote a response to here), that basically allocates women the role of victims. It also voids injustices women face of its political nature, and solidifies her fight as one with the opposite sex, culture, and religion. And in this case I do not believe the ends, women’s civil rights, justifies the means, women’s rights becoming social issues. Not because the end is of any small value, but because it is the polar opposite of the proposed means.

Mona Eltahawy argues that her approach is that of an opinion writer, poking in the hard places to spark conversation. And once this is done, results can be seen since it is brought to global attention. While some enthralled with passion for results may outright dismiss my critique, I believe responsibility must be assumed when writing narratives on causes. What is written today is what will be remembered tomorrow. Words narrate actions taken, and it is crucial they do so in the most just way possible. Agitating in a manner that is void of theory is just as pointless as theorizing yourself into an isolated corner.

About a year ago, when I first joined twitter, I did so after witnessing Tahrir, and being enraged at Manal al-Sharif’s arrest. One of my feminist idols was Mona Eltahawy. I found her fiery tweets and her countless appearances on CNN to be rather inspiring. At the time, I did not pay attention to details and my opinions were largely ridden of context. Now, how a Saudi woman’s fight in her own country is framed is crucially important to me. I simply cannot stand it turning into a sob-fest for victimized and oppressed women. I cannot stand the thought of the demand for an end to guardianship by calling on “Mama Amreeka” to save oppressed Saudi women from misogynic culture, or, conversely, calling on “Baba Abdullah” to protect Saudi women from a supposedly sexist society and extremist clerics. In both cases Saudi women remain a “special” case, allocating them the position of a child, and separating their struggle from that of men. If the means are carried out in such a way that coincides with the status quo, how proud are we to be of the results? When I participated in the online fervor for Manal al-Sharif’s release during the nine days she was in jail, I did not argue with people too much. I dismissed the relevance of the narrative that was being created around me. My sole focus was al-Sharif’s release. Occasionally, I would read a sexist comment or two against Saudi men, or all Muslim men, and I would let it slide. I remember thinking: it is sensational, but that is what will work. Now, I see that you cannot, or at least should not, do that. In doing so, I was using the Saudi woman as a means, by allowing her to play the role of victim, in order to achieve my goal. What good is a fight for dignity by first denouncing it and assuming the role of victim? What good is a fight for citizenship if it is done against my fellow citizens?

This is how my view on feminism has changed. Agnes Heller highlights this different perspective on feminism in saying, “Women’s Studies do nothing more than put women back in the kitchen.” Meaning that, feminism that treats women as a social case of study, a feminism that is based on anything other than pride and power in the political realm, forever keeps her rights in the kitchen, i.e. the social realm. Thus leaving her at the mercy of those who will take care for her, rather than her becoming a citizen of the political realm who wills for herself. I realize one might argue at this point that I am a privileged woman, entertaining theory and detaching myself from the plight of “real” Saudi women. But, to me, this accusation holds little in substance. I am a Saudi woman. I have experienced discrimination. I do seek change. And this is not a rejection of all outside support as a method for achieving change within. I am fully aware of the rise of social media activism and the increasing globalization of politics, and I realize campaigns typically cannot succeed in isolation. But, this does not mean that I, or any other Saudi woman, must inevitably submit to every form of support she is offered. Nor does it mean that Saudi women must accept a narrative they do not approve of or exploit theatrical methods of victimhood that undermine the full volume of personhood they wish to achieve. Saudi feminism does not have to be a story of “Mama Amreeka” coming to the rescue, or “Baba Abdullah” choosing to “grant” her rights. Feminism based on pride in its demand for civil rights, not pity, is worthy of praise. Feminism based on Power in the face of an oppressive state, not timidness, is the aim.

[This post was first published on Nora Abdulkarim's blog on 9 May 2012.]

Sanctions Against Iran: A Duplicitous "Alternative" to War

Mon, 14 May 2012 13:56:00 GMT

Media reports on Iran oscillate wildly between threats of imminent military action and hopeful reports of diplomatic progress. Amidst this confusing din, there is a constant truth: the United States has not ceased its economic bullying of Iran, nor has the threat of war receded. As Dennis B. Ross, the Obama Administration’s former Iran advisor, told the New York Times, “now you have a focus on the negotiations...It doesn't mean the threat of using force goes away, but it lies behind the diplomacy.” This echoes President Obama’s persistent refrain on Iran: “All options are on the table.” We argue that sanctions against Iran are not designed to work as an actual alternative to war, but rather are meant to, first of all, appease calls for sabre-rattling at home and by Israel; second, assert economic control over Iranian oil, while curbing Iran’s increasing influence in the region; and third, lay the groundwork for a diplomatic due-diligence claim in order to justify any potential military strike.

Diplomacy, also commonly thought of as an alternative to war, must be understood within the underlying context of the United States’ efforts to reestablish its sphere of influence over Iran, which it lost after the 1979 revolution. Ongoing talks between Iran, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, and Germany are not genuine negotiations, but rather are an effort to wring concessions from an economically weakened Iran. The dangerous outcome of these “talks” is that if Iran refuses to submit to Western bullying, the United States will be able to claim that diplomacy has failed, and move towards more aggressive means of achieving its agenda. The effect is that both diplomacy and sanctions become a prelude to war. If Iran does grant some concessions to the United States, this will only increase the US drive to regain access to Iranian oil as well as consumer markets and bring the two states one step closer to cutting a deal at the expense of ordinary Iranians.

Given the vast power imbalance between the two countries, “normalized relations” can only mean US support for another authoritarian regime. Note the fact that Libya achieved “peace” with the United States (that is, sanctions were lifted and it was taken off the State Department list of terrorists) at the very moment when it agreed to stop its nuclear program and allow US corporations a ninety percent share in its newly discovered oilfields. The two choices offered—subordination to the United States or escalation of hostilities—are both unacceptable, since they thwart the self-determination of the Iranian people. In addition, the recent NATO invasion of Libya shows that normalized diplomatic relations can be tossed out the window at any time should the United States and its allies see the opportunity to insert their influence more forcefully.

Everyday life for the majority of Iranians is already becoming increasingly unbearable. The Western drumbeats of war are a death threat hanging over their heads, and sanctions erode living standards and hope for a viable future. In this context, we feel it is necessary to lay bare sanctions against Iran for what they really are—the consolidation of geopolitical hegemony and war by other means. This article responds to the stated justifications for sanctions and outlines the impact of sanctions on ordinary people. As feminists, we insist that lasting peace and security will be built by people on the ground in Iran who are mobilizing for political and economic justice—democratizing Iran “from the inside out.”

Nuclear “Capacity”

While the United States insists that Iran is developing a “nuclear capacity”—a new term in US rhetoric that allows for slippage between nuclear energy and nuclear weaponry—this is by no means justification for sanctions or war. The US accepts Israel’s nuclear weapons, as well as India’s and Pakistan’s—all of them states that have proven how dangerous they are by engaging in horrendous border wars, occupations, and political repression. Regardless of Iran’s nuclear program, US policies and threats are a way of forcing Iran to line up with US interests in the region. This realpolitik does not, however, mean that we should defend Iran’s “right” to nuclear energy or weapons. As feminists, we take a broader view of the nuclear issue, and see a sense of urgency in unpacking the claims of national rights and regional security.

The world has seen the destructive capacities of nuclear weaponry, and even the nightmare of nuclear energy disasters (in Chernobyl, and more recently in Japan), and has the right to demand an end to the suicidal and homicidal drive towards ever-expanding nuclear capacity. Scapegoating one nation, however, does little to promote the effective global nuclear disarmament that is an environmental, political, and humanitarian necessity. When it comes to nuclear weaponry, the United States has acted hypocritically, fueling a nuclear arms race with itself as the extreme front-runner. The only nation to actually drop nuclear bombs on civilian populations, the United States did so to establish itself as a superpower after World War II—at the expense of millions of people’s lives.

The United States keenly understands the use of nuclear weapons to promote regional dominance. In recent years, the United States has promoted the nuclear ambitions of its allies, like Israel, and turned a blind eye to the ambitions of other nuclear powers, including India and Pakistan, while focusing all of its political attention on Iran. Rather than accepting the cynical US sanctions effort against Iran, we instead need a reinvigorated global disarmament movement that opposes nuclear weaponry everywhere.

Besides bombs, nuclear energy has proven nearly as dangerous. After the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan, Germany decided to close all of its nuclear reactors by 2022. Some European nations have followed by pledging to scale back their nuclear programs. Activists should demand that the United States take Germany’s lead. Rather than crippling the Iranian people in order to ineffectively punish their leaders, the United States should halt the arms race by dismantling its own nuclear arsenal. The sad truth is that if Iran’s nuclear program poses a threat to anyone, it is to the Iranians who would live closest to the nuclear reactors.

We should not assume that all Iranians support a “right” to nuclear energy as a nationalist stance of defiance towards the West. Many Iranians are terrified to have a government they do not support or trust in charge of radioactive materials, capable of causing environmental devastation and health crises for generations to come. Just as most Americans do not want to live near a nuclear plant, neither do most Iranians. We stand in solidarity with Iranians and people around the world who demand an end to nuclear energy and weapons production.

War by Other Means

While Iran has been subject to sanctions since the 1979 revolution, recent moves by the United States and European Union are significantly changing the economic and political landscape. In July 2011, President Obama announced the harshest set of sanctions to date, targeting Iran’s oil and banking industries and essentially barring any bank that processes Iranian oil transactions from doing business in the United States. The EU has agreed to ban any transactions with the sanctioned banks, while the SWIFT international banking system climbed on board to also block these banks as a way of intensifying the sanctions. Adding to the mix, the recent and unprecedented EU oil embargo—with a complete cessation of imports by member nations by July 2012—further cripples the Iranian economy. We believe that Western powers are increasing the severity of the sanctions and targeting the central oil industry in order to completely collapse the Iranian economy, with the Iranian government presumably to follow.

These economic attacks are rapidly snowballing as Asian countries—Iran’s biggest clients for oil—are pressured to follow the US and EU lead. Japan and South Korea are expected to gradually eliminate their reliance on Iranian oil. Saudi Arabia, happy to help undercut its regional rival, is promising to increase its own oil production to fill in the gaps. Russia, far from a reliable Iranian ally despite its previous refusal to support US sanctions, is similarly seizing the opportunity to promote its own oil industry as an alternative to Iranian supplies. China and India, which together consume a third of Iran’s oil exports, have so far indicated their intentions to maintain trade ties with Iran, despite intense pressure from the United States. As Iran loses customers, the remaining importing nations are at a strategic advantage to force Iran to sell at even cheaper prices.

With oil exports accounting for fully half of the Iranian government’s revenue, the newly intensified sanctions, coupled with the EU oil embargo, contribute to the downward spiral of the Iranian economy. A recent spate of bankruptcies is directly tied to the new round of sanctions; meanwhile, foreign-owned factories, such as Hyundai and Peugeot, have caved to US pressure and agreed to shut down their manufacturing operations in Iran. Unemployment is already around twenty percent, and closer to thirty percent for people under thirty years old. The value of the Iranian currency, the rial, has plummeted vis-a-vis the dollar, and inflation has soared into the double digits: 22.5 percent for 2011, with even higher estimates for 2012. Inflation this dramatic affects all classes of Iranian society, as people’s ability to purchase goods and services, save money, or live off fixed incomes rapidly diminishes.

Sanctions as Collective Punishment

Iranians are feeling the effects of intensified sanctions as they shop for essentials, fill prescriptions for medicines, and look for work. The sanctions have seriously impeded imports of food staples such as rice and palm oil, as regional suppliers, such as Malaysia, India, and Ukraine, cancel shipments because sanctions now prohibit the processing of payments. As this squeeze on supply continues, the cost of many basic foodstuffs has increased by fifty to two hundred percent. Rice—a staple in Iranian households—jumped from two dollars a kilo last year to five dollars now.

These sanctions amount to nothing less than collective punishment for a population already suffering under the effects of internally imposed austerity measures, economic mismanagement, and police-state repression. According to testimonials gathered by women’s rights activists in Tehran, medicines for illnesses such as asthma, multiple sclerosis, cancer, and other chronic diseases are either in short supply, completely unavailable, or no longer affordable even when supplies can be found. According to one pharmacist, “People with life threatening illnesses such as cancer can no longer afford to pay for the injections, so they either delay them or, mostly among poorer communities, totally forgo treatment.”

Children also suffer from sanctions. As economic conditions deteriorate, children have to leave school to help support their families. A thirty-five-year old woman explained that her husband’s wages working as a porter in the bazaar no longer cover the family’s basic needs. When her husband insisted their son quit school to work, she explained, “I beat myself and cried so much that he finally relented and agreed to let our son go to school, provided that he works after school.”

Women are often the most victimized by sanctions because, as a group, they are the most economically vulnerable. Women have a harder time finding jobs, are among the first to get laid off, and have fewer workplace protections. As those primarily responsible for running their households, women face increased loads of stress trying to feed their families, obtain needed medication, and buy necessary goods amidst skyrocketing levels of inflation. A forty-five-year old housewife in Tehran reports, “In the last few months, I have bought very little protein such as meat and poultry and have also refrained from buying any clothes for the children.” At the micro-level of household economies, women bear the larger burden for managing their families’ survival. In Iran, as in all societies, increased militarism and violence at the global and national levels exacerbates inequalities between men and women. As societies become more militarized, so do the very citizens living within them; as fear, anxiety, and stress rise in the lives of ordinary people, so do patriarchal and violent responses to conflict and hardship in intimate life.

A Feminist Response to Sanctions

The history of US-led sanctions against Iran shows us that they actually strengthen the regime that they purportedly target. Even as sanctions single out the Revolutionary Guards, whose primary function is as the repressive strong arm of the state, they allow the Guards to behave like a mafia controlling lucrative black and grey markets. This contributes to the further impoverishment of Iranian people. At the same time, the Iranian government has used US aggression and sanctions to justify the extraordinary repression that it has unleashed on Iranian labor, civil society, and activist groups through mass arrests, suppression of public dissent, imprisonment, torture, and execution.

In an effort to present itself as a bulwark against US intervention in the Muslim world, Iran rhetorically spins its ability to withstand sanctions as a moral victory against imperialism, while quietly moving forward with its neoliberal economic policies, ever-increasing militarization, and suppression of opposition at home. Just as in the Iraqi case, US-led sanctions make grassroots democratic dissent much more difficult for ordinary Iranians living in Iran. At the same time, the Iranian government has only tightened its control on the flow of wealth and information in the country. In the conflict between empire and dictatorship, there is a great need for a third way beyond the militaristic dance of macabre state-led politics as usual.

As feminists and anti-war activists, we believe it is ordinary people inside Iran who have the right to determine the direction and future of their society. We support the efforts of groups like the Iran-based Change for Equality, which began publishing a series of Women Against War videos on 8 March 2012 for International Women’s Day. It is with these and other activists from the labor and student movements in Iran that we stand in solidarity for a peaceful, just, and feminist alternative to all the options on the table.

Algeria's 10 May 2012 Elections: Preliminary Analysis

Mon, 14 May 2012 12:53:00 GMT

The results of the 10 May 2012 Algerian legislative elections ran against conventional wisdom, and at least two points will certainly provoke much commentary. First, despite widespread disgruntlement, Algerian voter turnout proved to be significantly higher than predicted by most observers. 42.91 percent of registered Algerians participated – seven percent more than in 2007. Second, and possibly with region-wide ramifications, Algerian voters bucked a major trend of the so-called "Arab Spring": Islamist victory at the urns. Islamists won neither a majority nor did they come close to winning a plurality of seats in the new parliament. In fact, the five-party Islamist bloc won a combined 59 seats in the new parliament, one less than in 2007, with an overall loss of three percent of total parliamentary share.

This analysis of the preliminary results suggests that though counter-intuitive to conventional wisdom and expert opinion, a higher than expected turnout rate and relative Islamist implosion fall within the realm of possibilty. While international observers and foreign chancelleries alike called the elections "satisfactory," this analysis does not make the claim that the elections were either entirely fair or transparent. Such a suggestion would be too early. Electoral data and methodology remain in question, while accusations of fraud abound. A tally of the number of votes each party won per wilayat has yet to be released by the Ministry of Interior, the election appeals commission has yet to receive detailed complaints from competing parties, local and international observer commission reports have yet to be published, and the Constitutional Council has yet to validate the final scores. A more detailed analysis of the 10 May 2012 Algerian legislative elections can only be elaborated following the release of key data.

Controversy One: 42.91 percent Participation Rate

Observers predicted low voter turnout. Some, including this writer, hedged their analysis on a steady decline in voter participation since the 1997 legislative elections.[1] Few expected a turnout higher than 35.65 percent - the 2007 participation rate. Shooting from the hip, most predicted something close to twenty percent, though few put that into writing. A relatively high participation rate certainly seemed improbable, though not impossible. There were several indicators – albeit partial and abstract – that turnout might be higher than expected before the elections. For various reasons, those indications were either summarily dismissed or discounted in advance of the elections.

Arab Uprisings and Algeria’s Specters from the Past

Foreign observers have failed to understand the symbolic violence and specters of the past that "Arab Uprisings" continue to conjure in the minds of many Algerians. Any regular follower of the Algerian press will have remarked that for more than a year and a half, the public and private media has (sensationally) framed the Arab Uprisings in a frightening triptych: destabilizing foreign intervention, Islamism, and fitna. While nearly all Algerians celebrated Tunisia following the flight of bully dictator Zine al-Abdine Ben Ali, widespread sympathy for the so-called "Arab Spring" reached a peak with Mubarak’s fall, and eroded precipitously thereafter. A month later, Algerians witnessed what they perceived as a French-led NATO intervention in neighboring Libya. Subsequent Islamist victories at the polls in Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia in the fall of 2011, and ongoing violence in Bahrain, Libya, Syria, and Yemen have further curbed public enthusiasm for radical change. It comes as no surprise that the Algerian government as well as many political party leaders reworked these images into an effective, if not negative, get out the vote campaign message: “vote to save Algeria from foreign intervention, (Islamist radicalism), and civil war.”

However naïve this may sound to the West (and indeed to many Algerians), the message resonated with many others. Algeria, after all, experienced both an Islamist victory and civil war in the 1990s. The message triggered fear of the unknown in some and struck a patriotic chord that continues to exist in others, especially older Algerians, who tend to vote. Though no less anecdotal than blurbs posted on Facebook or Twitter remarking the emptiness of streets in Algiers or Oran, the majority of 2012 voters with whom this author spoke boycotted the 2002 or 2007 elections. While perhaps not satisfied with the Algerian political system, their decision to vote in 2012, they stressed, fell into the triptych described above. Perhaps underscoring this as a more generalized phenomenon, 1.67 of the 9.18 million voters cast blank ballots: close to twenty percent of those who went to the polls.[2] Lacking proper public opinion polls to this effect, however, the validity of this suggestion remains subject to debate.

The 5 April 2012 El Watan Poll

More interesting to the discussion on participation is the 5 April 2012 edition of Francophone newspaper El Watan. The daily published the findings of an in-depth public opinion survey commissioned to private polling firm ECOtechnics. The survey revealed that 44 percent of registered voters planned to participate, while another 16% remained undecided. Because the findings ran so greatly against conventional wisdom, few took them seriously. The Algerian public remains highly skeptical of public opinion polls, and rejects them out of hand. Nor did academics or analysts place much credibility in the poll: neither the polling agency nor the newspaper outlined the survey’s methodology. Had the survey been fully explained (and had we been able to verify their methodological soundness), we might have had a more accurate baseline by which to understand voter behavior entering the elections. And possibly (though possibly not) the 42.91 percent participation rate might not come as such a shock.

Controversy Two: A Green Flop

Hitherto, the so-called "Arab Spring" has been tinged Green. Following the region-wide trend, many predicted a "Green Tsunami" in Algeria. Surely, Islamist victories in Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia had emboldened Algeria’s Islamists parties, just as it was taken as a given that the "Arab Spring" had expanded the size of the Islamist electorate. Other things equal, shouldn't Algerians want to emulate Ennahda-led Tunisians transitioning to democracy to the West? And a proliferation of Islamist parties seemed to show a new interest in political Islam. In addition to the "Green Alliance" formed by Bouguerra Soltani’s Movement for Society of Peace (MSP), and micro-Islamist parties al-Islah and an-Nahda, which collectively held sixty seats in the outgoing parliament, the 2012 campaign was marked by the entry of Abdallah Djaballah’s Front for Justice and Development (FJD) and Abdelmadjid’s Front for Change (FC).

The Western media and local Islamists assumed a strong showing. Indeed on the morning of the elections, the Reuters office in Algiers published an article titled “Islamists poised for strong showing in Algeria vote,” going as far as to predict an Islamist head of government. Shortly after the polls closed, MSP leader Bouguerra Soltani, boisterously announced: “We emerge victorious. Despite certain irregularities, the "Green Alliance" has created a political force.” The same evening, "Green Alliance" campaign manager announced the coalition had won 98 to 100 seats, just short of rivaling the incumbent National Liberation Front (FLN). The Islamists, it had seemed, had won their bet.

One can only imagine the shock to party cadres gathered at "Green Alliance" headquarters as Minister of Interior Daho Ould Kablia announced the results in the afternoon of 11 May 2012. The "Green Alliance" only won 48 seats – twelve fewer than the three parties collectively held in 2007 legislature. Indeed, Soltani’s much touted alliance captured four fewer seats than the MSP had going into the election. The combined Islamist bloc lost a seat in the 2012 parliament. In the 72-seat expanded 2012 parliament, the Islamist bloc effectively shrinks by three percent.

The "Green Alliance" has already begun to cry foul. Campaign director Abderrezak Mokri denounced “an enormous, fraudulent manipulation.” Bouguerra Soltani decried “a democratic regression,” stating, “The May 10 rendezvous was a failed occasion to realize an Arab Spring via the urns.” The FJD and FC have joined the fray. Abdallah Djaballah ironically noted “these weren’t elections, rather, they were a theatrical performance,” while Abdelmadjid Menasra claimed the elections were “stained by widespread fraud…we have proof that many voted two or three times…voting stations were invaded by electors from different regions.” Clearly, Algeria’s Islamists felt entitled to their share of the "Arab Spring."

Facts are indifferent to post-Arab Uprising Islamist claims

A growing disaffection with political Islamists seems evident in the steady decline in share of the Islamist bloc in Algeria’s National Assembly over the last decade and a half. Collectively, the Islamist bloc captured 27 percent of parliamentary seats in 1997, dropped to 21 percent in 2002, and fell to 16 percent in 2007. Though it bucks a region-wide trend of Islamist on the rise, the 13% of parliamentary seats reserved for the Islamist bloc in 2012 squarely fits into the opposite Algerian trend.

As explained elsewhere, Algeria’s Islamists are known entities. Djaballah, Menasra, and Soltani have participated in Algerian politics since the 1991 elections. In twenty years, Djaballah has founded three different Islamist parties (and been ejected from two). The MSP has held ministerial portfolios since 1997. It created the Presidential Coalition with the FLN and RND in 2004, quitting only five months ahead of the elections, while cynically holding onto its ministries. And it has been recently involved in several high-profile corruption scandals. Menasra’s attempts at recreating political virginity have come to naught: Algerians remember him as MSP Minister of Industry from 1997-2002. In short, far from sharing the popular mystique the Muslim Brothers or Ennahda had over the electorate in Egypt or Tunisia, Algeria’s Islamist parties are widely viewed as stakeholders in the system.[3]

The sine qua non condition for Algeria’s political Islamisst to make significant gains in the 2012 parliament was an expanded, post-Arab Uprising "green" electorate. With a stagnant Islamist electorate, the "Green Alliance," FJD, FC, and recently accredited micro-parties running neo-Islamist platforms would be poised to cannibalize each other, effectively cancelling out gains as individual parties or a bloc at the expense of the larger FLN and RND. The Islamist electorate neither grew nor necessarily stagnated. Rather, it appears to have shrunk over the last decade. In a 2004 survey,[4] 39 percent of Algerians indicated their preference for an Islamic Democracy. According to the 2011 Arab Barometer Report,[5] that percentage had dropped to little more than 18 percent in April-May 2011, when the survey was administered – nearly half a year before Islamist victories in Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia.

May 10, 2012 Election Results: Unlikely, though not impossible; Possible, but not validated

Given the cynical nature of the Algerian public, what happened on 10 May 2012 will likely be debated long after the Constitutional Council publishes the final election results, and long after domestic and international observers submit their final reports. Whether the elections were a break from the past, or whether they proved the long standing edict "plus ça change, plus ça reste," too will long be debated by government supporters and opposition parties alike. What seems clear, however, is that the elections bucked two expectations: low participation and relative Islamist gains. How this affects the rest of the region remains to be seen, though embattled secularists in the region surely feel they have been given a lifeline.

[1] Participation has steadily declined over the past decade and a half: 65.49 percent in 1997, 46.06 percent, and 35.65 percent in 2007.

[2] Blank ballots only constituted 14 percent of the 2007 poll.

[3] In Oran, the beard is often sarcastically referred to as a "commercial register."

[4] Mark Tessler and Eleanor Gao. 2005. “Gauging Arab Support for Democracy.” Journal of Democracy 16(3): 91.

[5] The author thanks Mark Tessler for permission to share data from the forthcoming report.

Should Tunisia Pay Ben Ali's Debts?

Mon, 14 May 2012 12:25:00 GMT

The journalist, uneasy, risked his question: “Do you have any fears that there is perhaps a far left movement coming through these revolutions that perhaps want more closed economies? I mean, there have been a lot of pictures of Guevara.” At a press conference on the Arab Uprisings held in April last year at International Monetary Fund (IMF) headquarters, then-Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn gave a reassuring nod in that direction. “It is a good question,” he responded. “A good question. There is always this risk, but I am not sure it will materialize.”

Strauss-Kahn was probably right to reassure the journalist about Tunisia. Since the fall of President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali on 14 January 2011, transitional authorities have followed the same economic policy as the old regime, seeking to restore market confidence. This strategy essentially serves to avoid Tunisia losing its status as a top IMF student who had incidentally boasted just before the revolution of its “simplified regulations” and “well-trained, low-cost workers.” This showed the world that, at an economic level, everything will remain as it was under the Ben Ali regime.

The question of public debt is symbolic of this continuity, and Tunisian officials consecrated their first declarations after January 14 to it. Mustapha Kamel Nabli, a former minister under Ben Ali during the 1990s and later a World Bank Chief Economist and Director for the Middle East and North Africa region, left Washington, DC, to become the Governor of the Tunisian Central Bank a few days after the fall of the dictator and his former boss. He immediately declared, “Tunisia will repay its debts without delays.” The immediate repayment of debts accrued by and for a dictator overthrown by a revolution is not, however, an obvious thing.

Yet, even Aristotle, in the third part of his third volume on Politics, noted over two thousand years ago, “when democracy succeeds oligarchy or tyranny, many people think one should refuse to carry out existing treaties, that is those treated contracted, they say, not by the State but by the tyrant.” Today, too, many people think that Tunisians need not repay Ben Ali’s debts.

Ben Aliism: ‘Power by Credit’

Under Ben Ali, if the relative portion of Tunisia’s foreign debt fell in terms of gross national revenue, it more than tripled in absolute value from 6.8 billion in 1987 to 21.7 billion Tunisian dinars in 2009. How can this explosion in revenue be explained? And how can we know the extent to which this debt was contracted in the name of the State while it actually was for the benefit of a tyrant or his cronies?

The old regime’s old observers have brought up the centrality of the Tunisian debt system for the functioning of its power. Fathi Chamkhi, Geography Professor at Manouba University in Tunis, has fought for the cancellation of Tunisia’s debt for a long time. Just months after the revolution, Chamki explained that “[debt] was at the heart of the system. For twenty-four years, the regime maintained an artificial life, thanks to one thing: the debt mechanism. Under Ben Ali, demanding the cancellation of debt consisted of wanting to destroy the system.”

Researcher Beatrice Hibou’s conclusions in her extremely precise inquiry The Force of Obedience: The Political Economy of Repression in Tunisia permit us to support Dr. Chamki’s assessment. She describes the Ben Ali political economic system as a form of “credit power” and an “economy of endebtedness” founded on the mechanism of “doubtful credit” that has enriched the regime and its attendants above all. She describes “the system of unrepaid (or unrepayble) loans, unrecoverable credit, attached or doubtful” as “a massive social fact” in Ben Ali’s Tunisia that served as “a mechanism of fully financing the economy” and “modality of exercising power.”

Businessmen and the powerful could obtain loans from Tunisian banks, which would not be reimbursed. During the 1990s, numerous public companies were ceded to them... without them paying the least sum. The whole operation was financed by a “non-repayable” loan furnished by banks. This “privatization” was “fictive” and could perpetuate itself because the state, notably through the Tunisian Central Bank, played the role of lender of last resort. And it obtained for itself the necessary funds from international bankers to “recapitalize and balance” the dubious credit which, as Hibou notes, was fully reconstituted following late 1990s loans from the World Bank and European Union.

This fictive system functioned because it enjoyed consensus among its participants. As Hibou argues, “all the interested parties (private banks, the Central Bank, financial firms, business, public authorities, and international agencies connected to Tunisia) knew the fragility of the banking system, its weaknesses, its insufficiencies, its nerve centers, and its potential sources of systematic risk. But all knew that the state and international lenders would always intervene to repair any failings.” International lenders, notably, took part in this fiction and knew its mechanisms well. Hibou adds, “foreign partners therefore financed the Tunisian economy without asking questions and participated in the fiction of a healthy economy of endebtedness and of a high-return banking system.”

We see that debt contracted on behalf of the Tunisian under the Ben Ali regime served to perpetuate this fiction, which enriched those closest to and holding state power. In effect, as Hibou suggests, “the ‘consensus’ obtained among dominant actors in the system [veiled] the existence of those who didn’t benefit at all. Those uncounted in the economy of endebtedness and of the virtuous circle of dubious credit were nonetheless numerous.” The overwhelming majority of farmers, small- and mid-size business persons, as well as artisans and informal workers do not have access to credit. But those in power do.

Tunisia’s debt appears to have accrued and been acquired by a dictatorial regime, for its own contractual interests, without the consent of the Tunisian people and against its desires. And yet, the first act of the country’s transitional authorities since the revolution has been to perpetuate the Ben Ali fictive debt mechanism and to continue to repay his dictatorial debts.

The 2011 budget proposal by the old regime was adopted the very same day that Mohamed Bouazizi — one of the many who are “uncounted for in the economy of endebtedness” — set himself on fire in Sidi Bouzid. Debt servicing of both principal and interest constitutes in this context the first line of state spending and was three times greater than the budget for higher education or health per Financial Law 2010-58. Following the revolution, the transitional government wanted to adopt a new budget to respond to the people’s demands. And yet, in the supplementary budget adopted on 25 June 2011 (Legal Decree 56-2011), debt servicing was still the first line noted to tally state spending, ahead of all other budget items. For some Tunisians, this very fact is a reason to demand for its cancellation.

An Odious Debt?

A Tunisian militant collective comprised of the Assembly for Alternative International Development and the Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt in Tunisia (RAID ATTAC/CADTM), as well as the Committee of Unemployed Graduates, took to the streets in March 2012 following up on an earlier letter addressed to the new governor of the Central Bank on 20 March 2011. In the letter, they stated that “Tunisia must mobilize, with all haste, all of its financial resources to be able to face the necessities of the current situation, notably: extreme poverty, indemnization of the unemployed, and an amelioration of the material situation for salaried” citizens. To mobilize these resources, they demanded “a unilateral moratorium on the public debt of Tunisia (with a freezing of interest) during the length of an audit of this debt.”

The debt audit question is essential. “I do not believe that the debt is odious in its entirety,” explains Mustapha Stambouli, an engineer and former staff member of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). Stambouli adds: “An audit should be held very quickly to have an overview of the situation and to bring out the part of the debt which served useful public investments for the development of the country and the creation of jobs and that of the odious debt used for private ends.”

This audit, once completed, would permit Tunisia to unilaterally cancel the illegitimate portions of its debt. There is already some international support for such a solution. The Belgian Senate decided to adopt a resolution on 20 July 2011 demanding the cancellation of Tunisia’s bilateral debt to Belgium because, as some Belgian senators explained, “the major part [of the debt] didn’t go to the population.” Additionally, one hundred European MPs signed an earlier 16 March 2011 call for the suspension of Tunisia’s debt pending the results of an audit. In France, then-presidential candidate and now French President Francois Hollande called for Tunisia’s debt to be transformed into donation. And at the global level, an International Crisis Group Report joined Joseph Stiglitz’s demand proposing that, at the very least, Tunisia’s debt be restructured.

On the legal front, a unilateral decision to cancel the debt would constitute prima facie a violation of Tunisia’s international obligations. And its creditors could seek to obtain payment before the various state tribunals or international arbitrators, based on the different loan contracts signed by the Tunisian government. Before these jurisdictions, however, Tunisia would be entitled to a certain number of legal arguments to demonstrate that it retained the right, due to the exceptional circumstances, to not respect certain loan contracts.

The essential argument could be founded on the doctrine of “odious debt” first elaborated upon by jurisprudence expert and professor of Russian law, Alexander Nahum Sack, in his 1927 book published by Recueil Sirey entitled Les effets des transformations des Etats sur leurs dettes publiques et autres obligations financières: traité juridique et financier (The Effects of the Transformations of States on their Public Debts and Other Financial Obligations: A Legal and Financial Treatise). Sack made the following claim: “‘Odious’ debts contracted and used for ends which, in the knowledge of the creditors, are contrary to the interests of the nation, do not concern the latter in the instance whereby it happens to relieve itself of the government which had contracted with them, except in the limits of the real advantages that it could obtain from these debts. Creditors have committed a hostile act with regard to the people; they cannot therefore count that the nation, having freed itself from despotic power, would assume the ‘odious’ debts, which are the personal debts of power.”

Recognizable in Sack’s analysis are three characteristics of the public debts contracted by Ben Ali’s Tunisia: they did not serve the interests of the nation; they were contracted by a despotic power; and the creditors knew it.

Today it may well be difficult to say that that this odious debt doctrine is, thus formulated, a rule of international law. Many jurists affirm contrarian viewpoints in what is a growing debate. Nevertheless, as professor Robert Howse in a UN report on The Concept of Odious Debt reminds us, even without using the ‘odious’ expression, there still exists in international law “some equitable limits to the sanctity of state-to-state debt agreements.” Thus, despite the uncertainties, a case for debt cancellation in a post-despotic Arab Spring context could still be legally defensible.

But what do lenders think? Certain bank professionals have recently taken on the whole strategy. Hubert de Vauplane warns: “Is it not high time that creditors (notably banks) worried about the outcome of the money that they loan and the “honorability” of their debtors? The risk is clear; their credit might be cut off!”

If numerous arguments exist for and against (at least provisionally) suspending the payment of Tunisia’s debt, then why have transitional authorities in Tunisia feigned ignorance of, and avoided all debate of this critical question? Why have they been so prompt to reassure creditors: “their” creditors? Shall we search for a psychological explanation, as Hibou invites us to seek? Hibou has emphasized that, “Tunisia for ... economic and historical reasons puts a point of the most proud nationalist honor in paying back its loans on time.” But is paying back the debts incurred by a dictator really a question of honor?

An explanation of the current transitional government’s silence is to be found perhaps more squarely in the counsel addressed to post-revolutionary Tunisia by lenders. One of the first among them, Robert Zoellick, the World Bank President, explained in Tunis on 4 May 4 2011 that “if a country wants to go back and access financial markets, seeking debt relief is not going to help that.” Soon after, the G8 Deauville Declaration on the Arab Spring insisted on the necessity that they “bolster further trade and investment integration” and “mitigate risks faced by private investors.” In other words, lenders demand that Tunisia continue on the same route taken during Ben Ali’s regime. Would it not be worse indeed for foreign investors to no longer easily have access to “well-trained, low-cost” Tunisian workers?

As Chamkhi observes: “The international lenders want to be assured of the maintenance of the old regime. They want this economic system to stay in place. They do not have a guarantee of that. The best guarantee was that of Ben Ali’s dictatorship. [However], this economic model will no longer work for the poor...It was a system of pillage.”

So, is what happened in 2011 still the case? Chamki concludes: “It was a revolution against an economic system, against a neoliberal capitalist system typical to Tunisia…The fundamental question of the revolution today is the problem of changing the economic regime. Yet all political parties, from the right to the extreme left, abandon the economic question. They do not put forward anything but the form of power: how to pass to a democratic regime. But no one puts the economic and social model as it was applied under Ben Ali into question.”

[This article is a translation of the French version that appeared in La Revue des Livres in January 2012]

Penetrated Opposition and Failure of Consensus in Syria: Interview with Haytham Manna`(Part 4 of 4)

Fri, 11 May 2012 22:35:00 GMT

On April 27th, around the Jadaliyya Co-Sponsored Conference at Lund University ("Contesting Narratives, Location Power"), I sat down for an extensive interview with Haytham Manna`, one of the icons of the independent Syrian opposition and a leading founder of the National Coordinating Body for Democratic Change (in Syria). The interview was long and candid, and addressed several topics, including the current impasse in Syria, the stages and transformation of the uprising, the questions of international intervention and of resistance, the Syrian National Council and its relations with other opposition groups and the Arab Gulf States and beyond, and the relationship between Syria and Hizballah.

Below you will find the fourth and final part of the interview (in two segments). This part addresses the relationship between the Syrian National Council and the National Coordiinating Body and other opposition groups. It also addresses the issue of the opposition's independence, and the question of resistance. The first part can be found here, the second part here, and the third part here.

The following are themes and paraphrased statements from the interview. These are not necessarily direct quotations, so please do not use them as such. We are planning to present quoted highlights from the interview in the near future.

The Deliberated Istanbul Project
(Themes and Paraphrased Segments from the Interview--Not for attribution)

There were parties to the conflict who wanted to create an opposition "project" with small players.

The make-up, preparation, and imposition of leadership did not proceed according to the real representative democratic formula. But nearly all external actors supported this formula. This was the end of the possibility of unity among the opposition.

The discourse and machinations of the SNC increasingly resembled those of the regime. If you wanted to remain independent, you could not join the SNC.

The leader of the Free Syrian Army was beholden to the declarations and positions of Turkish intelligence.

I don't have the right to accuse the SNC of being traitors or agents, but i do have the right to say that their political decision was compromised by their political funding and alliances. Their discourse tried to appease the West and Israel . . . every other word they attack HIzballah, and Iran, to demonstrate good will to the West.

My mission is neither to attack nor to glorify Hizballah. My mission is to glorify democracy and win the democratic battle that will change both Syria and Lebanon.

Failed Consensus and Aftermath
(Themes and Paraphrased Segments from the Interview--Not for attribution)

At the National Coordinating Body we have one voice, one discourse, one program. I represented this voice in our initial agreement with the SNC. Unfortunately, that was not the case on the other side. They annulled the agreement within 12 hours as a result of internal and external pressure. Burhan Ghalyoun, met with Hamad bin Jasim shortly after the signing, and it was withdrawn henceforth.

The SNC's dependence on non-Syrian preferences.

The desire of Arab Gulf Countries ("duwal al-khaleej") to avoid a Syrian agreement [among the opposition].

Critique of international intervention including the "Humanitarian Corridor" proposal.

The transformation of the demands of the revolution from opposition to the regime to reaching out to outside actors.

Arab Gulf Countries supported this transformation through their own media. Revolution was beaten by counter-revolution.

Those who were ideologically coherent, including the Salafis, were able to lead them way in the emerging chaos.

The idea of international intervention was planted from without.

This is the most precious lesson we learned during the past thirteen months: violence must be marginalized in order for democracy to triumph over the regime.

Our liberation project is ahead of us, not behind us.

The Golan is still occupied. Therefore, we cannot put the issue of resistance on the shelf, and I cannot leave it off our program. And resistance cannot proceed without alliances.