|
|
It was a good day for the 1st anniversary of the beginning of the Egyptian insurrection. Most of the past week has been grey, cloudy, an early khamsin filling the air with desert dust. Last night early arrivers to Tahrir Square were welcomed with a shower. But today was almost balmy as we set out from Dokki, across two bridges, and then to Tahrir Square. In the long and narrow streets, rimmed by tall buildings, shouted slogans echoed up and down: “Down with military rule!”
As we walked out from Dokki Square to the main street, the roar of the calls got louder and louder. A massive march was just ahead of us – easily 10,000 people. The participants were not really celebrating. They were protesting. As we got into the crowded mass of the march, more and more of the marchers were repeating the refrain. They know that the first stage of the struggle is very far from consummation. 10,000 political prisoners languish in prisons after having been tried before military tribunals. Over 1200 are dead, and they have not received justice. “The SCAF and the baltagiyya,” or the paid thugs of the military government, “are the same thing,” said one protester as I walked by.
The press of people on Kasr El Aini, the bridge leading directly into the square, was tremendous: it took us an hour to cross it at a tortoise’s shuffle.
As we got closer to the square, those spoiling for more action hit into the festive effervescence of the Muslim Brothers. In the recent round of voting, they dominated, winning close to half of the seats. They have plenty of reason to celebrate and have called out their support base to do so. They are “a free-market party led by wealthy businessmen whose economic agenda embraces privatization and foreign investment.” And they are apprehensive about instability and are eager to get back to the work of businessmen: making money. Thus they are labeled “pragmatists” by the Obama government, which is set to increase the pace of aid deliveries to Egypt in an effort to bolster them.
Understandably, those who look to further horizons were not happy with the celebratory mood. One chant I heard walking by was, “This is not a party, this is a revolution!” In front of the balustrades lining the road leading into Tahrir were numerous demonstrators holding placards of those who had been martyred in the Egyptian fight for freedom. A massive truck-borne obelisk listing every single martyrs’ name cut a swath through the human traffic blocking the square.
The Union of Revolutionary Youth have declared a sit-in in Tahrir. In Alexandria revolutionaries have given the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces until Friday to resign, and thus finish the bourgeois revolution, one that has been in stasis since the radical forces that could have brought it to fruition were destroyed in the years both immediately before and after 1952, leaving the state in the hands of the Free Officers who instituted the military junta that to this day rules Egypt. It’s a good sentiment, but the officers aren’t ensconced in Alexandria. They’re ensconced in Cairo. How to get them out of there is the question now facing those of the people of Egypt who wish to send the military back into the barracks, get it firmly under civilian control, and set to work to securing the goals of January 25, still hauntingly far a year later: bread, freedom, and social justice.
Technorati Tags: Cairo, Egypt, Tahrir Square
Aharon Shabtai
This country is turning into the private estate of twenty families.
Look at its fattened political arm, at the thick neck of its bloated bureaucracy.
these are the officers of Samaria.
There’s no need to consult the oracle:
What the capitalist swine leaves behind, the nationalist hyena shreds with its teeth.
When the Governor of the Bank of Israel raises the interest rate by half-a-percent
the rich are provided with backyard pools by the poor.
The soldier at the outpost guards the usurer, who’ll put a lien on his home
when he’s laid off from the privatized factory and falls behind on his mortgage payments.
The pure words I suckled from my mother’s breasts: Man, Child, Justice, Mercy, and so on,
are dispossessed before our eyes, imprisoned in ghettos, murdered at checkpoints.
And yet, there’s still a good reason to stay on and live here—
to hide the surviving words in the kitchen, in the basement, or the bathroom.
The prophet Melampus[1] saved twin orphaned snakes from the hand of his slaves:
they slithered toward his bed while he slept, then licked the auricles of his ears,
When he woke with a fright, he found he could follow the speech of birds—
so Hebrew delivered will lick the walls of our hearts.
—translated by Peter Cole
[1] “Melampus’ reputation as a seer spawned myths that verge on anecdote, to account for his gift, the offering of serpents. In one, as a young boy, he told his servants not to kill two snakes. Grateful, the snakes gave Melampus the ability to speak with animals. Another version says that he found a mother snake that had been crushed under a cart and two orphaned babies. Rather than leaving them he gave the snake a burial and raised the young ones. To thank him they licked his ears so that he was able to understand animals” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melampus).
[Thanks Jim]
Technorati Tags: Aharon Shabtai, Israel, Palestine, Zionism
[Thanks GR]
Technorati Tags: capitalism, Jordan, Middle East
While you are there (although I don’t disagree with the whole thing) Salim Tamari makes some good points about both Palestinian strategy and medium-run objectives. Although I am not entirely convinced by the issue of “legitimacy” vis-a-vis objectives. Legitimacy relates to political mobilization — that is, who considers a given goal legitimate and how they will mobilize to transform their mental conceptions of legitimacy into institutional and structural change. Breaking with the Quartet is key for the Palestinians, but I do think Tamari — like so many — overestimates the cracks in the “consensus” about Palestine. Full sovereignty is not on the table and never will be until we throw it on there and refuse to take it off.
Technorati Tags: Fateh, Hamas, Israel, Palestine, Palestinian strategy, Zionism
I have reviewed Belén Fernández’s book on Thomas Friedman for Jadaliyya. An excerpt, then go read it there.
A researcher once carried out an informal study to try to find out whether or not people actually read the books on bestseller lists. To find out, he put envelopes in the reputedly high-selling books. In each envelope was a note saying that if those who found the envelopes were to send them to a designated address, the researcher would send them five dollars. According to the story, the response rate was zero. After reading The Imperial Messenger, Belén Fernández’s treatment of the life’s work of Thomas Friedman, one can only hope for the sake of American intellectual culture that some of the books included in that experiment were Friedman’s.
Fernández’s book, part of Verso’s Counterblasts series, in which leftist writers take on the leading lay-preachers of the right, is organized around three themes: Friedman commenting on America and the economy; Friedman commenting on the Middle East; and Friedman commenting on the Special Relationship between America and Israel. Cataloging the stumbles of a man who can barely take a step before tripping over another fact was clearly a trying task. There is something altogether manic and dulling about reading the careful pairing of one Friedman statement with another that neatly negates it, again and again.
It cannot have been thankful labor, and it is clear that Fernández set to work with great diligence: reading all of his collected columns and books since 1995, crosscollating them for topicality, and juxtaposing them for their contradictions and inconsistencies.
The results, as befit the crown prince of American nincompoop commentators, are ridiculous. One week will see Friedman calling for US aggression against Iraq so as to “create a free, open, and progressive model in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world to promote the ideas of tolerance, pluralism, and democratization.” The previous week would have seen him announcing that “we can invade Iraq once a week and it’s not going to unleash democracy in the Arab world,” while a third reflection has him describing the invasion as “the most important task worth doing and worth debating,” even though it “would be a huge, long, costly task—if it is doable at all, and I am not embarrassed to say that I don’t know if it is.” This tangled skein and dozens like it that Fernández extracts from Friedman’s nearly endless production attest to a mind that displays total indifference to the consistency of the thoughts and words it commits to paper.
Technorati Tags: Belen Fernandez, Jadaliyya, Special Relationship, Thomas Friedman, Zionism
Mark Perry is huffing and puffing in Foreign Policy about Israel endangering American lives through its false-flag operation. Indeed I agree with him that Israeli actions endanger American lives, but that doesn’t strike me as something idiosyncratic about the actions of the Israeli state. If I have time I will write something about it, but these few paragraphs struck me as pretty endearing:
According to one retired CIA officer, information about the false-flag operation was reported up the U.S. intelligence chain of command. It reached CIA Director of Operations Stephen Kappes, his deputy Michael Sulick, and the head of the Counterintelligence Center. All three of these officials are now retired. The Counterintelligence Center, according to its website, is tasked with investigating “threats posed by foreign intelligence services.”
The report then made its way to the White House, according to the currently serving U.S. intelligence officer. The officer said that Bush “went absolutely ballistic” when briefed on its contents.
“The report sparked White House concerns that Israel’s program was putting Americans at risk,” the intelligence officer told me. “There’s no question that the U.S. has cooperated with Israel in intelligence-gathering operations against the Iranians, but this was different. No matter what anyone thinks, we’re not in the business of assassinating Iranian officials or killing Iranian civilians.”
Of course, the US does not assassinate Iranian officials. Instead it sponsors coup d’etats to destroy nationalist governments there and places their leaders under house arrest until they die. And the US does not kill Iranian civilians. It simply supports sanctions that lead to their death and sends arms to Iraq while the latter is destroying Iran. Does anyone actually think that the USG wants a nuclear Iran?
And just in case you are a little slow in getting the point that Foreign Policy is orienting its regional coverage and pontificating to the renovation of American and Saudi hegemony over the region, alongside a demilitarized Palestinian state (that is ‘Palestinian liberation” to all of you going on and on about the lobby) and trying to whitewash the sordid history of empire in the process, Perry reminds us:
“We don’t do bang and boom,” a recently retired intelligence officer said. “And we don’t do political assassinations.”
Part of renovating American regional hegemony is co-opting those whose demands go considerably farther than the re-jiggered prisons that the American and Gulf ruling classes envision for the Palestinians — and indeed the rest of the regional dispossessed. Part of the process of co-optation is absorbing into the merely reformist movement those who think that the division amongst the elites is larger than it is. And part of that absorption means bringing radicals into the liberal camp. If you didn’t shake your head when the “retired intelligence officer” beatifically claimed that “we don’t political assassinations,” check your coordinates, please.
Israel regularly proposes conducting covert operations targeting Iranians, but is just as regularly shut down, according to retired and current intelligence officers. “They come into the room and spread out their plans, and we just shake our heads,” one highly placed intelligence source said, “and we say to them — ‘Don’t even go there. The answer is no.’”
That Perry has just documented instances of Israeli plans being roundly rejected by US officialdom has escaped the notice of those getting excited about this story. About that phenomenon I am not sure what to say. But I have interrupted your search for a right-populist savior who will put the Jewish state on its leash and save American democracy. Consider the interruption over, and you may now return to your regular hallucinating habits.
Technorati Tags: Israel, Mark Perry, Zionism
I have not seen any reporting about these immolations in Jordan. AFP reports:
A 54-year-old Jordanian man died on Wednesday after setting himself on fire, in the second such death in as many days, a security official said.
“Yassin Falah Zubi set himself on fire in the Nazzal neighbourhood, east of Amman. He was rushed to hospital but died there,” the official told AFP. “According to his son, the man suffered from mental problems.”
On Tuesday, 52-year-old Ahmad Matarneh died in hospital after setting himself on fire the previous day because of his economic woes, his family said.
The former Amman municipality employee’s contract was terminated in July. The municipality said Matarneh received about $11,000 as end-of-service compensation and a $42,000 housing loan, “expressing regret over his death.”
In April, a man killed himself the same way after police refused to erase his criminal record.
Meanwhile, an 18-year-old activist was arrested on Wednesday after torching a large picture of King Abdullah II in the southern city of Madaba, near Amman, local news websites reported.
Technorati Tags: Amman, immolation, Jordan, Tunisia
Now I know why American tourists love the Israeli resort city of Eilat: it allows people to fly into the geographical heart of the Orient and pretend that they are in Florida. Palm trees, neon-lit hotels, everything overdone and garish. I was there briefly after entering Israel through the Taba Crossing from the Egyptian Sinai, and the flesh-and-blood figures of Israelis started to fill in the scholarly blueprint I had drawn of their society and its links with the world and the West.
Manning the border were 18-year-old Mizrahi (Jews from Arab or Muslim countries) conscripts, fresh out of high school, with their odd racist hyper-vigilance: young American backpackers scrutinized intensely, anyone speaking a whit of Hebrew to them waved through with barely a glance. Outside the crossing, on the Israeli side, was a family of ’48 Palestinians. They had been held up for hours at the checkpoint, they told me. So not just anyone speaking Hebrew glides in on the lubrication of Israeli racism – Israeli Palestinians speak it fine – but just Jews speaking Hebrew. On the bus from the border to the central station was a passel of Spanish teenagers on a Zionist tour group: the grassroots effort of building up global ideological support for Israel amongst Jewish communities in action. At the shabby bus terminal in Eilat were soldiers walking around with M-16s slung over their backs, younger cub trainees in desert fatigues: in Israel the militarist inculcation starts early and never really ends. And with chilling friendliness a Canadian man sitting next to me in the terminal started recommending that I spend as little time in Eilat as possible. He lived there full-time and had been there for five months. He was there as part of an industry training program, working at one of the seaside city’s resorts. Israel loves such links with the Euro-Atlantic world of which its leaders and founders so deludedly consider the country a part – oriented always north and west, to the Mediterranean of Barcelona and Athens, not the one of Alexandria and Beirut.
Even in the northern Mediterranean port cities, the truth seeps through the porous borders protecting the lie. The entire Mediterranean littoral can’t be militarized. Here, the lie is everywhere, since the raw materials with which it was cobbled together speak the truth through the simple fact of their being: the palm trees stolen from Palestinian orchards lining the city’s roadways and promenades, the Arabic lettering beneath the Hebrew on nearly every sign, the Sudanese refugees speaking to one another on the buses. In furious defiance of the future, the Israeli government will soon start building a new wall on its frontier with Jordan. They contemplate doing the same on the armistice line with Lebanon. In such acts, the rulers of the state tacitly confess their knowledge that their lie will not last. There is no wall that can be built tall enough to keep out the future.
Technorati Tags: 1948, Hasbara, Israel, Mizrahi, Palestine, Zionism
Watch very carefully how the NYT presents this story on the Muslim Brotherhood and its openness to rapprochement with the United States. The Obama administration is now very aware that MB lawmakers will work to create a state that will “respect individual freedoms, free markets and international commitments, including Egypt’s treaty with Israel”; in other words, respect the form but not the content of democracy while maintaining all the institutional scaffolding of capitalism and along with it the state’s control of the Egyptian people.
On the one hand, for the NYT, this move “underscores Washington’s increasing frustration with Egypt’s military rulers, who have sought to carve out permanent political powers for themselves and used deadly force against protesters seeking an end to their rule.” On the other, “The administration, however, has also sought to preserve its deep ties to the military rulers,” mainly maintaining the $1.3 billion dollars in military aid. Some frustration.
The article goes on to note that “Some close to the administration have even called this emerging American relationship with the Brotherhood a first step toward a pattern that could take shape with the Islamist parties’ coming to power around the region,” as the US moves close to Islamists. Of course, the US has always had the closest relationships with obscurantist religious regimes in the Gulf, but that is unmentionable here.
Behind the scenes, the US continues to call the shots. Responding to the raid on 10 NGOs this week – three of them closely linked to the US government, probably through National Endowment for Democracy funding – Victoria Nuland said that “It is, frankly, unacceptable to us that that situation has not been returned to normal.”
None of this should be surprising. What is slightly surprising is to see Hamas leaders, themselves with very little maneuvering room due to their ill-fated decision to take state power in Gaza, glorying in a renewed partnership with the MB. When Ismail Haniyeh was recently hosted by Mohammed Badie, the Supreme Guide of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Haniyeh said this “presence with the Brotherhood threatens the Israeli entity,” while Badie reaffirmed the Brotherhood’s commitment [sic] to “issues of liberation, foremost the Palestinian issue.” What this may signal instead is the final cave-in of Hamas to imperial pressure.
And it also affirms the numbing blinkeredness of looking at the region as though Israel is calling America’s shots: in response to the initial stirrings of unrest, Israeli army Home Front Command Chief Major General Eyal Eisenberg spoke of a “radical Islamic winter.” We should hope not, not for Israel’s sake, which may only have to worry about political Islam to the North, but for the sake of the Arab people’s as they bridle under petro-dollar fueled political Islam.
Technorati Tags: Gaza, Hamas, Haniey, Israel, Muslim Brotherhood, political islam, US
|
|
