The language barrier: How Islamists outshine Arab secularists

[Originally posted at NOW]

A little over a year ago, I visited a Jordanian friend in Amman. Determined atheists that we both are, as the Black Label bottle steadily drained our conversation turned, as it often would, to the evergreen subject of the woefully elevated positions of the region’s Parties of God in all their forms and guises.

“Man, let me show you something,” he suddenly said, reaching for the TV remote. “This is why the secularists can’t beat the Islamists today.” Flicking to one of at least a dozen available Islamic channels, we listened as a shrouded televangelist expounded on the boundless splendors of the pious path. “Just listen to the guy’s fusha [classical Arabic],” my friend said in sincere admiration. “It’s effortless.” And so it was – without the slightest stutter or pause, our imam filled the room with the music of 7th-century Arabian vocabulary, every single letter adorned with precisely the correct diacritical flourish. Picture someone mellifluously chatting in the tongue of Shakespeare and you’ll get something of the oratorical effect.

“Now compare that with these guys,” said my friend, switching to a political talk show featuring two beardless Jordanians in suits. Clearly ill-at-ease in the fusha they were compelled (by widely-observed custom) to speak on air – which is likely the only time they speak it – the contrast in style was disastrous. In awkward monotone, they would punctuate every other word with an “uhhh” as they frantically scanned their limited mental lexicons for the formally proper noun or adjective. “It doesn’t matter that what they’re saying is a thousand times more enlightening than the Islamist propaganda,” my friend said. “Who could listen to this for more than thirty seconds?”

That thought came rushing back to me on Saturday when I watched another Islamist, the fugitive cleric-cum-militiaman Ahmad al-Assir, mount an 11-minute-long diatribe against the “liberals” (what contempt he put into the word) of Lebanon’s moderate Sunni Future Movement. Secure in his amply-demonstrated fusha proficiency, Assir actually reverted to colloquial dialect to land his most personal jab, directed at Future leader Saad Hariri, “who doesn’t know how to string two words together in Arabic.” It’s a reference to the former prime minister’s famously shaky fusha, most memorably demonstrated in a calamitous 2009 parliament address. But Assir wasn’t trying to score literary points: he meant to undermine Hariri’s religious, and ultimately political, legitimacy as the representative of Lebanon’s Sunnis. It was an assertion of the supposed authenticity, the unshakeable Arabness, of Islamism compared to effete and decadent liberalism.

Older generations of Arab nationalist intellectuals championed the revival and protection of Arabic out of fear that “the nation” and its culture were losing ground to an ascendant West. Today, the new and graver danger is of young Arab minds being seduced by hyper-articulate jihadists, to whose rhetorical charms even this British kafir is not entirely invulnerable.

Among other things, this makes all the more necessary the secular Arabic literary heritage, from the classic pre-Islamic mu`allaqat through such brilliant medieval reprobates as Abu Nuwas to modern giants like Mahmoud Darwish. Indeed, there’s reason to believe a thread running through the entire oeuvre of the permanently clean-shaven Darwish, who never hid his dislike of Hamas and lamented those who “don’t know the difference between the mosque (al-jam`) and the university (al-jam`a),” was an unspoken determination to claim Arabic (and specifically classical Arabic, the clerics’ home ground) for an avowedly secular renaissance, or nahda. (The contribution of those who manage to turn these works into music and other art forms – Marcel Khalifé being perhaps the most obvious example – is also invaluable, not least because of the profanity of music in and of itself in the Wahhabist worldview. One recalls Khalifé’s farcical 1999 blasphemy trial.) Unless and until that is achieved, the Islamists will continue to exploit the appearance of an intellectual – and even cultural – superiority that is of course entirely and dangerously illusory.

A SCAF coup in Gaza?

[Originally posted at NOW]

According to a Reuters exclusive published today, the military dictatorship which ousted the former Egyptian President Muhammad Morsi last July and subsequently drove his Muslim Brotherhood support base underground – jailing journalists and extinguishing over a thousand civilian lives in the process – hopes now to engineer a repeat of the experience in the Gaza Strip.

“Gaza is next,” an anonymous senior security official told the news agency. “We cannot get liberated from the terrorism of the Brotherhood in Egypt without ending it in Gaza.”

The plan, according to various officials cited in the report, is to use opponents – both militant and civilian – of the Brotherhood-affiliated Hamas government in Gaza to ignite a “first spark” of protests, modeled on the ‘Tamarrod’ [‘Rebel’] movement that opposed Morsi in Cairo last summer, in order to provoke a violent crackdown that would ultimately lead to Hamas’ downfall. “Surely, the world will not stand still and allow Hamas to kill Palestinians. Someone will interfere,” as one source explained it.

To that end, a protest has been scheduled in Gaza for 21 March. Of course, how many people will actually show up is anyone’s guess – a previous attempt, last November, to stage a Tamarrod-branded demonstration in the Strip flopped entirely. It’s difficult to see how much influence the Egyptian generals can actually exert through Hamas’ domestic opponents, almost all of whom are either in jail or have been tortured and intimidated into silence.

Indeed the entire scheme seems basically ludicrous, and not just logistically. There’s no doubt the Hamas regime is a brutal theocracy; a coupling of the fundamentalism of Saudi Arabia with the iron fist of Saddam Hussein. And yet, the Egyptian experience of the past six months leaves rather a lot of room to doubt whether the putsch envisaged by Sisi’s gangsters offers the liberal and democratic alternative Gazans hope for.

Hezbollah shooting stokes Palestinian ire

[Originally posted at NOW]

Relations between Hezbollah and Palestinians set to fray further after checkpoint shootout leaves refugee dead.

Mourners carry Muhammad Samrawi's coffin through the narrow alleys of Burj al-Barajneh camp on Monday (NOW/Alex Rowell)

BURJ AL-BARAJNEH, Lebanon – As hundreds of mourners crammed the narrow, airless street outside the Furqan mosque to attend Muhammad Samrawi’s funeral Monday evening, a mood of anxiety hung palpably in the air. A distressed middle-aged woman, wearing a black abaya and black headscarf, broke the heavy silence, wailing of her hope that the mother of Samrawi’s killer one day feels the grief she is now feeling.

Within seconds, a pair of men pounced on the woman, hissing at her to be quiet. “We don’t want fitna [sectarian strife]!” shouted one to the crowd. Evidently fearing a repeat of the previous night’s demonstrations against Hezbollah – whose gunmen were responsible for Samrawi’s death – the man frantically repeated, “No chants!” When he went on to declare, “We are all with you, Sayyid Hassan,” a young man behind NOW cursed in disgust.

A coffin emerged from the mosque, draped in a Palestinian flag, and the procession began through the winding alleyways of Beirut’s most densely-populated refugee camp, the deafening claps of AK-47 fire reverberating off the graffiti-colored walls. At the cemetery fifteen minutes later, as the men buried the body, the same black-clad woman was still refusing to be hushed by bystanders. “I’m not going to be quiet. Tell me! Are we takfiris too, now?”

Such open expression of resentment against Hezbollah is a rare spectacle from Palestinian refugees, who generally support the party’s muscular anti-Israel stance and, in the case of Burj al-Barajneh residents, live in the heart of the southern suburbs, where the party’s control is at its tightest.

Yet Hezbollah’s killing of 40-year-old Samrawi at a party checkpoint at the camp’s entrance Sunday night has aggravated Palestinians’ feelings of being targeted by Hezbollah’s new security measures, which came into effect after the 15 August car bomb that killed 30 in the nearby Al-Roueiss neighborhood.

“There’s a feeling that the camp is being singled out,” said Ali, a camp resident in his mid-twenties who witnessed the clash. “They stopped the car of the wedding couple, which was at the front of the wedding convoy. There was an exchange of words, a provocation, and then eventually gunfire. If this was the only time this happened, it would be okay, but it’s happened before and it will keep happening. People are angry,” he told NOW.

Ali complained of routine petty harassment of Palestinians at Hezbollah’s new checkpoints. “As soon as you say you’re Palestinian, they pull you over, they search you, just like they do to Syrians. I’ve been pulled over myself at least four times. People as young as fifteen are made to hand over their phones. I thought we were done with racism.”

NOW also met with Hosni Abu Taqa, head of the camp’s Popular Committee, who has been working nonstop since Sunday to limit the fallout from the shooting and mediate an agreement to cool residents’ tempers.

“We understand why there are checkpoints – after all, this is Dahiyeh. And after people started blaming that Palestinian man for the rocket attacks, we obviously couldn’t refuse the security measures,” Abu Taqa told NOW, referring to Ahmad Taha, the Palestinian suspected of attacking Dahiyeh in May with rockets purchased, according to some reports, from Burj al-Barajneh itself.

As such, said Abu Taqa, a deal was struck with Hezbollah on Monday to move the checkpoint further away from the camp’s Haret Hreik entrance. Moreover, the checkpoint at the camp’s airport road entrance is now manned by the Internal Security Forces, not Hezbollah.

However, the Dahiyeh rocket attack is not the only recent source of friction between Hezbollah and Palestinian refugees. In May, residents of the Ain al-Hilweh camp in Sidon burned aid packages received from the party in anger at their intervention in Syria, reportedly saying, “We don’t want assistance soaked in the blood of the Syrian people.” Indeed, Ain al-Hilweh has for years been a hotbed of anti-Hezbollah sentiment, with some of the camp’s Islamist militants believed to have fought against both Hezbollah in Sidon and the regime in Syria. Elsewhere, residents of the Shatila camp in Beirut have been recruited into anti-Hezbollah militias in adjacent Sunni neighborhoods. And, as NOW has previously reported, Hezbollah’s relations with Hamas have reached unprecedented lows, with the latter accused of assisting Syrian rebels in the battle for Qusayr as well as harboring a key suspect in the Dahiyeh rocket attack.

Underlying this rift is a general proliferation of sectarian Islamist ideology among Palestinians in Lebanon, which Hezbollah’s intervention in Syria has accelerated, according to Yezid Sayigh, senior associate at the Carnegie Middle East Center and a former adviser to the Palestinian delegation to peace talks in the 1990s.

“Sectarian feelings have been building up in the Palestinian camps for a while, originally over the Iraq war and now the Syrian one, and this has been fomented by Arab governments like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Mubarak’s Egypt. As in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world, socioeconomically and politically marginalized communities like Palestinian refugees have moved toward Salafism. This in turn has alienated them from Hezbollah, which was otherwise a party they were close to on several levels. The bonds between them have eroded immensely over a number of years and the Syrian crisis has crystallized that,” Sayigh told NOW.

Moreover, the Syrian conflict has increasingly placed Palestinians in direct opposition to the Assad regime.

“Obviously, lots of Palestinians have joined the fight against the regime in Syria. Just yesterday, families from Damascus’ Yarmouk refugee camp which had taken shelter in Ain al-Hilweh were mourning five dead. So Palestinians here increasingly have close bonds that tie them to the opposition in Syria against the regime, which most Palestinians distrust anyway and have done for a long time.”

Maya Gebeily contributed reporting.

Hezbollah-Hamas rift quietly widens further

[Originally posted at NOW]

There are, arguably, more important things going on in the Middle East at this moment, but no one who takes an interest in (or is simply entertained by) the fratricidal frictions between the region’s self-described “Islamic Resistance” movements brought on by the Syrian conflict can afford to ignore this ‘Letter to Hamas’ penned on Monday by Al-Akhbar’s editor-in-chief Ibrahim al-Amin.

It takes the conventional Stalinist form of the apparatchik sternly reprimanding a comrade for deviancy from ‘revolutionary’ doctrine. Hamas, warns Amin, is “straying from the path of resistance.” Specifically, in siding with the Syrian opposition against the Assad regime, the movement has “implicated” itself “in questionable activity against the Resistance in Lebanon.”

Well, we knew that much already. What’s new now is Amin’s explicit accusations of violence carried out by Hamas not just against the Syrian regime, but Hezbollah’s civilian constituency in Lebanon itself:

“It is common knowledge […] that a Palestinian named Ahmad Taha was behind the rocket attack on Dahiyeh several months ago. He was assisted by many, among them a prominent member of Hamas in Rashidiya refugee camp in South Lebanon by the name of Aladdin Yassine. When Lebanese army intelligence asked for Hamas’ cooperation, they helped with Taha but refused to surrender Yassine, claiming that he had left the camp and his whereabouts are unknown.

It’s hard to imagine what Hamas is thinking – does it not understand the repercussions of dragging its feet in such a critical matter? Does it not know that its actions could cause a major rift with Hezbollah – the main target of the Dahiyeh rocket attack – and supporters of the Resistance, who have never hesitated in their commitment to the liberation of Palestine and all those forces that are struggling to that end?”

For Amin to all but accuse of treachery the foremost Palestinian militant group strikes me as rather significant. Also interesting is what it reveals about his attitude to “resistance” in general. Apparently when Hamas – which fought a week-long war with Israel as recently as last November – goes to fight in Syria on behalf of a popular uprising, this marks its “decline as a resistance movement.” Yet, when Hezbollah – which hasn’t traded serious blows with the Zionists in over seven years now – intervenes (on a far greater scale) on the side of the incumbent dictatorship, this leaves no blemish on its “resistance” credentials whatsoever. This might well make perfect sense to Amin, but for those of us without the benefit of his peculiar perspicacity, it begs again that old question: against whom is this “resistance?”

When resistances collide

[Originally posted at NOW]

While reports last week of Hamas members in Lebanon being ordered by Hezbollah security officials to leave the country have since proven false, they have nonetheless revived questions about the state of relations between the Palestinian Sunni Islamist militia-cum-party and its Lebanese Shiite Islamist counterpart.

Having both firmly sided with opposing camps in the Syrian conflict raging next door, the two nominal allies appear to be straining to preserve what they can of a relationship increasingly challenged by political and sectarian differences.

The official line was summed up by former Hezbollah MP Hassan Hoballah, who said Friday that, “What brings us together, in terms of our hostility towards the Zionist entity, is greater than a dispute over the […] situation in Syria.” This was echoed by Hamas’ spokesperson in Lebanon, Ali Baraka, in a phone call to NOW.

However, Baraka also admitted to NOW that, “Of course, relations are not like they were in previous years.” Moreover, he explicitly condemned Hezbollah’s now-publicly acknowledged military intervention in Syria on behalf of the Assad regime, saying, “We are against [it], just as we are against any foreign intervention in the Syrian conflict.”

That includes intervention by Hamas, Baraka added, responding to allegations that the group is training and even fighting alongside the Free Syrian Army (FSA) in Damascus and Aleppo. While no hard evidence has surfaced to support the accusations, they appear to be believed by some Hezbollah fighters themselves. Upon returning from the recent battle for Qusayr in Homs province, one such militant told a newspaper, “There’s a kind of irritating familiarity [in the rebels’ tactics]. Hezbollah taught Hamas all those tactics to fight the Israelis. Hamas apparently decided to transfer their experience to takfiri groups [Hezbollah parlance for the FSA].”

Whether true or not, there are certainly other indications of a deepening divorce between Hamas and its fellow members of the so-called ‘Resistance Axis’ – Hezbollah, and the Syrian and Iranian regimes. The London Telegraph reported last Friday that Iran has almost entirely ceased its financial support to Hamas – said to total some £15m ($23m USD) per month – as well as all military cooperation, in retaliation for the latter’s opposition to the Assad regime. (A subsequent article denying this was in turn denied by Hamas’ official website, a website which, significantly, describes the Syrian uprising as a “revolution” and has issued condemnations of regime “massacres” of Palestinian refugees.)

Such developments follow the broader pattern that has emerged since the Syrian uprising began. One month after Hamas’ politburo chairman Khaled Mashaal quietly left his Damascus headquarters in January 2012, the group’s Prime Minister Ismail Haniyah “saluted” the Syrian opposition in a Cairo speech. Mashaal has since based himself in Qatar, whose Emir Hamad al-Thani later paid a visit to Gaza in what was widely interpreted as a message that the Gulf state would henceforth be Hamas’s primary patron.

This new bond with Qatar – which is also among the most forthright sponsors of the Syrian opposition – is likely one reason why Hamas’ relations with the ‘Resistance Axis’ continue to deterioriate, according to Dr. Yezid Sayigh, senior associate at the Carnegie Middle East Center and former negotiator with Palestinian delegations in peace talks with Israel in the 1990s.

“Clearly Qatar has pledged lots of assistance [to Hamas],” Sayigh told NOW. “It’s possible that there’s been some sort of quid pro quo.”

However, Sayigh said equally significant are domestic pressures on the group in Gaza from friends and rivals alike, most of whom have welcomed the Syrian uprising.

“Having supported the Arab Spring in other countries, especially Egypt, I guess [Hamas] just found it awkward to be supporting the Assad regime, [especially] given that they’re trying to meet challenges in Gaza from people like the Salafists who are more openly supportive of the rebels in Syria.”

Ultimately, beyond Syria, perhaps the larger question is what will become of the ‘Resistance Axis’ now that it appears to have fragmented along political and sectarian lines.

“It’s certainly been weakened,” said Sayigh. “And it’ll be weakened further if the perception grows that this is basically a Shiite axis, or Shiite crescent, connecting the Shiites of Lebanon, Iraq and Iran with the Alawite regime in Syria. If Hamas is the odd one out, that would be very uncomfortable, because they really can’t afford anything that would undermine their [alliances,] with Egypt in particular, but also with the Saudis, who are [still] upset about their takeover of Gaza in 2007. I guess they just don’t have the choice of staying in the Axis of Resistance when almost everyone else sees that in a sectarian way.”

Or, as Dr. Nadim Shehadi, associate fellow at Chatham House, put it to NOW more bluntly:

“Without Hamas, the Axis of Resistance is reduced to a mere sectarian alliance.”

Yara Chehayed contributed reporting.

IDF cheerily live-tweets infanticide

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

I don’t know about you, dear reader, but if I were the spokesman for a formidable military institution that had, just moments ago, used its sophisticated killing equipment to end the lives of several civilians, including an 11-month-old baby, I might make a point of presenting a solemn face to the world (if not indeed an embarrassed and even contrite one).

Not so the spokespeople for the Israeli army, who, after yesterday’s launch of “Operation Pillar of Defense” against Gaza, began an extraordinary Twitter campaign of self-congratulation, self-pity, and “jokes” couched in the breezy language of adolescent computer gamers besting their digital adversaries. Here is a selection of their more galling efforts:

@IDFSpokesperson: We recommend that no Hamas operatives, whether low level or senior leaders, show their faces above ground in the days ahead.

@CaptainBarakRaz: #HamasBumperStickers I fired ten rockets and all I got was this lousy bumper sticker (Re-tweeted with a “LOL” by fellow official spokesperson @MajPeterLerner)

@NathanWurtzel: #HamasBumperStickers Honk If You’re About to be Taken Out by an Israeli Air to Surface Missile (Re-tweeted by @CaptainBarakRaz)

@IDFSpokesperson: Ahmed Jabari: Eliminated. pic.twitter.com/sCnQnKkM

This trash is in addition to the usual bluster about “surgical” strikes and the unmatched morality and “purity” of the “Israel Defense Forces”. Surgical, like removing a sore tooth with a spade. Pure, like the Red Army memorialized by Vladimir Putin on his most recent visit to the Holy Land.

Elsewhere, it was also dispiriting to see Zionist backers of the Syrian opposition hastily trying to change the subject to Bashar al-Assad – the mirror image, in other words, of the pro-Assad “leftists” who prefer not to dwell on the crimes of the shabbiha. Hamas is certainly not the Free Syrian Army, but a dead child is a dead child. Fortunately, as has been so often the case in the past twenty months, Syrians themselves produced the finest moral clarity:

@NuffSilence: Innocent civilians, whether Israelis or Palestinians, should be a red-line. Why is this so hard to grasp?

Video: Israeli police beat Palestinian teen

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

A disturbing video surfaced over the weekend showing Israeli policemen inside the Dome of the Rock compound pinning a 17-year-old Palestinian boy to the ground by the neck and punching him on the side of the head.

According to the Palestinian WAFA news agency, they continued to beat the boy, Hasan al-Afifi, until he bled on the ground, while also pepper-spraying his mother until she fainted.

The attack took place during a demonstration inside the compound, known in Judaism as the Temple Mount, in which Palestinians threw stones in protest against an earlier attempt by what Ma’an called “Israeli ultranationalists” to hold Jewish prayers inside it. The label is misleading – the ideology of these fanatics is in fact a fusion of territorial expansionism with heterodox Jewish fundamentalism.

It is, in other words, merely one more trophy in the cabinet of Israel’s ascendant extreme right wing. For decades, Israel’s chief rabbis have forbidden Jews from entering the compound on theological grounds (how, for example, are Jews to perform the mandatory cleansing ritual for entry into the Temple in the absence of the famous red heifer?). Today’s hot-headed settlers and other supremacists have no time for such craven defeatism, and are finding a growing number of rabbis only too happy to sign off on their more muscular approach (as history teaches us well, there is no political movement too sinister for the approval of the men of God).

To see how acutely dangerous this all is, one need only recall that it was Ariel Sharon’s visit to the same site in 2000 that sparked the Second Intifada. Meanwhile, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Israeli Air Force are trading blows in Gaza. Time for a large whisky, I think.

Gazans reveal shocking Hamas abuses

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

In general, I thought of myself as someone who harbored few delusions about Hamas. Unlike an alarmingly large contingent of self-proclaimed leftists, I’ve never been willing or able to ignore the Islamic fascism that is the lifeblood of the group’s ideology, and that makes ridiculous any notion of it as a “resistance”. I confess, however, that I used to suspect there to be a degree of exaggeration and/or Zionist propaganda in the stories I would read about its moral policing.

Not so anymore. After meeting last weekend in Jordan with a group of Palestinian journalists that included three arrivals from Gaza, I was appalled to discover the reality is worse than I had dared imagine. Without me even mentioning the subject, they would almost tremble with rage as they described the party’s thuggery, palpably relieved at the opportunity to unload an intolerable weight off their chests.

By their account, Hamas’ rule combines the fundamentalism of Saudi Arabia with the iron fist of Saddam Hussein. Unveiled women are harassed by policemen, regardless of their faith. Even the veiled ones are banned from arguileh cafes, as are the songs of Fayrouz and Umm Kulthoum. The men have to wear tops while swimming in the sea, and unmarried couples holding hands on the beach are confronted. Nor can men and women together dance the dabka, that staple of Palestinian and Levantine identity. There is, obviously, no alcohol. Thousands of Christians have fled since the 2007 coup, and public Christian ceremonies are now illegal. “They are building an Afghanistan, step by step,” as Omar put it.

Also banned are unapproved political demonstrations of any kind, as refugees from the Bureij camp found out just last week. Public criticism of the party is unthinkable - merely “Liking” a dissenting view on Facebook can lead to a knock on the door. To be a democracy and/or human rights activist is to risk severe beatings, as the likes of Asma al-Ghul, the 15 March movement and Gaza Youth Break Out can tell you from experience.

As for press freedom, one anecdote from Ahmad gives you an idea. Happening upon a man being thrashed by Hamas forces, Ahmad managed to take a photo but failed to get away unseen. After himself enduring a minute or two of truncheons and boots while refusing to hand over his camera, he felt the tip of a rifle barrel against his kneecap, and heard a voice count “1…” Suffice to say, he never got to see that photo. “Kneecapping”, apparently, is becoming a common method of settling disputes.

All this, of course, inflicted on a people already immiserated by Israeli bombs and blockades. To be sure, Israel is and will always be the ultimate enemy for Ahmad and the others, some of whom lost close family in Operation Cast Lead. But to take what pitiful liberty is left by Israel and strangle it further is entirely Hamas’ own achievement. How “leftist”! How “revolutionary”!

“Omar” and “Ahmad” are, of course, pseudonyms.

The pulse of Palestine: Dispatch from Ramallah and elsewhere

Last weekend, I spent a day and a half in various parts of the West Bank. Rather than write it up as a conventional travel piece, I thought I’d profile three people I met during my stay, with extracts from conversations we had, and then end with a description of Ramallah and some general concluding remarks. [Note: For my account of a previous trip to Jerusalem, see here.]

Muhammad

Muhammad was the first person I spoke with at any length. We happened to be sitting next to each other on the public taxi (‘service’) from Jericho to Ramallah – a ride of about half an hour that passes countless settlements and some of the most famous sections of the West Bank wall. It also transports one from the arid landscape of the eastern border strip to the relative greenery of the rest of the country.

“Inta min hon?” is how he begins our conversation. Are you from here? The question is so ridiculous, given how I look, that in retrospect I realize he was finding a diplomatic way of asking if I was Israeli. I tell him in Arabic that No, I am in fact a British tourist. He smiles and seems to relax. “Ah, British – welcome!” he replies in English. I ask where he’s from (Jenin) and from there we proceed to chat about Jerusalem, the Wall, and the occupation in general.

“There are three kinds of Palestinians: those who can go to Jerusalem any time; those who can go only with special permission; and those who can never go. In fact, there’s a fourth kind – those from Gaza, who can’t even leave there. I’m the second kind. Usually we only get the permission on religious holidays, if there’s been no violence lately. But even then, they don’t allow men between the ages of 18 and 35. They’re the youth, they’re most likely to, uh, do something.”

He pauses and smiles after those two words. “You can sneak in, you know. There are guys who do it, with ladders or whatever. And usually, you don’t sneak in unless you’re going to do something! But even if they catch you, they just kick your ass and send you back. It’s no big deal.

West Bank wall, somewhere between Jericho and Ramallah

“The wall is like a snake,” he says when it first comes into view – ugly, and rather smaller and feebler than I’d expected. “It snakes from village to village, because they want to take a bit from every one along the way.” After a pause, he adds with a laugh, “They’re stupid; they’re caging themselves in. We don’t care!” 

Arafat's and Marwan Barghouti's faces on the Wall

Rawda

Rawda Khouriya is the co-owner and manager of my hotel for the night: the Khouriya Family Guesthouse, a stunning stone villa converted into a bed & breakfast in the village of Jifna, about fifteen minutes north of Ramallah. The Khouriyas are a Christian Palestinian family originally from Taybeh, which readers may know as the hometown of Palestine’s very own Taybeh Beer. Everything about the house reminds me of a Lebanese Christian home, from the ubiquitous pictures of Mary to the bottles of Johnnie Walker Black to the view from the balcony, which could easily be Marjayoun (and, indeed, is only 200km south of it). 

View from the Khouriyas' home

The Khouriyas' villa

We talked a great deal over the course of my stay, about Lebanon as well as Palestine (“The Lebanese,” she said with a gush of admiration. “They really know how to live!” Yes, and how to kill, too, I replied, perhaps unfairly). At a glance, life in Jifna looks wonderful. Even the nearby Jalazun camp for refugees of the 1948 war is heaven on earth compared to the dumps that Palestinians have to live in here in Lebanon. But on closer inspection, the comforts are illusory, even for a well-off family like the Khouriyas.

“Please, when you shower, be quick,” urges Rawda. “Water is very limited here, and we haven’t been able to buy any for two weeks. It’s going to cut off any day now.” She points out the black cartons of water, bought from Israel, that are placed on the roofs of every house in the village. “You won’t see these in the settlements,” she adds with a snort. 

Water cartons on the roofs of Jifna homes

As indeed I did not. And speaking of which, Jifna lies on the outskirts of a certain Beit El, a religious Zionist settlement which was in the news at the time for having been declared partially illegal by the Israeli High Court (a decision that Prime Minister Netanyahu was “not happy” about, but which would ultimately “strengthen the settlement movement” when the homes were moved to another, “legal” part of the same complex). Proximity to a settlement adds numerous difficulties to everyday life, including sudden road closures, harassment, and violence. “Last week [the settlers] stoned four passing cars,” says Rawda. “We don’t dare drive past at night anymore. And if anyone approaches on foot, they shoot.” 

Beit El settlement, near Jifna

I ask her about Hamas; specifically whether as a Christian Palestinian she has conflicting feelings about a strong party that is nevertheless Islamist. “We don’t really think as Christians or as Muslims. Everybody is so sick of the Palestinian Authority; their corruption, their weakness. So people voted for Hamas – yes, even Christians – because we thought they were different, that they had integrity. But now, it looks like they’re all the same.”

And I ask her that clichéd, but necessary question: what’s the solution?

“64 years is enough. We can’t take anymore. Khalas [enough], you take Haifa, take the beach, take everything that’s nice, but leave us this. We don’t need a new settlement appearing every month. Let us live in our part, let us move around, don’t make us drive for hours when it should take twenty minutes. You can have your land, we can have ours, and we can visit each other. But let us share it as equals, not with one above the other.”

Jan

Jan is not someone I expected to meet in the West Bank. A Dutchman in his fifties or perhaps early sixties, he is not a journalist, nor an activist, nor really a political person of any kind. He is, in fact, a stamp collector. His dream is to own all of the 82 varieties of Palestinian stamps that have been issued since 1994. Within minutes of us meeting he is pulling out entire sheets of them, each bearing a slight variation on the classic Arafat portrait. This is apparently a business. “You know how much these are worth? $600,” he smiles. “I’m holding $600 in my hands. And this is nothing!”

Over arguileh at the Jifna village club that night (Jan is also staying at the Khouriyas’), I learn a bit more about why Jan is really in Palestine. It transpires that he once lived for three years in Israel, during the 1970s. “I’m not a Jew,” he says (not that I asked or would have minded), “but I was married to an Israeli girl at the time.

“I was always being told by Israelis of the urgent need to kick all the Arabs out, how the only good Arab was a dead Arab, and so on. This was the norm. It converted me, to put it bluntly, from being pro- to anti-Israel.”

He complains of the overwhelmingly prevalent pro-Israel bias back in Holland (which he credits to the still-seeping scars of the Nazi occupation). “When I tell friends I’m going to Palestine, they become hysterical. ‘Don’t you know how dangerous it is? They’ll stab you, they’ll rob you, they’re terrorists for God’s sake!’ All I can do is laugh. I’ve never felt safer or more welcome than I do here in Jifna.” Indeed, as we sit outdoors among twenty or so locals watching the Euro championship, the only conceivable source of anxiety is the verbosity of the commentator. (Rawda, too, had complained with great bitterness of the tired and stupid “terrorist” line, which belongs in the same intellectual dustbin as the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.)

There is a charming sort of innocence to Jan, which emboldens him to do things few others would. In Hebron, he says, he approached the sealed Jewish quarter (or “clean zone”, in the settlers’ parlance) with an Arab friend. “Can we go in?” he asked the soldier in Hebrew. “You can, but he can’t.”

“Doesn’t it make you feel strange,” Jan then asked, “that in front of you are two human beings, and you’re telling one that he can come in and the other that he can’t?” 

“Such is life,” was the soldier’s reply, though Jan insists he detected a glimmer of unease. “At the end of the day, it’s his job, what else could he do? But I’m convinced I made him think a little.”

Before calling it a night, I ask Jan too what the solution is. “Nothing that can be done overnight. But in the long run, I’d say what’s needed above all is the education of women. Educated women will raise their sons not to be extremists, not to continue the endless cycle of revenge. It’s actually an idea I read about in ‘I Shall Not Hate’, the memoir of a Palestinian doctor whose three daughters were killed by Israeli tank shells. It was the cleverest idea that I’d heard, personally. But it will take generations.”

Ramallah

There’s an energy in Ramallah quite unlike that of any city I’ve seen. With its winsome stone buildings, built around cobbled churches and mosques in the hills on the outskirts of Jerusalem, in other circumstances it might have just been a picturesque escape from the crowds of the Old City. Things, however, worked out rather differently, with the result that Ramallah today is a city galvanized by politics. There isn’t a square inch of al-Manara, the city centre, that doesn’t host a poster, a flag, a sticker or graffiti. Parts of Beirut are like this, but Beirut is a city of internal disagreement; of fragmentation and factionalisation. In Ramallah, there is that rare, spiriting feeling of single-minded purpose. 

al-Manara, Ramallah city centre

Tribute to Vittorio Arrigoni, Italian activist killed by Islamists in Gaza

Posters protesting administrative detentions of Palestinians in Israeli jails

And that purpose – much as I detest the word and all its abuse and misuse around the Arab world – can only be described as resistance. Not the lugubrious, murderous, religion-soaked pseudo-resistance of a Bin Laden or a Khomeini. On the walls of Ramallah there is colour, there is humour, there is a celebration rather than a negation of humanity. Like Beirut, Ramallah is a city of both Christians and Muslims, but unlike Beirut, the posters in Ramallah don’t distinguish between Christian and Muslim slogans and heroes. “Ramallah does not know creeds and factions,” wrote the poet Mourid Barghouti in ‘I Saw Ramallah’. I snorted when I read it – living in Lebanon will do that to you – but now I believe I was wrong to do so. 

Barghouti’s equivalence

I could write more: about the Wall, about Bir Zeit, about driving to the Green Line and the settlements every fifteen minutes along the way. But as I said, this is not a travel piece, so I’ll close instead with the following.

In I Saw Ramallah, Barghouti makes a seemingly straightforward observation as he prepares to enter his country of birth for the first time in thirty years. “There is no topological difference between this Jordanian land that I stand on and that Palestinian land on the other side of the bridge.”

Those of us fortunate enough to have been able to verify this, and to have descended into the Jordan Valley from both the eastern and western directions, will agree that the two sides are indeed nearly mirror images of one another. Anyone who has stared from Jordan across those agricultural plains, or the Dead Sea, at the peaks of Palestine on the horizon knows well enough what the peaks of Jordan look like when viewed from the other side.

It was this juxtaposition, or equivalence, of Barghouti’s that flashed to my mind as I crossed the King Hussein Bridge from Jordan myself, and saw all over again the unfolding of the apparatus of occupation. In particular, it was the sight of a young, pale blonde girl ordering a veiled Palestinian woman to queue that brought it on. Never before was the utter, radical abnormality of the Zionist project so plain to me. Consider, I thought, how Lebanese women look, how Syrian women look, how Jordanian women look. Consider how Palestinian women look. Now look again at that blonde hair, that white skin. Can there really be a dispute as to which one is the native around here?

Bashar al-Assad has never been an Arabist

In contemplating the situation in Syria over the last year, few things have left me quite as cold and sick with contempt as those people who have suddenly ‘discovered’, and announced, after a lifetime of confidently assuring us otherwise, that Bashar al-Assad is in fact a liar, a murderer and a tyrant after all. The Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan, who in recent years went quite out of his way to weave new ties with his fellow Kurd-persecutor in Damascus, now compares him to Hitler and bellows for his ouster as if he were the first man to have arrived at the thought. A number of influential Lebanese politicians such as Walid Jumblatt, who had been perfectly happy to make common cause with Assad’s proxies in that country’s ‘March 8 Alliance’, have overnight become champions of Syrian liberty (though one notices that Hizbullah, the self-styled ‘Islamic Resistance’, has not wavered in its courageous solidarity with the despot). Even Hamas, perhaps Assad’s most notorious ally, appears to be reconsidering its loyalties – what with its fellow Sunni Islamists at the forefront of the Syrian opposition, to say nothing of the thousands of Sunni corpses now decorating Syrian streets – and has begun withdrawing staff from its Damascus headquarters. The Lebanese academic Elias Muhanna, author of the Qifa Nabki blog, wrote in the New York Times last month about the “many Syrian intellectuals, journalists and ordinary citizens [who] have steadily migrated from the pro- to the anti-government camp” in recent months, and I confess it brings me more joy than I can begin to describe to see that all the detestable pseudo-dissidents and laptop-Leninists who for so long were excusing and enabling Assad’s crimes – not to mention the plain suckers who actually bought the Hizbullah rhetoric about standing for the ‘oppressed’ and ‘downtrodden’ – have at last been exposed in the light of broad day as the fools they always were. 

But I’m afraid I can’t find it in me to summon the magnanimity of Muhanna, who writes of the bloggers now changing their mind about Assad that “a number of them have written compelling mea culpas”. How “compelling” can anything like this be? Or, to put the question another way, what exactly has taken them this long? Bashar al-Assad has always been a dictator, and a violent and imperialist one at that (on which more later). Most of the bloggers Muhanna cites claim that it was Assad’s Arabist pedigree that attracted them to him. But Assad has never been an Arabist. In his most recent speech of January 10^th, he began by “salut[ing]” the crowd “in the name of pan-Arabism, which will continue to be a symbol of our identity and our haven in difficult times, as we will continue to be its heart beating with love and affection”. If this is the hand he’s betting on – a pose as the last remaining Arab nationalist; a Nasser with Yitzhak Rabin at the gates – then let’s by all means turn the cards over and see just how much they’re worth. 

“Who, more than Syria, has offered to the Palestinian cause?” he asks us. Never mind that the largest Arab forces in both the 1948 and 1967 wars were the Egyptian ones¹. Never mind that ever since the 1960s Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad, had forbidden attacks by the Palestinian feda’iyeen against Israel from Syrian soil (bravely proposing the use of south Lebanon for that purpose). Never mind that in 1976 the Syrian army upheld the spirit of Sykes-Picot by entering Beirut at the request of the Maronites against the Palestinians and their Arabist allies; an intervention that was to lead directly to the Tel al-Zaatar massacre of some 2,000 Palestinian refugees. Never mind that Assad père took every opportunity to divide the Palestinians and thus contain Yasser Arafat: creating and sponsoring, for example, the Syrian-Palestinian al-Sa’iqa militia, perhaps best known for assisting the Lebanese Amal gunmen in their war on the PLO in Lebanon’s refugee camps in the ‘80s. Never mind that the old man implicitly recognised Israel – the ultimate betrayal of the ‘67 Khartoum Resolution – by entering into peace negotiations, first in Madrid in 1991 and then in a series of later bilateral talks, in which he pressed for an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights but made no mention of occupied Palestine or Lebanon². Never mind these and innumerable other capitulations - they were, after all, before Bashar’s time. 

What then has the ophthalmologist done for Arabism since inheriting the family dictatorship? Not so much as a pebble has been launched at Israel, neither by the Syrian army nor the Palestinians in Syria, the latter of whom continue to be forbidden from doing so. Assad fils has openly continued his father’s pursuit of a peace treaty, the most recent dialogue in 2008 only being interrupted by the election of Benjamin Netanyahu (the same obstacle, incidentally, that thwarted Hafez). At the same time, he has propagated the most rabid and fanatical strains of Islamism in his dealings with Iran, Hizbullah and Hamas – which, again, constitutes a rank betrayal of Arabist principle, of which staunch secularism is supposed to be a sine qua non. As Assad is now discovering to his cost in Hama and half a dozen other cities, that omelette isn’t very easily turned back into an egg. 

Yet Palestinians are by no means the only Arabs viewed by the Assads as expendable subordinates to the Syrian empire. The Syrian occupation of Lebanon lasted seven years longer than the Israeli one, and brought with it not only the daily humiliations of a foreign military presence but a choking apparatus of fascism and intimidation. Bashar sustained this near-annexation of the country (whose legitimacy as a sovereign entity has always been rejected by the Syrian right wing) until as recently as 2005, when over a million Lebanese took to the streets to protest the assassination of their Prime Minister, Rafiq Hariri, in which Syrian involvement of some kind was and still is almost universally suspected. And in many ways, the consequent Syrian withdrawal (which was accompanied by the equally ‘mysterious’ assassinations of renowned critics of the Assad regime such as the Syrian-Palestinian-Lebanese intellectual, and genuine Arabist, Samir Kassir) was an occurrence in name only. Lebanon’s conspicuous abstention last year in a Security Council resolution condemning Assad’s violence against protestors, as well as its voting against an Arab League decision to suspend Syria’s membership in the organisation, led the Beirut-based journalist Hanin Ghaddar to write that “Now we can officially say that Syria has two governments, the one in Damascus and the one in Beirut” (disclosure: I am soon to become a colleague of Ghaddar’s at NOW Lebanon, of which she is the managing editor). And even if the mukhabarrat, or secret police, have formally left, the streets of Beirut’s bohemian Hamra district are patrolled around the clock by the shabiha, or ‘ghosts’, of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, an oafish satellite of the Assad regime that takes criticism of its leader extremely poorly, as these protesters discovered last August (and as Christopher Hitchens did in a different way in 2009). As well as a self-evident threat to Lebanese Arabs, this Damascus client is also anti-Arabist in the technical sense: at the time of its founding in the 1930s by the Syrian ultra-nationalist Antun Sa’adeh, the SSNP was a determined opponent of pan-Arabism on the sub-Hitlerite grounds that the Syrian “race” is not Arabic!³ Zionists, Islamists, tenth-rate racists – with whom else has Assad collaborated in his treason against the Arab nation?

Jihadists, as it turns out. Knowing as all imperialists do that in order to rule one must first divide, and fearful above all of the emergence of a democratic Iraq (what kind of precedent would that set?), when the American-led coalition overthrew Saddam Hussein in 2003, Assad was content to grant the use of his lengthy border with his eastern neighbour to the Bin Ladenists of what became known as Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). According to Time’s Nicholas Blanford, “analysis of al-Qaeda documents seized by American troops in Sinjar in northern Iraq [in 2006] suggested that 90% of foreign fighters entering Iraq came from Syria”. This was of course being done in the full knowledge that his ally in Tehran was financing the other side of the civil war (the Shia ranks of Muqtada al-Sadr’s ‘Mehdi Army’) on the Kissingerian principle that neither party should be permitted to win. In so doing, the great pan-Arabist contributed far more than Bush or Blair ever did to the appalling Iraqi civilian death toll (if it should turn out that it was indeed al-Qaeda behind the recent suicide bombings in Damascus, as the regime claims, it would only be an instance of the famous causal relation between reaping and sowing). 

Yet, as events since 2011 have made plainer than ever, to no Arab people is Assad a greater enemy than to the Syrians themselves. Of course, we didn’t need the ‘Arab Spring’ to tell us this – take the following description of the country by Kassir in 2004:

Suffocated for forty years under a dictatorship that, although less bloodthirsty than Iraq’s, has still brutally run it into the ground, systematically bled dry by powerful mafias, and weakened by a culture of fear, Syria is now in a position almost without equivalent in the Arab world – apart perhaps from Libya, although it doesn’t have Libya’s oil – in that it combines the corruption of the former Soviet republics with a Chinese-style closed police state.⁴

To this abysmal record we can now add the slaughter of well over 5,000 Syrian men, women and children (and counting). What else needs to be said, other than to ask how a mass-murderer of Arabs dares to pose as the bastion and beau idéal of the Arab cause?

If Arabs are ever to ‘unite’ in any meaningful way, it will take a radical political and ideological re-think. The ‘unity’ and ‘liberty’ of the old Ba’athist slogans will not be found in the junk race theories of ethnic chauvinists; nor the petty sectarianisms of mediaeval mythologies; nor indeed the corruption and stagnation of self-interested dictators, monarchs and tribal chieftains. If the ‘Arab Spring’ is able to achieve any approximation of its promise of emancipation, it will not be by emulating but by categorically rejecting the example of Bashar al-Assad.

¹ Bregman, A., El-Tahri, J., The Fifty Years War: Israel and the Arabs (1998), pp. 38, 69

² Ibid., pp. 256-272

³ Kassir, S., Beirut (2010 edition, first published 2003 in French), p. 486

⁴ Kassir, S., Being Arab (2006 edition, first published 2004 in French), p. 20

No, we absolutely must not 'embrace' Islamism

"[The] general enemy, of course, is extremism. What has extremism ever done for anyone? Where are its gifts to humanity? Where are its works?" – Martin Amis¹

"Question to several white, secular liberal friends in the West: why are you so keen on a #MuslimBrotherhood victory in #Egypt?" – Mohammed ‘Ed’ Husain, author of The Islamist, on twitter

Last Thursday, Reuters ran the headline, ‘West should embrace “Arab Spring” Islamists – Qatar’, citing a Financial Times interview with the Qatari Prime Minister Hamad al-Thani in which he voiced this opinion. As suggested by the above quote of Ed Husain’s, al-Thani may have been pushing an open door. So now that the ‘Arab Spring’ (if we’re still calling it that) has brought us the incredible spectacle of secular Westerners applauding the electoral successes of Islamist parties from Casablanca to Cairo, it might be worth recalling what we all knew, or ought to have known, twelve months ago.

Which is that Islamism – the politicisation of Islam, or, if you prefer, the Islamisation of politics – is extremism by definition. As much as the phrase has been allowed to infiltrate our language, there is no such thing as a ‘moderate Islamist’. From the outset, Islamism says that the practice of religion may not be left to the private domain; that the relationship between man and God is not allowed to be a merely personal one. Instead, you, the citizen, are to be given no say in your spiritual and metaphysical beliefs: the state has made up your mind for you, and is going to make certain that you obey the compulsory pieties and strictures while it’s at it. All questions of interpretation, nuance, allegory, etc., are out: the state knows best, and there is no court of appeal. By this intrusion into the innermost realm of the individual, Islamism combines totalitarianism and tyranny with the basest insult to the intelligence – the manifestation of Orwell’s Big Brother who can tell you that two plus two makes five, and make you very sorry if you dare to disagree.

And what, indeed, has Islamism ever done for anyone? Where are its gifts to humanity? Where are its works? Are they perhaps to be found in Yemen, ranked dead last in the World Economic Forum’s 2011 Gender Gap report, where more than a quarter of the female child population is sold into marriage (and therefore rape) by the age of fifteen? Or how about the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, which came in third-last on the same index, while topping the Committee to Protect Journalists’ ‘Deadliest Countries in 2011’ list? The sterile world of statistics cannot adequately capture the pure hell of this failed state, unforgettably described by Christopher Hitchens as follows:

Here is a society where rape is not a crime. It is a punishment. Women can be sentenced to be raped, by tribal and religious kangaroo courts, if even a rumor of their immodesty brings shame on their menfolk. In such an obscenely distorted context, the counterpart term to shame—which is the noble word “honor”—becomes most commonly associated with the word “killing.” Moral courage consists of the willingness to butcher your own daughter.

Nor is the picture much brighter in Saudi Arabia or Iran – the powerhouses of Sunni and Shia theocracy, respectively – where all social and cultural development is vetoed, and the people are harassed and humiliated daily by the secret police. Things are rapidly tending this way in the ‘Holy Land’, where the most admirable political cause of the modern era – the liberation of Palestine – has been hijacked by the fanatics of Hamas and Hizbullah, who want to kick out the Zionist empire only to install their own Islamic one in its place. True, life is bearable enough in comparatively relaxed Gulf dictatorships such as the UAE, so long as one is mindful not to ‘insult Islam’ by, say, criticising the Taliban. And then there is the purported ‘model’ of Turkey, where the advances made by Prime Minister Erdoğan’s party in economic and other respects have come at the price of an encroaching muscular reactionism in which a growing list of ‘vices’ from adultery to alcohol are falling under the stifling scrutiny of the state.

And now we suddenly have Tunisia, Libya, Morocco and Egypt to add to the list. Only time will tell how fascistic each turns out to be, although the Tunisian ‘Ennahda’ party may have given us an early indication last month when its secretary-general, Hamadi Jbeli, proclaimed that, “We are in the sixth caliphate, God willing”. That as many as a quarter of Egyptians appear to have voted for the Salafi 'al-Nour' party – a spawn of the same sewage that nearly murdered the greatest novelist of the Arab world, Naguib Mahfouz – is also less than comforting. Of course, one must presume innocence until guilt is proven, and democratic nations should at least tolerate Islamists to the extent that they adhere to international law. But to ‘embrace’ them would be to abandon every principle – and every friend within each of these countries – to which the secular world owes its unconditional allegiance. Over. My. Dead. Body.

¹ Amis, M., The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007 (2008), Author’s Note

Defining a Massacre: A review of 'Gaza: Stay Human' by Vittorio Arrigoni

Around 200 metres from the hospital lay about 30 bodies, among them women and children, many of whom were still alive. They couldn’t be rescued as the snipers on the roofs shot at anything that moved. Those bleeding bodies in the street were civilians who’d escaped from their homes when they’d caught fire after being shelled. [The] snipers hadn’t hesitated to shoot them, one by one, including the children, once they were framed by the viewfinders on their guns. 

Put the above passage to a panel of seasoned political ‘pundits’ (to use the Hindi word for ‘religious authority’ that we apply with unintended accuracy to that special species of charlatan and bullshit-merchant), and ask them to identify the army that carried out the actions described, and it seems safe to assume their minds would turn to one of the less restrained of the Arab regimes currently involved in the broad-daylight murder of their ‘own’ citizens. Snipers had been deployed to similar effect in Egypt, after all, as they had in Libya – before Qaddafi grew impatient and moved on to yet more lethal firepower. Live rounds continue to be fired at protesters in Bahrain, and only last Saturday, snipers of the Yemeni state assisted troops wielding anti-aircraft missiles in the slaying of at least forty peaceful demonstrators. My own guess (as an aspiring bullshit-merchant myself) would have been the Republican Guard of the Baathist dictatorship in Syria, having watched in April the harrowing footage of Daraa residents trying, directly under the scopes of government marksmen, to salvage the bullet-riddled bodies of civilian men and women from their burgundy puddles in the street. 

Yet the army in question belongs not to any blood-bespattered Arabian tyrant but to the State of Israel, that most precious of American allies and supposed shining example of democratic values in otherwise dark and barbarous waters. The quote comes from Gaza: Stay Human (p. 77), a slender but astonishing account of Israel’s 22-day assault on the Gaza Strip in 2008-9, and the first and sadly final book from the recently murdered Italian journalist and activist, Vittorio Arrigoni, who lived in Gaza from 2008 until his death at the age of thirty-six on April 15^th of this year. 

If it appears at all odd that an army so boastful of its ‘purity of arms’ would use high-tech military equipment against unarmed women and children, I assure the reader I am not ‘cherry-picking’ for exceptional cases: I could have plucked something similar from almost any of Gaza’s 118 pages. Indeed, if the above example were any sort of departure from the average, it would be toward the tamer side. And if the comparison between Israel’s attacks in Gaza and Assad’s in Syria is inexact, it’s only because the former were so many multiples more gruesome and homicidal than the latter. 

For Gaza is a bursting reservoir of violence from start to finish; a glistening inventory of gore; an emporium of horror. Sentences such as the following are by no means atypical:

Yesterday at the Jabalia refugee camp an F16 plane dropped some missiles onto an ambulance. (p. 15)

On Sunday, 11^th January, at about 3.00am, the F16s bombed the orphanage of the Dar al-Fadila Association [...]. (p. 64)

Once again, yesterday, an ambulance was hit in Gaza City. On the previous day two doctors at the Jabalia refugee camp had died when they were hit by a missile shot from an Apache helicopter. (p. 19)

If the firefighters tried to put out the fires, they’d instantly become the targets of the F16’s machine guns – this already happened yesterday.  (p. 17)

The soldiers actually prevent us from running to the aid of the survivors [...] When the wounded are close to the armoured vehicles they were just attacked by, we, in our Red Crescent ambulances, aren’t allowed anywhere near, as the soldiers take potshots at us. (p. 24)

Indeed, this sort of thing is so common that to apportion each individual case its due and proper outrage becomes impossible: after the first few dozen annihilations of hospitals, schools, orphanages, refugee camps and residential apartment blocks, an element of desensitisation is unavoidable. But nothing can prepare one for things like this:

A child was lying with his skull cracked open, his eyeballs literally hanging out of their sockets, swaying onto his face like those at the end of a crab’s stalks. When we picked him up, he was still breathing. His little brother had a disembowelled chest, and you could distinctly count his white ribs through the tatters of his torn flesh. Their mother pressed her hands on to that eviscerated chest, as if trying to fix what the fruit of her love had managed to create, and which the anonymous hatred of a soldier, obeying orders, had now forever destroyed. (pp. 25-6)

The website of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs has a section devoted to ‘Operation Cast Lead’, in which it states that “the IDF conducted pinpoint surgical aerial strikes, using precision guided munitions”. It’s the sort of thing the Israelis say rather frequently. The claim has some interesting implications: if true, then the IDF is by far the most sophisticated and accomplished terrorist organisation in modern history; and if false, then the official statements of the Israeli government are lies. As it happens, Arrigoni has his own take on this question:

There’s no such thing as a surgically precise military operation. When the Air Force and the Navy start bombing, the only surgical operations are those tackled by the doctors, unhesitatingly amputating limbs reduced to a pulp. (p. 10)

Perhaps worse than the immediate effects of the bombing, however, are the ones that are slower to manifest, and are not so readily described by statistics and news headlines. Gaza is no mere clinical collation of forensic evidence – it’s an account of what actually happens when you bomb every inch of one of the most densely populated territories on the planet, around the clock, for twenty-two days in a row. For instance, people will stop sleeping: sixty hours in, Arrigoni hasn’t managed a wink, “and the same can be said of any Gazan” (p. 6). There will be other biological irregularities - on the tenth day of bombing, Arrigoni writes, “Many terrified pregnant women are prematurely giving birth right now” (p. 27). The repeated use of white phosphorous munitions prompts a doctor at the Al-Shifa hospital to predict an impending wave of “new cancers and deformed babies” – indeed, so lavish was the distribution of these illegal toxins by the IDF that it worried the residents of the nearby Israeli cities of Sderot and Ashkelon, who “formally asked the Israeli government for clarification regarding the weapons used” (p. 96) in the Strip*. And then, quite apart from the physical damage, there is the incalculable mental trauma, which is unknowable to the outsider and can only be dimly guessed at by stories like the following:

 

A visibly malnourished child crouched in front of his mother’s corpse, already in an advanced state of decay. He had taken care of that body for four days, as if she were still alive. He had dried the blood from her face and dragging [sic] himself through the rubble of what had been their home, bringing her water, bread and tomatoes, which he’d carefully placed next to her head. He thought she was only sleeping. (p. 78)

Arrigoni goes on to explain - as anyone who had come as far as page 78 could have guessed - that “Israeli snipers had prevented the Red Cross from rushing in to bring aid” to the child’s mother, as well as everyone else killed or wounded at Zeitoun over those four days.

No reader acquainted with Israel’s conduct, or misconduct, in previous wars can fail to recognise some old friends in these pages. First, and least surprising, there is the ubiquitous T-word. During the July 2006 bombing of Lebanon, the Israeli justice minister Haim Ramon said, “All those now in south Lebanon are terrorists”. Nearly three decades ago, on September 18^th, 1982, when Robert Fisk was wading through the warm bodies of women and children in the Chatila refugee camp on the outskirts of Beirut, an IDF soldier stopped to warn him: “There are terrorists everywhere. Be careful” (Fisk, R., Pity the Nation, p. 370). Never mind that of the c. 1,100 killed in Lebanon in July 2006, nearly 80% were noncombatants**, or that no evidence exists to suggest a single one of the c.1,700 massacred with Israel’s permission at Sabra and Chatila was a militant, the line remained unchanged during Cast Lead: “Everyone [in Gaza] is a terrorist”, said an IDF soldier quoted in a Haaretz article cited by Arrigoni (p. 110). For the record, of the 1,390 Gazans killed during the 22-day siege, “at least 759 were not taking part in the hostilities, among them 318 persons under eighteen years of age”, according to the Israeli human rights organisation, B’Tselem.

Mention of Fisk’s magisterial account of the Lebanon war prompts a second example of old Israeli habits dying hard. Arrigoni recalls a conversation in the Al-Shifa hospital with Tamim, a journalist recovering from the amputation of both of his legs, having been selected as the target of one of Israel’s 2,360 precision-guided air strikes:

He explained how he thinks that Israel is adopting the same, identical terrorist techniques as Al-Qaeda: bombing a building, waiting for the journalists and ambulances to rush in, then dropping another bomb to finish off the latter as well. (p. 49)

Seems far-fetched, I hear you say. Yet here is Fisk describing the moment on June 27^th, 1982, when an Israeli shell missed him so narrowly that “the explosion felt as if it was coming out of the back of my head”: 

Ten minutes was all we reckoned we had. The planes usually came back after ten minutes. To finish off the survivors? To catch the rescuers out in the open? We never knew. (Pity, p. 306)

Thus one of the several journalistic triumphs of Gaza is to have added yet more evidence in favour of the view, hysterically denied by the neoconservative bien-pensant, that the consistently high civilian death toll on the receiving end of Israel’s attacks is at least to some extent an intentional outcome of Israeli policy. 

Reportage to one side, Gaza also contains some passages of sharp analysis. Reflecting on the wider effects of Cast Lead just two days after the ceasefire, Arrigoni is among the first to register the swivelling vanes of a fresh Palestinian paradigm:

If Israel’s objective was to isolate and rid the Strip of Hamas by dividing further a people already split by internal diatribes, then Israel has achieved the exact opposite of what it intended. The bombing has in part given Gaza back its national identity. [...] The flowing beards of the Izz Al-Din Al-Qassam Brigades’ Islamists, Hamas’ fighting wing, have fought side-by-side with the scampish, goatee-sporting Marxist guerrilla fighters of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and alongside Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. Only time will tell if this newfound unity among the militias is a reflection of unity within civic and political society. (pp. 93-4) 

Well, we know from the Goldstone report that things weren’t as merry as all that, with Fatah people being on multiple occasions detained, beaten and even killed by Hamas authorities during the 22 days. But it’s no less true that in May of this year, meeting in a newly liberated Cairo for the first time in four years, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah and Khaled Meshaal of Hamas signed a pact of unity that led to the formation of a coalition bloc that might yet govern the first UN-recognised Palestinian state. This is presumably not the return on investment the Israelis had in mind in December 2008 – nor, for that matter, is the loss of Israel’s two most strategic partners in the region, Turkey and Egypt, which the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy has also accredited to the “resounding failure” of Cast Lead. It’s numbing to realise that Arrigoni was killed just one month before the Fatah-Hamas conciliation, and would thus never know how prophetic his words had been.

Just in case that sounds at all saccharine, I ought to state that Arrigoni’s words can be a few other things besides. Sanctimonious, for example. Humourlessly self-congratulating, for another. Did we really need to be told that Arrigoni and his comrades are

[M]ore at ease in the midst of this Gazan hell than relaxing in a metropolitan heaven in Europe or America, where people celebrating the New Year and [sic] aren’t really aware of just how complicit they are with the butchering of all these innocent civilians. (p. 20)

? Or that

Human beings, like myself, like many who vent their indignation, are ready to risk their lives rather than lounge passively in their living rooms watching news bulletins. (p. 57)

? The point is not that Arrigoni isn’t risking his life, or that there aren’t Europeans and Americans who are complicit with Israel’s policies. It’s more, as one cringes to have to spell out, that people generally become less inclined to think a person heroic the more that person tells them how heroic he is. 

Far worse than this stylistic affront, however, is the moral affront of his complete omission of any reference to crimes committed by Palestinians against Israelis. He manages to write his penultimate chapter, titled ‘War Crimes in Gaza’, without mentioning the merest misdemeanour on the Palestinians’ part, despite quoting from Amnesty International’s Operation ‘Cast Lead’: 22 Days of Death and Destruction, which mentions “serious violations of international humanitarian law [and] war crimes” committed by Palestinians; from Physicians For Human Rights – Israel’s Ill Morals: Grave Violations of the Right to Health during the Israeli Assault on Gaza, which talks of the “severe and systematic violation of International Humanitarian Law” that was “the firing of missiles by the Hamas to the south of Israel”; as well as the Goldstone report itself, which describes the Palestinian rocket fire as “an indiscriminate attack on the civilian population of southern Israel, a war crime, and may amount to crimes against humanity”. If it’s true, as Arrigoni claims, that “[a]s a pacifist and non-violent person, I abhor any form of Palestinian attack against Israel” (p. 14), then one wonders why these nontrivial accusations weren’t given a moment’s mention.

Nevertheless, on balance, I feel this shortcoming must be forgiven. For no reasonable human being could read Gaza and earnestly feel that the firing of homemade projectiles at sparsely populated civilian centres is anything like as morally objectionable; as basically repellent as an exorbitantly powerful army launching an all-out military operation, using everything from tanks to navy ships to attack helicopters to fighter jets - not to mention cluster bombs and white phosphorous - on very densely populated civilian targets such as orphanages, hospitals and refugee camps. It’s true that critics of Israel are too often given to throwing heavy words around lightly - terrorism; atrocity; war crime; genocide – but what the Israelis committed in Gaza over those 22 days was a massacre if the word means anything at all. Let it be our tribute to this brave and honourable man to remember that much, and to insist on it. And let it be our tribute to the more than 700 dead innocents to loathe and resist their murderers – whether Israeli or Palestinian – by any and all lawful and democratic means. These are the necessary, if far from sufficient, conditions for our ‘staying human’. 

* For more on this, see Human Rights Watch’s Rain of Fire: Israel’s Unlawful Use of White Phosphorus in Gaza

** According to Human Rights Watch's Why They Died: Civilian Casualties in Lebanon during the 2006 War