Understanding the Arabs: "Self-Imposed Despotism"?
PRYCE-JONES, DAVID
DAVID PRYCE-JONES Understanding the Arabs "Self-imposed Despotism"? In the years since achieving independence, the Arabs have been creating an order all their own, owing nothing to the...
...An assassination attempt in November 1986 on the head of state in Kuwait led to the deportation of 26,898 people...
...Such an attitude, however, offers no clue toward cultivating a frame of mind more favorable to knowledge...
...Now and again, a shocked Westerner describes in the press how during his stay in Saudi Arabia he has stumbled upon such a sight, witnessed by a large crowd...
...In their years of independence, the Arabs have so far made no inventions or discoveries in the sciences or the arts, no contribution to medicine or philosophy...
...What political process, what self-delusion in the leadership, could have ordered such vulnerable troops into so wretched a battle...
...He was revealed to be a member of a fundamentalist Moslem group, for the sake of which he was prepared to launch this incident that could only endanger his own life...
...Will they ever begin to do so...
...There was never any cutting of the bone...
...journalist Nazih Malar...
...Instead, the Palestinians seem to have felt themselves abandoned first by Jordan, whose citizens they are (West Bankers, at least), then by fellow Arabs...
...In all likelihood, they were people going about their business in a spirit of tolerance unacceptable to extremists...
...Now and again, outright agnosticism or atheism is advocated...
...here was the war of every person against the other, in which the frightening phrase of philosopher Thomas Hobbes had come true, and life was "poor, nasty, brutish and short...
...The intifada is not about prices, to be sure, but it is a comparable outburst of violence because no other means exists to articulate deeply felt demands...
...Yet force of circumstance drew the two communities together in matters of common concern, such as trade, business, agriculture, policing and medicine...
...Until 'then, the majority of them had not seen an Israeli soldier, let alone been caught up in the war...
...To proclaim that communal violence is self-destructive is to condemn oneself to be an outcast...
...Libya has raided across the Egyptian and Tunisian borders and interfered militarily in Sudan...
...Nonetheless, somewhere in the frozen immobility of those officers and the frightened mothers at the Suez Canal was born the impulse to understand and interpret for myself a society in which such a scene was possible...
...Raising the matter with a Saudi prince, Aburish was told that guilt or innocence was immaterial...
...After the Six-Day War, Nasser sought to recover by launching the so-called War of Attrition, consisting of artillery exchanges across the Suez Canal, during which Ismailia and Port Said were virtually destroyed and hundreds of thousands of refugees swarmed into Cairo, which could not accommodate them...
...In the accident that ensued, 16 people were killed although Ghneim himself survived to be arrested and in due course tried...
...On house walls and doors were superstitious signs painted in bright blue to ward off the evil eye and bad spirits, and to promote fertility...
...Hearing that the inhabitants were fleeing in a mass exodus, I drove in haste to the Allenby Bridge, then a narrow and broken-down footbridge, and the crossing point between the West Bank and Jordan...
...Yet at the same time, postwar Germany and Japan contained foreign bases with large numbers of foreign troops, and both countries were spectacularly recovering from a wartime devastation on a scale never experienced anywhere in the Middle East...
...The world has grown accustomed to pictures on television and in the newspapers of Arabs strewing corpses in their wake, throwing bodies out of aircraft onto runways, driving cars loaded with explosives to kill anyone who might happen to be within reach, placing bombs in markets and shops...
...Life for the Arabs is certainly that, but it is also displaying a pattern, much more fundamental, recurrent and rooted in the past...
...Behind the serried mothers ran the barbed-wire fencing of an officers' barracks, and four or five officers were reclining in striped deck chairs, scrutinizing the masses through field glasses...
...Doctor Kamal Zaki Mostapha, apparently British-trained, is quoted as saying that he was preparing executioners for this task, teaching them how to dislocate the wrist from the forearm...
...On the opposite bank, under the sun, mothers waited in immobile and resigned lines, assembled from all over the country to leam the fate of their sons...
...The 20 years that have elapsed since the 1967 war offer more and more examples of self-inflicted and almost suicidal injury...
...The Palestine Liberation Organization has killed tens of thousands of people by now, only a relatively small number of whom are Israeli or Jewish, though these include many school children and a 69-year-old cripple thrown, in his wheelchair, off a liner at sea...
...I doubt it...
...Only the Israeli authorities are in a position to know if any of them were collaborators in an active sense...
...Abandoned hens and goats wandered into open rooms...
...One man was attacked with an axe, then shot dead in the hospital where he was being treated...
...The list of those murdered by the PLO extends to many hundreds, including lawyers and intellectuals who floated ideas of compromise...
...Nonetheless, commentators habitually apply them to Arab rulers and even groups, for example alleging that Maronites in Lebanon are "right-wing," or Shia and Palestinians are "left-wing," when the latter fight among themselves and all alike arc engaged in one and the same self-defense for survival as a group...
...At Kantara, on the east bank of the Suez Canal, they were eventually loaded into boats and ferried across in parties of 50 at a time, and this continued for several days...
...The example was enough...
...instead of creativity, wastefulness...
...Set up by Muslims for Muslims, every Arab state is explicitly Islamic in confession...
...Imperialism" was something other, happening like a fate...
...Like all soldiers after battle, they were glad to be alive...
...Another explanation has resonated in the speeches of Nasser and his colleagues and imitators over the Arab world...
...Among those millions of quick and gifted people of individualistic outlook, and heirs to one of the world's great civilizations, hardly a single Arab has earned an international reputation except as the beneficiary of his or her country's politics or its oil extraction...
...In this proposed "imperialism," Arab self-esteem vanishes and the relations of Arabs with the rest of the world at large arc twisted and poisoned...
...Neither British nor French garrisons, nor even stores, were permitted to remain in any Arab country after independence, as though their mere presence would be conducive to backwardness...
...Mcrcilessness to external enemies is matched by mercilessness to the internal population under rule...
...That evening I wandered by myself in the Jordan Valley, at Aqabat Jaber, a complex of refugee houses from which some 60,000 people had (led...
...In 1982, President Hafez Assad of Syria directed his artillery on people in his own town of Hama who threatened his absolutist hold on power, and in the ensuing carnage killed several tens of thousands...
...Common to all Arab states is the rule of a single power holder around whose ambitions the state has been arranged...
...76 West Bankers and Gazans were killed by the PLO, and 1J22 were injured...
...I attended the first seven or eight cases and when I was satisfied with the standard of chopping, I didn't go back...
...Blame was directed away from themselves onto "imperialism...
...The American presence in the Middle East was associated almost entirely with the extraction of oil for which the market price was negotiated and paid, with aid and development projects, and with its support for Israel...
...The passage of the years and the unfolding of the wars between the newly independent states has also revealed how misleading it was to suppose that the violences of the Arab world were momentary maladjustments, as if they were the teething troubles of nationalism...
...a Palestine in which dissenters or those with a grievance are eliminated or shot...
...Such demonstrations of Palestinian identity certainly serve to reinforce tribal or communal collectivity, but beyond that they provoke the Israelis to respond in kind...
...Sucking in Western goods out of all proportion to their capacity to absorb them, the Arabs are returning only oil, the Middle East's commodity par excellence...
...Eleven people were shot in the streets, and about 100 wounded...
...To me as to many, the Middle East for a while seemed in anarchy...
...Similarly, "right-wing" and "left-wing," originally parliamentary expressions, relate to the central democratic issue of what degree of control over the individual the state has or ought to have...
...This condescension is most probably unconscious and unintentional...
...and Issam Sartawi, the only Palestinian to have dared to raise openly in these circles the possibility of some political arrangement with Israel...
...In the absence of parliaments and genuinely elected representatives through whom grievances and conflicts of interest can be debated and then resolved, those who feel injured can only resort to a riot to make themselves heard...
...In the event of the extremists winning the day—whatever that might mean in terms of Israeli withdrawal—a Palestine would be created without pluralism or tolerance...
...Truces are no sooner made than broken...
...If Islam has made the Muslims backward, then it is flawed and should be more suitably reformulated and recast, and that indeed was the policy of 20th-century Turkish political leader Kemal Ataturk in Turkey and all the headlong secularists in his wake: Nasser in Egypt, the Baathists in Syria and Iraq, and Muhammad Reza Shah in Iran...
...Imperialism" was a metaphor for the failure or evanescence of Arab nationalism...
...Supervising, a doctor was obliging them to sign a register, and one by one they pressed their thumb onto a purple ink-pad and then onto the (loppy pages of the book...
...The fighting had been brief and was now over...
...To them, "imperialism" has been the reason why their societies were making so little headway...
...Western governments repudiate the terror without which the PLO would have no political presence, yet regularly declare that the PLO must be a party to peace talks affecting the Middle East...
...In the usual Egyptian manner, they were gregarious and friendly...
...Put another way, every stone thrown at the Israeli occupiers is also a stone thrown for a self-imposed despotism...
...Algeria, Egypt since Nasser, Iraq since 1958, Syria, Sudan, North Yemen and South Yemen are nominally "republics," nominally "progressive...
...Ready to stop and talk, the refugees were nevertheless unable to explain their motivation...
...Mayors at their tasks, former policemen, those who have overt dealings with Israel, even prostitutes, are among those victimized...
...Morocco and Algeria have fought, and for years Algeria has financed a proxy—the Polisario movement— to continue its feuding against Morocco...
...Victims in the Middle East have become statistics to be estimated in round numbers rather than counted...
...Captured Egyptian prisoners were willing to speak of their ordeal...
...Rather than drift, somewhat haplessly to be sure, towards pluralism, they preferred to assert their communal Palestinian identity...
...But not one of them can explain how natural right and justice will be embodied institutionally as a result of stone throwing, tire burning, flag waving and the writing of slogans on walls...
...Sprawled over the sand were soldiers who had fought and died there, more like boys in their youthfulness...
...If precedent were a guide, they were unlikely to be returning...
...To the limited extent that Arab power holders over the last 30 years tried to alter old structures and values and to introduce participatory institutions, they all failed...
...Just before the 1967 war, an issue of the Syrian army magazine recommended the abolition of outmoded traditions, including Islam, for the sake of military or socialist modernization...
...Tor instance denouncing extremists...
...Even from a London address, it took courage to say openly in print that he could see from the latest news of horrors in Lebanon that the Arabs have given their leaders and politicians the valid title "sons of a bitch," and he concluded, "That is, Sir, what they arc...
...Terror of this type is effective in the short run, in that any resistance to extremists is tantamount to suicide...
...Nowhere is there participation in the political process corresponding to any conception of representative democracy...
...Instead they resort to war in a perpetual process of adjudicating issues outstanding between them...
...No parliament or assembly except by appointment of the power holder, no freedom of expression throughout rigidly state-controlled media, no opinion polls, nothing except a riot to determine what public opinion might be...
...Between 1977 and 1984, at the bidding either of Syria, Iraq or Libya, Palestinian extremist Abu Nidal and his faction murdered hundreds of Palestinians, among them at least a score of senior PLO officials, such as the leader of As Saiga (a Syrian-sponsored Palestinian group), Zuhair Mohsin, who was gunned down in a luxurious villa in Cannes...
...If this hope is ever to be realized in institutional form, some Palestinian or other Arab will have first to legitimize it...
...For all the indisputable diversity, the remarkable thing is the extent to which Muslim societies resemble each other," author Ernest Gellner has observed...
...In the Eurocentric view, it is supposedly to their credit that the Arabs are becoming like Westerners, that they arc "modernizing," as though Western standards in these matters were as positive as they are universal...
...In the Sinai Desert somewhere near Abu Agheila, I came upon Egyptian trenches...
...Sure enough, refugees were swarming down to cross over...
...A number of Palestinians are capable of examining and assessing the historical record with the objectivity that alone will permit the formulation of agreed and rational policy for the future...
...instead of a body politic, atrocities...
...instead of creativity, wastefulness...
...Why did the mothers and returning sons not storm those lounging and staring officers, curse at them and cry for humane treatment...
...It was a shorthand for some psychological state of mind akin to an inferiority complex...
...Jordan, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have dynastic ruling families and are nominally "conservative...
...a Palestine as devoid as ever of the voluntary associations and protective institutions of a democracy,' and therefore at the mercy of whoever emerges as its local despot...
...In a country of about 3.5 million, a tenth have become l'Tom the bonk The Closed Circle An Interpretation of the Arabs by David 1'ryce-Jtims Copyright ®1989 by liavtd I'rycr-Jonn Rrpnitlal by prrmisuun of Harper and Ron Publiilirn, Inc refugees, perhaps 150,000 have been killed and countless more maimed and wounded...
...It seemed obvious that they must be exchanging their homes and land for a future that could only be more uncertain and hopeless...
...Nowhere in the Arab world is there security guaranteed under the law for persons and property...
...Historically, Islam gave the Arabs their uniqueness, and it is therefore supposed to have central causal connections, whether positive or negative, to their present condition...
...Like those who were so seized by their own concepts of nationalism and socialism that they transposed them by an act of imagination into an Arab world that has no place in it for anything so alien, so I too was forming judgments according to a scale of values that could not apply in those circumstances...
...These—and others—are masters of Western languages and techniques, often contributing at a high level to research in disciplines other than immediate politics...
...All have had varied historical experiences, yet now common to all is the rule of a single power holder around whose ambitions the state has been arranged...
...The Security Forces selected three Koreans at random, put them on a truck, drove them away and executed them without any due process of justice, as author Said Aburish, a Palestinian by origin, describes it in his book...
...To a Westerner, the conclusion that political instability and violence arc all of a piece with continuity is almost too paradoxical to be credited...
...A naked body was found hung up in chains in Nablus...
...Here, it seemed clear to me, a whole community had committed a mistake that it could not help committing...
...Ezzeddin Kallak of the PLO office in Paris...
...Israelis and Palestinians alike have no choice but to withdraw, each into their own community in an exclusive, tribal manner...
...perhaps 13,000 people died and 50 years of development in the port of Aden and along the shore were shelled to ruins...
...Extremists as usual seek to maximize pressure on ordinary people, to ensure there is no back-sliding toward tolerance or pluralism, and to make a dreadful example of anyone suspected of anything of that sort...
...This sentiment is repeated so often that it seems a truism, but it is superficial: Plenty of other wars have broken out to defy liberalism and rationality, and the) owe nothing to the presence of Israel in the Middle East...
...In the years since achieving independence, the Arabs have been creating an order all their own, owing nothing to the structures or values of the West, nothing to nationalism or socialism or to justice or equality as generally understood...
...the living, and even the coipses of the dead, are regularly defiled...
...One has the feeling that the same and limited pack ofcards has been dealt...
...This westernized outlook only-increased the scandal...
...Whether his heart was in it is far from clear, for at the same time he encouraged the people of Gaza and the West Bank to continue with their intifada, or defiance of the Israeli occupation of the territories...
...It is certain that mothers and fathers watch their children leave the house every day in fear and horror that they may never return alive...
...The Moroccan intellectual Abdallah Laroui has summed up what ought to have been the new and positive era of independence as "the long winter of the Arabs...
...Oil alone now permits Arabs to feed themselves...
...Both the young stone throwers and the young Israeli conscripts imagine themselves to be strengthening ihcir communities, a psychological belief that justifies whatever diey do and makes no demands on conscience...
...Public executions are frequent in Syria and Iraq, and criminals also suffer amputations in Saudi Arabia, Libya and Sudan...
...bankers and businessmen who took some step that the PLO judged to be against its interest...
...Nothing appears too inhuman to the terrorists...
...Since the 1967 war, these Palestinians under occupation have never hidden their dissatisfaction with the Israeli presence...
...Fear was not moving them...
...But to describe the continuing cruelty of custom as ' 'progress" is truly to patronize the Arab masses who still have no say in deciding their fate...
...Hope for peace is widespread among the Palestinian masses...
...By now, many Arabs have been educated in the West, where they too have learned the techniques forjudging themselves in an awkward and uncomfortable position of implicitly criticizing their own societies insofar as they are not yet Westernized...
...To suppose that the Middle East today is in a state of special and almost inexplicable turbulence, that the wars of the Arabs arc somehow Western-induced and a general threat to the peace of the world, is a Eurocentric misreading of the nature of these conflicts...
...In October 1988, for instance, Algerians took to the streets in order to protest poor living conditions...
...This Palestine in the making (if it is) accords with the rest of the Arab order...
...Far from creating approximations of Western social and political norms, the Arab order in its post-1945 independence has been reverting to basic tribal and kinship structures, with their supportive group values, as they were in precolonial days—with hindsight, perhaps it was only natural that this should have been so, a defiant assertion of that special and persistent sociopolitical system that in the last resort makes them Arabs...
...Violence arouses greater counter-violence, in a vicious spiral in which more than 400 Palestinians and some two score of Israelis have already been killed...
...Most knew little or nothing about Israel and had hazy or antique conceptions of Jews...
...People start to turn on one another, to denounce them to the authorities and to seek whatever remedy they can, taking the law into their own hands...
...Six hundred Saudi police surrounded one particular camp...
...Had such side-by-side coexistence lasted, some kind of pluralistic structure might have emerged, with an appropriate institutional form...
...Too old or ill to leave, a few very elderly people lingered in that ghostly place...
...not one has queried the retrograde parts played by shame and honor and by PLO corruption and money-favoring...
...Tried before a Lebanese court, al-Azm was acquitted but deemed it prudent, for a while at least, to live outside his native country...
...Since 1971, the Institute of Palestinian Studies in Beirut has been publishing a quarterly journal, and there is a body of work from authors such as Walid Khalidi, Yusuf and Faiz Sayigh, Sabri Jiryis, and Edward Said...
...In 1967, I covered the Six-Day War as a correspondent for London's Daily Telegraph...
...That same week of June 1967, Israel captured the West Bank...
...A single news item can sometimes give a more telling insight than an)- number of frightening generalities: Kuwait's State Security Court is to put on trial Mohammad Ahmed Al Kandari, on charges of promoting baseless news and deceptive rumours of the countiy's internal situation in other countries...
...Those who know this sad truth have mostly chosen to act upon it prudently, emigrating far beyond the tribal territory, whether into the wider Arab world or the West...
...Estimates of those killed by government forces range from 150 to 1,000, with innumerable cases of arbitrary arrest and accusations of murder and torture...
...This self-critical tone is now occasionally to be heard, at least among intellectuals...
...In the grip of a collective response, they were obeying codes of their own, inviting comparison to the mothers of Egypt waiting for their sons...
...There have been other moments, too...
...But it soon alienates the families and friends and neighbors of the victims, creating a general atmosphere of distrust and fear that completely undermines and demoralizes communal sentiment...
...Those who fit the Arabs into Western organizing principles and vocabularies ignore or misrepresent the quite other principles upon which the Arabs in fact ^organize...
...Jordan, Yemen— North and South—and Oman have experienced civil wars...
...Eurocentricity, the application of Western idioms and values to an Arab context, is a falsification, an attempt at apologetics...
...The inference is that on some journey this man was overheard, denounced and then arrested on his return home, to be brought before a special court with plenary powers, where he will be judged all the more harshly if what he is alleged to have said happens to be true...
...In 1969 and 1970...
...Religious and ethnic minorities have been persecuted everywhere...
...Hatred was not one of their emotions...
...Curfews were imposed, arrests followed, with more accusations of torture...
...Nothing more is known of the man, nor is it likely ever to be...
...That is the tragedy of the intifada...
...If there is no elected parliament and absolute rule submerges state and individual alike, the terms are notional...
...Martial law was declared...
...Psychological satisfaction notwithstanding, daily life for the Palestinians proves assumption that all but a handful of Palestinians fervently long for the violence to stop at once...
...that conflict, we would have been able to sec in that area a much more stable order, the orientation of which would have been liberal and rational...
...The Saudi regime admitted that the execution had occurred for the reasons given, but the mere fact of screening this film led to diplomatic tension and, of all paradoxical things, an apology to the Saudis from the British foreign minister of the day...
...not one has pointed out that private careerism cannot become national liberation, nor put forward proposals for how a movement of popular participation might start...
...Puritan," a Christian term of strictly limited application, is invariably applied to the Saudis, followed in the next breath by evocation of their lavishness, their sexual and other extravagancies and surreptitious drinking...
...This was further shown in the first week of July when Abdul al-Khadi Seleiman Ghneim seized hold of the steering wheel of a bus on the regular Jerusalem-Tel Aviv route...
...Said Hammami, head of the PLO office in London...
...the Imam of Gaza...
...An Iraqi writer in exile, Khalid Kishtainy, writing to an English newspaper, offered one explanation for this dereliction...
...Criminality has nonetheless not negated all prospects for a Palestinian state...
...What might look to Western eyes like volatility or willful self-damage is customary, normal on its own terms...
...Nothing like this havoc has been done to Israelis, although in 1982, Nidal did succeed in critically shooting Shlomo Argov, the Israeli ambassador to London...
...In the face of public outcry, the magazine was withdrawn, and three of the editors were put before a court-martial and sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labor...
...Instead of construction, destruction...
...The rulers alone are to blame...
...The barbarity of some of these murders suggests that they serve as warnings...
...It is difficult for a Westerner to jettison every one of his or her deceptive slogan metaphors as worthless, to make the imaginative leap of abandoning universe and institutions, and so enter the Arab collectivity of tribe, kin and religious affiliation...
...Born in 1937 into a famous Damascus family that could, to some extent, offer protection from the consequences of these opinions, al-Azm had studied for a doctorate in America and published a study in English of the philosopher Bishop Berkeley...
...Sa'd Saye), one of Arafat's military advisers...
...Hijackings and hostage-takings have been so many affronts in the Arab world and abroad, involving politicians, academics, businessmen, tourists, clergymen and journalists who happened to be available targets...
...Pluralist links so painfully built up since 1967 have consequently snapped...
...The Arab-Israeli conflict, according to a senior Egyptian diplomat in 1985, "has been the most important single factor in the shaping of history in the Middle East during the past four decades...
...In South Yemen, Ali Nasser Muhammed and Abdul Fattah Ismail, both nominally Marxists, fought in 1986 to decide which of them should rule...
...Tribes and religions do not have institutional mechanisms for compromise and mediation...
...Something in their culture more powerful than either self-interest or common sense had worked on these people...
...Similarly, in Jordanthis April, riots broke out in several towns in protest against price rises in essential foodstuffs...
...PLO chairman Yasir Arafat, in his speech at the United Nations in Geneva in December 1988, did indeed make a public plea for peace with Israel...
...When it comes to the issue of Palestine, however, not one Palestinian so far has broken tribal-religious identity to consider the role of Arafat and the PLO in finalizing the national catastrophe...
...So far, about 50 local Palestinians have been murdered as collaborators...
...blind, occult, often to be detected in strange euphemisms like "external forces" or "vested interests...
...Simplifications follow...
...Yet once tribal exclusivity runs unchecked and pride is engaged, none but the bravest dare express aloud such hopes and fears...
...These were illiterate conscripts...
...Beirut, once one of the most agreeable Mediterranean cities, has become a mass of rubble and no-go areas...
...No positive achievements, certainly no state-building, make a counterweight...
...For more than a decade now, the world has watched in impotence and horror the death-agony of Lebanon, as its component communities—Maronite, Druze, Sunni, Shia, Palestinian—have been, each in turn, victim and victimizer in the accelerating cycle of massacre and counter-massacre...
...Having put the plan into effect, as he thought (wrongly, thanks to security measures), he returned to the Syrian embassy in London, where the ambassador masterminding this operation "greeted him warmly," according to the evidence later given in the British court that sentenced Hindawi to life imprisonment...
...Britain and France had so misconceived the nature and intent of Arab nationalism, supposing themselves to be acceding to natural and popular demands, that they had actually handed over whole populations to the tyranny of the ambitious few among them...
...Had it not been for Mendlessness to external enemies is matched by mercilesstiess to the internal population...
...Nizar Hindawi, a Jordanian in London but in fact a Syrian agent, over a long period deceived an Irish girl into thinking that he loved her, made her pregnant, bought her a ticket to Tel Aviv and placed in her luggage a bomb to blow up in midflight, which would have killed her and his own unborn child, as well as all the passengers...
...and, of course, a majority of peasants accused of collaboration and treason, usually on hearsay, always without a chance of appeal...
...How this translated into "imperialism" has never been explained...
...Their faces stiffly wooden and inexpressive, the refugees passed over the bridge, whole families with small children, babies in arms, possessions tied in bundles...
...This has now become a matter of pride to them...
...Between 1983 and 1985, according to a newspaper report, religious courts in Sudan approved more than one hundred amputations, sometimes for petty theft, thousands of floggings, and even an unconfirmed crucifixion...
...On some mornings, Israeli patrols discovered the corpses of those killed hung on meat hooks in the Gaza market to intimidate the population...
...Quite properly, Palestinians under occupation are anxious about their future, and in seeking independence from Israel they believe that they have natural right and justice on their side...
...In Saudi Arabia, offenders are decapitated or have a limb amputated in public on a Friday, the day of prayer...
...Western media criticize, even sensationalize, the PLO record of crime, yet are prone to underwrite demands for a PLO state...
...A wave of pity shook me, and then anger against Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser...
...Here is another mistake that a whole community cannot help committing...
...Lebanese villages, city quarters, refugee camps, refineries and hospitals have been destroyed indiscriminately...
...nobody has to account for the likes of him...
...Daumas wrote, "We are striding ahead, they move neither forward nor backward...
...Rooftop snipers fire at any person visible in the streets below, women and children included...
...Some 32,000 Tunisians were expelled from Libya and had their assets seized for no other reason than that a proposed merger between the two countries had come to nothing...
...Death of a Princess was a film shown on British television in 1982, about the execution of Mishal, a young Saudi princess whose oflensc was to wish to live abroad with a young man of her choice...
...Churches and mosques are the objects of sacrilege...
...An Arabisl from the past, French General Melchior Joseph Eugene Daumas, who at the height of his career was director of Arab affairs in Algeria, finished his book La Vie Arabe— published in 1869 and as relevant as ever today—with the reflection that the Arabs had their traditional values but otherwise nothing, and it was this nothingness that so permanently separated them from Europeans...
...Iraq has threatened neighboring Kuwait and Syria, has twice sent forces into Jordan, and under Saddam Hussein, has fought one of the longest wars of the century against neighboring Iran...
...Fundamentalist," that Western phrase with its suggestion of a scale for intensity of religious belief, is no less inappropriate to countries in which secularism has as yet no institutional form...
...Today I stand by the sense of moral outrage that so upset me at die lime, but I have since perceived how essentially Eurocentric this reaction is...
...Publishing a book in 1969, Critique of Religious Thought, Syrian-Marxist intellectual Sadiq al-Azm had concluded that a modern, science-based Israel would not fail to defeat the Arabs so long as they remained conditioned by Islam to be backward, continuing to display "retarded mental habits, bedouin and feudal values, backward human relations, and obscurantist, quietistic world views...
...instead of a body politic, atrocities...
...Neither Koreans nor any other workers would now dare contemplate disturbing the authorities...
...No less unimaginable was Nasser's announcement on Egyptian television that the war had ended in catastrophe, whereupon millions of Egyptians crowded into the streets to weep, cheer and implore him not to resign (to which he agreed without ado...
...A million and a half foreign workers live in Saudi Arabia, and in 1982 some of them demanded better living conditions...
...Hamdi Nubani in Jerusalem is one among specialists who have introduced to Arabs the indispensable study of Judaism and Israel, and he has lately published the first Arabic translation of the Mishnah, the text in which Jewish law is codified...
...Over the years, Beirutis have been obliged to endure nights of random bombardment, to emerge pale and shaking in the dawn...
...alestinian" has become synonymous I with criminal, and passengers and travelers have to submit to security routines everywhere involving inconvenience and fear: That is the global memorial to the PLO...
...Instead of construction, destruction...
...Syria has twice invaded neighboring Lebanon, and once neighboring Jordan, and it has mobilized against neighboring Iraq...
Vol. 14 • October 1989 • No. 6
