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Inside Palestine

Posted June 20th, 2016 by Lesley Hazleton

A few years back, I was returning to Jerusalem from Ramallah via the Qalandia checkpoint. “Checkpoint” is a euphemism. This isn’t merely a couple of Israeli soldiers checking your ID. Instead, you pass through a series of turnstiles, concrete barriers, barbed-wire tunnels that act as elongated cages, two-way mirrors, and of course X-ray machines. You are surveilled, re-surveilled, and surveilled again. No words are used. You are waved on not by hand, but by gun — a semi-automatic at groin level, indicating this way or that.

Halfway along the barbed-wire tunnel, I heard a gun being cocked close by, to my right. Startled, I looked over.

The gun was in the arms of a female soldier, flushed and giggling as a male soldier embraced her suggestively from behind, his arms around both her and the gun. She caught my glance and held it. “Look all you like,” she seemed to be saying. “We could strip down and have sex right here in front of you, and there’s not a damn thing you could do about it.”

And she was right.

This was, I knew, the most trivial of events. It was nothing compared to what I’d already seen, and not even worth noting to Palestinians, who have to put up with far worse. Yet it stays with me because I cannot forget that look. I might as well have been a dog.

ehrenreich“The humiliation machine,” Ben Ehrenreich calls it in his new book, The Way To The Spring: Life And Death In Palestine. And it indeed works with machinelike effectiveness. “How do Palestinians stand it?” I kept asking later. “How do you stay human in the face of those who see you as inhuman?”

These are the very questions Ehrenreich answers in this rare book of reportage from inside the Palestinian experience of occupation. And he does so with truly amazing grace and control.

There’s a hint of how he does it when he mentions a European solidarity activist newly arrived in Palestine and “still sparkling with outrage; it would mellow, I knew, into a sustained, wounded simmer.” Ehrenreich opts for calm instead of outrage, the simmer instead of the boil. And that makes his writing all the more powerful. He doesn’t indulge in his own righteousness — or in anyone else’s, for that matter. “My concern is with what keeps people going when everything appears to be lost,” he says in the preface, “what it means to hold on, to decline to consent to one’s own eradication, to fight actively or through deceptively simple acts of refusal against powers far stronger than oneself.”

What he is not doing, he emphasizes, is trying to “explain” Palestinians, or to speak for them. Instead, living on and off in Ramallah and Hebron from 2011 to 2014 — from just after the “Arab spring” through to the devastating bombardment of Gaza — he allows people and events to speak for themselves, and the Palestinians he lives with are striking not for their anger, but for their determination; not for their despair, but for their resilience.

“People in Hebron use the word ‘normal’ a lot,” he reports. What counts as normal there? Being shot at; the screaming of someone being beaten by soldiers; having settlers throw Molotov cocktails at your house; schoolchildren being tear-gassed; “administrative detention” (no charge, no trial); having your ID taken by a soldier at a checkpoint who keeps it for hours just because he can; having urine and feces thrown at you by settlers. Day in, day out — indeed hour in, hour out — a ceaseless barrage of harassment at best, outright violence at worst.

The details are all here. It’s worth knowing, for instance, that “rubber bullets” are in fact rubber-coated steel bullets, each one the size of a marble, capable of breaking bones and gouging flesh (and increasingly replaced by live bullets anyway). Or that a tear-gas canister fired in your face will kill you. But these are only part of “the almost infinitely complex system of control” exercised by Israel over the West Bank — ” the entire vast mechanism of uncertainty, dispossession, and humiliation which… has sustained Israeli rule by curtailing the possibilities, and frequently the duration, of Palestinian lives.”

In punitive raids, random doors are burst open in the middle of the night, belongings ransacked, the contents of the pantry poured out on the floor, anyone offering so much as a word of protest beaten and arrested. The purpose? A clear message: this house is not yours, this land is not yours, your person is not yours.

As a community-center volunteer held (and tortured) for three months put it: “If they could take the air from us, they would.”

The statistics are here too if you need them. Forty percent of Palestinian males have been in Israeli prison at least once, and even those sent to trial were at the mercy of a military court system with a 99.74% conviction rate. The same military has an indictment rate of 1.4% against soldiers accused of misconduct. And all the while, “settlements” — huge suburbs and townships — have been expanded; construction more than doubled in 2014, and jumped another 40% last year.

Palestinians have now been pushed from nearly 60% of the West Bank. With effective leadership systematically broken up, assassinated, or imprisoned, leaving only the venally corrupt Palestinian Authority, that percentage seems destined only to increase as Israel asserts “complete and irrevocable” control. And yet, as Ehrenreich shows, “ordinary” people stubbornly refuse to submit.

There’s no pontificating in this book — no offering of blandly confident “solutions.” I have none to put forward either, especially in this US election season when even Bernie Sanders’ mealy-mouthed statement that ” we need to be able to say that Netanyahu is not always right” is regarded as a daring political stance, a marvel of honesty and insight.

What I can say is this: if you really do want honesty and insight, read The Way to the Spring.

———–

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The Rubble-Bucket Challenge

Posted August 26th, 2014 by Lesley Hazleton

If you happen to live in Gaza, the one problem with accepting the ice-bucket challenge is that it requires a plentiful supply of ice. After seven weeks of bombardment, water is in short supply in Gaza, and electricity is scarce, so there’s no way to make ice. As journalist Ayman al-Aloul noted, however, what Gaza has in abundance is rubble. In fact thanks to the Israel Defense Forces, it has whole neighborhoods of it. Thus: the rubble-bucket challenge, which I accepted this afternoon halfway round the world in Seattle.  Please consider this an open invitation to take the challenge too:

rubble_compo

(The rubble I used came, either ironically or appropriately, from a building site.)

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File under: Middle East, war | Tagged: Tags: Gaza | 6 Comments
  1. Nuzhat says:
    August 26, 2014 at 8:32 pm

    Too much of a chicken….for both, ice and rubble!
    Instead, we have a rice bucket challenge started in India yesterday. A great cause here too.
    We just got to take a pail of cooked rice to the nearest poor locality. Not too difficult for us, surrounded by starving fellow beings that we encounter each day. A practical and humanitarian move!
    Nuzhat.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      August 27, 2014 at 10:56 am

      Totally love the rice-bucket challenge, which actually makes a difference: kudos!
      http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/26/india-rice-bucket-challenge_n_5710481.html

  2. Guy de la Rupelle says:
    August 27, 2014 at 2:17 am

    Brilliant!

  3. amin tan says:
    August 27, 2014 at 5:21 am

    Dear Lesley Hazleton,
    You have been polite and assuage their ego that you use a passive or docile description of Israel armed forces as Israel Defence Forces. By doing so you are encouraging or embolden the Israel soldiers that their killing, destruction and bombing are strictly defensive in nature.
    I think it is grossly a misnomer.
    There is no such thing as Defence Forces. The prevailing fighting strategy is always attack as the best form of defence or the American calls it pre-emptive strikes.
    It would do humanity, goodwill and human welfare a lot of good if israeli is sincere by uplifting the blockade and removing all the road blocks and other humiliating treatment of human race in Palestine. What is the point of Israel continue to impose atrocities upon the Arabs of Palestine on the daily basis and at the same time they are shouting to the world that they are the vIctims.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      August 27, 2014 at 10:53 am

      There is an irony in the affairs of men…

  4. Zmurrad says:
    August 28, 2014 at 3:56 am

    I think it is really ‘cool’. May be we can all help rebuild Gaza bucket by bucket through this challenge. Where will they begin? Overwhelming!

Aron Kader’s War Against War

Posted July 30th, 2014 by Lesley Hazleton

aron kaderI am going to wage peace upon everyone who disagrees with me. It will be an aggressive, offensive and hostile strike that will continue until I inflict the final death blow to misunderstandings and conflict. I will gather all my available resources & weapons for this assault. I will never surrender until the foes of harmony surrender. I declare war on war. I will inflict peace on everyone and occupy your fear with understanding. You will suffer under my brutal campaign of tranquility. The enemy will endure the horrors of justice, tolerance, compassion and freedom. I will indoctrinate the aggressors with acceptance until the resistance is futile. I will show no mercy for hate. If you are not with me you are against warmth, love and little furry baby animals.

This brief manifesto was posted on Facebook earlier today by Palestinian-American stand-up comedian Aron Kader, followed by this update:

My war against war begins tomorrow. I will be on CNN tomorrow on the Brooke Baldwin program to talk about the murder of my cousin Mohammed Abu Khdeir and the police beating of Tariq Abu Khdeir. Also my plea for ceasefire in Gaza and how you will never convince me we cannot have peace.

To say I’m an instant fan doesn’t begin to cover it.  Finally, a war I can support!

 

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File under: Middle East, sanity, war | Tagged: Tags: Aron Kader, Gaza, Israel, Mohammad abu Khdeir, waging peace, war on war | 9 Comments
  1. Nuzhat says:
    July 30, 2014 at 10:35 pm

    I would join this war whole-heartedly….let’s do it instantly, it’s unbearable out there. Pleas and prayers in support….
    Nuzhat

  2. Khaled Hakim says:
    July 30, 2014 at 10:41 pm

    I think, Leslie, that true (and I know how much you hate the word Truth with a capital T, but this true could be capitalized and I’m sure you’d still be on board) martyrs are the ones that die fighting this kind of war.

    I support this war too.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      July 31, 2014 at 9:39 am

      Enough martyrs, Khaled. Let’s declare the age of martyrs well and truly over, no matter what the cause.

      • Khaled Hakim says:
        August 1, 2014 at 1:49 am

        I can accept that, blindly.

  3. Anita Sloan says:
    July 30, 2014 at 11:16 pm

    This is the only war worth supporting… we must save the children from their suffering; I weep when I see the fear in their eyes. Sending my prayers and support . God bless. Anita

  4. joezias says:
    July 31, 2014 at 3:34 am

    On the other hand, Israeli frnd who lives near the Jerusalem Forest where the body was found, erected with others in the village, a monument in memory of the 16 year old who was beaten and burned to death. That evening it was destroyed by right wing activists, they rebuilt it , the next day and again in the morning it had been destroyed. When the Arab families whose sons killed in cold blood, the three young teenagers who were hitchhiking in the West Bank I may have a change of heart vis a vis the present conflict. Meanwhile it’s time to sent Hamas, ISIS, Islamic Jihad and their supporters, back to the Stone Age.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      July 31, 2014 at 9:26 am

      The point is this: In the spirit of your friend who helped erect and then rebuild that monument — and who I hope will continue to rebuild it every time it gets pulled down — let’s get beyond sending anyone at all “back to the Stone Age.”

  5. pah says:
    July 31, 2014 at 9:34 am

    let’s fight a peace war, and stop the weeping of all the mothers….let;s fight a peace war in the name of all children, regardless of origin.

  6. joezias says:
    July 31, 2014 at 11:03 am

    Several yrs ago when i was much younger I had been asked by a local Rabbi, to come to a synagogue, something which I never do here in Israel, to maintain along with others a strong physical presence when things would ‘get out of hand’, which they did. The speaker was a Palestinian living in the US who was in favor of a non-violent confrontation with the on going situation, a Palestinian Martin Luther King like figure.

    Kahanist like males were scattered through out the the audience and interrupted his presentation, time and time again and each time they interrupted young guys, wearing kippas physically tossed them out of the synagogue. At times it was a bit violent.

    His presentation was impressive and spoke to us Israelis, Peace Now, Meretz types, however when I spoke with my Arab friends, no one had ever heard of him.

Gaza City

Posted July 27th, 2014 by Lesley Hazleton

And now…?

gaza city

Photo:  Wissam Nasser for the New York Times

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File under: Middle East, war | Tagged: Tags: destruction | 20 Comments
  1. Niloufer gupta says:
    July 27, 2014 at 11:20 pm

    If jehova and allah will ,the morgue will be cleared !
    Jehovah and Allah are not so full of anger that innocents are constantly destroyed.

  2. AJ says:
    July 28, 2014 at 1:38 am

    I see my post deleted.
    Israel is the litmus test….all the champion of freedom n freedom of speech are helpless with highest degree of hypocrisy.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      July 28, 2014 at 8:51 am

      Your comment was deleted because it was not a response to the question “And now?” Name-calling rhetoric may be a gratifying form of self-expression, but it gets everyone nowhere.

  3. paul skillman says:
    July 28, 2014 at 8:01 am

    I guess the Palestineans will never get over the idea that the Zionist have taken over their land. They will fight for the land until the last one is dead. A stiff necked people

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      July 28, 2014 at 9:05 am

      Your comment was written, I’m assuming, as an ironic play on the meme of Jews as a stiff-necked people. But Hamas is not “the Palestinians.” and given half a chance, the vast majority of Palestinians would reject its repressive, ultra-conservative, militant fundamentalism.

      • AJ says:
        July 28, 2014 at 9:58 am

        I am afraid one’s terrorist other man freedom fighter….it all started when Islamists(I personally don’t agree with them) won in Algeria were not accepted by so called civilized hypocrites of world and puppets were installed as installed all over the Arab world….those whose rights were denied become freedom fighter for their cause n terrorist for the rest of world.
        Similarly Hammas won land slide but were denied power so is Mursi of Egypt.
        Interestingly Hammas did not turn into terrorist instead their victory brought out a hidden terrorist in Israel.

        Lezley u wrote

        “But Hamas is not “the Palestinians.” and given half a chance, the vast majority of Palestinians would reject its repressive”

        Just think n think and think again what u wrote….what give u right to judge over other ppl.
        Are u by birth custodian of world or u got some certified Degree in passing such judgements..

        • Lesley Hazleton says:
          July 28, 2014 at 12:32 pm

          Freedom fighters? Hammas instituted a regime of intense repression of freedom: of speech, of dissent, of education, of women, of the Gazan population as a whole. Indeed Hammas has killed more Palestinians than it has Israelis. It’s ironic, to put it extremely mildly, that you conflate Hammas with Palestine, since to do so is to condemn Palestinians to an ISIS/Taliban type of dictatorship. And I know that is not your vision of the future.
          Re judgment, why would you assume that I have a perfect right to judge the Israeli government’s irredentist stance, but no right to judge that of Hammas? I would expect the same of you: that you be capable of looking with clarity at both, or at least try to do so.

          • tonosanchezreig says:
            July 28, 2014 at 3:27 pm

            The ironic part is, that Hamas is to ISIS same as Al-Nusra or Al-Qaeda are… that is… targets. In fact Hamas are stil tonight letting doors open to acknowledge the existance of Israel if Palestinians can have their land. They also renounced to taking power when they united with Fatah before all this hell started. In short words… Hamas decided to move aside.Especially because they have lost all popular support in Gaza, and they know that real enemy are the salafis and IS-like beardies… But a prospect for peace was too much for Netanyahu and his guys. Peace means the end for Samaria and Judea, and the Greater Israel. It means toi get back to 1967 and give back all settlements and the resources they took. And that’s why we are watchiung this hell. It’s not Hamas, this time, who started. Even Gazatis hate Hamas almost as much as they hate Israel.

          • AJ says:
            July 28, 2014 at 5:46 pm

            I am speechless…..Hammas instituted a regime of intense repression of freedom where theres no life allowed by Israelis….freedom is enjoyed where theres a life……and dissenting education of women….under strong Israeli suppression theres no education at all.
            Hammas has nothing in common with Taliban and other so called jihadiz pl fix ur confusion.
            Hammas lives among oppressed n occupied ppl n representing them….u must have learn all ur confusions from CNN and BBC…I thought ur open minded.

            I am appalled at the conjecture when Hammas is equated with Israel and one sided human massacre is shown as guilt vs guilt.

            For the sake of argument lets say Hammas is guilty on all counts u alleges…give me one account of killing a baby or kidz even Israeli’s.
            If u can not come up with single evidence then at least feel some shame n guilt on what u said.

            Finding faults with Hammas is not even handedness its diffusing Israeli crimes….its like “I know X has killed hundreds of kidz but make no mistake Y is not short of throwing stones n few rockets whenever get a chance”

            IMO Israel is less guilty than those who provide her moral support by hypocritical remarks like….”we strongly urge both sides to show restrains”

            For God’s sake we are talking here about loss of innocent human lives and innocent kidz and we are contend with urging both sides to show restrains….shame on us and shame on our hypocrisy.

          • Lesley Hazleton says:
            July 28, 2014 at 7:34 pm

            Apparently not so speechless. And not so informed as to the history of Hamas either. You might start with its battle against Fatah in 2007. And its long-time use and advocacy of suicide bombing against civilians. You accuse me of presuming to have judgment? That’s an accusation that could only come from someone who has none.

  4. AJ says:
    July 28, 2014 at 10:11 pm

    Just a fraction of what Gaza strip suffer in normal conditions.

    1. Electricity is available for only 8 hours per day, and not even regularly as it depends on the availability of diesel fuel which is controlled by the Israelis.

    2. 90% of the water found in the Gaza Strip is unpotable and unfit for human use such as bathing, washing etc …

    3. Sanitation and water treatment are nonexistent so waste water is routed directly to the sea, so the beach has been closed because it’s become unfit for swimming. This is the only choice for the population as supplies and equipment are controlled by the Israelis.

    4. The problem of fuel and gas … it’s not available in most cases and when it’s available the price is exorbitant so it’s become the most expensive gas in the world at $2.20 per liter for petrol. It is also causing a problem with cooking as there isn’t propane, and if it is available again it is very expensive.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      July 29, 2014 at 9:37 am

      I know. The seven-year blockade is collective punishment. It’s abominable, and it has to be lifted. ASAP. That is merely the first of a very long series of steps. I only wish I could see them.

  5. Lesley Hazleton says:
    July 29, 2014 at 9:23 am

    July 29, and the answer to my question from Israel: it gets worse. This report from 972 Magazine: http://972mag.com/not-about-tunnels-israeli-tanks-take-aim-at-central-gaza/94582/
    Has Israel totally lost its mind?

  6. Zmurrad says:
    July 30, 2014 at 2:10 pm

    And Now ….,,,, the world needs to bring big machines such as bulldozers and construction materials to start rebuilding Gaza.
    That’s the least we can do to help.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      July 30, 2014 at 3:06 pm

      Absolutely.

      • tonosanchezreig says:
        July 30, 2014 at 3:10 pm

        Now at least I hope Caterpillar and those companies involved in occupation are discarded!! … And a petition must be sent to UN asking for intervention against such an abuse on human rights!

        • Lesley Hazleton says:
          July 30, 2014 at 3:26 pm

          In an ideal world, Tono, the UN might actually be effective…

  7. Khalil says:
    July 30, 2014 at 10:52 pm

    To israel supporters,
    I’m a 50 year old American so please hear me out. I was born and raised in the United States and the Israel and Palestine conflict has really caught my attention. The future depends on young people like myself and we sure don’t want to see a future filled with deaths and turmoil. In order to have peace, you grown ups (who we look up to) need to grow up and stop bickering about religion. Israeli supporters, you need to see Palestinians as humans first. What would you do if you were in there shoes instead?

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      July 31, 2014 at 9:34 am

      Khalil — I’m assuming from the context that you are 15, not 50.
      I have edited out the rest of this very lengthy comment for three reasons:
      A. there is a 250-word limit in comments on this blog
      B. you attached an unattributed post from elsewhere
      C. readers of this blog, as you would know if you actually read it, are already well acquainted with the facts of the situation.

  8. fatmakalkan says:
    July 30, 2014 at 11:23 pm

    Terrible ! This is pure evil. Nerve raking. I pray for peace and justice at holy land. Now both sides must understand that neither of them going to leave that land. And both sides must get rid of its current governments. They don’t want peace, they want war. This war is tearing not only them a part. It is tearing all of us a part all over Earth. No one is benefiting from it. Israeli gov. is wrong to think that they are winning . They are losing greatly. Anybody has a merciful hearth now turning against Israel and Jews. Hamas is losing too. Since they came to power at Gazza situation became bad, grim and worse. They must go as well as Israeli extra vicious Natanyahu gov. They are comiting war crimes just like Milasovich did at Bosnia before.

Gaza Morgue

Posted July 20th, 2014 by Lesley Hazleton

I still have no words that I trust.  Only this photo of a doctor weeping in the overflowing morgue of Shifa hospital in Gaza:

Gaza doctor

(photographer: Oliver Weiken, for the New York Times).

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  1. Niloufer Gupta says:
    July 21, 2014 at 2:57 am

    Yes the throat chokes at the sights i have experienced thru al jazeera! I thought there would be a breakthru today- it has nt .

    Niloufer gupta

  2. Aijaz A. Mahesar says:
    July 21, 2014 at 3:26 am

    A picture speaks a thousand words, unspoken words, that do not even require to be remembered. They go deeper in hearts, deeper than we mortals know – they write themselves in our DNAs – for eternity.

  3. Rabab Maher (^_^) رباب ماهر says:
    July 21, 2014 at 1:24 pm

    The incessant ethnic cleansing of Palestine renders one speechless and anger and shame take the place of (unspoken) words (-_-).

  4. Lisa Kane says:
    July 21, 2014 at 6:35 pm

    Heartbreaking. When will this madness end?

  5. Zmurrad says:
    July 21, 2014 at 7:56 pm

    We are all ‘ DEAD’ people walking on earth. We have no humanity left. We are not moved by anything as if we are stones. Where is the power of collective conscience of human beings?

Gaza Beach

Posted July 16th, 2014 by Lesley Hazleton

My disgust with the Israeli government is so deep that I don’t trust myself with words.

But really, two articles in today’s New York Times say it all.

In the first, foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman is quoted advocating the Israeli invasion of Gaza in order to ensure “a normal summer vacation for our kids”  (the quote is way down in the 14th paragraph of the story).

In the second, we see what appears to be Lieberman’s idea of a kids’ summer vacation in Gaza:  four boys, ages 9, 10, and 11, killed by Israeli bombs while playing soccer on the beach.  It’s accompanied by this photo by the award-winning Tyler Hicks:

gaza beach

Reports from eyewitness foreign journalists here.

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  1. Guy de la Rupelle says:
    July 16, 2014 at 5:07 pm

    This is really too, too sad. There’s a silly movie called “Groundhog Day” whereby the main actor (Bill Murray) wakes up to the same day, again and again and again, and it becomes a nightmare. Every few years I wake up to see almost the same news, the same hatred, the same anger, the same rockets, the same out-of-proportion Israeli response with high-tech militaria, hundreds of homes demolished in the Gaza strip, and the photos…of limp bodies of children, tear-streaked faces of Palestinian women grieving, smug-looking Israeli tanks commanders and also the frightened faces of Israeli conscripts who would rather be in their homes in Tel Aviv or elsewhere…
    And I think to myself, Will there ever be peace in that part of the world? (sigh..)

  2. Cory says:
    July 17, 2014 at 11:49 am

    This reminds me of Tom Friedman’s recent column on arsonists vs firefighters. The thrust was that the leadership in Mid-East countries are the arsonists, fanning the flames for short term political gain. If left alone, however, the general populace is quite capable of living peacefully with various factions intermingled. But I begin to wonder whether there are any “firefighters” among Israelies and Palestinians.

    Do you find any reason for hope in this dysfunctional place? Any chance of a grass roots uprising? A growing chorus of “Enough”?

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      July 17, 2014 at 1:42 pm

      Reason for hope? I hate to say it, but no, not right now. After the massacre of kindergarteners in Sandy Hook, Long Island, for instance, I thought “maybe now” there’d finally be a move toward serious gun control in the US. I mean, a whole room of five-year-olds gunned down? How much worse could it get? But no. After seeing these boys blown up in Gaza, it’s tempting to again think “maybe now,” but everything tells me not. After 47 years, the ugly mentality of occupation is deeply institutionalized, and the thuggish dehumanization and demonization of the “other” seems only to be worsening, from the top on down.
      Do I hope nonetheless? Clearly, despite everything, and reason be damned. The fact that I cannot see something happening does not mean that it can’t happen. Human beings may be infinitely manipulable, but we can also be defiantly unpredictable.
      Re “firefighters,” they’re there, of course, but we hear little about most of them because as always with the news, the adage is “flames lead.” They need support more now than ever. Inflammatory leadership and biased reporting on both sides means that those who advocate dialogue instead of violence are branded “traitors” and then attacked by thuggish extremists on “their own side” as “worse than the enemy.” I have huge admiration for all those, Palestinian and Israeli, who continue this advocacy nonetheless. It takes no courage to speak out against violence from afar; it takes real courage to do so when you know that a death threat awaits you and your family.

      • Lesley Hazleton says:
        July 17, 2014 at 1:53 pm

        And I should add this from Nick Kristof in today’s NYT, starting with the families of both Naftali Fraenkel and Muhammad abu Khdeir calling for an end to violence, but to no avail — as I wrote the reply above, the ground invasion of Gaza began.
        http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/17/opinion/nicholas-kristof-leadership-israel-gaza.html?smid=tw-share

  3. fatmakalkan says:
    July 18, 2014 at 4:55 pm

    Since Israel started bombardment of Gazza I became unhappiest person on the earth, their arrogance, justifying their aggressions, not caring about safety of Plastenian women, children, elderly, sick, not respecting their life’s and property is despicable. Their heart became like a stone, no mercy, no compassion left in their hearts. If Moses was alive he would be a shamed by Israeli government and he would help Palestinians because they are oppressed by Israel. He would lead them to freedom. Instead of searching the murderer of 3 Jewish boys at West Bank they are bombing 2 million people at Gazza. They needed an excuse to attact Gazza and used this crime. It is Ramadan and they ruined 1,8 Billion Muslims Ramadan with their attack. We can no longer watch news, read news. We are fed up with them. Since US behind them all muslim world is afraid and helpless:(

Who Has Kidnapped Who?

Posted June 18th, 2014 by Lesley Hazleton

From a column in today’s Ha’aretz by former Speaker of the Knesset Avraham Burg, speaking directly to Israelis focused entirely on three yeshiva students kidnapped in occupied territory:

All of Palestinian society is a kidnapped society. Like many of the Israelis who performed “significant service” in the army, many of the readers of this column, or their children, entered the home of a Palestinian family in the middle of the night by surprise, with violence, and simply took away the father, brother or uncle, with determination and insensitivity. That is kidnapping, and it happens every day. And what about their administrative detainees?

What is all this if not one big official, evil and unjust kidnapping that we all participate in and never pay the price for? That is the fate of tens of thousands of detainees and others under arrest, who stayed, or are staying, in Israel’s prisons – quite a few of them for no good reason, falsely imprisoned on false pretexts. The vast majority of them have been exposed to the appendages of military justice, and none of us cares a whit.

All these things have turned the topic of the prisoners into the main subject in the lives of the occupied society. There is not a single household without a detainee or prisoner. So why is it so difficult to understand their joy and our pain, fears and worry notwithstanding? It was, and can still be, otherwise.

However, as long as the Israeli government shuts all the gates of freedom, flees from all real negotiations that could solve the conflict, refuses to make good-will gestures, lies and blatantly violates its own commitments – violence is all that remains for them.

 

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File under: Middle East | Tagged: Tags: arrests, Avraham Burg, detainees, Ha'aretz, Israel, kidnapping, occupation, Palestine | 4 Comments
  1. Joe Zias says:
    June 18, 2014 at 11:19 am

    Painfully true….

  2. lynnrosengiordano says:
    June 18, 2014 at 11:34 pm

    Spot on. What else remains?

  3. RICK says:
    June 20, 2014 at 9:37 am

    I applaud Burg’s courage to tell the truth. Follow this river of criminal government behavior and it will lead you to the fact Israel is a colonial settler state with its incumbent agenda.

  4. Tea-mahm says:
    June 23, 2014 at 9:16 am

    YES, Lesley!! Love that you tell-it-like-it-is!!

“Do Arab Men Hate Women?”

Posted February 27th, 2014 by Lesley Hazleton

Two excellent minds — liberal activist and journalist Mona Eltahawy and Huffington Post UK political editor Mehdi Hasan — went head to head at the Oxford Union on whether, per the provocative headline of Eltahawy’s article in Foreign Policy Magazine, Arab men hate women.

Go to it, accidental theologists!  But…

Please view the whole video before you comment.  Let’s get beyond knee-jerk reactions.  It’s true that it’s a long video, but if you don’t consider the whole issue important enough to merit 47 minutes of your time, I hereby suggest you forfeit the right to comment.

–

[youtube=http://youtu.be/T9UqlEmKhnk]

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File under: feminism, Islam, Middle East, women | Tagged: Tags: Egypt, Foreign Policy, Mehdi Hasan, Mona Eltahawy, Oxford Union, Saudi Arabia, sexism, Tunisia, Yemen | 15 Comments
  1. Stephen Victor says:
    February 27, 2014 at 2:27 pm

    I appreciate you for posting this video. Thank you!

    I am heartened with the fact that Mona Eltahawy is providing counterbalancing forces to the forces of misogyny in our world. And I applaud how she is doing this. Her provocative essay title landed her this interview. As a result, more of us have become informed. Well done!

    I see the issues of gender inequality as pandemic. Even though Ms Eltahawy spoke of this, her focus, in the context of this interview, was primarily the Muslim world. Good for her!

    To me misogyny is in our DNA whether we are women or men – girls or boys. Misogyny is in the atmosphere we breath. In the water we drink.

    Most compassionately intelligent aware and caring woman or girls, boy or men would be horrified to know that they behave, in subtle or not so subtle misogynist ways. If we are at all representative of our respective cultures, we cannot not do this. We perpetuate misogyny unwittingly and without intent. I see myself and Mehdi Hasan in this group as well.

    This is why your post, Mona’s work and Mehdi’s interview, and this video are so vitally important. We need to educate ourselves. We can no longer afford our ignorance. We need take on the disciplined personal responsibility and being wholly mindful – open-heartedly mindful:
    • in the reconstruction of our personal worldview – our personal cosmologies
    • of the states of being we embody
    • to consciously choose mental working models that genuinely work – that are just
    • in how and where we deploy our attention
    • of our thoughts, convictions and beliefs;
    • in our communicating and the actions we take.

    If we respect life…if we espouse justice…freedom…if we value gender-based relationships, whatever one’s orientation…if we purport to revere love, human dignity, beauty, and the innocence and lightness of being – we can no longer act in accord with a worldview that hates freedoms for any life-form, let alone girls or women. We must take a stand and change ourselves. This is not about others. This is about each of us individually.

    Those who subjugate others are themselves subjugated by this very act. Misogyny has colonized us all.

    Life cannot hate life. Yet we persist in acting as though we do. The great divide is between those with the capacity to intentionally and willfully injure another, and those who, though they can, and do injure others, do so as a consequence of unhealed injuries – never volitionally! We can change this. This is our responsibility.

    What possibly could be more important in our lives?

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      February 27, 2014 at 2:40 pm

      Thank you, Stephen — beautifully put.

      • Stephen Victor says:
        February 27, 2014 at 2:54 pm

        You are welcome… there is one more bit I believe relevant: Might it be worth considering that those who are reluctant to acknowledge the existence of witting and unwitting misogyny in our world are really reluctant to change themselves? If one allows oneself to see what is – one cannot help but be changed…and as such one must think and act differently…

  2. Lesley Hazleton says:
    February 27, 2014 at 2:37 pm

    And here’s another thoughtful — and more critical — response from my friend Tarek Dawoud here in Seattle.

    On my Facebook page, he suggested this video of a Deen Institute conference called “Can Muslims Escape Misogyny?”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leyJaLCf8ks
    and commented as follows:

    “Much more thoughtful and realistic, a lot less about “provoking” and “grabbing headlines” and a lot more about breaking down the areas where misogyny appears and offering solutions/alternatives.

    “As for this conversation, I watched the full video a few days ago. The main problem with it is of course that it’s completely unscientific and lacking in methodology. So, when one presents an argument “Arab Men hate women” one would need to present evidence based on some social studies that shows that Arab male attitudes towards women are particularly negative compared to others. Or perhaps even (God forbid) survey the women in question. Instead, she opts for the unscientific approaches of tokenization and over-generalization. She picks a bad act that happens in 1% of rural families to depict “an Arab male attitude towards women in this country” and then spreads that across to all other countries too, even those that do not have it. And then, without trying to understand the socio-economic reasons behind the bad act (say rural families marrying their daughters young to rich men from the gulf), she totally explains it away with hate/scorn for women. In addition, as the student cleverly asked her (and she dodged), she is committing the age-old colonialist crime of advocating for freedom, but only freedom she likes. She knows what is best for all Arab women, they don’t.

    “This is not scientific or helpful. She’ll neither get support from scientists, social workers or social leaders. In my opinion, this is 60s style feminist “controversial writing” only done in 2014 when not many like that style any more.

    “I assume she’s good intentioned and wants to bring about true reform, but I feel she copped out… She took the easy route of citing a few studies about the prevalence of female discrimination issues, made an outrageous claim out of it, published it in a high profile paper and thus has “sparked the debate.” I don’t see the solutions to the real issues she raises coming out of circus like debates and half-baked research.”

  3. Lesley Hazleton says:
    February 27, 2014 at 2:39 pm

    And here’s my Facebook reply to Tarek:
    “Thanks (I think — I posted a 47-minute video, and you responded with a five-and-half-hour one!). But the Deen Institute conference looks excellent, and I will watch it — just give me time.
    “Meanwhile, does Mona Eltahawy generalize? Yes. Is she angry? Of course — and she says so. Is she being deliberately provocative? Again, yes. Has she sparked the debate? As she herself acknowledges, citing the work of writers such as Leila Ahmed and Fatima Mernissi, the debate has been going on for some time and has still a long way to go. What then?
    “I think what Eltahawy has done is bring the debate far more into the open. By publishing in Foreign Policy magazine, she’s demanding that both men and women, liberal and conservative, pay attention. And by bringing her well-known energy and passion to bear, she’s helping reframe it not as a ‘Muslim issue,’ nor even (despite the title) as an Arab one, but as a human- and civil-rights issue.
    “My main criticism: that she didn’t widen her argument to what is happening with women in many countries in central Africa, where rape (most notoriously and viciously in Congo) has become a weapon of war.”

  4. Madhav says:
    March 2, 2014 at 12:22 pm

    I do believe that religion in misused by people who seek power and would do by any means to do so. Oppression is the key word.

    Women oppression :- 50 % of the population sorted out… Ticked off.

    Caste system: Another 75% (assuming 4 Castes) of the left over 50% done… Ticked off…

    That leaves just 12.5% of the population to sort out…..

    Then go on to Say above so and so age….. That would cuts say another 50% of the 12.5%… Ticked off……

    That now leaves only 6.5% of the original population to dominate…

    Financial Oppression: Eliminate about 5 numbers… That leaves only .5% against domination……

    It is a Legal system that is needed to prevent Oppression……

    I am indeed lucky to be in a part of the world that represents a much better future for mankind. The UAE.

  5. Hande Harmanci says:
    March 3, 2014 at 3:56 am

    Dear Leslie, thank you for introducing me to Mona. We need more women like her. I will be following her from now on.

  6. Ross says:
    March 5, 2014 at 8:06 am

    I do agree with those perceiving a generalised approach from Ms Eltawahy, but worry about her opening the door to dyed in the wool bigots. For instance I would hesitate to post a link to her lecture on Twitter for fear of the vitriol that I’m sure would ensue.

    Anecdotally, what I see of interpersonal relationships among Muslim men and women in Australia, where they are a minority, is that “generally” speaking they are loving and respectful, which I suspect to be the case in US.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      March 5, 2014 at 9:12 am

      Ross — Most of the response to this has come on my Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/lesley.hazleton), where I re-posted this on the same date. Maybe because people feel Facebook is more of a communal venture, instead of something ‘mine.’ If you go there, you’ll find not only a remarkable lack of vitriol, but an in-depth discussion both for and against. I realize this is partly a reflection of whose friend requests I respond to, but I also think that it’s possible to be overly cautious, anticipating negative feedback that doesn’t necessarily happen. Perhaps this is a conversation that the vast majority of Muslim men and women are ready to have.

  7. Niloufer Gupta says:
    March 14, 2014 at 6:27 am

    I watched the debate ,mehdi hassan and mona elthawy- as i listened ,my mind went to the country that is mine- india.her anger is well placed and i feel that ,we in india ,need what she is aspiring for- a n equality in reality and not in abstract- that equality in reality needs grass roots education ,in every way.

  8. Lesley Hazleton says:
    April 17, 2014 at 2:43 pm

    A month later, here’s “Pro-Feminists and Metrosexuals: the New Arab Men of the Millennial Generation,” a counter-argument from Khaleb Diab:
    http://www.juancole.com/2014/04/metrosexuals-millennial-generation.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

  9. Lesley Hazleton says:
    April 18, 2014 at 8:32 am

    And also a month later, Ziad Asali on how men must play their part in the struggle for women’s rights in Arab countries: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ziad-j-asali-md/men-must-play-their-part_b_5172728.html
    Looks like Mona Eltahawy has done what she aimed to do: start a real conversation.

  10. Omer says:
    May 12, 2014 at 5:41 am

    I recommend readers see the website of Professor Asma Barlas.

    Of course much of the discrimination against the female gender has nothing to do with Islam but is of Middle Eastern culture and history.

    Afterall, during Prophet Muhammad’s time, there were some crazy contemporaries who would bury their baby girls alive! So evil to kill innocent babies and moreover in such a painfully cruel way.

    But there is still some discrimination against the female gender that is supported by clerics…usually the subset of clerics that is less educated clerics whose smarter older siblings were sent by their parents to be physicians and engineers but told them to be clerics since they did not do as well in their exams.

    Even with the issue of the clerics which is to some extent across most of the clerics, please see the excellent talks and papers by Professor Barlas…. she shows that it is paternalistic biased reading of Islamic texts that leads to such issues and not a correct reading of the Qur’an itself.

    http://www.asmabarlas.com/talks.html

  11. سالم says:
    July 22, 2014 at 10:56 pm

    “Do Americans Men Hate Women?”
    Every minute American women get murder and rape in the U.S..
    Most killer in the U.S. are choosing women.
    American women are treated like sex objects.

  12. sam says:
    May 20, 2015 at 11:24 pm

    Do arabs hate women ? no, and we don’t care what you think ? and if we do….be it, let’s see what are you gonna do about it

The Book American Jews Most Want to Read

Posted February 19th, 2014 by Lesley Hazleton

“It’s almost laughable,” says M. J. Rosenberg of Media Matters. “The organized Jewish community, which claims to be worried about young Jews defecting in droves, just cannot help itself from doing things that drive Jews (not just young ones) away. Between supporting Netanyahu, advocating for war with Iran and maintaining the occupation, and keeping silent as Israel evolves into a theocracy, it is also in the business of preventing debate on all these things and more.”

judisThe case in point?  New York City’s Museum of Jewish Heritage, which describes itself somewhat oxymoronically as “a living memorial to the Holocaust,” first scheduled and then turned around and canceled a talk by New Republic senior editor John Judis, author of the newly published Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict.

As this review in the Boston Globe points out, Judis’ book is no polemic, but a serious historical study.  So why the cancellation?  The book challenges the conventional Zionist wisdom about President Truman’s recognition of Israel in 1948, showing him as a hard-nosed politician trailing in the polls in May of an election year, and being heavily lobbied by American Zionists who then helped ensure his reelection.

Judis quotes this from Truman: “I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism; I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”

Such were the folkways of American politics: squeaky wheels getting the oil. And with American Arabs and Muslims still generally reluctant to take an active organized part in national politics, such they remain.

As for the irony of a museum banning historical discussion, this is quite the trend among elderly American Jewish poohbahs when it comes to Israel.  When Peter Beinart’s book The Crisis of Zionism came out last year, Jewish community centers, under pressure from wealthy donors, seem to have all but blackballed him. “Pretty soon,” says Rosenberg, “any institution under any kind of Jewish auspices will have to abide by speech limits set by the Jewish 1%. The 92nd Street Y already does (it will not allow any Palestinian to speak unless ‘balanced’ by a Jew). Brandeis University wouldn’t permit President Carter to speak [on his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid] without a simultaneous rebuttal by Alan Dershowitz. Pretty soon, Mount Sinai hospital will check what books patients are sneaking into their sick rooms.”

Or maybe not. Controversy over the museum’s about-face on Judis’ book is sparking exactly the public debate its donors sought to avoid — and far beyond the presumably hallowed halls of the museum itself. As with the conservative Indian attack on Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus, which I posted on here, the desire to squelch consideration of Judis’ book is fated to achieve the precise opposite of what it intended. Beinart’s The Crisis of Zionism became a bestseller, and now Judis’ Genesis looks set to do the same.

As I post this, it’s #2 on Amazon’s list of books about Israel and the Middle East. By the time you read this post, it may well be #1.

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File under: absurd, Judaism, Middle East, US politics | Tagged: Tags: American Jews, Genesis, Harry Truman, Israel, John Judis, M J Rosenberg, Museum of Jewish Heritage, Peter Beinart, Zionism | Be the First to leave a comment

A Picasso for Jezebel

Posted November 25th, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

The come-on, in a brief item in the New York Times arts section:  “A Picasso for $135?  There’s a Chance.”

Yeah, sure.  I would have ignored the headline except that it ran under a photo of a run-down street somewhere in the Middle East.  Tyre, as it turns out.

The $135 is for a raffle ticket, and the raffle is a fund-raising project run by the International Association to Save Tyre.  How exactly the intended arts center and research institute could save this war-battered town on the coast of south Lebanon is not at all clear, but the organizers sure know how to get attention.  Apparently reckoning that international big spenders wouldn’t know Tyre from Timbuktu, they came up with a splashy prize:  a gouache said to be worth a million dollars.

tyre-picassoThe most I’ve ever spent on a lottery ticket before is $2.  Yet it wasn’t Picasso that made me go here and drop 67.5 times as much.  Nor the absurd idea of a million dollars hanging on the wall of my houseboat.  In fact much as I admire Picasso (there’s a bronze head of his in the Tate Modern right now that I could stroke all day if they wouldn’t throw me out at first touch), this piece, Man With Opera Hat, doesn’t really do much for me.  Perhaps because I’m just not that into men in opera hats (men in fedoras would be something else…).

No, what inspired my extravagance was Tyre itself.  Or rather, Tyre’s most infamous princess, Jezebel, who was born when it was at its most splendid, three thousand years ago.  The same magnificent Phoenician princess who married the king of a small mountain kingdom called Israel, challenged the fierce prophet Elijah and sent him packing, died one of the most gruesome deaths in a book not known for eschewing grue, and and was branded a harlot for her trouble by the men who wrote the two biblical books of Kings.  I wrote a biography of her some years back, and I’m still half in love with her.

Even her sworn enemies, the Hebrew prophets, were half in love with her.  Maybe more than half.  Here’s Ezekiel delighting in the splendor of her home city even as he savored its eventual fall:

You were an exemplar of perfection.  Full of wisdom, perfect in beauty.  You were in Eden, in the garden of God, and a thousand gems formed your mantle.  Sard, topaz, diamond, chrysolite, onyx, jasper, sapphire, ruby, emerald, the gold of your flutes and tambourines – all were prepared on the day of your creation.

So you might think the New York Times would ask the organizers what happened to Tyre, and how come the most sophisticated civilization of its time was reduced to battle-scarred poverty, its run-down buildings overlooking the archeological remains of what once was.  Instead, they asked this:  “What would Picasso have made of the raffle?”

Pfah!  They could at least have asked what Jezebel would have made of it.

“A tiny little gouache?” I can hear her saying.  “That’s it?  With all the wars fought and blood shed since I was alive here, wouldn’t Guernica have been more fitting?”

guernica3

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File under: art, Middle East, war | Tagged: Tags: Guernica, Jezebel, Phoenicia, Picasso, Tyre | 4 Comments
  1. Laura says:
    November 25, 2013 at 6:36 pm

    It was great to hear you speak about the Jezebel book a few weeks ago at the temple in Bellevue. You made biblical history come alive in a way I had not heard before. Thank you for sharing,

  2. Lesley Hazleton says:
    November 26, 2013 at 11:04 am

    Thanks, Laura — this post was definitely connected to that evening, which brought Jezebel alive again for me too!

  3. Karen Parano says:
    November 27, 2013 at 9:15 am

    For Jezebel’s honor and for so many other reasons, I hope you win! And that Mr. Picasso presents the gouache to you in person.

  4. Gwen Parker says:
    December 31, 2013 at 12:46 pm

    Guernica definitely fills the bill! Thanks for the thought!

Yes Woman, Yes Drive

Posted October 29th, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

Can comedy do what common sense can’t?

In case you somehow missed it, this video mildly satirizing the Saudi regime’s absurd ban on women driving has gone totally viral since it was posted on Saturday:

[youtube=http://youtu.be/aZMbTFNp4wI]

That thing about ovaries?  The Sauds seem to imagine that driving can make a woman infertile.  I kid you not.  Being a back-seat passenger has no such effect, it seems.

Could this possibly have anything to do with the idea of control?

(In case you’re amazed at how uniquely backward the Sauds are with respect to women, by the way, you might consider this ironic detail:  exactly the same argument was used in Israel for decades to stop women from flying planes.  Again, being a passenger was held to have no such effect — just being at the controls.  As a result, the first group of female Israeli air-force pilots graduated not in the ’70s or the ’80s or the ’90s, but all of two years ago, in 2011.)

So who is the guy in the No-Woman-No-Drive video?  He’s Hisham Fageeh, he’s a Riyadh-based stand-up comic who’s studied religion, and thanks to Mother Jones magazine, there’s more on him here.  And if you need a sense of what the dozens of women who defied the ban this past weekend were risking, here’s a TED talk by the wonderful Manal al-Sharif, who went to jail for doing it.

Meanwhile, I’m taking to the road (and the air) through mid-November, with Bob Marley on my playlist. But will I ever be able to listen to ‘No Woman, No Cry’ the same way again?

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File under: absurd, Middle East, women | Tagged: Tags: ban on women driving, Bob Marley, comedy, Hisham Fageeh, Israel, Manal al-Sharif, No Woman No Drive, pilots, Saudi Arabia, viral video | 4 Comments
  1. Reaching Out says:
    October 29, 2013 at 2:13 pm

    Reblogged this on Reaching Out and commented:
    Brilliant! Love this! 😀

  2. Jerry M says:
    October 29, 2013 at 5:39 pm

    We see a lot of ads for ‘low t’, which is a non disease that a lot of drugs are being marketed for. One wonders if steering wheels or brake pedals now contain that medication?

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      October 31, 2013 at 5:43 am

      Love it!

  3. Nasir. says:
    October 30, 2013 at 5:57 am

    Agreed Lesley. Old traditiond however unrealistic die hard. Pakistan is a moderate Islamic state and we too have many women air force jet pilots, paratroopers, mountain (Everest) climbers, sports women and ofcourse car drivers by the thosands as also wonmen Prime Minister, Speaker National Assembley, legislators, court judges…the list is long
    -and last but not the least, Malala Yousufzai! The Prophet’s wifes lady Khadijah was an accomplished business woman and Ayesha too had a public life including leading an army once. The Saudis are a cloistered people like many Orthodox Jews and share a semitic brotherhood.

American Influence?

Posted October 26th, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

rohdeThe road to hell may be paved with good intentions, as the saying goes, but there’s a lot of understandable suspicion out there about exactly how good American intentions even are when it comes to the Middle East.  That’s the theme of David Rohde’s book ‘Beyond War:  Reimagining American Influence in the Middle East.’

The first step I’d suggest:  do some major reimagining of images, and forget Orientalist stereotypes like the camel-rider on  the cover.  The second step:  question the whole concept of influence.

The Catholic weekly America asked me to review the book, and here’s what I wrote:

When the Egyptian military seized power in June, American pundits instantly rushed to preach about democracy.  This took some hubris considering that two recent American elections – 2000 and 2004 – are still considered by many to be of questionable legality, and that redistricting is rapidly ensuring the minority status of Democratic strongholds throughout the south.

Is the US even in a position to preach democracy?  Especially since as with national elections, so too with foreign policy:  democracy is subject to money, and how it’s spent.

This is the hard-headed reality behind two-time Pulitzer prize-winner and former Taliban captive David Rohde’s new book, which focuses on how the US government spends money abroad, specifically in the Middle East.  It’s an argument for small-scale economic rather than large-scale military aid, and as such is immensely welcome in principle. The question is how to do it in practice.

As Rohde writes, “Washington’s archaic foreign policy apparatus” and its weakened civilian agencies mean that “in the decades since the end of the Cold War, the ability of the White House, State Department, and Congress to devise and carry out sophisticated political and development efforts overseas has withered.”

Whether Rohde is aware of it or not, the problem might be encapsulated in the subtitle of his own book, which assumes not only the existence of American influence, but also its necessity. Many of his sources are well-informed and palpably frustrated employees of the Agency for International Development (USAID) who are basically in conflict with both the State Department and Congress.  Yet the stated goals of USAID are clear:  they include providing “economic, development and humanitarian assistance around the world in support of the foreign policy goals of the US.” [my italics].

For all the talk about the need for humanitarian aid and intervention (most recently in Syria), the reality is purely political.  What’s presented as humanitarian aid is always a matter of foreign policy.  And American foreign policy is still intensely focused on George W. Bush’s GWOT – the “global war on terror.”

The principle is that US aid should act as a stabilizing force against militant Islamic extremism.  But the very idea of the US as a stabilizing force has been thoroughly undermined by the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Even the best-considered foreign aid has now been rendered suspect in many parts of the Middle East, especially when there’s “a widespread perception of the American government as a finely tuned, nefarious machine, not an unwieldy cacophony of viewpoints,” and when authoritarian control fosters an intense rumor mill, with conspiracy theories rampant (most recently, for instance, Malala Yousufzai as a CIA plant, or American-backed ‘Zionists’ as the instigators of the new regime in Egypt).  In Egypt in particular, Rohde notes, “Washington faces an extraordinary public-policy conundrum.  Decades of support for Mubarak will not be forgotten overnight.”

Rohde details the conundrum in a series of country-by-country chapters, some intensively well-reported (particularly on civilian contractors’ takeover of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and on the use of drones in Pakistan and Afghanistan), while others (on Turkey, Libya, and Tunisia) seem more perfunctory by comparison.  But in the light of the June military coup, the chapter on American dollars-for-peace financing and the Egyptian army’s vast business empire is particularly fascinating and uncomfortably prescient.

Oddly, though, there is no chapter on Israel, the largest recipient of American aid.  This seems to me tantamount to ignoring the elephant in the room, since the intense investment in an Israel that seems willing only to prolong and intensify the conflict with Palestine undermines US efforts elsewhere in the region.  In fact you could make a pretty strong argument that American support of Israel, driven by domestic electoral politics, runs directly counter to its own foreign policy interests.  Inevitably, the US is perceived elsewhere in the Middle East as at least tolerating if not encouraging Israel’s land grab in the Palestinian territories;  if its funds do not literally finance the expansionist project, they certainly free up funds that do.

Even assuming the best American intentions, then, they’re all too often interpreted as the worst.  But what exactly are those best intentions?

At root, this book is, or could have been, about America’s perception of itself.  Are we the world’s greatest do-gooders, distributing our largesse (and our arms) where most urgently needed?  Or are we acting to secure a blinkered and out-dated conception of our own interests?

Either way, as Rohde wrote in a New York Times op-ed back in May, “We should stop thinking we can transform societies overnight…  Nations must transform themselves.  We should scale back our ambitions and concentrate on long-term economics.”  His economic recommendations are accordingly small-scale (sometimes to the level of pathos, as in his enthusiasm for an Egyptian version of ‘The Apprentice’).  Yet his emphasis on entrepreneurship may actually undercut his argument that trying to force Western models on other countries will backfire.  And this is the argument that matters.

Like Ambassador Chris Stevens in Libya, says Rohde, American officials need to listen rather than try to muscle their way in, whether economically or militarily.  A little respect, that is.   Preach less, listen more.  That may not be much of a “reimagining,” but it’s the really important message of this book.

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File under: Middle East, US politics | Tagged: Tags: 'America' magazine, 'Beyond War', Afghanistan, David Rohde, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Pakistan, Palestine, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, USAID | 2 Comments
  1. fatmakalkan says:
    October 26, 2013 at 2:13 pm

    I agree with you Lesley. In reality after Eygptian over throw of Moursi next one was Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. Turkey has much older democracy than Israel in Middle East but it is not in the interest of west to have strong Turkey with strong leader. West wants Soudi type regimes that will obey. Gezi park demonstrations at Istanbul in reality was an unsuccessful cue attempt of west. Thanks God it was unsuccessful. It would destabilize Turkey politically and economically and make Turkey again slave of west. Why West and Israil gov. Wants to get rid of Erdogan? Is he radical Islamist? No. Is he planing to bring sharia law back to Turkey ? No. If Turkey was a Christian state they would allow it to became another France or Germany but it is Muslim state very mellow understanding of Islam no treat to anybody but still even that much of Islam is not OK. There fore Turkey must remain as a third world country for western Judeo- Christian politicians.

  2. Jerry M says:
    October 28, 2013 at 10:57 am

    I can understand why the author left Israel out. I may not like our policy in Israel but it is a very different problem than what is happening in the Muslim world. In the case of the Obama administration, I don’t think they have a clue as to what they want to accomplish. Their lack of real preparation has led to them to keeping the mistakes of the Bush administration in effect long after they have left town. For example the spying on Germany has been going on for 10 years.

    Obama is a good administrator when he has a clear goal, but without ideas and without good advisors he is only a little better than an amateur.

Adoring ‘Darling’

Posted October 13th, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

Here’s my review of Richard Rodriguez’ “Persian carpet of a book” in today’s San Francisco Chronicle.

Yes, it’s a rave.

No, I’ve never met him.

Yes, I’d love to:

'darling'On rare occasion, a writer makes a reviewer’s life hard. Richard Rodriguez’s Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography has to be celebrated as one of those occasions.

The deep pleasures of such a book defy the usual capsule account. Instead you want to read sentences and whole passages aloud as I’ve been doing over cafe and dinner tables the past few weeks – “Listen to this!” You want to press “Darling” on others as a gift of friendship, judiciously picking whom to share it with lest you expose Rodriguez to pedants who can’t fathom the way his mind works.

“I did not intend to write a spiritual autobiography,” he writes in the foreword, and I’m glad to say that despite the subtitle (an editorial addition, I suspect), he hasn’t. This is something infinitely more supple – a rich tapestry, a Persian carpet of a book. True, it’s framed as an exploration of his own Catholicism post-9/11, when he realized that “Christianity, like Judaism, like Islam, is a desert religion, an oriental religion, a Semitic religion, born of sinus-clearing glottal consonants, spit, dust, blinding light,” and began to wonder how he and the “cockpit terrorists” could worship the same Abrahamic God.

But Rodriguez’s faith is light-years away from the deadening dogma of “mitered, bearded, fringed holy men.” As he investigates “the ecologies of the holy desert” – specifically the Judean desert – what he creates instead is more like an ecology of the soul. And unlike the desert, it teems with life.

St. Francis, Elvis, Muhammad Ali, Pope John Paul II, Cesar Chavez, Keats, William Randolph Hearst, Moses, Warhol, Herbert Hoover, Dorothy Day, Shelley – a short list of the roster of personalities jostling shoulders as they wander in and out of the virtual salon of Rodriguez’s mind, where San Francisco is “the mystical, witty, sourdough city,” Las Vegas is “disarmingly innocent,” and Jerusalem’s multiple archaeological layers are “vertiginously sunken – resentments and miracles parfaited.”

His writing is suffused with such little epiphanies, words and images springing to fresh life: His Mexican mother’s ojalá, “God willing,” as a Spanish borrowing from the Muslim inshallah; yellow tulips “closed and as thumpable as drumsticks” outside a Vegas hotel as a friend dies of AIDS in a nearby hospice; Picasso’s division of the female face “into competing arrondissements – one tearful, one tyrannical – like the faces of playing-card Queens.”

But at the heart of this book are women. Rodriguez – gay, Catholic Rodriguez – loves women. Not the way many men say they do, with a sexual twinkle in their eye, but deeply and gratefully. The stand-alone masterpiece of the title chapter starts with that “voluble endearment exchanged between lovers on stage and screen” (Noël Coward‘s “sequined grace notes flying up” like “starlings in a summer sky”), touches among other things on the use of habeebee among Arab men (“In a region of mind without coed irony, where women are draped like Ash Wednesday statues … men, among themselves, have achieved an elegant ease of confraternity and sentimentality”), and builds to the central take on how much the three “desert religions” need women to survive (“Somewhere in its canny old mind, the Church knows this. Every bishop has a mother.”).

Rodriguez depends on women “to protect the Church from its impulse to cleanse itself of me.” It was women who stood against the arid maleness he sensed as a child: “Outside the Rodriguez home, God made covenants with men. Covenants were cut out of the male organ. A miasma of psychological fear – fear of smite, fear of flinty tools, fear of lightning – crackled in God’s wake. Scripture began to smell of anger – a civet smell. Scripture began to smell of blood – of iron, of salt.”

He writes movingly of his schoolteachers, the Sisters of Mercy – movingly, yet with a wry, clear eye. A single sentence evokes a whole Irish immigrant world: “Most of the women who swelled the ranks of missionary orders had left peat-fumed, sour-stomached, skinny-cat childhoods behind.” That wry eye notes their “burqa-like habits” – perfect! – which “lent them protection in the roustabout world, also a bit of romance.” These women in teaching and hospital orders, he writes, were the forerunners of feminism, “the least sequestered women imaginable.”

The specific “darling” here is a newly divorced friend, and the whole chapter is in a way a conversation with her – an extended love letter, really – leading up to this stunning conclusion: “I cannot imagine my freedom as a homosexual man without women in veils. Women in red Chanel. Women in flannel nightgowns. Women in their mirrors. Women saying, Honey-bunny. Women saying, We’ll see. Women saying, If you lay one hand on that child, I swear to God I will kill you. Women in curlers. Women in high heels. Younger sisters, older sisters; women and girls. Without women. Without you.”

Even the most flinty-hearted reviewer could only melt at that.

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File under: agnosticism, Christianity, ecology, existence, Islam, Judaism, light, Middle East, women | Tagged: Tags: 'Darling', Catholic, gay, literature, Mexican-American, review, Richard Rodriguez, San Francisco Chronicle, Sisters of Mercy, spiritual autobiography | Be the First to leave a comment

Sign Here, Syria (and Israel, and Egypt)

Posted September 9th, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

In the whole debate on whether to deploy a missile strike against Syria for the use of sarin gas, my mind has been (appropriately?) like the many-handed Hindu goddess of darkness and death, Kali.

— On the one hand, what exactly would a US missile strike achieve, especially since President Obama has so carefully described it as limited in scope and intent?

— But then am I really so callous as to say we should not move when chemical weapons are deployed, especially against sleeping civilians?

— Then again, the level of the debate has sickened me (all the talk about maintaining America’s credibility, for example, as though that were more important that what’s actually happening in Syria — or the talk about how we can’t let Assad “get away with it,” as though he were merely a schoolboy who’d broken the rules).

— But does that really mean we just sit back and do nothing?

— Though that’s exactly what we’ve been doing as an average of 5,000 Syrians have been killed each month.

— But is military action really the only option?

—  And isn’t the idea of a surgical strike another of those military oxymorons created for armchair warriors thrilling to missile-mounted cameras as though war were a video game?

—  And shouldn’t the US have intervened to prevent chemical weapons being used, instead of as a gesture of disapproval after their use?

All this, and I haven’t even gotten to the question of who would actually gain from such a strike.  And without even mentioning Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and…

Kali needs more than eight hands.

But today’s diplomatic developments seem to me immensely hopeful.

All I know at this moment is what you do:  Russia has publicly proposed that Syria give up its stockpiles of chemical weapons.  And since Russia has so openly supported the Assad regime (and been a major supplier of the ingredients for those weapons), and since Assad has so publicly claimed his regime did not use chemical weapons (all evidence to the contrary), the demand that he give them up to avoid a US-led missile strike may be an excellent example of his bluff being expertly called.

So I have a modest proposal that might sweeten the deal — for all of the Middle East.  It’s as follows:

Seven countries have held out on the international treaty against the use and manufacture of chemical weapons, aka the Chemical Weapons Convention.  Those countries are Syria, Israel, Egypt, Angola, Myanmar, South Sudan, and North Korea.  (Two of these — Israel and Myanmar — have signed, but so far, have not yet ratified it.)

So if we’re really serious about banning chemical weapons, and if we’re really serious about the search for some nascent form of Middle East peace (two big ‘ifs,’ but bear with me), we should demand not only that Syria give up its chemical weapons and sign and ratify the treaty, but that at least Israel and Egypt both step up to the plate too.

We should seize the moment and say “Sign here, Mssrs Assad, Netanyahu, and Sisi.”

And we should do it right now.  Before we forget about chemical weapons until the next time they’re used.  Before we leave Assad to keep killing Syrians with conventional weapons.  And before the American public again retreats into its normal state of apathy about anything that happens in countries where the majority are not apple-pie white and Christian.

At least let something good come out of all this horror.

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File under: Middle East, US politics, war | Tagged: Tags: chemical weapons, Egypt, Israel, Russia, Syria, treaty, United States | 6 Comments
  1. Irene says:
    September 9, 2013 at 11:15 pm

    Thanks Lesley!!!!! This is the best I have read and heard on this topic so far. I am with you. Completely.

  2. Dora Hasen says:
    September 9, 2013 at 11:26 pm

    By jove, I think you have got it! The time is definitely now and I appreciate your truthful comment about American public.

  3. nuzhat fakih says:
    September 10, 2013 at 12:01 am

    how TRUE Lesley……on every word said here….oh, what a disgruntled feel it is, to be a helpless observer to this insolent crime being flaunted for the rest of humanity to see…..misguidedly in the name of religion or politics or power.
    Our hearts and prayers remain with each innocent sufferer of this holocaust.
    had been waiting for your comment on this issue from you, and was expectedly rewarded with these enlightened views.

    Nuzhat.

  4. Chad says:
    September 10, 2013 at 4:31 am

    Me Like!

  5. Lesley Hazleton says:
    September 11, 2013 at 10:37 am

    But how? Per today’s NYT, finding let alone destroying Syria’s chemical arsenal may be all but impossible:
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/11/world/middleeast/Syria-Chemical-Disarmament.html?hp

  6. Adil Rasheed says:
    September 19, 2013 at 7:00 am

    Lezley, I would like to bring to your kind attention that it is not only Sisi, Netanyahu and Assad who need to sign and ratify the treaty but even the US and Russia should be told to observe the CWC which required them to destroy their stockpile of chemical weapons before a final deadline required by the CWC, which elapsed in April 2012. So much for those who like drawing red lines.

Burning Man v. Zaatari

Posted August 6th, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

zaatari camp 2Burning Man campPoet and writer Tamam Kahn had the wit to contrast these two aerial photos of temporary cities — the Zaatari camp for Syrian refugees in northern Jordan, and the Burning Man encampment in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada.  The desperate on the left, the Dionysiac on the right (below).

She also had the fortitude to use the Zaatari one as her screen saver for the past two weeks.

Zaatari, she writes on her blog, is “miles of boxed lives,” with each box a caravan, a prefab shelter, or by now simply a tent.  By last month, the population of the two-year-old camp was 115,000, including 60,000 children.  It is now Jordan’s fourth-largest ‘city.’

Tamam quotes Angelina Jolie on the Syrian refugee crisis, speaking in June: “1.6 million people have poured out of Syria with nothing but the clothes on their back, and more than half of them are children… Every 14 seconds someone crosses Syria’s border and becomes a refugee.”

And she ends her post with this:  “I’m struck with the surreal thought that this is the time Burning Man begins to come together as a desert city — half the size of Zaatari — a celebration of life, way out in the Nevada desert. Two cities: one a sudden city of survival, the other — an enormous party of freedom and excess. Hold them both! I tell myself. May all beings have what they need. May all have shelter, food and clean water, be well, safe, and happy.”

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File under: existence, Middle East, war | Tagged: Tags: Angelina Jolie, Complete Word, Jordan, Nevada, refugee camp, Syria, Tamam Kahn | 4 Comments
  1. mary scriver says:
    August 6, 2013 at 2:58 pm

    I wonder what the Rainbow Family encampment would look like from the air. It is dis-assembled and the site restored afterwards. I’m curious to know what the average income for Zataari is, compared to the average income for Burning Man and the Rainbow Family. It would be fascinating to convene a panel of representatives.

    Prairie Mary

  2. fatmakalkan says:
    August 6, 2013 at 4:57 pm

    Hi Lesley, Forgive my ignorance about this event. First time I heard about it. Why 50.000 people goes to middle of the dessert in hot August? Syrian are fleeing from Brutal Assad Regime to save their life’s. Obviously, Burning Man participants life’s are not in danger. They live in a best country in the world for many categories. If they are paying for this event they are not poor. How they spend their week at that camp? Is it religious gathering? Is it social event? Or they don’t have any serious problems, they are bored, just looking for adventure? Or nudity, drugs, etc. living crazy life with no moral code is provided at that camp. Sincerely

    Fatma Kalkan

    • tamam Kahn says:
      August 6, 2013 at 7:14 pm

      Burningman is an amazing experiment in communal living. Aside from the initial cost, there is generally no money exchanged there. I went several times, took an old RV and was part of a group camping there. One evening a bicycle rider brought our camp a hot pizza in a box, delicious and free. Our neighbor hooked up a bicycle to an ice-cream maker and gave out cold treats. The infrastructure is admirable in that a responsible number of people hold the energy for 50,000 people to celebrate and visit the art and music that is available 24/7. On one level it is a “party” but on another it is so much more. Ritual actions — like honoring the dead of the last year and writing their names on a beautiful sculptural temple for 5 days, then celebrating the “burn” as it goes back to dust. And the clean-up takes a month or more until nothing is left in that pristine desert. You bring in what you need and leave with it all. It is so colorful that everyday life — when you return— seems in black and white. It was started by the dot com-ers back in the 90’s. I went just after that. Everyone I brought there had a memorable time. The “wildness” is just a small part of the picture.

      Someone just suggested that Burningman could contribute to the refugee camp — helping purchase water. I think that’s a great idea!
      Tamam Kahn

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      August 7, 2013 at 8:50 am

      Fatma — There are so many ‘compare-and-contrasts’ involved here. So many ironies I don’t think I can count them all. A few:
      East v. West. Wealth v. poverty. Choice v. no-choice. Freedom v. no-freedom. Indulgence v. necessity. One week v. indeterminate time. Desperation v. partying. Survival v. art. Danger v. safety.
      These multiple ironies are what made the twinned photos so powerful for me.

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