Avuncular American

Mideast Christians Beyond Christmas

Chances are that last week, as Christmas was being celebrated, your TV news included a segment on the Christians of the Middle East.  It's an annual staple, and provides jarring images like Santa confronting Israeli troops at a checkpoint near Bethlehem.

Throughout the Middle East, ancient Christian communities are being uprooted, if not extinguished.  Pope Francis, in a letter addressed to the Christians of the Middle East, wrote of their "leavening" effect:

You can help your Muslim fellow citizens to present with discernment a more authentic image of Islam, as so many of them desire, reiterating that Islam is a religion of peace, one which is compatible with respect for human rights and favours peaceful coexistence on the part of all.

William Dalrymple, the Scottish author of From the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East, in a recent Guardian article, sees the exodus of Christians as the end of secular Arab nationalism.  He quotes the late Lebanese AUB professor Kamal Salibi who detected a "fin de race" fatalism among eastern Christians, a net loss for the Arab world: "It is Christian Arabs who keep the Arab world 'Arab' rather than 'Muslim'."

In his recent Foreign Policy report on Alexandria Egypt (my home for two years in the Eighties) "The Lighthouse Dims," James Traub sees the end of the cosmopolitan ideal:

North Africa used to be a civilizational crossroads in which Muslims, Christians, and Jews not only lived alongside one another but also shared one another's language and culture. This mingled society, formed from many intense particularities, is what we call cosmopolitanism. It was born in the Middle East, and it now seems to be disappearing there, including from the one place where the cosmopolitan ideal reached its supreme realization: Alexandria.

Recently I renewed ties with an old friend, a Palestinian Christian who was a fellow volunteer at a Boy Scout center in Ramallah in the early Seventies.  He and his family are now exiles from their home in Jerusalem, victims of what the Israelis call the "center of life" policy, which renders stateless Palestinians who have the temerity to go abroad on a work assignment.  His wife recounts their ordeal in this article.

Whether it's Israeli policies of harassment and land seizures (which of course affect all Palestinians, whether Muslim or Christian), or flight in the face of ISIS terrorism (William Dalrymple refers to the ISIS "Christian-free zone"), Mideast Christians face what could be, in the very lands where Christianity was born, the end of their long history in an entire region.

The instability which has afflicted the region in recent years - the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the Syrian revolution and the ensuing ISIS onslaught - has meant the flight of Christians from countries where they had been protected minorities, with sizable populations.  The Arab world's loss - Christian Arabs were the intellectual founders of many of the modern nation-states - will likely be permanent.  As Professor Salibi said, "Each time a Christian goes, no other Christian comes to fill his place..."  

Israel: Swift Sword, Into Foot

In the heady days after the Six Day War, when the IDF vanquished numerically superior forces on three fronts, retired US Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall wrote Swift Sword: The Historical Record of Israel's Victory, June 1967.  Now, the title might have to be Spin Swiftly: Israel Inflicts Own Goal In Showdown With Aid Flotilla.

All the spin in the world isn't helping this time.  The Israeli MFA deployed its multilingual team of spokespeople, native speakers of English, French, Arabic, and the infinite diversity of languages brought back from the diaspora by the Aliyah.  To little avail.  When the IDF commandos wind up alienating 81 year old diplomats like retired US Ambassador Edward Peck, they probably have lost already.  What are they going to do, sink the next ship with Nobel Peace Prize winners aboard?

Israel may have the best spinners, but if the message is in contradiction to your very foundation - "Let my people go" - then audiences will quickly figure it out.  Yes, it would be nice if the Palestinians could deploy their own diaspora, who probably have as wide a linguistic background as the Israelis.  For now, they choose people whose imperfect command of English and of PR 101 leaves them at a distinct disadvantage.  The other problem: Israeli spokespersons represent a country, and Palestine does not yet have that status.

Which brings us to the heart of the problem.  As Israeli writer Amos Oz says today ("Israeli Force, Adrift On the Sea") in the New York Times

the only way for Israel to edge out Hamas would be to quickly reach an agreement with the Palestinians on the establishment of an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as defined by the 1967 borders, with its capital in East Jerusalem.

Amen.  Minus that, flotillas will continue to float - and rockets will resume flying.

(Image: Mother Jones)

Israel To Palestinians: Take A Hike

Put aside Jerusalem and its contested status for a moment.  Divert your eyes from AIPAC conferences and White House meetings.   Consider, like Robert Wright in the New York Times, that knee jerk "pro-Israel" support can actually be anti-Israel.

And take a hike with Raja Shehadeh, prize-winning author of Palestinian Walks: Notes On a Vanishing Landscape (Profile Books, 2007).

The danger with the current focus on East Jerusalem and Israel's obstinate construction of housing on this "annexed" territory is that it clouds our view of what is happening elsewhere in the occupied territories.  Shehadeh, a human rights lawyer who hikes in his spare time, has provided us with a beautifully written walk through time.  Some of his early walks are simply no longer possible today; paths walled off, territory declared off limits to Palestinians, or hills simply razed to make way for settlements.  Listen as he narrates excerpts from his book:

I hiked some of the same paths that Shehadeh was still able to follow in the early Seventies.  Around Ramallah, I hiked with Palestinian friends and fellow international volunteers, there for a Boy Scout/Quaker project.  Stopping at a grapevine shaded roadside cafe overlooking the olive groves, where a fried egg never tasted better.  Who would ever have thought that such simple freedoms could end?

With my pack rat tendency to keep every map I've ever bought (and I've picked up many), I still have an Israeli ordnance survey map from 1971.  It's a beautifully colored topographical map, whose accompanying "list of settlements" does not refer to Israel's then rare outposts on the West Bank, but is an index to any "settled" place, from Ashdod to Tel Aviv.  Shehadeh's trails are there too.

A return trip in the mid-Eighties, and I pick up a Survey of Israel map of Jerusalem, printed in  1982.  There's a long arm of Jerusalem reaching up toward Ramallah, enveloping "Jerusalem Airport."  The construction of high rise apartment blocks on the high ground around the city belies Israeli intentions.  But it's still rather tame, compared to what happens next.

The Geopolitical Atlas of Israel (Autrement, 2008) shows it in detail: an irregular carbuncle jutting east from what was already annexed East Jerusalem, with the "Separation Wall" enclosing what are clearly Israeli settlements that cut up and loom over Arab neighborhoods.  Elsewhere the Atlas shows what Shehadeh and other Palestinians are up against: a West Bank patchwork of "Areas," nature reserves, and military zones that relegate Palestinians to what's left over, with contiguity a quaint notion for the history books.

For Shehadeh, the omnipresent blockage of his beloved trails is a metaphor for the everyday frustration that faces Palestinians in their own back yards.   For him, "Oslo" is indeed a four-letter word, where negotiators who never hiked the hills were ready to trade them away for the chance to rule over Ramallah and a few other towns.

Raja Shehadeh dedicates his book to his nephew and niece, "with the hope that they will be able to walk in the hills of Palestine."  I certainly hope they will.  But not if Israel's response to everyone, from President Obama to Gordon Brown to Palestinians, is a dismissive "take a hike."

Healthy Boost For Obama's International Standing

"It's Safe To Come To America"

Such a headline might be premature - the US House of Representatives' passage of the Senate Health Care Reform bill is only hours old, and even after the President's signature, will require time for implementation.  In the meantime, foreigners traveling to the US will still need to check the fine print of their insurance policies, many of which exclude the US, given its costly and byzantine health care system.

Byzantium just got updated, though it's not over 'til it's over.  Meaning that even though this reform represents historic progress, much more needs to be done to make affordable health care available to all.  The training of new doctors and nurses.  The reform of tort laws and accompanying stratospheric malpractice insurance.  Instituting a culture of preventive medicine and prophylactic public health.

Fixated as Americans were on the outcome of yesterday's vote, they may have missed the fact that foreigners were too, especially foreign leaders.  It went beyond European incomprehension at American reluctance to join the club of civilized health care providing nations.  Had the President not succeeded with his own party, on the key domestic proposal of his first term, what would happen to US leadership abroad?  That breeze you feel coming off the Atlantic is a huge sigh of relief.

We were on the road all day Sunday, driving through France back to Belgium, and the BBC provided regular real time updates on the state of the vote. French commentators noted that Benyamin Netanyahu, who treated Vice President Biden with barely concealed contempt as little as a week ago, will be meeting a President Obama newly invigorated by his domestic victory.

The Obama Way should be especially instructive for the Israeli Prime Minister.  The President focused on a major problem, persevered when pundits said the patient was dead, and pulled off a reform that is being compared with the major progressive initiatives (Social Security, Medicare) of the last century.  Now that he'll be more free to zero in on the Middle East, the moribund peace process between Israelis and Palestinians will likely be tops among his major international priorities.

Important as the health care vote is, it is a reminder that nothing comes easily, and that the Democrats can count on no Republican support.  The sole priority for Republicans appears to block what they can, and that includes necessary reforms of America's casino financial system.

At least now those ads promoting travel to the US (which did get bipartisan support) can include some very good news on the health front.

Loaded Lexicon: Genocide, Apartheid, Fundamentalism

Bet you thought the US Congress was busy sorting out health care last week, or tackling unemployment.  Well, they may one day return to those rather crucial domestic issues, but not before dealing with pressing foreign policy matters, such as condemnation of the four decade-old occupation of Cyprus, and labeling almost century-old massacres of Armenians as genocide.

The point in common is casting Turkey as the bad guy.  The other point in common is Israel.  As MJ Rosenberg noted in Media Matters Action Network, Israel had heretofore taken the Turkish view that the Ottoman-era bloodletting should not be labeled as genocide.  In any case, Israel has always looked askance at others' attempts to appropriate the terms genocide and holocaust.  But, says Rosenberg

since the Gaza war, Turkish-Israeli relations have deteriorated.  The Turks... were appalled by the Israeli onslaught against the Gazans. And said so. Ever since, the Netanyahu government has made a point to stick it to the Turks. That battle is now being carried to Washington.  The Israelis are trying to teach the Turks a lesson.  If the Armenian resolution passes the House, it will not be for purely compassionate reasons, but rather, to send a message to Turkey:  if you mess with Israel, its lobby will make Turkey pay a price in Washington.

The Obama Administration opposes the resolution, and it may not go beyond the Committee stage.  But the point is that, like the noise about Cyprus, the pro-Israel lobby can wag the Congressional dog with impunity.  For Turkey, like for Israel, and for the US, words do matter.

Like the word apartheid, which Israel would like to see relegated to the history books concerning South Africa, period.  It bristles at the notion (anytime, but especially this week) that there is a parallel between its separation walls, checkpoints, bypass roads, ethnic ID cards, segregated housing on occupied land... and similar practices that ended with majority rule in South Africa.  Use the word apartheid and Israel in the same sentence (oops, just did) and you'll incur the wrath of its formidable PR machine.

Word association test: if I say fundamentalism, what word immediately flashes through your brain?  Be honest: "Islamic," of course.  As if Muslims, in their infinite variety, had a corner on the market for religious extremism.  We know to our chagrin that Christians include a fair number of end-days fundamentalists in their midst, including in the person of a certain FOX  News personality.

And ask Palestinians how it is to live in ground zero of inter-religious fundamentalisms, where home-grown Islamists attempt to crowd out secular Muslims and Christians, and where Jewish settlers claiming Biblical rights to the exclusion of all others get succor from millennial American Christians, who see the Holy Land as a convenient setting for rapture.   The Palestinians know that "fundamentalism" is ecumenical in its application.

So next time Congress tries to be helpful in throwing around loaded terms like "genocide" and threatening relations with longstanding allies like Turkey, or condemning "occupation" in Cyprus but ignoring a longer occupation in the West Bank, maybe it should consider the utility of sticking to the facts on the ground, instead of words that can be defined according to the political beliefs of the interested parties. 

In the World, Like It Or Not

FYI, fellow Americans: Europeans who care about maintaining close ties with the US administration are starting to get worked up over the likelihood of a no-show by President Obama at the May EU-US Summit in Madrid.

There may be many reasons for the White House to consider skipping this pow-wow, but most of them are probably purely domestic - reinforcing among populists that the President is totally focused on economic matters, job creation, etc.  None of which are unimportant matters.

But as the New York Times' David Sanger reminded us today, there is a direct correlation between American economic standing and its ability to wield power in the world.  "In the world," that Vietnam era GI phrase to mean everywhere other than their soggy rice paddy, is where we live, and everything from deficits to crude oil to climate change links Americans to everyone else, whether they are Chinese, Africans, or Europeans.

Yes, by all means cancel the Bush era Moon/Mars boondoggle, where money was to be borrowed (more deficits) on a whimsical return to manned Moon exploration, leading perhaps to Mars "colonization."  Meanwhile, back on Earth, the colonization that we really need to be concerned about is that which is going on in the West Bank.  Which brings me back to the US-EU Summit.

Here's what I wrote in Euractiv today:

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When Israel-Palestine merits not a word from a president, you know the United States is turning inward.

Roger Cohen on the SOTU, New York Times, 28 January 2010, “Exit America“

The same Cohen op-ed indicates that only nine minutes were devoted to international affairs in President Obama’s first State of the Union message last month. And now we hear about how intra-EU wrangling over which of its several “Présidents” will shake Obama’s hand first at the US-EU Summit may mean that none of them will get to do so - if the US President doesn’t attend.

Sorry, folks, this just won’t do. Adult leadership is required on both sides of the Atlantic if the warring parties on the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean are ever to be encouraged to make peace.

It’s not a problem that needs more time - Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and its siege of Gaza have lasted the better part of a half century. 90 years ago this month, in February 1920, the “powers” were meeting in the Conference of London - one of a series of conclaves to divvy up the defunct Ottoman Empire - and we know how that turned out.

Last month, a few days before the SOTU speech that ignored the Israel-Palestine situation, I chaired a panel in Brussels that looked at the unsatisfactory state of Western efforts to bring about a lasting peace. Despite the hope this time last year (Inauguration of Obama, his appointment of George Mitchell), the anniversary of the Israel campaign against Gaza reminds us how little has changed, except that Israel now has a government bent on expanding its settlements throughout the West Bank and Jerusalem. But in our conference, what was clear was that both sides of the pond needed to keep each other engaged.

The United States remains Israel’s primary security guarantor, and the European Union’s financial assistance allows the Palestinian Authority to remain in business. It would appear that the US and the EU have many things to talk about, and might want to better coordinate their use of what should be considerable leverage with both parties to the conflict.

What better way than to end the “egotistical wrangling” over lining up to shake hands? And for the US, to use the EU-US Summit to show Europe that the Obama Administration is not going to “go local.”

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Israel's Long Straw, Palestine's Trickle

The Biblical "land of milk and honey" and the "wilderness" of the holy book are one and the same.  There's the freshwater Sea of Galilee, the saltwater Dead Sea (getting deader by the minute), and the Jordan River in between.  There is rocky desert, chaparral, and the occasional verdant spring.

Until the rampant development of urban Israel, suburban Israeli settlements on occupied Arab land, and the increasing gerrymandering, walling off, and bypass-roading of what is left of "Palestine" thanks to the Oslo Accords, there was basically enough water.  Enough even to build a swimming pool in the then sleepy West Bank town of Ramallah, where I went in 1972 to dig its foundations out of solid rock.  Even during those early years of The Occupation, Israelis and Palestinians managed to share the region's precious water resources.

"Share" is a word that would be difficult to justify in the current circumstances.  Today's release by Amnesty International of its damning "Troubled Waters" report elicited a predictable official Israeli response, essentially saying "Water? ...what water problem?"  After denying there is a problem, the Israeli MFA, in a reaction that is remarkable for its brevity and chutzpah, goes on to say that if there is a problem, it's the Palestinians own fault.  For a more realistic account, see the BBC's report from Gaza.

Better yet, watch "Drying Up Palestine," the short documentary film on how Israel has been sucking on a long straw, digging deep under future Palestinian independent territory and depriving currently-occupied Palestinians and future "independent" Palestinians of one of the very requisites of statehood: water resources.  Maybe Peter Snowdon and Rima Essa's film (you can see a clip here) should be up on the Amnesty site.

Image: AppleWorks clip art.

Obama's Nobel Preventive Peace Prize

24 hours after Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said that Middle East peace is "impossible" and, especially helpfully in case that message appeared overly pessimistic, that many countries "have learned to live with" a permanent state of war, the Nobel Committee has awarded the 2009 Peace Prize to US President Barack Obama.

The President's personal honor can be shared with all those Americans who voted for him almost one year ago - they made the election of a potential peace maker possible.  I stress potential, for that is obviously what the Nobel Committee has in mind in designating a President who currently has not one but two wars on his hands:

For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world's leading spokesman.

As a former diplomat who joined hundreds of my colleagues in campaigning for Obama last year, it is gratifying that the Nobel Committee cited him for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples."

The award can't have come at a more important juncture.  Not only must the US deal with a belligerent Israeli government personified by Avigdor Lieberman, but Obama must craft an Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran policy that may contain as many military "elements of national power" as diplomatic.  The Nobel people are aware of this more than most, and want to put their weight preemptively on the side of diplomatic solutions.

At the same time, since the President will probably have to give the 10 million Swedish kronor (about $1.4 million) to the US Treasury, the Nobel Foundation is doing its bit to help the parlous state of the deficit.  With the dollar falling by the day, those kronor might be even more valuable next week.

Seriously, the President brings great credit to an office that was seriously discredited by his predecessor, who practiced preventive war instead of waging peace.  My humble congratulations.

Now, to the job at hand.  Please, Mr. President, have a heart-to-heart talk with Mr. Lieberman and his boss Bibi, who once said that the 9/11 attack on the US was good for Israel.  Talk about giving fodder to the conspiracy theorists...

Barak Bulldozes Chances For Israel-Palestine Peace

"The Bulldozer" was Ariel Sharon's nickname, but current Israeli Defense Minister and onetime Camp David peace processor Ehud Barak was the one who today gave the green light for the construction of hundreds of additional homes in West Bank settlements.  Building cheap housing for Russian immigrants would appear to outweigh building goodwill with Palestinians who own (or owned) the land where these fortress-settlements are sited.

Running roughshod over Palestinians and other Arabs was par for the course for Sharon, but you might expect more of Labour man Barak.  Then again, he is part of the most right-wing government in Israel's history.  But what of the impact on the negotiations (or talks about negotiations) brokered by US envoy George Mitchell?  It would appear that this is a rather provocative Israeli poke in the eye of the Obama Administration.  Will the President blink?

Chutzpah is a commodity in plentiful supply in the Netanyahu government, but yesterday's op-ed by Jimmy Carter in the Washington Post detailed an Israeli practice that has to take the world record for gall:

I visited a family who had lived for four generations in their small, recently condemned home. They were laboring to destroy it themselves to avoid much higher costs if Israeli contractors carried out the demolition order.

Demolishing your own house to avoid an Israeli bill for same?  That's like having to pay for your water from the very people who drain your wells - another Israeli-imposed practice.  Or how about paying for the "losses" of the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency, should it lose a court battle (highly unlikely) over confiscated Palestinian land, as lawyer Raja Shehadeh recounts in his award-winning book "Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape."

Those of us who live in countries where rule of law is generally applied to residents in a fair way, whatever the plaintiff's race or religion, will have difficulty even comprehending the daily lot of Palestinians in the West Bank, where confiscated Arab land may not be sub-leased to "non-Jews," as Shehadeh writes.

Shehadeh and other non-violent rights activists deserve our admiration and support.  Who among us would stand for years of niggling harassment over bypass roads (for Jews only), checkpoints (for Arabs only), and Separation Walls (which not only separate Jew from Arab, but also ensure that Palestinian farmers are cut off from their fields).

The poke in the eye, repeated enough, will result in self-defense mechanisms.  Have we not gotten beyond "an eye for an eye... ?"  How about "what goes around, comes around?"  Are a few hundred more houses really worth that much to Israel?

 

The Time That Remains: Palestinians, Israelis & Israeli Arabs

Had Palestinian writer Raja Shehadeh ("Palestinian Walks") written the screenplay of The Time That Remains (poster at left, from the official site for the French release), the dwindling time might refer to the chance to hike the hills of Palestine before the Israelis completely cover them in concrete.  Or maybe the time remaining before Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman succeeds in expelling Arab Israelis from the land of their birth.

But the title of Israeli-Arab director/screenwriter Elia Suleiman's highly personal view of being an Arab in Israel may apply to family relations as much as Palestinian-Israeli relations, as in "appreciate your parents while they are still around," the theme so touchingly sketched in the recent Japanese film Still Walking.  In Suleiman's Nazareth of 1948 to the present, we see the Arab-Israeli conflict as experienced by and recounted to a boy growing up in a Palestinian family that has stayed on - in what has become part of Israel.

When I first saw the film's poster, I imagined that the little boy was getting a scolding from his father (it's actually the school headmaster; little Elia, it seems, is developing a reputation as a political dissident).  No, Suleiman's father Fuad (actor Saleh Bakri dominates the first third of the film as the young resistance fighter) is portrayed as a strong, silent type, who is left for dead after his capture in the 1948 fighting, and who spends the rest of his life under a cloud of Israeli suspicion that he hasn't abandoned his Palestinian nationalism.

We never see Suleiman-père old and frail.  He's the reliable go-to man for family and neighbors in a Nazareth left adrift, cut off from their cousins across the Green Line.  At the local school, children sing patriotic songs (but for which country?) in Hebrew and Arabic.

Though political themes are ever present (what honest film on the subject could avoid politics?), The Time That Remains is at times black comedic, and more than one reviewer (including Suleiman himself) has seen shades of Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati in the absurdity of Israeli-Jewish and Israeli-Arab relations.

The cinema in France where we saw "le Temps qu'il reste" distributed a very helpful flyer with a reprint from the Nouvel Observateur interview with Elia Suleiman, where he explains to Pascal Mérigeau that his novel view of the last sixty-plus years is his alone - and is not a documentary.  We read that "at 17 years old, I was accused of being a Communist sympathizer, and had 24 hours to make up my mind," which is how the young Suleiman ended up in London, which led to New York, which led to Paris...  This episode is alluded to in the film, when we see a teenaged Elia getting caught up in the first "Land Day" demonstrations to protest Israeli expropriation of its Arab citizens' land.

For objective students of the Arab-Israel conflict, The Time That Remains should stand up well to scrutiny.  For connoisseurs of the absurd, the film will show a collection of war and post-war situations that could be fodder for Ari Folman should Waltz With Bashir ever get a prequel.

In keeping with Suleiman's ambivalence over matters of nationality, statelessness, and patriotism, The Time That Remains was presented at Cannes 2009 as neither an Israeli nor a Palestinian film, but a product of France, Belgium, Italy, and the United Kingdom.  Suleiman, the "present absentee" Israeli/Palestinian/Expatriate and on-camera narrator of his own film, looks on silently at his life and gives us a rare look at the conflicted world of Arab-Israelis.