Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2005, pages 64-69

Waging Peace

MESA Encourages Academic Courage

MESA President Laurie Bland drew applause from members for her stance on academic integrity (staff photo S. Powell).

AGAINST HIGH odds, the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) met in San Francisco Nov. 20 through Nov 23. As has been the case for the past few years, draconian U.S. visa requirements prevented many important scholars from Middle Eastern nations from attending the meeting. Additionally, a lockout of hotel employees caused heated MESA board debates as to whether to move the meeting and risk virtually all of MESA’s endowment, or cross picket lines and use the long-booked Hyatt Embarcadero. Ultimately, the conference proceeded almost as scheduled—but with attendance down, panels canceled, and events scattered across the city.

The lockout ended the first day—not with a resolution, but with a cooling-down period. Unfortunately, there is no cooling down period for U.S. laws targeting Arabs in a post-9/11 environment.

Nevertheless, the meeting had its successes. One of these took place at the Washington Report booth, which attracted crowds curious about the PATRIOT Act game. Created by Arab-American artist Mike Kabbash, the game is a parody in which the players receive civil liberties based on such criteria as citizenship, race, ethnicity, job and political affiliation, and lose them based on—well, not much. Although many were eager to buy the game, it is not for sale. However, it may be downloaded free at <www.graphix4change.com>.

Another highlight of the meeting was MESA President Laurie Bland’s excellent speech on the necessity of academic courage and integrity. It was especially important as many in the field of Middle East studies are either being attacked for their views, or pressured to use their expertise to advance the Bush administration’s “war on terror.”

Noting that scholarship was “under the shadow of empire,” Bland cautioned that MESA members must ponder who was setting the agenda for Middle East studies, citing actions such as the funding of “homeland security centers” in universities, and the creation of the National Flagship Language Institute. Bland also warned that HR3077, a failed 2003 bill to create an “educational advisory board,” had not died, and that the so-called Academic Bill of Rights was about curbing, not protecting, academic freedom.

Moreover, Bland said, academics face sanctions in the form of fines, and even prison, for editing books from disfavored countries. She further criticized the U.S. treatment of education in Iraq, mentioning the destruction of infrastructure and records, attacks on academics, and clumsy attempts by the U.S. to manage Iraqi education.

Alhough MESA is not a political organization, Bland pointed out, its particular region of study has been violently politicized, and stakes are high. Academics must make choices, she said, as to how much they allow government to be a part of scholarship decision-making. “If we take funding from the empire, we must take some responsibility for what our government does,” she concluded. “If ever there was a time to stand up and be counted, this is indeed that time.”

—Sara Powell

Jerusalem Women Speak at MEI

	(L-r) Hidaya Said Najmi, Jerri Bird, Marianne Albina, Gila Svirsky and Ambassador Philip Wilcox launch the “Jerusalem Women Speak” tour (photo D. Hanley).

Three women, each committed to peace, described how the Israeli occupation of Palestine affects their lives back home. The women—Marianne Albina, a Christian Pal­estinian; Hidaya Said Najmi, a Muslim Palestinian; and Gila Svirsky, a Jewish Israeli—spoke at an Oct. 7 luncheon in the courtyard of the Middle East Institute, in Washington, DC. This informative event, the first in a countrywide tour, was co-sponsored by Partners for Peace, the MEI, the Foundation for Middle East Peace, and the World Affairs Council of Washington, DC.

Ambassador Philip Wilcox, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, introduced the speakers as well as Jerri Bird, whose organization, Partners for Peace, organizes the annual tour.

“Oh, my God, it isn’t easy being a Christian in the holy land,” Marianne Albina said. “It’s hard to love my enemy,” she confessed, and then described why. Israel’s occupation is making it hard for Palestinian children to get to school, she said. In order to be in class at 8 a.m., they must get up before 5 in order to wait in lines, whatever the weather, to pass through the checkpoints.

In Gaza, Albina said, Israeli soldiers even destroyed a school. The students sifted through the rubble for their projects and paintings. One little girl asked Albina to promise her she’d live to grow up. Albina couldn’t, she said, adding: “Do you know how it feels not to be able to guarantee that a child will be safe?”

Israel demolishes four Palestinian homes a day in the occupied territories, Albina said. “Israel’s wall is separating Palestinians from their land and each other. It won’t bring security, it will promote more hatred,” she warned.

“Palestinians think the world has abandoned us,” Albina said. “We need actions, not words—not ink on paper, but real reconciliation.” She asked Americans to be both pro-Israeli and and pro-Palestinian by being “pro-end-the-occupation.”

Gila Svirsky moved to Israel from the United States 39 years ago. She was 43 years old before she met a Palestinian, she said. Svirsky described nine different peace groups which make up what she described as a vibrant Israeli peace movement. They hold vigils, die-ins, marches and concerts, and monitor checkpoints. “We all refuse to be enemies of each other or to raise our children to be enemies,” she said.

“Israel is paying too high a price to maintain the occupation, both in lives lost and in the half billion paid each year to support settlers, build their roads, schools and homes, in addition to another $1 billion spent on soldiers to guard the settlers. We’ve had to cut back social services for the disadvantaged in Israel,” Svirsky said. “It’s in our own self-interest to end the occupation.”

The occupation fosters a culture of violence in Israel, Svirsky added, noting that incidents of domestic violence, rape and racism are rising. Moreover, Israel is internationally isolated. “We are treated as pariahs in sporting events. We want to rejoin the family of nations,” Svirsky said. “Both sides have had enough of violence and occupation.”

Hidaya Said Najmi, 38, just met her first civilian Israelis. The youngest daughter of refugees who left Jaffa in 1948, her family moved from place to place before settling in Nablus. Najmi was only 8 in the 1970s when her sister’s friend, Lina, was killed, wearing her school uniform in a nonviolent demonstration in Nablus. Najmi asked her parents what Lina had ever done to deserve this, she said.

Years later she faced the same question from her own son, after he witnessed the shooting of two Palestinian men outside their apartment in Jenin. The answer is still the same, “It’s the occupation.”

She painfully described Israel’s 2002 invasion of Jenin (see the October 2004 Washington Report, p. 60, for her full story), her work as a senior design engineer with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency to rebuild Jenin, and Israel’s murder of their British project manager in front of her and the rest of the U.N. staff. “We’ve been denied our freedom for far too long,” Najmi said. “We just want to live free like everyone else in the world.”

The three wom­en left for their next talk in Baltimore, MD. Two weeks later, on Oct. 22, they returned to Washington, for a talk at the Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation conference, their last before heading home. They were tired after their trip across the country, they said, but exhilarated—because they now know that they aren’t alone, that most Americans support an end to the occupation, too.

—Delinda C. Hanley

Washingtonians Celebrate the Olive Harvest

Holiday shoppers buy Palestinian handicrafts at various tables, including the IMMEA booth (photo Michael Keating).

The Jerusalem Fund’s month-long exhibit, “Trees of Hope: Celebrating the Olive Harvest,” opened Nov. 13 with an evening of entertainment at the Palestine Center in Washington, DC. The exhibit emphasized the vital role the olive harvest plays in Palestinians’ traditional society and economy. The opening night featured Palestinian master carver Nimir Rishmawi, who demonstrated for the first time in the United States the artistry of olive wood carving as it is done in Bethlehem.

Guests enjoyed a documentary film, a photo exhibit, as well as free samples of Palestinian olive oil, olives, and traditional Middle Eastern desserts and coffee. Traditional Palestinian handicrafts, ceramics, embroidery, olive oil, olive soap, olive wood carvings, and various Middle Eastern cookbooks and music CDs were available for purchase throughout the evening. The event was co-sponsored with Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies.

Readers who couldn’t make it to the festival can still purchase Rishmawi’s carvings and Palestinian handicrafts from the AET Bookstore, as well as from the International Marketing for Middle Eastern Artisans’ (IMMEA) Web site: <www.immea.org>

—Delinda C. Hanley

Jerusalem Fund Gallery Exhibits Paintings by Mona A. El-Bayoumi

	A painting of an Iraqi woman by Mona A. El-Bayoumi (photo courtesy Palestine Center).

Mona A. El-Bayoumi’s striking iconic paintings graced the walls of the Jerusalem Fund’s Gallery in Washington, DC, from Oct. 1 to Nov. 5, 2004. Her exhibit, showcasing 43 new pieces, entitled, “Effects of Greed, Dreams of Justice,” reflects on the consequences of war in the Arab world.

Using iconographic imagery, saturated colors, and whimsical subtlety, Bayoumi”˜s work provides a provocative and unsettling commentary on the human side of the current conflicts in Iraq and Palestine.

Born in Alexandria, Egypt, El-Bayoumi moved to Michigan when she was four, with her political activist family. Her travels and her family have had a significant impact on her vision of justice in the world, now expressed in her art. She has exhibited her vibrant paintings for the past 19 years across the United States, in the Egyptian Embassy, in Washington, DC, the World Space Foundation, galleries in Egypt, and in private collections around the world.

—Delinda C. Hanley

Marcel Khalife Speaks at Palestine Center

Legendary performer Marcel Khalife (staff photo D. Hanley).

Legendary Lebanese songwriter, singer and oud player Marcel Khalife’s U.S. tour included a Nov. 9 talk at the Palestine Center, prior to his Nov. 12 concert at Washington, DC’s Lincoln Theater. Following a reception where fans got to chat with the artist, attendees watched a fascinating clip from a documentary made about his trial for blasphemy.

Khalife raised a furor in 1999 with his song, “Oh Father, I Am Yusuf,” based on a poem by Palestinian writer Mahmoud Darwish. The song compares the oppression of Palestinians to the biblical Joseph’s mistreatment at the hands of his brothers. Because the story also appears in the Qu’ran, singing verses from the Qu’ran resulted in charges of blasphemy by Dar al-Fatwa, Lebanon’s highest Sunni authority. Ironically, leading Shi’i clerics, usually thought to be more conservative, came to Khalife’s defense, as did hundreds of fans and other artists, and he was acquitted.

Khalife discussed his art, as well as his efforts to protest intolerance and injustice, and answered questions from the audience.

—Delinda C. Hanley

Iowa Activists Protest Iraq War

	Catholic Worker Community activist and protest organizer Frank Codaro speaks at the Nov. 2 “Vote With Your Feet” anti-war rally near Des Moines (photo Michael Gillespie).

Eleven anti-war protesters voted with their feet by trespassing at the Iowa National Guard’s Joint Forces Headquarters STARC Armory near Des Moines on election day, Nov. 2.

“Our main objective here is to bring our message to the powers that be in the STARC Armory that we don’t want to see any more kids killed,” said Jay Kozel, 17, a Roosevelt High School student.

“We don’t want to see any more going to Iraq or Afghanistan, or any other nation for that matter, and be forced to kill and be killed,” said Kozel.

“It’s a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,” Ed Bloomer of Veterans for Peace told the crowd of about 40 assembled outside the armory.

The protesters brought with them a step-ladder that they used to climb over the barricaded gate of the military installation.

Along with Bloomer, 57, of Des Moines, Frank Cordaro, 53, Renee Espeland, 43, Fran Fuller, 56, Chris Gaunt, John Heid, 49, Jay Kozel, 17, Duncan Pierce, 16, Spencer Pierce, 19, Tom Schmitz, 49, and Brian Terrell, 48, climbed over the gate and entered the armory grounds. They were greeted by National Guard security officers and Polk County Sheriff’s Department officers, handcuffed, and taken to police vans in the armory.

Gaunt was not arrested; she tested an offer made by Iowa National Guard JAG Officer Michael Kuehn, who gave each of the protesters an opportunity to leave the military reservation and avoid arrest. Gaunt was allowed to return to the group of protest supporters who remained outside the armory’s clearly marked boundary line.

The 10 protesters who remained were taken into custody. The two juveniles were taken to the Polk County juvenile detention center and later released to their parents. The eight adults were taken to Polk County Jail and later pled not guilty to misdemeanor criminal trespass charges. They were released on personal recognizance bonds after appearing in court the following morning.

According to protest leader and longtime anti-war and anti-nuclear-weapons activist Frank Cadaro, those arrested will appear in court in mid-December.

The protest, which included a spirited performance by the Radical Cheerleaders, several speakers, and two large banners, was organized by the Catholic Worker Community, the Catholic Peace Ministry, and Veterans for Peace. The groups hold a weekly vigil at the armory during which they regularly display a growing number of large, poster-sized photographs of Iowa Guard soldiers killed in Iraq.

—Michael Gillespie

Naji al-Ali’s Cartoons Still Relevant Today

Naji al-Ali drew this cartoon not long before he was assassinated.

Eminent Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali was the subject of a Nov. 17 lecture at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. Artist and San Francisco State University professor Fayeq Oweis discussed the “symbols, characters and relevance” of Al-Ali’s cartoons.

Naji al-Ali was born in 1937 in the Palestinian village of Ash Shajara, Oweis said. In 1948, when the creation of Israel resulted in the killing and forcible expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes, Al-Ali was expelled with his family to the Ein Al-Hilweh refugee camp in Lebanon. There, he discovered his love of art, as he would draw on the walls of the camp.

Impressed with Al-Ali’s work, in 1961 the late Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani published his drawings in Al-Huria magazine. Two years later, Al-Ali moved to Kuwait, where in 1969 he created his most famous character, “Handala.” The most recognizable representation of Handala, a young boy of 10 (Al-Ali’s age when he was forced to leave Palestine), is one in which his back is turned to the viewer with his hands behind his back. Frozen in age, the child will not grow until he returns to his homeland.

The young boy “will show his face once Arab dignity is restored and Palestine returns,” Oweis noted. Also, “like many children in the refugee camps,” Al-Ali once explained, Handala—in Arabic, the name of a plant known for its bitterness and resilience—is barefoot.

Another famous Al-Ali cartoon character, Fatima, represents the land of Palestine, Oweis continued. She is a strong woman depicted as fighting side-by-side with another notable character, an honest, poor refugee and freedom fighter called the “good man.” Fatima wears a key around her neck, to symbolize Palestinians’ longing to return to their land. One cartoon shows her and an identical woman embracing, one wearing a Qur’an pendant and the other a cross. Both women are draped in a large Lebanese flag, expressing Al-Ali’s strong opposition to Lebanon’s civil war.

In an effort to reach as many people as possible, including those who are illiterate, Oweis said, Al-Ali made his cartoons simple and easy to understand.

The late cartoonist’s work is very relevant to current events, Oweis added, pointing to cartoons shown on a projector screen. One drawing depicted oil barrels as “drums of war” used by an American and an Israeli soldier. Another laments the lack of democracy in the Arab world.

According to Oweis, Al-Ali became famous for his searing portraits of Palestinian life, frustration with Arab regimes, and general daring as “the only voice in the Arab world that criticized almost everybody.”

In 1987 the beloved cartoonist was assassinated in London. Only 50 years old, he seemed to foreshadow his death in a cartoon he drew two weeks before he was fatally shot. In it the “evil man” character points a gun at a flyer with a picture of Handala that says, “Wanted: Dead or Alive.” Standing behind the man, however, is a crowd of many more handalas, as if they are saying, “You can kill one of us, but we will grow and survive.”

About his beloved Handala, Al-Ali said, “This character was born to survive... I will continue within him even after I die.”

One need only to look at the walls of the West Bank, Gaza, and even San Francisco, where Handala appeared at an anti-war rally last year, to see that Al-Ali’s prediction was on point.

—Laila Al-Arian

Panel Examines Life After Arafat

	University of Maryland Prof. Shibley Telhami (l) and Martin Indyk, director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings, discuss the effects of Chairman Arafat’s death (staff photo L. Al-Arian).

A panel at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC examined “Palestinian Politics after Arafat: What’s next?” The panel, planned following news of the Palestinian president’s illness and hospitalization in France, was held Nov. 11, the day of Arafat’s death.

Amjad Atallah, a former member of the Palestinian Authority’s Negotiation Affairs Department, said that, when discussing the failure of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, “any attempt to pin the blame on any single individual” (as many analysts and politicians have done with Yasser Arafat) is “disingenuous.”

The three major institutions that have survived Arafat are the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the Palestinian Authority (PA), and Fatah, Atallah noted. Because Arafat was a “larger than life figure,” he noted, these institutions, which have separate functions and distinct legal mandates, “tended to get blurred and confused in the personality of the president as an individual.”

Recognized by the Arab League as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, the PLO is the party that negotiates and signs treaties with Israel, Atallah explained. Fatah is the largest Palestinian grassroots secular movement, with a presence in the West Bank, Gaza, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. The PA was created through an agreement between the PLO and Israel to administer certain aspects of Palestinian life under occupation. One of the first effects of Arafat’s death, Atallah explained, is these three organizations have “once again split into their original mandates.”

Mahmoud Abbas became PLO chairman a few hours after Arafat’s death. Fatah is now led by Faruq Qaddumi, one of the group’s original founders, who remained in exile and did not accept the Oslo process, charging that Palestinians were functioning as an administering authority for the Israeli occupation. Rawhi Fattuh will serve as president of the PA for 60 days, until elections are held.

However, according to Atallah, more important than organizational structure is “the question of popular legitimacy, which is now going to be the single greatest concern of the Palestinian leaders.” Atallah presented three possible scenarios for electing a new Palestinian president. The first option is to present PLO chairman Abbas as a candidate, in effect combining the PLO and PA positions. If the Israelis do not facilitate the elections, but continue to close borders, impose curfews or launch incursions into Palestinian areas, then the PLO by decree can appoint a president, who must then be approved by the Palestinian Legislative Council, undermining chances for a democratic election.

Atallah cited as a last option keeping the PA and PLO positions separate, meaning the PA presidency would be ceremonial.

In moving forward, he concluded, the Palestinians are concerned with “developing a system of governance...that relies on Palestinian popular will and not on American policy or Israeli goodwill.”

Reflecting on Arafat’s death, Shibley Telhami, professor of Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, said the late Palestinian leader’s legacy is that he made Palestinian statehood possible, legitimized Israel in the Arab world, and “wanted to make sure that Israel’s path to making peace with the Arab world went through the Palestinians.”

Arafat became prominent following the “humiliating Arab defeat” in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Months later, Telhami explained, there was a battle in the Jordanian town of Karama in which Israeli troops went after PLO concentrations. When the battle did not go well for Israel, Arafat became a symbol, and the next morning “thousands went to sign up for PLO participation.”

However, Telhami continued, during the past four years Arabs have viewed Arafat as a “paralyzed man” who was “incapable of addressing problems.” There also has been an “assault on the idea of Arab nationalism” and a two-state solution at the Arab and Islamic levels and from within Israel itself, Telhami suggested. Coupled with the rise of Hamas and Islamic nationalism, Arafat’s passing “is really the passing of an era,” he concluded.

“Not too many Israelis are going to mourn Arafat’s passing,” said Martin Indyk, director of Brookings’ Saban Center for Middle East Policy. Describing Arafat as a “perpetual thorn” in Israel’s side, the former U.S. ambassador to Israel—who, as a staffer at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, helped found the AIPAC-spinoff Washington Institute for Near East Policy—said those on the right of the Israeli political spectrum view the deceased leader as a “terrorist pure and simple,” while those on the left feel a “deep sense of betrayal.”

According to Indyk, Arafat also helped create a “broad consensus within Israeli society that the only solution to this problem that the Palestinians posed to Israel’s survival and security and self-definition as a Jewish democracy, was to separate Israelis from Palestinians.”

In addition, Indyk continued, Arafat probably would have considered as a victory Ariel Sharon’s Gaza Disengagement Plan, which calls for Israel’s removal of illegal Jewish settlers in exchange “for nothing,” the lifelong Israel-firster maintained, “rather than [trading] territory for peace.”

For Israel, the Australian-born Indyk said, Arafat’s death has “removed the argument that there is no partner to deal with.” The Israeli defense establishment recognizes that it now has an opportunity to help build a moderate Palestinian leadership, he concluded.

Flynt Leverett, former senior director for the Middle East Initiative of the National Security Council, said he hopes Arafat’s death will be an “opportunity for both parties to move back...to the political process.”

Noting President George W. Bush’s “difficult relationship” with Arafat, Leverett said the administration will now likely increase its involvement in the conflict, from helping to coordinate Palestinian elections to making the Gaza disengagement plan a “coordinated process.”

It is important for the U.S. to link all its actions to the road map, Leverett argued. He predicted that the administration will not ask Sharon to negotiate his positions on final status issues, however, because President Bush and Vice President Cheney “have convictions on these issues.”

The Bush administration, which “finds diplomacy daunting,” missed an opportunity by deciding not to send Secretary of State Colin Powell to Arafat’s funeral in Cairo, Leverett said. While Arafat’s passing has paved the way for the U.S. to push for progress in the political process, Leverett said he was “not at all optimistic that this administration will take advantage of those opportunities.”

—Laila Al-Arian