Author: Martin Kramer

When I last saw Gaza

On By Martin Kramer

The Israeli “disengagement” from Gaza stirs my memory of my only visit to the place. It was twenty-two years ago, before the words intifada, Hamas, and “Oslo” had entered the Israeli-Palestinian lexicon. I had taken up my appointment at Tel Aviv University a couple of years earlier, and we had a treat that semester: the historian Elie Kedourie and his wife Sylvia left the comforts of London to spend the term with us. One of our tasks was to fill up their time with interesting people and trips. Someone had the idea of taking them to Gaza, and I went along to provide small talk on the way. As Elie had a famous aversion to small talk, it was a daunting assignment.

Our guide on that occasion was Zvi Elpeleg. I came to know Zvi quite well in the mid-1990s, when he served as Israeli ambassador to Turkey and opened many doors for me. But back then, I knew him only as a street-smart Arabist who’d served in every war as a military governor. As a young man in the mid-1950s, he had governed a large swath of the Arab-populated “Triangle” in Israel. He later served as a military governor in Gaza in 1956, in the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, in Fayed in Egypt in 1973, and in southern Lebanon in 1982.

In Gaza Elpeleg still knew plenty of people. He had kept up old ties and did some business there. So he was more than happy to plan the day, do the driving, and introduce the Kedouries to some of his friends. In those days, driving an Israeli car through Gaza was a routine exercise, not fraught with any great danger. As we left, Zvi deliberated over whether he should take his sidearm; I don’t even recall whether he did.

During the drive down, I did my best to distract Kedourie, and at one point touched a nerve. Elie had been born and raised in Baghdad; he had left Iraq for Britain in the general Jewish exodus, never to return. Since we were headed into Gaza, I asked him whether he had traveled anywhere else in the Arab world—perhaps to Egypt, about which he had written a great deal. He answered that he hadn’t, and then pointedly added that he didn’t feel any need to do so. I was taken aback, but it reminded me of an old Jewish-American joke. Irv wants to impress his Old-World Jewish mother with his success. “Mama!” he announces triumphantly, “Sheila and I are going to Europe!” “Nice for you,” the old lady mutters dismissively, “I’ve been already.”

Here and there, as we drove through Gaza City, older men waved to Elpeleg or shouted out greetings. He’d obviously left an impression all those years ago. And our prime destination was one of his old interlocutors: Haj Rashad ash-Shawwa, a former mayor of Gaza (twice appointed and twice deposed by Israel) and a big landowner and citrus merchant, who had a long history of shifting to and fro among Israel, Jordan, and Fatah. He also enjoyed the exclusive franchise for issuing travel permits for Gazans who wanted to visit Jordan—the so-called “Shawwa passports”—and applicants formed a crowd outside his offices. Haj Rashad was nearing eighty, which made him the grand old man of Gazan politics.

I can’t say I remember exactly what Haj Rashad and Elie Kedourie said to one another about the issues of the day. Back then, “peace” diplomacy focused on getting Palestinian notables to come out for King Hussein in favor of a Jordanian-Palestinian federation. Haj Rashad was all for it, and so were many Israelis and Americans, but the “Jordanian option” never gelled. I do remember Haj Rashad and Elie hitting it off nicely. Here were two men who shared a memory of British order in the Middle East, who distrusted nationalist passion, and who exchanged views with meticulous civility. So we drank our coffee and mulled over various proposals, unaware that the pressure outside was building toward an explosion. They lived through its beginning, but not to its end: Haj Rashad died of a heart attack in 1988, and Elie died of the same in 1992.

Given the little history I’ve just described, I’ve wondered what Elie would have thought of the Israeli “disengagement” from Gaza. In 1978, he published an article entitled “The Retreat from Algeria” in the Times Literary Supplement. It was of a piece with his reproach of Britain for “abandoning” its responsibilities in the Middle East. “France and Frenchmen were guilty of a wrong no greater than that committed by the conquerors whom they supplanted,” he wrote. “What seems exorbitant and monstrous is for a state deliberately, suddenly and precipitately to withdraw its protection from those who look to it for the defense of their lives and possessions.” Algeria, he once told an interviewer, “was abandoned in the most lamentable and pitiless fashion, from one day to the next. Abandoned without any regard to the interest of those for whom France had taken responsibility for 130 years. That much can be said. In Algeria the French had a great responsibility and they fell down on it.”

But this responsibility—and this was Kedourie’s point—was owed by France to all the inhabitants of Algeria, not only the settlers. The French army had quelled the Algerian insurrection by 1959, he wrote. “This could have been the opportunity for the French state to assume its historic responsibilities, and at least to institute a public order which was not the plaything of the pieds noirs [the Europeans settled in Algeria], which would treat Frenchmen and Muslims as equals, and protect the life, property and livelihood of all without exception.” De Gaulle’s retreat not only betrayed the pieds noirs (who had seen him as their savior); above all it betrayed the Muslims, who were left to the terror and vengeance of the FLN.

This passage, more than any other, makes it impossible to infer anything about Gaza from what Kedourie wrote about Algeria. In leaving Algeria, Kedourie argued, France failed to live up to its universalist ideal. But Israel claims no “civilizing mission,” it has never annexed territory that would compel it to assume full responsibility for large numbers of Palestinians, and its long-standing objective has been to find someone credible to assume that responsibility. In leaving Gaza and putting up a high barrier there and in the West Bank, Israel has spurned the messianism of the far right and the universalism of the far left. It is still inspired by the model of the classic nation-state, in which the dominant nationality enjoys a clear majority and lives behind impermeable borders. Today Israel is reaffirming its faith in that model.

The problem is the weakness of Palestinians who share that faith. In leaving Gaza to the Gazans, Israel hopes to compel the Palestinians to mirror Israel. It’s a gamble: people like Haj Rashad don’t call the shots. Israel will soon find out whether, in the person of Abu Mazen, it has found someone who does.

Those other Orientalists

On By Martin Kramer

A few months back, art historian Kristian Davies sent me a copy of his new book The Orientalists: Western Artists in Arabia, the Sahara, Persia and India. This is more than a lavishly illustrated decoration for a coffee table. It’s a provocative dissent from the Saidian take on nineteenth-century Orientalist art. I’ll let Davies say it himself:

In the 1980s, the great age of deconstructionism, Orientalist paintings were thoroughly deconstructed and dismantled from every angle: the questionable authenticity of what the paintings depicted, the subliminal intentions of the artist, the genre’s ties to imperialism, the supposedly unavoidable corruption of an artist’s perception of the East before even traveling abroad, the way in which artists portrayed women, violence, commerce, the streets, poverty, and architecture, and what the Orient even was. Everything was implicated, every brushstroke, until as is often the final outcome of deconstructionism, one was left with the feeling that one should believe nothing and suspect everything.

“Fortunately,” Davies adds, “in the twenty-plus years since Said’s Orientalism was published, many of his theories have been sufficiently and successfully refuted.” And he goes on to quote Bernard Lewis, John MacKenzie, and myself–very gratifying.

Davies is plainly moved by these paintings. He describes the moment he succumbed to their allure: he turned a corner in the Musée d’Orsay, “and there I saw it: a painting of a camel procession coming directly at me.” It was Léon Belly’s Pilgrims Going to Mecca (1861) and Davies “felt a very potent sensation brewing.” (A detail from that painting is on the book jacket, and an entire chapter is devoted to analyzing it.) The Orientalists is potent, too, written in an accessible style for non-specialists, and the quality of the reproductions is outstanding. (For more, see this review.)

Of course, what keeps the interest in nineteenth-century Orientalist art in an upward trajectory is the fact that, pace Said, today’s “Orientals” are enamored of it. It’s a market that was pioneered by a London dealer in the 1980s, and today some of the most impressive collections are held by private enthusiasts in the Gulf countries. When Christie’s opened shop in Dubai earlier this year, it sent over some outstanding examples of the genre for a showing, in advance of a June auction in London. At that sale, John Frederick Lewis’s A Mid-day Meal, Cairo (1875), which had been shown in Dubai, fetched $4.5 million. It’s mind-boggling.

If you’re in New York City, make a point of seeing the very respectable collection of Orientalist art at the Dahesh Museum, which is now showing off its best pieces in a tenth-anniversary exhibition. (The one I personally most appreciate is Gustav Bauernfeind’s vast and dramatic 1888 depiction of Ottoman forced conscription in the port of Jaffa. Davies devotes a chapter to Bauernfeind as well, and includes two spendid details from this painting.) The best time to visit the Dahesh? The evening of Thursday, September 1: Kristian Davies will be lecturing in the auditorium.

Cole-ture shock

On By Martin Kramer

The Ora-Cole of Ann Arbor, author of the mega-blog “Informed Comment,” and El Presidente-elect of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), Professor Juan Cole, shares his keen ethnographic insights into the killing of American journalist Steven Vincent in Basra last week. An article in the London Telegraph (to which I also linked) reported that investigators were exploring whether Vincent’s murder was some sort of “honor killing.” The thesis: his relationship with his (Iraqi female) translator offended local sensibilities. This provides Cole with an opportunity to dismiss Vincent as a cultural novice:

In Mediterranean culture, a man’s honor tends to be wrought up with his ability to protect his womenfolk from seduction by strange men. Where a woman of the family sleeps around, it brings enormous shame on her father, brothers and cousins, and it is not unknown for them to kill her. These sentiments and this sort of behavior tend to be rural and to hold among the uneducated, but are not unknown in urban areas. Vincent did not know anything serious about Middle Eastern culture and was aggressive about criticizing what he could see of it on the surface, and if he was behaving in the way the Telegraph article describes, he was acting in an extremely dangerous manner.

In other words, Vincent got himself killed, out of ignorance. Implication: his journalism should be dismissed.

It’s certainly refreshing to see Cole slip into the style of Raphael Patai, going on about honor and shame and all that. Pentagon, take note: it’s all true. (But you knew that.)

What reeks of bad taste is Cole’s superior dismissal of Vincent, as if his death somehow proves his ignorance. Point of fact: you can know everything “serious” about Middle Eastern culture and never criticize it even in the mildest way, and still get yourself killed by fanatics.

Examples? Take Malcolm Kerr, a former president of MESA who left UCLA to run the American University of Beirut at the worst possible time, and got himself killed by gunmen on campus. Take Michel Seurat, French sociologist of Islam, who stayed in Beirut at the worst possible time, got himself kidnapped by Islamic Jihad (Hezbollah’s kind), got himself mistreated by his captors, and got himself dead by falling seriously ill in his dungeon. (His body still hasn’t been recovered.) These two Western scholars were born in the Arab world (Kerr in Lebanon, Seurat in Tunisia), spoke fluent Arabic, spent decades in the region, knew all about the dangers and still they died. Should we conclude they were “acting in an extremely dangerous manner”? Or does sole responsibility for their deaths lie with their killers and torturers? And if it does, why should Vincent be an exception?

But maybe what’s really at issue here is Cole’s ego (on his website, it usually is). Beneath his haughty dismissal of Vincent (“did not know anything serious”) lies the fact that Vincent had the audacity to challenge him. Vincent didn’t think much of Cole’s armchair expertise or his claim to be driven by concern for Iraqis, and told Cole just that on his weblog:

You might want to review your own site and how well it reflects love and concern for the Iraqi people. After all, on “Informed Comment,” pro-liberation Iraqi bloggers are accused of being CIA agents, the elections are practically dismissed as window-dressing and every terrorist—no, I mean guerrilla, as Cole would have it—attack is given marquis billing, as if their psychopathic bloodlust discredits the liberation of 26 million people. Whoops, I mean 23.5 million because according to Cole’s Wednesday post, 2.5 million Iraqis support the “resistance.”

Well, I thank Cole for revealing his gut-level concern for the Iraqi people… My question to the Professor is, which Iraqi people—the fascist thugs he calls the “resistance,” or the police, National Guardsmen, politicians, everyday people and eight million voters who comprise the true Iraqi “resistance”? We await his Informed Comment.

Cole didn’t respond then. But now that Vincent is dead, Cole has seized the last word in the argument. Vincent shamed him, but now he has his honor back. He’s taken his revenge. These sentiments and this sort of behavior tend to be rural and to hold among the uneducated, but are not unknown among full professors.

I will give Cole this: he does have cultural knowledge—enough to keep away from Iraq, which he’s never visited. Nothing he’s written has endeared him to any Iraqi faction outside the insurgency—quite the opposite. He’d have no protectors. And as someone who spent years in the Middle East as a Bahai missionary, his life wouldn’t be worth a plugged nickel if he fell into the wrong hands in Shiite country. Were Cole to surface in Iraq, he’d be “acting in an extremely dangerous manner.” So far, he hasn’t.

But as it happens, Cole will be headed for Beirut in December, on the tab of Saudi billionnaire Prince Alwaleed, to whip up support for his Americana Translation Project. (Is it a coincidence that Cole has just written a fawning puff piece at Salon.com, praising the new King Abdullah who “has the smile and goatee of a genial beatnik” and defending the kingdom against all comers, from Michael Moore to the neocons? Who knows? The Saudis have a long history of suborning the Middle East studies establishment.) And once in Beirut, Cole could pop over to Baghdad…

Don’t do it, Juan! Think of your readers! Think of MESA! We’ll keep visiting your blog, we promise, even if you remain a pundit of the armchair.

Addendum: Helena Cobban, another “expert” well out of harm’s way, does much the same thing as Cole: Vincent’s ignorance killed him, and anyway why is his death so significant, when so many other journalists have died? (Well, he was deliberately murdered, for starters.) Here again, Vincent is in good company: look at how Cobban, sidling up to Hezbollah on a visit to Beirut, wants us to understand the murder of Malcolm Kerr: “Killing Malcolm Kerr, an evidently noncombatant community leader, was clearly a major rights abuse”—a “rights abuse”! —but “hundreds of Lebanese Shiites were being killed, kidnapped, and otherwise abused by the occupation forces in those years.” Thanks for the perspective, Helena. We’ll remember it if the fiery ones ever grab you.

Follow-up: Tony Badran brings quotes from Juan Cole and Raphael Patai, and asks if you can tell the difference.