Tag: Palestinians

Hisham Sharabi, ad patres

On By Martin Kramer

I met Hisham Sharabi only once, when I was a visiting professor at Georgetown ten years ago. It was late at night, and we shared an elevator on the way out of the building. It wasn’t at all memorable, yet I remember it—I suppose because I’d been reading him for so long. He died of cancer in Beirut on Thursday, at the age of 77, and his departure marks the end of an era. He formed one corner of that formidable Palestinian triangle, comprised of Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Edward Said, and himself, that defined academe as war by other means. Now all three are gone.

As a Palestinian activist, Sharabi had the least impact of the three: he was a bit too academic. But he was the one most likely to surprise you by some brutally frank insight into the Arab condition. His book Neo-Patriarchy is loaded with sweeping generalizations that would be denounced as orientalist were any non-Arab to make them. Last May, when Seymour Hersh claimed that neo-conservatives had cooked up the idea that Arabs were “particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation,” I brought this quote from Sharabi:

A principal technique of child-rearing in the middle-class Arab family is shaming…. The child’s physical functions, particularly his sexual functions, become the instruments of control. The child becomes ashamed of his body and its functions…. In the more traditional families, emphasis on ritualistic purity only strengthens the awareness of physical impurity and heightens the feeling of embarrassment associated with the body…. The child’s experience of sex is chaotic, painful, and humiliating.

Sexual frustration figured in his amusing account (in his Arabic memoir, Embers and Ashes) of his first encounter with striptease, while a young student in Chicago in the 1940s. (It’s translated here.) But there was something sadly poignant, and even ominous, about this passage:

There is not a single Arab student who does not experience feelings of disappointment after arriving in America. The first disappointment is that they discover that American girls are not all as pretty as they appear in the movies and the magazines. The girls who are very beautiful are difficult to befriend because the competition over them is strong. One must spend months before being able to befriend a reasonably attractive girl. I know young men from Arab countries who have spent years in America without having romantic relationships or sexual encounters.

The fact that America, less beautiful up close, offers no escape from sexual frustration may belong somewhere in explanations of anti-Americanism among young Arab men, and even of 9/11.

Sharabi was born and partly raised in Jaffa, but he will be buried in Beirut. He did return to Jaffa, at least twice as far as I know—once to make a documentary film with Amos Oz, and again to attend Abu-Lughod’s funeral. But Beirut is where Sharabi went to college (at the American University), and it’s where he first became politically active in the cult-like pan-Syrian movement of Antun Saadeh. Sharabi also returned to Lebanon after his retirement from Georgetown in 1998. I have a paperback copy of his 1966 book, Nationalism and Revolution in the Arab World, and the back cover describes him as “a native of Lebanon.” I invite others who knew him well to parse that, but it suggests a certain complexity that shouldn’t be completely subsumed as he’s inducted into the Palestinian pantheon.

The Expulsion That Never Was

On By Martin Kramer

Among the predictions about the war that didn’t pan out, there is one that hasn’t been subjected to post-war ridicule, but that very much deserves it. This is the December letter, signed by over 1,000 academics, predicting and warning against Israel’s possible “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians in the “fog of war.” The letter ended with this recommendation: “We urge our government to communicate clearly to the government of Israel that the expulsion of people according to race, religion or nationality would constitute crimes against humanity and will not be tolerated.”

The United States made no such communication to the Israeli government, yet lo and behold, no expulsion took place. In the “fog of war,” the Palestinian street demonstrated wildly for Saddam, Palestinian politicians jockeyed for position, and Israel prepared with gas masks and duct tape, like a proper ally/client of the United States. All of this was completely forseeable by anyone with an iota of expertise, experience, and common sense. It was not foreseen by many of America’s leading Middle East “experts,” who put their names to this ridiculous letter, and who in fact seem to have initiated it.

One of the original signatories was Zachary Lockman, professor of Middle Eastern studies and history at New York University. Lockman justified the letter in this way:

People [in the Israeli government] have been calling for expulsion for years, but the Israeli government, including Sharon, realizes that it would not be acceptable under normal circumstances. But in middle of a war in Iraq, especially if they attack Israel, there would be panic and one can imagine all sorts of horrible scenarios. The public could countenance this, or the U.S. could turn a blind eye.

My comment back in December: “Let me not put too fine a point on it: anyone signing this letter, effectively condemning Israel in advance for something it has no intention of doing, is either an ignoramus or a propagandist.” Now that we are after the fact, it’s a point worth reiterating.

I sorted out the Middle East “experts” among the signatories and listed them back in December, so I won’t waste space here. But let me just list the original signatories (eight of fifteen) who are professors of Middle Eastern studies:

Joel Beinin, Stanford
Beshara Doumani, UC Berkeley
Zachary Lockman, New York University
Timothy Mitchell, New York University
Gabi Piterberg, UC Los Angeles
Glenn E. Robinson, Naval Postgraduate School
Ted Swedenburg, University of Arkansas
Judith Tucker, Georgetown University

And among the “additional signatories,” special mention should be made of Laurie Brand, University of Southern California, who is president-elect of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA).

These people have (once again) brought shame on their discipline. Those among them who claim special expertise on Israel and its policies have discredited themselves as interpreters and teachers of that country’s politics and society. And they are now collectively in the moral position of owing apologies to the Israeli people and the Israeli government—of Ariel Sharon. I suggest they make them at the next MESA conference.

Ignatieff’s Empire

On By Martin Kramer

Michael Ignatieff has a meandering piece in today’s New York Times Magazine on American empire. In it, he tells us that “leaving the Palestinians to face Israeli tanks and helicopter gunships is a virtual guarantee of unending Islamic wrath against the United States.” The exit from the present situation is a “United Nations transitional administration [for the Palestinians], with U.N.-mandated peacekeepers to provide security for Israelis and Palestinians.” Without this, victory in Iraq won’t staunch the hemorrhaging of U.S. prestige in the Middle East. These ideas have been bouncing around for some time. Now they get the endorsement of a noted journalist and Harvard professor, in the most prominent spot in the print media.

I admit I have a hard time taking Ignatieff seriously on the Middle East, in part because of an article he published back in April in the London Guardian entitled “Why Bush Must Send in His Troops.” Before you decide that Ignatieff is a sure guide to things Middle Eastern, read it.

You’ll find that it includes, in one form or another, every trendy calumny against Israel. There is the infamous South African analogy: Palestinian self-rule was really “a Bantustan, one of those pseudo-states created in the dying years of apartheid to keep the African population under control.” The Palestinian Authority had “failed because Israel never allowed it to become a state.” Reading through this piece, you would never know that there were Israeli-Palestinian negotiations at Camp David because they’re never mentioned. Perhaps Ignatieff didn’t want to get into the debate over what happened or didn’t happen in those talks, in which an Israeli leader proposed the creation of a Palestinian state on virtually all the lands occupied in 1967. But that would only have complicated things for Ignatieff’s inevitably Solomonic verdict: “Both sides have an equal share of blame.”

As for the Palestinian half of the blame, Ignatieff quickly shifts some of that to Israel’s shoulders, too. Israel kept the Palestinian Authority too weak. “Had Israel realized that its own security depended on assisting in the establishment of a viable and, if necessary, ruthless Palestinian Authority it might now be secure.” In particular, Israel did not allow the PA “enough military and police capability.”

Not enough? Did Ignatieff have a clue about what was going on in the PA? The PA (even according to David Hirst in the Guardian) had forty to fifty thousand persons in its security services—ten to twenty thousand more than the number agreed upon in Oslo II. As one observer put it, “the PA has become the most heavily policed territory in the world, with an officer-to-resident ratio of 1:50; the U.S. ratio for police officers and sheriff’s deputies, in contrast, is 1:400.” So what, in Ignatieff’s view, would have been “enough military and police capability”? (And why military?)

In fact, the problem was never one of capability. It was one of will. The PA decided to wage war with the weapons it had been given to keep peace. Some think that had there been fewer “security services” and guns, there might not have been an intifada at all.

But the absolute low point of this article is Ignatieff’s invocation of the “sacrifice of the young people on both sides in a mutually reinforcing death cult.” It’s an insufferable case of false symmetry, especially coming as it did in the midst of the worst suicide bombings. Even if you believe Israelis and Palestinians are locked in a “cycle of violence,” you’re showing yourself ignorant if you compare the suicidal “death cult” rampant among Palestinians to the stoic resolve of Israelis.

“The Americans now face a historic choice,” pronounced Ignatieff back in April. “For 50 years, they have played the double game of both guaranteeing Israel’s security and serving as honest broker in the region. This game can’t go on.” This is the greatest of all the calumnies—not just against Israel, but against generations of U.S. policymakers. A “double game”? It’s been an immensely successful strategy, which won the Cold War in the Middle East and produced the Israeli-Egyptian peace. This “double game” has prevented a general conflagration for thirty years. And it must go on, because the moment America’s commitment to Israel seems diminished in Arab eyes, the region is destined to spiral into war, just as it did in 1967 and 1973.

None of the nonsense Ignatieff published in the Guardian would have gotten past an editor at the Times, but all of it is implicit in today’s new piece. 9/11 has turned everyone into a Middle East expert for fifteen minutes. That’s about as long as it will take you to get through the lead article of today’s Magazine. Time’s up.