The intentional humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

There has been a lot of discussion in the press, not to mention on this board, about the Israel’s motivations in Operation Cast Lead. Many will claim that Olmert, Barak and Livini’s main aim was to stop Hamas from firing rockets into Israel and threatening its population. “Security for Israel” and “Israel has a right to defend itself” are the most often repeated mantras from Israeli officials, their sympathisers and allies. Others on this blog, including myself, have made a case that this war was not about the rockets given that the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas had worked effectively and put an end to hostile fire across the border. Other secondary Israeli motivations include its upcoming elections in February, the outgoing US President Bush and the need for the IDF to restore its reputation after it failed to defeat Hezbollah in 2006.

This 22 day war produced a staggering number of dead civilians – over 1300 – and scores more wounded (estimates range between 4000-5000). Just like the thousand-plus Lebanese civilians who died in 2006, Gaza’s dead have also been reduced to a sad consequence of the war. Casualties are to be expected during such periods of hostility and if they are not intentional then it is somewhat excusable. Following this logic means Israel is, yet again, immune from condemnation and, worse still, from being held to account for its war crimes. Again I have elsewhere argued, following Mirko Bagaric, that the only thing that matters in war are the consequences. This includes the dead civilians even if they are accidently caught in the cross-fire.

Israel and its supporters would like the world to believe that the 1300 dead Gazans are the unavoidable costs of the war. This, however, is not the case. It seems, as Ben White writes in The Guardian, that Israel did deliberately target civilians as part of its war strategy. He writes:

There is . . . no shortage of evidence available that points to rather different Israeli aims [for the war other than Palestinian rockets, Israeli elections, and deterrence] . . . Politicians, diplomats and journalists are by and large shying away from the obvious, namely that Israel has been deliberately targeting Palestinian civilians and the very infrastructure of normal life, in order to – in the best colonial style – teach the natives a lesson.

White goes on list “three alternative purposes” behind the operation in Gaza which move beyond the generic explanations. His three findings are summarised below:

1. The first aim is to humiliate and weaken Hamas. On the one hand, this seems obvious, but contrary to how the goal is often understood, this is not primarily to protect the Israeli public – as pointed out previously, ceasefires and negotiations are far more likely to deliver security for Israeli citizens – but rather it is a political goal. Hamas had withstood isolation, a siege, mass arrests, and an attempted western-backed coup. Moreover, cracks were appearing in the international community’s resolve to parrot Israel’s line on Hamas. The group, with its resilience and ability to deliver on negotiated ceasefires, was threatening the chance to make a deal with the Ramallah “moderates” [i.e. Abbas and the PA].

What is in store for Gaza’s population now?

Ahdaf Soueif’s article “The Palestinians say: ‘This is a war of extermination’ ” details some of the most horrific scenes the people of Gaza faced in the last three weeks. The stories Soueif records are not new – indeed, despite what Israeli officials have tried to tell the world, images from Gaza substantiate what can be found in the article. In Egypt at the general hospital at el-Arish she asks a Gazan man who he has accompanied there:

“I’m here with my nephew. He’s 19. Shrapnel in his head. He was sitting with his friends. He’s a student. Architecture. The helicopter dropped a bomb and seven of the group were killed and six were injured. They found a boy’s hand on a 3rd floor balcony.”

And Soueif goes on to write:

They [the Palestinians] describe bombs which break into 16 parts, each part splintering into 116 fragments, the white phosphorus which water cannot put out; which seems to die and then flares up again.

No one I spoke to has any doubt that the Israelis are committing war crimes. According to the medics here, to reports from doctors inside the Gaza Strip and to Palestinian eye-witnesses, more than 95% of the dead and injured are civilians. Many more will probably be found when the siege is lifted and the rubble is cleared. The doctors speak of a disproportionate number of head injuries – specifically of shrapnel lodged in the brain.

They also speak of the extensive burns of white phosphorus. These injuries are, as they put it, ‘incompatible with life’. They are also receiving large numbers of amputees. This is because the damage done to the bone by explosive bullets is so extensive that the only way the doctors in Gaza can save lives is by amputating.

Beyond this, and since writing her article, Soueif has uncovered the beginnings of another Israeli initiative which involves, under the auspices of humanitarian urgency, the permanent transfer of Palestinians from Gaza. Sonja Karkar, from the organization Woman for Palestine, outlines the following:

Racism: Arab-Black African Relations in North Africa

Dear Readers,

By now I am sure you are aware of my position on racism. In previous posts I have rallied against the Israeli state and certain segments of Israeli civil society for institutionalizing racism as a form of power over Palestinians and as a political mechanism to control national political discourse. I also have written and spoken about the scourge and legacy of colonial racism. My last post highlighted the twin forms of discrimination faced by Australian man Hussein Mumin who was both homeless and Black. I remember only too vividly how Andrew Fraser was able to gain momentary notoriety and fame (amongst a small but vocal segment of the population) for his obscene references to Black Africans- especially the Sudanese- as inferior humans, an argument he based on long discredited scientific evidence popular with Hitler and a central part of Nazi and Neo-Nazi propaganda. Before the Nazi’s, Fraser’s “science” was used by pro-slavery groups in the United States in the nineteenth century. Government silence on the issue was disquieting but even more troubling was the defence of Fraser’s right to free speech, by none other than the Minister for Education at the time, Dr Brendan Nelson. His colleague, former Federal Minister for Immigration in the last Howard government, Kevin Andrews, did not go quite as far as Fraser in his demonization of the Sudanese communities in Australia in 2007,  but skirted the edge of overt racism with his comments. The 2005 Cronulla riots, the recent bombings of Asian properties in WA and this weeks news on the anti-Semitic facebook scandal demonstrate the existence of racist attitudes in contemporary Australia. Racism remains a major issue for contemporary societies and the election of Barak Obama, while promising , should not deflect us from the reality of the continuing problems associated with racism throughout the world.

But in this post I want to focus not on Australia but on the recent racist trends in the North African context.

Blogging and Facebook politics on Arab Media & Society

Arab Media & Society, for those of you who aren’t familiar with it, is a really exciting publication that is a kind of hybrid breed, combining the reader-friendly layout, graphics, and images of a magazine with in-depth academic analysis.  The current Fall 2008 issue has a lot of interest, from an analysis of the rhetoric and media techniques of Beshir Gemayal, featuring video and English translations of his speeches, to three articles on cyberpolitics in the Egyptian world: two analysing the Egyptian blogosphere, and one on Facebook politics.  There’s also an analysis of what the rise in private media outlets means for Indonesia, and a look at the reception of Deutsche Welle in the Arab world.

–L.L. Wynn

In Memoriam: Youssef Chahine

The great, probably greatest, Egyptian film director Youssef Chahine died two days ago in Egypt.  He made his first film in 1950 and was known for launching the film career of another Egyptian film great, Omar Sharif.

You can read coverage of his work and his death at AFP, Time Magazine, BBC, The Guardian, Al-Jazeera English.

–L.L. Wynn

In memoriam: Dr Abdelwahab El-Messiri

Dr Abdelwahab El-Messiri, April 2008

Thursday morning, July 3, 2008, Dr Abdelwahab El-Messiri passed away after a long bout with cancer. Dr El-Messiri was from the small Egyptian town of Damanhour in the Nile Delta, but when his brilliance was discovered by teachers in high school, they helped him to apply for a Fulbright fellowship to attend Columbia University, where he received a masters degree. He went on to complete a PhD in comparative literature at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He returned to Egypt to teach literature at Ain Shams University.

He is most famous in Egypt for writing the many-volumed “Encyclopedia of Jews, Judaism and Zionism.” Anyone who has traveled in the Arab world knows that for many Arabs, hatred for Zionism all too easily shades into a thoughtless anti-Semitism.  But El-Messiri actively fought against this and his work clearly repudiated nonsense like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  He never allowed anyone to utter a disparaging word about Jews or Judaism in his presence, reminding them of the clear difference between Judaism and Zionism.

El-Messiri’s attention turned to politics more recently when he signed on, in 2007, to be the coordinator of Kifaya, a grassroots pro-democracy movement in Egypt.  But he maintained his active interest in literature, and he recently published an illustrated bilingual English-Arabic edition of his magnificent translation of Samuel Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Torture and blogging: “I forgot my password”

There’s a brief but poignant article on Associated Press about an Egyptian blogger who was arrested after the 6 April protests and only just released after being tortured in detention.

“We were subjected to electric shocks, to beatings and there was no food and or drink for the first few days,” blogger Karim el-Beheiri told AFP a day after his release. “We went through weeks of torture and humiliation.” …

These little lines in the article give us a moment of insight into the psychological effect of torture on the blogger:

He said the first thing he wanted to do when he got home after the release was to blog the events.

“But I couldn’t remember my own password.”

NPR reviews “Umm Kalthoum: A Voice Like Egypt”

I first saw Virginia Danielson and Michael Goldman’s documentary, “Umm Kalthoum: A Voice Like Egypt,” when I was in graduate school and it deeply shaped my appreciation for Arab popular culture.  Before watching the film, I honestly just couldn’t understand why everyone loved the low, almost masculine voice of Umm Kalthoum so much.  After seeing the film, it all made sense to me, and so by the time I was sitting in a Cairo nightclub in 2001, watching famous belly dancer Dina perform to an instrumental version of Inta Omri (“You Are My Life”), I could appreciate the reverence of the audience as nearly every person in the room quietly sang along to the music.  There was a kind of electricity in the room, a measure of how the singer’s powerful charisma has survived long after her death.

I don’t know why NPR is just now discovering the documentary, which is more than 10 years old (IMDB dates it to 1996, while NPR calls it “recent”!).  But it’s a good opportunity to listen to and watch some classic clips of Umm Kalthoum singing, and it will whet your appetite for the full documentary.

–L.L. Wynn

“We will not be celebrating”

“We’re not celebrating Israel’s anniversary”

The letter linked to above (full text at the end of this posting) appeared in The Guardian’s letters section on 30 April.  It’s notable that all signatories are Jewish activists.  It made me think about how credibility is conferred (or not) on one’s ideological and theoretical positions by virtue of one’s ethnic, religious, national or sexual identity.  For example, remember when a few weeks ago Khaldoun experienced some racist comments posted to the blog that provoked a rethinking of our comments policy?  One of the comments that we decided not to publish claimed that our blog postings and positions were transparently the thinking of “Arab Moslems.”  This comically points to the fallacies of simplistic reasoning about the relationship between identity and theory, since most of Khaldoun’s contributors are not Muslim and only a couple of us are Arab.  But it is a reminder that people do make those links, and that knowledge or assumptions about an author’s identity influences how people read her or his theories.  In the case of this Guardian letter, the authors clearly decided that their position on Israel’s 60th anniversary would be strengthened by pointing out to readers that they were Jewish.

I had reason to think about the links between ideological credibility and identity recently when I was in Cairo.

Bloggers report on strike in Egypt

On April 6th, protests took place in Egypt against the rising costs of basic foods. There are English-language reports in the International Herald Tribune and on Reuters, among other places. Egyptian security forces brutally suppressed these demonstrations; according to international journalist reports, anywhere from 200 (IHT) to 500 protesters (Bloomberg) have been arrested.

AFP reports that the Egyptian security forces have arrested two bloggers who wrote about the protest and its suppression, as well as the organizer of the Facebook group that has called for another strike in May. AFP argues that this symbolizes the rising political power of bloggers in Egypt (something that I’ve already commented on at Khaldoun and Culture Matters).

To that end, I thought I’d provide links to a few blogs where the fallout from the strike is being described. In Arabic, there is tadamonmasr, which reports that at least 4 have been killed in Mahalla al-Kubra (a poor neighborhood that was a center of protest), including a 15-year old boy shot in the head by police. Tadamonmasr compares the actions of the Egyptian security forces to the Zionist state’s attacks on Palestinian youths, and describes the murdered protesters as “martyrs.” Also in Arabic is an anonymous blog site devoted specifically to the 6 April Strike with extensive pictures and descriptions of the protest. For those of you who don’t read Arabic, Sunbula has been translating some of the Arabic-language blog postings on KABOBfest.

I’ll post more links as I come across them.

- L.L. Wynn

Update 9 April 2008: See al-Jazeera for more English-language coverage, and Egyptian blogger Zeinobia reviews the media coverage of the strike in the Egyptian press.