The End of the Peace Process, page 10
There are two especially troubling aspects of the practice of censorship as it exists today in Arab societies. One is that it does not work. It has not made one regime better, one ruler more loved, one army more efficient, one newspaper or university more up-to-date, one society more secure and modern. Its damage even to the regimes that enforce it is incalculable. It has made Arab societies as a whole the least democratic on earth. It has dispirited and discouraged every Arab who today is ashamed even to be an Arab. Untold riches have been lost to us in spirits broken, in talents exiled, in research, exploration, thought left untried, all because of censorship and the prohibition on free debate and discussion. Censorship has turned people away from their governments, and individuals away from other individuals. The question is then why, since it does not work, censorship is still there.
This is the second and more disquieting aspect of censorship in Arab societies today. The fact is that as individuals we can no longer evade responsibility for our own social evils, or for the governments and rulers that are either unjust or unresponsive to the real needs of the majority. Censorship exists because many individuals collaborate with it: individuals who censor themselves, who say it is better to be inside a regime trying to do good than to be outside and marginal, individuals who say what difference does it make if I allow myself to be censored since after all the world goes on. Everyone complains privately, but few, very few like Nasr Hamid Abu Zeid in Egypt or Laith Shubailat in Jordan, take the next step and say what no one else is willing to say in public. Above all, we accept censorship as we do nearly everything else that has been forced on us in this miserable, damp, gloomy period of mediocrity and defeat, because we say that we are powerless, the world is against us, Zionism and imperialism have won. We are told that we must be realistic and pragmatic—a nauseating word as it is used by our leading policy intellectuals to justify their own compromises, Baathists or Marxists one day, advisers to presidents and princes the next—we have been told, we must realize that we have no alternative, etc., etc.
There can be no meaningful compromise on censorship, on the banning of books and ideas, on the imprisonment and torture of critics or opponents of the regime. The time has come to hold the practice and the theory up to the scrutiny of reason and light, and to ask publicly why censorship is still necessary and whether it would be better for all Arabs to do away with it entirely, and to say that as prospective citizens of the twenty-first century we are entitled to say what we want to say and read what is available to be read, and enough of all this nonsense about security and danger and protecting ourselves against some imagined outside enemy. After all, Elizabeth Taylor is still before the public despite being banned in Egypt, and Time and The Economist still publish their opinions forty years after they were censored. But look at us.
Yasir Arafat and his Authority use censorship not just to silence and threaten opponents of his policy, but also to hide his past mistakes from discussion and accountability. He accepted an agreement with Israel that said nothing about Palestinian self-determination on the one hand, and tacitly accepted occupation and the settlements on the other. For the past three years his partners Rabin and Peres have been building and expanding settlements; they have sealed the doom of Arab Jerusalem; they have destroyed the Palestinian economy and corrupted its political class; they have imposed military rule on areas B and C, and have simply walked away with over 90 percent of the land. All of this with Mr. Arafat’s cooperation. After Netanyahu came to power and exposed the peace process for the fraud it always was, Arafat is pleading without dignity or credibility with anyone who will listen that he needs help. All the while his security forces torture and kill anyone who objects to his colossal failures as leader. He announces a four-hour general strike, which will hurt no one except his people (Israelis don’t do their shopping in Ramallah and Nablus), and he urges people to go to Jerusalem on their own to pray. This man has learned nothing from any of the nonviolent struggles against imperialism, has taken nothing from Gandhi or from Martin Luther King, and he has never understood the meaning of armed struggle as practiced by the Vietnamese or the Algerians. The South African experience means nothing to Arafat. What he should be doing now—instead of strengthening his power inside Palestine like the incompetent general that he is—is to lead a series of nonviolent demonstrations against the settlements, announce publically that he does not want to fight Israelis but rather the bricks and stones of their settlements and that he will do so unarmed, leading his people in large numbers, instead of sitting behind his guards and his palaces in Ramallah and Gaza. We should all speak out against a policy that will cost us the rest of Palestine unless it is changed, and unless the leadership is forced to change or be gone.
Al-Hayat, September 4, 1996
Al-Khaleej, September 4, 1996
The Gulf Today, September 6, 1996
The Nation, September 23, 1996
Courrier International, October 17, 1996
Chapter Thirteen
On Visiting Wadie
THE PRINCIPAL PALESTINIAN city on the West Bank is Ramallah, about ten miles north of Jerusalem. My parents and I spent the summer of 1942 there. I recall it as a leafy, slow-paced, and prosperous town of freestanding villas, largely Christian in population, served by a well-known Friends High School. Today it is the West Bank capital of the Palestine Authority set up under Yasir Arafat as a direct result of the Israeli-PLO negotiations; most of its Christian residents have been replaced by Muslims, it has considerably increased in size and is now full of office buildings, shops, restaurants, schools, institutes, and taxis, all catering to “al-Dafeh” or “The Bank” as it is known. But there are no hotels in Ramallah, nor is it any longer a resort, as I remembered it. While I was there during the second half of March, Mr. Arafat’s office in Gaza announced that the West Bank was to be renamed the Northern District [of Palestine]. No one I spoke to understood what that particular change really meant. But it is true that more than in most places, and despite their long history, the Palestinian territories seem to spawn new names, jargons, initials, and shorthands. They are a feature of the unstable circumstances in which Palestinians now live.
My twenty-four-year old son Wadie works as a volunteer in Ramallah, at an NGO (nongovernmental organization) called the Democracy and Workers’ Rights Center (DWRC) which is headed by an activist lawyer, Hassan al-Barghouti. (The Barghoutis are probably the single largest family-clan of Palestinians that exists anywhere; estimates of their uncounted number range from seven to twenty thousand, many of whom live in the United States as well as other Arab countries). Wadie discovered DWRC on his own when he visited Palestine from Cairo during the winter of 1995. He is the older of my two children; his sister Najla (twenty-two) is now a senior in college. Although they both were born in the United States and grew up as New York City kids, only Wadie has developed a consuming interest in the Arab world, the Arabic language, and of course Palestine. At age fourteen he asked us if he could be tutored in Arabic, and he was. As they were growing up, both children heard the Arabic that my wife Mariam and I normally communicate in; both came to understand it to some degree, but neither was able to speak, read, or write it with any fluency. Until 1982 we would visit our families in Lebanon, but we stopped going there regularly after that year: the civil war and Israeli invasion finished off Lebanon for us as a summertime destination, and as an Arab-speaking environment for the children to enjoy and learn from.
Still, Wadie persisted in his solitary efforts to acquire a working knowledge of his parents’ language: in college he took eight semesters of Arabic and made heroic efforts to speak to relatives and friends, despite the fact that he was inordinately sensitive to their natural wish to correct his mispronunciation or grammatical errors. Arabic is a difficult language for at least three reasons, all of them applicable in Wadie’s case. It is made up of a spoken version that varies dramatically from country to country; a Moroccan cannot readily be understood by a Lebanese, for example, though Palestinians, Syrians, and Egyptians—each with a distinctive accent—can communicate with each other. Which dialect does one learn? The written version, on the other hand, is common to all Arabic readers and writers, but it is an almost completely different language from the spoken dialects; its relationship to demotic Arabic is rather like Latin’s to French, Italian, and Spanish. The rich vocabulary, grammatical complexity, and rhetorical structures of written or classical Arabic are difficult, but necessary to master. Linguistic knowledge and fluent literacy are an almost obsessive concern for most educated Arabs. Third, there is a cultural barrier against Arabic in the United States. Arabic is associated with violence and terrorism and, of course, anti-Israel rhetoric; Arabic literature is scanted and the Arab contribution to civilization is usually ignored or downgraded in universities. For a young person growing up in New York, the challenge to press on and actually get hold of the language is formidable: learning Arabic was the hardest way for a young Arab-American like Wadie to understand his heritage, but it is also the most serious.
Wadie majored in history in college and wrote a senior thesis on the Bandung Conference of 1955; meanwhile, his Arabic kept getting better and better, almost unbeknownst to us. We should not have been surprised that the kid who surmounted an early learning disability, who suffered osteomyelitis and a shattered elbow from hockey and bike-riding respectively and, despite both, was an honors student and a member of the tennis team, turned out to be as persistent in his resolve as he was. He graduated in 1994, then won a Fulbright award to study intensive Arab language and culture in Cairo. During that year he steeped himself in novelists from Mahfouz to Ghitany, the films of Rihani, Shahine, Adil Imam, television and radio serials like Layali Hilmiyia, Koranic studies, as well as the dubious pleasures (afforded by seedy cafés) of the hookah. He applied to and was accepted to law school in the United States but, he informed us last spring, decided to defer it for another year. His exploratory visits from Cairo to the occupied territories convinced him that he wanted the experience of living in the new, post-Oslo Palestine now, and having settled on DWRC as the place to work, he moved to Ramallah last September. Barghouti gave Wadie and Rudiger, a German volunteer, a tiny unfurnished house rent free, plus $100 a month.
In December the house was broken into. Wadie’s glasses, his heavy metal CDs, the CD player, and a mobile telephone’s battery charger were stolen; his plane tickets and money were not. Though he dismissed it as “a typical Third World crime,” the robbery seemed to wound him, and he resolved to find a new place, which he did in Ar-Ram, a small outlying town near the Jerusalem–West Bank border. He moved in there in January, this time with his girlfriend, who works as a freelance photographer. It is a matter of considerable wonder to his parents that throughout his stay Wadie has taken no money from them. He is very spartan in his lifestyle but has also managed to supplement his DWRC pittance by producing English translations for academics, researchers, and journalists; this has financed trips he’s taken to Jordan and Upper Egypt.
In the meantime the peace process has continued to unfold. I was an early dissenter from what I interpreted as a poor deal for Palestinians; for the past two decades I had had few doubts that a negotiated political settlement was the only valid option for our struggle with Israel, but, after the Gulf War and his disastrous alliance with Saddam Hussein, I had lost confidence in Arafat’s abilities to lead or truly represent our national interests. The Oslo accords were the result of his crippled, but still potent, position as Palestinian leader of which the Israelis took full advantage. Coincidentally I was diagnosed with leukemia, which made my exit from Palestinian politics (I was a member of the Palestine National Council since 1977) seem imperative to me in 1991, although I continued to write (mainly in the Arabic press) and speak.
For my children, their father’s involvement, plus the enormous hoopla of White House ceremony and media celebration, made Palestine even more of an inevitability in their lives. We had gone as a family to Israel and the territories in 1992 (my first trip since leaving West Jerusalem as a boy in late 1947). Wadie was stirred by what he saw—quite obviously this was the germ of his plans to return there— and this gave added charge to his Arabic studies. Ever the antipolitical skeptic, Najla rejected the whole thing as altogether too much, too involved, and confrontational for her as someone interested in literature, acting, fashion. Since 1992 I came to feel that the changing situation on the ground after Oslo warranted another look; besides, with Wadie there the notion of going as his visitor was attractive, and I could assess what was taking place through his eyes as someone participating in the life of the new post-intifada, post peace accords generation. At this point, however, he could not acquire the permanent residency granted very sparingly to diaspora Palestinians by Israel: he therefore had to exit the country every three months and re-enter as a visitor.
He had had almost seven months of being there when I arrived during a sustained spell of unusually cold and wet weather; Mariam joined us several days later. The February and March bomb outrages had brought down on the territories the closures, arrests, and all-round discomforts that made life for everyone extremely hard. While we were there, Peter Hansen, the Danish Commissioner-General of UNRWA, which is the main aid organization serving Palestinians, spoke out strongly about the dangers—including starvation—to the West Bank and Gaza of Israeli policies. Ramallah itself had been free of Israeli soldiers since December, but what I hadn’t quite bargained for was how isolated and cut off it (as well as the other six “liberated” Palestinian towns) had become.
The maddening complexities of the Oslo Two West Bank map provided for three types of area not including the Jerusalem area, which Israel considers entirely its own. Area A is about 1 percent of the West Bank, and includes Ramallah and the five other main towns spread all over the West Bank, except for Hebron. Area A is under the PA’s jurisdiction. Area B, a network of four hundred villages and adjoining rural areas that comprise 27 percent, is controlled by Israel with the PA as a very junior partner; Area C, which is made up of settlements, and connecting and “by-passing” roads, was entirely Israeli, accounting for the balance of almost 72 percent. Palestinians now speak of their land almost entirely in terms of the Arabic initials “Alif,” “Beh,” and “Jeem.” One difficulty is that you cannot go from one part of Area A to another without going through Area B; this enabled the Israelis in early March to shut off exits and entries to towns like Ramallah in Zone A from Bir Zeit, which is where the leading West Bank university is, in Zone B. Moreover, since the expanded area of Jerusalem takes up almost a quarter of the West Bank and requires a special permit to enter, people from Ramallah find it impossible to enter the city, or even to get to Bethlehem, south of Jerusalem. Entrances and exits to Gaza are also controlled by the Israelis—even Arafat needed special permission to leave—so that negotiating the roads was for the average Palestinian both a costly and often discouraging business. During the time I was there I made repeated, but ultimately unsuccessful, efforts to enter Gaza. In 1992 and 1993, before the peace process Mariam and I did make it there; “peace” has made movement much, much harder for Palestinians.
Wadie was helped in his daily movements by his U.S. passport, although like everyone else he has to queue at all the Israeli barriers. Most of the time he gets around by “service” taxi, which enables you to pay for one seat rather than the whole car. During my visit we rented a car with a Jerusalem (i.e., Israeli) license plate; this made it possible for us to go everywhere except Gaza. The change in road surface and width between Israeli and Palestinian areas is dramatic: roads in the former are wider, landscaped, and cared for, whereas in the latter they are extremely narrow, rutted, potholed, and unattended. It’s as if one suddenly crossed over from Southern California into Bangladesh. As my driver, Wadie first drew attention to this with his comment that, unlike the Palestinians, the Israelis had a mania for building roads; he reminded me of Kipling’s Kim in his knowledge of all the backways and shortcuts in the Ramallah area, as well as each building, road, and alley inside the city. He had the native’s sense of known, familiar space. It was the first time in our lives that I felt that I was in his hands: I needed the feeling, since most of the time I felt disoriented and at a loss.
I stayed at the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem, a well-established albeit elegant and comfortable haunt of journalists, security men, and Israeli as well as Palestinian politicos. The Colony’s staff, however, was halved while I was there because West Bank workers were prevented from coming to Jerusalem by the closures. Yet the alleys of the Old City, a short walk from the Colony, (past St. George’s Cathedral, where I was baptized, and St. George’s School, attended by myself as well as the male members of my family) were clogged with Christian tourists, transporting dreadful little brown crosses in their hands with a look of rapt vacancy, wandering all over, oblivious to the twentieth-century world of conflicting Palestinians and Israelis all around them. As the Holy Land’s nerve center, and the likeliest source of future conflict, Jerusalem has never been especially attractive to me, although I was born there, as were my father, his father, and several generations before them. There is something ungenerous and unyielding about the place that encourages intolerance, given that all sorts of ultimate religious and cultural claims emanate from the city, most of them essentially denying or downgrading the others.
