My interview with David Hirst, author of Beware of Small States, reviewed here, was done on behalf of the indispensable

Veteran Middle East correspondent David Hirst, author of the seminal work on the Palestinian plight The Gun and the Olive Branch, has a new release: Beware of Small States, an equally important book on Lebanon’s complex tragedy. The Electronic Intifada contributor Robin Yassin-Kassab interviewed Hirst on his work and views.

Robin Yassin-Kassab: You did your national service in Cyprus and Egypt just before the 1956 Suez War. What effect did your first experience of the Middle East have on you? Why did you end up spending your life in the Middle East, particularly in its more violent corners? Have kidnappings and bannings discouraged you?

David Hirst: Yes, I was one of the last generation of British 18-year-olds obliged to do two years of military service. Politically speaking, it had virtually no effect on me; I was an immature youth from a thoroughly apolitical middle class background, and knew next to nothing about international affairs, and hardly knew, for example, the difference between Arabs and Israelis. But — unusually for a mere private soldier — I sought and secured permission to use a fortnight’s leave to travel round Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon. I enjoyed the experience. After three years at Oxford, I could not think of a career to embark on. Remembering the American University of Beirut, I wrote and asked them if there were any kind of introductory course about the Middle East that I could follow there. There was. With a vague idea of staying there for a couple of years or so, I found myself drifting into journalism, and, taking to it, I ended up staying fifty.

I grew deeply interested in the politics of the region; I also like to think that — having come to the area entirely devoid of preconceptions, or anything more than the most rudimentary knowledge, tabula rasa as it were — the opinions and interpretations I developed about the Arab-Israeli conflict were always as near as possible spontaneously personal and first-hand ones; I quickly learned that, as such, they were all too apt to clash with what one might call the prevailing Western orthododoxy of the time. I stayed because I felt personally at home in the region, because my work was so professionally interesting, and my newspaper — unusually — never asked me to go anywhere else. As for the dangers, I definitely didn’t relish them, but unless they had become overwhelming and personal — i.e, for example, if I knew, as I did for a while, that there was a plan to kidnap me — I would never have left the region because of them.

RYK: The subtitle of your 1977 book The Gun and the Olive Branch is “The Roots of Violence in the Middle East.” Would you agree that yours was one of the first books (of those widely-available in the Anglo-Saxon world) to contextualize Palestinian violence against the backdrop of Zionist violence and Palestinian dispossession? What was the response to your book back then?

DH: I guess so. But that this should have been so is basically a measure of just how far that Western orthodoxy about the nature and moralities of the Arab-Israeli conflict parted company with historic truth and essential fairness. It is not as if my book discovered or vouchsafed anything really new. All the research had been done for me by earlier scholars. But it seems that I was at that time one of the few Westerners to put the history together in the form of a straightforward narrative setting Palestinian violence against Zionist/Israeli violence, a narrative whose basic conclusion was that the Zionists essentially pioneered the violence in pursuit of their political purposes — at their most dramatic and premeditated the ethnic cleansing of the territory they coveted — whereas Palestinian violence and terror has been essentially reactive.

RYK: Why has the West, in media and cultural production as well as in its geostrategy, tended to be partial to the Zionist narrative of the Middle East?

DH: For all the well-known reasons that have been rehearsed a thousand times. Biblico-Christian sentiment, Western guilt complex, admiration for the rugged, idealistic early Zionist settlers and their achievement in “making the desert bloom” and all that, highly effective Jewish/Zionist propaganda and influence within the corridors of Western power. On the geostrategic level, I don’t agree with the idea that Israel has been a valuable asset or ally in the service of an “imperial” or “neo-imperial” America. Quite the contrary, nothing has been historically more damaging than Israel itself to America’s interests, legitimate or otherwise, and its image in the region.

It is basically a measure of the quite extraordinary, disproportionate influence of the “friends of Israel” — AIPAC and company — that they get American politicians to buy the thesis that Israel deserves the support that the US lavishes on it not only because it shares Western “values” (which it increasingly doesn’t), or it is “the only democracy in the Middle East” (which it increasingly isn’t), but because it is to the strategic and political benefit of the US itself. This is not to say that Israel cannot in certain circumstances render services to the US — a classic example would be Israel’s readiness to rescue King Hussein in Black September 1970 — but that begs the question: who created the circumstances in which such a service was necessary in the first place? And the essential, underlying, perennial answer is that Israel itself, and its behavior towards the Arab region in which it implanted itself, is the principal cause of these kinds of crises and emergencies; and that they constitute threats to US interests because, in its deference to all things Israeli, it allows its interests get inextricably mixed up with those of its proteges. Even before Israel came into being the Zionists and their friends felt the need to promote a “strategic” argument for the creation of a Jewish state — that it would protect the British imperial life-line to the East — that was as spurious as its American descendant is today.

RYK: How have Western perceptions of the Israel-Palestine issue and the wider Israeli-Arab conflict shifted in the years since The Gun and the Olive Branch was published? Why?

DH: Public opinion is clearly changing at an accelerating pace, and will continue to do so the more obviously the nature and characteristic activities of Israel collide at variance with Western “values” and interests. In general governments and political classes lag behind their publics in their perception of this, or, at least, fearful of having to “take on” Israel, they are loath to acknowledge it in public. Hence their continued reluctance to adopt the truly impartial or “even-handed” attitude toward the Arab-Israeli conflict that alone could bring about the “Middle East peace” they so solemnly proclaim they want.

RYK: Do you think the greater visibility of the Israel lobby in the West, partly because of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, partly as a result of changes in the American Jewish community, will have a positive effect on Western policy?

DH: The extraordinary outrage, hysteria almost, that greeted the publication of their book — sober, scholarly, unassailably objective presentation of its topic though it was — and the manifest reluctance of the mainstream media and of course the US political establishment to be seen to endorse its conclusions, is just another demonstration of how very powerful — and spoiled — that lobby is, but also, I think, how eventually vulnerable it is too. I just don’t think AIPAC and the like can go on like this for ever, with their bigotry on Israel’s behalf, their specious arguments and their disdain for America’s true interests in the region, as opposed to those which they define for it; they are pushing their luck and the harder they do so the stronger will be the eventual backlash against themselves and the foreign state they promote.

RYK: Should we believe that US President Barack Obama’s different tack on peace-making will go anywhere? Is a two-state solution still a realistic possibility?

DH: Only if Obama summons up the determination to “impose” a solution along the lines I suggest in my book. Though more promising than any other American president in recent times, I don’t think he will. The “friends of Israel” in America are still too strong.

RYK: Will there be further constitutional reform in Lebanon? Will the day that a Shia vote is worth the same as a Maronite vote be the day that Hizballah’s forces integrate into a national army?

DH: Well, within the complex checks and balances of the “sectarian state,” the Maronites do hold a disproportionate share of political power. But, thanks to constitutional modifications, demography and local and regional developments over time, it is nothing like it used to be when the state first came into being. The Shia were once the underdogs in the system; now they are the most dynamically up-and-coming — indeed perhaps, in practical terms, the single most powerful one. And that in large measure, is thanks to the existence of Hizballah, its military might and its regional, above all Iranian, backing. They won’t be integrated into a national army unless that army can somehow espouse enough of their agenda to satisfy them. Hizballah’s relationship with its environment is a constantly evolving one, but I don’t see that happening in any foreseeable future.

RYK: Recently a demonstration for “secularism” was held in Beirut. Could this be the beginning of a significant movement which could finally break down sectarian loyalties?

DH: Such manifestations have happened before. They never seem to lead anywhere significant.

RYK: Arab world opposition shifts from Leftist to Arabist to Islamist. At the moment Islamism is most prominent, with some Arabist and Leftist ideas subsumed into Islamism. What do you foresee happening next?

DH: I foresee that Islamism as a whole — in power as well as in opposition — will in the fullness of time lose its moral ascendancy, just as the other great credos, nationalism — or at least the “nationalism” of the regimes that presume to embody it — and leftism have done. Take the most famous and influential of Islamist regimes, Iran. The new opposition movement, largely from within the ranks of the existing order, is a striking indication of just how much, through the actual exercise of political power, Islamists can discredit themselves and the exalted ideology they uphold — indeed, no doubt, Islam the religion itself as well.

RYK: The “resistance front” of Hizballah-Syria-Iran seems to be threatening a unified response to any future Israeli attack outside historical Palestine. Is this a credible threat? Does the changing role of Turkey — its economic and political alliance with Syria and Iran — and the increasingly warm relationship between Russia and Syria, suggest the Middle East may be approaching a “balance of terror” to deter Israel from adventurism?

DH: There are increasing indications that the “next war” in the Middle East — what I call the seventh — may spread beyond Lebanon to embrace Hamas in Gaza, Syria and Iran. There is no formal military alliance between them, but Syria and Iran are clearly seeking to inculcate the fear that, if Israel does go to war against its likeliest, first target — Hizballah — they will join in on its side. They might be doing this for deterrent purposes only. Even so the mere hint of it increases the risk that, by accident or design, it will come to pass. Alternatively, of course, if Israel were to hazard a strike on Iran’s nuclear sites, it is highly probable that Hizballah would retaliate with its now vastly replenished stock of missiles. And, this time, that could well escalate into the war with Syria which had failed to materialize in 2006 — with Israel’s so-called Second Lebanon War — and earlier such conflagrations between it and Hizballah.

RYK: British journalist and author Robert Fisk says he is utterly pessimistic about the future of the Middle East. He sees it as an unfolding “hell disaster” with no light on the horizon. Are you equally gloomy?

DH: In my experience it has become a truism: things never get better in the Middle East, they just get steadily worse. I have been hearing that — from Arabs of pretty much any condition or background — since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. I don’t see any likely change in that reality, certainly not, at any rate, till the chief of the region’s many maladies — the Arab/Israel conflict — finds a cure, or a convincing remission.

RYK: Beware of Small States strikes exactly the right balance between close detail and broad interpretative sweep. How do you do it? Do you have a guiding principle?

DH: Well, I am happy you think so. I don’t think I have a guiding principle. It just comes out that way. I suppose that, apart from trying to get my facts right and my analysis sound, I aim above all at readability and narrative flow. Achieving it is the toughest thing, and sometimes I almost despair of doing so. But the breakthrough always seems to materialize in the end.

No better candidate than David Hirst, whose 1977 book “The Gun and the Olive Branch” was one of the very first to sympathetically present the Palestinian plight in English. Hirst’s latest work “Beware of Small States” is a panoramic study of Lebanon’s difficult history which strikes exactly the right balance between close detail and broad interpretative sweep. The writing is precise, penetrative and elegant. For sober, logical analysis, “Beware of Small States” outstrips even Robert Fisk’s magisterial “Pity the Nation.”

Hirst explains Lebanon, and especially the fifteen-year maelstrom of the civil war, its pogroms, set battles, kidnappings and car bombs, by delineating patterns of cause and effect. The civil war is interpreted as “the intertwining of the socio-economic, the sectarian and the Palestinian, those three characteristics of the whole, ever more noxious brew.”

To start with the socio-economic, class issues often underlie and mask Lebanese sectarianism; banker’s Lebanon and resistance Lebanon have always been opposed. Chieftains, notables and tycoons have always “connived, across the confessional divide, in a harsh form of laissez-faire capitalism .. mercantile rather than productive, steeped in cronyism and corruption, and marked by great disparities of wealth, by a sybaritic luxury that flaunted itself side by side with the poverty and squalor of Beirut’s spreading slums and shanties, by a massive brain drain, unemployment, exploitation, and a favouring of the capital at the expense of the provinces, especially the remote and mainly Shiite South.”

Then Lebanon is “the sectarian state par excellence.” Inhabited by minority sects, the impenetrable mountains of Greater Syria have never submitted to centralised control. The Ottoman Empire’s millet system allowed for Maronite Christian and Druze autonomy in the mountains around Beirut, and as Ottomanism decayed in the 19^th Century France and Britain made their influence felt, each sponsoring a sect. “If one man hits another,” remarked a local chief shortly before the civil war of 1860, “the incident becomes an Anglo-French affair.” By 1920 France had separated Lebanon from the Syrian Mandate – a Lebanon expanded to include a majority who considered themselves both Syrian and Arab. When Lebanon achieved formal independence in 1943, Maronites constituted only a third of the population, yet dominated parliament and the army and held the presidency. Increasing Maronite prosperity and ambition combined with an antipathy to Islam and an Arabism which, despite the significant Christian contribution to its ideology, still seemed too ‘Muslim’, provoked a fierce Maronite nationalism. The ‘Phoenician’ myth, encouraged by the French, portrayed the Maronites as an ethnically and culturally separate, non-Arab, very nearly European people. Suggestively, ‘Phoenicianism’ has been called ‘Lebanese Zionism.’

Which brings us to Maronite relations with Zionism, and therefore with the Palestinians, Hirst’s third factor of conflict. The struggle between pro and anti-Zionist Maronites started long before the Jewish state was established on the ruins of Palestine. Pro-Zionists, with the Maronite Church in the forefront, welcomed non-Muslim ‘European’ settlement in the region to compensate for their own demographic decline.

Zionists originally envisaged a third of Lebanon for inclusion in Israel – a state “whose creation amounted to a vastly more arbitrary example of late-imperial arrogance, geo-political caprice and perniciously misguided philanthropy than Lebanon’s could have ever done.” In 1948 Zionist militias captured 13 Lebanese villages. In atrocities reminiscent of the Nakba unfolding in Palestine, 80 people in the village of Houle and 94 in Saliha were slaughtered when their homes were exploded over their heads. By the time the dust had settled, there were 17 Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, accounting for 12% of the population and a worrying (for the Maronites) increase in the proportion of Muslims in the country. Restrictions were imposed on Palestinian employment in every sphere except manual labour. Palestinian organisers suffered persecution by the notorious intelligence service, the Deuxieme Bureau.

When Jordan expelled the PLO in 1970, Lebanon became the main base for Palestinian resistance. Fatahland, or the Fakhani Republic, was established as a state-in-exile. This was important for Arafat’s plan to prove the institutional existence of the Palestinians to the West, but abuses alienated the villagers of the South, and staggeringly violent Israeli responses to Palestinian attacks increasingly polarised Lebanon’s politics.

From 1975 to 1982, what Hirst calls the ‘Palestinian half’ of the civil war, two conflicting camps can be identified. The National Movement, led by Druze chieftan Kemal Jumblat, including Druze, Sunni Muslims, and Leftists (many from the Greek Orthodox community), allied themselves with the Palestinians. On the other side stood pro-Zionist, anti-Arabist Maronites represented by Pierre Gemayel’s unashamedly fascist Lebanese Phalange. At first, with passive support from Syria, the National Movement prevailed, but a Syrian volte-face in 1976 robbed it of its victory.

Israel invaded in 1978, pushing Palestinian fighters north of the Litani river and setting up the mercenary South Lebanon Army in their place. In the 1982 invasion Israel reached Beirut and subjected it to atrocious bombardment. Hirst points out that it was the Camp David treaty – removing Egypt from the Arab front – which allowed Israel to lay siege to an Arab capital, and to kill at least 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians. Israel’s General Sharon (facilitator of the Sabra and Shatila massacre) envisaged mass deportations of 200,000 refugees to Jordan. Beyond expelling as many Palestinians as possible, Israeli war aims involved turning ‘Christian Lebanon’ into a formal ally, thereby transforming the region from ‘Arabist’ to ‘pluralist’ (in Zionism’s own Orwellian language).

Israel was successful in removing the PLO from Lebanon, and in this respect won a great victory. Exiled to Tunis, Arafat’s men lost touch with the Palestinian grass roots and began the decline that would end with Oslo and the replacement of the liberation organisation by a collaborative ‘authority’ policing the West Bank and Gaza. Even if ‘Christian Lebanon’ (after the assassination of Bashir Gemayel) was unable to reorient the country according to Zionist wishes, Israel can’t have been too upset by the post-Palestinian status quo. The second stage of the war was characterised by extreme fragmentation. The country was split into ten cantons contested by 150 militias and factions. By now, after so many years of brutal conflict, the pathologies of the warriors often superceded strategic concerns. Christians fought Christians, Palestinians killed Palestinians, Shia slaughtered Shia. The 1990 Taif agreement (which retained the confessional system while improving Muslim political representation), and the geopolitical ramifications of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, finally established a heavy-handed but stable pax Syriana.

But behind the superficial chaos of 1982 to 1990, an epochal change had occurred – the rise of the Shia, Lebanon’s largest sect, and specifically Hizbullah. (Hirst is better able to understand the importance of this change than Robert Fisk, whose writing on Lebanon in recent years has suffered from too close an identification with the perspectives of the anti-Shia, anti-Syrian March 14th movement).

The Shia were Lebanon’s poorest, most despised community, and had played almost no part in the early stages of the war. But they had been developing a more militant identity since Musa Sadr launched the Movement of the Deprived in 1974. They were inspired by the Islamic Revolution in Iran and radicalised by Israeli occupation.

On 23^rd October 1983, 241 US marines and 58 French soldiers (both countries had taken sides, the French with the Maronites and the Americans with Israel) were killed in car bomb attacks carried out by the shadowy Islamic Jihad, an organisation whose key players would later form Hizbullah. The Israelis, meanwhile, were relentlessly beaten back by a resistance more ferocious than they had ever met before. By 1985 Israel had withdrawn to its self-declared ‘security strip’ in the south, 10% of the country.

Israel had unwittingly stumbled into the turning point of the Lebanese war, and possibly of the larger regional conflict. For the first time its army suffered a series of minor defeats by a combination of sword – Hizbullah and Iran (which offered to send 50,000 troops in 1982; Syria turned this down) – and shield – Syria (re-equipped by the USSR after the initial Israeli advance). Hirst remarks correctly that the same actors are facing off today.

He devotes a chapter – ‘Triumph of the Warrior Priest’ – to Hassan Nasrallah’s transformation of Hizbullah into the key player it is now. Nasrallah oversaw the party’s retreat from its maximalist aim of creating an Iranian-style Islamic state in Lebanon, sought accomodation with other sects, and brought Hizbullah into parliament.

In May 2000, Israel made an “ignominious scuttle” from the country. This was the first time that occupied territory had been liberated without Arab concessions. When Israel reinvaded in 2006 it expected to finish the resistance in a few days. Instead it bled in the border villages for five weeks. The Sixth Arab-Israeli War ended in defeat for Israel and the loss of its hitherto enormous psychological deterrent power. Hizbullah had grown from a barely-visible terrorist militia to the developing world’s most effective guerrilla group, and now to a semi-conventional army able to repulse invasions.

By perceptively drawing out historical trends, “Beware of Small States” gives structure to what, as lived, was often no more than a bloody mess. This indispensable history of Lebanon is also a history of Lebanon’s neighbours, the larger Middle East, and the superpowers. The book is an essential tool for understanding a tragic story which has not yet reached its end, and is very highly recommended.

Art, if it’s worth anything, doesn’t float above reality. Art is part of reality, and reality is part of art. Art should help us see reality more clearly. Art grows out of and reflects reality and, in some indefinable way, creates and shapes reality too. The greatest artists, whatever their politics, know this. Tolstoy, Mahfouz, Marquez, Bellow, Grossman, Pinter, Coetzee – writers whose work stands on its own feet, who therefore never needed to weave an illusory mystique around ‘art’ – understood this.

Because it is so inextricably entangled with other aspects of reality, because it is so inescapably part of the way in which human beings see and hear, because it is so tightly rooted in our human nature, art is powerful. It has nothing in common with a high-buffetted lonely cloud. Art can be powerfully dangerous. It can – and often does – determine who gets killed.

See above Jackie Salloum’s short film response to Jack Shaheen’s book Reel Bad Arabs. Shaheen’s study of Hollywood’s portrayal of Arabs over more than a century shows how racist assumptions do not just sprout spontaneously in Western minds. They are systematically planted. And – like commercial advertising – this dehumanising imagery works. Arabs? What are they about? O yes – they’re woman-hating, Jew-hating, irrational, violent, anti-Western, animalistic, dark and fanatical. How I hate them. I hate them all. Let’s kill them. Let’s kill them now. “Let’s turn the whole goddamn Middle East into a glass crater” (as a New Yorker said half an hour after the World Trade Centre collapsed, before anybody knew what had happened).

But perhaps I’m over-reacting. Perhaps I should ignore all this and focus on my higher, purely artistic nature. Perhaps (and I fear some of us are intimidated in this way) I show people my crudeness, my lack of refinement, by insisting that art lives here on the messy earth. I will tie myself to poesy’s rocket and inhabit the outer ether. It’s a shame those barbarian Muslims, those Philistines in Gaza, can’t do the same. Peace and love, brothers and sisters…. Keep artistic… Keep it unreal…

art by Ghassan Kanafani

This is in large part an amalgam of other pieces I’ve written on the topic. Like almost all of my stuff, it’s at PULSE, and will be crossposted at the indispensable Mondoweiss.

In his contribution to the debate on the rights and wrongs of violent resistance to oppression, David Bromwich tells us that non-violent action is supposed to be “visible and exemplary.” In the case of Palestine, this chimes with the dominant Western narrative that the Palestinians would have achieved liberation long ago if only they had avoided mindless acts of terrorism. Much of the mainstream media goes a step further to suggest that the Palestinians are hindered by their culture and religion – which are inherently violent, hysterical and anti-Semitic – from winning their rights. If only they would grow up a little. If only they’d set a good example.

Leading liberal clown Bono has also asked where the Palestinian Gandhis are. The problem here, though, is not the absence of Gandhis but their lack of visibility – the visibility which Bromwich says is so important. For the first two decades after the original ethnic cleansing of 1947 and 48, almost all Palestinian resistance was non-violent. From 1967 until 1987 Palestinians resisted by organising tax strikes, peaceful demonstrations, petitions, sit-down protests on confiscated lands and in houses condemned to demolition. The First Intifada was almost entirely non-violent on the Palestinian side; the new tactic of throwing stones at tanks (which some liberals consider violent) was almost entirely symbolic. In every case, the Palestinians were met with fanatical violence. Midnight arrest, beatings, and torture were the lot of most. Many were shot. Nobel Peace Laureate Yitzhak Rabin ordered occupation troops to break the bones of the boys with stones. And despite all this sacrifice, Israeli Jews were not moved to recognise the injustice of occupation and dispossession, at least not enough to end it.

The American public didn’t see the non-violence because the Zionist-compliant media either didn’t report it or found ways of pretending that it was in fact violent. The first weeks of the Second Intifada were also non-violent on the Palestinian side. Israel responded by murdering tens of unarmed civilians daily, and the US media blamed the victims (to the extent of wondering why Palestinian mothers didn’t love their children enough to keep them in the house). These facts undercut Bromwich’s argument that “the power may desire the approval of other powers.” If the other powers which count are complicit in the oppression (because of the lobby, and Christian Zionist discourse, and racism, Islamophobia and orientalism), then the oppressive power can count on approval whatever the oppressed may do.

Which recent siege-busting ship was more visible, the Mavi Marmara or the Rachel Corrie? The unarmed activists on the Mavi Marmara quite correctly and lawfully resisted the piratical hijacking by Israeli forces in international waters. (Does anyone remember the heroes of United Airlines Flight 93?) On the Mavi Marmara, nine activists were murdered. Their sacrifice was not in vain – in the following days Israeli criminality was exposed as never before, and even the White House and Downing Street were enabled to make anti-siege noises.

The passengers on the Rachel Corrie, on the other hand, announced in advance that they would not resist. As a result, only keen observers noticed the ship at all. (Readers of Ha’aretz may remember a photograph of a middle-aged European lady smiling as a gallant stormtrooper helped her disembark in Ashdod.) Unwittingly, the ‘non-violent’ activists (whose commitment I salute) handed Israel ammunition for its propaganda – ‘when civilised, peaceful activists arrive we deal with them peacefully. When mad Islamist Turks attack us with sticks, we have no choice but to shoot them many times at close range in the back of the head.’

Bromwich and Taylor’s unfavourable comparison of Palestinian armed resistance with Gandhian non-violence in India is unfair and illogical for two more reasons – firstly because conditions in India were much more favourable to a successful campaign of non-violence than in Palestine, and secondly because Gandhi’s campaign was only one factor in achieving Indian independence, and certainly not the decisive factor.

In colonised India there were hundreds of thousands of Indians to each British officer, so the cause of independence had sheer numbers on its side as well as time. Many British people came to love Gandhi and to respect the moral courage of his non-violent strategy, but the British officials who counted could also see the tide of violent anti-imperialism rising behind him, a tide that would dominate if Gandhi’s method failed. It’s a lot easier to deal with the nice guy when you see the nasty guy rolling up his sleeves.

The single most important factor in ending British rule was Japanese militarism during World War Two. By the end of the war, British popular attitudes to Indian independence were quite irrelevant. Britain simply did not have the money or the manpower to rebuild its own society, let alone to reassert control over the subcontinent.

Nevertheless, Gandhi is lionised and the children of the West learn that India would still be a colony had it not been for the passive efforts of the nice man in the loincloth. This pernicious narrative is very useful for those guarding the status quo, including America’s first black president.

In one of the most contentious sections of his thoroughly contentious Cairo speech, President Obama declared:

Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It’s a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end. It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered.”

It’s difficult to know where to start with this. Perhaps by registering just how insulting it is for the representative of the imperial killing machine – responsible directly and indirectly for well over a million deaths in the last decade, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, Somalia – to lecture the dispossessed and massacred Palestinians on their occasional attempts to strike back. We can be sure that the sleeping children Obama is concerned with here are the Israeli children who live above the destroyed villages of Palestine, not the unsleeping, traumatised, anaemic children of Gaza, several hundred of whom were burnt and dismembered in the massacre of 2008/2009. Then it’s worth remarking how the erudition and intelligence shown in Obama’s pre-presidential book ‘Dreams from my Father’ were immediately crushed on his assumption of the presidency. How otherwise could his historical vision be so partial and simplistic? There was certainly a key non-violent aspect to the struggle for civil rights in the United States, but pretending that violence played no role in the process makes it necessary to ignore the American Civil War (half a million dead), Nat Turner, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers and rioting Chicago. When it became necessary for the American military to occupy American inner cities, it became necessary to grant African-Americans their rights.

Violence, or the threat of violence, was important in South Africa too, and certainly in Obama’s ancestral Kenya, and was the dominant anti-imperial strategy in Vietnam and Algeria. Max Ajl has already pointed out that violence ended the brutal occupation of South Lebanon. I challenge readers to think of any situation in which colonial or racist oppression has been vanquished by the application of non-violent action in isolation from other forms of struggle.

To end his piece, Bromwich quotes Gandhi’s idea (in 1938) that a non-violent civil disobedience campaign by German Jews could have defeated Nazi anti-Semitism. In retrospect, is it possible for any intelligent person to believe this? Of course, some people will force themselves to believe for religious reasons, although I suspect that most would rapidly change their minds if they saw their own child killed, their own home bombed. When such things happen to you and your family, the issues become more urgent.

My purpose here is not to discount the usefulness of non-violence in every instance. Indeed, there is a good tactical case to be made for non-violent resistance in Israel-Palestine given that the Palestinians are so comprehensively outgunned, and given that the only possible solution is for the two peoples to eventually live together in one democratic state. Norman Finkelstein has made a good argument (which I don’t fully agree with) for Gandhian action against the Wall, and the villagers of Bil’in and elsewhere are doing essential work to delegitimise the occupation in the eyes of the world. But to suggest that violent resistance to violence is wrong in principle is as wrongheaded as blaming a raped woman for scratching the eyes of her rapist. Even the mahatma knew that violent resistance is better than no resistance at all. This is what he said about Palestine specifically:

 Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French…What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct…If (the Jews) must look to the Palestine of geography as their national home, it is wrong to enter it under the shadow of the British gun. A religious act cannot be performed with the aid of the bayonet or the bomb. They can settle in Palestine only by the goodwill of the Arabs…As it is, they are co-sharers with the British in despoiling a people who have done no wrong to them. I am not defending the Arab excesses. I wish they had chosen the way of non-violence in resisting what they rightly regard as an unacceptable encroachment upon their country. But according to the accepted canons of right and wrong, nothing can be said against the Arab resistance in the face of overwhelming odds.”

The Arab world is undergoing seismic transformations, groping its way towards new, as yet unknown forms, throwing up works of art as well as bombs in the process. In the face of vast complexity, however, and in a time of war, our media’s first response is to dumb down.

If the news media simplifies, literature, by offering social and psychological context, broadens and diversifies our understanding of the region, and particularly literature written by Arabs. (When Martin Amis or John Updike write about Arabs, they are of course writing about themselves, their own ideas of how Arabs tick.)  The reading public seems to know this. Recent years have seen an increasing demand for Arabic writing in English translation, though Europe still translates far more.

So the publication of “Beirut 39” ­– 39 extracts by Arab writers under 40 – is a timely and worthwhile initiative. The 39 are winners of a contest organised by Banipal magazine and the Hay Festival of Literature, and the book’s name honours UNESCO’s World Book Capital for 2009. “Beirut 39” contains short stories, novel extracts and a few poems, often brimming with exuberant confidence and sparkling with innovation. The quality of translation ranges from acceptable to excellent.

Many of these worlds are alien to British readers, at least superficially. Libyan writer Najwa Binshatwan’s “The Pools and the Piano”, for instance, opens: “We took time off our classes to clean the school of the black ashes left behind from the burning of the foreign-language books.”Abdullah Thabit imagines the harsh education of “The Twentieth [9/11] Terrorist ” more successfully than Hollywood could. In Ala Hlehel’s ironic story, a Palestinian-Israeli writes to a resistance leader requesting that he send bombers anywhere but Haifa, because after each attack in Haifa the writer is bothered by journalists working on ‘coexistence’ pieces.

But many stories, even if their setting is unfamiliar, take us via individual lives into universal territory. Among these: the nighttime expulsion of a maid who pursues affairs with both master and mistress of the house; a philandering Damascene housewife measuring the beauties, shortcomings and material benefits of her lovers; a lonely woman in a Cairo towerblock slipping towards madness; a man watching a film about gay lovers on satellite TV, torn between sexual arousal and fear that his sleeping mother will awake.

Grouping work from such a vast geographical area is justified because the Arabs – whatever their spoken dialect or state loyalty – share a culture-language, a literary culture, and a key range of religious, political and historical references too. But Abdo Wazen’s introduction arguing that the new generation of writers destroys regional boundaries in order to create a pan-Arab literature – as there is now a ‘globalised’ Arab cinema, music and news media – is debatable. The stories and poems in “Beirut 39”, while open to pan-Arab and international influences, are textured according to their regional origins as well as their specific locations. They represent an unforced Arabism, no longer self-consciously “committed”, and hence more suggestive, more profound in its implications

For instance, Wajdi al-Ahdal’s tragi-comic nightmare “A Crime in Mataeem Street” feels distinctly Yemeni, as it should, but resonates under any regime of corruption. “Man conducts himself in a certain criminal way,” al-Ahdal writes, “like a predator in a forest, in order to obtain his material and moral entitlements in society.”

The Egyptian stories are more urban, more densely social. Youssef Rakha’s “Suicide 20, or the Hakimi Maqama” which plays with Druze theology in contemporary Cairo and London, is the most intriguing of these. Stories from Syria and Lebanon are sexier, often concerned with subverting romantic stereotypes. The extract from Rabee Jaber’s “America”, in which a Syrian-American (when ‘Syrian’ meant Lebanese, Palestinian and Jordanian too) suffers First World War hell, makes one wish the whole novel were available in English.

Some tales originate in the state of ghorba – a word meaning ‘residence beyond the Arab world’, related by root to the words for ‘alienation’ and ‘the west’. In Abdelkader Benali’s “The Trip to the Slaughterhouse” a Dutch-Moroccan teenager tells his sister about being beaten in the shower for having a circumcised penis. “This is the first time I’ve ever heard that there’s a disadvantage to being a boy!” the clever sister retorts. In Faiza Guene’s lively “Mimouna”, written in French, an immigrant remembers her youth amid Algeria’s War of Independence. Randa Jarrar, whose well-received novel “A Map of Home” follows a Palestinian coming-of-age through Kuwait, Egypt and Texas, and who writes in English, fits into the migrant category, but her contribution here addresses the problems of the old country. “The Story of My Building” retells Isaac Babel’s “Story of my Dovecote”, with the pogrom transferred to Gaza.

More alienated still than ghorba is the Iraq depicted in the extract from Ahmad Saadawi’s “Frankenstein in Baghdad”, where a scrap vendor assembles the body parts he finds littering the exploded streets in order to construct a composite corpse – which moves off of its own accord. Saadawi’s macabre hyper-realism reminded me of Hassan Blasim, who isn’t represented here, despite being under forty and perhaps the best writer of Arabic fiction alive. Blasim’s “The Madman of Freedom Square” presents writing of a whole different order – tight, intelligent, urgent in each word. Only a couple of the pieces here reach a similar standard. It would certainly be a mistake, therefore, to believe that “Beirut 39” is necessarily representative of the Arabs’ best. In fact, controversy over the selection process led Alaa al Aswany, author of the wonderful “Yacoubian Building”, to resign from chairmanship of the judging panel.

“Beirut 39” is a rich and varied feast, but one whose portions are dissatisfyingly meagre. In some cases the extracts were too brief for the reader to fully appreciate, so 15 longer pieces may have been wiser than 39. At worst, the book offers a disconnected and slightly frustrating reading experience. At best (Jaber, Jarrar, Wannous, Yazbeck, Saadawi), it motivates you to search out the writers’ full length works. Insha’allah it will motivate publishers to publish more Arab writing, and all of us to understand a little more.

by Naji al-Ali

June 4th 2010

Dear Editor

The murder of humanitarian aid workers aboard the Mavi Marmara in international waters is the latest tragic example of Israel’s relentless attacks on human rights. But while violently preventing the free passage of medical, building and school supplies to Gaza, Israel continues to pride itself as a highly cultured, highly educated state. In solidarity with Palestinian civil society and its call for a Boycott Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel, we the undersigned therefore appeal to British writers and scholars to boycott all literary, cultural and academic visits to Israel that are sponsored by the Israeli government, including those organised by Israeli cultural foundations and universities. (This boycott does not include courageous independent Israeli organisations who openly oppose the occupation.) We also ask that writers, poets and British funding bodies actively support Palestinian literary events, such as the Palestinian Literary Festival and the Palestinian Writing Workshop.

Materially and ideologically, state-sponsored Israeli academic and cultural events both prop up and mask the on-going brutal occupation of Palestine. Israeli universities are key players in the creation and dissemination of government policy, and while some Israeli cultural foundations may promote ‘dialogue’ between the two peoples, there can be no true dialogue when one party is a military superpower and the other a nation of second-class citizens, refugees and virtual prisoners. Appearing as an international guest at all such Israeli cultural and academic events helps to divert attention from, and normalize, Israeli war crimes in Gaza; the annexation of East Jerusalem; and the on-going illegal settlement of the West Bank. Such appearances will also help to normalise Israel’s recent abhorrent military actions at sea.

More information on the cultural and academic boycott of Israel may be found at www.pacbi.org and www.bricup.org.uk. But in brief, we the undersigned do not wish to lend our presence or approval to cultural or academic events underwritten by the State of Israel, nor do we wish to help sustain the deliberately fostered illusion of moral and military parity between the two actors in this conflict. Rather as Britons and British residents, we believe that we have a historical and moral obligation to support the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people in their struggle for long-denied peace, justice and self-determination.

Yours truly,

BWISP (British Writers In Support of Palestine)

bwisp.info@googlemail.com

Rowyda Amin (poet)

Prof Mona Baker (scholar)

John Berger (novelist, art critic, essayist, poet, Booker Prize winner)

Marilyn Booth (scholar)

Kevin Cadwallender (poet)

Jenny Diski (novelist, essayist, travel writer)

Alison Fell (novelist, poet)

Naomi Foyle (poet, editor, scholar and BWISP co-ordinator)

Prof Patrick Ffrench (scholar, writer)

Prof Ian Gregson (poet, literary critic)

Rumy Hasan (scholar)

Aamer Hussein (writer)

Judith Kazantzis (poet and BWISP co-ordinator)

Mimi Khalvati (poet)

Wendy Klein (poet)

Stephen Knight (poet and critic)

Diane Langford (novelist)

Catherine Lupton (writer)

Lauro Martines (writer, socio-political and historical scholar)

Alan Morrison (poet and editor)

Dr Dalia Mostafa (scholar)

Ali Nasralla (scholar)

Sybil Oldfield (academic, scholar, feminist historian/biographer)

Julia O’Faolain (novelist)

Jeremy Page (poet, editor, critic)

Thomas Pakenham (historian)

Dr Ian Patterson (poet and scholar)

Prof Jonathan Rosenhead (scholar)

Dr Duncan Salkeld (literary scholar)

John Siddique (poet and writer)

Mark Slater (scholar, critic and writer)

Dr Derek Summerfield (writer, scholar)

David Swann (poet and writer)

Kate Webb (writer, critic)

Irving Weinman (novelist and BWISP co-ordinator)

Eliza Wyatt (playwright)

Evie Wyld (novelist)

Robin Yassin-Kassab (novelist)

Any Resistance There? by Ali Farzat

What the Western political class and its media demand of the Arabs and Muslims is acceptance of the unacceptable status quo in Israel-Palestine. To resist the status quo is to be troublesome, destabilising and irrationally violent. Resistance arises from the inadequacies of a culture and religion given to antisemitism and hysteria. In order to develop, these backward folk must give resistance up.

For the Lebanese, this means that they must forget the brutal 22-year occupation of their country and the 1982 siege of Beirut as well as the 2006 assault on the country’s civilian infrastructure. They must forget the endless chain of massacres perpetrated by Zionists and their allies on Lebanese territory. They must smile when Israel violates their air space on a daily basis and threatens to send them “back to the stone age” on a weekly basis. They must disarm and label as terrorist Hizbullah, the principled defender of their country.

Syria must smile at the illegal occupation and annexation of the Golan Heights and the theft of its essential water supplies. It must repress the refugees from the Golan and the half million Palestinian refugees and their political organisations. It must not buy or build weaponry that might give it minimum protection from Zionist terrorism. It must grin stupidly when Israel chooses to bomb its territory.

The Palestinians must be modern and democratic. They must do this by fighting the winner of democratic elections and by supporting an unelected and corrupt bunch of collaborators.

As for Western sympathisers with the Palestinian cause, they must preface their criticisms of Israel with such statements as “Of course, Israel has a right to exist in security,” or “Of course we don’t support Hamas,” or, in the case of the passengers on the Rachel Corrie (whose courage and commitment I salute), “We will not resist.”

learning not to resist

It’s time we stopped playing this game. To recognise Israel’s ‘right’ to exist in security is to deny Palestine’s right to exist in security. No state which occupies other states’ territories has a right to security. Did Hitler’s Germany have a right to security once it had invaded Czechoslovakia and Poland? And apartheid states don’t have a right to exist at all. There’s nothing anti-Semitic about this, just as there was nothing anti-white or anti-Afrikaaner in arguing that apartheid South Africa didn’t have a right to exist. A state established by massive ethnic cleansing and perpetuated by occupation and repeated massacres is not a normal state like any other. Israel will earn its right to exist when it allows the refugees to return home and when Jews, Muslims and Christians enjoy equal rights.

What are the arguments used to demonise (rather than critically engage with) Hamas?

Firstly, Hamas doesn’t recognise Israel. True, Hamas believes that Arafat made a major strategic blunder by officially recognising Israel before Israel allowed the Palestinians minimal rights. In this Hamas is only being logical. Hamas certainly knows that Israel exists, and even if Hamas drank enough whisky to forget Israel’s existence (which isn’t likely) Israel would still be there, with its Merkava tanks, its checkpoints and its nuclear bombs. Hamas has repeatedly said that it will stop fighting if Israel leaves the territories occupied in 1967. It still won’t recognise Israel as a Jewish state on 78% of Palestine, because this would be to recognise the ‘justice’ of the theft of Palestine in order to build an ethno-state. In any case, Israel doesn’t recognise Palestine. Its failure to recognise Palestine has immediate and practical ramifications, like the occupation and the ethnic cleansing.

Secondly, Hamas doesn’t recognise the two-state solution. But again, neither does Israel, whatever its propagandists say. If Israel supported two states, it wouldn’t have spent the last decades, under Labour and Likud, building settlements on the West Bank and in Jerusalem. And Israel is the occupier.

Thirdly, Hamas has attacked civilians. This is surely the most hypocritical of reasons for isolating the movement. Since September 2000, Palestinians have killed 1072 Israelis. In the same period, Israelis have killed 6348 Palestinians (not including those who died as an indirect result of the occupation, for instance critically ill people who died in ambulances held up for hours at checkpoints). So Israel is far more guilty of killing civilians. And I would say that the violence of the occupied struggling to liberate themselves is more justifiable than the oppressive violence of the occupier. The people who cry over the fate of Sderot should consider not only the far, far worse fate of Gaza and the West Bank, but also the fact that the inhabitants of the bombed and starved refugee camps in Gaza come from the destroyed villages on which Sderot is built. If your home is stolen and neither the law nor the conscience of the thieves will give you restitution, you are entitled to fight the thieves. Hamas also holds one prisoner of war – not a civilian but a stormtrooper of the occupation. It is grotesque that the world knows the name of this captured terrorist but not the existence of at least 10,000 Palestinian prisoners in the Zionist gulag, many of them children.

A Good Arab - Not Resisting

Even if we could establish that the Palestinian side has been more violent than the Israeli side – which we can’t – Hamas, unlike Israel, has shown itself capable of sustaining ceasefires. And anyway, many of the Israeli victims have been killed by the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which is linked to Fatah.

Fourthly, Hamas aims to establish an Islamic state. True, in theory. But it knows that it was elected for its resistance agenda and its freedom from corruption, not for Islamic reasons. There are signs that Hamas has recently tried to impose some of its moral code on the people of Gaza – and I oppose this – but given the circumstances, it’s been a gentle Islamism. It is in fact a bulwark against the more offensive Salafi nihilist groups which are now appearing among Palestinians in their desperation. And of course Israel is not a state for its citizens, still less for the people under its control, but a Jewish state. The fact that some of its people define Jewishness ethnically rather than religiously does not change this fact.

My main quibble with Hamas is its constitution’s reference to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an antisemitic Russian text discredited by anti-Zionists such as Abdelwahhab el-Messiri. (I’m not as outraged as I am by European anti-Semitism – if anyone can be excused for generalising about Jews, it’s the victims of the self-proclaimed Jewish state). Hamas leaders frequently say they do not oppose Jews for being Jews, but Zionists for being Zionists. If this is the case, I wish they’d remove the Protocols reference. So Hamas is not perfect, but neither was the Communist Party, which dominated resistance to Nazi occupation in Europe. Had I been around, I would have supported the anti-Nazi resistance as I support Hamas – critically but unconditionally.

As for the brave passengers on the MV Rachel Corrie, I wish they had not said, “we will not resist.” I wish they had said, “We are unarmed and we have no desire to come to blows with Israeli soldiers. However, if we are hijacked by armed men in international waters or near the shore of Gaza – over which we do not recognise Israeli jurisdiction – we will resist as best we are able.” Unwittingly, the activists handed Israel ammunition for its propaganda – ‘when civilised, peaceful activists arrive we deal with them peacefully. When mad Islamist Turks attack us with sticks when we board their ship, we have no choice but to shoot them many times at close range in the back of the head.’

The passengers on the Mavi Marmara should be congratulated for resisting piracy and the illegal,  barbaric siege. We should never be ashamed of resistance – in occupied Europe, in South Africa, in Iraq, in Vietnam, in Palestine, in Lebanon, or on the Mediterranean sea. Resistance is beautiful. Resistance proves the existence of the human spirit amid a vast sea of inhumanity.

by Steve Bell

Dear Sir/ Madam
 
I appreciate the Guardian allowing a range of voices to be heard on the issue of Israel-Palestine, but I find straightforward propaganda in the news (as opposed to opinion) pages very worrying indeed. I refer to the ‘story’ by Harriet Sherwood – “Flotilla raid: Turkish jihadis bent on violence attacked troops, Israel claims”.
 
In Muslim cultures, it is common to refer to those who have died for a cause or who have been killed by state terrorism as ‘martyrs’. In the hospitals of Palestine, one might hear people crying – “My baby has been martyred! They’ve martyred my mother! My grandfather was prepared for martyrdom, and now it’s happened!” This does not mean that the baby, mother or grandfather in question were trained-up, armed Wahhabi-nihilists.
 
Sherwood’s ‘story’, which the Guardian positioned so prominently, is based on the assumption that when grieving Turks use the word ‘martyr’ they mean ‘Islamist suicide bomber’, that they mean what we decide they mean. This is not journalism but propaganda. Its purpose is not to inform readers concerning facts or to give more background on Turkish culture and Turkish responses to the attack on their ships, but to whitewash the piracy and murder committed by Israel in international waters. Sherwood’s sources are “the Israeli government” and Colonel Richard Kemp, who Sherwood doesn’t tell us is a well-known pro-Israel propagandist.
 
A decent newspaper like the Guardian should allow a full range of Zionist and anti-Zionist arguments in the opinion pages. It should not trot out execrable propaganda on behalf of a foreign regime.
 
Yours faithfully

See Idrees’s more detailed attack here. A great speech by the great Naomi Klein, in which she says “These boats were like messages passed between prison bars,” is here. Another great speech here by MC Lowkey, who says, “It’s not a line of division between Muslims and Jews – it’s a line of division between those who stand with the equality of all and those who stand for the supremacy of some.” Here are Turks storming the Zionist consulate in Istanbul. Those following the slow but steady realignment of Turkey in the region will understand the importance of these events.