Finger Paint etc.

On Jacques Derrida

2008-08-27T05:46:00.004+03:00

(This is the only way I know how to write about the man who all but made writing impossible, for all the injustices done to the text, I apologize)

H.C. for Life, That Is to Say…

Derrida begins with this title. He begins as if it were possible to begin. He begins as if any beginning could be anything but a continuation. As if any continuation could be anything but an infinite number of beginnings. He begins as if in the beginning of beginning, the ultimate (extreme) beginning, the beginning of creation, the beginning of metaphysics. Therefore he begins with the impossible. The impossibility of beginning in (despite, because of) itself, the as if that is engaged in when one attempts to begin. He begins with the impossibility of beginning and the impossibility of not beginning. In order to begin (as if that were possible, read: it is impossibly possible), he must decide to begin. He must therefore be able to know (or choose or believe or wager on) what does not constitute a beginning, and therefore to decide where it is he has ended so that he can once again begin (because beginning will always be associated with beginning again), since there must be an end preceding a beginning in order for it to be a beginning, unless it is the ultimate beginning, in which case it is also the beginning of all ends. And because there is no way to actually decide on where one has ended (died?) in order to begin again, because any beginning is ultimately connected to, given life to, by a preceding end, then no beginning is wholly beginning at all in the sense of it being First or Ultimate or, in any way untouched by death. And because no such beginning save the Ultimate First Beginning exists, then one must impose a beginning. Unavoidably then, when one decides to begin, one imposes a moment of artificiality, fiction, and thus necessarily a moment of violence, which may also be a moment of death. Because this choice of a beginning necessarily negates all other possibilities of a choice for a beginning, then it actually involves infinite instances of death. Perhaps, then, Derrida’s multiple beginnings can be understood or explored as a way to portray the infinite deaths involved in one beginning by showing the possibility of other beginnings; showing us death, through using examples from life. Alternatively, his multiple beginnings may be, since he is drawn to the side of death, a way to multiply the infinite (multiply the infinite?) deaths contained in one beginning by choosing several beginnings. In another way he begins. He begins when he initializes Helene Cixous: H.C. pour la vie. He begins with beginning Helene Cixous. Thus the title is alternatively H.C. for life, (H.C. pour la vie) This is for life (C’est pour la vie), Initials (Beginnings) for Life. Beginning (Initializing) For Life, (H.C., C’est, Initials, Beginning) for the span of life, or (H.C., C’est, Initials, Beginning) for the sake of life. A conclusive sentence here such as “In fact what he is saying is…” seems impossible, because “in fact” takes on so many possibilities, and it seems best to choose to leave it at that, at the possibility/inevitability of multiple beginnings. He provokes (among others) two questions here which are worth pondering: one is whether beginnings are essential for the possibility of life, the second is that if this means we must also choose death for the sake of life (related questions of course would be what sort of life that would be, and whose death and whose life, or if they may be possessed at all).Derrida makes of the sentence an extreme beginning in this sense then, because of the many beginnings contained within it, because of the use of the initials H.C. and the adage of “That is to say…” and so he leaves us with a beginning that is wholly beginning (including the sense that there is no such thing), because even as a beginning it does not end. In fact he adds to the impossibility of beginning, the impossibility of ending in this sense as well, so that we cannot know whether this beginning ends at the word “Life” or at “Say” or at “…” or not at all, which seems the most probable and fitting of answers. Thus because it is impossible to begin, then to begin at all is an act of faith, as Derrida would say, a wager, a decision (whether it is possible to do such a thing as decide to believe is highly arguable though and I don’t think that Derrida says this,) to believe that a beginning is possible, in essence, a belief in the possibility of what we know to be impossible. Paradoxically (and what isn’t) then, since, as Derrida says, each beginning is unique, and we will always have to begin again, each beginning takes the side of life, because of its uniqueness at the same time that it triggers the death of other possibilities of beginnings. Each beginning as unique is each beginning as irreplaceable. Each beginning then stands on the side of life, while forcing other beginnings never to be realized, and thus relegating them into the realm of anonymity, the realm of death. In that sense, if we understand life to be that which is unique (is this something that Derrida hints at?) and death to be that which is not (for the lack of a good opposite to “unique”) then it seems possible to claim beginnings as belonging to someone, possible to claim a beginning, claim a life (interesting how the English language allows claim a life to mean possess a life and take a life in the meaning of death) while it is impossible for the end to be possessed (if we relate the end to death) which is why death must be so elusive. “And it begins again. Again and again (2).” It seems to me then, because so much of death is contained in the beginning which is emblematic of life, and so much life at the same time is in that beginning because of its ultimate irreplaceability as a particular beginning then it seems impossible for either Jacques Derrida or Helene Cixous to remain firmly on the side of either life or death. Thus the relationship between life and death (like the one between Derrida and H.C.) must remain unstable and moveable, with the sides shifting all the time. This seems even more so when Derrida writes “would that I might believe her, yes I wish I might believe her,” here he invokes the possibility of the impossible (might (because might is not and thus impossible)) twice, in the double usage of “might” and “believe” and perhaps also in wish. He also adds “would” which he himself realizes is intriguing as a word in that sentence. Who would? What would? Would what that he might believe her? It seems that there is an ultimately unknowable subject that would, and thus solve all the paradoxes of this sentence, but it remains evasive and hidden. Is it possible then that Derrida found himself on the side of death, but did not choose the side of death, and in fact, would that he might believe her? But then the same goes for Helene Cixous, she knows, as he says, that in the end we die too quickly but she doesn’t believe any of it. This is because belief (perhaps) doesn’t involve a choice. One can choose to know, to decide to want, to will, but it is questionable whether one can decide to wager on the impossible, to decide to believe, to wish that it might be or that it would. It may be that the meaning of “believe” (because as he notes believe takes on so many different meanings) when it comes to choosing to believe, choosing to wager on life or death is one that doesn’t allow choice at all. Derrida says that he finds this title unpublishable. This is because, according to him, it would “lose its vital breath” (9) if it is published. The title must be pronounced, but not written; it can only be voiced, because only then can it be true to its multiple implications. Writing the C-C’est distinction makes it flat, crude, the integrity of this title, this beginning, this label, would be compromised and confined when published. It is published anyway. It is made public, its secrecy violated. There has been an evasion of a certain responsibility when this title is published, a fulfilment of ultimate responsibility made impossible by the writing of the act. The act of labelling then is only satisfied in its most destructive sense when this title is published. But because Derrida allows the title to be an ultimate beginning and thus including within it the impossibility of beginning he allows the title to deconstruct itself, and prevents it from dying on the pages. In fact, the fact itself that the secret remains secret and is made public presents it with its own paradoxical integrity. “This nullification of the border, this passage of the forbidden between the public and the private, the visible and the hidden, the fictional and the real, the interpretable and the unreadable of an absolute reserve, like the collusion of all genres, I believe, is at work at every moment.” (12). And so the title comes to life (notwithstanding the problem of using such wording) because it is emblematic of all that is always at work in all instances of life itself. What does it mean for Derrida to want to be Helene Cixous’ prophet? Not just her announcer, not any type of announcer, but her prophet. What God-like qualities does H.C. possess so that it is possible for Derrida to be her prophet? And what does that mean for the possibility of H.C. to speak directly, and not through Derrida, once he has announced her in this way? There is a certain monopoly, so it seems, that the prophet will have over the words of the god, does Derrida want to be able to possess H.C.’s words in this way? And if he has this yearning for uniqueness, for this extreme sort of uniqueness, or irreplacability of a prophet, does this not draw him to the side of life? “As if I were destined to be her prophet…As if I had heard or seen her before the others and were coming to say, inheriting the rightful anger of certain prophets who address their people: what on earth are you waiting for to see and hear her? Beware the wrath of history-or of god, if you prefer. (15)” Helene thus is not portrayed as a God, but as a truth which must be revealed, one that is primal and impending, inevitable. However, it must be noted that Derrida is aware of the “as ifs” in his speech, aware of the fiction he imposes and is happy to point it out. It is interesting then to wonder about the role of the fictional here. The fictional, it seems, will unavoidably factor in any consideration of the impossible as it “might” be that which allows the imagination a margin for considering what is impossible (however, the fictional is not the same as the impossible, because even the fictional may be possible) and thus we create a fictional scene when we attempt to begin, because of the impossibility of absolutely beginning, and thus every time we begin (because we ultimately must begin) we need to be prophets ushering in the dawn of a new era. But with this prophecy comes the responsibility of revelation, of, in fact, beginning anew, and of ending something old. And thus I have not begun or ended anywhere on this essay, I have not created divisions (which would necessarily require beginnings and endings), which would necessarily imply choices for death and life which seem impossible to make, and so faced with the impossibility of beginning I have not begun, but because it is also impossible not to begin, to avoid beginnings altogether, I will now begin.

One thing I hate

2008-08-26T15:46:00.003+03:00

If we're going to be utilitarian about the matter, then I believe the function of most relationships in life is to teach us what we do and do not want in a relationship, so that our relationship entering skills become more refined until we are able to, at last, enter a mostly functional, not unhealthy relationship. Then again this is sort of an ideal type of relationship pattern where learning and progress are highlighted. Sort of like the all but failed modernization theories.

I hate feeling that the significant other (whether they are really significant or not, as this applies to everything from one night stands to actual long term relations) is involved in an attempt to conquer, to excersise power. Some do it (much) more subtly than others. This applies to anything from trying to out-do one another in small talk, to trying to obtain gratification through defeating the other person's will in matters of difference of opinion or through sex. There is a fine but all-important difference between this and being in a relationship with someone who is challenging. Challenging is good, great,for me, necessary actually. But a healthy, challenging relationship is considerate, compassionate, and sensetive, because one side refuses to take from the other side anything but what the other side willingly concedes, rather than sieze it through an emphasis on power differences. This, taken to an extreme, is the difference between consensual sex and rape. But what interests me is how it is done on a day to day basis, in small ways, in different types of relationships, so subtly that the gnawing sense of something being wrong is almost untraceable to its origins. Discomfort turns into either shame or resentment.

The only way out of this, I think, is to make sure you feel completely comfortable at all times, meaning during tea time, in social gatherings and in bed. If you're not comfortable, well, do something about it. But let me stop here lest I start giving out relationship advice.

Writing Boredom

2008-08-26T15:09:00.005+03:00

It has been almost a month since my last post. In my defense, I have been thinking alot about writing. Not that I need a defense. Sometimes, there are just too many words to write. Or, rather, a lack of connections between words, thoughts, that makes writing impossible. It is not possible to write without a sense of agitation. It is also difficult to write if one is so agitated that one does not have the patience to make sense out of it all.

Two types of boredom here become possible, the boredom with nothing, and the boredom with everything. The boredom with nothing makes everything seem like nothing. Nothing is interesting, nothing is worth loving or hating, or having an opinion about. The boredom with everything is a boredom borne out if weariness. The continuity of life becomes overwhelming, and one gets tired, and eventually bored of being tired. I am in neither state of boredom, thankfully. I am, however, terrified of being bored. No imaginable fate could be worse than boredom, in its meaninglessness and apathy. I, however, am optimistic.

It occured to me that it might be possible to write (about) boredom. I cannot yet decide if that would be different from describing a state of boredom. Any good description really, must leave the reader with a sense of (what else) boredom. Is writing which bores the reader good writing? It can be, if it is honest. But to write boredom one also must convey the terror, the tragedy, of what it is to truly be bored. I am not so bored that the mundaness and emptiness of boredom is clearly apparent to me, neither am I brave enough, in the immediate moment, to delve deep into the horrors of such an emptiness so that I can write truthfully, differently, and thus meaningfully.

In memory of Youssef Chahine

2008-07-27T16:17:00.004+03:00

( This is a film analysis I wrote in which I used two of Chahine's films out of a total of three films I used to understand the relationship between conflict and cinema in Egypt. Whatever reservations we might have about the man and/or his work, it must be said that he did great things. It is also partially a continuation of my earlier post where I investigated the same themes conceptually.)

The issue that concerns me in this essay is the specific way in which films and their creators represent these conflicts and thus paint a picture of contemporary Egyptian society. Representation in itself is a highly problematic concept. In representing, the artist speaks for a reality or a social identity which s/he doesn't necessarily share. The artists interpret the dynamics of societal relations and power politics in specific ways which allow them to produce a coherent whole which is able to speak[1] about the reality of a particular time and place. From this point of view then, representation will never be an exact replica of an abstract "reality" which is "out there" somewhere, but will always involve the artist's own understanding of this reality which s/he can appropriate however s/he sees fit.

Thus by definition, there is an instance of violence in representation, during which a specific interpretation is selected-based on a specific epistemology- and (re) presented as the reality of the film(text). The violence is thus manifest in omissions, negative re-drawings, and general selectiveness in regards to what is relevant and what is not. Since films (or any works of art/representation for that matter), by virtue of their structural limitations cannot ever portray whole truths the question here is not one of truth. No argument will be made for a more authentic reality than that which is portrayed in the films. Fictional works of art, even if realist in style, are, at the end of the day, fictional. In fact, any representation, fictional or not, by definition of what it is, is not reality, but some recreation of a portion of what is imagined to be "out there." The best a film can aspire towards is to draw on social realities in a way which is morally honest and aesthetically pleasing, perhaps even critical. [2]

Having stated this then, to assert that there is violence in representation (the truth of which I am not denying) is a tautological argument which fails to say anything useful about the particular ways in which films fit into a social dialectic about identities and power relations in society. There seem to exist two contradictory desires in this statement. One, is to assert that all representation is violent representation. The second, is to search for an "uncontaminated," pure representation which is genuine and therefore not violent. Yet as Raymond Baker articulates it: "such messy spaces of cultural contestation bear no resemblance at all to any imagined pure aesthetic realm, outside history and above politics.[3]" This merely repeats the problem of abstracting from time and space which it attempts to criticize in the first place. What is useful, however, is to examine the ways in which representations can be violent, the historical context and discursive trajectory which gives meaning to their precise framings of reality (and, therefore, which allow for the possibility of particular incidents of violence), and the ways in which they interact with, critique, and generally affect dominant social narratives about power, politics, society and conflict. Particularly, what interests me are the specific ways texts create limitations[4] through representing certain modes of being in definite ways so as to do violence to the real-life inspirations of such representations.

I am driven by a concern that the "representation is violent" assertion has become increasingly disabling for those who seek a timely and effective medium for circulating their ideas directly to the "experts" who are responsible for creating social narratives, in this instance, film makers. At a time where academia seeks to address experts, social critics and artists through circulating to the proper constituencies relevant and empowering ideas, we must rethink the manner statements such as "representation is violence" is conceptualized in order to ensure that it is not paralyzing for those whom it is used as a critique against, but rather enabling, and that it does not flatten differences in representation, but produces subtleties. It is only in the service of films' function of "creating political spaces that empower film artists to speak for or against existing power arrangements and within which rebuttals and counter-assertions can also take form[5]" that such critiques should be made at all. It is with this idea in mind that I proceed to look at some of the most important Egyptian films of the past century.

The first of these films is The Terrorist, directed by Nader Galal, but more commonly associated with its lead actor, superstar Adel Imam who plays the role of the terrorist. The Terrorist tells the story of a young Egyptian man, lured into the world of Islamic extremism and violence by the promise of a young bride. While on the run, he is hit by a car driven by a pretty, upper middle class young woman, who takes him to her family home where he lives with her family while recovering from the car accident. There, he encounters on a day to day basis the supposed "moderate" religiosity of the Egyptian bourgeoisies, to whom he lies about his identity and from whom he silently learns the misguided nature of his violent ways. He pretends to be a professor of philosophy until eventually found out by the younger sister of the young woman, at which point he has repented from the path of violence but is killed by a member of his own terrorist organization.

The Terrorist, like almost all of Imam's movies was quite popular when it came out in the nineties amidst an atmosphere of social tension and political struggle between the Egyptian state and violent Islamic groups. The film reinforces the official state narrative about the reality of Islamic extremism and what is to be considered "good" Islam. Imam's character is superficial, even stupid. He has never been exposed to the "moderate" and "tolerant" values of the Egyptian middle class, and seems to have no real or deep rooted grievances which led him to join the "terrorists" in the first place. In fact, it seems that all that Imam needed was an instructional workshop, provided de facto during his stay at the family house, on how to be a good Egyptian Muslim.

The family which is supposed to represent the moderate middle class in fact portrays values in terms of codes of dress and gender roles which are much more Westernized and liberal-so to speak- than that of the dominant majority of the Egyptian middle class in the nineteen nineties. They are presented as the ideal, educated, patriotic and all around wholesome nuclear family, who enjoy social success and good relations with their neighbors. Contrastingly, Imam's character seems generally unused to human decency and good will, and carries an expression of concealed surprise throughout most of the film. He is consumed by sexual fantasies and militaristic tendencies instead.

The representations employed in the film are problematic in a number of ways. First and most blatantly, Imam's character is stripped of all social, political, historical and economic contexts. The character of the terrorist as protagonist is not at all used to explore the dynamics of violent groups who recruit disillusioned youth frustrated by a stagnant political and economic situation. Imam seems to have no real justification for the politics he practices and is easily swayed to the righteous path throughout his encounter with his temporary family. Young men who join extremist religious groups, then, are portrayed as essentially good at heart, but simply misguided and unaware (but might have to be killed unless they realize the futility of their philosophies). That is as far as the portrayal of the phenomenon of political violence in the film goes.

The economic devastation, social alienation and political subjugation in which the real young men who joined the Islamic groups of the nineties lived are never alluded to. The blame for the phenomenon of political violence lay mostly with the young men themselves who allowed themselves to be misguided and tempted by medieval and barbaric pleasures such as an anonymous young bride, and partly with a neutral lack of awareness about true Islam, the responsibility of articulation of which is left unclaimed. Society as a whole, and the state apparatus in particular, holds no ownership of the phenomenon that nearly ravaged Egypt's social and political fiber during the last two decades of the Twentieth century.

Thus we find massive and particular acts of omission throughout the film which construct a narrative of an Egypt free from social problems or wealth inequality, as if Islamic extremism was an alien intruder, not borne of the society which it aimed to transform. Furthermore, class is not presented as an issue at all in the movie, despite the fact that the family which hosts the terrorist is of a very privileged social class which exists as a foreign minority to the majority of Egyptians. In fact, good Islam is equated with middle class values, wealth and women's empowerment.

The film also does not make any serious reference to the regional and international politics which agitated the Islamist right, but presents the Islamists as aimless and empty-headed. The film, then, is but a euphemism for the actual complex social reality which created Islamic extremism in Egypt and the region. The bearded young men who bear arms are dehumanized until they enter the sphere of the acceptable moderate middle class, the lifestyle of whom, as portrayed in the film, the real Egyptian Islamist extremists rejected in whole and on well articulated ideological grounds. There is also never a portrayal of the often indiscriminate violence used by the Egyptian state at the time to curb the threat of political violence. Instead, the symbols of the Egyptian state are patriotic guardians of the moderate Egyptian way of life, and often victims of the violence of Islamic extremism.

This portrait fits in perfectly with the official Egyptian and Arab narrative on the Islamic extremists which were threatening the stability of their regimes. The Islamists in this film are never allowed to speak for themselves-in fact, even when they try to speak they are rude, incoherent and generally confused. Such a popular portrayal by Egypt's undisputed number one actor served to legitimize the government's violent suppression of all forms of Islamic opposition in Egypt whether moderate or violent. The film uses the power of simplicity and some comedy as well as the power of the on screen presence of Imam to lend itself credibility. The specific violence of representation here lies in the obliteration of the humanity of the young Islamist, and the providence as the only alternative a way of life which was neither acceptable nor at all available to the majority of Egyptians.

The film, despite its popularity, does not use its artistic power either to convey a complex reality or to provide a creative alternative to that reality, and thus leaves the average Egyptian viewer with little to relate to, almost as if the political realities in which he lived were something stripped from him and appropriated to other agents: a bad, almost non-Egyptian terrorist, and a happy, wealthy, liberal, also almost non Egyptian bourgeois family. It thus creates the impression that if everyone would just let the government do its job in peace without protest, everyone will have a two story house with a big garden and pretty daughters too.

In one analysis of Imam's public role, Raymond Baker states that " Adel Imam emerges as the most prominent figure from the arts to confirm the diagnosis offered by a desperate regime for the virus infecting Egyptian society: at the heart of Egypt's ills stands the irrational terrorist, the enemy of culture and civilization, and not the failed policies and terrible desperation that produced him." Yet Imam is possibly the most well known and well loved actor in Egypt and the Arab world, and while Imam has generally been known for his pro-government views, he has also played roles in the past which were critical of official practices and the corruption of bureaucracy. It is not, thus, useful to condemn Imam's talent as nothing but an artistic instrument of autocratic political power.

Despite the film's superficial storyline, there is no reason to question Imam's integrity-in this instance- as an artist expressing a worthy cause; but it is necessary to show how the film, precisely because of its artistic weaknesses, can be and has been appropriated by hegemonic powers to justify controversial domestic and foreign policies. The subtle powers of his acting talent would have allowed Imam to make a movie which still condemned political violence-which is in itself a noble cause- but without negating the grievances of a politically active group in society and all who could be related to them from near or far, and while being sensitive to the realities of Egyptian society. Since making this movie Imam has spoken at official congresses of the ruling National Democratic Party, has been appointed a Good Will Ambassador by the United Nations, and has married his daughter to the son of a prominent leader of the banned but tolerated Muslim Brotherhood.

The second film relevant to this essay is Youssef Chahine's Cairo Illuminated by Her People. It comes in the context of the 1990 Allied invasion of Iraq and is a quasi documentary which finds Chahine juxtaposing images of a sanctioned, scenic and tourist-safe and friendly Cairo (the Pyramids, the Nile, a bellydancer etc.) with images of Cairene day to day life which include religion, poverty, family, political dissent and trade. The film was banned due to its portrayal of Egyptian student demonstrations against the Gulf War and against the Egyptian involvement in it. While it does not tell a story in the usual sense of following around a protagonist, Cairo tells the story of the city and its inhabitants as they go about their daily lives, with all the liveliness, joy and hardship that that entails amidst regional and international political developments which are portrayed as having a fundamental-but not essentially determining-relationship to their existence in the city at that point in history. Chahine describes the domestic troubles which afflict the lower and middle classes in Cairo such as inflation, housing prices and unemployment, and indicates that these are related to international developments in the Gulf and the policies of the United States as well as Egypt's own role there- although the exact dynamics of this relationship are not wholly clear.

Chahine thus provokes the official stance on the Gulf War by opposing Egypt's involvement in it and second guessing the supposed role Egypt would play in the region and in relation to the United States in the post war Middle East. Chahine has been known for his oppositional stances towards the Egyptian government, and his generally controversial portrayals of taboo issues such as deviant sexuality and marginalized social identities in his films. While it clear that Chahine intends a link between Egypt's domestic situation and international politics, it is never made clear what the link is constituted of or how exactly the war in the Gulf would affect the daily lives of the Egyptians which he illustrates. His representation lacks the production of differences which would have allowed it to uncover a web of domestic, regional and international relationships that could help explain why exactly it was that life was so hard for the average Egyptian at the same time that the government was making promises of progress and development.

While there is no reason that he should not question official policy on such substantial matters as regional war against an Arab country or that he should not try to link it to the lives of ordinary Egyptians, Chahine's lack of specificity allows him to romanticize the struggles of the Egyptian citizen while lumping together all his political and ideological enemies-the Egyptian government, American imperialism, Arab dictatorship, and the world economic order- as somehow responsible (which is not to say necessarily that they were not) for as well separate from the realities of the lives of Egyptian men and women. In the absence of coherent linkages, the critique of a social and international order loses its profundity and can be counted by its critics- despite the artistic merits of the film- as another voice to be added to the heap of an opposition-for-opposition's sake romanticizing left which has no real alternative to the very tangible challenges posed in the last decade of the century.

That is not to say that the role of film is to provide answers to social ailments. But even for questions to be asked usefully-and I would venture, honestly- they must be asked specifically, concretely and not rhetorically, which is what Chahine seems to be doing. A master of the political film of all genres, with a career spanning almost fifty years[6], an American cinematic education, a number of political causes about which he is very passionate[7] and arguably Egypt's most important filmmaker, Chahine has "argued that anyone concerned with Egypt's social problems as he was could not avoid politics and foreign policy because "politics controls society and what controls politics is foreign policy.""[8] He has also stated that "Politics are inevitable. Politics control our lives the way world economics influences our local economy and how that influences our social life. We are managed by everything that is happening in the world-it's globalization.[9]" But even here the vagueness of his idea is clear.

While the film has been celebrated as a scathing social critique [10] and Baker remarks that "Chahine's struggle…goes to the heart of the issue of representation,"[11] Chahine fails to portray the layered relationships between war, power, domestic economics and lived human existence. This would not be so much of a problem had Chahine not claimed to speak for these Egyptians and to speak the truth about the reality of the nature of the relationship between domestic and foreign policy. It is in this sense that Chahine is violent in his representation despite his commendable efforts (which, I maintain were artistically successful) to produce an original social critique. He claims to speak of a truth, and attempts to display a sense of authenticity[12] (particularly through the use of documentary filmmaking methods) which he leaves obscure and of a government which he can only represent as incompetent and willfully subjugated, thus failing to complicate the pictures he paints of Egypt during the Gulf War.

The final film I will discuss here is also a creation of Youssef Chahine. The Return of the Prodigal was filmed in 1976[13] and tells the story of bourgeoisie corruption after the nationalization project in Egypt. The returning son has spent the past twelve years of his life in prison for political opposition, but quickly falls into the vile habits of his bourgeois family after he is released. The film ends in the tragic massacre of the whole family. It is essentially the story of the decay of the Egyptian intellectual class, with whom Chahine continues to be affiliated.

The film was an attempt by Chahine to regain market success and appeal to a wider constituency after being accused of being elusive and elitist in some of his preceding films.[14] The Return of the Prodigal was, in the words of Chahine, a musical tragedy. [15] Yet he continued to use unconventional methods such as obscure characters which were external to the narrative and extra-textual scenes which did not fit in with the story of the film. In The Return, Chahine attempts to give a reason for this intellectual decay, and one of the main themes of the film is corruption. He also alludes to the increasing American hegemony in the Arab world through the character of a cowboy who stops a group of Egyptians in the street who had been singing the brilliant Salah Jahin's revolutionary and nationalistic medley "The Street is Ours."

In her analysis of Chahine's film, Maureen Kiernan writes that "as Chahine moves towards an increasingly postmodern form of expression, he also attempts, in this film, to criticize the very class which, in conjunction with the postcolonial presence of the United States, is responsible for the introduction of these very forms of discourse."[16] The film is a sharp political critique but with the latent contradiction that Kiernan points out. Chahine's love-hate relationship with the West in general and with America in particular would later be spelled out in films which directly addressed that topic and took an autobiographical-fictional form.

Like a true critical artist Chahine saves the most scathing critique for members of his own class, and seems to display an internal conflict in films like these. The nationalism of Jahin's music is contrasted with the image of the cowboy and the lack of will of the intellectual class. One of Chahin's most moving films in terms of how it evokes a lost glorious past of a dynamic nationalistic and intellectual life, The Return is also very original in artistic form. Yet the idea of the decadent intellectual class which has not been able to stand up to Western imperialism is a well-worn and weathered motif in Egyptian and Arab cinema. Chahine represented this post colonial colonized class as one lacking the motivation to change and the will to redeem itself-a general sentiment among secular leftist intelligentsia in the Sadat era when the grand slogans of anti imperialism and Arab socialism had faded away.

In fact what Chahine does in The Return is reify this state of impotence and apathy which may or may not have existed to the same extent which the film claims. Here is Chahine's moment of violence. Chahin's final solution seems to be the destruction of this class, perhaps in the hope of the birth of a new more imaginative and hopeful one. Yet Chahine condemns this class to mortal doom although all he can offer them as an alternative is a long gone past. Chahine can come up with no new or original way in which this class of intelligentsia can confront a world order controlled by hegemonies over which they have no control. The idea of a world beyond their control is central here to the plot, the existential situation of the protagonists and Chahine's general philosophy about how international relations work to create lived (often miserable) realities in local (specifically Egyptian) situations.

In conclusion of this brief survey of The Terrorist, Cairo Illuminated by Her People and The Return of the Prodigal, a reiteration of the objectives and limitations of this analysis is warranted. What I sought to do was to deconstruct these films as cultural texts which include self imposed instances of violence in their narrative regarding the way certain ontological realities are portrayed. What I did not mean to do was to indicate the films' lack of "authenticity" or truthfulness, the end of which as previously discussed, I believe is futile, but to point out what the specific contours of the violence imposed in the films were. Neither did I intend to say that the artists' visions of reality were misguided or partial, but to critique the films on their own terms so as to uncover the differences they conceal and the similarities which they fail to see.

The point of this is to be able to speak to the "experts" who create cultural texts, not from the privileged position of a detached critic but from the position of an individual who lives in the society which creates and is influenced by these works of art and statements of politics. To speak to these experts about these texts in a way that is relevant and not just condemnatory is to engage in a conversation about the relationship between global politics and the lived situation of the average Egyptian citizen, and to participate in a dialectic which is responsible for the production of such works of art. The point then, also, is to be able to talk about these texts both as works of art which have their own intrinsic value and as representations of social discourses which cannot be separated from the reality in which they emerge.

Pointing to problems of representation within the specific narration of the relationship between politics and art is not to want to transform art into political manifesto or, on the other hand, strip it of its political content, rather it is to realize its importance in the everyday conversations which create visions of reality and eventually influence social movements, mobilization, patterns of behavior and power politics. My largest ambition for this essay is that it is able, on its own merits, to take part in and to speak during conversations within and about society and with the authors/artists who are endowed in society with the talent and the capabilities to influence politics in subtle but far reaching manners, for the wider purpose of helping create an awareness of the violence in art which opposes violence.

There exists a necessity to create a more sensitive, culturally resounding and hard-hitting social critique (as manifest in the films) through a medium which has just over the past five years in Egypt begun to reinvigorate itself and create original works which speak of different politics in different ways, and thus affect the course of conflicts through our understanding of them in different ways. The role of conversing with these texts and their authors, then, is to root film in the cultural matrix from which it emerges and enable it to better carry out its political role as a voice which is heard by mass audiences.

[1] For a discussion on the ability of texts to speak, see Said
[2] For a discussion of the changing language of cinema in response to Egypt's changing society see Armbrust
[3] Baker, P.7
[4] Said, p.9
[5] Baker, p.7
[6] Massad, p. 77
[7] Massad, p. 87
[8] Baker, p. 31
[9] Massad, p. 88
[10] Baker, p. 29, Massad, p. 83
[11] Baker, p. 30
[12] Kiernan, p. 148
[13] Kiernan, p. 141
[14] Kiernan, p. 141
[15] Kiernan, p. 142
[16] Kiernan, p. 142

Bibliography
Armbrust, Walter. "New Cinema, Commercial Cinema, and the Modernist Tradition in Egypt." Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 15 (1995): 81-129. JSTOR. EBSCO. AUC, Cairo.

Baker, Raymond. "Combative Cultural Politics: Film Art and Political Spaces in Egypt." Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics os 15 (1995): 6-38. JSTOR. EBSCO. AUC, Cairo.

Bouzid, Nouri. "New Realism in Arab Cinema: the Defeat Conscious Cinema." Alif: Journal of Comaparative Poetics 15 (1995): 242-250. JSTOR. EBSCO. AUC, Cairo.

Elnaccash, Ataa. "Egyptian Cinema: a Historical Outline." African Arts 2 (1968): 52-71. JSTOR. EBSCO. AUC, Cairo.

Kiernan, Maureen. "Cultural Hegemony and National Film Language: Youssef Chahine." Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 15 (1995): 130-152. JSTOR. EBSCO. AUC.

Massad, Joseph. "Art and Politics in the Cinema of Youssef Chahine." Journal of Palestinian Studies XXVI (1999): 77-93. JSTOR. EBSCO. AUC.

Said, Edward. "The Text, the World, the Critic." The Bulleting of the Midwest Modern Language Association 8 (1975): 1-23. JSTOR. EBSCO. AUC, Cairo.

Samak, Qussai. "The Politics of Egyptian Cinema." MERIP Reports Apr (1977): 12-15. JSTOR. EBSCO. AUC, Cairo.

Not Just In Israel, In Syria Too

2008-07-22T15:25:00.003+03:00

Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Al Mu'alim visited Beirut Yesterday for a few hours on a visit that was meant to initiate a new phase in Lebanese-Syrian relations based on equality and diplomatic representation, as well as the drawing of clear borders, or so said the Syrians. Hundreds of Lebanese demonstrated near the Presidential Palace demanding the return of their husbands, sons and brothers who are in Syrian prisons for political reasons, some of them for over 30 years.

For the first time Syria candidly acknolwedged that it did indeed have Lebanese political prisoners in her prisons and Al Mu'alim, when asked about what he thought about the demonstration, said that he understood their feelings and that it was normal for them to demonstrate, and added (somewhat insensetively-not that the Baathists are known for their sensetivity) that some of these families have waited for over 30 years, they can wait for a few more weeks.

Last week negotiations between Hizbullah and Israel led to the realease of the last Lebanese prisoners in Israel-all of them captured during war or inside Israel, and at least one of them an admitted murderer. The return of those captives was the pretext for Hizbullah's 2006 kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers which led to the 2006 war.Those prisoners totalled 5. There is an estimated minimum of 200 Lebanese political prisoners in Syria which up till recently Syria has been completely silent about. Here's an idea: Why doesn't Nasrallah kidnap two Syrian soldiers so they can start negotiating about the return of Lebanese prisoners? Or is it only dishonourable to have prisoners in Israel but totally aight to have them in brotherly Syria?

Sexual emancipation?

2008-07-16T17:22:00.002+03:00

Sahar El Mougy's new novel "Noun" (which I admittedly have yet to pull off my bookshelf) is getting attention as the new feminist novel dealing with the challenges and tribulations of being female, single and liberal in contemporary urban Egypt. That's nice, and if I were to ever write a book (ha!) I'm sure it would cover similar topics since being in that class/gender/lifestyle position is an extremely definitive experience, for me as well. There's something though about all the talk about sexual emancipation that bothers me. It's as if all our problems as single, secular (what the hell does that mean?) females revolve around how to get it on. That is simply not true.

More important, and more relevant to a wider class of women, are the societal structures which limit the spaces in which women can exist and function in society. Such spaces are both physical and symbolic, and while this is related to the image of women as inferior sex objects to be preserved in the private sphere, the resulting problems have less to do with sexual emancipation , I think, than with recreating the meaning and value attatched to being a woman in Egypt today. Most Egyptian women could care less about sexual emancipation, but I imagine that issues such as economic discrimination and norms on public visibility and interaction affect all women in Egypt. I don't even really care about how many girls wear the veil or not, because I simply don't think that that is the issue. Focusing on themes like veiling and sexual emancipation (while sometimes relevant) shifts the spotlight away from what really matters: a ridiculously uneven distribution of power reinforced by and employing a mostly Islamicized discourse which leaves women of all classes and walks of life in a vulnerable position socially, economically and sexually.

Now here's one I didn't see coming

2008-07-15T08:55:00.002+03:00

BBC's correspondent says that "[Sudan] will also seek to defend itself against what many consider to be an assault not only on the country's sovereignty but also an attack on Islam." Of course.

Watcha gonna do when they come for you?

2008-07-15T08:23:00.002+03:00

So, in a tragic, hillarious and very high profile and politically provocative move, the first arrest warrant for an incumbent head of state in the history of the International Criminal Court has been requested for the arrest of Sudanese president Omar El Bashir for crimes against humanity and genocide in Darfur. Obviously, this could really be destabilizing for Sudan if carried out, but working to stop the ICC is embarassing for everyone too.

Without degenerating into the mindless "how-come-no-one's-trying-George-Bush" type nonesense (nonesense because it doesn't take a morally hyped up idiot to tell us that there are politics involved or to point out that modern civilisation has seen worse than El Bashir, but it does take one to confuse premeditated ethnic cleansing with other awful shit), it's interesting to contemplate the fate of Sudan if the arrest warrant were to actually be issued. Even more amusing to think about is the response of some of the Arab public (Can you say Imperialism 500 times fast? Or can you count the number of journalists who will make copious amounts of money defending war crimes in the name of Arab honor?).

Obviously this situation is not, and has never been about Justice (although there have been some commendable efforst to make it about that) and the situation is as politically sensetive as ever. At the same time that this may be the only way to bring a certain amount of ethics to what is happening in Darfur( although what kind of crazy shit would happen were another Arab country be stripped of its dictator, only God knows) this development also uncovers a degree of discrepancy between the Global North and the Global South, and says something about who can get away with what.

But at the end of the day, the son of a bitch deserves it. (and yes, I do have a personal vendetta against the man). In my view, more than anyone else. And hey, we should catch the ones we can catch anyway. The fact that some big guys are too big to be caught shouldn't stop us from trying to make the lives of those we can hell. For now, I'm just enjoying the thought of Omar El Bashir not knowing whether he'll be under Sudan-arrest in a few months-and what a horrible prospect he's made that become.

Arabs are Confused

2008-06-25T20:12:00.000+03:00

And what could be a better example than what I just stumbled on? For some reason I was reading a 3 year old news peace on Alarabiya.net about the first Muslim to be crowned Miss UK. The piece discusses just that, very briefly and includes a quote from the Muslim Miss UK about how happy she is.That is all. A year after the news piece was published, one Al Arabiya reader called Abd El Wahab left a comment which translates:

"To the Iranians: Standing up to the brutal American enemy with
perseverence is necessary."
A number of questions come to mind: who the hell is Abd El Wahab? Why didn't he leave his comment on one of the millions of articles which discuss Iran? Why does he think he can adress a message to "the Iranians" anyway? What drove Abd El Wahab at that moment? Is Abd El Wahab a code name for a secret agency which was sending a top secret coded message through Al Arabiya to a top secret ally? Could the top secret agency not have spent a tiny bit more effort at blending in?

OK, I'm done being confuddled.

Counter-terrorism and Morality of War

2008-06-15T07:22:00.000+03:00

I read Elizabeth Dauphinee's The Politics of the Body in Pain and Christian W. Erickson's CounterTerror Culture: Ambiguity, Subversion, and Legitimization?, Alex J. Bellamy's Torture and Ethics in the War on Terror, Anthony Burke's Just War or Ethical Peace? Moral Discourses of Strategic Violence after 9/11 and Andrew Neal's Foucault in Guantanamo: National, Sovereign, Disciplinary Exceptionalism in an attempt to find something new/interesting on the already worn out terror/counterterrorism debate.What follows is my personal response to these articles. (and yes, I got bored)

At the most simplistic level, the debate about the ethics of counter-terrorism seems to be one between the age old concepts of order and justice in international relations. To complicate the issue-and to attempt to gain a more accurate understanding of the stakes at hand- the debate can be framed as one between different types of justice, because the argument for order itself implies a specific understanding of morality and is not empty of ethical substance. The debate between different sets of ethics, or different types of justice, can be related to understandings of power and its distribution, of the realistic possibility of the application of one set of morals rather than another, and the competing discourses which exist when one talks about/visualizes or otherwise represents war, violence or pain.

In the docu-drama"The Road to Guantanamo," the suspected terrorists are the focus of the narrative, and as problematic as their objectification in the film might be, this shifts the focus of the debate from the moral integrity of the interrogator, the self involved ethical standards of the organizations involved in counter-terrorism, to the experience of the terror suspect himself. As problematic as this representation of the terror suspect himself might be, both in relation to the film's narrow perspective on who that terror subject is and in relation to the problems of the representation of pain in the light of Elizabeth Dauphinee's article, it is an important divergence from the all-too-common focus on the counter-terrorism agency as described in Christian W. Erickson's article, which focus on the problematic ethics of counter-terrorism not in relation to those on the receiving end of counter-terrorist policies, but in relation to those enacting the policies themselves.

Notwithstanding any critiques I may have of the film, I believe a certain goal of leaving the viewer genuinely disturbed, was achieved. Whether it achieved Dauphinee's suggested goal of making pain inter-subjective or whether "our ability to engage is relegated to that of observation, which severely limits the possibility of making response," is difficult to gauge. However, had the representation been completely disconnected and distant from both the represented and the observer (me), there could have been no sympathetic engagement and no depressed feelings, not only at the state of things as they are, but also at the reality of my connection with and thus degree of responsibility towards, the state of things as they are.

While often both subversive and ambivalent, as Erickson describes them, the pop culture representations of terrorism and counter-terrorism in American-become global television series, their main defect is the inability to question the ethics and motivations of law enforcement or intelligence agencies from the perspective of the enemy, at least not seriously. All the eight shows or cinematic works Erickson cites are centered and take place inside the decision making counter terrorism agency (except perhaps for The Matrix). This renders it impossible to address the problems of counter terrorism where they are most acutely felt. Even when sympathetic portrayals of terror-suspects (or those wrongly accused of being such) exist, they employ a logic of the counter-terrorism agency as object and the "terrorist" as subject which makes it impossible for the terror suspect( subject to questionable methods of countering terrorism) to actually have a voice that goes beyond the limits of the security discourse.

Alex J. Bellamy in his discussion on torture and ethics in the War on Terror, brings to focus the central theme of the shows and image representations mentioned above: in what circumstances, if any, can torture be used for the purpose of combating terrorism? His conclusion is that "dire and desperate necessity may require the use of torture in the "ticking bomb terrorist" case, but that it may not excuse torture nor be elevated into a universal principle." The inherent paradox in this statement is that torture may be required, but not excused. While this paradox seems to be inescapable, its main point lies in the quotation by Slavoj Zizek who states that " only in this way, in the very inability or prohibition to elevate what we had to do into a universal principle, do we retain the sense of guilt, the awareness of the inadmissibility of what we had done." The retention of a sense of guilt, of unavoidable responsibility no matter what the imposed necessity of the situation is, may just be the safety valve required against the normalization of torture practices which allows them to occur with impunity. However, we face the same problem of object and subject: the guilt belongs to the torturer, and not the tortured, the spotlight is shifted to the morality of the doer rather than the suffering of the done-to.

This is problematic because it presents a lopsided narrative. It is also problematic because it unquestioningly accepts the necessary structure of power which makes this whole process a possibility, it presents a picture which is dichotomous and not complicated, and an understanding of space and time which is discontinuous. It separates the act of torture, both temporally and spatially, from the general context of power relations and perceived threats. While establishing the guilt of the torturer even in the most desperate of circumstances can help prevent the elevation of torture into a universally accepted practice, it obscures a more unified and historicized picture in which responsibility is distributed between "terrorist" and "anti- terrorist," but also, and more fundamentally, between the hierarchies of power within both camps. Thus what are previous policies of war, intervention or terrorism's share of the responsibility for the moment in which torture does or does not happen? And can the sense of guilt, beyond its effect on future situations (as important as that is), at all affect the dynamics of the immediate situation in which a decision has to be made?

Anthony Burke attempts to solve this problem in his piece on moral discourses of strategic violence post 9/11. He contends that "if war is seen as policy, we must do what so many just war thinkers fail to do: treat war as part of a historical continuum, rather than an isolated event limited to the conduct of high intensity military operations whose impact can somehow be limited in time, scope and spatial reach." Of course this is an enormous philosophical undertaking, and the question arises, that in the current structures of policy making and decision taking, as well as the dominant modes of power, can such a discourse as ethical peace have the space to grow? Burke seems idealistic, even utopian in this sense so that : "ethical peace differs from "just war" by rejecting the latter's prima facie acceptance of the legitimacy of strategic violence, and by making peace-however complex, difficult and delayed-its central normative goal." Such a way of thinking is not impossible if war is not understood as a transcendental reality or structural necessity of modernity, but the historical and power conditions necessary for such a discourse to be possible need serious consideration and assessment, beyond stating the desirability of existence of such a discourse. Here I have a made a transition from the discussion on torture to the discussion on war. This is because I believe that, while different and employing different terms of reference, both can be understood within the logic of exceptional situations, necessary measures and the discourse of separation between object and subject as well as an a-historical justification for either instance of violence: torture, or war.

Employing a Foucauldian outlook, Andrew Neal addresses precisely this issue of exceptionalism. In his own words " the politics of esxceptional situations have more to do with discourses and sociopolitical processes than with any fundamental metaphysical problem. [Securitization theory stresses] that security is a discourse what can be deployed and manipulated through strategies of securitization. As such, there are no events that in themselves dictate particular political responses; rather, any events or issues can be turned into security issues by particular discursive strategies…in this way, securitization theory still treats security as a special category: security is still distinguished from politics, and the exception is still distinguished from the norm."

It is, again, this inability to understand the norm and the exception as part and parcel of one and the same thing, and thus the inability to understand the torturer and the tortured, or the counter-terrorist and the terrorist as part of the same system of historical possibilities which enables simplistic and dehumanizing representations of the situation. This tendency and insistence to fragmentize our understanding, to isolate torture and war, to further isolate the moment of torture, and to insist on a one sided guilt which cannot be related to the other side and which in fact makes absolutely no difference to the reality of the other side at the moment of war or torture which makes violence, at the very beginning, even possible. What is needed is a much more complex understanding of relational realities, an understanding of a more shared, historically distributed responsibility, which can transform the approach to such tragic human situations.

The U.S and the Arab Israeli Conflict

2008-05-24T07:15:00.000+03:00

As inspired by Melani McAlister's Epic Encounters: Culture, Media and U.S. interests in the Middle East since 1945

Telling stories is the most important job anyone could have. Building social and political orders and managing overseas interests requires having a certain perception of plot, characters, roles and a system of signifying and assigning meaning. Within such stories, values are created and negative and positive attributes ascribed to certain behavioral patterns and identities. As part of these storylines a process of positioning occurs where specific ideas are placed over and above others. These narratives have the function of maintaining a system of social order through continuously preserving a shared meaning using particular signifiers which are pertinent to the public audience. A process of negotiating such meanings and symbols is always in sway.

The perceptions of Israel in the United States and, importantly, the history of how these perceptions came to be, are part of a bigger story about America and the emergence of different sub-plots in different locations in American politics and society, including America's role abroad (particularly in the Vietnam era), gender roles in American society (and the rise of the feminist movement) and issues of race (as manifest in the civil rights movement). What is interesting in Melani Mcalister's analysis of the role Israel played in the American narrative in the decades spanning the fifties through the eighties is how she reveals the converging sub-narratives at different points in time which worked to place Israel in a favorable position vis a vis US foreign policy in a sort of, to use Weberian terms, elective affinity. Such an elective affinity existed between the losses in Vietnam and Israel's victory in the Middle East. Mcalister writes that " Israel came to be constituted as an icon in the post-Vietnam debate about the nature of U.S. world power… As questions raged both about the morality of the U.S. war in Vietnam and about the role of the U.S. military more generally, Israel came to provide a political model for thinking about military power and a practical example of effectiveness in the use of that power ."Similarly the rise of the evangelical right to fill a spiritual vacuum in America amidst a " rising tide of interest in religious and inspirational writings". coincided with Israel's 1967 victory and seeming parallelism between the biblical prophecies and the wars in the Middle East. Moreover, Israel provided a masculine militaristic alternative to the feminism which "shook American culture to its core in the 1970s".

This challenges the proliferation of texts which give hegemonic influence to the Israel Lobby as the determinant of all US actions related to Israel. The picture appears to be more complicated than that. In fact what Mcalister does is reveal that such alliances of interests are- while often historically coincidental, -definitely not linked meaninglessly. In her landscape portrait the Israel lobby can be understood as a benefactor of the historical processes that preceded it or at least a part of the whole which is not itself separate and did not come to exist in its form out of sheer will. In fact the meaning of Israel for America has much more to do with America's perceived role and identity of itself in the larger storyline than is usually implied. And thus much of the alliance power we see today is a result of America's effort to define itself, and less because of conscious planning by anyone in the Israeli foreign ministry.

The narrative in which Israel as American friend, benefactor and moral exemplar fit so perfectly was one which came together as a result of forces attempting to counter the social turmoil that had made the sixties and seventies a time of instability. This was a time when America was searching for its soul- a system of symbols and values to once again create shared consensus over meaning which events like the Vietnam War and the women's and the civil rights movements had done much to shake up. It was a time when a new social order was in formation and thus meanings had to be renegotiated and new potent signifiers were drawn upon eagerly. Israel came at this point as the redeemer of American spiritual life (with the rise of premillennial dispensationalists), American masculinity ( as a militarized state countering the feminist movement ) and American power ( as a heroic warrior against terrorism and hostile, inferior races).

This brings up interesting questions about the relationship between philosophy and politics. This is because what such an analysis shows is that interests are not fixed static facts on an unchanging agenda where meaning is taken as a given constant. Agendas and interests require systems of meanings-in a sense, philosophies- in order to validate them, and thus allow them to exist at all. No sense of interest is possible without first a sense of identity, role and a general understanding of how the system as a whole works and what the economy of its values are. In discussing the rise of evangelical Christianity and its support of the state of Israel, Mcalister writes that " the gaps in linear, rational logic apparent in certain kings of cultural texts highlighted (of only implicitly) the failure of rationality in the face of a dramatically transformed world system- an economic, political and social universe that no longer seemed comprehensible by the old methods". Thus it is the most basic questions about the nature of the human being and her relationship to the universe that are implicitly at stake in such moments. Similarly, questions about masculinity and femininity, about the desirability of certain types of power, notions of race, and the nature of the world order came to shape the relationship of America to Israel.

In such negotiations there are winners and losers. Yet the process never comes to a close and the losing systems of meaning, although suppressed, rarely cease to exist. In fact the relationship between America and Israel today is still mitigated by the existence of certain values of liberalism and humanism, as well as notions of race and gender equality for example as present in the democracy discourse. It is thus the network of relationships as a whole both in its horizontal complexity and depth of layers which must be analyzed in order to be able to understand how Israel is framed in the (not monolithic) American consciousness. Further studies of different sorts of coalitions and organizational and institutional practices as well as corollary developments in seemingly unrelated areas should be scrutinized to explain how such framing translates into specific policy decisions. The final lesson to be learnt is that rarely can one process or one set of interests explain phenomena which are of concern to the historian or social scientist, especially if it would help international relations specialists of the Middle East to know more about the American feminist movement and American popular culture as influenced by films such as "Exodus." This is much more than saying that culture influences politics. This brings itself to bear on the necessity of being more than a specialist, boxed in disciplinary academic divisions, if the historian or political analyst is to have a well-rounded understanding of what shapes policies and constructs histories

Minutes

2008-05-19T07:11:00.000+03:00

Let's sit here, me and you, let's enter into some altered state of consciousness, which is really just another minute, another minute trying to prove itself, trying desperately to create an identity and be remembered among the millions of other minutes, trying frantically to make us remember her.So let's sit here. Let's look out the window, at the lives passing by, the deaths on their way, the people trying to dodge both of them. And let's throw words around like confetti at a wedding. Let's be abstract, meaningless and full of meaning, like those randomly shaped tiny pieces of confetti that create such a wondrous celebratory spectacle, that makes you just want to giggle and hug the person next to you for joy. let us simply sit here and revel in our own wisdom, then laugh at the whole masquerade when we're done.Ill shift this way, and you'll gesture that way, then someone will reach for a cigarette and nonchalantly light it up, like it was some normal, logical thing to do. Because that is what we do, we rationalize everything that shouldn't and can't be rationalized and then act like we know more than they do.And even as we're sitting here, me and you, adrenaline will suddenly surge through me, filling my tummy, then up to my heart, when I realize all the potential the little minutes hold. The little minutes, seeing that they have caught my attention will flaunt and sway, sashay sashay this way and that, showing off, trying to please me and make sure I'm interested still. You will keep talking about concepts, ideas and truth like it was Socrates' birthday, and I will be carried away by the minutes, dreaming of all the different ways I could arrange them, the different costumes I could dress them up in, the different lives I could create, suddenly I am powerful, I hold the world in my hands. But then you bring me back to nonreality, and I reengage you, challenging your words with mine. Just because I can. Just because I know you like it too.

Things I want to do

2008-05-15T07:07:00.000+03:00

I came up with these, for now:

Be a size 6

Read all the philosophy

Read all the Middle East

Read all the great Western Classics

Read all the Great Arabic classics

Visit all of Egypt

Go diving

Go skinny dipping at night

Develop a regular relationship with my family

Learn Yoga

Learn different types of dancing( including swing)

Model for a boudoire photo-shoot

Go bungee jumping

Go sky diving

Learn to ice skate

Take a survival course

Visit (enter city)

Take a Nile cruise

Climb Mount Sinai

Write a book

Learn 2 more languages

Learn about music/music history

Read the main texts of the 5 largest religions

Perform

Learn to cook fine cuisine

Go on a safari

Go Sailing

Do volunteer work

Take acting classes

Learn about film and theatre history

Heli-hike

Fly a kite

Learn to swim

Learn to surf

Learn to skateboard

Visit the graves

Visit the Ka'ba

Live amongst nature

Go to a war zone

Visit a prison

Live very luxuriously

Donate a large sum of money

Learn photography

Learn about astronomy and quantum physics

Learn horse riding

Learn a card game and a gambling game

Go camping and caving

Go mountain climbing

Go skiing

Play basketball

Learn to fly a plane

Learn a form of martial arts

Learn golf

Swim with dolphins

Go whale watching

Have a huge party and invite all my friends

Own a room with a view

Kiss in the rain

Write down my whole life story

Travel the world for a year

Buy my parents something really nice

Write a fan letter to someone who means a lot to me

Fall hopelessly in love

Have a baby

Teach someone to read

Ride a Harley

Take a road trip

Sleep under the stars

Own a living space and spend time decorating it exactly as I want

Go up in a hot air balloon

Run a marathon

Visit all 7 continents

See opera Aida at the pyramids

See the northern lights

Travel on the Orient Express

Be part of the audience on Oprah

Ride the bullet train in Japan and the shuttle from London to Paris(or vice versa)

Feel honestly healthy

Write in a journal regularly for at lest a year every single day

Go to a concert of a major rock band

Attend a fashion show in Italy

Go on the three biggest rollercoasters in the world

Make friends with a kid

Make friends with an old person

Make friends with someone from a different social class

Attend a Broadway show

Attend mass in Vatican

Live in 5 different cities

Attend services at a synagogue

Attend the circus

Attend the birth of my grandchildren

Attend a Sufi prayer circle

Ride a private jet

Give an inspirational speech in front of a lot of people

Be completely honest and comfortable with someone about everything

Get married

Be 100% happy for a week!

Meet one significant head of state

Learn first aid, CPR, to give shots and save someone from choking

Publish a ground breaking academic work

Go on a crazy shopping spree

Get sent a dozen gorgeous velvety red roses with a card by someone I like/love unexpectedly

live in the mountains, in the woods, in the desert, on a farm and on the beach

get naked!

Buy myself a diamond something

Cut my hair short

Collect something from every city I visit

Have a Ph.D before the age of 30

Dance in the moonlight

Get an organ donation card

Look stunning in a black bikini

Have expensive wine and cheese in the South of France outdoors

Eat in one of the best restaurants in the world

Go to a really nice spa

Visit the Amazon rainforest

Fast a whole Ramadan the way it should be done-just so I know I can

Hug a monkey

Own two dogs

Swim in the Dead Sea and Blue Lagoon in Iceland

Pay for and fly a first class ticket then stay at a very posh hotel

What do you want to do?

Researching Political Islam

2008-05-10T06:52:00.001+03:00

Being the (gorgeous) Geek that I am, I actually researched the literature on Political Islam and was entertained by my own conclusion. But it's OK because Political Islam is totally sexy nowadays.

Reviewing the literature

Writings on political Islam have proliferated in the past few decades. Certain international events, such as the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York in 2001 seemed to spark a new flood of research on the topic by scholars from all over the world. To be sure, the political stakes involved are high, much of this writing is politically motivated, and one must steer clear of research which is too blatantly propagandist. Through my research I have been able to classify the main work done on political Islam/Islamic groups/fundamentalism into a number of different categories.

The first of these categories focuses on the historical continuity of political Islam, and the essential aspects present in Islamic movements. This work, the approach of which I move away from, is exemplified by the work of those such as John Voll[1] and Abdulaziz Sachedina.[2] The break with such types of work was made by John Esposito[3] who was able to move from this essentialist understanding of Islam to locate them within a wider social and political setting, as well as to interrogate the movements themselves and to differentiate between the natures of different types of movements. What Esposito shares with writers such as Voll and Giles Kepel[4], is a focus on the ideas of political Islamists. The ideas of political Islam will be important here only insofar as they are represented in a constructed historical narrative which shapes the boundaries of the public sphere in Egypt today.

An increasingly prominent approach to understanding political Islam has focused on political economy, and the manifestations of economic and social transformations in Egypt which made the rise of political Islam both possible and varied in forms. One strong advocate of such an approach is Joel Beinin[5]. I draw on his work addressing the structural economic shifts that contributed to the rise of political Islam in Egypt in its different variations, as well as on the work of Maha Abd El Rahman[6] who addresses the manifestations this has had on patterns of consumption fused with the symbols of Islam in contemporary Egyptian society.

Other writers such as Sami Zubaida [7]and Asef Bayat[8] explain the rise of Islamic movements within the context of the nationalist struggles of their respective states. I have found their work useful in contextualizing the rise of political Islam, as well as explaining the methods of social mobilization that have been used by these actors in their struggle for power. Discussing a struggle for power at a different level, Salwa Ismail[9] and Maha Azzam[10] have focused on the discourse of the Islamic movement in Egypt, and the way it operates employing a particular narrative within Egypt's political configurations. This type of work explores the relationship between the different variations of political Islam within Egypt, the state, and other forces of opposition. Their work has been enlightening regarding the specific language of the Islamic opposition in Egypt, and how the use of a specific discourse has in itself generated new power dynamics at discursive planes of contestation, determining what is possible or impossible as forms of action in the public sphere. Obviously the literature is varied and addresses different threads regarding the political Islamic phenomenon. There seems to be a gap in the scholarship( not to say that the examples I give are all I've found, or that my research is exhaustive), however, regarding the capacity of the Islamic movement in its moderate, conservative form to occupy public spaces in ways which are not conventionally understood as political. The gap is shocking considering in my own view it is this type of activity, not traditionally understood as political, is the most powerful and visible aspect of political Islam. But more on that later.

[1] Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appelby, Ed., The Fundamentalisms Project :Volume One. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press ,1991.

[2] Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appelby, Ed., The Fundamentalisms Project :Volume One. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press ,1991.

[3] John L Esposito, Introduction to Political Islam: Revolution, Radicalism or Reform?
Edited by John L. Esposito,1-17.Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press,
1997.

[4]Gilles Kepel. Muslim Extremism in Egypt: The Prophet and the Pharaoh. 3d ed.
Berkeley:University of California Press, 2003

[5]Joel Beinin. "Political Islam and the New Global Economy: The Political Economy of an
Egyptian Social Movement
[6] Maha Abd El Rahman. "Divine Consumption: "Islamic" Goods in Egypt" in Cultural Dynamics in Contemporary Egypt, edited by Maha Abd El Rahman, Iman A. Hamdy, Malak Rouchdy, and Reem Saad, 51-69. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2006.

[7]Sami Zubaida. Islam the People and the State. NewYork: I.B Tauris, 2001.

[8] Assef Bayat. "Revolution Without Movement, Movement Without Revolution:
Comparing Islamist Activism in Iran and Egypt." Comparative Studies in Society and
History 40, no. 1: 136–70.(1998)
[9] Salwa Ismail. "Confronting the Other: Identity, Culture, Politics, and Conservative
Islamism in Egypt"International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2.
(May, 1998) and "The Paradox of Islamic Politics." Middle East Report 221 (Winter 2001

[10] Maha Azzam. "The Use of Discourse in Understanding Islamic-Oriented Protest Groups in Egypt 1971-1981"Bulletin (British Society for Middle Eastern Studies), Vol. 13, No.2. (1986),

Global Crises, Global Solutions: Why I Think the Copenhagen Consensus is crap in more or less words

2008-04-26T19:37:00.000+03:00

On the surface of it, the logic of Bjorn Lomborg's book, the well advertised product of the Copenhagen Consensus, seems sound and pragmatic, even philantrhopical. Lomborg is right, if we fail to prioritize, then resources will inevitably be wasted. The question that must be asked here is what the implications or, even more importantly, assumptions of this simple statement are. This will be discussed in detail later. He is also right that the information and insights that science has provided us with should be utilized as far as possible in addressing the biggest challenges in our world today. In fact, there is a moral aspect to the project which according to the editor is "based on the idea that academic information should be brought to the general public to make a better contribution to democratic decision making. " Whether the approach Lomborg advocates proves conducive to democratic decision making is, however, in doubt.
Lomborg is also very specific about what the book, which follows from the Copenhagen Consensus, aims to do: basically prioritizing the use of developed country money outside the developed world . The chosen issues are ranked based on a cost-benefit analysis. That this choice of ranking method is very significant will be shown in this discussion. Moreover, the problems are not ranked in order of seriousness (however that may be defined) but in descending order of the best opportunities for benefits given the constraint of 50 billion USD in the span of five years, which the book assumes is the realistic time and money frame. It is important to note that were the conditions set by the Copenhagen Consensus, for example, 300 billion USD in fifteen years the results would be very different.

The book also clearly states that the prioritization of solutions was made by economists on a pure economic basis. The argument is that "just as you ask a climatologist about the climate, and a malaria expert about malaria, you ask an economist about prioritization". This holds in the sense that if specialists in the different fields addressed here were to participate in the final ranking, they would necessarily be biased towards their own fields of expertise. Still the choice of economists to the exclusion of all other academic professionals is problematic, and will also be discussed later.

The first issue to explore and attempt to deconstruct is that of the paradigmatic assumptions that were necessary to produce the book. That is to say, what are the assumptions about the world, the methodological preferences that follow from them, and the sociopolitical-historical structure from which they emanate that this book was built on? That such assumptions, preferences and biases will exist is almost always necessary and does not make the work invalid per se, but the existence of such specific lenses of seeing the world must be explicitly acknowledged if the results of the academic endeavor are to be honest or are to have any value in solving actual problems.

That having been said, the book is invaluable in the amount of academic input regarding such central issues. It provides a useful, if incomplete, overview of the debates regarding each problem, and in bringing them together in one volume forces the reader to see how interconnected they are (although the book does not always explicitly discuss the ramifications of this). The book is also clearly structured and well organized, if not as accessible to the general reader as it claims to be due to the amount of jargon and technical information employed. Also, taken separately, each chapter of the book on one of the challenges provides an excellent introduction to the literature review in that field and a summation of the most significant debates as well as important and innovative ideas about tangible solutions and their limitations.

Assumptions, Language and Historical Situation

The book makes little effort to explain its assumptions or leave room for a renegotiation of concepts. This is problematic on many levels. For one thing, the solutions the book proposes are phrased in the same language as the problems which created them. That this may not be the view of the writers is valid and does not lessen the credibility of the work, but the fact that the epistemological basis of the approach and solutions the book proposes are controversial is not even addressed does affect its academic integrity and its value for policy makers. A useful analogy here is that the book seems to start in mid sentence. That is, it assumes the reader knows and is aware of the discourse from which it emanates, and feels no need to qualify its statements, conclusions and supposed declaration of facts as being a continuation of a very particular political and historical discourse, which it undoubtedly is. This discourse is rationalistic, ethnocentric, places a high value on science as objective and value-free, and on facts as independently existing entities. It assumes that the current global capitalist system is "natural", part of a historical continuum, and separable from certain ideological discourses and historical creations and is not embedded in a power structure, to refer to Foucauldian notions of knowledge and power. It presupposes that knowledge and values which were in fact created in a certain part of the world according to certain assumptions and consciousness informed by power dynamics are "universal" and "objective" and applicable regardless of time/space conditions, ignoring its own civilizational heritage.

Not only are they applicable, according to the book's assumptions, but the approaches and solutions are also neutral, ignoring the North-South discrepancy, the individuals and institutions responsible for creating this knowledge and its propagation, and the historical power struggles and structures of domination and subjugation that accompany them. This applies to all sorts of knowledge, but the reason that makes it especially critical in this circumstance and worth pointing out is that the book explicitly purports to create a link between the industrialized and non industrialized world through giving aid in specific ways through creating certain priorities via particular mechanisms and advocating them as rational and correct policy options without in the least acknowledging how this process is also an exercise of power and a representation of a certain created paradigm.

For example, absent from the analysis is the impact of the general imbalance of power between North and South and how this affects the application of solutions created in the global North to be carried out in the global South (if such categories can be said to exist). Also absent is at least a mention of the history of colonialism which previously characterized this relationship and how that history could have participated in the creation of certain problems. Similar omissions include the political and practical problem of foreign aid as a way to solve the grievances of the developing world, or a discussion of non Western perspectives of problems such as malnutrition or education. Also significant is the possibility that problems which seem most devastating to the United Nations or the Copenhagen Consensus may be less important to those directly facing them in comparison to other issues such as foreign domination, political legitimacy, or regional cooperation.

These omissions ignore the createdness of the paradigm from which the book emanates and dehistoricize the approach it takes as though it existed in a vacuum of objectivity and neutrality where object and subject, perception and consciousness, self and other, do not in the least matter. To be clear, it is not that this knowledge is used that is unsettling, but that its nature and the historical context in which it exists is not problematized which is so.

The book says nothing about what the developing world can do for itself, and mentions nothing of the discourses regarding these problems where they actually occur and affect people's day to day lives. It also does not find it relevant to explore the perceived causes of these problems in different discourses and thus reimagines the third world in a way which makes it a passive recipient, an object to be acted upon, incapable of initiative or deprived of local structures and discourses that might in themselves hold solutions. It thus imposes itself on local structures/discourses and distorts them leaving them dependent. This is because local structures of economic systems for example or local discourses regarding what the most important problems are according to indigenous societies, if they do not conform to the assumptions of the rational of the book, are implicitly dismissed as "pre modern" or "backward" as if history was a process of linear "progression" and "improvement" or they are just assumed not to exist.

In "Global Crises, Global Solutions," the specific notions and presuppositions which fall under this critique include the exclusively economic-based (and a very specific economics for that matter) approach to prioritization, and the argument that in order for prioritization to be "rational" it must be based on quantifiable criteria made tangible by a cost benefit analysis method. Likewise, the choice of experts and panelists which are informed by a Western-rational socio-historical discourse and academic profession and the utter reliance on supposed "facts" without acknowledging the value laden and political meanings which accompany them(especially in the final ranking, if not in the challenge chapters) when making choices. Also crucial, is the idea that Western academics have both the right and the responsibility to make these choices for the developing world in an implicit "white man's burden" type scenario.

The book is also very strongly based on placing a high value on rationality. This rationality is defined by placing our faith in facts made useful through economic analysis. Lomborg assumes that unless we prioritize in this way, we are doing nothing but wasting resources, which is irrational. The result is a prioritization which rewards situations which have an easier solution, so to speak, rather than one which focuses on the more "urgent" problems, since urgency cannot be measured in economic terms. Thus rationality here, in a Weberian sense becomes an end in itself, and not a means to an end, resulting in an arguably irrational ranking.

This process results in the marginalization of the part of the world which it purports to help and propagates its image as peripheral and submissive by ignoring the context in which it exists, the history of East-West/North-South relations and interactions as well as the different possible root causes of these problems which are portrayed as "global" but are in fact presented as emanating from the developing world( a very obvious example is the presentation of climate change as a developing world problem, which clearly it is not).

It can thus be argued that this approach to solving these problems is nothing but a propagation of the notions and discourses which created them in the first place. My aim here is not to victimize the developing world; on the contrary it is to allow it some space to behave as an actor outside the paradigm which this book suggests. This is not to say that the paradigm is useless or incorrect, or that it is part of a larger "conspiracy" of sorts, it is only to say that the fact that this approach is in fact only part of a particular perception of how the world functions absolutely must be acknowledged if any useful (and not just circular and technical) debate of its findings is to be possible.

The approach of the book is explicitly exclusively economic, and assumes that the biggest and most daunting challenges of the world can be solved by economic, mathematical methods. That this is a value statement is clear and a justification for this approach (on pragmatic terms) is discussed in Lomborg's introduction. What this actually ignores is the fact that this choice to separate economics as a discipline from the structures within which it exists and to assume that it is possible to utilize it with no reference to its historical context, but even more pressingly, the decision to separate economics from politics(especially in the final ranking), is in itself a political choice. It is a choice which sublimates the political and moral values of the particular economics used. To the extent that it does this, it comes up with portrayals of problems and thus solutions which are only partial, if not misleading.

The Exclusivity of the Economic Approach

This is true of the findings even if the logic of the book were to be accepted as is. For example, the final ranking of the proposals does not include the "costs" of mobilizing the political will necessary to implement them, as if they existed in a vacuum where all that is missing is the financial support or technical know-how for their application. It mistakenly assumes that governments do (or at least should) make the choice to solve particular issues on purely economic grounds, and that their failure in certain instances is due to a flawed utilization of economic knowledge. In fact, the choice of governments to focus, for instance, on education rather than migration issues, is largely political, and has nothing to do with what the rate of return on the different solutions are. Similarly, the choice made in the world's different aid agencies, whether governmental or non governmental, as to how their aid would be best utilized is based on political or moral considerations separate from economic concerns. The book's assumption that the political decision has already been made in favor of its ranking, while explicitly stated, largely misses the biggest part of the problem, which is decidedly political rather than economic. In addition, if this logic were to be carried through to its logical end, then there would be no reason not to assume that the political will existed to divert funds from military spending to poverty reduction for example, if an ideal profit maximizing scenario should be created. It is interesting that many of the authors of the chapters on the different challenges recognize this problem and point out the flaws in the cost benefit approach. None of them, however, go as far as to suggest moving into another discipline in the search for answers, and non object to the methodology and logic of the final ranking.

This representation of the problems of our world as clear cut and easily calculable is misleading, and in this sense economics is at least blinder than politics when it comes to the process of decision making. The book's approach and methodology seems to imply that we can substitute economic analysis for political choice in human societies. It implies that there is no reason for there to be public debate regarding where to spend scarce resources in any given society, because all that is needed is the expertise of professional economists who in this sense can make for us the choice about what kind of world we want to live in. The point is that grounds other than economic cost benefit analysis are made to seem illegitimate as grounds for prioritizing policy issues. It is here that Lomborg's goal of encouraging democratic decision making is brought into doubt. The critique here then is that this uni-disciplinary approach only scratches at the surface and only addresses a narrow portion of the problems. A more holistic approach to the issues involving fields such as politics, anthropology and philosophy, an approach which is inward looking and self evaluating, one which is self aware of its biases and the historicity of its discourse as well as the narrowness of its scope, thus its strengths and weaknesses, is absolutely necessary.

This specifically applies to issues such as governance and corruption, conflict, education and migration which involve not only issues of economics but also of infrastructure and, very significantly, issues of sovereignty, political will, variations in predilections of interest groups and autonomy. Lumping together the developing world as one bloc ignores the specific domestic, regional and international relations conditions which affect the range of policy options available to governments and the preferences informing these decisions. Such preferences are affected by balance of power and security concerns, cultural and religious practices, and even ideological considerations. This should not be dismissed as irrelevant or irrational.

Ignoring Systemic Conditions

The book, especially in its introduction and final ranking, also seems to ignore the state as an institution which makes choices and the interaction of states in a specific system which determines what choices they make. In fact, it imposes an epistemological/ontological violence in the sense that it forces concepts such as "global problems" as well as an abstract "global community" which is supposed to solve these problems (and collectively benefit from this), and assumes the existence of politically neutral aid agencies which are willing to finance these solutions. It thus creates not a nuanced picture of "reality" but an artificial categorization of the world according to which economics can be the master science to answer the world's most pressing human dilemmas. This artificial categorization can be useful as an ideal type to which an infinitely more complex reality can be compared and analyzed, but not as the basis as a useful plan for action. Questions of who benefits, who pays who defines and problems and who decides, are left unanswered.

The solutions proposed usually miss the fact that the sociopolitical infrastructure of the developing world may not have the capacity to apply these solutions for various reasons and are not capable of addressing these conditions as additional costs. The ranking, but usually not the challenge papers, also discounts the interconnectedness of these problems in a larger encompassing structure. This interrelatedness means that a change in the status of one issue, for example HIV rates, necessarily affects all other issues, such as malnutrition or conflict. This means that depending on the order of ranking and the anticipated levels of achievement for each problem, the cost-benefit analysis of every other problem would have to take into account new conditions and the whole ranking would have to be reordered.

In many regards, then, the final ranking does not make sense. This is because the vastly different nature of the problems presented does not allow for their comparison as alternative investment possibilities with comparable rates of return. Conflict prevention thus is not an alternative to battling HIV, but may be a precondition to it. This clearly reveals the difficulty of applying a capitalist business model reliant on rates of return as a criterion to developmental social problems affecting multitudes of human lives

The Experts and the Panel
.
Lomborg explains that the experts in the different fields and the panel of economists were chosen solely on the basis of their academic expertise and skill. He dismisses the objection that most of the economists are white, middle class, Western men, basically stating that it is just a fact of life that that is the category in which the experts exist. His offhand dismissal of this as mere coincidence, and his disregard of the implications of who these individuals are, comes to be symptomatic of the book's one-sided approach as a whole. There is an explicit refusal to contextualize, and an attempt to make these issues insignificant in order to portray the orientation of the methodology used as universal and value free.

In fact, not only are the experts almost exclusively from a western economic scientific oriented background, but they are also from a certain subset of this category. That is to say, none of the analyses of the expert panel questioned the usefulness of the current global economic system for a root solution to these problems, or its responsibility for their existence in the first place. That expert economists coming from similar backgrounds that take different approaches to development economics exist is a fact. Even with my limited knowledge of the field, names such as Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen stand out as examples of academics that would have significantly different perspectives on these issues. It is worth asking why economists representing a wider portion of the academic spectrum, even if no other disciplines were to be employed, were not present in the panel. To qualify this objection, it should be made clear that I see no intention on the part of the experts to skew the evidence in a particular way to bolster a certain school of thought in economics. In fact, the analyses of both the experts on the particular issues and the economic panel on the ranking, is informative, serious and academically sophisticated. However, it is the portrayal of these specific views as all there is, to the exclusion of all other perspectives, which cannot be useful for the solution of such devastating and controversial problems and is an exercise of an attempted subjugation of one discourse by another.
The Ranking

Other than the problems of underlying assumptions regarding the cost benefit analysis and ranking, there are also logical problems which make the final list interesting, but less than convincing. For one thing, there are many costs and benefits that remain uncalculated in the final CBA figures used to rate each problem. For example, the obstacles of HIV prevention will include overcoming social stigma regarding certain prevention policies, and will be affected by the general health service infrastructure present in the different countries. The panel explicitly states that it chose to overlook such political and infrastructural costs while acknowledging that they are important.

This, however, seems to put the carriage in front of the horse in the sense that such unquantifiable costs usually prove the most difficult to overcome, since an allocation of a sum of aid money cannot solve them. In deciding not to address problems such as governance and corruption because of the difficulty in calculating costs, the panel presents a list useful only in a fantasy world where governments are cooperative and political and social constraints do not exist. This is part of the bigger problem of focusing on economic analysis to the detriment of other types of knowledge. This is also part of a larger trend in the book which leans towards ignoring political and social actors, including individuals, states and aid organizations, treating the problems as if they were simply malfunctions in a machine which could be treated by technical expertise.

Also, the tax revenues from climate change proposals are calculated as costs, while in fact they constitute revenues to governments which can use them to implement other social welfare policies. Similarly, the lessened costs, for example, to community managed water supply and sanitation due to having made progress in control of HIV/AIDS and malnutrition and hunger (since they come earlier on the list) thus increasing overall community productivity, are not considered. This is an instance of the previously mentioned problem of failing to relate the problems/solution proposals in the final ranking and treating each one in isolation as if any such state of separation existed in reality. A plan of action based on such a list, which is nonetheless a commendable effort, will necessarily be unreliable and cannot stand the test of implementation without other complementary research and policy recommendations.Moreover, the specific chapters on the problems attempt to present an idea of fact based assessment using rigorous economic theory, while a lot of the times (but not always) failing to mention the degree of arbitrariness involved in choosing discount rates which are decisive in whether a particular problem makes it to the list or not. This also applies to the range of factors selected to be quantified and included in the cost benefit analysis as well as the methods chosen to quantify them. That this arbitrariness in selection exists is inevitable, but what is needed is an explicit statement that the authors are aware of these choices and not an attempt to make the analysis seem neutral.

If you haven't read the book, have a look at it, it IS interesting, but unless you're an expert on communicable diseases or the ins and outs of subsidies and trade barriers I personally think the book is too jargon-ridden and technical to be of lay-man use.

Judging Oslo

2008-04-25T06:26:00.000+03:00

The "Middle East Peace Process" has been thrown around so much and in so many different contexts that the phrase has all but lost its meaning. This is an attempt to recapture the meaning of that phrase. More precisely, it is an attempt to understand the factors which led to the start and collapse of Oslo through examining, roughly, three different perspectives. The first of these perspectives focuses on the structural global factors which prevailed during the lifetime of Oslo, the second blames the stillborn stab at peace on the lack of an Israeli will for a just peace, and the third explains the different stages of the process through the domestic economic factors which controlled Israeli society.

James Gelvin presents the process within its historical context, and assesses the conditions that made the process possible as well as those that led to its demise. Neither side of the negotiating table was able (willing?) to maintain momentum when the New World Order gave way to reality and as domestic political realities refused a process that alienated many on both sides. If the Intifada, Post Cold War optimism, and the Gulf War set the stage for Oslo, then the rise of the Israeli right, Hamas, the Aqsa Intifada and the War on Terror were the structural conditions that led to its demise. Whatever common ground the Israelis and Palestinians who negotiated in Oslo tried to build on fell out from under their feet when it came to implementation.

Yet there was an internal logic to the peace process- which nevertheless could not be separated from global political realities-at the heart of which was a fundamental and perhaps inescapable power inequality. Negotiating from a position of weakness, the Palestinians made concessions which were not matched by the Israeli side, and which built into the peace process the formula for its own undoing. If stressing process over content only hid the inequalities and stalemate at the heart of the conflict, it was also a reflection of global power realities which favored the Israeli side. Confidence building could not work in a context where one national narrative had to impose its will on the other in order to reach a "settlement." When substance became the focus of the negotiations at Camp David, it was the expression of an "Israeli peace" which was not-and probably could not-be accepted by the Palestinians.

As the process came to a halt, an Israeli settlement was imposed anyway. This by no means led to peace, but enabled Israel to expand its territorial reach, increase settlements and create a grid of infrastructure in the Occupied Territories which has all but made a two state solution physically impossible. With the construction of the Separation Wall, the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza and the continued violence perpetuated on both sides in the Occupied Territories and inside Israel, the peace process seems dead for good.

This, of course, is the problem with explaining the success or failure of the process in terms of shifting international politics. While it is impossible to understand the process without situating it historically like Gelvin so lucidly does, it also infuses the process with an air of fatalism: if the core problem is an inequality in power and if the global power scale does not look like it's shifting in the direction of the Palestinians then the process is doomed to failure. Either Violence will continue, or Israel will finally succeed in smothering Palestinian nationalism. Such a bleak horizon though should not stop those whom it may concern to continue to look for radically different solutions. What is worth questioning here is whether Oslo would have faced the same fate had the international situation been different. While the Aqsa Intifada put one of the final nails in the coffin of the process, it was itself , essentially, a result of the failure of the process. Similarly, it is the failure of peace talks and, as a corollary, the absence of the United States from the scene that put the Israelis and Palestinians on opposing ends of the War on Terror doctrine which emerged after 9/11. There seem to be, then, other factors which poisoned the peace process which do not necessarily follow from regional and international politics.

Henry Siegman paints the picture a little differently. For him, the main problem is that "Israel will never allow the emergence of a Palestinian state which denies it effective military and economic control of the West bank. To be sure, Israel would allow-indeed it would insist on- the creation of a number of isolated enclaves that Palestinians could call a state, but only in order to prevent the creation of a bi-national state in which Palestinians would be the majority."(Siegman) That there was/is a lack of will on the Israeli side, given the facts, is difficult to dispute. That the international community bears a large part of the blame for failing to create the political incentives that would create a will for peace in Israel is also true. In fact, it is only an Israeli will for a just peace that would have overcome the inherent power imbalance at the negotiating table which would have allowed for a sustainable settlement.

Yet it is to go a step too far to put the conflict in conspiratorial terms and to spare the Palestinians any portion of the responsibility for the failure of the process. It is true that Olmert does not offer anything acceptable either to Hamas or to Abbas. This is precisely because the cost of ignoring Palestinian demands is near negligible. If it can be asserted that the Palestinians have a right to reject flimsy peace settlements because of their inherent right to self determination and the right to engage in a struggle towards that goal, then it must be noted when the Palestinians have failed to bear the burden of their own struggle. What concerns me is not a question of which policy the Palestinians adopt, but that they adopt a unified and coherent policy at all and are capable of implementing it given the constraints imposed on Palestinian leadership by the facts of the occupation.

If the problem is the Israeli avoidance of peace talks, their blatant disregard for international law and Israeli expansionism masked as peace offers, then it is also a failure of Palestinian institutions and democratic culture and badly targeted use of violence which contributes to enabling Israel to behave in the way that it does. In this sense, the first step towards a just settlement is not a change in the stance of the international community towards Israeli policy (although this too is necessary), but rather the rebuilding of the Palestinian national movement which has all but disintegrated since the death of Arafat. If the Israeli claim that there is no Palestinian partner for peace means anything at all, it is that there is no visionary, strong willed leadership on the Palestinian side which has the ability to make decisions and implement them, not that the Palestinians have chosen the path of violence, nor that they continually reject "generous" Israeli "offers."

Yoav Peled offers an insightful explanation of Israeli attitudes towards the peace process through analyzing the structure of Israeli society, domestic politics and macroeconomic policy changes. The peace process-or lack thereof- can then be understood in terms of the internal dynamics in Israel which propelled it and those which sabotaged it. In layering the liberal, republican and ethno-national discourses in Israel and looking at the effect on such discourses of the neo-liberal shift in Israeli economic policy, Peled uncovers a complex interplay between competing narratives and overlapping hierarchal structures within Israeli society-and by extension the occupied territories. In this sense, the Peace process is held hostage to Israel's nation building project. While the domestic policy aspect in a conflict such as this one where the foreign and the domestic are so difficult to disentangle is a crucial one, it is a difficult idea to wrap ones mind around that the beginning and end of Oslo can be explained away by Israeli domestic economic policy and class/ethnic politics within Israel.

It is significant, though, that economics never function independently to shape policy towards the Palestinians, but always in a context of competing national discourses and a hierarchal citizenship structure. Interestingly, the liberal business/peace coalition which spurred the Oslo process according to Peled, gave way to the death of the peace camp and the survival of neo-liberal economic policy. This can be understood, at least in part, if the peace impetus part of this coalition is seen as having been treated instrumentally in order to achieve economic gains. Once peace became no longer necessary for the attainment of economic goals, Oslo became dispensable. Even if the picture is not so Machiavellian, the forces of political liberalization in Israel could not hold their ground vis a vis the self-defensive cultural (and, when it came to non-citizen Palestinians, military) war waged by the conservative, socially and economically disadvantage right, which nonetheless was able to employ a Zionist ethno-nationalist narrative to create real changes in policy. In a seemingly improbable situation, the disadvantaged castes of Israeli society emerged politically victorious and economically defeated.

The three narratives presented here (and it must be noted that except for Siegman, their authors do not present them as exclusive) collaborate to pain a picture, or more appropriately, piece together a collage, which is richer and more substantive than any one separate explanation. As I hope has been demonstrated, it is necessary not to give in to mono-causal explanations and to actively deconstruct even those arguments which seem the most self-evident in order to assess their validity if one is to come to a useful understanding of the peace process.

The Nakba

2008-04-21T06:33:00.001+02:00

The End of the Mandate and my two cents on the big Debate

Perhaps one of the first questions to ask when approaching the history of a subject such as the end of the British Mandate/ the creation of the state of Israel/the Nakba is what is it that is at stake? If history is written and thus constructed, and not given as fact and if such a process of constructing historical narratives is fundamental to the life of political movements, the way they create their discourses (in fact limiting the contours of how they can create such discourses) and ultimately the decisions they take and claims they make based on what they know, then the stakes, politically speaking, are quite high. To put it briefly, the careers of political movements and potentially the fates of large groups of people, are on the line when discussing the histories of seminal events such as the end of the British mandate.

I will not be so crude as to say that knowledge equals power without fleshing that out, but -at least - a relationship exists between the kind of knowledge one has (and produces), the goals one aspires to achieve (which themselves are informed by such knowledge) and what can be done about them. Having said that, it is hardly tenable to think that a historian will approach such a subject (or any subject for that matter) uninterestedly, without a sense of the stakes personally involved for him or herself. The historian as a knowing subject is located within a particular nexus of power relations, prejudices and discursive narratives and thus will come to any subject with a specific knowledge of the world. It is therefore not necessarily useful to ask how to be "objective," or whether one historian is more "objective" than another because such a thing as a detached uninterested objectivity does not seem possible, or, in any case, useful. What must be addressed, then, is how those who write our histories relate to the issues at hand, how explicit they make the connection between themselves as agents and the material they study, and what historical interpretations they exclude through the deployment of particular discourses.
This brings up a series of other questions: what is the role of the intellectual in the public space? How far is the historian constrained by political and social structures, regarding what can be said? How conscious is the historian of his location, constraints, and personal trajectory which at a specific moment in time informs simultaneously his/her interest in the subject and his/her biases towards it? In fact, given that discursive limits do exist at any specific point in time, how much responsibility does the individual intellectual bear for what they present as knowledge?
Certain structures in terms of political configurations, social constraints and historical events necessarily limit which versions of history can be written at any one point in time. Having said that, there is still no reason to excuse the individual intellectual from bearing responsibility for the implications of the knowledge she or he produces. The discussion on methodology (Beinin) falls within the bounds of this. Each methodology will produce specific knowledge. Different types of knowledge allow for different possibilities for action. What the historian must be able to do is distance him/herself enough from the discourse within the bounds of which he or she operates to be able to look at it critically and identify the assumptions and exclusions it makes use of.

Surveying what has been said about the end of the British mandate and the Nakba by Gelvin, Morris, Masalha, Parsons, Beinin and Finkelstein,(and excluding the right of the center half of the spectrum) it seems that there is no longer any real debate as to why there came to be a Palestinian refugee problem. This is especially true when taking into consideration the development of Morris' own views regarding the importance of direct expulsions (Parsons& Beinin). While Morris' multi-causal explanation (Morris) still holds, the weight of direct expulsions in the light of later findings and other scholarship has increased. This has blurred the distinction, which Morris hoped to clearly make (Masalha), between a number of military decisions to expel Palestinians, and an explicit political macro policy to rid the state of Israel of an Arab constituency through expelling Palestinians.

The reason Laila Parsons' article on Druze Jewish relations can be said to make a contribution to this discussion is not simply that she elucidates the experience of one religious minority on the eve of the Nakba, but that she is able to link this to the wider debate, contextualize it and use it to help us understand more about the decisions made by the Zionist leadership and the different experiences of Palestinians (Parsons). Parsons takes the findings of her work to make a wider conclusion about the nature of expulsions and does so coherently without any imaginative stretches of history.

Morris is willing to assert that the Palestinians left their lands for a number of reasons including the effects of the military operations, fear of mistreatment and sometimes to make way for the invading Arab armies (Morris, Response to Finkelstein and Masalha in Journal of Palestinian Studies Vol 21. No. 1, 1991, p.99). He is also willing to assert that direct expulsions constituted a proportionally high percentage of the causal factors (Parsons & Beinin) leading to the refugee problem, and that those expulsions also took non direct forms, such as whispering campaigns or preventing Palestinians from returning during the war once they had left their homes. Neither does he make the argument that there didn't exist already strong ideas among the Zionist leadership about the desirability of an Arab-free Palestine (Masalha). What Morris doesn't want to do, is make the linkage between the Zionist leadership and the expulsion of the Palestinians, in the absence of an official document that would prove the existence of a political policy to expel Arabs (Masalha). In effect, what Masalha and (less convincingly, in my opinion) Finkelstein (Finkelstein, Rejoinder to Benny Morris, Journal of Palestinian Studies Volume 21, No.1, 1992) seem to want Morris to do, is to take the responsibility, politically for what he states to be historical fact.

Masalha and Morris do not differ significantly as to what actually happened, but Masalha places the expulsion of the Palestinians within a historical lineage of transfer thinking, while Morris refuses to make such a connection. It is difficult to imagine that any tendencies towards expelling the Palestinians first appeared on the battlefield, or that the military leadership was completely disconnected from the political leadership and thus there was no exchange of ideas regarding expelling the Arabs. In fact, such a hypothetical situation would seem a-historical in the sense that it dislocates the moment of the Nakba from a longer history of Zionist thought regarding the Arab inhabitants of Palestine. At the same time, Morris wants to insist that in the absence of a document, there can be no proof of an official policy. However, there is also no reason to attribute the flight of the Palestinians solely to a trend in Zionist thought which would have preferred a Palestine free of Palestinians. That alone, as a single cause explanation and given what we know about what happened during the 1948 war, does not suffice.

Indo-Pakistani relations through film

2008-04-18T06:01:00.000+02:00

The Indo-Pakistani conflict is a multilayered one with overlapping and contentious national, ethnic, religious and class identities to which simplistic portrayals of Manichean worldviews do not do justice. If ICG's assessment regarding the role of dialogue where " even an official dialogue on normalization will improve the climate insufficiently unless it is accompanied by other dialogues-between India and Srinagar, between Pakistan and Muzaffarabad, between private Indian and Pakistanic citizens, and between the Kashmiris themselves" (ICG, Asia Report No. 79) is correct, then Arti Shukla's discussion of the Portrayal of Pakistan in Hindi cinema becomes relevant regarding "the use of cinema as means of political mobilization", particularly "the way partition is remembered in Indian cinema" and how it "bears upon the attitudes towards Pakistan".

If the current conflict, centered around Kashmir always links itself to the respective national discourses of India and Pakistan and the images of partition, responsibility, shared history and difference, then cinema as a medium which reflects and also critically observes hegemonic discourses about the national self and the other is important to the extent that it can measure and create changes in such discourses which determine the possibilities for a public acceptance of different types of peace/conflict. In that sense a Hindi cinema which continues to portray Pakistan "through the window" where "Indians are peace loving, responsible and take a paternal attitude to the actions of an irresponsible, fundamentalist and tactless Pakistan"by default allows no room for dialogue by preempting the possibility of positive agency for Pakistan and Pakistanis. That in itself seems evident.

The more interesting question then is whether the cinema described by Sunny Singh where the national identity is non-Pakistan-centric is any more conducive to attitudes which foster peace relations between the two states. While the process of vilification described by Shukla seems absent here, it is arguable whether this is indicative of a more benign attitude towards Pakistan, or whether the absence of Pakistan from the narrative is its negation as a valid nationhood, in a sense irrelevant to the Indian one. This "irrelevance" of Pakistan, while allowing for fruitful dialogue within the Indian national discourse itself makes Pakistan absent from the narrative-there can be no peace with an actor which is not relevant enough to be present.

Yet that having been said, perhaps it is a step forward that the Indian national discourse can be discussed apart from a focus on Pakistan, where Pakistan itself is bracketed and the conflict and how India handles it comes to bear more on intra-national relations amongst Indians themselves. From films which "identify Pakistan overtly as an enemy nation" ( says Sunny Singh) to films where " the enemy is merely a distant, nameless force whose only role is to function as the opposition against which the nation-state defines itself "(Singh) which "Reflects a dramatic shift in discourse, reaching instead to an earlier past as well as reflecting upon a post-independence reality to construct a national identity that does not include references to Pakistan. Thus Hindu-Muslim relations within the country can be framed in an internal context, without reference to Pakistan."(Singh).

In a conflict such as this one, it is vital that the discourse about the other does not come to define relations between majorities and minorities within India, where Muslims are made into an internal other. This seems to be precisely what the new wave of films described by Singh are consciously avoiding doing. Yet if the shift from Pakistan centered cinema where Pakistan was the enemy to a more internally looking cinema which treats political conflict within the frame of relations between groups inside India is understandable through the need for new identities forged by younger film makers which neither experiences the colonial project nor the partition, evaluating this shift as a shift to a different type of dialogue conducive to or hostile to peace is more difficult. "Popular Indian discourse on the Pakistan has been perceived by that nation as an Indian refusal to accept its identity as a separate state." The new cinema does not seem to actively do this, but appears to sideline the issue altogether.

Aside from commenting on the state's employment of nationalist discourse through cinema to garner support for policies and maintain an image of a united front, it is clear that there is a space to be negotiated in cinema, it being a form of artistic expression, that can subvert such hegemonic discourses and bring up uncomfortable questions which are relevant to conflict and security. To link this to the conflict, in an atmosphere where a cold peace is the best option in the short term "until a long process can produce an atmosphere in which the support of elected governments in both states might realistically bring a Kashmir solution" (ICG, Asia Briefing no. 51) there is room for dialogue and construction of images and self an other which will come to bear on the last diplomatic endgame of a final settlement. In light of improved relations since 2004, taboos should ease around topics of contact and engagement with the other.

Self images are also vital in this respect. If India and Pakistan can come to terms with their internal differences and multifaceted identities as well as their common colonial history, they will be much better endowed to come to terms with each other's existence as separate nation states. It is much easier to discuss and criticize Indian cinema and its self portrayal because of the relative freedom it enjoys in comparison to Pakistani cinema. In fact, if the choice is between a vilified other or a narrative which excludes the other and focuses on the problem within the self, for now, the latter option seems to be the healthier one.

Not that such choices are ever made consciously and directly. The development of different types of narratives assumes a life of its own, beyond the competing political forces which promote one narrative rather than another. It is in this sense that conflict based cinema can affect a situation rather than just reflect hegemonic discourses. It is in the manner in which the conflict is reflected, in the aspects of it chosen to be portrayed and the highlighting of certain factors over others that cinema can come to shape consciousnesses or at least provoke questions and encourage self reflection in mass consumerist audiences in a way other media fails to capture.

From Oslo to Annapolis

2008-04-15T05:51:00.000+02:00

(Inspired by Mouin Rabbani and (who else?) Edward Said)

In the first two chapters of "The Question of Palestine," Said tells, essentially, the story of a success. The successful, but morally condemnable, protagonist in this story is Zionism. While Said makes sure that we do not disregard the Zionist project for all that it represents for its supporters as an absolute negative, he tells the story "from the standpoint of its victims" and unravels what the successes of Zionism have meant for the unheard but not silent majority: the Palestinian Arabs. Said tells the story of two nationalisms, one imperialist, colonialist-settler, and essentially Western, the second anti-imperialist and Eastern, both liberationist. It is in the striving for liberation where the two nationalisms converge in another way as well: they have both failed.

Said explains how Zionism as a coherent ideology and manifest reality has been able to appropriate notions of time and space in order to build demarcations of inclusion and exclusion, layers of absolute difference and a shockingly active and conscious project of othering. The history of the Jewish people within Zionist historiography is constructed so that it literally overwrites any possible parallel history of Palestinian Arabs. The Zionist project is merely a reclaiming, redeeming one, in fact, portrayed as a normalizing activity the purpose of which is to reestablish things the way they should be. The land of Palestine is like the damsel in distress, to be rescued by the gallant Westerner from the hands of the barbaric Oriental who fails to understand its true needs and so neglects it and leaves it to decay.

Similarly, the Zionist project is premised on a methodology of negation, where the real presence of Arab Palestinians is obliterated (literally and figuratively) by the interpretation of this presence by Zionism as an absence , or worse, a rodent like nuisance to be eliminated for the sake of the common good. Commonality, of course, not being extended outside the community of Jews. The point is that the idea behind Zionism is a fascinatingly powerful one, with the ability to transform reality into its opposite by drawing on and actively adding to the community of language and values and the history of success of Western imperialism. Said's analysis, then, is premised on his notion of the Western discourse which created the Orient and the Occident and placed them in opposition to each other, and the latter in a positional superiority to the former which he elaborated in "Orientalism."

Said does not fail, however, to make the point that Zionism is a unique form of Western imperialism. This uniqueness can be found in its exclusion of the native from its civilizing mission , in its liberationist roots (although Said does not focus on this), in its amalgamation between a Western identity which allows it to draw on a vast network of Western values, ideas and technologies and an Eastern identity which legitimizes its geographical positioning and its insider status which gives it authority to speak about the native Oriental ( in this case the Palestinian Arab). Zionism is also unique in that it is able to maintain a position of respectability, even moral superiority as an imperialist project actively dispossessing and subjugating a native population well into the twenty first century and given the international (Western) consensus on human rights and self determination in a supposedly post colonial world. Said explains this partially by his allusion to the alliance between Zionism and liberalism from the beginning of its inception. This is the power of the idea of Zionism which does not at all appear in a vacuum in terms of the history of the relationship between Orient and Occident.

It is within this understanding that Said's opposition to Oslo can be explained. The process which, for him, institutionalized power imbalances and could only create further conflict down the road was structurally flawed. This is because it accepted the epistemological basis of Zionism as elaborated by Said in The Question of Palestine. It was not just the "manner in which its application during subsequent years affected the lives and aspirations of West Bank and Gaza Strip Palestinians"but more fundamentally that it " is neither an instrument of decolonization nor a mechanism to apply international legitimacy to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but rather a framework that changes Israeli control over the occupied territories in order to perpetuate it.

It was not just the structure of the conflict as controlled by Zionism since its inception that was relevant, but, importantly, the disappointment after Oslo of the Palestinians where their living conditions continued to worsen. He explains Israel's failure to implement its obligations in Oslo and its continued insistence on renegotiations previous concessions as small as they may have been in the first place. What Oslo did was create a framework which was supposedly constructively ambiguous but which allowed Israel to elude its obligations, since their terms of implementation could always be renegotiated. It is in this context that Rabbani explains the Aqsa Intifada, and details the behavior of Fatah as the main Palestinian protagonist. While Israel continues to go back to the status quo ante, Palestinians explicitly refuse the status quo ante and find it difficult to reaccept an Oslo like agreement, although it seems that this is where Annapolis is headed.

While Annapolis is attempting to reach final status negotiations, it comes in an atmosphere of Palestinian disunity, the exclusion of vital regional players (Syria, Hamas, Iran), and weakened leadership on both the Palestinian and Israeli sides. Although it may have some circumstantial advantages over Camp David, it is unlikely to see how any plan come to under Annapolis could be implemented in the current situation.

If Said was right about Palestine, and about Oslo, then the same structure of conflict exists, including the same power imbalances. If Said was right, it seems difficult to negotiate with Zionism. The Hamas/Fatah split after Hamas' Gaza takeover pits two ideologies about the nature of the conflict against each other. The two understandings seem irreconcilable. While they are split, however, it is the Palestinians who suffer from the lack of a united front against Israel. The international community plays a role in this, and continues to pressure Hamas and condemn it for its violent tactics, but without providing a serious alternative, a truly different framework through which the settlement of the conflict can be reformulated. It seems that the ICG report was right in its bleak optimism in October 2006, which was expressed as "if there is a silver lining in the recent succession of catastrophic development in the Middle east, it is that they may impart renewed momentum to the search for a comprehensive settlement of the Arab Israeli conflict. It is admittedly a slender hope." And so we remain, awaiting momentum.

Husserl screws with your head( in a good way) and is a horrible writer (in a really bad way)

2008-03-18T11:47:00.000+02:00

In what follows, I will take my lead from Husserl, and continue to expand on his ideas according to the threads of thought I found personally intriguing, and in ways which may contradict Husserl. Husserl's premise here seems to be that there are different modes of thinking, some of which hamper the possibility of others. The dominance of logical objective scientific thinking seems to delay the possibility of intuitive processes of thought precisely because it presupposes so much that it makes such a mental process of intuition impossible.

The focus then, needs to be not on the presuppositions which make possible the type of thinking which is objective-scientific, but the mental process that, figuratively speaking, the knowing subject encounters when she opens her eyes and experiences the world, in a pure sense, in an essential manner, without filtering it through unnecessary presuppositions, but while filtering it through the mental process itself. The focus is then on the process of experiencing (the experience of experiencing) which connects the knowing subject to the intended object rather than on an objective and detatched ontological reality of the object to be known, which here, seems to be impossible without passing through the subjectivity of the experience.

To say that certain types of thinking hamper the possibility of others is not to say that logical thinking makes impossible the intuitive process. This is because the intuitive process is inevitable and is a truth in itself. The difference, then, is in the awareness of the intuitive process. This awareness is what is hindered by the focus on external rather than internal realities. The awareness of the experience of being aware, and not the awareness of that which we are aware of, is the higher level of experience, of a subjectivity which in itself constitutes and helps us understand reality and which determines the relationship between the knower and the known, which, in my view, phenomenology hinges on.

In fact, intuition is what enables us to understand reality not as all that is ontologically possible, but as a modality of experience. This then opens up categories such as the non-real. However, since the intuitive process of intending an object always occurs against a backdrop of central figure vis a vis background, it also means that experience is not atomistic, but necessarily experiences what is as a whole. This makes it possible to shift intentionality from one object to another, creating a total shift in perspective, the possibility of which is necessary for knowing any single object. This is because the single object can only be-wholly- known through the combination of the different perspectives in which it presents itself to the knower. Thus the interrogation of the process of experiencing becomes necessary if we are to understand the possibility of a shift of focus which allows the knower to become aware of different aspects of the object's being, or of the existence of things the knower was not previously aware of at all.

Logical thinking then is possible only through the process of intuitive knowing. How the mathematician first experiences the possibility of numbers-the mental process of cognition and not what can be known itself- is necessarily prior to all else. Thus the natural sciences must need be grounded in an understanding of this process first and foremost before they can progress. The life world, then, must be prior to theory, if theory is theorizing about the life world. How we experience the life world must be prior to theory if theory is theorizing about how we know the life world. Experience then, must come before and above theory because it is that which makes theory possible, and it also encompasses theory, since nothing can exist, which is knowable, outside experience.

Can the scope of objective science, then, ever include the realm of intuitive experience if objective science itself is embedded in experience? If objective science cannot stand outside experience because of the presuppositions it necessitates which are themselves not prior to experience, then it is at the fundamental level of consciousness where objective science must stop. Phenomenology could fill this gap by the bracketing of all such presuppositions and logical constructs and by going straight to the thing itself as experienced, understanding it as part of the relation between the knower, the cognitive process, and the known. By going from mind to object, objective-logical thinking ignores the fundamental link, that being the mental process of knowing-the intended action of the mind.

If consciousness is the essence of experience, then the question presents itself whether there can be a unitary knowing of the immanent object and the transcendent object. The answer seems to be that the transcendent object, while possessing an essential truth in itself, can only be known through the way it presents itself to the knower, and thus the way in which it is immanent. This means that only a unitary knowing is possible since the acknowledgment of the transcendence of the object can only occur once the object has been immanent, once it is experienced as a phenomenon. This is precisely how the reality of the real may be transcended: through this combination of its different aspects and through understanding first how it is experienced through how it presents itself to the knower, and not to go directly to its being as a transcendent object.

One of the main problems that comes up when placing experience at the centre of our focus, is that of the isolation of the experience-and thus the reality- of each individual. If experience is the door to all else, and if experience is necessarily subjective and isolated, then how can we move from this to a more inter-subjective understanding of reality with a sets of shared meanings-possibly even shared experiences? Since the experience is essentially a mental process, it is also necessarily isolated, and belongs to the individual knower only. Yet, this does not rule out the possibility of creating a common set of experiences through communication and acknowledgement of the experience of the other. In fact, the variation of accounts of experience of the same phenomenon may help us understand the full reality of this phenomenon. Thus, while the experience is essentially isolated, and one experience of one knower cannot be expanded to include another, the similarity of experiences regarding the same phenomena helps reaffirm the nature of the transcendent being of objects, through more experiences of their immanence.

This short reflection has barely scratched the surface of the ideas it intended to explore, but suffices to outline the basic inspirations which I have so far derived from Husserl. Each figment of thought here deserves a post on its own, but also requires much more disciplined meditation, on my part, on the nature of consciousness and what we can or cannot know through experience.

Humanism and Democratic Criticism

2008-03-12T17:59:00.000+02:00

(My take on Said's idea of Humanism)

In the diverse but well-linked number of articles which constitute Said's last book Humanism and Democratic Criticism, he offers, simultaneously, a philosophy of knowledge, and a moral credo for resistance. For Said, humanism is essentially and among other things an epistemology which is both secular and universal. It is secular to the extent that it takes as its starting point the human construction of history and the power of the human mind to know the human mind[1]. It submits to no Gods but the necessity of knowledge for the pursuit of freedom and justice; in fact knowledge with any other intention is undesirable. And it is in this sense that humanism is universal. The type of knowledge which is confined, provincial, exclusive, not relatable to interventionist action on the behalf of liberty against the oppressive reigns of power all over the globe is for Said co-opted, banal, and unusable. The other becomes necessary for knowledge of the self which is both a requirement and a product of criticism. Criticism, then, is required both for writing history (in the literal and metaphorical sense) and for resistance to history through reading it in an investigative manner, and interrogating the assumptions which inform its silences. This is one of many paradoxes which inform Said's ideas throughout the book.

Said's exploration of how such knowledge is possible takes him to the realm of the individual. And it is this insistence on the centrality of the individual which is the most powerful and problematic aspect of the philosophy he puts forward. Humanism, Said argues, begins with criticism. Criticism requires a close reading, a meticulous investigation of texts within their historical contexts and of social and physical structures[2] as both constitutive of and constituted by these texts. Such criticism must-can only- start from the individual intellectual/writer/humanist. This notion of the individual as the agent of history is empowering. And yet Said's concessions to the hegemonies of the totalizing and embedded structures of power and discursive practices which he repeatedly claims are dominant, stand in a seemingly irreconcilable opposition to the idea-the mere possibility- of individual agency. In fact, Said admits to this contradiction in his first chapter where he acknowledges his critics[3], and the rest of the book is centered, one way or another, around negotiating this relationship between history and man, power and the individual, the general and the particular. Said's method towards reconciling his recognition of hegemonic discourses and his insistence on the fact that history is not impersonal, and I surely oversimplify, is a focus on the potential for achievement of the individual unavoidably coupled with the will towards collective action (at the same time that he warns us repeatedly about the dangers of mobilized collective passions) to reread the past and present in ways which destabilize fixed notions and challenge power. Said goes from systems of thinking over which the cogito has no power to the centrality of human agency[4] through the idea of historicism. That is, while the human mind cannot distil abstract ideas which are free floating and detached from the realities of lived experience, it must also be recognized that the social and physical structures and power dynamics which are the not so passive framework[5] of the possibility of human thought are themselves human creations, knowable and vulnerable to deconstruction and change also-and only-through human agency and thus "change is human history; and human history as made by human action and understood accordingly is the very ground of the humanities."[6]

However Said does not claim to have fully bridged the gap, but admits to the "tragic" nature of human knowledge which is necessarily, subjective partial and incomplete[7]. His remedy-also admittedly limited- for this, is a return to philology which involves close reading, democratic critique and a conscious will to relate such endeavors with the ever-pressing problems of the human condition. The limitations to knowledge are exacerbated by the fragmentation of disciplines, the alienation of academia and the rule of experts, the canonization of ideas, and a monolithic, static understanding of history: phenomena which are by nature anti-democratic and, for Said, even anti-intellectual. At first glance this seems naïve: after explaining the dominating and totalitarian structures of power which control human life and the blurring of borders between the public and the private spheres, Said says the answer is to be a good reader. Said's point though is that what is necessary to confront power is a reclamation of knowledge, and a reading which is able to go from the specific to the general. He critiques Foucauldian and Derridean readings[8] on the grounds that they fail to make decisions about texts, to will the use of knowledge in order –to borrow one of Said's phrases- to speak truth to power. In the final analysis though, Said succeeds more in his argument for the moral necessity of speaking truth to power than in convincing us that his method will work to actually transform the equations of power. While theoretically Said is successful in making coherent his idea which relies both on the existence of impersonal power structures (which should be challenged) and the power of the individual (who challenges them by making the impersonal personal), it is uncertain whether he is as triumphant when he brings his theory to bear on reality using examples of humanistic practice and collective action which have in the past challenged and continue to challenge the extravagances of power. Addressing language as the core of the problem as well as the only tool to challenge its own oppressiveness[9], Said tells us that alternative media outlets, platforms for public debate, the internet and some notion of civil society are all spaces in which the humanist may speak, write and form a constituency[10]. And here Said runs the risk of sounding simplistically like a liberal explaining the virtue of interest based politics. The examples which he gives of the type of action he is advocating all display admirable courage as well as defeat, not in the sense that they cease to exist, but that they fail, ultimately to change the discursive practices which maintain the structures of power. His example of Ralph Nader and the American electoral system is a case in point.[11] However, despite this critique of Said, this skepticism about the power of the individuals, his epistemology and methodology seem to provide the only link between man and the structures which surround him without denying the subjectivity of man, or leaving us in a world where man is powerless to effect change.

At the same time that Said focuses on the state of humanism and democracy in the United States, and suggests the uniqueness of the American scene, his ideas can, and are meant to be, universalized to the general state of the human condition within its different contexts. This is because for Said humanism must be usable, it must be a practice[12], a conscious act and not a set of ideas which are possessed and utilized for the benefit of a specific culture or ideology. Humanism is not only relevant, but necessary for contemporary life, all over the world, because it takes as its basic assumption a shared humanity which cannot be ascribed exclusively to one group of people: critique in the final analysis must be democratic critique or it can only serve the interests of power. This is especially the case within the changing reality of an increasingly globalized world where events, ideas and destinies are inextricably linked. Said sets the scene of the post-Cold War world by explaining the threat such combative, diametrically opposed identities, as were the central feature of the Cold War and the cultural conflicts which have followed after them, pose to the humanities, and thus human life. And yet he maintains that humanism as defensive nationalism is a mixed blessing, which is allowable in some instances and not in others[13], towards ends of liberation (for exampled Palestine) but not of oppression (for example imperialist nationalisms).

Said problematically assumes that such a standard of what is considered just and emancipatory, versus what pretends to be just but is only in the service of power and parochial identities exists. This is linked to Said's notion of humanism as resistance. The individual is not predetermined by circumstances but exists in a dialectic with them which allows the taking of an active role. Said's theory thus explicitly makes allowances for the underdog, so to speak. Where there is no real room for identity politics in humanism, this rule does not apply to defensive identities which are in a struggle against domination. This connects itself to Said's discussion of nationalist frameworks, within which humanist practice occurs. Said implies that nationalism can and should be embraced instrumentally as a tool for liberation but then denounced once that end is achieved. That this is against the very nature of nationalism which constructs narratives that are meant to be permanent, and intended to be internalized by large numbers of people, fixed in history, limited by space and set as a basis for knowledge production, and prescribing a system of education, is not addressed by Said. Again, Said seems to urge the reader to attempt the impossible: to essentially separate the aesthetic from and maintain it in oppositional standing to the national[14] and to recognize the national context but attempt to go beyond it, which is never, in the end fully possible. Said maintains a precarious balance between, on the one hand, emancipation through critique, through speaking the unspeakable, and ultimately challenging fixed notions and identities in ways which are intelligible and timely, and between, on the other hand, mitigating against the chaos of an ultra subjectivity which makes nothing comprehensible and threatens the concept of knowledge in itself. With no common denominator, knowledge as humanism intends it is not possible, and yet it is against the ossification of humanities which Said cautions. He seems to approve of "conventions, semantic frameworks and social or even political communities operating as partial constraints on what would otherwise be an out of control subjective frenzy"[15] even while he spends most of the book explaining how such conventions and communities must be challenged in their rigidity and far reaching control. Said's recognition of a need for a measure of stability is prudent and his attempt at a synthesis is admirable, but once again seems so delicate that it leaves us unsure whether it is up to the challenge which it claims to recognize.

Humanism and Democratic Criticism is infused with the same sense of worldliness-one of Said's most expressive adjectives- which has informed his previous works such as Orientalism, Culture and Imperialism and Representations of the Intellectual. It rests on the same understanding of all representation as necessarily contaminated, and advocates the recognition of this fact and its exploitation for the goal of emancipation. His corpus all speaks to the relationship between the part and the whole, and attempts to understand how the former constitutes the latter and is also constrained by it. His corpus is one which testifies to a life of resistance and an aspiration towards knowledge embedded deep in moral principles of equality and the betterment of the human condition. Written very near the end of his life, the book sees Said attempting to spell out his philosophy once and for all, to make explicit the principles based upon which more specific works such as Orientalism were written. It also demonstrates that Said is comfortable with the contradictions and paradoxes he sets out, and views them as essentially inescapable. His work is one which is also conscious of its limitations: hegemonic discourses still prevail, the intellectual is never completely free and close reading of texts must recognize that texts are never completely knowable: the whole is never made subservient to the part, and yet the part must continue to struggle against being made invisible as well as against becoming exclusionary and aggressive. As a humanist, to demystify[16] and elucidate and make relevant, and not to contribute to a provincialised body of work has been Said's governing ethos. The dialectic between texts, their locations, and their readers in their life situations and the power dynamics this contributes to has not been absent in any of his major works, as has his attempt to widen circles of awareness always been present. Like his description of the ideal humanist, Said himself has not been an insider or an outsider, but has traveled between both in an attempt to make transitions between cultures. Whatever we may say about the feasibility of Said's ideas then, we must acknowledge them as noble, and at least worth investigating further. If Said has done anything at all it is to have provoked serious questions which have opened the door to a different type of knowledge production which takes as its starting point human dignity and a belief in liberation in a post-Cold War world, and continues, until his final days, to see hope in the bleakest of situations where human life is in the throes of a battle between a Eurocentric logos which has caused suffering, and a post modernity which refuses to recognize it as real. And so Said works with what he knows best-and what he believes to be the only realm available to humans in a secular world: that of language which is directly engaged with itself in confrontational spaces between freedom and power.

1 Said, Edward W. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. p.65
[2]Ibid. p. 83
[3]Ibid, P.9
[4] Ibid, P.10
[5]Ibid, P.75
[6] Ibid, P.10
[7]Ibid, P.117
8 Ibid, P.66
[9]Ibid, p.29, p.132
[10] Ibid, P. 132-133
[11] Ibid, P.126
[12]Ibid, P.6
[13]Ibid, P.37
[14]Ibid, P.140, p.144
[15] Ibid, P.69
[16]Ibid, P.73

A Note on Egyptian Cinema and Conflict

2008-03-10T05:33:00.001+02:00

The question of the relationship between art and politics is one that has ravaged the minds of philosophers, artists and politicians for centuries. Art as a form of expression draws on, reflects upon, critiques, converses with and even creates its surrounding social and political realities. Art, as a representation of realities and alternatives to realities is in a constant dialectic with politics and power. In fact, art possesses one of the strongest political/cultural tools of all: the power of representation. Art as representation recreates, reproduces and refashions social realities and perspectives. The power of representation lies in its ability to create reality out of perspective, and power out of discourse. "Art can subvert ordinary, everyday understandings and thereby open the way for a changed consciousness in which new ways of living and new forms of politics might be grounded." If a story can be told right, it can transform itself from just a story to a social narrative which creates and modifies vested power interests, complex social relations and lays the epistemological groundwork for creating political realities. It is in this context that I discuss the relationship between art and conflict, although the far-reaching effects of the art I discuss here is not the topic of this essay.

The particular art form in review here is film, its specific locale being Twentieth Century Egypt. Film is taken to be a unique and complex art form which has the capacity to illustrate its surroundings in a dynamic manner, as well as the advantage (and disadvantage) of being part of a large industry with the potential of massive circulation, and thus the potential of maximum social impact. The conflicts in consideration are those portrayed by some of the iconic pieces of modern Egyptian cinema. The conflicts are usually not portrayed directly as international conflict, but their extra territorial nature is implied, sometimes more clearly than others. Mostly, they are conflicts which undisputedly have a regional nature: Islamic extremism/terrorism, American hegemony in the Arab world, and the 1990 Gulf War. The films I have in mind here depict the conflict through the lens of Egyptian protagonists and have a vision of the conflict's effects on Egyptian society, but also allude to the transformation of social realities domestically as an effect of regional and international political on-goings. The domestic in these films is usually viewed as peripheral in the sense that the structural situation is seen to be a result of political happenings elsewhere, namely, at the center of global politics.

In fact, the films themselves-and not just there subject matter- can be considered within a framework of international relations. This is true if we consider international relations in the widest sense as a matrix of complex linkages between different power centers and peripheries which produces reference systems, interests, and commodities, part of which are movies. Egyptian films thus are either included or excluded from an "international" film industry and resources are directed towards or away from them depending on the detailed functioning of the system at a point in time. As one commentator noted, "postmodern capitalist power, mobile and penetrating, easily colonized the cultural sphere, particularly in its more commercially and technologically dependent domains like film, and it did so on a global scale."

Moreover, these films, like any art once it has been unleashed for public consumption, should not only be considered within the chronology of the historical development of Egyptian cinema, but also as autonomous entities which have social and artistic effects different than and beyond what their creators intended. The films I speak of here are a product of the second half of the Twentieth Century. They come after nearly a century of Egyptian filmmaking during which cinema had seen its ups and downs. This included the colonization of the film industry in the form of the replication of Western storyboards, motifs and visuals, the nationalization of the industry under Nasser's socialism and the near complete commercialization of all film production during the Open Door policy of Sadat as well as various forms of censorship. Film" has the capacity to elude the intentions of its creators and to transcend its social determinations." To this extent, the specificities of time, place and circumstances of production should be heeded as part of an exercise to locate these films within a framework of meaning and understand the biases of their creators. It is thus crucial to locate the authors of these cultural texts and view them within their circumstantial restrictions. However, such considerations should not prevent us from viewing the films as detached from their authors as cultural texts which gain meaning through their interpretation by consumers.

Perhaps more on this later.

On the Possibility of Self Discovery with a Reflection on Sartre;Or My Story With the Red Corvette

2008-03-06T05:22:00.001+02:00

It is a striking image, that of consciousness as a burst towards the world. That the essential quality of consciousness is a movement, and thus an inherent instability, a fundamental disconnect with a fixed self, which throws the relationship between self and world into a light which is bewildering at times. The image of a burst or explosion is that of disorder, fragmentation, dispersion, and force. One cannot burst or explode in an orderly manner, and it seems that one cannot have complete control over the way in which one bursts into the world. And yet, according to Sartre, it is in such a manner that we know the world. This manner, also according to Sartre is conscious (whether pre reflective or reflective) and we must take responsibility for the way in which we interact with the universe. And yet his use of the act "to burst" makes the interactive process seem chaotic, if not unwilled. We are thus accustomed to things made to burst, or things bursting because they could not prevent this bursting, but not things bursting willingly of their own accord. It is perhaps here, that we get Sartre's notion of being condemned to freedom. We must burst outward, for there is no other direction to go. Realizing this, we will it to happen, as if we could not will it. Finding ourselves in the world, thrown forcefully, a little confused and in situations which do not always seem coherent, we are tempted not to take responsibility for how we interact with the universe. This is what Sartre calls bad faith.

We must realize, believe, that we have control over the way in which we exist, although we have no control over the fact that we are free, that we constantly move and burst in different ways towards different things. And yet intentionality is key. And any negation of intentionality is an instance of bad faith. And here is the difficult existential question, the horror of being forced out into the world in a manner which is pre-intentional, only to find that we have complete responsibility for how we intend such interactions. From here, we can choose to focus consciousness on certain objects rather than others. And so when I choose to understand a text, for example, it is according to Sartre, only possible because the text is external to me, it is an object outside of consciousness to which consciousness can be applied. I am not forced to understand the text, I may choose to focus, instead on the image accompanying the text, but again it is the quality of the image being separate from my consciousness of it that makes me able to focus on it in the first place. The text or image are knowable to me only because I can apply consciousness to them since they are external to me, but to the extent that they remain external to me, they are never completely knowable and always elude me in a sense. This fact is paradoxical, but also brings itself to bear on how I know myself. I can know myself in the way I am conscious of the world, the way I bring myself to bear on the world, in every act of perception. Thus I know the I as an external fact, which has no existence beyond how I perceive. And yet, since consciousness is separate from the world, since it is a whole which cannot be permeated by the world, it is also conscious of itself, of its own consciousness, which is precisely what separates it from the world, and makes possible the existence of an I. The question of consciousness of the self then comes up, since it is an instance of knowing that which is both external to and included in my consciousness. The I becomes an object which I know external to consciousness at every moment I am aware of my reflection on my own consciousness, but it is also something which I possess and cannot be separated from me and attributed to another object or another cogito.

If consciousness is a movement towards the world, what is it a movement away from? If consciousness is translucent, as Sartre argues, then for consciousness there is only itself-nothing is contained within it, it has no contents, so to speak. It is thrown against the world, but cannot ever merge with the contents of the world, or assimilate them into itself and thus it cannot ever possess them, or unify them with a self and then go on to acquire other possessions. To know is not to possess. And this same fact requires that consciousness, as Husserl said, is always consciousness of something. This, argues Sartre is the irreducible principle of phenomenology. The quest to "discover" a pure consciousness, a consciousness in itself and for itself, is thus impossible. We do not, when we move towards the world, move away from a stable self, rather we consciously create that self in the manner in which we move towards the world. The self is then also outside consciousness, never completely knowable, always in flux-but essentially attached to consciousness at the same time. It seems then one does not ever "discover who they really are", but is always burdened with creating who they are at a particular moment in time, as well as synthesizing the self at that moment with the self of the past. Consciousness is then whole, never divided, although it may exist in different forms.

There is nothing that we move away from when we move towards the world because our whole consciousness, including our consciousness of our selves, which is all that we know of ourselves, (and so speaking about a self separate from consciousness is not possible) is directed outwards. The fact of movement then governs our relationship with the world. There is no consciousness which is still, which is undirected, which does not intend towards an external object. To cease moving towards the world, is to cease to be conscious. And since nothing can be known completely which is always moving, consciousness can only be known insofar as we can know how it moves. We cannot know consciousness in its pure, still form: consciousness purely in itself is no longer moving, and so is dead. Consciousness purely for itself is all knowing, is identical with itself and with nothing else: it is God. It is the moving quality of consciousness which separates it from inanimate objects. Thus there is no consciousness without the world, and no world without consciousness and to discover oneself is not to find a pure essence which can somehow then be applied to the world, but a state of being which is created through consciousness of the world and not in any way prior to it (since even pre reflective consciousness is pre reflective in relation to the world).

One thus creates oneself through the discovery of the world, more precisely through the exploration of the different ways one might interact with it, move towards it, and then create certain patterns of interaction which we might attach to the self as its essential qualities. For Sartre, " it is not in some hiding place that we will discover ourselves: it is on the road, in the town, in the midst of the crowd, a thing among things, a man among men."[1] Still, the point is that such patterns are changeable, and knowable since they are of our own creation. In the present moment we have-a slippery sort of- control over the self now. We can no longer control or create the self of past consciousness. We have what seems like full control over the self of the future, as we try to create it and are in a constant loss of the present which is always slipping away from us. And yet consciousness is always a whole, a synthesis between past and present. When consciousness refers to itself, it does not refer to the fleeting consciousness of the present, but to a consciousness which survives the passage of time as a unity and assumes the connection of future consciousness to itself. Still, there remains a sense of differentiation between what is past, present and future which does not always seem reconcilable with consciousness as a unified whole.

Therefore if we construct the ego in the process of reflection, we need not move away from it when we move towards the world, since it is never there to move away from, but only comes into existence once we impose it as a unifier on the pre-reflective and reflective levels of consciousness: they are both mine. For Sartre, to assume that such a transcendental I exists, is to burden consciousness unnecessarily. There is no process of self discovery, no process of searching inwards, but only a process of self creation, of moving outwards. And yet to say that is not to say that consciousness is all outwardness. In fact, in its basic unreflected state it is an absolute inwardness, says Sartre, which is precisely what makes it identifiable from the world which surrounds it. Consciousness of something does not always mean consciousness of something in relation to the self, but it does always mean consciousness of something in relation to the world. The transcendental I requires a stillness which consciousness does not know. The transcendental I is no longer necessary for the possibility of experience, all we need is a consciousness grounded in such experience, and an understanding that such a consciousness is whole, subjective, related to the world and also absolutely beyond it, and separate from it. It is not required to posit an essentialising transcendental I on consciousness thus, because consciousness is on its own unified, separate and subjective, and the I remains outside of it, an object for it to act upon.

While it has been stated that a transcendental I need not stand between me and my consciousness of something, it also true that as soon as consciousness reflects upon itself, the I is immediately and inescapably present. The act of reflection requires the recognition that it is my consciousness, and that I am reflecting on it as such. This becomes problematic though. If as Sartre posits, "the consciousness which says I Think is precisely not the consciousness which thinks[2]" and if, as Husserl argues (and Sartre agrees) "there is an indissoluble unity of the reflecting consciousness and the reflected consciousness[3]" then it seems that the I Think is always inescapable. Is it not possible, that at the moment in which I think about the red Corvette, I am also aware that I am thinking about the red Corvette and thus in a state of both reflecting and reflected consciousness? Or is a transition from one to the other required so that one moves from a relationship which is described as consciousness towards object to one that is consciousness towards consciousness of object? If so, what form does this transition take? It seems that there are not two consciousnesses but one conscious directed differently, once outwards towards an object, and once inwards towards itself at a point which itself is directed outwards towards an object.

If the question is one of self knowledge/discovery, then it seems, if the two states of consciousness are not simultaneously occurring, that I can only know myself as reflected consciousness as I was in past states, and never as I reflect on the world at the moment in which I reflect on the world. In other words, if I am thinking about the red Corvette now, I cannot also know now myself as I think about the red Corvette, but only later once I reflect on myself reflecting on the red Corvette. This means that something of the I think is always lost to us when the cogito is aware of itself thinking, since it can never grasp the reflection in the moment in which it happens, but only once it has happened. This problematizes the whole possibility of self knowledge. Sartre says that there is no I in the unreflected consciousness. The I only appears once the I reflects on the unreflected consciousness, and this is where it is found. This means that the self is not created through my interaction with the world per se, but that I construct the self once I reflect on my interaction with the world. The self is thus neither found in some obscure inner part of consciousness, nor is it constantly obstructing the path between consciousness and its objects, but it appears once consciousness becomes self reflective and posits as its object unreflected consciousness.

Thus far, and from what will now follow, it seems that a notion of self-discovery is inherently incompatible with Sartre's philosophy. This is because the idea of self discovery seems to imply that there are hidden essences of the self which we can know by looking inwards, deeper and deeper, while Sartre rejects this idea of hidden essences, and argues instead that all our actions must be owned and are necessarily the result of reflective consciousness. Thus, even when there seems to be a suppressed motivation for an act, Sartre argues that we must first take notice of this motivation, reflect on it, and decide to suppress it. And yet Sartre seems to have a vision of reflective consciousness which is necessarily clear, knowable to itself at all times and unified so that it cannot "forget" a past act of suppression. Whether this picture painted by Sartre is true is difficult to determine. Can reflective consciousness not function in more subtle ways, in more complex mechanisms than that of clear reflection followed by conscious decision making? Cannot the desire to forget something be so powerful that consciousness reflects on it and successfully (but never completely) suppresses it within itself? Suppressed or hidden feelings then, remain, necessarily a function of reflective consciousness (and hear I mean that I love the red Corvette, not that the red Corvette is loveable), but reflective consciousness, aware of itself, may also be able to suppress my desire for the red Corvette, in effect, decide to no longer reflect on it. In order to find out why I dated the ugly guy then, I must revisit the act of reflective consciousness which decided not to think about my desire for the red Corvette. I would find then that I dated the ugly guy not because he was nice, but because I desired his red Corvette.

Sartre touches upon this idea again when he deals with states as transcendent unities of consciousness. In this he argues that a state of desire, for example desire for the red Corvette, is not of consciousness but transcends it. If that were true, then the fact is my desire for the Corvette was not instantaneous, it did not appear and disappear when I first saw the Corvette, but remained with me while I dated the ugly guy. It is not that I desired the Corvette, but that I desire the Corvette, and so my feelings towards the Corvette and the ugly guy are mediated through this permanent state of desire, which is expected to continue into the future. And so, it is not that my desire for the red Corvette was suppressed, but that it may have been confused with a passing act of consciousness when in fact it was a state beyond consciousness itself. I was always aware of it-the desire for the red Corvette that is- but it only made itself immanent, only appeared to me, at the times when I saw the red Corvette, and so by a fault of reflection I was unable to consistently link my desire for the red Corvette with the reason I dated the ugly guy since it was a desire that escaped/transcended my consciousness by virtue of it being a state and not just an act of consciousness. Perhaps this is using Sartre's ideas to argue something very different from what he says, but since it is my own reflection on my own consciousness, Sartre cannot tell me what I did or did not feel. He may object to other things which are beyond my own consciousness, perhaps that the guy wasn't really so ugly, or that Corvettes are passé anyway, but he cannot tell me that I had no desire for the red Corvette since no desire for the Corvette was known to me while I dated the ugly guy-or can he? The question here is how infallible my own conscious reflection is when it comes to matters of reflecting on itself. Here Sartre would object that I have no exclusive right to speak of my consciousness regarding things that I superimpose on it and assume to have acted on it –such a desire for a red Corvette- which were not known to me at the time and thus were not the result of my reflection on my own consciousness at the time: how would I know I had a suppressed desire for a red Corvette if no such desire was apparent to me at the time of dating? Is not my claim that there was a suppressed desire just as valid as his that there wasn't since neither of us can have proof of such an unfalsifiable notion as repressed desire?

The question has not been addressed of why anyone would want a red corvette in the first place. Desire, for Sartre is always directed towards being. To desire to have and to desire to do are in fact desires to be. They are desires towards a being which asserts itself as identical with itself, and which is both in itself, since it is, and for itself, since it can create by attaching an object to itself (through having or doing). This desire to be is never fully achievable because it desires to fulfill itself and also to continue to desire which are inherently contradictory actions. And so it is never really that I want the red Corvette for itself, but that I want to attach it to my own being, to possess it, in order that I can be in a particular way. But is this not similar to the notion of suppressed desires which Sartre rejects? If I am not aware of my desire towards the Corvette as a desire to be rather than a desire to be masked by a desire to have, then my consciousness must have repressed, forgotten, not take account of my desire to be which was the real reason I wanted the red Corvette. Sartre seems to leave this paradox unsolved.

Attempting to sum up, it is sufficient to say that I am not my desire for the red Corvette. My ego is constituted of more, in terms of states, actions and qualities, than my desire for the red Corvette, on Sartre's account. And yet, if I were to be stripped of all desires, all states and all qualities, I would cease to be, since my ego does not exist separately from these things which give it character, it is not preserved in any essential form once all of these things are taken away. It has no being, beyond that which is qualified by the ways it interacts with the world. Thus existence is prior to essence. The most difficult question then, if all that remained of my states, actions and qualities was my desire for the red Corvette, would I choose to continue dating the ugly guy, or would I choose to be stripped away of this desire, and cease to exist at all?

[1]Sartre, Jean-Paul. Intentionality: A fundamental Idea of Husserl's Phenomenology
[2] Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Transcendence of the Ego
[3]Ibid.

Merleau-Ponty and the How of Experience

2008-03-02T17:18:00.001+02:00

One of the basic questions here is how do we experience given how we are. The "how" of our being, according to Merleu-Ponty, is fundamentally embodied. And so, any interaction with the world, any experience of the world, must be organically tied to our existence as a body, limited by the laws of time and space. There can be no strict division between mind and body because the body is an a priori condition for the existence of consciousness, which is not found in time or space but which is limited by them given its attachment to the body which does exist in time and space. Thus all of our consciousness is in fact subject to our existence as bodies, just as our existence as bodies is not the same as the existence of a chair for example, but is also qualified by our existence as bodies which are conscious of themselves.

Can then, a real distinction be made between what is in itself and what is for itself? In other words, do we exist separately as being on the one hand and as consciousness on the other? For Merleu-Ponty, such a proposition, it seems, is absurd. In fact we must exist as being which is conscious of itself, and consciousness which always is. Since neither can exist separately, and since our being is fundamentally subject to the body, then it is not possible to exist separately as being in itself and consciousness for itself. Yet saying that there is no duality does not negate that being and consciousness cannot be one and the same thing: a link needs to be present in order to demystify this type of existence. Perhaps it is enough to say, like Merleu-Ponty does, that when seen as being within the realm of existence, the physiological and the psychic become indistinguishable, and both work to direct us towards an outer world, separate from but- in this sense of our being inevitably oriented towards it-always linked to our own existence as being and consciousness.

Our consciousness of the body derives from the existence of the body and of the objective physiological processes that accompany it and enable consciousness to exist by keeping the body alive; yet by being aware of itself as embodied as well as separately as thought, consciousness is not fully tied to the body and has a sort of existence which is qualitatively different. Our interaction with the world depends on our consciousness of ourselves not merely as consciousness but also as bodies. In fact it would be absurd to think of such a thing as a self awareness which is not fundamentally aware of its embodiment. Such a free-floating consciousness, by definition, cannot exist in the realm of the human.

A question which comes up then, is what is it that experiences? For bodies on their own cannot experience: things can be done to them, they can change, but they cannot, strictly speaking, experience. Yet if we were to remove the bodily apparatuses which enable our experience, then there would be no receptors, no sensory organs, and again no experience. The point then is that there is no such thing as bodies on their own or consciousness which is disembodied, and thus there can be no experience without the unity of mind and body.

The fundamental act of consciousness, being aware of itself, is in fact, not a voluntary act at all but a sort of quality of consciousness given its nature. There is then, an inherent restriction on consciousness, that of being always conscious whether it wills to or not. This is a function of consciousness being attached to a body. Although Merleu-Ponty doesn’t go in this direction, then, it seems that there is a fundamental lack of freedom in the nature of consciousness since although it can conceive of willing, and can will, it cannot will not to be itself: to be the consciousness of another subject, or not to be at all. This quality of consciousness as tied to being also ties the individual consciousness to the world. This is because there is a fundamental quality of consciousness which is not willed by it, and which essentially constitutes the personal but is also impersonal since it is not of the subject but is prior to the subject and so essentially links it to the world by not allowing it to disconnect from itself: consciousness needs only to be conscious of itself to also be conscious of the world.

This impersonal element of existence forces the conscious subject to be forever turned simultaneously outward to the world as well as inward to itself. Experience then becomes inevitable, but also the fundamental link between self and world. Our existence as a conscious being links us to the world by its very nature (particularly the impersonal elements of this nature) through the modality of experience. This relationship then, between soul and body, is one mediated by how we experience them. The fusion of the physiological and the psychic happens in the realm of existence which is only known through experience and thus within the scope of time. Existence then takes the shape of the acting together and upon each other of consciousness and being, moving the self towards the world, to which the self is organically linked, at every moment, creating experience which is itself only possible within time.

This brings us back to the question of mind and time which was mentioned at the beginning of this paper. If the body is temporal and a strict duality between body and consciousness does not, in experience, exist, then is consciousness also linked in the same way to time? That there is a relationship between time and consciousness seems evident but the nature of such a relationship is much trickier to negotiate. Because consciousness can never be disembodied, its basic link to time seems to be established through the body. But consciousness seems to ease the stringent hold on the body of time by being able to conceive of the past and project towards the future, whereas the body is always stuck in the present. But because consciousness cannot exist in the past or the future, it also seems restricted by time. Yet there is a hint of a possible detachment from time which consciousness provokes by being able to think about time, in a sense, to objectify time as an intentional object of thought, in a way which is not conceivable for the body. Because consciousness does not exist in space, but is paradoxically embodied, there seems to be a stronger link between body and time which is different in the case of consciousness, but which is also difficult to explore, and may be the topic for another post.

Film and the Politics of Representation in Israel/Palestine

2008-02-26T05:08:00.000+02:00

(Inspired by Yosefa Loshitzky's Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen, Jerome Slater's essay Muting the Alarm over the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and Kamal Abd El Malek's The Rhetoric of violence : Arab-Jewish encounters in contemporary Palestinian literature and film)

The Palestinian Israeli conflict is unique in many ways, perhaps the most striking of which is its persistence as an anti-colonial struggle for independence over 60 years after the end of the Second World War. Its representation through film always has as its subtext the continued existence of the conflict as a lived experience, in whichever way it is portrayed. Can films help us understand the conflict in new ways which deconstruct parochial differences and dualistic understandings? More specifically, can films in this highly complicated political conflict be useful to the student of international relations? I argue that they can, if only because they force us to treat the textual themes of the conflict and interact with the ways they are symbolized, represented, and even displaced.

What film does is take the chaos of the conflict and transform it into texts which can be taken a part, and be made to implicate the conflict as a whole. Films (texts) bring the issue of representation to the forefront in a way which the fact-obsessed and realism dominated field of IR doesn't normally allow. They allow us to freeze-frame the conflict in temporal and/or thematic blocs and understand characters and scenes as what they necessarily are: representations, of wider systems of meaning each with their own logic.

In this way and whether they intend to or not, films reveal hegemonic systems of meanings and thus inevitably the alternative meanings which they suppress. For the purposes of IR then, films are worth as much as they signify. That is not to say that the artistic endeavor loses its aesthetic quality or becomes wholly politicized. In fact, it is because they are works of art usually focused on human stories that they help us see the penetration of politics and the narratives that compete on the political scene into the particularities of an individual human life. " It is easier to face the "big" conflict when it is broken down into "small" conflicts that aim to negotiate its meaning on the micro level."

In fact films as an art form which is generally mass consumed have the power to bring to the discussion topics and opinions which are usually absent. Of course there are still restrictions to what can or cannot be made explicit at any point of time at least in terms of what can be said and taken seriously. But the use of fiction to represent a very pressing and tense reality softens the bite of bringing sensitive issues to the surface. The displacement from reality to fiction of certain themes allows their discussion at the same time that it denies them "real" existence. " The displacement taking place in Israeli cinema, of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the territory of forbidden love, makes it easier for the Israeli audience…to encounter the conflict whose roots are complex and painful"

Like news coverage films can set the scene for political discussions, and like news coverage films can also signify the issues at hand in such a way that prevents the discussion of specific narratives. In this case, while texts are themselves powerful in affecting general perceptions and even policy decisions (as Jerome Slater argues), it is important to ask what the texts are a product of. What, for example are the different conditions in Israel and the United States which allow Ha'aretz to be so much more critical than The New York Times? This question is important because it concerns the histories of narratives, and the structures which allowed them to develop in the way that they did. Slater argues that "a major explanation "for incorrect US understandings of the conflict and their resulting one-sided policies " is the largely uninformed and uncritical mainstream and even elite media coverage in the United States of Israeli policies, a consequence of which is that alarm bells that should be sounded loudly and clearly are muted." He goes on to contrast this with the openness of the debate within Israel. Underlying this is an assumption about the importance of the media to policy decisions.

Slater does not, however, explore why it is and how it came to be possible to say certain things and not others in the United States as compared to Israel. He makes a sort of disclaimer that "with regard to the central argument of this article, it is the differences between the two newspapers-and their consequences for public policy in the United States and Israel- that are important, rather than an explanation of why these differences exist." However, if Slater is not willing to ask why these differences exist, and does not systematically and within a coherent framework make the link between these differences in media coverage and actual political decisions (because after all, despite the openness of Israeli media, Israeli policy continues to be more directly oppressive and imperialist towards the Palestinians than that of the US, which is only the more shocking considering how much more well informed Israeli policy-makers are) then all he can do for us is categorize and list differences in representations without really asking what this means. Yet the histories of narratives are crucial, and the layers of differences which support certain modes of existence and by implication deny others are precisely at the root of specific policy orientations. The issue then becomes more complicated than good media good politics versus bad media bad politics. Without understanding the temporal and spatial context of the different news narratives it will be difficult to "begin this process of re education …in the pages of the The New York Times."

Fiction in general and films in particular by nature force us to make more connections and more extensive spatial and temporal links, albeit selectively. Telling the story of a conflict through personal narratives means that the viewer must think of the history of the character off-screen, how the character came to be as he/she is before the beginning of the movie, and that is precisely the exercise which I argue is the most useful in art in relation to politics. Because the function of art is representation, all that is onscreen must also be understood as representation and not a static declaration of fact. Films can help illuminate certain questions which historians such as James Gelvin ask such as: "How do symbols chosen by nationalist movements to represent themselves restrict the meaning of the nationalisms they advocate? How do those symbols enable nationalist movements to incorporate those who hold diverse views into their fold?" Yosefa Loshitzky addresses such questions through her analysis of identity politics in Israeli cinema. In discussing the film Hamsin it is said that its power "derives from its politics of representation, which employs two parallel plots: one Palestinaian, the other Jewish. Hamsin is perhaps the first Israeli film that while predominantly presenting the conflict from within the Israeli perspective, also tries to penetrate into the consciousness of the other side, as if to speak through it." The author goes on to explain the tools of this parallel if not equal representation: " the film uses Palestinian actors who speak Arabic, and part of it takes place in a purely Palestinian territory, "uncontaminated" by Israeli Jewish presence. In this respect the film not only accords literal and symbolic space and voice to the Palestinians but also attempts to represent their point of view." Similarly, films allow us to talk about what they suppress, what they choose not to represent by representing something opposite in a way which is difficult to do in real-life situations. For example "On a Narrow Bridge" "fixes the woman in a double state of occupation. She is colonized not only be the colonizer, but also by her own society and family which expel her." Statements such as these are difficult to make with much credence in traditional international relations.

Another mechanism we may take from film analysis is gender as an analytical tool for understanding conflict. It is in this context which feminist international relations makes sense and is able to make statements which other types of theory cannot. Loshitzky discusses the sexual economy of the conflict in Israeli movies explaining that " within this patriarchal perspective women are perceived as exchange objects for consumption by the superior or dominant race…both groups…are controlled by male anxieties regarding the transfer of women from their group to the "enemy" group." Other themes of male superiority, white superiority and heterosexual superiority are uncovered throughout the analysis of a large number of films especially those which focus on the theme of forbidden love. While Abd El Malek does not go in to the same type of analysis of Palestinian cinema his outlining of the main themes of Palestinian films says something about the politics of representation in these works of art themselves. In this sense, Palestinians speaking as and for Palestinians about occupation, exile, the nakba and return engage in a form of resistance by willing their voices to come through unmediated. This however should not deter us from looking at the systems of logic these films are part of and which in themselves suppress certain voices and deny certain possibilities of existence. The small number of films which focuses on the issues of Palestinian women is a case in point.

Imagining Egypt: the social vision of the Muslim Brotherhood

2008-02-22T02:59:00.000+02:00

"The Quran is our constitution, The Prophet is our leader, Jihad is our way, Death for the sake of God is our highest aspiration.[1]" Between this credo, and the infamous "Islam is the Solution," which is supposed to sum up the Muslim Brotherhood's reformist vision, the uninformed observer can tell little about one of the most important social and political movements in the history of the modern Middle East other than it is "Islamic." Without a careful analysis of how the Brotherhood enacts this vision in their stances on specific issues, and their behavior as political and social actors, their religiously inspired rhetoric is of little use to those interested not in flattening differences among all movements dubbed Islamic, but rather in understanding the Muslim Brotherhood as a unique and complex socio-political phenomenon which is connected to its own historical realities and interacts with specific issues and constraints in its own context. Here all I want to do is show where I think we should start if we are going to speak about the Brotherhood, if we don't want to keep going around(and around and around) in circles.

The Muslim Brotherhood, formed in 1928, is one of the oldest and by far the most influential Islamic movement in the Arab world. Today, in their 80th year and located in the most populous country in the Arab world they are as relevant as ever to the future of Egypt and the Middle East. Although constantly harassed by the regime, and not recognized as a legal movement, they have proved to be the only organized opposition in Egypt worth reckoning with[2]. They are brought up in discussions on democratization, terrorism, reform, and regional politics. After their 2005 successes in Egypt's parliamentary elections when they achieved the largest parliamentary representation in their history constituting one fifth of parliamentarians (despite electoral fraud on the part of the regime), and the issuance in late 2007 of their draft party platform indicating their willingness to eventually become a legally recognized political party, the question of their vision of the ideal Egyptian society is more pressing than ever, not only in anticipation of their possible rise to power one day, but, more urgently, because of the effects they have on public debate and the formation of popular sentiments.

Some observers have pointed to the group's serious attitude towards parliamentary processes and think the Brotherhood's presence has the potential to strengthen the legislative institution as a whole.[3] A sign of their seriousness towards parliament is their creation of a "parliamentary kitchen" which is a research organ with specialized divisions that work to provide the movement's MPs with information on issues being discussed in the People's Assembly. The kitchen also reaches out to intellectuals from different political backgrounds and inaugurates debate with them on timely and relevant matters.[4]

It is easy to dismiss the Muslim Brotherhood either as Islamic apologists on the one hand, or illiberal religious fanatics on the other or even both if different elements of the Brotherhood are taken into account. Yet such labels are not useful for comprehending what a Brotherhood run society would mean for the majority of Egyptians, which is what concerns me here. Such easy labels obscure real differences and make it difficult to produce knowledge about the Brotherhood which is connected to the everyday lived realities of their existence in Egyptian society and how they affect and are in turn affected by this society. What the lives of Egyptian citizens would look like under Brotherhood rule (or just increased Brotherhood influence) compared to the current state of Egyptian society under Mubarak's semi-authoritarian National Democratic Party (NDP) is better predicted by the Brotherhood's stances on specific social, political and economic issues in Egypt, and how this fits into their general world view; this is what I find interesting.

[1]Bradley, John R. "From Social Workers to Political Players." The Straits Times 11 Dec. 2006, sec. Review. Lexis Nexis. EBSCO. AUC, Cairo. 18 May 2008.
[2]Shehata, Samer, and Joshua Stacher. "The Brotherhood Goes to Parliament." MERIP 240. 18 May 2008 http://www.merip.org/. p.7
[3] Ibid, p.3, 5
[4] Ibid, p.4

The Politics of Knowledge

2008-02-17T03:44:00.000+02:00

(Commentary on Edward Said's essay The Politics of Knowledge in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays)

That "knowledge is power" has become a commonly accepted notion amongst the moderately educated, although the nuances and complications of what this means is lost on most people. To think about the politics of knowledge, then, is to examine the relationship between power and epistemology and the different epistemologies which are linked to different relations of power. In fact, "speaking truth to power" then precisely mean confronting power with an alternative epistemology, one that challenges the dominant power relations through its own "truth." When Said writes that " Because of that native resistance-for instance, the appearance of many nationalist and independence movements in India, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East- it is now evident that culture and imperialism in the West could be understood as offering support, each to the other, " he makes a twofold statement: one is that resistance, to be possible, requires a different epistemology than the one "offering support" for the dominant power relations (in this case imperialism) and, two that the relationship between power and epistemology in the dominant order can only be revealed and fully understood through resistance to it. This is because systems of knowledge continue to reproduce themselves, and do not have the ability to make a paradigmatic shift with their own representations.

While certain (subaltern/colonized/subjugated/negated) identities can only exist in a form that is positive, dignified and fully human through an epistemology that aspires to knowledge which challenges objectifying discourses, to make such identities the focus of such a struggle-that is to say, to value specific identities in themselves simply because they were able to exist and make everything secondary to the maintenance of such identities- risks severing the link between an alternative epistemology which seeks truth through a redefinition of power relations and such resistant identities. It is also to transform such identities from dynamic, assertive and self aware ontological experiences to revered, untouchable and rigid ones which fail to account for the struggles through which they were created. It is in this sense, I think, that Said's anxiety about the fact that "today a fantastic emphasis is placed upon a politics of national identity, and to a very great degree, this emphasis is the result of the imperial experience" can be understood.

In fact, the placing of such identities on a politically correct pedestal or making them a national necessity empties them of their meaning and creates around them new subjugating power relations which repress the expression of anything which does not fit their self-narrative. It is also to fail to recognize their situatedness, and their emergence at certain historical contexts which made them possible. Creating a focal point of rigid ideas about identities negates the worldliness-in Said's terms- of the epistemologies that made them possible and which were in turn fed by them. If the "epistemology of imperialism"is essentially one of separation, so is the epistemology of nationalism, although in a different sense, as a derivative of imperial thought: "just as natives were considered to belong to a different category-racial or geographical- from that of the Western white man, it also became true that in the great anti-imperialist revolt represented by decolonization this same category was mobilized around, and formed the resisting identity of, the revolutionaries."

A politics of knowledge based on identity omits possible truths because of their incompatibility with a given identity. More ominously, it precludes the possibility of universalizing the experiences of struggles against and suffering under oppression. It also eventually reasserts the separatism that is inherent in the logic of subjugation. It leads to a narrowing rather than a widening of narrative, and becomes subject to power relations similar to those which rejected it in the first place. It is in the search for alternatives to such identity politics and approaches to knowledge that the real struggle lays.

Text is meaningless without interpretation. Interpretation requires the employment of specific epistemologies. Knowledge which has become linked to a separatist notion of identity can only isolate a text and disallow the possibility of universalizing its value. In fact "to testify to a history of oppression is necessary, but it is not sufficient unless that history is redirected into intellectual process and universalized to include all sufferers." That, I believe is Said's point when he discusses Ghassan Kanafani's Men In the Sun. While Said always emphasizes the necessity of historically situating texts and their authors, he rejects the phenomenon that "all readings and all writing are reduced to an assumed historical emanation.".

The text for Said then is assumed to have value in and of itself, beyond the historical moment in which it was written or read, and beyond the epistemology that allowed its author to write it. What Said seems to be implying here is that certain epistemologies should not be rejected out of hand for the fact that they have been used to oppress and subjugate alone, because the knowledge (science, literature, art) which is produced of such systems has value in and of itself, value which can, and historically has been , useful to those resisting objectification and negation. Yet if knowledge becomes entrenched in identity politics, it loses much of its richness and power to liberate.

The Occupation

2008-02-15T04:28:00.000+02:00

(Commentary on J Halper's The 94 Percent Solution: A Matrix of Control and Eyal Weizman's Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation)

Occupation is complicated, its strength lying in its complexity and its highly detailed system of control. The intertwined mechanisms of control seem to take on a life of their own, greater than the sum of the parts of the separate tools of subjugation. Halper describes the "matrix of control" as an "interlocking set of mechanisms, only a few of which require physical occupation of the territory" which mostly depends on "subtle interventions performed under the guise of "proper administration, "upholding the law," "keeping the public order," and, of course, "security."In this sense, the dynamics of operation become difficult to comprehend since they cannot be traced back to a single linear chain of command or master plan of control, yet that is not the same as saying that Zionism as a colonial project does not have a coherent logic.

As Eyal Weizman noted about the Wall, " although the very essence and presence of the Wall is the obvious solid, material embodiment of state ideology and its conception of national security, the route should not be understood as the direct product of top-down government planning at all." Unpacking the logic and particular mechanisms of occupation becomes essential to understanding it, and to producing the differences and similarities between its different institutions: for example how can the military establishment and the High Court of Justice be understood as two institutions of an occupying state serving different as well as similar purposes?

Suppression breeds resistance. In fact, the occupation-as highly developed as its practices and discourse are- creates its own antidote precisely through its unsustainable will to power. The state of Israel, attempting to reconcile its simultaneous and contradictory wishes to separate Jews from Arabs and to expand territorially, deepens the interconnectedness of the communities and forces them to face each other, some encounters being more violent than others. For example, and I quote from James Gelvin's The Israel-Palestine Conflict: A Hundred Years of War, "the Israeli government broadened and deepened the economic linkages between Israel and the occupied territories and even made the territories a factor in national economic planning" but later "began imposing a policy of closure" which highly restricted the freedom of movement of Palestinians. The goal, as Barak framed it when explaining the logic behind the Separation Barrier is "separation between the two entities together with the possibilities of cooperation."The phrase, to me, seems inherently contradictory. In order to avoid "the possibility of a cognitive encounter" as Weizman explains about the system of tunnels and bridges which are designed to guarantee maximum territorial freedom for Israelis while keeping them physically separated from Palestinians, "in the over-complexity it requires, the system of tunnels and bridges demonstrates the very limitation of the politics of separation."

If it is impossible to separate and expand at the same time, then it is in the space which the dialectic between the two goals creates that lays the weakness of the colonial project. The occupier never has complete control neither over the subject nor over the occupation itself as a project. For example at the same time that Israeli governments encourage the building of settlements in order to create facts on the ground and use them as leverage in negotiations, " on those occasions when the Israeli government has floated the idea of limited withdrawal from settlements, settlers have been able to mobilize political support…far in excess of their numbers."Thus resisting the government's original intention behind the settlements.Yet, herein exists the possibility of resistance.

Resistance itself though is problematic. Resisting the occupation on its own terms in fact validates its existence both discursively and materially. Thus the resistance to the Separation Barrier becomes analogous to the resistance of the Occupation as a whole. If Oslo as a process for the creation of a peace settlement and an independent Palestinian state accepts the premises of Zionism as its starting point, then similarly waging piecemeal legal battles against the Wall in a court which admits its legality based on a security logic is an implicit resignation to the fact that the wall exists. As Weizman explains "the "elastic" nature of the Wall is thus simultaneously empowering and frustrating…empowering because bringing pressure to bear on the route, in protests and court petitions, has been demonstrated to alleviate conditions on the ground…also frustrating because it demonstrates that any action directed against the Wall's route rather than against its very concept, presence and essence…not only legitimizes it and confirms it as a fact, but effectively takes part in its making."

The debate is usually framed in terms of rejection as opposed to pragmatism. It is "pragmatic" to accept the 94% solution (as Halper calls it) as a starting point, so the argument goes, leaving Palestinians in a position of increased strength from which to continue resistance. Following the same logic, had the Palestinians accepted the partition plan in 1947, they would have been much better off today. Yet there is no justification for blaming the Palestinians for rejecting the premises of the Zionist colonial project, especially at a time when it seemed like it could be overcome. Similarly, had the Palestinians forgone violence as a means of resistance completely after Oslo, they would be better off-despite the continuance of the occupation. On the other hand, those who reject such solutions argue that they are based on an imperial logic which neither acknowledges the suffering of the occupied nor denies the racist logic of occupation, and thus only paves the way for more conflict. Such reasoning, the counter argument states, where Zionism/the Wall is negotiated with rather than rejected, only works to serve the occupation which always has the upper hand in such negotiations.

One of the problems then becomes how to negate the logic of the occupation without negating the other as a whole. That is, if the struggle is one against Zionism, it doesn't also have to be one against all Israelis. If Zionism cannot be spoken to because of its inherent racism that does not mean that there is no one in Israel to speak to. The question is also one about the moral problem of immediate human suffering. If the suffering of Palestinians today can be alleviated by winning a court case against the Wall, or by accepting small land concessions in the West Bank and rejecting violence, even if it means accepting the terms of the occupation, should that not be moral justification enough?

In other words, is it fair to demand Palestinians who are under occupation now with lives which are continually obstructed and interrupted by the facts of occupation to take on the burden of resistance (rejecting occupation as a concept rather than asking it for concessions) which invariably increases suffering by bringing the brunt of imperial force to bear down on them, or can an argument be made for their right to a better life now by accepting, temporarily, that the occupation exists (through accepting Oslo, for example)? Halper argues that " we must be able to evaluate any "peace agreement" for what it is: a genuine peace between equals, or a cover for occupation under another name."Yet it seems that in speaking of the Palestinians for whom we seek a just peace or nothing at all, we forget that it is they who must suffer the consequences of rejecting an "Israeli peace," and hold out under oppressive conditions until real peace is reached, forgoing the possibility of partial respite if they were to agree to such a partial peace. That this never solves the problem once and for all is clear though, and Palestinians would have to settle for " a "soft" Palestinian sovereignty within temporary borders which the Palestinians, if they so desired, would be free to call a state."

Autobiography

2008-02-10T08:01:00.000+02:00

It's the moment that eludes me. The ephemeral moment. The passing, the fleeting, the unverifiable existence of the now. Because a moment later, it is not there. And a moment later, I look desperately for something, someone, that witnessed the same moment I did, someone to guarantee that it happened, someone to prove that I was there. That the feeling I had was acknowledged, that something happened, that I felt something, thought something, that my presence collided with the moment and created something that was mine and the world's, and that this was recorded in the eternal filing cabinet of moments. Moments upon moments. Because what else is there? What could possibly hold them together, create a unity, and make a life out of nothing but what is ephemeral? More importantly, how can meaning be assigned to the fragile chain of moments? Could they possibly produce their own meaning? Will any meaning given to them necessarily involve a violence?

*************************************

Places

I was moved from a new, aesthetically unpleasing middle class neighborhood where the concrete buildings looked over the remnants of agricultural land housing rural urban migrants( who had never migrated, but had found that the city had come to them, uninvited) to a lower middle class neighborhood where my parents had grown up, fallen in love, and married. Where she had made the family proud by becoming an engineer, and where he had hidden from the state security forces as a revolutionary university student. (From Giza to Cairo, Arab Republic of Egypt)

I was put on a plane, and flown to The First World. From cheap community housing, to less cheap student housing. Two preschools, a new language, then kindergarten and grade school. Colorful classrooms, massive playgrounds, Frisbees, rollerskates, climbing trees and avidly reading children's chapter books. The first lessons learned: I was smarter than all the rest, but my hair wasn't as straight, and my clothes didn't fit as well. I didn't celebrate Christmas like they did. We learned about caterpillars turning into butterflies, and how to use our imagination. (DeKalb, Illinois, The United States of America)

Five years later, They put me back on a plane, and we all went South. The Global South, that is. Back to the very first middle class neighborhood, in the building on the staircase of which I had been born, among distant relatives, and my father's Intellectual Friends. We often visited the second neighborhood, the poor one, where my maternal grandparents lived. I was sent to a school with rich kids, who spoke poor English and poor Arabic, had a lot of money and Increasingly Came to Believe in Islam. The strange alliance of money and religion first made itself known to me. At home I played on the roof of our house with chalk and raised baby chicks with the girls in the building who played in their pajamas and didn't speak English at all. (Haram, Giza, Egypt)

Somewhere in between these two paragraphs I played basketball and made the Ahly Club team.

Two years later, I was moved to a new suburb of Cairo. There were trees, and more people who spoke English, and less people who Increasingly Came to Believe in Islam. I liked the new school, I made my fourth Best Friend, and the only one who would stay with me for the next eleven years. Eventually I learned about boys, learned to get angry at my mother, learned to want things I couldn't have. Learned that I was different. We continued to visit my grandparents, and the discrepancies between their neighborhood and our neighborhood were devastating. For seven years, I went to that school. I grew up, had my first real existential crisis, experienced rejection, acute depression, and laughed for hours on the phone. My teenage years were decidedly typical. (Maadi, Cairo, Egypt)

In between these two paragraphs I watched a lot of MTV and read Milan Kundera and Ahdaf Soueif. And towards the end, I listened to a lot of Amr Khaled, contemplated hijab, turned atheist, and turned back. I was on my first steps to adulthood. Or something.

We moved to a new house in Maadi. Just one street away. I entered university and learned about guilt, ambition and change. I learned a little bit about drugs, a little bit about sexuality, and a lot about death, friendship, love, and what not. In a few months I will graduate and become who knows what. (Maadi, and Downtown, Cairo, Egypt)

I encountered philosophy and the Science of Politics, and downtown cafes where leftist intellectuals hung out to dwell on The State of Things.

How is that for a life?

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Thoughts

At the end of the day, of the party, of the love affair, of the funeral, of the year, I'm all alone. That, I firmly believe. The question then becomes how to reconcile utter solitude as the condition of human existence, with the world and its simultaneous invasiveness and distance. How to link the internal with the external in a way that maintains your integrity, and make meaning out of the movement of moments. A professor once told us to take our selves seriously, for God's sake. And he showed us how not to take our selves too seriously. It seems, then, that I should write about time and consciousness and meaning.

So I light a cigarette, and pretend to think profoundly. Maybe if I pretend enough, a profound thought will enter my mind and open a door to a stream of consciousness that will allow me to tell you about my life.

It starts with the fear of loss. With the desperate attempt to hold on to something. What, I don't know. With the scramble to make linkages and leave little pieces of myself in places, in the hope that I will be remembered. Why, I'm not sure. What difference does it make to be remembered? You live, then you die, and in between you're happy and you're sad. What then, does it matter if anyone else takes notice of it? I guess it comes from the creeping suspicion that you are unique. That you have never been before and never will be again, and the fact that you are now, means something. In fact, the world will never be the same again. And because of that, for the sake of the smooth revolution of the earth on its axis, I write. Either that, or from an unsettling sense of insecurity and fragmentation, an insistence to impose myself and claim that I Was Here, comes my will to write. I will state that I am special and prove that I am not.

Age and Education

I am twenty one years old. I don't know if this is what you are supposed to feel like at twenty one. Last time I checked I was still excited about becoming a teenager. Last time I checked I was eight. And the whole world was ahead of me. And the possibilities were eternal because they were unknown. America was right, I could be anyone I wanted to be. That was before I found out about metanarratives, postmodernism and the structures imposed on us by the capitalist system as explicated by critical theory. Of course none of that matters. And the years we spend reading Derrida and criticizing Hobbes will mean nothing in the final moment.

Yet we will spend years writing bibliographies and creating files. And unless we are able to bring the words we read, the values we adopted as ours, the understanding from the abstract to the mundane and everyday and practical, it will not mean much. At the end of the day, meaning is found somewhere else. Elsewhere. Nonetheless, the temptation that we will be able to live on a different plane, an elevated level of existence, to understand more, to know right, to experience differently, pushes us on and drives us to philosophy and to music and literature and to absurd relationships, chasing that hope of better things and exciting dimensions which we are yet to encounter. We will be special, different. We will not be Just One In Many. And so we strive to be alone and are terrified once we feel we're close to getting there. But let me not speak in the plural, for I only speak for me, and any attempt to link that with something bigger than myself is unnecessary. If the link exists, then it will speak for itself.

Instead of the yearning for time to pass by so that I could experience New and Wonderful Things, it seems like I'm terrified that there simply isn't enough time to get it all right. Every once in a while, at age twenty one, I'm scared that the best years have gone by. Then I laugh at myself, and remember that it's barely begun.

Class and Identity

It seems proper to start from the current moment. Because the writing cannot be understood except in the context of where I am now; in fact, this is the only real purpose of writing this. We sit in a coffee shop studying. I am surrounded by the modern Egyptian bourgeoisie, who I am very good friends with. In fact almost all my close friends come exclusively from this category. Half an hour ago, I had a strange urge (which upon realizing, I laughed out loud to myself) to tell one of these friends that my grandfather had been a taxi driver. This stemmed not from any feeling of intimacy (not really, not if I'm honest with myself) or need to explain something about myself. Just from an irrational curiosity about how little rich kid who thought he knew all about the world and all about me, would react to the fact that my grandfather was a taxi driver. Unfortunately, I don't indulge my irrational curiosities often enough, and so I did not tell him.

And thank god I didn't. Because I would have had to answer to myself later about why I told this person, who really did not need to know, about one of my biggest hurdles in life. A hurdle, which to a large degree I have passed. Maybe it was to prove to myself, at a very unlikely time, that I had in fact passed it, that I wanted to tell him. That hurdle, of course, being my life in the midst of social class discrepancies. My grandmother was a factory worker, then a housewife. She passed away. My grandfather was a lorry, then taxi driver. He has Alzheimer's. My father delivered pizza in the afternoon and taught classes in the morning as a PhD student in The States. I have lived and grown up in working class neighborhoods, and always gone to schools and institutions with members of the middle and upper classes. This is part of my parents'-both PhD holders-obsession with education. And part of the strange moment of social mobility in Egyptian society of which they were part, a moment which does not seem to have been shared by anyone else, because I have yet to meet anyone in a similar situation. Then again, maybe they just hide it as well as I do.

Of course the issue here was one of identity. Who was I? Where did I belong? In Maadi or Ain El Seira? In the American University in Cairo, or in a shanty town? Which language should I speak in which location? And by language, I meant body language, expressions and inherent value systems. Needless to say, I learnt a lot. I learned what to talk about with my grandmother, and how to say hello to my peers at school, what hairstyle would get compliments in Maadi, and where my Grandmother would think a good place to go for dinner was-and let me tell you it wasn't McDonalds. In the beginning, it felt like I didn't really belong anywhere. But now, I realize that I have the power to belong everywhere. Little pieces of me belong in different places and they fit just as comfortably. Or so sometimes I think.

Perhaps the fact that I couldn't feel this till my aunt and grandmother passed away, and my grandfather's Alzheimer's got serious, is what hurts me. Perhaps this is where my guilt stems from right now, when before it had stemmed from thinking I was internalizing certain parts of my personality as more authentic or more whole.

God

My Grandmother had a story about how she was feeling really sad one night and fell asleep crying. Then she had a dream where the prophet Muhammed came to her and although she couldn't see him, she saw a light that she was sure was The Messenger of God. She was naked, and she had long hair. He told her not to be sad and that everything would be alright. And it was alright.

The Messenger of God, when I was seventeen, seemed to mock me with his impossibility. He was impossible to imagine, impossible to talk to, impossible to relate to as a human being, part of a concept that was impossible for me to understand. I think to me, at times, the non picture of him and the intrusive picture of Amr Khaled, fused into one. At nineteen I came to the decision that he was part of a concept that I believed in whether I logically wanted to or not. And that perhaps I would give faith a fighting chance, but I didn't need to fight now. I came to terms with the fact that I didn't know, and decided to stop forcing beliefs on myself that I had not come to. So I continued to talk to God, telling him that I just didn't know. In fact I had fought a lot, and felt the most helpless and scared in my life. For a year I cried nightly, begging the guy I didn't know existed to tell me if he existed. That description sounds like a dysfunctional love affair that I hope I never have. And that, for now, is my story with Him. My story with other male figures however, would continue.

Love or something like it

In the past months, at some points I thought I was in love. Yes, I thought I was in Love. I'm sure that in twenty years I will read this and laugh and realize that I was not in love at all and perhaps even have trouble remembering who the boy that caused all that commotion was. But right now, that seems like a very sad thought to me. All in all, I was able to go about my daily life, with no one noticing the fact that I was living an obsession. I was able to write papers and attend classes, while fighting daydreams and the pain of wanting something really bad. I developed a coping strategy for love. And for that I am amused, grateful and surprised. As much by the fact that I was able to consciously control and deal with my feelings on my own, as by the fact that my feelings were mature and unselfish: I loved him, thought he was an idiot for not loving me back, and did not resent him one bit for it. My first relationship with a boy with a sexy accent and a habit of teasing me had been more fondness than love. Of course I was in love with a lot of boys, but that was just part of my fascination with the concept of Boys, aided by the fact that I hadn’t encountered many of them growing up. I have officially, no matter for how short a time, actually dared to think that I was in love. And that in itself, as silly as it is, is something. I don't think it will take twenty years for me to start laughing about it. Perhaps the next 20 minutes will do.

Boys and Body

The talk of Boys brings me directly to talk of my Body. What a lovely letter, the letter B. Because Boys make you think of your Body. And your Body determines your relationship with Boys. And my failure to have a romantic relationship with Boys has always been explained by me as my Body. It is true that this consciousness of the importance of the appearance of my Body has been present since age seven, as far as I can remember. And at about the same time I started linking this image of myself with my relationship to Boys. I am still at the very experimental stages with what I know about my Body. I still haven't done very much with it at all. At age twenty one, as an official adult, that seems kind of strange. Physical encounters with Boys have been enlightening if not always pleasant. Mostly because Boys are Boys and are too young and immature to just relax and have a good time, and instead act like idiots by trying to prove something to the world. But I suppose that is part of their charm. But the purpose of this is not to rant.
And so let me end with the superficial, even as I started with the philosophical. Because the two, as I go through the day, will intertwine and collide in my mind, creating a complete thought of something absurd, that 20 years later I will wish I had written down. I bet in 20 years from now the struggle to create meaning will still be with me. And I suspect that that might be what it is about. The creation of meaning. My only real wish is to always be one of those people who know what matters, and that I will not be bored or boring. So please forgive me if you were bored. I'm still working on it.

1967

2008-02-08T20:25:00.000+02:00

It is a puzzling question of where to start when discussing the Six Day War, or as more commonly referred to in the Arab world, the Naksa. As an Egyptian/Arab who was not alive to see the war, it is still engraved in my consciousness as the disaster of the century, the war that ended the modernization project of Egypt. More profoundly, it was the war, I was taught to think, which ended the optimism of the first half of the century and shattered the hopes of millions who had been riding high on Nasser's poetic proclamations of progress and glory. The deep seated cultural effects of the war are difficult to measure, but to be certain it left behind a mood of pessimism and defeat that was never quite reversed in 1973. Could the event that has shaped the destinies of millions for over three decades been nothing but a series of miscalculations and poor judgments? Perhaps on Nasser's side, it was. On the Israeli side, the war seems to have been coolly calculated, and for the most part, well planned (the occupation of the West Bank being my reservation, as it seems to have sparked the force of Palestinian nationalism and lost the possible cooperation of Jordan). In an attempt to keep a distance from the moral arguments about the war and the emotional expressions which accompany them, I will comment on the causal explanations of the war as presented by Abba Eban, Norman Finkelstein, and Machover and Hanegbi.

Norman Finkelstein's argument that Israel was under no mortal threat on the eve of the Six Day War is difficult to challenge. The balance of powers in the Middle East seems to have been clear to all those involved, including Egypt and Israel. It is difficult to see how Nasser could either have intended or thought he could endure a war with Israel. Abba Eban's speech to the UN and following justifications for the supposedly defensive war, must then be understood as official state propaganda on behalf of Israel and an attempt to portray Israel as the eternally victimized but heroic member of the region. The 1967 war was an aggressive one but Nasser seemed to have done all the dirty work for Israel, laying the groundwork for an offensive war that could be made to seem as a reaction to Nasser's troop deployments combined with his military alliances and the closing of the Straits of Tiran.

Finkelstein does a good job of laying out the evidence that proves that Israel faced no existential threat, as well as the motivations of the Israeli leaders for launching the war despite the plausibility of a diplomatic solution. What Finkelstein leaves out of the narrative -other than the extent of the hostility of the situation before the war and the fiery, often racist, rhetoric employed by both Arab and Israeli leaders-is that the politics of balance of power dictated that had Israel not launched the war, the conclusion would have been a political victory for Nasser. Thus while Israel gained tremendously from the Six Day War, the choice for the Zionist leaders was not-as Finkelstein tends to portray it- one between great gains at the expense of the massive devastation of the Arabs on the one hand and an already favorable status quo on the other (although rational choice theory dictates that even in this case it would still have made sense for Israel to launch the war). Instead, Israeli decision makers were to choose between the gains of launching the war, and the losses they would incur if Nasser was allowed to bolster his prestige and standing in the Arab world and internationally by paying no price for his actions and being allowed to create facts on the ground. Ben Gurion's statement that the most important feature of the war was that "it diminished the stature of the Egyptian dictator, and I do not want you or the entire people to underestimate the importance of this fact," should not be taken lightly.

The question then, is not why did Israel behave as it did, but why did Nasser decide to provoke Israel and provide it with an opportunity to attack when he knew he could not bear the consequences? Did Nasser truly have to put the modernization project of Egypt as well as the fate of the Arab world on the line in order to protect is status and prestige in the Arab world? To be sure, the risks of losing his leading stature in the Arab world were real. If anything, the events that led to the 1967 war were the collective decisions of the Arab leaders seeing as Nasser was prompted to act under heavy pressure and mocking rhetoric from other Arab leaders playing out their own inter-Arab rivalries. It is difficult to know now whether Nasser had thought he had other choices. At any rate, while the situation for Israel seemed to have been a choice between a gain and a loss, Nasser seemed to have been choosing between the lesser of two evils, with the advantage of hindsight; it seems that he chose the greater evil. In a highly hostile situation, where trust existed between neither allies nor enemies, and when all involved seemed to perceive reality as a zero sum game, Israel seems to have exploited the dynamics to its advantage, while the Arabs seem to have learnt the ropes of realism the hard way.
Manchover and Hangebi explain the Six Day War in terms of the longer history of Arab-Zionist conflict and the specifically Zionist policy of creating faits accomplis on the ground and protecting them by force. It would take more research to ascertain whether there was anything uniquely Zionist about this policy, but at any rate, given the way the state of Israel was create in 1948 and the many grievances left unaddressed, coinciding with the rise of Arab Nationalism and independence movements in the Arab world, Israel and the Arabs seem to have been on an inevitable collision course, the final impact of which the policies of Nasser and the Arab leaders worked to intensify.

Red Paint

2008-02-08T19:50:00.001+02:00

I just needed somewhere new. A fresh start, a beginning. A line drawn. A mark on the page. A big fat squigly red line, with no real direction, but which makes arbitrary separations, spaces, exclusions and openings.