Two stories about thin mattresses today. First, from Iraq. Thanks to Juan Cole for linking to Trudy Rubin’s recent piece from Najaf in the Philadelphia Inquirer, in which she recounts highlights from an interview with Ayatollah Muhammad Sa’id al-Hakim.
(By the way, Cole’s continuing compilations of news from world Shia’dom are so well-done and so timely that I’ve put a permanent link to his blog in my ‘select list’ of blog links, to the right.)
Anyway, one telling detail from Rubin’s story was:
- The 37-year-old Hakim, in black turban and robe, received me in a bare room in the narrow Najaf rowhouse near the shrine [of Imam Ali], where petitioners come to seek religious rulings. We sat on thin cushions on the floor…
So there he is, one of the four Shi-ite Ayatollahs in Najaf, sitting on “thin cushions” in “a narrow Najaf rowhouese.”
And there are the US overlords, still swanning around in the hulking great palaces that Saddam built for himself all over the country.
In a situation in which most Iraqis are suffering from lengthy power outages, unsafe drinking water, general economic collapse, and rampant insecurity, does anyone (=Paul Bremer) think the symbolism here might be just a tad inappropriate???
I “understand”, of course, that Bremer and his staff, and numerous US army units, chose the palaces to lodge in “primarily because of security considerations”.
But has he stopped to think that the palaces were built where they were, and in the ultra-high-security way they were built in– precisely because Saddam knew that he needed multiple layers of protection against the hatred and wrath of his much-abused people?
So if Bremer’s people and the US military choose to live in the palaces “for security reasons”, what does that say about their expectation of building a relationship of trust (and respect, and equality) with the Iraqi people?
Pictures of US troops cavorting in a swimming pool in one of Saddam’s palaces on July 4 also presumably didn’t go down too well with the millions of Iraqis lacking access to safe drinking water.
How about if Bremer at least opened up a few of the Saddam palaces with their extensive leisure complexes for use by low-income Iraqi kids, or something generous like that??
Okay, on to Palestine. Thin mattress story #2. This was a great quote from James Bennet’s story from Tel Aviv in yesterday’s NYT. Bennet quoted Samir al-Mashharawi, a leader of the mainstream Palestinian faction, Fatah as saying:
- “When the intifada began, the demand was, `End the occupation, because the negotiations led to nothing… Now, Palestinian demands are to return back to the situation right before the intifada, and we are negotiating about this.”
[Mashharawi] said that during one of his terms as an Israeli prisoner, he and other inmates demanded chairs and tables. In response, he said, the Israelis took their mattresses. The prisoners demanded them back.
“After a month, they returned the mattresses, and we felt very happy we achieved something,” he said. “Israeli diplomacy is based on this idea.”
I was reminded of that story when I read Orla Guerin’s great piece from Bethlehem on the BBC website today. Guerin is the Beeb’s feisty and talented Middl;e East correspondent.
The dominant narrative from Bethlehem the past couple of days has been one of the intense relief of Israeli soldiers at last able to pull back from policing the inside of the city (though not its perimeter), and of the hopes in the ‘Roadmap’ etc expressed by some Palestinians. Guerin said/wrote of the Palestinian police force’s re-emergence in Bethlehem:
- I watched as a young recruit hauled himself up the concrete face of a two-storey barracks – using his bare hands and some homemade knee-pads.
It was his task to raise the Palestinian flag on the roof. From his colleagues in the dusty courtyard below, thin applause.
A producer friend looked away – bored. “I’ve already filmed this ceremony three times in the past few years,” she said.
When you see Guerin on BBC TV News, you find she speaks in the engaging dialect of Northern Ireland. In the website piece today she also recounts conversations with violence-bereaved parents in Bethlehem and in “a Jewish settlement near Jerusalem”, and with an Al-Aqsa Brigades bombmaker in Jenin. Toward the end of the piece she puts in the two-pennorth of barely disguised commentary that is quite allowable in news pieces under British (but not US) norms of journalism, writing:
- Live long enough in the Middle East and you start to feel that optimism is like a dose of the flu.
It becomes an illness you treat, knowing it will pass.
Well, I don’t know about that. I can certainly understand the need to be wary of anything approaching “irrational exuberance”. And the Roadmap does have big flaws. But maybe, just maybe, its launching signals that the situation in Israel/Palestine might be about to turn round?
I shall have to write more–much more–about this later.