A week in the west (and drama in Salt Lake City)

I got back to DC yesterday after a week in the western portion of this fine North American continent of ours. I started off (as previously noted) at a couple of events in the beautiful small city of Victoria, British Columbia.
The first was a planning meeting– and actually, the first properly constituted Board Meeting– for the Global Partnership for the International University for Iraq. I have been a member of the planning group for this for 2-3 years now, but the group had never previously been able to organize an actual face-to-face meeting.
So now, the GP-IUI is properly constituted as a legal entity, headquartered in Canada. The distinguished Iraqi-Canadian professor Tareq Ismael is the Chair of the Board. The President and CEO of the project is the veteran US- and Cairo-based Middle East specialist Raymond Baker. The two other main officers of the project are both people who recently retired from the leadership of Central Connecticut State University, former CCSU President Richard L. Judd and former Dean John S. Waggett. The thirteen members of the Board of Directors include five people of Iraqi background, four Americans (including Richard Falk and myself), a very savvy Canadian lawyer called Erik Richer La Fleche, and the courageous German diplomatist and long-time UN staff member Hans-Christof von Sponeck.

Anyway, more details on the GP-IUI, obviously, as our plans develop. Also, I’m not sure at this point how much I can share of the content of our meetings, though I can note that I thought they went very well indeed. It was excellent to finally meet face-to-face with many of these people who had only previously been names at the bottom of our planning emails. The project has encountered numerous problems since the original plan of establishing this international (i.e. not “American”), not-for-profit university inside Iraq proved impossible to pursue. So the planning now is directed at finding ways to build up its cadre outside Iraq, including by organizing specialized short courses for both potential faculty and potential students, with the firm goal of establishing the university inside Iraq at the earliest possible date.
More later– including, I hope soon, a link to the GP-IUI’s own website, as soon as that gets developed and published.
Meeting Hans von Sponeck for the first time was a particular pleasure of the meeting. I have long been an admirer of the way that, as a UN staff member in the late 1990s and early 2000’s, he worked tirelessly to minimize the extent of the mass killings that US-UK intransigence in the sanctions effort against Iraq inflicted on the most vulnerable portions of the Iraqi population.
After the GP-IUI’s meetings wound up, the conference of the International Center for Contemporary Middle East Studies started. I could only stay for the first day and a half of it.
One excellent grace note was provided by the President of the University of Victoria, which was hosting the meeting. As he welcomed us to the first session he noted that the place we were meeting was the traditional territory of the Esquimault and Saanich peoples. Okay, so maybe simply the invocation of these peoples’ names doesn’t mean that much… but at least it is a nod of recognition to the expropriatory and frequently genocidal history of White colonial settlement in the Americas.
At the conference I got to catch up with a number of old friends. I went to a pretty interesting panel on current prospects in and for Iraq. A smart young Japanese scholar, Dai Yamao, gave a fascinating presentation on the history of the Iraqi Shiite organizations during the years they spent in exile prior to 2003. And Dr. Abbas al-Jamali, an Iraqi professor of botany and horticulture, gave a great overview of agricultural development issues in Iraq. At the very beginning he identified the two key inputs required for a sound agricultural development policy in the Mesopotamian region– which was, after all, a crucial cradle of all world agriculture. These were, quite simply, a sound water-use policy and public security.
Obviously, those two key inputs are quite missing today. Thus we have the tragedy of Iraq now being a huge net importer of food products. Thank you, George W. Bush.
I also ended up participating in a panel on current prospects for the Palestinians. That was a last-minute arrangement. Tareq Ismael had asked me to chair the panel, and a couple of participants dropped out at the last minute. So I said I had just written a long piece on Hamas, Gaza, etc for the Boston Review so why didn’t I present that on the panel if he could find another person to chair it, which he did.
So last Saturday, I left Victoria at noon and took the excellent bus line to Vancouver International Airport. Since Victoria is on an island (confusingly called Vancouver Island), while Vancouver is on the mainland, the bus ride involves the bus taking you from downtown Victoria to a ferry terminal some 20 miles north; then the bus rolls onto a huge ferry and you have a beautiful 90-minute ferry ride across the sound there; then you re-board the same bus, it rolls off the ferry and proceeds to the airport. All for one $48 ticket. Very civilized indeed, though the wireless internet that seemed to be available on the ferry refused to work for me.
Then I flew down to Los Angeles to make my first maternal visit to the new digs established there by my youngest, Lorna Quandt. Lorna started work as a staff researcher in the neuroscience program at UCLA med center last June, so I really wanted to see how she’s doing there. This country is so large and I hate her being so far away from me!! However, she seems to be well established, has a great room-mate and excellent work colleagues. I stayed in her apartment there, got to see her work-place, took in a couple of yoga classes with her, and generally had a fun timewith her. I also caught up with some more old friends there…
On Tuesday I drove down to Orange County for a lunch hosted by a great Quaker couple called Al and Dee Abrahamse, who had invited in a bunch of people to hear me talk about my work and my upcoming book. Great lunch, great group. Thank you, Al and Dee!
Wednesday I flew to Salt Lake City and gave a bigger, more formal lecture about the Palestinian situation, at the invitation of the Middle East Center at the University of Utah. It was titled “Palestine and Israel: One state, or two states, or what?” In it I developed much of the material in my upcoming BR piece (that was previously largely developed here.) We had a big crowd there, and I thought the questions and discussion were generally excellent.
Afterwards, I went out for dinner with Center head Ibrahim Karawan, Peter Sluglett, Peter Von Sivers, and my old friend the legal scholar and former (sorry, correct that to long-running) Lebanese presidential candidate, Chibli Mallat. Chibli had asked a great question at the lecture, namely why don’t we all demand that Pres. Bush at this point simply recognize Palestine as an independent state, with its final borders yet to be determined?
My first mental reaction to this was skepticism. I thought it would be a meaningless thing to ask for. Almost as meaningless as Yasser Arafat’s much-trumpeted “declaration of an independent Palestinian state” back in 1988. Also, if the borders for the state aren’t defined, what would the recognition be of? (Of course, Israel’s borders aren’t defined, either, and that hasn’t stopped most states from recognizing it.) Then I thought, well, at least Recognition, by the US and other key international actors could lead speedily to Palestine getting admitted to the UN as a state, which would give it some leverage, and also the ability to take its many cases against Israel to the International Court of Justice.
Of course, under customary international law, for an entity to be recognized as a state it has to legally control the territory of that State; and that is only case for the Gaza (i.e. Hamas-dominated) branch of the PA. And international Recognition would raise the stakes around (and the urgency of) reaching a political accommodation between Fateh and Hamas.
Anyway, it’s an interesting idea.
Chibli has written about it here. That article is also interesting to me because he proposes the creation of “a mixed [i.e. Israeli-Palestinian] committee or court, including international judges, … to adjudicate the myriads of claims that remain to date, and will inevitably continue. Its decisions must be binding.”
His belief in the power of legal institutions to resolve conflicts in the absence of political/diplomatic agreement is astounding to me! Actually, we had a pretty spirited discussion of that whole issue over the dinner there on Wednesday night. Chibli had been one of the main actors involved in organizing and bringing the (ultimately aborted) criminal case that Belgium brought against Ariel Sharon in 2001, with regard to the Sabra and Shatila massacres.
Well, in the circumstances it was incredibly kind of Ibrahim Karawan to treat me so graciously at the University of Utah, since he and Peter Von Sivers, the deputy director of the M.E. Center, had both resigned from their positions at the Center just the day before, on an important issue of principle. The Dean of the College of Humanities had earlier simply, by fatwa, terminated the association of professors Peter Sluglett and Harris Lenowitz with the Center, sending them letters with vague accusations of “lack of collegiality.”
Lack of collegiality?? What complete nonsense! That was, we can recall, the charge brought against Norman Finkelstein by DePaul University after they discovered they had no valid academic grounds whatsoever on which to terminate his employment there.
You can read more about the Sluglett/Lenowitz case in the U of U student paper, here; and in the Salt Lake City Tribune here.
What seems clear is that the dean’s abrupt terminations/reassignments of Sluglett and Lenowitz had no defensible justification. The SLC-Trib account says that Sluglett had had disagreements with the dean over the college’s failure to hire enough Arabic teachers. But that disagreement was apparently never even mentioned in the termination letter the dean sent to him. And anyway, it would not constitute grounds for termination of Sluglett’s affiliation with the Center.
This business of citing “lack of collegiality” is so insidious! For one thing, I’ve known Sluglett for years now and never for a moment thought of him as hard to get along with. But even if he were– so what?
So anyway, my very best wishes to my friends in Salt Lake. I hope the ME Center there, which has played a very distinguished role in the development of Middle East studies over its 50 years in existence, can still be saved.