Category: Writing and publishing

Saudi ‘Mystique’ alive and still writing

The Saudi woman blogger ‘Mystique’ left a comment on JWN yesterday pointing out that the reason her earlier blog was down for a while was

    because I sort of lost my anonymity to only one person. & this alone made me stop blogging, here in Saudi it is very difficult to write freely so imagine if I no longer have the privilege to remain anonymous..

But she’s put her blog back up with a new URL, and if you go there you can see some of her very interesting commentary on her life and on the society in which she lives. This new blog seems to contain the archives of her old blog (which originally had a different URL) back to March 2006– perhaps complete, perhaps not.
But the new blog also, sadly, contains this “farewell” from Mystique as a blogger, posted November 20.
I think that what likely caused all this turmoil in M’s life as a blogger was this November 12 article on Saudi bloggers, in which the WaPo’s Saudi reporter Faiza Saleh Ambah described her encounter with Mystique in these terms:

    When the woman who blogs anonymously under the name Mystique finally shows up for an appointment at Starbucks on trendy Tahlia Street, she seems used to causing a stir. Heads turn when the 23-year-old walks into the coffee shop minus the mandatory head scarf worn by most Saudi women, her caramel-colored hair cascading past her shoulders. She is wearing a black cloak with a shiny copper-colored print on the sleeve, a black Prada purse slung over her shoulder.

And thus, I suspect, the woman who has successfully kept her anonymity as a blogger for several months now, was rudely “outed” by a journalist eager for a “good”, i.e. salacious, story. [Addendum, Dec. 14: Please note that below, ‘Mystique’ herself comments that, “I broke Mystique’s anonymity once I told one ex colleague of mine about my blog, and since that day I can’t write like before, I feel I am watched and being monitored by her.” Therefore my supposition that it was Faiza Ambah who had “outed” M through her description now clearly seems misplaced. Apologies to Ms. Ambah. ~HC]
In the WaPo story, Ambah makes it seem as though the first thing Mystique wants to talk about, the very moment they meet, is sex. In this very pained post that Mystique put up on her blog the next day, she wrote:

    Back in mid-Ramadan, the famous Saudi journalist Faiza Ambah contacted me and told me she wanted to write an article about Saudi bloggers. I was very excited since she is one of the first Saudi female journalists, and I couldn’t wait to meet her.
    The first meeting was cancelled since I couldn’t get a driver for that evening (of course all of you know that we women can’t drive here).
    The second meeting was amazing. We’ve talked about many things: how I’ve discovered my talent, how I started blogging, what inspires me to write, and the reasons behind me writing of “Rantings of an Arabian Woman” and “Unleash the Buried Soul I & II” [i.e., two of her earlier blog posts.]
    We discussed sexual harassments that women at work face here, a topic still untouched here in Saudi Arabia, and of course women’s life in general…
    … When I read the article I wasn’t very pleased. The Mystique portrayed there is nowhere close to who I am and Faiza had met me in person and we had many conversations. The portrayal of me was all about sex! Actually, my blog has a combination of a lot of topics. Why was the main focus only about the relatively small sensual parts? …
    I did not sit down and immediately start talking about sex or when I got in touch with my sexuality. We talked about a lot of things and about how young women in Saudi learn about sex.

Anyway, I’ve now gone and read a few of the posts on Mystique’s reconstructed blog. Certainly, not all of them are about sensual relations (and the sensuality in those that are is expressed only in a very indirect way.)
I found this poem, that she posted on November 16, particularly touching. It’s about a flock of beggar children in her home-town, Jeddah. Yes, beggar children in Saudi Arabia. How many other people write about that??
So anyway, in her “farewell” post there she assures us, “I won’t stop writing, I promise.” (And she quotes a couple of beautiful lines from the great palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.)
… Just a couple of quick final notes on the Mystique story. Firstly, Mystique, I’m delighted you came to JWN and left a comment here– especially since it included the link to your reconstructed blog.
Secondly, in response to the discovery that Mystique’s original blog had been taken down after the WaPo piece came out, our sometimes overheated commenter, Vadim, wrote here about Saudi Arabia, “Does it concern you in the least that one of their female bloggers may face imprisonment, torture or death merely for expressing her thoughts online?” I later described that as a “silly exaggeration” that seemed intended only to whip up additional Islamophobia in western society.
(I also wrote, “The rights infractions that do happen in Saudi Arabia are bad enough without you propagating completely baseless scare stories like this one.”)
So anyway, I’m glad that we have, to a certain extent, cleared that one up and established that Mystique has apparently been neither imprisoned, nor tortured, nor killed as a result of her blogging..
Finally: My very best wishes to Mystique in her new writing ventures. I hope we can all enjoy the results– online, or on paper– sometime soon!
Addendum, 8:30 p.m. 11/28: Soon after I published this on my blog, Mystique’s reconstructed site also came down off Blogger. So I did a “cache” search on Google for the distinctive term she used in her URL there and got successfully to the cached version of the main page of her blog. I copied the banner there and the first three or four entries into this file, so that JWN’s readers can read that small sampling of her work. (It includes the farewell post, the post about the WaPo, and the poem about child beggars.)
I am, of course, sorry that Mystique took down even the reconstruction of her blog, as that means I’m now unable to explore most of it any further. But it was very plucky and resourceful fo her to have put it back up again, even if for only a few days there. And at least it gave her the chance to say “farewell” to her readers. I for one return the hope that she fares well in her new ventures.

My BR article on the 33-day war

It’s finally here: The 33-Day War: Hizbullah’s victory, Israel’s choice, the piece I wrote back in late August/early September about the Israel-Hizbullah war.
Yesterday I went over to BR’s new digs, just a mile or so northwest from MIT, where they used to have their offices. I said hi to Josh Friedman, the Managing Editor, and Chloe Foster, an editorial assistant, who had both worked on editing my piece. I had my first look at the paper version of this issues, which is sensational. (It has the long piece by Nir Rosen in it, as well as other good pieces by Elaine Scarry and Anatol Lieven.)
Then I went out for lunch with Deb Chasman, who is one of the two incredibly talented people at the top of BR’s masthead. The other one, the political philosopher Josh Cohen, is now in California, having taken up a position at Stanford University. So he exercises his editorial functions from there.
It was a pity not to be able to see Josh C. here; but Deb and I had a good time. I always really appreciate the opportunity to connect with smart colleagues who are also female. We discussed a couple of new ideas for the mag, of which I’m a Contributing Editor. Actually, one of the new things they’re already doing is a series of short, very classily-produced books on various topics. Deb’s background is in book publishing, so she’s very attached to that project. (I immediately started thinking which of my various ideas could be crammed into that 20-30,000-word format…)
One final short point before I invite you all to contribute your comments on the text of the BR piece… Since the ceasefire I have nearly always referred to the war as the “33-day war”. However, toward the end of his editing, Josh F. noted that many other people refer to it as the “34-day war”. He asked me whether we should consider going with that.
Well, my original thinking was that the war “started” at around 9 a.m. on July 12 and the ceasefire went into operation at 8 a.m. (or earlier) on August 14. So in terms of 24-hour blocks of time, it was just under 33 of those. However, if you look at days on a calendar that included hostilities, there were 34 of those…
There is a small political subtext to the choice, too. In calling it the 33-day or 34-day war, there is an almost immediate contrast with the 6-day war of 1967– one in which the Israeli army definitively conquered the armies of of three entire Arab states (or four, if you count Iraq, which did contribute some troops.) So just in mentioning the length of this summer’s war– in either of the two formulations– one is pointing toward the fact that Hizbullah not only held out 5.5 times as long as those Arab armies but also that it was by no means definitively defeated by them… Given that political subtext, therefore, I think it’s wise to go with the slightly smaller counting method. No need to exaggerate Hizbullah’s strategic achievements during the war, I figure: they were evident enough without any exaggeration.
So we went with the 33-day figure.
Today, I get to take a boxfull of copies of this issue along to the Middle East Studies Association meeting in downtown Boston.
Enjoy the article; tell your friends and colleagues about it; and comment (courteously) on it here.

CSM column calls for US pullout from Iraq, accountability

Here’s my column in the CSM of Thursday, October 12.
The title is Bush created a mess in Iraq. Here’s how to clean it up. The subtitle is: It’s time to pull our troops out of Iraq – and to hold our leaders accountable.
So now you can go read the whole thing and tell me (courteously) what you think.

Back to JWN

Phew! My horrible time/work crunch is now over. I had a really busy schedule planned for this week, and then on Mon. afternoon Deb Chasman at Boston Review sent me a marked-up copy of the big Lebanon-war upsumming piece I wrote for them at the beginning of September: She asked me to review the markups on it as fast as I could and get it back to her by Wednesday. I looked it over and quickly concluded it needed quite a lot more careful work from me– to update it, to refine its internal organization a bit, and to save it from what looked at that point a little like “death from too many different people having had a go at it.”
Meanwhile, this incredibly busy week loomed. Including me being the gracious hostess (!) for a small fundraiser Bill and I were hosting Tuesday evening for our great Congressional candidate, Al Weed; me getting to DC by 10 a.m. Wed. morning for a really interesting-looking discussion at the U.S. Institute of Peace on “How to deal with Hamas and Hizbullah”; various other meetings in DC; various Quaker-related things; etc etc.
So I panicked a bit. Most of all I didn’t want to short-change the rewriting job for the BR piece, which needed a lot of the kind of focus that’s hard to muster when you have a zillion other things on your mind and you’re flitting from hither to yon. Deb finally gave me till this morning to get it done. On Tuesday, Wednesday, and last night, I did what I could. But it still wasn’t finished… Finally, by sitting straight down at my desk at 7:30 this morning I finally finished the rewrite and got it back to Deb by about 10… Then I pulled on my running clothes, walked the dog, ran three miles, and finally got to sit down with a cup of coffee and today’s newspapers.
So now, what better way to spend a relaxed afternoon than by blogging?
Deb says the issue with my piece in it will be a generally excellent one. I’ll trust her on that, but it won’t be out till the end of October. Since I started enjoying the instant gratification of blogging, I’ve often felt frustrated by having to endure something as onerous as a seven-week turnround for an important, timely piece of writing. But I guess it’s worth doing. I do, after all, keep coming across people who say they’ve read one or another of my longer, composed-and-edited articles– mainly the BR ones on the Middle East or Rwanda, but also my Foreign Policy piece from earlier this year, on war-crimes courts in general. So I guess it’s worth taking the trouble to try and make them as good as possible?
(Talking of long-turnround efforts, where the heck is my book on post-atrocity policies, anyway?? The folks at Paradigm Press told me it was due to ship from the printers a couple of weeks ago… But I haven’t seen it yet. Oh well, that just further reminds me how worthwhile it is to keep blogging.)
Watch for a few interesting posts coming up.

My ‘Atrocities’ book– about to ship!

I can’t figure out why I’m so excited about my new book, Amnesty After Atrocity?: Healing Nations After Genocide and War Crimes… Maybe because it was a new, intellectually challenging, but ultimately very inspiring subject to work on?
Anyway, last week, the folks at Paradigm sent me the book’s cover (big PDF file there; be warned.) It’s absolutely beautiful. It features a pen-and-ink drawing by the great Mozambican artist Malangatana that to me looks very Guernica-esque. It’s titled “O Aberto”– “the Opening”. You can see the “opening” there just above the middle of the picture, if you look.
(I just found another version of that image on the website of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, which owns the picture. And on this web-page of theirs you can learn that this picture– described as a screenprint, so perhaps there are other copies?– was donated to the Court by Justice Albie Sachs, who is one of my heroes.)
Anyway, the blurbs on the back cover of the book are fabulous. I had no idea the folks there at Paradigm were gathering such great blurbs for me while I was traveling over the summer…
Here’s a downloadable order form (also a large PDF file) for the book. Alternatively, if you go to the Paradigm website you can order the book there and get a non-trivial discount that brings the shipped price of the hardcover edition in at under $70.
Okay, I know that’s an astronomical figure for many people. Self included. The paperback– priced at under $25– will be out in January.
Here, by the way, is the Table of Contents:

    1. Atrocities, Conflicts, and Peacemaking
    2. Rwanda: Court Processes after Mass Violence
    3. South Africa: Amnesties, Truth-Seeking—and Reconciliation?
    4. Mozambique: Heal and Rebuild
    5. Comparing Postconflict Justice in Rwanda, South Africa, and Mozambique
    6. Restoring Peacemaking, Revaluing History

The amazing thing about books is that they really do take on a life of their own. They are surely the artefact for which the term “shelf-life” has the most applicability. This remains true today, even with all the great electronic gadgetry we have… I mean, it really is not as much fun to curl up in bed or stretch out on a couch and read stuff off a laptop, is it?
I’m not sure, though, that the subject of my book is one that you necessarily want to read about just before going to bed. Sorry about that…

Article-writing lockdown here

I just have to intensify the article-writing lockdown I’ve been trying to impose on myself for the past week. For some reason this Boston Review piece is proving hard to organize… Mainly, there’s ways too much to say. Plus I have to finish another piece soon, for Tom Paine, for the fifth anniversary of 9/11.
Meanwhile, a lot of other stuff has been going on in my life. Including Quaker commitments, family stuff like the kids coming to visit, etc., etc. The rich fabric of a real life, you might say.
Rightly.
Yeah, well. But I didn’t even have the time or energy yesterday to go run the C’ville Women’s Four-miler Race, which I generally like to do. Maybe this year would’ve been the year I busted 40 mins for the race?? Who knows??
Anyway, much thanks to those who’ve been sending me material either for the BR piece or for JWN. I must promise myself however at this point, though, that I shan’t put any new posts on the blog till I’ve finished the BR piece.
So just post interesting things here yourselves, onto the various existing comments threads, as appropriate.

‘Peace after Lebanon’ at TomPaine.com

I did another piece for TomPaine.com at the end of last week, and I see it’s up on their site today. Astute JWN readers will see it’s an updated combination of a couple of things I’ve posted here already. (Remember: you generally read my stuff here on JWN first! It just gets better composed and better organized when I work with an outside editor…)
The piece is called Peace After Lebanon. It looks first at the need for a broad and serious Arab-Israeli peace effort in the aftermath of the Israel-Hizbullah war, and then at the broad debate (not to mention dismay and conusion) in post-war Israel and the debate that’s already emerging there over what should now replace Sharonist “unilateralism” regarding the Palestinian Question.
Here’s how I concluded it:

    Decision-makers and concerned citizens here in the U.S. have, whether we want it or not (and many do), enormous influence over how battle of ideas inside Israel will play out. This past week, Israel’s internal politics have shown themselves to be uniquely fractured, uniquely vulnerable—and therefore, uniquely open to influence from America. Will the political forces in our country line up strongly behind the neocon-Likud vision of Israel as an ever better-armed and trigger-happy bastion of colonial expansionism? Or will they, in this moment of unique opportunity, line up behind Yossi Beilin’s vision of working for a regional peace?
    We Americans must know that our tax dollars, our government’s political support, and our munitions all combined to make Israel’s recent military actions possible. Now, we have a responsibility before the whole world for the political choices we make regarding the chance the region has for a viable post-war peace.

I swish I could be more optimistic that our “opposition party” here in US might actually show some vision and guts and jump onto the Beilin/pro-peace bandwagon. (I say, is hollow laughter quite inappropriate at this point?) But if past experience is anything to go by, that’s not likely to happen soon.
But don’t you think that with militarism and colonialist hegemony getting such a bad rap in the US regarding Iraq– even, finally, among many Democrats here– that the Dems might also just start to think to themselves that these exact same kinds of policies might also not be the best thing for Israel, either?
I live in hope (and note with appreciation Scott’s recent post here on JWN, on Republican Senator Chuck Hagel) …

My CSM column on the need for speedy, comprehensive Israeli-Arab peace

The Christian Science Monitor of Thursday carries my column on what to do about Lebanon (also here.) The editors there titled it For a lasting Middle East peace, look back to 1967 UN plan. That’s not quite how I would have titled it, but I guess it’s okay…
In the most operational part of the column I write:

    Israel’s government and people need to find a way other than coercive military force to build a relationship that is sustainable over the long term with these neighbors [i.e., the Lebanese and Palestinian peoples] and thus to enjoy at last the sense of security that they (and all the peoples of the region) so deeply crave. And Americans, who have a long and close relationship with Israel and aspire to have good relations with the Lebanese and Palestinians, should understand that the region’s most urgent needs are to win a complete and fully monitored cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon (and, if possible, between Israel and the militants in Gaza), and to link that cease-fire to an explicit plan to have the United Nations convene an authoritative peace conference within, say, two weeks that aims to find a speedy resolution to all the unresolved strands of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

In the draft I sent to my editor there Monday, I had the “plan” part there organized under two separate “bullet points”. But I guess that space considerations prompted her to consolidate the lines of text. So what I would have preferred is this:

    the region’s most urgent needs are:
    * to win a complete and fully monitored cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon (and, if possible, between Israel and the militants in Gaza), and
    * to link that cease-fire to an explicit plan to have the United Nations convene an authoritative peace conference within, say, two weeks that aims to find a speedy resolution to all the unresolved strands of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Is this pie-in-the-sky? I think not. It strikes me firstly that it would be infinitely preferable to the endless prolongation of the violent conflicts between Israel and the Palestinians, and between Israel and the Lebanese, and secondly– as I argue in the column– that nailing down final peace agreements on all three remaining fronts really is quite do-able once you get your head around the possibility.
Think how close the Israelis and Syrians– and therefore also Israel and the Lebanese– came to resolving their conflict back in 1996 or 2000. (You can read my 2000 book about much of that diplomacy, to get all the fascinating details.) Or think how close the Israelis and Palestinians came in late 2000. Nailing down these agreements really is a much closer proposition than it might appear… and nearly everyone realizes what– if they are to be sustainable over the long term– they would look like… That is, very close to a total “land for peace” deal on all fronts. Which, yes, was indeed the content of the security Council’s famous resolution 242 of 1967.
So what I am arguing is Yes, let’s go for the very speedy, very complete ceasefire, as called for in the Siniora plan. But let’s tie that ceasefire not just to a promise to resolve the Lebanon issue– an issue that, quite frankly, is just about impossible to resolve sustainably on its own, given the country’s chronic political fragility… But let’s tie it instead to a firm promise to resolve the Syria-Israel dispute and the Palestine-Israel dispute as well as the Lebanon-Israel dispute. Why not pursue such a bold vision?
What on earth is there to stop all these strands of the Arab-Israeli conflict from being resolved in very short order???
Back in 1991, an earlier round of very committed diplomats and world leaders pledged themselves to just that goal. (And yes, before that, in 1973, as well… though with– on Henry Kissinger’s part– notably less sincerity.) The diplomacy that flowed from the Madrid Peace conference of 1991 did not succeed, it is true, in resolving all outstanding strands of the Arab-Israeli dispute. But it did resolve the Jordanian-Israeli dispute; and, as noted above, the post-Madrid diplomacy laid a considerable amount of the groundwork for a final peace settlement on both the Palestinian and the Syrian fronts, too.
I assure you: If the Syrian-Israeli conflict is resolved and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is resolved, Lebanon will make peace with Israel in a jiffy.
So okay, maybe you have concerns with my approach. You may say, “Wouldn’t it overload the Lebanese ceasefire to have it organically linked (as per my formulation above) to the promise to convene a speedy conference dedicated to negotiating a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace?” Yes, it might– a little. But right now, the ceasefire doesn’t look as though it’s going to be happening terrifically soon, anyway. So as we sit out the agonzing wait for it, why not start planning how it can be tied to an effort to build a really worthwhile regional peace, rather than a Lebanon-only stabilization effort that– especially in the absence of any incentives for the Syrians– is anyway almost certainly doomed to be short-lived?
You may say, “Wouldn’t promising a speedy and comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace effort somehow reward the Hizbullah and Hamas militants for their intransigence and use of violence, and reward Syria for having supported them?”
I would say a couple of things to this: First: the real hardliners in Hamas and Hizbullah would certainly not feel “rewarded” by such a peace effort. These are the people who hate the idea of any peace that leaves a thriving Israel in place at all, and would want to fight to the end. But the majority of supporters and fighters within these organizations could be won over to supporting a regional peace effort– provided it were sufficiently balanced to give independent Palestine and independent lebanon a real chance to thrive (alongside the thriving Israel.)
Surely, the idea should be to try to structure the incentives so that as many Palestinians, lebanese, and Syrians as possible want to make peace, rather than to continue to fight??
Secondly, I’d say we have to get completely away from the idea that securing a comprehensive Israeli-Arab peace is something that is only in the interests of the Arabs. Of course it is not! It is something that’s in the interests of the vast majority of Israelis, as well. Yes, some proportion of those Israelis who have been living as (illegal) settlers on occupied Arab land, whether in Golan or the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, would have to be prepared to see those homes coming under (or, in the case of Golan, returning to) the soveriengty of an Arab state. The fate of all those settlers would certainly be part of the peace negotiations… But all those issues have already been extensively negotiated before, back in the 1990s… No need to re-invent the wheel there…
Anyway, that’s the big outline of my argument. A few other people– Brent Scowcroft, Jimmy Carter, etc– have already started to argue in the US discourse that this current crisis should prompt the world to renew its search for a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace. I applaud the boldness of their vision and willingness to speak out and articulate it! I think that what I add to the argument is the idea that the promise of the very rapid convening of the regnional peace conference should be embedded within the ceasefire resolution itself.
Oh, and I also make the point in the column that the US faces quite enough challenges elsewhere in the world right now– including in Iraq and Afghanistan– that surely it should welcome any move that promises the speedy de-escalation of Arab-Israeli tensions… Plus, I draw out an extended comparison of the current crisis, as it faces the US, with the Suez crisis of 1956, as it affected Britain. I don’t recall that either Scowcroft or Jimmy Carter did that…
Anyway, I’m off to California in the wee hours of tomorrow morning. Tell me (courteously, as always!) what you think of the column.

My upcoming book: paperback and hardcover

I’ve been working with the good folks at Paradigm Publishers who will be releasing the hardcover edition of my book Amnesty after Atrocity?: Healing Nations after Genocide and War Crimes NEXT MONTH, here in the US. This is so exciting.
I received a confirmation from them yesterday that they will be releasing the paperback in January. It will cost a fraction of the hardcover price of $70. Here is Paradigm’s web-page about the book. (I’m not sure what the $63.75 figure there means– it must be some kind of a trade-discounted price for the hardcover. The paperback will be under $25.)
The book deals with important issues in transitional justice and post-conflict peacebuilding, and includes the first ever comparative study of the utility of international war-crimes courts. If any JWN readers would like to write or commission reviews of the book– or even better, to organize some kind of a discussion event at which its main themes and arguments can be examined and discussed– please contact Patricia Giminez at Paradigm. You can click on a form to do that if you go here.