Kevin Sites and Gal Uchovsky

Kevin Sites has a fascinating interview in his ‘Hot Zone’ project– with Gal Uchovsky, the Israeli writer of a new film called ‘Walk on Water.’
Excerpt:

    KEVIN SITES: Your movie deals with a variety of issues, but a prominent theme is how a society’s history defines its present. The Holocaust has defined Israel in many ways — even dominating it — but to evolve a society has to put history in its proper place and move forward.
    Do you think that’s hard to do when you have people like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad questioning whether the Holocaust actually took place?
    GAL UCHOVSKY: I don’t care about this guy from Iran. He’s not part of my life. I’m not part of the political game to the point that I care what someone in Iran says. But I am interested in how the Holocaust has shaped the Israeli male. It’s been 70 years and we have to make some peace with it. But we still see ourselves as victims of the Holocaust.
    We become victimized to the point that we’ve become aggressors, and now others use terror as a weapon against us. It’s not the tool of the strong, it’s the tool of the weak. So (in our film) we wanted to examine the fact that we still see ourselves as victims — even though we are a vibrant nation and have a strong army that can defend us just fine.
    SITES: It does say on your film’s Web site, “The filmmakers believe that the fact that Israelis are still so obsessed with the Holocaust and their status as victims renders them blind to the fact they themselves have become aggressors, imposing pain and suffering on the Palestinians. The filmmakers believe that the first step in helping the Israelis understand how cruel they themselves have become lies in making some kind of peace with their own traumatic past.”
    What kind of suffering specifically do you mean that the Israelis have imposed on the Palestinians?
    UCHOVSKY: Well, the occupation — building all these settlements on Palestinian lands. Apartheid roads…
    … SITES: Back to the earlier question though, how do Israelis make that peace with their history, keep the Holocaust from making them a society of permanent victims?
    UCHOVSKY: We have to understand that we’re not there anymore. It was 1945. We had long hollow cheeks; we were very, very hungry. Some of our families were turned into soap. It was terrible. But we are not there anymore. We are a vibrant force in the world. We’re not there anymore. Jews are pretty much safe in most places in the world. We are not like sheep to the slaughter. Israel was built on the notion of victimization.

Sounds like a movie worth seeing.

Program notes: Chicago and NYC

If you live in Chicago and want to listen to me talk about Jaafari and Iraq, I’ll be on public radio at 10 a.m. there, Tuesday. Update 11:35 a.m. EST: I just did the interview. It went pretty well. A stunningly articulate and well-informed interviewer– Jerome Macdonald. But it was taped. So CPR listeners will get it at noon CST.)
If you live in New York City and had been planning to come to the event I was scheduled to speak at, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on March 2, then I’m sorry I can’t make it. It’s still a super program with some great people, so don’t let my absence stop you from going..

Africa book re-edit finished

So I finished it today, coming in with a whole text that I feel fairly good about and that is under 94,000 words… Plus, two days before deadline.
At times there, cutting my own carefully crafted prose felt like cutting a live baby. At times, I got totally into the Zen of it and remembered why it is I just love burying myself in text and working with it like clay. (I work on the text; the text works on me.)
No-one ever taught me to write. When I was in high school in England from age 14 onwards I only studied Pure Maths, Applied Maths, and Physics (that was my A/S levels)– oh, I guess there was a nothingy little exam in there that one had to take called “Use of English.” Three or four years ago, when I was co-writing our Quaker book on Palestine with a bunch of (mainly) US-educated people around my age (or older), I was gobsmacked to discover all the formulaic things they’d been taught about “How to Write”, back in 4th grade– and they had stuck with them ever since. My friend Jim Matlack said he felt phsyically almost sick when he saw me trying to start a sentence with “But”– and he said he could still feel his fourth-grade teacher sitting on his shoulder spelling out all her writing rules to him
Who knew?
A few years ago, I figured out about myself that I really need to get into the physicality and the flow of any long text I’m working on… to be able to read it all in front of me and see the broad flow of the argument and the rhythm of the prose as it unfolds. So at some point– even though I now have a very wide computer screen that lets me put two or three whole pages of text up side by side– I have to work with printout. One-sided printout. And I’ll carefully read each page, mark it up for revisions in a complicated hierarchy of erasable colored pencils (with Post-it notes added where needed), and then shove it off to the left… and then keep doing that till all the pages are laid out side by side there. Well, you can only do that with– on our dining-room table with both leaves extended– 13 pages of text side by side. So then the next 13 pages have to be placed below those; and then the next 13… and by that time I’m crammed off the near-side of the table and this whole text is up there in front of me. And I can stand up on a chair (like G-d?) and look down and see what my creation looks like.
(The reason I’m on the dining-room table at that point is that the very long work counter in my study that I designed specially to be able to do this same thing with has been piled with an archeologically significant set of striations of books and papers for the past 3-4 years.)
But the dining-room table thing only works for text that is 39 or fewer pages long. Some of these chapters I’ve been working with over the past month were around twice that long, and I couldn’t get them all into my head in that very phsyical/visceral/visual way that I need to, all at the same time. I had some anxiety about that.
Then, keyboarding in the edits was a pain. Literally. A couple of times my right shoulder became very inflamed from all the mousing in there. (Apparently, I need to get something called a mouse bridge.) Intermittently I would think, “Hey, Helena,you should really hire some grad student to be doing this.” If I were a male person from a certain generation, no doubt I’d have a lovely wife at home to do it for me. But I do it myself. Okay, I’m not exactly a control freak… but still, there is something valuable about having repeated, intimate relations with a piece of text.
So last night I almost-almost finished it. (Okay, truth in advertising: I thought I had finished it.) I ran myself a deep, hot bath, ate a bunch of chocolate, and had a glass of wine. Spouse still overseas, but son very supportive and celebratory.
I woke up this morning with one final, excellent tweak right at the end of the last chapter in mind… worked on that a bit…chained all the chapters together into a single Word doc and sent it off to Paradigm (and Kinko’s). I ran five miles, did a few other things, picked up the spouse from the airport, and have been generally winding down since then. I think I’ve been going on high adrenaline for about a month and I definitely need to sleep some.
Along the way– did I mention this?– I had to tell the spouse I wouldn’t be going with him on the trip we’d planned to Egypt together. Bummer. But I really needed to focus on this manuscript.
My reward to myself is that next week I’m going to make another trip… one I’m pretty excited about. Yeah, of course I’ll let you all know about it at the appropriate time.
And tomorrow, I’ll get back and write something of my usual insight (!) and trenchancy (?) here on JWN.

A museum of WHAT?

I’ve been working so hard on my Africa book that I had missed all the reports that the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center has started building a Museum of “Tolerance” on the site of a Muslim cemetery in West Jerusalem.
The Independent’s Donald Macintyre reported Friday that

    Skeletons are being removed from the site of an ancient Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem to make way for a $150m (£86m) “museum of tolerance” being built for the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre.
    Palestinians have launched a legal battle to stop the work at what was the city’s main Muslim cemetery. The work is to prepare for the construction of a museum which seeks the promotion of “unity and respect among Jews and between people of all faiths”.

This Reuters report in HaAretz says:

    A petition to halt construction of the museum had been presented to the Supreme Court….
    The discovery of human remains during construction in Israel is highly sensitive, particularly to Jews and Muslims who have strict rules for burial of the dead.
    A spokesman for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, an international Jewish human rights group behind the Museum of Tolerance, said… “The land wasn’t a cemetery when we got it from city hall and the government and we are waiting to know the (court’s) decision.”
    Muslim leaders say the parking lot on which the museum is planned is above remnants of a Muslim cemetery on land owned by the Muslim Waqf, a religious trust, and confiscated by Israel.
    California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger unveiled a cornerstone of the museum in 2004. The $150 million facility will promote “the vital need for tolerance in Israel and around the globe,” the Wiesenthal Center said on its Web site.

Gershon Baskin, the admirable Israeli who is co-director of the Israeli-Palestinian Center for Research and Information (IPCRI) issued a statement today that said:

    the issue is not a legal one. It is an issue of tolerance, sensibilities, morality, and mutual respect.
    Imagine the outrage if the Palestinians were building a Museum of Tolerance (or anything else) on what was once a Jewish Cemetery. Would it matter to anyone if the cemetery was not active and in use since 1948 or that it was being done “legally”?
    This project has no right to exist if it creates the outrage of the millions of Muslims in this shared land and of the hundreds of thousands of them in the Holy City. The issue is now before the High Court in Israel, but it is not a legal issue. A Jewish moral voice must be sounded loud that will resonate throughout the Land against this outrageous blindness. The Chief Rabbis of Israel must speak out against the desecration of this Muslim Cemetery. All of the citizens of Jerusalem should raise their voice against this project. Jews, Muslims and Christians alike should respect each others’ sacred spaces – without this there can never be peace in this Holy City or in this Holy Land.
    We call on the Government of Israel to stop this madness – who could ever imagine a Museum of Tolerance built on such bad foundations?!

Well said!
In addition to appealing to the Israeli government, I believe those of us here in the US should make our voices on this issue heard by the Wiesenthal Center itself– contact details here.
I must admit, as I come to the end of my work on the Africa book, I am looking at the issue of public memorial spaces and museums– how and when they help to build a greater sense of shared humanity, and how and when they are used (as they quite frequently are) for quite contrary purposes. Reading these news accounts sent a shiver down my spine.
To have construction workers lifting Muslim bodies out of an ancient Jerusalem cemetery, quite without any permission from the Muslim Waqf (religious trust) authorities concerned– and to do so in the name of “tolerance”?? This almost beggars belief.

Jaafari gets UIA nomination

So where are they now, all those pundits and experts in Iraqi affairs who’ve been telling us non-stop since the December elections that SCIRI’s Abdel-Aziz Hakim is “the most powerful politician in Iraq”?
Ever since December 20, I’ve been saying— hey, wait a minute! It certainly looks true that the UIA did very well in the election– but don’t just assume that Hakim and SCIRI are the strongest force inside the UIA!
That day, and on Dec. 22, and Dec. 27, and many times since then I’ve been saying the same thing, and pointing to the very important tussle that’s been going on inside the UIA.
Very early on there, the Norwegian researcher Reidar Visser started coming in with some solid data indicating that– as I had judged might well be the case– Moqtada Sadr and his people was much stronger inside the UIA than the western pundits’ “consensus” seemed to think, and SCIRI/Hakim correspondingly weaker.
Just until a couple of days ago, western media people in Baghdad were still routinely describing Hakim as “the most powerful pol in Iraq.”
But he got upstaged and out-maneuvered, didn’t he? The UIA swung behind outgoing Premier Ibrahim Jaafari, instead. Jaafari’s Daawa Party (both branches) only got 26 of the UIA’s 128 seats in the parliament– fewer than SCIRI’s 29. But the two branches of Sadrists got 45 seats, and Sadr swung behind Jaafari, most likely in an effort to block SCIRI.
Visser did a pretty good job in this Jan. 20 post of describing the differences in political approach between SCIRI and the Sadrists. One main one has to do with federalism: SCIRI and Hakim have expressed themselves strongly in favor of a radical decentralization/dissolution of the Iraqi state, whereas the Sadrists– including in the south of Iraq– are much more in favor of keeping the unitary state.
How did so much of the US MSM– and even, on some occasions, Juan Cole– manage to get it so wrong about Hakim being (or not being) the “most powerful politician in Iraq”? In that same post, too, Visser refers to SCIRI’s “slick and professional” leadership style…
Well, Jaafari and the Sadrists winning this one is only the first step toward forming a sovereign, independent government in Iraq, which surely should be the goal of all concerned. The parliament is now due to convene within the next two weeks. It will elect a President, and then a prime Minister. There are many, many hurdles still to cross. But wouldn’t it be great if Sadr and his allies were truly able to reach out to form a ruling coalition made of people who are, as he seems to me to be, strong and politically effective Iraqi nationalists?

The UIA and the final vote tally

Reidar Visser, who must be the western world’s leading UIA-ologist, has come out with his latest analysis on the seats won in Iraq’s new 275-member parliament by the United Iraqi Alliance, which is the large, catch-all electoral “list” fielded in the December elections by a coalition of Shiite parties.
The main development there since Visser produced his last piece of UIA-ology on January 20, is the distribution within the UIA of the 19 “compensatory” or “national” seats that the list was awarded. Visser had warned back in january that the distribution of these seats would be hard fought over among the parties within the list… and indeed that seems to have been the case. But the upshot was that SCIRI/Badr seems to have competed the most successfully in that internecine, intra-party contest– and came out with 9 of those 19 seats despite having earlier won only 19% of the more fairly allocated “governorate-level” seats.
Of the 19 national seats, Visser writes that the pro-Moqtada Sadrist bloc was awarded 3, the Fadila Sadrist bloc 2, Daawa (Iraq)– one, and 4 went to independents.
Visser’s analysis of the final allocation of the UIA’s 128 total seats is therefore as follows:

    SCIRI/Badr: 23%– 29 seats
    pro-Moqtada Sadrists: 22% — 28 seats
    Fadila Sadrists: 13% — 17 seats
    Daawa: 10% — 13 seats
    Daawa (Iraq): 10% — 13 seats
    Independents: 22% — 28 seats

His political-analysis bottom line is this:

    Even after this impressive catch of [“national”] seats by SCIRI, the internal UIA structure remains multiplex and without any obvious point of gravity. Recent political developments only serve to emphasise this. Complaints about the internal distribution of “national” seats have been loud, with some threatening to leave the coalition. The ongoing contest over the Alliance’s candidate for prime minister has also taken a lot longer than UIA leaders had envisaged; some of the smaller parties such as Hizb al-Fadila have even fielded candidates of their own. And Sadrists have continued protesting against federalism, claiming that the issue should at least be postponed until all foreign forces have left Iraq. The Sadrist subtext seems to be that the whole course of Iraqi politics today is influenced by the presence of foreign troops (and their influential diplomats, who are in the habit of paying frequent visits to a highly select pick of Iraqi politicians), and that normal conditions will only come once the external factor diminishes in importance. That point may conceivably even be aimed at the internal politics of the United Iraqi Alliance, where SCIRI is far ahead of everyone else in expertly cultivating bilateral ties with foreign powers.

Well, as I noted here on Tuesday, Moqtada’s also been making a series of “premier-in-waiting” type calls on foreign powers– namely, on Iraqi neighbors Iran, Syria, and next up Saudi Arabia.
And today, AP reported that the meeting of UIA pols this afternoon that had previously been “spun” (by the SCIRI types) as the gathering that would generate the name for the UIA’s candidate for PM, resulted instead in yet another deadlock.
That AP piece, by Qassi Abu-Zahra, reported that,

    the vote was postponed for at least a day at the request of the faction loyal to the anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr because of differences with another group, according to Shiites who attended the meeting.
    Shiite officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the negotiations, said the al-Sadr faction was leaning toward Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari.
    Another Shiite group had doubts about al-Jaafari, and al-Sadr’s lieutenants wanted time to confer, the officials said.
    The disagreement could strengthen the position of the other major candidate — Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi, a French-educated former finance minister backed by the country’s top Shiite group, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in
    Iraq.
    The choice of the umbrella Shiite alliance is assured of becoming prime minister because Shiites won the most parliament seats in national elections. The alliance, however, is a collection of Shiite parties and factions with individual agendas, not a cohesive organization.
    The winning candidate will need a simple majority of the 128 parliamentarians.

I haven’t had time to get into the Arabic-language press on these late-breaking developments. Anyone who has, please post a link and a summary in the comments.
My DDI counter here tells me, meanwhile, that it’s been an amazing 58 days since the Iraqi election, and they still don’t have a government accountable to the elected parliament. Could it be– shock! horror! (irony alert)– that there has been political interference from foreign powers that has sought to sway the outcome??
But Reidar, thanks again for your great work on this. Am I missing something, or does a lot now hang on the choices made by that large number of “Independents”?

French responses on the cartoons issue

    I am delighted to publish here, in its entirety, a very informative and thoughtful comment recently submitted here by Christiane, who lives in a Francophone part of Switzerland. Christiane, thanks so much for adding so much to our knowledge-base here! Apologies to you and to other JWN readers that I haven’t yet had time to go through and tidy up the occasional mis-spelling in English, but I’ll do it when I can. Meantime it’s all very easily readable, and a great contribution to the global discourse (especially it’s English-speaking part.) ~HC

In complement to your recent comments on the cartoons issue, I find it interesting to report on the reactions they stirred in France. After all, France is the European country counting the most important minority of North African and black Africans Muslims. At the same time it is also the most anticlerical country of Europe. Further, at the end of last year, the suburban areas where the majority of North African and black African immigrants live were inflamed by the most serious riotting ever seen, burning for several weeks, although with a few casualties.
In France, probably due to a long anticlerical tradition, two important, nationally distributed newspapers have reproduced all the 12 Danish caricatures of the Jylland’s Posten. The first to do so was “France Soir”. Paradoxically, the owner of the journal is a Franco-Egyptian and he fired the chief editor right afterwards. This led to several calls for the defense of free speach in various French newspapers. Last Thursday, Charlie Hebdo, a satirical journal with a large readership, dedicated its whole weekly issue to the subject. They sold out in a moment and the owner had to reprint a lot more issues. Charlie Hebdo has a long tradition of anticlericalism, antimilitarism and harsh political satire. I’ve been unable to get an issue in Swizterland, it was out of stock the very day it came out. So I don’t know how they treated the subject. The media reports that one of their own caricatures represented a distressed Prophet Mohammed stating that “It is a pain to be loved by assholes”.
But apart of two or three provocative attitudes of this same kind, the reaction in France has been very measured, especially at the government level and the Muslim organizations level. Jacques Chirac immediately condemned these publications as provocation, especially the most recent issue of Charlie Hebdo. He called on everyone to stay calm and the press to act responsibly. The government also met with Muslim organisations who issued calls for peace as well. The Conseil français du culte musulman (CFCM) (an Association regrouping several Muslim Organisations) chose the legal path and will file multiple complaints (French text) against both France Soir and Charlie Hebdo. It’s not yet sure whether they will also file complaints against other newspapers like “Le Monde” and “Liberation” who reproduced only some of the caricatures. Brubaker, the president of the CFCM stated that they were only looking for a “symbolic condemnation” in order to discourage new provocations which could “reinforce a clash of civilizations”. Some protests of angry Mulims took place, mostly at the exit of the Friday prayers, but they didn’t run out of control. Secular Arabs interviewed in the streets say they felt insulted by the caricatures as well, especially by the stigmatizing of all Muslims as terrorists.
The secular “Mouvement contre le racisme et pour l’amitié entre les peuples” (MRAP, aka Movement against racism and for the friendship between all peoples) also decided to file a suit against France Soir, for provocation and incitement to racial hate (this was before the issuing of Charlie Hebdo; they will probably sue Charlie Hebdo as well).
Compared to the weeks-long riots that inflamed the suburbs at the end of last year, these protests look like a very restrained reaction. This proves what many French intellectuals and politicians of the left said then : that the French suburb-dwellers’ riots had nothing to do with religion, that they represented a social movement against discrimination, agaisnt economic and social exclusion, but that they were neither fomented by religious movements, nor indicatied a ‘clash of civilizations’, as US neocons would have liked to see them.
The issue of the complaint filed by the Muslim organizations and the secular MRAP isn’t yet certain…

Continue reading “French responses on the cartoons issue”

Some calming wisdom from Kofi Annan

I just saw a good piece by the LA Times’s Maggie Farley in New York, where she reports on Kofi Annan’s latest attempts to calm things down around the cartoons controversy.
Notable in there, this:

    When asked about claims this week by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that Syria and Iran had inflamed the controversy and incited protests, Annan told reporters that he had “no evidence to that effect.”

Evidence? You think the Bushies rely on evidence for any of the increasingly wild series of allegations they’ve been making against Syria and Iran?
Farley also wrote of Annan:

    “Honestly, I do not understand why any newspaper will publish the cartoons today,” he told reporters at the United Nations. “It is insensitive, it is offensive, it is provocative, and they should see what has happened around the world.
    “This does not mean that I am against freedom of speech, or freedom of the press,” he added. “But as I have indicated in the past, freedom of speech is not a license. It does entail exercising responsibility and judgment.”
    … He also condemned the violent response by demonstrators.
    “They should not attack innocent civilians,” he said. “They should not attack people who are not responsible for the publication of the cartoons.”

Well said, Mr. Secretary-General. That’s a whole lot more constructive leadership than the global community has been getting from the self-proclaimed leader of the world George W. Bush on this issue.

Dainty western leaders and violence

People in the west who’ve gotten so riled up about the “violence” (of some– actually, a very, very small proportion) of those Muslims who’ve been protesting against the Danish cartoons might do well to remember that very little, if any, of this violence has been directed at western persons. Nearly all of it that I have learned about has been directed against western property including “symbolic” property, like flags.
Indeed, the casualties related to these protests have not been among westerners. They have all been among Muslim individuals involved in the demonstrations:

    One (in Lebanon, at the weekend) was apparently of a demonstrator/?arsonist most likely asphyxiated by his own fire,
    Four were of Afghan protesters shot dead by the US-backed Afghan security forces– oops, scratch that, the latest total on the number killed by the US-backed forces in Afghanistan is eleven…
    And in Kenya, police today shot and injured one person while trying to keep hundreds of protesters from marching to the residence of Denmark’s ambassador. And one passerby was killed when he was hit by an ambulance rushing away the wounded protester.

Once again we hear dainty voices in the west saying “Eewwww! Look how violent those Muslims are!” But have we heard GW Bush or any other western leader expressing sorrow or condolence for the actual people who have suffered violence as a result of these cartoon-related incidents? Have we heard GWB or any other western leader calling on the security forces in mainly-Muslim countries to find alternatives to the use of lethal violence in their actions against local protesters?
Not yet…
And of course, I’m just holding my breath for our President to “take the lead” and announce that from here on out the United States will foreswear the use of violence in all its dealings with the world. Now that would be a fine thing to do.

CSM column today on cartoons, the sacred, and sacrilege

My column titled Respecting both free speech and Muslims’ faith can bring peace is in the CSM today. As so often, they didn’t choose exactly the title I would have chosen. But what the heck.
The only thing I would have changed in the text of the column is to have clarified that for many of the Muslim governments involved it was primarily Rasmussen’s refusal even to meet with their ambassadors to discuss the cartoon issue that really riled them.
I was thinking of writing a little post here that would ask why does the Bush administration feel it has to inject itself into this very hot-tempered debate, at all? This completely mystifies me, since until now the issue has overwhelmingly been one between a (large) number of Muslim nations and a number of European nations.
So why have W and Condi felt they had to adopt a high public posture on this issue at all? And why has it become so much more hardline over recent days? I am honestly mystified.
I started being mystified when I saw them make a harshly accusatory statement over the weekend, accusing Syria of having instigated the violent protests in Damascus that resulted in the burning of the Danish and Norwegian Embassies there.
This is based on an assumption that “every single popular protest in Syria is totally controlled by the Syrian government.” This has most definitely NOT been the case in recent years… including back at the beginning of the present US-Iraq war, when there were street protests in Damascus against the US that truly terrified the regime.
(I guess the Bushies would have preferred for the Syrian regime to have shot some of the protesters dead, as the US-puppet forces in Afghanistan did earlier this week?)
But then I figured that the “temptation” of taking a hostile potshot at the Syrian regime whenever and however it can is just too overwhleming for the Bushies to be able to restrain themselves…
Anyway, I am also interested to see the effects of the synchronicity of the cartoon controversy with the commemorations in Shiite communities of the events of Ashura.
In Lebanon, Hizbullah organized a huge Ashura-related procession/demonstration at which Hasan Nasrallah “urged Muslims worldwide to keep demonstrating until there is an apology over the drawings and Europe passes laws forbidding insults to the prophet.”
The size of that crowd– in a country whose population totals 3.5 million, was, “estimated by organizers at about 700,000. Police had no final estimates but said the figure was likely to be even higher.”
In Iran more than a million Shiites marched in Karbala for Ashura. (No mention in that story of the cartoons.)
In Lebanon, we are of course coming up to the first anniversary of Rafiq Hariri’s killing. So no doubt there will be huge marches and counter-marches around that, too…
Altogether, not a great time for GWB to inject himself into a worldwide debate that started off not fundamentally involving Americans…
Gotta run. Time to go demonstrate for peace. As every Thursday till– when?