Issue No. 600
Opinion
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22 - 28 August 2002 Issue No. 600 Opinion |
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Reflections
Taking the waters
If it was a bad choice in the 1950s it is wholly absurd today. Yet doggedly we repeat the same mistake, plunging forever headlong into the same pond, unmindful of it having long ago become a particularly putrescent cesspool.
In the 1950s the Arab masses, led by various "organic intellectuals", forfeited the right to determine their own fate (ie to democratic liberty) for the sake of the "greater battle" against the national enemy. Admittedly, it was not an easy choice back then. For one thing we did not have the benefit of the experience of half a century of "nationalist" authoritarian rule, let alone of the pathetic implosion of the Soviet Union and its "socialist bloc".
Then, nearly two centuries of colonial plunder and humiliation had obfuscated the schisms within "the people". The region was going through massive upheaval and revolutionary change; colonial regimes were being overthrown and new nation-states were being set up on their ruins. The Arab bourgeoisies had yet to show their mettle, or lack of it, and seemed, for the most part, at one with the masses in their national yearnings. Political independence was being won -- we were to be governed, for the first time in centuries or millennia (depending on which founding myth was being upheld at the moment), by 'native sons' of our own land. Enter also, a profoundly aggressive and supremely efficient Zionist colonial project in Palestine, a historic anathema in that it was coming to fruition at the very moment that Arabs and Palestinians were coming to their own national self- awareness, and as colonialism was collapsing in the region and throughout the world.
Amid all this, here as in the rest of the Third World, the massive monolith of the Soviet model stood dimming horizons, stunting the imagination.
Then, we had a host of excuses, extenuating circumstances for committing the gravest mistake of our modern history. But what excuse, short of intellectual sloth and self-interest in its most rapacious sense, do we have now, 35 years after June 67, 12 years after Saddam Hussein went about liberating Palestine via Kuwait, several decades after our ruling native sons consigned their various socialisms to the rubbish heap of history to embrace, instead, realism, private enterprise and the global economy? What excuse do we have at a time when the most roguish of Arab regimes have outrun the proverbial rabbit in pure, unmitigated cowardice, to grovel at the feet of the greatest rogue state of them all? (Given half a chance, Saddam would have outdone even Omar Al- Bashir in proving his allegiance to the global war against terror).
There is a further twist to the story which makes the current national unity frenzy doubly absurd. For if we've learned anything from our contemporary history, surely it is that the Arabs' national rising, which crystallised in pan- Arab nationalism, was a total washout precisely where its two most cherished objectives -- the liberation of Palestine and Arab unity -- were concerned. And though I do not have the space to discuss it here, I will posit an utterly heretical proposition. Pan-Arab nationalism bolstered the Zionist project in Palestine in ways undreamed of even by David Ben Gurion (who, indeed, was appreciative of the great benefits Israel might derive from the then increasingly hegemonic concept of a single Arab nation). It helped provide Israel with over 50 per cent of its settler population and the bulk of its working class (Arab Jews); it provided sufficient cover for Jordan's King Abdullah to grab the West Bank and Egypt's King Farouk to put his hands on Gaza; similarly, the then nascent Palestinian nationhood, physically eradicated through military force by Israel, was ideologically and politically effaced by its rhetorically united Arab brethren. The ever- impending war for the liberation of Palestine was as great a boon for the military/ bureaucratic hegemony domestically as, ironically, it was for "little besieged" Israel. There was one significant difference, however. While Arab regimes merely talked liberation war Israel prepared for the coming instalments of its 'war of independence'.
Pan-Arab nationalism's role vis-à-vis Arab unity was more positive, if no less paradoxical. In a sentence, the strong sentiment of solidarity it helped conceive provided the various Arab peoples (and their bourgeoisies) with sufficient clout to win political independence and loosen foreign domination, strategically and economically, thereby creating the necessary conditions for setting-up and bolstering their separate nation-states.
Pan-Arab nationalism's greatest success story -- and this is the biggest irony of them all -- was not national, however, but social. Beneath the nationalist bond that unified the new rulers with the people against a foreign, colonial and imperialist enemy was an elaborate social contract that, while denying the masses even the crumbs of democratic liberty guaranteed them greater access to and influence over the state than they had ever enjoyed before or -- for a great many -- had ever believed was possible. In the final account it was not national triumph but greater social justice that constituted the pan-Arab nationalist wave's most genuine contribution to the Arab peoples during the post-colonial period.
It is a long time since that was erased out of existence, as, indeed, it was bound to be. When the bureaucrats, as is their wont everywhere, decided that the time had come to send the masses packing, the masses packed and went. Guided by their political and intellectual leaders, they had surrendered their democratic liberties, which alone would have enabled them to resist their new and much more drastic disenfranchisement. The very terms of the "national unity" ensured that it would be so.
And yet, given the flimsiest of excuses we jump, almost feverishly, at the chance to do it, over and over and over again.
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