Out of the ashes
The Arab press was preoccupied with regional politics this week, writes Amina Elbendary
Throughout the week news of progress, or lack thereof, in reaching a cease-fire between the Palestinian factions and Israel dominated the banners of Arab newspapers. The visit by US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice also grabbed attention, as the US continued to be looked to as the real power broker in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Rice's comments criticising Israel's infamous "security wall" to be erected along the length of the West Bank were also given prominence. "This is a woman who could accomplish what men have so far failed to do," wrote Sultan Al- Hattab in the Jordanian daily Al-Rai on 30 June.
The televised interview by former Iraqi Information Minister Mohamed Said Al-Sahhaf, though it made front-page news, was perceived as a disappointment. However, Al-Sahhaf did find defenders, such as Tareq Masarwa writing in Al- Rai on 29 June, who argued that Al-Sahhaf's role had been part of the "psychological war", and it should be judged in that context. News of the continuing fighting in Iraq and stalled attempts at state-building continued to preoccupy commentators.
However, the cease-fire in Palestine remained the story of the week, especially as it marked what for many amounts to the end of the second Intifada. According to Abdel-Wahab Badrakhan in the London-based Lebanese daily Al-Hayat on 30 June, there were good reasons to accept the cease-fire. First, the violence had reached a dead end, and second, there was now an international project to establish and monitor such a cease-fire. Regardless of the agreement of the Palestinian factions, however, it was up to Israel to respect the cease-fire and make it work, as the editorial of the Palestinian daily Al-Quds argued on 26 June: "The ball has moved to Israel's court."
The cease-fire, Mohamed Ibrahim wrote in An- Nahar on 26 June, was between Israel and Abu Mazen, and it was the latter who would now be expected to use it to clamp down on Hamas and Islamic Jihad and further to sideline Yasser Arafat. On 30 June, Wisam Sa'ada analysed the politics behind the Intifada in the Lebanese daily As- Safir, the irony of the present arrangement being, he argued, that the escalation in the violence had meant the impossibility of resolving the conflict either militarily or politically.
Suicide bombings inside the Green Line had been the cornerstone of the second Intifada, Sa'ada said, while the various Palestinian factions had shown increasing willingness to accept new ideas for resolving the conflict. However, the Israeli right had shown itself to be unable to transcend the Oslo framework. According to Sa'ada, the Palestinian factions should recognise that attempts made to resolve the conflict had been made in good faith: the negotiators and the suicide bombers were part of the same struggle, he said, and they were also part of the resolution process. Political pragmatism was thus, Sa'ada argued, the fate of all Palestinians.
The split between the Iraqis, represented in the press mainly by exiled Iraqi intellectuals, and the rest of the Arabs persisted. In his 30 June editorial in the London-based newspaper Al-Quds Al- Arabi, Abdel-Bari Otwan criticised Iraqi intellectuals for attacking others for their alleged collaboration with the former Saddam regime instead of focussing their energies on attacking the current US-led occupation of Iraq. He also questioned how many Arab intellectuals from nationalist and leftist backgrounds, who had been ardent supporters of the Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation, were now silent about the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq.
Otwan was against the idea of "Iraq for the Iraqis", which called on other Arabs not to intervene in Iraqi affairs, isolating Iraq from the rest of the region, and criticised the Iraqi Kurds for acquiescing in the US occupation, while continuing to denounce other Arabs for being silent about the crimes committed against them by the former Iraqi regime.
Most newspapers characterised the continuing fighting in Iraq as resistance to the Anglo- American occupation. On 30 June Hisham Al- Dajani wrote an article in As-Safir trying to define this resistance and to answer the question of why such operations were mainly taking place in Sunni areas and not in the Kurdish north or Shi'a south of Iraq. Al-Dajani argued that the apparent acquiescence of the Shi'ites to the occupation might be related to the pressures their main ally, Iran, has been under since the official end of the war. The Kurds, on the other hand, enjoyed good relations with the Americans, he said, and they were now enjoying enhanced autonomy.
However, Kurdish political activists should not fantasise about the establishment of an independent Kurdish state, Al-Dajani said, since both neighbouring countries, such as Turkey, and the US would not support this. He also refuted the American claim that the resistance operations were part of a Ba'thist conspiracy: while Ba'thist elements might be involved, he wrote, the ranks of the movement also included many Islamists, who had not been part of the former regime. Writing in Al-Rai on 26 June, Tareq Masarwa also predicted that Iraqi resistance would continue to grow, viewing it as an extension of the global anti-war movement that rejected the domination of the United States.
In his weekly article in the Lebanese daily An- Nahar on 30 June, Editor-in-Chief Ghassan Tueni focussed on US pressure on Syria and the cease- fire imposed on the Palestinian resistance movements. Tueni drew attention to a comment made by Shimon Peres, putting forward the idea of a federal entity that would include Israel, the Palestinians, Jordan and Iraq. This was not simply a fantastic dream, Tueni warned; rather, it was part of an attempt by Israel to establish a "micro- empire" in the region.
The connection between, or rather the irony of US approaches towards Iraq and Palestine pointed to an essential contradiction, wrote Hazem Saghiya in Al-Hayat on 28 June. In Iraq, the US was more interested in macro-security than in micro- security, he said: toppling the regime and fighting "terror" were more important than providing law and order for Iraqi citizens. In Palestine, on the other hand, the US expected the cease-fire to encourage democracy and stability in the region, even though this was a "paralysed democracy" that was not allowed complete control of the country. Yasser Arafat had been pushed out of this "Palestinian democracy", Saghiya wrote, as had Hamas, and this meant that the Palestinian people's wishes had also been pushed to one side.
Such contradictory approaches marked an ideological contradiction on the part of the Americans, Saghiya said. Immediate American withdrawal from Iraq would be catastrophic for the country, he said, and therefore the kind of resistance to US occupation recently seen at Faluja and elsewhere was not the answer. Similarly, US withdrawal from the Palestinian question would give Sharon carte blanche to do as he pleased, for neither the Europeans nor the Arabs could fill the role vacated by the US. Therefore, Saghiya advised, both the Iraqis and the Palestinians should speak to the Americans with one voice, cooperating with them as far as was possible.
The 14th Arab National Conference, which met in the Yemeni capital Sana'a last week under the theme "what is to be done?", also received attention in the Arab press. On 1 July, Egyptian columnist Fahmi Howeidy compared the Dead Sea meetings of the World Economic Forum (WEF) with the Sana'a conference in As-Safir. The former had taken decisions that would decide the fate of the region, he said, while the latter had only analysed the consequences of these.
Also referring to the WEF, Salah Al-Qallab wrote in Asharq Al-Awsat on 30 June to defend the Dead Sea to Red Sea canal project, which had been discussed at the meeting. Qallab referred to an unnamed opinion article in an Arab newspaper that had denounced the canal as an attempt to "bypass" the Suez Canal, and he defended the project by saying that the new canal would not be a navigational waterway but a waterway for pipelines. However, he failed to acknowledge the strategic ramifications of such a waterway on the development of oil trade, especially since the US occupation of Iraq.
Writing in An-Nahar on 26 June, Egyptian intellectual Sayed Yassin analysed what he termed "the occupation of the Iraqi scientific mind" and, by extension, Arab intellectual consciousness. "Colonising the Arab mind is only the headline in America's attempts to dominate Arab contemporary thought, to domesticate it and to uproot the deep antipathy felt by Arab intellectuals towards the United States, pushing them to change their outlooks through a specific cultural strategy," he wrote.
The US's attitudes towards Iraqi scientists, both in the run up to the war and after it, was part of this scenario. Furthermore, Israel had been working to co-opt a number of Iraqi scientists and academics, some of whom had been living in exile. Yassin drew attention to the hero's welcome given Kanan Makiya, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University in the United States and an Iraqi exile, when he visited Tel Aviv recently to receive an honorary doctorate. Iraqi nuclear physicist Taher Labib had also received a doctoral degree from Ben Gurion University. Arab cultural and scientific institutions seemed to be unaware of this Israeli campaign, Yassin said.
