Bottom Lines:
A semblance of order
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from top: Amgad Rasmi in Asharq Al-Awsat calls for the separation of those conjoined twins: Sharon and Bush; Mohamed Hakim's cartoon in Al-Ahali complains of the wave epidemic: corruption waves, heat waves and now the inflation wave; for Mustafa Hussein in Al-Akhbar prices have become so swollen people can't live with them anymore
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"Peace, security and basic needs have become the primary Iraqi demands, before freedom which, under Saddam Hussein, they had thought would be a priority," -- Laila Muhsin, Al-Hayat 13 July
"Arabs and Muslims need an educational jihad," -- Ahmed Zuweil, Asharq Al-Awsat, 14 July
"Dr Khalil Al-Shiqaqi should thank God that angry refugees opposed his poll [claiming that only 10 per cent of Palestinian refugees would return to Palestine] only by throwing rotten eggs at him. This shows that, despite their anger, they were quite civilized, for the goods he is selling are rotten, his centre is rotten goods, his project is one for civil strife and surrendering Jerusalem," -- Abdel-Bari Otwan, Al-Quds Al-Arabi, 15 July
"A year after the prime minister's call to fleeing capital to return to Egypt, it looks as if the initiative is no longer on the table and what is currently going on are common efforts by banks seeking to retrieve their moneys and clients wanting to clear their reputations and resume their business activities," -- Mahmoud El-Maraghi, Al-Ahram, 15 July
"The government is responsible for the increase in the price of cooking oil," -- Al-Wafd, 14 July
Hurdles to the implementation of the roadmap for peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis, though mostly anticipated by the Arab press, continued to raise eyebrows. On 11 July the London-based Saudi daily Asharq Al-Awsat 's editorial pointed out that the compromises agreed to by the Palestinians in order to give Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) a chance to implement the roadmap had been perceived by Israel as a Palestinian surrender. Hence, Israel was continuing with its policy of settlements, assassinations and collective imprisonments, the paper wrote, and it was demanding an end to what it called "incitement" by the Palestinian media while ignoring the incitement on the Israeli side. The current crisis, the editorial concluded, had come about because Israel, contrary to its declared policy, had refused genuinely to implement the roadmap.
Disputes over the release of Palestinian POWs were also covered extensively. However some commentators, such as Ghazi Al-Saadi writing in the Jordanian daily Al-Rai on 13 July, argued that even though this issue was important to the Palestinian cause it should not be used to divert attention from other more fundamental issues, such as putting an end to the occupation and achieving independence. For Al-Saadi, too, the problem was not with Abu Mazen's failure to reach a compromise with all the Palestinian factions, or with the alleged hard line taken by Hamas; rather, it lay in Israel's lack of good faith in genuinely accepting the roadmap.
The internal problems faced by the Palestinian Fatah movement were the subject of an analysis by Joseph Samaha in the Lebanese daily As-Safir on 12 July. Recent developments, he argued, had revealed the existence of a number of factions within Fatah, with "the Fatah movement appearing to be simultaneously a ruling party, an opposition party, a resistance party, as well as the party of a besieged president capable of holding on to all the threads." However, the Palestinian people could not afford behaviour like Abu Mazen's recent threat to resign, Samaha argued, and Abu Mazen should be more accommodating to all Palestinian viewpoints, especially since he had not been elected.
Samaha also criticised Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's appointment of Hani Al-Hassan as a commissioner for Fatah, adding that Mohamed Dahlan and Jibril Al-Rajoub, two Fatah officials, could not be expected to get along with each other either. For Samaha, Al-Hassan represented a radical Palestinian trend that was betting on "the Arab right", while Abu Mazen represented a moderate Palestinian trend betting on the Israeli left. The two could not be expected to coordinate their efforts since their history had consisted of a series of attempts to outwit one another. It was time for Fatah to convene a general conference to discuss its problems, he said.
The declaration that a Ruling Council had been set up in Iraq was greeted with solemnity throughout the Arab world, though editors were cynical about the council's real role. The Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef, who lives in exile, wrote in As-Safir on 12 July to the effect that the Council should be called the "Council of the Ruled" and not the Ruling Council. Youssef saved most of his wrath for Adnan Bachachi, however, who had agreed at the age of 80 to play a role on the council. Why, Youssef asked, would Bachachi want to associate himself with such a political quagmire?
The question of what exactly was going on in Iraq continued to busy commentators. However, the question of whether there was a genuine "resistance movement" in Iraq and how this was to be evaluated remained unanswered.
Waddah Sharara writing in the London-based Lebanese daily Al-Hayat on 13 July insinuated that the "resistance" was a media fabrication, with each incident being given wide interpretation and placed within a narrative that might very well be fictitious. The media was predicting the development of a resistance movement on the model of what had occurred in Vietnam in the 1960s, Sharara said, but events in Iraq were simply manifestations of the chaos that had erupted after the fall of the Saddam regime. The present operations, he stressed, were not producing a political agenda or horizons worthy of Iraq, but were more like reactionary calls to re- establish the old regime. However, Sharara, did not go so far as to repeat the American claim that the acts in Iraq had been coordinated by Ba'athist "remnants".
In the debate between the Iraqis and the rest of the Arabs over alleged previous Arab support for the Saddam regime, Al-Fadl Shalaq wrote in As-Safir on 12 July calling on the Arabs to support the Iraqis instead of merely giving them more good advice. If the Arab elites wanted to take a democratic turn, then they should align themselves with what is happening in Iraq, he said. However, no one had the right to advise the Iraqis what to do, and if the status quo meant that the US was imposing its own will on Iraq, then rejecting this from a democratic standpoint should not mean coming up with an alternative scenario to impose on Iraq, he said.
However, Shalaq became ambivalent when referring to resistance to the US occupation. While he expected this resistance to continue growing and urged other Arabs to support it, he also stressed that the Iraqis deserved support regardless of the resistance. It was the choice of the Iraqi people that must be respected, he concluded, whatever that choice may be.
Changing international realities and the lopsided balance of power, wrote Saleh El-Qaleb in Asharq Al-Awsat on 10 July, have induced political actors like Hamas and the Muslim Brothers of Jordan to reconsider their programmes and policies. In times such as these, it was not wise or brave to swim against the current, he said. Both parties had now opted to align themselves with legitimate political systems: Hamas by agreeing to the cease-fire with the other Palestinian factions, and the Muslim Brothers by running in the Jordanian parliamentary elections.
Meanwhile, the US was trying to find a "third way" out of the current impasse in the Middle East, wrote Basim Al-Jisr in Asharq Al-Awsat on 10 July. The US could not afford a long occupation of Iraq or a quick withdrawal without assuring law and order and a friendly government, he argued. It also needed to secure a peace of sorts on the Arab-Israeli front to curb the rise of Islamist movements and the resistance to Israeli occupation. The US knew that it could not occupy the countries of the Arab and Islamic world and change the regimes there just to satisfy Israel and the American extreme right: instead, it needed to a find a "third solution" to regional problems.
Iran also continued to occupy commentators in this week's press. On 12 July, Mohamed Sadeq Al-Husseini, political adviser to Iranian President Mohamed Khatami, wrote in Asharq Al-Awsat explaining that for Iran to agree to a compromise on the issue of inspections of its nuclear facilities would jeopardise its independence. Iran was ready to make a deal with Mohamed El-Baradei, the director of the International Atomic Energy Authority, Al-Husseini explained, but this agreement would have to be fair and on an equal footing.
The results of the Kuwaiti parliamentary elections and the subsequent decision by the Emir of Kuwait to separate the duties of the prime minister and the heir-apparent, though they made the headlines and were hailed by the Gulf press, have yet to be properly taken account of in the rest of the Arab world. Writing in As-Safir on 11 July, Saqr Abu Fakhr commented on the progressiveness -- what he termed secularism -- of the Kuwaiti Emir Jabir Al-Ahmed Al-Sabbah, when compared to what he called the "more fundamentalist elements" within the Kuwaiti population.
Also of interest in this week's press was an article in Al- Hayat on 14 July by the Moroccan writer Abdul-Ilah Balqiz analysing the ideas of the Islamist movements and linking them to historical Kharijism. The "jihadists" of today, Balqiz argued, were neo-Kharijites.
