Disrupting still waters
Major transformations and ripple effects throughout: the Arab press is struggling to keep up, writes Amina Elbendary
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Khaldun Gharayba in Al-Rai depicted the US etching out the Palestinian map; Al-Sharq Al-Awsat's Rasmi drew Arab leaders as a bunny rabbit, not exactly the epitome of courage
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Last week's manoeuvre by the Kuwaiti government, requesting a formal apology from the Palestinians for their support for Iraq during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait over a decade ago before an expected visit to the country by Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, continued to raise criticism in the Arab press this week.
Writing in the Jordanian daily Al-Rai on 15 August, Sultan Al-Hattab argued against the move. The Kuwaiti government should not have snubbed the Palestinians who had come looking for support in the face of increased oppression by Israeli occupation forces, he said. Though the Arabs should try to understand the pain the Kuwaitis had suffered, it was also obvious, the writer pointed out, that the invasion of Kuwait had been reversed and that the Iraqi regime that had carried it out had now fallen.
The Arabs have long disappointed the Palestinians, Al-Hattab recalled. Now the time had come for Arab regimes to find mechanisms for mutual support and cooperation. Kuwait's behaviour, on the other hand, was a sign of how these regimes were still giving more attention to formalities than to the core of the matter, he wrote.
In an interesting article in the Lebanese daily An-Nahar on 15 August, Gihad Al-Zein reviewed the zero issue of one of the recently launched Iraqi newspapers, Fakhri Karim's Al-Mada. The writer referred briefly to Karim's Communist intellectual background and his wide contacts among the Iraqi diaspora. The great majority of this diaspora opposition, Al-Zein wrote, was clear in its political priorities, which had differed from those of the rest of the Arab world: priority had been given to removing the Saddam regime, even among those circles whose political discourse denounced American imperialism.
However, the articles in the zero edition of the new paper lacked sophistication, Al-Zein wrote, expecting the paper to mature with coming editions. Al-Zein pointed to an article signed by the paper's political editor, which implored opponents of the new Iraqi Governing Council to "oppose but beware of divisions", a statement that revealed the political standpoint of the newspaper.
Saudi Arabia's crackdown on militant opposition groups in the country has been making headlines on the front pages of Arab newspapers over the past few weeks. However, commentators have so far refrained from analysing these developments in depth. One departure from this norm was Sati' Noureddin's article in the Lebanese daily As-Safir on 15 August. The current standoff between the Saudi regime and the militant groups was not a passing phase, he wrote. There seems to have been a political decision to turn Saudi Arabia into an open battlefield with the Islamist groups, and though the confrontation was for the time being exclusively on the security level, Noureddin predicted that it would soon find political expression as well, both on the level of the regime and on that of the secret militant cells.
A debate developed on the pages of the London-based Lebanese daily Al-Hayat between the paper's senior staff writer, Raghda Dergham, and Egyptian sociologist Saadeddin Ibrahim, director of the Ibn Khaldun Centre for Development Studies, on the prospects for fundamental change in the Arab world. In an article controversially entitled "Yes at the hands of [others] if our hands don't rush to change" on 13 August Ibrahim answered an earlier article by Dergham by arguing that change would come from the outside if there was not enough internal dynamism to move conflicts towards resolution and citing the cases of Iraq, Palestine and Sudan.
Decision-makers and intellectuals bore a responsibility, Ibrahim argued, in sustaining conflicts and maintaining extremist demands, anything below which was considered unacceptable and a violation of principles. It was understandable that rulers would resist change, he said, agreeing with Dergham, but not that intellectuals would resist change in the name of standing up to "Western attack" or to globalisation. The Arab world, he concluded, was pregnant with change, but the question remained as to whether the midwife would be Arab or American.
Responding in the same paper on 15 August, Dergham called on Arabs to "hurry on change with our own hands". Dergham pointed to a recent Palestinian initiative for alternative resistance, the leaders of which had refused either to give in to Israeli oppression or to adopt violent resistance that could lead to collective suicide. Their idea, she explained, was to rely on innovative alternatives and non-violent strategies of resistance. One tactic they planned, for example, was to organise groups of disabled Palestinians, who would go to Israeli checkpoints asking to enter other towns. Repeating these non-violent confrontations in the presence of extensive media coverage would either prompt the Israeli authorities to let them in, or urge the Israeli public to intervene in order to salvage the international image of the Israeli state.
Dergham also called on Arabs to deal with fundamental issues in their social, economic and political lives. She was against the view that saw only two options before the Arabs: change at the hands of the Islamists, or at the hands of Americans. In fact, she wrote, Arab-American dialogue was not about bowing to the Americans because they were stronger, since such dialogue necessitates the right to agree or disagree.
"One of the main weapons used by the extremists among the neo-conservatives in the US is that of the 'Arab street'," she wrote, "and that of Arab intellectuals whose only action is demagoguery. Even the regimes under attack are a weapon for a group of extremist Americans, because they are based on intelligence and their discourse has no place in today's dictionary.... The US is a superpower that works on the basis of its interests, which is its right. There is no shame in an Arab-American balanced partnership. If America causes change, by coincidence to the benefit of the Iraqi people, there is nothing wrong in accepting that and building on it. If international, American and European and other, efforts help an Arab crisis, whether Palestinian, Sudanese or Iraqi, they should be welcome. What is important is to stop this demagoguery," she concluded.
Comments made last week by Hussein Al-Khomeini, grandson of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, in various press interviews were the subject of Amir Tahri's article in the London-based Saudi daily Asharq Al-Awsat on 14 August. The grandson was like the grandfather, wrote Tahri, arguing that nationalism was not part of Khomeini senior's beliefs, and that the spiritual leader of the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran had cooperated with various foreign powers against the Shah.
Similarly, Ayatollah Khomeini, argued Tahri, had believed that ends justify means, and in this Hussein Al-Khomeini was like his grandfather: he did not care whether he lived in Iran or Iraq, and he called on foreign powers, including the US, to "liberate Iran" and place him in power. However, the writer concluded, Iranians realised that the solutions to their problems must come from the inside.
"Aside from Hussein Al-Khomeini and the (cosmopolitan) residents of big cities like himself, no Iranian wants to see his country invaded by the American or any other army, even if this means getting rid of a failing oppressive regime. And, more importantly, no Iranian wants another Khomeini," Tahri concluded.
The future of the Arab world will be decided by what happens in Iraq -- a recurring viewpoint that was expressed once more this week by Hashem Saleh on 15 August in Asharq Al-Awsat. Saleh reviewed the various scenarios before US forces in Iraq, as analysed by the Spanish politician Philip Gonzalez: a speedy retreat by US forces abandoning Iraq to mayhem, heavier US involvement and more troops, or involving others in dealing with the situation.
Despite the problems that the occupying forces were facing, and their continuing loss of troops, the writer pointed to the confidence emanating from US National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice's views on the possibilities for change on an Iraqi model throughout the Arab world. He pointed out that the ideology of "hatred and resentment" the Arabs were sometimes accused of indulging in was due, in large part, to the Arab-Israeli conflict, and he questioned whether the US was willing to pressure the extreme right in Israel to adopt a just solution to the conflict, just as it was pressuring the extreme Arab and Islamist right.
The process of democratisation in the Arab world would inevitably be slow, coming after centuries of oppression and injustice, but Saleh argued that Rice's comments on poverty in the Arab world indicated that perhaps the US was finally aware of the need to fight the causes of terrorism, and not just terrorism itself.
The controversy that has been raging in the United Sates for several weeks now surrounding the expected appointment of right-wing US commentator Daniel Pipes to the Peace Institute started to gain attention in the Arab press. Hossam Eitani, writing in As-Safir on 15 August, explained the background to the issue and to Pipes's entrenched disdain for Arabs and Islam, quoting extensively from the American academic's published works.
Pipes's appointment, whether it takes place with the approval of Congress or whether US President George W Bush avoids that, would not, Eitani argued, represent a significant change in the influence of the neo-conservative right on the American administration. The writer did, however, point to two important matters. The first was that Pipes did not hail from an intellectual background, unlike many of the neo-cons who have Leftist or Democratic backgrounds. He thus represented the rise of one-track Likudist thinking to decision-making circles in the US. Furthermore, Pipes's appointment would send a message to the Arabs and Palestinians, as well as to the Europeans and the Russians, that a trend within the administration that was more obsessed with petty domestic considerations at the expence of foreign affairs had become firmly entrenched.
Finally, on a lighter note, the television competition Super Star 2003 hosted by Lebanese Future TV almost turned sour when the Lebanese contestant, Melhem Zein, lost in the final countdown before a Syrian and a Jordanian. The issue took on political connotations, especially in Lebanon, where popular mood was shocked and dismayed that Zein had been left out. The public uproar naturally made the front pages of Arab newspapers, with most commentators lamenting the fact that a television show could expose such inter-Arab sensitivities.
Writing in Asharq Al-Awsat on 17 August, Iyad Abu Shaqra analysed the political overtones of the controversy. The programme, which is a carbon-copy of similar European television programmes, had not adopted the "pluralistic set up" used in Europe, which prevented the voters of each state from voting in favour of contestants from their own country, giving voters from each state equal points to divide among the contestants and preventing national loyalties from affecting the competition.
On the contrary, the programme had shown, Abu Shaqra wrote, that Europeans were more honest than Arabs when they talked about unity, and that they were cleverer in carrying it out. On Monday night, a Jordanian singer, not a Syrian, won the competition.
