Glances at Arab Distress
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Original Title: Considérations sur le malheur arabe Author: Samir Kassir Publisher: Actes Sud Sindbad Publication Date: 2004 Language: French Pages: 102 Glances at Arab Distress By Samir Kassir - November 2, 2004 Is there a need to describe Arab distress? A few numbers are enough to highlight the depth of the entrapment of Arab societies: The percentage of illiteracy, the gap between the rich - who are filthy rich - and the poor - whose poverty is miserable - in addition to the overpopulation of cities and the deforestation of different regions. Some might say that it is the shared destiny of what we used to call the Third World that has led to more poverty in the streets of Calcutta and has deepened the social gap in Rio de Janeiro. This is correct. Yet distress is not a development trap or an issue of social classes. It is not even lack of education. The particularity of Arab distress is that it affects factions that distress usually does not reach in other societies. The Arab distress is incarnated in conceptions and feelings more than in numbers. It starts with a publicly rooted feeling that the future is leading nowhere. Facing this multifaceted sickness that is incurable, there seems to be no way out, except perhaps, through individual escape, that is if escape is possible at all. The truth of the matter is that Arab distress has been also the product of the view of others. This view has always prevented escape and has reminded the Arab - with all the arrogance that it entails - of his/her miserable situation which they can never quit, thus making fun of the Arab impotence and pre-destroying Arab hopes. In front of border stations, no one feels this prejudice more than those who bear passports issued by one of the doomed countries. No one can understand the extent of paralysis that this view causes such passport bearers save for those who can compare the anxiety that they feel with the confidence of other nationals. It is possible to overcome this view of the other, or simply ignore it. But how can one stop looking at others? How can due comparison be avoided? It is not necessary to go to the extent of comparing to the West that while it dominates the world today, it is still based on an open citizenship anchored in the principle of the immunity of law and human rights. This kind of citizenship is able to counter potential attempts aimed at limiting it. It is possible to overcome this view of the other, or simply ignore it. But how can one get rid of looking at others? How can due comparison be avoided? It is not necessary to go to the extent of comparing to the West that still maintains its tyranny. It is not necessary either to take a deep look at the gap unveiled through the comparison between a culture that never stops hosting technological revolutions and a world that still lives in a pre-industrial age and is satisfied with the consumption of the achievements of others. Even more modest comparisons are enough to provoke feelings of frustration, like with Asia for example, where economic growth has increased the number of tigers and dragons or with Latin America where democratic transformation has reached the point of no return. Even in Africa to the south of the desert democratic experiences live side by side with brutal civil wars. These areas that seemed, until the near past, to be sharing underdevelopment and political oppression with the Arabs, are still far from reaching equal grounds with the industrial and democratic countries of the north but still hold to their achievements against despair: Confident steps toward democracy, economic development and technological skill that provoke the envy of Europe and give these nations the ability to take the initiative in international affairs. Sometimes all of these elements meet in one place while the Arab world faces utmost deficiency at all these levels. Facing the confusion resulting of the view of the other, or the comparison with him, self-awareness does not rescue much since the self has become so fragile that the least of concerns have become enough to shake it. The least of these concerns have become required today, and here lies the most brutal characteristic of Arab distress since there is no need anymore for a foreign standard for this self to get provoked. No doubt the enormous feeling of impotence, which generates distress, feeds weeping over past glories and therefore measuring the self against a historical standard taken from a different age. The Arab impotence hurts more because it is not in the past. More accurately, the distress of the Arabs is the result of their impotence to be, after they had been. Unfortunately this does not stand anymore either. Weeping over past glory that played a role in the formation of modern nationalism and liberation practices has lost its efficiency. Consequences of the Arab distress have reached an extent where they succeeded in shutting out history, thus imposing eternal impotence that kills the chances of a new awakening. Impotence has become the symbol of Arab distress. It is impotent to be what you think you should be. Impotence is the inability to do what it takes to reaffirm your existence, even if limited, facing the other who ignores your presence, scorns you and dominates you time and again. Impotence is the inability to subdue a feeling that you are merely a brushed aside thing on the global chessboard while the chess game goes on your ground. This has become a feeling impossible to subdue after the war on Iraq brought back foreign occupation to Arab land, and its result has made the era of independence irrelevant. Here it is not important whether an individual supports the war or not. About those who oppose the American war for national reasons, we should not confuse them with millions of humans who took to the streets in Europe and America to express their refusal of American diktats. Impotence does not need a proof. It is based on a simple and even bitter given: That nothing can be done to stop a foreign force -the most powerful in human history - from crossing millions of kilometers to play the role of a policeman on your ground and destroy in a few weeks a country that had been scary for its citizens and at least neighbors. In addition, it seems - for further embarrassment - that if a force were to delay the American war, we wouldn't find this force among Arab populations but in the global social society that the alternative globalization movement seeks to establish and where Arabs have only a very minor role. And even if some difficulties that the American occupation is currently facing have revived some national fervor, those with joyous feelings realize that they can never bet on a domestic or regional status quo but on the ability of the opponent society itself to react. That is because they know that the opponent society is democratic. Thus, the last say belongs to others and never to the Arab ability to overcome impotence. As for the supporters of war, impotence is their first given. Their collaborating, opportunistic or waiting position vis-à-vis American calculations springs out of their conviction that change that is much needed in Arab societies, cannot be undertaken by the peoples of the region and that making it happen needs foreign assistance. Yet impotence still persists even after the coming of this assistance. The victorious one takes his decisions on his own and this is a fact that only those who have illusions about their ability to influence the course of events ignore as they play the role of Eastern consultants or domestic collaborators. No doubt that the successive and confused decisions that the viceroy in Iraq took, even if these decisions were irreversible, have aggravated the feeling of impotence. The American practice that has not been characterized by much democracy, resulted in a surge in the number of those who prefer the struggle against foreign dominance as opposed to those who prefer the struggle for the establishment of democracy especially that a negative colonialist understanding of the American dominance in Iraq has been reinforced by a general feeling that the Americans tend to be against us. Here, it is not necessary to be driven by the Islamist ideology for such feelings to get to you since the unwavering American support of Israeli radicalism has been enough for the justification of such a view. There was no need to wait for the American occupation of Iraq for impotence to eat the Arabs since at each chapter of the story of the Palestinian cause, impotence has been there. Impotence has been able to impose a perplexing effect to the extent that experts with better knowledge of the actual status quo, did not hesitate to put it in the context of demographic comparison between the Israelis and the Arabs. We note here that we do not intend to retrieve the ready-made ideas that were circulated about the 1948 Catastrophe that was less surprising than it has been thought to be since the higher British command had already expected it in 1946 as it realized what the leaders of the Arab states with incomplete sovereignty could realize: The Jewish Haganah Organization outnumbered the Arab armies put together. We don't intend either to retrieve the joy of the Israelis in 1956, which by the way was a relative achievement for the Arabs had it not been for the participation of French pilots and the wise decision that Abdul-Nasser had taken to withdraw his army from the Sinai Desert in order to defend Cairo that was the actual goal of the Tripartite Aggression. We also do not intend to transform the other Israeli achievement in 1967 - which is a clear achievement - into a model that condemns Arab impotence by considering it to be a genetic one embedded in the Arab civilization. At each one of these levels, however, a determined will of resistance and an intention to stand up after the downfall were incarnated. After the 1967 war broke out, the War of Attrition that the Egyptian army fought, then the penetration of the canal, not only to erase shame - to quote one of the expressions that has been popular in the dictionary of Arab speeches - but also to prove the ability of the Arabs to handle their destiny. Yet this, ironically, never happened. Since the half victory, or the half defeat in 1973, Israel has been leading the Middle East on its own. It has aligned the Egyptian deterrent force after the signing of the Sadat peace. She [Israel] has become reassured with the unlimited support coming from the American superpower, and she has become confident of escaping moral accountability thanks to a rise in European awareness. She depends on a nuclear arsenal that she built with French assistance, the European superpower, and that she keeps on developing amid the silence of all the nations. Israel has become able to do whatever she intends to do as seen best by its leaders and their illusory visions of dominance. Israeli superiority, on which the Arabs base their perception of the world and of themselves, presented its model during the Beirut siege in summer of 1982. In its precedent attack on an Arab capital, the Israeli air force looked as if it were in a show parade as it doubled its intensive bombardment that even the Jewish Synagogue in Beirut - that was under the protection of Palestinian fighters - did not survive and practiced its air maneuvers while using live ammunition culminating in its attempt to assassinate Yasser Arafat in person as it used, at one time, a vacuum bomb that destroyed a whole building. This was in addition to the Israeli usage of techniques from past ages such as the blockade that cut supplies of food and water. Neither the Arab peoples nor oil diplomats could stop that humiliation in 1982 Beirut. Perhaps the way through which it was possible to secure a truce for the re-filling of the Beirut water tanks indicates the brightness of Arab impotence. Under the insistence of several Lebanese figures, the Saudi king had to call the American president asking him repeatedly to intervene, in vein, with the Israeli prime minister who cooperated one time and refused to respond at other times. These calls formed a metaphorical image of the situation of Arab diplomacy on the Arab Israeli conflict. At least since after the 1973 war, the Arab leaders have become unable to alter the status quo. They head to the United States asking her to work on easing Israeli radicalism, without any particular success, except of some passing demands. Even in such cases, the American response comes as a result of America's intention to avoid the aggravation of a certain situation deemed critical by the Americans. This certainly does not apply to the daily mishaps of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza or to the settlement policies that have been going on since 1967. And since the status quo has not changed, the United States is rarely concerned with the continuous Israeli violations of International Law. This is evident through the many resolution drafts that America has vetoed in the Security Council. It is also evident in the fate of the resolutions that have succeeded - after repeated editing - and have become merely ink on paper. This is not to talk about the ill fated resolutions of the United Nations General Assembly. It is natural that such diplomatic inability deepens the feeling of impotence. With the scores of texts that condemn Israeli policies or just cite them (there are volumes of these), Arab impotence is best incarnated in issues such as the Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem, or the policy of chunking the areas surrounding the city, or the unwavering settlement policy in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip after the signing of Oslo Accord. Whatever explanations this impotence is given, frustration can not be alleviated through the feeling of having a legal right reinforced by International Law, or through the forms of solidarity that are expressed here and there around the world. That these cards are in hand without the ability to play them, transforms impotence into some kind of a destiny, as it has become evident in the issue of the building of the racist separation wall. Despite this seemingly sealed destiny, there were at least two peoples who opted for resistance: the Palestinians and the Lebanese. The Lebanese resistance has the right to pride itself for one of the rare Arab victories over the span of the long history of the conflict. The victory that was achieved in two phases was not expected since Lebanon is one of the weakest Arab countries and since this victory originated from nothing. In the first phase, a broad resistance front was put together - in which the left formed one of its most active and efficient elements - and forced Israel, after its withdrawal from Beirut where resistance started since the beginning of occupation, to evict big cities in the Lebanese south three years after continuous struggle. Israel was forced to give up its strategic project that aimed at making Lebanon a satellite country while the presence of its occupation only made her pay a price. This price became very high with the restart of resistance again by the end of the eighties of the last century. It took Hizbullah, which handled the mission, 10 years to achieve liberation. Yet it forced the Lebanese, who have a history of resisting occupation, to become mere tools in Syrian hands and subject to their tactical calculations. As for the rest of the Arabs, the price was not expensive, meaning that the Lebanese resistance became an "idol," that was marketed as a goal in itself and independent of politics and a model to be exported to the outside, regardless of the circumstances, starting with Palestine, where the status quo is very different, and where the occupier is ready to bear greater sacrifices in order to preserve the present situation. Things are much harder for the Palestinians. Still, nothing can push them to despair. The ability to bear hardships and strike again can be a model for all the Arabs. But the ideology of the Arabs on resistance can never imagine heroism in daily practices. Despite the presence of political elites that have gained high skill in comparing international relations with the regional status quo, the Arab view of Palestine - more than the view of the Palestinians themselves - has been monotonous. If the Palestinian factions were responsible in the mid sixties of the past century for the "only guerilla war" approach to the conflict, decision-makers in Arab countries were the ones who imposed the approach of "only the intifada" ever since the great rebellion of 1987 and 1988 to the extent that the issue has turned into considering the Palestinian people to be composed, in its entirety, of professional revolutionaries: It's bravery that has vented off the pressure of those Arab spectators who clap in front of their TVs. The Lebanese and Palestinian resistance exposed further Arab impotence. This was reaffirmed in the second intifada that started in September 2000. The Arab approach of praising "only the intifada" meant that any reconsideration of this activity would call for an immediate accusation of betrayal especially with the transformation of the intifada into an "idol," starting with the exaggeration in generalizing the Lebanese model. This obstructed the need for reconsidering the means and led to preferring the bad over the successful, like with suicide operations. Furthermore, the means of the Palestinian struggle - despite their temporary pay off in reviving feelings of missed pride among the general public - could not disperse impotence or more particularly the image of distress. On the contrary, one of the results of the ongoing confusion between Palestine and Iraq - which does not serve either of them - would drown the image that the Middle East Arabs have formed of themselves, as well as the image that the world has formed about them, in a huge swamp of blood. The truth is that impotence is not a standard of measurement among all of the Arabs for there is an active and developing group, as it seems, that looks at Arab impotence and sees a justified quagmire. This, however, can never be justified since expressing joy and legitimizing comprehensive destructive violence, a Samson style at best, are never acceptable. In fact, there is nothing here that worries the leaders of radical Islam since for them defaming the Western "crusade" mandates that they prove the grandiosity of the victim, who is asked to play the role of the victim so that he goes to heaven. This religious approach is in itself one sign of Arab distress. It is natural to look at political Islam as one of the factors of the Arab entrapment that Islamists believe has been the product of radical Arab secularism. Even if so, this does not mean that we have to carry on - despite historical changes - with judging Islamist movements based on their previous positions, for they had previously served the American game, and the Israeli occupation as well. Everyone has the right to change their political stances, and we should perhaps credit the Islamists that there transformation this time is final and that their commitment against foreign dominance is sincere. But this is not enough for us to accept this commitment as the only available option for Islamist fundamentalism - if it has never been or stopped being a collaborator for the foreigner - or makes this foreigner right. When it justifies the clash of civilizations to the extent of practicing it, it offers the supporters of the crusade a chance to come together and gives the West a chance to use the different means, which his technological abilities make available, so that the West maintains its supremacy over the Arabs, making their impotence eternal.
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