He was seven when - in the Nakba of 1948 - he fled from Birweh, his village in the Galilee. At the age of 12, living in Deir el-Asad, in what had become Israel, with a reputation as a precocious child poet, he was asked to compose a poem for a public reading. The occasion was the celebration of Israel’s "Independence Day" and the poem he read described the feelings of a child who returns to his town to find other people sleeping in his bed, tilling his father’s lands. He was summoned to the military governor who told him that if he continued to write subversive material his father’s work permit would be revoked. That incident set the tone, I think, for Darwish’s life.

 Ahdaf Soueif in The Guardian on the death of Mahmoud Darwish.

"Rice Says Houses Hurt Mideast Talks"

JERUSALEM — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Sunday that thousands of housing units that Israel is building on captured land were harming peace talks with the Palestinians. She also said she could not understand why Israel was still blocking three Fulbright grantees from leaving Gaza.

NYT 

The National has launched in Abu Dhabi. Won’t make any judgements yet on its royal family-funded coverage, but its book review looks good. Here is a good lambasting of Sandra Mackey’s A Mirror of the Arab World, the current non-fiction ME release at Barnes and Nobles.

A Mirror of the Arab World is aimed at Western readers who are afraid that the Middle East is going to erupt and arrive violently on their doorsteps…

Mackey seems to have gathered no voices, no stories of lived experience…

…She also gives Assad’s son, Syria’s current president, the name Bashir rather than Bashar. Similar, true. But to gauge the difference try this: Find a small street in Beirut with a large concentration of Lebanese Forces Stencils. Find a young man born around 1983 named Bashir (the popularity of the name surged in the wake of the Christian warlord and president-elect Bashir Gemayel’s assassination in 1982). Call him Bashar and see what happens. You might want to duck.

A video collage I made for an Alternative Media seminar. The assignment, to “curate” some YouTube video.

My father was a man who always defied the notion that one can only be the outcome of his circumstance. Expelled from his village at the age of 10, running barefoot behind his parents, he was instantly transferred from the son of a landowning farmer to a penniless refugee in a blue tent provided by the United Nations in Gaza. Thus, his life of hunger, pain, homelessness, freedom-fighting, love, marriage and loss commenced.

The fact that he was the one chosen to quit school to help his father provide for his now tent-dwelling family was a huge source of stress for him. In a strange, unfamiliar land, his new role was going into neighboring villages and refugee camps to sell gum, aspirin and other small items. His legs were a testament to the many dog bites he obtained during these daily journeys. Later scars were from the shrapnel he acquired through war.

More of Ramzy Baroud’s eulogy on Counterpunch. 

The occupied West Bank, looking toward the sprawl of Maale Adumim, Israel’s largest settlement, August 2007.

"115 bridges were bombed. What did that have to do with Kuwait?"

Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon talked to Charlie Rose on the five year anniversary of the Iraq war and immediately turned the conversation back to Kuwait, sanctions and the 1990s. He pierced through the current rhetorical stasis of Sunni-Shi’a, of benchmarks, and of blaming Iraqis to the "material reality" of America’s first destruction of Iraq in 1991 and the subsequent decade of sanctions that killed maybe a million, kept the country’s infrastructure ruined, expanded the Iraqi diaspora and plainly convinced Iraqis that the Americans were not interested in liberation when they invaded in 2003.

He was searing in his criticisms, as he attacked "amnesia" in this country about the American-made devastation of Iraq before it was invaded. He explained to Rose that the myriad Iraqi uprisings which followed Saddam’s expulsion from Kuwait and which were not supported by the United States were mixed and wide-ranging. They did not fit into exclusive frames broken down into religious groups — the favorite sought-after media explanation for any violence in Iraq and the Middle East today. After all, as he explained, there was an uprising in 16 of the 18 provinces of Iraq, from the Shia holy cities to "mixed" Baghdad and even Saddam’s home province of Tikrit.

The seemingly ignored recent history of America’s complicity in destroying Iraq before the jingoes launched shock-and-awe is vital to any view of Iraq in 2008 and, while the point should seem obvious, it seems to escape most coverage on this anniversary. The mainstream focus is instead on a "what-if" timeline that looks at the mistakes of the past five years outside of the context of the 1990s, which indirectly serves to support the rationale of going to war in the first place.

A rough transcription of one of the interview’s best moments:

Antoon: The problem we have also in the discourse is all this talk about mistakes and what-not. The premise of the entire war is not questioned. Even if no mistakes were ever done, citizens need to understand that human beings by and large do not like to be occupied by foreigners, no matter what. And that was the case, so even if no mistakes would have been done, people would have said in a very short period of time, thank you, bye bye.

Rose: Okay, then that raises the question of whether you could have done it in a way that you did not create the idea of occupation. You created the idea of liberation, not occupation. Unless you say that’s not possible at all?

Antoon: It would have been impossible because the practices of the United States army and Pentagon reflect also a certain ideology and a way of looking at the Middle East and a way of looking at the past and its history. So, we don’t have time to go through all of that, but these mistakes are made. They are not side mistakes. They reflect the structure and the approach to the Middle East and to Iraq and to its history and this amnesia that I’m talking about.

Two of Antoon’s remarks have stuck with me all day. The first is his citing of a US general in 1991, that "we bombed them back to the pre-industrial age." It immediately brings to mind Arundhati Roy and her article, "The Algebra of Infinite Justice," which the New York Times refused to publish after 9/11.

"In America there has been rough talk of ‘bombing Afghanistan back to the stone age,'’" Roy wrote then. "Someone please break the news that Afghanistan is already there. And if it’s any consolation, America played no small part in helping it on its way."

Iraq was half-way there after eight years of war with Iran — supported by the US — and farther down the road after Operation Desert Storm. The United States made sure it never recovered with sanctions through the 1990s, only to bomb the devastation all over again beginning in 2003, our five year anniversary. And Americans still wonder why there are insurgents.

The second quote from Antoon was in response to Rose asking what sort of conditions were needed for reconciliation: water, sanitation, the basic amenities of modern, unoccupied life. Antoon nodded but shot back: "It’s a crime after five years that electricity is not back to pre-war levels, because Saddam Hussein, who was a dictator I detested, was able to have electricity back in 45 days."

"So why is the United States not achieving that in five years? It’s not just miscalculation. That was never the priority."

"The Israeli foray left many Palestinian civilians dead."

So understatement. Say perhaps that rockets fired by militants from Gaza had killed five or ten Israelis in the past week. Would the New York Times have reduced that to a "Palestinian foray that left a few Israelis dead." Of course they wouldn’t — there would be obituaries within news articles on the Israeli dead, and longer reports on the anxieties of 100,000 living in Ashkelon. But 120 dead Palestinian — reportedly a third of them children, uninvolved save for the fact that they were born in the prison of Gaza under occupation, blockade and air strikes — are not eulogized, are reduced in the euphemism of "many Palestinian civilians dead," consistently in the context of Israeli air strikes aimed at curbing terrorist rocket fire — a "foray" into a strip of land populated by a million and half desperate and starved people.

Palestinian rockets are never framed as retaliation for an on-going blockade, or as violent resistance to a 40 year occupation. Israeli bombs however are tactical strikes with regrettable consequences, whether in Gaza or Lebanon.

None of this is new, whether the bias of different deaths accounting for different journalistic language or the outrage at such moral deficiencies in the New York Times and wider American press not to count Muslim or Arab lives as equal lives. It only echoes what Judith Butler wrote in 2002, that "a frame for understanding violence emerges in tandem with the experience, and that the frame works both to preclude certain kinds of questions, certain kinds of historical inquiries, and to function as a moral justification for retaliation."

The New York Times is barely concerned with reporting on experiences of Palestinians that do not include celebrating rocketry or fitting into an unexplainable "cycle of violence" — or, if you like, "The Chronic Crisis of Gaza: Air Strikes and Rocket Attacks." There are in fact discernible political and historical factors that have created this current crisis in Gaza — who funded Hamas during the first Intifada? Who stoked the recent civil war in Gaza? — but it’s easier, and beneficial to the twisted mathematics of one dead Israeli justifying 30 dead Palestinian kids, to skirt those in favor of the rhetoric of cycles, something chronic and unexplainable.

Last week Isabel Kershner in the Times called Katyusha rocket attacks on Israel "unprecedented" and advanced the view that they were "an escalation of the conflict." What did it call the mounting Israeli air strikes and new round of dozes of dead Palestinians, specifically 54 last Saturday? "Israel Takes the Gaza Fight to Next Level."

Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed since the so-called peace conference in November. But the Times continues to propel a view that only Israeli victims can escalate the conflict and that the Palestinian dead and injured should be the second or third detail in news stories. The peace process is doomed by homemade rocket fire on fields and scattered apartments, not by bodies pulled from buildings flattened by smart bombs. Palestinians dying that way ought to be normalized in how we view this "cycle of violence," as the Times covers it. Heed the Israeli army spokesman quoted last week: after all, Hamas fighters firing rockets at Israeli civilians are war crimes.

Last week’s Israeli air strikes on 10 year-old boys playing soccer were acts of state security. And please, if you can, forget about them quickly.

Reading Ted Swedenburg’s blog this afternoon — he is an anthropology professor teaching in Arkansas, focused on the Middle East but specifically obsessed with music and the stylistic adoption of the kufiya (or keffiyeh) — I came across this music video. It’s by an Iranian sister-duo called Abjeez ("Abjee" is Farsi slang for sister). They are based in Sweden. "DemoKracy" is a riff on the rhetoric and picture of preemptive war, justified by democratization and propagated on cable news. Best part: the English subtitles rolling along the bottom of the screen, like news alerts. 

"What is your position on Palestinian property rights?
- John Arthur Wills, 61, Oakland
Sen. McCain: There can be no secure future for the region without a secure Israel at peace with neighbors that recognize its right to exist. U.S. policy must ensure that Israel retains its qualitative military edge in the region. Only a strong Israel can have the confidence to strike a permanent peace with the Palestinians, a peace I will seek as President. But such a peace can only progress when Palestinians abandon terror as an instrument of policy and show a capacity for self-government."

 Via the Angry Arab.

I lived more than half of my life in the US and I never felt the alienation that I felt on the day I read George Habash, the Palestinian revolutionary who passed away last week, labeled as a "terrorism tactician" in a front page obituary in The New York Times. What do you when they want to convince you that a kind and gentle man you met and respected as a person is a terrorist when you know otherwise? Do you quibble with their definitions to no avail? Do you go back and see how they wrote glowing obituaries for Zionist militia leader and later Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, a man whose record of killing civilians is as horrific and grotesque as that of Osama Bin Laden, former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, Fatah Revolutionary Council founder Abu Nidal or Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet?

As’ad AbuKhalil, "George Habash’s contribution to the Palestinian struggle," at the electronic intifada.

China’s winter.

 

New blog at Source Palestine, a working bibliography on the Palestine-Israel conflict: politics, history, literature and the media.

Photo from Daily Mail. Eight inches in Jerusalem.

 

I talked to Pulitzer-prize winning author Lawrence Wright (The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11) at the end of last month for a long interview in the Daily Star Egypt. Wright was in Cairo for three years in the late 60s and early 70s; he was a conscientious objector to Vietnam and came to study and teach at AUC instead. His book and now his one-man play, "My Trip to Al Qaeda," create a compelling narrative account of the lead-up to 9/11 and his own experience interviewing hundreds of subjects, from Saudi princes to FBI agents to jihadists, for his book.

Read the full interview here.  

An excerpt:

What would you say to people who describe 9/11, its precursors and the years since as part of an inherent clash of civilizations?

Well, for one thing it’s not inherent. Islam and the West have clashed in the past and have not clashed. There is nothing inevitable about it. Also, I think it’s wrong to think of it as a clash between civilizations, because Islam is not really a civilization but a religion that exists in civilizations all over the world. That is a mischaracterization. I think that, for the most part, the clashes come from a clash of identity within civilizations that feel threatened.

In Belgium, for example, the number one name for a child born today is Mohammed, which isn’t that surprising because Mohammed is the most popular name in the whole world right now. But if you were someone of Flemish ancestry, you must be saying to yourself, where is this going? What is happening to my country’s history and language, our precious place in the world? And if you’re Mohammed you’re probably thinking, they speak for someone else; I’m not one of them.

And it’s very likely that Mohammed has never been to Morocco, or may not even speak Arabic. But he’s really lost. It’s not surprising that he goes off to this mosque and associates with other angry and alienated young men and that Islam becomes more than a religion; it becomes a complete identity. That is why I call it a clash of identity within civilizations. It’s different wherever you go. It’s different in Europe than in the Middle East. It’s different in Indonesia. There are many different expressions of these feelings of alienation, rather than this clash of civilizations.

I started blogging at the Huffington Post a few weeeks ago, leading with this post about the joy of cab rides in Cairo.

But taking a cab is also one of this place’s great daily undertakings, whether through a snarl of laneless evening traffic or an easy drive across the city’s deserted streets on any Friday morning, before the Friday prayers. My older sister, after a visit in November, wished she were out of the East coast and back here just to ride around town again in a Camp David Accords-era Fiat with a driver eager to ask about where you’re from, what you think of Egypt, what you’re doing here — all with the requisite "Welcome to Egypt."

Update:
More posts since, find them all here.

 

After three days of shelling and more than 100 dead and with no electricity or water, Nahr el-Baled reeks of burned and rotting flesh, charred houses with smoldering contents, raw sewage and the acrid smell of exploded mortars and tank rounds.

Press figures of 30,000-32,000 are not accurate. 45,000 live in Bared! Contrary to some reports food and water still not being allowed in.

Via Counterpunch.

 

The camp population all say that Fatah Al-Islam came in September-October 2006 and have no relatives in the camp. They are from Saudi, Pakistan, Algeria, Iraq, and Tunisia and elsewhere. No Palestinians among them except some hanger ons. Most say they are paid by the Hariri group.