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.

http://flickr.com/photos/freddydeknatel/745876287/in/set-72157603566793980

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 

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.

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.

Top of the minaret, Bab Zuweila, Cairo, Feb. 2007.

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.

"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."

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."

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.

The Nile and Zamalek, August 2007.

Six and half years later, 9/11 has happened enough that the United States occupies Iraq and continues to bomb Afghanistan. There is a government tome that might signify 9/11’s happening, The 9/11 Commission Report, and it recommends, among other things, that "Americans should not be exempt from carrying biometric passports or otherwise enabling their identities to be securely verified when they enter the United States." So surely the event has happened, or why else would Americans need biometric passports?

But we don’t have those yet. Nor has the United States yet engaged "with its friends to develop a common coalition approach toward the detention and humane treatment of captured terrorists," like the Report also recommends. Jordan and Egypt, some of our closest friends in the Middle East, do the most brutal things to our captured terrorists, bearded men whom the CIA pick up in Europe and fly to Cairo or Amman to have their testicles electrocuted, and much worse, until a piece of uncorroborated knowledge can be extracted and, maybe, used in another government tome, like The 9/11 Commission Report.

The "problems in the U.S.-Saudi relationship" have not been "confronted, openly," either, and yet Rudy Giuliani recently campaigned for president under the banner of what he did as mayor of New York when 9/11 happened. But without yet confronting the problems in our relationships with Saudi Arabia, with Pakistan, or with any other "terrorist sanctuary" to "engage the struggle of ideas," how did Giuliani campaign? Because we haven’t confronted those problems, 9/11 cannot have happened, fully — it has not reached its recommended end points, in the frame of the government’s tome.

But, then again, Giuliani had to drop out of the presidential race. He never really had much of a chance, after all pinning his hopes on what he did when 9/11 happened. He has made millions doing business in the Middle East since leaving office in New York, with Guiliani Partners LLC, apparently consulting in countries like Jordan, perhaps on how best to electrocute terrorists’ testicles. Does consulting on that make Rudy Giuliani sure that 9/11 has happened? As sure as he was in autumn 2001, when he oversaw the cleanup of the rubble of the World Trade Center, which burned for a hundred days?

I have been reluctant to comment on the recent ‘events’ because the event in question, as history, is incomplete and one can even say that it has not yet fully happened.

Obviously there are immediate comments one can make, in particular on the nauseating media reception, whose cheap pathos seemed unconsciously dictated by a White House intent on smothering the situation in sentiment in order to demonstrate the undemonstrable: namely, that ‘Americans are united as never before since Pearl Harbor.’ I suppose this means that they are united by the fear of saying anything that contradicts this completely spurious media consensus.

Historical events, however, are not punctual, but extend in a before and after of time which only gradually reveal themselves. It has, to be sure, been pointed out that the Americans created bin Laden during the Cold War (and in particular during the Soviet war in Afghanistan), and that this is therefore a textbook example of dialectical reversal. But the seeds of the event are buried deeper than that. They are to be found in the wholesale massacres of the Left systematically encouraged and directed by the Americans in an even earlier period. The physical extermination of the Iraqi and the Indonesian Communist Parties, although now historically repressed and forgotten, were crimes as abominable as any contemporary genocide. It is, however, only now that the results are working their way out into actuality, for the resultant absence of any Left alternative means that popular revolt and resistance in the Third World have nowhere to go but into religious and ‘fundamentalist’ forms.

As for the future, no one (presumably including our own Government) has any idea what the promised and threatened ‘war on terrorism’ might look like. But until we know that, we can have no satisfactory picture of the ‘events’ we imagine to have taken place on a single day in September. Despite this uncertainty, however, it is permitted to feel that the future holds nothing good for either side.

Fredric Jameson
North Carolina

11 September, the London Review of Books.

We’re supposed to be writing less dismissive, more imminent responses to the readings. Last week was The Emperor’s Children, by Claire Messud. Next week is more of the 9/11 Report. What I wrote last night, after also reading the assigned Arundhati Roy article, "The Algebra of Infinite Justice":

I found the 9/11 Commission Report much easier to read as a comic book. Is it because I saw the day like most people did as picture, on the television and in news magazines? The comic, The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, was done by two old illustrators and is available online at Slate. Its speech boxes are mostly pulled from the book. It reads like a graphic novel. Stan Lee says on the cover: "Never before have I seen a nonfiction book as beautifully and compellingly written and illustrated as The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation."

Who is reading this Report, which sounds often like David McCullough history writing. Too bad the figures are not older, like Washington or Teddy Roosevelt, some of McCullough’s usual characters. The narrative, based on the CIA and FBI’s corporate histories, provided in interviews and depositions and files, looks a lot like bin Laden does in the Graphic Adaptation: too phony, too much like the single villain, like it is the plot line of a Cold War serial. Where is Captain America?

Amazon.com describes the Graphic Adaptation as putting "at every American’s fingertips the most defining event of the century." Arundhati Roy writes in late September 2001 that 9/11 is a "monstrous calling card for a world gone horribly wrong." She does not say it is the defining event of the century. Instead she talks about the last two decades, from the previous century, and about America’s wars.

"The millions killed in Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, the 17,500 killed when Israel - backed by the US - invaded Lebanon in 1982, the 200,000 Iraqis killed in Operation Desert Storm, the thousands of Palestinians who have died fighting Israel’s occupation of the West Bank."

And the 500,000 Iraqi children dead from US sanctions and Madeleine Albright thinking it was "a very hard choice" but that "we think it is worth it."

In the Report there are strange metaphors provided by Sandy Berger and for some reason I imagine him in an office near the Capitol, or maybe in suburban Virginia, comparing counter-terrorism to muddy windshields for Lee Hamilton. There is the fear that this is set to script a national melodrama movie like "Pearl Harbor," which it will, thanks to Oliver Stone, with Nicholas Cage and "World Trade Center."

The Report’s readability reveals what it is trying to sell: the government providing the story, trying to prove it, laying some blame and defending itself.

"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.

Finally, can you guess the last thing we heard as we were walking (OK, hustling) out of the stadium right after the final play? That’s right, it was the sound of euphoric Giants fans chanting, "Eighteen and one! Eighteen and one! Eighteen and one!" Yes, it’s safe to say the Boston-New York rivalry has been taken to new heights. As a tennis umpire would say, "Advantage, New York."

Eighteen and one! Eighteen and one! Eighteen and one!

I can still hear them. I will always hear them.

The point-on Sports Guy-nut Bill Simmons.  

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.