Date: Sun, 19 Nov 2000 07:53:45 -0800 (PST) From: Marwan Dalal <dmarwan-AT-yahoo.com> Subject: An article by Roger Owen Warped perspective Al-Ahram Weekly 18.11.2000 By Roger Owen Living in the United States during an intense Middle Eastern crisis is always a difficult business. It is not, to say the least, a balanced or friendly place. My unhappiness, and that of my friends and students, exists at various levels. The first level involves the difficulty of getting any reliable news. It is not particularly a matter of political bias, although, of course, this has something to do with it. It is more the way American news gathering is organised. A process of editing and selection intervenes which ensures that whatever is transmitted from the Middle East reaches here in a form which fits Middle Eastern reality to American perceptions of the region and its peoples. Only very rarely does a correspondent, usually a European, manage to convey something of the real feelings involved. The second level is made up of commentators of one kind or another whose prejudices and personal points of view require a continuous process of decoding or outright rejection. The stones thrown by Palestinians become "rocks," and so threatening and so worthy of an armed and overwhelming response. The armed settlers marching around the hills near Nablus become innocent "hikers." And the number of the members of Hamas released from Palestinian jails rises inevitably from the real 17 to the more emotive "dozens." Then there is the third level of problems posed by the fact that the present crisis comes in the middle of a hotly contested presidential election. It is probably to be expected that neither candidate should devote much time to the Middle East crisis, largely ignoring it like any other foreign policy issue. But those advisers and commentators who publicly try to influence Bush or Gore do reveal much about the way in which the foreign policy establishment views the non-American world. Europe is, of course, far away and, in the Bush camp's view, a place which should be left to look after itself. It is certainly a continent whose problems, to echo Bismarck's famous phrase, are not worth the bones of a single American soldier or airman. And not one of them was killed during all the intense air campaign over Kosovo. Not so the Middle East. It has become part of America's backyard, as one commentator put it, a place where American ships rightly belong and where American casualties, however much regretted, make perfect sense. Israel, the Suez Canal and the route to the Persian Gulf are seen as vital parts of a domestic interest which links Israel and oil and the containment of rogue regimes like those of Iraq and Iran in a single, seamless web. And this interest is powerful enough to be worth dying for. The fourth level, at least for a European like myself, is the one at which American policy towards the Middle East seems designed to exclude any input from the governments of my own continent. This has been particularly obvious in recent months when Washington has managed to keep the members of the European Community from having anything significant to do with either the abortive Camp David negotiations or the Sharm Al-Sheikh rescue summit. This is, as you might say, the way of the world. American power, whether used creatively or simply to block the initiatives of others, seems to have been strong enough to cripple the Euro-Mediterranean scheme for a series of separate, but linked, agreements with the various southern Mediterranean states. It has also succeeded in sidelining the possibility of any European input into the Israeli-Palestinian just at the moment when it seems that new initiatives and new thinking about the process of peacemaking is most needed. That is when recent events in the Middle East itself have led many to believe that there needs to be some diplomatic alternative to the old framework based on the Oslo Accords. To make matters worse, the Europeans are denied a voice even when, as everyone knows, American policy-making will now be put on hold for the presidential election and then for as long as it takes for any new administration to place its own followers in key decision-making posts. If Bush wins, it will be even worse. Unlike Gore, who may continue the policies already begun by Clinton in a number of areas, the Bush team will certainly insist on a lengthy re-evaluation of policy towards every area and almost every significant Middle Eastern regime. Is there anything to be done? The answer, in the short run at least, is not very much. Given the very narrow political parameters which govern any policy towards the Middle East there is little mileage to be gained by running campaigns to convince those in Washington of injustices against Arab peoples. The best that can be done is to try to show that certain policies, like the sanctions regime imposed on Iraq, are, in fact, inefficient and counter-productive. The same, we must hope, applies to any possible official support for Israeli plans to impose a physical separation on Palestinian Arabs and Jews. Not that this might not have certain small advantages for the Palestinians themselves. But it would violate the most basic premise on which real peace can only exist and that is the principle that, somehow or other, the peoples who live in what was once Palestine have to learn to co-exist without violence and to share the land and its resources in common. For the moment it is better to write these things than to try to explain them verbally to local reporters. I don't myself know enough about what is actually taking place in Israel-Palestine on a day-to-day basis to be able to offer any instant analysis. And, on top of this, the local journalists who try to find out my opinions are so ignorant themselves that I cannot reasonably trust any of them to report what I try to say correctly. It is better, for the moment, to spend my time with those of my students who are troubled and upset by both the crisis itself and by having to experience it here in these unfriendly surroundings. University teach-ins and workshops will follow Roger Owen is the head of the middle east department at harvard. ==== __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Calendar - Get organized for the holidays! http://calendar.yahoo.com/ --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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