File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_2000/postcolonial.0011, message 112


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. 

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