The Middle East - A Century of Conflict

I am still ploughing through The Politics of Dispossesion. Some parts of it tend to be a bit of a hard reading since Edward Said sort of assumes the reader is familiar with the history of the middle-east and the origins of the conflict. Of course, this is to be expected since the book is really a collection of his writings and essays. So, I had to dig around a bit more to understand the situation better and put things in historical perspective. I came across this seven-part radio series from NPR's Morning Edition on the topic The Mideast: A Century of Conflict. I would highly recommend this to anyone seriously interested in this topic. I got to complete 2 parts today during a couple of short breaks at work today. Here a few interesting pieces from the transcripts (I have quoted what I found interesting pieces of historical links/events directly from NPR):

On the history of Zionism

• Modern Zionism was born in the late 19th century in a Europe where anti-Semitism was rampant and Jews in many nations experienced persecution. For centuries some Jews longed to return to Zion, the biblical Israel.
• The idea of a modern state for the Jews emerged from the mind of Theodor Herzl, for whom Zionism was political and had most likely had nothing to do with Judaism, the religion. (Herzl was a Viennese Jew, a journalist and a playwright. He was completely secular and he had no particular attachment to the Jewish religion. As he conceived it, the idea of a Jewish state was a secular idea.) Herzl understood that his political goal needed an organization. So in 1897 he gathered about 250 followers at the first Zionist Congress.
• In 1897, though, Palestine was a sleepy Arab backwater of the Ottoman Empire. It had been ruled from Constantinople by the Turkish sultans for nearly 500 years and was populated by largely Arab peasant farmers, most of whom had never heard the word Zionism.
• The Arabs of Palestine knew little of the plans of Theodor Herzl and the first Zionists. A general awareness of the Zionist goal would not take hold in Palestine for some time.
• Around the early 20th century, two things were happening in the Ottoman Middle East: the awakening of the Arab nation, and the effort of the Jews to reconstitute the ancient kingdom of Israel.

On the origins of the conflict

• World War I proved to be decisive and clearly shows British imperialism playing a big part. Zionism's second great personality, Chaim Weizmann was a Russian Jew, settled in Great Britain before the war. Weizmann managed to make his way into the offices of Great Britain's highest officials, including David Lloyd George, who became prime minister in 1916. The British quickly warmed to the strategic value of a Zionist enterprise in Palestine, and began to see a number of very important advantages to cultivating a Jewish presence in Palestine with the unspoken understanding that this Jewish presence would be under a British protectorate.
• Lloyd George also believed support for the Zionists would cement Jewish support in the U.S. for entering the war as a British ally and in Russia convulsed by revolution for remaining in the war on the British side. The result was the Balfour Declaration, issued on November 2, 1917, named for Balfour, the British foreign secretary. This declaration provided for a Jewish state in Palestine.
• According to Rashid Khalidi, a historian at the University of Chicago, this was a monumental injustice. "The existing non-Jewish populations were the 92 percent majority of the country. Their national and political rights were ignored in a declaration which promised national and political rights to the Jewish people. "
• In 1922 the League of Nations made Palestine a mandate of Britain, whose task it would be to bring the territory to independence. After Jews began to immigrate and purchase land, Palestinians began to realize that this will lead eventually to either their domination or their expulsion.
• This increased to become large scale riots during mass Jewish immigration during the 1930s thanks to Hitler. Arabs started attacking Jewish settlements and thence started the bloody clashes that has continued to this day.

More to come on this topic. I hope I can find some time soon to go over in detail the history of the Kashmir conflict. For those interested, there have been several posts on Amardeep's blog sometime ago on this topic.

The Politics of Dispossesion

I recently came across this brilliant book by Edward Said thanks to my uncle who is a Professor of English Litetature here in Bangalore. Edward Said was one of the greatest thinkers of our generation, a Palestinian by birth, who grew up in Cairo & the US, and till recently, was a professor of literature at Columbia University, New York. He was an outspoken critic and an unfailing humanist of both Israel's aggressive Zionist movement and America's (and the world at large) uncaring attitude towards the millions of dispossesed Palestinians. Said is critical of the immaturity of the PLO, and its leader Yasser Arafat. The book itself is an eminently readable, almost riveting account of the history of the Palestinian state, or what remains of it, interspersed with some personal experiences and encounters, including an interesting conversation with Salman Rushdie on the occasion of the release of his book After the Last Sky. His other works include the classics The Question of Palestine and Orientalism (this would perhaps be my next read). Thomas Friedman's Beirut to Jerusalem is another classic on this subject; Friedman was a middle-east correspondent for over two decades.

Here is an interesting, almost reflective, excerpt from Said on the identity crisis developing in Palestine in the post 1967 war (In May 1967, Egypt and Syria took a number of steps which led Israel to believe that an Arab attack was imminent. Gamal Abdul Nasser ordered a withdrawal of the United Nations Emergency Forces (UNEF) stationed on the Egyptian-Israeli border, thus removing the international buffer between Egypt and Israel which had existed since 1957. Egypt announced a blockade of all goods bound to and from Israel through the Straits of Tiran. Israel had held since 1957 that another Egyptian blockade of the Tiran Straits would justify Israeli military action to maintain free access to the port of Eilat. Syria increased border clashes with Israel along the Golan Heights and mobilized its troops. Against this backdrop, Israel launched a pre-emptive strike against Egypt on June 5, 1967 and captured the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip. Despite an Israeli appeal to Jordan to stay out of the conflict, Jordan attacked Israel and lost control of the West Bank and the eastern sector of Jerusalem. Israel went on to capture the Golan Heights from Syria.). Said spells out how Palestinian nationalist movement reached newer heights after this war, and although he is careful about analogies between individual and collective identities, this description was seemingly apt:

Only in ill-health does one realize the intricacies of the body; only in a crisis, individual or historical, does it become obvious what a sensitive combination of interrelated factors the human personality is - a combination of capacities created in the distant past and of opportunities divined in the present; a combination of totally unconcious preconditions developed in individual growth and of social conditions created and re-created in the precarious interplay of generations.

Along the same lines, Noam Chomsky has been one of America's best-known intellectuals and the world's most famous critic of American political culture, and the new face of American imperialism. According to Chomsky, "Americans have a tendency to gloss over their government's multitudenal historical mistakes and make "self-serving reconstructions" of the past. While denying their own government's history, Americans tend to "recall with great horror the misdeeds of political enemies."

Every Second Counts

Due to a 3 hr flight delay at Bombay (I had gone to visit my very good friends S. & D.) last weekend, I ended up finishing Lance Armstrong's Every Second Counts. His first book It is not about the Bike: My Journey back to Life is an amazing book. And frankly, this book wasn't a let down at all, I thought. Although non-enthusiasts of cycling might find things a trifle boring, the details of his subsequent Tour De France victories kept me quite engrossed. His work with the Lance Armstrong Foundation (LAF) is really impressive, although I felt sad with the recent turns his personal life (and his wife's) has taken.