The crisis that never came...

Take a moment and consider these words by American diplomat George Ball, writing in 1979:

"It is unrealistic to believe that Israel, which has maintained a military occupation over 1,200,000 Palestinians for the past 12 years, can continue that role indefinitely. With violence increasing and Arab strength expanding, the attempt to maintain the status quo offers only a sad an bloody future. Nor is it reasonable to believe that the American people will be prepared indefinitely to subsidize this Israeli brand of colonialism so far out of tune with present-day opinion."

So right, yet so wrong... The article, titled "The Coming Crisis Israeli-American Relations," deals with US-Israeli relations from 1948 to 1979 and also touches upon the growth of the pro-Israel lobby, and is still an interesting read 30 years later. Ball describes US-Israeli relations as characterized by "dependence without responsibility." Some excerpts: 

"Over the last 30 years these relations have evolved to the point where Israel is more dependent on the United States than ever, and yet feels itself free to take hard-line positions at variance with American views without fear of anything worse than verbal admonition from Washington."

"/---/ Today Israel is able to continue on its present course only because of continued vast subsidies from the United States. Distasteful as it must be to Israelis, the nation has become a ward— a kind of welfare dependent—of America. The United States is providing annual subsidies out of the public sector that amount to the equivalent of $7,500 a year for every Jewish family..."

"/---/ Why should Israel not pursue its own course, when Israelis have been so long conditioned to expect that America will support their country, no matter how often it disregards American advice and protests and America's own interests, that both sides now accept this extraordinary ritual dancing as quite normal?"

30 years later, in the Obama era, the White House "regrets" the construction of new settlements on the West Bank. The dance continues...

Ben-Gurion and Sinai

I'm currently working (or should be working) on a piece on the Suez Crisis/Tripartite Aggression, which - as Israeli historian Avi Shlaim points out - is not only one of the most famous but also the "best-documented war plot in modern history." The deceit and lies and bizarre worldview that led up to the war is a truly fascinating (and horrifying) piece of history that makes present-day neocon warmongers like Dick Cheney look like amateurs.

The highlights are provided by David Ben-Gurion - prime minister and defense minister of Israel. At the secret conference that produced the Protocol of Sèvres, Ben-Gurion was at his expansionist best. First he floated a proposal to re-organize the entire Middle East, giving the east bank of the Jordan river (Jordan, that is) to Iraq, annexing southern Lebanon to Israel in order to help establish a Maronite Christian state in the rest of the country, and toppling Nasser and replacing him with a pro-western leader that would also be prepared to sign a peace treaty with Israel. 

Later, in a private conversation with his french counterpart, he suggested "tearing" Sinai from Egypt. On 25 October 1956, Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary: "I told him (the french minister) about the discovery of oil in southern and western Sinai, and that it would be good to tear this peninsula from Egypt, because it did not belong to her, rather it was the English who stole it from the Turks when they believed that Egypt was in their pocket. I suggested laying down a pipeline from Sinai to Haifa to refine the oil..."

Much can be said about Ben-Gurion, but at least he was a man of vision...

What suddenly changed?

Western media often have a funny way of refusing to speak in a straightforward manner about the most simple things - calling colonies "settlements", or occupied territory "disputed" for example. This applies especially to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, of course, and Swedish media is usually no different from other Western media in this regard. So I was positively surprised by this article about Netanyahus trip to Europe this week, and the resistance he met there against his demand that Israel should be allowed to "continue colonize the West Bank." Further on, the journalist uses the (very correct and straightforward) phrase "extensive jewish colonization" of the West Bank to describe Israel's settlement policy. Surely this would have been almost unthinkable in a mainstream daily newspaper not so long ago?

I haven't been following Swedish media coverage of the conflict closely during my stay in Egypt, so I can't tell for sure, but this might be a small indication that a broader change in attitudes towards Israeli colonialism and apartheid is taking place. I think the public outcry against the war on Gaza might have played a role in this, as well as the new focus of the Obama-administration on the issue of settlements (even if he is wrong to focus narrowly on settlement expansion - the Arabist blog has a good discussion about this issue over here.) But of course, it might also be simply because it is easier for journalists to write critically about a right-wing Israeli government including blatant racists like Lieberman.

Pic above: Jewish colony Har Homa in eastern Jerusalem in the background, a demolished Palestinian home in front.

Colonial nostalgia and prerevolutionary Egypt

I just started reading John R. Bradley's Inside Egypt - The Land of the Pharaohs on the Brink of a Revolution (how can you stay away from a book with a catchy title like that?), and I must say I'm slightly put off by the first chapter. It's not that I am a hardcore fan of Nasser or don't agree with much of the criticism of the Free Officers disdain for democracy and so on, but I do think it's a bit unfair to judge the revolution as if the history of oppression and corruption in Egypt only started in 1952.

The essence of Bradley's take on history is captured in this amazing sentence: "Nasser's coup got rid of everything that was good in Egypt, and slowly replaced everything that was bad with something much worse."

Thus, everything that is bad in Egypt today ultimately derive from the wrongdoings of Nasser and his cronies, described as having "none of the positive attributes of the former decadent, but culturally sophisticated, aristocracy they had replaced and humiliated." (Note that cultural sophistication is the only "positive attribute" of the ruling aristocracy that the author bothers to mention here, perhaps because there were no others)

In his scarce references to the situation before the Free Officer's coup, Bradley gives the impression that it was a wonderland of democracy. Thus, he writes that "Nasser banned the opposition political parties that had similarly thrived in prerevolutionary Egypt." While the first part of this sentence is certainly true, it doesn't exactly hit the spot to say that opposition parties "thrived" in prerevolutionary Egypt, as communists and muslim brothers alike were persecuted and British colonial officials repeatedly intervened in national politics, while striking workers and demonstrating students were often shot and killed by the police.

In one paragraph, Bradley describes the prerevolutionary era as "a time when Egyptian society's undoubted inequalities and exploitative political manipulation by outside powers were somehow tempered by the refined high culture of tolerance, cosmopolitanism, intellectualism and architectural extravagance." It's a beautiful sentence, but I fail to see exactly what role "architectural extravagance" or "high culture" played in tempering "inequalities," since the latter were constantly on the rise in Farouq's Egypt.

The intellectual weakness of Bradley's reasoning is displayed most clearly in the following paragraph:

"By the interwar years of the early twentieth century, after Egypt had been granted nominal sovereignty by the British and was ruled by a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy [sic] in all matters except national security and control of the Suez Canal, Cairo became the most cosmopolitan city in the world. But six months before the 1952 revolution, on a day remembered as Black Saturday, anti-British mobs torched Cairo's Western landmarks including the Turf Club, major hotels, banks, cinemas, and residences.... Nasser's Free Officers would hijack the popular unrest to seize power."

The problem here is that since the Cairo fires or "Black Saturday" occurred before the revolution, the Free Officers and Nasser clearly cannot be blamed for it. So if Cairo somehow changed from "the most cosmopolitan city in the world" to one where raging "mobs" would attack and set fire to British targets, then surely this must be the responsibility of the prerevolutionary regime.

Bradley's take on prerevolutionary Egypt is completely in line with official British imperial history - perhaps not surprising for someone who has been reporting regularly for The Economist and The Financial Times. It's very revealing, for example, that Bradley doesn't care to mention the incident that preceded and triggered the Cairo fires: the attack by British forces on a police station in Ismailiyya - during which tens of police and gendarmes were killed - an event that was perceived by the public opinion in Cairo as an outrageous massacre.

Most importantly, the all too common idea of early 20th century Cairo as a cosmopolitan heaven must itself be critically examined, since this would certainly not apply to Egyptian workers and government clerks who were being systematically discriminated against in favor of Europeans, or to the rural migrants who were deported back to the countryside to preserve the social order in "cosmopolitan" Cairo. But as often seem to be the case with writers in the tradition of colonial nostalgia, "cosmopolitan" here should perhaps be interpreted simply as "dominated by foreigners."