Ronnie Kasrils is a South African author and activist. He was Minister of Intelligence Services from 2004 to 2008, and member of the African National Congress (ANC) from 1987 to 2007. He was a founding member of Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) and lived in exile in London, Luanda, Maputo, Swaziland, Botswana and Lusaka where he served the ANC. He is currently a jury member of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine.

I caught up with Kasrils in London where he participated in a book launch and in Marxism 2012 to talk about a new book - London Recruits. Here is what he had to say about the situation in Palestine/Israel and anti-apartheid in South Africa.  

Frank Barat: How did you become an anti-apartheid activist? 

Ronnie Kasrils: Well, I am from a background which afforded me privileges in white South Africa, but I grew up with a social conscience and could not tolerate the cruelty and oppression against my black compatriots. After the Sharpeville massacre of March 1961, in which 69 black protesters were killed, I took the decision to become an activist and joined the ANC. I was involved in demonstrations and soon came to understand that armed actions were required to reinforce the mass political struggle.

I consequently responded to Nelson Mandela's call for volunteers to join the movement's military wing Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). I was subsequently on the run from the police, left the country for military training in the former Soviet Union, and worked throughout Africa in our military camps and on the front line. I became chief of military intelligence for MK. 

FB: How does it feel to be back in London, a city you lived in for many years in exile during apartheid in South Africa? 

RK: I settled in London for a while and my wife, a fellow activist who escaped with me, and I worked here, and our two sons were born here. We participated in many international solidarity movements, including the Palestinian struggle, and have many friends in Britain. So I enjoy meeting up with old comrades and friends and love the political and cultural life of the British capital. 

FB: Could you tell us more about this new book London Recruits? 

RK: The book is a compilation of the experiences of over 30 foreign supporters I and others recruited to travel to apartheid South Africa over many years as secret couriers and smugglers of political literature, funds and false documents needed by our underground in the country.

They participated in the physical distribution of leaflets at a time when our underground presence was at a very low ebb and when we needed to get our message of freedom across to our people. They acted very bravely to do this and were trained in London in clandestine methods of distribution. In time some of these activists settled in South Africa to provide safe houses for our cadres or smuggled weapons into South Africa from neighbouring African states.  

FB: I was recently with you in Cape Town for the third session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, and what shocked me was that while apartheid ended in a legal and institutionalised sense, things were still very tough for Black South Africans and one could still feel a sense of social apartheid. What is your view on this? 

RK: Yes, this is unfortunately the case. In the first place, the centuries-old legacy of colonialism and apartheid still persists and despite exceptional achievements in building homes, delivering water and electricity, and raising pensions and social grants for the previous underprivileged, it is still a long way to go to eradicate poverty.

Secondly, in this unipolar world dominated by market capitalism and the neoliberal global agenda, it has proved very difficult to break free from the old prevailing relations of production, distribution and exchange. Our democratic government from Mandela's time compromised to ensure a peaceful transition from the apartheid order, but this has not translated into the kind of economic justice that is required. A second revolution is needed. 

FB: You are one of the most vociferous critics of the policies of the State of Israel towards Palestinians. Why the focus on Israel? 

RK: Because what is taking place in Palestine reminds us, South African freedom fighters, of what we suffered from. We are the beneficiaries of international solidarity and need to make a similar payback to others still struggling for liberation. Palestine is an example of a people who were dispossessed of land and birthright just like the indigenous people of South Africa.

As a Jew, I abhor the fact that the Zionist rulers of Israel/Palestine claim they are acting in the name of Jews everywhere. I am one of many Jews internationally, and in Israel itself, who declare "Not in my name." 

FB: In November, in Cape Town, the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, an initiative you have been involved with from the start, called Israel policies towards the Palestinian People as a whole, apartheid. In your opinion,  what is the difference between SA apartheid  and Israeli apartheid? 

RK: The SA government admitted outright they believed that races were distinctly different and had to develop separately along their own cultural and traditional lines. Blacks therefore would be treated as foreign workers/visitors to white SA and would have their own "national" rights in their Bantustans - greatly deprived rural areas. Laws were required for such separation of racial groups. Of course, they pretended that each group would receive same assistance for their development but in fact the White group received all the privileges. 

In the Israeli case, it is quite clear that non-Jews do not receive equal rights and treatment as Jews, but the Zionists are embarrassed to admit this. Consequently, they attempt to conceal the fact that Israel is not a democracy for all its citizens, but they have various laws to ensure that Jews receive preferential treatment. It is apartheid by another name. I refer here to the situation in Israel itself where over 40 laws give Jews privileges and rights over non-Jews.

In the Occupied Palestinian Territories, it is quite a different matter where open and strict apartheid laws allow for the segregation and control of the Palestinian people whilst the illegal Jewish settlements receive State protection and privileges. But in both cases - Israel itself and the OPT - a clear system of apartheid-style rule operates. 

FB: Israel is backed by most western states and the only remaining superpower in the world, the US. Do we, we the people, have enough power to change this? 

RK: A people involved in a just struggle, occupying the moral high ground, will triumph over oppression in the long run, as long as they persevere with their struggle; are prepared to sacrifice; stand united in their cause; and have the correct theory, strategy, and leadership. 

Such a struggle will gain support and solidarity of the world community and the masses of the western states, including the US, who will force their rulers to support change in the end. This process happened in Vietnam and South Africa. 

FB: Finally, you are also involved with Polisario Front, which is fighting for the rights of the people of Western Sahara. As John Berger once said, "The struggle is going to be endless", right? 

RK: The struggle in such cases as Polisario and Palestine will be protracted, but I am sure will culminate in victory because these are struggles of heroic peoples who are steadfast in their objectives and just do not give in. South Africa and Nelson Mandela are illustrations of this. 

[Ths interview was originally posted on Al-Jazeera English.]

     القراءة الأولية لمسودة باب الحقوق والحريات فى الدستور الجديد تظهر أن القيود الثلاثة المفروضة على حريات الأفراد والجماعات المشكلة لقوام هذه الأمة والتي نشأت فى خضم عملية بناء الدولة الحديثة عبر زمنيّ الاستعمار والتحرر الوطني مازالت حاضرة فى ذهن كتّاب دستور الثورة. نعني بهذه القيود أشكال ثلاثة رئيسية من الوصاية: الوصاية على الحق فى التنظيم والحركة المستقلة للجمهور العام وما يتطلبه ويقتضيه من حريات، الوصاية على ضمير الأفراد ومايستتبع ذلك من تقييد لحريات الاعتقاد والعبادة وأخيراً الوصاية على الجسد والسلوكيات العاطفية والجنسية، وخصوصاً جسد المرأة المُعتقل بشكل حصري داخل مجال الأسرة البرجوازية والمُنظَّم بقوانين تعتمد على تفسيرات متشددة للتراث الإسلامي. تكشف هذه المسودة والحال كذلك عن انفصال شبه تام مابين روح هذه الثورة وقيمها، والتي سعت إلى إعادة تأسيس للدولة الحديثة وجماعتها الوطنية على أسس مختلفة جذرياً عن سابقتها، وبين الطبقة السياسية الجديدة -وخصوصاً جناحها الإسلامي- والتي مازالت مخلصة للموروث من ركائز هذه الدولة. بعبارة أخرى، ينبع الالتباس فى موقف غالبية الفصائل الإسلامية، أو الإخوان على وجه التحديد، بخصوص الحريات الخاصة والعامة من إخلاصهم لمشروع الدولة الوطنية الحديثة وثوابته وليس العكس. ومن ثم فالنضال ضد ميل التيار الإسلامى للتضييق على الحريات فى الدستور الجديد يجب أن يبدأ بنقد ما استقر داخل مؤسسات الدولة المصرية الحديثة ووعى نخبها القانونية والسياسية من خطابات.  

الدولة الحديثة وقيودها الثلاثة: 

     نشأت الدولة الحديثة منذ البداية متشككة في الحركة المنظمة لعموم المصريين رابطة إياها بميل فطري للشغب والتخريب. هذا التشكك في قدرة "العوام" على الحركة المنظمة لطالما كان حاضراً عبر عصور ماقبل الدولة الحديثة، فقد وسم علاقة الأرستقراطيات العسكرية التي تعاقبت على حكم المصريين منذ الفتح الإسلامي وما قبله والتي لم تر فى سكان هذا البلد- وبالتناغم مع حقائق هذا العصر- الأهلية اللازمة للعب أي دور محوري فى ممارسة شئون الحكم. كذلك شكّل هذا التشكك عصب النظرية الإسلامية السنية التقليدية في الشرعية والسيادة بشكل عام والتي اشتهرت بكراهة الخروج على الحاكم وإقرار الأمر الواقع- أي سلطة ما عُرف بأمراء التغلب- على أي محاولة لاستدعاء العوام إلى الشأن السياسى مقرنةً هذه المحاولات "بالفتنة". عاد هذا التشكك ليلعب أدواراً مختلفة في دعم مشروع التحديث الرأسمالي الذى قادته أرستقراطيات عسكرية ومدنية من نوع آخر ارتأت لنفسها مهمة تمدين المصريين وتحويلهم لمواطنين كاملي الأهلية منتظمين في علاقة مجردة مع الدولة على النمط المعروف في المجتمعات الرأسمالية الأوروبية. استتبعت مهمة التحديث تلك أنماطاً من الوصاية على الأشكال المختلفة من الإجتماع الأهلي لضمان استنبات علاقات الملكية والسوق الرأسمالي ومؤسسات الحكم الحديثة وتحصينها ضد أي شكل من أشكال التمرد المنظم، بل والتعالي الممنهج على تلك الهبّات باعتبارها تعبيرات مختلفة عن ميول غريزية لرفض التحديث والتقدم. وبالتالي لم تر تلك النخب أي إمكانية لمشاركة شعبية واسعة فى مشروع التحديث إذ يستحيل على تلك الجمهرة إدراك جوهر هذا التحديث ابتداءاً. ومن ثم فالمشاركة فى الشأن العام وفقاً لهذه الرؤية يجب أن تمر عبر عملية من التعليم والتمدين تعيد انتاج التمييز بين النخب الجديدة المتعلمة وعموم السكان. باختصار، ولدت النخب الجديدة متشربة بوعي يمكن وصفه "بالاستعماري" فى علاقتها بالجمهور المشكل للأمة المتخيلة. 

     وفى ارتباط وثيق بمشروع الدولة الحديثة ذاك تَشكَّل مشروع الإصلاح الإسلامي -على يد نخبة أزهرية معروفة ولاحقاً على يد نخبة قانونية جديدة يُعتبر الأستاذ السنهوري أبرز أعلامها بالطبع- ليقدم نظرية فى السيادة والشرعية تحل محل النظريات الموروثة من عصور ما قبل الدولة الوطنية الحديثة وليلعب أدوراً مساعدة في الضبط الإجتماعي وصناعة الهوية الوطنية الجديدة. أوكلت النظرية السنية التقليدية للحاكم الفرد، أو أمراء التغلب كما سبق الذكر، مهمة التشريع فى المسائل التى صمتت عنها الأحكام الشرعية الصريحة توظيفاً لمفهوم "التعذير" على أن يلتزم فى ذلك باجتهاد العلماء والقضاة. ولكن مع تعقُّد مهمات الحكم وتنوع تبعاتها وتشكل شبكة متداخلة من المصالح فى حاجة لتمثيل دخلت نظرية "السياسة الشرعية" تلك في أزمة حقيقية مع منتصف القرن التاسع عشر. تمثل إسهام هذا المشروع الإصلاحي فى فتح الطريق لتحل الأمة محل الحاكم الفرد فى التشريع أي تتحول لمصدر السلطة والتى تُمارس فى هذه المساحة التي تركتها الشريعة ومن ثم تأسس تناظر بين مهمة التشريع ومهمة الإجتهاد الفقهية. تمارس الأمة هذه السلطة عبر مجموعة من الترتيبات المؤسسية الديمقراطية كالفصل بين السلطات وتوازنها وما يرتبط بها من حقوق مدنية وسياسية كحق الانتخاب والمساواة أمام القانون وتأسيس الأحزاب إلى جانب الحق المقيد فى التنظيم. ويتم تسكين الأقباط داخل هذا التصور عبر توظيف متطور لفكرة "الذمة" يتحول بمقتضاه الأقباط لطائفة أولى بالرعاية أو كطائفة في علاقة تحالف وثيق واستراتيجى مع الأغلبية المسلمة على أرضية العداء للاستعمار الغربي.    

     يدشن هذا التصور مهمة أيديولوجية للدولة الحديثة تتمثل فى نشر وحماية هذه الطبعة الإصلاحية من الإسلام وإلا انهارت نظرية الشرعية التي تتأسس عليها الدولة نفسها سواء لصالح نظريات إسلامية مغرقة فى تطرفها تنفى وجود هذه الأمة المصرية الجديدة نفسها أو لصالح تصورات مغرقة فى علمانيتها لا تعترف بهذا المفهوم المحافظ للوطنية. وفى هذا السياق تحول الأزهر تدريجياً منذ أول قانون منظم لأعماله عام 1910، و مروراً بتعديلات 1927، لأحد مؤسسات الدولة المنوط بها تعريف هذه الطبعة من الإسلام وصونها وكذلك فرض تصوراً واحداً مهيمناً داخل حقل الممارسات الدينية. وفي سياق مماثل، نشأت الكنيسة القبطية كمؤسسة عامة منوط بها تعريف حدود الإيمان المسيحي وأمور الأحوال الشخصية فى ضوء التصور الطائفي الذى حكم علاقة الدولة بالأقباط. وفى هذا السياق أيضاً وُلدت ممارسات الرقابة على الضمير وحريات الاعتقاد وأشكال التعبير والإبداع المختلفة بوصفها ضمانة لوحدة الأمة واستقرارها. 

     وأخيراً، حاول هذا المشروع التحديثي مد ولايته على الأجساد المشكلة لقوام هذه الأمة وضبطها. اقتضى ذلك فى الممارسة العملية التدخل لضبط جسد المرأة وسلوكها فى المجال العام- خصوصاً تلك المنتمية للطبقات الأدنى- ومحاولة تطويعها للعب أدوار محددة سلفاً داخل مشروع التحديث ذاك. فالانتماء لـ"جسد" هذه الأمة والتمتع بما يتيحه هذا الانتماء من حقوق لم يكن ليتم بشكل تلقائي ولكنه يقتضي عملية تمدين كما سبق الذكر. ولمّا كان مفهوم الأمة نفسه معرفاً فى علاقة وثيقة مع الإسلام، فكانت صفة المدنية تلك تقتضى التشرب بفهم معين للإسلام قدمه مشروع الإصلاح الإسلامى يلهم السلوك اليومي وترتكز عليه الدولة فى ممارسة مهماتها. أي أن صناعة الفرد بالمعنى الحديث للكلمة –محور الممارسات الديمقراطية نفسها- اقتضت صناعة طبعة من الإسلام تلائم هذا الفهم للتحضر. فتم توظيف التصورات الأرثوذكسية مثلاً المناهضة لممارسات التصوف والبدع كالموالد فى سياق حرب الدولة الحديثة مع الخرافة أو انشغالها بمسائل الصحة العامة وجرى الاعتماد على ذات الفهم الأرثوذكسي لمواجهة كثير من الممارسات العرفية كالثأر أو الممارسات القَبَلية الحاكمة للمواريث في مناطق مختلفة كالصعيد مثلاً والتي تخالف الفهم الثابت للشريعة فى هذا الصدد وذلك بهدف دعم حكم القانون وسلطة الدولة المركزية. هذا بخلاف الدور الذى أوكل للإسلام، والدين بشكل عام، فى دعم مفهوم محافظ للأخلاق والآداب العامة استخدم فى سياق عملية تمدين السكان. 

     يتجلى هذا النزوع المحافظ بخصوص الجسد والسلوك العام فى كتابات النخب المعنية بمسألة "تحرير المرأة"، كقاسم أمين مثلاً، والتى عكست تململاً من التفسيرات المتشددة للإسلام أو الممارسات العرفية فيما بتعلق بوضعية المرأة ولكنها كذلك عكست تأففاً من السلوك المنقلت لنساء الطبقات الأدنى فى شوارع القاهرة والذى يستوجب تدخلاً لتنظيمه فى إطار مشروع الإسلام الإصلاحي. ومن هنا ظهرت الأسرة "كخلية" للمجتمع المنشود تنتظم على نمط الأسرة البرجوازية وتستفيد بدورها من الإسلام المُحدَّث الذي سبق وشرعن للدولة الحديثة نفسها. هنا انتزعت المرأة بعضاً من الحريات والحقوق، ولكن نطاق هذه الحريات ظل مرتهناً بتفسير المؤسسة الدينية الرسمية المحافظة. ثم امتدت الوصاية على أشكال السلوك الجنسي المختلفة خصوصاً فى مجال الحياة الخاصة للعوام والتي تهدد تماسك وعفة هذه الأسرة الجديدة. 

عن "النظام  العام": 

     ما نريد التشديد عليه أن نظرية الشرعية الجديدة، بنت مشروع الإصلاح الإسلامي، قد وُلدت فى ارتباط وثيق بتصور محافظ عن الأخلاق العامة وتشكك أصيل فى قدرة المصريين على الفعل الجماعي المنظم، وأن كلٍ من هذه العناصر الثلاثة يعتمد فى وجوده على الآخر. فى هذا السياق، قدَّم مفهوم "النظام العام" المستعار من الأدبيات القانونية الفرنسية فى ذاك الوقت التعبير القانوني عن هذه العلاقة الدقيقة بين تلك العناصر الثلاثة. فبخلاف عدد من الأدورا التى لعبها هذا المفهوم فى صياغة التصور القانوني عن الجماعة الوطنية الجديدة، أصبح كذلك من المنوط به تحديد ما يشبه قائمة بالأفعال وأوجه السلوك المخلة بتماسك عناصر هذه العلاقة الدقيقة، وهي القائمة التى امتدت لتشمل طيف واسع جداً من الممارسات يبدأ بتشكيل جماعات متطرفة بالمخالفة للقانون مروراً بالتبشير يديانات غير سماوية أو معتقدات فاسدة ولا ينتهي بأشكال من السلوك الجنسي المخل بالآداب العامة. 

     عبّر هذا الفهم للنظام العام عن نفسه في عدد من النصوص الدستورية والتشريعية بدايةً بإعلان حالة الطوارئ مع فرض الأحكام العرفية خلال فترة الحرب العالمية الأولى وما تلاها إلى جانب أشكال مختلفة من تجريم الإجتماعات بعدد من نصوص قانون العقوبات وكذلك تجريم حزمة من أشكال الاحتجاج الجماعي وعلى رأسها الحق فى الإضراب. إقرار الحق فى التنظيم فى مرحلة لاحقة مع كتابة أول دستور مصري ظل مرتهناً بمجموعة من الشروط تضمن "تحضُّر" المحتجين أنفسهم، أي صورة من الاحتجاج منزوعة المخالب. على سبيل المثال، رهنت المواد 15 و20 من دستور 23- أيقونة الفقهاء الدستوريين المصريين- حريات إصدار الصحف والإجتماع بما أطلقت عليه "ضرورات الحفاظ على النظام الإجتماعي". قدمت هذه المواد الحجة اللازمة لقمع الحركة النقابية الوليدة وحلّ الحزب الشيوعي المصري فى عام 1924. كذلك شهد دستور 23 نفسه تقييداً لحرية ممارسة الشعائر الدينية "باعتبارات النظام العام والعادات المرعية فى الديار المصرية" (مادة 13). ثم شهدت السنوات التالية أولى المواجهات مع كافة المعتقدات التى تم اعتبارها من قبل الأزهر أو الكنيسة خارجة علن الفهم العام المستقر للإسلام أو المسيحية كالبهائية- والتى بدأت معاناتها مع النظام القانوني المصري منذ منتصف العشرينيات تقريباً- أو جماعة شهود يهوه المسيحية مثلاً والتى لم تحظ قط باعتراف الكنيسة القبطية. كذلك ظهرت القوانين المتعاقبة التي أسست للرقابة على أشكال الإبداع المختلفة لتقر جميعها بحظر ما تراه هى إجتراءاً على الرموز أو المعتقدات الدينية، فظهرت مبكراً ممارسات الرقابة على المبدعين أو المفكرين بدءاً من لائحة الرقابة على "التياترات"، أي المسارح، فى عام 1911 ومروراً بحزمة من القوانين التي مازالت مقيدة لحرية الإبداع حتى اليوم. كذلك عرف قانون العقوبات تجريماً لما سمى "بالفجور" و "التحريض على الفسق" فى سياق الحرب على الدعارة، والتي قادتها وجوه معروفة من نساء الطبقات الأرستقراطية بالتحالف مع بعض رجال الدين للحفاظ على نظام العائلة بل والصحة العامة للمواطنين. هذا بخلاف التوسع فى تطبيق هذه المواد لمواجهة أشكال مختلفة من العلاقات والسلوك كالمثلية الجنسية أو العلاقات العاطفية التي لا تنتظم فى إطار الأسرة النووية.  

     وهكذا تبدو الثنائيات التى يجري تداولها فى الجدل العام بشأن الدستور باعتبارها من قبيل البديهيات غير مؤسسة على سند تاريخي يعتد به. أحد أشهر تلك الثنائيات تتمثل فيما تلح عليه القوى اللييرالية وبعض القوى اليسارية من تمييز بين الدولة الحديثة العلمانية والمشروع الإسلامي الذى يشكل نكوصاً عليها - أو المقابلة ما بين إسلام الأزهر المعتدل أو إسلام الدولة التحديثية وإسلام الحركات الإسلامية السياسية- وهو تمييز لا يستقيم أخذاً فى الاعتبار أن الدولة الحديثة كانت هي من قامت برعاية طبعة محافظة من الفكر الإسلامي معادية لحرية العقيدة وهذه الطبعة قدمت بدورها الجذر الأيديولوجي لفكر الإسلام السياسي فى مرحلة لاحقة. كذلك تتجاهل الثنائية التى يروج لها قسم آخر من مثقفى اليسار ما بين الحريات الشخصية بوصفها شأناً برجوازياً خالصاً وبين الحريات العامة كحرية التنظيم بوصفها مطلباً شعبياً حقيقة أن هذه "البرجوازية" نفسها كانت من ضمن القوى التي قادت حملة تقييد الحريات الشخصية في سياق إخضاع الطبقات الأدنى لسطوة الدولة الحديثة وتصورها عن الأخلاق العامة. 

صفقة يوليو:

     استمرت أنماط الوصاية الثلاثة تلك حاضرة على الصعيدين الدستوري والتشريعي حتى ثورة يوليو والتى زادت عليها مزيداً من القيود الاستثنائية في مقابل رشوتها الإجتماعية الموسعة، وهي الرشوة التي شملت بالإضافة للحقوق الإقتصادية والإجتماعية مزيداً من الحقوق الشخصية للمرأة من داخل نفس الإطار العام لمشروع الإصلاح الإسلامي. فأبقت الثورة على القيود على الحق فى التنظيم بل وزادت عليها عدداً من المحاذير على الحريات النقابية. وهي المحاذير التى أفضت عملياً إلى مصادرة استقلال النقابات العمالية وحظر تعدديتها مع تأسيس الإتحاد العام لعمال مصر عام 1957. كذلك أبقى نظام يوليو على ما هو متعارف عليه من قيود على حرية الاعتقاد بل ووظف الهواجس المتعلقة بالخطر الصيهوني والمواجهة مع الاستعمار لفرض مزيد من القيود كما هو الحال مع حل المحافل البهائية 1960 تحت دعوى وجود علاقة ما بين الطائفة البهائية التي دفن مؤسسها فى مدينة عكا والدولة العبرية! وأبقى نظام يوليو على أسس العلاقة الطائفية مع الكنيسة، بل وأفضى التضييق على كافة أشكال التنظيم- والتي شكلت حاضنة معقولة للاندماج الوطني- إلى تضخم دور الكنيسة فى حياة الأقباط وتحولها لمؤسسة إجتماعية شاملة لكافة أوجه الحياة مع بداية السبعينيات. ثم كانت المحصلة الطبييعية لهذا الميل هو النص على الشريعة الإسلامية كمصدر رئيسى للتشريع في سياق مزايدة النظام على الحركات الإسلامية. 

     إلا أن الثورة أسست كذلك للخروج على نظرية الشرعية الدستورية السابق الإشارة إليها عن طريق ماهو معروف من إجراءات دستورية وتشريعية كادت أن تصادر المجال السياسي لصالح دولة بوليسية موازية كالإعلان شبه الدائم لحالة الطوارئ وإلغاء الأحزاب السياسية والتوسع في دور أجهزة الأمن السياسى والمؤسسات القضائية الاستثنائية وتقليص صلاحيات المؤسسات التشريعية. هذه الإجراءات على وجه التحديد دون غيرها هي التي أثارت حفيظة النخبة القضائية والقانونية الأمينة على ميراث الدولة التحديثية. أي أن نظام يوليو قد خرج على إجماع النخبة التحديثية فيما يتعلق بمسألة الشرعية والحريات السياسية والمدنية ولكنه لم يمس الإجماع الخاص بالقيود الثلاثة السابق ذكرها. 

     نجح النضال الحقوقى والسياسى على مدى العقدين الماضيين من خلال تفاعله مع النخبة القضائية فى انتزاع بعض المكاسب المتعلقة بالحقوق السياسية والمدنية على النحو الذي يستعيد قدراً من حيوية المجتمع التي صادرتها ثورة يوليو. إلا أن هذا النضال نفسه قد اصطدم بأسس إجماع هذه النخبة القضائية أي تلك الشروط الثلاثة. فشهد العقد الماضي مثلاً إعادة التأكيد من قبل مجلس الدولة على القيود الورادة على حرية الاعتقاد في أكثر من موضع خصوصاً فيما يتعلق بحريات أتباع الديانات غير السماوية أو بحرية التحول الديني. كذلك شهدت محاولات رفع وصاية الدولة التحديثية عن الجسد الأنثوي مقاومة عنيفة من داخل أروقة الدولة ومؤسساتها القضائية. على سبيل المثال صوّت مجلس الدولة نفسه عام 2010 بالإجماع تقريباً على رفض تعيين المرأة قاضية بين صفوفه وأبدت تلك النخب تحفظاً وتململاً فى مواجهة كافة الإصلاحات التشريعية التي تضمن قدراً من الحرية للمرأة فيما يتعلق بجسدها أو حركتها داخل المجال الخاص كما هو الحال مع تعديلات قوانين الأحوال الشخصية كقانون الخلع عام 2002 أو قانون الطفل عام 2008. وأخيراً كان القيد على الحق فى التنظيم أكثر تلك القيود قابلية للمنازعة تحت وطأة النضالات المتصاعدة لقطاعات واسعة من المصريين وفى القلب منهم الطبقة العاملة الحضرية. ولكن ظل الاعتراف من قبل المشرع والقضاء خجولاً ومقتصراً على الحق في استقلالية العمل النقابي مع الاستمرار في أشكال مختلفة من تجريم الإضراب. 

دستور الثورة؟

     ومع سعى التيار الإسلامي لوراثة هذه الدولة الحديثة، والذي يشكل هذا التيار نفسه أحد إفرازاتها وتعبيراتها كما ألمحنا، كان من الطبيعي أن يعيد انتاج قيودها الثلاثة مضافاً إليها قيوداً تتعلق باعتبارات ضمان استمرار سيطرته السياسية والانتخابية. في هذا السياق، ظهر باب الحقوق والحريات العامة معبراً عن هذه المعادلة الجديدة. 

     فعلى صعيد الحق في التنظيم، أقرت المادة 33 من المسودة بالحق في الإضراب وكفلت المادتين 18 و19 للمواطنين حق تكوين الجمعيات والأحزاب والنقابات بمجرد الإخطار، ولكنها رهنت ممارسة هذا الحق بما أسمته "احترام السيادة الوطنية"! الإشارة لما يسمى "باحترام السيادة الوطنية" تمثل بدعة على التراث الدستوري المصري ولم يرد ذكر أي شيء مشابه في الدساتير السابقة. من البديهي أن تحترم هذه المنظمات السيادة الوطنية ولكن من يحدد مقتضيات هذا الاحترام وطبيعة الأفعال التي تشكل إخلالاً به؟ ألا يمكن حل مجالس إدارة هذه المنظمات النقابية مثلاً إذا ما قادت حملة دولية ضد ممارسات الحكومة المصرية وإخلالها بالمعايير الدولية للعمل المحددة بمواثيق منظمة العمل الدولية؟ ألم يسوق نظام مبارك نفسه هذه الحجة ضد عدد من منظمات المجتمع المدني النشطة في حقل الدفاع عن الحقوق الإقتصادية والإجتماعية وانتهى الأمر لإغلاق دار الخدمات النقابية و العمالية عام 2007 عقب مشاركتها في إحدى جلسات استماع منظمة العمل الدولية بجنيف؟ (هذا بخلاف الحجة الجاهزة التى استخدمتها كافة الأنظمة المتعاقبة على حكم هذا البلد فى مطاردة منظمات المجتمع المدني وهي "تلقى تمويلاً أجنبياً"). ألا تفتح عبارة "السيادة الوطنية" تلك الباب لمطاردة هذه الهيئات فى المحاكم خصوصاً أن المادة تمنح القضاء حق حلّ مجالس إدارة هذه المنظمات بل وحلّ تلك المنظمات نفسها؟

      وتبعاً للتقاليد الدستورية والتشريعية المصرية، امتد التقييد إلى أوجه النشاط المرتبطة بالحق فى التنظيم والإجتماع كحرية تداول المعلومات أو تأسيس الصحف. فتتيح المادة 20 حرية الحصول على المعلومات والبيانات والإحصاءات والوثائق أياً كان مصدرها ومكانها، وتلزم الدولة "بتمكين مواطنيها من التمتع بهذا الحق دون معوقات وبما لا يتعارض مع الأمن القومى للبلاد أو ينتهك حرمة الحياة الخاصة". مرة أخرى من يحدد معنى "الأمن القومي" هنا؟ كم من مواقع الإنترنت قد تُحجب ابتداءاً تحت نفس الدعوى؟ بل إن قطع خدمة الانترنت كما حدث في الأيام الأولى للثورة قد يصبح إجراءاً مُحصَّن دستورياً. مرة أخرى قانون تنظيم الإتصالات هو المعنى بتحديد هذه المعلومات التي ينبغي حجبها وكيفية هذا الحجب على سبيل الحصر وليس باستخدام صياغات فضفاضة. وكذلك أبقت المادة العاشرة المنظمة لحرية الصحافة على عقوبات كإغلاق الصحف وسحب رخصتها القانونية على الرغم من إلغاء نظام مبارك نفسه لهذه العقوبات في عام 2006. فقد نصت المادة 10 من المسودة على أن "حرية الصحافة والطباعة والنشر وسائر وسائل الإعلام مكفولة والرقابة على ما تنشره محظورة، ولا يكون إنذارها ولا وقفها ولا إلغاؤها إلا بحكم قضائي، ويجوز الاستثناء في حالة إعلان الحرب أن تفرض عليها رقابة محددة". اشتراط الحكم القضائي هنا لا يغير من الأمر شيء إذ أن العقوبة يجب أن تقتصر على الصحفي أو المسؤول التحريري أو الإداري دون إغلاق الصحيفة. هذا بخلاف المماطلة غير المفهومة أيضاً فى النص بشكل صريح على حظر عقوبة الحبس في جرائم النشر، وهو الحظر الذي ورد فى المادة 12 من أحد مسودات باب الحريات العامة واختفى بشكل غامض فى المسودة الأخيرة!

     وعلى صعيد حرية الضمير والاعتقاد، أعادت المادة الثامنة التأكيد على القيود الموروثة عبر القرن الماضي. فجاءت المادة الثامنة لتحيي تقليداً بائساً كان قد اختفى من دستور 71 وهو تقييد حرية ممارسة الشعائر الدينية "باعتبارات النظام العام"، بل ولتذهب خطوة إضافية وتقصر حرية إقامة دور العبادة على أتباع الديانات السماوية فقط فى صياغة تفرّغ حرية الاعتقاد من مضمونها بل وتطلق يد الأجهزة الأمنية فى مطاردة الناس والتفتيش في حياتهم الخاصة بحجة التأكد من عدم تحويل البيوت مثلاً لدور عبادة لأديان غير سماوية كما حدث أكثر من مرة مع أتباع البهائية أو الأحمدية أو الطائفة الشيعية. 

     وأخيراً أعادت المادة 36 تأسيس الموقف التقليدي من المرأة والمجال الخاص بالمجمل إذ ألزمت الدولة "باتخاذ كافة التدابير لترسيخ مبدأ مساواة المرأة مع الرجل فى مجالات الحياة السياسية والثقافية والاقتصادية والاجتماعية وسائر المجالات الأخرى بما لا يخل بأحكام الشريعة الإسلامية. وتضمن الدولة "التوفيق بين واجباتها- أي المرأة- نحو الأسرة وعملها في المجتمع". هذه المادة منقولة حرفياً من دستور 71- وزادت عليها أحكام الشريعة الإسلامية- وتتضمن نفس أوجه القصور والتناقض، إذ ما الداعي للنص على أحكام الشريعة مرة أخرى هنا طالما أن المادة الثانية موجودة؟ والأهم، ماهو مبرر افتراض التعارض بين حقوق المرأة وواجباتها نحو الأسرة؟ كم تشريع قد يُجهض ابتداءاً بسبب هذه المادة الغريبة؟ وكم تشريع انتزع للمرأة بعضاً من حقوقها سيصبح عُرضة للطعن بعدم الدستورية؟

     هكذا يولد "دستور الثورة" فى عزلة شبه كاملة عن قيم هذه الثورة وروحها. وهذا الانفصال بين المجال السياسي الجديد وبين ما يموج به هذا البلد من نضالات تستهدف أشكال الوصاية الثلاثة تلك على وجه التحديد – بغض النظر عن هوية رعاتها السياسيين- لا يمكن أن يضمن الحد الأدنى من الاحترام لهذا الدستور والذى سيبقى منتجاً غريباً مفروض على الناس حتى ولو تمت تمريره وفقاً "لإرادة شعبية".

Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu seemed inspired by the Road Runner cartoons, Glenn Beck and Reverend Gene Scott. The bizarre, almost hand drawn, “bomb” in one of his hands was complemented by the red marker in another: man enough, Bibi suggested, to draw his own red lines. He doesn’t need the Americans.

The last time someone came to the UN General Assembly and did one of these amateur presentations, the US went to war. Poor Colin Powell would come to regret his February 5, 2003 speech where he laid out one exaggeration and falsehood after another that led to the US war on Iraq. As Powell put it two years later, “I’m the one who presented it on behalf of the United States to the world, and it will always be a part of my record. It was painful. It is painful now.” Bibi is not one to apologize. His is the swagger of the non-combatant, eager to send others to war, eager for others to taste its misery.

What was Netanyahu’s case against Iran? That Iran is close to having a nuclear bomb. This is an old saw from Bibi. In 1992, as a Member of the Knesset, Netanyahu predicted that Iran was “three to five years” from a nuclear weapon. He was wrong in 1992, and he is wrong now. Take the case of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) recent reports on Iran. The Director General of the IAEA provided a report to the IAEA’s Board of Governors on August 30, 2012. If you are able to get through the bureaucratic and legalistic verbiage, you’ll get to the two important sentences: (1) that the IAEA is confident about “the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran”; and (2) that the IAEA can “conclude that all nuclear materials in Iran is in peaceful activities.” By the IAEA’s standards, Iran has not diverted its materials to nuclear weapons use. In other words, Iran remains on track with a program that President Eisenhower’s administration championed, Atoms for Peace (at his 1953 speech to the UN General Assembly).

Indeed, it was under the Eisenhower program that the US leased Iran 13.2 pounds of low enriched uranium to get the program going. On March 5, 1957, the US and Iran signed an agreement “for cooperation in research in the peaceful use of atomic energy.” Eleven years later, on July 1, 1968, Iran signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), and by 1974 Iran completed the IAEA’s Safeguards Agreement. India’s successful nuclear weapons test in 1974 intrigued the Shah of Iran, who, it is said, considered, but did not develop, a covert nuclear program. India did not sign the NPT, tested nuclear weapons once more in 1998, and despite receiving nuclear materials through the 2006 US-India Civil Nuclear Agreement continues to be outside the NPT regime. The hypocrisy of this need not be explicated.

Avner Cohen’s Israel and the Bomb (Columbia, 1998) documents Israel’s nuclear weapons program from the Dimona project before 1967 to its crossing the nuclear threshold before the Six Day War, and into the construction and development of the Negev Nuclear Research Center. The book also highlights the correspondence between Israeli Ambassador to the US Yitzhak Rabin and US Deputy Secretary of State Paul Warnke, where it becomes clear how the US colluded with Israel to mask its nuclear weapons program and accepted its reasons for ignoring the NPT. Rabin asks Warnke, “What is your definition of nuclear weapons?” Warnke replies with two points, “the definition of what is and what is not a nuclear weapon, and what is and what is not introduction into the area.” The first part of the definition is fairly clear-cut: if Israel has the components of the bomb, regardless of its state of assembly it would count as a weapon. The second part allows Israel “ambiguity,” with Warnke elaborating on the idea of “introduction” with the remark “that is your term and you will have to define it.” They agreed that if Israel does not test its weapons publically, then they would not be considered to be a nuclear weapons state.

The ambiguity around the term “introduce” is the reason why Shimon Peres told Khaled Dawoud in 1999, “Israel has not tested any nuclear weapons, and without the test, you cannot even introduce. It is a commitment that Israel gave to the world and the United States of America and we are very serious. Israel said that we are ready to sign the ban on nuclear tests. Not only did we not do a nuclear test, but we are not going to have one. These are guarantees that Israel is not going to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East.” Israel’s own red line is “introduce.” Iran is being given a much lower threshold.

What is the real reason for the antipathy against Iran’s nuclear program? It is certainly not the question of a nuclear program under NPT rules and with IAEA inspections. There is no smoke here, nor fire. An honest reading of the IAEA materials shows that there is little anticipation that Iran is close to or even interested in a nuclear weapons program. Meanwhile, outside the NPT and outside IAEA inspections, Israel already has a nuclear weapons program even if it hasn’t, to its own standard, introduced nuclear weapons to the region.

The real reason is not whether Iran can have a nuclear program (or even nuclear weapons), but who can do so. Four countries have nuclear weapons programs outside the NPT: India, Israel, North Korea and Pakistan. Three of them are US allies and one of them sneaked under the barriers when no one was looking (the US was then obsessed with Iraq). Iran cannot have a nuclear program because, we are told, it might move this into a weapons direction and because it threatens its neighbors. This is a legitimate fear, but it is not unusual to Iran. One forgets that Cuba, for six decades, has lived with the fear of annihilation, with the political class in the US routinely and casually passing a death sentence on the beleaguered island. The question of an “existential threat,” as the Israelis put it, has been held over Cuba without any eyebrows raised in Washington. The principle at work here is no longer that countries that threaten their neighbors should not have nuclear weapons. The point seems to be allies of the US/Israel are acceptable; non-allies are unacceptable. This is not a principled objection to Iran’s nuclear policy, but a political one.

If Israel was serious about the principle of a nuclear-free Middle East, it would immediately sign onto the most important proposal made in this UN General Assembly session thus far: when Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi called for the creation of a Nuclear Weapons Free zone in the region by the end of 2012. The problem is that Morsi’s proposal will be blocked by two powers: the US and Israel. A Nuclear Weapons Free Zone would mean that the US would not be able to bring its nuclear weapons to its bases in the Middle East and nor can it use depleted uranium in the weapons that its ships carry into the Gulf. “The only solution is to get rid of nuclear weapons,” Morsi said, “and all weapons of mass destruction.” However, “we also emphasize the right of all countries of the region to the peaceful use of nuclear energy within the framework of the NPT, with a commitment to honor their obligations in this respect and provide the necessary guarantees to the countries of the region so as to remove any doubts surrounding their intentions.”

Morsi’s sensible suggestion is buried beneath the shoddy coverage in the US media that concentrates on Ahmadinejad’s antics (although he was uncharacteristically subdued this year) and on Bibi’s baseless threats. The UN Charter emphasizes that its role is to fight for disarmament, not simply conflict prevention. The Charter is closer to Allen Ginsberg’s advice to the US about atom bombs (in Howl) than it is to the cynical use made of its chamber by Colin Powell in 2003 and now Netanyahu.

President Obama continues to tout the withdrawal of troops from Iraq on the campaign trail as one of his foreign policy accomplishments. The other being the extrajudicial assassination of Osama bin Laden. But not all American troops are out of Iraq. Some have stayed behind to “help out” and they operate under the civilian umbrella of the gargantuan U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. The catastrophic failure of reconstruction projects due to fraud and corruption and the disappearance of tens of billions of dollars in and from Iraq have been documented by journalists and investigated by Congress. But in all fairness, one should never overlook the success stories no matter how minor. The Al-Nahrain Center in Baghdad is one.

On June 17 the Iraqi Prime Minister cut the ribbons to inaugurate the al-Nahrain Center for Strategic Studies. But he did not mention the role of the U.S. Embassy in funding the project in his speech, nor did he inform Iraqi citizens of the scope of its activities. He stressed the role to be played by the War College and the National Defense College, both of which are linked to the al-Nahrain Center, in “training strategic cadres to build the state, internally and externally.” Two days later, on June 19, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad issued a press release that was relatively less laconic than Maliki’s speech about the nature and actual goals of the center. Here are some excerpts from the release. I have bolded the revealing parts:

“. . .The center was sponsored by the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, in coordination with the Government of Iraq, as set out by the Strategic Framework Agreement. The June 17 opening ceremony launched a three-day Iraqi Regional Security Seminar featuring presentations from scholars and experts from Iraq, the U.S. and other countries.  The seminar’s objective was to define strategic relationships and reinforce the commitment to partnership and cooperation between Iraq, the U.S. and regional partners.

The center. . .will facilitate regional dialogue and serve as a basis for partnership building between Iraq and other nations throughout the region. The $15 million complex, with funding from the U.S. Embassy, was completed in two years and represents Iraq’s commitment to professional development and strategic studies for senior Iraq officials. The complex features first-class conference and meeting facilities, video teleconference capabilities, classroom buildings, and a student center, complete with a library, auditorium and coffee shop.

Senior Iraqi leaders will receive education in areas such as defense economics, civil-military relations, leadership and management, regional security issues and strategic resource planning.  The center will also engage academic partners, both regional and international, to facilitate out-of-country military-to-military exchanges for training and development. . .The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad was honored to support this initiative.”

It is truly heartwarming that this project, unlike hundreds of others that had to do with Iraq’s infrastructure and vital services and needs such as electricity, potable water, hospitals. . . etc, was completed efficiently and on time. Here you can watch a video of the facilities right before inauguration. American military personnel can be seen at 1:28 to 2:20. Here is an earlier video from the DVIDS (Defense Video and Imagery Distribution System) about the project.

In a country that had the highest level of literacy in the developing world by 1980, illiteracy has now jumped to 20 percent. Iraq’s higher education system is in shambles and the number of fake diplomas in Iraq is in the thousands. So why the urgency and who are the “cadres” Maliki is referering to in his speech? Those who are already practicing “state building” in Iraq and have distinguished themselves in corruption and pervasive violence, but need further training from American experts or regional counterparts? And what is exactly meant by “external state building?” The language in the press release and the code words (military training, strategic and regional cooperation. . . etc) are reminiscent of the discourse and practices of the notorious School of the Americas (SOA). The 60,000 alumni of the SOA went on to terrorize and massacre civilian populations in their countries and have included eleven military dictators from Noriega (Chile), Galtieri and Viola (Argentina), Alvarado (Peru), to Suarez (Bolivia) and others who became “some of the worst human rights abusers in Latin American history.” Although the SOA was closed in December of 2000, it reopened in January 2001, but under a new name: the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC).

An upcoming two-day “western style” seminar for 120 people at al-Nahrain Center (November 5-6) dubbed Iraq Regional Security Seminar (IRSS) will cost $233,000 to host. This is according to the no-bid contract won by BH Defense. You can read the details here. This despite the fact that the U.S. Inspector General had called for a halt in funding the entire project back in January 2011. This might explain why al-Nahrain’s previous appellation was the Iraq International Academy. Al-Nahrain (two rivers, i.e. the Tigris and Euphrates) is definitely cozier and more authentic. The “contract justification” cites Obama’s January 2012 speech “Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership-Priorities for 21^st Century Defense”:

“Whenever possible, we will develop innovative, low-cost, and small-footprint approaches to achieve our security objectives, relying on exercises, rotational presence, and advisory capabilities.”

It is neither innovative, unless drones are on the agenda, nor low-cost. I am sure if Iraqi citizens knew what this center represents and the violence it will perpetrate and institutionalize, they would want it closed yesterday.

This “small-footprint” is way too big. 

The 25 January revolution can be considered the final showdown of the Nasserist socio-political order, which has been slowly decaying since the 1967 defeat. Nasserism was based on a paternalistic authoritarian state where political rights were sacrificed for social and economic ones.

The collapse of the remnants of the Nasserist political apparatus implies the absence of the institutional framework through which the social conflict was traditionally managed in Egypt for over six decades. This poses the greatest challenge to the current ruling party, which has to find a new ruling order — one that differs from the Nasserist system of Gamal Abdel Nasser and his military successors.

The Six-Day War of 1967 leveled a lethal blow to the whole Nasserist order, setting it on a long-declining trajectory. Under Anwar Sadat, attempts were made to generate economic growth through partial economic liberalization while trying to appease the traditional Nasserist constituencies made up of state employees, public-sector workers, officers and students. Yet the January 1977 riots revealed the fragility of Sadat’s regime.

Under Mubarak, the authoritarian state could no longer manage its fiscal crisis as oil-related rent plummeted in the second half of the 1980s. In 1990 and 1991, the regime adopted the Structural Adjustment Program under the auspices of the IMF, the World Bank, USAID, and later the EU. Gradual yet consistent trade and financial liberalization, deregulation, and privatization took place throughout the 1990s. The pace was accelerated and the scope widened since 2004 under former Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif’s cabinet.

As the state was no longer capable of delivering the side-payments necessary for the appeasement of the traditional Nasserist constituencies, the authoritarian regime could only survive through more oppression, yet broad social bases no longer supported authoritarianism. Political and social protests started to challenge the security apparatus and to claim parts of the public sphere since 2004. Political protest remained confined to intellectuals and middle-class activists whereas socio-economic protest mobilized the sum of millions of workers on the factory-level calling for higher wages and better working conditions.

State paternalism was crippled by the state fiscal calamity and the wider socio-economic crisis. New social strata and generations had the will and means to challenge authoritarianism while corruption, the deterioration of public services and the inability to increase state revenue all combined to accelerate the regime’s breakdown. Whereas political protest aimed at the toppling of Mubarak, socio-economic protest operated within the classical paternalistic moral economy, which demanded the state to deliver. However, both forms of protest were merged in April 2008 during the riots in Mahalla, which was, to some extent, the precursor of the January uprising. In brief, Mubarak’s regime collapsed under the weight of a severe social crisis that could not be borne by the regime’s ossified authoritarian institutions.

The collapse of the remnants of the Nasserist regime with the toppling of Mubarak in the aftermath of the January revolution mandates a new modus operandi — specifically vis-à-vis socio-economic rights — by the conservative newly-elected Islamists. Unfortunately, there seems to be some kind of a tacit accord between almost all to insulate the future political sphere from potential demands of socio-economic change. The military council, which was solely in charge of managing the transitional process, confined political rights to political parties while denying rights and freedoms to more grassroots organizations such as unions, cooperatives, syndicates, chambers of commerce and industry and student unions. The Muslim Brotherhood has no clear socio-economic vision. Their agenda for state restructuring, the nature of the economic order, and the extent of political freedoms is quite vague. A strong faction within the group is explicitly in favor of further neoliberal reforms blaming the rather weak economic performance under Mubarak on corruption.

Will that suffice to forge a broad social coalition on which the Brotherhood can build its future hegemony? The Brothers’ ideas about state reform are quite technical and apolitical. The group seems not to be prepared to mobilize its popular, electoral, and organizational capital to reinvent the political order in a way that could ease and manage the social crisis. Socio-economic protest has increased since Mubarak’s ouster as economic hardship persists and the police state is no more. This implies that the coming elected parliament and government will be subject to tremendous pressure to deliver side-payments for some time to come.

The current governing bloc has three options to (re)establish a stable and representative political order. The first option is to pursue macroeconomic populist policies to raise wages and deliver services. This will depend on heavy public indebtedness and large deficits. This option is not realistic, as Mubarak himself had been running such populist schemes to overcome the legitimacy and fiscal problems. The coming government will have to be fiscally conservative and to spend from real resources. Otherwise, the chances of overall economic recovery will dwindle.

The second option is even less attainable, namely to resort to state terrorism to oppress demands and reestablish some bureaucratic authoritarian order. Had this option been on the table, the military would have been the most capable of doing so without giving in to political concessions. The third option is to treat the state fiscal crisis through taxation with all the implied political, economic and administrative reform. This would mean igniting class conflict as the state collects from the wealthy in favor of the poor, necessitating the formation of a socio-political coalition in support of the reconstruction of the Egyptian state, and the redistribution of political and economic rights alike.

If the ruling bloc decides to defend the status quo, then this would mean the perpetuation of the socio-economic and political crisis, i.e., instating an illegitimate and unstable, albeit elected, order. Egypt is facing a historic transformation. A democratic and developmental order is demanded for the first time in the country’s modern history. This is a clear break since “development” was historically delivered through a paternalistic authoritarian setting.

The real question that lurks in the horizon, however, is this: which socio-political groups can forge a coalition in support of a democratic developmental order in Egypt?

[This article originally appeared in Egypt Independent.]

[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on the Arabian Peninsula and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the Arabian Peninsula Page Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each week's roundup to ap@jadaliyya.com by Monday night of every week.]

Regional and International Relations

Citing US Fears, Arab Allies Limit Syrian Rebel Aid Robert Worth argues that Saudi Arabia and Qatar have not provided the Syrian rebels with heavy weapons because of discouragement from the United States, in The New York Times.

Reports and Opinions

Kuwaiti Emir Dissolves Parliament A news report on Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah's decision to dissolve the 2009 parliament in a bid to end crisis, on Al-Jazeera English.

Saudis Protest after Chicken Prices Soar Andrew Liddle reports on the Twitter movement, "Let it Rot," that urges Saudis to stop buying chicken in protest at the high prices, in The Independent.

Whose Refugees Matter More? Mona Kareem reflects on the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees' position on the question of refugees and the stateless in the Gulf States, in al-Akhbar English.

Crisis in Yemen

Yemen "Foils al-Qaeda Plan to Bomb Air Base" A news report on a bomb discovered in al-Anad air base, which is used by US troops to train local forces, on Al-Jazeera English.

Yemen: Determined to Self-Determine Jomana Farhat analyzes the situation in Yemen in light of the upcoming National Dialogue conference and the tensions between the Islamist Islah party and the Houthi movement, in Al-Akhbar English.

Repression in Bahrain

Protesters Clash with Police in Bahrain A news report on the protests that erupted in Manama after a memorial held for a man who died in jail, on Al-Jazeera English.

Economy and Markets

Qatar Telecom Holds 92% of Kuwait Company Shereen El Gazzar and Nikhil Lohade report on Qatar's acquisition of 199.65 million shares in Qatar Telecom, in The Wall Street Journal.
 

Arabic

1. Paralysis in Washington

US policy on Iran is paralyzed. A report from mid-September by the Iran Project shows how the Obama agenda is poorly considered. This report, “Weighing the Costs of Military Action Against Iran,” comes with the imprimatur of Washington’s retired eminences: politicians (Republican Senator Chuck Hagel and Democratic Congressman Lee Hamilton), ambassadors (Frank Wisner and Thomas Pickering), and military officers (Admiral William Fallon and General Anthony Zinni). It suggests that if the United States attacks Iran, it would push back an Iranian nuclear program by only four years. If such an attack were to take place, the report suggests, it would galvanize the Iranian government to create a nuclear weapons shield.

A US attack on Iran would hasten an Iranian nuclear weapons program that is not on the agenda at this time. The intelligence agencies of the United States, Israel, and the International Atomic Energy Agency have concluded that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program. “That assessment,” one US official told the New York Times’ James Risen, “holds up really well.” The talk of redlines and pre-emptive strikes, therefore, are disproportionate to the threat posed by Iran to the US client, Israel. The Iran Project report marvels at a policy establishment that wants to act against something it knows does not exist — to bomb a nuclear weapons program that is simply not there.

2. Distress in the Bazaars

Very few in the US military establishment are eager for an attack on Iran. Retired Lt. General Gregory Newbold, a former operations chief for the US Joint Chiefs of Staff and a respected person in the military, told Robert Burns of the Associated Press, “Planners and pundits ought to consider that the riots and unrest following a Web entry about an obscure film are probably a fraction of what could happen following a strike — by the Israelis or United States — on Iran.” The Obama administration probably concurs with this view, although they have held their cards close to their campaign’s chest. No view adverse to Tel Aviv will be allowed prior to the November election.

US policy, currently, is to strangle Iran through economic warfare. The sanctions against the Central Bank of Iran have led to the Iranian currency, the Rial, losing half its value in less than a month. Food prices have skyrocketed and basic supplies have disappeared from the markets. Riots in the bazaars threaten to bring social distress to the country. US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the Senate Arms Services Committee in February of this year that the sanctions “probably will not jeopardize the regime,” but will certainly, “have greater impacts on Iran.” By “Iran,” Clapper means the seventy-five million Iranians. The US political class is in agreement: “Sanctions,” they say gleefully, “are working.” This is reminiscent of US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s callous statement in 1996; when asked about the half-million dead Iraqi children resulting from the sanctions against the regime, she said, “we think the price is worth it.”

3. Tact and Trust

A military attack, or the Netanyahu Road, is out of the question. Economic sanctions, or the Obama Road, simply brings distress to the population and might even harden the regime’s attitude toward the West. Economic warfare is not the same as diplomacy, although by yoking the two ideas together, the Obama administration is trying to make this so.

Diplomacy is founded on confidence. Iran does not trust the United States. Its contemporary history militates against any belief in what the US leadership says. Much of this distrust goes back to the August 1953 coup against the democratically elected President Mohammed Mosaddegh. His regime nationalized oil production and started the country down the path of social reconstruction. A CIA report from January 1953 said that his reforms had “almost universal Iranian support.” Nonetheless, the agency removed him from power, and its director, Allen Dulles, personally escorted the Shah to his Peacock Throne. The CIA helped arm and train the Shah’s massive security apparatus, the SAVAK, which rivaled that of any authoritarian state. It was because of the thirty-year collusion between the United States and the Shah that the Iranian revolution of 1978-79 delivered its mandate not only to the clerics, but also to an anti-American dispensation. There has been no attempt to build trust across the divide. Instead, US President Jimmy Carter enunciated a doctrine to protect the Saudi monarchy from any threat (namely from Iran) and the Gulf Arabs with US egging pushed Iraq to invade Iran in 1980. Such a history deservedly leads the Iranians, not just the clerics, toward suspicion of US motives and fears of US action.

The first step to build trust from the US side would be to come clean about this terrible history. Saturated with American exceptionalism and with the blindness of American innocence, such a pathway is unlikely to unfold. The United States is trapped by its own arrogance – and by its fealty to Israel, whose current leadership is obsessed with Iran. It is true that Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad makes dangerous threats against Israel and makes ridiculous assertions about history, particularly the Nazi genocide of European Jews. Ahmadinejad won the presidential election in 2005, and was re-elected in a highly disputed election in 2009. He leaves office in 2013. For the United States to build an Iran policy based on the antics of Ahmadinejad, who is unpopular in his own country, is to make a grievous error. Since that is precisely what the United States has been doing, it has left itself very few options apart from economic warfare and military strikes. Real diplomacy is off the table.

4. Geography is Destiny

Iran, by dint of geography, is an important actor both in Central Asia and in West Asia. The two major US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq dethroned Iran’s enemies, the Taliban and the Ba’ath regime of Saddam Hussein. In their place came governments friendly to Tehran, the governments of Hamid Karzai and of Nouri al-Maliki. As part of its attempt to strangle Iran, the United States has put pressure on those who import Iranian oil to stop this immediately. However, US-occupied Afghanistan is landlocked and continues to import half of its oil from its neighbor Iran. The Obama Administration accused Iraq’s Elaf Islamic Bank of punching a hole through the embargo, and it has accused Iraq of allowing Iranian aircraft to fly over its airspace into Syria. No threat has been able to bring Iraq to heel, and no alternatives to Iranian oil have been able to persuade Karzai to cut his imports.

Iran is currently in the middle of significant negotiations to create a “southern Silk Road,” which would give India direct access to Central Asian and Iranian markets. Since 2003, Afghanistan, India, and Iran have jointly worked to build the port of Chabahar in southeastern Iran, and to link this port to Afghanistan by Indian and Iranian built road and rail systems. About seventy percent of the port is complete, with most of the investment coming from Iran. A meeting at the sidelines of the 16th Non-Alignment Movement Summit in Tehran in September brought assurances that India would be able to invest to complete the port. Iran has built a road from Chabahar to the Afghan border, and India has substantially completed a road from the border to Zarang/Delaram, which is on the Kandahar-Heart highway. In other words, Chabahar is linked to Kabul and to Central Asia. The Indians plan to build a railway line from Chabahar to the mineral rich area of Hajigak in Afghanistan (assets estimated at one to three trillion dollars). The Iranians plan to build a freight line from Herat (Afghanistan) to Mashhad (Iran), and then onwards into Turkey. This project will take a decade to complete.

The United States has put considerable pressure on India to cut back on its oil purchases. India now imports between ten and fifteen percent of its oil needs from Iran, a figure much reduced from five years ago. For the past two decades, India has cultivated close ties with the United States. It was willing to pay a stiff price (voting against Iran in the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2005 and 2009) to come out of the nuclear cold (through the 2008 United States-India Civil Nuclear Agreement) despite not being a member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), unlike Iran. Nonetheless, India remains a major trading partner with its close neighbor, even crafting an interesting payment vehicle to help circumvent the harsh European and US sanctions regime against Iran (Iran will accept forty-five percent of its oil payments in Indian rupees, which will help bolster Indian exports into Iran). The opportunity of Chabahar has now put India in a mini-bind: should it invest more in this major project and gain access to Central Asian trade, or should it make Washington happy and snub Iran?

Afghanistan remains under US occupation. India seeks a close equation with the Unite States. Iran and the United States are hostile powers. Yet, these three countries, with very different relations with the United States, now find that geography is their destiny. A pragmatic foreign policy built on the urgency of economic development draws these states together. Afghanistan needs access to a port and oil, as well as manufactured goods. Iran needs to sell its oil. India wants to find markets for its manufactured goods, and to find a ready supply of oil. Such linkages are hard to ignore.

The southern Silk Road is an important development in the creation of regionalism, linking South Asia to Central Asia, and West Asia to China. No longer will these regions need to go through US and European-dominated routes to conduct their trade. The hub (US-Europe) and spokes (the rest) approach to world affairs is being rendered anachronistic by these developments. As a result of the growth of regionalism, US primacy and its unipolar approach is being set aside. The deepening links with Iran are a testament to the lack of US domination in the region, and of its political failure to isolate Iran.

To isolate Iran and threaten it will only make the caged tiger roar louder. To build confidence for the web of relationships in the region is the only way to build a stable foundation for what the Iran Project calls “the best and permanent way” to end the standoff. Such an approach would have to recognize that the time of US primacy is over, and that the time of multilateralism and regionalism is now at hand.

The march from the Cairo district of Shubra was huge, like the numbers on 28 January. In the front row was a group of men in long white bibs, “martyr upon demand” written on their chests. A tiny old lady walked among them, waving a large wooden cross: “God protect you my children, God protect you.”

"The moment I saw my brother laying on the ground covered with blood, after he was run over by an armoured military vehicle, fails to leave my memory, even one year later. Especially as I was hit when I tried to pick him up," says Wael Bishay, brother of Ayman, forty, who died in the 9 October Maspero massacre last year.

Wael Bishay, thirty-one, is one of many who cannot forget the bloody events of that night, when at least twenty-five protesters died during clashes with the Egyptian army at a peaceful protest for Christian rights outside Cairo's state media headquarters.

One year on, only three soldiers, who have been charged with "involuntary manslaughter" and sentenced to just two and three years in jail, have been held responsible for the events.

In a report released last week, Amnesty International criticised the Egyptian authorities for failing "to conduct a full, impartial and independent investigation into the circumstances of the violence and bring those responsible to account."

9 October As It Happened

"Bloody Sunday" saw hundreds of peaceful protesters, the majority of which were Copts, march from Cairo's working-class district of Shubra to the state radio and television building Maspero.

Maspero was chosen as state media had sparked widespread disapproval due to its coverage of preceding events.

The protest, which the government and the military reportedly approved, was leveled at the authorities who had failed to investigate the burning of a church, in Merinab village in the upper Egyptian governorate of Aswan.

The torching of the church, reportedly by Muslim youth, followed an escalation in attacks on Christian buildings and homes after the January 25 Revolution, despite Christians and Muslims fighting side-by-side for a "better Egypt" during the eighteen-day uprising.

Copts complained that the violent incidents against their community were usually informally resolved by public or religious leaders, without Egypt's legal system being involved.

Protesters were assaulted within an hour of setting off by unknown assailants wielding bottles and rocks. As they neared Maspero, the military attacked.

Video footage taken by activists and journalists shows the army running over protesters in military vehicles, in some cases mounting pavements outside the state media building. Eyewitness accounts and wounds of those who died prove live ammunition was used.

"I saw army soldiers throwing bodies of protesters in the Nile," Bishay told Ahram Online. "I remember seeing three armored personnel carriers (APCs) intentionally running over protesters, each APC had three to four army personnel inside."

"For the first time in my life, I heard soldiers saying Allah Akbar (God is great) after killing Coptic protesters," said Ramy Kamel from the Maspero Youth Union, who claims it was a targeted sectarian attack.
 
"The army soldiers were firing live ammunition at protesters," added Hani Hanna, a researcher in Coptic issues. "We saw people in civilian clothes firing live ammunition as well; I saw many falling down after being shot."

Nevertheless, the Ministry of Defence denied the use of live bullets and claimed that the vehicles "unintentionally" knocked down protesters.

Three days after the massacre in a televised press conference, SCAF members said that the military was not to blame and claimed soldiers had died but refused to officially announce the number of "fallen" officers. Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) member General Mohamed El-Assar insisted army personnel were unarmed and conversely were attacked by the protesters.

The military council then conducted its own investigation into the events in October and officially exonerated the army of wrongdoing.

Justice Awarded?

Two legal cases were launched in December following the bloody events. One a military investigation into the fourteen protesters killed after they were run over by APCs, the other a civilian investigation into the deaths of eight protesters from live ammunition.

It was not until September of this year that the military prosecutor sentenced Mahmoud Sayed Abdel-Hamid Suleiman, twenty-one, Karam Hamed Mohamed Hamed, twenty-one, to two years and Mahmoud Gamal Taha Mahmoud, twenty-two, to three years in jail, after they were charged with involuntary manslaughter.

The court ruled they were guilty of "negligence and absence of caution, while they were driving armed forces armored personnel carriers in an arbitrary fashion... leading to them striking the victims."

The civil tribunal investigating the use of live ammunition and the deaths of eight protesters, on the other hand, closed the case due to a lack of evidence.

"This sentence is neither fair nor sufficient, in the end, army personal obey orders, the man who gave the order [former head of the military council] Hussien Tantawi should have faced trial," maintained Nabil Gabrial, a Human Rights lawyer representing five of the families of those killed at Maspero.

Illegal Trials

The fact that the SCAF was ruling the country, in charge of the officers who attacked the protest and at the same time investigating the case was seen by many as an astonishing conflict of interest.  

“How can a military court rule in a situation where military personal are accused in a civil case?” asks Gabraial, adding that this could only lead to a massively biased verdict.

Accordingly, a case was filled at Egypt's Administrative Court in March 2012 calling for all cases related to the Maspero massacre to be aborted, due to the lack of impartiality and independence, as military personnel were being investigated by a military prosecution.

The case was adjourned until 30 October.

In addition, a conflict of jurisdiction case was filed with the Constitutional Court in February this year demanding that all investigations and rulings in these cases be stopped, this is also ongoing.

"Dividing a case into two pieces across military and civil courts is illegal," Gabraial told Ahram Online.

Protesters Blamed, State Media Involvement

In the aftermath, the military prosecution hauled thirty-one civilians in front of military courts, including well-known activist and blogger Alaa Abdel-Fattah. They were charged with using violence against the armed forces and in some instances for possession of or stealing army weapons.

"We were not carrying any arms, these kinds of accusations were leveled at protesters to distract and brainwash the public," Kamel asserted.

Although twenty-nine of the thirty-one were released in December 2011, two, Michael Abdel-Naguib and Mosaad Shaker, are still facing charges of confiscating an automatic gun belonging to the military. Cairo Criminal Court adjourned the case until 4 November of this year.

The belief that the protesters had initiated the violence was propagated by state media during the bloody crackdown.

As demonstrators were dying outside the media headquarters, inside the walls, state television called on the nation to "come and protect the armed forces" from their supposed assailants. State-run Channel One TV host Rasha Magdy repeatedly claimed the military were under attack.

Hanna is one of many who believe that the events on 9 October were "organized" and that "different state agencies collaborated to make it happen." Accordingly, a case was filed against the state television channel at the end of last year, accusing it of promoting lies.

After extensive investigations by the civil court, it was ruled that "two of the accused media personal were to face punishment by their work entity," Gabraial told Ahram Online.

The Legacy of Maspero

No one has been held responsible for the deaths and so activists promise to keep fighting until the "main" instigators face trial. Several protests are expected to take place on the anniversary, including marches following the route taken a year ago.

"Soldiers do not open fire without receiving an order from their [then ] leader Tantawi, accordingly the military council should face trial for Maspero massacre," Hanna asserted.

It seems that some steps have been taken to achieve this. This month, it was announced that Tantawi, former chief of staff Sami Anan, former military police head Hamdy Badeen and current military police head Ibrahim El-Domiaty are to be investigated for their role in the deaths of protesters.  

This decision was taken after twenty-four complaints were submitted to the public prosecutor by relatives of the dead and the case was finally transferred to the justice minister.

"I will fight till my last breath to see justice for all in Egypt," Bishay concluded, spurred on by his brother's memory. "Unfortunately, we are moving backwards."

[Developed in partnership with Ahram Online.]

One year ago, nearly thirty Egyptians, almost all Coptic Christians protesting against sectarian violence, were murdered as they marched on Maspero, the Egyptian Radio and Television Union building in downtown Cairo.

The events of that day are seared into my memory despite the fact that I was thousands of miles away at the time ­— not least, the images of devastation and desolation that were photographed and videotaped at the Coptic Hospital as the victims of the violence sought medical aid. In my view as a historian of modern Egypt, there are few traumas that can compare to the trauma of 9–10 October 2011.

For me, Maspero has joined Dinshaway and Bahr al-Baqar as sites of memory, the mere mention of which evokes a panoply of images in the mind’s eye.

The pace of events in Egypt is now so great that the revolution often strikes me as having taken place ages ago, rather than a mere twenty months ago. For whatever reason, though, Maspero is an exception to this: Maspero seems like only yesterday.

Perhaps this is because of the vividness of the images of that day — images whose horror and desolation seem not to diminish with time. Or perhaps this is because of the peculiar futility that I associate with the massacre — the overwhelming sense that, despite the horrors that transpired, nothing that happened that day had a purpose.

I should emphasize immediately that this is not to say that the massacre is without meaning. The victims of the massacre are described by both Copts and Muslims as martyrs. Among Copts, this language of martyrdom has a particular resonance, rooted in a history of struggle as the practitioners of a minority faith in Egypt.

When I refer to the peculiar futility of Maspero, I am speaking, rather, of the persistent difficulty I have had understanding and explaining the events of 9–10 October 2011. There are those, for instance, who immediately took up the language of “pogroms” to account for the events.

In crudest form, this account of the massacre breezily invokes a purportedly primordial conflict between Copts and Muslims in Egypt, of which Maspero was only the latest instance. Less crudely put, this “pogrom” account suggests a divide-and-rule strategy on the part of the military authorities who then ruled Egypt — that is to say, anti-Christian violence was used as a means to divert attention away from threats to the rule of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.

My own view at the time was that neither of these accounts was persuasive — that the SCAF, above all, sought to send the message that protest was unacceptable. In this sense, Maspero fit into an existing pattern of attacks on freedom of speech and assembly undertaken by the SCAF, of which the prior “virginity tests” and the subsequent Battle of Mohamed Mahmoud formed part.

Yet there was, and remains, the gnawing suspicion that even this explanation was not enough. As a close colleague and friend asked upon listening to my view, “But did it not matter that they were Copts?”

It did. It did matter that they were Copts. It mattered not in the sense that there is a primordial conflict between Copts and Muslims, nor in the sense that the massacre was of a cynical SCAF’s design.

It mattered in the sense that there exists in Egyptian public life what I would call a latent sectarianism, which denigrates the citizenship of Copts.

There is an important sense in which, during the past forty years, the Copts and the Muslims of Egypt have become two solitudes — that is to say, two communities that share one space and yet fail to communicate in basic ways. To my mind, this trend is related above all to the decline of public spaces — both literal and figurative — in which this communication can take place. In the absence of such communication, a latent sectarianism has thrived.

Regrettably, the evidence for this latent sectarianism is not hard to come by, as Coptic families flee their homes to secure their lives and livelihoods, as Coptic teachers fend off blasphemy accusations from peers and students, and as Coptic children find themselves in police custody for playing with the wrong set of papers. And perhaps most disturbing of all is a Constituent Assembly that seems more concerned with the terms of exclusion from the Egyptian polity than inclusion.

There is a strange irony in the identification of Maspero with this sectarianism and the attendant depredation of Copts’ citizenship. The area of the Radio and Television Union building was named in honor of Gaston Maspero, a French Egyptologist who repeatedly served as the head of the Egyptian Antiquities Service in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

But Gaston Maspero’s interests were not limited to ancient Egypt. Indeed, on 19 November 1908, he visited the Ramses Club in Cairo to deliver a lecture on the links between the ancient and modern inhabitants of Egypt.

The final words of the lecture are still worth pondering, a century later:

What is the conclusion? It is straightforward: There are not two Egypts, one Coptic and one Muslim, but only one Egypt. To be a Muslim or a Copt is a question of religion. In France, we too have citizens with different religious convictions, but whether Protestants or Catholics, they are all French. A bit of tolerance, a bit of goodwill here and there, and among you, Muslims and Copts will soon recognize that they are one people.

For all of his colonial condescension, Maspero had a point — one that eluded the perpetrators of the massacre that now, lamentably, bears his name. 

[This article originally appeared in Egypt Independent.]

[”ملف من الأرشيف“ هي سلسة جديدة تقوم ”جدلية“ بنشرها بالعربية والإنجليزية بالتعاون مع جريدة ”السفير“ اللبنانية. الملفات ستكون لشخصيات أيقونية تركت أثراً عميقاً في الحقل السياسي والثقافي في العالم العربي.]

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الإسم: بدر

الشهرة: سياب

إسم الأب: شاكر

إسم الأم: كريمة السياب

مكان الولادة: جيكور

تاريخ الولادة: 1925

تاريخ الوفاة: 1964

تاريخ الزواج: 1955

إسم الزوجة: إقبال طه عبد الجليل

الأولاد: غيداء/ غيلاء/آلاء

الجنسية: عراقي

الإختصاص: إجازة من دار المعلمين العليا

الفئة: مؤلف

المهنة: شاعر

"كان ديمقريطس وهرقليطس فيلسوفين. اعتبر أولهما الحالة البشرية مضحكة باطلة، فما ظهر بين الناس إلا والضحك والسخرية ملء وجهه. أما هرقليطس فقد شفق على الحالة البشرية وعطف عليها، فما انقشع الأسى عن وجهه يوماً، وماخلت عيناه من الدموع.."

مونتين

الخيال / الثورة:

الثورة "فعل رفضوي حاسم" ، فهي تقوم على رفض الحاضر كاملاً وكلية، والجنوح بشتى الوسائل التعبيرية –بداية من اللغة- إلى نقضه وإزالته ، و إستبداله -وليس إصلاحه- ، وهو فعل لا يصدر بمنأى عن التخيل الحر إذ أنه قمة الحرية في التخيل ،ماكانت لتكون ثورة مالم تكن فكرة رحيل إبن علي ومبارك حتى اللحظة الأخيرة الماقبل ثورية بل وفي اثناء الثورة إلا محض خيال فاضح وجامح. فمن منا تخيل يوماً أن طغاة العرب سيهرب منهم من يهرب و يسجن منهم من يسجن، كيف ذلك وبلادنا تتحقق فيها النصيحة: "إذا تكلمت نهارا فأخفت ، و إذا تكلمت ليلا فإلتفت"، هي التي صدحت فيها عبارة "الشعب يريد إسقاط النظام".
ولم يتوقف الخيال عند هذا الحد ، فسيرورة الخطاب الثوري من "الشعب يريد إسقاط النظام" إلى "الشعب يريد محاكمة السفاح" وغيرها من التعبيرات التي بقيت لعقود سجينة الخوف و الظلمة ، هي تطور تعبيري عما يعتمل خيالاً في الوعي الجمعي العربي، و التي لم تكن لولا أن تحرر الخيال فينا وخرج للفضاء العام. الجذر التخيلي للثورة -أي ثورة- في مقاومة الواقع وتغييره ، لابد لنا أن يقودنا للتوقف أما التالي:

أولاً: لكل منا القدرة على التخيل ، فكل منجزاتنا الإنسانية مابدأت إلا خيالاً وحلماً ، وسواءاً أدركنا ما نقترف من خيال أم لم ندرك ، هو مطبوع في عقلنا اللاواعي ، وهو الأكثر تأثيراً على تصرفاتنا و إدراكنا للعالم ولذواتنا، وهنا موطن القوة ، فلولا تلك القدرة لما واجهت القوة المتخيلة (إرادة الشعوب) تلك القوة المتحققة (الأجهزة القمعية).

ثانياً: ولأن الرواية هي "بداية جديدة للعالم" بمنطق الراحل إدوارد سعيد، أي أنها محاولة لخلق عالم جديد، فكذلك هي الثورة ، من حيث أنها إعادة خلق وإبتداء لعالم (مجتمع) جديد ، بعد إعلان رفض الحاضر المستلب ، بعبارة أخرى الثائر يحمل وجهاً من وجوه الروائي، مما يتحقق في القول أن الثورة لا تقوم لتحقيق الممكن و إلا ماكانت ثورة ، الثورة تقوم لتحقيق المستحيل (المستحيل الذي لا يتسع له الحاضر/الواقع، و إلا ماكان مستحيلاً) ، وهنا تنكسر الصورة النمطية (الكليشيه) التي تنظر للروائي والثائر –والشاعر كمثقف عضوي- على أنه منفصل عن الواقع ويعيش في بعد منفصل عن العالم و الواقع ، ونعيد للتذكير: ألم تكن الثورة حلماً؟ ألم يكن إسقاط هؤلاء الطغاة ضرباً من المستحيل؟ ألم يكن تخيلاً جامحاً أن تنزل الشعوب إلى الميادين العامة وتصدح بما خفت به حديثها ليلا: "الشعب يريد إعداء الرئيس"؟.

ثالثاً: إن لحظتي الوعي السابقتين: "التخيل" لبداية و عالم جديدين ومستحيلين و "الرفض" لواقع معاش و مستلب ، هما اللحظتين اللتين تتحدان لتخلقا "العمل الروائي" وهو الواقع المتخيل ، الذي يجب أن يكون ، و "الشخصيات الروائية" المتخيلة التي تعمل على خلق ذلك العالم المتخيل و/أو السعي إليه بديلا عن الواقع المعاش.
وهو تماماً ما يمكن مطابقته مع شرارات الثورات العربية ، بداية من محمد البوعزيزي الذي أعلن رفضه لواقعه المستلب بالظلم و الطغيان ، ففعل أكثر خيالاتنا "إستحالةً" وجموحاً وخيالاً فأحرق نفسه. وخالد سعيد الذي وقع عليه من الوحشية و الدموية والبشاعة مالا يمكن تخيله ، فقط لأنه رفض واقعه ، و أعلن ذلك الرفض بغية تغييره، فكان كما وصفه الكثير من الشباب "هو مثلي و مثل كل فرد فينا هو أنا و أنت و هو". وكان أطفال درعا وحمزة الخطيب هم جموح الفطرة فينا في التخيل و الرغبة في الإنعتاق، من واقع لا يتسع لخيالنا.
هم شخوص وجودوا في واقعنا ليحرروا خيالاتنا ، ويقروا بمستحيل قابل للتحقق ،ليبشروا بخيال حر ، تلك أهم وظائف الأدب. أحرار هم من مستحيلاتنا ، شخوص روائية حية وحرة ، حرية تخرج عن سيطرة الطرف الأقوى من العلاقة بين الروائي و شخصياته المتخيلة ، فالشخصيات الروائية تامة الحرية لها مواقفها و تحيزاتها و تجاربها و إنتماءاتها ، اللاتي ليس بالضرورة أن تتفق مع كاتب النص ولا متلقيه ، وهو عين الثورة والأدب أن تخرج عن الممكن إلى المستحيل ، وتثور بأن تطرح الأسئلة و تستكشف الواقع وتستشرف المستقبل ، و إلا فما الأدب؟

كل هؤلاء إنطبعوا في الوعي والإدراك الجمعي العربي بشكل تخيلي في أحد جوانبه (تماما كالأعمال الروائية الخالدة) ، ومن هنا وجبت الإشارة إلى أن الفارق بين الروائي والثائر أن كلاهما يقوم بفعل التخيل ، و الرفض معاً ، ولكن لكل منهما طريقته و أدواته التعبيرية ، لتظل في النهاية البوصلة واحدة: الحرية و الجمال، وهما الشرطان اللذان متى تحققا في العمل الروائي خلد في الذاكرة و الوعي، وهما –أيضاً- الشرطين اللازمين لنجاح الثورة – أي ثورة-.

الرواية / التاريخ: 

أياً كان موقع الرواية الزمني ، ومهما إدعى كاتبها أنها رواية شخصية لا علاقة لها بالسياق الجماعي ، تظل الرواية تعبيرا عن موقعها وموقع لحظتها الإدراكية في المجتمع و الذات من السيرورة التاريخية التي تؤدي إلى الثورة . وبالتالي تصبح الرواية تحقيقاً لما يسمى "شهادة الأدب" التاريخية (كما يصفها الروائي إلياس خوري) ، من أن تتقيد بفردانية "أدب الشهادة" ودون أن تكسرها في آن.

فالروائي يكتب بشكل أكثر موضوعية وذاتية في آن من السرد التاريخي المستند على بنى صلبة ، فالرواية فن يجمح إلى الإنسان في النهاية، على غير المنوال التاريخي الذي لا ينجو من فداحة خطاب القوة –على حساب الموضوعية-، ولعل هذا ما أراد الناقد هومي بابا الإشارة إليه بالقول أننا في أحوج مانكون لسرد تاريخي يكتبه المنفيون و المقموعون.

الرواية شاهد على التاريخ من جانبيه : الذاتي و الموضوعي، فتتمثل فيها التحيزات و الإدراك الإنساني للسلطة و الوقة و الجمال و الحق و الحرية والخير ، وكل القيم المطلقة الأساسية لتحديد المنطق الأخلاقي في التعامل مع الذات و الآخر. وبالتالي يصبح الروائي مؤرخاً يغلب على خطابه محددين أساسيين يتحددان كلما نزع الإنسان لداخله في فهم ماهو خارجه: الحرية و الجمال، على العكس من السرد التاريخي الذي يتحدد بمحددات تختلف تماما عن السابقة وهو: القوة و الفائدة ، إذ تكاد تتضاد في أغلب السياق التاريخي مع الحرية و الجمال ، بما يضمن فقط للأقوى تشكيل الوعي و الإدراك. 

وتاريخنا الأدبي زاخر بالأمثلة الأدبية التي إنطبعت في الوعي المجتمعي وسجلت لفترة تاريخية حاضرة كأدب السجون وروايات الإجتياح الإسرائيلي للبنان و المقاومة الفلسطينية. إن إدراكنا لأهمية الروائي كمؤرخ "قيمي" للمجتمع عن طريق حالة الحوار و التمثل الروائي يسهم بشكل كبير في تشكيل إدراكنا لذاتنا وتاريخنا ووعينا بسياقنا الحضاري وموقعنا فيه، وذلك عن طريق خلق حالة حوار قيمي معه ومع منتجه المتخيل قبولاً و/أو رفضاً.

كل ذلك تؤسس له النظرة إلى الرواية باعتبارها شهادة عن المجتمع و الحاضر والمستقبل وموقع الإنسان منهم جميعاً ، شريطة أن نتخلص من الفكرة النمطية المقيدة أن الجمالية في الفن نوع من الثمالة والإنفصال عن الواقع المقصورة على فقط إلهاء القاريء عن واقعه ومشاكله ، وجعل التخييل أداة تخدير وتسكين ، وليس أداة تحرر، وكأن لا جمالية في المقاومة و الثورة و الرفض.

The persistence of the regime's cohesion in the face of all the fissures and strikes it has sustained demands that every Syrian—whether an activist, a fighter, a partisan, or [a] silent [observer]—take pause and reconsider the trajectory of change in Syria. This change has exceeded in its level of danger anything our imaginations and expectations contained within them. Every Syrian citizen that does not reconsider the factors of success and failure [of the revolution] can be considered directly responsible for the accumulation of destruction, violence, pain, and bloodshed.

I will not waste time and effort on discussing the internal and external elements of the Syrian political opposition, because they are all in need of an intensive care unit. Their scandalous impotence is the consequence of objective internal and external factors, as well as a regressive self-assertion. Their lack of political programs and instruments has turned them into blocs that are void of revolutionary content, unaware of the real functions and intended gains [of revolutionary blocs]. They are incapable of analyzing the realities and problems of the revolution so as to [adequately] plan its stages and define its tactics for the purposes of expanding the capacities of the revolution. This impotence is expressed through its pitiful and shallow rhetoric, which does not go beyond describing the crimes of the regime in media and bowing down to external intervention. This intellectual and political impoverishment has had catastrophic effects on the course of the revolution, such as the escalation of militant religious discourse and the entrenchment of [various] fears among broad sectors of society, which in turn have held tightly to their role of observers of the fate of the struggle. The absence of political organization and revolutionary political discourse, both of which the revolution was and continues to be in need of, is the primary reason for multiple deviations and setbacks in the course of the revolution. Therefore, let us leave the Syrian political oppositions to their own devices.

Has the armed opposition fared better than the political opposition? Is the former a revolutionary armed opposition or a [set of] fighting forces with particularistic goals? What are its problems and what are the factors underpinning its success?

The revolution is but the midwife of a new society during the latter's birth. However, the primary logic, law, and condition of success of a revolution are not to be found in its peacefulness or arming. Rather, it is to be found in broad popular consensus on a minimal set of objectives, as well as on the dismantling—or, at the very least, the neutralization—of the coercive apparatuses of the ruling regime such that those apparatuses reach a point of self-dissolution under the pressure of popular mobilization. If arming the people (in the waging of revolution) was an inevitable choice, then we need to accept this only as Hegel describes we should: a temporary path in a revolutionary journey. This requires that we know the rules and laws of armed action as well as that we commit ourselves to the factors of its success. Otherwise, armed action will be a prelude to the fall of all.

Therefore, the feasibility of popular arming, or the arming of the opposition, lies in the ability to confiscate or take apart the arms of the regime. If the armed wing of the opposition does not succeed in crafting a well thought-out strategy for this purpose, and therefore fails in establishing this equation, it will inevitably lead to a civil war. At that point, the people will be forced to pay an extremely high cost, even if "the revolution succeeds." We can evoke the example of the armed struggle of peasants in Tambov or that of the Russian naval soldiers at Crohn Stadt against the Soviet government in 1920, both of which ended in failure, despite an immense humanitarian cost. Therefore, taking apart and dissolving the coercive apparatuses upon which the regime relies is a necessary condition for the success of a revolution—that seeks to build a new society based on non-authoritarian and more just governing relationships—rather than for the success of the opposition in merely brining down the ruling regime.

This leads us to the issue of the responsibilities that fall on the armed opposition in Syria, for which it is no longer acceptable to simply carry weapons and clash with the regime's standing army without a planning military mind, a studied military strategy, and an organizational structure that is binding on all the various armed parties. Everyone that takes a stand in a time of revolution, whether it is a military, political, or what is called partisan stance, is fully responsible for the requirements and consequences of his position. Where are the armed battalions, which I will take care to refrain from calling the Free [Syrian] Army due to their lack of coalescing under one military leadership and one military discourse? Where are those that will live up to their responsibilities in the face of its people, the owners of the revolution, and the ones that are paying the great cost?

Let us proceed from the premise that the armed opposition is a national opposition with defined goals. This is in contrast to both a seller of political speeches in the media market and a shop that sells and purchases (with labels of moral value) those that curse the regime. It also contrasts with those that play the role of God's caliph on earth, forcing a militant religious discourse on a diverse people simply because they carry arms.

The armed opposition has other tasks that are clear and defined. These are military tasks, not political or religious tasks. The aspiration of the people cannot be realized without a political opposition whose authority is higher than that of the armed authority. If the armed opposition cannot carry out these tasks and fulfill its responsibilities, we as a people and as a revolutionary mobilization need to correct it and reject it just as we have rejected the many political oppositions that have failed to carry out their political responsibilities. There can be no fear or hesitancy in critiquing the Syrian armed opposition. This is because no person and no party is above the interests of the people, their will, or the revolution. The people have raised the following slogan in their peaceful mobilization: the revolution is above all. Those that cannot accept critiquing the armed opposition or confronting its problems do so for one of several reasons: they are naturally ignorant of things; their fears that the revolutionary winds had chased away have returned to them; or they do not want the revolution to succeed but rather to deviate.

Let us therefore put forth the following thoughts to the armed opposition in Syria, to its various leaderships, and to ourselves. Let us try to seek out the position of the combat forces relative to the revolutionary popular mobilization so that we can all work towards saving the country.

1) It is assumed that the armed wing of the revolution is in the first instance revolutionary. That is, its allegiance should be to its mother, who gave birth to it, which is the popular revolutionary mobilization. Therefore, it should express the motivations and aspirations of this mother, who is the reason for the existence of any popular revolution. This means that the original goals of the revolution should be liberation and emancipation from the bondage and tyranny of the ruling regime, as well as the building of a new era of justice, freedom, and dignity for all the sons of society.

2) Given that the revolution in Syria includes a broad set of groups, with their diverse sects and nationalities, in their peaceful and civilian wings, the armed wing has no right (even if its majority is drawn from a specific sect) to produce an exclusivist discourse on the different components of Syrian society, which, until today, continue to participate in different proportions and various ways in the civilian sphere. This is because a genuine national opposition, whether armed or not, defends the rights and liberties of all citizens irrespective of their different allegiances, and irrespective of their participation in the revolution or lack there of. It must speak in a national language that is composed above all religious, national, or political allegiances. This is because the freedom that the people are struggling for cannot be separated from its comprehensive humanitarian depth. The freedom that is sought by those chanting for justice, dignity, and the reclamation of rights will be turned on itself and transformed into a new authoritarianism if it does not include everyone.

3) The armed opposition draws its legitimacy from its popularity and social base. Otherwise, it will become a new burden and oppression for both the revolution and the people. When the source of its strength is the same source of strength for the ruling regime—meaning arms—it loses its legitimacy even if it is an opposition. Some of the most important criterion for the legitimacy of the armed opposition are its sincerity, transparency, integrity, and candor with the people. All that is beyond the realm of military secrets—that must be concealed from the ruling regime—must be genuine (meaning honest) amongst the people. A lot of times the Syrian political opposition was not genuine or honest. Was the Syrian armed opposition better than its political counterpart? Did it honestly and fairly present information, news, analysis, and positions of both positive and negative natures to the Syrian people that defend it?

4) The armed resistance is not an urgent issue in the history of revolutions, but it does have its laws and strategies. One of the forms of armed resistance is the partisan form, or what is called guerrilla warfare, which is the form that the armed opposition in Syria has taken. This type of armed fighting emerges in an asymmetrical situation with respect to the arms of both sides. It begins as guerilla warfare relying on hit-and-run tactics within the villages and cities. However, when the partisans lack a united national military leadership, reinforced by a national military discourse, that is above all smaller allegiances in society, and when they are unable to set strategies and tactics to be implemented by all fighters, this is when a revolutionary military opposition is transformed into mere fighting groups that are sustained by the power of arms and that see no goal for themselves except to destroy the regime by any means necessary. This then drives them to carry out subversive and destructive operations against both the society, as well as the state, and thus lose the necessary popular legitimacy.

So what are the rules of guerilla/partisan warfare?

As Carl Schmidt argues, and as is the case with the Syrian armed opposition, the partisans function as one form of armed resistance with the goal of destabilizing the regime. The danger in this is that it creates for itself, and by itself, legitimacy when the regime falls, or even before it falls, that legitimizes its own specific set of rights, laws, and system. This form of armed resistance puts the country in a permanent state of emergency, as the country is threatened by chaos and the destabilization of security. In the shadow of partisan warfare, or what is called guerilla warfare, against the army of the ruling regime, the entire system in the country—not just the regime—breaks down. This is what we are witnessing in Syria today. There is no law today in the face of the violence that is imposed by armed combat. In the absence of political leadership, the principle of which the armed opposition should be brought under, a new reality has been imposed on the revolution: armed combat monopolizes to a great extent the determination of the fate of popular mobilizations and revolutionary civilian popular forces. This is part of the nature and consequences of armed resistance. The massive setbacks for the role of peaceful revolutionary civilian mobilization in Syria are evidence of this.

The armed opposition in Syria began under the name of the Free Army, as part of the oppressed people, having been the weaker party and the defender [of the people] in the face of the regimes violence and brutality. Its establishment was natural despite the external factors that supported it. However, the militarization of the struggle has escalated to an unbelievable point between, on the one hand, the army of the Asad regime and, on the other hand, disorganized armies that have no revolutionary military leadership. The role of arms has been transformed from that of self-defense to that of an incoherent armed opposition entity. According to the nature of such things, this will lead to one of two developments. In the event that the opposition gains in strength and the regime's army is weakened, it will lead to a decisive battle between the two sides. Alternatively, it will lead to a situation of guerilla warfare without a decisive battle, and thus a long-term continuation of a battle that is destructive to both humans and the country, and thus one in which everyone perishes.

If we wish to exceed the teenage-level politics practiced by the Syrian opposition in their estimation and analysis of the Free Army or armed combat in Syria, and if we deal with the reality of armed opposition with national responsibility, political maturity, and rational analysis far from emotional and populist language, we must analyze with depth the reality of the militarization of the revolution, point out its problems, and propose without fear or hesitation our reading of the odds for successful armed combat, genuine representativeness of the revolution, or its deviation. If we do not do so, we are nothing but a bunch of political entrepreneurs who care only about populist mobilization and opportunistic gains.

The military strategy and the ways of armed combat of the opposition in Syria do not call for optimism. This is a time when the regime's army and its coercive apparatuses continue to function with a high degree of coherence despite all the shocks it has sustained. This is a time when the regime is developing its means of gaining control over the armed opposition, which now includes collective punishment of every area in which there are armed battalions, such that it destroys the humanity of the Syrian citizen and threatens the premise of subsistence itself. Nevertheless, we see that the armed opposition has not developed its military strategy, its military discourse, or its war tactics. It has not been able to unify the military leadership, the general plan, the command structure, or execution of military operations.  Nor has it given a chance to those with military knowledge and competence to put forth a new military discourse to replace the religious and sectarian political discourse that is dominating the language of many of the fighters. It has also failed to instantiate an image of general ethics and morality that gives the impression that these fighters are fighting for the sake of the freedom of the Syrian people in its entirety, so as to truly deserve the title of a popular liberation army on the road to achieving freedom, dignity, and justice for all Syrians (of all sects and nations, and allegiances) whether they are supportive or armed opposition or afraid of it.

Theorists of revolutionary armed struggle, such as Mao Tse Tung and Che Guevara, have put forth general observations on the laws of armed combat against an authoritarian ruling regime. They consider the first stage of armed struggle to be based on strategic defense, which in turn is based on weakening the adversary. This is on the condition that the people support the armed struggle, and whereby tactical attacks are integrated into the defensive strategy within a plan to balance power with the adversary. It is in the next stage that there begins a gradual transformation of the armed opposition from a scattered and disorganized form to an organized one. In the final stage, the unorganized combat units are dissolved and the military body takes on an fully organized form with respect to its structure, command pyramid, and means of execution similar to the army of the regime. There is, however, a necessary and decisive condition for this: the application of a strict policy of maximum commitment to the values and goals of the revolution. This discipline includes avoiding acts of looting, kidnapping, and revenge that have happened in Syria and continue to happen at the hands of a segment of those bearing arms.

The armed opposition needs to always keep in mind Guevara's wise insight that guerilla warfare derives its strength and legitimacy from broad popular reach, and must always be the first line of defense for the people. Its legitimacy is eroded when it is based on one segment of the people (and does not include the others), or when it is saturated with religious ideology or authority that does not include all the people. The discourse of revenge and sectarianism is one of the most salient symptoms of the deviation of the Syrian revolution, and we must boldly confront it with awareness so as to not lose out on revolutionary change at the end of the day.

Where does the armed opposition, or what is called the Free Army or several other names, derive its popular legitimacy when it carries out sectarian assassinations, torture, humiliation, and executions against its prisoners from amongst the [regime's] security services and army? This was precisely what we described as brutality when it was committed by the criminal regime. Where does it derive its popular legitimacy when it speaks of a war between Sunnis and Shi'is, or Alawis, as is wished for by those that call themselves the Friends of Syria or the friends of the regime? What distinguishes the discourse of the opposition from the discourse of the regime when one of them speaks of Sunnis, Shi'is, and Alawis, while the other speaks of Salafis, Islamists, and terrorists? Both discourses operate beneath the national level, which gathers and views all as equal with respect to human rights. Both discourses indirectly call for a long-term Iraq-like divisive civil war. How can the people consider the armed opposition to be the military arm of the revolution, for which one of its principles were "one, one, one … the Syrian people are one," and that offered the lives of its sons for the sake of building a civilian state, not a religious emirate or a Muslim Brotherhood state? If we take into consideration the external role of exporting a militant religious or Salafist discourse—that is a stranger to the moderate religious discourse of Syrian society—to the ranks of combat battalions, then this only increases the deviation of the revolution from its national level. In this view, the enemy is no longer the sectarian authoritarian Syrian regime, but rather the Alawis, the Shi'is, or other categories of people.

There is a major difference between striking specific military targets of the regime (which work to weaken the coercive apparatuses) and striking state institutions (for the sake of revenge and ignorance). Striking at state institutions means contributing to poverty, chaos, and the absence of security for many years beyond the fall of the regime. This will benefit the states whose companies are awaiting contracts with post-Asad Syria, so as to accumulate profits on the bones of our martyrs and the ignorance of our opposition. If the armed opposition does not discriminate between bringing down the regime and destroying the state as an entity, then let us bid the world farewell and mourn the loss of the revolution.

What is happening today in Syria is a war of extermination whose source is not only the regime that is burning everything for the sake of its survival. Its source includes the armed opposition that desires to bring down the regime but has begun to bring down society without evening knowing it. There absolutely cannot be any equivalence between the violence and bloodiness of the regime with the violence of the armed opposition. The Syrian regime is in the first and last instance responsible for all the destruction that is happening to both the people and society. However, both sides—the ruler and the ruled, the oppressor and the oppressed—are today destroying the basis and foundations of the state, and are threatening the national unity of the country. The regime is doing this with intention and purpose, while the armed political opposition is doing this unintentionally and in complete ignorance of the laws of armed resistance. Nevertheless, the result is the destruction of society and part of the institutions of the state that are the property of the people. Let us all—Syrian activists, politicians, and soldiers—work together to think and act so as to correct the path of the revolution on the political, military, and civilian levels, and consolidate the nationalism and citizenship of all above the religious allegiances and away from foreign gambles, so as to save both the revolution and the country. What is needed from all of us is to think, then to think again, and then think again of every political or military act we adopt against this treacherous regime that is outthinking and outplaying us so as to exterminate both the Syrian citizen and Syrian society.

[This article was originally written in Arabic and published on Jadaliyya here. It was translated into English by Ziad Abu-Rish.]

Myriam Ababsa, Baudouin Dupret and Eric Denis, editors. Popular Housing and Urban Land Tenure in the Middle East: Case Studies from Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. Cairo and New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2012.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Myriam Ababsa (MA), Baudouin Dupret (BD), and Eric Denis (ED): The first impulse behind this book came out of Eric Denis’ and Baudouin Dupret’s collaboration during the nineties at the French Institute in Cairo (CEDEJ), when the former conducted major research on urbanization and the latter on legal practice. When Dupret moved to Damascus, he was granted some funding from a research agency to conduct an inquiry into the relationship between the law and urban transformations in southern countries; he asked Myriam Ababsa, who was based in Amman, to step in as a geographer specializing in urbanization within the Bilad al-Sham. A small team was built, which met a couple of times and finally put together this volume. The whole group of authors had the opportunity to discuss a common conceptual frame, as well as their individual contributions to this volume, at the Mediterranean Research Meeting organized by Florence’s European University Institute.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does it address?

MA, BD, ED: Our main questions are related to the production of architectural and legal forms and norms. Actually, Forms and Norms was the title we first had in mind. One striking phenomenon in MENA countries is the development of neighborhoods out of the framework of urban planification and regulation. Buildings are erected and their property is transferred. It means that architectural forms are produced according to certain patterns, with specific shapes, in relationship to each other, along alleys with access them, and with connections to commodities like water and electricity. At the same time, these housing units are purchased, sold, and rented; their legal status is established and sometimes challenged; taxes are levied and bills are collected, that is, they become objects around which legal practices develop.

Since this is the central topic of this volume, it means that several and often parallel sets of literatures are addressed, including Middle East studies, urban planning, cities and development, sociolegal studies, and ethnography. The book is also connected to a tradition that remained up to now very confidential in the social sciences dealing with MENA countries—that is, ethnomethodology, which is best characterized as the descriptive study of the ways in which the people (ethno) develop their own means (methods) to make sense of and act in their specific environments. This is the reason why many studies included in this volume devote their attention to the concrete practices of informal neighborhoods and of inhabitants regarding their real-estate and goods.

J: How does this work connect to and/or depart from your previous research and writing?

MA: I am trained in social geography, and I first worked on the perception of the Beirut demarcation line and its neighbors’ daily practices beginning in 1994. I then turned to Syria, where I analyzed public policies and ideologies, focusing on the implementation of the Euphrates Project and social practices in the city of Raqqa in 2001-2004 in my book Raqqa : territoires et pratiques sociales d'une ville syrienne. I have been based in Jordan since 2000, and have worked on upgrading policies and social housing in Amman; I have also published a collective book with D. Rami Daher of the German Jordanian University, Cities, Urban Practices and Nation Building in Jordan.

ED: I work in geography and urban studies. My research focuses on urban dynamics in Egypt and Sudan, and I have published extensively on metropolitan physical planning and economics, as well as on regional urbanization and small cities. Coming in to working on this volume, my work was already dealing with questions of negotiated territory and everyday life in cities.

BD: I was educated both in law and in the social sciences. I have published extensively in the field of the sociology and anthropology of law and legislation in the Middle East. My analysis has evolved into an ethnomethodological study of the production of norms, especially legal, in Arab contexts, including courts and parliaments. My main publication in this domain is entitled Adjudication in Action: An Ethnomethodology of Law, Morality and Justice, and deals with the practice of criminal law in Egypt.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

MA, BD, ED: Our main hope is to open up the field of ethnographic studies of ordinary practices in the MENA area, especially when dealing with cities and the phenomenon of informality. To our mind, research has often been stuck at a very abstract, overhanging level, and therefore has largely missed the phenomenon of what was actually at stake for the people on the ground. Addressing the practical means by which people deal with the building, renting, and selling of their housing is probably the best way to adopt policies that do not conflict with, but rather accommodate, their best interests.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

MA: I have a forthcoming project, an Atlas of Jordan, put together with a team of forty European and Jordanian scholars, in English and Arabic, and published by the Presses de l’Institut français du Proche-Orient. I am currently associated with the University of Paris I research program, “Integrated Territorial Analysis of the (European) Neighborhoods” (CNRS / CIST). I am also preparing a book on urban governance and participation in the Middle East.

ED: I am presently working with Baudouin Dupret on a comparative research project dealing with land titling practices in the Indian, Moroccan, and Ethiopian urban contexts. In India, I am conducting research on subaltern urbanization, looking at the multiple and ordinary ways people are producing and negotiating town environments far from megacities. I am also working on the linkages between real property and city forms.

BD: I am currently working on issues related to practical epistemology, that is, the ways people make sense of issues like truth, time, space, evidence, or reality in the conduct of their daily, ordinary life. I recently published part of this work in a book entitled Practices of Truth: An Ethnomethodological Inquiry into Arab Contexts.

J: In what ways does your book diverge from other literature examining the nature of urban spaces in the Middle East?

MA, BD, ED: The accent on the ordinary practices remains an original entry in urban studies. It gives clear arguments in favor of approaches rejecting any a priori exceptionality of the Middle East urban scenes. Looking at the everyday way people are, every day, producing and negotiating their living spaces helps us to understand why reforms, including constitutional and legal reforms, are not radically transforming the way of life of urban societies. They are absorbed in a web of practices. Inherited forms and norms, including property documentations in use and ways of building or sharing the street, are the most active “dispositifs” through which locally, external impulses, influences, and novelties are encoded and slowly lead to some changes. This inertia of the ordinary built environment and everyday life are very much under-appreciated by the existing literature.

Excerpt from Popular Housing and Urban Land Tenure in the Middle East: Case Studies from Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey

From “Introduction: Forms and Norms: Questioning Illegal Urban Housing in the Middle East”

This book aims at describing and taking seriously two major transformations that have been observed in the Middle East during the last thirty years: first, the accelerated changes in public policies toward neighborhoods characterized as irregular or illegal, and second, the claim that this form of housing in urban areas constitutes the ordinary and majority condition.[1]

There is nothing specific or original about these observations; and indeed the aim of this volume is to emphasize their banality in favor of empirical work aimed at describing interactions specifically located within the urban sphere. This is as part of a wider trend within the social sciences that seeks to think afresh the ways in which to observe societies of the Middle East.

Here, and for longer perhaps than anywhere else in the world, the mode of analysis remained constrained by a dualistic way of thinking, one which pitted state apparatuses against populations utterly deprived of any ability to influence their governments’ policies. The few works that dealt with illegal urban housing in the Middle East underscored the lack of institutionalized forms of governance, especially when contrasted with India and Latin America, where neighborhood associations and nongovernmental organizations are active in the protection of squatters’ rights.[2]

However, several new studies dealing with strenuous avenues of political participation in Cairo (Singerman 1996), political participation on the street as the locus of popular micro-interventions and the quiet encroachment of the poor on the city of Tehran during the 1980s (Bayat 1997), and ordinary citizens’ participation in the Arab world (Berry-Chikhaoui and Deboulet 2000), made it possible to break with this burdensome tradition. They all proposed relevant tracks for researching urban space through examination of the most ordinary interactions around which agreements take place.

Without falling into the trap of radical readings of Middle Eastern politics, which had a tendency to overshadow analyses of the simplest daily interactions (cf. Hoodfar 1997), and which contributed in turn to denying any efficacy to “limited democracy” regimes, these approaches share a real heuristic force. They establish a continuum between different modes of action and bind ordinary citizens, public agents, and entrepreneurs to one another through their daily interactions. Recent work in legal anthropology (cf. Dupret 2006) testifies to such an approach: through the observation of daily practices within local tribunals, it shows how legal norms are produced and how the relationship with positive law is constructed. The precise description of interactions, routines, and ordinary practices sheds light on the way in which “bits and pieces” of cities, neighborhoods, or broader urban formations appear, are reproduced, balance each other, evolve, and transform. It seems therefore unproductive to continue thinking about changing urban environments exclusively in terms of social contradictions and profound inequalities. Exploring the ways in which agreements are reached and compromises emerge proves much more heuristic, even in a context of highly asymmetrical relationships. It does not equate to an irenic vision of empirical realities; rather, it aims to eschew criticism in favor of close attention to the day-to-day mechanisms that make up urban phenomena.

In the context of the daily practices and legal documents negotiated by inhabitants, we observe a crossing of institutionalized borders, which are in turn blurred and re-made with the cooperation of state agents. As the anthropologist Fredrik Barth puts it, border drawing is a collaborative or conflictual, and thus, social, accomplishment, the sides of the divide concurring in the definition of the “wherefrom I speak” that is necessary in interaction. This means that instead of dichotomies pitting permanence against change, public against private, and state against society, it seems more fruitful to adopt an endogenous perspective. This approach reflects real experiences and processes that therefore appear far less contradictory and chaotic than when observed through broad and fixed categories.

Illegal housing constitutes the most obvious example of the rejection of such a dichotomy. Although illegal housing, by definition, infringes upon formal legal rules, it has become the norm for the majority of the inhabitants in all the metropolises under study in this volume—Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, Istanbul, and Amman. It is less heuristic than ever, as we closely scrutinize this so-called illegality, to describe and analyze this quiet and steady production of housing—with all its buildings and life investments—as partaking in a scheme that pits formal against informal or legal against illegal, therefore shaping two separate markets, informal and formal real-estate networks, and legal systems (cf. El Kadi 1990). Similarly, the analysis from above, which considers the authoritarian state as dominating its “non-citizens,” whom it controls in a patron-client relationship while maintaining them within a no-law margin via illegal housing, falls short, regardless of the importance of relations of dominance and the unfair use of force to back arbitrary decisions. Here again, denouncing inequity cannot account for its operational modes; moreover, such an approach radically erases what social practices are in terms of complexity, fluidity, order, and (conflicting) negotiation and collaboration.

Let us go further with the example of the law, around which many contributions to this volume revolve. The study of legal practices can follow different tracks. The theory of legal pluralism, which posits the co-existence of multiple laws alongside state law, was once fashionable. Instead of the state as sole producer of the law, this theory held that law-making was the production of a multiplicity of semi-autonomous and self-regulated social fields. According to this perspective, the state itself is little more than the aggregate of multiple social fields. Whereas it is perfectly legitimate to posit the law and the state as objects of sociological analysis, the unlimited extension of the notion of law-making to any form of normativity seems excessive. Instead of the legal dichotomy between the monism of state law and the pluralism of non-state instances, we suggest a double shift in our viewpoint: On the one hand, it is necessary to analyze normative systems close to state law, in the sense that they are grounded in written or oral rules which a group of specific persons is deemed to know and interpret, that they are endowed with persons in charge of their enforcement, and they are referred to by people as a legal system alternative to state law; on the other hand, it is also necessary to examine the ways in which people grasp their legal environment, understand it, and act in the relevant contexts, constantly reconciling a plurality of social norms to the unified character of the law in force. This is the challenge of the praxeological approach to law, which seeks to study, while faced with multiple customary systems, fluctuating legal practices, and the impact of hegemonic state laws, the organizations and hierarchies designed in an endogenous manner by the people involved in a specific course of action. These organizations are necessarily neither institutionalized nor stable. Contexts of interaction lead people to establish circumstantial hierarchies, to select priorities, and to proceed to what is conventionally called “forum shopping.” However, the same contexts can also compel them to act within one system rather than another and to have no choice in competent legal forums, which nevertheless does not mean that they have no specific practice of these instances.

This praxeological approach to law asks how inhabitants produce their legality in practice: through the payment of taxes or fines which are used as means to warrant a right; through the use of seals, a finance ministry’s official forms; engineer’s documents; notary documents; evidence required by the Cadastre Department; or the use of “customary” contracts (very widespread in Jordan and Syria).

The chapters in this volume defy theoretical dichotomies, for which they substitute a close observation of ordinary situations. Nothing contributes more to the understanding of how urban societies are produced than the detailed, not-too-interpretive description of the ways in which housing deemed a priori illegal is secured, a transaction concluded, a conflict resolved, the breadth or the use of a street in construction is determined and enforced, and so on. Add to that the description of how a land-titling policy is conceived of, formerly recognized equipments are claimed, a neighborhood is equipped with electric wires, sewerage systems, school facilities, and asphalted roads. The ambition of the volume is to restore the obvious continuum in the consolidation, building after building, of the popular neighborhoods of the cities under study, while showing the proximity of social relationships and the forms of solidarity that are mobilized.

Instead of looking for the Middle East’s specificities in politics, we suggest adopting a research policy that scrutinizes the “proximate”: denying the holistic and culturalist exception for the sake of the study of daily routines and practices. The first ambition is therefore to upgrade the knowledge of urban land tenure dynamics, eventually underscoring the banality of current trends (something that can hardly be reconciled with the quest for something specifically characterizing the Middle East taken as a whole).

We assumed that there is a tendency for these neighborhoods to be considered afresh by the actors of urban politics—government employees, counsellors, international experts, and development agencies. This approach induces new relationships, and new contexts of interaction between inhabitants and the agents of urban development, urbanism, and taxation agencies. All these situations make more palatable (because they are more diverse and numerous) the possibilities for negotiation and adaptation involved in complex and pluralistic forms of governance. This holds true for social science analysis, the methodological and epistemological renewing of which is closely connected to the dynamics of “real life,” and has a direct impact on it (in a looping, or feedback, effect which is essential with regard to what was stated above).

As urban planning disappears in favor of juxtaposed projects and delegated urban development, there is a momentum for the tacit acknowledgment of the positions/possessions that were previously acquired and of their regularization. Access to networks of urban services depends on criteria of profitability and on the inhabitants’ financial capacity; networks no longer belong to the sovereign power of ministries and urban public agencies. In the same way, forced and massive dispossessions orchestrated by ruling governments disappear, giving way to “market evictions” (Lasserve 2007), which introduce new forms of land and tenure insecurity in the very place where land titling procedures appeared to guarantee stability (see Chapter 11 in this volume by Jean-François Pérouse).

The current convergence of urban land markets and the blurring of the line dividing legal and illegal lead us to regard urban dynamics as being less regulated than previously assumed and therefore inherently uncertain and unstable. They also lead us to consider the period that was dominated by public intervention, which gave way in the early 1990s to economic liberalization without political democracy, as a long “bracketing” of urban construction. Today, the production of urban forms on the scale of plots, buildings, transactions, or even the more ambitious projects of developers, appears in a clearer and more assertive manner. Obviously, the evident liberalization of the city’s “production forces” encouraged us to observe the inhabitants’ strategies to secure and transfer those properties.

Nevertheless, it is impossible to ignore the fact that the 2010–2011 revolutionary movements in the Middle East represent popular protests against the trend of economic liberalization led by authoritarian governments. In Egypt in particular, economic reforms of the 1990s have had a considerable effect on popular housing, inducing greater pressures on land access, land grabbing by businessmen, and greater insecurity of tenure.

The issue of historical development is a background one, since the dynamics we observe are not new in any sense, be they in architecture, popular urbanism, or in the realm of legal regulations. The dynamics of urban relationships described here can be traced back to modes of urban growth that have existed in the Middle East since at least the Ottoman unification. These represent ordinary ways of producing urban units, according to forms that are suitable, inherited, and still active, and hence according to what Bernard Lepetit (1993) called the “traces” of history.

NOTES

[1] This book was written as part of a research program on public policy and legal practice on the management of informal settlements supervised by Baudouin Dupret within the ANR (l’Agence Nationale de la Recherche) “Citadain” program: “City and Law in the Arab World and India” (2006–2009) directed by Philippe Cadène (Paris VII).

[2] According to Nezzar AlSayyad, urban informality in Latin America involves political belonging and sets a relationship of reciprocity between groups of squatters and the state, whereas in the Middle East, to the contrary, the depoliticizing of informality sanctions the squatters’ projects; in Latin America, squatting develops or is boosted in contexts of political change—polls for instance. These same changes tend to take place in the Middle East during phases of economic change (AlSayyad 1993, 14).

[Excerpted from Popular Housing and Urban Land Tenure in the Middle East, edited by Myriam Ababsa, Baudouin Dupret, and Eric Denis. Copyright © 2012 by the American University in Cairo Press. For more information, or to purchase this book, please click here.]

[This article was written as a response to a recently published article by Maya Mikdashi and Jasbir Puar on the intersections and impasses between US centered pinkwashing and pinkwatching activism.  Click here to read Mikdashi and Puar's rejoinder to this response. Clear here to read the original article by Mikdashi and Puar]

Jasbir Puar and Maya Mikdashi’s recent “Pinkwatching And Pinkwashing: Interpenetration and its Discontents” challenges those of us who work for Palestinian liberation to re-think our practices of solidarity and queer resistance.  The authors suggest that pinkwatching, as a form of political activism, fails to be sufficiently radical. That is, pinkwatching fails to get at the roots of pinkwashing, which lie in settler colonialism, Islamophobia, and homonationalism. Pinkwatching therefore reproduces the discourses and dynamics that enable pinkwashing, thereby perpetuating it. 

We fully appreciate the importance of self-critique, especially for activist movements.  However, we think Puar and Mikdashi lean rather too heavily on the conceptual framework of homonationalism in their analysis of pinkwatching, making it do more work than it can bear. This overreliance on homonationalism obscures specific, politically relevant features of pinkwatching activism that are particular to Palestine and Palestine solidarity work.  Moreover, we believe the authors’ self-exemptions from activist struggle pushes their criticisms dangerously close to a rehearsal of academic critique at the expense of contributing to movement building. Finally, the lack of a single example of the kind of work they critique renders their argument impossible to actually assess, leaving us grasping at straws – and, as we shall argue, straw caricatures of ourselves and our movement.

We write this response as activists, writers, and thinkers who are committed to justice for Palestinians.  Haneen is a queer Palestinian activist living in Jerusalem, while Heike is an American queer academic and activist located in Boston.  Both of us participate in and organize anti-pinkwashing activism. Haneen’s work in this area is much more extensive (as co-founder of alQaws and Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions [PQBDS], as well as a member of Pinkwatching Israel's coordinating team).  Heike has focused more generally on various BDS campaigns, but she has also incorporated Palestine and pinkwatching activism into her academic life as both teacher and researcher. Together, we have carefully considered Puar and Mikdashi’s claims. We have also engaged friends and comrades (activists and academics alike) in discussions about this piece. Our response, then, reflects our views as well as the views of activists and academics from our respective communities. We offer this piece, in part, as a response to Puar and Mikdashi. We hope, too, that it will serve as an invitation to further engagement, collaboration, and collective struggle for the liberation of Palestine. 

Homonationalism and Pinkwashing:  On Palestine and Solidarity

Puar and Mikdashi’s virtually exclusive reliance on homonationalism to evaluate pinkwatching leads to a number of difficulties. First, this framework obscures the specific manifestations of pinkwashing in the Palestinian context, rendering Palestine somehow beside the point. Second, the focus on homonationalism allows for easy—but misplaced—critiques of Palestinian “authenticity” and pinkwatcher solidarity.  Finally, the authors’ failure to cite a single example of the pinkwatching activism they critique further compounds the problems engendered by the narrow confines of this theoretical framework. The lack of concrete evidence raises not simply logical questions for their argument, but ethical and political questions as well. 

Pinkwashing is more than a branding campaign that queer Americans can congratulate themselves for opposing.  The conventional depiction of pinkwashing as an attempt to divert attention away from the occupation is simplistic and one-dimensional. In Palestine, pinkwashing is part of the ongoing Nakba. Both Zionism and pinkwashing depend on a notion of the prior destruction and continued negation of Palestine and Palestinian belonging. This is the case whether one interprets Zionism as homophobic, gay-friendly, or—in its popular narrative form—as having followed a historical trajectory from an originary homophobia toward ever-increasing tolerance. Zionism must be understood as a historically specific, racialized process through which different discourses of sexuality emerge that bolster, rather than undermine, Zionist ideology.  

In this context, pinkwashing is a tactic of Zionism and an influential discourse of sexuality that has emerged within it.  As PQBDS/alQaws consistently point out, the disavowal and erasure of (queer) Palestinian bodies and subjectivities constitute pinkwashing. This invisibility of Palestinian bodies and images is matched only by a hypervisibility when they do appear. Palestinians are seen only as “backward” or “threatening,” while queer Palestinians only become legible as either “gay” or “victims of culture.”  Invisibility and hypervisibility are results of the ongoing erasure of Palestinian belonging.  

Pinkwatching, then, is neither a narrow rejoinder to pinkwashing nor a promotion of global queer solidarity. Pinkwatching reframes queerness as a politics by revealing the sexual politics inherent to contemporary Zionist ideology. Pinkwatching’s attention to the biopolitics of Zionism disrupts the latter’s regime of surveillance. Pink-watchers return the gaze; they disrupt the hierarchical positioning of subject and object. Initially, pinkwatching activism was based on the dismantling of Palestinian erasure, the reclamation of international queer spaces, and the promotion of new queer Palestinian bodies, images and voices.  Today, pinkwatching continues to uncover and make visible the racial, ethnic, and sexual violence that informs Zionist ideology.  

For these reasons, the authors’ focus on “authenticity” (sorry–at least one of us does not know how to articulate a non-authentic queer Palestinian voice) is limited by a critique of homonationalism that ignores the specificities of Palestine. This oversight may be read as slightly patronizing, suggesting that Palestinian queers are either too naïve or lacking in enough critical insight to discern between activist commitments that are appropriate and those that tokenize them. More problematic still are the ways in which an emphasis on authenticity ultimately overlooks queer Palestinians’ strategic uses of recognition and visibility.  Beyond simply “making our voices heard” or claiming "authenticity,” these tactics are intended as a direct and immediate challenge to the presumptions of pinkwashing’s Zionist logic.  Finally, such claims overlook the fact that Palestinian queers daily work against, and re-define, fixed notions of queerness as well as narratives of the closet, coming out, and rights typically associated with a politics of visibility and recognition. For example, in the face of repeated questioning by members of the first LGBTQ delegation to Palestine (in January 2012), local activists continually challenged the delegation by refusing to engage in discussion about “the situation of LGBTs in the West Bank.”  Instead, the work was repeatedly framed as solidarity with Palestine (the outcome of this work is evident in point two of the delegation’s solidarity statement). Similarly, in New York, SiegeBusters asked PQBDS to take part in their action protesting the LGBT Center’s ban of their event during Israeli Apartheid Week. PQBDS felt this was a clear example where such work is not the role or the responsibility of queer Palestinians. Participating in such actions, we felt, might have resulted in tokenizing us, despite the organizers' good intentions.

The authors’ homonationalist emphasis also misconstrues pinkwatching activist work.  The authors contend that pinkwatching activists myopically focus on Israel and neglect the larger, enabling frames of imperialism, racism, and Islamophobia.  But why does activist focus on Israeli pinkwashing entail a neglect of US pinkwashing, Islamophobia, neoliberalism, or the difficulties of rights discourse?  This is faulty logic. It is simply untrue that focusing on one struggle precludes concern for, or work towards, other struggles, much less does it entail a limited analysis of local or global politics.  Rhetorically, such an assertion is reminiscent of the oft-repeated Zionist objection “Why Israel?” or “Why don’t you protest X country’s human rights violations?” It is almost as if the authors view pinkwatching work as problematically “singling out” Israel.  Empirically, however, this claim is simply untrue.  Just as BDS activists resist the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, protest the United States’ hidden wars in Pakistan, Bahrain, Yemen, and Somalia (among others), and actively resist the impending US-Israeli war on Iran, so too are pinkwatchers vigilant regarding the United States and Europe’s deployment of their own Islamophobic versions of pinkwashing to justify war, imperialism, and discriminatory immigration policies. Indeed, the only example of supposedly neglected pinkwatching activism the authors cite in their article concerns a float in the 2011 San Francisco Pride Parade. Sponsored by Zionist front-group Iran180, the display featured a blow-up doll of Ahmadinejad being beaten and sodomized with a missile by a white dungeon master, ostensibly in protest of Iranian oppression of LGBT people and to manufacture American LGBT support for war on Iran.  This grotesque – and strangely homophobic – instance of pinkwashing was, however, systematically de-bunked by BDS and pinkwatching activists.  In other words, the single piece of evidence cited in Puar and Mikdashi’s article only confirms the opposite of what their argument contends.  

Finally, the authors claim that pinkwatchers compromise on divisive questions “in the name of political expediency and coalition building.”  Again, the authors offer no examples of such compromise.  By rebuking imaginary activists for failing to broach subjects like the legitimacy of violent resistance, such criticisms simply appear untethered to the difficult and complex processes that face any developing movement, this one in particular. Two years ago, we collectively began to raise awareness about Palestine, colonialism, and Israeli apartheid through the example of pinkwashing and the politics of sexuality. To the audiences we addressed, Palestine was the divisive question. It continues to be the most challenging aspect of this movement.  In other words, divisive issues are far from avoided in pinkwatching work. The divisive issue is Palestine. Indeed, as Haneen argued in the “Queer Palestinians Talk Politics” speaking tour, LGBTQ communities should be divided over Palestine. Her claim entreated audiences to link organizing on justice in Palestine with the organizing of people of color, anti-war activists, HIV activists, and more.  In pinkwatching work, we bring Palestine and the relentless attempts to erase it to the foreground.  It is the very naming of this erasure, the calling out of Zionism, that “divides” people. Certainly, violent resistance, refugees, and “final status” issues are also divisive, but they are parasitic on the primary issue of Zionism itself, which pinkwatching, by its very character, is committed to uncovering. To pinkwatch is precisely to talk about Palestine, and to force the divisive issue of Zionism into the conversation.

A very concrete example of such inter-movement negotiation of Zionism is the writing of the LGBTQ Palestine delegation’s solidarity statement (with which Puar was involved). For Palestinian participants, a lot of compromising happened in this process, one of which was the group’s repeated assertions (throughout the text) that they support Israeli progressive activists. We understand activists’ fear of being labeled "anti-Semitic.” But for Palestinians, these comments put Israel and Israelis on an equal footing with Palestinians. They expressed a “coalition” interest that distorted the meaning of solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle. Nevertheless, the announcement of “acknowledging and resisting US complicity and settler colonialism” was actually one of the crucial parts of the statement that was included and, moreover, added a new layer to the growing debate. It is worth noting that here, the “divisive issue” of Zionism was implicitly on the table, and what is evident in the statement is both an egalitarianizing of Israelis and Palestinians and a simultaneous critical acknowledgment of (US) settler colonialism.  Such compromise and negotiation is part and parcel of this work.  Such interactions allow us to develop a sharper discourse, expose its limitations, and construct a future vision together that is compatible with long-term movement building.   

We are well aware of the problematic hegemony of particular gay Western notions and strategies.  It is true that a significant challenge of pinkwatching activism has been to draw a line between queer involvement in the struggle for Palestinian liberation and the tendency to make pinkwatching about queers and sexuality in Palestine/Israel. But we find this to be a problem much more in Israel than in the US or Europe.  There are still many gay Israeli activists who insist that “Israel does have gay rights, and we as gay activists worked hard to make it happen,” doing what we call “pinkwashing in reverse” (see, for example, this interview with Hagai El-Ad and the writings of Aeyal Gross).  But careful examination of most of the pinkwatching materials, statements, and actions produced in the last three years reveals a movement committed to channeling all of our capacity and vision to expose Israel’s colonial project, occupation, and apartheid.  

Pinkwatching is not about gay rights; it is not about gay Israelis (progressive or not); it is not about the status of homosexuals in Palestine; it is not about self-congratulatory gay Americans or Europeans. Indeed, Queer BDS and Pinkwatching are part of a Palestinian-led campaign. Pinkwatching originated by promoting the Palestinian liberation struggle as relevant to worldwide queer movements by highlighting our responsibility to engage in and fight other struggles. From the beginning, BDS was a key practice that shaped pinkwatching activism. Rather than viewing pinkwatching as homonationalist, then, we understand it as an act of solidarity, akin to the BDS work of people of conscience all over the world. Pinkwatching activists  defer to the leadership of (queer) Palestinians in their work not as an exercise in homonationalism, but rather from a commitment to working in solidarity with those most affected by violence and domination, a central principle of anti-oppression organizing. This work is undertaken not “in the name of” Palestine, a Palestinian nation, or an exceptional Palestinian sexual subject (much less from a superficial celebration of identity politics). It does not commit one to any particular state or state formation whatsoever (just as BDS work does not commit one to a one state solution). It is instead a form of holding ourselves accountable to the needs and requests of those most affected by violence and oppression.  We see such acts of solidarity as, if anything, a deflection of US homonationalist practices.

Positionality and (Self-)Critique 

The authors’ acknowledgements of their positionality was perhaps the most disappointing aspect of this article. Despite the fact that both authors are themselves part of pinkwatching efforts (through writing and by participating in the first queer delegation to Palestine), they nevertheless offer their article as a series of “observations.” Such a choice locates the authors outside the movement, a convenient position that relieves them of complicity or responsibility for the problems they point to, while explicitly dissociating themselves from the questions and complexities of activist struggle.  This disassociation is confirmed by their reference to “divergences between academic and activist concerns and strategies.”  What precisely are these divergences? As “observers” of pinkwatching, are the authors claiming a (solely?) academic perspective? Is academia (or are academics) outside of or beyond activism? Do the authors (or academics more generally) have an analytical framework that activists lack?  We are concerned that the authors are implicitly presenting activist work as less thoughtful or intellectually sophisticated than academic work, and thus needing to “learn from” the lessons being taught in this piece. 

The intended audience of this article is also unclear, as pinkwatchers have waged similar critiques. Haneen has written publicly about these issues. The compiled statements, writings, and activism of PQBDS and pinkwatchingisrael.com (including the latter’s new Pinkwashing Kit) offer vast resources for thinking through issues of pinkwashing and pinkwatching in ways that clearly resist homonationalism.  Both the recent LGBTQ and the Indigenous and Women of Color Feminists delegations to Palestine have offered anti-homonationalist opposition to pinkwashing. Globally, queer Palestinian groups succeeded in re-locating the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Youth and Student Organization's (IGLYO) General Assembly that was planned to take place in Tel Aviv outside of Israel.  US-based queer theorist Judith Butler refused to accept the Civil Courage Award from Berlin’s Pride Committee in 2010 because of complicity with racist and homonationalist formations. Various Arab and Muslim queer organizations from around the world resisted and effectively shut down a panel on LGBTQI Liberation in the Middle East by Zionist front-group Stand With Us at the 2010 US Social Forum.  Meanwhile, within the United States, smaller pinkwatching actions have questioned homonationalist assumptions and fought pinkwashing in an anti-colonialist frame, whether through clever guerrilla art in the Bay Area or the ongoing efforts of Boston activists to get Israeli films out of the city’s LGBT Film Festival. 

This proliferation of existing critical theory and activism raises the bar for arguments like Puar and Mikdashi’s, challenging all of us not simply to re-hash familiar critical terrain, but to begin to speak the language of complicity, contradiction, and, crucially, strategy. In other words, what now? Indeed, the article left us wondering, “how can this criticism help to advance our work?”  Part of the reason we believe we can find no answer to this question is because the critique of “they” and “them” unfolds in a moralizing manner that would otherwise have been impossible if the authors had included themselves within the movement.  Our fellow activists felt blamed, humiliated, or singled out by this piece. Some were unsure if they were the target of critique, given that the authors did not cite any examples. The authors may have been legitimately cautious about naming specific people or organizations in an already small movement.  However, the lack of concrete evidence for their claims leaves us wondering just where the finger is pointing. And it is clear that finger-pointing is going on.  Although the authors are careful to specify that their argument about the homonationalist structure of pinkwatching is not a normative one, by the end of the article, pinkwatchers’ alleged complicity with homonationalism emerges as an egregious intellectual, political, and strategic error. This error needs to be called out, but apparently lacks any solution or productive mode of address (or at least none the authors care to offer).  Such finger-pointing is, we believe, very different from invitation or constructive critique.  

Unfortunately, this dynamic is nothing new in solidarity work.  Many of us may recall working under the powerful shadow of Joseph Massad’s work on the Gay International.  For many, Massad’s work effectively produced a straw image of the “Gay Arab” who is, by definition, complicit with cultural imperialism and an agent of international gay organizations. Massad's discourse reinforced an academic/activist hierarchy that obscures the ways in which academics' privileged position can force activists to spend their time measuring and assessing themselves according to the academic’s discursive rubric, putting themselves on trial before one another and the academy. However, Massad’s critique did not by any means promote a new discourse, more aware communities or better queer activism in Arab societies. This came from within activist fields of experience, through activists’ efforts to analyze their own needs and explore their internal and external working dynamics.

We want to suggest that the “homonationalism” and “normalization of settler colonialism” of Puar and Mikdashi’s article have the potential to operate in much the same way. To praise the piece for its properly critical perspective (i.e., for its willingness to provoke disagreement and divisiveness) is a familiar academic positioning that we ought to be cautious about reproducing. As well, the claim that homonationalism is not only a contemporary critical model but, moreover, the state of things today might be understood as a form of bolstering one’s own academic brand.  Puar and Mikdashi’s vague generalizations, academic authority, and general lack of evidence have the potential to produce a new set of straw caricatures—not the Gay Imperialist and Gay Arab this time, but the Homonationalist Pinkwatcher and Token Palestinian Queer.  Moreover, these new characters seem to be offered not in the spirit of furthering a movement, but rather from a position of academic observation, analysis, and judgment. It is almost as if the task has become to differentiate the “proper” pinkwatcher from the “improper,” homonationalist pinkwatcher (much less the “proper” Palestinian queer from the patsy for homonationalist gay American activists). 

We appreciate Puar and Mikdashi’s vigilance in holding us accountable to our principles in our activist work. However, we are troubled by the ways in which they fold pinkwatching into a homonationalist framework. While they offer a worthy critique of pinkwatching activism, because of the implicit valorization of academic theorizing and analysis and the gaping lack of specific examples of homonationalist pinkwatching, we end up wondering not only to whom, but about whom, this article was written.  We worry that a set of straw caricatures is being erected, and entreat the authors to specify in greater detail to what (or whom) they are referring.  Such vague, critical musings seem less productive to us than an engaged critique that implicates its authors even as it prods a movement to look more closely at its own workings and motivations.  The relationship between academia and activism is potentially a positive and interactive one, wherein both sides can inspire and sustain one another organically, with the ultimate goal of pushing our movement(s) forward together. We hope that this exchange can initiate precisely such a constructive and self-reflective process regarding pinkwashing, pinkwatching, and homonationalism within our movement.

[The authors are grateful to Stasha Lampert for her incisive editorial work on this piece and to their respective activist communities for their ideas, comments, criticisms, contributions to, and feedback on this article.]

[Click here to read the original post that this article is in response to. Click here to read the rejoinder by Jasbir Puar and Maya Mikdashi to this response.]

[This article was written as a rejoinder to Haneen Maikey and Heike Schotten's response to the authors' article on the intersections and impasses between US centered pinkwashing and pinkwatching activism.  Click here to read Maikey and Schotten's response, and click here to read the original article by Mikdashi and Puar.]

We thank Haneen Maikey and Heike Schotten for their thoughtful and detailed response to our article. We appreciate the time, effort, as well as political commitment and conviction it took to articulate their concerns about our article. We do not necessarily disagree with many of their points. We would like, however, to take the opportunity to clarify the methodological approach to our article, and acknowledge that some of this elaboration would have been helpfully included in the original essay. It is important to translate political disagreement into dialogue and we welcome this opportunity to continue this discussion.

On Not-Naming Names

There are several reasons why we did not provide “examples” or  “evidence.” First of all, our piece was informed by numerous conversations over the past several years (Puar has been writing on and speaking about queer organizing in relation to Israel-Palestine since 2005 and participating in such organizing since 2009; Mikdashi has been involved in activism and teaching on these topics since 2006). These conversations often indicated concerns that overlapped with our own; not directly about certain people, statements, or organizations, but more about public forums and the politicization of activists at these forums, discourses that emerged from various events, and responses to publications on social media. In synthesizing these conversations, we hoped to take part in forging a space for critical discussion among a diverse and growing activist movement.

Secondly, we understood first and foremost ourselves to be implicated in this critique.  As participants in this solidarity movement, as we noted, and as pinkwatchers ourselves, we constituted our own work, positionalities, and histories as a source of critique for the article. (For example, Puar produced an early public intervention detailing pinkwashing in the Guardian in 2010 that fell into many of the pitfalls we outline in our piece.)

We also understood several other political organizing benefits to not naming names:

1. Providing names/examples would have detracted from the overall systemic problem we are discussing by blaming certain individuals and events and lauding other individuals and events by not-naming them. We did not, and do not, see any singular activity, organization, person nor event as culpable for these dynamics. We are talking about a discursive field of power, collectively produced through multiple actors and elements that implicate all of us who struggle with the question of pinkwashing, which often undermines—unwittingly—the very kinds of interventions that are originally attempted.

2. We did not name any names—neither those whose work we might find to be problematic, nor those whose work we laud—precisely to avoid the kind of insider/outsider positioning that happens when one claims greater moral authority (in the name of activism, in the name of authenticity, in the name of representing a community with a global reach) to speak about an issue than another. This kind of “finger-pointing” would have been divisive, creating a binary politics of insiders/outsiders, authenticity/inauthenticity, resistant/complicit, good organizing/bad organizing that we believed to be deeply counterproductive. 

3. Related to the last point, we surmised that not-naming names is more beneficial to a long-term solidarity politics.  By this we mean that it potentially can initiate a fruitful self-reflective process. We trusted our readers to find themselves in the critique.  Had we named names, we would have restricted the freedom to relate to the critique on one’s own terms. If the critique resonated, perhaps uncomfortably so, then there might be something there to think about.

On Positionality

We were very clear that we were discussing pinkwatching activism in the United States only, so we are a bit confused as to why the response takes up the question of regional organizing in the Middle East. We are well aware, and say as much, that regional organizing needs to rely on its own strategies to be effective. Puar, in fact, has in her writing and lecturing highlighted the strategically intricate work of al-Qaws and PQBDS for several years now.

This misreading of our critique is hardly a minor semantic affair. 

Activism in Palestine emerges from a specific set of circumstances because Palestinians live under occupation and settlement and have been scattered throughout the world by practices of ethnic cleansing. Activism in the United States emerges from a different context and has a different set of ethical imperatives. One should question, for example, US-based activists who fight settler colonialism in Israel without acknowledging the ongoing settling of the United States. Similarly, Palestine and the United States do not occupy the same geopolitical space internationally. Palestine is an occupied territory, while the United States is the premiere superpower and imperial force in the world today. Thus, to read our piece as a critique of regional activism, in particular as a critique of on-the-ground Palestinian activism, is to miss our basic point: “American” pinkwatching activists (we are aware of the complexity and contingencies that such a category references) must work within the framework of US settler colonialism and empire in order to not risk being complicit in the further normalization of both. While many activists do work within these frameworks, in our experience this approach is far from pervasive among pinkwatching actions.

We acknowledge that the field of US organizing is diverse, transnational, multiracial, multiethnic, and involves many different groups. This diversity accounts for both sets of positive and critical responses that our piece was met with. Indigenous studies scholars and those activists working on indigenous issues in the United States, for example, very enthusiastically agreed about our assessment of the need to highlight with greater force the settler colonial status—not historical, but current —of the United States. The absence of this recognition naturalizes settler colonialism as a situation of the past rather than the very lived everyday. Their response indicates at least one audience that feels that US settler colonialism of the present day is not being more radically integrated into pinkwatching efforts.

We could continue to list the positive ways our article has been received by both activists and academics and activist-scholars. But to insist that we had the moral authority produced by consensus would only repeat the violence of producing a bounded political movement where only some people are allowed to voice a critique. It seems more fruitful, rather than to say “everyone agrees with us” (as Maikey and Schotten insinuate), to simply acknowledge that there are intense political disagreements about how this work should be done. Claiming a consensus is dangerous and flattening to the potential productivity of those disagreements.

Further, we would point out that another insider/outsider politics recurs through continually invoking an uncomplicated and purported transparent academic/activist binary. To rely on such a reductive binary is to miss the multiple ways in which many of us who labor for social and political justice do so from and across multiple, and complex, rather than discrete, positions and histories. Furthermore, while any activist/academic tensions must be carefully contextualized and elaborated, academics in the U.S. who have spoken out against Israeli state policy have been subjected to a great deal of institutional censorship and harassment. Thus academic freedom is not protected in regards to this issue and we would question the assumption that academia is a safe, outsider position free from recrimination and professional blowback.  

On Homonationalism as a Framework 

A quick word on homonationalism, in regards to what Maikey and Schotten refer to as the overemphasis of homonationalism in relation to pinkwashing and Palestine. Homonationalism and pinkwatching are not parallel phenomenon, rather pinkwatching is one manifestation and practice that is made possible within and because of homonationalism. As theorized by Puar in her formative work on the concept, homonationalism is not another identity politics, not another way of distinguishing good queers from bad queers, not an accusation, and not a position. It is rather a facet of modernity and a historical shift marked by the entrance of (some) homosexual bodies as those now worthy of protection by nation-states. Unlike pinkwashing, homonationalism is not a state practice per se. It is instead the historical convergence of state practices, transnational circuits of queer commodity culture and human rights paradigms, and broader global phenomenon such as the increasing entrenchment of Islamophobia.  These are just some of the circumstances through which nation-states are now vested with the status of “gay-friendly” versus “homophobic.” More importantly, homonationalism is an analytic category deployed to understand and historicize how and why such a status (“gay-friendly”) has become desirable in the first place.  Like modernity, homonationalism can be resisted and re-signified, but not opted out of: we are all conditioned by it and through it. Arguing that some pinkwatching rhetorics reproduce the queer exceptionalism of homonationalism is simply to note that we are subjects formed through apparati of state, consumer, and legal recognition that are engendered by the historical advent of what we can now identify as homonationalism. 

So a more accurate read of our argument, rather than accusing us of somehow negating the specificity of Palestine, is that we were mapping out the relations between pinkwatching and homonationalism, or more precisely, the global conditions of homonationalism that make a practice such as Israeli pinkwashing possible and legible in the first place. In connecting Israeli pinkwashing to a broader global system of power networks, we were not minimizing Palestine, rather demonstrating the myriad of actors that converge to enable such a practice. Of course it is important that concepts mutate and merge freely as they find their usefulness in various contexts. We therefore reiterate Puar’s original framing not as a corrective but simply to clarify how our usages of the terminology operated.

Ultimately our piece was generated from a profound and deep commitment to the liberation of Palestine from Israeli Occupation and from a genuine desire to dialogue about what we now see as some hegemonic forms of pinkwatching activism. That there is not agreement on the presence, scale, magnitude, or impact of these forms should be expected and even productively welcomed in a global solidarity movement. We hope to continue these conversations with our allies in the struggle for Palestinian liberation.  

[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on Syria and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the Syria Page Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each week's roundup to syria@jadaliyya.com by Monday night of every week.] 

International and Regional Perspectives

Is a Turkey-Syria conflict inevitable? Al Jazeera’s program with Yasar Yakis, Haldun Solmazturk and Joshua Landis 

Egypt asserts an old pan-Arab principle to deal with Syria  Issandr al Amrani speculates on why Morsi makes Syria the centerpiece of his early foreign policy.                                                             
A shadow state in Lebanon for the Syrian opposition Radwan Mortada on Lebanese factions’ support of the Syrian opposition

Turkey shows double duplicity on Syria Kaveh L Afrasiabi says “what needs to be done instead of such militaristic tactics covered with the language of compromise is a new peace offensive”

Palestinians escaping Syria find little relief in Lebanon Jonathan Broadbery says Palestinians are struggling to gain legal protection from the Lebanese government on grounds of nationality.

Plucky little Turkey standing up to evil Syria? It's not as simple asthat Robert Fisk says, “when it comes to international law, to moral compromise, to sheer hypocrisy, the Western powers take the biscuit”

Syrian Narratives

Syrian activists reach across sectarian divide BBC on cross-sectarian movements opposing the Syrian regime.

The battle of Aleppo: high stakes for both sides Nicolas Nassif says “the battle underway in Aleppo is unprecedented in terms of the number of fighters involved and the level and sophistication of their weaponry and defenses.”

Syria’s Tragedy Sends a Chilling Message to All Arabs Marc J. Sirois cynically writes that “the carnage in Syria were not sufficiently tragic on its own morbid merits, its cruelty is exacerbated by the effect it is having – and will continue to have – on the entire process of Arab revolution.”

‘Saudi Weapons’ seen at Syrian rebel base Ian Pannel reports from the frontlines in Aleppo, where neither side seems to be winning. 

The Battle of Aleppo: Lebanese-style Lines of Demarcation Nicolas Nassif claims that “while Homs and Hama saw devastation equal to Aleppo now, the fighting taking place in this northwestern city has followed a different script.”                       

A sect in the Middle: Syria’s Alawites endure considerable resentment Marlin Dick suggests that “in exhibiting three significant orientations – pro-regime, pro-opposition and pro-solution – the Alawites would appear to mirror the rest of society more than people think.”

343 Victims in Syria and 193 Victims in the United Nations Salam al-Kawakibi on the failure to come up with a cohesive solution at the annual meeting United Nations General Assembly.             

On Middle East Expertise: The Decline of Narrative Karl Sharro  is critical of the “total lack of a principled approach among the multitude of analysts and experts writing about the region.”                    

Kurdish autonomy in Syria troubling for rebels, Turkey “The cross-border shelling illustrated how Turkey's relationship with Assad, who had kept Syria's Kurds in check, has crumbled.”

Remembering Syria's historic Silk Road souk in Aleppo  Kevin Rushby on the latest cultural casualty of the war. 

Arms supplies to Syrian rebels dry up amid rivalries and divisions                                                         
Inside Syria

Damascus Life Interrupted John  Wreford wanders around a city he no longer recognizes.        

“To leave or not to leave, seems to be the question” Razan Ghazzawi speaks with an exiled activist who expresses remorse over leaving the working class behind. 

Syria’s Internally Displaced on the Rise Elizabeth Abott on Aleppo citizens who seek assistance pro-regime institutions. 

Tug of War for Aleppo neighborhoods Basel Dayoub on the shifting frontlines in Aleppo.

In Syria, a rebellion calls for revolutionary measures LA Times on a nineteen year-old female law student who underwent a  “marriage of convenience” to take part to the armed fighting against the regime. 

In Syria's east, the revolution's strengths are largely ignored Hassan Hassan says “an unfortunate fact of the Syrian uprising is that different opposition forces focus on different areas depending on their narrow, cynical interests”

As Syria’s Bloody Civil War Rages, Aleppo’s Hospitals Are Under Siege

Art and Social Media

Social Media, Journalism and the Syrian Revolution Kimberly J. Curtis on the intersection between social media and traditional journalism and the construction of narratives 

Destruction comes to Aleppo  A photo gallery featuring Aleppo and its citizens.                       

The Unmentioned: an Interview with Syrian Photographer, Khaled Akil The photographer reflects on his position on Syria through art.

Diaries of a Damascene Revolutionary Orient TV’s documentary on the opposition youth groups of Damascus.                                            

Arabic 

الشرع كبديل للأسد
Abd Al-Bari Atwan writes about the Turkish President Davutoglu's recent statement about Farouq Al-Shar' being a candidate worthy of replacing Bashar Al-Assad's in order to stop the war in Syria.

هل الجيش الحر حر فعلاً
Munther Khaddam writes about the Free Syrian Army.

المقابلة | عارف دليلة
An interview with Aref Dalileh on Al-Akhbar.

كيف «ننظّم حروبنا الأهلية»؟
Ward Kasouha writes about reframing the struggle in Syria in the context of different social classes in the country.  

معركة الفرقان في حلب : تحرير المدينة أم تدمير سوريا؟!
Mohammad Hayyan Assamman writes about the battle in Aleppo.

حقبة تاريخية مختلفة!
Michel Kilo writes about the shift that the political structures and processes will undergo in the Middle East.

عبد العزيز الخيّر: «حكيم» المعتقل والثورة الحقّة
Thaer Deeb writes about Abed Al-Aziz Al-Khayyer, a leader in the National Coordination Council for the Forces for Democratic Change in Syria who has been detained by the Syrian regime's security apparatus.  

مقامرة سورية محسوبة
Abd Al-Bari Atwan analyzes the Syrian regime's actions against Turkey.

من الذاكرة: الجمعة العظيمة
An anonymous writer describes her memorable experience at a protest in the Syrian city of Harasta. 

المغول الجدد: معركة «القاعدة» في حلب
Wessam Abd-Allah writes about Aleppo and the "jihadist" and "salafist" presence in its battle.  

عن مفهوم الوطنية والثورة
Ammar Dyoub redefines nationalism in the context of the revolution in Syria.

 بين عيني ليل و عدسة كميرتها
Sobhiya Najjar writes about Layl's experience when she was filming wounded Syrian refugees in a Turkish hospital and recounts their stories.  

الأكراد في ريف حلب: “تحرير” تشوبه الصعوبات المعيشية
The Damascus Bureau presents an article on the situation of Kurds in the Aleppo Rif.  

«الجيش السوري الحر» يسقط في امتحان المقارنة
Sameer Al-Hasan writes about the Free Syrian Army.  

مستفبل ينفض الماضي عن كاهله‫!
Michel Kilo writes about what he describes as the battle for a future of Syria that would be freed from a cruel past that was represented by a backwards regime.

Last month saw the successful founding of an independent workers’ union emerge out of the Lebanese private sector. Yet there has been little social media fanfare outside Lebanon over this success … perhaps not surprisingly. Class struggle in contemporary Lebanon has rarely captured the imagination of either scholars or social activists. Long described as a bastion of laissez-faire politics, a site of never-ending civil strife, and a platform for settling regional scores, Lebanon is hardly seen as a crucible for subversive class activity in the Arab world.

More recent history has served to reinforce this conception of a complacent – or complicit – middle and working class. Following the end of the civil war in 1989, over a decade of Hariri-led neoliberal policies destroyed the country’s already emaciated networks of social and class activists, including unions, associations, and political parties. The ongoing Arab uprisings, despite all the momentum they produced to fight injustice, seemed to trigger little in their wake amid the discontented Lebanese. In early 2011, signs of a mass movement for regime change in Lebanon fizzled amid bickering about slogans and goals; since then, the social and political climate has deteriorated at an alarming pace. State services are all but a caricature of what they once used to be. Basic needs like clean water and electric power are now a privilege of the very few. Daily struggles for survival are punctuated by spouts of kidnappings, tire-burning riots, and in certain areas by the intermittent militia fighting between pro and anti-Asad forces, with the Lebanese army joining in the fray every now and then. Meanwhile, Zionist aggression in its myriad forms remains a constant.

Amid this domestic and regional conflagration, a local matter such as the founding of a workers’ union at the supermarket chain Spinneys might appear as a sideshow unlikely to cause ripples of change. The jury is indeed still out on the long-term impact of this development. But there is little doubt that it has set a precedent for union activism in Lebanon. It is the first known case of founding an independent private sector union in the country in the last two decades. And unlike many other “depressing” stories of class struggle that expose persistence of sectarianism as enabler of the status quo, the Spinneys story suggests that the sectarian monster does have an Achilles’ heel, but it is buried under decades of rooting out any resistance to it.  

Undoing Unions in a Neo-liberal “Utopia”

In the 1990s, the long neo-liberal reign of Lebanon’s late prime minister Rafiq Hariri finished off what a fifteen-year civil war nearly failed to: eliminate the remnants of any independent union movement by destroying or co-opting it into the institutional apparatus of the state. Hariri of course had more than willing partners in the sectarian warlords that came to rule Lebanon after the war. Top among them was Nabih Berri, who continues to hold strong sway among members of the General Workers Union (GWU). The GWU is an umbrella of dozens of unions, many defunct, and acts as the official negotiator and spokesperson for Lebanon’s workers, both public and private. The GWU fought and lost its battle for independence and influence during Hariri`s time. It is now a caricature of what it used to be. But its legitimacy was not vociferously challenged until recently.

Following the assassination of Hariri in 2005, workers across Lebanon remained largely out of the media limelight. Street union mobilization, often ceremonial, was largely the domain of white-collar and public sector employees. The most visible were the teachers who had retained partial cohesion of their union body and held traditional bargaining chips of the education sector (abstention from grading etc). But in 2010, an unexpected strike at a factory in northern Lebanon marked a watershed. The firing of about 400 workers without compensation at the Future Pipes factory triggered an onsite sit-in and strike and grabbed public attention. The workers eventually lost their battle and their lawsuits against the employer in arbitration councils are still pending. But their bold move exposed the hypocrisy and laxity of the GWU and the quasi-defunct communist party that continues to pay lip-serves to class struggle.

In the following two years, a movement to set up alternative representative bodies to the GWU emerged and a new smaller umbrella of unions was formed under the name The Unionist Coordination Committee. But the GWU would receive its harshest blow from the least expected quarter, the Ministry of Labor. In 2011, a new minister was on the block and the rules of the game were turned on their head. The duet between minister Charbel Nahhas and the GWU would be short-lived, but long enough to inflict significant damage on the reputation and credibility of the GWU and its tactics.

State as a Site of Subversion: The Nahhas Touch

After a long career as an economic and administrative consultant for local and international organizations, Charbel Nahhas became a household name in Lebanon after taking on two ministerial posts in the past few years, that of telecommunications and labor. Nahhas had ridden the ticket of Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) to come to power. His reputation as an upright and non-corrupt politician vouched for him among many leftists. Others were less optimistic and speculated he would have to either turn coats or be swallowed by status quo rules. Despite some compromises, Nahhas proved his mettle. When Nahhas was telecommunications minister The government was a loose coalition between Lebanon’s two dominant political cams, March 14 and March 8. The former continued to hold the reigns of state power while Nahhas was telecommunications minister. Targeting Harirism as the source of economic ills made sense and jibed well with March 8 forces. Nahhas had a relatively free reign to do so. Things changed when a March 8-dominated government was formed in 2011. Nahhas found himself at odds with his own allies. Once in power, the reform and resistance discourse of March 8’s FPM and Hezbollah was exposed as largely lip-service. Ironically, Nahhas would be hung out to dry in the face of elite vested interests – not by Hariri, by the very people who brought him to power.

Nahhas was not the first independent politician in Lebanon to make some noise and gain public support as a credible voice of ordinary people’s desire for change. What distinguished him from other critics of the political system however has been his ability to move beyond the rhetoric of bringing down the sectarian regime and endorse a concrete roadmap built on a moderate discourse of the return to law and order (so often invoked by the country’s ruling partie but turn it against them). According to Nahhas, the state has become so dysfunctional, its apparatus entirely co-opted, its resources thoroughly plundered by the ruling elite [by?], that a concerted campaign to demand a sincere implementation of law and order and a restoration of state authority would be a subversive act in itself (The 1946 Labor Law is such an example). Such an act would not only seriously threaten the authority of those who had usurped it, but confuse them. What is needed, Nahhas holds, is a restoration of the “aura” or “prestige” (haybah - هيبة) of the state. In his public campaigns, Nahhas compares the political system to a giant machine, a juggernaut, that has been running for a long time. Ruling elites have become so comfortable in their hegemony and control of the state apparatus that they may not be able to handle emergency malfunctioning, no matter how insignificant it may seem. The trick is to find screws here and there and keep tinkering with them till the entire machine starts shaking. The sense of security that elites enjoy is reinforced by what Nahhas refers to as the taming, or domestication (tadjin –تدجين) of the public, which is led to believe that the system is so robust that it is futile to tinker with any screw. To break this sense of domestication, a successful challenge of the status quo needs to happen on multiple levels and with ant-like persistence. (For some examples of Nahhas’s writings, click here.)

Nahhas tried to implement his theory as Minister of Labor. By constantly invoking the country’s labor laws and exposing the outrageous extralegal practices of the state, he forced stakeholders to live up to their empty rhetoric of state-building and sovereignty. Instead of merely calling for an increase in wages, he put forth a detailed proposal to redefine what a wage means (it includes transportation fees, it is inflation-adjusted) and focused on job security as a whole. In a scenario that contradicted the basic assumptions of class struggle , the Ministry of Labor’s wage hike and reform program was deemed too much to ask for by none other than the alleged representative of the workers, the GWU. In December 2011, the GWU eventually struck a side deal with the government that gave the workers less than what the minister had called for, and Nahhas found it too much to swallow. He resigned in protest. Nahhas lost his wager on change from within. Towards the end of his tenure as minister, he was asked to identify with one of the following myths: Don Quixote, Icarus, or Sisyphus. He chose the last. With his exit from office, the rock that rolled down the mountain had to be picked up somewhere else and pushed upward. This time it would need a helping nudge that came from a most unexpected place, a handful of workers at one of Lebanon’s largest supermarket chains, Spinneys.

Spinneys as a Springboard: Breaking the Class Ceiling

The wage hike battle waged by Nahhas and the exposing of the GWU would not be in vain. After many years of working at Spinneys, veteran employee Samir Tawq was fed up with the way management continued to violate the rights of the workers and take them for granted. When a watered-down version of the Nahhas-proposed wage hike was approved in December of 2011, Tawk protested the management’s partial implementation of it. He convinced over 100 of his colleagues to sign a petition calling for a full and swift implementation of the hike. The only swift reaction of the employer was to order the transfer of Tawq to a faraway branch, and when he protested, to fire him. In the meantime, close to 700 employees out of the estimated 1500 working for the company were either coaxed or coerced into signing a statement forfeiting their right to demand full implementation of the wage increase. But Tawq would have none of this. He was determined to take the fight to its conclusion, and a handful of workers were ready to join. He found a handful of workers willing to join the fray.

The defiant workers were in for an uphill battle. Their move had coincided with one of Lebanon`s longest strikes at the country’s national power generation company. Daily contract workers at the company refused to work for over three months and staged sit-ins and sleep-ins at the company’s head office. They were facing the threat of layoffs amid privatization plans of power distribution and revenue collection. The strike was another watershed in reviving street action for unions, but it fell short of total victory. Final resolution was brokered among two of the country`s main political factions who held sway among the workers or management. In the case of Spinneys, the workers were not even recognized as a collective entity neither by the state nor by the employer. Legally, forming a political party in Lebanon is easier than forming a union. Parties need only notify the state of their existence to become recognized as such. Unions have to apply for a permit or license from the Ministry of Labor. The labor minister in turn can “consult” the Ministry of Interior about the criminal records and other purported security concerns regarding the members of the founding committee. The discretionary nature of the process meant that political patronage was the key to setting up a union and that union leadership loyalty to political parties was the key to getting patronage. The power of ministerial discretion is not the only risk factor taken by those who wish to publicly found a union. The minister has two months from the date of submission for a permit to make a decision. During this “grace” period, the founding committee members are sitting ducks unprotected by law or a critical mass of membership. Of this, Spinneys was fully aware.

On 26 June 2012, the founding committee applied for the legally-required union license to be issued by the Ministry of Labor. Five days later, they organized a well-attended press conference. During the conference, testimonies of working conditions in Spinneys did serious damage to the company`s standing. According to these testimonies, close to 450 porters were not even registered employees. More scandalously, it was revealed that porters who help customers bag their groceries actually have to pay the company (not vise versa) a daily fee (5000 L.L., or about $3.33) to “reserve” a spot for themselves at the checkout counters (they make their money through customer tips). These revelations placed the company on the defensive and triggered a vicious campaign to ensure that the union never fully sees the light of day. The campaign was led by British businessman and Spinneys President Michael Wright. Lawyer activist Nadim Souaid says Wright himself was rumored to be working in Lebanon without a permit and scrambled to obtain one once the unionists outed him. Wright apparently had little qualms about this alleged violation. For Spinneys had already secured impunity vis-a-vis the law in Lebanon by embedding itself into the sectarian system of power and privilege dominating the country. The company reportedly bought the favors of powerful local politicians in each region by renting out their land for long term leases to set up branches of the supermarket. The politicians were also allegedly granted quotas to employ their loyalists. Under this arrangement, the politicians rake in profits from rent, and gain the favour of constituents. The company in return is able to call on the politicians to vouch for its interests in legal, tax and other matters and on the employed loyalists to do the “dirty” work for the company such as bullying and intimidation of union activists.

These tactics were extensively used in the two months following the union’s first press conference. They culminated in the firing of the union founding committee’s elected president Milad Barakat. At that point, solidarity with the union movement spilled into the street. On 31 August, a few days after news of Barakat’s firing, a rally calling for his reinstatement was held by activists in solidarity with the workers at the door of the supermarket’s Achrafieh branch in eastern Beirut. Solidarity also came in the form of a letter of support from the International Labour Organization (ILO). The Spinneys founding committee had kept invoking ILO Treaty no. 87. The treaty guarantees the right to form a union without a permit or state obstruction. Over 150 countries have ratified the treaty. In Lebanon, the Council of Ministers had approved it and passed it on to Parliament for ratification, but it has yet to be voted on, let alone placed on the docket . The sit-in outside the store had taken the conflict to the street and threatened to expose Spinneys more explicitly in front of its customers. A creative Facebook campaign attacking management was also growing. Unlike factories where production space is hidden from consumption, consumer-based companies like Spinneys could not easily suppress such moves unnoticed.

Despite the escalatory nature of the sit-in, the turn-out of a few dozen people was lower than expected. Of more concern was the fact that more workers stood at the store entrance in support of management than were in the demonstration. Founding committee members say these were the politician loyalists brought in from different branches by management to undermine the rally. Among the founding committee members, only Milad Barakat was visibly present at the solidarity rally. The absence of all founding committee members, despite the fact that the rally was called for by support groups, was disconcerting. Even if the union had the sympathy of most workers, Spinneys seemed to be winning the war of intimidation. It was becoming painfully clear that without gaining state recognition, via the permit, the union would remain in a very precarious position.

Just when things seemed to hit a dead end, a Beirut-based judge lit a light at the end of the tunnel. One week after the rally, and following a media shaming campaign directed at the corrupt political and juridical system conspiring against the workers, judge Zalfa Hasan of Beirut`s court for expedited matters effectively placed a freeze on the ability of Spinneys to lay off members of the founding committee pending the decision on granting a permit by the minister of labour. What had seemed so farfetched now became probable. Hasan’s decision placed the ball squarely in the minister’s court, who was running out of excuses to deny the union a permit. On 25 September, the last day of the two months grace period, the permit was issued. The union became a legal entity. A new stage of struggle was ushered in that may prove as difficult, if not more, as the founding moment. Infiltration, intimidation, and factionalism stoked by status quo forces can easily compromise the union. But a precedent of setting up an independent union and getting state recognition without the traditional route of clientalism has been set. A screw has been loosened. With everyone’s priorities seemingly elsewhere, sustaining the struggle ... is all that remains.

Joe Sacco, a comic artist, journalist, author, and illustrator, who has published works focusing on the Middle East is in conversation with historian Zachary Lockman, a professor in NYU’s Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies.

The interview is available at NYU Primary Sources, along with other interviews with Sacco and Lockman on the following topics: "On Documents and Footnotes", "On Historical Memory", "On Objectivity and Truth", and "Why Palestine?"