أما عن القاهرة الجميلة؛ فيأبى قمرها السكون، ويظل يبعثُ لحاله، منذ عدة ليال، بصغار الميدان، لكسر صفاء عواء الكلاب في مدى المدينة الليلي الواسع. يملأ هؤلاء الصغار الشارع بالألوان؛ انتهى عصر اللون الزيتي والرمادي والبناطيل القماش. وفي الشارع الواحد؛ قد تجد عزاءاً فاخراً في مسجد عمر مكرم لميتٍ مات على سريره، زغاريط أمسية فرح في الحي المقابل، ورسّاماً ينقش على الحائط تحديد وجه شهيدٍ مات لتوه بإصابة رصاص في الدماغ.

وبين ذلك وذاك، سائق توصيل طلبيات ”بيتزا هت“ يحاول جاهداً اختراق الغاز المسيل، لتوصيل البيتزا ساخنةً للحي على الجانب القريب. القاهرة كما ترى، لاتزال تدفئنا بصوتها في بوادئ الشتاء...وفي نهارها التالي، قد تغمي شمسها قليلاً، فتتماشى سماؤها مع غيام الغاز المسيل للدموع ... وكأنهم واحد، فلا يُلاحظ الفرق.

وبين كل ليلة وليلة، تحمل على واحد من كفيها صغار الميدان؛ يدفئون ليل قلب المدينة بوهج المولوتوڤ الطازج، ويصفقون ويعلو صوتهم خلال أحاديثهم المتقطعة المتفرقة، فأحاديثم هي في الأصل غناء. وإذا أخذت خطوة واحدة للجوار، تجد نفسك على كفها الآخر؛ حيث يجتمع المخبرون مع ضباط الأمن المركزي، في ظلال شارع القصر العيني، ليسلّوا ليلهم المقيت بحملقة فارغة في كون كل زائرٍ يتمشّى الشارع، فالتمشية عندهم حرام.

Egyptians are revolting once again but this time against an elected President: Mohammed Morsi, who just passed a series of presidential decrees giving him near-dictatorial powers. Almost two years after the fall of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt remains mired in major political struggles between the remnants of Hosni Mubarak's regime, the Muslim Brotherhood and the rest of Egyptian political opinion. What is the balance of power as it stands now between the different competing political movements in Egypt, and how has president Morsi's latest move affected this balance? Khalil Bendib put these questions to Assistant Professor of political science at Barnard College, Mona El Ghobashy and jadaliyya co-editor, Hesham Sallam. 

Shahram Aghamir spoke with Hadi Ghaemi, director of International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran about the case of imprisoned human rights lawyer, Nasrin Sotoudeh who has been on a hunger strike since October 17.

Tahani Rached’s latest documentary film, Nafass Tawil (Deep, Long Breath), premiered in September at the American University in Cairo as part of the International Summer Academy’s Aesthetics and Politics: Counter-Narratives, New Publics, and the Role of Dissent in the Arab World, a research program organized by the Center for Translation Studies and the Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien.   

أخرجت ثورة 25 من يناير 2011 الحياة السياسية في مصر من حالة الإنسداد والجفاف، التي ألمّت بها طيلة العقود الماضية، وفتحت أبواب المشاركة السياسية أمام ملايين المصريين، لتدخل مصر مرحلة التحول الديمقراطي، التي تنتقل بموجبها من النظام السلطوي اللاديمقراطي، إلى النظام التعددي الديمقراطي، القائم على المشاركة، والمنافسة الديمقراطية، والتداول السلمي للسلطة، عبر الإنتخابات الحرة النزيهة. وتُعد عملية تأسيس الأحزاب السياسية، التي تعبر عن المرحلة الجديدة من أهم سمات هذه المرحلة، فما هي أهم ملامح التجربة الحزبية الجديدة؟ وما هو مستقبلها؟

لمحة تاريخية

يعود ميلاد التجربة الحزبية بمصر إلى مطلع القرن العشرين، عندما تمخضّت الحركة الوطنية المصرية، في مواجهة الإحتلال البريطاني عن مولد الحزب الوطني بزعامة مصطفى كامل باشا. إلا أن  الميلاد الحقيقي لها، جاء بعد قيام ثورة 1919 والتي أفرزت قيادة ثورية ، تبلورت تنظيمياً فيما بعد ، عبر ظهور حزب الوفد بزعامة سعد زغلول باشا، المُعبر عن القوى الثورية، التي حملت لواء تحقيق مطالب الثورة، وإلى جواره جاءت أحزاب أخرى وصفت بأنها أحزاب "الأقلية". وعرفت الحياة السياسية المصرية ثقافة الإنتخابات، وتداول السلطة، بالرغم من تدخلات القصر، والإحتلال، التي أفسدت التجربة وأفرغتها من مضمونها.

وتسبّب فشل التجربة الحزبية في تقديم حل للقضية الوطنية، وإهمالها للقضية الإجتماعية ،في قيام ثورة يوليو 1952 والتي بدأت بإنقلاب عسكري قاده تنظيم "الضباط الأحرار". وتعامل نظام يوليو 1952 مع كان الوضع السابق ،عبر سياسة الهدم الشامل، فقررالإجهاز على التجربة الحزبية عبر قرار إلغاء الأحزاب السياسية، في يناير 1953 بعد سلسلة من الإجراءات إستهدفت إذلال النخبة السياسية الحزبية. 

بعدها "أممّت" الدولة السياسة ،بإتباعها لنظام الحزب الواحد أو التنظيم الشمولي الأوحد، والذي تغير إسمه من "هيئة التحرير"، إلى "الإتحاد القومي"، إلى "الإتحاد الإشتراكي" ،إلى "حزب مصر"، إلى "الحزب الوطني"،- المقبور- والذي إحتكرت "إصداراته" السلطة لقرابة 60 عاماً ، فكلها مسميات متعددة لكيان واحد.

العودة الثانية

وفي عام 1976 جاءت التجربة الحزبية الثانية بقرار سلطوي فوقي، عبر إنشاء المنابر السياسية، التي تحولت لاحقاً إلى أحزاب سياسية. وجاءت التجربة الثانية ليس بهدف ترسيخ مبدأ التعددية، أو التعبير عن توازنات سياسية،  فضلاً عن تداول السلطة الذي لم يحدث على الإطلاق، بقدر ما جاءت بهدف إضفاء قدر من "الديكور الديمقراطي"، والتعددية الشكلية على النظام الحاكم، خاصة مع توقيع إتفاقية "كامب ديفيد" وقدوم المعونة الأمريكية، التي كانت لها شروط محددة، فكان الهدف هو خلق كيانات هامشية تحيط بالحزب الواحد. وبعدها جاءت تلك اللجنة العجيبة المسماة ب"لجنة الأحزاب السياسية"، التي ترأّسها رئيس مجلس الشورى، الذي يحمل صفة قيادية في الحزب الحاكم، و تمتعت تلك اللجنة بسلطة مطلقة في منح أو منع الشرعية عن أي مشروع لحزب سياسي. 

بإختصار كانت التجربة الحزبية بعد عودتها الثانية تجربة مريضة تعاني من خلل بنيوي، وعيوب هيكلية، فكانت أحزاب المعارضة المعروفة – وهي تعد على أصابع اليد الواحدة- ممنوعة من ممارسة العمل السياسي خارج مقارها الحزبية، فضلاً عن معانتها من تكلُّس في قيادتها، ومن غياب الديمقراطية الداخلية، فاقتصر نشاطها على إصدار صحف تعبر عنها، فكان الأمر أشبه بصحف لها أحزاب، وليس أحزاباً لها صحف. 

أما بقية أحزاب المعارضة  فقد خرجت بالأساس برغبة أمنية، والطريف أنها كانت تحصل على دعم حكومي ، واعتمدت في عضويتها على الروابط العائلية، فلم يعرف الخاصة حتى مجرد أسمائها، فضلاً عن المواطنين العاديين. ولم يكن غريبا أن تندلع ثورة 25 يناير، ولم يكن لتلك الأحزاب أي دور في إشعالها، أو إستمرارها، بل إن غالبية القيادات الحزبية لم تكن لتجرؤ على الدخول إلى ميدان التحرير من الأصل، إبان أيام الثورة.

آثار ثورة يناير

جاءت ثورة 25 يناير خالية من القيادة الثورية التي تقود حركة الشارع ، ومن التنظيم الذي يمثِّلها ويتحدث بإسمها ، و ربما كان هذا ميزة في البداية، إلا أنه  تحوّل بعد ذلك إلى ثغرة كبيرة في مسيرتها ، وحتى بعد نجاحها في الإطاحة برأس النظام بتنحي الرئيس المخلوع مبارك لم تفرز ثورة 25 يناير قيادة لها، وبالتالي غاب الحزب أو التنظيم الذي يجمع قواها و يتحدث بإسمها، بعكس الوضع في ثورتي 1919 و1952. ولقد ترك سقوط رأس النظام، وغياب القيادة الثورية، فراغاً سرعان ما ملأتاه القوتان صاحبتا التنظيم على الأرض بحكم الأمر الواقع و ميزان القوى ، المجلس العسكري ، وجماعة الإخوان المسلمين.

كما فتح غياب القيادة الثورية الباب واسعاً فيما بعد، أمام  قوى وقفت ضد الثورة بكل قوة كي تدّعي نسبها فيما بعد. كما زادت السيولة الفكرية والتنظيمية الهائلة التي ضربت الشريحة الشبابية الطين بلَّة، فبالرغم من تفجيرها للثورة ،و توحدها في معركة إسقاط النظام، إلا أنه بعد الإطاحة برأسه،  تشظّت على عشرات الإئتلافات الثورية، فانقسمت على نفسها سريعاً، ولم ترتب أولوياتها ولم يفرِّق بعضها بين أدوات معركة الهدم وأدوات معركة البناء ، مما منح فرصة مثالية  لوجوه النخبة السياسية القديمة لإعادة تدوير نفسها، وعودتها إلى صدارة المشهد، وإعادة إنتاج أخطائها، التي ساهمت في وصول درجة الفساد والإستبداد إلى ما وصلت إليه قبل إندلاع الثورة.

وبعد هدم الثورة للبنية السياسية القديمة ، بدأت تتضح ملامح المرحلة الجديدة، وعادة تعرف المجتمعات بعد الثورات ظاهرة "الإنفجار الحزبي"، المتمثلة في ظهور عدد كبير من الأحزاب السياسية، ولقد أدت عدة عوامل إلى ظهور هذه الظاهرة بمصر بعد نجاح الثورة في الإطاحة بالرئيس المخلوع مبارك، أهمها تغيير البيئة القانونية، و شروط تأسيس الأحزاب، التي صارت بمجرد الإخطار بعد إستيفاء الشروط القانونية، إلى جانب التفكك الحزبي للتيارات السياسية الكبيرة، بحيث خرج أكثر من حزب ليعبر عن نفس التيار، بالإضافة إلى شغور مقعد القيادة الثورية، وعدم وجود حزب يفرض نفسه متحدثاً باسم الثورة.

ولقد وصل عدد الأحزاب السياسية بعد الثورة إلى حوالي 60 حزباً  حصل على الترخيص الرسمي، بالإضافة إلى قرابة 100 حزب  في قائمة الإنتظار، وتنوعت خلفيتها الفكرية من أقصى اليمين إلى أقصى اليسار، من أحزاب تعبر عن الإسلاميين الجهاديين، إلى أخرى تتحدث باسم الشيوعيين.

ولقد شهدت مصر أول إنتخابات برلمانية بعد نجاح الثورة، في نهاية عام 2011 والتي اتسمت بقدر كبير من النزاهة والحرية، غير أنها أُجريَت في مناخ من الإستقطاب السياسي الذي تفجر منذ إستفتاء 19 مارس على التعديلات الدستورية، الذي نقل الإستقطاب من محدوديته النخبوية إلى القواعد الشعبوية، إذ نقل خلافات النخبة إلى الشارع، و أحاله البعض إلى إستفتاء على الهوية بهدف إستعادة أرضية شعبية مفقودة.

كما أُجريت الإنتخابات في  ظل بقاء البنية الإقتصادية – الإجتماعية القديمة على حالها ، إذ لم تُدخِل الثورة أي تغيير عليها، ولقد حملت نتائجها دلالات تستحق التوقف والتأمل. أهم هذه الدلالات هو بقاء المحددات الناظمة للعملية الإنتخابية كما هي، عبر الحضور البارز للظهير الديني والظهير المالي للقوى السياسية صاحبة الصدارة، فقد عزّز الإستقطاب السياسي الحاد من حضور العامل الأول بإستخدام المساجد في الدعاية الحزبية والإنتخابية، ووصف المنافسين من التيارات الأخرى بأوصاف تطعن في مدى إلتزامهم الديني والأخلاقي. 

وفي المقابل تحالفت أحزاب سياسية متكتّلة مع الكنيسة، من أجل الحصول على الكتلة التصويتية القبطية. أما حضور رأس المال السياسي فهو من الظهور الطاغٍ بمكان، بما يكفي عن أي وصف، فقد إعتمد عدد من الأحزاب الجديدة في تمويلها، على كبار رجال الأعمال، بل إن بعضها شهد مفارقة مُعبِّرة حيث كان إسم رجل الأعمال الممول للحزب أشهر كثيراً من إسم رئيس الحزب، كما جاء الإنفاق البَذِخ على الدعاية الإنتخابية، عبر وسائل الإعلام المختلفة، وفي الشوارع  ليزيد الصورة تأكيداً. 

وبالحضور الطاغي للظهيريْن الديني والمالي غابت البرامج والأفكار، فلم تحقق الأحزاب التي إكتفت بطرح برامجها نتائج ذات بال، بسبب عزوفها عن إستخدام دور العبادة في الدعاية الإنتخابية، إلى جانب محدودية قدراتها المالية، وعدم  خلطها للعمل السياسي بالعمل الإجتماعي. 

كما حملت النتائج مفارقة كبيرة تمثلت في تراجع الحضور السياسي للقوى اليسارية، بالرغم من أن السنوات التي سبقت الثورة  شهدت زيادة معدلات الفقر، وإرتفاع وتيرة الإحتجاجات العمالية، وهو مناخ مثالي لإنتشار الأفكار اليسارية، إلا أن الخطاب اليساري ظل خطاباً نخبوياً حبيس الصالونات المغلقة، يصعب على البسطاء في الشارع فهمه والتفاعل معه، ولم يسع للإنتشار والعمل في الشارع، إلى جانب ضعف القدرات المالية للأحزاب اليسارية.

وجاءت المفارقة الثانية في مجيء التيار السلفي كثاني أكبر قوة سياسية ، وفق نتائج الإنتخابات البرلمانية، بالرغم من حداثة عهده بالعمل السياسي، وبالرغم من موقفه المقاطع للسياسة برُمّتها قبل الثورة، إذ كانت غالبية ذلك التيار تحرِّم العملية السياسية بالكلية، من الأحزاب، إلى الإنتخابات، إلى دخول البرلمان، وكان موقفها يقف على أرضية العقيدة "الولاء والبراء"، وليس على أرضية الشريعة "المصالح والمفاسد".

كما أن غالبية القوى السلفية وقفت ضد الثورة بكل قوة،  وحتى قبل التنحي ببضعة أيام ظلت على موقفها منها، وتراوحت رؤيتها للثورة من كونها "فتنة"، أو "مؤامرة خارجية"، أو "خروج على ولي الأمر أو الحاكم"، ولم يخرج عن هذا الموقف إلا حالات إستثنائية، تُعد على أصابع اليد من القيادات السلفية المعروفة. ثم إنقلب موقف القيادات السلفية من الزمهرير إلى الهجير دفعة واحدة ، فصار ما كان حراماً بالأمس حلالاً اليوم، فقفزت على ثمار الثورة التي وقفت ضدها،  دون أن تتقدم بإعتذار عن موقفها السابق، ودون أن تقدم على عملية نقد ذاتي ومراجعات فكرية تؤصِّل لتحولها الكبير. 

ثم جاءت الإنتخابات الرئاسية لتكشف عن مفارقة أخرى، إذ غابت الأحزاب السياسية عن التأثير في مجرياتها، فلم يكن المرشحون أصحاب المراكز الخمسة الأولى – عدا الأول- من ذوي الإنتماءات الحزبية، وحتى جماعة الإخوان المسلمين عندما قررت التقدم بمرشح رئاسي، لم يأت القرار عن طريق حزبها، وإنما جاء عبر مجلس شورى الجماعة وهو أمر يحمل دلالة بليغة.

نظرة إلى المستقبل

ومن المنتظر أن يستغرق قيام حياة حزبية سليمة بعض الوقت، ريثما تتبلور خريطة حزبية واضحة المعالم، تتكون من أحزاب حقيقية، تعبر عن مختلف الشرائح الفكرية والإجتماعية للمجتمع المصري. وهو ما يستلزم إجراء حوار وطني حقيقي، بين مختلف القوى السياسية المتواجدة على المسرح السياسي، بهدف خلق توافق وطني حول المباديء الأساسية التي تمثل أرضية مشتركة ، و وضع ضوابط محدة للعمل الحزبي والسياسي، تمنع التوظيف السياسي والحزبي لدور العبادة والمناسبات الدينية ، كما تضع حداً للإنفاق على الحملات الإنتخابية وتحظر شراء الأصوات.

فقد برزت مؤخراً ظاهرة التوظيف الحزبي للمنابر والمناسبات الدينية مثل صلاة التراويح و صلاة العيد، عبر تنافس الأحزاب على السيطرة على المساجد والساحات المخصصة لأداء الصلاة، من أجل إغتنام الفرصة والقيام بدعاية حزبية، ولو استمر الحال على هذا المنوال، قد يطالب البعض قريباً بإنشاء قسم للأحزاب السياسية في وزارة الأوقاف!. 

وتجدر الإشارة إلى أنه لا حياة سياسية سليمة ،إلا بعودة الدولة إلى دورها الإقتصادي والإجتماعي تجاه مواطنيها، وبعودة الدولة إلى دورها ستتغير المعادلة الإنتخابية  عبر عدة محددات، أهمها تفكيك المنظومة الإقتصادية الحالية المشوهة ، مما سيحجِّم من الدور الكبير الذي يلعبه رجال الاعمال في عدد من الأحزاب السياسية. 

كما أن عودة الدولة لدورها ستدفع بعدد كبير من المواطنين إلى ساحة العمل الحزبي، ممن تمنعهم دوّامة أمورهم المعيشية من الإنضمام لأحزاب سياسية، حيث يضطر الكثيرون للعمل عملاً إضافياً للوفاء بمتطلبات المعيشة، مما يجعل  من التفكير في الإنضمام لحزب سياسي ترفاً بعيد المنال، فضلاً عن معاناة الكثيرين من البطالة، التي تجعلهم فريسة للإحباط الشديد، الذي يُقعِدهم عن أي إهتمام بالعمل العام. 

كما أنها ستضع حداً لظاهرة خلط العمل الحزبي بالعمل الإجتماعي "الخيري" ، ممن يستغلون حاجة المواطنين بهدف الحصول على أصواتهم، ففي كثير من الأحيان ، يعطي المواطن صوته لحزب أو لمرشح بعينه، ليس عن قناعة بشخصه أوتوجهه بقدر ما هو عرفان منه لمن وقف بجانبه، عندما تخلّت الدولة عنه وتركته وحيداً مجرّداً يواجه مصيره بنفسه.

فلابد من وضع حدٍ فاصل، بين العمل الحزبي الذي تقوم به الأحزاب السياسية، والعمل الإجتماعي"الخيري"، الذي تقوم به الجمعيات الأهلية دون صبغه بلون سياسي. ويقع العبء الأكبر على الموجة الشبابية العاتية التي ألقتها الثورة في بحر السياسية الراكد، ومدى إستيعابها لدروس الأشهر الماضية، ومدى مسارعتها للخروج من حالة السيولة الفكرية والتنظيمية، لتشكيل كيانات سياسية وإجتماعية تحمل مطالب الثورة وتسعى إلى تحقيقها، فيبدو أن البعض لا يدرك الفارق بين وسائل الهدم و وسائل البناء، ويخلط بين وظيفة الحركة الإحتجاجية أو جماعة الضغط الجماهيري، ووظيفة الحزب السياسي، فآليات التأثير في التطورات السياسية تختلف من مرحلة إلى أخرى.

الحياة الحزبية الصحية من أهم سمات التطور الديمقراطي للمجتمع، ويحتاج إنطلاقها إلى تضافر الجهود بين مختلف القوى السياسية، وستتكفّل الممارسة العملية، بفرز الغث من السمين من كل هذا العدد الكبير من الأحزاب السياسية، لإنضاج التجربة الحزبية الجديدة، ليكون لدينا تعددية حقيقية، تتنافس فيها عدة أحزاب قوية، تمتلك المقومات الفكرية، والقدرات التنظيمية، والإمكانات المالية، وتتمتع بالديمقراطية الداخلية البعيدة عن الشخصنة والفردية، وتمثل قواعد جماهيرية حقيقية، فلا تكن مجرد صالونات نخبوية، فالتعددية الحزبية الناضجة شرط أساسي لإنطلاق التجربة الديمقراطية.

[ينشر بالإتفاق مع الكاتب عن جريدة "القدس العربي"]

In 1981, George Azar traveled from U.C. Berkeley to Beirut, Lebanon to see the Arab-Israeli conflict first hand. He got a job as a stringer photographing the Lebanese civil war for the Associated Press and United Press International. He was captured by the Israelis during the 1982 invasion and taken to Israel where he was released in Jerusalem. He returned to Lebanon and continued photographing the war until 1984. As the thirtieth anniversary of the Sabra and Shatilla massacre approached this year Azar returned to Beirut to search for the people in some of his most memorable photographs. His story, and the story of his subjects, is explored in the film “Beirut Photographer,“ to be broadcast on Al Jazeera English as part of the documentary series Witness, beginning 5 December.

While many photographers documented the string of Lebanese wars from 1975 to 1991, George’s commitment to live in Beirut from 1981 – 1984 during a period of intense violence and turmoil stands out. He was not just another foreign photographer parachuting in for a few weeks to create sensational, action-packed images. Although he is clearly attuned to the political complexities and concerns of the multiple parties and groups in the conflicts of the region, his main interest has always been in individuals – whether they were street-level fighters or non-combatants caught up in events they had no control over. The large number of photographs of children and young people in his Lebanon work also speaks to a real empathy for their particular situation. But he never slips into pathos. He never asks for the viewer’s pity. Rather he depicts them directly and simply as they struggle to come to terms with violence while also remaining children – happy, full of bravado, frightened, playful. It is his dedication to depicting the lives of ordinary people that really makes his work live on, whether he was photographing war in Lebanon, the intifada in Palestine, or making documentaries around the region.

The photographs included here are samples of his work from that period. Jadaliyya co-editor Michelle Woodward spoke to George about his experiences both in the early 1980s and in 2012.

George Azar: During that period in Beirut there was a core group of combat photographers and we were all friends, more or less. Learning photojournalism alongside them was one of the best things about being there for me. During the war we traveled in groups of two or three, in case one person was wounded and needed help. Most of the time we were on assignment for competing news organizations, like the AP and UPI, or Time and Newsweek. We thought that no matter what you find, different sensibilities are at work - so the pictures are going to be different. And it always worked out that way. I learned by traveling with Catherine Leroy, the great Vietnam-era photographer who covered the Viet Cong; Alfred Yaghobzadeh, one of Iran’s most celebrated war photographers; Eli Reed of Magnum, and the list goes on. Don McCullen was there and later James Natchway, the two preeminent war photographers of our time. I watched how they worked, what they looked for, and how they treated people. The one thing they all had in common was that they loved pictures and the life lived taking pictures.

The story as defined by the news organizations employing us was always essentially the same. Beirut = War. The sub story changed from time to time, as did the players: the PLO, the US marines, Hezbollah, hijackers, kidnappers. As individual photographers we were free to follow our interests. But the market, then and now, highly values “bang-bang,” dramatic images of violent combat. Many of us were focused on the fighting and the quest for the ultimate bang-bang image, with encouragement from our employers. When I first started working in 1981 and 1982, network TV crews had body armor and helmets, but none of the photojournalists wore them. By the mid-1980’s photographers started wearing Vietnam-era marine flack jackets with an old tin pot style helmet on occasion, as I did when covering the battle of Souk al Gharib. But since I always want to blend in as much as possible, not disturb the normal dynamics of the situation, and to share the life of the people I’m filming, I generally don’t like to wear body armor unless shells are really falling nearby.

Gradually I recognized that working for a big news magazine was essentially feeding the fires of propaganda and disinformation. It was hard to stomach the editorial line. About the same time, I realized that while my early photography was pretty strong in its depiction of the front line war experience, it didn’t reflect any of the things I loved about Lebanon: the humor and spirit of the people, or the physical beauty of the country. So during my next major period, in Palestine during the first Intifadah, I made a conscious decision to take time to photograph the things I loved about Palestine in the context of the political struggle.

I was very reticent to return to Beirut this year with the photos I had taken in Lebanon 30 years ago. I expected the subjects to be angry with me for photographing them at such vulnerable, horrible moments. I was conscious that I’d frozen that moment forever, and I didn’t imagine it would be anything like giving them a gift. So I was really wary of coming face to face with the Takkoush family on Rue Jean d’Arc in Hamra for example. It was hard for me to step through the door to their shop. To make matters worse, one of the first things Badr said to me was “Oh yes, that was the day my son died.” I felt the same reticence meeting the family of the young Palestinian fighter Samir Salamon, who was killed days after I took his picture. However, they were all very pleased to have the photos. Each held them in a tender way, and you could see they were being transported back to the moment of the photo. Watching them regard the photos so deeply as physical objects reignited my appreciation of still photography.

I made the documentary film “Gaza Fixer” seven years ago while I was living in Gaza working on assignment for the New York Times. It’s a film about covering the news. It was my first documentary, and it opened up a new world for me. Since then I’ve done my photography with a video camera. I try to bring the aesthetic and practice of photojournalism to film. “Gaza Fixer” gave me the chance to make additional films, so since 2005 I hadn’t felt an urgent need to take still pictures.

But the experience of making “Beirut Photographer,” of going back and pulling these pictures out of the shoebox, renewed my appreciation of the single still frame. They are simple and pure and true. So I’m really happy that I’ve taken out the camera again. Freezing a fraction of a second allows you to understand a moment, an event, in a unique way that is different from, and complementary to, cinema.

The physical search for the people in the pictures was really interesting. It was like a detective story. When Al Jazeera commissioned the film I thought to myself, ‘Oh great. How am I going to explain that I couldn’t find any of the people?” I sensed that the whole film would be a disaster, or at very least, the story of a fruitless hunt for people long disappeared. So I was shocked we were able to track down anyone. We found people by physically covering the same ground, walking the streets, handing the pictures around, asking questions, networking. That was great fun and really rewarding.

It’s hard to describe how surreal it was for me to be in places that held such deep and disorienting experiences, trying to be in the present moment filming the scenes unfolding while at the same time being flooded by memories of the same place in the past. It was like seeing two images superimposed upon each other, like a double-exposure in photography.

[West Beirut, on the Green Line, in the Chiyah neighborhood, 1984. Photo by George Azar.]

I met these kids in February 1984 during a battle that was raging in West Beirut between Amal and the Lebanese army. They were the defenders of a neighborhood that straddled a strategic crossing point, right on the front line. In order to film in the heart of a battle it helps if you know a particular group of fighters who will take you in with them and allow you to essentially become an “embed.” I followed them as they ran from alley to alley through destroyed houses, under tank and shellfire. We had some close encounters with death, and several of the Army of Chiyah kids, or the “Smurfs” as they called themselves, died while I was with them.

The two youngest boys, Zutti and Jawkal were fourteen years old and orphaned when their parents were killed by the Israelis in south Lebanon. They came to Beirut and lived in an area known as Sector 25, near Gallery Sam’an. During lulls they climbed up on the rooftops and became snipers firing down into ‘Ayn al-Rummana, the adjoining neighborhood. They used to play music on a cassette recorder to pass the time between shots.

Their relationship to the war was different than the older boys, since they never knew a time before war. They had a different, more matter of fact relationship to violence. This is Beirut’s war generation.

The search for the Smurfs was complicated by the fact that their political groups, Amal and Hezbollah, are still in a state of war with Israel and there are very real security barriers to prowling around Beirut’s southern suburbs with a camera. It was a huge break to get permission to do so. Once I was able to locate the leader of the Smurfs, Ali “Castro,” I had my guide to that past. We walked the streets of the neighborhood with an iPad and a stack of pictures finding each of the spots and sharing them with the people in the neighborhood.

[Aftermath of a blast next to the Takkoush flower shops, Rue Jeanne d'Arc, 1982, Beirut. Photo by George Azar.]

[Madame Takkoush after the blast next to the Takkoush flower shops, Rue Jeanne d'Arc, 1982, Beirut. Photo by George Azar.]

MW: In 2012, when you took these photos to the Takkoush flower shops, you found the shop proprietor and his wife, who is shown on the ground in the photo above. You thought she was dead but actually she survived. She didn’t think it was herself in the photo.

GA: The main reason she didn’t recognize herself is that she normally wears a hijab, and the woman in the photo had a pile of hair showing. It was only later, after her son pointed out her gold bracelets, that she realized that her headscarf had been blown off by the blast and that the woman lying on the ground was herself.

At the time I couldn’t see how she could be alive but I also didn’t focus on her. There was so much going on at the time… the noise, the smoke and general commotion, people running all about, the screaming. With the cameras of the period, you had to calculate exposure and manually focus. Later, I learned how to keep my head and clearly see what was going on, as if it was in slow motion. It’s a trick to see frames among chaos, while not forgetting shutter speeds and f-stops, focusing and all that.

[Fatah fighters, Baddawi camp, 1983. Photos by George Azar.]

The picture of the blond PLO fighter with RPGs and his friend with a Kalashnikov was taken one morning in 1983 during the battle of Baddawi Camp. Smoke turned the sky dark. We had breakfast of sugar tea and bread. Then the fighters organized themselves in pairs. One with RPGs and the other with a Kalashnikov and in a group of about eight or ten they marched off to fight the Syrian / Abu Musa forces. I have a picture of them marching away. I never saw them again. When I went back to Baddawi in 2012, these two teenagers were among the first people I looked for. The old fida’iyyin said that these guys were part of a contingent of fighters from the Palestinian camps in Syria who joined Yasser Arafat in Tripoli.

[Um Jalal & Khaled Marzouk and family under fire in a house in Jiyya during the Israeli invasion, June 1982. Photo by George Azar.]

MW: The boy on the lower left in this photo remembered you from this moment in 1982 and asked you in 2012 “why did you leave us at that moment?”

GA: His question had two levels of meaning, both of which were disturbing. On one level he was saying that as the adult male we looked to you to take care of us. During the battle I had made sure everyone was low and away from flying glass and metal, I had taken charge during the shooting and he expected that I would stay with them. Then after the Israelis rolled over our position they took me away. On another level, when he asked why did you leave us at that precise moment he was saying that all these years they wondered if I was a spy who flipped once the army arrived on the scene of this important battle. Lebanon was full of spies. I’ve seen spies posing as photographers more than once. All he remembered is that I appeared at the moment of the Israeli attack and then left with them. At nine years old he couldn’t grasp that I was being taken away against my will. So he feels a lot better about me now.

[Vendor at Martyr's Square, Beirut, 1992. Photo by George Azar.]

I never found the kid I searched for first and last during our ten days in Lebanon. I don’t know his name and I think of him as the “Chiclets boy,” after the brand of gum kids sell on the streets. I took his picture on my first visit to downtown Beirut after the end of the war. I was walking around in a kind of trance, it was near sunset, the light was beautiful, people were out playing cards, smoking arguila in the magnificent square that was absolutely shattered, and it looked horribly beautiful with all its bullet holes in a cinematic way. I had only known that place as a free-fire zone where you had to run and duck the bullets, so it was amazing to walk around freely, watching people enjoy themselves. Then I saw a kid selling photos. When I looked at them I saw it was Beirut before the war, and he was standing in the same spot under the statue. I took this simple picture of a kid selling memories at the end of the war. I never saw him again.

Being given the opportunity to return to Beirut and make a film covering my personal terrain there and more interestingly, an era of Palestinian and Lebanese history that shaped today’s world, was a huge privilege. I just hope I told the story well.

[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.]

Regional and International Perspectives

As battle raged in Syria, Russia sent tons of cash to Damascus, flight records show A report by Dafna Linzer, Michael Grabell and Jeff Larson.

Iraq Tensions Rise as Syria Crisis Deepens Lauren Williams suggests that Iraq’s official position of neutrality is falling apart.

Zombie vs Frakenstein Malik al-Abdeh believes that the Syrian National Council and the National Coalition will be competing with one another for funds and recognition from the international community.

Unwanted: a failed crossing from Damascus to Gaza Rita from Syria deplores the presence of a smuggling market along the Jordanian border, which leaves the Syrian and Palestinian refugees vulnerable to exploitation.

Syrian refugee camps and conflict in Turkey Theodore Baird suggests Turkey’s humanitarian infrastructure is strained.

Syria refugee influx a crisis for Lebanon's Shatila camp

Imperialism and the Left

Syria is central to holding together the Mideast Condoleezza Rice says if the United States does not intervene in Syria “Iran will win, our allies will lose, and for decades the region’s misery and violence will make today’s chaos look tame.”

Syrian Narratives

Syrie: liberté pour les mariées de la paix !Thierry Boissiere says the activists who peacefully protested in a Damascus souq last week (and who were subsequently arrested) broke the official narrative wanting that the regime is fighting terrorists.

Nothing nuanced in Assad's bloody survival strategyAmal Hanano says“what the staunch defenders of resistance have forgotten is that the suffering of Syrians has been historically linked to the suffering of Palestinians.”

After Assad falls, Syrians will have to forgive his supporters Jasmine Roman writes that “the derogatory dichotomy of for or against only serves Al Assad's existential narrative, and protracts the conflict at the expense of Syrian blood.”

Syrian wounds and Iraqi scars Andrea Glioti says “despite good intentions, Syrians will face a challenge keeping control of its destiny to avoid the Iraqi fate.”

Syria's Jabhat al-Nusra militia looks pretty serious Dan Murphy on the alarming progress of the Islamist group gaining territory in the east.

Syrian rebels turn looted missiles on Assad's aircraftMartin Chulov on this latest tactical development.

Vice Turns Back the Pages on Syrian Resistance An interview with Aaron Lake SmithandAnna Therese Day.

Inside Syria

Syria crisis: Kidnappings compound conflict fears Linda Sinjab on the story of a schoolboy kidnapped by men who claimed to be from the FSA and who asked for a $2m ransom.

Rebels flying black Islamist flag seize artillery base in Syria’s Deir al Zour province David Enders on the military gains of Jabhat al Nusra in the east of the country.

Position regarding Jabhat al Nusra, similar groups and suicides bombings Syria Freedom Forever rejects “the reactionary and sectarian character of this group in total opposition to the origins and reasons for the uprising.”

Art and Social Media

The Revolutionary Cannot Speak Poem by Razan Ghazzawi

Smuggled out of Syria to show London, the art of war Ian Black on the “Shattered Beauty” exhibition that will include the works of artists inside and outside Syria

The Misery of Atmeh Refugee CampA photo essay by Sarabiany

Policy and Reports

A Precarious Balancing Act: Lebanon and the Syrian Conflict International Crisis Group report.

Arabic

آن أوان التدخل الأميركي في سورية

Al-Hayat publishes this arabic translation of Condoleezza Rice's article on Washington Post in which she analyzes the Syrian situation from her perspective and the "strategical" importance for the United States to intervene in Syria.

أدلجة المعركة ضد الاستبداد لضرب المقاومة

Mohammad Dibo writes about the ideology of resistance, that has been compromised due to its abuse by tyrannical regimes such as the Syrian one for political interests.

رحلة التغيير العربية: إنتفاضات وحراكات وثورات

Shafiq Nathem Al-Ghabra writes about the need for revolutions and uprisings in order to achieve real change in the fact of regimes who are reluctant to enact reforms.

الشام الأمس واليوم

Hussein Al-Awdat writes compares the Damascene past, full of glorious monuments and natural beauty, with its current insecure reality.

البحث عن مواطن سوري سعيد

Hayfa Bitar writes about taking advantage of kids and the youth by both sides of the struggle in Syria in order to achieve strategical interests.

هل تقع حرب بين سوريا و اسرائيل؟

Fayez Sarrah questions whether, in light of the recent events, a war is taking place between Syria and Israel.

شهران على إخفاء عبد العزيز الخيّر

Lillian Yousef writes about the detention of Abd Al-Aziz Al-Khayer, who had disappeared two months ago. 

برنامج صدى المواطنة الحلقة الرابعة ٢٢‫١١‫-٢٠١٢

This is a video of the 4th episode of the show Sada Al-Muwatana, which reports about the recent events in Syria, including a segment in which the host interviews 3 Syrian members of 3 different opposition parties and movements: The Syrian National Council, The Ma'an Movement, and the National Coordination Body for the Forces of Democratic Change in Syria.

سري كانيه‫" (رأس العين) توحّد أكراد سوريا"

Sherzad Adel Al-Yazidi writes about the Kurdish response to the invasion of the city of Raas Al-Ein by armed Salafist groups in Syria.

باب الهوى: التهريب النظامي

Rasha Rami writes about the situation in Bab Al-Hawa on the Syrian border to Turkey, where tens of Syrian refugees queue waiting to legally flee the dire situation in their homes.

البرد يعصف باللاجئين السوريين في ظل تدهور المساعدات

Assharq Al-Awsat issues a report about the situation of Syrian refugees who are suffering from a mass shortage in humanitarian aid. 

The outcome of a United Nations General Assembly vote on enhanced membership status for Palestine has never been in question. The Palestinians will win, probably handily, because the international community overwhelmingly supports the Palestinian right to self-determination and opposes Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory. Those openly opposing this vote can easily be counted on the fingers of an amputated hand: Israel; the United States, which is more pro-Israel than Israel itself; Canada, which is more pro-Israel than even the United States; and perhaps one or two Pacific islands casting one of their final UN votes since they will be rewarded for their obeisance by further North American carbon emissions and an attendant rise in the sea level.

Rather, this event should be considered on the basis of a number of related issues:

1. Will Abbas do it? For much of the past year there has been justified skepticism about Abbas's intentions. He repeatedly delayed. Firstm Abbas parked the application at the UN Security Council, where it was guaranteed to languish under US custodianship. Then, he postponed it until after the US presidential elections. Finally, he appeared to  want to procrastinate further until after the January 2013 Israeli elections. Since Abbas remains confident Obama will commence the liberation of Palestine in 2013 or 2014, he most likely would have continued delaying matters.

What then happened was that events (and Abbas's own conduct) essentially forced his hand. First, he informed Israeli television of his personal disinterest in the right of return in order to assuage Israeli fears about Palestinian rights. This created an instantaneous firestorm among Palestinian public opinion, and put Abbas in the position of needing a quick fix to arrest the rapidly accelerating collapse of his remaining legitimacy. Then the there was the recent Israeli assault on Gaza, and the resulting perception that Hamas is successfully confronting Israel while Abbas is hapless, helpless and (more dangerous yet, irrelevant). This in equal measure left him no choice. Presumably, he came under significant pressure from what is left of Fatah to act and act speedily as well. 

2. This is about quality not quantity. With the outcome of the UN vote never in doubt, the real question is whether the Palestinian UN bid will gain significantly more support, and garner significantly less opposition, than the 1988 proclamation of independence. There are already very encouraging signs in this respect. France is leading a very respectable group of EU member states to vote in favor. Germany, which is no longer the determined obstructionist within the EU it has been in years past, is abstaining. It seems no more than one or two insignificant EU members, if any, will vote against the status upgrade. Even Australia is abstaining.

Within Europe, the British position is of particular interest. London has made its vote conditional on a Palestinian commitment to unconditionally resume participation in a peace process that does not exist (and that within the framework advocated, simply cannot exist), as well as a Palestinian pledge to ensure Israeli impunity at the  International Criminal Court (ICC) with respect to its war crimes. They appear to have obtained neither condition, but are nevertheless abstaining rather than voting against. For this, Abbas has Ahmad Ja’bari rather than David Cameron to thank.

The above notwithstanding, it has been painful to watch the unbridled glee and haste with which the Harper government is flushing Canada's international reputation for neutrality and support for international law - built up over decades - down the toilet and into the sewer.

More amusing have been US efforts to restrain the Israeli response to the UN vote. Since Palestinian success will trigger automatic US sanctions, the Obama administration wants to prevent the Netanyahu government from doing the same lest the Palestinian Authority collapse. The prospect of Washington pleading with Israel to limit sanctions against the PA to lessen the impact of US sanctions is, to say the least, utterly bizarre. But given the EU’s total abandonment of Israel on this specific issue, Israel’s freedom of action in the coming weeks will in any case be constrained. To be sure, a formal Israeli annulment of Oslo would have been icing on the cake. However, it is far from clear that Israel’s security establishment would have let Netanyahu and Lieberman run amok on election eve.

3. The real issue is what comes next. Anyone familiar with the position of Western governments knows that, for them, what this issue is really about is not the United Nations or Palestine’s status in the General Assembly but rather the International Criminal Court (ICC). They desperately do not want to have to make a choice between their commitment to Israeli impunity and support for the ICC. That has worked so long as the ICC only goes after Africans. They are simply mortified that this may now change. Not only should they make that choice, they should be forced to make that choice in full public view. If this means the demise of the ICC and its inability to continue with the exclusive prosecution of Africans, so be it. We need a real court, and a willingness to prosecute Israeli war crimes is for many, and quite rightly, the litmus test of the court’s efficacy and utility. Parenthetically, it is Interesting that the same governments getting all bent out of shape about a UN vote and particularly the prospect of Israel having to account for its crimes have a policy of total indifference on Israeli settlement expansion and total support for "Israel's right to self-defence" every time it launches a murderous assault on the Palestinians. Indeed, when is the last time Victoria Nuland even alluded to the latest Israeli settlement announcement. Obama’s record in this respect has been significantly worse than even that of George W. Bush.

For the Palestinians, the key question is whether Abbas is using this as cover to resume utterly meaningless negotiations with Israel that serve only to consolidate occupation, or whether it is a step towards the internationalization of the Question of Palestine and therefore an irrevocable move away from the Oslo framework. There is in this respect an urgent requirement for a Palestinian national strategic consensus, so that this tactical move becomes part of a comprehensive national strategy rather than an initiative that is taken for personal or factional considerations. 

The not unrelated point is that to the extent the PA is punished (particularly financially) for this move, it reduces foreign leverage over the Palestinians to undertake absolutely essential maintenance work on the national movement, particularly insofar as ending the schism between Fatah and Hamas is concerned. To the extent it is not punished, it should serve as an object lesson in how to call a bluff and stand up to foreign pressure.

The key issue here is internationalization. 

With November nearly at an end, it seems like an eternity ago that Israel and Gaza were engaged in intense if unequal fighting. Yet it was only two weeks ago that Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi spent intense hours on the telephone with US President Barak Obama to craft a truce. Not long after the two men hung up their phones Egypt’s current crisis began and many Egyptians today are, for the first time in centuries, afraid of civil war. Street fighting has broken out in several provincial capitals and claimed several lives and several local headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood have been torched; so these fears are not unfounded.

The proximate cause is President Morsi’s decision to issue a second constitutional declaration of his own removing all of his actions from judicial review and allowing him to take any decision he wishes to safeguard the revolution. There has been widespread criticism of successive drafts of the new constitution as well as of a process from which the representatives of almost all political forces other than the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafist trends have withdrawn. Morsi believes his declaration was necessary to protect the revolution; the political figures that have withdrawn believe it was a final attempt by Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood to subvert if not destroy the revolution. In addition to a debate about the merits of Morsi’s declaration there is also a debate about the responsibility of various political and institutional actors in creating what is now not only a constitutional deadlock but an increasingly deadly conflict as well. This debate inside Egypt has been echoed in the US where several scholars have strenuously argued that Morsi’s actions are well-considered necessities to safeguard the revolution against a motley collection of unruly and isolated liberals and secularists allied with remnants of the old regime in an irrational hatred of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Of the complex story of the past two years, three points are worth keeping in mind. First, the Muslim Brotherhood has a large disciplined membership and a significant constituency but it also evokes significant anger, fear and opposition within wide sections of Egyptian society (Muslim as well as Christian). By some accounts the group has 800,000 active dues-paying members and can probably count on getting at least thirty-five percent of the votes in parliamentary elections. The Muslim Brotherhood was the largest and most-disciplined party in 2011; it was also the only one. After two years of revolution that is no longer true. The Social Democrats, Al-Wafd and even the Free Egyptians look more like real parties now than the debating clubs that they were in 2011. In 2011, lacking leaders of national stature, the revolutionaries made a virtue of necessity by opposing the idea of leadership. Today there are leaders with proven national constituencies. Hamdeen Sabahi, Mohamed ElBaradei, and Amr Moussa all have significant flaws but they have also shown themselves to be plausible spokesmen for popular discontent. More important for the future, a group of younger and far more organizationally savvy young political leaders and organizers are emerging. Third, despite pseudo-academic babble, the last two years have been truly revolutionary: with the occasional exception of the courts there have been no functioning institutions to resolve fundamental issues of power and politics. The frequent repair to emergency proclamations in the form of constitutional declarations (four in two years) is indicative that the shaping of political institutions remains a matter of raw and direct political conflict.

The constitution should resolve this elemental conflict by providing appropriate channels for the routine resolution of struggles over pressing policy issues such as investment, unemployment, education, and public safety. With measured unemployment in the 15-29 year old age group at seventy-five percent, foreign currency reserves less than a quarter of what they were two years ago, and tourism at a standstill this is a country that needs to be able to address pressing challenges rapidly and effectively.  

The content of the constitutional draft has been subject to extensive criticism. It is clearly a document written by the Muslim Brotherhood, its supporters, and allies. This, they argue, is the outcome of democracy. They won the March 2011 referendum setting up the political process; they won the parliamentary elections of 2011-12; they won the presidency with Morsi’s victory in 2012. Consequently they have the right to shape the constitution.

They are certainly right as far as the argument from democracy goes. The problem, however, is that it does not go that far. Morsi’s constitutional declaration was designed primarily to prevent the courts, especially the Supreme Constitutional Court, from stepping into the constitutional process. The president and his supporters blame the court for dissolving the lower house of parliament, forcing a reorganization of the initial constitutional assembly, and threatening to dissolve the current one.

Seen as a dispute between legally constituted powers, Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood have a plausible argument. The courts, and the rule of law more generally, often play an anti-democratic role. The problem is that what Morsi conceives as an institutional conflict can also be perceived as an assault on the fundamental right of Egyptians to seek redress in the courts for wrongs inflicted by the state. The courts, rather than parliament or the executive, have been the primary source for such redress over the past thirty years and Egyptians have widely resorted to them.

If Morsi’s vision of Egypt’s future were sufficiently widely held he could simply ignore the courts. He and his supporters have tried that approach by claiming that judges represent only a tiny, westernized minority of public opinion. Unfortunately for him that has turned out to be insufficiently true. Views about the judiciary are complex. Some Egyptians would like to see the judiciary undergo significant reforms. Others in the midst of a revolutionary upheaval seem to want to keep the old court system intact and they also seem to have accepted, at many junctures, the substance of court decisions. Whether these decisions would win referenda is less important than that they have commanded at least as much respect as those made by any competing institutions or political actors. And whether they deny it or not, the courts, with their own vision of the rule of law and a discursive tradition that extends beyond several successive constitutions, a political force to be reckoned with today.

In a world in which things have changed frequently and rapidly the courts at crucial points provided a way to revisit earlier decisions electoral, administrative, or institutional. Unpleasant as this is for executive and even legislative officials it is a necessity in the extremely unstable and uncertain times through which the country is living. And, indeed, the courts have done this not because they have a larger plan but primarily in the defense of their own institution and their small community of jurisprudential discourse.

Despite Morsi’s claim to have a program to make significant change within hundred days of his inauguration, things have not improved. The most egregious example occurred in mid-November in the southern town of Asyut where a train ran into an overloaded bus carrying sixty kindergarteners, killing dozens.   Obviously Morsi did not cause the wreck but it underlined the depth of the severe problems with Egypt’s government (which runs the malfunctioning rail system and pays the absent crossing guards) and infrastructure. In the past such an accident in the countryside might have gone unreported, but no longer. Also in the past the concurrent Israeli bombing of Gaza during which children died might have driven the Asyut tragedy out of the news, but again that is no longer true.

Elected by an extremely slender majority, Morsi has made almost no effort to reach out beyond his supporters and visibly be the president of all Egyptians. His assertion that he is not prejudiced against any Egyptian citizen was a peculiar way to be reassuring. He promised to choose vice presidents (he can have more than one) from among Egypt’s women and Copts, but in the end chose one conservative Muslim judge (as well as choosing the judge’s brother to be minister of justice). He did choose a wide array of advisers, but it is well known that he has never actually sought their advice. He has been very visible at mosques around the country for communal prayers, but has never visited a church and refused to attend any of the ceremonies for the recent installation of a new Coptic pope. Nor has he visited clubs, cafes, or other places where ordinary Egyptians congregate. In a recent meeting attempting to iron out his conflict with the courts he insisted the judges come to the presidential palace although the custom has been for the president to recognize the judiciary by holding meetings at their headquarters. His wife attended the funeral a few days ago of a young man from Damanhur associated with the Muslim Brotherhood who was killed in street fighting. Morsi, however, neither attended nor sent a representative to the funeral of the Asyut school children. Singly, none of these matter but they add up to a presidency which is and which is widely seen to be extremely narrowly based on the Muslim Brotherhood, the Salafists, and their electoral constituencies. In ordinary times this might not matter so much, but in the midst of ongoing and revolutionary disorder, it portends a leader and a party with plans to conquer the political and social realm rather than to negotiate with it. Morsi sees himself as a revolutionary leader but if that means the re-imposition of an authoritarian regime, many Egyptians do not want it.

In many ways the story of the last year has been a struggle over the courts. A proposal by a member of the now-dissolved lower house to install new personnel in the Supreme Court and limit judicial review of laws passed by super-majorities was an inauspicious beginning to the chamber’s work and no doubt alarmed members of the court. Morsi’s most recent constitutional declaration limited judicial review and allowing him nearly untrammeled authority to “defend the revolution” is equally alarming. The response has been a political strike by members of the judiciary who have also declared that they will not oversee the upcoming referendum on the constitution.

Why this may lead to civil conflict is, therefore, not so obscure. President Morsi has not only alienated many Egyptians while also reinforcing his base. He has also now arrayed the judiciary against him. So, too, had Mubarak but he had the police on his side. The other aspect of Morsi’s constitutional declaration threatens the police with further trials (and re-trials) for offenses committed during the early phase of the revolution and they are almost certainly not very happy about that. The armed guardians of the law are no longer as eager as in the past to establish order and may not necessarily come to Morsi’s aid. The Armed Forces, which refused a request by the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood to safeguard the national headquarters, have made it clear that they will stand aside unless civil disorder again threatens the institutional existence of the state. Consequently, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists may, as seems to have occurred in provincial cities, rely on their own paramilitary forces to fend off threats to their physical safety or even to prevent crowds from gathering nearby. Escalating violence could result and some leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood have hinted that they are barely restraining restive younger members. The recent call by Al-Nour Party spokesperson, Nader Bakkar for a Saturday demonstration in support of Morsi in Tahrir, where protesters are staging a sit-in in opposition to the president’s decisions, is inflammatory. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a noted scholar and religious leader associated with the Muslim Brothers, probably well reflected their beliefs when he said that the current demonstrations against Morsi in Egypt are illegitimate and announced that the opposition would be unable to bring significant numbers to the capital and daring them to try. A year ago that might have been true; Tuesday night it proved not to be.

President Morsi and his allies continue to argue that their attempts, legitimated through electoral success, to write a constitution have been destabilized by remnants of the old regime including its security agents, a westernized minority, and outside agitators. Claims that Morsi is somehow like Abraham Lincoln saving the union might be more plausible if his opponents were in the streets demanding the moral equivalent of slavery. They are not. The Morsi presidency has divided the country, but it has succeeded in uniting the opposition. A test of strength is probably inevitable but it will not be pleasant and it may prove to be cruel.

The political economic system that the revolution rose up against was not successfully eliminated because it is built on an alliance between political despotism and unreserved capitalism, monopoly and association.

This has resulted in a marriage between power, money and mounds of brazen corruption that we have yet to entirely discover and that is bound to leave an enormous legacy of social injustice.

Therefore, revolution forces or its advocates should provide a sound foundation to establish social justice. Complete social justice could never be achieved until this political economic system is overturned and replaced with a coalition between sound democratic rule and an economic structure that guarantees efficient and fair distribution.  By the way, these are two features of proper capitalism.

The 1971 Constitution, before it was sabotaged in 2007 by the posse of the deposed tyrant, incorporated key provisions that guaranteed sound democratic governance and social justice. Nonetheless, these provisions were not fulfilled because of the abovementioned format of political economy that inherently produces immense social injustice.

Why, then, do we care about the place of social justice in the new draft constitution?

The main reason is because the constitution is the crown of society’s legal structure; laws are derived from it and must come under its banner. It sends crucial signals to all branches of proper democratic rule: legislature, executive and judiciary, to guide state, society and social justice entities since it is a goal of the great people’s revolution. Any deviation from serious action to achieve it is equivalent to high treason against the revolution and its martyrs.

But how can the constitution incorporate texts that guide action to achieve social justice?

There is one prerequisite and three basic guarantees. The precondition is that the draft resolution guarantees sound democratic governance and a peaceful rotation of power. Sound democratic rule means that rulers represent the people transparently and guarantee wise governance, including disclosure and accountability. This would mean that all powers are accountable to each other and routinely accountable to the people through free and honest elections.

This would guarantee that powers are mindful of the people’s public interests, and submit to effective routine accountability on how well they have fulfilled their mandate to govern on behalf of the people.

But there are three more requirements for social justice in a draft constitution that champions the great people’s revolution over tyranny and corruption.

First, the constitution must emphasise the state’s responsibility to guarantee that all people in Egypt, without discrimination based on gender or faith, have several unreserved social and economic human rights. These include the right to good health physically and psychologically that goes beyond the right to medical treatment regardless of one’s financial situation and also includes a healthy environment for a good life.

Also, acquiring knowledge through education and training throughout life, a good job that efficiently employs a person’s skills in a humane work environment, and generating enough income to cover the cost of a decent standard of living for the worker and his family. Also, decent housing and social security services when circumstances prevents someone from working, including old age and illness.

A draft constitution worthy of the great people’s revolution must guarantee these five basic human rights for everyone in Egypt, without discrimination based on gender or belief or any restraints on these rights.

The issue of restrictions is vital; authoritarian rule always seeks to circumvent constitutional provisions that guarantee a right or freedom. Traditionally, constitutional provisions are bypassed through amendments by “constitutional tailors” who restrict rights under the pretext of regulating them legally and end up either curtailing or even revoking them.

Unfortunately, in the new draft constitution, the fanatics who dominate the Constituent Assembly decided on several conditions that appear benign but in truth are not by stating “what does not contradict God’s laws." It is an ambiguous condition that opens the door to extremist jurisprudential interpretations that restrict a right or freedom.

Regrettably, Sharia was not used by this fanatic camp to support a right or freedom, although the essence of Islam’s tolerant Sharia champions ultimate human rights and freedoms. Instead, this camp — which wants hardship to prevail — focused on restricting freedoms and rights under the pretext of applying God’s laws, although this contradicts God’s instruction to make life easier for people.

Using God’s laws to place restrictions in the draft constitution intensified when it came to equality between women and men by linking the matter to the rulings not the principles of Sharia. These rulings are open to interpretation by fanatic jurists and could usher in backward and retarded jurisprudential interpretations, as is the case in some neighbouring countries that call for governing through God’s laws. It is as if those writing the constitution are itching to subjugate women, “the sisters of men,” as the good prophet put it.

Any draft constitution that does not advocate the full rights of girls and women in the face of the historical injustices they have suffered for long decades, or even centuries, cannot claim to champion social justice.

The second guarantee of social justice in the draft constitution is mentioning a minimum wage and pension (which is in actuality deferred pay until after retirement) that rises in proportion to price hikes. This would guarantee a good life for recipients of wages and pensions. Minimum wage is complemented with maximum income — not just wage — as a reasonable percentage of minimum wage, just like in all advanced capitalist countries.

The third required provision is a progressive tax system on income and enrichment (increase in wealth) whereby tax brackets increase as income or enrichment rise.

Let us now look to see if the current draft constitution contains these guarantees. If not, then it is wasting an opportunity for the post-revolution constitution to move Egypt in the direction of a key demand of the revolution: social justice. In that case, the Constituent Assembly — which has corrupted Egypt’s post-revolution political life — will have betrayed one of the fundamental goals of the revolution. 

[Developed in partnership with Ahram Online.]

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

Algeria

Pouvoirologie: Saïd Bouteflika au premier rang. @7our discusses the obscurity of the Algerian government's inner workings.

Grève des barreaux d'Algérie : Les avocats décideront ce samedi Lawyers discuss plans to boycott the beginning of the judicial year to protest against a draft law that would strengthen the power of the executive over their profession.  

Algeria’s rulers are misunderstood artists An anonymous Algerian satirically addresses government failure on the 50th anniversary of independence.

Libya

The Libyan: First Exhibition of Post-Gaddafi Art in London Karen Dabrowska chronicles exhibits at the multimedia Noon Arts show.  Preview of the exhibit available here.

The Syrian conflict through a Libyan lens Rhiannon Smith comments on the similarities and differences between Syrian and Libyan calls for international help as well as Libyan support for the Syrian revolution.

Compensation to Freedom Fighters Not Welcome in New Libya Ayat Mneina criticizes the loosely defined proposed payouts as an obstacle to progress and reminiscent of the former regime's silencing tactics.

The Libyan public’s role in drafting the Constitution: Part I Lorianne Toler recommends several methods of public participation in constitution-making to increase the state's legitimacy and inclusiveness.

Does Libya have a President now? Sufyan Maghur warns against the GNC's sustained arrogation of the executive branch.

Mauritania

Human Rights Bodies Denounce Abuses in Mauritania Anita Hunt summarizes the joint report issued by the International Federation for Human Rights and the Mauritanian Human Rights Association.

Mauritania: February 25th Movement says “No to Guardianship” of France Overview of French involvement in the 2008 coup and the FEB25 movement's #nonalatutelle campaign.

Le Président mauritanien prêt à se remettre au travail The newly returned president discusses Mauritania's potential role in the Mali war and opposition members reflect on the president's return with surprisingly moderated criticism.

Note d‘information sur la caravane de commémoration des martyrs de Sorimalé Account of the Caravan of Martyrs which commemorates the extrajudicial executions performed by the army on Black Mauritanians in 1989-91.

من أجل مدنية الحكم في موريتانيا
Ahmed Jadu reflects on Aziz' military rule and French involvement in his ascension to power, calling for a restoration of civilian rule. 

Morocco

Qui doit-on « vivement critiquer » : la monarchie ou le PJD ? "Pour ne Alternative Révolutionnaire" critiques a Le Monde feature's inacccurate depiction of political power and opposition movements.   

Hercule contre Hermes – Acte 2 Summary of Mohamed Ulad's documentary on the state's support of a wealthy Frenchman who has swindled and exploited property in Asilah.

La « politique de la magouille » servie par une « démocratie fanfaronne »…, Driss Benali reflects on the Makhzen's attempt to bolster credibility without legitimate democratization.  

Morocco legislators spar over finance bill Siham Ali reports on the seemingly unprecedented fragmentation of ruling party coalition members.

Tunisia

Tunisie: Origines des affrontements entre forces de l'ordre et manifestants dans la ville de Siliana Lilia Weslaty reports on the violent suppression of a peaceful demonstration that called for the resignation of Governor Ahmed Ezzedine and the implementation of development projects in the region. (Some video coverage here).

La Polit-Revue: « Les mal-aimés » Seif Soudani reviews this weeks's political stories.

Tunisian Police Use Shotgun Shells Against Protesters Afef Abrougui curates social media and human rights organizations' reactions to the clashes between security forces and protestors in Siliana.

Ennahdha’s Political Strategy: Between the Seculars and the Salafis  Mohamed Bechri examines Ennahada's new alliance with the secular opposition and related 'concessions.'

Recent Jadaliyya Articles on the Maghreb

From Opposition to Puppet: Morocco’s Party of Justice and Development
Lonely Servitude: Child Domestic Labor in Morocco
Quelle justice transitionnelle pour la Tunisie ?
ثورة . . . أما بعد
Plurality, Hybridity, and the Self: A Review of Benjamin Stora's "Voyages en postcolonies"
Maghreb Monthly Edition on Jadaliyya (October 2012)
Du « péril noir » au Maroc
Tunisian Unionists on Strike in Kasserine Province
Chomsky on the Western Sahara and the “Arab Spring”

Etel Adnan

September 12 – October 28, 2012

Callicoon Fine Arts, Manhattan

Roughly fifteen miles north of San Francisco, across the city’s iconic burnt-orange Art Deco masterpiece, is Mount Tamalpais, another Bay Area icon. In the surrounding areas of this unassuming mountain lived the Coastal Miwok Indians—a now landless people—who (as popular legend would have it) once claimed that an evil witch lived atop its peak in order to deter early European settlers from scaling its heights. It is also said that Mount Tamalpais was home to the Miwok coyote creator-god, who shook his blanket in each cardinal direction and brushed aside water in order to reveal dry land, fashioning his descendants out of that same earth.  

For Lebanese-born cultural figure Etel Adnan, who has maintained a residence near this mountain since the 1950s, its name is derived from the intertwined histories of two opposite views of the same referent landmark, the differences between “the native and the conquer.” “The Indian called the Mountain Tamal-Pa, ‘The One close to the Sea.’ The Spaniard called it Mal-Pais, ‘Bad Country,’” writes Adnan in her 1986 essay Journey to Mount Tamalpais (The Post-Apollo Press). This ode to her enduring muse was published after more than two decades of painting, drawing, and contemplating its terrain, where the renowned artist, poet, and writer of Syrian and Greek origins first experimented with the visual arts at age thirty-three.

There, in Marin County, Adnan was encouraged to paint by artist Ann O’Hanlon, who was the head of the art department at Dominican University of California (formerly Dominican College). Adnan taught philosophy at the private institution for years and it was through O’Hanlon that she became part of a tight-knit circle of artists that converged around the mountain, living and working at its base while drawing inspiration from its gentle yet stoic reign. Richard O’Hanlon, Ann’s husband, was also an artist—one who assisted Diego Rivera on his 1931 San Francisco Art Institute mural while still a student. The couple owned a large plot of land at the foot of Mount Tamalpais, which they turned into the Sight & Insight Art Center in 1969, a creative colony of sorts that is now the non-profit O’Hanlon Center for the Arts. Shortly after she began painting in 1958, Adnan shifted her focus to the ascending shadowy mass that stands as the natural compass of the peninsula.

Last month, at Callicoon Fine Arts in Manhattan a selection of her Mount Tamalpais paintings were highlighted in the artist’s first solo show in New York. These intimate works were included in a more extensive presentation at this year’s dOCUMENTA (13), the international art world’s hippest grand event (which takes place every five years and is geared towards the intellectual set).

                                                                                                [Installation view of the exhibition at Callicoon Fine Arts. Image courtesy of the gallery.]

To most, she is known for her exquisite writing: her many volumes of poetry, a recent award-winning series of essays accompanied by drawings, and the 1978 Lebanese civil-war era novel Sitt Marie Rosie—to list a few. She is also revered for accordion art books that are based on the Japanese tradition; delicate pieces that unfold to reveal her handwritten transcriptions of poetic texts—the style and format of which have been emulated by a number of contemporary Arab artists. But there is another side to her decades-long output, one that is anchored in the Bay Area with her longtime partner (and frequent publisher), the equally accomplished artist Simone Fattal.

Among the vibrant colorist works that comprised Adnan’s exhibition in the Lower East Side was a pronounced aesthetic leaning and an indication that her subject matter, while based on actual scenery, is representative of something more; or as Octavio Paz so aptly determined, “A landscape is not the more or less accurate description of what our eyes see, but rather the revelation of what is behind visible appearances” (Alternating Current, Wildwood House Limited: 1974).

In the artist’s untitled paintings that were created over a five-year period beginning in 2000 that landscape is distinctly Californian. Rendered with the coarse application of palette knife, which traces the movement of her labor with marked tactility, the outline of the mountain (or the ocean in some cases) appears at the moment when colors meet—when fields of gold, blue peaks, and a red sky equalize and carry the weight of each other. These hues not only function as affecting sparks as they are bathed in light, they are independent forces.

                                                                                                  ["untitled" (2000-05). Copyright Etel Adnan]

Adnan’s gamut of color is reminiscent of other California artists such as Richard Diebenkorn, yet she is not interested in the flat aerial swaths of the “Ocean Park” series that the well-known painter is distinguished by. Texture is visible in her work. Moreover, Diebenkorn’s palette has much in common with the 1920s and 30s landscape painters of the area, particularly Maynard Dixon (who, from 1920 to 1935, was married to acclaimed photographer Dorthea Lange, a chronicler of some of the state’s most oft-ignored scenes). In studying the semi-social realist compositions of Dixon, the reserved, abstracted forms of Diebenkorn, and the carefully (de)constructed naturalist bodies of Adnan—a question can be posed: Do views of California really bear such effervescent tones?

                                                                                                 ["untitled" (2000-2005). Copyright Etel Adnan.]

The history of art in this West Coast locale is centuries old. Prior to the arrival of Spanish invaders in the 1500s, its Indigenous peoples, although diverse in language, shared a number of common practices, most notably their abundant execution of functional and ceremonial objects that forged a broad visual culture. Basket weaving—with its rigorous patterns and designs and highly developed treatment of raw materials—was the core unifier of their multifaceted practices, all of which related to the available resources of specific environments (coastlines, deserts, mountain regions, or valleys). Although the imposition of missionary rule and the later US takeover of the state in 1850 were apocalyptic to Indigenous societies, their traditional arts were able to remain intact, assuming new elements as general art making techniques progressed.

As the editors of the invaluable survey Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000 (University of California Press: 2000) relate, with such battles over ruling the state came parallel pursuits of defining how its land, people, and culture(s) were represented.

Early missionary meditations on its varied natural setting as a prosperous new world provided the foundation for local landscape painting. Under the US’ governance, such depictions were expanded into the 1900s with the thrust of emergent economies: gold mining, “pioneer” settlements, agriculture, tourism, the film industry, etc. Institutionalized racism and xenophobia, reflecting national agendas, simmered with increased control over California’s capital under white-owned industries. This all came at the expense of the Native population and with the overall sidelining of non-white communities. Images of poppy-covered hills, coasts adorned with gnarled cypress trees, and majestic Yosemite vistas were intentionally depicted as uninhabited, pointing to an all-too-familiar “land without a people” dictum (see Sheri Bernstein’s “Selling California: 1900-1920,” Made in California). 

A schism materialized in this genre of painting when Modernism seized the local art scene and two notable camps of artists took to navigating its scenery. A number of plein air painters continued along the same path of creating depopulated pictures, yet such outlooks didn’t always signal big-business-sanctioned fantasies. If anything, World War I and the Great Depression left behind profound cynicism, causing many painters to find solace (and search for answers) in pristine views (See Steve Hauk’s “Painting the Human Landscape,” This Side of Eden: Images of Steinbeck’s California, National Steinbeck Center: 1998).  

Others began to address social issues in their work and in doing so incorporated the realities of disillusioned residents into California’s nature-based imagery. Several factors contributed to this break, among them was the influence of the Federal Art Project under the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and its model the Mexican Muralist movement (the “big three” of which created significant frescos in California; Diego Rivera to the north and Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros to the south) with more politically-geared works popping up in the interiors (and on the exteriors of) public buildings and spaces.

Magnifying such visuals was the popularity of certain writers, namely John Steinbeck, whose timeless stories set out to dispel the utopian myth. The laden stage where his dramas unfold is based on the Central Coast, where he was born and raised—the mountains, hills, and valleys that, although analogous to the origins of life in their offering of sustenance, are forever tainted by man’s inability to humble himself before such forces. As Steinbeck exposes the class divisions that encase the dysfunction of American social institutions, the misfortunes of his most approachable protagonists manifest in betrayal and alienation—the fates of entire communities in real time.

Widespread deportation of Mexican-Americans, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and attacks on labor organizing made up but a fraction of the contested political events and policies that spurred a pressure-cooker explosion two decades later as a subsequent generation of Californians partook in the mass upheavals of the 1960s and 70s. The converging (and diverging) ideologies of anti-war protests, “second-wave” Feminism, and the Black Panther Party (which inspired similar movements among Indigenous, Chicano/a, and Asian-American youth) all impacted the visual arts, as did new forms of expression that were instep with California “counterculture” and cultivated (to a lesser extent) in response to the state’s increased militarization, which began in World War II when it became an industrial center for the US Armed Forces. Local performance art and earthworks, for example, were often tied to an aggravated sentiment that questioned the links between mainstream visual culture and American hegemony while seeking to understand California in its entirety, including its relationship to the land, which by then was imbued in history as a political battleground.  

                                                                                                ["untitled" (2000-05). Copyright Etel Adnan.]

In The Woman Artist in Lebanon the late Helen Khal suggests that Adnan’s painting is the direct result of the creative environment that she encountered when first arriving to the US. Khal, a Lebanese-American who moved to Beirut in her adolescence and was part of the city’s famed cultural scene prior to the civil war as a painter, gallerist, and writer, insists that “In this [American] climate of intellectual and artistic revolution, Etel found stimulation and encouragement to venture into unexplored fields” (Institute for Women’s Studies in the Arab World: 1987).

Among the insights of Journey to Mount Tamalpais, Adnan reveals her place within the dynamism of the 1960s “experiment”:

The early workshops participated of the newness of the world. Yes, they were at the beginning of the Sixties, yes, they participated in the prophetic spirit of a decade which has its equals in History in the Pre-Socratics, or closer to us, in the decade which preceded the Russian Revolution and was made by Malevich, Tatlin, Kandinsky.... This time a whole nation was again being involved in a Great Experiment, unabashedly, through street marches, music, songs, underground movies, and millions of silent events which tried to uproot a culture and plant a new one, a new forest.

A gradual move towards “Perception” was augmented during this time through studied observations of her Sausalito surroundings:

Ann O’Hanlon, who started it all, says: ‘To perceive is to be both objective and subjective. It is to be in the process of becoming one with whatever it is, while also becoming separated from it.’

To apply this metaphysical approach to painting is to venture back through the philosophical path of Modern art to its early twentieth-century dawning, arriving at the abstract compositions of German-Swiss painter Paul Klee who argued that an artist’s “sense of direction in nature and life” was derived not by serving or ruling “this world of variety” but by transmitting it. For Klee, this sense brings about order “into the passing stream of image and experience.” To distort natural forms through art is to provide the location wherein nature is reborn:

The Deeper he [the artist] looks, the more readily he can extend his view from the present to the past, the more deeply he is impressed by the one essential image of creation itself, as Genesis, rather than by the image of nature, the finished product. (On Modern Art, a lecture given in 1924 at the opening of the Museum of Jena)

Color, according to the European modernist, can unlock such transmissions, offering “tremendous possibilities for the variation of meaning” when color fields are combined and/or contrasted. This supporting principle of abstraction is found in Adnan’s paintings. 

Amidst the illuminated masses that descend onto her picture plane, there appears to be a spiritual dimension to the kinship that she developed with her organic monument; more precisely, “Perception” as a method of seeing is “a laser beam which destroys in order to assimilate, it is an exchange of energies”:

Now the clouds are grandiose and turbulent. An autumn storm is coming. Whatever makes mountains rise, and us, with them, makes colors restless and ecstatic. At my right, the Tiburon hills are somberly yellow. They have a strange power in their color. Is this pale gold on the surface of these hills so extraneous to its own place, that it makes my mind jump into the notion of some past I never knew and which, still, strangely, I relate to them? (Journey to Mount Tamalpais)

 

                                                                                              ["untitled" (2000-05). Copyright Etel Adnan.]

Echoing Klee’s theory of order she asks, “Do colors have the power to break the Time barrier, and carry us into outer spaces, not only those made of miles and distances, but those of the accumulated experiences of life since its beginning or unbeginning?”

                                                                                                  ["untitled" (2000-05). Copyright Etel Adnan.]

Her paintings compel the viewer to believe so.

Her words function in a similar way and at times one wonders if it wasn’t through “Perception” that she arrived at such lyricism in writing. Marie Rose, the heroine of her celebrated novel, often demonstrates such clarity. The strength of the newly released Sea and Fog (Nightboat Books: 2012) lies in its interlaced transcendental imagery: the elements coalesce with history, color is infinite, and man must confront his inevitable end. The cover of this latest book of prose and poetry, like many of Adnan’s literary works, contains one of her paintings—a seascape in variations of blue. A thick fog settles over cool and blackened water within its borders, masking the artist’s signature above, while a gradient ocean takes on the shape of Mount Tamalpais.  

Tens of thousands gathered Friday in Tahrir Square, the birthplace of the 25 January revolution that ousted President Hosni Mubarak last February. They chanted slogans against President Mohamed Morsy, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Constituent Assembly.

The cliché always reasserts itself as a truth: “as long as you are safe, that is all that matters.” In the wake of a disaster, material things – buildings, possessions, money – fade away in importance, and we first worry about the safety of our friends and loved ones.

Yet, as Hurricane Sandy approached New York City, my initial, frenzied concern was for things material, yet valued in symbolic abstraction: the last historic structures of Washington Street in Lower Manhattan, chiefly St. George’s Melkite Catholic Church (operating as an Irish pub for the last 30 years), a 1926 settlement house for immigrants, and an old 1885 tenement with still-occupied apartments. For the last year, under a campaign called “Save Washington Street,” I have worked to coordinate a difficult engagement with the City of New York and its Landmarks Preservation Commission to prevent demolition of the Downtown Community House, a building that charitably served immigrants of this neighborhood once known to Americans as “Little Syria.” Because of the construction of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and later the World Trade Center, most of this old downtown district, outside the miraculous “trinity” of contiguous structures, has been destroyed. And while the Western and Gulf Arab media have taken substantial and curious interest in the advancing extinguishment of the Lebanese and Syrian heritage in Manhattan, in practicality the campaign still faces a great struggle with so much money at stake in a transforming downtown real estate market.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Washington Street was the economic and cultural hub of Arabic-speaking life in the United States. It was the birthplace of the Pen League in literature and was the locus of operations for the many import-export businesses that supplied peddler armies and vast networks of stores. When asked why they chose to settle right there near the docks, some Lebanese would joke that “they wanted to remember how to get back” or that “they didn’t have the nickel to go uptown.”

Being in old New York and on the water near the financial district evidently gave the Lebanese and Syrian intellectuals a special vantage point to consider the meaning of America and the meaning of the modern megacity. In Ameen Rihani’s The Book of Khalid, considered the first Arab-American novel, the two peddler characters Khalid and Shakib would on weekends “take the air in Battery Park, where the one would invoke the Statue of Liberty for a thought, or the gilded domes of Broadway for a metaphor, while the other would be scouring the horizon for the Nothingness, which is called, in the recondite cant of the sophisticated, a vague something.” From this now forgotten neighborhood in the heart of downtown, Rihani and his cohort were able to look the monster of American financial and industrial might, with its foundational claims about freedom and liberty, directly in the eye.

And, as Sandy approached, the place where reporters began to congregate, Battery Park City, well, that is a landfill extension of Little Syria. Flooding has historically been such a problem in the neighborhood that Rihani chose to include this aspect in his novel. Khalid and Shakib’s effort to protect their product becomes a metaphor for the immigrant obsession with money and material gain: “On the floor we laid our mattresses, on the shelves, our goods. And never did we stop to think who in this case was better off. The safety of our merchandise before our own.”

Tracking Sandy inch up the mid-Atlantic, weather experts were increasingly confident that a massive storm surge could hit New York City, and Little Syria was right in the “Zone A” mandatory evacuation area declared by Mayor Bloomberg. As a self-appointed advocate for the neighborhood, I discussed the risks for our buildings with Carl Antoun (Carl Anthony Houck), a New Yorker and 21-year-old college student whose grandmother (the daughter of merchant Antonio Sadallah) grew up in “Little Syria” and with whom I had partnered in the campaign. Carl’s 93-year-old grandmother had told him how the 1938 hurricane had created a mess for Washington Street, and, so, in the final days and hours as the storm approached, we tried to contact building owners and encourage them to install sand bags around the historic structures and to secure loose equipment at nearby construction sites. We also maintained contact with Washington Street residents who could alert us to any preparations they witnessed. Yet, since I lived in Washington, D.C., I felt largely impotent. But I did not think that it would be appropriate to head to a soon-to-be disaster area to make preparations on property that did not belong to me. Besides, Sandy was approaching my home as well.

[An image of Little Syria post-Sandy. Image taken by Todd Fine.]

And Carl also became preoccupied. His Lebanese-German family lives in Belle Harbor, Queens, in the Rockaway Peninsula section that would likely face the brunt of a storm surge hitting at high tide. As I kept distracting him through talk of Lower Manhattan, it became clear that his own preparatory work was perhaps more urgent, and as he followed the storm spin up the coast, leaving destruction in its wake, he started to signal his nervousness. He and his family however had decided to stay on the peninsula during the storm in order to protect their house.

We also discussed something that in our passion for history was extremely important, the priceless array of artifacts – newspapers, photographs, books, documents, and objects – that Carl possessed through his mother’s family. These objects anchor the collection of the “Washington Street Historical Society” we are initiating, and I was a little dubious about the notion of keeping his family artifacts in Belle Harbor (in fact, we had earlier discussed trying to locate space at another city historical society), but, at this stage, it was too late and he had to worry about his home itself. He moved the objects to higher-ground, and we just had to dance around the unutterable fear that damage could destroy the home itself, ruining everything.

As Monday night, October 29, approached, windows of opportunity for action closed. Through tenement resident Esther Regelson, we gained reports of a few fortunate preparations on Washington Street, and power was cut in Little Syria and several other downtown neighborhoods as a preventative measure. We did our part, but, overall, our desperate attempts to protect Lebanese and other ethnic heritage from a major hurricane, on top of all of the money-based threats barreling forward, started to feel a little comical and absurd.

During the storm’s landing, I checked twitter constantly, searching for real-time information from “washington st,” “washington street,” “rector street,” “west st,” and “battery park.” To my horror, there were reports of shaking cranes at construction sites near the historic buildings, anecdotal reports of waist-high flooding, and – incredibly, out of the void – pictures of flooded streets sent from mobile phones. The façade of St. George’s Church is delicate, intricate terra-cotta so damage from flying objects might not be repairable. My concern and anger about the risks facing the buildings started to grow, and once I even screamed curses in frustration from my bedroom, frightening my Palestinian flatmate and his visiting family.

In my apartment in Washington where we fortunately encountered a slightly kinder Sandy, the power did eventually cut out, and I had to monitor the developments in New York from my mobile phone, powered by a quickly depleting battery. And, laying on floor in the dark, as I turned to check on Belle Harbor, I was shocked at what I found on twitter: reports of uncontrolled electrical fires near Carl’s home in the midst of enormous flooding. Belle Harbor, like many other seaside communities in the storm, was largely cut off from emergency services at landfall. As I felt that terrible flash of concern for the life of a compeer, Little Syria faded away, and I spent a few hours praying for Carl and for all of people going through hell in the wake of Sandy. Late at night, somehow from his own mobile phone, he posted a short and wild report on facebook about his experience, reassuring all of his friends of his survival.

After the storm was over, I tried to obtain reports from locals about the damage to Little Syria, but most Washington Street residents had abandoned buildings that would not receive power for days and weeks. And, for the city and the global media, the Arab heritage of Lower Manhattan was certainly not the top priority. On Tuesday night, I decided that I would have to go up to New York myself to document the flooding and the damage, and to make sure that the building owners were actively addressing things. Wednesday morning, I took a bus from Washington to New York, and, after getting off in midtown, I walked for over an hour by foot to Washington Street in subway-less New York, witnessing, along the way, the empty streets, the powerless rows of buildings, and the storm damage.

On Washington Street itself, most of the large buildings and their basements were being pumped of water, and you could see brown slimy residue from the flood on the sides of most of the structures. Fortunately, I could not identify any damage to the exterior of church, and the key problem in New York seemed to have been the flooding much more than high winds. I was also able to meet a resident of the tenement at 109 Washington Street who had remained, although he was uncertain which of the historic structures had been pumped. Walking around the perimeter, I further noticed that some of the parks in the neighborhood had received some damage in the storm, and I resolved that trying to persuade the Lebanese, Syrian, and Arab-American communities to help support the Department of Parks with repair could be a useful task in the coming weeks.

Now that things have settled down weeks later (although Washington Street is still lacking power in places), I am compelled to take stock of the meaning of this entire endeavor. We assume the buildings were relatively unharmed by nature this time (as long as the owners pump their basements appropriately), and yet we cannot be more confident that they will not be destroyed by man. Carl, the director of the Save Washington Street campaign, is overwhelmed with the damage to Belle Harbour and his family home, and, in such an uphill preservation struggle, every day lost increases the risk of failure. Moreover, the terrible crises facing modern Lebanon and Syria, which cruelly damage their own heritage as well, make the destruction of Little Syria seem trivial in comparison and create a collective despair that handicaps our efforts to build a response for Manhattan.

[An image of Little Syria post-Sandy. Image taken by Todd Fine.]

In this struggle, it can be tempting to think of the effort to protect the Little Syria neighborhood in blunt political terms: to show the world that Ground Zero was once a patriotic Arab-American neighborhood or that the Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestinian Americans should be respected for their contributions to the United States. However, for me, the storm damage emphasized the essential point that ultimately everything comes down to people and personal relationships. We should not save Little Syria to instrumentalize past people and affirmatively deploy them as weapons in the present; we should only tell the story of its residents to help us understand and respect them as they were. The past can teach us, but it is extremely risky to deploy it in a highly didactic way. Let Rihani and Kahlil Gibran and Mikhail Naimy speak for themselves; let us preserve their heritage so that people can find their own paths, inspired by the words and lives of these writers as they see fit.

Buildings of metal, wood, and stone will eventually be destroyed by nature without restraint, and it is possible, as we have been warned, that different cultures have varying perspectives on the value of physical heritage. Our struggle to protect Washington Street must move from a tenuous and debatable symbolic exercise to a collective mission in the present based on community, relationship, and love. We are fond of the buildings because we love the Lebanese and Syrians who came and embraced the American ideal, and because we love the present-day Arab-Americans who have struggled to explain their heritage during a present era of hatred, confusion, and war. Ultimately, as a community, the Arab-Americans – with the support of Lebanese, Syrians and other Arabs – will need to decide how they want to communicate and protect their history. The buildings require people to stand up and make choices, and Carl and I intend to advance our intellectual contributions to educate and persuade. Yet, we will not demand that others articulate their love in the same way.

And as long as saving these buildings could require millions of dollars and may seem out-of-reach, protecting the parks in Little Syria after Sandy could be a small gesture to show that the Lebanese and Syrians understand the importance of their neighborhood as, during the storm, it became the center of worldwide concern. Through discussions with the Department of Parks, we have now created the opportunity for admirers of Little Syria to “adopt a park” at Greenwich and Edgar Street and help the neighborhood recover and improve. New York City, for all of its atomization and monstrosity, connects to all corners of the world like no other place, and Little Syria maintains an outpost at its heart. I am thankful that Carl and his family are safe, and we will continue to sacrifice and will continue to fight together, so that the memory of the specific people we love and admire – the Antonio Sadallahs and the Ameen Rihanis – not fade away.

Abdel Moneim Abul Futuh was a leading candidate in the 2012 Egyptian presidential election held last May, garnering approximately seventeen percent of votes cast in the first round (compared to approximately twenty-four percent and twenty-three percent for the two eventual run-off candidates—Mohamed Morsi and Ahmed Shafik, respectively). He is a physician by training, and has been the president of the Arab Medical Association since 2004. Abul Futuh is a former member and leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, having served on the Guidance Bureau for over two decades. During that time, he was a vocal critic of Mubarak's regime, speaking out against authoritarianism and corruption, and consequently spending several years in jail. In April 2011, he resigned from the Brotherhood shortly after announcing his presidential candidacy. Then in July 2012, Abul Futuh established the Strong Egypt Party, which styles itself as economically progressive and socially moderate political group. Despite it's declared opposition to President Morsi's constitutional decree, the Strong Egypt Party has abstained from joining with the opposition. Refusing to join the protests and sit-ins in Tahrir Square, Abul Futuh and Strong Egypt have announced plans to organize their own march.

This interview was conducted with Abul Futuh in Chicago on 26 November 2012 during his first visit to the United States since the eighteen-day Egyptian uprising that toppled Husni Mubarak. While Abul Futuh was critical of the constitutional decree during the interview, he also made unsubstantiated claims against the aims and methods of the opposition to the decree. Even though he is no longer a formal member of the Muslim Brotherhood, in the interview Abul Futuh was critical of the opposition's orientation towards the group. At a time when the opposition appears to have coalesced and stood firm in its rejection to the constitutional decrees, Abul Futuh alleges that "elements of the opposition" are more interested in "settling scores" with the Muslim Brotherhood than they are in pursuing the national interests. This is a serious charge in light of the stakes of the constitutional decree, the stated intention of opposition forces to escalate their mobilizations, and the level of repression protesters are being subjected to. However, despite being asked for details in the below interview, Abul Futuh refused to identify those elements or provide any concrete evidence.

Because of a Cloud, Most likely

Wadih Saadeh

Translated by Ghada Mourad

Shadows

They moved toward the water
descending from their mountains like soft shadows
so that as not to awaken the grass.
When their shadows passed the fields
some parted company and slept there
Others clung to rocks, stretched out
and returned them to the rocks.

They moved until they reached
the water exhausted
Above them the sun was looking for a needle
to reconnect them with the shadows.

A Gaze

They leave their eyes and they walk
reclining on old gazes
A silence lying on their bodies
dead breezes lying
spirits of annihilated places
if a cloud passes through their mind
rain comes down on their distant fields

They walk
and when they get tired they spread a gaze
and sleep.

Lilies

Death was not dancing in the squares only
but near the flowers,
near the cockscomb, snapdragon and basil
with the spring water to their tables.
Death was dancing
in the squares they were
blending with asphalt
Those bent over the flowers are taken
up by bullets
and in space they become
lilies.

The Dead Are Asleep

They were naked
and they had children
whose hair they tickle in the evening
and sleep
They were naked and simple
would sweat all day smiling
on their way back they stand in front of façades
their eyes measure clothes for their children
and walk

They would take two steps and touch
the trees' trunks before the dawn breeze
under their eyes branches bear fruits
in the January snow
Their machetes would long for the fields
The wind between the villages always ready for their call
when suddenly their wheat turned into ribs
and the breeze became grass growing on their bodies.

They were naked
and every evening the sun was
throwing her light silken cover
on their souls.

Death, at Dawn

They open their doors before the sun rises
they open both leaves
so that the whole sun comes in.
The breeze at dawn
watering the flowers at dawn
love of life at dawn,
and at dawn
a beam entered
through the door's wood
and made a white line
on closed eyelashes

A Nocturnal Visit

They were telling their children tales
about the guardian angel and the crops
and the nightingale who came this morning
and sang on the mulberry tree, outside their window
They were telling them about the grapes
They were going to sell and buy
them new clothes
about a treasure
that will be under their pillows tomorrow if they sleep,
but they arrived
severed the tales
left red stains on the wall
and went out.

Fishermen

Before they overthrow each other they practiced
long years
on partridge hunting
on throwing pebbles in the air
engraving them with bullets
they practiced plucking wings
making them brooms
They tried
to plant plumes
in their arms
to become birds
They fall down
like birds

A Secret Sky

They found him
his hand blue and flat
like the wing of a bee-eater
his mouth slightly open
as if he wanted
to sing.

Something on the Doorstep

He was dead but he was
feeling their fingers on his forehead
They placed him in the middle of the house
on a bed they rented; he used to
wish to buy one like it
They laid him and draped him in clothes
like the ones he saw in the city's storefronts
and when they carried him
as he was leaving the house he left
a strange thing on the doorstep
and whenever they entered they
shivered without knowing why.

A Leaf

They silently carried him
and left him there, in the square
in the field of crosses and tombstones
in the spacious square next to his sleeping
comrades.

He said, "I'll be back
the key is under the flower pots"
One of its leaves
was still in his hand.

Revenant

He lay down
One half under the roof
the other under heaven
Many hovering around him.
Today he returned
they brought him colored with blood and dirt
They placed him on the terrace
and water drops
were descending from a cloud
on his feet.

Words

The words he uttered
on the seats, in the closet, on beds and the wall
they brought a maid; she cleaned the house
furniture, pots and stones
they brought paint
they brought new voices
and continued to hear them.

Absence

That day
under the square's oak tree
only two empty stone seats remained
they were silent
looking at each other
and weeping

A Tree

He walked two steps and touched
a plant he had planted the day before
sap went out of his hands to its veins
leaves left his eyes to its branches
and when he wanted to return
he did not leave his place,
his feet turned into
roots.
the lock that was locking up behind itself the howling of the night
and the door out of whose cracks morning was getting

[Translated from the Arabic by Ghada Mourad. From the poet’s collection; Bisabab Ghaymah `Ala al-Arjah (Beirut: Dar al-Jadid, 1992)]

Three Poems

Saadi Youssef

Translated from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon & Peter Money

The Glance

Our loss is not the earth

for the earth will stay,

it stayed before us,

it will stay after us,

earth of the singers,

and of silent ones,

earth of those who stay

and transients;

it is the earth of those

who became earth’s body

. . .

What we have lost is not the earth.

The loss is that glance we no longer exchange,

between one child and another

as they share a loaf of bread.

December

I will not open my window:

Even the grass is drowning in the sea winds;

trees are shaking under the rain.

The room is still (the house has double-windows);

I hear the clock ticking:

Tick

Tick Tick Tick,

I can hear the pond’s tiny waves in the distance

Nearby:  tiny waves of fingers. . .

Is my lover back after a long trip?

The yellow flowers at the entrance are very early.

No visitor knocks at my door.

Even the birds found a shelter.

But we,

the squirrel and I, are trying

to catch something. 

Bees Visit Me

A bee perched on my shirt,

then another.

Blossoms were radiant,

shaking the beechnut tree

and the orchard— 

How did the bees come?

My table doesn't have much:

a piece of bread and cheese,

but it overflows with French wine. . .

Is that what the bees are after?

What is strange is that they cling to my shirt,

persistent.

Do they know that honey,

the universe,

and the end,

are under the shirt?

—That pollen is quivering?

[Translated from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon & Peter Money. From Saadi Youssef, Nostalgia, My Enemy, published November 2012 by Gray Wolf Press. You can purchase the book here.]       
    

Whether in terms of timing or substance, the October 2012 visit of Qatari Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani to the Gaza Strip defies simple explanation. As so often where Palestinian politics is concerned, a cottage industry of explanations and interpretations rapidly materialized. Thus Qatar was either seeking to ensure the support of Hamas’s Gaza leaders for the re-election of Khalid Mashaal to the leadership of the Islamist movement’s Politbureau; using its considerable influence with the Muslim Brotherhood to help transform Rafah into a normalized and regularized border crossing between Egypt and Palestine; staking a claim to Mediterranean gas reserves on the basis of informal understandings between Hamas and Israel; promoting development in the destitute Gaza Strip to the tune of $400 million in order to vastly increase the cost of militancy within it; furthering an American-Israeli scheme to irrevocably institutionalize the Palestinian schism by laying the diplomatic foundations for a Palestinian entity limited to the Gaza Strip; and/or again challenging Egyptian hegemony over efforts to negotiate Palestinian national reconciliation.

At some level each of the above probably contains an element or so of truth. Yet in this particular instance it just might be the case that Palestine is not – or at least not the only – center of the universe. Rather, as a chief sponsor of Syrian regime change, Sheikh Hamad went to Gaza in order to further isolate Syria’s Assad by mocking his claim to be the region’s sole remaining sponsor of continued Palestinian resistance in the most visible manner possible. It was after all the Wahhabi Hamad rather than Baathist Bashar who was the first Arab leader to launch a motorcade from Rafah to Gaza City. And in doing so he made the break between Hamas and Damascus final and definitive.

That so many theories continue to abound about the Qatari visit reflects the rather extraordinary influence the tiny emirate has managed to project in Palestine. It did not come suddenly, and was nurtured over the course of many years.

Until the mid-1990s Qatar’s place in the political consciousness of most Palestinians rather accurately reflected its miniscule size and population. Its policies were determined by and indistinguishable from those of Saudi Arabia and its foreign patrons, and it was the place where one of the less prominent Fatah leaders, Mahmoud Abbas, had carved a special relationship with the ruling family on account of his residency there since the 1950s and role in its civil service.

As with so much else about Qatar, this began to change after Sheikh Hamad in 1995 overthrew his father and –particularly after the Saudis and Egyptians sponsored a failed plot to restore Al-Thani père– initiated a determined effort to emerge from Riyadh’s shadow and challenge it and Egypt’s primacy in Arab affairs. The primary vehicles for this campaign were Al-Jazeera and the Muslim Brotherhood, and the two were from the outset related phenomena.

Although Arab media had traditionally enjoyed greater leeway to criticize Palestinian leaders than any of their Arab counterparts, Al-Jazeera set new – professional as well as political – standards in this regard. By the time the Al-Aqsa Uprising erupted on the ruins of Oslo in late 2000, Al-Jazeera was by far the most popular broadcaster in Palestine, and in the region on Palestinian affairs. Its wall-to-wall, in-depth, often live and many times fearless coverage of every aspect of the uprising and Israel’s furious efforts to restore the status quo added significantly to Doha’s political capital among Palestinians.

During the same period, and astutely taking advantage of Hosni Mubarak’s reduction of Egypt to a banana republic and the erosion of Cairo’s primacy in Arab politics, Qatar also emerged as a leading regional troubleshooter. In 1999, it provided the Hamas exile leadership temporary refuge after its expulsion from Jordan, but did not hesitate to put them on a flight to Amman after the latter apparently reneged on a pledge to take them back after a decent interval. Qatar’s Prime and Foreign Minister, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, also played an important role behind the scenes in resolving the siege of Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat’s Ramallah headquarters during Operation Defensive Shield in Spring 2002. A seeming champion of the Palestinian uprising against Israel and its occupation, Qatar’s leaders were equally comfortable meeting their Israeli counterparts and permitting Israel’s liaison office in Doha to remain functional after it was officially closed. Twice.

If Doha had remained more aloof from the Palestinian Authority (PA) leadership and closer to that of Hamas than many Arab capitals, crises during the Arafat era rarely graduated beyond punishment of business interests associated with Qatar, such as the imprisonment in Gaza of Issa Abu Issa. The brother of Palestine International Bank Chairman Issam Abu Issa, and hailing from one of Qatar’s most prominent Palestinian families, he was promptly arrested by the PA when accompanying an official Qatari delegation to Gaza in 2000. The delegation had been seeking to resolve a dispute between the PA, which seized Palestine International Bank after accusing it of various irregularities, and Issam Abu Issa, who retorted that his sole crime was a refusal to put the bank at the disposal of the PA. Only after Qatar threatened to sever funding and relations with the PA were the Abu Issa brothers permitted to leave Gaza City for Doha. Al-Jazeera was during these years often in the forefront of Palestinian-Qatari relations, whether through various exposes of PA politics and malfeasance, or punitive measures against it – including vigilante attacks upon its personnel and premises.

The succession of Abbas in late 2004, coupled with the electoral victory of Hamas in 2006 transformed an already tense relationship into one often characterized by mutual and outright enmity.

On the face of it the developments post-2005 do not appear to make sense. Individual Fatah leaders typically cultivated special relations with specific Arab states – to the point where they were seen as representing their interests within the Palestinian national movement – and Abbas was in this respect understood to be Doha’s man. Abbas has, in fact, throughout this period despite fierce political differences according to many observers managed to maintain warm personal relationships with the Qatari leadership – akin to rugby players who batter each other half to death on the field then go out for drinks afterwards.

For Qatar, the issue was ensuring the integration of Hamas into the Palestinian political system and establishing itself as the Palestinian Islamist movement’s undisputed political patron to further augment Doha’s influence and prevent the Islamist movement from joining the rival Iranian camp, in the process steering it in a more accommodationalist direction. For Abbas, the objective was preventing the loss of Fatah hegemony and subordinating Hamas to his own agenda. 

Reflecting the enormity of the stakes, Qatari diplomacy was during this period unable to punch very far above its weight. While Al-Jazeera’s coverage continued to subtly promote official policy while retaining professional standards not easily found elsewhere – whether in the region or beyond – the country’s rulers were unable to effectively compete with either Saudi Arabia or Egypt in terms of negotiating Fatah-Hamas understandings before the Islamists’ June 2007 seizure of power in the Gaza Strip, or reconciliation agreements thereafter. The one agreement between Abbas and Mashaal Qatar did manage to broker, in 2012, was effectively still-born.

Nevertheless, Qatar was in subsequent years able to leverage the enormous and abiding symbolism of the Palestinian cause to both enhance its own profile and credentials, and solidify its sponsorship of Hamas. At a time when Qatari-Syrian relations were considerably closer than those between Damascus and any other Gulf state, Doha during Israel’s 2008-2009 assault on the Gaza Strip succeeded in defying much of the Arab world (including the Arab League) and the West in hosting an emergency summit to highlight Arab inaction. And a year later Al-Jazeera’s publication of the Palestine Papers managed to place the Palestinian Authority and its adherence to a negotiated treaty with Israel within the Oslo framework in the worst possible light. Not much sensationalism was required, but it was thrown into the mix nevertheless.

It bears recollection that Qatar’s policy and objectives in this regard were very different from those of Syria and Iran. Where the latter sought to weaken the PA in order to strengthen Palestinian militancy in the context of a proxy conflict with Israel, Qatar sought not conflict but rather a piece of the peace and – whether directly or otherwise – a prominent seat at the table. It is the astuteness and seemingly limitless capacity for opportunism that set Doha so clearly apart from other Arab capitals. Unlike Saudi Arabia, Qatar didn’t much care about the ideological affinities of those it sponsored so long as such organizations, institutions and individuals – who spanned the spectrum of contemporary Arab political thought and activism – could further its own ambitions and agenda. And so, unlike Mubarak’s Egypt, Qatar was consistently willing to maneuver among and between rival camps, and engage in public disputes with close allies and sponsors, in order to further its own policies.

The uprisings that erupted throughout the region in late 2010 appear to have brought Qatari policy full circle. As the main sponsor of the Muslim Brotherhood – and one with a very considerable capacity for sponsorship – Qatar is now indisputably in the ascendant, though not unlike Al-Jazeera perhaps more temporarily than many assume. And drawing much closer to its traditional Gulf Cooperation Council allies in the context of the spread of these rebellions – most notably to Bahrain – and the increasingly sharp rivalry with Iran, it has thrown its weight behind the Syrian opposition to its erstwhile ally Bashar. Aside from direct support to the Free Syrian Army, Qatar’s main contribution has been the success with which it has weaned Hamas away from Damascus. Mashaal no longer resides in Damascus, but rather in Doha. Deputy Politbureau Chairman Musa Abu Marzouq has relocated to Cairo, and other Islamist leaders similarly vacated Syria before Damascus went on the offensive against its former Islamist ally.

Upon arriving in Gaza, Sheikh Hamad was thus received by Hamas as a conquering hero rather than perfidious Zionist stooge. The effectiveness with which Qatar has been able to call in favors from those it has supported testifies to the astuteness of its political investment policies of the past two decades. It will be most interesting to see where this leads next: A renewed push for Palestinian reconciliation, or alternatively further support to Hamas to ensure its continued ascendancy within the Palestinian political system, but with a political program eventually indistinguishable from those it seeks to replace.

[This article first appeared in Perspectives MENA #4.]

Jadaliyya's November culture bouquet arrived on the last day of November. Culture Page co-editor Maymanah Farhat reviews a recent exhibit by the Lebanese-American artist Etel Adnan. Mai Serhan reviews Tahani Rached's latest documentary. Ghad Mourad translates poems by the Lebanese poet Wadih Saadeh. Sinan Antoon and Peter Money translate three poems by the Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef:

* Maymanah Farhat, "Etel Adnan at the Base of the Mountain."

* Ghada Mourad, "Wadih Saadeh: Because of a Cloud, Most Likely."

* Sinan Antoon and Peter Money, "Three Poems by Saadi Youssef."

* Mai Serhan, "Rules of Engagement: Documentary Filmmaking According to Tahani Rached."

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