INTRODUCTION
I have lived my formative years in an Arabic country, namely Morocco. This experience has resulted in my absolute conviction that Arabs – whether in Morocco or Palestine or elsewhere – are just people like you and me. Of course, people’s historical developments and cultural traditions are different: in particular, Morocco’s colonial status was an unavoidable factor. But in a world that is daily shrinking and interconnected, we are coming to understand that our cultural differences and historical conditioning may be used to perpetuate the injustices of the colonial era. Is it defensible that a country with obvious military advantages imposes its will and dictates the economic and political and social choices on another country?
My earlier life experience in Morocco was followed by a later life experience in New York. There we lived in a neighborhood on Staten Island that was about 50% Jewish. Because most of my fellow car poolers, PTA activists, and Neighborhood Association contestants were Jewish, and we were invited to Bar Mitzvahs and weddings and reciprocated in kind, I developed the same fellow feeling for Jews that I had earlier developed for Arabs.
However, absorbed by family and career concerns, I was largely ignorant of the political turmoil in the Middle East – except for the familiar version: because of millennial anti-Semitism and the “final solution” of the Holocaust, the Jewish people were entitled to a land of their own, and Palestine was the logical place. Israelis had made the desert bloom in Palestine, Israel was a vibrant democracy in a backward and contentious Middle East, and it behooved us Americans to stand by Israel in a hostile world full of terrorists.
Even in my general ignorance I knew deep down that such a view of Arabs did not ring true. Eventually, after we moved to Arizona, I had the occasion to join a Tikkun group (Tikkun alum means to “mend the world” in Hebrew, and it is a movement launched by Rabbi Lerner) and got a chance to become better informed.
EMRACING ISRAEL/PALESTINE by Rabbi Lerner.
Well aware of established consensus in the issue, Rabi Lerner takes the time to address the subject in depth. The history of Israel/Palestine has, of course, a prehistory. The millennial anti-Semitism is a fact. In the Middle-Ages religious reasons prevailed: “the Jews had killed the Christian Son of God Jesus.” Then and later, in a culture which prohibited the taking of interest in lending, the Jews became expert financiers by default, and were vilified for it. This in no way stopped most European kings to rely on their lending to wage their wars. And generally, because they were “the strangers in the land,” they were convenient scapegoats for all that might go wrong in a particular society.
Does the Zionist idea of a safe haven not make sense under the circumstances? And is the pe-diaspora territory of Israel not such a logical haven? Unfortunately, claiming that the territory was a “land without people for a people without a land” did not reflect reality. There was a people occupying the territory, namely the Palestinians, and a bitter contest ensued. The Jews first fought the British who had wrested the land from the Turks during WWI, then the Palestinians whose lands were being confiscated. When the United Nations recognized Israel in 1948, neighboring Arab nations began to react. There was the 1956 contest over the Suez Canal, the 1967 War against Syria and Egypt and more ambiguously Jordan, but also many volunteers from other Arab countries. Then there was the 1973 war and then the 1986 war against Lebanon. And then there is the more recent contest over Gaza.
In all these wars Israel was the winner – but at what cost? Over a million Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and elsewhere, continued demolitions of entire villages, the deviation of water ways, the building of the Security Wall, the expansion of settlements, the daily harassment of check points and finally the horrendous bombings of Gaza. Has Israel won security as the result of these “victories”?
And as all this fighting was taking place, many peace initiatives were undertaken. There were negotiations initiated by Presidents Carter and Clinton, and there was President Bush’s “road map” and then the Oslo, and Geneva, and a number of other “agreements.” And there was the King Abdullah initiative, and many votes at the U.N. Rabbi Lerner documents all these wars and all these peace initiatives in painstaking detail.
Rabbi Lerner also holds a Ph.D. in psychology, and he diagnoses both the Israelis and the Palestinians as suffering from socio-cultural PTSD. He maintains that “imposed solutions” are bound to backfire. Cultures as well as individuals suffering from PTSD have a hard time trusting others, so the task is not easy. Change is difficult and doesn’t happen automatically. And yet change is something we need to make happen. His final word is a passionate appeal to keep digging to the very bottom, because that’s where the living waters of peace, justice, and love are awaiting us.
THE ISRAEL LOBBY by John Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt
The subtitle of the John Mearsheimer/Stephen Walt book is U.S. Foreign Policy. The book is exhaustively – one might even say obsessively – detailed, citing names, dates, documents etc. as academic books should be. It is divided into two parts. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 of Part I discuss the relationship between Israel and the United States. Its basic contention is that there is a special relationship between Israel and the U.S. The evidence the authors present is the extent of the financial, military, and diplomatic support of the U.S. to Israel. They cite the amounts of direct economic aid, special loans and grants, specific weapons systems, and the votes and vetoes in the UN Security Council.
The rationale for this special relationship is that Israel is a strategic asset U.S. can rely upon in the troubled waters of the Middle East. Another rationale they cite is moral rather than practical: the memory of the Holocaust, the sense that the Jews of Europe deserve a haven of safety and a sense of reparation, that Israel is a fellow democracy in the midst of states with more questionable political practices, and that it is an underdog among them.
There is also a religious aspect to this support. To the Jewish religious Zionists who believe that Palestine was given to them once by God – there correspond Christian Zionists who believe, in addition, in the apocalyptic Revelation in the New Testament which recognizes in the Jewish repossession of Judea and Samaria the fulfillment of the End of Times.
The authors question the validity of most of these rationales. They claim that the special relationship with Israel is one-sided, that it is not of much strategic value to the U.S. – and that it actually fuels instability in the Middle East. They acknowledge the moral validity of reparation because of the Holocaust and the right of Israel to exist as an independent state. But they question the status of Israel as an underdog, arguing that it is economically vital and better armed, including with nuclear weapons, than any of the states surrounding it. They also question Israel’s credentials as a democratic society given its treatment of their non-Jewish citizen as second-class, and its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. They condemn the two wars against Lebanon, and they claim that the failure of the various peace initiatives can be blamed on Israel as well as on the Palestinians.
As you can see, such claims can be viewed as eminently controversial and have been declared as such by none other than what the authors call “The Israel Lobby.” So, who or what is “The Lobby?” To begin with, the authors state that it is perfectly legitimate, given our democratic society, to form lobbies. Other ethnic groups and other entities form lobbies. It is a means of communicating with our government representatives and to militate on behalf of particular issues. They do, however, have a bone to pick with the so-called Israel Lobby. Basically, their analysis is that the Lobby’s influence in guiding U.S. foreign policy with respect to Israel is counter-productive to the actual interests of both countries.
So how did the Lobby come to acquire such power, and how justified are the authors in critiquing its activities? We all understand the motivation rooted in the Holocaust, and the resolve of Jews everywhere to insure a safer future for themselves. One way to achieve this is the Zionist idea of an actual state where they Jews can be in charge of their own destiny. Other Jews have chosen to continue to live elsewhere but have felt committed to support the state of Israel. To that end, particularly in the U.S., which has emerged as a dominant power after World War II, Jews have organized to create a network of support – or the Israel Lobby.
It is a loosely organized set of groups – educational, religious, civic, and social, whose interests may be broadly distributed, but who are united around the idea of supporting Israel and its agenda. One of the organizations (AIPAC) is a kind steering entity for all the others and their clout in what is called “the Washington Beltway” is impressive. They actually undertake to screen prospective candidates for Congress – and if they “pass” the pro-Israel test, they are then referred to networks of lavish financial resources. The lucky chosen get campaign contributions, vote turnout, and once elected, staff support, and assistance with research, preparing legislation, and marshaling votes. They also get invited on lavish trips to Israel where they meet Israeli officials. As one of the senators put it, it is easier to sign a letter of protest or support submitted by AIPAC than to have to deal with 500 letters of irate constituents.
If, however, a given candidate does not “pass the test,” even if he or she has been previously elected, their opponents will be supported (Paul Findley, Cynthia McKenney, and several others – Adlai Stevenson was one I did not expect to find among them). Stubborn Jesse Helms was also convinced to toe the line, as was Hillary Clinton, who had made the mistake of hugging (I believe it was Yasser Arafat’s wife) and has since then been a loyal supporter. Howard Dean was famously blackballed, and we also know about the irate reception of former President Carter’s book.
Success in politics also involves shaping public discourse. This means channeling public discourse to favor Israel policy in media, academia and through think tanks. Marginalizing opponents and silencing critics is part of the game. Here again, the authors go into scrupulous detail as to which organizations, groups, columnists, editors, think tanks, etc. have been active in attacking or defending particular positions, and which professors at Colombia, Princeton, Yale, Harvard, Chicago, Berkeley, etc. have been accused of antisemitism.
I will only say in conclusion that I have found the book’s evidence compelling. Lobbying is a healthy democratic activity. But the people in Gaza, their missiles notwithstanding, are no match to the power of Israel and the Israel Lobby in the U.S. Rabbi Lerner’s Tikkun and other groups have come forward to champion more equitable solutions to the Israel/Palestine dilemma and have not found it easy to do so.
RESET by Stephen Kinzer
INTRODUCTION
Stephen Kinzer is the author of a number of books based on his distinguished career as foreign correspondent for the New York Times and the Boston Globe in Turkey, Germany and Nicaragua. His latest book, Reset, is dedicated to his grand-parents: Abraham Ricardo, 1882 (Amsterdam)-1945 (Bergen-Belsen) and Jeannette Marghareta (De Jongh) Ricardo 1891(Amsterdam)-1945(Bergen-Belsen).
His book broadens the focus on the Israel/Palestine by examining related parties to the conflict. He provides historical perspectives as well as recent updates and suggestions of possible solutions in three articulated parts.
PART 1: The Legacy of Reza Palhavi in Iran and Kemal Ataturk in Tuurkey.
Iran (still called Persia) was of strategic value in the “Great Game” played out between the Russian and British Empires. This resulted in a country divided into two “spheres of influence” and ruled by Russia and England behind a façade of subservient and corrupt sultans. Russia exited after the Bolshevik Revolution while England stayed, dependent on the oil that was badly needed during World War I and World War II. A simple soldier with an imposing physique called Reza was singled out by a British diplomat as a promising leader. He organized a revolt and was crowned shah in 1926.
This paralleled the rise of Kemal Ataturk in Turkey. Of modest origin and charismatic personality like his Persian counterpart, he organized Turkish resistance after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. What is now the Turkish mainland was also due to be carved up among Armenian, Greek, Kurdish, and other minorities under Allied “protectorate.” Against all odds Kemal managed to win his war of Turkish independence against the Allies and was “elected” (not altogether democratically) president of the brand-new Turkish Republic.
Both Reza Palhavi and Kemal Ataturk were fierce and ruthless modernizers (including defenders of women’s emancipation), which put them at odds with their traditional Islamic societies. Turkey was Sunni, where secular and religious authority was traditionally combined whereas Iran was Shia, where religious authority tended to be in opposition to secular authority. This made Kemal’s job easier. Still, they both ran roughshod over opposition, some of it liberal and democratically minded.
PART 2: Cold War Politics: Turkey and Iran.
After World War II Turkey, having remained neutral, was free to go its own way. It struggled with a tradition of military authoritarianism, oppression of minorities, and the legacy of Kemal’s “secular fundamentalism.” He had struggled to build modern institutions. One example was his invitation of hundreds of Jewish scholars who were ejected from Hitler’s Germany in 1933 – which resulted in the foundation Istanbul University.
Decidedly pro-Western in the Cold War dynamics, Turkey became a member of NATO. Motivated by the prospect of becoming accepted into the European Union, Turkey struggled to improve its human rights record, and during the 80s, experienced entrepreneurial innovation and economic growth. It also seems to have succeeded in synthesizing Islamic tradition with democratic aspirations.
In Iran things developed differently. Reza (perhaps because of continued British “tutelage”) admired Hitler, was deposed by the British in 1941, and died in exile in South Africa. His modernizing drive was a legacy of absolutist rule under foreign dictation. His son, Reza Palhavi, would follow a similar path, only under American rather than British patronage.
Yet Iran had experienced a Constitutional Revolution, and eventually succeeded in electing Mohammad Mossadegh as Prime Minister. His efforts to renegotiate the 16% of oil revenues Iran received from British Petroleum to a more equitable proportion failed. His decision to nationalize Iranian oil doomed him. The British turned to the U.S., raised the specter of Communist takeover in Iran, and a CIA coup deposed Mossadegh in 1953. The Eisenhower and subsequent American administrations supported the shah with aid, and together with sundry multinationals enjoyed the oil bonanza, arms sales, and construction contracts – while ignoring his ruthless suppression of civil society.
Stephen Kinzer writes: “Although the shah banned secular opposition groups, he feared the clergy and left it alone. As a result, mosques became the only places where Iranians could gather to talk of forbidden things.” Ironically, everyone was surprised by the Islamic Revolution of 1979 headed by Ayatollah Khomeini. During the subsequent war with Iraq the United States supplied Saddam Hussein with war materiel, then, later, did the same for Iran (the Iran/Contra Deal).
PART 3: Cold War Politics: Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Right after the famous Yalta Conference of 1945, FDR met with King Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud to discuss a friendly oil deal, initiating a long-standing and paradoxical alliance between the two countries. The Saudi king was the absolute ruler of a medieval kingdom, whose religious beliefs were exceptionally rigorous even by Islamic standards – characteristics not exactly compatible with the American way of life. But the alliance was happily lubricated by oil: the U.S. economy needed the oil, and the Saudis grew rich selling it to them. The U.S. needed support in their Cold War – the Saudis abhorred godless Communism – and bankrolled counter-insurgency efforts in Nicaragua, Somalia, and, of course, Afghanistan.
The September 11 attack, however, where 15 of the 18 people involved turned out to be Saudis, illustrated the problematic nature of the alliance. It had, after all, been worked out among elites (the king and his entourage – and their counterparts in the U.S.). Stephen Kinzer states that “at least $1.476 billion had made its way from the Saudis to the House of Bush and its allied companies and institutions.”(p.178)
The hypocrisy of Saudi princes who stifled all liberties at home while enjoying illicit liberties as international playboys could not escape their compatriots and other Muslim believers. The Saudis paid the clerics off by bankrolling fundamentalist schools around the world – but this became a rebellious terrorist nursery against them as well as against their partners, the Americans.
The Israelis didn’t have oil to offer in exchange for U.S. support, and President Truman was not eager to extend it – while Eisenhower was reluctant in maintaining it. In time, however, Israel proved its mettle in the wars of 1967 and 1973 and the Cold War offered it a chance to become a “prized, semisecret partner“ in anti-Communist struggles around the world: a trainer and arms conduit to regimes and rebel groups the U.S. could not support officially.
This was the case in Guatemala in the 70s and 80s: “The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported in 1985: “Israelis who visit Guatemala are shocked to see the special Army units wearing Israeli uniforms and armed with Israeli weapons.” (p.162). The horrors of the counter-insurgency movement involving Israeli participation also took place in El Salvador, Honduras, Panama, Bolivia, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Burma, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Angola. There had also been cooperation with the apartheid regime in South Africa’s plan to develop nuclear weapons. (pp. 161-165)
In the realm of public opinion Israel also made spectacular headway. Stephen Kinzer cites Leon Uris’s 1958 bestseller Exodus and subsequent movie version with Paul Newman as capturing the sympathy of the general public for Israel and its precarious position in Palestine. And thanks to its emotional connection to Jewish-Americans, Israel developed a powerful political lobby in the United States. In time, the support of Israel, regardless of its conduct, became unquestionable.
Like an increasing number of others, however, Stephen Kinzer finds the current Israel/Palestine situation untenable. Citing all the numerous peace efforts (Camp David Accords, Madrid Conference, Oslo Process, Road Map, Wye River Memorandum, Annapolis Peace Conference) he concludes that “negotiation has become the enemy of peace.” He states (p.185) that “Israel’s electoral system is skewed in ways that give radical factions wildly disproportionate power and make decisive steps toward peace impossible. Palestinian society is distorted in an even more frightening way: life under occupation has given power to angry men with guns and marginalized those who believe in peace.”
Like Rabi Lerner discussed earlier, the only solution, he suggests, is peace. As the only authoritative world power and proven friend of Israel, the United States should take measures to ENFORCE the terms of the peace already negotiated: “make real the promise of “land for peace.” It is a formula enshrined in United Nations Resolution 242, which was adopted after the Six-Day War of 1967 and reaffirmed with another resolution after the Yom Kippur War of 1973.”
However, as Mearsheimer and Walt pointed out as well, Kinzer admits that the American “president taking such a bold step would be taking political risks.” Just the same, asserting a different moral imperative than the one associated with the Holocaust legacy, he states that “the United States would be doing Israel, as well as its neighbors, a mitzvah of historic proportions.”
PART 4: The Possible Role of Turkey as Mediator.
Stephen Kinzer feels that Turkey is uniquely qualified to play the role of conciliator in the Middle East. Recent backtracking about admitting Turkey into the E.U. has motivated it to focus on its potential in its own region. Turkey’s geographical position in the Eurasian landmass, its Ottoman heritage, and its blend of moderate Islam and democracy may have a better chance of success where earlier policies sponsored by the U.S. have failed. Turkey shares the American goal of stability in the Middle East but is not embroiled in its conflicts. It also has a good relationship with Israel.
And it could be a credible broker in the escalating conflicts with Iran. As Stephen Kinzer has proposed in the early chapters of his book, Turkey and Iran have much in common: unlike most other countries in the Middle East, they have made considerable strides toward modernization as well as having profound aspirations, not always equally realized, toward a democratic political order. They are likely to understand each other’s struggles better than “outsiders” like the Europeans or the Americans.
Citing the example of Nixon’s opening to China, the author proposes that the United States “RESET” its policies in the Middle East. He ends on a hopeful note, quoting the thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi: “Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?”
TWO ALGERIAN WRITERS
INTRODUCTION
I was seventeen years old in Morocco when I read Camus and Sartre and Mauriac and Bernanos. At the time we lived in a tiny mining town on the southern slope of the Atlas Mountains, and I was on vacation from my boarding school in Marrakesh. Across from our house on a rocky outcropping there stood a military fort occupied by French soldiers. The year was 1956 and Morocco was undergoing a transition from its colonial status to independence. The soldiers were there to protect us, but events in Morocco were fairly peaceful. That fort was, in fact, a way station to Algeria. What did I know about Algeria? Not much, except that those cute boys from the military fort might be going there to die.
But then, what did I know about Morocco? We had arrived there in 1949. I loved the open skies and barren hills of southern Morocco. And I loved the purple burst of jacaranda trees in the European section of Marrakesh in April. And I loved the crowds on the square of Djemaa el Fna with its water vendors and snake charmers – and the Kutubia, the tall square minaret towering over the Medina or Arab section of Marrakesh. Well yes, there were two sections. And I had learned French, but only a smattering of Arabic – just enough to communicate with the help. That was the way it was.
As I stated earlier, I was on vacation and reading all those books. Camus’ The Stranger was a bit of a puzzle. I did get the sun pouring out of the sky like out of a hot cauldron, and the song of the salty sea: we escaped to the beaches of Casablanca or Agadir as often as we could. And the people Meursault observes from his balcony, – I could recognize them as well. Our neighbors were not just French, but some Italians and a couple of Germans and many Spaniards. And here we were, White Russians. A motley crowd looking to start over with our modest ambitions and traditional quirks and ready conviviality. The Arabs had their own separate and much larger living quarters. They were the ones who worked the mines underground.
All this to illustrate how intimately Camus’ novel could resonate with me. But then again, there was all that stuff about l’acte gratuit (gratuitous act) of the killing on the beach – and the trial’s comical slant I failed to appreciate at the time. The book by Kamel Daoud, Meursault, contre-enquête (counter-investigation), which was up for the Goncourt Prize last year, brought Camus front and center again.
KAMEL DAOUD’S MEURSAULT, CONTRE-ENQUETE
Kamel Daoud’s novel re-appropriates The Stranger. Its purpose is to gift the anonymous “Arab,” killed so casually by the character Mersault, with a name and a life. But Kamel Daoud’s relationship to Camus discloses interesting ambiguities.
It is not just that Daoud writes in French, but that he draws on Camus’ later style, particularly displayed in The Fall.In that novel, just as in Daoud’s, the narrators buttonhole their listeners in a bar. And both their cantankerous voices come straight out of Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man to obsess about crime and punishment. In fact, Camus’ The Fall builds on a passing episode of Crime and Punishment where Raskolnikov watches a young woman jump into a canal and does not intervene to save her. Camus’ The Fall is a discourse on the moral implications of that failure. But does not Mersault also commit a crime of omission? He kills “the Arab” not from familiar human motives of hatred or revenge, but “because of the sun.”
How can one kill “because of the sun?” Meursault’s judges are intent on looking for more plausible motives and latch on to his “inappropriate” behavior with his mother: he parks her in a home for old people, doesn’t visit her much, and when she dies, shows little emotion during the vigil and burial. Such a man, they conclude, deserves to die. For them as well as for the character Meursault the fact of killing “the Arab” remains a non-fact.
It is the mission of Daoud’s narrator, then, to reopen the case and to put the anonymous “Arab” back into the picture. But the mission in question, perhaps like any “mission,” proves problematical. Kamel Daoud is both the Algerian writer arguing his country’s grievances and he is the francophone writer using all the tools of that tradition. This could turn out to be a double-edged sword.
The original intention was to give the slain “Arab” an identity: a name (Moussa), and a family. The narrator claims to be Moussa’s younger brother Haroun. But Moussa is a form of Moses, hence all the mythical connotations of a struggle to lead an enslaved people out of bondage. And could not Haroun be an allusion to Haroun al-Rashid, also known as “the Just?” It was under his Caliphate, with all the scholars and poets he patronized at his court, that Islamic civilization lived its glory days – a civilization superior to the then much more primitive Franks.
If there is a challenge implied in these names, the very first sentence of Daoud’s novel also reads like a challenge. The Stranger begins with the words: ” Maman died today.” The Counter-Investigation begins with the words: “Today, Mother is still alive.” Meursault’s unprepossessing “maman” is replaced by the formidable M-ma. She will not accept Moussa’s death without a fight. But since she is an “Arab,” a destitute, illiterate woman, her options are minimal. She enlists her younger son, still a boy, into her “crusade.” This begins with a frantic search for the dead man’s body, is sustained by elaborate and highly emotional mourning rituals, then grows to mythical proportions with fantastic stories about the lost son now celebrated as a “martyr.” But forcefully enlisted into this crusade, the young boy and later the young man end up resenting the older brother’s shadow high jacking his own life.
Now we know of course that the killing of “the Arab” and the frantic actions of his “mother” and “younger brother” are fictions. But the realities they evoke are inescapable. The lives – or deaths – of Algerians under French colonialism simply don’t belong in the picture, except as occasional extras. But then the Algerians draw attention to themselves by rebelling, and the killing becomes quite intentional – on both sides.
But not quite, as Doud’s novel discloses. As the Algerian War of Independence takes shape in the background, Haroun does not join up with the guerrilla fighters. Instead, driven by the family cause to revenge the slain brother, he achieves the intended goal by killing a Frenchman, an incidental character as anonymous as Meursault’s “Arab.” So now he too has committed an acte grauit because the war is over, the Algerian cause is won, and killing is no longer sanctioned.
There ensues a trial as misdirected as Mersault’s. While the latter’s crime was about his presumed failure of duty toward his mother, Haroun’s crime is about his presumed failure of duty toward his motherland. The two seem conflated and the protagonists of both novels fall equally short in the eyes of their societies. The scene of a judge waving a crucifix in Meursault’s face is echoed by the investigating officer waving the Algerian flag in Haroun’s face. Similarly, a priest’s visit in Camus’ novel is echoed by an imam’s visit in Daoud’s novel.
But the military judges let the murderer off the hook in Daoud’s novel – for the obvious reason that a man’s killing was never the real concern – but perhaps for another, more literary reason. Unlike Meursault who dies young, Haroun needs a life extension to outgrow Meursault’s youthful display of “the absurd” to pursue a more searching reflection on crime and punishment. Unlike Meursault, Haroun actually stops to think and finds that he is sorry for the incidental Frenchman he killed – a fat Alsatian who used to like swimming in the sea.
He had been dubious all along about the family “cause” driven so excessively by his mother’s passion, and he had been reluctant to jump on the bandwagon of patriotic fervor. And now that patriotic fervor takes on the cloak of unconditional Islamic piety, the name of Haroun may well point to the benefits of a complex Arab civilization rather than to the strictures of religious fundamentalism. Haroun is driven into opposition. He complains about the call to prayer of the muezzin from a nearby mosque, and he proclaims God to be just another absentee father (as his own father had been). And he makes these “blasphemous” proclamations as he sits in a bar guzzling wine – another breach of Koranic prescription. In a scene when he becomes quite vehement about the “hypocrisies” of his fellow neighbors, his description of them from his balcony recalls Mersault’s description, also from a balcony, of his fellow pieds-noirs (the European colonists). Except that Haroun’s voice has evolved from Meursault’s reticence to emulate the fevered outpouring of the narrator of Camus’ The Fall.
Like his antagonist’s Meursault, Haroun’s last word is to invite the mob’s hatred. He too has become a “stranger.” The writer’s paradox is that you always end up in the Underground Man’s cellar, – or some disreputable bar, or the defendant’s box. At least, this is the tradition Kamel Daoud has chosen for his remarkable novel. Sadly, his narrator’s wish has been granted: instead of winning the Goncourt Prize Kamel Daoud has been honored by a fatwa calling for his public execution.
THE NOVELS OF YASMINA KHADRA
Like Kamel Daoud, another Algerian writer, Yasmina Khadra, (the pseudonym for Mohammed Moulessehoul) has addressed some of the same issues, only perhaps in more accessible ways. His output is daunting, and I have selected just a few novels for this essay.
Let me begin with L’écrivain (The Writer). Here, as in other of this author’s novels, we are confronted with the striking North-African landscape, the squalor of life in the Kasbah, and the dreams of a boy with an uncertain future. And always, dreams fetch a stiff price. For the first-person narrator, presumably the writer’s alter ego, this means leaving the safety of his family for a distant military school at the age of 9. Eventually resigned to the inexorable course of “fate,” he buckles down to the ruthless discipline, and begins to take interest in his studies. We are given a lively gallery of the military personnel, his fellow-students, and his teachers. President Boumediene himself, who represents the aspirations of an independent Algeria, visits the school, and his approval signals the hopeful prospect of the young man’s ambition to become a writer.
The novel I propose to select next is A quoi rêvent les loups (What do Wolves Dream about). It was written before The Writer but may be taken to illustrate a prospective writer’s choices (in this case those of the aspiring actor Nafa Walid) in the new Algeria. The picture is dismal. Once again, we are confronted with poverty in the Kasbah, a struggling family, and the limited options of an adolescent. But here again the young man has a gift: good looks – as they say, he has “the right profile” for movies. He does get a part in a local “soap,” but no other prospects materialize. Resigned, Nafa accepts the job of chauffeur for a wealthy family of “new” Algerians. Things have changed since the days of Boumediene, and his populist ways inspired by Nasser’s Egypt. Nafa is now in a position to observe the lifestyle of the rich, who have figured out how to ride the neo-liberal profit motive, and this gets him tangled up in a crime. He is expected to help “dispose of” the body of a young woman who, hired to satisfy his employer’s sexual appetites, has died of an overdose.
Is this the Algeria his parents’ generation fought for? He resigns, only to find himself once again in the dead end of the Kasbah. But this is where the neighborhood imam finds him, and step by step, leads him to the “path of righteousness.” This hesitant personal process is swept up in the mounting rise of the Kasbah’s rebellion against the status quo, and the Islamist banner it hoists. Reluctantly, but inevitably, the aspiring actor becomes a soldier of jihad. This leads to clandestine activities, a first assassination, and finally the bitter guerrilla fighting in the backwoods, the appalling escalation of cruelty, and the desperate final stand.
As it happens, Mohammed Moulessehoul was intimately involved in the Algerian Civil War which erupted in the early 90s – only not on the side of the Islamists, but on that of “law and order.” In The Writer the young protagonist finishes military school just as the novel’s author became an officer in real life. What about the writing side of that early promise? Somebody called Yasmina Khadra (this is his wife’s name) becomes the writer so that Mohammed Moulessehoul the officer can escape notoriety, censorship, or maybe worse. The writer’s job of truth telling condemns him to a double life.
In L’imposture des mots (The Imposture of Words) Moulessehoul describes the vicissitudes of such a life. We first meet him in Mexico, during a time of transit between Algeria and France. That in-between place recalls Kamel Daoud’s duel with Camus. France is a place of recognition but also of misunderstanding for Moulessehoul/Khadra. He is visited by the ghosts of kindred writers and haunted by his own fictional characters, who goad him into taking a stand. But how can he take sides between the writer and the man? Between his novels written in French, and the Algeria which lives in them?
Perhaps Ce que le jour doit a la nuit (What the Day owes to the Night) is a kind of peace offering to that dilemma. The novel goes back to colonial times in Algeria. Once again, a young boy from the cursed Kasbah gets a special chance: he is adopted by a well-to-do relative married to a French woman, and “passes” for a European. Thus, Younes becomes Jonas, gets to go to a French lycée and becomes accepted by his peers. There is a romance with a proud French girl. Inevitably, however, the entitlements of such a lifestyle are challenged by the Algerian Movement of Independence, and Younes/Jonas is caught in the middle. Younes feels in his gut the suffering of the people he came from, but Jonas also hears the claims of the people he now associates with: “this land owes everything to us… we have built its roads… and rails… and bridges… and towns… we have turned a bare stone into a garden of Eden…” The bloody struggle takes place in the background, and results in the ejection of the “colons.” Yet human relations are such that the coda of the novel is a reunion of the old gang in Marseilles – French, Spanish and Algerian, to celebrate their friendship despite everything.
But what Mohammed Moulessehoul has lived in Algeria exists in other places. Les hirondelles de Kaboul (The Swallows of Kabul) takes place in Afghanistan, even though the author has never been to that country. But he has met Afghani mujaheddin in Algeria, heard their sermons, and experienced their influence on his own territory. No wonder he has a bone to pick with the Afghani Taliban as the Kabul of his novel stages one atrocity after another. The fate of women has a special place in this narrative. While in other novels women are primarily long-suffering wives putting up with inadequate or intractable husbands, the young and beautiful Zunaira, sequestered behind her chador, is a modern woman, and utterly unreconciled to her fate.
It is as if Moulessehoul addresses the previous novel to his fellow Muslims, while in Les Syrènes de Bagdad (The Sirens of Baghdad) “the West” needs a demonstration of how extreme reaction is triggered by its own callous brutality. The initial setting is not the typical Kasbah, but a Bedouin village. But the poverty and deprivation are the same. Here too a young man is looking for a signal from fate. It comes in the guise of American soldiers “liberating” Iraq. First, in a typical “accident” during a stop at a check point, they kill a young mentally handicapped boy. On another occasion a helicopter targets a convoy of cars on the way to a wedding. Finally, American soldiers break down his door in the middle of the night, and drag him where his extended family, mostly women and children, are stood against a wall, half naked and shaking with fear. But the ultimate insult, something “a Westerner cannot understand, its utter disaster he cannot fathom” is the vision of his elderly half-clad father who, rudely pushed, falls over backward, revealing his nakedness. The sight of this nakedness, which transgresses every Bedouin taboo, now puts the son under the sacred obligation of revenge.
From then on, the story is his inexorable progress through underground networks toward a monumental act of terror. This entails accepting to be injected with a deadly virus which he will carry in his body on a flight to London and propagate in the West. He goes to Beirut for this secret operation, and once injected with the virus, prepares to board the plane to London. While he waits at the airport, he observes the people around him. There is an elderly woman who keeps checking her phone, expecting a call that never comes. There is a happy-looking man who surrounds his pregnant wife with loving attentions. There is a young couple, blond Europeans, kissing passionately. When the announcement to board the plane occurs, he remains in his seat.
Later, his handler picks him up and takes him to the outskirts of Beirut, where he is prepared to meet his fate. This is a fate neither defined by the American “liberators,” nor dictated by his Bedouin ancestry. If “fate” under these circumstances had not allowed him much of a life, now he is free at least to choose his death: to die of a shot in the back of his head so the rest of the world can live.
Mohammed Moulessehoul’s whole fictional output is that of an interpreter between parties speaking different languages – even though he writes in French. But his French has to “import” worlds of historical and cultural difference and attempt to “translate” what is sometimes untranslatable. How do you “translate” the underdog experience of the Kasbah and the bitterness of the oppressed without resorting to the “obsolete” language of Zola or Gorky? How do you deal with the overwhelming presence of the North African landscape unfamiliar to more temperate climes – a landscape that dominates human activity and imposes through the very excess of its beauty excessive metaphors of language?
Speech habits that are informed by these realities may be untranslatable into the Flaubertian prose of le mot juste, or the accomplishments of the French nouveau roman, where language is strictly purified of all “pathetic fallacy.” Mohammed Moulessehoul’s language is vivid and colloquial. His character sketches are memorable. The inner life of his main protagonists takes us where we may not wish to go: this is not a Baudelairian Invitation au voyage, not a safari, not the “Orientalism” of Flaubert’s Salambô. Sometimes he uses words or expressions that seem somewhat exotic. After all, French is Moulessehoul’s second language, and if he chooses to take liberties with some of its formal parti pris, he has famous precedents. Nabokov relished bringing back to unexpected life elements of the English language long since retired to the status of cliché.
Like Kamel Daoud, Mohammed Moulessehoul practices the “imposture of words.” Words may incite to hate and to kill – but in the works of these writers they incite to stop and listen – to another voice. Their double register may be disturbing if our attachments are frozen on either side of the gap of words. But because the bridges they build are two-way bridges, they offer a meeting place.
THE ATTACK, Moulessehoul’s novel made into a popular film by director Ziad Doueri.
Once again, the principal character of Mohammed Moulessehoul’s novel, Amin Jaafari, is stuck in unfavorable conditions. What prospects does a gifted young Palestinian have in the Occupied Territory? Are his only options to “collaborate” with the occupier – or to become a “martyr” fighting him? Amin decides to take his chances. Is it really a “crime” to become a doctor in Tel-Aviv, where he can practice cutting-edge medicine? His choice seems vindicated. He is professionally successful, and fully appreciated by his Israeli peers. He is also successful in his personal life: he is happily married to a beautiful, modern Palestinian woman.
But then tragedy strikes: there is a terrorist attack in a restaurant. Actually, this is “a fact of life” in Israel given the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian contest over the territory both claim as their own. The truly unexpected twist is that the suicide bomber turns out to be Amin’s wife Siham. But then again, was that not the very premise Moulessehoul sets up in his novel for Palestinians under Israeli occupation? Amin chooses “cooperation;” Siham has chosen “martyrdom.”
How does Ziad Doueri’s film address this existential dilemma? He chooses to make it a purely personal tragedy. The film dwells on the couple’s happy, successful life in Tel Aviv. So how could Siham, whom Amin thought he knew so intimately, turn out to be this unfathomable stranger? He undertakes a trip to the West Bank to unravel this mystery. His visit with his sister’s family in Bethlehem is awkward. They had not seen each other in ten years, and there is a sense of ambient distrust. Convinced that Siham has been “radicalized” by local clerics, Amin confronts the imam at the mosque. But this yields familiar grievances about the Israeli-Palestinian relations, and this is not the “explanation” he is looking for. Amin follows a clue: the Mercedes parked in his sister’s yard looks like the one that was seen near the attack site. This leads him to his nephew, who admits to have driven Siham there. The revelation that she had been an active resister all along under her husband’s very nose only compounds the mystery instead of resolving it. Disconsolate, his life shattered, Amin returns to Tel-Aviv.
This film version leaves out crucial episodes in Moulessehoul’s novel. In the novel Amin gets to go to Jenin, which is a Palestinian refugee camp and the site of a bloody battle between entrenched resisters and the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces), with many casualties on both sides. It is in Jenin that Amin begins to realize the contradictions of his own life: “In Tel-Aviv I was on another planet. My blinders were hiding the drama plaguing my country.” Then there is the episode with a Palestinian commander, who subjects Amin to a humiliating interrogation and week-long detention. The purpose is to make Amin “feel in his flesh and soul” the insults the Palestinian commander says he suffered since he was born… “every morning…every evening.” Then Amin’s young relative Wissam drives him to his uncle’s farm in the countryside. The young man departs, and the next day the news comes that Wissam has filled his car with explosives and crashed into a check point. In retaliation, Israeli soldiers surround the uncle’s house, give the inhabitants 30 minutes to vacate, then destroy it. Finally, Amin finds himself in a mosque. But the Sheik who is to preach at that mosque is targeted by a drone attack, and Amin, now just a Palestinian among Palestinians, is killed. The Israeli drone “attack” in Bethlehem closes the tragic arc initiated by Siham’s “attack” in Tel-Aviv.
In the film, by contrast, we experience Amin’s story not so much as that of a Palestinian, but as a mere visitor to the West Bank, and as such he discovers nothing: not about Siham, and not about himself. Siham, and by implication the actions of Palestinian terrorists, remain opaque, if not downright bizarre. Mohammed Moulessehul’ novel, on the other hand, as in all of his novels, takes the trouble to explore the seemingly irrational, and to find the words to articulate its reality to “the West.” In a dialogue between two intellectuals in The Syrens of Baghdad, a writer points out to his antagonist that they have the essential gift of bi-culturalism – an ideal tool of mediation between East and West.
It so happens that Ziad Doueri is also practiced in crossing cultural boundaries. He grew up in Lebanon, is francophone, and has since become an American citizen. Unsurprisingly, his personal journey has some of the overtones of the character Amin Jaafari. A Lebanese national escaping the trauma of his country, Doueri finds a receptive environment for his dream of self-actualization as an artist. He describes his fifteen years of apprenticeship in Los Angeles, where he was intent on mastering the technical tools of his craft. His position, in his interviews, is that in The Attack he sought to create a work of art and not a political tract.
So, the American environment has given him technical mastery. The Israeli environment has welcomed his efforts. But how innocent are such gifts? His film is a gripping story in the best Hollywood tradition but misses the more complex truth of the novel. The evidence of the film itself shows that, for whatever reason, he did not (or could not) film Jenin, or house demolitions or drone attacks. Yet these are part of “normal life” in the West Bank as terrorist attacks are in Israel proper.
In an effort to facilitate the change suggested by all these writers, I undertook a trip to Israel and Palestine in 2012 organized by a Tucson interfaith group. A report on this trip can be found under the category of Essays.
Rise and Shine: Galina DeRoeck's Website 