Sinai Uprising

Nicholas Pelham's "In Sinai: The Uprising of the Bedouin," from the New York Review of Books, Dec. 6, 2012.

Up Against the Wall

walls in Nador/Melilla, Palestine & Mexico. Kickstarter project from Flo Razowsky. here.

Jesus through Muslim eyes

Very informative piece by Tarif Khalidi, history professor at the American University of Beirut.

"I think it can safely be shown that Islamic culture presents us with what in quantity and quality are the richest images of Jesus in any non-Christian culture."

Gamal Abdel Nasser responds to the Muslim Brothers, on the veil

Subtitled in French. Someday I should translate into English.

Documentary on Abdelkrim and the Rif War

In French, but worth a look even if you don't know the language.

Nakba: Essential account of the flight of Palestinians from Haifa, 1948

Ethnic cleansing? Check out this article by Shay Fogelman from Ha'aretz.

The central event was the Haganah's deliberate shelling of the market, where the Palestinian Arabs were gathered. Here's an excerpt:

Several history books published in Israel in recent years describe the flight of thousands of Haifa Arabs to the port on the day of the city's conquest, and their departure by sea to Acre and Lebanon. The event assumes greater import and significance in the newspapers of the time and in various archives. Segal and Tadmor write: "On April 22, as Haganah forces moved toward the market, a mass flight of thousands was recorded." They do not say what happened in the market, preferring instead to draw on Prof. Karsh's thesis. "The Arab leadership," they write, "urged the members of their nation to evacuate their homes, whether to clear the territory for the Arab forces or for propaganda purposes aimed at negating the legitimacy of the Jewish state."

Another source the authors cite for their chapter conclusions is the book by historian Benny Morris, "1948," (published in English in 2008 and two years later in Hebrew ). They write that Morris used to be a new historian "until he recanted," and add that he is the most respected and serious member of the group. Morris has written about the Haifa conquest and mentioned the flight of the Arab residents to the port in several studies. In "1948," he describes the events of April 22 as follows: "The constant mortar and machine gun fire, as well as the collapse of the militias and local government and the Haganah's conquests, precipitated mass flight toward the British-held port area. By 1:00 P.M. some 6,000 people had reportedly passed through the harbor and boarded boats for Acre and points north."

Morris sums up the reasons for the flight with these words: "The majority had left for a variety of reasons, the main one being the shock of battle (especially the Haganah mortaring of the Lower City ) and Jewish conquest and the prospect of life as a minority under Jewish rule." However, in his first book, "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem" (first English-language edition, 1987 ), which was written well before his "recantation," Morris described the course of events in greater detail and shed a different light on them, quoting from a book by an Israeli historian: "The three-inch mortars 'opened up on the market square [where there was] a great crowd ... a great panic took hold. The multitude burst into the port, pushed aside the policemen, stormed the boats and began fleeing the town.'"

But this, too, is very much a partial description. Morris actually quotes from a book by Zadok Eshel, "Haganah Battles in Haifa," published in 1978 (in Hebrew ) by the Defense Ministry. Eshel was a member of the Haganah and offers first-hand descriptions of many of the unfolding events in Haifa. Here is his account of the events of April 22 (note the words which Morris omitted and replaced by an ellipsis ): "Early in the morning, Maxy Cohen informed the brigade's headquarters that the Arabs were using a loudspeaker and calling on everyone to gather in the market square, 'because the Jews have conquered Stanton Street and are continuing to make their way downtown.' Upon receiving the report, an order was given to the commander of the auxiliary weapons company, Ehud Almog, to make use of the three-inch mortars, which were situated next to Rothschild Hospital, and they opened up on the market square [where there was] a great crowd. When the shelling started and shells fell into it [the crowd], a great panic took hold. The multitude burst into the port, pushed aside the policemen, stormed the boats and began fleeing the town. Throughout the day the mortars continued to shell the city alternately, and the panic that seized the enemy became a rout."

"That is a mistake," retorts Ehud Almog, who was the commander of the auxiliary unit in the Carmeli Brigade's 22nd Battalion. "It was not a three-inch mortar. They were Davidka shells" - referring to homemade shells which were renowned for the loud noise they made. Of the other details he says, "The historical description is correct. Absolutely true. I remember the events vividly. We were ordered to shell the market when there was a large crowd there. There were tremendous noises of explosions which were heard across 200 meters." Almog adds that the shelling, which took place in the early afternoon, was short "but very effective."

Like Eshel, Almog also says the mortars fired by his unit spurred a flight of civilians to the port. Although not an eyewitness to the flight, officers from Shai (the Haganah's intelligence unit ) who were stationed near the port's gates gave him a real-time account of events. Another testimony (quoted by Morris in "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem" ) comes from a British soldier who was stationed in the port: "During the morning they [the Haganah] were continually shooting down on all Arabs who moved both in Wadi Nisnas and in the Old City. This included completely indiscriminate and revolting machine gun fire and sniping on women and children - attempting to get out of Haifa through the gates into the docks. There was considerable congestion outside the East Gate [of the port] of hysterical and terrified Arab women and children and old people on whom the Jews opened up mercilessly with fire." (A truncated version of this quote also appears in "1948" - reduced to "completely indiscriminate and revolting ... fire," the ellipsis replacing the words "machine gun." )

Beyond the moral issues that arise from firing into a crowded market, the testimony of Zadok Eshel, which is backed up by that of Ehud Almog, indicates that the attack was carried out by order of senior Haganah officers. How senior they were is not known. Not all the Israel Defense Forces archival material about this period is accessible to the public. It is therefore impossible to determine whether the shelling was part of a general policy aimed at expelling the Arabs, or one of several similar instances that were documented during the war.

Asef Bayat on Muslims and Copts in Egypt

Read it here.
Copts, in general, speak of how they are under-represented in academia and professional unions; are deprived of state support for Coptic studies; have no Coptic mayors, governors, college deans, school head teachers; and are absent from high-ranking military positions, the judiciary, intelligence, presidential offices.

Egypt's Bedouins begin to demand equal citizenship rights

Read it here, from The Guardian, June 17, 2011.

Sandmonkey on sectarianism in Egypt

This is really a great post, very enlightening.

Ellis Goldberg made two comments about this when I posted it on Facebook, which I will summarize.

1. The "take a Christian to lunch" approach won't work any better in Egypt than the "take a Negro to lunch" campaign worked in the US, largely for the same reasons.
2. The country's political leadership need to be held accountable for not dealing with the problem openly and politically. The Sharaf government and all the upper-level political elite (including presidential candidates) are avoiding directly dealing with these issues, despite all the violence of the disputes.

Interactive map of US military sales to the Middle East

Very revealing. Check it out here.

Just a sample: Saudi Arabia, 2009, $2.89 billion.

August 2010: Moroccan demonstrators block Melilla, charging racism

Article from Associated Press.

Moroccan protesters block Spanish enclave border

By DANIEL WOOLLS, Associated Press Writer – Thursday Aug 12, 2010

MADRID – Demonstrators in Morocco blockaded a Spanish enclave for hours Thursday, restricting trucks from making food deliveries in a dispute over alleged police violence and racism against Moroccans entering the city.

The protest just outside the city of Melilla, which is claimed by Morocco, came a day after the kings of the two traditional allies spoke by telephone to try to calm tempers in a conflict that has been simmering for three weeks.

Police said protesters at dawn prevented all trucks from entering Melilla, interrupting shipments to the centuries-old Spanish city of 70,000 at the tip of North Africa between the Mediterranean and northern Morocco.

But 11 trucks carrying fruit and vegetables were allowed over the border in the afternoon, according to Gabriel Escobar, the Interior Ministry's top official in the city.

An official in Escobar's office said later it was not clear if more trucks would be allowed to cross Thursday. The official spoke on condition of anonymity in keeping with department policy.

Protest leader Mounaim Chaouki said the blockade will be lifted for the Muslim holy day on Friday and over the weekend but ramped up again Monday to prevent trucks with construction material from crossing, according to Spain's El Mundo newspaper.

He said protesters on Tuesday will prevent Moroccan women who work as maids in Melilla from crossing over, the newspaper reported. Calls to Chaouki's cell phone went unanswered Thursday.

Morocco supplies the Spanish enclave with perishable products, and about 35,000 Moroccans cross daily into Melilla to work or shop.

Morocco claims the city and another North African enclave of Spain, Ceuta, as its own — but Spain rejects any talk of giving up the cities. Many Moroccans enter the enclaves by day to work, then go home at night.

The demonstrators manning the blockade Thursday also were pressing Morocco's claim to the cities.

Morocco has made five complaints over the last three weeks alleging Spanish police mistreatment of and racism against Moroccans crossing into Melilla. Moroccan officials also accused the Spanish coast guard of finding, then abandoning, a group of ailing migrants in a boat off the Moroccan coast. Spain has denied the claims.

The Spanish foreign ministry declined comment on the blockade, which started a day after King Juan Carlos called his Moroccan counterpart Mohammed VI to try to ease tensions.

Calls to Morocco's foreign ministry in Rabat went unanswered, and an official at the Moroccan embassy in Madrid had no immediate comment. She declined to give her name in keeping with policy.

Spain and Morocco are key allies, cooperating closely on fighting Islamist terrorism and preventing illegal immigration.

Relations between Spain and Morocco are generally good, despite periodic bouts of tension. The most serious break came in 2002, when the nations edged close to armed confrontation after a handful of Moroccan soldiers occupied a rocky Spanish island off the Moroccan coast inhabited by goats.

______

Associated Press writer Debbie Seward contributed to this story from Paris.

Do the poor of Tehran support Ahmadinejad?

"Time to bust the myth of the slumdog Islamists." By Doug Sanders. The Globe and Mail (Canada), November 28, 2009 Saturday, p. F3

It's always been a dangerous fallacy to believe that the main boosters of Islamic fundamentalism are the Muslim poor. Now, movements in impoverished parts of Cairo, Tehran and elsewhere are demanding more from their rulers than pious rhetoric

dsaunders@globeandmail.com

If you take an evening stroll around the southern fringes of Tehran, where the mountains plunge into the desert and the apartment blocks descend into haphazard neighbourhoods of self-built structures, you may be surprised to hear a rhythmic chant echoing from the blackened rooftops.

Allahu akbar, allahu akbar, the voices chant in unison: God is great, God is great. You might think that this is a cry of pious loyalty in the heart of the world's only Islamic theocracy. After all, these are very poor people, migrant families and casual labourers, surely the lifeblood of the Islamic revolution.

But watch what happens. The chants draw motorcycle-bound members of the Basij, the zealous paramilitary volunteer branch of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's Revolutionary Guards. Several times this year, they've managed to catch, beat, imprison and kill South Tehranis for doing this. They're expecting another round of the chanting a week Monday.

Through a 30-year linguistic alchemy, the praising of God's name has been transformed into a popular cry of disenchantment with the revolutionary government. In wealthier North Tehran, students took to the streets and yelled it after last spring's contested elections. The protests still flare up occasionally, and probably will again on Dec. 7, national student day. This week, the regime arrested scores of people in a pre-emptive strike

But the more furtive protests that have spread across the rooftops of Tehran's poorer districts and Iran's regional cities seem to terrify the regime even more, to judge by its recent responses - such as the stationing of Basij units and clerical authorities inside 6,000 primary schools, mainly in these neighbourhoods.

While these non-violent protests don't have the power to unseat the government, they do dethrone one of the world's most closely held myths.

This myth holds that the slum-dwelling poor of the Middle East are the natural constituents of Islamic regimes - the most religious, the most loyal and the most likely to believe in Koranic authority. As people who live in pre-modern squalor, they're thought the most likely to embrace a pre-modern ideology of theocratic rule. Many of the Islamic parties themselves have taken these migrants for granted as their base.

As a result, for example, Canada and the United States support the authoritarian regime of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, believing the slums of Cairo would quickly fill any leadership vacuum with another Islamic revolution.

Those who spend their time among the poor of the Middle East know that this simply isn't true.

Political Islam is a middle-class movement and always has been. It has struggled, from the moment of Iran's 1979 revolution, to get the poor onside. It has promised them material and economic benefits, but usually has held their attention only briefly and provisionally. In Iran, the poor of South Tehran were holding anti-ayatollah street protests as early as 1985.

Perhaps the most experienced observer of the poor in Middle Eastern cities is Asef Bayat, a former Iranian villager. He's now a professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands, but he has spent much of the past 20 years living in Tehran and Cairo, studying the marginal poor.

His 1997 study Street Politics: Poor People's Movements in Iran unveiled a world of protest erupting in South Tehran and other poor migrant centres; it anticipated the rise of the reformist Iranian government of the late 1990s.

He has just published Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East, a look at grassroots politics in the parts of Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey and Iran that are usually ignored by the media.

His key argument is that political Islam has no natural base among the Muslim poor: They have spent the past decade moving to a "post-Islamist" politics that rejects a role for religion in government and law.

"It really is a myth, held even among people in Egypt and Iran, that there is this ecology of poverty, one that generates anomie and therefore a propensity to embrace any kind of ideology and violence and extremism," Mr. Bayat told me recently as he was preparing to leave for Egypt again. "Or that the poor have a greater propensity towards this kind of religious politics.

"Well, they are, of course, religious people," he said, "but my understanding of them is that they are pretty pragmatic people. And the issues of daily life, employment and economic issues, rights and housing - these things are what is important for these people."

Two years ago, I spent a few days myself in the very far south of Tehran, where the most recent people to arrive from rural areas and regional cities had built dusty communities. Any image of a pre-modern, deeply observant and subservient culture of poverty was exploded by what I saw.

These people were indeed religious believers, and older women wore the black head-covering chador in greater numbers than downtown. But the younger women were just as likely as their wealthy urban sisters to wear the legal-minimum, bright-red "bad hijab" scarf hat that leaves most of the hair exposed.

The simple two-storey houses were studded with satellite dishes (now possessed by 40 per cent of Iranian households) tuned to the liberalizing messages of Al Jazeera and CNN. People spoke to me openly of their dislike for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and more discreetly about deeper unhappiness with the regime, which they felt had deprived them of work and trade opportunities by wasting its time on spiritual matters.

They talked about protests they had participated in - against bus fares or for housing development. They knew about and understood the democratic, reformist movements of the previous decade. They weren't liberal democrats by any means, but neither were they interested in theocratic rule.

When the so-called Green Wave swept across Iran this spring, the poor of South Tehran stayed comparatively on the sidelines. Their quiet protests - directed at bread-and-butter issues, but punctuated by allahu akbar chants - were not enough to spawn a revolution. But they showed that disdain for the regime was not confined to the wealthy.

At the same time, the slum dwellers of Cairo staged their own surprising revolt. For one day in April, Cairo stayed home - everyone, including street vendors, shutting down Egypt's entire economy for a day. Yet the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement that is often presumed to be the heir to Egypt's leadership, had no involvement. In fact, it opposed the protests, but was largely ignored.

The idea had spread, instead, by text message and Internet. Inside the Cairo slum of Imbaba, word reached every house to stay home for the day, and nobody moved.

A strong role was played by Kifaya, also known as the Egyptian Movement for Change, a pro-democracy group that was active earlier in the decade among the middle classes but had faded, only to reappear this year with this new grassroots following. It might be a movement of religious people, but it is certainly not a religious movement.

Eight weeks later, Lebanon went to the polls and rejected the Islamist coalition led by Hezbollah, instead giving a plurality to the parties of the Cedar Revolution, who have recently negotiated a coalition government. Despite Hezbollah's popular attacks on Israel and its expensive, Iranian-funded social-welfare projects in the slums, it failed to win the solid support of the poor, who divided their vote.

This anti-authoritarian shift seems to be the uniting trend in the Middle East. The bellwether example is probably Turkey, where the Justice and Development Party has held power since 2003. Its members tend to be more religious than the country's secular elite, but also tend to be more concerned with democracy, equality among ethnic groups and free trade with Europe.

"We are an Islamic political party in the same way that the Christian Democrats of Germany, Angela Merkel's party, are Christians," cabinet minister Egemen Bagis told me once. Six years have borne this out: There has been no sign of an Islamist inclination.

"They are religious people, there is no doubt about that, in Iran or Turkey or Indonesia," Mr. Bayat said. "They feel that religion is important, and they want to be pious, but that's different from actually defining politics and the state through the lens of religion. They don't want to do that."

Studies in Turkey and Iran reveal that public support for religion in political life has dropped continuously since the 1990s, even as "Muslim" has become a popular badge of personal identity. Religion is seen more and more as a private matter.

Given the terrible inequalities in this resource-rich region, the heavy-handed governments and the economic mismanagement, it is entirely likely that the slums of the Middle East will erupt.

But it is no longer so easy to say, after the stirrings we've seen this year, that this would be bad news.

Resources on Shi'ites in Lebanon, part 1

Hamza Hendawi, "Beirut's Shiite bastion revives after '06 war." The Guardian, Friday October 23, 2009.

Resources on the Sinai

Useful articles on the Sinai:

Laleh Behbehenian, "Policing the Illicit Peripheries of Egypt's Tourism Industry," Middle East Report 216, Fall 2000.

Abdel-Rahman Hussein, "Sinai Bedouins suffer repeated crackdowns in a year of tension." Daily News Egypt, Dec. 22, 2009.

Amirah Ibrahim, "Hopes for Conciliation." Al-Ahram Weekly, 3-9 December, 2008.