Normalization
Politics on the Nile
Ursula
Lindsey
Ursula
Lindsey is a Cairo-based writer and reporter.
Putting
Intajuna (“Our Products”) stickers on Palestinian
goods in a Ramallah supermarket. Intajuna
is one of many campaigns asking Palestinians
to avoid Israeli products. (Fadi Arouri/Reuters/Landov) |
On
September 23, Farouq Husni lost a close vote for
the post of head of the UN cultural and educational
body, UNESCO, to the Bulgarian Irina Bokova. Husni,
the sitting minister of culture in Egypt, had become
the “controversial” contender for the position, his
candidacy marred by accusations of anti-Semitism.
His narrow defeat came after months of high-level
negotiations, sparring in the international press
and an intense debate in Egypt and the Arab world
over the emotionally loaded subject of “normalization”
with Israel.
UNESCO
was founded in 1945 to “build peace in the minds
of men” by raising educational levels and supporting
cultural and intellectual exchange among UN member
states. The organization is perhaps best known for
its efforts to catalogue and save World Heritage
sites—its most famous effort, in Egypt, is the dramatic
relocation of the Pharaonic temples at Abu Simbel,
threatened by the creation of Lake Nasser behind
the Aswan High Dam. Farouq Husni has been culture
minister for 22 years, and as such has collaborated
with UNESCO on many projects, such as the Nubian
Museum in Aswan, and the Museum of National Egyptian
Civilization under construction in one of Cairo’s
oldest districts.
Husni’s
campaign to lead UNESCO was proceeding smoothly until
the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Israeli Foreign
Ministry expressed grave concern over statements
he had made in the past. These remarks were highlighted
in an open letter published by Le Monde on
May 21, penned by film director Claude Lanzmann,
intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy and Holocaust survivor
and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel. The letter
quotes Husni as saying that “Israel has never contributed
to civilization in any era, for it has only appropriated
the contributions of others,” and that Israel has
been “aided” by “the infiltration of Jews into the
international media.” It also references an exchange
that took place in the Egyptian parliament in 2008,
in which an MP claimed there were Israeli books in
the Alexandria Library and Husni reportedly countered:
“Burn those books; if there are any there, I will
burn them myself in front of you.” The letter averred
that “Mr. Farouk Hosny is the opposite of a man of
peace, dialogue and culture; Mr. Farouk Hosny is
a dangerous man, an inciter of hearts and minds”
and called on “all countries dedicated to liberty
and culture to take the initiatives necessary to
avert this threat and avoid the disaster that would
be his nomination.”
Husni responded with a letter of his own,
defending himself and focusing in particular on the
exchange in Parliament. “I was expressing angry feelings
at what is happening to an entire population [the
Palestinians] deprived of its land and rights,” he
wrote. “Although the words themselves are charged
with extreme cruelty, they should be seen in context.”
Nonetheless, Husni continued that he regretted what
he had said. “Nothing is more abhorrent to me than
racism, rejection of the other or a desire to discredit
any human culture, including the Jewish culture.”
The discussion in the world press centered around
Husni’s vow to burn Israeli books. In interviews,
Husni offered several justifications: that the remark
was taken out of context; that it was entirely rhetorical
(he did not really mean to follow through); and that
it escaped his lips when he was provoked by an affiliate
of the Muslim Brothers. (Skirmishes between the Ministry
of Culture and Islamist elements are standard in
Egyptian political life, and Husni is a bête noire of
the Islamist bloc in Parliament.)
Yet while trying to assuage the international
community’s fears regarding anti-Semitism, Husni
also had to allay the very different anxieties of
Egyptian artists and intellectuals, who feared that
in his UNESCO bid, the minister was compromising
what has become a near fundamental principle of Egyptian
cultural life: boycott of Israel and avoidance of
anything smacking of “normal” relations with the
Jewish state or its citizens. Husni’s remark about
book burning has been widely condemned in Egypt—everyone
can see that it was, to say the least, an embarrassing
choice of words for a minister of culture. But the
words are not as shocking here as they are abroad,
because almost everyone agrees that there should
not, in fact, be Israeli books in Egyptian libraries.
A
Political Stance
When
President Anwar al-Sadat made peace with Israel in
1979, he flew in the face of domestic public opinion.
Opposition among the country’s cultural elite quickly
crystallized in the form of the Committee for the
Defense of National Culture, established by the author
Latifa al-Zayyat. Professional associations and syndicates
passed boycott resolutions, proscribing their members—journalists,
filmmakers, authors—from traveling to Israel or participating
in any events with Israeli counterparts. For the
cultural class (muthaqqafin) of Egypt, this
refusal of “normalization” is one way they can register
their anger at Sadat’s conclusion of a peace that
excluded the Palestinians and other Arabs and, more
so, at the violence and intransigence of Israel’s
occupation of Palestinian lands.
This blanket ban on cultural contact with
Israel has survived nearly intact to this day—even
as many Arab countries, including Egypt, have moved
toward greater political and commercial normalization.
Egypt is at one with Israel on security issues such
as the containment of Hamas in Gaza. Egyptian businessmen
have no problem doing business with Israel, whether
in the Qualified Industrial Zones in Egypt churning
out products with a mandated percentage of Israeli
input or through the call centers where young Egyptians
take calls (in Hebrew) from Israeli customers.[1] In
fact, as Wassim Al-Adel argues, the Arab world has
moved, over the decades, from adamant rejection of
Israel to a “growing culture of numbness and complicity,”
particularly on the economic level. “Arab governments
can no longer be, if ever they were, considered reliable
champions of the boycott.”[2]
Meanwhile, attempts to organize widespread
boycotts of global brands such as Coca-Cola or McDonald’s
that do business in Israel tend to peak at times
of general indignation—during the first and second intifadas,
for example—and then fizzle over time. Such efforts
are weakened by the lack of a single coordinating
body, the long list of possible targets and the counter-argument
that boycotts hurt Egyptian workers more than anyone
else. Direct activism is severely curtailed, with
convoys of aid to Gaza, for example, often blocked
or tightly monitored. But Egyptian muthaqqafin have
clung to the language and practice of anti-normalization,
with a vehemence that often seems directly proportional
to their powerlessness to affect government policy.
As minister of culture, Husni has supported—or
at least gone along with—the cultural boycott of
Israel. In an interview, he said: “Normalization
isn’t a decision of the minister. It’s a global,
collective decision on the part of all intellectuals
and creators. I personally am not against cultural
normalization. I’m against choosing the current time
to start. It has to be after the establishment of
peace between Israel and Palestine.”[3] In fact, much of the international
criticism of Husni stems from his adherence to the
anti-normalization stance. Ha’aretz has described
Husni as “an extreme anti-Israel Egyptian official”[4];
as Mona Anis wrote in al-Ahram Weekly, “Israel
and its friends have decided to consider him the
prime instigator against Arab-Israeli cultural cooperation.”[5] (In fact, after meeting Egyptian President Husni Mubarak in
May, and no doubt as part of an unknown quid pro
quo, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
said Israel would no longer oppose Husni’s nomination.)
Several of Husni’s critics have found it
convenient to equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism,
conflating support for a boycott with anti-Jewish
prejudice. This elision is accomplished in an article
in Foreign Policy that argues—without a single
supporting quote—that Husni’s statements exemplify
the “rampant Judeophobia” of Egypt’s cultural elite,
while dismissing solidarity for the Palestinian people
as a factor in attitudes toward Israel here.[6] Similarly, a September New York Times article
opened with the flat assertion that “Egyptians generally
do not make the distinction between Jewish people
and Israelis. Israelis are the enemy, so Jews are,
too.”[7] While
there is certainly anti-Semitism in Egypt—and that
anti-Semitism may be exacerbated by the lack of interaction
with Jews and Jewish culture to which the boycott
contributes—many Egyptians are perfectly able, and
eager, to articulate the difference between anti-Zionism
and anti-Semitism.
The focus on anti-Semitism (Husni’s or otherwise)
obfuscates the fact that the cultural boycott of
Israel is a political stance, one of the only avenues
available to Egyptian intellectuals for expressing
disapproval of Israeli actions in the Occupied Territories.
Supporters of Israel argue that the boycott is a
form of censorship or bigotry. But the Israeli state
itself has injected politics into its cultural initiatives.
It reportedly requires the artists it funds to sign
a statement committing them to “promote the policy
interests of the state of Israel via culture and
art, including contributing to creating a positive
image for Israel.”[8] Israeli
officials have been prominently quoted saying they
will launch a cultural public relations campaign,
to “show Israel’s prettier face, so we are not thought
of purely in the context of war.”[9]
Brouhaha
Husni’s
support for the boycott has been one of the few issues
on which he has seen eye to eye with Egyptian intellectuals
and artists—even though, like many of his positions,
it seems dictated as much by political expediency
as by personal conviction. Although, for example,
Hosni tends to present himself as a champion of a
free speech and a bulwark against Islamists and their
attacks on “immoral” culture, he has quite often
acquiesced to their demands—when not engaging in
censorship on his own initiative, arguing, “Sometimes
creativity surpasses all limits, so who’s supposed
to guard the people? There are agreed-upon limits
of freedom, and the artist must abide by the limits
of society.”[10] The
minister’s long history of political opportunism
is one reason why many in Egypt became concerned
that in the process of campaigning for UNESCO, as
Anis put it, he was preparing to “hand over the last
card in his possession” to Israel. Egyptian intellectuals
feared the principle of anti-normalization would
be sacrificed to appease the minister’s Western critics
and advance his UNESCO aspirations.
Throughout
the spring and summer of 2009, the Egyptian press
was in a tizzy over signs that Husni was softening
toward Israel. First there was the invitation of
the Israeli Daniel Barenboim to conduct at the Cairo
Opera House in April. (Barenboim supports a Palestinian
state and founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra
with the late Edward Said.) Then, in June, Agence
France Presse reported that the National Translation
Center would be translating works by the Israeli
historian Benny Morris and novelists David Grossman
and Amos Oz,[11] a story that was quickly and
angrily picked up by the local press. The head of
the center, the critic Gabir ‘Asfour, explained that
the works would be translated from English or French
editions, rather than the original Hebrew versions,
so as to pay no royalties to Israeli publishers and
authors. But this did not pacify critics such as
Sabri Hafiz, who wrote in the literary weekly Akhbar
al-Adab: “Does changing the nationality of the
agent, by making it a European publisher, justify
forming a contract with…a Zionist writer who chose
to settle the land of another through force?”[12] There
were also reports that Husni was pressuring the organizers
of the Red Sea Festival (held in Suez in July) to
invite Israeli participants. In the end, Israel did
not participate, and the festival’s coordinator—who
had been quoted pledging not to bow to ministerial
pressure—“resigned.”
Husni’s
damage control agenda was clear—officials from his
ministry even held a press conference highlighting
the restoration of ancient synagogues in Cairo. But
none of the above examples necessarily portend a
move toward normalization. The brouhaha, however,
is typical. Boycotts have to be maintained and enforced,
and a great amount of energy in Egypt goes into shaming
and attacking those who are perceived to have betrayed
a shared principle. All too often, this self-policing
can seem petty. In the summer of 2007, the young
actor ‘Amr Wakid was threatened with expulsion from
the actors’ syndicate—thus being banned from ever
working in Egypt again—because of his participation
in an international TV production, “House of Saddam”
by HBO Films, that also featured an Israeli actor.
In August, a mini-scandal erupted when the famed
cartoonist Bahgouri travelled to Ramallah with other
artists for an initiative called “Cartoons for Peace,”
and also spent a day in Tel Aviv. The debate over
whether the cartoonist had engaged in normalization
came to hinge on whether he had stepped out of the
tour bus or not.
The
wall between Ramallah and Jerusalem. (Ahikam
Seri) |
Anxiety
over possible moves toward normalization is a constant
of Egyptian cultural life. In 2008, Nadia Kamal began
screening her documentary Salata Baladi (House
Salad) around Cairo, and quickly caused a furor.
The film was an exploration of Kamal’s far-flung,
heterogeneous family and focused on her mother—an
Italian-Egyptian Jew who married an Egyptian Muslim,
converted to Islam, and was a Communist and pro-Palestinian
activist, serving jail time for her political beliefs.
In the film, Naila Kamal decides—after much agonized
deliberation, and with the encouragement of a Palestinian
friend and of her daughter—to visit a Jewish cousin
who left Cairo when they were both teenagers and
now lives in Tel Aviv. The Kamal family’s trip to
Israel led to charges that the film was “pro-normalization”
and to Kamal being attacked in the press and convoked
by the filmmakers’ syndicate for an investigation.
She refused the summons.
In
an interview in 2008, Kamal said: “I think the reason
most of the people are accusing me of pro-normalization
is that they just didn’t think about it a lot. They
don’t have a definition of normalization. They don’t
have a definition of boycott. They think they are
two opposite sides: If you normalize, you don’t boycott;
if you boycott, then you’re not normalizing. Boycott
is a way of resistance. It’s a tool. You can boycott,
you can make war, you can make a demonstration, you
can sign a petition. It’s a tool, not a principle,
not a lifestyle, not an attitude.… Normalizing is
when you see injustice happening and you just give
a cold shoulder to the victim or a blind eye to the
whole process. When you just agree to go on with
business as usual. Engaging with the Israelis or
with the Jews or with the Zionists—engaging in a
war or in a discussion—is not normalization.”
Kamal
is in the minority, but is not entirely alone in
suggesting that Egypt’s three-decade cultural boycott
of Israel is in need of reevaluation. Asked about
Bahgouri’s trip to Israel and the Occupied Territories,
several Egyptian colleagues defended him, pointing
out that his trip was part of an internal initiative
to promote peace and that the content of the works
he presented was critical of Israel.[13] Gamal
al-Ghitani, the novelist and editor of Akhbar
al-Adab, has defended the effort to translate
Israeli books, pointing out that it was undertaken
in the 1960s (as part of a series entitled “Know
Your Enemy”) and that the likes of Ghassan Kanafani
and ‘Abd al-Wahhab al-Massiri had compiled scholarly
works on Hebrew literature and Judaism, respectively.[14] Regarding
the tumult surrounding Husni’s alleged moves toward
normalization, al-Ghitani wrote of “an unprecedented
atmosphere of demagoguery, which makes necessary
an objective stance from the cultural community,
to define the ideas and foundations on which anti-normalization
is based.” He has also said: “We need to discuss
normalization again—our position has become unclear.
There is something like a Palestinian country in
Ramallah and Gaza—what is the position of Arab intellectuals
toward travel to these regions? What about dealing
with Arab Israelis?”[15]
Sorts
of Boycott
The
boycott, as currently articulated, bars Egyptians
from visiting the Occupied Territories (a self-restriction
that quite suits the Egyptian security services,
which is loath to allow such travel in any case).
As Elliott Colla has pointed out in these pages,
the boycott strategy has “cut off links between Egyptians
and the very Palestinians whose cause they champion.”[16] Not only do Egyptian activists and intellectuals have few opportunities
to coordinate with their Palestinian counterparts,
the discussion of boycott strategy among Egyptians
is also quite narrowly delimited. In Egypt today
there is not so much a discussion of the boycott
as a constant reiteration of a fixed position. Articles
on the subject all seem to have the same headline,
a simple declaration: “Normalization is rejected.”
Colla has also pointed out how “most of anti-normalization’s
successes are counted negatively”—in trips not taken,
invitations rejected. Adhering to the boycott—maintaining
one’s ideological purity—is often seen as enough.
This is in great part because other forms of solidarity—setting
up aid convoys to Gaza, organizing widespread commercial
boycotts, picketing a Qualified Industrial Zone—would
entail great effort and attract the hostile attention
of the authorities, who are showing less and less
tolerance for any form of active solidarity with
the Palestinians. In fact, the boycott—which is mainly
maintained through state-licensed professional syndicates—operates
in a tightly constrained political space, tolerated
and even championed by government officials because
it is a cost-free way of paying lip service to the
Palestinian cause. It suffers from the same atrophy
that has infected Egyptian political life at large.
More
is the pity, since an international, Palestinian-led
academic and cultural boycott movement has been gaining
momentum. Launched in April 2004, the Palestinian
Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of
Israel (PACBI) calls upon intellectuals and academics
worldwide to “comprehensively and consistently boycott
all Israeli academic and cultural institutions as
a contribution to the struggle to end Israel’s occupation,
colonization and system of apartheid.” In July 2005,
almost 200 Palestinian associations and organizations
signed the Palestinian Civil Society Call for Boycott,
Divestment and Sanctions.
The
movement has been involved in a number of high-profile
actions, from pressuring international artists not
to perform in Israel to targeting particular events
organized by Israeli institutions. Over the summer,
PACBI supported a protest of the Toronto International
Film Festival’s decision to spotlight the city of
Tel Aviv in its program. The many well-known signatories
to the “Toronto Declaration: No Celebration of Occupation”
wrote that the Festival “whether intentionally or
not, has become complicit in the Israeli propaganda
machine.”
PACBI
issues (and occasionally revises) its own boycott
guidelines; it currently suggests, for example, that
all events or works funded by official Israeli institutions
and ones that “promote false symmetry or ‘balance’”
be eschewed. The guidelines can be debated—and, in
fact, one suspects that the main achievement of PACBI
for some time to come will be simply to start debates—but
the important point is that the boycott as articulated
here is context-specific, taking into consideration
the funding, aims, framework and content of each
event. This sort of boycott is also open to progressive
Israeli participants—and has indeed been embraced
by some, such as Neve Gordon, a professor at Ben
Gurion University who penned an op-ed entitled “Boycott
Israel.”[17]
The
Palestinian boycott is shaped by different factors
from those that affect Arab neighbors such as Egypt.
Palestinians have never been able to boycott Israel
entirely—a fact acknowledged at the 2008 Palestinian
Non-Governmental Organizations Network conference
in Ramallah, dedicated to promoting the broader boycott,
divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign of which
PACBI is a part. Participants agreed that Palestinians
should only be asked to boycott Israeli products
for which local alternatives were available, and
that they could not be expected to avoid working
in Israel. Many Palestinian organizations also have
experience working side by side with Israelis, engaging
in joint activism such as the protests against the
separation wall in the West Bank village of Bil‘in.
At
the same time, Palestinian civil society has been
scarred by the anodyne “people-to-people” projects
that proliferated after the Oslo agreements of 1993.
Millions of international aid dollars were spent
to promote activities that would bring Palestinians
and Israelis together, to learn “dialogue” and “tolerance.”
But many of these projects perpetuated the very asymmetries
of power that bedeviled, and eventually killed, the
“peace process” of the Oslo years. Palestinian organizations
are accordingly cautious about legitimizing Israel
through forms of cooperation that focus on “reconciliation”
between two seemingly equal sides. Today, most of
those involved in the BDS campaign insist that a
prerequisite for joint activities is an explicit
acknowledgement that in Israel-Palestine there is
“a situation where there is an oppressor and an oppressed,
a colonizer and a colonized.”[18]
At
the meeting of the Palestinian Non-Governmental Organizations
Network, it was pointed out that Palestinians have
engaged in various boycotts since the 1920s.[19] Bringing a boycott to fruition
is extremely difficult, demanding constant coordination
and adaptation. The concern over Farouq Husni’s suspected
capitulation on the boycott issue shows how important
engaging in some form of solidarity with the Palestinian
people remains for the Egyptian cultural class. Joining
the global conversation over what normalization consists
of and how best to fight it might help Egyptian intellectuals
and artists channel their anxiety in more productive
directions.
Endnotes
[1] L’Express,
August 15, 2009.
[2] Wassim
Al-Adel, “How Arab Normalization Is Undermining the
Boycott Movement,” Electronic Intifada, August
29, 2008.
[3] Ursula
Lindsey, “Culture Clashes,” The National,
September 6, 2009.
[4] Ha’aretz,
May 27, 2009.
[5] Mona
Anis, “Why Can’t an Arab Be More Like an Israeli?” al-Ahram
Weekly, July 2-8, 2009.
[6] Raymond
Stock, “Very, Very Lost in Translation,” Foreign
Policy, September 2009.
[7] New
York Times, September 7, 2009.
[8] Yitzhak
Laor, “Putting Out a Contract on Art,” Ha’aretz, July
31, 2008.
[9] New
York Times, March 19, 2009.
[10] Hossam Bahgat, “Cultural House of Cards,” Cairo
Times, January 18-24, 2001.
[11] Agence
France Presse, June 11, 2009.
[12] Sabri
Hafiz, “A Salute to al-Aswani and a Rebuke to ‘Asfour,” Akhbar
al-Adab, June 21, 2009.
[13] Riham
Mahmoud, “Normalization in the Name of Art,” al-Muhit.com (September
2009).
[14] Gamal
al-Ghitani, “Hubbub!” Akhbar al-Adab, June
21, 2009.
[15] Lindsey,
op cit.
[16] Elliott
Colla, “Solidarity in the Time of Anti-Normalization,” Middle
East Report 224 (Fall 2002).
[17] Neve
Gordon, “Boycott Israel,” Los Angeles Times,
August 20, 2009.
[18] Faris
Giacaman, “Can We Talk? The Middle East Peace Industry,” Electronic
Intifada, August 20, 2009.
[19] Andréa
Schmidt, “BDS Conference in Palestine: Building Solidarity,
Combating Normalization,” Left Turn, April
9, 2008.
