Interventions is a feature in Middle East Report Online offering critical reviews of important Middle East-related books, films and other cultural production.

Once More Into the Breach
Interventions
Ussama Makdisi
December 2009

The first decade of the twenty-first century may well be remembered as the biggest boom time ever for Middle East studies. Jobs in the field were abundant, and publishers, after fretting for much of the 1990s about the future of the monograph, were suddenly in the midst of unanticipated demand for things Arab and Muslim. Hanging over these developments, however, were both a tragedy and a debacle. The tragedy, of course, was the attacks of September 11, 2001. The debacle was the presidency of George W. Bush, which claimed to have found its purpose in the attacks’ aftermath. The results spoke for themselves: two foreign countries occupied; countless innocents dead; torture embraced; American credibility at historic lows; and, for the first time in living memory, a Middle East policy openly bleeding American taxpayers. A Manichean view of the world appeared to have overcome America: Good was said to be ranged against evil; crusades were needed to defeat jihads; and despite the platitudes emanating from the White House about how Islam as a religion was not the enemy, there was a very clear sense that “the West” was besieged by dangerously fanatical Muslims. Full Story>>

Rachel Corrie in Palestine…and in San Francisco
Interventions
Joel Beinin
August 2009

The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, the oldest such festival in the United States, was founded in rebellion against received wisdom. Since 1980, the festival has promoted independent Jewish films that contest the conventional Hollywood depiction of Jewish life, particularly its lachrymose over-concentration on Jewish victimhood, and regularly presented “alternatives to the often uncritical view of life and politics in Israel available in the established American Jewish community.” The festival’s audience, mostly Jewish, has reacted positively to this policy, even in 2005, when the organizers decided to show Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now, the theme of which is suicide bombing. Full Story>

Shooting Film and Crying
Interventions
Ursula Lindsey
March 2009

Waltz with Bashir (2008) opens with a strange and powerful image: a pack of ferocious dogs running headlong through the streets of Tel Aviv, overturning tables and terrifying pedestrians, converging beneath a building’s window to growl at a man standing there. It turns out that this man, Boaz, is an old friend of Ari Folman, the film’s director and protagonist. Like Folman, he was a teenager in the Israeli army during its 1982 invasion of Lebanon. And the pack of menacing dogs is his recurring nightmare, a nightly vision he links to the many village guard dogs he shot -- so they wouldn’t raise the alarm -- as his platoon made its way through southern Lebanon. Full Story>>

Recipe for a Riot: Parsing Israel’s Yom Kippur Upheavals
Interventions
Peter Lagerquist
November 2008

On October 8, 48-year old Tawfiq Jamal got into his car with his 18-year old son and a friend, and set out for the house of his relatives, the Shaaban family, who lived as of then in a new, predominantly Jewish neighborhood on the eastern edges of Acre. A walled city on the sea, mainly famed in the West for having served as the CENTCOM of the crusading Richard the Lionheart, Acre is today a “mixed” Israeli town, inhabited by Jews as well as Arabs like Tawfiq. That day, he was on his way to pick up his daughter, who had been helping the Shaabans prepare cakes for a wedding scheduled for the following week. He insists that he drove slowly and quietly, with his radio turned off. It was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, one of the holiest days of the Jewish religious calendar, on which the streets of Israel’s Jewish cities and towns customarily empty of traffic. After he parked his car at the Shaaban home, a group of Jewish youths attacked Tawfiq and chased him inside. For the next few hours, a mob besieged the place, and as rumors spread that one of its inhabitants had been killed, Arab youths poured out of the city’s old casbah ghetto, some reportedly to come to the rescue. On their way back home the youths proceeded to break a number of windows in Jewish shops. Full Story>>

Another Struggle: Sexual Identity Politics in Unsettled Turkey
Interventions
Kerem Öktem
September 2008

What happens when almost 3,000 men, women and transgender people march down the main street of a major Muslim metropolis, chanting against patriarchy, the military and restrictive public morals, waving the rainbow flag and hoisting banners decrying homophobia and demanding an end to discrimination? Or when a veiled transvestite carries a placard calling for freedom of education for women wearing the headscarf and, for transsexuals, the right to work? Full Story>>

Lawfare and Wearfare in Turkey
Interventions
Hilal Elver
April 2008

With war on its eastern borders, and renewed turmoil inside them, Turkey is transfixed by something else entirely: the desire of university-age women to wear the Muslim headscarf on campus, a seemingly innocent sartorial choice that has been forbidden by the courts, off and on, since 1980. At public meetings and street demonstrations, in art exhibits, TV ads, and dance and music performances, headscarf opponents argue vociferously that removing the ban will be the first step backward to the musty old days of the Ottoman Empire. A quieter majority of 70 percent, according to a recent poll, thinks that pious students should be allowed to cover their heads, perhaps because approximately 64 percent of Turkish women do so in daily life. There is almost no middle ground between the two poles: Even completely apolitical Turks have gravitated one way or another. Full Story>>

The Intimate History of Collaboration: Arab Citizens and the State of Israel
Interventions
Yoav Di-Capua
May 2007

Sometime in the late 1990s, employees in the Israeli State Archive unintentionally declassified an array of police documents. Many of the files consisted of the unremarkable personal data of prostitutes, petty thieves and black marketeers, but others dealt with a far more sensitive matter: the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel during the 1950s and 1960s. Though these “Arab files” also contained records of mundane criminal cases, most of the documents concerned the politically explosive subject of Palestinian Arab collaboration with the Jewish state. By means of the mistaken declassification, the actions, methods and goals of multiple Israeli security agencies among the Palestinian Arabs of Israel -- in short, the entire history of two decades of espionage directed at a group of Israeli citizens -- lay exposed. At the heart of these documents was detailed information about individuals and families and the well-guarded secrets of what they “gave” and what they “got” in return. Many retired collaborators are still alive. Full Story>>

Reel Casbah
Interventions
Peter Lagerquist with Jim Quilty
March 2006

To live the East as film is to be in Dubai in mid-December, perched front-row in the outdoor cafés that dot the Madinat Jumeira Oriental theme park. An integrated hotel, shopping and entertainment “experience” sprawled on the city’s booming beachfront rim, the Madina and its whimsy of stucco battlements mass an Arabian fort effect plucked straight from an Indiana Jones set, and as such, the red carpets and film banners that have also come to adorn it in wintertime key a double sense of enframement. From December 11-17, 2005, the Madina hosted the second annual installment of the Dubai International Film Festival, a production whose rumored budget of $10 million has quickly distinguished it as the richest Middle Eastern event of its kind. The money already draws a bevy of Arab glitterati, led in 2005 by Egyptian screen icon ‘Adil Imam. A few Bollywood players were also in attendance, and though the Hollywood guest list remains modest, returning festival guest Morgan Freeman echoed the ambition of the week with assurances that Dubai will soon be bigger than Cannes. Full Story>>

Paradise Now’s Understated Power
Interventions
Lori Allen
January 2006

Joining Ang Lee, director of the gay cowboy epic Brokeback Mountain, among the winners at the January 16 Golden Globes award ceremony was the director Hany Abu-Assad, a Palestinian born in Israel whose Paradise Now took home the prize for best foreign language film. While critics of all persuasions remark upon what Brokeback Mountain’s victory means about Hollywood and American mores, it is perhaps more remarkable that Paradise Now, a film about two Palestinians recruited to carry out suicide bombings, was deemed unremarkable enough to be honored by Hollywood. Full Story>>

Urban Violence in France
Interventions
Paul Silverstein and Chantal Tetreault
November 2005

Anyone who was listening to Suprême NTM ten years ago would not be terribly surprised by the violence that has struck France in the early weeks of November 2005. The rap group hailing from Saint-Denis northeast of Paris knew all too well about the everyday police aggression that shapes life in the decaying housing projects ringing cities across France. Like NTM, many young residents of the cités, as the housing projects are known in French, had simply been asking themselves, “Why are we waiting?" Full Story>>

Ariel Sharon and the Jordan Option
Interventions
Gary Sussman
March 2005

An avid enthusiast of Ariel Sharon and his unilateral disengagement plan recently opined that the plan “has one inborn defect: it has no vision, has no diplomatic horizon and is devoid of any ideological dimension. This view of the Israeli prime minister -- tactically brilliant but lacking as a strategic thinker -- is common but mistaken. Sharon clearly belongs in the pantheon of master tacticians in modern politics, but he does indeed have a long-term strategy -- and disengagement fits right in. Full Story>>

Off the Grid: Reading Iranian Memoirs in Our Time of Total War
Interventions
Negar Mottahedeh
September 2004

Air-conditioned transportation in Tehran is notoriously difficult to find. For pampered visitors such as the cultural anthropologists and documentary filmmakers from New York and Los Angeles who seem to converge on the Iranian capital every summer, a cool taxi ride to the northern parts of town recalls something of the charmed life they left behind in the United States, a life some refer to offhandedly as "the grid." Full Story>>

The Imperial Lament
Interventions
Joel Beinin
July 2004

There is something refreshing about British historian Niall Ferguson's argument "not merely that the United States is an empire, but that it has always been an empire." For a certain kind of American liberal, the Bush administration's eager invasion of Iraq has been a bad dream. The ignominious departure of US viceroy L. Paul Bremer from Baghdad on June 28, many assume, marks the beginning of the end of a grim, aberrant interlude in an otherwise innocent and idealistic US foreign policy. In contrast, Ferguson cheerily cites the work of the independent Marxist, Harry Magdoff, and the secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Geir Lundestad, to establish that US armed forces were stationed in 64 countries in 1967 and that those forces conducted 168 different overseas military interventions between 1946 and 1965. Full Story>>

Torture and the Future
Interventions
May 2004
By Lisa Hajjar

There is a popular belief that Western history constitutes a progressive move from more to less torture. Iron maidens and racks are now museum exhibits, crucifixions are sectarian iconography and scientific experimentation on twins is History Channel infotainment. This narrative of progress deftly blends ideas about “time,” “place” and “culture.” In the popular imagination, “civilized societies” (a.k.a. “us”) do not rely on torture, whereas those societies where torture is still common remain “uncivilized,” torture being both a proof and a problem of their enduring “backwardness.”
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No More Tears: Benny Morris and the Road Back from Liberal Zionism
Interventions
February 2004
By Joel Beinin

On July 11, 1948, Aharon Cohen, director of the Arab Affairs Department of the socialist-Zionist Mapam party in Israel, received a carbon copy of a military intelligence report. Israel, a state less than two months old, was embroiled in a war with neighboring Arab states that would last until 1949. The document in Cohen’s hands analyzed the reasons for the flight of 240,000 Palestinian Arabs from areas which had been allocated to the Jewish state by the November 1947 UN partition plan and another 150,000 from the Jerusalem region and areas allocated to the Arab state. Cohen was upset to read the report’s conclusion that 70 percent of these Arabs had fled due to “direct, hostile Jewish operations against Arab settlements” by Zionist militias, or the “effect of our hostile operations on nearby (Arab) settlements.”
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Behind the Battles Over US Middle East Studies
Interventions
January 2004
By Zachary Lockman

An ideological campaign to reshape the academic study of the Middle East in the United States has begun to bear fruit on Capitol Hill. In late 2003, the House of Representatives passed legislation which would, for the first time, mandate that university-based Middle East studies centers "foster debate on American foreign policy from diverse perspectives" if they receive federal funding under Title VI of the Higher Education Act.
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Never Too Soon to Say Goodbye to Hi
Middle East Report Online
September 2003
By Elliott Colla and Chris Toensing

Despite its deepening troubles in Iraq, the Bush administration maintains an audaciously upbeat outward mien. From George W. Bush's macho landing on an aircraft carrier in May to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's victory lap around the Mesopotamian battlefields in September, the song Washington sings to the world strikes a chord of triumph. No matter that most people outside US borders, and some within, hear the sound of desperation in the American anthem of the studied positive attitude. If they do not want to bask alongside the US in the afterglow of hasty battle, they must not be listening very well. In the summer of 2003, the State Department began broadcasting a remix of this triumphalist tune in Arabic, in the form of a slickly produced magazine called Hi.
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What Is Wrong with What Went Wrong?
Middle East Report Online
August 2003
By Adam Sabra

It is no exaggeration to say that Bernard Lewis is the most influential writer on Middle Eastern history and politics in the United States today. Not only has he authored more than two dozen books on the Middle East, he trained large numbers of two subsequent generations of historians of the region. Lewis is a public figure of the first order, publishing widely read articles on Middle Eastern politics. He is perhaps the only scholar of the Middle East to be well-known outside the field -- most academics would be hard pressed to name another historian of the Middle East or the Islamic world, excepting colleagues at their own university. This is ironic, since, as we will see, his interpretation of Islamic history is essentialist and ahistorical. Furthermore, Lewis is greatly respected in US policymaking circles. His opinions on policy matters have been sought by governments run by both major American political parties, and by all reports have been especially heeded by the administration of George W. Bush. An August 29 op-ed by Lewis in the Wall Street Journal concisely states positions which are articles of faith for the Bush administration's neo-conservatives -- notably that the problems of post-war Iraq are caused by anti-American fascist or Islamist forces seeking to defeat Western Christendom, and that the Westernized former banker Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress are the best candidates to govern a stable Iraq in the future.
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The Peace Movement Plans for the Future
Middle East Report Online
July 2003
By Mark LeVine

As the Bush administration struggles with occupying Iraq, the anti-war movement is in the midst of intense self-evaluation. For all of the movement's success in raising doubts about and opposition to the March 2003 invasion, as of July George W. Bush's war is still popular among Americans. The war caused thousands of Iraqi civilian deaths, and Iraqis may be dying for years to come due to widespread use of cluster bombs and depleted uranium munitions. While some local Kurdish and Shi'i leaders have cautiously decided to work with the occupation regime, the inability of US forces to restore law, order or public services, along with the imperial style of US viceroy L. Paul Bremer, have led to increasing opposition to the occupation among ordinary Iraqis. Yet sentiment among Americans, amidst concerns over post-war casualties and the missing weapons of mass destruction, still supports (albeit cautiously) the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
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Free People Will Set the Course of History":
Intellectuals, Democracy and American Empire
Middle East Report Online
March 2003
By Robert Blecher

As the Bush administration struggled to find a justification for launching an attack on Iraq, churning out sketchy intelligence reports about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and links with al-Qaeda, Washington wordsmiths produced their own grist for the war mill: the prospect of a democratic pax americana in the Middle East. The importance of the pundits' contribution to the war machine should not be underestimated. As the task of swaying public opinion grew more difficult, rhetoric around freedom and democracy has become ever more central. In the weeks after September 11, 2001, George W. Bush did not talk of remaking the Middle East. But in successive State of the Union addresses, commencement speeches, press conferences and televised appeals to the nation, Bush showed increasing faith in the ability of the US to extirpate tyranny and implant freedom in this agonized region.
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