“The Arabist establishment”

0 thoughts on ““The Arabist establishment””

1. “For any youngish writer or commentator on the Middle East, there is an enormous incentive to follow the Likudnik line when one can find gainful employment so easily by being pro-Israel (especially if you’re Arab, actually — these organizations have approached tons of up-and-coming Arab liberal intellectuals I know.) “

   Interesting – can you name any names re: Arab liberal intellectuals? I know a lot of liberal South Asian muslims and a couple of Egyptians were taken on by Brookings and Carnegie a few years ago to fill the native informant role.

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2. I would prefer not to name them or even mention their country, but they include the scion of a prominent family long involved in politics (now in DC, refuses to work on Palestine) and the editor of one of the best, most liberal Arab magazine (he said no because he wanted to be principled on Palestine) and several Arab-Americans I know. Of course, there is enormous appeal of a fellowship in Washington in places that can grant considerable access to politicians and policymakers, but people usually don’t have much illusion about the intellectual environment they’d be working in. One friend despaired of working with a Lebanese Maronite who kept referring to himself as a Phoenician. And I see others who just want to work on the Middle East and find there are few places one can do that in the US that don’t have a pro-Israel agenda. Actually you mentioned Carnegie, which I think is the only intellectually rigorous and unbiased (or at least only biased towards the US) place to do Middle East analysis in DC. Like the excellent Amr Hamzawi, for instance.

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3. True, Carnegie has been getting a lot better on the Middle East (Amr Hamzawy is great). It’s sad that most of these Middle East programmes are so Israel-Palestine centric (I should say Israel-centric, since they consider Palestine a nuisance at best) because there are some good people who work on other parts of the Arab world but it’s mainly Israel-obsessed ex-career bureaucrats who get to positions of leadership in the Middle East policy and think-tank community, with the result that there’s precious little real, important research being carried out. USIP recently funded Carrie Wickham to do a big study of Islamist moderation, that might be the exception.

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4. Aw, you’re just jealous because he didn’t call you out by name…

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5. “My Jerusalem hotel is filled with refugees: Jews, Druze, and Israeli Arabs, from the north, who can afford to pay for the respite from the ongoing Hezbollah rocket attacks. Right around the corner is the American Colony, one of the best-known hotels in the region, famous not just for its beauty and elegance, but also its guests”

   While the term “Arabist establishment’ is questionable, it seems to me that your obsession with the Jewish lobby in the U.S. is blinding you to the sad reality of the plight of those refugees, Jews, Druze, and Arabs (or if you have a better terminology please go ahead). While these were most probably well to do people, other Israeli civilans fleeing were less fortunate and stayed in bomb shelters or went south to stay with family relatives. Others were offered rooms free of charge in hotels all over Israel. I read on the excellent blog (sorry it’s in French) http://windowinlebanon2.blogspot.com/ the comment of a Lebanese who wished the big hotels of Beyrouth had welcomed refugees flleing Israel’s bombings also.

   Now as for Israel’s role in all this: the central point that seems to be missed in this debate has to do with “intentionality”.
   Nothing seems to indicate, contrary to some bloggers beliefs, that Israel wants to destroy Lebanon for normative or
   strategic reasons. It makes no strategic sense to do it.
   Example: people really believe that
   destroying lines of communication/resupply of weapons (roads) have no inherent military value;they are either ignorant of military strategy or ideologically blind.

   Reply

6. I’d love to see a criticism and rebuttal to this article!

   Arabist Indoctrination at Middlebury College
   By Franck Salameh
   The Middle East Quarterly | August 8, 2006

   [The following article is reprinted from the current edition of the
   Middle East Quarterly].

   At a time when Arabic language training lags at many universities, the
   Arabic summer school at Middlebury College in Vermont retains its
   reputation for quality language instruction. Indeed, it could be said
   to define the gold standard of Arabic language training programs. But
   even as students leave Middlebury with better Arabic, they also leave
   indoctrinated with a tendentious Arab nationalist reading of Middle
   Eastern history. Permeating lectures and carefully-designed
   grammatical drills, Middlebury instructors push the idea that Arab
   identity trumps local identities and that respect for minority ethnic
   and sectarian communities betrays Arabism.

   Conflating Language and Identity

   Historically, defining who was an Arab was easy: until the early
   twentieth century, scholars from both the Middle East and the West
   considered an Arab to be a person whose ancestry was in the Arabian
   Peninsula or the Fertile Crescent. Someone from Jeddah was an Arab, a
   Cairene was not. Indeed, historian Bernard Lewis has shown that the
   Middle East was a mix of cultures, particularisms, nationalities, and
   self-perceptions that never enjoyed a single uniform collective
   identity, let alone an exclusively Arab one.[1] This began to change
   in the early twentieth century when Arab nationalist elites began
   superimposing a new overarching national identity on preexisting group
   affiliations. In the 1930s, the idea that one is an Arab if one speaks
   Arabic came into vogue.[2] However, this definition of identity in
   linguistic terms was a borrowed European concept reflecting uniquely
   European circumstances with no parallel in the Near East. Indeed, this
   new linguistic parameter of identity, so favored by the Arab
   nationalists, was the result of the post-World War I concept of
   “self-determination” of European communities, all of which had
   languages with long literary traditions, which could be billed as the
   emblem of specific national identities.[3]

   The Middle East had no such “tribal” languages possessing the
   requisite literary and cultural tradition upon which to base a
   specific identity. Rather, the Middle East was, and remains to this
   day, a paradox of multiple identities based on religion, sect, town,
   village, family, and other group associations and interests, the
   majority of which, until the emergence of Arab nationalism, did not
   involve the Arabic language. When the modern Egyptian poet Luwis ‘Awad
   wrote about his homeland, he did so in colloquial Egyptian, not modern
   standard literary Arabic. When the Lebanese-American thinker Gibran
   Khalil Gibran yearned for his native Mount Lebanon, he did so more
   comfortably in English than in Arabic.[4] When the fifteenth century
   Maronite bishop of Cyprus, Gabriel Alkilai, wrote his history of
   Lebanon, he did so in Karshuni, his local Lebane se dialect written in
   Syriac characters.[5] Even some Bedouin poetry is, likewise, recited
   in a number of colloquial variants.[6]

   The Arab nationalist-inspired shift in ethnic identity was easier said
   than done. In a sense, Arab nationalists assigned identity to an
   arbitrary language that, like Medieval Latin, might have been the
   language of officialdom but was not used colloquially. Even today,
   modern standard Arabic remains the domain of newspapers, not
   conversations. Arabs themselves speak a multiplicity of languages
   “which are downgraded to dialects” but which, in the words of Harvard
   linguist Wheeler Thackston, “resemble [modern standard Arabic] as much
   as Latin resembles English.”[7]

   Ideology became an important component in this shift. Arab
   nationalists used linguistic definition of Arabism to deny the
   cultural claims of ethnic or sectarian minorities. Sati’ al-Husri
   (1880-1967), a Syrian writer who played an important role in the
   crystallization of Arab nationalism, maintained that “under no
   circumstances should we say: ‘as long as [a user of the Arabic
   language] does not wish to be an Arab, and as long as he is disdainful
   of his Arabness, then he is not an Arab. He is an Arab whether he
   wishes to be so or not. Whether ignorant, indifferent, undutiful, or
   disloyal, he is an Arab, but an Arab without feelings, or
   consciousness, and perhaps even without conscience.”[8] Michel Aflaq,
   an apostle of Husri’s and founder of the Baath Party, promoted
   violence and cruelty against those users of the Arabic lan guage who
   refused to conform to an overarching Arab identity.[9]

   Later Arab nationalist figures like Egyptian president Gamal Abdel
   Nasser or Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein found the linguistic definition
   of Arabism convenient in order to neglect, if not completely reject,
   the reality of ethnic and cultural diversity in the Middle East. This
   view—also adopted by a number of social scientists and post-Edward
   Said Middle East scholars—holds that the Middle East is populated by a
   breed of culturally and linguistically homogeneous Arabs. Assyrians,
   Berbers, Copts, Chaldaeans, Kurds, Maronites and many other millions
   of Middle Eastern peoples who possess their own distinct cultural and
   historical heritage and who disapprove of their ascribed latter-day
   Arabness, are nevertheless anointed as Arabs. If they do not embrace
   their Arabness, they are dismissed as traitors or isolationists.

   Robert Kaplan expressed this negative slant against Middle Eastern
   minorities in the conclusion of his remarkable book The Arabists,
   which examined the history of State Department experts on the Arab
   world. These experts, the so-called Arabists, he argued, quoting a
   U.S. Foreign Service official, “[h]ave not liked Middle Eastern
   minorities. Arabists have been guilty in the past of loving the
   majority and the idea of Uruba, which roughly translates as ‘Arabism.’
   I remember once going to a Foreign Service party and hearing people
   refer to the Maronite Christians in Lebanon as ‘fascists.'”[10]
   Lebanese commentator Michael Young adds, “What pro-Arab Americans
   couldn’t stomach was that the [Middle East’s] Christians were often
   estranged from […the Muslims] and from the Arab nationalism the region
   engendered.[11]
   The Middlebury Program

   Arabic language proficiency is necessary not only for scholars seeking
   to conduct original archival research and more contemporary
   sociological studies but also for policy practitioners and security
   specialists who face increased deployment and interaction in
   Arabic-speaking countries. Recognizing Arabic language deficiency
   among U.S. government personnel, on January 5, 2006, President George
   W. Bush launched the National Foreign Language Initiative.[12] This
   initiative built upon the so-called Title VI programs, established by
   a 1988 amendment of the 1965 Higher Education Act. While Title VI
   language study programs provide universities with US$92 million per
   year to promote language instruction—not only in Arabic, but also in
   Russian, Chinese, and a number of other languages[13]—many Title VI
   programs have failed to provide proficiency and train those pursuing a
   government or military career.[14]

   As many Title VI programs failed to produce proficient Arabic
   speakers, the Middlebury College Summer Arabic program appeared to
   have a magic formula. Every summer, it draws approximately 100
   students, diplomats, professionals, and academics from across the
   United States, the Middle East, and Europe to rural Vermont to
   undertake a nine-week intensive full-immersion course. “N
   o English
   Spoken Here” is its basic principle. Students sign a pledge in which
   they vow not to speak, or expose themselves, to any language besides
   Arabic for the duration of their stay at Middlebury on the penalty of
   expulsion. Classes, which consist of five contact hours five days a
   week, are conducted strictly in modern standard Arabic. Modern
   standard Arabic is the sole medium of communication on weekends, at
   study and meal times, and during outings, cocurricular,
   extracurricular, and even private activities. What initially appears
   to be a daunting and discouragi ng ent erprise to most students fast
   becomes second-nature.

   But, unlike Middlebury’s French, Spanish, and other language programs,
   its Arabic course goes beyond language instruction and subtly works to
   inculcate an Arab nationalist ideology. This takes two tacks: first,
   the school infuses its academic program with Arab nationalist content.
   Second, it constructs an atmosphere that replicates Arab nationalist
   hostility toward minorities and the United States.

   When I worked as an instructor at Middlebury in 2004, students arrived
   at Hepburn Hall, their home for the nine-week program, and were
   greeted not only by Ahlan wa Sahlan (Welcome) posters but also
   colorful and smartly outlined maps of the Middle East adorning the
   hallway bulletin boards. In these, Israel is absent, replaced by
   Palestine stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
   The border between Syria and Lebanon was labeled a temporary frontier,
   a designation consistent with the refusal of Arab nationalists in
   Syria to recognize Lebanon as a separate entity.[15]

   The Persian Gulf had morphed into Al-Khalij al-‘Arabi, the Arab Gulf.
   The term is anything but innocuous. While Arab nationalists first
   sought to rename the Persian Gulf after Arabs in the 1960s, the change
   in terminology is unscholarly and unrecognized. Arabs and Arabic maps
   referred to the Persian Gulf by Al-Khaleej al-Farsi for centuries, not
   bothered by the term Persian. In 1917, the U.S. State Department’s
   Board of Geographical Names designated the Persian Gulf as the sole
   official name. The United Nations followed suit in 1975 and 1984.[16]
   Middlebury’s endorsement of the Arab nationalist discourse is far from
   innocuous, especially after Saddam Hussein adopted the region’s Arab
   identity as a justification for invading Iran.

   The Middlebury Arabic language school also exerted subtle religious
   pressure upon its participants. During the first week, a posted
   handbill announced the formation of a Muslim prayer group. It
   encouraged interested parties to contact the faculty members
   coordinating the group’s activities and invited them to join in weekly
   Friday prayer (jum’a) rituals. Soon after, another flyer announced the
   formation of a Christian Sunday prayer group. Both congregations were
   sponsored by the Arabic School administration.

   I queried Ken Habib, assistant director of the Arabic program, about
   whether there would be a Shabbat group for the school’s many Jewish
   students. He replied that while the Middlebury Summer Arabic School
   had never had such a group in years past and it was not a school
   tradition, he would raise the issue with Mahmoud Abdalla, the
   program’s director. Abdalla said he did not object to the formation of
   a Shabbat group but insisted that interested students petition him. I
   passed word to the Jewish students, but they said they preferred not
   to ask the director. Because of the maps promoting Israel’s
   elimination, they did not want to advertise their Jewishness. They
   instead formed an unofficial group.

   Only after the conclusion of the program, after all exams were graded,
   did one Israeli student complain about the maps to Abdalla. The
   director said he was unaware of the problem, and the maps promptly
   came down. Nevertheless, the incident showed how with subtle
   provocations and discrimination, the Middlebury Arabic program brought
   the dhimmi (second-class citizen) experience to Vermont.

   The narrow world-view espoused by Middlebury’s Arabic language school
   manifested itself in other ways. The Arabic school was alone among
   Middlebury programs to ignore Fourth of July festivities. Why does
   attaining proficiency in Arabic mean disdain for American culture?

   Visiting faculty from the Middle East treated with noticeable coolness
   older students sporting closely cropped hair, courteous manners, and
   discipline suggesting membership in the U.S. armed forces. Students
   eager to curry favor with Arabist professors would contribute their
   own suspicions, snide remarks, and cynicism. As if beholden to the
   Arabist atmosphere, most students and faculty avoided contact
   altogether with those dubbed hukuma (government) or jaysh (army).
   While it was an Arabic school policy not to allow faculty and students
   to bunch up in permanent cliques and faculty had an obligation to
   engage those who remained aloof, these “suspect” students were, like
   the Jewish students and self-effacing dhimmi faculty, forced to huddle
   together during mealtimes and breaks.

   Another example of the Arabic school’s restricted definition of Middle
   Eastern culture was its ban on alcoholic beverages during school
   events and student parties. While Abdalla explained the ban to be
   “Middlebury College policy,” beer and wine flowed as freely during
   cookouts and gatherings organized by the Middlebury German, French,
   and Spanish schools as such beverages do at parties in Lebanon,
   Tunisia, and Bahrain.

   The prohibition on alcohol is a matter of Islamic religious practice
   and personal interpretation, not accepted practice across the Arab
   world. Arabism and Islam should not be conflated. They are not the
   same thing. Had Abdalla wanted to avoid insulting observant Muslim
   faculty members, he should have said so openly.

   Likewise, Middlebury instructed the Arabic school dining services to
   conform to the halal dietary restrictions of Islam. This implied all
   Arabic speakers to be Muslim and all Muslims to be observant. But less
   than 20 percent of the Arabic school community was Muslim. No such
   accommodations were made for the Jewish students who kept kosher, even
   though their numbers exceeded those of the Muslims. Some students who
   wanted to uphold their dietary restrictions made private arrangements
   for meals to be delivered through a service unaffiliated with
   Middlebury. The few students who sought to observe halal standards
   could have made similar accommodations.
   Indoctrinating Arabism

   Aside from atmospherics, the Middlebury program reinforces the Arab
   nationalist view of a monocultural “Arab world extending from the
   [Persian] Gulf to the [Atlantic] Ocean” in more substantive ways.

   A case in point is the Wednesday lecture series. In its choice of both
   lecture topics and lecturers, Middlebury encouraged disdain for
   minorities. Topics ranged from the history of Turkish baths in
   Damascus to the image of Arabs in Hollywood. Permeating the lectures
   was a wholesale condemnation of Orientalists and non-Arabs. No
   visiting lecturer portrayed Arabs or Muslims as masters of their own
   destiny. Not once was the notion entertained that Arabs and Muslims
   could be oppressors and victimizers as well as victims. Indeed, both
   the lectures—and a weekly Arabic movie series billed as part of the
   program’s curriculum—took pains to depict Arabs and Muslims as
   powerless and abused victims of Western imperialism, Zionist rapacity,
   modern-day Crusaderism, and a medley of foreign interventions and
   conspiracies. From the Orientalist bent of an insidious Hollywood, to
   the wickedness of the U.S. war on terrorism, to the vilification of
   Middle Ea stern minorities as imperialist agents and Western moles
   bent on the de
   struction of the Arabs and their culture, these lectures
   and films went to great lengths to malign outsiders and dismiss
   dissent as product of local quislings.

   One talk, for example, touted as a scholarly discussion of the
   “Dilemma of Identity in Lebanon” degenerated into a festival of scorn
   at Lebanon, the Lebanese, and their “artificial” culture of upstarts.
   In his lecture, Mahmoud al-Batal, the director of the Institute for
   Comparative and International Study at Emory University, declared that
   Lebanon had no specific culture beyond its Arabic accretions. Most
   students left the lecture with tainted conclusions and caricatures of
   the Lebanese as culturally bankrupt French wannabes who denied their
   Arabness, preferred French to Arabic, but nevertheless remained Arabs.

   Chris Stone, an associate professor of Arabic at Hunter College,
   delivered another lecture in which he addressed popular song in
   Lebanon. During the course of his lecture, he poured scorn on Lebanese
   folklore and the similes—and imageries of cedars, snows, harvests, and
   mountains—used in the music of Fayrouz, Lebanon’s foremost diva. His
   subtle prescription was that Lebanon should conform more to the
   landscape of its Arab surroundings. Fayrouz should instead have sung
   of the beauty of her neighboring desert-like scenery—not an ostensibly
   alien Alpine topography, evidently pilfered by Lebanon’s Christians.
   According to Stone, the music and metaphors of Fayrouz were seditious
   not only to Arab unity and uniformity, but also to Lebanon because
   they reflected the imagery and assumptions that led to the 1975-1990
   Lebanese civil war.

   Within the classroom, the Middlebury program inculcated Arab
   nationalism in other ways. In one exam, I had used the Arab
   nationalist slogan, “from the Gulf to the Ocean.” To prompt my
   students to use the Arabic verb yamtadd (to extend/stretch), I had
   written a fill-in-the-blank sentence where the use of that verb would
   have been suitable. The sentence, incorporating that familiar Arab
   nationalist catch phrase, which I qualified with “according to Arab
   nationalists,” read as follows: “According to Arab nationalists, the
   Arab world ______________ from the Gulf to the Ocean.”

   The phrase “according to Arab nationalists” caused controversy.
   Abdalla kept a close watch on how exams were written. He insisted on
   removal of the “irrelevant” clause on the grounds that “according to
   Arab nationalists” was “unnecessary verbosity irrelevant to the
   evaluation of the students’ knowledge or the general meaning of the
   sentence” and “confusing for the student.” But, by truncating the
   sentence, the Arabic school conveyed a distorted version of reality
   and suggested a partisan slogan to be unquestioned fact. Millions of
   Assyrians, Berbers, Copts, Chaldaeans, Jews, Kurds, and Maronites both
   in the Middle East and in the diaspora object to unqualified Arab
   nationalism.

   Ironically, even as Middlebury indoctrinates a new generation of
   professors, government officials, journalists, and aid organization
   workers into a failed ideology of the past, many Arabs are charting a
   different course. Since 2002, Cairo University political scientist
   Nader Ferghany and a small team of experts have challenged in the Arab
   Human Development Report the outmoded discourse of Arab
   nationalism—and the social, political, and cultural failures it
   engendered.[17] It is all the more ironic, then, that as Arab
   intellectuals challenge the outlook that so long constrained Arab
   development, a volatile mix of Arab nationalism and dependency theory
   endures in Middlebury’s classrooms.
   Conclusions

   Experts in the Arab world and cultures of the Middle East need not
   embrace the current state system in the Middle East nor must they
   accept standard geographical appellations. They need not like the fact
   of Israel’s existence nor need they emphasize the cultures and
   narratives of the Middle East’s non-Arab minorities.

   But, by the same token, a leading Arabic language program should not
   tie language instruction to a political philosophy. Arabic language
   instruction should promote linguistic ability, not force area experts
   to march in ideological lock step. Rather than impose an Arab
   nationalist discourse, programs like Middlebury’s should enable
   students and practitioners to realize that not all Middle Easterners
   are Arabs, that not all users of the Arabic language are Arabs, and
   that Arabs did not emerge out of nothing from an uninhabited Middle
   East.

   Arab nationalists and Arabists hold the countries of the modern Middle
   East as illegitimate entities contrived by Western colonizers against
   the wishes and aspirations of indigenous Arabs, but that is simply
   untrue. While Western powers chose allies and interfered in local
   disputes, the shape of the Middle East was no less the result of local
   actors making their own decisions and pursuing their own local
   interests.[18] While Arab nationalists may dream of a united Arab
   super state, the fact remains that this was never a coherent political
   or geographical reality. Nor can its absence be blamed on outsiders.

   Regrettably, the Summer Arabic School at Middlebury College is not
   alone in shirking its obligation to academic objectivity and a
   dispassionate approach to Arabic studies and Middle East history. Many
   area specialists continue to treat Middle Eastern minority narratives
   with derision. From the patrician colleges of Boston to the maverick
   academies of the West Coast, faculty lounges and arcane
   associations––all functioning outside of the “Arab world”––cling to
   the carcass of Arab nationalism.[19]

   Foreign language experts like those at Middlebury are entitled to
   their own opinions and convictions and should be free to advance them
   openly. What is not appropriate, however, is for academics to
   intellectualize their ideological sympathies and disseminate them
   through the classroom in the guise of scholarship. By teaching the
   Middle East as Arab nationalist proponents wish it to be rather than
   as it is, Middlebury and its fellow travelers ill-prepare their
   charges and marginalize themselves.

   ENDNOTES:

   [1] Bernard Lewis, The Multiple Identities of the Middle East (New
   York: Schocken Books, 1998), p. 31.
   [2] Martin Kramer, “Arab Nationalism: Mistaken Identity,” Daedalus,
   Summer 1993, pp. 171-206.
   [3] William Safran, “Nationalism,” in Joshua A. Fishman, ed., Handbook
   of Language and Ethnic Identity (New York and Oxford: Oxford
   University Press, 1999), pp. 77-8.
   [4] See, for instance, The Prophet (1923), Jesus, the Son of Man
   (1928), and The Garden of the Prophet (1931).
   [5 ] Kamal Suleiman Salibi, Maronite Historians of Mediaeval Lebanon
   (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1959), pp. 31-2.
   [6] See, for example, Kees Versteegh, The Arabic Language (Edinburgh:
   Edinburgh University Press, 2001), pp. 48, 57-8.
   [7] Samar Farah, “So You’d Like to Learn Arabic. Got a Decade or So?”
   The Christian Science Monitor, Jan. 17, 2002.
   [8] Abu Khaldun Sati’ al-Husri, Abhaath Mukhtara fii al-Qawmiyya
   al-Arabiya (Beirut: Markaz Diraasaat al-Wihda al-Arabiyya, 1985), p.
   80.
   [9] Michel Aflaq, Fii Sabiil al-Baath (Beirut: Dar at-Tali’a, 1963)
   pp. 161-2; see also Kanaan Makiya, Republic of Fear: The Politics of
   Modern Iraq (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 206.
   [10] Robert D. Kaplan, The Arabists; The Romance of an American Elite
   (New York: The Free Press, 1995), p. 306.
   [11] Michael Young, “Orient Obsess: A Lackluster Look at Americans
   Abroad,” Reason Online, Dec. 2003.
   [12] American Forces Information Service, Jan. 5, 2006.
   [13] “1998 Amendments to the Higher Education Act of 1965,” PL
   105-244, Jan. 27, 19
   88. See also, “Detailed Information on the
   International Education Domestic Programs Assessment,” White House
   Office of Management and Budget, Jan. 17, 2006.
   [14] Kenneth D. Whitehead, “Learning the Language,” National Review,
   Jan. 14, 2004.
   [15] Michael Rubin, “Lebanon’s Tenuous Transformation,” Aspenia
   (Rome), Oct. 2005.
   [16] Ali Mostashari, “Factsheet on the Legal and Historical Usage of
   the ‘Persian Gulf,'” Iranian Studies Group at MIT, 2004.
   [17] “How the Arabs Compare: Arab Human Development Report,” Middle
   East Quarterly, Fall 2002, pp. 59-67.
   [18] Efraim Karsh, Empire s of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in
   the Middle East, 1789-1923 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
   1999), pp. 2-3.
   [19] Martin Kramer, Arab Awakening and Islamic Revival (New Brunswick:
   Transaction Publishers, 1996), pp. 3-4.

   Reply

7. Olivier, if I don’t mention the Israeli vicitims of this war it is because their plight, while tragic, is individual. In Lebanon you have an entire nation brought to its knees. Forgive my bias, the sheer imbalance of the damage has imposed it.

   Regarding Israeli strategy: yes, cutting off roads cuts off supply lines for Hizbullah and is sound military strategy. Except that they also destroyed factories, the national airport, power stations, gas stations, targets in the north where Hizbullah has no presence, civilian housing, and much more. I really don’t see your acharnement to defend Israel’s conduct of this war. I know you have personal attachments to the country, but that doesn’t mean you should embrace it utterly, especially considering its behavior. As for my “obsession with the Jewish lobby in the US,” well I’m not the only one. This has become one of the major aspects of this war and, in the US and elsewhere, diaspora Jews have become players in the Israeli-Arab conflict. In my opinion, right-wing American Jews (ironically a minority, but one that seems to control major US Jewish organizations) have hurt prospects for peace in the Middle East. They are not the only ones — Arabs have plenty of obstructionists — but I really don’t see how this issue can be ignored anymore.

   Reply

8. Re: the Middlebury article. A printout has been lying in my living room for over a week, it is utterly demented. I am taking it to a former Middlebury professor and hope to post something about it soon.

   Reply

9. The Middlebury article is childish in the extreme.

   I’m a Middlebury alumna and I participated in its language immersion programs, and the kind of cultural immersion (with the concomitant simplification of what it means to be from a linguistic community) that the author describes is standard across language programs. The French program gives you a metropole worldview, the teachers are Parisian, and I remember them making gentle fun of the Midi accent; they had wine at French department gatherings on the sly, even when other departments strictly followed university rules against it (what about students who didn’t drink for religious reasons – I hadn’t thought of that before); the Spanish department was regularly accused of neglecting Latin American dialects and always hiring teachers from Spain.

   Why, even a regular introductory American history course simplified and probably artificially homogenized American culture (and the critical lefty history profs would probably be accused of liberal indoctrination by our Mr.”Salameh” too). IR courses were always taught from an American policy viewpoint, as they are in all American universities, even those with large foreign student populations. I’ve heard profs in such classes make derogatory remarks about French appeasers and borderline racist remarks about “Muslim terrorists.” Is that indoctrination into an American worldview, or the natural bias of professors who are American?

   Anyone who has taught undergraduates or intro classes knows that this is inevitable, you simply don’t have time to discuss your subject in all its complexity in a few hours. Ask any American teacher of English overseas how s/he teaches students about American culture, and see if you get the most nuanced perspective and historical and political contextualization. Do they stop for a long political debate on the implications of “from sea to shining sea”? Ask whether Texas and California are more historically Mexican than US? Teach their students about spanish-speaking pockets of the US rather than just telling them that English is the national language?

   Some claims this guy makes are pretty far-fetched. He makes it sound like they only teach fusha and “high” Arab culture in the program, when it’s a well-known fact that Middlebury has a strong ameyya program and they do a good job of introducing students to varied Arab dialects and cultures. Teachers are far from Arab government hacks, many are American, and I very much doubt they would downplay dissent in the Arab world. And on the map question, what about standard world maps we see in the West, do they show Palestine? No, they show only the state of Israel. Is that not a political decision, though it seems “natural” to many of us? And about the Muslim prayer group – there were tons of signs for Christian groups all over campus when I went to Middlebury, and we had chapel ceremonies as part of our convocation and commencement, as do most American colleges. Is this religious indoctrination or a majority norm? Would our whiny author like to start protesting that?

   I’m all for challenging the “high-culture” view of Arab-ness and the Arabic language (why on earth do we have to study spoken fusha?) as well studying Arab culture and politics historically and critically, and I wish the author would discuss how he thinks this can be best done in language programs. And how he thinks one can “teach” a culture without generalizing or homogenizing. He puts me off with his Campus Watch cliches about Arabist conspiracies which are rather crudely mixed with rants against “elitist” academia a la Tenured Radicals. I can’t believe Middlebury hired such a moron.

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10. Elijah – perhaps I do feel a little bit neglected. If only Lee Smith could have written “U.N. employees, journalists, academics, NGO workers, civil society officials and Issandr El Amrani. In other words, the Arabist establishment.” Then I would have felt a lot better.

    But, alas, Lee Smith doesn’t need to pick on me (he’s too busy writing that book on Arab culture) and in any case has people who do it on his behalf:

    http://beirut2bayside.blogspot.com/2004/12/expertise-and-arab-public-opinion.html

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11. Thanks SP for that.

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12. Sorry, I really don’t think it’s fair to put Carnegie in that box, and Brookings is a mixed bag.

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13. Sorry, Olivier – Issandr’s so blinded by his obsession with the Israel lobby that he’s failed to see the tragedy of Israeli refugees forced to stay in an expensive hotel in Jerusalem? Is the room service really that bad? Did the laundry service miss a spot? Did the front desk overcharge them for the minibar? Tragic.

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14. Don’t get me wrong, I am talking about human beings being maimed and killed on both sides. Since there were 1300 casualties in Lebanon, I understand that there is more attention to the plight of one side. But I have friends in Lebanon and I have friends in Israel. And I do not understand why the 100 or so Israeli civilians are considered as individual cases who deserve no attention because these are “individual cases”. I do not think this is a reasonable argument. This is not a zero-sum game, these are not private affairs. This is collective butchery on both sides and Hizbullah’s rockets and missiles kill indiscriminately and for the sole purpose of killing.
    The relative number of casualties in Israel vs Lebanon is NOT the issue.
    There is no arithmetic of death that I can accept, especially in light of all the killings that plague a country south of Egypt in the Darfur to name just that. What do the Arab moderates do to denounce those killings? do civilians need to be killed by Jews in order to become news? what sense of humanity do you have?

    The number of Israeli casualties would have reached higher numbers had there not been in the shelters and had those hotels not opened their doors. It is tragic that you don’t understand these simple facts.

    Had you been honest intellectually you would consider this as a tragedy for both sides of this conflict and would have dared to condemn those who kill indiscrimantely Druze, Jews, and Arabs in northern Israel, with a clear intention to kill civilians. Perhaps this story will enlighten the likes of you who think some people’s deaths are more equals than others’.

    Not a uniform death toll

    By Shahar Ilan
    Ha’haretz 12/08/2006 21:41

    Until the siege in the mid-1990s, the hills around Sarajevo were covered with fir and birch trees. By the time the siege was over, the slopes had been stripped naked. The residents had cut down the trees for firewood.

    “Public parks were turned into cemeteries,” recalls American journalist Elizabeth Rubin, who was posted in Sarajevo at the time. The residents used the earth of the freshly dug graves to grow lettuce and tomatoes. Sarajevo, writes Rubin, was a city of unending violence. Children playing in the playground were killed by missiles. People were shot in their bedrooms by snipers. The fear of death that lurked everywhere gave rise to depression and serious emotional problems. There were suicides every day. The incidence of ulcers rose dramatically. Out of a population of 500,000, 200,000 people fled. Over 10,000 were killed, among them 1,500 children, and 50,000 people were injured.

    Total war

    Lebanon War II, in which civilians on both sides are bearing the brunt of the warfare, is part of a global trend. The proportion of civilians killed in wars has mounted steadily over the past century, while the proportion of soldiers who lose their lives is decreasing. The director of the Danish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Prof. Eric Markusen, has calculated that civilians constituted 5 percent of the casualties in World War I. In World War II, the percentage rose to 60 percent (largely due to the extermination of the Jews). In the 1970s and ’80s, civilian casualties reached 80 percent (in Cambodia, for example).

    Dr. Elihu Richter, the head of the Hadassah-Hebrew University Program on Genocide Prevention, says that in the 1990s, the rate of civilian deaths in Rwanda and Bosnia was even higher. “Wars have become total,” he explains. “The home front and infrastructure that supports the army are considered part of the enemy force.”

    As many as 170 to 360 million people died as a result of events including genocide, massacres, widespread starvation and population transfer in the 20th century, according to the Encyclopedia of Genocide, edited by Prof. Israel W. Charny. At the same time, 34 million fighters have been killed on the battlefield. In other words, for every fighter killed, 5 to 10 civilians have died.

    “You don’t have to be in the army anymore to be near a war,” says Charny. “The war comes to you.”

    From Blitz to Narnia

    If there is any historical event that symbolizes war on the home front it is the Blitz – the German bombing of British cities, and particularly London, from September 1940 to May 1941. According to the Wikipedia on-line encyclopedia, 34,000 people were killed in London during the Blitz, 139,000 residents were injured and over a million homes were destroyed.

    Even with the city in ruins, what angered British citizens most of all was the fact that Buckingham Palace was slightly damaged in the bombing. As usual, the poor were hit the hardest. London’s East End, a hardscrabble immigrant neighborhood, suffered the greatest damage. There were not enough air-raid shelters at the time in London, so 80 Underground stations became home to 177,000 people. Many people dug shelters in their backyards. And yet the Blitz failed to achieve its major aim: It did not crush England’s spirit and pave the way for a German land invasion. Altogether, German historian Joerg Friedrich concludes that morale was not affected in any of the cities bombarded in World War II, although the bombings certainly generated fierce hatred.

    A comic highlight in the movie “Hope and Glory” about the London Blitz is when the children discover that their school has been bombed and one of them shouts “Thank you, Adolf!” Many of the children of London did not actually have an opportunity to celebrate the destruction of their schools because they were evacuated to the country. In C.S. Lewis’ famous “The Chronicles of Narnia,” four of them climb into an enchanted wardrobe in a country cottage and end up in the Kingdom of Narnia, where they become entangled in another war – between Aslan the Lion and the White Queen.

    From planes to rockets

    Modern technology, which has turned distance into something that is almost meaningless, has been instrumental in transforming the home front into a battlefield. In World War II, fighter-bombers turned cities into heaps of rubble. By the end of the war, however, planes were being replaced by V1 and V2 rockets, which laid waste to London. The Israeli home front is now suffering greatly from the ease with which relatively simple projectiles like Qassam rockets and Katyushas can be purchased or manufactured.

    Dresden in flames

    Revenge is also a factor in wars. The British and the Americans bombed Berlin every day, and destroyed the city of Hamburg. Over 1,000 bombers dropped 2,700 tons of incendiary bombs on Dresden over a two-day period in early 1945, turning the city into a ball of fire. According to the official figures, 35,000 people were killed in these operations. Some say the real number was twice or three times as high. Because most of the men were at the front, a large percentage of the victims were probably elderly, and women and children. The bombs laid waste to 85 percent of the city.

    Dresden was not bombed for its strategic importance, but in order to force Hitler to surrender. Other possibilities: a desire to get there before the Russians and a desire for vengeance. Dresden has thus become a symbol in the debate over whether or not the Germans are entitled to blame others for the destruction of their cities. Looking back, the Germans are the ones who invented the technique: They dumped bombs on the Spanish city of Guernica in 1937, and destroyed 17,000 different communities in the Soviet Union.

    The goal of destruction

    Is there anything unique about the Hezbollah rocket attacks? Elihu Richter believes there is. He says that the goal – the destruction of Israel – is unique. He cannot think of a single case where bombing a civilian population was carried out with the express purpose of wiping out the enemy. This is genocide, he says, and Israel must demand that the leaders of Hezbollah be tried in an international court for war crimes and incitement to murder.

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15. I don’t know what “box” you’re referring to, praktike – I mentioned Carnegie because I happened to know some of the people that they and Brookings hired to expand their Muslim world programs some years ago, and they were clearly looking for “Muslim liberals” but none of them worked on Israel-Palestine. I don’t know if they were expected to follow any sort of party line, but they didn’t have much influence on the American foreign policy documents that both places put out. I knew some of their American scholars of the Middle East and they were fairly predictably pro-Israel. Things may well have changed, esp. with Amr Hamzawy at Carnegie, who I really like. It would be great if other think-tanks started to hire real Arab scholars too.

    I was curious about the establishments Issandr mentioned reaching out to Arab liberals because I wondered which Arab liberals would consider playing along with the neocons. There were a few who dutifully produced studies on hate-filled madrassa education at institutions down the road from Carnegie in DC, but they didn’t last long.

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16. Olivier, I did mention the Israeli deaths on this blog during the war and posted HRW’s condemnation of Hizbullah’s rocket attacks on civilian areas. I still see a big difference between the kind of damage inflicted by Hizbullah and the kind inflicted by the Israeli armed forces.

    By the way, regarding Sudan, although I know you’re a well-read individual I am not surprised that you’re not aware of the many editorials in the Arabic press condemning what’s happening in Darfur. These got little attention in the West. Yes, there are less prominent than editorials against Israel’s actions. Big surprise. The Arab-Israeli conflict has festered for 50 years to become a central political issue for Arabs. The Sudanese civil war(s) are not central, because Sudan is at the periphery of the region. Despite all the killing, I see little coming from Western countries apart from condemnations. (And by the way Egypt has peacekeepers in Darfur, among other countries.) But I regret seeing you use whatever flaws Arabs may have on other subjects as a weapon in the Arab-Israeli PR war. Because if you cut through the bullshit, what’s needed is for Israel to get out of the territories it has occupied since 1967 and find a fair solution to the Jerusalem and refugees problems. If Arab groups – Hizbullah, Hamas, PFLP, whoever – continue to attack it then, I will be the first in line to condemn them and urge that action be taken. I’m sorry to speak in such simplistic terms about this conflict, but I do believe that at the end of the day it’s a fairly simple one.

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17. “Some of them are truly anti-Semitic, like the one Arab who explained…”

    Come on, Issander, “Arab” and “Anti-Semitic” in one sentence don’t make sense. You can say anti-Israeli, anti-Zionest, or even anti-Jew.

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18. Alif, first those were not my words but Lee Smith’s, secondly I think everyone knows now that the curent usage of Semitic is to mean Jewish, and finally I don’t really accept these nineteenth century labels or particularly think they apply to either Jews or Arabs, who are after all highly intermixed.

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