Burrowing in Middle East History and a Bright Spot

I have been thinking, reading, and researching a good deal about the Middle East for a project on the Israeli settlements. I am also preparing for a trip there in May with the specific purpose of meeting with Iraqi refugees. Plans will be final soon. Reading as much as I have been about the situation, especially regarding the Occupied Territories, is a roller coaster ride of facts and sadness and misery and anger.


It's a real test for an attitude I have been trying to practice recently. The attitude is based on reading and thinking about the philosophy of non-violence as taught by Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk. He has even worked with Palestinians and Israelis. It's a variation on the theme of seek first to understand then to be understood. Violence cannot be overcome unless there is communication. Communication begins with mindfulness of your own pain, and then mindfulness of the pain of others.


Today I worked my way through a set of thirteen historical maps showing the original and the current boundaries of the Occupied Territories. I found myself in such a state of fury when I finished that I had to hold my face in my hands, as Thich Nhat Hanh once said he did, in order to keep the anger from escaping out into the world, in order to hold it within to focus on it, to understand it. If I can get so furious over the "facts on the ground" (as the Israeli government calls them) what must go on in the soul of a Palestinian?


You cannot read the history of the region without having these upwellings of anger and frustration, not if you believe in justice and in recognizing injustice. Then comes a positive note when you think that despite all of this injustice, you can see quiet reconciliations and positive thought as in the statement of Ali Abu Awad, "Everyone wants to be right; no one wants to be honest." That's become a mantra for me.


And then randomly comes another positive note as I take a break from the study and thinking. A dull gleam at the end of a long tunnel. Robin Wright, one of the best of the Middle East journalists, has written a new book, Dreams and Shadows, which gives a cautiously optimistic thought about the Middle East. Here she is in an interview with Charlie Rose:

So I went back to the region to see if we're back at square one, and discovered, in fact, that there are openings in the region shaping -- people carving out new political space because of the young, because of the soccer moms, because of rebel clerics in places like Tehran, because of the young techies in Jordan. There is a budding culture of change. There is a beginning, and it is only a beginning. But I'm not sure it's the same old Middle East that you and I have covered for so long.

You'll find the quote and more information on the author's website. Wright is a good speaker and good interviewee, especially when someone superb like Terry McNally (not aggressive and egotistic, like Ch. Rose) is interviewing. McNally interviewed her on KPFK and you can scroll down on his web page to find the Play or Download podcast buttons for his two-part interview. You might also book mark the page for his interviews with Dahr Jamail and Joe Stieglitz.

All three writers, and McNally as well for that matter, don't care about being right so much as they care about being honest.

Just in case . . .

you were wondering about getting out of Iraq, why not read this account from someone who just returned? It's Dahr Jamail, the American unimbedded journalist, now back home. One of the true heroes of American journalism. Read it and remember.

Or perhaps you would like to hear some of the voices you won't find in the New York Times or the Los Angeles Times or the Washington Post and certainly not in National Review or The Weekly Standard. So check out Amy Goodman's program from this morning and get some sense of what servicemen can go through to bear witness.
These are the soldiers who have the courage to understand and speak out. These are the kind of fellows that we always hope that we would have enough courage to be.

I support all the troops who are still alive and that's why I want the troops brought home now. They were sent off to fight an unjust, illegal war and as good soldiers do, they followed their orders. But the war has always been illegal, and now, as predicted, it has wrought more damage, terror, and destruction than Saddam Hussein in his worst moments, while being punished by American and British sanctions, could have wrought. It has produced even more terrorists than ever before and put all of us at risk.

The idea that we must fight them "over there" to keep from fighting them "here" is one of the most morally corrupt ideas ever given expression. Even people against the war can utter it with no sense of irony. (On a smaller scale, of course, it's the usual American response to the waste, pollution, and destruction that plutocrats, pathocrats, and oligarchs always fail to include in their corrupt calculations of the price of capitalism: it's known as NIMBY.) The problem is, it's always the people on the short end of the economic stick that get to bear the consequences.

And so even though I did not support the decision to invade and occupy Iraq illegally, I understand that the terrorists will always be gunning for us. But when I hear the glib formula of "We have to fight them in Iraq so we don't fight them in New Jersey" I am revulsed. The arrogance of that thought, and the stupidity, the inanity, with which it is so readily uttered are beyond the bounds of decency. Yet it slithers almost every day from the brain to the lips of that spineless and addle-headed fool in the White House and from his insidious, venal, corrupt and traitorous puppeteer, Dick Cheney, as if it were the most profound insight into the heart of darkness. What corruption. The darkness accumulates within them.

We not only should be preparing to thwart the terrorists that we have created and encouraged, we should be talking about making meaningful reparations to the people of Iraq, and we surely should be figuring out how to take care of the traumatized soldiers once we bring them home.