The mother of all pretexts
Uri Avnery

WHEN I hear mention of the “Clash of Civilizations” I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. To laugh, because it is such a silly notion. To cry, because it is liable to cause untold disasters.
To cry even more, because our leaders are exploiting this slogan as a pretext for sabotaging any possibility of an Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation. It is just one more in a long line of pretexts. Why was the Zionist movement in need of excuses to justify the way it treated the Palestinian people? At its birth, it was an idealistic movement. It laid great weight on its moral basis. Not just in order to convince the world, but above all in order to set its own conscience at rest. From early childhood we learned about the pioneers, many of them sons and daughters of well-to-do and well-educated families, who left behind a comfortable life in Europe in order to start a new life in a far-away and — by the standards of the time — primitive country. Here, in a savage climate they were not used to, often hungry and sick, they performed bone-breaking physical labor under a brutal sun.
For that, they needed an absolute belief in the rightness of their cause. Not only did they believe in the need to save the Jews of Europe from persecution and pogroms, but also in the creation of a society so just as never seen before, an egalitarian society that would be a model for the entire world. Leo Tolstoy was no less important for them than Theodor Herzl. The kibbutz and the moshav were symbols of the whole enterprise. But this idealistic movement aimed at settling in a country inhabited by another people. How to bridge this contradiction between its sublime ideals and the fact that their realization necessitated the expulsion of the people of the land?
The easiest way was to repress the problem altogether, ignoring its very existence: The land, we told ourselves, was empty, there was no people living here at all. That was the justification that served as a bridge over the moral abyss. Only one of the Founding Fathers of the Zionist movement was courageous enough to call a spade a spade. Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote as early as 80 years ago that it was impossible to deceive the Palestinian people (whose existence he recognized) and to buy their consent to the Zionist aspirations. We are white settlers colonizing the land of the native people, he said, and there is no chance whatsoever that the natives will resign themselves to this voluntarily. They will resist violently, like all the native peoples in the European colonies. Therefore we need an “Iron Wall” to protect the Zionist enterprise. When Jabotinsky was told that his approach was immoral, he replied that the Jews were trying to save themselves from the disaster threatening them in Europe, and, therefore, their morality trumped the morality of the Arabs in Palestine.
Most Zionists were not prepared to accept this force-oriented approach. They searched fervently for a moral justification they could live with. Thus started the long quest for justifications — with each pretext supplanting the previous one, according to the changing spiritual fashions in the world. The first justification was precisely the one mocked by Jabotinsky: We were actually coming to benefit the Arabs. We shall redeem them from their primitive living conditions, from ignorance and disease. We shall teach them modern methods of agriculture and bring them advanced medicine. Everything — except employment, because we needed every job for the Jews we were bringing here, which we were transforming from ghetto-Jews into a people of workers and tillers of the soil.
When the ungrateful Arabs went on to resist our grand project, in spite of all the benefits we were supposedly bringing them, we found a Marxist justification: It’s not the Arabs who oppose us, but only the “effendis”. The rich Arabs, the great landowners, are afraid that the glowing example of the egalitarian Hebrew community would attract the exploited Arab proletariat and cause them to rise against their oppressors. That, too, did not work for long, perhaps because the Arabs saw how the Zionists bought the land from those very same “effendis” and drove out the tenants who had been cultivating it for generations.
The rise of the Nazis in Europe brought masses of Jews to the country. The Arab public saw how the land was being withdrawn from under their feet, and started a rebellion against the British and the Jews in 1936. Why, the Arabs asked, should they pay for the persecution of the Jews by the Europeans? But the Arab Revolt gave us a new justification: The Arabs support the Nazis. And indeed, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, was photographed sitting next to Hitler. Some people “discovered” that the Mufti was the real instigator of the Holocaust. (Years later it was revealed that Hitler had detested the Mufti, who had no influence whatsoever over the Nazis.)
World War II came to an end, to be followed by the 1948 war. Half of the vanquished Palestinian people became refugees. That did not trouble the Zionist conscience, because everybody knew: They ran away of their own free will. Their leaders had called upon them to leave their homes, to return later with the victorious Arab armies. True, no evidence was ever found to support this absurd claim, but it has sufficed to soothe our conscience to this day.
It may be asked: Why were the refugees not allowed to come back to their homes once the war was over? Well, it was they who in 1947 rejected the UN partition plan and started the war. If because of this they lost 78 percent of their country, they have only themselves to blame. Then came the Cold War. We were, of course, on the side of the “Free World”, while the great Arab leader, Gamal Abdul Nasser, got his weapons from the Soviet bloc. (True, in the 1948 war the Soviet arms flowed to us, but that’s not important.) It was quite clear: No use talking with the Arabs, because they support Communist tyranny. But the Soviet bloc collapsed. “The terrorist organization called PLO”, as Menachem Begin used to call it, recognized Israel and signed the Oslo agreement. A new justification had to be found for our unwillingness to give back the occupied territories to the Palestinian people.
The salvation came from America: A professor named Samuel Huntington wrote a book about the “Clash of Civilizations”. And so we found the mother of all pretexts. The arch-enemy, according to this theory, is Islam. Western Civilization, Judeo-Christian, liberal, democratic, tolerant, is under attacked from the Islamic monster, fanatical, terrorist, murderous. Islam is murderous by nature. Actually, “Muslim” and “terrorist” are synonymous. Every Muslim is a terrorist, every terrorist a Muslim. A skeptic might ask: How did it happen that the wonderful Western culture gave birth to the Inquisition, the pogroms, the burning of witches, the annihilation of the Native Americans, the Holocaust, the ethnic cleansings and other atrocities without number — but that was in the past. Now Western culture is the embodiment of freedom and progress.
Professor Huntington was not thinking about us in particular. His task was to satisfy a peculiar American craving: The American empire always needs a virtual, world-embracing enemy, a single enemy which includes all the opponents of the United States around the world. The Communists delivered the goods — the whole world was divided between Good Guys (the Americans and their supporters) and Bad Guys (the Commies). Everybody who opposed American interests was automatically a Communist — Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Salvador Allende in Chile, Fidel Castro in Cuba, while the masters of Apartheid, the death squads of Augusto Pinochet and the secret police of the Shah of Iran belonged, like us, to the Free World.
When the Communist empire collapsed, America was suddenly left without a world-wide enemy. This vacuum has now been filled by the Muslims-Terrorists. Not only Osama bin Laden, but also the Chechen freedom fighters, the angry North-African youth of the Paris “banlieus”, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, the insurgents in the Philippines. Thus the American world view rearranged itself: A good world (Western Civilization) and a bad world (Islamic civilization). Diplomats still take care to make a distinction between “radical Islamists” and “moderate Muslims”, but that is only for appearances’ sake. Between ourselves, we know of course that they are all Osama Bin Ladens. They are all the same.
This way, a huge part of the world, composed of manifold and very different countries, and a great religion, with many different and even opposing tendencies (like Christianity and Judaism), which has given the world unmatched scientific and cultural treasures, is thrown into one and the same pot. This worldview is tailored for us. Indeed, the world of the clashing civilizations is, for us, the best of all possible worlds. The struggle between Israel and the Palestinians is no longer a conflict between the Zionist movement, which came to settle in this country, and the Palestinian people, which inhabited it. No, it has been from the very beginning a part of a worldwide struggle which does not stem from our aspirations and actions. The assault of terrorist Islam on the Western world did not start because of us. Our conscience can be entirely clean — we are among the good guys of this world.
This is now the line of argument of official Israel: The Palestinians elected Hamas, a murderous Islamic movement. (If it didn’t exist, it would have to be invented — and indeed, some people assert it was created from the start by our secret service.) Hamas is terroristic, and so is Hezbollah. Perhaps Mahmoud Abbas is not a terrorist himself, but he is weak and Hamas is about to take sole control over all Palestinian territories. So we cannot talk with them. We have no partner. Actually, we cannot possibly have a partner, because we belong to Western Civilization, which Islam wants to eradicate.
In his book “Der Judenstaat”, Theodor Herzl, the official Israeli “Prophet of the State”, prophesied this development, too. This is what he wrote in 1896: “For Europe we shall constitute (in Palestine) a part of the wall against Asia, we shall serve as a vanguard of culture against barbarism.” Herzl was thinking of a metaphoric wall, but in the meantime we have put up a very real one. For many, this is not just a Separation Wall between Israel and Palestine. It is a part of the worldwide wall between the West and Islam, the frontline of the Clash of Civilizations. Beyond the wall there are not men, women and children, not a conquered and oppressed Palestinian population, not choked towns and villages like Abu-Dis, Bilin and Qalqilia. No, beyond the wall there are a billion terrorists, multitudes of bloodthirsty Muslims, who have only one desire in life: To throw us into the sea, simply because we are Jews, part of Judeo-Christian Civilization.
With an official position like that — who is there to talk to? What is the point of meeting in Annapolis or anywhere else? And what is left to us to do — to cry or to laugh?

—Arab News

Wait until spring
M J Akbar

THE government’s retreat on the Indo-US nuclear deal, after three years of do-or-die bravado, can only be explained by that old adage: He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day. Martyrs get memorials and medals, but they don’t get a second chance. Dr Manmohan Singh and Mrs Sonia Gandhi, sensibly, have opted for a second chance in preference to a charge of the light brigade towards immediate elections.
It is all a bit embarrassing of course. No general likes to march his troops to the top of the hill, heroic breastplates glinting in the sun, only to march them down again. Even if you do not lose a battle, you do lose face. But embarrassment is a small price to pay for survival in office. What the prime minister does need to worry about is loss of credibility. For three years he has told the country that the nuclear deal is central to India’s well-being and prosperity for the next five decades. At various points, opponents of the deal have been derided as unpatriotic and even enemies of peace. You cannot suddenly sit down to supper with pseudo-traitors and enemies with the thin explanation that life must go on. The prime minister raised the stakes. He invested more time and energy into this one policy than the rest of his decisions put together. This was the central fact of his administration. To walk away from such pinnacles of history with nary a whimper can only whittle the authority of a man leading a government.
A prime minister must ride high. You cannot rule India by riding low.
The only politician riding high now is Prakash Karat, and that is because he rode steadily through intense turbulence. That is always the litmus test in leadership, the ability to be steadfast in a crisis. He was steady because Marxists have a stabiliser called ideology. It would be incorrect to minimise the storms he was facing. If there was a typhoon charging at him in Delhi, there was a tornado behind his back, in Bengal.
The prime minister always maintained that he was motivated by principle, but when it came to the crux he succumbed to the politician’s irresistible lure for office. The Congress decision turned on something as insubstantial as opinion polls. You can see the relationship between public posture and psephologists. When some rather breathless television polls (where are they now?) predicted that the Congress would win 200 seats thanks to the nuclear deal, the prime minister picked up his lance and charged at the Left’s windmills, daring Marxists to do their worst. This was not a private dare; this was a public challenge. When the poll numbers began to drop, the triumphalism started to waver. The latest internal polling numbers must have been truly desultory to force such a retreat.
The paradox is that while it remains to be seen how helpful this will be to the Congress, the Congress has done the Left a huge favour. The Marxists are in a poor shape in Bengal (which makes Prakash Karat’s ideological clarity all the more praiseworthy). Ration riots — not seen since 1967 — have erupted in Marxist strongholds, and bode ill for the Left in an election. A Left bulwark in Bengal has been the substantial Muslim vote: Muslims account for 27 per cent of the population and over 30 per cent of the vote since they tend to vote in larger numbers. This support has weakened in rural areas because of Nandigram, and in Kolkata because of the case of a young man called Rizwan ur Rehman. He died recently in unexplained circumstances after falling in love and marrying a Marwari Hindu girl. By all accounts, it was a happy marriage, and the girl was content with a middle class home despite the fact that her father, Ashok Todi is supposed to be worth over Rs200 crores. It is known that this money came from the less than respectable trade of illegal betting; you do not succeed as a bookie without a mutually beneficial relationship with the police. Rizwan’s family alleges that the police murdered him on Todi’s instance; the police claim it was suicide; the truth is in the hands of an enquiry, if the enquiry can find the truth.
Kolkata, true to its reputation as a bastion of spirited secularism, has treated this as a human rights issue, rather than a communal problem. Kolkatans have lots of reasons for pride in their city; this one is at the top. Chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee is honest and sincere but he is no Jyoti Basu. Jyoti Basu was unique. He combined the patrician’s impartiality with a common touch. He could, through instinct and experience, read the common pulse and soothe the popular nerve at moments of crisis. Buddhadeb seems constantly torn between his administration’s self-centred advice and a public position that tends to suffer from poor counsel. This is why Rizwan’s mother says that she would meet Jyoti Basu any time, but will not meet the chief minister. Buddhadeb was mature enough to visit the family despite the comment, which is an indication of how CPI(M) can turn things around.
In plain words, Bengal is in a bit of a mess. The one thing that the CPI(M) needs desperately is time to clean up the mess. It has the capacity to do so, with the help of Jyoti Basu, but it could never have managed this in the hothouse of an immediate election campaign. It needs a minimum of three months if not more. The Congress retreat has given it invaluable time.
The big mystery is: why did the Congress blink before it needed to? It could have waited till the CPI(M)’s politburo meeting on October18, or the next UPA-Left meeting on 22 October. A week is a long time in politics, and who knows who would have succumbed under internal pressure. The Bengal CPI(M)’s dilemma must be obvious. Mrs Sonia Gandhi’s speech in Haryana was written to raise the pitch in preparation for an election. Why then the volte face?
Perhaps we need to return to our starting point: have Dr Singh and Mrs Gandhi survived to fight another day over the nuclear deal? If so, when is the “another day” scheduled?
The Bush administration has not changed its calendar. It still wants the necessary clearances from the IAEA and the Nuclear Suppliers Group so that the agreement can be sent back to Congress by March. It believes that it has enough leverage with both to complete the process in eight or ten weeks. Support in the Congress thereafter will be bipartisan. So, even if the deal were activated in December, it could still catch the March deadline. In other words, if you are a betting man, take your chances on a nuclear winter in India. That would of course mean an April election, but hasn’t the prime minister said, if winter comes can spring be far behind?
An April election would also be within the comfort zone of the Left. Is there a difference between calculation and speculation? Not much perhaps, when it comes to Indian politics. But watch out for the omens. We already have one: the decision not to raise oil prices. Who wants higher prices in an election year? One can already see the whole Cabinet suddenly getting teary-eyed about the welfare of the poor, who have, for three years, been fed the old routine of minimal sops and maximum promises. That is another omen. If there is a sudden flurry of attention towards what are considered “Muslim” issues, that will be a third. Nothing sets off a frenzy of do-goodism quicker than the prospect of a general election. But you have to time these things accurately. This cannot be done too early, or time will expose them as hollow.
To govern you need balance, flair and credibility. The prime minister does much more than an administrative job. The momentum of power is not static. If you do not propel it forward, it pushes you back. You have to ride high. The only horse that moves on static is a hobby horse. Has the nuclear deal become one? The prime minister cannot accept yes as an answer to that tricky question.

—Khaleej Times



The Benazir Bhutto factor this time around
Nasim Zehra

AS BENAZIR Bhutto prepares to land in Pakistan after an eight-year long self-imposed exile, Pakistanis know her return qualifies as a major political event. The party her father founded almost four decades ago is still a living entity. Despite all the corruption scandals against her the party cadres, even if decreased and somewhat decrepit, are still intact. The cadres and the party supporters will no doubt put up a grand welcome for their leader provided the government does not prevent them from travelling to the airport.
Benazir carries the name that has for the longest time ruled the hearts of the largest chunk in the Pakistani electorate. Even for its detractors and the authors of guided-democracy perpetually engaged in landscaping Pakistani democracy, the Bhutto name cannot be ignored. It is an irony of fate that those very forces that led the khaki logic of 2002, which dictated that Benazir Bhutto’s electoral victory will be detrimental to Pakistan’s interests, have now concluded the opposite. In a recent television interview, General Pervez Musharraf acknowledged that despite the corruption of the PPP, it is a party that enjoys national support.
The khaki’s political re-engineering project did not succeed. Musharraf’s eight years failed to discard the Benazir and Nawaz factors. No new political leadership emerged. Instead the charisma of the old survived. Politics does not lend itself to ‘engineering.’ Instead it is the intangible charisma, among other factors, that builds the support for popular politicians. In Pakistani politics, topping the list of charismatic politicians is the Bhutto name. Despite the long list of Benazir Bhutto’s political blunders, corruption scandals and other contenders for political charisma, passed from father to daughter, the name still bears, even though markedly reduced, the charismatic hold.
Clean logic doesn’t explain charisma. The chaos of the complex, the non-elite reality, which sentiments of a large section of the society’s ‘have-nots’ calculate, the lived experiences of the marginalised that defies the dominant reason-based discourse, are the factors that comprise the context within which charisma survives. Also it is a life afflicted with tragedy and turmoil, one that lives through the pain and the anguish and still survives to play a role on the public stage, is one that becomes the stuff of charisma. Charisma-struck Bhutto supporters tend to only selectively register the flaws of their leader. Their perception is distorted by the triple tragedy of death of a father lost at the gallows, a brother bulleted and another poisoned, forced ouster from her legitimately earned prime ministerial position, and Benazir’s own years in imprisonment and for eight years remaining away from her homeland.
The other side of the Bhutto reality is what her supporters have long ignored: the corruption scandals and the intolerance and inefficiencies of her governments. The Zaradari factor too, is disregarded. Her Washington connection pales before her many positive assets. Then there is the broader power context of Pakistan which, with its many contradictions and many excesses takes away peoples’ ability to move beyond the realm of heroes and villains. The public lives the reality of the morality of the ruling classes that is constructed on shifting sands. If it’s a choice between your crook versus my crook, the public will rather opt for their own crook. The cost of the absence of a process, which helps to weed out the bad and lead in the good on the political horizon, is the rise of cultish figures. Yet whatever popular support exists for Benazir it is not merely a manifestation of blind faith. Instead it makes manifest the acceptability by the public of what they believe to be the lesser evil. Much of the middle class analysis may appear to be an Orwellian chant of the advantaged elite.
Benazir returns, to yet again, benefit from the political support that this charisma accrues to her. Her dealings with the uniformed president are unlikely to be a support-loser. Her core support will remain intact. The issues of constitutional democracy, rule of law and judicial independence have not yet become important political determinants of Pakistani politics. These issues have only captured the imagination of the urban population which also recognises that in Pakistan’s current political scenario these will remain parallel to and not integrated in Pakistani mainstream politics.
None other than the political choices that the man who was the star of the post-March movement for judicial independence, has reiterated this reality. In a recent interview Aitzaz Ahsan said he will stand by his leader and will contest on the PPP ticket. He is okay with his leader’s deal with the man he argued repeatedly must vacate the presidential position. By his political support for Benazir, Aitzaz has endorsed her position that for a smooth transition engaging with a uniformed president is okay. In the 2002 elections the PPP polled 29 per cent of the votes that were cast. The response to her post-arrival politics in the various provinces, and especially in the NWFP, will indicate Benazir’s likely electoral support in the coming elections.
Meanwhile, her public support and her charisma factor notwithstanding, her arrival in Pakistan will pose hurdles for her that she must overcome at least in her return to active electoral politics. One, the nervousness of the Musharraf government and of the ruling party as Benazir opts for active politicking. There is room for Bhutto-Musharraf tension given that there is no comprehensive political accord between the two. She entered into an only issue-specific engagement with General Musharraf. Hence once on the election trail, at the hustings her party’s traditional political positions vis-à-vis the army in politics, the PML-Q and the MQM will also be articulated. Also, Musharraf’s stated displeasure at Bhutto’s pre-election return, may mutually queer the pitch. In short, it’s not a guaranteed Musharraf-Bhutto smooth-sailing ahead. Musharraf ‘s right hand men of the PML-Q are unlikely to opt for any but a policy of political bickering with the PPP.
Two, the media trial that will be conducted on issues ranging from corruption to engaging with a military ruler and from the Washington connection to her pro-Washington position on the global war on terrorism and on extremism within Pakistan. The media has repeatedly raised the paradoxes of Benazir’s political careers. It is a media that generally is both sympathetic personally and harsh politically towards Benazir. Meanwhile armed groups in Waziristan have repeatedly issued death threats against Benazir for what they view as pro-Washington policies against terrorism.
Three, the return of the Sharifs to Pakistan could potentially cut into her vote bank; especially in the Punjab and in the country’s urban constituency. As the voice of a genuine national level opposition the Sharifs pose the biggest challenge to the Bhutto bid for power. As a party positioning itself as an anti-establishment nationalist democratic party, the PML-N is the flag bearer of 21st century radical politics of Pakistan. Meanwhile, the ruling party’s political contours, beyond being a Musharraf-mentored party, have yet to emerge.
Finally, how the Bhutto name scores in the latest round of electoral politics notwithstanding, what is relevant for Pakistan is Benazir’s ability to deliver on the crucial challenge that Pakistan’s state, society and politics faces; the challenge of being able to effectively arrest the growing violently promoted internal ideological and political discord. Her existing credentials to meet this challenge do not appear to be strong. —Khaleej Times