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Columbia University Beauzeau Sounds Off.
Edited for length. You can find the whole thing at the link.Written by Joseph Massad, assistant professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University Whenever I open an Arabic newspaper these days, I am accosted by columns written by neo-liberals expressing much worry about the "primacy" of the question of Palestine in Arab politics. The columnists insist that it is to the detriment of Arab nationalism, the Arab regimes, and "the Arab Street", that Palestine remains central. While Arab nationalism as an organised political force has ceased to exist as a political project except in the hopes of believers, Arab regimes who might have paid lip service to it as the quintessential "Arab Cause", no longer even do so except as parody. Well, Since the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the military defeat of the PLO, even that organisation, or its mere truncated shadow, the Palestinian Authority no longer believes the Palestinian cause is primary. As far as the PA is concerned, two of the three central elements of the "cause", namely, the millions of Palestinians living in forced exile or the over one-million Palestinian Israelis who live under Israeli institutionalised racism are no longer part of the cause. If for the Arab regimes, While pontificating about "the Arab street", few of the commentators bother to even define it. It is not workers and professional unions, women's organisations, business associations, members of opposition political parties (legal and outlawed), men and women of letters, artists, students and faculty, government and private sector employees, the unemployed, and all kinds of people drawn from rural and urban backgrounds that are spoken of, but rather some amorphous entity known as "The Arab Street". As the last and only bastion where the cause of an oppressed people remains primary, "the Arab street" has become the major target of subversion. It is not only the United States and its propaganda outlets (to which Radio Sawa was added last year and a new Arabic--speaking television station will be added this year) that is targeting it, but also the neo-liberal Arab intellectuals who aim to throw the Palestinian cause in the dustbin of history in the interest of making subservience to America and Israel the primary cause for "the Arab street" to espouse -- just as it has been for the Arab regimes. As opposed to subservience to the terrorist supporters and kleptocrats? The neo-liberals' resentment of the Palestinian people and the primacy of their cause for "the Arab street" is not a new phenomenon. It has been espoused by a number of Arab regimes and political currents since the 1960s. All the neo- liberal Arab intellectuals are currently doing is mobilise this resentment across the Arab world with the aim of dislodging the Palestinian cause once and for all. If some Arab nationalists and Islamists believe America is responsible for all the ills of the Arab world, neo-liberal Arab intellectuals believe that the primacy of the Palestinian cause is the main reason for all these ills. Thus, the idea is to mobilise resentment of the Palestinian people and rid the Arab world of the Palestinians in preparation for a long-awaited Arab embrace of America and Israel, otherwise known as "modernity and politics". In an article in Al-Hayat which he co- authored, Hazim Saghiyyah, the most prominent of the neo- liberals, has recently labelled what he calls "the Arabist ideology" in reference to Arab nationalism, as "pre-political". He often laments that the Arab world is yet to reach modernity! You got that last right! Hat tip LGF Posted by: Katz 2003-05-29 |
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