Book review: “A World I Loved”

This is my review of Wadad Makdisi Cortas’ memoir, A World I Loved. I highly recommend this book for people outside the Middle East who wish to better understand this region’s recent history.

Book review: “A World I Loved”
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10869.shtml

“This is my story, the story of an Arab woman,” Wadad Makdisi Cortas states in the opening line of her memoir A World I Loved. Born Wadad Makdisi in Beirut in 1909, which at that time was considered a part of Syria, she discovered Arab nationalism at a young age and lived a life true to the idea in every sense. Cortas, born a Greek Orthodox Christian, believed passionately that Arabs, in order to protect their culture and values, should liberate themselves from Western colonialism which sought to impose its ways and divide the people.

Though the memoir was originally written in Arabic, Cortas’ daughter Mariam Said explains in the book’s introduction: “She felt compelled to write in English to explain to the West the politics around the Palestinian tragedy …” (xxviii). Before her death in 1979, Cortas gave the manuscript to Mariam’s husband, the late Palestinian thinker Edward Said, for publication. At first, the family was unable to find a publisher. But after the 11 September 2001 attacks and subsequent US-led wars in the Middle East, the region became the focus of much of the world. It was then, Mariam Said writes, “that the time for her book had come” (xxix).

Cortas’ story begins in 1917, the year of the infamous Balfour Declaration in which the British promised Arab Palestine as a national home for the Jewish people, and the year before an old empire would be replaced with a new one. World War I marked the end to centuries of Ottoman rule and the beginning of the French and British Mandate over much of the Middle East; Syria and Lebanon fell under the control of the French. While growing up, Cortas had no choice but to become involved in politics. Her father, a professor of Arabic at what is now the American University of Beirut, sent her to the still-operating secular Ahliah National School for Girls in Beirut. She learned much through him and his intellectual colleagues who would meet at the family’s home to discuss issues of the time. Throughout the book, she quotes her father’s lessons: “‘No one loves us for our black eyes,’ goes a saying that Father often repeated. ‘These big nations are selfish; their major aim is to use us as tools to further their interests and ambitions’” (34).

THE GULF

A few images from my first ever (and very brief) visit to the Gulf:

Doha, Qatar, 2009. (image: matthew cassel)

Doha, Qatar, 2009. (image: matthew cassel)

Doha, Qatar, 2009. (image: matthew cassel)

Doha, Qatar, 2009. (image: matthew cassel)

Doha, Qatar, 2009. (image: matthew cassel)

Doha, Qatar, 2009. (image: matthew cassel)

Mohammad Othman

Mohammad Othaman's brother and father collect olives from one of the family's trees just a few meters away from the Israeli built fence/wall in Jayyous, 2004. (image: matthew cassel)

Last Tuesday a dear friend of mine was traveling back to his home in the occupied West Bank after a trip to Europe. He had been visiting Norway where he was meeting with senior officials in his capacity as an organizer with Stop the Wall, a Palestinian non-governmental organization that campaigns against Israel’s illegal wall in the West Bank. In order to travel abroad, Palestinians in the West Bank must go to Jordan and take flights from Amman. Even though Jordan shares a border with the West Bank, it is Israel that controls that border. Traveling through any checkpoint (and the West Bank is full of hundreds) let alone one on a border, is a frightening experience for any Palestinian who are all subject to detention, arrest or other mistreatment by the young M16-wielding Israeli soldiers. As he attempted to return to his occupied home he was stopped and detained, and later he would be arrested and taken to one of Israel’s many prisons where it holds around 11,000 Palestinians like Mohammad, including hundreds of children.

Mohammad and I atop his home in Jayyous, 2004

Mohammad did not choose to get involved in politics, it chose him in 2003 when Israel built its wall that split his village in two, separating the residential area of the village from its farmland. Like many West Bank villages, the people in Jayyous’ livelihood depended on their olive trees. Mohammad’s family was no different. After the wall was constructed residents had to apply for permits, which were often denied to nearly all young men making it nearly impossible for families to collect all of their olives during the autumn harvest season. Israel also began uprooting and destroying olive trees to make way for a Jewish settlement that was to be built on the farmlands of Jayyous. Mohammad and his family suffered a great deal. I spent the harvest of 2004 with him and his family when only a few of them and I (of course my American passport gave me infinite more rights than those wishing to work on their lands) could make it to the trees, while the rest waited anxiously on the other side clearly disappointed by missing the harvest and ready to take the olives to get processed into oil. It was in that time that I learned about Palestinian fellah (peasants) and their generations of struggle to maintain their land, a struggle embodied in the olive trees hundreds of years older than any person living in Israel/Palestine.

Mohammad’s activism is his resistance, his way to protect himself, his family, his people, his land. He uses only words, but even words are a threat to the injustice of the oppressors. And that is why he sits in a cell now where his captors use every intimidation technique imaginable to break his spirit. But they will never silence Mohammad and those fighting on the side of what’s right.

Learn more about Mohammad’s case here: http://freemohammadothman.wordpress.com/.

Venezuela pics online

image: matthew cassel

Click to see the complete gallery

Finally! After many months I’ve uploaded images I took in Venezuela back in April of this year. It was not an easy trip, I was only in the country for about a week and tried to do way too much. It usually takes me that long just to get a feel for a place before I feel comfortable walking around taking photographs, which was very hard to do on this trip. I brought only one fixed 35 mm lens so as to not stand out too much, and I also kept my camera in my bag most of the time since having uninsured gear in a tough city like Caracas is not fun — everywhere we went Venezuelans told me to be careful because I would get jumped for my gear.

Crime is high in Caracas, but I was really impressed meeting those organizing against it. In many communities in Venezuela, there is an energy similar to one I felt in Palestine earlier in the intifada, or even in Chicago in 2003 when tens of thousands were organizing against the war in Iraq. Another thing that impressed me was that just walking around we came across health clinic after health clinic that I could just enter and be treated for free by well-trained Cuban doctors. This made me feel constantly safe — the complete opposite to being in the states with no health coverage. Needless to say, I will be back in Venezuela soon.

Many thanks to my sister for her initial invitation to visit and her assistance with everything thereafter.

Venezolano cat-fight

23 de Enero barrio, Caracas, April 2009. (image: matthew cassel)

Beirut rains

The rains have begun in Beirut. Summer is over and in a matter of minutes the city has taken on a completely different feel. The air is fresher and the water is giving life to the dehydrated vegetation on my balcony and in the park below. I feel like this dude after a hot day in Caracas, Venezuela a few months ago:

23 de Enero barrio, Caracas. (image: matthew cassel)

“Why I threw the shoe”

Right after the famous shoe incident involving Iraqi journalist Muntadher al-Zaidi and then US President George Bush, I wrote an opinion piece speculating about the reasons behind the incident (and others involving shoes) titled “The weapon of the occupied“:

But why did Western media constantly explain that shoe throwing is considered offensive in Arab culture? Unlike the entire Western media, I’m not going to claim to know the answer to this great cultural phenomenon. Maybe it’s not a phenomenon at all. Maybe it is what any of us would do if someone as arrogant as Ariel Sharon or George W. Bush visited the place that they’ve brutalized for years. … Could it be that Iraqis and Palestinians aren’t as armed and violent as they’re portrayed, and that the shoe is just something that everyone is armed, or rather footed with, and can easily be thrown? … Forget the cultural differences when it comes to the meaning of shoes for a moment and focus on the real question: will an occupied people ever accept their occupiers? There is no more straightforward answer to this question than a shoe whizzing past the US president’s head.

After his release this week, al-Zaidi provided evidence for my speculation in a piece titled “Why I threw the shoe.” Al-Zaidi writes:

I am free. But my country is still a prisoner of war. There has been a lot of talk about the action and about the person who took it, and about the hero and the heroic act, and the symbol and the symbolic act. But, simply, I answer: what compelled me to act is the injustice that befell my people, and how the occupation wanted to humiliate my homeland by putting it under its boot. … When I threw the shoe in the face of the criminal, George Bush, I wanted to express my rejection of his lies, his occupation of my country, my rejection of his killing my people. … I didn’t do this so my name would enter history or for material gains. All I wanted was to defend my country.

Despite him stating otherwise, he is considered a hero by many who was brave enough to do what most of the world wanted to. Unfortunately, he’s had to leave Iraq at least temporarily to receive medical treatment after accusing authorities of torturing him during his nine months in prison. His family has also expressed concern for his safety if he remains in the country. He has become one of the most popular people in the Arab world, right alongside Hizballah head Hassan Nasrallah. These two men are proof that as long as war and occupation exist in the Middle East, resistance will always be supported by the masses.

Nahr al-Bared protest in Tripoli

Residents from the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon gathered on 16 September to protest the Lebanese government’s halting of planned reconstruction of the camp that was destroyed in 2007 in a battle between the Lebanese army and militants from Fatah al-Islam. Hundreds of refugees from the camp and their supporters gathered in Tripoli, the closest major city to Nahr al-Bared. After being denied a permit to protest at the police station near the city’s center, organizers change the location an area far away from symbolic government buildings and people.

image: matthew cassel

image: matthew cassel

image: matthew cassel

image: matthew cassel

Lebanon’s communists remember

Last night, hundreds of supporters of the Lebanese Communist Party and other leftist groups gathered just around the corner from my house near Sanayeh in Beirut. They celebrated the 27th anniversary of their first resistance operation in Beirut against the Israeli army after the latter’s brutal invasion of the Lebanese capital in 1982. The attack happened at the same time while Israeli troops sealed off the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp allowing right-wing Phalangist militias to kill thousands of unarmed and defenseless Palestinian refugees.

image: matthew cassel

image: matthew cassel

No hate speech.

Hate speech will not be tolerated anywhere on this blog, period. Comments are moderated for this reason. Comments containing hate speech will not be permitted.

Refugees without refuge

Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, northern Lebanon, September 2009 (image: matthew cassel)

Jabaliya, Gaza Strip, February 2009 (image: matthew cassel)

Israeli army fires tear-gas at reporter live on air

This is from Al-Jazeera English. If you don’t get the channel at home, you can download a program called livestation (for mac or pc) and stream it over the web.

Ramadan in Nahr al-Bared

A Palestinian family prepares for iftar outside of prefabricated homes in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp. Most homes were destroyed in the fighting in 2007 between the Lebanese army and militants from Fatah al-Islam. The fighting made nearly all of the camp's 35,000 residents refugees for at least a second time. (image: matthew cassel)

Article or assassination, which one needs to be condemned?

In the wake of Israel’s demand that Sweden go against its policy of freedom of speech and condemn Swedish journalist Donald Bostrom’s article accusing of Israel of organ theft, I think it’s important to go back in time and highlight an event in 1948 when Israeli militants assassinated Folke Bernadotte. Bernadotte, a Swede, was assigned by the UN to mediate peace between Zionists/Israelis and Palestinians. Many Zionists didn’t agree when he suggested that Jerusalem be a city under international control and not Israeli. So a group called the Lehi (or Stern Gang in English) killed him in 1948. The 61st anniversary of his assassination is a few weeks away on September 17. Ironically, only a few years before he was killed, Bernadotte was celebrated for negotiating the release of tens of thousands of Jews from Nazi concentration camps.

Many Israelis say that those who perpetrated such attacks around 1948 were a bunch of extremists, and didn’t represent the majority of the Zionist society. I find this hard to believe. Pre-state militias like the Stern Gang, Irgun and Haganah were all quickly migrated into the nascent Israeli state, the latter of the three was even transformed directly into the base of the Israeli army. No one was ever convicted of the assassination. In fact, one of the Stern Gang’s leaders, Yitzhak Shamir, would later become Israel’s 7th Prime Minister in the 1980s.

Bernadotte’s assassination has never been officially condemned in Israel, nor have they apologized for it. And yet they expect the State of Sweden to condemn the words of one journalist in one article.

Wlad al-mukhayem/Kids of the camp

Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon, August 2009. (image: matthew cassel)

I can never accurately express my admiration for children in Palestinian refugee camps. By now I’ve been to most of the dozens of camps around the Arab world, and there is something consistent in all of them. It’s as if from day one children are born with an understanding of their family’s more than six decades of struggle to return to their homeland. Often when I speak to kids in the camps I don’t feel like I’m speaking to kids at all. I feel humbled in their presence similar to when I speak with a person much older and more experienced than me. It’s strange to feel that way around a seven year old, no?

And In the camps you feel how far the conflict is from being resolved. I spoke about current events with friends today in Nahr al-Bared who couldn’t care less about any of the “peace” talks currently taking place, especially the debates surrounding the “freezing” of settlements in the West Bank. There is only one issue that they are concerned with — their right to return home. At six million, not only do they make up roughly half of the world’s Palestinian population (Palestinian refugees outside Palestine and those in the occupied territories and Israel), but they are also the largest refugee population in the world today. This is the issue at the core of the conflict, and it’s the issue that is always put off for “later.” However, until it’s addressed, these children are evidence that freezing settlements and even ending the occupation will not bring the conflict any closer to a peaceful and just solution.