The Arab Preference for War + Silencing Dissent, Something is rotten in the state of Egypt

Egyptian playwright Ali Salem visited Israel in 1994 to “rid himself of hatred,” as he put it, and he wrote a slim volume about his experience called A Drive to Israel. His book was a bestseller in Egypt, but Cairo’s intellectual class ostracized him. The Egyptian Cinema Association and the Egyptian Writers Association canceled his memberships.

The Middle East Media Research Institute just translated an interview with him in Kuwait’s daily An Nahar newspaper that makes for depressing reading. His interlocutor harangues him throughout and comes across only somewhat more reasonable than the intellectual colleagues who shunned him.

“My trip posed a serious challenge to the Egyptian intellectuals and the entire Egyptian society,” Salem said. “How are we to treat this small society next to us [i.e., Israeli society]? Reality forced us to embark upon a peace campaign with the society that defeated us ruthlessly in 1967. My generation cannot overcome the hurt of 1967. All the attacks on me were because I forced them to face the truth.”

It’s difficult to even imagine a Western intellectual getting in this kind of trouble for writing a sympathetic portrait of former enemies decades after peace has been made. When our wars are over, they’re over whether we win or lose.

No one in the United States wants to reignite conflicts with Germany, Japan, Vietnam, or any other country we’re no longer at war with. While we argue among ourselves about whether it’s a good idea to withdraw troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, no one in the U.S. prefers war in Iraq, Afghanistan, or anywhere else if peace and normal relations are viable options.

Americans from one end of the political spectrum to the other would be thrilled to see Iraq and Afghanistan as stable, prosperous countries at peace with themselves, their neighbors, and us. We don’t even have a marginalized fringe group unhappy with the fact that Germany and Japan emerged as they did from World War II. The U.S. lost the war in Vietnam in the 1970s, as Egypt lost its last war with Israel in the 1970s, but no one among us wants to fight it all over again or wishes that we were still slugging it out.

We Westerners aren’t unique in our ability to forgive, forget, and move on. I have never visited Vietnam, but everyone I know who has says even Vietnamese who supported the Communist side seem to hold no grudges against Americans.

My grandfather fought in both Europe and the Pacific as a United States Army officer during World War II. He visited Tokyo many years later and purged some of his demons there just as Ali Salem did in Israel. My mother has a picture of him smiling with his arms around a former Kamikaze pilot. I don’t know what these two former enemies said to each other, but my mother who traveled to Japan with him said it was a transformative experience for both of them.

Though my grandfather was not a public intellectual, if he had been, and if he had written about his own personal reconciliation, there is no chance his American colleagues would have shunned him or revoked his memberships from the institutions he worked with. Many Israeli writers, intellectuals, academics, and activists likewise have visited the Palestinian territories and other Arab countries with Ali Salem’s spirit. None have been ostracized by their peers. On the contrary, they’re usually lauded.

It’s easy, for those so inclined, to prefer war to peace with Israel while living in places like Damascus and Cairo. Everyone killed recently in the Arab-Israeli conflict lived in Israel, Gaza, and Lebanon. No one is shooting at Cairenes or the residents of Damascus. Egyptians, Syrians, and most other Arabs can enjoy, if that is the word, the emotional satisfaction of hostility with the hated “Zionist Entity” without suffering any consequences.

“It is strange that some people [still] say, ‘What good did the peace [agreement] do us?’” Ali Salem said. “My answer to them is this: ‘You refuse to recognize [the value] of peace, [and] therefore you are unable to understand what peace has created. . . . The [mere] fact that you return to your home safely and are not hit by a sniper’s bullet or by a missile falling from the sky, that you do not [have to] darken your windows and fortify your door with sandbags, or check the list of the fallen every morning — all that, or [at least] some of it, is thanks to peace.”

But what of the people in Gaza and South Lebanon? They actually do have to live with the consequences of war. Support for Hezbollah and armed conflict with Israel is much stronger in south Lebanon and the suburbs south of Beirut–the parts of the country that suffer almost all casualties–than it is in central Beirut, the north, or Mount Lebanon. This can be mostly explained by sectarian and regional politics, but there’s another element, too, that is illogical and barely even explicable.

Emotions aren’t rational. Love and hatred certainly aren’t, anyway, and neither is that dark part of the human psyche that thrills to war and destruction. Rebecca West put her finger on it in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her masterful travel narrative set in Yugoslavia on the eve of World War II. “Only part of us is sane,” she wrote. “Only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our 90s and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set life back to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.”

President Barack Obama, like his predecessors, hopes to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict once and for all. There’s no viable solution, though, when people on one side can’t even make peace with the idea of peace. A distressingly large percentage of the Palestinian population is still in the throes of what Rebecca West glimpsed in the Balkans some time ago. The bitter hatred and rejectionism that drives this conflict still hasn’t ebbed even in Egypt 30 years after a peace treaty was signed. It’s hard for most of us in the West to believe that some people prefer war to peace when they could have either, but they do. Ali Salem, bless his heart, has been contending with them for years

Michael J. Totten: Occasional guest-blogger and former Cairo resident Lee Smith picks up where I left off a few days ago:

Silencing Dissent
Something is rotten in the state of Egypt.
by Lee Smith
09/27/2009

The Obama administration's Arab-Israeli peace process is in more trouble than even the White House realizes. To be sure, the Israelis and Palestinians are both dug in, and when the president sought baby steps from the Arabs toward normalizing relations with Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Kuwait rebuffed the administration. But now even Cairo, where Obama hit his reset button with the Muslim world, has made its stand, albeit much less publicly. The campaign against Egyptian editor and analyst Hala Mustafa for meeting with Israel's ambassador to Cairo is sufficient evidence that the first country to have a peace treaty with Jerusalem is no closer to normalization than it was when Anwar Sadat signed the Camp David Accords 30 years ago.

Recently, Israel's envoy to Egypt, Shalom Cohen, visited Mustafa at her office in the Al-Ahram newspaper building, home to the semi-official daily to which Mustafa often contributes, and where she edits the quarterly Arabic-language journal, Democracy.

"The ambassador had a proposal to convene a symposium and asked me to participate," Mustafa told me by phone. "Egyptians, Israelis and Palestinians were to discuss Obama's initiatives and the peace process. Since we would need authorization from Al-Ahram and other state institutions, I didn't give him any final decision."

Nonetheless, chairman of the Egyptian press syndicate Makram Muhammad Ahmed claimed that Mustafa's brief interview with Cohen violated the boycott of the Zionist enemy that the syndicate adopted in 1983.

"But there have been many exceptions" over the past two decades, Mustafa says. "A lot of journalists at Al-Ahram have met with Israelis and even traveled to Israel. Even the chairman of Al-Ahram met with Israelis when he took part in the Copenhagen movement in the '90s. There is no way my act could be considered a violation."

A member of the ruling National Democratic Party's policy planning staff, Mustafa says that the regime still considers her an independent intellectual, and wants to limit interactions with Israel to intellectuals and journalists with connections to the security establishment. "The issue with me is not a legal one," she says, "since the constitution endorses the right of individuals to think and act freely, and we have a peace treaty with Israel and Cohen is the ambassador whose credentials have been accepted by the state. Rather, it is a political issue."

The context is not just normalization, but an Egypt gorged, fat, and sleek with anti-Israel sentiment as well as anti-Semitism.

"The press syndicate's probe is part of a paranoid reflex against any contact with Israel or Israelis," says Raymond Stock, an American writer and academic who has lived in Cairo for nearly two decades. "It harms not only Egypt's psyche but also makes it more difficult for them to actually understand their alleged enemy to the northeast."

It also affects Egypt's soft power, or those intangible qualities of national honor that enable states to advance their interests by way of what statesmen once called prestige.

Egypt's Culture Minister Farouk Hosni was considered the front-runner to take over UNESCO, the United Nations' organization devoted to cultural diversity and cooperation until some of his less tolerant opinions were aired in public. For instance, to prove his anti-Zionist credentials at home, Hosni, as Stock reported in a recent Foreign Policy article, told the "Egyptian parliament that he would 'burn right in front of you' any Israeli books found in the country's libraries."

Hosni was passed over in favor of the Bulgarian candidate, Irina Bukova, which is to say that if the Culture Minister's anti-Israel bias had crossed even UN redlines, then something is decidedly wrong with Egypt. And indeed Hosni confirmed those suspicions when he told reporters after the vote that he saw the hand of international Jewry at work. A "conspiracy cooked up in New York" masterminded by a "group of the world's Jews," said the part-time painter, " had a major influence in the elections."

The Mubarak government, Mustafa believes, missed an opportunity in the Hosni affair to make a constructive point. "It was a chance for the state to say, 'Egypt has nothing against Israelis or Jews.' It is the same thing with my meeting the ambassador," she says. "My act was helpful. But the government has made no statements about my affair. Instead, there has been complete silence. If they were against it, they could've put the whole story to rest."

Mustafa, a frequent visitor to Washington during the heyday of the Bush administration's Freedom Agenda, says that the campaign against her is a reflection of the Egyptian regime's desire to keep the peace with Israel cold. "After all this time, no one can have a free discussion about what Egypt gets from its anti-normalization posture for three decades. This is ridiculous."

Egypt, after all, is supposed to be part of the moderate Arab trend, those U.S.-backed Sunni states that share a common interest with Washington and Israel in setting back the Iranian-led resistance bloc. And it is true that while Hezbollah and Hamas have warred against Israel, Tehran's allies have targeted Egypt as well; Hassan Nasrallah went so far as to invite the Egyptian masses to bring down the regime. In return, Hosni Mubarak rounded up Hezbollah cells in the Sinai, but has done nothing to confront the ideology of his enemies. Nor does it seem that President Obama has it in his power to compel him to do so. In the Middle East right now, it is the resistance that wields the predominance of soft power.

"The regime is comfortable now that Obama has dropped political reform and democracy, contrary to Bush," says Mustafa. "But the message is clear: Egypt cannot adopt normalization with Israel as part of Obama's plan."

Lee Smith is the author of 'The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations' (Doubleday), forthcoming in January.

“Egypt is among the least of our problems”

1. Egypt was supposed to be a success story for American diplomacy. In reality, they are only so-so.

They are paid 2 billion dollars or so every year since Camp David. For what? For not attacking Israel. While there is no hot war, they are far from normalizing. Egypt’s propaganda machine keeps feelings simmering just under the boil.

2. If our best success story and the best (and most expensive) Arab ally acts that way, what chance does any diplomacy there have? And Obama looks dead set to do something active there.

3. While playing a strong hand might not bring you a desired result in that part of the world, playing a weakling guarantee to fail.

4. As long as Arabs have oil that we consume, that part of the world will continue to draw disproportionate attention.

Egypt is the least of our problems.

1. They are not hostile. They are taking care of THEIR terrorists, and some of ours.

2. It is a success, comparatively speaking. It is not a dictatorship on the level of Syria. It is not a crazed Islamic republic like Iran. It has a reasonably cohesive population. It at least engages with us on human rights. It cooperates with Israel. It has an active, effective civil (as opposed to religious) society. It at least recognizes and is attempting to establish the rule of law. It has an army of judges who are respected across the Middle East. It is working on its government corruption, and is centuries ahead of most other Islamic countries on that score. It has an active media that enjoys much more freedom than media in other Islamic countries, but not of course the same level of freedom enjoyed here. It is not perfect, but that does not mean we should waste time and energy challenging it when there are so many other poisonous fish to fry.

3. It would be pointless and self-defeating to go at the relatively cooperative Egypt when there are so many and much worse bad actors in the region.

4. Egypt has no oil. And Egyptians aren't Arabs.

Egyptians are Hamitic, not Arab. They speak Arabic, but genetically are almost identical to their Old Kingdom ancestors. BTW, Arabs are not descendants of Abraham through Ishmail. They are descended from Shem through the line of Joktan.

After the Muslim conquest of the country, Egyptian converts to Islam were allowed to be adopted by Arabic tribes, and were called mawali. Through intermarriage and acculturation, they eventually became Arab speakers, but they are no more truly Arabic than I am English, just because I happen to speak the language.

They are paid 2 billion dollars or so every year since Camp David. For what?

The original idea was that it would go toward economic development. Bring Egypt into the wester sphere of influence. Perhaps one of Carter's few good ideas. But it was quickly morphed into military aid, the better to kill Israelis with. Eisenhower made the same mistake in 1956, the difference he and Nixon recognized their mistake quickly. Carter is still up in the clouds.

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