The Gaza withdrawal and Israel's next move

Having spent decades under fire from Hamas mortar shells and gunfire, the final destruction of the settlements in Gaza comes at the hands of the same people who guarded them for so long. Armour-plated D9 bulldozers, so used to tearing up Palestinian towns in often fruitless terrorist hunts, are standing by in Gush Katif and elsewhere, ready to rub out the final vestiges of this ultimately untenable 38-year occupation. For the settlers, many of them veterans of the euphoric rush that followed the success in the 1967 war, this cannot be how they expected things to end.

With the dismantling of the Gaza settlements, the dream of ‘Greater Israel’ dies. While the pictures of tearful settlers being forcefully evicted may well evoke sadness, their own raison d’etre for continuing the illegal occupation inspires nothing but scorn. According to their strict beliefs, Israel’s destiny is the complete control of the area between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. In this imagined country, Jews would dominate entirely, with Palestinians working as a lower, servile class, while a rabbinical order would effectively run the country. The Knesset, or Israeli parliament, would exist largely to rubber-stamp the religious proclamations. Only then would the redemption of the Jews be complete, and the Messiah return to Earth. Anybody coming from a rational mindset will find it hard to empathise over such obvious nonsense.

Ariel Sharon is a man who, despite his secular views, has long known how to utilise the fervour of the Israeli right, moulding their religious passion into realisable geopolitical goals. As one of the key architects of settlement expansion, his 2003 decision to withdraw unilaterally from Gaza and parts of the West Bank was greeted with a timorous rage from the Israeli right, even while it was scorned by the Palestinians and much of the Israeli left as an empty gesture that would never come to fruition. Yet it has happened, and – despite the best efforts of the settlers, plus thousands of supporters from across the country and around the world – the actual disengagement proceeded in a surprisingly easy manner. Already, the time has come to try and see what exactly Ariel Sharon is planning for the future.

A recent article in the New Statesman by Lindsey Hilsum detailed the planned extensions to settlements in the West Bank around the Palestinian areas of Jerusalem. According to Hilsum, the idea is to create a ring around the city, in the form of what are euphemistically termed ‘facts on the ground’ – newly established communities that, with the Gaza pullout so fresh in mind, will be seen as permanent bases. The new settlements almost bisect the West Bank, further imperilling the future possibility of a viable Palestinian state. Although this activity explicitly contradicts the terms of the multilaterally agreed ‘road map’ for peace drawn up in 2003, it is unlikely that the Israeli government will be censured.

Concurrent with this, the ‘security’ wall (which will likely provide anything but) continues to be erected, with its planned completion estimated at some time in 2006. The effect of these of encroachments into Palestinian territory – which stray far over the pre-1967 green line – will be to further isolate the Palestinians who live there. Already, lives and livelihoods are being destroyed by the wall, which often cuts right through Palestinian towns, rendering what was a twenty minute walk to work into a several-hour-long endurance test through an Israeli checkpoint. Under the auspices of ‘security’, the wall’s true, racist agenda – to keep a Jewish majority in Israel, and delay the ‘demographic time bomb’ that will see the Arab population outstrip the Jewish one – is never mentioned.

The problem for the Palestinians now is that they have been left with the same paradigmatic aim as before, but one whose realisation is ever more jeapordised by Israel’s go-it-alone stance. The scenes in Gaza, of IDF forces advancing on settlers who throw rocks and call them Nazis, were captured on camera for a worldwide audience. Seeing such trauma, how can the world expect Israel to disengage from the far larger settlements in the West Bank – let alone even consider the idea of a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem? For the Palestinians, however, nothing has changed: these are still, rightfully, the demands that must be agreed if a viable peace is to be reached.

For now, they will have to bide their time and see what happens in Israel before knowing where to turn next. It remains to be seen whether Hamas will continue with the ceasefire that they have admirably held during the pullout; for mortar shells to rain down on Israel from newly re-taken positions in the former settlements will be proof that the Israelis truly have no partner for peace. For the future, much will depend on how civil society in Israel leans after the next election. If Binyamin Netanyahu, who quit the government in protest at the Gaza withdrawal, mounts a successful challenge to Ariel Sharon’s leadership, then the Palestinians can expect little more concessions. With Sharon, as the NS article shows, the future is murky to say the least. The new West Bank settlements may indicate his intentions but, as Gaza shows, even facts on the ground can be altered; and the fact that the man who was long regarded as the patron of the settler movement can be the one who orders their destruction shows how little can be taken for granted as Palestine and Israel fumble in the dark for an ever-elusive peace.

On the question of an Islamic 'reformation'

Writing in the Times, Salman Rushdie this week outlined his view that the Muslim world is in dire need of an equivalent to the Reformation; a process by which Islam would move on from the dogmatic, strict interpretation that it now favours, and recognise that the Koran is a historical product of a time and place – 7th century Arabia – and that its central tenets are subject to interpretation.

Leaving aside the slight, yet palpable, suggestion that he is merely agitating for the release of his forthcoming novel (which purportedly tackles Islamic extremism), Rushdie does indeed raise a number of interesting points. In the years since Muslim extremism became such a topic of concern in the West (which predates the attacks on the USA by nearly a decade), thousands upon thousands of words have been poured onto the subject of what can be done about Islam, and how it can be rid of the elements which cause well-educated individuals to wish to blow themselves up on packed trains, or fly jets into skyscrapers.

That he should highlight the Protestant Reformation as an exemplary model is an interesting conceit. Part of the Reformation’s appeal was that of a nascent nationalist fervour – the kind of which had never been experience to such a degree by the Christian faith. The Middle East, on one hand, has experimented with secular, pan-Arab nationalism, yet Nasserism is regarded now by most as a failure and by some of the radical members of Islam as sacrilegious. Meanwhile, the arch-nationalism of Pakistan has resulted in the ‘Muslim bomb’ and a potential nuclear flashpoint in the Indian subcontinent.

One thing all too often lacking from discussion of the moribund state of Islamic debate in the modern era is the fact that, traditionally, Islam has been a religion of enlightened and reasoned dialogue. The term ijtihad refers to a practice in Islamic law whereby decisions are reached by the examination and verification of both the Koran and the Sunnah, the Prophet Mohammed’s sayings. In the first few centuries after the Prophet’s death, ijtihad lent Islam a tolerant and pluralistic tone, whereby interpretation of Koranic verses were shifting and open to discussion, and laws divined according not to a ‘true’ (in any sense of the word) meaning but through the rational analyses offered by the mujtahid, or scholar.

By the time of the retreat from Al-Andalus in the late 15th century, the tradition had largely died out. What replaced it, and as Rushdie highlights has remained until the modern era, is a strictly dogmatic, literalistic interpretation of the Koran that has led to a stymieing of open thought and an increasingly restricted tolerance of alternative readings. As Karen Armstrong noted in the Guardian, it is this blinkered outlook that has led those who wish to create death and destruction to seek vindication in lines such as “slay unbelievers where you find them”. Removed from contextual anchoring, deprived of the epithets of tolerance, compassion and regard for others, such lines can justify any number of tragic excesses.

The tricky part, of course, is that it is relatively easy for us in the West to discuss in dispassionate tones the hows and whys and wherefores of changes in Islamic practice. Yet in a religion which, particularly in the Middle East, considers itself under constant siege from Judaeo-Christian ‘crusaders’, our views do not hold much weight and indeed will inevitably be interpreted as mendacious and entirely self-serving. The talk of freedom and democracy, and America’s supposed desire to bring them across the wider Middle East, have backfired spectacularly and – as can be seen daily in Iraq – spawned an entirely new generation of individuals who will pay the ultimate price to inflict harm on their enemy. As a Muslim, Rushdie may well have more influence, yet his notoriety following the publication of the Satanic Verses, after which he was (and to many remains) an apostate who should be put to death, surely precludes any equitable analysis.

Indeed, it is difficult to know where exactly to look for a change in the Muslim world. Tariq Ramadan is rightly lauded for his belief that Muslims living in Europe should integrate fully with their home countries, in the process rejecting the idea of the umma. Ramadan sees no real conflict in living in a modern, largely secular West, and being a Muslim; yet he remains a strict literalist when it comes to the issue of Koranic interpretation.

It is surely only by divorcing the literalist teachings of the Koran from their implementation in modern society that we can hope for better relations between Islam and the West. Yet it cannot be willed on by divisive figures such as Rushdie, or the lesser-known (and bitter because of it) Irshad Manji, a self-styled ‘Muslim refusenik’ with a terminally swollen ego, who seems to believe that Islam is a malleable object that should be conformed to fit one particular ideology – her own. The reformation, if there is to be one, must come from within.

In Defence Of Adam Curtis

In his BBC series, “The New Al-Qaeda”, Peter Taylor opens with a non-too-subtle dig at one of last year’s most controversial documentaries:

“Some people saw the idea of al-Qaeda as a nightmare drawn up by politicians to increase their power… it was not a view I shared”

It was a reference to the “The Power Of Nightmares”, a documentary put together last year by Adam Curtis, which –through a compelling mixture of interviews, archive footage and clever juxtapositions – offered an analysis of the roots of both Islamic fundamentalism and Western neo-conservatism. One of Curtis’ conclusions was that the threat posed by al-Qaeda is in fact hyped up beyond its realistic level, in order that the politicians with the “darkest nightmares”, as the filmmaker put it, can control and manipulate populations.

Evidently, in the light of the past four weeks in London alone, the threat exists, and – if we believe reports of previously foiled attacks – it has always existed. Several people have been quick to jump up and take a few potshots in Curtis’ direction, eviscerating him for what they see as an irresponsibly triumphalist attitude towards terrorism, accusing him of naiveté and claiming that his thesis was blown apart in the wreckage of the no. 30 bus and the dead bodies on the Underground.

Yet Curtis never suggested that the threat was non-existent. In fact, the contrary – he maintained that it was highly likely an attack would be mounted in Britain. Writing in the aftermath of Bali, Istanbul and Madrid, to have suggested otherwise would have been foolish. Rather, Curtis’ main conjecture is that – instead of al-Qaeda representing a mortal threat to civilisation as we know it, manifested through ‘sleeper cells’ that can be activated at a moment’s notice – the threat is from small-scale operations that have no tangible connection with an international terrorist organisation, other than sharing the desire to maim and injure as many as possible.

Despite the protestations of Ayman al-Zawahri, whose video message this week warned of new attacks, it is highly unlikely that the July 7th and 21st bombers had any collusion with the al-Qaeda leadership. It has become a predictable pattern: shortly after an attack, al-Qaeda releases a videotape claiming responsibility. Presumably, the two-or-three week gap is due to the difficulty of finding videotapes and camera equipment in the mountains of Waziristan, where Zawahri and bin Laden are thought to be hiding. In 2003 they even claimed responsibility for the blackout that affected the northeastern US and Canada.

Politicians seem to be caught in two minds over the seriousness of the threat. On the one hand, Tony Blair, Ken Livingstone, and others, have defiantly proclaimed that our way of life, our very “freedoms” (the things, we are told, that the terrorists despise) will not change. Simultaneously, however, the government is considering introducing a bespoke collection of new laws that will legislate and undoubtedly transform the lifestyles that we are all accustomed. Already an innocent man has been shot dead, although admittedly the shoot-to-kill policy that resulted in the death of Jean Charles de Menezes was not a new one. Yet the police presence on our streets has been stepped up considerably, possibly for the foreseeable future; random searches are being introduced (and – despite protestations to the opposite – they will be racially biased and hence contribute to feelings of persecution already felt by Muslims); and the Met Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, reiterates daily his desire to hold suspects for up to three months without charging them.

Simon Jenkins, in an article in the Sunday Times, suggests that the constant elevating of the threat, the repeated proclamations that further attacks are ‘imminent’, the repetitive warnings that the police are stretched to their very limits – all of these actually help to lift terrorism, wrongly, onto the plateau of civilisation-threatening danger. Yet – to go back, finally, to Curtis – the British state itself is, quite simply, not at risk. The nightmares created by politicians seem to have taken root firmly in the minds of the populace, and it is time to snap out of it and recognise the lies and exaggerations for what they are.