An Unacceptable Helplessness

One opens The New York Times on a daily basis to read the most recent article about the preparationsfor war that are taking place in the United States. Another battalion, one more set of aircraft carriers andcruisers, an ever-increasing number of aircraft, new contingents of officers are being moved to the PersianGulf area. 62,000 more soldiers were transferred to the Gulf last weekend. An enormous, deliberatelyintimidating force is being built up by America overseas, while inside the country, economic and social badnews multiply with a joint relentlessness.

The huge capitalist machine seems to be faltering, even as it grinds down the vast majority of citizens.Nonetheless, George Bush proposes another large tax cut for the one per cent of the population that iscomparatively rich. The public education system is in a major crisis, and health insurance for 50 millionAmericans simply does not exist. Israel asks for 15 billion dollars in additional loan guarantees and militaryaid. And the unemployment rates in the US mount inexorably, as more jobs are lost every day.

Nevertheless, preparations for an unimaginably costly war continue and continue without either publicapproval or dramatically noticeable disapproval. A generalised indifference (which may conceal great over-allfear, ignorance and apprehension) has greeted the administration's war- mongering and its strangelyineffective response to the challenge forced on it recently by North Korea.

In the case of Iraq, with no weapons of mass destruction to speak of, the US plans a war; in the case ofNorth Korea, it offers that country economic and energy aid. What a humiliating difference between contemptfor the Arabs and respect for North Korea, an equally grim, and cruel dictatorship.

In the Arab and Muslim worlds, the situation appears more peculiar. For almost a year American politicians,regional experts, administration officials, journalists have repeated the charges that have become standardfare so far as Islam and the Arabs are concerned. Most of this chorus pre- dates 11 September, as I have shownin my books Orientalism and Covering Islam.

To today's practically unanimous chorus has been added the authority of the United Nation's HumanDevelopment Report on the Arab world which certified that Arabs dramatically lag behind the rest of the worldin democracy, knowledge, and women's rights. Everyone says (with some justification, of course) that Islamneeds reform and that the Arab educational system is a disaster, in effect, a school for religious fanaticsand suicide bombers funded not just by crazy imams and their wealthy followers (like Osama Bin Laden) but alsoby governments who are supposed allies of the United States.

The only "good" Arabs are those who appear in the media decrying modern Arab culture and societywithout reservation. I recall the lifeless cadences of their sentences for, with nothing positive to say aboutthemselves or their people and language, they simply regurgitate the tired American formulas already floodingthe airwaves and pages of print.

We lack democracy, they say, we haven't challenged Islam enough, we need to do more about driving away thespecter of Arab nationalism and the credo of Arab unity. That is all discredited, ideological rubbish. Onlywhat we, and our American instructors, say about the Arabs and Islam -- vague re- cycled Orientalist clichésof the kind repeated by a tireless mediocrity like Bernard Lewis -- is true.

The rest isn't realistic or pragmatic enough. "We" need to join modernity, modernity in effectbeing Western, globalised, free- marketed, democratic -- whatever those words might be taken to mean. (If Ihad the time, there would be an essay to be written about the prose style of people like Ajami, Gerges, Makiya,Talhami, Fandy et. al., academics whose very language reeks of subservience, inauthenticity and a hopelesslystilted mimicry that has been thrust upon them).

The clash of civilisations that George Bush and his minions are trying to fabricate as a cover for apreemptive oil and hegemony war against Iraq is supposed to result in a triumph of democratic nation-building,regime change and forcible modernisation à l'américaine. Never mind the bombs and the ravages of thesanctions which are unmentioned.

This will be a purifying war whose goal is to throw out Saddam and his men and replace them with a re-drawnmap of the whole region. New Sykes Picot. New Balfour. New Wilsonian 14 points. New world altogether. Iraqis,we are told by the Iraqi dissidents, will welcome their liberation, and perhaps forget entirely about theirpast sufferings. Perhaps.

Meanwhile, the soul-and-body destroying situation in Palestine worsens all the time. There seems no forcecapable of stopping Sharon and Mofaz, who bellow their defiance to the whole world. We forbid, we punish, weban, we break, we destroy. The torrent of unbroken violence against an entire people continues.

As I write these lines, I am sent an announcement that the entire village of Al-Daba' in the Qalqilya areaof the West Bank is about to be wiped out by 60- ton American-made Israeli bulldozers: 250 Palestinians willlose their 42 houses, 700 dunums of agricultural land, a mosque, and an elementary school for 132 children.The United Nations stands by, looking on as its resolutions are flouted on an hourly basis. Typically, alas,George Bush identifies with Sharon, not with the 16-year-old Palestinian kid who is used as a human shield byIsraeli soldiers.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority offers a return to peacemaking, and presumably, to Oslo. Having beenburned for 10 years the first time, Arafat seems inexplicably to want to have another go at it. His faithfullieutenants make declarations and write opinion pieces for the press, suggesting their willingness to acceptanything, more or less.

Remarkably though, the great mass of this heroic people seems willing to go on, without peace and withoutrespite, bleeding, going hungry, dying day by day. They have too much dignity and confidence in the justice oftheir cause to submit shamefully to Israel, as their leaders have done. What could be more discouraging forthe average Gazan who goes on resisting Israeli occupation than to see his or her leaders kneel as supplicantsbefore the Americans?

In this entire panorama of desolation, what catches the eye is the utter passivity and helplessness of theArab world as a whole. The American government and its servants issue statement after statement of purpose,they move troops and material, they transport tanks and destroyers, but the Arabs individually andcollectively can barely muster a bland refusal (at most they say, no, you cannot use military bases in ourterritory) only to reverse themselves a few days later.

Why is there such silence and such astounding helplessness?

The largest power in history is about to launch and is unremittingly reiterating its intention to launch awar against a sovereign Arab country now ruled by a dreadful regime, a war the clear purpose of which is notonly to destroy the Baathi regime but to re-design the entire region. The Pentagon has made no secret that itsplans are to re-draw the map of the whole Arab world, perhaps changing other regimes and many borders in theprocess.

No one can be shielded from the cataclysm when it comes (if it comes, which is not yet a completecertainty). And yet, there is only long silence followed by a few vague bleats of polite demurral in response.After all, millions of people will be affected. America contemptuously plans for their future withoutconsulting them. Do we reserve such racist derision?

This is not only unacceptable: it is impossible to believe. How can a region of almost 300 million Arabswait passively for the blows to fall without attempting a collective roar of resistance and a loudproclamation of an alternative view? Has the Arab will completely dissolved? Even a prisoner about to beexecuted usually has some last words to pronounce. Why is there now no last testimonial to an era of history,to a civilisation about to be crushed and transformed utterly, to a society that despite its drawbacks andweaknesses nevertheless goes on functioning.

Arab babies are born every hour, children go to school, men and women marry and work and have children,they play, and laugh and eat, they are sad, they suffer illness and death. There is love and companionship,friendship and excitement. Yes, Arabs are repressed and misruled, terribly misruled, but they manage to go onwith the business of living despite everything. This is the fact that both the Arab leaders and the UnitedStates simply ignore when they fling empty gestures at the so-called "Arab street" invented bymediocre Orientalists.

But who is now asking the existential questions about our future as a people? The task cannot be left to acacophony of religious fanatics and submissive, fatalistic sheep. But that seems to be the case. The Arabgovernments -- no, most of the Arab countries from top to bottom -- sit back in their seats and just wait asAmerica postures, lines up, threatens and ships out more soldiers and F-16's to deliver the punch. The silenceis deafening.

Years of sacrifice and struggle, of bones broken in hundreds of prisons and torture chambers from theAtlantic to the Gulf, families destroyed, endless poverty and suffering. Huge, expensive armies. For what?

This is not a matter of party or ideology or faction: it's a matter of what the great theologian PaulTillich used to call ultimate seriousness. Technology, modernisation and certainly globalisation are not theanswer for what threatens us as a people now. We have in our tradition an entire body of secular and religiousdiscourse that treats of beginnings and endings, of life and death, of love and anger, of society and history.

This is there, but no voice, no individual with great vision and moral authority seems able now to tap intothat, and bring it to attention. We are on the eve of a catastrophe that our political, moral and religiousleaders can only just denounce a little bit while, behind whispers and winks and closed doors, they make planssomehow to ride out the storm. They think of survival, and perhaps of heaven. But who is in charge of thepresent, the worldly, the land, the water, the air and the lives dependent on each other for existence?

No one seems to be in charge. There is a wonderful colloquial expression in English that very precisely andironically catches our unacceptable helplessness, our passivity and inability to help ourselves now when ourstrength is most needed. The expression is: will the last person to leave please turn out the lights? We arethat close to a kind of upheaval that will leave very little standing and perilously little left even torecord, except for the last injunction that begs for extinction.

Hasn't the time come for us collectively to demand and try to formulate a genuinely Arab alternative to thewreckage about to engulf our world? This is not only a trivial matter of regime change, although God knowsthat we can do with quite a bit of that. Surely it can't be a return to Oslo, another offer to Israel toplease accept our existence and let us live in peace, another cringing crawling inaudible plea for mercy. Willno one come out into the light of day to express a vision for our future that isn't based on a script writtenby Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, those two symbols of vacant power and overweening arrogance? I hopesomeone is listening.

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