Martin Woollacott: Arab Eyes Really Can Travel to Jerusalem Every Day Now
Like Vietnam for America, TV has brought the conflict home.
Fairuz comes to the microphone like a bride to the altar, with her eyes cast down, her features immobile, and her red hair all but concealed under a gauze and gold scarf. Then her wonderfully throaty voice is suddenly hurled at the audience, striking them like a blow. The famous Lebanese singer begins with her most famous song, Jerusalem. They say that even when Muslims and Christians were killing one another in the Lebanese civil war, they would stop to listen to Jerusalem.
Here in Dubai they will not let her go, demanding encore after encore. Time and again she is pulled by insistent applause back to the stage at the American University, sometimes to render the inconsolable love songs which the Middle East adores but above all to give her listeners what they most want, songs of protest at the plight of Palestine and the Palestinians.
The passion which Arabs feel about the Israeli-Palestinian struggle is hardly a surprise, but Dubai is a good place to measure its new intensity. Arabs had become accustomed to the idea that some kind of imperfect peace was being brokered in Palestine. It was a peace which they might despise but which most could reluctantly accept, and it was in any case the basis of political and economic decisions. Now that peace has been replaced by war, and now that the images of that war have been relayed to virtually every household from Morocco to Muscat by the new Arab media, in particular by TV satellite chan nels like al-Jazeera, real rage has replaced what was often the somewhat routine anger of the past.
The sudden immediacy of the Palestine fighting for Arabs and for others has been compared to the effect on American public opinion during the Vietnam conflict of what was then the novel capacity of the American networks to bring the war into American homes. This kind of television came belatedly to the Arab world but it has come, and both America and Israel may have failed to appreciate that there is no such thing as a private war any longer. "Our eyes travel to Jerusalem every day," sings Fairuz, in her version of a poem written many years ago. Or, thanks to television, to Jenin, Hebron and Bethlehem. What was then metaphorically true is now literally so.
Dubai is also a good place to appreciate that a feeling for fellow Arabs and the sense that justice is being denied are not the only reasons for that anger. Arab societies feel directly threatened by the failure so far to contain the conflict, restrain Israel, and impose a return to serious peace negotiations. This is crudely understood if it is seen only as a matter of worried pro-American governments facing a popular unrest centred on the one issue which prevents them using their normal methods of suppressing opposition. There is some truth in that, but what is also true, especially in relatively favoured societies like the Gulf states, is that all the plans for the future, the investment in education, in infrastructure of all kinds, in diversification away from oil, are in jeopardy if war or an occupation punctuated by violence represent the future in Palestine.
Look out on Dubai from the top of one of its many fantastically styled hotels and you see a checkerboard of roads and streets, many of them enclosing nothing but large blocks of sandy land. This is the grid on which the future is being plotted. Here a media centre and an internet centre have been built, there a new financial district is supposed to emerge, here another hotel and conference centre is planned, there a marina or a theme park, and here new government offices. It is a paint-by-numbers city, with many of the panels not yet filled in.
But all this is extremely vulnerable to the impact of war and terrorism, as the aftermath of September 11 showed. Tourism slumped, trade dipped, and the chances of attracting foreign interest or investment narrowed. The Dubai government carried on resolutely sowing the sand with money and there has been an unexpectedly rapid recovery, but the lesson is very clear. If Palestine has no future, and if the almost certain consequences of that are a growth in extremism and terrorism, then Dubai may not have one either - at least not the modern future it now imagines. If these are the difficulties faced by the small Gulf states, how much larger are those facing Saudi Arabia, where the government can no longer afford to keep a growing and youthful population in the style to which their parents were accustomed? And how much larger still those faced by Egypt, with its already huge problems?
The American columnist Tom Friedman has been a tireless advocate of modernisation in the Arab world. He has implied that the internet and the new economy are almost alternatives to old loyalties and obsessions, or solvents of problems that would otherwise remain intractable. Get the globalisation right and the politics will follow seemed to be the message.
But the contrasting message is that only if you get the politics right can modernisation reliably follow. That was certainly one of the themes evident at the conference held in Dubai this week to discuss relations between the Arab and western worlds since September 11, and especially since the intensification of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Since Friedman has become something of a diplomatic player himself after he conveyed Crown Prince Abdullah's peace proposal to the world, some were cheered by his suggestion that a way out of the impasse might be even now in preparation. But many of the Arab delegates wanted to question him on what he has written in the past, and when one of them accused him of having accepted free air travel from the Saudis, he walked out, although he was later persuaded to return.
The incident was a symptom of how troubled are the relations between Arab states and the country to which, as one Arab speaker put it, "we send our children to be educated, we send our money to invest, and to which we take ourselves for holidays." Tom Friedman may be somewhat on the left of the debate in the United States but in Arab eyes that debate is far too skewed toward Israel.
The other side of the American question was represented by John Sununu, the Arab-American chief of staff to the first President Bush at the time the US, in withholding critical loan guarantees, took the only serious punitive action against Israel it has ever taken. His message was to cease the grossly counterproductive business of defending suicide bombers and take up the task, at which Israel has so far been infinitely better, of influencing American opinion and policy.
Most remained un-convinced that martyrs could be obstacles to peace. Sununu was at least a reminder that it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that America can act decisively in the Middle East. As long as Arab eyes travel to Jerusalem every day, Arabs will be waiting for that America to show itself.
m.woollacott@guardian.co.uk
Here in Dubai they will not let her go, demanding encore after encore. Time and again she is pulled by insistent applause back to the stage at the American University, sometimes to render the inconsolable love songs which the Middle East adores but above all to give her listeners what they most want, songs of protest at the plight of Palestine and the Palestinians.
The passion which Arabs feel about the Israeli-Palestinian struggle is hardly a surprise, but Dubai is a good place to measure its new intensity. Arabs had become accustomed to the idea that some kind of imperfect peace was being brokered in Palestine. It was a peace which they might despise but which most could reluctantly accept, and it was in any case the basis of political and economic decisions. Now that peace has been replaced by war, and now that the images of that war have been relayed to virtually every household from Morocco to Muscat by the new Arab media, in particular by TV satellite chan nels like al-Jazeera, real rage has replaced what was often the somewhat routine anger of the past.
The sudden immediacy of the Palestine fighting for Arabs and for others has been compared to the effect on American public opinion during the Vietnam conflict of what was then the novel capacity of the American networks to bring the war into American homes. This kind of television came belatedly to the Arab world but it has come, and both America and Israel may have failed to appreciate that there is no such thing as a private war any longer. "Our eyes travel to Jerusalem every day," sings Fairuz, in her version of a poem written many years ago. Or, thanks to television, to Jenin, Hebron and Bethlehem. What was then metaphorically true is now literally so.
Dubai is also a good place to appreciate that a feeling for fellow Arabs and the sense that justice is being denied are not the only reasons for that anger. Arab societies feel directly threatened by the failure so far to contain the conflict, restrain Israel, and impose a return to serious peace negotiations. This is crudely understood if it is seen only as a matter of worried pro-American governments facing a popular unrest centred on the one issue which prevents them using their normal methods of suppressing opposition. There is some truth in that, but what is also true, especially in relatively favoured societies like the Gulf states, is that all the plans for the future, the investment in education, in infrastructure of all kinds, in diversification away from oil, are in jeopardy if war or an occupation punctuated by violence represent the future in Palestine.
Look out on Dubai from the top of one of its many fantastically styled hotels and you see a checkerboard of roads and streets, many of them enclosing nothing but large blocks of sandy land. This is the grid on which the future is being plotted. Here a media centre and an internet centre have been built, there a new financial district is supposed to emerge, here another hotel and conference centre is planned, there a marina or a theme park, and here new government offices. It is a paint-by-numbers city, with many of the panels not yet filled in.
But all this is extremely vulnerable to the impact of war and terrorism, as the aftermath of September 11 showed. Tourism slumped, trade dipped, and the chances of attracting foreign interest or investment narrowed. The Dubai government carried on resolutely sowing the sand with money and there has been an unexpectedly rapid recovery, but the lesson is very clear. If Palestine has no future, and if the almost certain consequences of that are a growth in extremism and terrorism, then Dubai may not have one either - at least not the modern future it now imagines. If these are the difficulties faced by the small Gulf states, how much larger are those facing Saudi Arabia, where the government can no longer afford to keep a growing and youthful population in the style to which their parents were accustomed? And how much larger still those faced by Egypt, with its already huge problems?
The American columnist Tom Friedman has been a tireless advocate of modernisation in the Arab world. He has implied that the internet and the new economy are almost alternatives to old loyalties and obsessions, or solvents of problems that would otherwise remain intractable. Get the globalisation right and the politics will follow seemed to be the message.
But the contrasting message is that only if you get the politics right can modernisation reliably follow. That was certainly one of the themes evident at the conference held in Dubai this week to discuss relations between the Arab and western worlds since September 11, and especially since the intensification of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Since Friedman has become something of a diplomatic player himself after he conveyed Crown Prince Abdullah's peace proposal to the world, some were cheered by his suggestion that a way out of the impasse might be even now in preparation. But many of the Arab delegates wanted to question him on what he has written in the past, and when one of them accused him of having accepted free air travel from the Saudis, he walked out, although he was later persuaded to return.
The incident was a symptom of how troubled are the relations between Arab states and the country to which, as one Arab speaker put it, "we send our children to be educated, we send our money to invest, and to which we take ourselves for holidays." Tom Friedman may be somewhat on the left of the debate in the United States but in Arab eyes that debate is far too skewed toward Israel.
The other side of the American question was represented by John Sununu, the Arab-American chief of staff to the first President Bush at the time the US, in withholding critical loan guarantees, took the only serious punitive action against Israel it has ever taken. His message was to cease the grossly counterproductive business of defending suicide bombers and take up the task, at which Israel has so far been infinitely better, of influencing American opinion and policy.
Most remained un-convinced that martyrs could be obstacles to peace. Sununu was at least a reminder that it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that America can act decisively in the Middle East. As long as Arab eyes travel to Jerusalem every day, Arabs will be waiting for that America to show itself.
m.woollacott@guardian.co.uk
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