Intolerable cruelty
Ξ December 31st, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Uncategorized |
Through the Iron Cage
by publius
I haven’t waded in too deeply into Gaza ? largely because I’ve been holiday traveling. I did, though, happen to be reading Rashid Khalidi’s most excellent The Iron Cage, which provides some interesting longer-term perspective on the ongoing tragedy. Below, then, are just a few scattered thoughts on the book that are hopefully relevant to recent events. (Khalidi is the moderate and well-respected scholar that McCain shamelessly attacked in the closing days of the election).
To begin, what really becomes clear in reading The Iron Cage is how profoundly ignorant Americans (including me) are about the region and its history. And the ignorance exists on many different levels.
For one, Americans (including me) are simply blind to the region’s past. They don’t even see it ? or at best see some fairy tale make-believe version. And it’s hard to make them see it because our media and educational systems do a horrible job integrating that history into the lens of current events. To us, the world starts anew with each new rocket attack ? that’s all we see, and that’s where our analysis begins.
But that’s not what actual Palestinians see. They see — indeed, they have lived — the institutional obstacles that Western powers (particularly the British, who owe every Palestinian an annuity) have erected against a viable Palestinian state for nearly a century. They also see quite clearly how Western meddling ? e.g., the creation of Hamas to undermine Arafat; arming Afghan tribes to fight Communism ? are proximate causes of modern suffering in the region. In other words, they see what Americans don’t see, which is that the West helped create much of this mess, but now refuses to help fix it.
Americans are also quite ignorant of Palestinians’ (and Muslims’ more generally) subjective perceptions of these actions. In particular, they don’t understand how the scars of repressive colonialism color modern perceptions. If we were aware that the legacy of colonial occupation still sears the region’s consciousness, we’d be less willing to support, you know, imperial occupations of former colonies.
The sad truth is that an honest debate about what’s going today is difficult because so many Americans (me included) just don’t know anything about anything there.
One additional thought in reading Khalidi’s book is how truly shameful McCain’s attacks were at the close of the campaign. A Cold War historian friend of mine said in an email that it was “the moral lowpoint of McCain’s campaign.”
There’s a decent amount of competition for that honor, but it’s a strong candidate for sure. It’s not merely that Khalidi is an extremely well-respected scholar. He’s actually considered fairly moderate. Indeed, one interesting aspect of the Iron Cage is that he assigns both agency and blame to the failures of the Palestinian leadership. To be sure, he notes that the British and other external forces play extremely important roles as well in creating the modern-day Palestinian misery. But the implication that Khalidi is some sort of dangerous radical is not just absurd ? it’s flatly dishonest and not a little racist.
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