Author Archives: Arab America

For years now, analysts and observers of Palestine have predicted a third intifada, or uprising against occupation. The first intifada which, lasted from 1987 until 1993, caught everyone off guard, and few predicted it. This included the PLO itself.

While political cadres of the various PLO factions were active on the ground in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in leading the intifada, including through the Unified National Leadership, the higher echelons of the exiled PLO leadership soon attempted to direct the spontaneous popular uprising from their bases in Tunisia.

Due to the high level of popular Palestinian support for the PLO at the time, this would have not been a problem, were it not for the way that historical PLO leader Yasser Arafat ultimately directed the intifada.

The hard-fought gains that the Palestinian people won through popular resistance, demonstrations, boycotts, stone throwing and (towards the end of the almost entirely unarmed uprising) some limited guerilla actions against Israeli soldiers, were ultimately squandered by Arafat. This was done even against the wishes of many in the PLO, including the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (led by the late George Habash) and independent intellectuals like Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish.

Said for his part not only left the PLO in protest, but almost immediately saw 1993’s Oslo accords for what they were: “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles,” as he wrote a month after that infamous ceremony on the Whitehouse Lawn and the orchestrated shaking of hands between Arafat and Israeli war criminal Yitzak Rabin. As early as 9 June 1994 Said described the Palestinian Authority as “an Israeli protectorate resembling… a Middle East version of a South African Bantustan” – an analogy which is now made quite often, but would have been far more controversial in those days.

As with the first intifada, so with the second: few people really saw it coming. Although, like the first intifada, the “al-Aqsa intifada” of 2000-2005 began as an unarmed popular uprising of demonstrations, protests and stone throwing, extraordinary Israeli brutality against the demonstrations meant that it soon escalated, and armed Palestinian factions began to strike back.

The Hebrew press reported that Israeli soldiers fired one million bullets at the demonstrations within the first two weeks of the intifada. With such brutality on display, it is no wonder Palestinians began to lose faith in unarmed resistance.

As the first two intifadas were largely unpredicted, it has since become a fairly regular occurrence for pundits to predict a “third intifada”. Usually alongside this prediction comes another: that its first target will be the Palestinian Authority. This makes a certain logical sense, as the PA is – as Edward Said said it would be – little more than a Palestinian subcontractor for the Israeli occupation regime.

And yet, years later, the Palestinian Authority endures. Despite occasional murmurous of discontent and even demonstrations against the PA (such as 2012’s brief surge of protest against the neoliberal policies of unelected former Prime Minister Salim Fayyad), the West Bank seems largely under the control of the PA – and hence of Israel. What accounts for this?

There are many factors, most of which are beyond the scope of this column. But I would like to highlight a central one here: those wanting to know more should read the chapter “Neoliberal Palestine” in my colleague at The Electronic Intifada Ali Abunimah’s latest book, The Battle for Justice in Palestine (which won MEMO’s 2014 Palestine Book Award).

After the end of the second intifada, and especially after 2007, Israel and its allies sought to impose pacification on the Palestinian people in the occupied West Bank under the guise of “economic peace”. That latter year was when a US-Israel-Fatah coup against the elected Palestinian Authority government, led by Hamas, succeeded in the West Bank, but failed in the Gaza Strip where Hamas (Palestine’s Islamic liberation movement) expelled the US-trained forces of Muhammad Dahlan from Gaza (dubbed the “Palestinian Contras” by Abunimah). In that chapter, he outlines how the brutal neoliberal economic policies of Fayyad, backed by the anti-democratic thuggery of Mahmoud Abbas’s US-trained PA forces kept the people under the regime’s thumb.

All this, combined with a new neoliberal spirit of consumerism and culture of debt, means that people are less likely to resist. Any “third intifada” seems a long way off. But the very nature of spontaneous uprising against oppression means few will really see it coming.

An associate editor with The Electronic Intifada, Asa Winstanley is an investigative journalist who lives in London.

Source: www.middleeastmonitor.com

The Roman aqueduct in Wadi Qelt, Jordan Valley, West Bank (Photo: Angela Gruber) Two young Palestinian guys pass by, not looking all too interested in our hiking group, though their facial expressions betray a distinguishable touch of bewilderment. Our routes cross on a small, dusty trail in the Wadi Qelt in the Jordan Valley. As … Continued

ne recent morning, art historian Nada Shabout was telling me about her search for a graduate program two decades ago. “When I contacted universities and said I wanted to work on modern Arab art, they would say, ‘What is that? There is no such thing!’” Shabout said. Academics pointed her to Middle Eastern studies or Islamic art departments. “Now, at least,” she said, “schools are not saying that.”

Shabout earned a Ph.D. in the humanities from the University of Texas at Arlington and is currently an associate professor of art history at the University of North Texas. She is one of a small band of curators and art historians in the West who specialize in modern Middle Eastern art—avant-garde art made in the region beginning in the middle of the last century, frequently in dialogue with peers in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere.

Though contemporary art from the area (the Middle East, MENASA, MENAM—picking a term is tricky) has recently received quite a bit of international notice, thanks to an ascendant market and generous governmental funding, there is still scant knowledge in the West of earlier, modern work. Nevertheless, despite daunting financial, political, and logistical hurdles, a picture of 20th-century Middle Eastern modernism is emerging, and the next few years will see a number of milestones.

“People would look at the work of the Arab modernists and say, ‘This is really pastiche. They’re just copying Picasso or Braque,’” said Venetia Porter, the assistant keeper of Islamic and contemporary Middle Eastern art at the British Museum, which has been a leader in the field.

“In fact,” she continued, “these Middle Eastern artists were going to Paris and Rome to study, sometimes on government scholarships, and of course they were picking up what everyone else was picking up. But the really interesting thing was that they were going back to their own countries and producing work that had new themes. So an Iraqi artist, for example, might be using Cubism to depict a Baghdad street scene.”

“There’s a burgeoning awareness that the story of art as we’ve known it and taught it and presented it is only one story, and that there are many others,” Iwona Blazwick, the director of London’s Whitechapel Gallery, said. “There are multiple modernisms.”

Source: www.artnews.com

Rania Matar was born and raised in Lebanon and moved to the United States in 1984. Originally trained as an architect at the American University of Beirut and at Cornell University, she studied photography at the New England School of Photography and the Maine Photographic Workshops. Matar started teaching photography in 2009 and offered summer photography workshops to teenage girls in Lebanon’s refugee camps with the assistance of non-governmental organizations. She now teaches Personal Documentary Photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and regularly offers talks, class visits and lectures at museums, galleries, schools and colleges in the US and abroad. She is currently a visiting artist and critic at the University of South Florida.

Matar’s work focuses on girls and women. She documents her life through the lives of those around her, focusing on the personal and the mundane in an attempt to portray the universal within the personal. Her work has won several awards, has been featured in numerous publications, and exhibited widely in the U.S. and internationally. Her images are in the permanent collections of several museums worldwide.

Her first book titled Ordinary Lives was released October 2009, published by the Quantuck Lane Press and distributed by W.W. Norton. Rania’s latest monograph, A Girl and Her Room, published by Umbrage Editions was released in May 2012.

Source: www.aquila-style.com

Zena Fakhouri (left), Saba Aljahmi, Chelsea Liddy, and Dillon Fuad Odeh—staff and volunteers of Center for Arab American Philanthropy—sell jewelry and other items at the 100 Arab-American Women Who Care event. Photo by Teresa Duhl On March 28, 140 Arab-American women gathered at the Arab American National Museum to fulfill the promise of an event … Continued

Wearing the hijab, abstention from alcohol and praying five times a day are not tenets widely found among rappers, but that is not stopping a London-based duo.

In a male dominated-genre, Muneera Williams and Sukina Owen-Douglas are breaking through the hip hop scene with electrifying performances under the name of “Poetic Pilgrimage.”

“There’s this dichotomy,” Owen-Douglas, 33, told the Telegraph as she expalined the paradox her and partner often encounter.

“Some days I’d walk down the street in my hijab with my headphones on listening to the Wu-Tang Clan. I’d catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and laugh. Someone would see me and probably think I can’t speak English properly, but I’m actually listening to rap.”

The Muslim duo is aware that they are shattering stereotypes.

“They think we’ll do some poetry, or sing, or be really soft. But I used to rap really hard, and I think it was because of these stereotypes.”

“I wasn’t overcompensating, but we were trying to be like, we can rap just as hard as the guys. We’re not these kind of fragile, petalled flowers.”

The two have been rapping for almost 10 years now, since they left their hometown of Bristol to study at the University of London.

They fended off stereotypes from both camps, Muslim peers who believe music is frowned upon and non-Muslim peers who choose to ascribe them the image of how a Muslim woman ought to be.

“It’s really because we’re women, or we’re doing music,” Williams, 34, said.

“There’s this idea [in Islam that] our voices are beauty, and we shouldn’t show our beauty.”

During performances at Muslim community centers, Williams and Owen-Douglas were on occasion asked to sit down throughout their performance. In another event, organizers asked them to perform behind a screen.

Although happily married, Owen Douglas said that people often tell her Muslim husband that his wife should not be showing off her voice on stage.

To which he responds: “He’s always like, have you heard my wife rap? That’s not beautification – she’s scaring people.”

As to critics outside the Muslim community, they too seem to preach a certain image the women should be wearing.

“We get expectations of what we should be,” Williams.

“People are always like, you should write a song about the Quran. They want us to be their poster girl and not say anything against [Muslims].”

Poetic Pilgrimage are crafting their own music and exuding their own image. They are incorporating their Caribbean heritage and their Islamic faith – to which they converted 10 years ago- into their music.

Poetic Pilgirimage songs preach about embracing one’s self, female empowerment, and social and political issues. And their conversion into Islam did not erode their Caribbean or British heritage, they say.

“My national dress isn’t a Shalwar Kameez – it’s H&M,” Owen-Douglas assertes.

“Some people think the…west and Islam can’t meet. But we can’t ever have that stance because that’s who we are.”

Source: english.alarabiya.net

JAMES ABOUREZK   The Minnesota State Board of Investment is honor bound when it invests monies from Minnesota’s public employee pension funds. Each of the Board members, which includes Governor Mark Dayton (Chair), State Auditor Rebecca Otto, Secretary of State Steve Simon and Attorney General Lori Swanson know, or should know, that the Board has … Continued

Vine star and Instagrammer Amy Roko, 22, is the Gulf’s latest social media sensation. Based in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, Amy took her short comedy sketches to Vine and Instagram hoping to make her friends laugh. In just a few months, she’s garnered 475,000 followers on Instagram and almost 60,000 on Vine. But online … Continued

It’s an old gambit—slipping out of a hotel in the dead of night to dodge the bill. But it’s a bit tricky when you have an entourage of 60 people, a balance of more than $7 million, and a fleet of limousines and other vehicles waiting to collect you and your mountains of bags. That … Continued

VOI’s Palestinian affair analyst Bassem Eid joins VOI’s Dan Diker in-studio and charges that the South African leadership of the global BDS campaign is discrediting and assaulting working-class Palestinians who are trying to earn a living. Read more at http://www.breakingisraelnews.com/33666/bassem-eid-bds-is-a-prelude-for-genocide-against-the-palestinian-people-israel-radio/#OF0BQWrRJLCxT0gC.99

The idea of making cartoons was started after the war, after being inspired to help the many traumatised children within Gaza. They suffered from psychological and behavioural problems during the war, as with all children living in a state of armed violence. Their idea behind the cartoons is to show the world what the children … Continued