I walked around Cairo yesterday jetlagged and overwhelmed by cultural difference.
The plane takes nearly twice as long to get here as it does to England. We're hundreds of miles east of Istanbul, and it sure feels like the orient. There are mosques everywhere and the muezzin calls all day long. Men with prayer marks on their foreheads push through the souk with trays of tea, and you see women in black burkas with slots to look out of.
I'd heard that most of the women in Cairo are covered, in fact it's almost all. I've only seen a handful of Egyptian women not covered. My guidebook, the Rough Guide, contains the shocking assertion that most Egyptian women have undergone genital mutilation.
I know that these kinds of thoughts are what underlie Benny Morris's barely-veiled racism toward Arabs in his latest book (One State, Two States). Morris, who lives next door in Israel, believes the Palestinians are incapable of getting along with Jews in a binational state. He quotes a lot of people who don’t live here calling for secular democracy and sneers at them for even imagining such a thing in the “totalitarian fundamentalist Islamic Arab” world.
But walking around Cairo I think, Who asked you to come here in the first place and tell these people how to behave? It’s no wonder to me that about high numbers of Israelis have foreign passports, and say they would like to leave if they could.
At the AIPAC convention in Washington earlier this month, the lobby’s executive director Howard Kohr said that he was proud to call Israel an "outpost" of western democracy. But then Kohr doesn’t live here either. He makes a few hundred thousand dollars in D.C. And all I heard when he said that were echoes of Joseph Conrad's horrifying story, An Outpost of Progress, where two colonialists in the Belgian Congo end up going crazy and killing one another. And Jews certainly seem to be going down that path in Israel and Palestine– the ones who haven’t left, that is.
When Herzl first came to Palestine, he described the Arabs as so much filthy beggary, fit to drain the swamps and make the place livable for Jewish writers like himself. Yes, I know, Israel was a settler state, fueled by European persecution, but what’s the difference? All the politicians at AIPAC declaring that Israel made the desert bloom are just serving up warmed-over colonialism. AIPAC and its fellow-lobby, the Israel Project, do the same thing when they seek to justify Israel’s presence by saying that it is providing cutting-edge technology to the west, water desalination and cell-phone innovations. As if that justifies the apartheid policies in the West Bank that the whole world is now appalled by.
Morris quotes people saying that we’re witnessing the end of Zionism, and I nod my head. Why wouldn’t we be? How many American Jews want to visit, let alone move there? Very few. Chas Freeman says that if Israel doesn’t learn how to live with its neighbors it might turn out to be a crusader state, washed away by the sands. But the crusaders got in 200 years.
I know, I’m in culture shock. Right now I wonder if it's not a zero-sum game. Before I left, a Palestinian friend who was visiting New York told me of a vicious argument she'd had with an expatriate Israeli at a clothing store. The Israeli said, So what is the solution? And the Palestinian woman said, The solution is for the rest of you to move to the United States and let us have our land back.
Then the Israeli woman spat back, that her only regret is that she hadn't killed more Palestinian babies when she was in the army. I think that’s another line from Conrad.
