Total number of comments: 65 (since 2010-01-09 17:39:44)
BenjaminGeer
PhD student in Middle East Studies
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The more individuals make a conscious decision to abandon the seductive but pernicious notion of "my people" and to see all humanity as their people, the fewer horrors human beings will have to endure.
"Common" is not the same thing as "good". You can still use the "ethnic states are morally unacceptable" argument.
I like the idea of a political party. As for organising a conference, Cairo might not be the best choice. I've seen reports of Palestinians being denied entry to Egypt without any explanation:
link to jsonline.com
link to gulfnews.com
For details, see:
link to bit.ly
link to bit.ly
There were several different elections in Germany in 1932. In the Reichstag elections on 31 July, the Nazi party won 37.3% of the vote; while this was not a majority, it gave them 230 seats and made them the largest parliamentary group. The web page you cited doesn't make this clear, and also fails to cite any sources.
Academics are human beings; they make mistakes, and on occasion can even be dishonest, like anyone else. This is not news. But they are expected to support their arguments with logic and verifiable evidence, and in the long run, they are held accountable to their peers. The same cannot be said of just anyone who publishes something on a web page. This in itself is a compelling reason to have much more confidence in academic texts than in random web pages, and to resist all attempts to undermine the authority of academic research in general.
Oren, the idea of a single secular democratic state for Israelis and Palestinians is a perfectly reasonable one, and seems to have been gaining popularity among Palestinians. Please see Ali Abuhimah's book One Country for an in-depth discussion.
It sounds like you handled the whole thing pretty well, Philip. I'm glad you didn't try to lecture anyone on the status of women in the Arab world. But I think you should really try let go of that feeling of "tribal allegiance", and see all humanity as your tribe instead. I think this can only strengthen the moral force of your arguments. Representing universal human values is a lot more powerful than representing Jews or any other group.
Please don't say "crusaders". It conveys the opposite of the message you intend.
I think apartheid is a good analogy, and Palestinians are right to use it. I was in college in the US at the height of the campaign to divest from South Africa, so the word "apartheid" is a permanent part of my political vocabulary. But I'm starting to worry that a lot of younger people have never heard of apartheid.
Sure, someone should make a programme like that. But a television programme is probably only going to be seen on one particular day in history, by whoever happens to be watching that channel on that day. Meanwhile millions of people are born every year who will never see it. That's why a school textbook can have a much bigger influence than a television programme. What you could hope for is that if enough television programmes are made, and enough books are published, even if they only reach a small audience, eventually, if you're lucky, some people in that audience will go on to change school curricula.
Sorry, typo there: should be "Cairo International Book Fair".
Sure. But you can't acknowledge the reality of the events unless you have some way of finding out what they are. Access to reliable historical information is a prerequisite for the kind of reasoning you're talking about. And it's important to think about what "access" means in practice. One thing that Achcar and I were lamenting over dinner last night is the Arabic publishing industry's very poor distribution networks. In Egypt, for example, a lot of books only appear once a year, at the Cairo International Fair. And they're very expensive for most Egyptians. This means that, in practice, if a historical event isn't taught in school, most people here will probably never learn about it. In the US and Europe, the Holocaust is taught in school history classes; in Egypt, it's not.
The atmosphere at my university (SOAS) is, overall, very pro-Palestinian. Pappe regularly appears at events organised by the SOAS Palestine Society. After a while, it's easy to forget that not all of academia is like this. Still, don't forget that the Journal of Palestine Studies is produced in Washington, D.C., and published by the University of California Press at Berkeley, and that almost everyone on its editorial committee teaches in the US. Edward Said's whole academic career was in the US. Same for As’ad AbuKhalil, Beshara Doumani, etc.
At the moment I'm in Cairo (where the atmosphere is, of course, even more pro-Palestinian than at SOAS), and yesterday I had dinner with Gilbert Achcar, who teaches at SOAS and has just published a book called The Arabs and the Holocaust. He said he agrees that belief in the authenticity of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is widespread in the Arab world, and that one of the reasons for Holocaust denial here is the lack of reliable information about the Holocaust in Arabic. (There's the Aladdin Project, which has translated Primo Levi and Anne Frank into Arabic, but without showing much awareness of what they'd need to do to be taken seriously in the Arab world.)
Probably.
I don't buy that. One journal, yes, but not a whole sector. Sokal himself wrote that his hoax
Which is not news. Every academic knows that some journals are much better than others.
No one said it was easy. But the bottom line is that he passed peer review and got his book published. So I think there's still hope for science.
You missed my point above. Academic pedigree isn't something that's acquired all of a sudden, once and for all. Peer review is only the beginning of the process. The more controversial a piece of research is, the longer it generally takes for its reliability to be determined. If you want to know how controversial something is, you generally just have to wait a bit after it's published, to see how other academics react to it. All academics have rivals who are only too happy to try to poke holes in their research. And this is exactly what happened with The Case for Israel. Finkelstein's critique in Beyond Chutzpah was peer-reviewed and published. That's an example of science working the way it's supposed to.
By the way, if you want to know more about the changes in Middle East Studies in recent decades, a good book on the subject is Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism by Zachary Lockman.
Tuyzentfloot, as I said, sometimes peer review does go bad. I don't know whether Dershowitz's book was actually peer reviewed in the first place; it looks to me as if it's somewhere in the grey area between mass-market books and academic texts. I agree that political bias has especially been a problem in research related to Israel. But things have changed a lot since Edward Said published Orientalism, and I think the increasing number of Arab scholars in Middle East Studies in European and American universities in the past few decades has made a big difference.
Cliff, you didn't read what I wrote before responding to it. Once again:
Yes, bias still exists. Sometimes major flaws do get past peer review, but they usually get dealt with in the subsequent literature. And if you feel that some important bias has been ignored, you can always get a PhD and critique it yourself. Academia is full of people like that.
That's a very controversial book. Dershowitz hasn't exactly had an easy ride.
What David Cook thinks of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and what As’ad AbuKhalil might think of David Cook, are irrelevant to the question at hand. I don't have to agree or disagree with a scholar's political opinions to consider his scholarship reliable. Science doesn't work that way. Yes, people's political views do influence their research, but the system of academic peer review puts severe constraints on this influence, especially at the best publishers and in the best journals. Peer reviewers are often hostile, keen to find any possible flaw, and have political and theoretical commitments that are opposed to those of the author.
The book I cited, Cook's Martyrdom in Islam, was published by Cambridge University Press, which means that it was subjected to a tough peer review. This is the main reason to be confident in its reliability. Moreover, Kamran Aghaie, an Iranian, gave the book a very positive review in the academic journal Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
VR, you still haven't read what I wrote. I didn't say the British didn't give the Zionists anything. I said they didn't give them Palestine. When you give someone something, you do all the work to produce the gift, and they do nothing. You agree that that's not what happened. So my statement is correct.
As for David Cook, Campus Watch isn't a reliable authority on anything. It's pretty self-contradictory of you to use a Zionist witch-hunt web site as an authority on academic research, and it's reprehensible of you to resort to an ad hominem argument.
As for you, it doesn't matter who you are. What matters is that you make unsubstantiated claims and can't provide evidence when pressed.
VR, I hate to say this, but please learn to read. I wrote:
Read it again. Slowly. The point here is simply that Britain didn't create the state of Israel with no help from Zionists. I was replying to Mooser, whose description seemed to portray Zionists as completely passive, as if Britain and/or the UN had created Israel for them, while they had done nothing. I was simply pointing out that there was an armed Zionist movement in Palestine that actively pursued a policy of ethnic cleansing. Got it?
Again: learn to read. My whole argument in this discussion has been that "peoples" don't exist in the first place, so there's no such thing as self-determination of any "people", ever, anywhere.
VR, whenever you reply to anything I've written, I feel as if I'm dealing with some kind of Orwellian thought police, demanding constant ritualistic condemnation of Zionism and reiteration of its crimes in every single sentence I write. Wake up, man! Zionism has already been debunked, and its crimes have been described extensively. In my world, those things practically go without saying, and you're not adding anything to the discussion by repeating them again and again. I'd rather talk about, say, how to solve the Israel/Palestinian conflict in practice. Hence my contribution to this discussion: the conflict can't be solved by using the idea of national self-determination, because self-determination is one of the standard justifications for Zionism, and because it's a nonsensical idea in the first place.
Let's see, which is more credible, some guy commenting on a blog, or an academic text published by Cambridge University Press? David Cook, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Rice University, writes, in his recent book Martyrdom in Islam (Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 137:
Zionists make claims about "the Jews", and I think it's important to understand those claims in order to critique them, which is what I've been doing here. I don't see how keeping silent about them is going to help anyone understand them, or how critiquing Zionism aids the Zionists.
Of course. But more to the point, nations are fictions, so whenever people claim to speak on behalf of a nation, they're making a false claim. There is no "Jewish nation", so no one can speak on its behalf.
I certainly haven't conflated them. I haven't said anything at all here about Jews in general; I've only been discussing the Zionist fiction of "the Jewish nation".
Britain certainly assisted Zionism, but they didn't "give" Palestine to the Zionists, who used a mixture of violence, intimidation and land purchases to expel as many Palestinians as possible. The British simply abandoned Palestine on 14 May 1948, washing their hands of the situation. Ben-Gurion immediately proclaimed the establishment of the state of Israel, and the Zionists then confirmed their control of the territory by winning the 1948-49 Arab-Israeli war. The United Nations had nothing to do with it. For details, you could read William Cleveland's A History of the Modern Middle East.
I don't think it's possible to imagine any concept of "national self-determination" that wouldn't infringe on anyone's rights. In any geographical territory, there are always multiple possible "nations" that could claim the same land. The break-up of Yugoslavia is a good example. More generally, since the amount of land on the Earth is finite, but the number of possible "nations" is infinite, it will never be possible to satisfy all conceivable claims to national self-determination. As Philip Spencer and Howard Wollman observe:
Philip Spencer and Howard Wollman, Nationalism: A Critical Introduction (London: Sage Publications, 2002), 143-145.
It is for Zionists. Mainstream Zionism has always claimed a right to Jewish national self-determination in "Eretz Israel", i.e. "Greater Israel". For a useful discussion, see:
Nils A. Butenschøn, “Accommodating Conflicting Claims to National Self-determination. The Intractable Case of Israel/Palestine,” International Journal on Minority & Group Rights 13, no. 2/3 (June 2006): 285-306.
Butenschøn notes:
No, because for Zionists, the "Jewish nation" won't have fulfilled its right to self-determination until it acquires all the land in "Eretz Israel".
I think Zionism is definitely about a belief in national self-determination. It posits the existence of a "Jewish nation", and argues that this nation has the right to govern itself by means of a "Jewish state" in Palestine. In Zionists' view, Israel was created, and the non-Jews in Palestine were ethnically cleansed or made subservient, because the Jewish nation asserted its right to self-determination. Naturally, this idea completely disregards the rights of non-Jews. This is a standard part of nationalism: one assumes that one's own national interest takes precedence over everything else. The disastrous consequences of Zionism follow directly from nationalist beliefs that have been widespread since the 19th century, and were reflected in Woodrow Wilson's doctrine of national self-determination.
All nationalists claim that their nation is legitimate and "historically proven". Yet modern scholarship has found that nations are fictions. There is no such thing as a "legitimate nation". Suggested readings:
Umut Özkırımlı, Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000).
Umut Özkırımlı, Contemporary Debates on Nationalism: A Critical Engagement (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
That's what makes the most sense to me, and in order to remove any ambiguity about the meaning of the word "people", I'd say "the inhabitants of a given territory" rather than "the people resident". But that's something very different from Woodrow Wilson's nationalist concept of self-determination.
The problem with the idea of "a people’s right to self-determination" is that it legitimises Zionism, too. And for Zionists, "self-determination for the Jewish people" means taking all the land that could be used for a Palestinian state. The basic problem is that "a people's right to self-determination" is a nationalist idea; it assumes the existence of imaginary entities called "peoples" or "nations", which are thought to have rights that individuals don't have, e.g. the right to create states on their "ancestral" land.
As for inheritance rights, I side with Marx: they're a way of reproducing class divisions. As for social contracts, Hume refuted Locke's contractarianism: one can't be bound by agreements that one’s ancestors made.
Should sovereignty be based on ancestry? Once again, I ask: if we are all descendants of Africans, can we all claim sovereignty over Africa? The plight of the Palestinian refugees, the Palestinians living under military occupation, and the Palestinian Israelis who are treated as second-class citizens, is morally unacceptable not because of their ancestry, but because they lack political rights here and now, rights that all human beings should enjoy. There's no need for "ancestral sovereignty rights" to solve this problem; just turn Israel and the Occupied Territories into a secular, democratic state with open borders, so the Palestinians who want to live there, enjoying full citizenship and equal rights, can do so.
You're right about race; a mainstay of 19th-century anthropology, it has long since been discredited and abandoned as a scientific concept.
As far as I understand, the argument of Sand's book is that there was never a Jewish diaspora, and that the presence of Jews in Europe is the result of conversions due to Jewish proselytism in the ancient world. Hence he argues that the Jews who lived in Palestine during the Roman Empire are not the ancestors of European Jews; instead, they're the ancestors of today's Palestinians, whose families converted first to Christianity and then (for the most part) to Islam. In any case, I don't think ancestry should have anything to do with rights. According to current paleoanthropology, all human beings alive today are descended from a group of about 150 people who emigrated from Africa 70,000 years ago. Does that give all of us the right to colonise Africa?
Since the emergence of nationalism a few hundred years ago, the concept of "a people" (or "a nation") has meant much more than "whoever happens to be a citizen of a particular state"; it implies a mythical belief system involving notions of ethnic, linguistic, cultural and/or religious commonalities, a shared history, "sacred" ties to a particular area of land, and many other things as well. To redefine "nation" in terms of mere legal citizenship would be a radical departure from the nationalist beliefs that currently prevail in every country in the world. But to do so in Israel, without changing citizenship law, would be self-contradictory. Citizenship in Israel depends on religious/ethnic criteria: Jews can immigrate and become citizens, but Palestinians can't. If you try to define "the Israeli people" as "whoever can get Israeli citizenship", you've actually taken for granted the idea that Israel is a state for "the Jewish people", which is the principle that Israeli citizenship laws are based on.
If Ben-Ami doesn't feel fully accepted in Israel, how does he think Israeli Arabs feel?
Shlomo Sand thinks there's an Israeli people, not a Jewish people. I agree with him that there's no Jewish people, but the idea of an Israeli people is no better. What are the criteria for membership in this alleged Israeli people? More importantly, who gets to decide what the criteria are? Orthodox Jewish Israelis? Israeli Arabs? If you exclude Jewishness (however you define it) from the definition of the Israeli people, what's left? Of the two main things that Ben-Ami mentions above (speaking Hebrew fluently and serving in the Israeli army) one of them (the army) is currently off limits to Israel's Arab citizens, while the other (fluent Hebrew) includes many Palestinians who live in the Occupied Territories, and doesn't include many Jewish Israeli citizens. I have a hard time believing that Sand or anyone else could come up with a non-religious, non-ethnic definition of the "Israeli people" that wouldn't cause outrage because of who it included or excluded. Why not abandon the fantasy of "peoples" and "nations" and instead talk about something practical, like equal rights, i.e. a one-state solution?
You could argue that material interests are a motivation for having client states in the region, but that symbolic interests (i.e. ideological attachments) help determine the choice of client states, e.g. Israel as opposed to Iran.
OK, but this doesn't address the point I quoted above:
In other words, it may be true that "once oil is in a tanker or refinery, there is no controlling its destination", but it would still be possible to reduce production, and thus to put less oil in the tankers and refineries. But the US indicated that it would be prepared to use military force to prevent this, and the Saudis heeded the threat. Isn't this a form of "spigot control"?
I'm open-minded on this issue, but here's something that might be relevant:
Laurens, Henry. Paix et guerre au Moyen-Orient: L'Orient arabe et le monde de 1945 à nos jours. 2nd ed. Paris: Armand Colin, 2005, pp. 305-306 (my translation).
People do indeed have other motivations than strict material self-interest; they have non-material, symbolic interests. Sociology has come a long way in the past few decades towards understanding the political economy of symbolic power, but a lot of leftists haven't been paying attention.
No cultural practice is high-falutin' in itself; it's the way it's used that makes it high-falutin'. Moreover, the "same" cultural practice can have different meanings and functions for different classes. I remember many years ago going to a concert of the Modern Jazz Quartet, in a splendid concert hall. I had loved their music for years, and for me, jazz wasn't something high-falutin'. I was in jeans, and didn't particularly notice that everyone else in the audience was very formally dressed. At one point during an exciting solo, I whooped with enthusiasm. I quickly realised my mistake when the rest of the audience, which was listening in solemn silence, started at me in shock and disapproval. For them, it was something high-falutin'.
In Philip's wife's anecdote above, a literary agent gave her a "curt lecture" for not knowing something about Jewish culture in New York. If you can be given a curt lecture for not knowing something, that usually means that there's some kind of exclusion going on. The curt lecture is a warning that if you don't acquire the necessary knowledge, you won't be welcome in some particular group. In sociology these are called "calls to order", i.e. explicit or implicit warnings about norms to be obeyed. They include things like the disapproving stares I got at the Modern Jazz Quartet concert, as well as utterances like "What?! You've never read X?!" Note that in the story above, Philip's wife implicitly puts Yiddish in the more general category of Jewish shibboleths that she had to acquire in order to be accepted by people like that literary agent.
The lesson could be that if people are expected to know Yiddish words in order to be accepted in certain social circles, this gives an advantage to those who grew up hearing Yiddish from their parents. In other words, knowledge of Yiddish is a kind of shibboleth, and could function as a class barrier. That's not a "gift"; it's what dominant classes always do to exclude outsiders, or at least to make it more difficult for them to join.
marc, thanks for the tip about Civil Religion in Israel; it looks very interesting, e.g. this part (pp. 94-95):
marc, I think Alain Dieckhoff gives a pretty convincing analysis of the relationship between Judaism and Zionism in his chapter in the book Citizenship and Ethnic Conflict: Challenging the Nation-State (ed. Haldun Gülalp). He argues that, although Theodor Herzl's Zionism was based on an emphatically secular concept of a Jewish nation, Israel's secular leaders have ended up giving more and more power to religious authorities (and thus, as you say, Israel has gained characteristics of a theocracy), because it turned out to be "impossible to define the national tie that unites Jews on any other grounds than religious criteria". This is, of course, a disaster for Israel's non-Jewish population, as Dieckhoff points out.
My own research is all about how and why nationalism and religion are so similar. Even the most secular nationalisms (like French nationalism of the late 18th century) bear striking resemblances to religion. Nationalisms have holy books, catechisms, priests, prophets, saints, martyrs, hymns, temples, pilgrimages, etc. (My article on Nasser has examples and references.) I'd love to see someone do a study of these aspects of Zionism.
marc, I haven't read Karabel's book, just skimmed an earlier article of his that presents some of the same argument. There he seems to be saying that between the two world wars, Harvard, Yale and Princeton were mainly social clubs for the reproduction of upper-class WASP privilege, and that most students therefore took social activities (including sports) more seriously than grades. In contrast, most of the Jewish students were from more modest backgrounds and took grades much more seriously. Hence they disturbed the upper-class atmosphere of these universities, threatened "the WASP quasi-monopoly on the unusual cultural and economic opportunities provided by the elite colleges", and made their WASP classmates look bad. Therefore admissions policies were modified in an attempt to reduce their numbers. "Character" was used basically as a euphemism for whatever upper-class WASP manners and tastes happened to be.
marc: Noam Chomsky said in an interview: "When I got to Harvard in the 1950s, the anti-Semitism was so thick you could cut it with a knife". That's all changed completely of course, as he points out, but I don't think you can date that change to the 1940s or 50s.
Interestingly, sociologist Jerome Karabel, who has written a book on the history of US university admissions policies, argues that that the emphasis on students' "extracurricular activities" in university admissions was introduced by the Ivy League schools in the 1920s because
Quite a bit of research has been done on the economic attainment of American Jews; here's a place to start:
Paul Burstein, “Jewish Educational and Economic Success in the United States: A Search for Explanations.” Sociological Perspectives 50:209-228.
Walid is right: talk is cheap. And that goes for Obama, too. That's why Israel knows it can get away with pretty much anything. I don't think any Palestinians are holding their breath waiting for any Arab government to stick its neck out for them. I also doubt that "regional recognition" is a high priority for any Israeli politician; surely economic interests, which are global rather than regional, rank much higher.
Aref, you're making many points here that I've already made in the discussion above, e.g. that anti-Jewish sentiment in Egypt is a relatively recent phenomenon, and that its primary cause is the conflict over Palestine. At the same time, it's not something that appeared yesterday. According to Joel Beinin's book (which I mentioned above), conflation of Judaism with Zionism began in Egypt in the 1930s. As for "curiosity", see my next comment. As for "drawing conclusions without context", I've lived in Egypt for three years, I'm proficient in Arabic, I know Egyptian history well, I've talked to a lot of Egyptians, and I have a lot of Egyptian friends. I think you'd have a hard time finding anyone in Egypt who disagrees with what I've been saying here: that negative attitudes towards Jews are widespread in Egypt. Sales of Mein Kampf are just one indication of that. You'll find others in my previous comments.
One of the amazing things about studying sociology is that everyone thinks they know your field better than you do. No, Cliff, Bourdieu's sociology of the publishing industry is not "ridiculously shallow"; you haven't studied it and aren't in a position to make that judgement. Moreover, I haven't talked at all here about Palestinians (who have my wholehearted support in their struggle to reverse the effects of Israel's ethnic cleansing), and no one here is equating anyone with Nazis. My suggestion here has simply been that sales of Mein Kampf and the Protocols are one indication among many of widespread negative stereotypes about Jews in Egypt.
I'm pretty sure that people who are "curious" about Hitler in the US or Europe don't generally satisfy their curiosity by reading Mein Kampf; they do it by reading a reputable history book about Hitler or Nazism, because they know that Mein Kampf is demented, hate-filled propaganda and therefore not a reliable source of information. A tiny minority of people might be curious enough to read it, but most people will seek out a more reliable source. Hence Mein Kampf doesn't sell well in the US or Europe.
What are people's intentions in buying Mein Kampf in Egypt? It's difficult to say, because there are no opinion polls and I'm not aware of any empirical studies on this. "Channeling their own conflict through that work" sounds plausible to me, but think about what exactly that means. What is the connection between Israel and Hitler? The only possible conceptual connection is that Zionists are Jews and that Hitler hated Jews. So if you're feeling angry about Israel, and you conflate Zionism with Judaism, Mein Kampf could be an appealing book, because it will confirm your existing feelings and beliefs.
My conversation with my Egyptian friends about the Protocols went something like this:
Me: "The Protocols are fake; they were forged by the Russian secret police."
My friends (sceptically): "Really? Everyone in Egypt thinks they're authentic. There was even a TV series based on them."
Me: "Every respectable historian knows they're fake."
My friends: "Have you got evidence of that?"
In the end I had to dig out scholarly studies to convince them. I can't believe you don't see a link between that and sales of the Protocols and Mein Kampf in Egypt.
Aref, a single individual's purchase of a book does not necessarily mean that the buyer approves of the content of the book. But when a book becomes a bestseller, this is indeed sociological evidence that a large number of people approve of its content. It's well-established in sociology that best-sellers respond to existing tastes among the reading public. A book cannot sell well without appealing to some particular widespread taste for a particular type of book. Of course, different types of books can appeal to different segments of the reading public; hence books that appeal to very different tastes can be bestsellers at the same time. If you're interested in knowing more about the sociology of the book industry, I suggest Pierre Bourdieu's classic study The Rules of Art.
Aref, your question has been addressed in the comments above; see, in particular, this comment, this one and this one. (Sorry for the duplicate comment here.)
Aref, your question has been addressed in the comments above; see, in particular, this comment, and this one.
VR, I've said repeatedly that TV has to please both the state and the market. State propaganda has affected people's perceptions about lots of things, and attitudes about Jews are no doubt among them. My main point, which perhaps you've now accepted, is that negative stereotypes about Jews are widespread in Egypt, and that the media reflect this. No doubt the media have also helped to promote those stereotypes and shape people's attitudes about Jews. (Though I think other factors are at work as well, as I've said.) If so, they've been successful, and the book sales and TV programmes we've been talking about reflect this. Will you grant me this so we can end this discussion?
Street vendors sell books published by all sorts of publishers. The size of a publisher is not necessarily correlated with the success of its books; small publishers can publish books that sell well. You talk as if you know a lot about the publishers who are publishing Mein Kampf in Egypt (and selling it via street vendors as well as ordinary bookshops), and how much state control they face. When you have some empirical data on this, let me know. In any case, what matters for the purposes of our discussion is that Mein Kampf seems to be selling well, regardless of who is publishing it, and that this reflects the prevalence of negative attitudes towards Jews.
The sentence “Educated Egyptians have been surprised to hear from me that the Protocols are a forgery” is simply a statement of fact. That's my personal experience; you can't deny it. There's nothing in that sentence about "pronounced backwardness". Educated people all over the world are misinformed about all sorts of things; it doesn't mean that they suffer from "pronounced backwardness". I've gone out of my way, throughout this discussion, to give examples of tolerance and intellectual brilliance among Egyptians, and to ascribe anti-Jewish attitudes in Egypt to historical and political factors (foremost among them Zionism) rather than to "backwardness" (a word I find meaningless in any case).
It seems strange to me to call colonialism an "influence"; your use of the word was confusing. In any case, as I've said, colonial domination can't, by itself, explain why some Egyptians adopted some aspects of fascism, though it's certainly a factor.
VR, the state can't simply impose whatever it wants on the media; there's a market, and the products have to sell. This isn't rocket science. All you have to do is imagine the outcry that would be provoked in the US by a TV miniseries presenting the Protocols as authentic, and to notice that no such outcry occurred here in Egypt, to realise that there's a big difference, in general, between the attitudes of American and Egyptian viewers towards Jews. TV viewers in Egypt are not passive consumers of state propaganda; they react when something offends them. Cultural producers anticipate this and try hard to avoid doing things that might offend the public. For that reason, the series wouldn't have been made in the US, but it was made in Egypt and no outcry ensued.
This point applies even more to books. My understanding is that street vendors are in general operating illegally, and bribing police to be allowed to occupy space on the pavement. They carry books that are critical of the regime, or even that directly attack the president. This suggests that they're not exactly tools of the state propaganda machine. I've read a good deal of research on the publishing industry in Egypt, and it seems to me that in general, the state isn't particularly interested in book publishing, because relatively few people read books. Censorship of books is fairly light; writers can get away with a lot. The state mainly tends to intervene when there's a public outcry about a book, e.g. to ban novels that are accused in the press of being offensive to religion. A good source here, in addition to Mehrez's book Egypt's Culture Wars, is Richard Jacquemond's Conscience of the Nation: Writers, State, and Society in modern Egypt.
You're making a huge leap from my observation that (in my personal experience) educated Egyptians tend to believe the Protocols to be authentic (my friends had never heard anything to the contrary), to the inference of "pronounced backwardness", which you won't find in anything I've said. My inference, as I've said here repeatedly, is simply that negative stereotypes of Jews are widespread in Egypt. Viewers accepted the Protocols miniseries as credible because it fit those stereotypes. This has nothing to do with "backwardness", whatever that is; it has to do with the political history that I keep referring to (the conflict over Palestine, the wars between Egypt and Israel and the resulting emigration of Egyptian Jews), and the almost complete absence of any effort, in schools or in the media, to counter those stereotypes. My Egyptian friends, I might add, readily agree with me on the prevalence of anti-Jewish stereotypes in Egypt.
About fascism: It's one thing to say some Egyptians attempted to use fascism in the 1930s to combat colonialism, and another thing to say that fascism in Egypt was a product of "foreign influence". The latter phrase suggests that foreigners somehow brainwashed Egyptians into adopting fascism, and that the Egyptians were completely passive. On the contrary, Egyptians had been actively reflecting on different ways to deal with colonialism since the beginning of the British occupation in 1882, and their responses were very varied; fascism was only one of many different options that some people tried, and it appeared rather late in the game and only for a short time. So I think it would be hard to argue for a necessary cause-and-effect relationship between colonialism and fascism. Moreover, neither Germany nor Italy were under colonial domination, yet somehow fascism was very successful in those countries. I think you really need to take a close look at the relevant history in order to try to understand why fascism appeared in any given context, rather than just blaming it on "foreign influence".
Donald, you asked about Holocaust denial in the Arab world; I forgot to mention that Gilbert Achcar has a new book out on this subject. Here's an interview with the author.
VR, the relationship between the state and the media in Egypt is more complex than that. The media do have to respond to the public's demands and expectations; that's precisely why the state tries to use the media to pretend it's doing things to help the Palestinians. TV is full of propaganda, but it still has to sell advertising and therefore it has to attract viewers. If people found the programmes utterly unappealing, they wouldn't watch; producers must therefore try to make programmes that people will enjoy watching, while still obeying the constraints and agendas imposed by the state. Moreover, public controversy over the contents of TV series is a common occurrence, and sometimes results in modifications of the storylines. For an example, as well as a look at relationships between writers, publishers and the state, I recommend Samia Mehrez's excellent recent book Egypt's Culture Wars.
Reading primary sources when you don't have the background to evaluate them isn't audacity or temerity; it's folly. You're very likely to mislead yourself, never mind others. Do yourself a favour and get a proper history book.
I don't think you can call a state either a "forgery" or a "fiction", except perhaps metaphorically, but you can say that the Israeli state misrepresents itself as democratic and moral, and that the whole idea of a "Jewish and democratic" state is an inherent contradiction.
The Rothschilds were one of the the world's richest families. I think you'll find the same sort of behaviour among Christian families of comparable wealth, then and now. As for your second source, what makes you think it isn't simply anti-Jewish propaganda? Are you a historian and a specialist on the period? If not, why are you reading primary sources without having any way to evaluate them?
I'm not saying that Mein Kampf has any influence on anyone in Egypt; instead I'm suggesting that widespread feelings of hostility towards Jews, which exist for other reasons (mentioned above), generate sales of Mein Kampf. Unfortunately there is no reliable data on book sales in Egypt, because Egyptian publishers "deal with distribution figures as if they were military secrets" (in the words of Egyptian literary scholar Samia Mehrez). Yves Gonzalez-Quijano's book Les gens du livre: édition et champ intellectuel dans l’Égypte républicaine (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 1998) contains a tragicomic account of his fruitless attempts to get such data from various sources; I'm not aware of anyone who has made a more successful attempt since then.
VR, I can't believe you read all of that into my comment. Actually, I'm opposed to Zionism, and to all nationalisms. I can't stand Bernard Lewis. If you can read Arabic, please go read my Arabic-language blog, where you'll find me discussing social-science research on Israel's injustices, as well as research showing what a disaster the whole concept of "nation" is, including of course the concept of "Jewish nation". You could also read my recently published article in International Journal of Middle East Studies, which makes the same argument.
You seem to think that discussing the social problems that exist in an Arab country automatically makes one a vile racist or imperialist. On the contrary, I think that if you want to understand human society as it really is, rather than through the distorting lens of racist or nationalist categories, you need to acknowledge social reality in its entirety, including the problems.
Maybe I'm wrong about Mein Kampf and the Protocols "invariably" being on display on Cairo's pavements, but I've seen them countless times. Maybe they're occasionally out of stock, but these books are definitely part of the standard product line of booksellers in several of the busiest streets in downtown Cairo. No, nobody is running up and down the streets hawking them, nor did I say they were, and maybe university students don't buy them, but these books must be selling pretty well (along with the self-help books, Dan Brown novels, popular religious texts, and other mass-market paperbacks that the pavement vendors sell), otherwise they wouldn't be there taking up display space.
Surely it's significant that state TV broadcast a programme presenting the Protocols as authentic. It's not plausible that television producers would have made the series if they had thought that most of the audience would reject it as a lie.
Of course, it's important to keep this in perspective. The book market in Egypt is small. About 30% of the population is illiterate, according to government statistics. Egyptian novels rarely sell more than a few thousand copies. These books aren't a huge social phenomenon in any case.
Your assertion that "widespread but not universal" is like "partially pregnant" is just silly. "Widespread but not universal" means that many people are prejudiced, but not everyone is. Perhaps I should also make it clearer what sort of prejudice I'm talking about. A couple of anecdotes might help.
An Egyptian friend of mine, a writer, once asked me for a copy of the Roman Polanski film The Pianist; I gave it to him, he liked it very much, and proceeded to show it to some of his relatives. They reacted with a vitriolic diatribe against Jews, saying that the film was Zionist propaganda intended to distract people's attention from Israel's crimes against the Palestinians, and that Jews were an inherently evil race; even if you took a Jewish baby from its family at birth and raised it as a Muslim, they said, it would still turn out to be a bad person. My friend was astonished at this reaction, because he saw the film as a universal statement about cruelty, compassion and the will to survive.
I once helped out another Egyptian friend of mine, a playwright, with a production of one of his plays. Another playwright, who had some grudge against my friend, found out that my ancestry is Jewish, and used this piece of information to launch a smear campaign against my friend's play, alleging that it was "Jewish theatre". (There wasn't the slightest reference to Jews or Judaism in the play.)
Maybe a comparison will help put this in perspective. In the UK, prejudice against Muslims is also widespread but not universal, but I think it takes a different form. A Palestinian friend of mine who lives in London is exasperated with the huge amount of scorn and prejudice she's experienced from people there in her daily life. Not everyone is prejudiced; she has friends and a fairly normal life. In contrast, I've never been scorned or treated as inferior to my face in Egypt; my daily interactions with Egyptians are almost always friendly and positive. I think anti-Jewish prejudice here is mostly abstract, and easily overridden by the hospitality, friendliness and curiosity towards foreigners that are common here. I suspect that if I had been in the room while my friend was watching The Pianist with his relatives, things might have gone differently; they might have even changed their views.
As for the quality of education in Egypt, it really is low, and you don't have to take my word for it. Just ask any Egyptian state university student; they'll gladly tell you about the overcrowded lectures, the reliance on rote memorisation, the lack of discussion and critique, the avoidance of any topic that might be politically sensitive, the corruption, the need to pay the professor for private lessons in order to pass the course.
Basically you missed the whole point of my comment above: here as in other parts of the world, prejudice exists for historical and political reasons. You also missed the point of my reference to Gershoni's and Jankowski's study on attitudes towards fascism in Egypt. At least read the publisher's description of the book; it's exactly the opposite of what you seem to have assumed: "this enlightening book seriously challenges the recent assumption of an inherent Muslim predisposition toward authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and 'Islamo-Fascism.'" And yes, the US currently supports dictatorship in Egypt, but that's irrelevant in this context, because their book is about the 1930s. As for the reasons why fascism appealed to some people in Egypt during the 1930s, this can't simply be ascribed to "foreign influence"; Egyptian nationalist groups, such as Young Egypt, borrowed some aspects of fascism in order to mobilise resistance against British colonial domination. This bit of Egyptian history is more complex than you think.
Eva, I don't know who Richard Witty is, but I'll strongly disagree with anyone who thinks that "Arabs suck". My field is sociology; I think all human beings are basically the same, and the basic mechanisms of human society are the same everywhere. My point above was that there are political reasons for the problems we're talking about here.
Many things are in an atrocious state in Egypt, as Egyptians are often quick to point out. A great deal of contemporary Egyptian literature, e.g. the novels of the wonderful writer Sonallah Ibrahim, is devoted to demonstrating this. In 2003, Ibrahim refused a state literary prize by making a speech to a packed auditorium, in which he railed against the state of things in Egypt: "We no longer have any theatre, or cinema, or scientific research, or education. All we have is festivals and a boxful of lies. We no longer have any industry, or agriculture, or health, or justice. Corruption and robbery are rampant, and anyone who opposes the status quo faces humiliation, beatings and torture." The audience of Egyptian intellectuals went wild with applause.
Sure, lots of things are propaganda, but that's neither here nor there. I enjoy debunking Zionist propaganda as much as anyone, but here we're talking about anti-Jewish propaganda in the Arab world.
I've been seeing Arabic translations of both books prominently displayed by downtown sidewalk book vendors ever since I first moved to Cairo in 2005. Unfortunately no reliable statistics are available on book sales (or anything else) in Egypt.
It's not just a question of a book's availability. Millions of books are available in the US and Europe; far fewer are available in Egypt, simply because the Arabic publishing industry is much smaller. There are also far fewer bookshops per capita here, and hardly anyone orders anything online. So the presence of a given book, prominently displayed by a bookseller in Cairo, means much more than the mere presence of the same book on Amazon. Admittedly, it's not a scientific measurement, but when you notice that sidewalk booksellers in downtown Cairo, whose book selection is very small (often only fifty titles or so), invariably carry Mein Kampf, I think it's reasonable to take that as a sign of its popularity.
Annie, yes, and Beinin's book has more details about Operation Susannah and its effects.
PG, Protocols is a forgery because it claims to be something it isn't; its authors wrote it for the express purpose of making readers believe that it was written by others and that it isn't fiction. Exodus, in contrast, is a novel and doesn't pretend to be anything else, or to be by anyone other than its author.
Here in Cairo, practically every bookshop, and every bookseller in the street, carries Mein Kampf, as well as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Educated Egyptians have been surprised to hear from me that the Protocols are a forgery. In 2002, Egyptian state TV broadcast a miniseries called Horseman Without a Horse that revolved partly around the Protocols and presented them as authentic.
My impression from living in Cairo for three years is that prejudice against Jews here is widespread, but far from universal. It's not difficult to find people who reject it. It's also a fairly recent phenomenon, for the most part. There used to be a sizeable Jewish population in Egypt, and there's plenty of historical evidence that they were a well-accepted and largely prosperous minority until the conflict over Palestine got into full swing. Egypt's state of war with Israel from 1948 to 1979 undoubtedly has a lot to do with the transformation of anti-Zionism into prejudice against Jews in Egypt, and with the emigration of most Egyptian Jews. Joel Beinin's book, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry, which you can read for free online, has the details. He notes: "Before the 1936–39 Arab Revolt in Palestine, the dominant current among literate Egyptians regarded Egyptian Jews as full members of the [Egyptian] nation. Secularist political commentary carefully distinguished between Judaism and Zionism."
Ahmad Abdallah's beautiful recent film Heliopolis alludes nostalgically to this history by including the sympathetic character of an elderly Jewish Egyptian woman who lives in a world of memories and doesn't want the neighbours to know she's Jewish.
Now that there are practically no Jews left in Egypt, the only Jews most people here ever see are the Israeli soldiers who appear in TV news reports, killing Palestinians. This surely doesn't help anyone make a distinction between Judaism and Zionism.
Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski have just published a book called Confronting Fascism in Egypt: Dictatorship Versus Democracy in the 1930s; I've only skimmed it, but it looks as if they found considerable expression of negative attitudes towards fascism, as well as some positive attitudes towards it.