REFRACTION

By Malik Isasis























David Brooks, a conservative New York Times columnist wrote an Op-Ed piece in the April 8, 2007, Sunday edition of the New York Times. In his column Brooks critiqued a conference on democracy in the Middle East in which he attended in Jordan. The conference was sponsored by the University of Jordan and the conservative think-tank American Enterprise Institute.

I’m not going to critique Brooks’ worldview; instead, I would like to juxtapose his column with that of Palestinian writer, Rami G. Koury on Middle East-American relations. Enjoy

A War of Narratives

by David Brooks, New York Times


On the Dead Sea, Jordan

I just attended a conference that was both illuminating and depressing. It was co-sponsored by the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan and the American Enterprise Institute, and the idea was to get Americans and moderate Arab reformers together to talk about Iraq, Iran, and any remaining prospects for democracy in the Middle East.

As it happened, though, the Arab speakers mainly wanted to talk about the Israel lobby. One described a book edited in the mid-1990s by the Jewish policy analyst David Wurmser as the secret blueprint for American foreign policy over the past decade. A pollster showed that large majorities in Arab countries believe that the Israel lobby has more influence over American policy than the Bush administration. Speaker after speaker triumphantly cited the work of Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer and Jimmy Carter as proof that even Americans were coming to admit that the Israel lobby controls their government.

The problems between America and the Arab world have nothing to do with religious fundamentalism or ideological extremism, several Arab speakers argued. They have to do with American policies toward Israel, and the forces controlling those policies.

As for problems in the Middle East itself, these speakers added, they have a common source, Israel. One elderly statesman noted that the four most pressing issues in the Middle East are the Arab-Israeli dispute, instability in Lebanon, chaos in Iraq and the confrontation with Iran. They are all interconnected, he said, and Israel is at the root of each of them.

We Americans tried to press our Arab friends to talk more about the Sunni-Shiite split, the Iraqi civil war and the rise of Iran, but they seemed uninterested.
They mimicked a speech King Abdullah of Jordan recently delivered before Congress, in which he scarcely mentioned the Iraqi chaos on his border. It was all Israel, all the time.

The Americans, needless to say, had a different narrative. We tended to argue that problems like Muslim fundamentalism, extremism and autocracy could not be blamed on Israel or Paul Wolfowitz but had deeper historical roots. We tended to see the Israeli-Palestinian issue not as the root of all fundamentalism, but as a problem made intractable by fundamentalism.

In other words, they had their narrative and we had ours, and the two passed each other without touching. But the striking thing about this meeting was the emotional tone. There seemed to be a time, after 9/11, when it was generally accepted that terror and extremism were symptoms of a deeper Arab malaise. There seemed to be a general recognition that the Arab world had fallen behind, and that it needed economic, political and religious modernization.

But there was nothing defensive or introspective about the Arab speakers here. In response to Bernard Lewis’s question, “What Went Wrong?” their answer seemed to be: Nothing’s wrong with us. What’s wrong with you?

The events of the past three years have shifted their diagnosis of where the cancer is — from dysfunction in the Arab world to malevolence in Jerusalem and in AIPAC. Furthermore, the Walt and Mearsheimer paper on the Israel lobby has had a profound effect on Arab elites. It has encouraged them not to be introspective, not to think about their own problems, but to blame everything on the villainous Israeli network.

And so we enter a more intractable phase in the conflict, which will not be a war over land or oil or even democratic institutions, but a war over narratives. The Arabs will nurture this Zionist-centric mythology, which is as self-flattering as it is self-destructive. They will demand that the U.S. and Israel adopt their narrative and admit historical guilt. Failing politically, militarily and economically, they will fight a battle for moral superiority, the kind of battle that does not allow for compromises or truces.

Americans, meanwhile, will simply want to get out. After 9/11, George Bush called on the U.S. to get deeply involved in the Middle East. But now, most Americans have given up on their ability to transform the Middle East and on Arab willingness to change. Faced with an arc of conspiracy-mongering, most Americans will get sick of the whole cesspool, and will support any energy policy or anything else that will enable them to cut ties with the region.

What we have is not a clash of civilizations, but a gap between civilizations, increasingly without common narratives, common goals or means of communication.

Where columnist David Brooks Went Wrong

by Rami G. Khouri, Daily Star

David Brooks' column in the Sunday issue of The New York Times deserves a few thoughts from a colleague who has generally admired his work, but finds him now reflecting the troubling intellectual and ideological gap between the United States and the Arab world. One of the grave new threats facing both sides is the declining quality of public analysis and discussion of American-Middle Eastern relations, especially in the mainstream American media that have lived so cozily with the exercise of American military power in the Middle East in recent years.

I was particularly struck by this column because I read it on the last day of a two-week trip to the US that allowed me to mix with a wide range of Middle East experts, scholars in various fields, and many other Americans. Everywhere, I encountered and sometimes engaged in a lively, healthy discussion on the deteriorating relations between various quarters of the US and many people in the Arab and Islamic world. In all the discussions and encounters I had - including with many fine men and women at the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, at the University of Chicago, and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and in Philadelphia, Boston and New York City - the dominant tone was that American-Middle Eastern relations were in deep trouble and that we needed to put our heads together to find a way out of the mess we had created.

I have had the exact same discussions with a variety of Arabs, Iranians, Israelis, and Turks for many years; but for some reason this deeper reality of an ongoing quest for rational problem-solving rarely gets into the mainstream American media.
Brooks in his column wrote about his views after attending a weekend conference in Jordan that brought together Arab intellectuals and activists with leading American neoconservatives. He concluded: "The events of the past three years have shifted [the Arabs'] diagnosis of where the cancer is - from dysfunction in the Arab world to malevolence in Jerusalem and in [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee]."

He saw Arab elites becoming less introspective, and instead "blaming everything on the villainous Israeli network. And so we enter a more intractable phase in the conflict, which will not be a war over land or oil or even democratic institutions, but a war over narratives ... Americans, meanwhile, will simply want to get out. After 9/11, George Bush called on the US to get deeply involved in the Middle East. But now, most Americans have given up on their ability to transform the Middle East and on Arab willingness to change ... What we have is not a clash of civilizations, but a gap between civilizations, increasingly without common narratives, common goals or means of communication."

I've spent my whole life between the US and the Arab world, and I strongly disagree. While Arabs do blame Israel and the US for many of their contemporary ills (and European colonial powers, too, not to forget that older culprit), they have also spent much of the last quarter-century criticizing their own elites and power structures, and trying to figure out how to make things better at home.

American and Arab civilizations share many common goals, and can use numerous means of communications should they make the effort. My experience in traveling between these two civilizations is that Arabs and Americans share predominantly common values and goals. However, they are plagued by the problem of entangled relations in the Arab-Israeli-American web, and poor political leadership verging on the morally deficient and criminally negligent on all sides.

Focusing only on Arab criticism of the United States and Israel while ignoring the rest of this cycle, and sidestepping the impact of American and Israeli policies in the Middle East, is both factually inaccurate and politically inflammatory. Our most useful job as newspaper columnists is not to lounge in an ideological fog that mediocre statesmen and angry citizenries generate, but rather to cut through it, to make way for more complete, honest communication.

Powerful American leaders like President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice choose to inhabit worlds in which Arabs and Muslims suffer terrible faults that must be rectified by the values-changing and swamp-draining actions of the noble American armed forces. Arab dictators, extremists and terrorists respond with equal ferocity and intellectual dishonesty.

Those who have the opportunity to shape and enrich the public debate should describe, understand and repudiate all such fanaticism, not just be irritated and perplexed by it. That many journalists abandoned this responsibility four years ago, when the Iraq war started, has proven terribly costly to all of us. We should avoid repeating that shortcoming by making a more rigorous effort to understand and describe our world in all its integrity and complexity, however perplexing things may appear on any one weekend.

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