How Little We Know [Michael Ledeen]
We really have a poor picture of daily life in the Middle East, it's not just Iraq. I was reading the excellent reportage from Ramallah by Lisa Goldman, a freelance Canadian/Israeli, and there were two bits that really helped me understand things a bit better, or so I think. The first is in the middle of a description of escapees from Gaza, who told horror stories about Hamas's violent assault on pro-Fatah Palestinians. She warns us to discount the melodramatic descriptions, and then quietly serves this up:
"The unspoken message, though, is interesting: suddenly Fatah represents the reasonable, civilized Palestinians. They speak Hebrew, they look like us and they sound like us, and Islamist militants threaten them just as they threaten Israel."
So at least some of the Arabs get the point: first they come for the Jews, then for the rest of us. Which reinforces my conviction that generalizations about "Arab streets" and a monolithic Islam prevent us from seeing the highly dynamic, even explosive nature of the region and the political/religious/intellectual ferment there.
The second bit is "everything that comes around goes around." Two generations ago the Jews of Eastern Europe were being slaughtered by the non-Jewish locals. Today you get scenes like this:
"...there were plenty of shoppers – including one bearded, unkempt guy who wore a blue T-shirt that advertised the services of an Israeli moving company in Hebrew. Mohammed, our translator, told us that he was a Romanian foreign worker in Israel who shopped in Ramallah nearly every Friday, because the...prices were lower. He said it was very common to see Eastern European foreign workers from Israel shopping in Ramallah on Fridays."
The Israelis got tired of Palestinian Arabs coming across the border, because even though most of them were honest, hard-working people, some were terrorists and it wasn't worth the risk. So they built a fence and welcomed immigrants from Eastern Europe. Whose grandparents may well have been killers of the grandparents of their new employers.
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