Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 225
March 27, 2019
Six myths about electronic waste in Agbogbloshie, Ghana
Still from Welcome to Sodom.
Agbogbloshie��is an urban area in Ghana���s capital Accra, housing a vegetable market, a scrap metal yard, a large slum, an industrial area, and a household waste dump. As��researchers, we know that��Agbogbloshie��is a thoroughly polluted place and the people working in the recycling trade are exposed to serious health and safety risks.
We also know that this trade generates much needed jobs for young men and contributes to an important repair and recycling culture.
This complexity is lost��in the Western media. Media portrayals focus��almost��exclusively��on��Agbogbloshie��as an��electronic waste dump,��drawing��on the dramatic imagery of��burning cables��and tires��for the��extraction of��copper, which forms only part of the activities of the scrap metal yard.
The latest in a long line of documentaries and publications��to sensationalize��Agbogbloshie��is��Welcome to Sodom, a 2018 documentary directed by��Austrian filmmakers��Florian��Weigensamer��and Christian��Kro��nes.��In its title, and in its portrayal of ���this apocalyptic society,��� the film perpetuates the tendency to mythologize a reality that needs no exaggeration. In the process, the film gets most of the relevant facts wrong.
Consider the��logline���or��opening��statement���of the documentary:
Agbogbloshie, Accra is the largest electronic waste dump in the world. About 6,000 women, men and children live and work here. They call it ���Sodom.��� Every year about 250,000 tons of sorted out computers, smartphones, air conditions tanks and other devices from a faraway electrified and digitalized world end up here. Illegally. Cleverly interwoven, the destinies of the various protagonists unravel the complex story of this apocalyptic society. Their very personal inner voices allow a deep insight into life and work at this place���and of Sodom itself. And you can be sure���it will most probably be the final destination of the smartphone, the computer you buy today.
Still from Welcome to Sodom.Let���s��examine this statement, one sentence at a time:
���Agbogbloshie,��Accra is the largest electronic waste dump in the world.���
The part of��Agbogbloshie��where electronic waste is dismantled��is not an��e-waste dump,��but��a��scrap metal yard.��All kinds of machinery and household equipment, cars,��buses, bicycles, generators, air��conditioners, computers, etc. are taken apart for scrap and spare parts.
The myth is often repeated that it is��the��largest��e-waste��dump��in the world,��despite the fact that there are��many other sites in the world, actually specialized in e-waste, that��are��many times larger. For example,��Giuyu, in China, employed��at its peak��100,000 people and covered��52��square kilometers.��The��Agbogbloshie��scrap metal yard��occupies an area less than half a square kilometer!��All scrap is brought in by the people who work there��and who are organized by the Greater Accra Scrap Dealers Association.
���They call it ���Sodom���.���
���Sodom and Gomorra�����is the name��outsiders have given to��Old��Fadama,��the��slum��in the��Agbogbloshie��area, which houses around��100,000 people. Western media have not been able to separate the scrap metal yard and the slum, even though they occupy very different functions and are separated by the��Odaw��river.
���About 6,000 women, men and children live and work here.���
The vast majority of people working in the scrap metal yard are young men and boys. People don���t live in the scrap metal yard; most of them live in Old��Fadama.
���Every year about 250,000 tons of sorted out computers, smartphones, air conditions tanks and other devices from a faraway electrified and digitalized world end up here.���
There is no reliable estimate which comes close to suggesting that 250,000 tons per year of electronic waste ends up��illegally��at��Agbogbloshie.��The documentary��actually��shows��how��electronic waste is brought in by��pushcarts and motorized��tricycles. If 250,000 tons of illegally imported e-waste was brought into the scrap metal yard��every year, this would amount to��35,000 computer monitors��or��14,000 air conditioner units or 4 million mobile phones��every day.��Everyone spending a few days in��Agbogbloshie��knows that these numbers are absurd.
The most likely source for this��estimate��we could find,��is from a 2011��report��published by the Secretariat of the Basel Convention.��The report estimated that in the period 2009���2011, five West African countries���Benin, C��te d���Ivoire, Ghana, Liberia, and Nigeria���imported a total of 250,000 tons of��electronic waste each year.
���Cleverly interwoven, the destinies of the various protagonists unravel the complex story of this apocalyptic society.���
Calling��Agbogbloshie��an apocalyptic society��suggests the vulnerabilities experienced by its inhabitants and workers��are��somehow uniquely��appalling. They are not. The vulnerabilities experienced by the people of��Agbogbloshie��are terrible in and of themselves, but they are morally unbearable precisely because they are a normal part of��the global��economic��system��that sustains��modern��overconsumption.��There are many slums in the world and even more small scrap metal yards where electronics and other equipment and machinery are dismantled with rudimentary tools, with resulting health and safety risks for the workers involved, including children.
���And you can be sure���it will most probably be the final destination of the smartphone, the computer you buy today.���
The mobile phone or computer you buy today will��most probably��not end up at��Agbogbloshie.��Here���s why:��almost��50 million tons of electronic waste��was produced in 2017.��Research��has shown that the main e-waste trade routes are not from high-income to low-income countries, but regional.��Electronic waste��is��still��being imported into Ghana, but the amounts are minimal��when��compared with the electronic waste generated in Ghana itself,��as a result of its��domestic consumption of electronics.
Myths don’t help
Still from Welcome to Sodom.The myths about the��Agbogbloshie��e-waste situation have been busted before (for example,��here,��here,��here,��and��here). While��Welcome to Sodom��is clearly well-intentioned���especially by lifting the profile of minorities in the context of poverty in Ghana���it is not well informed.
In fact, it is��a good example of what��Bennett��called��dramatization bias. Its images reinforce common cultural attitudes and values among an��audience��that has no opportunity to check the validity of the statements made in the documentary.
The uninformed statements made in the documentary, combined with imagery that doesn���t distinguish between the scrap metal yard, the slum, and the household waste dump next to the yard,��presents an uncomplicated��objectionable��image of��Agbogbloshie��as an e-waste dump.
By portraying��Agbogbloshie��as an ���apocalyptic society���, the film may even contribute to risks for those vulnerable people for whom it clearly seeks to generate sympathy: the Ghanaian authorities have shown in the past that they are not unwilling to use foreign media attention��for ���the largest e-waste dump in the world�����as the��justification��to��forcefully evict��people from the slum.
By perpetuating these��myths,��the film is unlikely to help the��people working there.��The film also presents electronic waste as a ���First World��� problem, ignoring the fact that Ghanaians themselves consume large amounts of electronics,��and that the repair and recycling of these electronics��are��not only��an important economic activity,��but��also��an important contribution to sustainable consumption��in Ghana.
Electronic waste is a huge global problem; it is not a problem that stops by guilting some consumers in rich countries into stop buying new electronics every year. Ghana needs practical and maintainable electronic waste policies, which recognize the importance of the informal repair and recycling sector and secure the health and safety of the people involved in this trade.
A bloody scandal in Mali
Mopti, Mali in 2014. Credit: United Nations Photo via Flickr CC.
Mali may be in a worse position now than it was in the months before the coup d�����tat and jihadist takeover of 2012. This is despite the fact that there is a robust UN force in place, one which has lost an extraordinarily high number of peacekeepers, making it the most dangerous deployment in the world. It is despite the fact that the Malian army is now buttressed by two other international forces���the French counter-terrorism mission and the “G5 Sahel” force, which coordinates the militaries of Mali and some of its neighbors. Despite also the fact that the country was able to hold a credible���at least arguably credible���presidential election in July, which returned Ibrahim Boubacar Keita to power. This is true despite the EU���s efforts, despite all the talk of (yet) another Marshall Plan for the Sahel and all the money behind it, despite the countless hours and ceaseless efforts of Malian activists, intellectuals, officials, of all the diplomats, journalists, analysts, and security experts, of all the citizens��� associations and the more high-minded political parties. Despite all the rallies, marches, radio call-in shows, reports, seminars, fact-finding missions, summits, and coffee breaks. Despite all that and more, Mali might be in a worse state than it was just before the deluge, seven years ago, when jihadists took over two-thirds of the country and the army made a mess of the rest. And if it keeps on raining, like August in the Sahel, the levee���s going to break.
Mali endured twin disasters in the last fortnight. A garrison at Dioura (Mopti) was attacked and decimated, leaving nearly two dozen soldiers dead. This is a tragedy for their families, and for the civilian populations they were meant to protect. But it���s not only a damn shame, it���s a bloody scandal. After seven intense years dedicated to re-building the Malian army���and after more than a decade of joint training exercises and ���capacity building������the army remains unable to defend fixed positions in areas of known danger against identifiable assailants. Almost precisely seven years after a mutiny that turned into a coup d�����tat, one provoked by similar issues, soldiers are still being let down���not to say betrayed���by their officers and by the civilian leadership (and although the presidency has changed hands, key ministerial positions are still held by the same people). This is not Marx���s 18th Brumaire. The first time was catastrophe; the second time will not be farce. The stakes are high, but now the government may be able to count on some protection from attack by its own soldiers���in the form of other people���s soldiers, and maybe other men in arms. Those other men in arms, who are they? How closely are they tied to the army, to some of its officers, to certain politicians? The shadows are deep and dangerous.
All of which brings us to the massacre last week���more than 150 people from two small villages, Ogossagou and Welingara, attacked at home, murdered, the villages burned. I walked through Harlem yesterday, past the hair braiders and down a row of brownstones, listening to RFI���s Serge Daniel report from Ogossagou, a desolate wind in his microphone. I thought of the scale of the loss. It was like a whole block had been murdered. As if someone from every family in my co-op in Sugar Hill had been shot in the courtyard. Ala k���anw khalifa. This���the militias, the murders, the indiscriminate score-settling that will be (and has already been) dubbed “ethnic violence”���is exactly what observers feared the most, seven years ago. This form of violence���and the army���s obvious failure to prevent it and potential complicity in it���is exactly the genie that won���t go back in the box. Who will forget the murdered village? It won���t be the end of the story, only the beginning. There will be revenge, and revenge for the revenge. Who wouldn���t, under these circumstances, create a self-defense militia? Why wouldn���t Bamana, Dogon, Minianka, Bwa look to the hunters, the donso? Why wouldn���t the Peuhl arm themselves, as they have done, as will everyone else? Reciting the holy trinity of conflict resolution���disarmament, demobilization, reintegration���sounds like so much whistling in the wind. The absence of the state, its failure to provide either security or justice, particularly to herders, has always been an engine of the insurgency labelled jihad. The alliance between the ���security services������the army, gendarmes, customs, police���and the ���hunters������more aptly, ethnic militias, only fuels the engine. And here we are, in March 2019 (or 2012?), sensing which way the wind is blowing, but not knowing where it will take us.
The other scandal
And there���s another scandal, nowhere near the same scale, but telling nonetheless. Throughout Mali���s crisis, there has always been a strange sense of drift, a surreal disconnect between Bamako and most of the country, a lack of clarity or urgency. As if once you���d called out ���fire���, there was no point looking for a bucket, even as your neighbor���s roof burned and embers reached your own. Meanwhile in Paris, too, there seems to be a kind of muscle memory of the Fran��Afrique that successive presidents have claimed ���to put an end to.��� This week, some of France���s most respected researchers working on Africa���Vincent Foucher, Daouda Gary-Tounkara, Yvan Guichaoua, among others���resigned from the editorial board of the journal l���Afrique Contemporaine after the ministry that funds the journal quashed the publication of a peer-reviewed dossier on Mali. This isn���t the first time the editorial independence of l���Afrique Contemporaine has been put into question. Maybe it is also time for such a journal���a state-driven scientific enterprise���to be killed off. But the whole kerfuffle raises questions���while Bamako might be in 2012, is Paris still living in the Fran��Afrique world of 1982? At least the researchers won���t have to publish their research on Minitel. We���ll look forward to hearing what they have to say on other platforms.
Longing for freedom in Morocco
Still from Razzia.
The French-born, Morocco based filmmaker and educator, Nabil��Ayouch, has directed five features in the last decade and produced nearly a dozen others. Along the way, he���s distinguished himself as one of the most dynamic and gifted directors in the Arab world. From his heart-rending breakout��Ali��Zaoua, about the embroilment of Casablanca street kids��in��gang warfare to��Much Loved, a deeply sympathetic portrait of prostitutes that was banned in Morocco due to its ���contempt for moral values.���
Ayouch��treads where no one else in the country would. Every film captures the struggle for outsiders���which include figure such as independent women, Jews, and even suicide bombers���to exist in an oppressive society. But despite their arresting realism,��Ayouch���s��films are not documentaries. They���re meticulously crafted dramas about identity, change and redemption. Although his work is undeniably political, denouncing the ills of Moroccan society without fear or favor,��Ayouch��privileges immersive storytelling and arresting visuals over any blanket statements. His latest film,��Razzia, especially pulsates with humanism. Set in Casablanca, it depicts the Morocco of the last thirty years with brutal honesty. Interweaving glimpses into the lives of a wide array of outsiders���from a Berber schoolteacher to a young Jewish man to an aspiring singer grappling with his queer identity���the film chronicles the destinies of men and women longing for freedom and a greater sense of autonomy. A narratively and visually ambitious tone poem, the film explores unmistakably Moroccan themes even as it keeps its sights set firmly on a universal humanism. Screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Jewish Film Festival,��Razzia��was recently released in Morocco and France and will be traveling throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.
Theo Zenou
In��Razzia, all the characters share the same status. They come from different backgrounds but all are outsiders. Where did the idea come from? Was it research and observation? You seem to be an artist that likes to delve deep into specific milieus.
Nabil Ayouch
To me, it���s not really��research��but digging. I���m digging and I���m listening to my environment. I���m fascinated, for example, by Casablanca as a city, even if human beings are my first and only obsession. So, I meet people, visit places, and I dig. I find out what haunts me, inspires me, and shocks me.
Theo Zenou
So, what about one of the film���s most memorable scenes? The teenage girl is sitting on her bed, and her phone buzzes, so she goes over to her dresser to put on her djellaba. We think maybe she���s going out to meet a boy. But she doesn���t: She kneels and prays. In so doing, she exits the frame momentarily, and we are left watching her computer screen��� playing a sexually risqu�� music video. That one shot captures the theme of your film: tradition and modernity at odds with one another.
Nabil Ayouch
This scene came from my daughter and her friends. She went through a religious phase, between twelve and sixteen, and it was funny because I was watching her knowing that it wouldn���t last. Of course, you should never tell your kid not to do something because it only makes them want to do it more. So, I was just waiting and observing. She and her friends are so attracted to music, to parties, to media, and they���re living in the Arab world, but they don���t know the language so well, the country, or the people���the ���real people������, so they���re living in a bubble. Their way to feel part of the traditional culture is religion. It���s hard for them when so many cultures are mixed together. And I always told her, ���You will quit,��� and she said, ���No!��� Then last year, she told me, ���You were right about the fact that I would quit. I���m not Muslim anymore!���
Joseph Pomp
Maybe you could say a little about if and how your audiences have changed over the course of your last few films. My impression is that your first features were made primarily for the festival circuit [although��Ali��Zaoua��was a huge box-office success in Morocco, perhaps France too?] and the last two releases veer more toward popular entertainment.
Nabil Ayouch
So, you thought��Razzia��was entertaining?
Joseph Pomp
Very much so! Let���s say that it stays clear from the ghetto of social realism. Does the broadening of your tone and subject matter have anything to do with the different sources of funding you���ve secured more recently?
For��Razzia, we got French government funding [L���aide��aux��cin��mas��du monde��administered by the CNC], but we also had money from Canal+, France 3, and the European Union, so in that way it���s more popular. I build the project and then I wonder how I���m going to finance it. Each time it���s different. But I���ve been able to get financing while keeping total artistic freedom���as long as I can maintain this, I���ll keep working the way that I do. It���s a mix of French, Belgian, and Moroccan money���private financiers plus state money, although from Morocco, less and less. Most financiers are just looking at the French territory. That���s where they know they can get their money back. For example,��Much Loved��sold 200,000 tickets, which is more than what they expected. After that, we have international sales agents, but they���re the only ones in the French system that are concerned with how our films do in the Arab world.
Joseph Pomp
What about for you, though? Is it important that your films will reach an audience in Morocco and other Arabic-speaking countries?
Nabil Ayouch
Until now, the Arabic market was very small and quite hard to penetrate. We have similar languages [the Moroccan dialect is not mutually intelligible with modern standard Arabic] but not the same one. It���s weird, because it���s better to have a totally different language than a close language. When you want to do films in Moroccan Arabic, which is what I do, it���s hard to sell them abroad. Because of��Much Loved, my previous film, this one (Razzia) has sold pretty well in the Arab world. It���s going to be released in Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, the Emirates, and so on. This is the very first time, that we have an interest in the Arabic market for my films. Otherwise it was only festivals, where they were popular. Sometimes there was a limited release, like in Tunisia, but this time, it���s going to be wide.
Joseph Pomp
This means, of course, that there really was a huge number of people in the Arab world that saw��Much Loved, whether or not many of those viewers would admit to it. It feels as if, when you were making that film, you had to have been thinking primarily of a Moroccan spectator.
Nabil Ayouch
I never think about a spectator���
Joseph Pomp
You don���t think of the films as either French or Moroccan?
Nabil Ayouch
No, never. I don���t think, ���I���m French��� or ���I���m Moroccan��� either. I never thought that��Much Loved��would be so huge. I remember after Cannes, when the film was banned in the Arab world, it had something like 30 million views on YouTube. Only in Morocco! People were like, ���It���s a scandal! How can we make films like this?��� But there were 30 million views. And people from around the Arab world were telling us that the movie is all they were talking about on social media. Even in Iraq, a country at war! Saudi Arabia��� they became crazy, gossiping about clips from the movie. They hated me and at the same time I think there was a kind of respect. And now, with this new film, I can profit [laughs].
Joseph Pomp
Maybe my favorite part of��Razzia��was the first vignette about the Berber teacher, Abdellah, played by the incredible actor Amine��Ennaji. How did you come to work with him?
Nabil Ayouch
He���s probably the best Moroccan actor we���ve ever had. He���s been doing pretty uninteresting movies and TV series for years and years, but I believe he���s a really, really big actor, very strong, very powerful. I want to write a part just for him, opposite an American actor, because he has that kind of range.
Joseph Pomp
What is it like working with him, as opposed to a non-actor? Do you give more directions to him or to the non-professionals (e.g., in��Ali��Zaoua��and��Horses of God)? Is rehearsal an important part of your process?��
Nabil Ayouch
I think that directing is really above all listening. You listen differently to professional actors, whom you have to help break out of certain habits, than you do to non-professional actors, with whom you have to build, because you are working from their real lives and you have to keep them natural, whereas in the other case, you have to clean in a certain way.
Joseph Pomp
When you���re working with street kids, as you often have, are they at all trying to direct��you? Is it hard, in other words, to insert yourself and your crew into their community?
Still from Razzia.Nabil Ayouch
It���s not difficult when it���s a place where I feel comfortable, like in the shantytown of Sidi��Moumen��[outside of Casablanca] where I shot��Horses of God��and where I���ll shoot my next film.��I���ve gotten really familiar with these kinds of areas, because I grew up in this suburb of Paris���Sarcelles���that, to me, is very similar. Sarcelles hadn���t been a shantytown since the ���50s���I lived there in the ���70s and ���80s���but it has very strong, violent communities, and experienced the same problem of having no social link to the city center. Plus, these places are literally inaccessible. So, when I arrived in Sidi��Moumen, I felt like a fish in the water.
Joseph Pomp
I know that you decided to make��Horses of God��(based on the novel,��Les ��toiles de Sidi��Moumen,��about the Casablanca suicide bombings in 2003) because you couldn���t believe it when you read that the kids involved were from that area [Sidi��Moument], which you knew well. How has it changed since you shot that film? Is there anything specific that made you want to make your next film there?
Nabil Ayouch
Yes, when I first started spending time there in the ���90s, let���s say it was about 80% shantytown and 20% buildings. Today, it���s the reverse, 20% shantytown and 80% buildings. There���s a tram that goes to the center [of Casablanca], which is very new���so, now there���s not only a mental, but also a physical connection. And I built a cultural center there where 500 children now go every day to learn about how to open themselves to the world through arts and culture.
Joseph Pomp
Do you also have filmmaking workshops there?
Nabil Ayouch
No, but I���m showing them films, and we have discussions. Because, I believe that when you say to these young people that violence shouldn���t be a means of expression, if you don���t offer them an alternative, you didn���t do a thing. So that���s what we did, me and Mahi��Binebine, who���s a painter and friend of mine (whose novel we adapted into��Horses of God). And we opened a new center in Tangiers, in the same kind of area as Sidi��Moumen. And this is because in Sarcelles, from a cultural standpoint, I learned everything I know in a��maison��des��jeunes��et de la culture��(or ���MJC���)���tap dancing, singing; it���s where I watched my first Chaplin and Eisenstein movies. When I arrived in Sidi��Moumen, I observed the same problem, with the same cause and the same consequence. It���s not a question of being happy or unhappy; I was very happy in Sarcelles. It���s a question of being cut off, of feeling abandoned, like a second-class citizen.
Joseph Pomp
It���s interesting that you pursued the reverse course of migration, leaving France to work in Morocco. Did you feel that your own options were a bit limited in Paris, that you���d be ghettoized in the rubric of��banlieue��cinema?
Nabil Ayouch
Yes, you���re totally right. I quickly understood that staying in France would put me in a box. If I were really intrigued by French society, I would have stayed, but I was getting really bored. Things are changing a little bit now, but Morocco seemed like the Wild West to me. Everything could change in five minutes. If you wanted to do something, you could just do it. People are so generous; they have big hearts. Every day I drive across the city, it���s a short film: there are so many stories.
Joseph Pomp
So, was it specifically Casablanca that drew you to living in Morocco? What makes it special?
Nabil Ayouch
Well, Tangier is the only other city in Morocco I would consider living in���my wife is from Tangier. But it���s a lazy city. There���s not a better place for my family to live in than Casablanca. I love it. The center is very small and not very interesting, but the surrounding area is big and very inspiring.
Joseph Pomp
I was very intrigued to discover the small Jewish community there, as you present it in��Razzia. And then I realized that the Casablanca bombings that serve as the tragic finale to��Horses of God��were targeting specifically Jewish sites. Have those events affected the number of Jews that are still living in the city today?
Nabil Ayouch
Not a lot. The majority of Moroccan Jews, of course, emigrated long before. Twenty years ago, there were ten to fifteen thousand Jews. Today, there are two thousand. The big exoduses are in the past, 1956, 1973, and again 1991 after the Gulf War. The number continues to diminish, but it remains the only country with the Arab world with a strong, influential Jewish community. The Jews living abroad are still very attached to the country. But there were so many important Jewish theologians that lived here, so every year we get 150,000 or so coming to make pilgrimages. And they���ve restored several synagogues, and the��mellah��of Marrakech. The monarchy has always felt it needs to protect the Jews. The mentality of most Moroccans is another story. For those that have actually worked and lived among Jews, there���s no question that a Moroccan Jew is a Moroccan. Those who haven���t, and only know about Jews through school and the media, it���s a totally different story. But real anti-Semitism is in Europe. In Morocco, it���s ignorance, stupidity.
Joseph Pomp
At the same time that I don���t want to ask you to decode the film, I���m wondering whether you see the angry mob at the end of��Razzia��as symbolic of changes in Moroccan politics and society���perhaps we could identify a wave of Islamic fervor that has been sweeping across North Africa in recent years.
Nabil Ayouch
It���s been more conservative���that���s for sure. There���s less and less space for debate, discussion, tolerance, and universal values. At the same time, the people have this feeling that something doesn���t work. It���s not a feeling they would verbalize, but it���s that the system reached its limits and something has to change. So, beginning two years ago���and it���s a coincidence that the first time was during the shooting of��Razzia, which we had written a year earlier���we���ve had a lot of major social protests.
Joseph Pomp
But, of course, you didn���t have the kind of uprisings that happened during the Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt, and beyond. Morocco has been more sedate.
Nabil Ayouch
Yes, because the regime is not the same. I had the strong feeling that the Moroccan people were issuing a warning. It was like we were a basketball team entering [what is called in French] ���money time.��� It was like we said to politicians, ���OK, we���ll give you some time. Let���s see what you do.��� And nothing happened. Time is accelerating, and the pressure increases. The educational system is broken!
Theo Zenou
Do the Moroccan elites want to hear this?
Nabil Ayouch
Of course not, but they have no other option, because when they banned my film [Much Loved], there was a huge debate that happened (about prostitution, etc.), even if it didn���t take the shape you���d have in this part of the world. Just as there isn���t good or bad publicity, there isn���t good or bad debate. There was a debate. And now that they haven���t banned this new film, a debate has already begun around it, and it���s going to be big, because I completely live with��Much Loved��and I���ve built��Razzia��on its foundations.
Theo Zenou
It���s very brave!
Nabil Ayouch
I don���t know if it���s brave. I have no other option. If I don���t do this, I���d just shut down and quit. But as I���ve said, Moroccans are expecting something to happen. They���ve been living in an oppressive system, waiting for an explanation about why things are the way they are.
Theo Zenou
So, is this new picture you���re working on also set in the Morocco of today?
Nabil Ayouch
Yes, it���s in Sidi��Moumen. I���m following a hip-hop class in this cultural center, looking at how young boys and girls are expressing themselves through their words and bodies. It���s a musical. The teacher is a very handsome, charismatic man who quit rapping himself after he got disgusted by the system and decided to give his life to these young people.
Longing for freedom and a greater sense of autonomy in Morocco
Still from Razzia.
The French-born, Morocco based filmmaker and educator, Nabil��Ayouch, has directed five features in the last decade and produced nearly a dozen others. Along the way, he���s distinguished himself as one of the most dynamic and gifted directors in the Arab world. From his heart-rending breakout��Ali��Zaoua, about the embroilment of Casablanca street kids��in��gang warfare to��Much Loved, a deeply sympathetic portrait of prostitutes that was banned in Morocco due to its ���contempt for moral values.���
Ayouch��treads where no one else in the country would. Every film captures the struggle for outsiders���which include figure such as independent women, Jews, and even suicide bombers���to exist in an oppressive society. But despite their arresting realism,��Ayouch���s��films are not documentaries. They���re meticulously crafted dramas about identity, change and redemption. Although his work is undeniably political, denouncing the ills of Moroccan society without fear or favor,��Ayouch��privileges immersive storytelling and arresting visuals over any blanket statements. His latest film,��Razzia, especially pulsates with humanism. Set in Casablanca, it depicts the Morocco of the last thirty years with brutal honesty. Interweaving glimpses into the lives of a wide array of outsiders���from a Berber schoolteacher to a young Jewish man to an aspiring singer grappling with his queer identity���the film chronicles the destinies of men and women longing for freedom and a greater sense of autonomy. A narratively and visually ambitious tone poem, the film explores unmistakably Moroccan themes even as it keeps its sights set firmly on a universal humanism. Screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Jewish Film Festival,��Razzia��was recently released in Morocco and France and will be traveling throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.
Theo Zenou
In��Razzia, all the characters share the same status. They come from different backgrounds but all are outsiders. Where did the idea come from? Was it research and observation? You seem to be an artist that likes to delve deep into specific milieus.
Nabil Ayouch
To me, it���s not really��research��but digging. I���m digging and I���m listening to my environment. I���m fascinated, for example, by Casablanca as a city, even if human beings are my first and only obsession. So, I meet people, visit places, and I dig. I find out what haunts me, inspires me, and shocks me.
Theo Zenou
So, what about one of the film���s most memorable scenes? The teenage girl is sitting on her bed, and her phone buzzes, so she goes over to her dresser to put on her djellaba. We think maybe she���s going out to meet a boy. But she doesn���t: She kneels and prays. In so doing, she exits the frame momentarily, and we are left watching her computer screen��� playing a sexually risqu�� music video. That one shot captures the theme of your film: tradition and modernity at odds with one another.
Nabil Ayouch
This scene came from my daughter and her friends. She went through a religious phase, between twelve and sixteen, and it was funny because I was watching her knowing that it wouldn���t last. Of course, you should never tell your kid not to do something because it only makes them want to do it more. So, I was just waiting and observing. She and her friends are so attracted to music, to parties, to media, and they���re living in the Arab world, but they don���t know the language so well, the country, or the people���the ���real people������, so they���re living in a bubble. Their way to feel part of the traditional culture is religion. It���s hard for them when so many cultures are mixed together. And I always told her, ���You will quit,��� and she said, ���No!��� Then last year, she told me, ���You were right about the fact that I would quit. I���m not Muslim anymore!���
Joseph Pomp
Maybe you could say a little about if and how your audiences have changed over the course of your last few films. My impression is that your first features were made primarily for the festival circuit [although��Ali��Zaoua��was a huge box-office success in Morocco, perhaps France too?] and the last two releases veer more toward popular entertainment.
Nabil Ayouch
So, you thought��Razzia��was entertaining?
Joseph Pomp
Very much so! Let���s say that it stays clear from the ghetto of social realism. Does the broadening of your tone and subject matter have anything to do with the different sources of funding you���ve secured more recently?
For��Razzia, we got French government funding [L���aide��aux��cin��mas��du monde��administered by the CNC], but we also had money from Canal+, France 3, and the European Union, so in that way it���s more popular. I build the project and then I wonder how I���m going to finance it. Each time it���s different. But I���ve been able to get financing while keeping total artistic freedom���as long as I can maintain this, I���ll keep working the way that I do. It���s a mix of French, Belgian, and Moroccan money���private financiers plus state money, although from Morocco, less and less. Most financiers are just looking at the French territory. That���s where they know they can get their money back. For example,��Much Loved��sold 200,000 tickets, which is more than what they expected. After that, we have international sales agents, but they���re the only ones in the French system that are concerned with how our films do in the Arab world.
Joseph Pomp
What about for you, though? Is it important that your films will reach an audience in Morocco and other Arabic-speaking countries?
Nabil Ayouch
Until now, the Arabic market was very small and quite hard to penetrate. We have similar languages [the Moroccan dialect is not mutually intelligible with modern standard Arabic] but not the same one. It���s weird, because it���s better to have a totally different language than a close language. When you want to do films in Moroccan Arabic, which is what I do, it���s hard to sell them abroad. Because of��Much Loved, my previous film, this one (Razzia) has sold pretty well in the Arab world. It���s going to be released in Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, the Emirates, and so on. This is the very first time, that we have an interest in the Arabic market for my films. Otherwise it was only festivals, where they were popular. Sometimes there was a limited release, like in Tunisia, but this time, it���s going to be wide.
Joseph Pomp
This means, of course, that there really was a huge number of people in the Arab world that saw��Much Loved, whether or not many of those viewers would admit to it. It feels as if, when you were making that film, you had to have been thinking primarily of a Moroccan spectator.
Nabil Ayouch
I never think about a spectator���
Joseph Pomp
You don���t think of the films as either French or Moroccan?
Nabil Ayouch
No, never. I don���t think, ���I���m French��� or ���I���m Moroccan��� either. I never thought that��Much Loved��would be so huge. I remember after Cannes, when the film was banned in the Arab world, it had something like 30 million views on YouTube. Only in Morocco! People were like, ���It���s a scandal! How can we make films like this?��� But there were 30 million views. And people from around the Arab world were telling us that the movie is all they were talking about on social media. Even in Iraq, a country at war! Saudi Arabia��� they became crazy, gossiping about clips from the movie. They hated me and at the same time I think there was a kind of respect. And now, with this new film, I can profit [laughs].
Joseph Pomp
Maybe my favorite part of��Razzia��was the first vignette about the Berber teacher, Abdellah, played by the incredible actor Amine��Ennaji. How did you come to work with him?
Nabil Ayouch
He���s probably the best Moroccan actor we���ve ever had. He���s been doing pretty uninteresting movies and TV series for years and years, but I believe he���s a really, really big actor, very strong, very powerful. I want to write a part just for him, opposite an American actor, because he has that kind of range.
Joseph Pomp
What is it like working with him, as opposed to a non-actor? Do you give more directions to him or to the non-professionals (e.g., in��Ali��Zaoua��and��Horses of God)? Is rehearsal an important part of your process?��
Nabil Ayouch
I think that directing is really above all listening. You listen differently to professional actors, whom you have to help break out of certain habits, than you do to non-professional actors, with whom you have to build, because you are working from their real lives and you have to keep them natural, whereas in the other case, you have to clean in a certain way.
Joseph Pomp
When you���re working with street kids, as you often have, are they at all trying to direct��you? Is it hard, in other words, to insert yourself and your crew into their community?
Still from Razzia.Nabil Ayouch
It���s not difficult when it���s a place where I feel comfortable, like in the shantytown of Sidi��Moumen��[outside of Casablanca] where I shot��Horses of God��and where I���ll shoot my next film.��I���ve gotten really familiar with these kinds of areas, because I grew up in this suburb of Paris���Sarcelles���that, to me, is very similar. Sarcelles hadn���t been a shantytown since the ���50s���I lived there in the ���70s and ���80s���but it has very strong, violent communities, and experienced the same problem of having no social link to the city center. Plus, these places are literally inaccessible. So, when I arrived in Sidi��Moumen, I felt like a fish in the water.
Joseph Pomp
I know that you decided to make��Horses of God��(based on the novel,��Les ��toiles de Sidi��Moumen,��about the Casablanca suicide bombings in 2003) because you couldn���t believe it when you read that the kids involved were from that area [Sidi��Moument], which you knew well. How has it changed since you shot that film? Is there anything specific that made you want to make your next film there?
Nabil Ayouch
Yes, when I first started spending time there in the ���90s, let���s say it was about 80% shantytown and 20% buildings. Today, it���s the reverse, 20% shantytown and 80% buildings. There���s a tram that goes to the center [of Casablanca], which is very new���so, now there���s not only a mental, but also a physical connection. And I built a cultural center there where 500 children now go every day to learn about how to open themselves to the world through arts and culture.
Joseph Pomp
Do you also have filmmaking workshops there?
Nabil Ayouch
No, but I���m showing them films, and we have discussions. Because, I believe that when you say to these young people that violence shouldn���t be a means of expression, if you don���t offer them an alternative, you didn���t do a thing. So that���s what we did, me and Mahi��Binebine, who���s a painter and friend of mine (whose novel we adapted into��Horses of God). And we opened a new center in Tangiers, in the same kind of area as Sidi��Moumen. And this is because in Sarcelles, from a cultural standpoint, I learned everything I know in a��maison��des��jeunes��et de la culture��(or ���MJC���)���tap dancing, singing; it���s where I watched my first Chaplin and Eisenstein movies. When I arrived in Sidi��Moumen, I observed the same problem, with the same cause and the same consequence. It���s not a question of being happy or unhappy; I was very happy in Sarcelles. It���s a question of being cut off, of feeling abandoned, like a second-class citizen.
Joseph Pomp
It���s interesting that you pursued the reverse course of migration, leaving France to work in Morocco. Did you feel that your own options were a bit limited in Paris, that you���d be ghettoized in the rubric of��banlieue��cinema?
Nabil Ayouch
Yes, you���re totally right. I quickly understood that staying in France would put me in a box. If I were really intrigued by French society, I would have stayed, but I was getting really bored. Things are changing a little bit now, but Morocco seemed like the Wild West to me. Everything could change in five minutes. If you wanted to do something, you could just do it. People are so generous; they have big hearts. Every day I drive across the city, it���s a short film: there are so many stories.
Joseph Pomp
So, was it specifically Casablanca that drew you to living in Morocco? What makes it special?
Nabil Ayouch
Well, Tangier is the only other city in Morocco I would consider living in���my wife is from Tangier. But it���s a lazy city. There���s not a better place for my family to live in than Casablanca. I love it. The center is very small and not very interesting, but the surrounding area is big and very inspiring.
Joseph Pomp
I was very intrigued to discover the small Jewish community there, as you present it in��Razzia. And then I realized that the Casablanca bombings that serve as the tragic finale to��Horses of God��were targeting specifically Jewish sites. Have those events affected the number of Jews that are still living in the city today?
Nabil Ayouch
Not a lot. The majority of Moroccan Jews, of course, emigrated long before. Twenty years ago, there were ten to fifteen thousand Jews. Today, there are two thousand. The big exoduses are in the past, 1956, 1973, and again 1991 after the Gulf War. The number continues to diminish, but it remains the only country with the Arab world with a strong, influential Jewish community. The Jews living abroad are still very attached to the country. But there were so many important Jewish theologians that lived here, so every year we get 150,000 or so coming to make pilgrimages. And they���ve restored several synagogues, and the��mellah��of Marrakech. The monarchy has always felt it needs to protect the Jews. The mentality of most Moroccans is another story. For those that have actually worked and lived among Jews, there���s no question that a Moroccan Jew is a Moroccan. Those who haven���t, and only know about Jews through school and the media, it���s a totally different story. But real anti-Semitism is in Europe. In Morocco, it���s ignorance, stupidity.
Joseph Pomp
At the same time that I don���t want to ask you to decode the film, I���m wondering whether you see the angry mob at the end of��Razzia��as symbolic of changes in Moroccan politics and society���perhaps we could identify a wave of Islamic fervor that has been sweeping across North Africa in recent years.
Nabil Ayouch
It���s been more conservative���that���s for sure. There���s less and less space for debate, discussion, tolerance, and universal values. At the same time, the people have this feeling that something doesn���t work. It���s not a feeling they would verbalize, but it���s that the system reached its limits and something has to change. So, beginning two years ago���and it���s a coincidence that the first time was during the shooting of��Razzia, which we had written a year earlier���we���ve had a lot of major social protests.
Joseph Pomp
But, of course, you didn���t have the kind of uprisings that happened during the Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt, and beyond. Morocco has been more sedate.
Nabil Ayouch
Yes, because the regime is not the same. I had the strong feeling that the Moroccan people were issuing a warning. It was like we were a basketball team entering [what is called in French] ���money time.��� It was like we said to politicians, ���OK, we���ll give you some time. Let���s see what you do.��� And nothing happened. Time is accelerating, and the pressure increases. The educational system is broken!
Theo Zenou
Do the Moroccan elites want to hear this?
Nabil Ayouch
Of course not, but they have no other option, because when they banned my film [Much Loved], there was a huge debate that happened (about prostitution, etc.), even if it didn���t take the shape you���d have in this part of the world. Just as there isn���t good or bad publicity, there isn���t good or bad debate. There was a debate. And now that they haven���t banned this new film, a debate has already begun around it, and it���s going to be big, because I completely live with��Much Loved��and I���ve built��Razzia��on its foundations.
Theo Zenou
It���s very brave!
Nabil Ayouch
I don���t know if it���s brave. I have no other option. If I don���t do this, I���d just shut down and quit. But as I���ve said, Moroccans are expecting something to happen. They���ve been living in an oppressive system, waiting for an explanation about why things are the way they are.
Theo Zenou
So, is this new picture you���re working on also set in the Morocco of today?
Nabil Ayouch
Yes, it���s in Sidi��Moumen. I���m following a hip-hop class in this cultural center, looking at how young boys and girls are expressing themselves through their words and bodies. It���s a musical. The teacher is a very handsome, charismatic man who quit rapping himself after he got disgusted by the system and decided to give his life to these young people.
March 26, 2019
When teachers don’t get paid, we all lose
The message is intended to remind the government that the strike is not without cause. Image credit Tsebo Phakisi.
The phenomenon of underpaid, under-resourced and under-appreciated teachers is a soap opera many of us are familiar with. One would think that the people responsible for shaping future leaders would be treated with respect by their governments and elected officials, but this is often not the case, and Lesotho��is no exception.
Three teachers��� unions, namely the Lesotho Association of Teachers (LAT), Lesotho Teachers Trade Union (LTTU) and Lesotho Schools Principals Association (LESPA), were granted permission to hold a strike from the country���s Directorate of Disputes Prevention and Resolution (DDPR���s) in early February, 2019. Even that right was not ensured until the unions sent an appeal to��Labour��Court judge, Justice��Keketso��Moahloli, after the DDPR initially tried to prohibit the strike from taking place.
A teacher chants a song of protest on the day the DDPR gave permission for the strike. Image credit Tsebo Phakisi.As��of February 18th, public school teachers will be boycotting classes until March 12th with the possibility of extending to the rest of the year. The assumption is that this will give the government enough time to take proactive actions towards meeting the��teachers��� demands. Their defiance has prompted multiple threats and pleas��from the��Ministry of Education and Training��(MOET),��but the teachers remain unrelenting.
Listed below are the demands made by the teachers unions in Lesotho:
Salaries to be paid (on time), because it is their legal right as MOET employees;
Immediate payment of salary payments in arrears
Progress report on how long it will take the MOET to fill acting leadership positions (principals, deputy principals and heads of departments) within schools.
Overall review of the 2009 teachers��� salary structure, which has failed to keep up with the rate��of inflation.
Timely distribution of utility grants to primary schools
Payment of gratuity to principals whose performance contracts have expired (regardless of their age), including those who retired after the expiration of their performance contracts.
Announcement of a proper gratuity payment strategy for principals whose contracts are yet to expire and a clear strategy to hire them on a permanent basis;
Provision of relevant teaching and learning materials for the effective implementation of the new Lesotho General Certificate of Secondary Education (LGCSE) curriculum in both primary and secondary schools; and
Recognition of special education qualifications.
A policeman on strike duty watches on as protesters sing and dance past him with tree branches in hand. Image credit Tsebo Phakisi.This chapter of the strike follows earlier��labor��actions in��August 2018��in which striking teachers gathered to��serve the Minster of Education and Training with a petition��in response to the��contractual flaws that plague Lesotho���s education system and are symbolic of the magnitude of financial mismanagement in Lesotho on a governmental level. As if to uphold the legacy of ministers in Lesotho not being present to receive petitions, the Education Minister, Professor��Rapapa, was not present to receive the petition. This earlier strike was the beginning of a tumultuous engagement between government and the teacher���s unions to remedy a wound whose blood has over the years, seeped and trickled into classrooms; subtly affecting the quality of education.
The situation led��Education International, a worldwide association of teachers, to wage its support for the Lesotho strike and urged the Government of Lesotho to abide by its national and international obligations as prescribed by��UNESCO, including government���s duty to respect the right to freedom of association and to collective bargaining as guaranteed by the Lesotho��Labour��Code and the International��Labour��Organization (ILO) conventions.
The August 2018 events led to the ministerial cabinet setting up a special committee of��6 ministers��to respond to the teachers��� grievances. While some progress has been made and government has allegedly already spent 53 million Maloti ($3.8 million) towards correcting its wrongs, teachers have remained steadfast and refuse to capitulate until all of their demands are met. As it stands, the strike is ongoing into March 2019 and midterm exams are on the horizon, putting additional pressure on the government to act.
Some teachers laying in the road after the protest had traffic blocked in parts of the city centre Maseru. Image credit Tsebo Phakisi.After just one week back in the classroom, teachers resumed their protest the very next Monday, March 18, until further notice.
Reflections and images from the streets (by Tsebo Phakisi)
This national education crisis spilled��into the streets in February 2019. On the day I took these photographs, I stumbled onto teachers huddled into a cluster of activity in the middle of downtown Maseru. I had seen an influx of red as I made my way to��the State Library, which I dismissed, thinking yet another political party had just been formed. In hindsight, it is as if their red regalia was symbolic of their anger which you could feel rise as they jointly sung lamentations berating political leaders��who they accused of stringing them into poverty. On their backs was still a reminder that in August last year, they had picketed for the same reasons. The February strike was��yet another nail into the current coalition government in Lesotho that fails the people it claims to serve.
A member of the Lesotho Teachers Trade Union in full union regalia. Image credit Tsebo Phakisi.The current state of affairs reveals the implications that an underpaid teaching force has on the relationship between teacher and pupil(s); which, when drawing from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, it becomes evident that some motivating factors which are not being met by government as the employer are responsible for Lesotho’s quality of education and the spaces within which learning occurs. Moreover, it is quite unfortunate because at the heart of poor teaching is a teacher having too little knowledge, too little skill to impart the knowledge or too few resources to do their job. As it stands, the educator���s��grievances have in them contributing factors that make room for poor teaching.
Molefi��Chabeli,��who has been a teacher for seven years now, gave me a closer look into how dire the situation was. He passionately stated that despite salary increments being framed as the sole motive behind the strikes, the grievances weighing heavily on teachers have to do with the basic essentials needed to make the learning environment successful for both teacher and student. I could tell how discouraging it is for him and for the teaching force as a whole as he repeatedly noted that the year 2009 was the last time their salaries were reviewed.�� He continued, stating that (in 2009) he was doing the second year of his teaching degree. This goes to show that in trying to live in 2019 on 2009 salaries, financially, teachers in Lesotho are not alright. Coupled with overcrowded classrooms and limited facilities, most students are losing out as well.
Teachers huddled in unison as they sang along the Kingsway road in Maseru. Image credit Tsebo Phakisi.
March 25, 2019
When is it antisemitic to criticize Israel?
A beach for Whites only near the integrated fishing village of Kalk Bay, not far from Capetown (1970). Image credit KM via UN Photo (CC).
The��Israeli state��and its supporters frequently accuse its critics of being motivated by antisemitism, and although they usually��concede��that��it is not inherently antisemitic to criticize the country, recent controversies��have��proven that��it��is quite difficult to draw��precisely��where the line begins and ends.
One extremely popular method for delineating the borders of acceptable criticism��of Israel��is��the ���Three D���s of antisemitism,��� also known as the ���3D test��� developed by its one-time��Minister of Internal��Affairs,��Natan��Sharanksy.��This framework evaluates��criticism of Israel against three ���D���s���:��demonization (when ���Israel���s actions are blown��out of all sensible proportion���), double standards (when Israel is ���singled out��� or criticism is ���applied selectively���)��and delegitimization (when ���Israel���s fundamental right to exist is denied���).��If��a��critical statement��meets��any of these criteria, then��it is��determined to be��antisemitic.
The ���3D test��� has been promoted by the��likes of the��US��Anti-Defamation League��as a simple��way to distinguish ���anti-Israel��� criticism from��antisemitism,��but it falls short in at least one important way: its standards��can easily be applied to the discourse surrounding countries other than Israel. In fact, the ���three D���s��� mirror complaints made by supporters of apartheid South Africa in the 1970s and 80s,��who��also��believed��that their��country was subject to unfair criticism.
A brief overview of pro-South African propaganda��reveals comparable accusations of demonization, double standards, and delegitimization.��Far from��providing a reliable tool of analysis, Sharansky���s ���3D test��� merely codifies the same rhetoric that was used to defend apartheid South Africa, turning the language of pariah states into supposed evidence of antisemitism.
Demonization
Glenn Babb, South African Ambassador to Canada from 1985��to 1987, often��criticized the ���exaggerated rhetoric�����that was used against South Africa. He felt that the country was being�����vilified��� in��the��public debate, and that its critics were��full of ���dismal ignorance.�����Babb claimed that��the Canadian government was conspiring with�����anti-South Africa��� groups��and the��African National Congress (ANC) to manufacture an unfriendly attitude towards South Africa���he referred to this ���incestuous relationship��� as�����the anti-South Africa industry.���
In fact,��South Africa���s supporters frequently complained that the country was��being depicted from��an entirely negative and one-sided point of view; they blamed the ���biased��� and ���liberal media��� for uncritically repeating disinformation from ���terrorists��� and Soviet Union ���puppets��� like the African National Congress (ANC), and for convincing the public that apartheid was uniquely evil.
Supporters argued that biased media coverage had triggered emotional responses at the expense of rational analysis, poisoning the possibility of constructive debate.��John Shingler, a professor at McGill University who was also a director of an elite pro-South Africa group,��wrote��that��campus��debates��around��South African��divestment��were�����unbalanced,��� ���one-dimensional,��� and ���wholly negative.�����The result was that��South Africa itself had become tainted as a country��(and��not just its policies),��which��had two main effects:��the��tone of the��debate��had become�����abusive�����and�����shrill,�����and��it had become impossible to take a ���moderate��� position or to oppose sanctions without being accused of being ���racists��� and ���fascists.�����By demonizing South Africa, any association with the country had become toxic.
Double Standards
A glossy��1987 pro-apartheid magazine called�����South Africa: Nation on Trial�����opened with a combative editorial claiming that�����South Africa bashing has become a national sport.��� The magazine, which was mailed to spouses of Canadian members of parliament, went on to complain that�����South Africa is judged by double, triple, and even quadruple standards.��Many of these are highly subjective, intellectually inconsistent, biased, racist, and downright arrogant.”
South Africa���s supporters��felt that many in the West had an ���obsession��� with the country, and questioned��the��disproportionate��attention��it received from governments.��John��Chettle��of the South Africa Foundation blasted the ���ruthless majority��� in the United Nations��for applying ���illegal sanctions�����against South Africa, and Babb pointed out��the ���selectivity��� with which ���the world singles South Africa out as a special case.���
Many��others��questioned why ���liberal do-gooders�����did not��boycott the Soviet Union or��other��African��states. An anti-sanctions advertisement published in November 1985 by both the Globe and Mail and the Ottawa Citizen��lambasted��Prime Minister��Mulroney���s ���one-sided ���get-South Africa��� threats��� and ���hypocritical��� sanctions, and asked why Canada was not��boycotting�����the Marxist dictatorship of��Tanzania.���
While allegations of��hypocrisy largely took an anti-Communist ideological line, South Africa���s defenders occasionally drew upon other examples.��As��one audience member remarked during a��public forum on South African censorship in 1988, during the First Intifada:�����What is this maniacal preoccupation with South Africa at the moment? I mean, 200 Palestinians are being shot to death in the streets on��the West Bank you know. I hope [you] will use the same kind of energy to bring inequities in Israel to the general public.���
Delegitimization
���There is a war going on,�����journalist Peter Worthington��grimly stated in his 1987 anti-ANC documentary, ���not against apartheid, but against South Africa itself.���
South Africa never had��an��argument��that was��exactly equivalent to Israel���s ���right to exist������that is,��its supporters��did not claim that white South Africans had a positive right to maintain ethnocratic control over the state, per se. Nonetheless,��they argued that��the demands of the anti-apartheid movement��would lead��to the violent overthrow or destruction of South Africa itself, and as such posed an existential threat.��In this, the��pro-South African lobby mobilized��an implicit idea of white self-determination as threatened by African and Marxist barbarism.
Supporters of South Africa rejected the call for ���one-person-one-vote��� by pointing to neighboring African countries to show that��democracy��has not��worked elsewhere on the continent but was in fact a ���cataclysmic failure.�����Toronto Sun columnist McKenzie Porter��blamed��this��on�����the inability of native blacks to govern well a modern state,�����and predicted that��if apartheid was dismantled,�����within a decade the only civilized nation on the African continent would collapse.�����Babb warned of a ���bloodbath,��� and��in a full-page article for the��Globe and Mail��titled ���The good side of white South Africa,��� Kenneth Walker wrote that one person, one vote�����is a recipe for slaughter in South Africa.���
Predictions were often apocalyptic. Most evocative was a��pro-apartheid comic strip��by Disney cartoonist Vic Lockman, whose��panel on the ���Soviet encirclement of South Africa��� presented��an image of a giant bear with a hammer-and-sickle, moving down from the African continent upon frightened South African factories and mines who��were��completely surrounded, declaring ���We shall drive South Africa into the Sea!���
The 3D test is fatally flawed
This is only a small sample of the arguments advanced by supporters of apartheid South Africa, who insisted that��criticism of the country was unfair��in a manner��consistent with��allegations��of demonization, double standards, and delegitimization. This suggests that the ���3D test��� for distinguishing criticism of Israel from antisemitism is fatally flawed: in effect, it bundles together a number of rhetorical strategies that are not unique to Israel but have been used by other pariah states to justify��their own��oppressive practices.��These strategies are, in essence, claims about a lack of fairness, and they are likely to be advanced by any country facing significant criticism.��Using these��tired and repackaged��arguments as a weapon against Israel���s critics will not��contribute to the fight against antisemitism, but��rather��undermine human rights activism.
‘Terrorism’ and antisemitism
Counter-terrorism exercise in Hebron. Image credit the Israel Defense Forces via Flickr (CC).
��� US Democratic Party Leadership Statement on Anti-Semitic Comments of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, February 11, 2019We are and will always be strong supporters of Israel in Congress because we understand that our support is based on shared values and strategic interests. Legitimate criticism of Israel���s policies is protected by the values of free speech and democratic debate that the United States and Israel share.
For decades, elected officials and pundits in the US have policed the borders of what is and isn���t legitimate criticism of Israel and its policies. The reason is straightforward: what if some legitimate criticism led to the conclusion that specific Israeli policies do, in fact, contradict those cherished ���shared values���? How would Congress then be able to fulfill its (truly extraordinary) promise of eternal support?
This dynamic is clearly illustrated by studying a shared value at the center of the political and moral maps of Israel and the US: their unequivocal claim to oppose and condemn all ���terrorism.��� In the public and media discourse, this claim does not need to be proved. It is simply assumed to be obvious and, by definition, accurate. To use media critic Daniel Hallin���s terminology, it belongs squarely in the ���sphere of consensus.���
Over the last year however, very credible evidence has surfaced that contradicts this claim in fundamental ways; evidence to which elected officials, pundits and other purported experts have responded with deafening silence. Such silences, coupled with repeated accusations of anti-semitism against critics of Israeli policies, have been central to the persistent campaign to ensure that the public debate remains safely within the boundaries of the Washington consensus.
Earlier this year, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu brokered a merger between the Jewish Home religious nationalist party and Otzma Yehudit, the successor to Meir Kahane���s Kach party. These maneuverings sparked outrage from an unusually broad section of American Jewry.
Kahane and his Jewish Defense League (JDL) resorted to ���terrorism”��in the 1970s and 1980s. Kach is considered a ���terrorist organization��� by the US and Israeli governments, and Michael Ben-Ari, the leader of Otzma, was denied entry to the US for that reason. Many critics of the Netanyahu���s deal have based their condemnation on a principled, absolute rejection of all ���terrorism.���
New York Times writer Bari Weiss, for example, applauded a statement by the American Jewish Committee condemning Otzma. She added that this condemnation ���exposes the strawman erected by anti-Zionists,��� namely that ���legitimate criticism of Israel is smeared as anti-Semitic.��� ���This is criticism of Israel,��� she insisted. ���No one mistakes it for something else.���
The ���terrorism��� denounced so publicly here was the ���terrorism��� that Kach and the JDL, extremists with no ties to the Israeli government, engaged in in the 1980s. Around the same time however, senior Israeli officials were busy creating and running a terrorist group that would, mostly with huge car bombs, kill hundreds of civilians in Lebanon. The existence of this secret ���terrorist��� operation was made public more than a year ago. It has not caused any outrage, has not led to any condemnation. Rather, these revelations have been met with absolute silence by elected officials, journalists, pundits and ���terrorism experts��� alike.
Without any explanation whatsoever, this extraordinary example of official Israeli ���terrorism��� has been treated as simply beyond the pale, as a fully illegitimate, unacceptable and (again per Hallin���s terminology)��deviant form of criticism.
Between 1979 and 1983, dozens of car bombings in Lebanon (and a few in Syria) were claimed by the Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners (FLLF), a mysterious group the true identity of which was never ascertained with certainty at the time. Many of these bombings were covered in the US��and international press. Palestinians and their Lebanese allies (the main victims of these attacks) repeatedly insisted that the FLLF was a front used by Israel to wage a ���secret war��� against them. Such accusations were rejected by Israel, who argued that these bombings were instances of ���Arab on Arab��� violence.
In February 2018 Ronen Bergman, a respected Israeli journalist since hired by the New York Times, published Rise and Kill First. In this book, he revealed that the FLLF was created by very senior Israeli officials (Rafael Eitan, Meir Dagan and Avigdor Ben-Gal) in 1979 in order to ���cause chaos among the Palestinians and Syrians in Lebanon, without leaving an Israeli fingerprint.���
The Palestinians, it turns out, had been right all along.
After Ariel Sharon became defense minister in 1981, Bergman further explains, the FLLF bombs were used to ���provoke Arafat into attacking Israel, which could then respond by invading Lebanon.��� A RAND report from 1983 gives a sense of the scale of this secret Israeli terrorist campaign. In just a few weeks in late September and early October 1981, FLLF bombs killed more than 120 people, thus accounting for over 40% of all terrorism fatalities in the world for that year. By contrast, in 1980 and 1981 combined Palestinian attacks killed 16 people and wounded 136.
The FLLF bombs exploded in market places, on busy streets, in theaters and refugee camps, that is to say they were aimed solely at civilian targets. Several of these attacks are included in the terrorism databases compiled by START and the RAND corporation. As one Israeli intelligence officer told Bergman:
I saw from a distance one of the cars blowing up and demolishing an entire street. We were teaching the Lebanese how effective a car bomb could be. Everything that we saw later with Hezbollah sprang from what they saw had happened after these operations.
Remarkably, this secret terrorist campaign was under way just as Israeli officials (including Sharon) were engaged in a comprehensive effort to claim the high moral ground by re-framing Israel���s decades-long fight against the Palestinians as a principled struggle between the Free World and the existential threat posed by ���international terrorism.��� Central to this hasbara campaign was the Jonathan Institute, founded by Benzion Netanyahu and his son, Benjamin (the current Prime Minister), and which organized two influential international conferences on ���terrorism��� in 1979 (Jerusalem) and 1984 (Washington, DC).
These efforts were extraordinarily successful. Since the mid-1980s, the American and Israeli discourses on terrorism have been virtually indistinguishable. Israel is, by definition, opposed to all ���terrorism.����� It is the victim, never the perpetrator of, ���terrorism��� and its uses of force are therefore to be understood as justified because in self-defense against this ���terrorist��� threat. Palestinians, by contrast, are always the perpetrators of ���terrorism,��� never its victims. The idea that they may have the right to use force to defend themselves against Israel���s ���terrorism��� is, in such a rhetorical context, absolutely nonsensical.
As Bergman���s revelations demonstrate, this discourse has, from the beginning, been pure ideology. And elected officials and pundits are the guardians of the ideological temple. Indeed, Rise and Kill First has been extensively and very positively reviewed in the US press, and its author interviewed on countless occasions, but the FLLF revelations have been systematically absent from these public discussions.
The debate around the book has proceeded as if the FLLF bombing campaign never happened, as if the Palestinians were never the victims of a widespread campaign of ���terrorism,��� and as if this campaign wasn���t directed by some of the most senior Israeli leaders of the last decades. Remarkably, this debate has been informed by the usual assumption that Israeli uses of force are to be understood, self-evidently and by definition, as part of that country���s ongoing fight against terrorism. And yet, the revelations about the FLLF highlight precisely how incredibly tenuous the claim that states have the right to use force against ���the terrorists��� truly is once the term ���terrorism��� is applied in a descriptive, non-ideological manner.
After all, would any elected official, in Washington or anywhere else, accept the notion that the Palestinians (or Lebanon or Syria) had the right to use force against the ���terrorist threat��� posed by Israel���s FLLF? Or the right to target Eitan, Ben-Gal, Dagan or Sharon for assassination (targeted killing) because of their direct role in this ���terrorist��� campaign? Or the right to target the kibuztim where, according to Bergman, many of the FLLF bombs were manufactured? Can one imagine a columnist in a major US newspaper claiming that civilians accidentally killed in the process should be considered mere ���collateral damage,��� or insisting that such uses of force should be celebrated as courageous, determined actions in the moral fight against the scourge of ���terrorism��� around the world?
On what basis then can Israel, the United States, or any other country claim the right to target terrorist leaders, bomb terrorist bomb making facilities or use deadly force against demonstrators because of an alleged connection to a terrorist organization?
Acknowledging that Palestinians have been the perpetrators of ���terrorism��� against Israel but also the victims of Israeli ���terrorism��� thus threatens to upend the entirety of the hegemonic discourse on ���terrorism.���
Over the past few weeks, pundits like Bari Weiss and Bret Stephens have repeatedly condemned Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar���s allegedly anti-Semitic remarks while proclaiming their readiness to accept ���legitimate criticism��� of Israel that is based not on slander but on a ���foundation in truth.��� Yet, they have not written a single word about the extraordinary revelations contained in Rise and Kill First, a book written by their own Times colleague and based on accounts from Israeli sources who were involved in the operation or knew of it at the time.
On August 8, 1983, Thomas Friedman described on the front page of the New York Times how a Peugeot car packed with 200 pounds of TNT ���detonated around noon, when the surrounding stores and vendor���s stalls were jammed with shoppers.��� The bombing killed 33 and wounded 125 and, he added, ���appeared to have had no other immediate objective than to kill as many civilians as possible.���
Bergman���s book finally answered a question the Times reporter (and countless other journalists) repeatedly asked at the time: who was behind this extraordinarily violent campaign of terrorism against Palestinians and their leftist Lebanese allies? And yet, over the past 13 months, Friedman has not written a single word about the topic. He has, however, found the time to condemn Representative Omar���s ���anti-Semitic��� tweets.
A radical critique of the discourse on terrorism and, specifically, of repeated Israeli and US claims to moral superiority in the fight against ���terrorism,��� is profoundly legitimate and of the utmost importance. Such a critique is the exact opposite of anti-Semitism. It attempts to hold Israel but also the US and any country who has embraced this dangerous rhetoric not to higher but to precisely the same standards these states regularly apply to other actors around the world. ���Terrorism��� is a method. The term should be used regardless of the identity of the perpetrators or of the justness of the cause they claim to be fighting for. Or it should be discarded altogether.
Such a critique would bring to the fore the extent to which this rhetoric has, for decades, been used to delegitimize, dehumanize and otherize Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims and to justify the use of force against them. It would complement current attempts at understanding (and fighting against) Islamophobia and right-wing ���terrorism��� of the kind just witnessed in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Finally, opening such a debate would indicate that there are no taboos regarding Israel and its policies, thus nipping in the bud precisely the kind of conspiracy theories that fuel and nourish the all-too-real rise of anti-Semitic sentiment around the world.
The fragility of the Mozambican state in the face of climate change
A ships graveyard in Beira, Mozambique.��Image credit Babak��Fakhamzadeh via Flickr (CC).
On Thursday, March 14th, Cyclone��Idai��slammed into the Mozambican port city of Beira, destroying large sections of the city, before barreling towards Zimbabwe along one of the region���s most populous corridors.��Idai��was accompanied by strong winds and heavy rains which led to severe flooding as the rivers Pungwe and��Buzi��broke their banks.��In the district of��Buzi, thousands��clung for their lives onto trees and rooftops, as their��villages turned into ocean.��While the rains have since subsided and the waters are receding, the risk of flooding remains, as dams upstream reach full capacity.
It is too early to gauge the magnitude of devastation. According to the latest figures from Mozambique���s��National Institute for the Management of Calamities��(INGC), 447 people have died as a result of the cyclone, 128,941 people are living in 143 accommodation centers and nearly 800,000 have been affected. However, these figures are expected to rise. The UN World Meteorological��Organization��projects that��Idai��will be among the worst weather-related disasters in the southern hemisphere.
���We didn���t expect it to be this bad,��� an��Idai��survivor in Beira remarked. Apparently, neither did President Filipe��Nyusi, who��proceeded with a state visit��to the Kingdom of Eswatini the day following the cyclone. The government did issue a ���code red��� emergency two days earlier, warning residents in the affected area to take precautions, but in a country��where 46.1 percent, of the population lives in absolute poverty��few can afford to evacuate without institutional support.
Details following the cyclone were slow to emerge. Communication networks and power lines were downed, road access was cut, and the government���s silence deafening. Watching the initial footage of a small team of South African rescuers, racing against time to save lives, one wondered:��Where is the INGC and the Mozambican Armed Forces? Where are the international development agencies? What does a code red emergency actually mean in Mozambique?
Admittedly, few countries could adequately respond to a disaster of this magnitude���certainly not Mozambique, a country in the midst of a debt crisis, whose annual Gross Domestic Product barely tops US$12 billion. The debt crisis is the result of a combination of factors including an over reliance on the extractives sector, which has made the country vulnerable to fluctuating commodity prices; public borrowing for large-scale infrastructure projects; and��extensive fiscal incentives to lure multinational corporations.��
The discovery in 2016, of��$2.2 billion in odious loans, illegally incurred by leading figures of the Frelimo government, was the straw that broke the camel���s back. According to a recent US indictment, $700 million remain unaccounted for, while $200 million were channeled as bribes and kickbacks to bankers and politicians. Frelimo���s attempt to retroactively legalize the loans at a significant cost to taxpayers, triggered a counter-movement by citizens under the hashtag, #eun��opagod��vidasocultas��(I won���t pay secret debts).
In an ironic twist, the International Monetary Fund and donors (who until then had tolerated���even promoted���a national bourgeoisie embedded in political patronage networks and allied to global capitalist interests), froze general budget and sector support. With little space to maneuver, the government imposed a series of austerity measures, including a civil service hiring freeze, and cuts to social sectors such as health, education, social welfare, sanitation and hygiene. As��Idai, swept across Mozambique, it encountered a state weakened by an��extractivist��development model and captured by global capital.
Despite many government officials working around the clock under precarious circumstance to do what little they could, the vast majority of survivors ultimately saved themselves. In Beira, neighborhood WhatsApp groups were established, where family members could request information about their loved ones. In Maputo, more than 4500 volunteers, under the banner of��Unidos por Beira, filled 76 containers of donations of non-perishable food items, hygiene products, clothing, bedding, utensils, medicines and construction material bound for Beira. And the left media platform��Alternactiva, launched��a crowdfunding appeal, to support reconstruction efforts.
However, for most survivors the struggle to live continues. Clean water is scarce, and the incidence of typhoid, malaria, cholera and��diarrhea on the rise. Without homes, survivors must sleep in the open, unprotected from the elements, and from (sexual) violence. In the accommodation centers, they receive a single, daily meal of maize or rice, with beans, but outside, the price of food has skyrocketed. In Beira,��a��chicken meal is said to cost $25���more than the average per capita monthly expenditure. Desperate, residents have stormed warehouses, risking their lives, as police shoot live ammunition at��them. Reconstruction not only requires the rebuilding of physical infrastructure but the reconstitution of social and economic life.
The��United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs��is coordinating the emergency response in Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe. More than a dozen governments and numerous international NGOs have pledged material and monetary support. However, former first lady and one time Minister for Education and Culture,��Gra��a��Machel, contends that support is inadequate,��given the magnitude of the disaster: ���We have a lot more than three million people affected and all the support is still insufficient��� This is an emergency never seen in our history��� It is good to say that this is a result of climate change��� that it is the poor who will pay the highest price.��� While tropical storms are not unusual during this period of the year, their impact has intensified as waters warm, vapor in the atmosphere increases and sea levels rise.
The environmental organization,��Justi��a��Ambiental, has called on industrialized countries to��repay their environmental debt. The INGC estimates that at least��474,154 hectares of crops have been destroyed. Small-scale farmers have lost their source of sustenance (food), their safety-net (livestock), and their savings (seed).��In a country where 71.7��percent�� of��the labor force��relies primarily on small-scale agriculture to survive, climate reparations are one mechanism to compensate those who depend on nature, to enable the state to make the investments to protect them from its wrath. In the meantime, Mozambique���s Center for Public Integrity just hopes that any funds allocated to the INGC��will be strictly audited.
The geo-politics of Malcolm X
Mural of Malcolm X. Image credit Thomas Hawk via Flickr (CC).
���I have difficulty praying. My big toe is not used to it,�����Malcolm told his diary on April 20, 1964 shortly after arriving in Mecca. Having recently left the Nation of Islam with their practices, he was still acclimating to sitting on his knees during prayer. Despite the pain, the following day he embarks on the journey to Mount Arafat, part of the hajj pilgrimage, joining “hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, all colors, buses, car, camel, donkey & foot. Mecca, he writes, is surrounded by the: “cruelest looking mts [mountains] I���ve ever seen. They seem to be made of the waste material from a blast furnace. No vegetation on them at all. The houses are old & modern. Some sections of the city are no different than when the Prophet Abraham was here over 4000 [years ago]���other sections look like a Miami suburb.”
Wandering among the pilgrims, he describes the rituals, the seven stones cast at the devil, the circumambulating of the��kaaba, and��observes,”This��would be an anthropologist���s paradise.”
The diaries also provide a firsthand account of Malcolm���s travels in Egypt, Ghana, Palestine, and Saudi Arabia in 1964. There���s Malcolm crossing Tahrir Square to buy some lemonade at Groppi���s, a still-existing pastry shop; then he���s buying pajamas, picking up vitamin C tablets (because he���s feeling kind of ���woozy���), going to the movies, and so on.
Malcolm X is a powerful optic through which to understand America���s post-war ascendance and expansion into the Middle East. His is the perspective of a ghetto-dweller who has transcended the borders drawn around��him.”[A]s though I had stepped out of prison,” he writes, when he travels abroad. The diaries���several notebooks of single-spaced hand-writing���show an anthropologist���s eye. Malcolm comments on the landscape, the politics, cultural and religious differences, with humorous asides. When a friend arrives late, he quips, “Arab time!!” At one point, he observes, “The worst most dangerous habit among Arab Muslims is cigarettes. They smoke constantly, even on the Hajj.” There are also personal reflections on his mood, health and intense��solitude. The��words “lonesome” and “alone” appear on almost every other page. His thoughts on Saudi Arabia support the standard narrative that the hajj was transformative.
Yet the diaries show something else: when not in Arabia, Malcolm seemed to enjoy being away from his role as a religious leader, and away from religious strictures as��well. Whether��in Ghana, Guinea, Kenya or Egypt, he immerses himself in the cultural life of these newly independent states, and the younger Malcolm, the music aficionado, resurfaces, as he frequents night-clubs and dance centers again. In Nairobi, he goes to see his friend Gee��Gee��sing at the Equator Club, and then accompanies Vice-president��Oginga��Odinga to a party at the Goan Institute of Dance. (“The PM is a good dancer, remarkably for his age,” he writes.) In Guinea, he attends a wedding party, then goes to a nightclub��and, “watche[s] some Americans from the Ship-hope try to dance.”��He rejoices in seeing newly independent states shunt aside European colonial music and celebrate their own musical traditions. In Accra���accompanied by Maya Angelou���he attends a party at the Ghana Press Club and enjoys “Highlife,” which would become the country���s national music (Angelou 1986, 134). But it���s mostly in Egypt, which he saw as the bridge between Africa and Asia, a key player in the Non-Aligned Movement, that he spent the most time and experienced the most cultural immersion.
The story of Egyptian jazz dates back to the Harlem Renaissance, when African-American musicians who had settled in Paris, ventured east. In December 1921, Eugene Bullard, the Georgia-born military pilot, drummer and prize fighter, traveled from Paris to Alexandria, Egypt. For six months, he played with the jazz ensemble at the Hotel Claridge, and fought two fights while in Egypt (Lloyd 2000, 79). A decade later, the blues singer Alberta Hunter followed suit, singing in Istanbul and Cairo (Shack 2001, 43). The trumpeter and vocalist Bill Coleman would live in Cairo from 1939 to 1940, leading the Harlem��Rhythmakers/Swing Stars. As Islam began to take hold in American cities and within jazz circles, Muslim jazz musicians would journey to Egypt. In 1932, an African-American Muslim with a saxophone turned up in Cairo, saying that he was working his way to Mecca (Berger 1964). With America���s post-war ascent, jazz would spread around the world carried by servicemen, Hollywood and Voice of America broadcasts. In 1958, the bassist Jamil Nasir, trumpeter Idrees Sulieman, and pianist Oscar Dennard traveled to Tangier, where a VOA relay station would broadcast Willis Conover���s Jazz Hour to listeners behind the Iron Curtain, where they recorded an album. They then went on to Cairo. In the Egyptian capital, the thirty-two-year-old Dennard would fall ill and die from typhoid fever; he would be buried in the city, his grave a regular stop for visiting jazz musicians.
All to say, by the time David Du��Bois��arrived in Cairo in 1960, there was already a local jazz scene and the State Department had launched its jazz diplomacy tours aimed at countering Soviet propaganda. Du��Bois��and his friends���with the support of the Egyptian Ministry of Culture���would try to create a music culture different from that sponsored by the US government. The Egyptian government was also leery of the jazz tours, and turned back “jambassador” Dizzy Gillespie at Cairo airport in 1956 following the Suez War.
This was the buoyant cultural moment that Malcolm X encounters when he arrives in July 1964. Egypt is flourishing culturally, a regional leader in music, cinema and��literature. Malcolm���s diary entries from Egypt confirm the events and personalities described in Du��Bois�����novel. David Du��Bois��is working as an announcer at Radio Cairo, and lobbying Egyptian officials to have his father���s books���especially Black Flame Trilogy���translated. (Black Boy by Richard Wright was the only work of African-American literature available in Arabic, he would write to his mother in November 1960; he wanted the government to translate Lorraine Hansberry���s Raisin in the Sun and Langston Hughes��� primer on jazz.) The local jazz scene was feeding off musical trends in the US, as American jazz artists wrote compositions in honor of Africa and Afro-Asian solidarity. Malcolm would soak up the scene in Cairo and Alexandria, attending weddings and concerts, socializing at Cairo���s elite social clubs, sailing down the Nile to the Valley of Kings. It���s in Cairo that he meets Fifi, a Swiss woman who works for the UN, and who is quite smitten by him. All along, of course, he is networking with regime officials and scholars hoping to build a branch of Al-Azhar in��Harlem.When��he travels from Cairo to Saudi Arabia for hajj, he is struck by how culturally barren the kingdom is compared to Egypt.
The diaries in effect show a man who has landed smack in the middle of the ���Arab Cold War��� of the early 1960s, which pitted Nasser���s Egypt and her socialist allies against Saudi Arabia and the conservative monarchies backed by the US. As part of the Non-Aligned Movement, Nasser had stepped up his rhetorical attacks on American-allied monarchies in the region, through Radio Cairo, denouncing the royals for their social conservatism and alliance with the West. Music was at the heart of this propaganda effort, as top musicians were enlisted to sing the praises of ���our destiny��� and ���historical leader.��� And the expat jazz artists were solidly on the Egyptian side. One of the musicians, saxophonist Othman Karim, would set up the Cairo Jazz Quartet and record a track called “Yayeesh��Nasser” (“Long Live Nasser”) (Du��Bois��1964, 47). Karim would go on to collaborate with Salah Ragab, a young drummer and major in the Egyptian army, who would become Egypt���s most famous jazz musician, working with Sun Ra and Randy Weston.2 When Malcolm X arrives in Cairo, he negotiates this cultural tug of war, hanging with the ���bros��� but also listening to jazz with��Morroe��Berger, a Princeton��Arabist, expert on Black Muslims and organizer of State Department jazz tours. This contest is subtly rendered in Du��Bois�����novel. Both Ragab and Karim make appearances���as characters named Salah Janin and Muhammad X���performing at the Cairo Jazz��Combo.The��Saudis would soon respond to Nasser���s cultural diplomacy, creating a radio station with religious broadcasts. In 1964, they launched their own ideological offensive, setting up the Muslim World League, to mobilize various Islamist groups to counter the spread of socialism and secular Arab nationalism.”
An excerpt from the ��(2018).
March 24, 2019
The collapse of oil for insecurity
Image: United States Marine Corps, via Flickr CC.
The crisis in US-Saudi relations triggered by the state sponsored murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi might seem unrelated to Venezuela���s current turmoil.
Commentary on both crises has of course noted the centrality of oil. Whereas Venezuela���s civil conflict allegedly stems from mismanaged oil revenues, the Khashoggi crisis is represented as a consequence of Washington���s tragic ���oil for security��� deal with Saudi Arabia, the idea that the US reluctantly but imperatively protects the region���s oil and, in return, the Saudis buy US weapons to keep thousands of defense workers employed.
In many ways, however, both of these crises are related to a greater crisis, the growing crisis of oil���s ���overabundance.��� As such, these crises call into question the possible collapse of political and economic arrangements created in the 1970s that have been disrupted by a recent technological revolution in US oil extraction. For four decades, hyper-militarization and permanent war in the Middle East and North Africa were the primary conditions that allowed wealth and power to be extracted from oil. These means ��� oil-for-insecurity ��� no longer appear to be working.
What ���oil for security���?
���Oil for security��� represents a powerful but flawed narrative of US relations towards the greater Middle East for a number of reasons. First, there���s no documentary evidence that any such deals formally exist, as political historian and Saudi specialist Robert Vitalis has argued.
Second, oil-for-security narratives don���t add up. Washington was much more directly involved in the day-to-day security of the Saudi, Iranian, and Libyan monarchies in the 1950s and 1960s, well before the US became dependent on foreign oil. In Libya, British and US ���protection��� preceded oil production by over a decade. Washington has also shown just as much commitment to Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Israel, Turkey, and Pakistan, countries with little or no oil production. During the Cold War, Morocco received more US military aid than any other country in Africa besides Egypt.
Third, oil-for-security has been a losing proposition for almost everyone involved. The Iraqi, Iranian, and Libyan monarchies were all overthrown and replaced by regimes that openly challenged Washington���s policies. More recently, the US army concluded that Iran was the only country to benefit from the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. By 2014, the American occupation of Afghanistan had already cost more than the Marshall Plan, and yet the Trump administration now seems set to withdraw on almost the same peace terms that the Taliban offered before the 2001 invasion.
Nor has oil-for-security been very good for the region���s security. Today the Middle East boasts three of the five deadliest conflicts since the end of the Cold War, and since 2012 it has witnessed more deaths from armed conflict than all other regions of the world combined.
Fourth, oil-for-security narratives obscure the ideological nature of US policies. In the 75-year history of America���s ���awkward entanglements��� and ���unfortunate interventions��� in the Middle East, Washington has never once found itself durably if regrettably allied to any of region���s oil-producing populist socialist republics like Algeria, Libya, Syria, Iraq, or Iran. It hardly needs to be said that these were in fact the regimes Washington most often contained, confronted, or changed through force.
Finally, energy security does not require oil-for-security entanglements. China has managed to develop the world���s largest economy and now boasts the planet���s largest fleet of motor vehicles, all without invading or occupying a single oil producing country.
Oil for Insecurity
The problem with ���oil for security��� theories is the common assumption that oil politics is defined by oil���s natural scarcity. Hence the frantic efforts to control it, especially in the Middle East and North Africa. But as historian Timothy Mitchell has demonstrated, oil���s role in the making of the modern world has been defined by the exact opposite problem: there���s always been too damn much. The ability of companies to extract wealth from oil and the ability of governments to draw power from it has always depended on creating a sense of oil���s scarcity.
In the early decades of oil, profits and power were created through domestic monopolies and collusion between imperial powers. After World War Two, a cartel of the dominant North Atlantic oil firms colluded with their home governments to managed oil���s scarcity. This system gradually came into crisis in the 1950s and 1960s. The major producer states began to demand more equitable profit sharing agreements and more involvement in the technological, scientific, and managerial aspects of extracting, refining, and exporting oil. Soon ownership of oil reserves and infrastructures were being aggressively renegotiated, if not outright nationalized, across the postcolonial world.
This crisis of Western power and corporate profitability in the late 1960s was resolved when a new means of manufacturing oil���s scarcity emerged in the Middle East and North Africa: war. In the wake of the 1967 and, more importantly, the 1973 Arab-Israeli wars, the major international oil companies saw their relative rates of profit surge. This scarcity had nothing to do with the so-called Arab oil embargoes. Rather, it was the power of permanent insecurity in the Middle East and North Africa to induce a global sense of scarcity, and so raise prices.
By the end of the 1970s, a constellation of new and exacerbated conflicts had developed from the western edge of the Sahara desert to the western Himalayas. With the world���s major oil reserves under constant threat from political instability, permanent war and hyper-militarization had the effect of creating unprecedented rates of profit.
All of this was a happy coincidence for the oil companies. The real drivers of permanent insecurity across the Middle East and North Africa stemmed from two other developments: one, Washington���s post-Vietnam policy of indirect control, proxy wars, and Communist containment in the postcolonial world (e.g., the Safari Club); and two, the imperative to find new markets and sources of financing for weapons manufacturers. The geographical confluence of these interests in the Middle East and North Africa could be more accurately described as oil for insecurity.
The Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations consistently pursued policies that destabilized the Middle East. Wars in Western Sahara, Chad, Iran-Iraq, and Afghanistan were all deliberately exacerbated; pariah regimes in Iran and Libya were aggressively confronted; and conservative authoritarian allies in Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan were lavishly rewarded with weapons and aid.
Flush in petrodollars, regimes across the Middle East responded to the intensification of inter-regional rivalries by equipping themselves with either North Atlantic or Soviet-made weapons depending on their Cold War (non)alignment. For North Atlantic arms manufacturers, oil-for-insecurity was also the solution to their own post-Vietnam crisis of profitability. In 2017 dollars, Middle East arms imports went from $7.5 billion in 1971 to over $30 billion in just six years. By the end of the 1970s, Middle East represented the vast majority of countries whose military expenditures registered as ten percent or more of GDP. The ten countries with the highest ratio of military expenditures to central government expenditures in 1982 were all in the Middle East. Today, most governments in the region continue to outpace all other ���middle income��� countries in terms of military spending and arms imports.
As economists Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler have consistently demonstrated in a series of studies spanning over three decades, the relative profitability of the major oil and armament companies since the late 1960s has been closely tied to instability across the region.
The Crisis of Overabundance
Though the Islamic State���s resurgence in Syria, Iraq, and Libya from 2014 onward seemed to indicate an intensification of regional instability in a number of key oil producing zones, the relative profits of the major petroleum companies actually entered a period of unprecedented decline. So what happened?
In the fifty years since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, there have been two cycles of scarcity and abundance driven by permanent insecurity in the Middle East and North Africa: the first from the mid-1970s through the 1990s; the second from 2001 to now.
The first cycle of oil-for-insecurity pushed oil prices to unprecedented levels in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which incentivized new frontiers and technologies of extraction (e.g., Alaska and the North Sea). An increasing glut of oil worldwide followed. Prices finally crashed in 1986, taking the Soviet Union down with them.
The end of the Cold War soon became a period of sustained crisis for the major oil and arms companies. It was a world of base closures, reduced Pentagon budgets, and Middle East peace processes (e.g., Western Sahara and Palestine). As the neoliberal Democratic Party sidelined labor and embraced those sectors within capitalism that thrive on peace and security (tech and services), the reactionary political forces of the neoconservative movement doubled down on the old alliance of oil, arms, and Middle Eastern insecurity to restore their political fortunes. The Bush-Cheney administration���s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were in fact stunning successes in one respect: the peace crisis of the 1990s was ended and relative profitability was restored to oil and defense.
The major oil producing states ��� those not engulfed in war or under US sanctions ��� transformed these profits into political power. An ironic example was Venezuela. Hugo Ch��vez���s ability to conduct one of the most ambitious experiments in socialist populism since the end of the Cold War was made possible by the very imperialism he regularly denounced.
But the success of oil-for-insecurity from 2001 to 2012 proved to be its unmaking. New yet expensive technologies for onshore and offshore extraction, above all, hydraulic fracturing (���fracking���), seemingly became financially viable as oil prices finally returned to levels not seen since 1980. Production in the United States began to surge. And so this is how the second cycle of oil-for-insecurity, like the first, created the conditions of its undoing ��� by producing too damn much.
Ch��vez, who died in 2013, would not live to see the 2014 collapse in oil prices and the squandering of his legacy under Nicol��s Maduro. But like all political and corporate leaders who had grown dependent on oil-for-insecurity, Maduro struggled to adapt to a new reality of implacable overabundance. Nor did it help that US sanctions have made it impossible for Venezuela to restructure its debt.
Today���s overabundance crisis has proven exceptionally resilient. Civil wars in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen were intensified by foreign interventions in 2014 and 2015 yet prices continued to crash. More recent effort to raise prices through traditional mechanisms ��� OPEC-Russia quotas and sanctions on Iran and Venezuela ��� have so far proven ineffective. As fracking becomes cheaper, efforts to restrict oil and so raise prices appear to be automatically offset by increased output from North America.
The demise of oil-for-insecurity raises questions as to the kinds of strategies that will emerge to adapt to this new reality. It is tempting, after all, to think that we are seeing early iterations of a new politics of overabundance in the neo-authoritarianism of Putin and Trump. That might be giving them too much credit, however. There are still immensely formidable incentives in the world today ��� at the level of corporate profits and political power ��� to see major oil producing states like Venezuela cut off from markets through sanctions, civil conflict, or both. Hence the world should be concerned when it sees leaders in Washington and Moscow effectively colluding to exacerbate Venezuela���s crisis.
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