Johann Hari, liberalism, Islamism, Palestine and more discursive debris. posted by Richard Seymour

While you puny earthlings have been working, travelling on the tube, and pursuing similarly contemptible human pursuits, I have been lying around on the sofa with my fingers prodding several orifices, reading newspapers and books. Today, boys and girls, I read Johann Hari, for perhaps the first time in months. I'll give Hari this: unlike most of his colleagues at the Independent, he does appear to read the very occasional book or two. He still evinces extraordinary ignorance, of course, not least when confronted with a left-wing intellectual whom he can't possibly match (Derrida, Negri, Pinter, Chomsky, Hobsbawm etc). I recall when he was still doing his best to land a few blows on George Galloway, and he claimed (in his "review" of Galloway's book) that 800,000 Jews were 'ethnically cleansed' from Arab countries after 1948. I won't disclose private correspondence, but his reply when asked about this raised a chuckle or two, reminding me of the gentleman who when asked by Mark Twain if he believed in baptism replied "Believe in it? Hell, I've seen it done!" (If anyone is interested in the actual history of the Jewish exodus to Israel, you could do worse than read, for instance, Abbas Shiblak's Iraqi Jews: A History of Mass Exodus, 2005, which documents the complicity between the Jewish Agency in Israel and the pro-British Hashemite monarchy in forcing Jews to flee Iraq. Just like the Mizrahi Jews of the Maghreb, the Sephardic Jews in Arab countries were treated by the Zionists as a pool of useful labour, not to mention as footsoldiers for expansionist war).

Well, anyway, here he is again, worrying about the success of Hamas in the Palestinian elections. As a good liberal secularist, he is horrified at the prospect that Hamas will now use its power to oppress women and gays, which is a reasonable and valid concern (unless the whole thing is harnessed to an apologia for Israel, in which case it becomes an empty shell, a fascia, a simulation of principle). I can't accuse Hari of being anything but a liberal two-stater on that matter, however, and there are worse things to be. A few glaring moments caught my eye, however. For instance:

Palestinian identity has evolved many times since it was first smelted in reaction to Zionism in the 1930s and 40s. At first, the Palestinians saw themselves primarily as Arabs and looked to the rest of the Arab world – led by Colonel Nasser – to destroy the "Zionist entity" and restore them to their homes. This pan-Arabism died on the battlefields of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. It was replaced with a more local, romantic Palestinian nationalism – familiar to Europeans – that reveres the peasant and the shepherd and dreams of reaping the land. It focused on Yassir Arafat and his Fatah Party.

Here, the glibness and snarkiness that is the hallmark of liberal journalistic idiom is encapsulated. By mere insinuation, one is led to the supposition that there is a causal chain leading from Palestinian identity to their dependence upon Arab regimes and thence to the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Forget, if you like, that Palestinian identity could be said to pre-date the 1930s and 40s (Arab states recognised Palestine as an independent, sovereign identity in 1921, and as Rashid Khalidi shows in Palestinian Identity: The Formation of Modern National Consciousness, 1996, there is a case for dating a unique Palestinian identity that superseded Arab nationalism well before that - histories of the Palestinian people by Baruch Kimmgerling & Joel S Midgal as well as Ilan Pappe locate its origins in the 1834 revolt against Pashim). The reliance of the Palestinians on Arab leaders resulted partially from the feudal social structure and the consequences of the 1936-9 upheavals. The feudal structure placed families, often hostile to one another, at the head of the Palestinian national movement. And it was leading notables like Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the Mufti of Jerusalem and head of the “political wing of the Arab Higher Committee”, were responsible for allowing the initiative in the Palestinian cause to be appropriated by Arab states, preventing the establishment of independent institutions and leadership. I hope I don't need to explain why the ethnically cleansed and scattered Palestinian populace then took a couple of decades to develop resilient nationalist structures, particularly under the watchful eye of the pro-Zionist Hashemite police state in Jordan. Further, the British exiled much of the leadership as part of its crackdown on the revolt. What is more, the 1967 war was really more to do with Israeli expansionism in the 'demilitarized zones' as well as its opportunistic carping over the Tiran Straits 'blockade' than a Nasserist attempt to crack the 'Zionist entity'. By all accounts, this was a war that neither Nasser nor the Syrian leadership, nor especially the Jordanian leadership wanted. See any number of books by Yapp, Shlaim, Kimmerling, Pappe, Finkelstein etc for a thorough account of that war if curiosity really prods your divinely shaped rear.

Also noticeable is that Johann must think he is providing an unusually sympathetic portrayal of the Palestinians here, and yet he cannot help but describe every stage of alleged Palestinian identity with condescension and derision, from Colonel Nasser to idle rural nationalist fantasies and now to the dread "Islamism". Then there's this:

Has ethnic cleansing, topped with four decades of occupation and bone-breaking, driven the Palestinians so crazy that they will turn to this?

And this:

The Hamas victory is an urgent tick-tock underneath Ariel Sharon’s hospital bed. The longer this occupation goes on, the more enraged, incoherent and fundamentalist the Palestinian people will become. The annexation of a great chunk of the West Bank will simply be a continuation of the occupation by other means. If Sharon sticks to his current mockery of a peace plan and continues to rule out “any possibility of a return to the 1967 borders”, his people will be locked in a bloody tango with Islamic fundamentalism for another century.

The 'again' in the last sentence is redundant, since Israel has been in conflict with no one or nothing for a century, least of all 'Islamic fundamentalism'. But the penny drops: this is a plea to the supremacist Israeli state to cease winding up the Arabs so much, lest they go Islamic and "fundamentalist", become "incohrent". And "fundamentalism" undergoes some curious shifts in definition. To attenuate the notion that Palestinians really voted for "Islamism", Hari remarks that: "To gain mainstream support, Hamas has had to flirt with a ceasefire and indicate it would accept a two-state solution along the 1967 border." The axis of acceptability has shifted from treatment of homosexuals and women to one's attitude to Zionism.

This reminds me of Johann's reaction to the July 7th bombings, in which he wrote that "The best way to undermine the jihadists is to trigger a rebellion of Muslim women". This is to be achieved by implementing Irshad Manji's idea(!) of instituting a system of low-interest loans for women across the Middle East to set up businesses. Muslim women, then, if they are not concerned about usury are at least desperate to join the petit-bourgeoisie. This suggestion presumably strikes Hari as a deft combination of munificence and strategic prowess, and yet the New Labour idiotology underlying it is glaringly apparent. "Jihadis" are to be brought to heel by a Western-created class of female employers, Prada-wearing, maid-owning, 'empowered' women who idolise their 'assertive' role models in Sex and the City. Feminism is to be subsumed into a movement of US-sponsored poujadistes. This troop of would-be Irshad Manjis, aspiring capitalists, will march on every mosque and announce to the mujahids secreted within that they have replaced religious garb with Jimmy Choo high heels and lipstick - to which, the "jihadis" will reply: "you're too late, the Taliban have already tried that." This imaginary social force, which is supposed to be seeded and fertilised by the West, will not think of anything so distant to their immediate interests as colonialism and imperialism - heaven forfend! - but shall instead think of how rich and free they will be when they turn Arabia into wholly owned subsidiary of the United States.

There is an even more grotesque notion at work in Hari's thought here: Muslim women are posited as an inert mass to be operated on by cunning anti-terror strategists, with no agency of their own. Meanwhile, who are these "jihadis"? The term is a suitably vague one, and so is widely used since it appears to mean something and conveys and appropriately condemnatory stance. The term connotes more than it denotes: "Jihadis" are wicked, evil people, who chop off heads, kidnap civilians, crash planes into buildings and blow themselves up on a crowded London Underground. Yet, in simple terms, it denotes any fighter for a cause using any method, and who can be found to be doing so in the name of some variant of Islam. Movements from the FLN moujahidine to the Palestinian and Lebanese groups with some affiliation to Political Islam to the Iraqi resistance, can be "jihadis". The use of the term is that it obliterates all distinctions and provides a negative mirror to Western self-adulating fantasies. The old word would have been "terrorists", which isn't without its own problems of consistency, but being a "jihadi" appears to be worse - as if being Muslim while detonating a bomb somehow compounds the offense.

This is all part of Hari's version of the Prime Minister's "evil ideology" thesis. "Islamism" is merely spread - like a contagion, one assumes - through various vectors like mosques, universities and secret gatherings in that reputedly enclosed community (how are they so unresponsive to the White Man's Serenade?). Hari's psychologising - Islamism's adherents are all, apparently, sexually repressed, hence the armies of female antibodies - is really diagonisis and suggested cure all at once. And if the phenomenon cannot be medicalised, phrenologised, then it remains an inexplicable eeeevillll, issuing from the heart of darkness.

Call me an idle fantasist, but there will be a time when even liberals will resile from these synecdoches, cliches, and cynosures of imperialist discourse: when the decadence of empire is more apparent than it already is, perhaps. The perceptual violence wreaked by this intellectual clutter will be so embarrassingly apparent that only the lunatic right will avail itself of such rhetoric. And again, I don't think I am being hopelessly Whiggish when I suppose that there may also be a time when liberals will not try to master oppressed groups whom they purport to support. Every declaration of such support will not be appended with a series of prefatory clauses, conditions and stern instructions that insists the group lives up to one's ego-ideal of secular, liberal and - oh dear me, yes - 'nonviolent' resistance. They will not try to make every movement congruent with their own attachment to capitalist democracy. They will engage with the oppressed as equals, with a right to articulate their own narrative about their suffering and elaborate their own strategies for dealing with its causes - not uncritically, but without continually asserting their right as Western liberals to demand some emollient unction for their residual prejudices. And they will be humble enough not to pretend to enlighten their readers as to the history and background of the oppressed unless they have also taken the trouble to know of which they speak. You may call me a dreamer, and indeed I do colour my dreams with Johann Hari - but I know, reader, I am not the only one.