Speak, for your lips are free…
Speak, for the truth still lives.
– Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Tariq Ali has a penchant for taking on uncomfortable subjects. For four decades now, having been both praised and reviled by many, he has gone against the grain and lived life at an angle. As we spoke desultorily for over an hour at his office in Soho, it was impressed upon me – by this amalgam of political commentator, activist, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, broadcaster and powerful orator – that nothing is sacred and there can be no room for dogmas.

Britain is a rather secret country. The esotericism of the political establishment is seldom shared. A recent disclosure of files from 1974 reveals minutes from a cabinet meeting where the activities of one Tariq Ali were discussed. In the years that preceded, his political forays had certainly caused a great stir. In 1965 he was elected President of the Oxford Union, during which time he had risen to prominence after a series of debates with Henry Kissinger and then Foreign Secretary, Michael Stewart. He was invited to dinner by Marlon Brando, arrested in Latin America under suspicion of being Che Guevara’s bodyguard, had travelled to Vietnam on behalf of Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertrand Russell to survey war crimes and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had sought his counsel on founding a new political movement in Pakistan.

Famously, as a leader of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, Tariq led over 25,000 students to Grosvenor Square and later, in October 1968, a 100,000 strong demonstration to Trafalgar Square. It’s a subject that he’s speaking on later tonight at the National Portrait Gallery, The Crowds in the Square: Demonstrating Dissent.

But things are different now; ideas have changed. With the événements of 1989, Tariq avers in a wonderful commanding voice that carries delightful Lahori intonations, ‘I had realised that the epoch of socialist ideas had come to an end.’ Working with people like Darcus Howe (now a columnist for The New Statesman), Tariq produced The Bandung File for a number of years – a weekly magazine broadcast on Channel 4 that peeled away at the Third World. Around the same time the ex-revolutionary took up another pursuit: ‘Politics was in the doldrums and nothing much was going on in reality, so I decided to write fiction.’

Tariq’s earliest set of novels is called the The Fall of Communism Trilogy, the first of which, Redemption, is a savagely witty attack on some of his erstwhile comrades. ‘It was basically a satirical attack on the sectarianism within Trotskyism, and on sectarianism in general. I followed that up by Fear of Mirrors and then began my Islam Quintet.’

The Clash of Fundamentalisms, his seminal polemic, opens with the laconic sentence, ‘I never really believed in God.’ It follows that historical materialism came easy to him, but Tariq is not so much an atheist as he is an antitheist: every religion being a different version of the same untruth. So why the fascination with Islam? ‘The question I wanted to pose in the wake of the first Gulf War was, “Why hadn’t Islam experienced a Reformation?” I wanted to go to the roots of the problem, so I went to Spain, spent months travelling around, imagining things – I didn’t feel to write a history, I wanted to write a novel.’

Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, The Book of Saladin, and The Stone Woman, all published by Verso, have bound within them the confrontations between Islamic and Christian civilisations set to a picturesque background of humour, love, heresy, betrayal and tragedy. Critics have argued that historical fiction of this rank put the author in the company of writers like Amin Maalouf, if not Naguib Mahfouz at a stretch. What about the remainder of the quintet? When can we expect the next novel?

‘Well, I need to find a writer’s retreat. After I came out with Shadows, and it was well received, my friend Edward Said told me, “Don’t just stop at Spain. Do it all.” So I’ve got to chronicle the whole damn thing. And there’s a third volume also that I’ll be looking to write, looking at the subject of renegacy.’

Renegacy? I suppose he’s alluding to the phenomenon surrounding former leftists who have since reneged their views; ‘The new empire loyalists’ as he referred to them in The Guardian nearly two years ago. In that particular piece, while confronting those who had found their way from ‘the outer fringes of radical politics to the antechambers of the state department’ – presumably people like David Horowitz in the United States – Tariq found time to chide former friends Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens for having metamorphosed into the belligerati. The attacks of September 11 drew huge rifts between a number of scribblers who are courted by the liberal press on both sides of the Atlantic.

Having earned a reputation as a caustic critic of Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton and others who felt his iconoclastic fury, Christopher decided on that tragic day to throw in his lot behind the Bush administration and its ‘War on Terror’. Since then, Tariq Ali and Christopher Hitchens have met publicly on a number of occasions and, needless to say, clashed calamitously. Their disagreement has been rendered all the more dramatic by their shared history: both read PPE at Oxford, graduated with stylish thirds, held positions in the Oxford Union, developed their political grounding as soixante-huitards from the Trotskyist movement, and several years later collaborated on the Channel 4 film, Hell’s Angel that blew away the halo surrounding Mother Theresa.

The appendix to Tariq’s latest polemical work, Bush in Babylon, is a humorous dissection of The Hitch’s political writing around Iraq. Their last fracas, broadcast on DemocracyNow, sees Christopher repeatedly interjecting on the point of support for the resistance in Iraq at which point Tariq stammers, ‘Don’t be stupid and arrogant!’ ‘Ok, I’ll be quiet now,’ was the enfeebled riposte from the equally irascible Christopher.

The resistance to occupation in Iraq has been a point of contention for many. Leading into the war there was unprecedented international opposition, yet once it began there was a specious demand made to ‘support our troops’ or to ‘withdraw only once stability has resumed’. The conversationalist entertaining me, however, staunchly defends a different position.

His latest book is written very much in the style of the one that preceded it, The Clash of Fundamentalisms. Acerbic prose is luxuriantly mixed with poetry, personal reminiscence, and heavily interlarded with history. The analysis, though at times cogent, suffers from the same symptoms: a casual attitude toward scholarship and an over-reliance on single sources. Bush in Babylon (which was confiscated off me by US Customs on a visit to Chicago last November) offers a popularised history of Iraq, detailing periods of political turmoil, the roots of Western interference in the country and a thought-provoking history of resistance.

Why then, as the book begins by asking, is it that people are surprised to learn that the occupation is detested by a majority of Iraqis? ‘I think what creates this bewilderment is two things. First, there’s no sense of being occupied historically, and second, there is an arrogance in the world in which we live that says they should be so lucky to be occupied by the United States. What’s wrong with them? Why are they getting so upset? We’re doing them a big favour.’

And what are people to make of the resistance being waged against this occupation? ‘The resistance in Iraq is following anti-colonial patterns; it’s not too dissimilar to what happened in Algeria or Vietnam. And one must remember, while the British governed Iraq through the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s – there was resistance of one sort or another.’

Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism, once posited that there has also always been some form of cultural resistance in the face of an active Western intruder. Though Arabic-less himself, Tariq Ali has brought to the attention of the Western reader the importance of poetry as a medium of cultural resistance in the Middle East. ‘Poetry,’ Tariq tells me, ‘plays a very important role in Arab culture. It’s not an elite thing at all, which it has become in the West. In the Arab world and the Muslim world you have poetry readings attended by tens of thousands.’

It certainly is a tradition somewhat alien to the West, but bearing in mind that in the 19th century there was a strong tradition of radical poetry in Britain and the United States, I ask how culture and politics imbricate through poetry. ‘There’s a tradition where critical poems written by Nizar Qabbani, the fine Syrian poet, or Mahmoud Darwish, the national poet of Palestine, is immediately picked up by ordinary people in cafés, across frontiers without any problems. The great singers of the Arab world then sing these poems; the poem is transformed and is consumed by millions.’

Somewhat less well received have been the interviewee’s scripts for the stage. Together Tariq Ali and Howard Brenton have co-written a string of political satires for performance. Their first outing was with Iranian Nights at the Royal Court Theatre, in the wake of the Salman Rushdie affair. ‘We chose the theatre as a forum of choice because political theatre has a history in Europe, and the place was packed out.’ Snogging Ken, Ugly Rumours and Collateral Damage followed. The last two were scurrilous attacks on New Labour, very much in the spirit of the attacks by Harold Pinter and Hanif Kureishi, as is Tariq Ali’s latest play, The Illustrious Corpse (shown at the Haymarket Theatre, Leicester and the Soho Theatre).

Having mentioned that the LIP is looking at issues around asylum and immigration, I want to know why he finds New Labour so odious. Tariq’s face contorts to evince a grimacing look full of disdain. ‘I have a visceral hatred of them and everything they stand for. These are people without any political principles at all, intent on staying in power at all cost. They will back war, privatise things even the Tories wouldn’t dream of, they are selling off schools to corporations, they are just wrecking this country.’

I sense that time is trespassing on his patience with much still to be exhausted. I couldn’t, however, possibly leave without understanding why he persists to rail against power in an age that is hardly propitious for dissent. After all, most of the people, most of the time, prefer to seek approval or security. ‘I think it’s a case of just obstinately refusing to capitulate. Through, projects like the New Left Review, which is a cultural and political journal, the work I’ve undertaken with comrades close to me manages to sustain me.’ In Letters to a Young Contrarian, Christopher Hitchens postulates that ‘rebellion is innate’. I put the point to Tariq. He winces. I don’t know what he’s offended by more, the contention or the contender. ‘I, myself, prefer Goethe’s maxim: “the world goes forward because of those who oppose it.”’

Bush In Babylon and Clash of Fundamentalisms are published by Verso.

Chhouk claims the ambush was an act of war, and not a breach of the law. ‘It was a war, not a kidnap or a robbery,’ he said.

As a feared Khmer Rouge warlord, Chhouk Rin was renowned for his charisma and battlefield prowess. But those days are gone. Now his time is spent battling illness and trying to overturn his conviction for a crime of which he says he is not guilty. Gone are the military fatigues, as he stepped from the darkness of his wooden home in the southern Cambodian province of Kampot, his hands held together in traditional Khmer greeting.

Pulling up a plastic chair on his concrete porch, he huddled slightly to protect himself from the relative cold. Reportedly a fan of karaoke and cock fighting, Chhouk appeared thin and fragile, with an abscess on his lower lip.

‘Some were starved to death, some died of disease, and some were shot,’ he recalled when asked about the Khmer Rouge. ‘All is different now as AIDS kills a lot of people.’ Clad in a loose green and white striped shirt, a toeless foot exposed through cheap plastic sandals, he said he is no longer well enough to drink alcohol and opts for tea instead.

Last November, Phnom Penh appeals court upheld Chhouk’s conviction for a 1994 train ambush, in which ten Cambodians were killed and three Western backpackers were taken hostage and later executed. Chhouk had previously been convicted for murder, terrorism and illegal detention, relating to the events. He arrived at the appeals court too late to hear that his November appeal had been rejected, he said, and remains free despite his life sentence.

The conviction, Chhouk says, has left him ostracised by the Cambodian government, which contains numerous Khmer Rouge defectors, including the Prime Minister, and reduced his stature in Kampot. ‘I’m like a bad smelling fish. If [politicians] touch me they will become bad smelling too.’ He said. ‘I used to be a leader. . . Nowadays I depend on the people in the [Phnom Voar] area.’

Chhouk was convicted for his role in the train attack after he confessed to sending 200 of his soldiers to participate in the ambush, and delivering the three backpackers – Briton Mark Slater, Australian David Wilson and Frenchman Jean Michel Braquet – to his Khmer Rouge superior. The three men, all in their 20s, were found buried in shallow graves several months later.

Chhouk does not accept the charges against him. ‘There is no evidence to charge me,’ he said. He claimed the ambush was an act of war, and not a breach of the law. ‘It was a war, not a kidnap or a robbery,’ he said.

Chhouk filed his final appeal at Phnom Penh Supreme Court December 15 but does not believe Cambodia’s notoriously corrupt legal system is able to deliver justice. ‘Foreigners and local people think the Cambodian court is not reliable at all,’ he said. ‘Even a simple person thinks it’s not reliable.’

Gary Benham, Vice Consul at the British Embassy, declined to comment on whether or not the Cambodian legal system was sufficiently thorough to achieve a just result for Chhouk. ‘We are just hoping that the case proceeds in a correct manner,’ he said. The embassy has been following the case and will be present for Chhouk’s final hearing.

Although Chhouk rejects his conviction, he said he would be happy to defend the Khmer Rouge at the UN tribunal, which he hopes will happen later this year. ‘I don’t worry even if I am summoned to the tribunal,’ he said. ‘I would be happy to stand in front of the court to explain the Khmer Rouge to foreigners.’

‘Yes, sometimes there were mistakes,’ he said of the regime, under which 1.7 million people died. ‘But [the Khmer Rouge] were right most of the time. ‘Some countries didn’t want the Khmer Rouge to be independent, so the Khmer Rouge said, “we don’t need you.” We wouldn’t follow anyone or serve anyone… But now our country has to beg money from other countries otherwise our country will die.’

The Khmer Rouge also protected the country form neighbouring Vietnam and Thailand, he argued. ‘You dared not come in.’ Chhouk called for the UN tribunal to be televised, and stressed the need for international monitoring to ensure justice.

But asked about the genocide committed by the Khmer Rouge, he distanced himself from the regime, and called for the leaders to be called to account. He pointed the finger at Khieu Samphan, the president of Democratic Kampuchea, who is also living in freedom. ‘I want to know why Khieu Samphan killed three or four million Cambodians,’ Chhouk said.

Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, which collects records on the Khmer Rouge regime to be used during the tribunal, dismissed Chhouk’s defence of the regime. But he voiced a measured defence for Chhouk’s views, arguing that he was a product of rigorous indoctrination. ‘Most of the Khmer Rouge of his age joined at an early age,’ Youk Chhang said. ‘They are heavily influenced by Khmer Rouge ideology and he spent most of his life in the jungle.’

In the wake of his court case, Chhouk has been attempting to keep a low profile, and a wide berth from Nuon Chea, Brother Number 2 in the Khmer Rouge regime. Associating with the former Khmer Rouge leader could bring him further trouble, Chhouk said. ‘If I meet him, people will accuse us of doing something bad again’ he said.

Chhouk still maintains some popular support amongst Khmer Rouge defectors, many of whom object to seeing their leader charged with murder. But he does not plan to resist arrest if the authorities come for him. When the Supreme Court summons him for his final hearing, Chhouk is determined that this time he will arrive on time. ‘You have to believe that when [the appeal] begins, I will be there for sure.’

by William Shaw and Sam Rith

It is often said that first impressions count, and leaving Senegal behind for The Gambia this was never more poignant. The friendly checking of passports by Senegalese policeman took place whilst buried under a sea of groundnut vendors screaming in French. This was to be replaced by suspicion and fear at a primitive, burnt-out shed, twenty metres walk across no-man’s-land in Karang. The initial gauntlet was what passed for customs. Three rotund men, sporting western baseball shirts and mountains of gold jewellery, inspired no confidence that I would be leaving this border with anything more than the clothes I was wearing. This initial phase completed, I found myself fielding a barrage of accusatorial questions from several sultry looking women, wearing uniform that was anything but uniform.

The final stage at any African border crossing is always the money traders. Groups of these suspicious men invariably lurk around the first corner to be found in the country with several bricks of worthless, filthy notes, hidden from view in shopping bags. Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the more surprising of the world’s successful integrated economic zones. The majority of former French colonies use the same currency, the West African Franc, which until the introduction of the Euro was pegged against the French Franc. What makes it all the more surprising that the currency works is the delicate care with which the notes must be handled. With the high temperatures and exhausting humidity they take the form of a dirty, sweat ingrained pulp.

Summer in Sub-Saharan Africa is rainy season. The same summer that saw Charles Taylor reluctantly relinquish power in Liberia was in the main dry and unforgiving for me. On one of the few days in which this norm was violently broken I happened to be destined for the far eastern tip of The Gambia. Morning in Basse-Santa-Su saw me trudging through rivers of mud and rubbish, which had to be negotiated in order to reach the bus station. This was stocked with a surprising number of the battered white Peugeots found throughout Africa.

The rain had broken the fragile crust that had previously existed on the surface of the mud track. Each metre saw the truck lurch into another hole, covering me and my bag with more watery silt. The vehicle floundered, and from time to time the gang of children hanging onto the roof jumped down and struggled to push us out of another hole. The water brought the land to life. Trees became a vibrant green and glistened in the morning sun. The barren earth was a deep burnt red. Ten kilometres from the town we reached the border, a single thatched hut without even so much as a gate. Having answered the customary questions I waited for the cheerful guards to fill in their dog-eared logbook. A poster on the wall sang the praises of the currency, the Dalasi, and promoted the mint which, to my bemusement, was apparently in Wales.

In recent years Mali and Senegal have been linked by an African Highway that in Britain would pass for a minor A road. This route is impassable in the rainy season, leaving the train as the only option for crossing the border safely and away from the bandits in the north. Two trains run each week from Dakar in Senegal to Bamako in Mali, taking a nominal sixty hours. In practice this is rarely the case, the engines setting their own pace as they chug peacefully though the undulating plains of eastern Mali.

The train screamed to a halt at the border, providing a much needed opportunity for breakfast. Passports and identity cards were gathered and taken away for checking, and the passengers flooded onto the barren plains lining the track. Opportunistic locals had set up a bazaar of stalls, and frenetic bartering and trading commenced. I settled for a tot of sugary instant coffee and freshly baked bread, heavily infused with sand. We stopped for an hour and throughout this period a constant chain of muscular men loaded the already heavily laden train with countless bags of grain and vegetables, and even more plastic buckets. This worried me slightly as the previous night had been sleepless, with little room for my cramped legs, and did not bode well for the next. Suddenly my thoughts were shattered. It was time to retrieve documents and in no time a large crowd was swarming like flies around the officials.

The Gare Routiere in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, is considerably quieter than those in other capital cities in the region. Despite this I still encountered the usual hustle and bustle and soon found each of my limbs being dragged towards numerous dilapidated vehicles. I managed to fight my way through the crowds and eventually settled down for the long wait for the departure of my chosen car. The procedure is always the same. Find a car, haggle over the price, load the bags on the roof, and then wait for the remaining places to be filled, sometimes for hours. This time I was lucky and soon on the road. The driver shared the front with two men on the passenger seat. Immediately behind them sat three more men and a colourful lady nursing a baby. I was squashed in a poorly welded seat in the boot with two others. During the journey the baby also found its way back into this tight space and spent most of the journey on my knee.

Some borders are pompous affairs, with all the regalia and importance of halcyon colonial days. In stark contrast to the extensive no-man’s-land separating The Gambia and Senegal, Ghana is announced with arches and new administrative buildings. The people of Ghana are some of the more fortunate in region. Known as the Gold Coast during colonial times it was the richest of the African colonies, fostering a thriving press and boasting the best schools and civil service in the region. Since gaining independence it has suffered a modest three coups, making it one of the most stable of the fledgling democracies.

I was travelling across the border into Ghana, and a small town called Bolgatanga. Before long I wished I had chosen another of the cars. The rickety frame was suffering on the poor roads, and an hour into the journey we found ourselves pulling over for the third time to tend to the engine. By this stage we had also passed five accidents, having driven no more than a hundred kilometres. All involved trucks of various sizes, one of which had driven into a village. The road was strewn with bales of straw, gallon drums with unidentifiable contents and scrap metal. Eventually we passed under a ‘Welcome To Ghana’ arch and with it the relative safety of the border. Looking back it was unclear whether driving into Burkina Faso takes the driver under a sign that reads: ‘Bye-Bye. Safe Travel’, or the more appropriate: ‘Bye-Bye Safe Travel’.

For me the final border to be crossed was that between the free-for-all front of Cotonou airport and the quiet, clean and heavily sedated international interior. Cotonou is the capital of Benin in all but name. Ministries line Avenue Jean Paul II and a single railway line snakes tortuously to the north of the country, the birthplace of Voodoo. The roads are clotted with a sea of mopeds and almost impossible to cross. The streets and buildings are littered with rubbish and caked in mud and a fine dust that infiltrates every pore. Myriad Beninese seep from every corner, and unlike many African towns and villages the people all seem to be on urgent business. The airport is not finished. Only the lounges are complete, fostering in weary arrivals a false sense of security. The exterior is a building site, with steel bars protruding from heavily amputated columns. The final sermon on Africa, a radio plays at ear-splitting volume in the left ear, local television vies for attention in the right.

This debate is by no means new: Dogma may have been a shrewd movement, a kind of faux-declaration, but it was also downright Aristotelian in its idea of forcing the spectator through an emotional mangle. Nor was it new when it engaged André Bazin – perhaps the most influential film critic, responsible for inspiring a revolutionary generation of directors, the French Nouvelle Vague – in his essays on the nature of cinema, which pose the moral question of what form cinema should take.

For André, cinema reached the apotheosis of its expressive capabilities in 1946, with Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà. This film assured the director’s title as the father of neo-realism and inspired André’s essay ‘An Aesthetic of Reality’, which, like Lars Von Trier’s films, explores cinema’s ability to make reality signify. Composed of six discrete views of post-war Italy, Paisà (meaning ‘Fellow Countrymen’) follows people – abandoned American soldiers, partisans, families – in their journeys through a no-man’s land. The neutral tone of the film – ‘the impassive lens’ – was revolutionary, moving away from editorial conventions, which André saw as cutting up and digesting reality on the spectator’s behalf. Rightly, André identifies this aversion to didacticism as a reaction against the limits imposed on reality and its expression under fascism. Paisà is a film about freedom: freedom of representation but also, and perhaps most interestingly, freedom of interpretation.

Appropriately, Paisà is being shown as part of a series of films complimenting this year’s Oxford Amnesty Lectures. Although chosen for their representations of displacement, asylum and migration, films such as Three Colours: White (1993) which is the least heavy-handed of Kieslowski’s trilogy, often veer into an exploration of themes such as freedom, identity and love. They are perhaps most interesting in their different, often fantastical approaches to reality.

Pawel Pawlikowski’s Last Resort (2000), for example, is an unassuming but great film, taking a very real situation and transforming it into a modern fairy-tale. Tanya and her son, Artiom, arrive from Russia, supposedly to a new life with Tanya’s British fiancé. They are soon abandoned and quickly escorted to a centre for refugees with pending Home Office applications in Stonehaven. The monolithic tower block that provides the pair with temporary shelter initially becomes a form of prison, then a purgatory where Tanya feels she is being punished for her ‘sins’. Such connotations develop, until gradually the film emerges on the other side of realism, the bleak landscape becoming resonant with emotion. Tanya’s growing love for bingo-host Alfie provides us with a sense of her identity – her being – which takes us as close to the reality of her situation as any ‘objectivity’ ever could.

The interplay in this film of reality and fantasy is perhaps most clearly expressed through the use of an abandoned boat. At first, the film appears simply to come across this boat, stranded on the sand. Of course we identify it with Tanya’s own sense of abandonment, but it is presented merely as fact. Later, however, it is lifted into significance, becoming the means by which Tanya is rescued as Pawel rejects the reality of her situation, allowing her the freedom of fantasy in an exhilarating representation of escape.

Neo-realist films, inspired by Roberto Rossellini, often used ‘real people’ as actors – something Michael Winterbottom does in In this World (2003), a depiction of human-trafficking notably absent from the OAL’s series. In this film, Michael blurs the boundaries between art and life, following two Afghan refugees on their journey to the UK, using raw, documentary-style footage. It is, perhaps, the nature of the subject matter (immigration) which makes this technique so unsettling: we are constantly forced to ask ourselves if the situation unfolding is real and, on a certain level, we must realise that it is. Michael plays with our reactions in this film, and it is the rigorously intellectual nature of this manipulation, especially when compared to the ‘purer’, emotional landscapes of films like Wonderland, Jude and The Claim, that marks this British director as one of the most important film stylists of the moment.

Like Stanley Kubrick, Michael is an experimental filmmaker. Refusing to limit his output with questions of what cinema should do, he makes full use of the medium’s ontological relation to reality to create different worlds, which reveal what it can do. In this World poses questions about the relationship between art and reality at once political and aesthetic. It (like Dogville, it seems) would have made a great addition to the OAL’s already thought-provoking series of films.

Movement of the people: Displacement, asylum and migration in the cinema is now showing. For further information visit: www.oxford-amnesty-lectures.org

The UK’s so-called ‘New Vision for Refugees’ proves itself woefully inadequate, for it is not about solutions to a problem of international dimensions, so much as a self-regarding and self-interested attempt to minimise this country’s role, at the expense of refugees, asylum seekers, and less well off countries in the developing world.

If the ‘current asylum system requires those fleeing persecution to enter the EU illegally…’ perhaps part of the answer is to ‘de-criminalize’ the asylum seeker.

The old and the not so old

The modern story of the UN and refugees goes back many years. Already in 1921, the plight of some 800,000 Russian refugees adrift in Europe led the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross to appeal for action to the Council of the League of Nations. He found a positive response, with the League appointing its first High Commissioner for Refugees, Dr Fridthof Nansen, that same year. The Russian refugees, of course, were rapidly joined by others: Armenians, Assyrians, Assyro-Chaldeans, refugees from fascism, from Nazism, and from conflict.

The High Commissioner’s task then, and that of the various organisations which have followed, was to provide protection – legal and political protection – while private philanthropic organisations assumed responsibility for relief and it was left to the goodwill of governments to remove the obstacles to solutions. While much was achieved through the 1920s and into the 1930s, the very nature of the challenges posed by the rise of the Third Reich found the rest of the world wanting. As Nazism consolidated its hold, and as racial and political persecution and economic proscription became all pervasive, the League’s members cast a cautious eye on the reasons for departure. And in an all too familiar pattern, they saw the exodus, not as a human and humanitarian crisis, but as an economic, financial and social problem, a ‘political embarrassment’.

In this period of immigration restriction and economic uncertainty, widespread and concerted hostility to taking any Jews was paramount, and continued even into the period of post-war resettlement. States refused to face the costs, or to make room. Jewish refugees were not welcome because they were Jewish, because they were presumed to have the wrong skills, for geo-political reasons, or on security grounds, particularly after war broke out. By contrast, when the Second World War ended and the Cold War began, refugees were briefly found to have political significance, but at the price of coherent, people oriented strategies.

The humanitarian needs of the many thousands displaced by conflict and political developments in Europe were indeed met, but the self-interest of States was at work, and their policies also served broader political interests, allowing propagandist positions on source countries to be developed to advantage. Now, at the beginning of this twenty-first century, refugees no longer have political significance, though the need for protection is no less. As always, the primary costs, the human costs, are borne by those at serious risk if they remain, obstructed if they move.

The new order and the national dimension

Refugee protection and solutions are also matters for national initiatives and action. In 2003, however, the United Kingdom circulated proposals, which cast doubt on the premises underlying the international regime of refugee protection. These proposals assume that the ‘current global system is failing’. This premise in turn appears to be based on the assumption that the asylum process generally (which, by definition, is commonly driven by crisis and unpredictability) can be better managed, and that the perceived link between illegal immigration and asylum seeking can be broken. It is said, for example, that financial support for refugees is badly distributed; that those fleeing persecution have to enter the EU illegally, while most refugees remain in poorly resourced refugee camps in third countries; that the majority of asylum seekers do not meet refugee or other protection criteria; and that those found not to be in need of international protection are not returned to their country of origin.

Among various suggestions, the United Kingdom proposes regional protection areas (RPAs) in regions of origin, with the object of providing accessible protection ‘closer to home’. Asylum seekers arriving in Europe would be returned to their local RPA where ‘effective protection’ would be offered, where they might be processed either for resettlement in the region or, for some, for resettlement in Europe. The RPA, it is suggested, might also provide a destination to which failed asylum seekers might be sent from Europe, when immediate return to their country of origin was not possible.

Who can argue against better protection closer to home? The fact is, however, that for many refugees the idea remains just that. In the absence of concrete commitments to UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) and refugee-receiving countries, it is no more than another responsibility-avoiding device, along with white lists, black lists, non-suspensive appeals, and doing away with review. Many commentators, including the European Commission, raised serious questions about the legality of these proposals and the means necessary to carry them to fruition, or noted their disassociation from the internationally agreed goal of ‘comprehensive durable solutions’, which is the fundamental premise for the international refugee regime.

Others saw the UK proposals as an exercise in burden-shifting, not burden-sharing. They remarked on their failure to acknowledge and integrate, among others, the need fully to respect international legal obligations, in particular, the full and inclusive application of the 1951 Refugee Convention, the non-refoulement principle, and the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. The European Commission and others noted the critical importance of addressing root causes; of access to legal immigration channels; of respect for international humanitarian obligations; and, in particular, they called attention to the need to improve the quality of asylum decisions in the European Union.

This last point is significant. In this country, we are beginning to hear a lot about the inability of the Home Office to take decent, defensible decisions on asylum applications. Over 20% of decisions are overturned on appeal, with that percentage rising to 35% in the case of Zimbabwe claims, 32% in the case of Somalis, and 30% in other cases. Strangely enough, the one element in the UK’s asylum procedure that has never been reformed in over 30 years of legislation is the Home Office, which leads one to question overall the premises underlying the recent United Kingdom proposals. Perhaps the sums currently spent on refugee determination could indeed be reduced, if the money were better spent on getting it right first time. And if the ‘current asylum system requires those fleeing persecution to enter the EU illegally…’ perhaps part of the answer is to ‘de-criminalize’ the asylum seeker.

Similarly, if the ‘majority of asylum seekers in the EU do not meet the criteria for refugee or subsidiary protection status’, then the reason why so many others use the asylum system may be due to labour market needs, implicitly condoned by governments throughout the developed world. Moreover, the reasons why ‘those found not to be in need of international protection are not returned to their country of origin’ are complex; in part, this may be due to lack of capacity in ‘sending’ States, political unwillingness to engage the issues, on either side, or again, because the labour resources provided by failed asylum seekers are acceptable, either in the long or short term.

If the government of this country were truly radical, if it were seriously interested in reforming the asylum process, it would move responsibility for deciding refugee cases away from the Home Office and into an autonomous agency — a Refugee Board, ‘front-loaded’ with trained decision-makers who would both see the claimants and decide the cases of those who came before them, properly advised and represented; a Refugee Board which would be transparent and accountable, whose decisions would be based on impartially collected, objective and credible country of origin information, unsullied by politicians and their policy goals.

But this government is not radical, and is not interested in reform. It is consequently not interested in improving the quality of first instance decision-making, so much as in resisting accountability and in ring-fencing systemic inefficiency, incompetence and ineptitude. Those who pay are refugees and asylum seekers whose enforced destitution, even during the application stage, is a declared aim of this government; and whose children are intended as hostages to fortune should the system fail once again. And those who pay are ourselves, whose essentially if not exclusively British values of fairness, due process and the rule of law are subverted by what looks to be an alien, executive authoritarianism.

Concluding remarks

If there is indeed need now for a ‘new order’ — and to survive every living system must evolve — then it will clearly need to amalgamate both international and national elements. Experience, particularly over the last ten or twelve years, has shown that the international community ignores the causes of forced migration at its peril; that refugee movements can and do contribute to instability and thus also to apprehensions for international peace and security. The evolving order will have to respond proactively, and with a view to solutions, to internal displacement, intra-State conflict, and the demographic and political pressures attaching to persistent underdevelopment.

Faute de mieux, the new order will need also to factor in States’ concerns about individual threats to security, even though the connection between forced migration and the movement of individual terrorists is tenuous. Nevertheless, recent and current experience underlines the necessity for rule of law oversight, particularly where governments are inclined to act in disregard of human rights and internationally protected values. National bills and charters of rights and freedoms may help to moderate executive excess, but regional and universal protection mechanisms will still be needed.

Finally, we need to see how essential and agreed international goals may be linked to national goals and policies. This is where the UK’s so-called ‘New Vision for Refugees’ proves itself woefully inadequate, for it is not about solutions to a problem of international dimensions, so much as a self-regarding and self-interested attempt to minimise this country’s role, at the expense of refugees, asylum seekers, and less well off countries in the developing world.

Even if one accepts the premises, the gaps are obvious, for example, in the disregard of solutions for refugees and in the failure to commit, even in principle or in outline, to long-term financial support, such as has been proposed in the case of development. In short, then, this is a time for further evolutionary steps in the international protection of refugees. But it will not be accomplished through narrow national conversations and self-interested re-writing of international commitments.

On the contrary, it is by way of the path of experience; recalling the lives lost in Bosnia and Herzegovina because of the barriers thrown up in the way of those in flight; of lives lost in Rwanda because Security Council members declined to read the writing on the wall; of lives lost at sea, because families are intentionally divided by policies designed to penalize those who would dare to seek asylum; of refugees and asylum seekers deliberately alienated and driven to destitution on our streets, because of a government’s determination to avoid accountability and because of its persistent refusal to learn from the lives of those who have escaped persecution, torture and death.

Where will the impetus for change come from? Obviously, the self-interest of States will play a role, and many governments seem destined not to learn from the past, and bound forever to underestimate peoples’ capacity for self-preservation when faced with desperate circumstances and risk to life and liberty.

The picture is not universally bleak, however. Some governments do now invest in the future, and contribute to the development of civil society in countries emerging from crisis or conflict, recognising that local stability and reasonable future prospects are a powerful incentive to stay. It is this constituency of commitment which we must seek to join and to enlarge.

If the values established and promoted by the United Nations over decades are to be preserved and strengthened, then we must be prepared to face up to those governments which appear content, often for mixed reasons, to allow the dehumanization of the refugee and the asylum seeker, and ready to build systems of control and degradation upon perceptions of the common will driven by irresponsible elements in the popular press.

Clearly, there are important battles ahead. The weight of public opinion must be secured, in the often hostile environment created by some of the media, and other battles must be fought through the courts. Both will need to be won, if the rule of law is to prevail and that human dignity and worth common to us all is to be effectively protected.

The author is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, Professor of International Refugee Law, Oxford and President of the Refugee Legal Centre, London.

This is an edited extract from Professor Goodwin-Gill’s speech for the Evan Memorial Lecture, entitled: ‘The United Nations and Refugees: Time for a New Order?’ The full text is published on the UNA Oxford Branch website http://una.oxfordcity.org/.

There is general agreement now that culture is capitalism. Whether their value is financial or symbolic, the processes and products of cultural expression are widely acknowledged as submitted to an advanced network of capital transactions. The processes of global capitalism have long since invaded the sphere of artistic production.

Cynical as it may seem, this assertion has never been acknowledged by artists themselves. From the cut-up paintings of the early avant-garde to the degradation of the body in contemporary performance, art has always challenged the ideological concept of its own autonomy: the idea that aesthetics is secluded from the processes of commercial and cultural production. In the early 00’s, the scrutiny of art’s socio-economic and ideological premises that the nineties knew as postmodernism, has led to the development of a new aesthetics, based on a deconstruction of boundaries between aesthetic, political and intellectual experience, and on the consequential cultural interchange between artists, intellectuals and political activists. Be it publications, exhibitions or concrete pieces, traditional institutions of modern art have become vehicles for political as well as aesthetic discussion, allowing these discourses to interweave.

Despite repeated efforts to recycle its political relevance, no similar development can be said to have taken place in European theatre. There is little critical discourse surrounding the traditional institutions, and aesthetic experimentation as well as political discussion is left to off-off companies, operating in the margins of both subsidy and publicity. Theatre in Europe seems not to have undergone the same deconstructive process as that of the visual arts, and one might ask whether theatre is still protected by the modernist illusion of artistic autonomy that once governed the art institution as a whole. The answer to this question is yes, but only insofar as artistic autonomy is a viable currency; an appropriate means to increase theatre’s market potential in the symbolic economy of culture.

Theatre in Europe has never reached the visual arts’ level of aesthetic autonomy. More than artistic presentation, theatre has always been a re-presentation: a more or less pertinent display of something prior to it. For this reason, governing principles of theatre have always been sought beyond the borders of the theatrical event. Theatre’s own worth has been examined only in its ability to conform to an ‘exceeding logic’ ( i.e. a logic that goes beyond the boundaries of the specific discourse in which one is operating). Consequently, there has not been much of an autonomous discourse to deconstruct in theatre.

Historically, theatre has played an important part in the nation building of young countries throughout Europe. And although its ambitions may no longer seem so lofty as establishing a supreme national essence, theatre still holds a primary function in representing national identity. This identity, however, is not an imagined common ground for the citizens of a particular nation, but rather an indicator of the nation’s cultural prosperity, its assets in the circuit of the symbolic economy.

European theatre today works mainly as a provider of symbolic capital, not only to the respective countries in intra-continental competition, but also to Europe itself as a continent and economic union. Through a high level of high culture, the challenges to European identity presented by the culture industry of Asia and the US are kept at bay. As are the challenges raised by contemporary aesthetic and political theory, which have long since left these ideological notions of art and culture behind.

Based on the assumption that commercial interest is an impediment to artistic excellence, theatres throughout Europe are sustained financially as autonomous institutions. However, this simulated autonomy actually becomes destabilised, as theatre simulates its own submission to the market economy!

This tendency that emerged in the early nineties has been central to the cultural politics of small countries like Norway and Denmark. Demands are made of the heavily financed theatre institutions of these countries to exercise a certain amount of hard-headed economic competence, in order that they regain some small share of what they have been given through public subsidy. And so, with a paradoxical twist to classic culture consecration, European theatre simulates market submission, to render its own withdrawal from the market legitimate.

All this has meant that Theatre has become a showcase of successes from other media. It has submitted to the circulation that renders the products of other media as trademarks, and, because it has withdrawn from the same circulation, it is deprived of the possibility of producing similar trademarks of its own. Which might explain last year’s production of Jerry Springer: the Opera at Britain’s Royal National Theatre, and the movie star Emanuelle Seigner playing Hedda Gabler in Paris, not to mention the many state-financed re-stagings of movie blockbusters on national theatres in Scandinavia, such as A Clockwork Orange, The Celebration and even The Full Monty.

Withdrawn from the circulation of cultural capital, theatre is deprived of the discussions governing contemporary aesthetics. Nevertheless, as a result of demands for its economic self-sufficiency, it is submitted to the same circulation. Through this double strategy, European countries maintain their theatres as impotent institutions, without commercial potential, but with strictly commercial boundaries. This mixture of withdrawal and submission ensures that theatre is kept alive as a symbol of cultural prosperity, while a discussion of theatre’s aesthetic, political and socio-economic premises is kept at bay. Now, as this discussion has been crucial to the proceedings of contemporary art, there is good reason to insist that theatre, not least from an aesthetic viewpoint, should be its next object of scrutiny.

Tony White has written a different narrative by giving a voice to the lives of young British Bangladeshis around Shadwell in Tower Hamlets. The story is of two young Bangladeshi women, Foxy-T and Ruji-Babes (their tag names), who run an internet and international phone call shop, and the impact on their lives of Zafar Iqbal who has just come out of prison.

Foxy-T, Ruji-Babes and Zafar grapple with the meaning of friendship and love in the context of few opportunities for people like them in the area. However, the significance of the novel is in the way the characters perceive, express and give meaning to their relationships and their lives in their own words. In order to do this Tony White, who is English, has attempted to reproduce the vernacular of young Bangladeshis – a hybrid of cockney, East London Caribbean patois and Bengali. The result is something more than the sum of its parts.

The whole of the novel is narrated using this language. We get a flavour of this in the description of the first encounter between Zafar and the two Bangladeshi women, Ruji-Babes and Foxy-T:

‘Tell the truth though he was more interested in them girls than just talk about himself innit. This Zafar was keen to know what they was doing here in him grandad flat and with there little business in E-Z Call. And they could tell he was a ghetto youth because of all him question them and the way he was slightly take the piss out of them but also keen fe check what kind of angle they was working.’

Although this kind of language may surround us, we are not used to reading it, and for this reason Foxy-T is a difficult book to get into for the first 30 – 50 pages. But the effort pays off as we immerse ourselves in this self-consistent inner world created by the narrator’s imagination.

Tony White attempts to portray the world of young people with a different culture to his own. Does he succeed? Some might think that the language is a simple parody. But if anything, given that Tony is not of the culture he portrays, he does an admirable job in conveying the language of the youth that I know and hear everyday in Shadwell; perhaps the only difference being that many East End youth will also break in and out of Bengali when speaking their English. This is the real sound of the East End, and it deserves to be recognised.

Foxy-T by Tony White is published by Faber.

From these feelings it is not long before the distinction between a brown migrant and a black neighbour who has known Europe to be his home all this while is blurred, and racist feelings towards asylum ‘cheats’ are transferred to the neighbour. All over Europe, ethnic minorities who have been residents for decades feel the effects of discrimination and prejudice. The asylum seeker is all too easily obfuscated with the ethnic minority resident. In the Swiss parliamentary elections last year, one poster of the anti-immigrant Swiss People’s Party – in a series of posters the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees called atrocious – carried a caricatured black face and a slogan reading ‘The Swiss are increasingly becoming the Negroes’. One can only surmise the feelings of Black or Asian Swiss citizens. That party’s share of the vote also rose from 5% in 1999 to 27% last year. British history and perceptions of empire as taught in schools are loaded with racist assumptions and practices, and the intellectual and cultural atmosphere still holds up black and brown people to be fundamentally inferior, if insidiously rather than overtly.

In a recent paper on asylum seekers and state racism in Europe, Liza Schuster argues that as states devote more time, energy and money to asserting control over migration and publicise these efforts, a spiral of fear is created over an apparent loss of control. It is this fear that hardens migration policy. And it is this same fear that feeds a growing number of countries’ ‘forward-looking’ policies that may not target, but inevitably affect, their ethnic minorities.

Techniques that had supposedly been consigned to a dark European past have been revived in policy towards asylum seekers – forcible and unfair dispersal, detention and deportation. These measures are now deemed reasonable, and parallels can be seen in how ethnic minority residents are treated. French pilot Lotfi Raissi was detained arbitrarily for five months on false allegations that he trained the September 11 hijackers and released when no charge could be laid against him. He believes that he was a victim because he was Arab and Muslim, and finds widespread support for this view. Asian participants in riots in Oldham and Bradford some years back found themselves receiving sentences far harsher than those handed down to white rioters.

Alongside this concern, European states’ deepest underlying fear – something they may not wish to admit publicly but increasingly express – is an increasingly plural, multicultural Europe. Five years from now, the first majority non-white child will be born in the Netherlands. In Belgium, estimates are that that will happen in twenty years. Michael Vlahos, writing in Tech Central Station in August 2003, notes that the Arab minority in Roman Europe (France, Spain and Italy) will more than double by 2050 to stabilise at 20 to 25 % of the population, while forming a larger proportion of the working population – this is when it ‘will come to occupy – for at least a slice of historical time – a unique demographic space’. So it is a long way away, but the ‘flood’ of foreign, often brown and Muslim, residents feeds a deep-seated racism and resentment on all sides. States, consciously guided or not, therefore feel the need to stem and mediate this transformation of their societies – and asylum policy only goes so far. But the spiral of distrust this perpetuates never seems to end.

In the Netherlands, populist right-wing leader Pim Fortuyn won widespread support on his anti-immigration platform before his murder by an animal rights activist. Pim’s party directed much of its racism towards Muslim migrants who were in their view unable to respect Europe’s liberal values and diversity. This was a fallacy. As the Muslim scholar Tim Winter notes, for Muslims in Europe, polls indicate that integration is no problem when ‘it signifies an enhancement and addition to what we already are, rather than an erasure and destruction’. Demands for citizenship tests, and for integration on ‘European’ terms, fail to define the culture into which immigrants should integrate, perhaps because the notion of an unchanging culture is illusory and feeds populist sentiment.

The British tabloid press in January 2004 scare-mongered over Roma who were ‘ready to flood in’ from the EU’s new member countries when they could in May. The Sun reported that ‘tens of thousands of gypsies are poised to flock to Britain’. The Daily Express, notes Arun Kundnani, states that Roma are ‘heading to Britain to leech on us’ and then apparently espouses their cause by warning that if they are let in, the Roma will become ‘figures of hate’. These concerns are hollow, when its imagery of floods and invasions does little to mitigate such hatred. The Nazis used similar language in the Holocaust.

Giorgio Agamben recently noted that the West’s political paradigm was no longer the city state, but the concentration camp, and ‘that we had passed from Athens to Auschwitz’. I liberally extend his metaphor, but it is a tragic irony that an increasingly borderless Europe has, when it comes to asylum and migration, adopted a fortress Europe mentality and regards its citizens as inhabitants to be moulded in a certain racist image. And non-white Europeans appear to be treated as if they were in a concentration camp, battered on all fronts, even if what happened at Auschwitz decades ago is still a long way from repeating itself.

The mainly landscape photographs are striking for several reasons. The sand-castle like buildings are thrown into relief by the ochre coloured light at sunset, and the deep blue expanses of sky create geometric compositions which look as reminiscent of a George Braque canvas as they do of a photo on the pages of National Geographic; it is with a true artist’s eye that Elhum has captured the winding cavernous streets of Bam and its ancient architecture.

But it was not just a city that was destroyed in the earthquake. Over 41,000 lives were lost, and this exhibition aims to keep those innocent victims in mind as well. The Persian people are incredibly proud of their cultural heritage, it is relatively unknown to the West and is an important part of the individual’s identity; by keeping the memory of the city alive, the spirit of the people who lived there will live on too.

Uncomfortably juxtaposed with the beautiful images of the ancient city are the front pages of the Iranian newspapers. ‘Death Toll Mounts’, reads the front page of Iran News, photographs of a very different kind illustrating suffering in the rawest of forms; rude heaps of bodies, dejected rescue workers, families grieving. Fatemeh, age 35, burying her two children. ‘I am burying myself in this grave’ she explains.

The proceeds from the exhibition, which is running for a limited time at St Anne’s College Oxford, are being donated to the Popli Khalatbari Charitable Foundation – Bam Earthquake Fund, as are the profits from the sale of the works themselves. ‘This place was incredible, and now, it’s not there any more. I want to make people remember that, I want to make it a reality’ Elhum says of the project. The reality may be a painful one, but the memory is beautiful.

Prints and posters of the exhibition are available for purchase. For more information contact Elhum Shakerifar, Wadham College, Oxford OX1 3PN or visit: http://surf.to/bamexhibition.

The same year, my granddad entered his new home in Haifa. Only a few months earlier the people calling the same place home were a working-class Palestinian family. A manual labourer himself, granddad told me about the solid arched doorways, the brightness of the limestone walls, admiring the skill of whoever had managed to use sea-sand in the plaster. But in my imagination I could also smell the recently-emptied pantry, rummage through random possessions left behind in haste, and kick at the still-moist pebbles of goat shit in the yard. Now my mother’s crib was in that house. Through her eyes my granddad remembers his own mother, father and eight siblings. Rays of sunlight penetrate the foliage over a forgotten mass grave in the Ukraine.

—

Israeli and Palestinian negotiators have been hammering out ‘creative solutions’ to the refugee problem for years, without ever touching the pain. Repatriation to the future Palestinian state; compensation schemes; possibly limited ‘family reunions’ in Israel itself. International funds, multilateral boards, administrative committees. We must be pragmatic, we are told. Which is to say we need to leave matters in the hands of existing and would-be power elites, and accept their cook-ups as panacea. ‘This agreement provides for the permanent and complete resolution of the Palestinian refugee problem. No claims may be raised except for those related to the implementation of this agreement’. Nobody mentions that refugees will more likely than not be absorbed into the Palestinian state as an underclass. Nobody mentions that third-generation refugees, eking out an existence in situations of dire poverty in refugee camps, might not find it so easy to exercise ‘free and informed decision’ as to their permanent place of residence, let alone prove title to lost lands or the value of lost property. We tend to forget that diplomatic agreements are not about justice, they’re about interests.

All that Palestinian politicians want from their Israeli counterparts is a solution to the refugee problem which, despite being agreed over the heads of the refugees and with no more than symbolic input from them, will still be legitimate enough in the Palestinian public’s eyes not to jeopardise the politicians’ own power.

As for Israeli politicians, any solution carrying even the whiff of the possibility of an eventual Palestinian majority in post-agreement Israel is non-negotiable. An unrestricted right of return for Palestinian refugees is anathema to Zionism, especially to a political Zionism in its Israeli form, which claims its realisation under the banner of ‘A Jewish and Democratic State’. Only with the secure promise of a continued Jewish majority can a state that extends special rights to Jews still be able to hold up its shaky façade of democracy.

To systematically marginalise and discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel when they’re just a quarter of the population can still be covered up – albeit with diminishing success – by universal suffrage and ‘minority rights’. But to do so when they’re the majority can only be defined as apartheid – not metaphorical apartheid, not swearword apartheid – the real thing. This is why even Israeli politicians on the Zionist left have been using the Jewish majority argument to support separation from the Palestinians.

But we already know that ‘Israeli democracy’ is a sham, don’t we? It’s the same sham held up by millionaires who steal elections, by governments who go to war despite the protests of millions, by elected representatives who privatise water and healthcare. So what is the real reason for resisting the right of return? Is it just the prospect of exercising apartheid that makes Israelis pale at the thought of a Palestinian majority?

The picture becomes even odder when we recall that in the early days of Zionism, nobody thought of a Jewish majority in Palestine as attainable or even necessarily desirable. For the idealistic (some may say naïve) communards who founded the first Kibbutzim in the nineteen-tens, what mattered was not how many Jews ended up there, but what kind of life they would live. Theirs was a project of human renewal, in which Jews would come to Palestine not because they had to, but because they wanted to. To escape anti-Semitic pogroms in Russia one could just as well go to America. But the point was to leave behind the diasporic world of parochialism, inequality and uprooted-ness, to reconnect to the earth. They wanted to be self-sufficient, to work with their own hands, to live free and equal. Any land they settled on was to be either empty, or bought from its Arab cultivators fair and square. They recognised that they would have to prove themselves worthy of the land, to show that they could exist organically again, and to earn the respect of the felahhin who had been there for centuries.

In Israel today, all of this is of course long gone. The communards’ vision has been superseded by what turned out to be the dominant trend – the ‘catastrophic’ version of Zionism. This current already begins in the fin-de-siecle with Herzl, who was calling for a ‘night-shelter’ to absorb the waves of Jewish fugitives from Eastern Europe. At the time it could have been Palestine, Argentina, Uganda – whatever. The last thing these fugitives’ well-off cousins in Germany and France wanted was for a crowd of poor, uncultured, bearded, smelly Östjuden to crash their party. Even Jews can be anti-Semitic sometimes.

Today, the same predisposition continues to be fed by the Israeli-Arab conflict. The marauding Cossacks of the nightmare have transformed into armed Palestinians: Jews were at risk, therefore they needed a state. A state was founded on an act of dispossession, breeding resentment and revolt. Therefore Jews are at risk. Therefore they need a state. In a mind-boggling vortex of circularity, Zionism needs the Israeli-Arab conflict to justify itself. The solution of the conflict, real peace and coexistence, is supposed to take us out of this vortex.

Without a conflict, who cares about majorities and minorities? But Israelis who take communion at the table of their leaders have been brought up to think that peace in its fullest sense is something that can never exist; a dream that depends on its non-realisation. When I was a kid, people at least sang about peace, they had us draw pictures of it in kindergarten. Today even that’s gone. Because now for the first time people are beginning to understand that peace in its fullest sense, a coexistence spreading to all areas of everyday life, makes the boundaries between communities fuzzy, until they disappear.

The spectre of bi-nationalism is haunting the Israeli peace agenda. It grates on the nerves of those who, in Raoul Vaneigem’s words, carry cadavers in their mouths. Say ‘bi-national’ and you’ll see the cadavers peer out. Corner even the most moderate/liberal Zionist in an argument and you’ll get the same bottom line: ‘It can’t be allowed to happen again’. And this is the dark truth: politically, Israeli Zionism is indeed defined as the position that Israel should continue to be a Jewish state. Psychologically, however, it boils down to one factor: the fear of a second Holocaust. Bi-nationalism, with or without a Palestinian majority, only becomes a spectre against the backdrop of such a horizon. To put it as bluntly as possible: Israelis are afraid that they will be marched into the gas chambers. Again.

—-

Peace. Not permanent armistice, not perpetual ceasefire – Peace. Tranquillity. Ease. To eat, sleep and shag without your existence ever being clouded over by the prospect of armed conflict.

Is this so unimaginable? Will we, Israelis and Palestinians, ever be able to live on the basis of the presently unthinkable working assumption that nothing bad is going to happen to us? For Israelis, confronting the question of the right of return of refugees is the litmus test of our readiness for such a situation. If current indications are of any use, most of us are far from it. A demon is going to have to be exorcised first, a demon that we have handed down through the generations like a black dowry. All I want to do in this article is point out its existence. Only by ceasing to define ourselves in terms of non-annihilation can we, the Jewish community west of the Jordan, finally recognise ourselves in our homeland, to the extent of casting off any claims of exclusivity towards it.

Let my Palestinian sisters and brothers speak of the Naqba demon, if they are willing to call it that. We need a reconciliation that would transform not only our material conditions, but our collective psyches. No on-paper agreement will ever be enough to achieve this. Healing the wounds requires not clever formulas but brave communities, willing to engage in grassroots dialogue in everyday life. Seeing one another as human beings on the street, in the fields, at the beach. Doing laundry together, making babies together, and perhaps finally turning into one people. Or just into people.

More information

• Palestinians were displaced/expelled by Israeli military forces in two waves, during the 1948 and 1967 Arab-Israeli wars.
• There are now more than 5 million Palestinian refugees. More than half live in Jordan, around a quarter in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and approximately a sixth in Syria and Lebanon.
• One third of the 3.8 million refugees registered with the United Nations live in refugee camps.
• UN Resolution 194 (passed 11/12/1948) states that ‘the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return’
• The recent ‘Geneva Accord’, an unofficial template for peace signed by moderate Israeli and Palestinian politicians, accepts resolution 194 while expecting almost all returning refugees to live in the future Palestinian state.

Uri’s Recommended Links:

• Palestinian Right of Return Coalition: www.al-awda.org.uk
• Alternative Information Centre: www.alternativenews.org
• International Solidarity Movement: www.palsolidarity.org