Mezzaterra
First published as the introduction to Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground (Bloomsbury, 2004)
Holland Park. He came towards me through the crowd in the drawing room of the grand house that I’d never been in before and have never been in since. ‘Come,’ he said, ‘I’ll show you the menagerie.’ That was twenty-five years ago. I have, in some sense, been examining the menagerie ever since.
I had thought it made no difference where one lived: Cairo, London, what was a four-and-a-half-hour flight? We were citizens of the world and the world was fast becoming more connected. I saw the difficulty only in terms of the personal life: on the one hand, how much would I miss my family, my friends, the sun, the food, the – life? On the other, what was life worth without this miraculous new love?
We married in 1981. But I did not move to London permanently until 1984 when our first child was born.
I shared, then, in the general life of the country that had become my other home. I supported Spurs, kept an eye on house prices, formed political opinions and found that whatever view I might hold about Thatcher or Europe or the NHS, I was bound to find it expressed somewhere in the common discourse of the mainstream media. Where I felt myself out of step was when this discourse had anything to do with Egypt, the Arabs or Islam. I had become used to what was at the time unequivocal support for Israel in the British media, but it troubled me that in almost every book, article, film, TV or radio programme that claimed to be about the part of the world that I came from I could never recognise myself or anyone I knew. I was constantly coming face to face with distortions of my reality.
I reasoned that this must be the experience of every ‘alien’ everywhere and that it shouldn’t be taken personally. But it was a constant irritant – and world geo-politics meant that interest in where I came from was growing. Lebanon was suffering the tail end of both the Israeli invasion and its own civil war (which was the direct result of the troubles in Palestine). Afghanistan became the crucible in which thousands of disaffected, young – mainly Arab – Muslim men were being transformed into a fighting force pitted against the USSR. Then the Soviet Union imploded. The Gulf War came and with it the imposition of sanctions on Iraq, the basing of US troops in the Arabian peninsula and talk of a New World Order. In the run up to the Gulf War, Israelis and Palestinians were summoned to negotiations in Spain and Norway and the world applauded while a perceptive few foresaw the mess for which the Oslo accords laid the ground plan.
It was impossible – apart from a few notable exceptions – to find in the media of the West coherent interpretations of all this that did justice to the people of the region and their history. If the New World Order was a mechanism to control the Arab and Muslim worlds then I felt that the media of the West was complicit in it; for they always represented those worlds in terms that excused or even invited the imposition of control.
Was this misrepresentation reciprocal? If I were an American or British person living in Egypt, and if I knew Arabic well enough to read the mainstream Arabic press, would I constantly be brought up short by skewed accounts of my history and culture? Would I switch on the television to find a doom-laden voice intoning about how the Celts worshipped the massive stones placed on Salisbury Plain by astral beings? Would I switch on my car radio and hear an account of yet another outbreak of ‘Christian paedophilia’, with a background theme of church bells and Christmas carols? Would I wander into the movies and come face to face with an evil American character bent on destroying the ‘third’ world so the cinema audience cheers when the Arab hero kills him? I have to say the answer is a resounding no. Where the Arab media is interested in the West it tends to focus on what the West is producing today: policies, technology and art, for example – particularly as those connect to the Arab world. The Arab media has complete access to English and other European languages and to the world’s news agencies. Interpretive or analytic essays are mostly by writers who read the European and American press and have experience of the West. The informed Arab public does not view the West as one monolithic unit; it is aware of dissent, of the fact that people often do not agree with policy, of the role of the judiciary. Above all, an Arab assumes that a Westerner is, at heart, very much like her – or him. Many times I have heard Palestinian village women, when speaking of the Israeli soldiers who torment them, ask ‘Does his mother know he’s doing this?’
Living in London, I know that I am not alone in the experience of alienation; there are hundreds of thousands of us: people with an Arab or a Muslim background living in the West and doing daily double-takes when faced with their reflection in a western mirror. I felt upset and angered by the misrepresentations I encountered constantly and I felt grateful when a clear-eyed truth was spoken about us. And then again, who was 'us'?
I went to school in London briefly when I was 13. Mayfield Comprehensive in Putney. There, the white girls thought I was white (or thought I was close enough to white to want to be thought of as white) and the black girls thought I was black (or close enough to black to make identifying with the whites suspect). But that did not mean I could associate freely where I chose; it meant that I had to make a choice and stick with it. And whichever group I opted for I would be despised by the other. After three months I refused to go to school. Thinking about it now, I see this as my first serious exposure to the 'with us or against us' mentality; the mentality that forces you to self-identify as one thing despite your certain knowledge that you are a bit of this and a bit of that.
Growing up Egyptian in the ‘Sixties meant growing up Muslim / Christian / Egyptian / Arab / African / Mediterranean / Non-aligned / Socialist but happy with 'Patriotic Capitalism'. On top of that, if you were urban/professional the chances were that you spoke English and/or French and danced to the Stones as readily as to Abd el-Halim. In Cairo on any one night you could go see an Arabic, English, French, Italian or Russian film. One week the Russian Hamlet was playing at Cinema Odeon, Christopher Plummer's Hamlet at Cinema Qasr el-Nil and Karam Mutawi's Hamlet at the Egyptian National Theatre. We were modern and experimental. We believed in Art and Science. We cared passionately for Freedom and Social Justice. We saw ourselves as occupying a ground common to both Arab and Western culture, Russian culture was in there too, and Indian, and a lot of South America. The question of identity as something that needed to be defined and defended did not occupy us. We were not looking inward at ourselves but outward at the world. We knew who we were. Or thought we did. In fact I never came across the Arabic word for identity, huwiyyah, until long after I was no longer living full-time in Egypt. Looking back, I imagine our 'Sixties identity as a spacious meeting point, a common ground with avenues into the rich hinterlands of many traditions.
This territory, this ground valued precisely for being a meeting-point for many cultures and traditions - let's call it 'Mezzaterra' - was not invented or discovered by my generation. But we were the first to be born into it, to inhabit it as of right. It was a territory imagined, created even, by Arab thinkers and reformers, starting in the middle of the Nineteenth Century when Muhammad Ali Pasha of Egypt first sent students to the West and they came back inspired by the best of what they saw on offer. Generations of Arabs protected it through the dark time of colonialism. My parents' generation are still around to tell how they held on to their admiration for the thought and discipline of the West, its literature and music, while working for an end to the West's occupation of their lands. My mother, for example, who had fallen in love with the literature of Britain at school, and who could not be appointed to teach it at Cairo University until the British had left, did not consider that rejecting British imperialism involved rejecting English literature. She might say that true appreciation and enjoyment of English literature is not possible unless you are free of British colonialism and can engage with the culture on an equal footing. This is the stance that Edward Said speaks of when he describes how "what distinguished the great liberationist cultural movements that stood against Western imperialism was that they wanted liberation within the same universe of discourse inhabited by Western culture."
They believed this was possible because they recognised an affinity between the best of Western and the best of Arab culture. ... Generations of Arab Mezzaterrans had, I guess, believed what Western culture said of itself: that its values were universalist, democratic and humane. They believed that once you peeled off military and political dominance, the world so revealed would be one where everyone could engage freely in the exchange of ideas, art forms, technologies. This was the world that my generation believed we had inherited: a fertile land; an area of overlap, where one culture shaded into the other, where echoes and reflections added depth and perspective, where differences were interesting rather than threatening because foregrounded against a backdrop of affinities.
The rewards of inhabiting the mezzaterra are enormous. At its best it endows each thing, at the same moment, with the shine of the new, the patina of the old; the language, the people, the landscape, the food of one culture constantly reflected off the other. This is not a process of comparison, not a 'which is better than which' project but rather at once a distillation and an enrichment of each thing, each idea. It means, for example, that you are both on the inside and the outside of language, that within each culture your stance cannot help but be both critical and empathetic.
But as the 'Eighties rolled into the 'Nineties the political direction the world was taking seemed to undermine every aspect of this identity. Our open and hospitable mezzaterra was under attack from all sides.
Personally, I find the situation so grave that in the last four years I have written hardly anything which does not have direct bearing on it. The common ground, after all, is the only home that I - and those whom I love - can inhabit.
As components of my mezzaterra have hardened, as some have sought to invade and grab territory and others have thrown up barricades, I have seen my space shrink and felt the ground beneath my feet tremble. Tectonic plates shift into new positions and what was once an open and level plain twists into a jagged, treacherous land. But in today's world a separatist option does not exist; a version of this common ground is where we all, finally, must live if we are to live at all. And yet the loudest voices are the ones that deny its very existence, that trumpet a 'clash of civilisations'. My non-fiction, then, from the second half of the 'Eighties, through the 'Nineties, rather than celebrating Mezzaterra, became a defence of it, an attempt to demonstrate its existence.
Throughout the ‘Nineties the world was treated to the spectacle of the Iraqi people suffering under sanctions because their dictator had invaded Kuwait, while next door the democratically elected Labour government of Israel speeded up its theft of Palestinian lands and resources under cover of the Oslo peace accords. Neither process could have taken place without the backing of the United States, the world's one remaining superpower. The effect was to radicalise Arab opinion and expose the weakness and complicity of Arab rulers. In the West, public opinion was slowly starting to shift towards a more balanced view of the Palestinian-Israeli issue. For a brief moment at the end of the Clinton administration it seemed that a solution with which both sides could live was within reach. It is said that Arafat was willing to accept the offer Clinton put to him at Taba but was advised to wait until after the American elections. The reasoning ran: Clinton is on the way out. he can’t do any more good. George W. Bush is our man; his Arab oil connections go back a generation. Let him be the one to sign the peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis. But before this could happen Sharon had gone for his promenade through the Noble Sanctuary, the Intifada had erupted, Barak was out and a Likud government was in and all deals were off. True to form, most of the UK and the American media presented the Intifada as essentially a religious protest to Sharon entering the Haram. Hardly any mention was made of the fact central to the preceeding seven years of collective Palestinian life: that the Oslo accords had been a new screen behind which Israel could continue to dispossess the Palestinians. It was as though a simple-mindedness descended on the media when it reported on matters to do with Arabs, Islam and, in particular, Palestine. No, it’s a bit deeper than that: it is that the media attributes simple and immediate motivation to Arabs and Muslims as though they were all one-celled creatures. Watching the news on the BBC or CNN on the one hand and al-Jazeera on the other was like seeing reports from two different planets.
As we now know, the New World Order announced at the beginning of the 'Nineties was - by the beginning of the new millenium - mutating into the Project for the New American Century. An extreme strand of American ideology deemed the omens propitious for America's 'manifest destiny' to be actualised: it was time for America to dominate the world. The key to this would be strategic control of geography and of the main energy resource of the planet: oil. Dominance in central Asia and the Arab world would both control the oil and prevent those parts of the world from forming alliances with China or Russia.
But the US could not underwrite Israeli policies and ambitions in the region and at the same time be regarded by the Arab people as a friend. The Palestinian issue was largely at the heart of this, but so also was the Arab reading of Israel's desire to become the local superpower. Apart from the questions over the Syrian Golan Heights, the Lebanese Shab'a Farms and the never-quite-renounced expansionist 'Eretz Israel' idea, Israel's footprint was to be found in many issues critical to the wellbeing of its neighbours such as the debate over Egypt's share of Nile water, the surreptitious introduction of GM crops into the region's agriculture or the growing drug trade. America, therefore, (and this is before September 11, 2001) could not seek to secure its interests in the region through a positive or mutually beneficial relationship with the Arabs.
This is never spelt out by the American media for the American public: that the discord between the Arab world and the USA is entirely to do with Israel. The International Court of Justice, environmental policies, globalisation problems - these are issues between America and the entire world not just the Arabs. Between America and the Arabs specifically there is only Israel - or was until the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
In the early months of 2001 the Intifada had unmasked the bankruptcy of the Oslo agreements, Israel was using increasingly violent measures against Palestinians and Israeli Arabs, the people in Arab countries were agitating, collecting donations and demanding action from their unwilling governments. In the face of the Palestinians’ refusal to back down and accept their dispossession, and with world public opinion shifting to support them, the US was essentially left with four choices. It could:
1. Dissociate itself from Israel, or
2. Pressure Israel into a true peace deal with the Palestinians, or
3. Pressure Israel into disguising or deferring its ambitions and pressure the Palestinan leadership into conceding more ground to Israel, or
4. Accept the hostility of the Arab world and a growing part of the rest of the world and decide how to deal with it.
The first option was unrealistic. US domestic dynamics precluded it. Every American President, presidential candidate and Secretary of State has felt obliged to swear an oath of allegiance to Israel in front of the powerful American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The recruitment, in the late Nineties, of the Bible-belt right (now estimated to form 18 per cent of voters and 33 per cent of Republican voters) to Israel’s cause made it even more unlikely.
The second option was not possible for the same reasons as the first.
Options three and four have formed the basis of US strategy for almost forty years.
Every American administration from 1967 to 2001 has tried to conclude interim peace deals which buy Israel time to create more facts on the ground. Since Richard Nixon's visit to Egypt in the early 'Seventies, American tactics for dealing with Arab hostility to US policies were to increase the region's (particularly Egypt's) dependency on the US through USAID projects, to support corrupt Arab rulers and corrupt them further, to advise and co-operate with regimes in silencing opposition and to attempt to co-opt local élites. Regimes that have balked at the American line have been branded ‘rogue’ and sanctioned.
Yet this unquestioning pro-Israeli stance was becoming problematic. Awareness of the plight of the Palestinian people had begun to increase in the US through the alternative media, the Internet and the efforts of second-generation Arab Americans. The day might have come when American taxpayers realised that the billions of dollars they were paying to subsidise Israel were simply buying them the anger of the Arabs and the Muslims and nudging them out of step with the rest of the world. They might have asked why this support continued to be necessary when Israel was the only nuclear power in the region and had the fourth strongest army in the world and was refusing to abide by international law even though it was no longer under any existential threat.
The events of September 11, 2001 played straight into what would appear to be the Neo-con dream scenario. With the collapse of the Soviet Union the US no longer needed the Islamist fighters it had helped to create in Afghanistan. In fact they had become a nuisance since the US refused to cede to the demand of their leader, its one-time ally, Osama bin Laden, that American troops be pulled out of Saudi Arabia. The political groundwork for dealing with the Arab world in terms of pure power had been laid by the Neo-cons who were now in central positions in government. The ideological framework for a confrontation with 'Islam' had been fashioned by Samuel Huntington and his followers out of the anti-Islamic discourse prevalent since Khomeini's revolution in Iran. Now the War on Terror was declared. Israeli politicians leapt to declare common cause with America, or rather to declare that their cause had always been the war on terror and now, at last, America had joined them.
It was now possible to move the conflict from the political into the metaphysical sphere: a conflict with an enemy so nebulous as to be found anywhere where resistance to American or Israeli policies might lurk.
It was within this rubric that the 2003 war on Iraq was started and it blazes on as I write. The old language of colonialism surfaces once again. Politicians and pundits insist on describing Iraqis in ethnic and religious terms although Iraqis describe themselves (in the Arabic media) in political and economic terms. The US insists on ramming a vicious form of global capitalism down Iraq’s throat....
To date, the effect of American policies on the Arab world has been the complete opposite of their stated aims. In Palestine America defined itself as the "honest broker" between the Palestinians and Israelis and proceeded to place matters in the hands of US Special Envoys almost every one of whom was a graduate of AIPAC. Today, after more than thirty years of an American-sponsored 'peace process' thousands of Palestinians and hundreds of Israelis have been murdered, Jerusalem is encircled by illegal settlements, the West Bank is decimated, an Apartheid barrier is in the process of construction and the President of the US has taken it upon himself to absolve Israel of any obligation to conform to past agreements, to international law or to the declared will of the world. Gaza and Rafah are seeing killings and demolitions of homes on a scale unparalleled since 1948.
In Egypt, the late president, Anwar Sadat, invited the US to set up its stall promising peace, democracy and prosperity and his regime has toed the American line faithfully since then. The country now has unprecedented levels of poverty, huge disparities between rich and poor and a shattered middle class. What small intimations of representative government there were have been strangled; Egyptians have been ruled by Emergency Law for the past twenty-three years and the abuse of the citizens' human rights has become endemic. So bad is the situation that Egyptians have reversed the trend dominant for some six thousand years and now seek to emigrate from their land.
Similar effects can be seen in every 'third world' country that bought into American promises or had them forced upon it. And still the media burble on about the 'peace process' and bringing 'democracy' to the Arabs. Almost 300 years ago Giambattista Vico pointed out that the first symptom of the barbarisation of thought is the corruption of language. The media has a clear duty here: the US administration and the British government should be made to define very precisely what they mean by "sovereignty", "democracy", "freedom", "stability", "peace" and "terrorism". These people are not vague idealists; they are lawyers and businessmen, they know all about fine print and defining terms. They run democratically elected governments answerable to the people and their representatives. The media should demand that they spell out the fine print in their pronouncements to their electorates. We could even limit the question and ask what do the British and the American governments mean by these terms in the context of their dealings with the Arab world? Then, depending on how the definitions agree with those in the OED, say, we could find different terms for the commodities Bush and Blair are so keen to export to the region.
And since the Western media is now blithely using Arabic words it would be useful if they could demonstrate their understanding of those too. They can start with "jihad", "fatwa" and "shaheed", all of which are far more layered and subtle than you would guess if you just came across them in English.
The whole question of Islam and the West needs to be examined honestly. The current pieties that say "we know so little of each other" or, in the words of Lord Carey, the ex-Archbishop of Canterbury, "we must get rid of the deep hatred we have for each other", may be well-intentioned but they rest on untrue premises and are not helpful. The huge populations of Arab Christians and the Christians who live in Muslim countries know a great deal about Muslims and there is no evidence that they "hate" them. In fact Arab Christians have fought side by side with their Muslim compatriots against the Crusaders and against the Western colonialists of more recent times. And Muslims are very well informed about Christians. Eastern Christians have been their compatriots, neighbours and friends for fourteen centuries. And Muslims have had to learn about Western Christians if only because the West has been the dominant power in Muslim lives for the last two hundred years.
As for hatred, a ‘secular’ Muslim cannot, by definition, hate a Christian or a Jew on the grounds of religion. A ‘believing’ Muslim cannot hate a Christian or a Jew because of who they are since Islam is clear that Muslims must live in fellowship with people “of the Book”. There is, though, an important difference between Christians and Muslims in terms of belief. Since Islam came after Christianity and Judaism and saw itself as a continuation of their traditions, it is part of the faith of a Muslim to believe in Christ, Moses and the prophets of the Old and New Testaments. This is stated in the Qur’ān and it is not open to choice. A believing Christian or Jew, on the other hand, can choose whether or not to believe that Muhammad was a prophet and, therefore, whether Islam too came from the God of Christianity and Judaism. ONE PARAGRAPH
A linked and recurrent theme is to claim that Arabs use Israel and the West as an alibi, an excuse for their passivity, that they should get on with fixing their lives, with developing. Here it is essential to differentiate between the Arabs and their rulers. The rulers will do nothing because their only interest is to remain in power. They have failed in their primary task of protecting their nations' sovereignty and steering their countries' resources towards providing the people with a decent life. Their positions are now so precarious that they dare not move one way for fear that their people’s anger will finally unseat them, and they dare not move the other way for fear of offending America. As for the people, they are doing plenty. First they are surviving – by the skin of their teeth. The poor are poorer then they have ever been. The middle classes are often running two jobs just to make a living: civil servants are driving taxis, lawyers are working as car park attendants, graduates are working on food stalls. Even so, local NGOs challenge governments on human rights, on trade union laws, on constitutional reforms. Citizens challenge government officers on corruption. They take cases to court and they win. Artists paint and musicians sing. Newspapers are full of analysis and debate. And this against a background of arbitrary detention, of torture, not just in prisons, but in police stations. Protests are organized despite the thousands of armed security forces the state puts on the streets. And despite the sullying of these terms, people still campaign for democracy and freedom.
What does the Western media report of all this? ...When the UNDP report on the Arab countries came out with its abysmal findings, where was the logical concern about the measly percentage of state budgets devoted to research and development and the trillions spent on importing western arms? Instead the headlines screamed about how 50% of Arab women were still illiterate. But another finding was that in the last two decades Arab women outstripped every other group of women in the world in the advances they had made. Why was that not a headline?
It should be said that representation in the Western media is not high among the priorities of my friends in Egypt and other Arab countries. Nor should it be. But for those of us who live in the West this fashioning of an image that is so at variance with the truth is very troubling. As Jean Genet observed in Un captif amoureux, the mask of the image can be used to manipulate reality to sinister ends. And while it would not be correct to attribute malign motives to the media in general, it is not unreasonable to feel that by promoting a picture of the Arab world that is essentially passive, primitive and hopeless, a picture that hardly ever depicts Arabs as agents of action (except for terrorists and suicide bombers), the media validates the politicians' dreams of domination.
This, also, is where a certain breed of Arab intellectual plays a crucial role. Decrying the political oppression rampant in their countries of birth and exposing the atrocities that take place there, these intellectuals (the majority of whom are to be found in Washington DC) will implicitly widen their critique to discredit the very culture and people of these countries. They therefore provide the ideological justification to 'save these people from themselves'. This has been seen in action recently in the writings of Arab intellectuals embedded with the US administration encouraging it into its disastrous Iraqi adventure.
It has become commonplace to say that the world has never known such dangerous times. It's possibly true. The givens we live with at the moment are well-rehearsed: the absence of a world power alternative to that of the United States, the US’s umbilical links with the global ambitions of capital and corporatism, and the reach and power of contemporary weapons.
I would add to these that the identification (despite the efforts at blurring) of Islam as 'the enemy' is particularly dangerous. When the West identified the USSR as 'the enemy' it had to construct 'the Evil Empire' from scratch. But with Islam, the idealogues and propagandists of the West need only revive old colonialist and orientalist ideas of Islam as an inherently fanatical, violent ideological system that rejects modernity. They can play to deep-seated fears and prejudices with roots stretching back into the Middle Ages. When, at the height of the Troubles the IRA launched a bombing campaign on the mainland, the suggestion that this was a manifestation of 'Catholic fanaticism' was a marginal one. However repellent their bombing of civilians it had to be regarded and dealt with as a politically motivated act. A similar reaction was afforded the African National Congress’s bombing campaign - no reasonable person suggested that this was 'black fanaticism'. From 1970 to 2000 the United States has been directly implicated in creating and nurturing Islamist groups to counter secular national liberation movements in Palestine and other Arab countries. It, and the Arab regimes, have succeeded in pushing most political opposition into the cloak of Islamism. Now that the most militant of the Islamist extremists, whose lands are the 'objects' of Western policies, are no longer content for the battles to be fought exclusively on their home ground and have brought a sample of the carnage into the territory of the West we hear a ready-made discourse on 'nihilistic Islamic fanatics' who are on the rampage because they hate the democracy, freedom and prosperity of the West. One does not have to condone the murder of civilians to admit the political demands behind it. In fact denying the existence of these political demands guarantees the continuation and escalation of the conflict and the deaths of yet more innocents.
The role of Israel here needs to be clearly acknowledged, for Israel has always predicated its value to the West on the premise that there is an unresolvable conflict between the West and the Muslim hordes. Today, allied to the American Christian right, its role is to exaggerate and escalate the conflict.
A bleak, bleak picture. And yet there is still hope. Hope lies in a unity of conscience between the people of the world for whom this phrase itself carries any meaning. We have seen this conscience in action in the demonstrations that swept the planet before the invasion of Iraq, in the anger of Americans and Europeans at the pictures coming out of Abu Ghreib prison in Iraq, in the brave stand of the Israelis refusing to serve the Occupation, and in the private citizens from every part of the world who have tried - and some have paid with their lives - to stand between the Palestinians and their destruction. We see it every day in the writings of the brave and dogged few in the mainstream media and in the tireless work of the alternative and fringe media. It expresses itself in a myriad grass-roots movements that have coalesced into a world-wide effort to influence and modify the course of global capitalism.
For all these voices, these consciences, to be effective, however, Western democracies have to live up to their own values. It is shameful that on questions of international politics there is so little to choose between the governing parties and the opposition in the US and Britain. Democracy presupposes vigorous opposition on matters of national importance, it also presupposes a free and informed media which sees its task as informing the electorate of the facts. The current attacks on civil rights on both sides of the Atlantic, the drive to place security concerns before every other concern, the attempts to tamper with education and the law to serve a political agenda remind me of nothing so much as the activities of the ruling regimes in the Arab world for the last several decades; activities that have now brought the Arab world to what Arab intellectuals argue is the lowest point in its history.
The question of Palestine is of paramount importance not just because of humanitarian concerns about the plight of the Palestinians. It matters that, now, in full view of the world and in utter defiance of the mechanisms the international community has put into place to regulate disputes between nations, a favoured state can commit vast illegal acts of brutality and be allowed to gain by them. If the world allows Israel to steal the West Bank and Jerusalem and to deny the history of the people it dispossessed in 1948 and 1967 then the world will have admitted it is a lawless place, and the world will suffer the consequences of this admission. The question of Palestine is also where the influence of the USA on world affairs is most sharply in focus. If there is no just solution to the Palestinian problem, if the ordinary citizens of Palestine and Israel are not permitted the conditions which would allow them to live their daily lives in a human way, then the influence of the world's only superpower will be proved to be irredeemably malign.
Globalisation is happening. It is driven by economics, economic ideology and communications. But does this have to entail the economic, political, cultural annexation of chunks of the world by whoever is the most powerful at any given moment? Surely that is the path to constant conflict, to grief and misery.
There is another way, and that is to inhabit and broaden the common ground. This is the ground where everybody is welcome, the ground we need to defend and to expand. It is to Mezzaterra that every responsible person on this planet now needs to migrate. And it is there that we need to make our stand.
London, June 2004