Joel Beinin

The New American McCarthyism: Policing Thought about the Middle East

September 11 ushered in a sustained campaign by the American Right and the Bush administration to delegitimise critical thought about the Middle East, Islam and the Arab world. The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) has borne much of the brunt of this campaign, some of it conducted by think-tanks with close links to Israel’s ruling circles. Such attacks on MESA date back to 1967 and the Arab-Israeli war. The role of organisations such as ADL, AIPAC, AVOT and ACTA is examined, as is Campus-Watch and the attempt to introduce legislation in 2003 to place university-level Middle East studies under much closer government control (via HR 3077).

Workers' Protest in Egypt: Neo-liberalism and Class Struggle in 21st Century

From 1998 to 2008 some 2 million Egyptian workers participated in 2,623 factory occupations, strikes, demonstrations, or other collective actions. This social movement does not have a national leadership or program and has not been supported by the Egyptian Trade Union Federation. It is propelled by locally generated grievances that have been produced by the acceleration of the neo-liberal transformation of Egypt since 2004. This workers movement has not changed the existing structures of power that constrain Egyptian working people because the informal, local networks that have sustained the movement are, by their nature, unable to organize a national-scale political movement on their own.

The Israelization of American Middle East Policy Discourse

World Trade Center and the Pentagon could have provided an occasion to begin a serious national conversation about why some Muslims— relatively few to be sure—hate the United States enough to kill themselves to harm our country and its people. Instead, September 11 further consolidated an understanding of the world drawing sharp oppositions between “us” and “them,” and positing Islam as the “new enemy for a new world order.”1 President Bush declared, “Islam is not the enemy.” Nonetheless, the administration and its allies—neoconservatives, the Christian Right, and pro-Israel hawks—encouraged this understanding by promoting a vision of the world divided into the forces of freedom and “the evil ones.” The proposition articulated in the president’s January 2002 state of the union address that North Korea, Iran, and Iraq constitute an “axis of evil” may well be the most flawed and unsophisticated understanding of international affairs to have been offered by any head of state since the end of World War II. Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon quickly identified with the Bush administration’s post–September 11 worldview and sought to turn it to Israel’s advantage. Announcing a day of mourning in Israel and appropriating rhetoric from the era of the Cold War, Sharon declared, “The fight against terror is an international struggle of the free world against the forces of darkness who seek to destroy our liberty and way of life. Together we can defeat these forces of evil.”2 After September 11, Sharon repeatedly equated Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda with those he regarded as Israel’s more direct enemies: Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Lebanese Hizbollah, Iraq, and Iran.3 The Bush administration, with only minimal reservations, embraced this proposition. The consequence was to give Sharon a nearly free hand in repressing the second Palestinian Intifada, which erupted a year before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) attempted to give a patina of intellectual legitimacy to the Bush administration’s simplistic world outlook in a report entitled “Defending Civilization” released in November 2001.4 According to ACTA, criticism of the Bush adminisJoel Beinin The Israelization of American Middle East Policy Discourse

Coexistence, Equality, and Universal Principles in Israel/Palestine: Regrouping in the Absence of a Two-State Solution

F or most of my adult life I believed that a majority of Israelis could be persuaded that their own interests required recognizing Palestinian Arabs’ right to national selfdetermination and equality. Therefore, I believed that establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel was the most politically realistic way to achieve peace and security for both peoples. In recent years, however, I have come to realize that promoting a twostate solution to the conflict based on the Oslo process when no such solution is likely abets Israel in perpetuating the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Fostering the fiction that the Occupation is temporary allows people of good will to entertain illusions that a substantial proportion of the settlements and settlers will be evacuated. This fiction distracts us from the core reality on which we should be focusing: the concrete and everworsening conditions faced by Palestinians in the current moment. This realization has made me doubt the value of gestures such as the October 2014 vote by the British House of Commons to approve a resolution to “recognize the state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel.” Although government and opposition members of parliament alike supported the measure, which passed 274 to 12, it was an exercise in political fantasy. Fewer than half of the 650 parliament members voted, as most Conservatives absented themselves from the vote. And in reality, the parliamentary resolution has no practical consequences because the resolution was nonbinding — it did not change government policy. Junior Foreign Office Minister for the Middle East Tobias Ellwood stated the Conservative government’s position: “The UK will bilaterally recognize a Palestinian state when we judge that it can best help bring about peace.” That is, the UK will recognize Palestine at some point in the distant future when the United States gives permission.

The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora

In this provocative and wide-ranging history, Joel Beinin examines fundamental questions of ethnic identity by focusing on the Egyptian Jewish community since 1948. A complex and heterogeneous people, Egyptian Jews have become even more diverse as their diaspora continues to the present day. Central to Beinins study is the question of how people handle multiple identities and loyalties that are dislocated and reformed by turbulent political and cultural processes. It is a question he grapples with himself, and his reflections on his experiences as an American Jew in Israel and Egypt offer a candid, personal perspective on the hazards of marginal identities.

Knowing Your Enemy, Knowing Your Ally: The Arabists of Hashomer Hatza'ir (MAPAM)

One of the less-noticed casualties of Iraqs invasion of Kuwait was the Israeli peace movement. While it did not endorse the US-led military response to the Gulf crisis, the Palestine Liberation Organization did not support Iraqs seizure of Kuwait. However, many Palestinians in Jordan, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and even in Israel proper enthusiastically embraced Saddam Husseins challenge to the Middle Eastern status quo. In response, several prominent Israeli advocates of negotiations between Israel and the PLO and the establishment of a Palestinian state