We are all Iraqis now

My little niece received a baptism of fire of sorts last Friday: her first police beating. Well, not so little perhaps; she's nearly 18 and has just graduated from high school. Thankfully, the beating was not too harsh. Salma, along with her friends (none of whom had seemed to me very political before) had been out on the streets, with tens of thousands of others, finally able to express a popular outrage so bitter and profound that the nation had almost visibly been choking on it for the past two years - since the outbreak of the Palestinian intifada. To be absolutely precise, since the televised and brutal murder of 11-year-old Mohamed Al-Durrah, as he was cowering behind his father's back.
A wave of demonstrations by university students had erupted then. Another, stronger wave erupted yet again during April of last year, as Sharon sent his troops wreaking death and destruction throughout the Palestinian territories. Yet, by the time Bush, Blair and their assorted aides were beating the drums of war against Iraq, the "Egyptian street" seemed to have sunk back into its decades-long stupor. The anger and outrage were palpable, but in a country with no political parties worthy of the name; with no independent trade unions or social movements of any sort, there seemed no way for it to go - only to simmer and simmer. The ideal recipe for producing suicide bombers.

Then came February 15, 2003. More than 30 million people, from Los Angeles to Tokyo, were out on the streets protesting against the war on Iraq. One million people demonstrated in London, three million in Rome; it was a day the like of which the world had never seen. In the Arab world there was almost silence. Even the governments were embarrassed. After all, in their desperate appeals to their White House patron and his over-zealous adviser at 10 Downing Street to "lighten up" on the Arabs, the Arab governments' major bargaining card (indeed, their only card) has been their feebleness.

"A military attack on Iraq would push the region into an abyss of chaos - instability and terror would rule the day," they protested repeatedly. Yet, so successful had they been in depoliticising their citizens, so complete seemed the disenfranchisement of the Arab peoples, that the Masters of the Universe called the regimes' bluff. They held the Arab masses in the same contempt that their rulers held them in.

Robert Fisk, in the Independent, put it brutally. "One million people demonstrate in London, while the Arabs, faced with disaster, are like mice." Even before it appeared in translation in one of the opposition newspapers, Fisk's article was picked up on with almost masochistic relish; being forwarded by email, in the original English and in various ad-hoc translations - testimony perhaps to the profound effect the day had on popular consciousness in Egypt and in the rest of the Arab world. Not only was the perceived confrontation between Arabs and Muslims on one hand and a monolithic west on the other proved absurd, but western Christians and atheists were defending an Arab cause much better than the Arabs themselves could hope to do.

On Thursday, day one of the invasion, thousands of protesters collected in Tahrir Square, in Cairo. "It's like Hyde Park," was the common refrain, expressed in exhilarated tones. The anti-riot police, while very much in evidence, had stayed its hand, letting demonstrators be as they peacefully occupied the square until the evening, chanting slogans, making speeches, painting political graffiti on the ground and staging street theatre. On Friday, the beatings began, and continued. The government's message was loud and clear: "You've had your one day. No more."

The anger and outrage fester, yet, alongside them, a new mood, something very like euphoria, has also been growing, almost grudgingly ("dare we hope"); the Iraqis, devastated by wars and crippling sanctions, have been offering what appears to be stiff resistance to the invading force of the most powerful and deadly military machine in history. "Where is this shock and awe," people ask one another at newsagents, on public transport and in coffee houses, the latter providing the majority of Egyptians with communal access to al-Jazeera and other satellite TV news channels, which carry the latest news of the fighting in Um Qasr, Nassiriya and Basra. (Few seem to have been tuning in to Egyptian TV during the past week). The buzz about it is incessant and inescapable - it is everywhere.

"Now they're talking about the Geneva Conventions, what about Guantanamo?" sneered my newsagent. A friend, a veteran of the 70s left-wing student movement, was similarly reminded of Guantanamo, if in more emphatic terms. The televised footage of the obviously scared and bewildered American PoWs, had left my friend upset. She whispered something to that effect, only to be upbraided by her teenage daughter, who - rather - was absolutely thrilled by evidence that the Iraqis had indeed taken a number of the invasion soldiers prisoner."

The Americans are talking like Arabs and the Arabs are talking like Americans," laughingly commented an elderly man, probably a retired civil servant at an Alexandria coffee house. I'd been in the coastal city on business and had stopped for a spot of tea and Jazeera. His meaning was immediately clear to the other patrons who laughed in appreciation. Egyptians are naturally sceptical about the statements of their own officials, and by extension those of other Arab states. But as the days of invasion rolled, they were becoming increasingly struck by the rhetorical tone and prevarication of the statements of coalition military and civil officials, in contrast to the almost calm detachement and precision of the statements of the Iraqis, particularly their information minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf. Saddam had not been killed in the "window of opportunity" bombing of Baghdad that opened the war. Neither did Umm Qasr fall on day one of the invasion, as coalition statements had claimed, but was still fighting valiantly into day 6. "It's a very small town, you know?"; "Do you realise that Umm Qasr is just across from the Kuwaiti border," such were the comments that people were exchanging incessantly as the fighting in the port town kept going on, and on - the admiration mixed with wonder.

Perhaps the most enthusiastically greeted piece of news has been the shooting down of an American attack helicopter south of Baghdad. "Did you see the old man who downed the Apache helicopter?" I've been continually asked, the rhetorical question uttered always in tones of glowing pride. Very few, if any, are under any illusion that Iraq could win the war, though many will dutifully mumble "may God grant us victory", as they discuss the latest reports of Iraqi resistance. All are outraged and grief-stricken at the death and destruction being wreaked on the Iraqi people, and most people realise that much more lies ahead. Yet none can help but feel a certain pride, a sense of dignity restored. We are not, after all, mice.

How far back does one trace the sense of humiliation and deeply injured dignity at western hands that has been such a formative element of Arab awareness and self-image for decades? Do we need to go as far back as the 1917 Balfour Declaration, or as recently as the 1948 war, the dispossession of the Palestinians and the resounding and humiliating defeat of the combined armies of the Arab world.

The 1948 war would be carved in common Arab memory as Al-Nakba, the Catastrophe. And then there was the Six-Day war, the resounding defeat of Egypt, Syria and Jordan in June 1967 at Israel's hand, resulting in the occupation of Sinai, the Golan Heights and all that remained of the historic land of Palestine. The sense of humiliation born out of June 1967 was perhaps the most shattering of all in proportion to the immense hopes of emancipation and restored national dignity that the wave of pan-Arab nationalism, led and symbolised by Nasser's leadership, had come to trigger. It was so profound that the Lebanese philosopher and political writer George Tarabishi, some 10 years ago, authored a large work in which he used psychoanalytical concepts to analyse the effects of the June war on the Arab psyche in terms of trauma leading to neurosis.

The humiliations have been piled one on top of the other ever since. The October war of 1973 offered a very temporary relief. The Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, in one and the same breath, proclaimed Arab victory and, asserting that America had entered the battle alongside Israel and declaring: I cannot fight America, he accepted the UN call for a ceasefire. Egypt got back the Sinai, eventually.

The interplay of a resigned and defeatist realism and a deep and increasingly intense sense of humiliation has been a defining feature of Egyptian and Arab awareness ever since. Egyptians, for the most part, seemed resigned to it, their resignation interrupted by moments of rude awakening, such as the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the first intifada and the 1991 Gulf war. Even then, with Egypt part of the US-led coalition against Iraq, people on Egyptian streets were proudly discussing the latest news (soon enough proven to be myth) of this or that "secret weapon" in Saddam's possession. And then came the second intifada, the collapse of the peace process, the ongoing destruction of Palestinian life, 9/11, and the "war against terror". It had all become too much to bear.

Injured dignity lies at the heart of all rebellions. Throughout history human beings have revealed an enormous capacity to bear, and cope with the harshest forms of oppression and exploitation. It is only when they perceive these as "injustice", however; when the implicit or explicit compact between oppressor and oppressed appears to have been shattered and violated by the oppressors; when the exercise of power appears lawless and arbitrary - it is then that people rise up.

Yet for the Arabs, as galling and bitter as the sense of injured dignity has been and continues to be, it has also been disabling, creating a situation and mindset in which their choices seemed to be limited to either suicidal vengeance or abject and bitter hopelessness. It remains to be seen whether the war in Iraq will put the Arab masses on a new trajectory, one in which they fight to win, rather than just to die while maintaining some sense of their basic human dignity. But whatever the course of the war in the coming days or weeks, for the moment the Arab masses have two things going for them: They are not mice, and they are not alone.

arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)