I am reading lots of analysis of Arab intellectual production of the 20th Century, which is mostly written and published in the West and focuses on the effect of colonialism on the Arab intellectuals. Said set the pattern with his Orientalism book and has created a veritable school of thought. What is shocking for me is the poverty of the documents on which this structure is built: The number of non-trivial books (that is, not children's illustrated stories or religious tractates or porn) are few, there is almost no intellectual discourse that can be analyzed, the journals consist in one or two pages with no controversies nor real content. The overall production of the Arab world, almost one thousand million human beings, is negligible. Contrast that with the copious production of Israel, full of controversies, rivalries, intellectual fights, thousands of original books published every year, hundreds of political films - most of it damning Israel and its "colonialism". There are more serious representations of Arabs in Israeli Jewish films than in all the childish stories of Arab TV and filmography. In extremis, compare Arab production with the explosive boiling over of Nigerian literature and filmography, which may be less abstract than German philosophical tractates and shockingly "vulgar", but impress the observer as a tropical explosion of color, libido and elan vital.
My point is that Western analysis of Arab intellectual discourse is more voluminous than the production itself. The West is trying to attribute intellectual thought to the Arab umma where there is none.
One reason for the wasteland that is the Arab production is that they live in harsh dictatorships, where original bloggers are jailed and journalists live in fear of writing a controversial word. They keep repeating the infantile formula of colonialist oppression because wrongly, they feel it flatters them and know that blaming the short episode of Western colonialism (say sixty years, from 1890 to 1945) they will have no issues with their own governments and they will enjoy the applause of Western universities.
When I worked in Nigeria, collected hand made iron tools. I walked the Onitsa Market on the river Niger, where hundred of African Ibo smiths manufactured original and interesting hand tools, agricultural machines and a large variety of machetes and knives. I bought a lot, very cheap for me, and had it sent back to Buenos Aires. It never arrived.
While in Europe the Iron Age followed the Bronze Age, in Africa it started EARLIER and followed directly the Stone Age. Ancients Greeks used heavy and expensive bronze body armor and hand machetes that were almost useless in battle after a few hits. African iron knives were durable although the quality of the metal (they mined and refined it themselves) was poor.
In Onitsa I bought also bronze statues, some of artistic value, sold to me as "antiquities". A few heads I brought to Argentina in my luggage, and later to Israel, but they disappeared. In retrospective, it is quite imaginable that the Niger River Delta people like Igbo and Ibibio, could have advanced more rapidly than the Europeans, even they peopling Europe instead us. I speculate that they "lost the train" with a difference of 2000 years.
When I worked in the Delta, the area was peaceful and policed, a legacy of recent British colonials. It hits me as paradoxical that instead of developing fast (the region is rich in oil and tropical agriculture), they descended into a jungle slum. The Delta peoples are intelligent, healthy and physically stronger than Europeans. I can't explain their failure but I am sure that raw IQ is not the answer. The IQ of British Africans is similar to that of the autochthonous population that created the Industrial Revolution.
It is not surprising that within a general war, some larger ethnic groups seize the opportunity to clear out smaller ethnias. In the general ethnic cleansing or mass migration that took place in the Mandatory Palestine in 1947, no one noticed the evacuation of seven minority-within-minority villages. Those were the Metawali villages of Tarbikha, Saliha, Malkiyeh, Nabi Yusha, Qadas, Hunin, and Abil al-Qamh. Their lands were distributed among the nearby kibbutzim and moshavim, and the larger Palestinian villages that had sided with the Jews in the War of Liberation. It is not widely known that the Jewish forces were very weak (and tired) in the Galilee region, and that the Galilee was conquered thanks to the collaboration of the Druze ethnic minority, the Chechen Muslim villages, the Christian villages and the Bedouins that hated and were hated by the Palestinian fellahin. Also the villages of the descendants of African slaves brought here by the Arabs, like Jisr-al-Zarka, sided with the Jews. I heard that the political secretariat of the Jewish Agency, headed by Golda Meir, distributed sacks of gold coins to secure their allegiance. We learnt that from English colonialists, like the political agent Colonel Lawrence. All the villages (except two Christian villages on the Lebanese border) that allied themselves with the Jews emerged untouched from the Palestinian Naqba, they still exist and prosper. They are the Israeli Arab minority. That is their secret shame.
What were those Methawali that some unknown (non-Jewish) hand ethnically-cleansed during the chaos of the 1947 war? The Palestinians follow the Sunni tradition of the Islam, like the Saudis and Jordanians, as against the Shi'a, followed mainly in Iran. Within the Sunni, the Shafi'i madhab (legalistic thought) is one of the four schools of Islamic law, the one practiced in Palestine, while the Methawali followed a different interpretation. In the Middle East, people hides their real ethnic and religious identities, and the Methawali adopted an ambiguous coloration of Sunni, although with light philosophical disagreements with the Orthodox Sunni majority, with the idea that they could - should the need arise - present themselves as faithful Shi'a. The Alawites are another ethnia that never cleared up what they believe and to where they belong but now that they life depends from Iranian military assistance, they count themselves as Twelvers. Within the Islamic world, till the return of the Jews to Eretz Israel, Palestinians were barely considered Muslim: almost no village had a mosque, and there was not one Islamic college in the country. The Palestinians - especially in the Galil - started to hit their foreheads against the tarmac only as a reaction to the presence of the Jews. It could have been different, but "It was written" that they would oppose the rise of Judea.
Amira Hess is my favorite journalist to vomit on. She sees the world in black and white - black being the Jews and white the colonized Palestinians and occasionally the victimized Ethiopian and Sudanese intruders. Today she writes about the village of Zur Baher, near Jerusalem. Under the Turkish Sultanate, the village (meaning Big Rock or Big Secret) had 24 families living in natural caves; these people has multiplied to 40,000 today. Part of the village has been annexed to the Municipality of Jerusalem and its inhabitants enjoy Israeli citizenship, the rest are Palestinian Authority subjects. A house on the Israeli side sells for 300 - 400 thousand dollars, while the same a few meters further sells for 100,000 US$. Almost like Detroit and its White suburbs. The Israeli side is under tremendous demographic pressure: Palestinians try to marry Israeli citizens and bring in their extended families, lots of undocumented transients, and much building without plans nor permits. The place is unmanageable, the police avoids entering the neighborhood and the government tries to establish order and legitimacy. For Amira this is intentional, malignant, colonialist, planned destruction and transfer, although I agree that from her despicable self-hating point of view it well may be so.
American right wing blogs - always ahead of the general press - have adopted a cold, scientific tone, they are full of statistics and data. For example, one note about Ilhan Omar, a Minnesotta senator, whose very name and family origins are obscure (has been married to her blood brother for nine years), mentions that DNA controls show that in 98% of the Somali family reunion requests there is no genetic relationship and that they are ALL lying. It is more or less like our family reunion requests of our Ethiopian "Jewish" immigrants. In our case, the so called "Jewish" Agency never rejects them because it is known that Ethiopian "Jewish" families are fluid, marry and separate without thinking it twice, are polygamous and polyandrous, and they themselves are not sure who their parents and sisters may be. In Hebrew: Ethiopian Jews are not lying, they don't know. The Jewish religion is most rigorous regarding family purity, but for the State of Israel they are all kosher Jews and please be in the airport three hours before the time.
Of course yesterday's note was a joke, Israeli animals are not becoming smarter and fitter: the opposite is true. I went down to the parking and pitiful meowing of a lame - three legged - cat greeted me. Immediately appeared an old lady with a cup of cream cheese and milk with bread crumbs, and the beggar, slowly and graciously, moved toward the feast. I had to stop at the exit because an ancient and venerable dog, painfully dragging its bandaged hind leg, was taking a rest. Obviously, the poor animal had been hit by a car (maximum speed in our street 20 miles per hour) and a generous soul took it to the pet hospital. The bakery in front was spreading bread crumbs to the three hundred pigeons of the neighborhood. A few hungry hoopoes and colored birds tried to take part in the celebration, but they were aggressively expelled by the symbols of peace. Scenes like these are common in my pet-loving town. Obviously, the large and growing parasite pet population is not being selected for fitness in the wilderness but for begging ability. I see many females carrying small 5 kg white dogs, they function as baby substitutes, and being mostly silent and self-propelled, they are better that human babies. Extrapolating present trends, we shall end like the Romans. The Latter Day Israeli Jews - formerly Eritreans - will inhabit our city and wonder what happened to the giants that built those tall buildings.
Cats and dogs cross the streets in red light and get hit and maimed. On the routes I see wild animals killed - roadkills - such as foxes, small Samarian deers, lots of reptiles and frogs. When driving fast, blind birds hit my windshield and spiral off to the asphalt to be eviscerated by the car behind. The hoopoe, Israeli national bird, is the stupidest of all. This mass massacre can have only one result: the dumbest are not surviving and we are breeding an intellectually able wildlife population. Humans have exterminated all their competitors, lately the Neanderthals, but it well may be that the genetically improved animals around will rise and outcompete us. Sci-fi novelists fear the rise of intelligent machines, but the rise of intelligent animals may be more frightening. Good night children, sleep well and dream with sweet angels!
According to HaAretz of today, the Shekel (left) has strengthened some 25% regarding the rest of the currencies and now is stronger than the dollar and the euro and the holy Swiss Frank. What people is doing with this new acquisitive power? They take vacations in Europe and exotic destinations. They buy chachkes by internet and the post. And they invest in real estate.
I am in TASE Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and follow with interest real estate prices. The high prices are frightening: How can it be that an apt. in Tel Aviv is more expensive than in San Francisco? It is unreal, unnatural, irregular, can't be. I still cannot cast away my mentality of the sixties, when Israel was perceived (and was in fact) a struggling embattled mini-country, begging donations. Now we are a rich country whose currency is appreciated even by foreign banks.
I think I may take a mortgage at 2% interest and buy an apt. in Rosh HaAyin. I am antediluvian and statistically, I have been dead for years, which is not the best age to undertake long term investments, but I have daughters and now two or more new grandchildren are on their way here. We are just starting.
