The landing of a small machine on Mars has sent human imagination soaring. But here on earth, says Azmi Bishara, it's business as usual With the landing of the Mars Exploration Rover, Spirit, on 4 January, the mysterious planet took hold of our imagination, pushing Iraq and the war against terror into the background. Soon after the landing the US president announced ambitious plans for a space programme featuring a transit space station on the moon, from which cosmonauts may be able to travel to Mars. The plans were reminiscent of the $400 billion space programme that Bush senior contemplated a year before he left office. Bush junior is now contemplating programmes that will take humans, not just robots, to Mars by 2015. Lockheed rose to the challenge with full-page newspaper commercials announcing its readiness for the job. No one doubts Lockheed's abilities, or the fact that it stands to make a fortune from the state-funded space programme. Great, the satirists said, let George W Bush be the first man to land on Mars, and why wait for 2015? The programme became part of the election campaign, as all issues put forward in an election year are destined to be. Mars has turned into a terrestrial affair. Will they find a trace of life on Mars? The old debate came alive once again. Will they find water? Will Mars be part of planet Earth's future? With the uproar over Saddam's dental inspection having abated, and with the high cost of the occupation returning to the news, this was a chance to divert public opinion. And what topic can be more tantalising than life on Mars? Science and scientific discovery are universal things. Patriotism and national dignity -- and megalomania -- are not. The space programme is more than a quest by man to conquer nature. It is a quest by one country to declare its greatness to all others. When John Kennedy approved plans to land a man on the moon during the Cold War, the decision had everything to do with ideological and cultural rivalry with the USSR. The building of the first Mars Exploration Rover (MER-A), the small vehicle that collects samples and tests the soil on Mars, cost $0.8 billion and took ten years. People are bound to wonder if such a sum would not have been better spent on programmes to combat poverty and hunger on earth. President Bush has allocated an extra $12 billion to NASA over the next five years. Reckless spending, some may say. Think again, for the US army spends up to $1 billion a day in Iraq. It has already gone through over $100 billion in that country. The redistribution of income for the sake of creating a better world does not begin in space -- it begins by a critical assessment of US policy on earth. With US-USSR rivalry over, some are tempted to belittle the importance of putting a man on Mars, and bringing him safely back to the moon. Such a debate is not without worth, even in NASA's own subculture. But let's look at the broader philosophical issue here. What is the point of getting out of earth to explore the infinite space to Mars and beyond? Who wants to deal with infinity? In a sense the transfer of US national pride to Mars seems quite natural. The human mind often leaps across intricate paths of free association. And, in the primordial depth of our hearts, Mars is still perhaps the god of war, a celestial being glowing red, the colour of anger. It is the planet HG Wells immortalised in War of the Worlds. And it is the planet on the surface of which an Italian scientist saw, back in 1877, what seemed like water canals. Mars is myth and myth is irresistible. The phrase "pictures from another planet" has a ring that makes the human soul resonate. The word "planet" is most evocative. I cannot help recalling how this word was used by the writer Yehiel De-Nur (better known as Ka-Tzetnik 135633) during the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Speaking of Auschwitz, Ka-Tzetnik 135633 said, "I was there for about two years. Time there is not the same as it is on earth. Each moment there moves at its own speed. The inhabitants of this planet had no names. They did not dress as we dress here. They were not born here, nor did they give birth. They breathed by other laws of nature. I believe with all my heart that, as in astrology, the stars influence our fate. So the ash- planet Auschwitz stands over this earth and influences it." While Spirit landed on Mars other events were unfolding in Gaza. This strip of land is no Auschwitz, and cannot be compared with Auschwitz. It is a place where over 1.5 million people live, incarcerated behind walls and barbed wire. From their restriction of movement the dynamism of a detention camp has evolved. Theirs is another planet, right here, on earth. The first signals from Spirit arrived on 14 January. On that same day a different signal arrived from another planet. A mother of two blew herself up in the midst of soldiers at the Eretz checkpoint. A day later 13,000 men were lining up in freezing cold at dawn at the gates of the promised land, to work. They weren't lined up to get into a discotheque, to gain admission into the Hard Rock Café, just to work. They needed to work. Is this understood by the thousands of people who don't work and live in luxury? Can the latter understand why thousands push and shove and get trampled underfoot at a military checkpoint just so that a thousand or so may get through, to get work, to get food for their children? One should not gauge levels of progress in terms of controlling a vehicle on Mars, but in terms of controlling Israel in this other planet here on earth, in Gaza, where an infinite number of possible worlds exist, worlds in which love and beauty are attainable, but out of reach. I am not getting myself all worked up about Mars exploration. Gone is the time when it mattered that the US landed a man on the moon before the USSR. There are undeniable scientific and technological gains, if not in space exploration then at least in the process leading to it. What I find galling, however, is that the same country that sends robots to far off planets is doing little for the homeless in its midst, is not putting together a decent health insurance system for its own people, and is so reluctant to restrain the machinery of Israeli repression on planet Palestine.
