By Hani Shukrallah Any issue more important -- or is it sensitive? -- than the football league tends to be discussed by Arabs under conditions of suffocating siege, so all-encompassing that genuine intellectual debate (not to be confused with hectoring, baiting and the usual shouting) is conspicuous by its absence. The siege is formidable. The enemies at the gates of our minds are many, though their stranglehold is a function not just of sheer numbers, but of diversity. You don't know from where the next blow will come. Take any issue of significance and discuss. But look around before you say anything. You will find you are surrounded. Any, or all, of the following, are likely to be present, teeth bared. There are the touchy authoritarian states, whose liberalised façades have, in some ways, made stepping on their toes an even more precarious proposition now than in their more 'vigorous' days. With liberalisation, their propensity for repression, while less all-encompassing, has become ever more whimsical and arbitrary. The red lines constantly shift. What was permissible yesterday may bring the wrath of a ferocious security apparatus down on your head today. What is acceptable for x may be a recipe for disaster for z. These enthusiastically globalising, economically liberalising Soviet-style states (it is surely no coincidence that some of our ruling parties' highest bodies are still called Politburos) are fortified by an oppositional intelligentsia whose strongest tie to the anti-colonial, national liberation heritage is a Soviet mind-set. Whether Liberals, Islamists, pan-Arab nationalists or Marxists, it doesn't matter, for the accent is almost always on the "consensus", the "closing of ranks", the reinforcement of a united, impenetrable home-front immune to "foreign penetration". Interestingly, the intelligentsia's devotion to the closing of ranks against outside threats -- to our independence, culture, national security, traditions, religious beliefs and the like -- is reinforced by virtue of its amenability to the self-serving agendas of individual intellectuals. It creates a sometime subtle, sometime conspicuous bond with the state, which in turn guarantees not only safety (nothing to shrug one's shoulder at) and possibilities for career advancement, but also a taste of the power that is wielded by state bureaucracy. The privileges that accrue from this convenient confluence of ideology and self-interest range from basic rights of citizenship (a privilege denied most) to supra- legal/inner-circle status, this latter often bringing with it great affluence. Alongside the touchy states will be the foreign elements, the outer ring that provides the others with their potency and nearly limitless endurance. The UNDP's Arab Human Development Report's brief reference to the Israeli occupation having "frozen growth, prosperity and freedom in the Arab world" triggered considerable media commentary. Yet it doesn't even touch the profound effect the creation of Israel has had on the Arab world for over 50 years. This is not limited to the dispossession and enormous suffering of the Palestinian people, nor to the devastating effects of several Arab-Israeli wars. No less ruinous has been its effect on Arab intellectual life. Lebanese political writer George Tarabishi long ago produced a psychoanalytical reading of the Arabs' reaction to the June '67 defeat and the occupation of the whole of Palestine as well as Egyptian and Syrian land. Rather than a shock, a challenge to be met, June '67 was a psychological trauma and it triggered a full range of neuroses. Tarabishi may have taken his Freud a bit far but there was a lot of merit in his arguments. The obsession with the threat posed by Israel has undoubtedly served as a convenient pretext, not least for the general laziness and vulgarity that has become such a prominent feature of our intellectual life. The fact that it has worked so well and for so long, however, is not a function of inherent cultural and religious attributes (as the thinly-veiled racism of a host of Western and Israeli politicians and commentators would have it), but of the horrible, self-perpetuating reality of the threat. What Mr Thomas Friedman et al deliberately neglect to see is the enormity of the humiliations and pain that Israel has been heaping on the Arabs for over half a century. And if Arab obsession with the West has developed into a pathology it is only because history and geography have worked to grant Arabs the dubious privilege of being the West's favourite punching bag. And this is not, as today's fashion-setters would have it, because of an inherent rejection of Western modernity. Rather, such close proximity to Western capitalist modernisation -- which gave us Mohamed Ali's grandiose designs -- has also been our greatest curse. The state of Israel is a product of this proximity; the accident of the Arabs' straddling a sea of oil has served only to ensure its longevity. And, what with Bush and Sharon, carnage in Palestine and the forthcoming destruction and occupation of Iraq, it is all getting progressively worse. It may well be justified, though to go on wailing that our very stupidity and intellectual indolence are not our fault is pathetic, as well as being utterly futile.
