Samir Kassir and the Arab Uprisings

In his novella, Men in the Sun (1962), the Palestinian author and spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Ghassan Kanafani, tells the story of four Palestinians trying to get to Kuwait in order to find work. They manage to find someone who promises to smuggle them across the border for a fee by hiding them in his tanker. However, Abul Khaizuran, the deeply insecure and cynical smuggler who lost his genitals in the 1948 war, is held up at a check point on the border between Iraq and Kuwait, and his passengers, who are hiding in the steel tanker, perish in the hot, airless container.

As Hilary Kilpatrick points out in the introduction to her translation, Kanafani’s story was an attack on the corruption of the Arab regimes that stood by while the Palestinians suffocated “in an airless, marginal world of refugee camps.” It is a picture of a political order that is, if anything, more recognisable today.

A Manifesto: Gaza Youth Breaks Out

A group of young people in Gaza have organised an anti-politics manifesto for change, the Guardian reports.

They express deep anger at being let down by parties on all sides, ending with the plea: “We want three things. We want to be free. We want to be able to live a normal life. We want peace. Is that too much to ask?”

In some cases, formal politics is the best way to solve our problems (if only through necessity). In others though, it isn’t – and I think the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of these cases. It seems to me that on both sides, the people affected by politicians’ decisions aren’t being included in that decision-making, despite the workings of democracy in both Gaza and Israel. Ultimately the politicians have consistently let down the people they pertain to represent by the only standard that really counts: achieving peace.

To quote one of the group members in interview, “Politics is bollocks, it is screwing our lives up…Politicians only care about money and about their supporters.”

If you want to read the manifesto in full, go to the GYBO Facebook Group here: http://on.fb.me/gTqyzH.

Some Thoughts In Defence of Arundhati Roy

Author Arundhati Roy has been making Indian headlines – and causing mild hysteria – in the last few days after comments she made about the disputed region of Kashmir.

I say author, because that was the first context within which I encountered her, reading the brilliant The God of Small Things for my degree, before moving on to her other non-fiction activism works. I’ve been lucky enough to hear her speak, and am consistently struck by her eloquence in articulating potent and persuasive arguments about power relations between a state and its people, with other states, and the ideology insidious to both.