[NOTE: I delivered this talk at a luncheon with Tal Becker as the other speaker at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, March 16, 2010.]

In my remarks today I want to look at the evolution of the concept of Israel as a national home for the Jewish people and a ?Jewish state? in international law, then at Israel’s character as a Jewish state, and finally at the way in which the occupation negates that character. My broadest point is that at every level Israel’s status as a national home for the Jewish people and as a Jewish state is dependent on the creation of a Palestinian state to live alongside Israel in peace and security.

I. Israel as a Jewish state in international law

The Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917 begins with the phrase, “His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people?” There are at least two significant aspects to this language worth noting: the Declaration commits to “a national home for the Jewish people,” but not to “a Jewish state,” and to “a national home,” but not “the national home.” National home might be taken to imply state, but it might mean many other things as well. Many have noted the irony of no overt reference to the overwhelming majority of the population of Palestine, the Palestinian Arabs, in the Declaration, and the moral, political and legal difficulties attached to the United Kingdom making such a pledge regarding a territory over which it had, the time, no legal authority and in disregard of the wishes of its population. Nonetheless, the Declaration introduces the concept into international relations in a most decisive manner.

The text of the Mandate for Palestine adopted by the Council of the League of Nations on July 24, 1922 made the project a practical reality rather than simply a rhetorical position by holding that “the Principal Allied Powers have also agreed that the Mandatory should be responsible for putting [The Balfour Declaration] into effect.” Article II repeats the language of the Declaration that, “The Mandatory shall be responsible for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home, as laid down in the preamble, and the development of self-governing institutions, and also for safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion.” Like the Declaration, the Mandate therefore set up a virtually impossible conundrum by pledging to establish a Jewish national home in Palestine, without specifying whether or not this would involve a Jewish state, and more importantly without violating the civil and religious rights of the Palestinian majority. Probably the only way to parse this in a manner that makes the language of the Mandate and the Declaration intelligible is to distinguish between civil and religious rights to be afforded to non-Jews (that is to say Palestinians) in Palestine on the one hand, and national political rights which are only mentioned in connection with Jews on the other hand. In other words, there does seem to have been a time at which, guided by British policy and interests, the international community, such as it was, regarded the Jewish national project in Palestine as legitimate and simply refrained from commenting on the Palestinian national project, unless to damn it by silence.

However, given the increasing assertion of Palestinian national identity and ambitions during the mandatory period, this willful blindness could not extend itself into international decision-making about the end of the Mandate, as it had at its beginning. Several proposals from the late 1930s, most notably the 1937 Peel Commission Report, suggested partition of Palestine between Jewish and Arab states. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 of November 29, 1947 called for the establishment of, “Independent Arab and Jewish States and the Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem.” This partition resolution, along with its own unilateral Declaration of Independence that defines it as “a Jewish State in Eretz-Israel,” is generally regarded as the birth certificate of the Israeli state. Indeed, Israel’s admittance as a member state of the United Nations by UN General Assembly Resolution 273 (III), adopted on May 11, 1949, specifically referenced “its resolutions of 29 November 1947 [181] and 11 December 1948,” and a commitment to the implementation of those provisions.

The irony, of course, is that if the 1947 partition resolution was the primary international birth certificate for Israel, it must also be so for the yet to be established Palestinian state as well. The logic of partition cannot cut in one direction only. Indeed, the “land-for-peace” formula of UN Security Council Resolution 242 of 1967 and its numerous legal progeny is simply a logical extension of the fundamental attitude towards balancing Jewish and Arab rights in Palestine through sharing of the land between two equally sovereign and ethnically-defined entities. Therefore, Israel’s legal status internationally as a Jewish state depends on the eventual creation of a Palestinian state to complete the logic of its own creation. International legality on this question has been formulated such that neither Israel nor Palestine makes sense as a standalone, but represent two mutually dependent functions of the same equation.

II. Israel as a Jewish state

Israel, in many important respects plainly IS a Jewish state. First of all, it is a sovereign member state of the United Nations and therefore defines its own character. In negotiations with the Palestinians, it is this power and prerogative of self-definition that leaves many wondering what is the point of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s demand that Palestinians recognize Israel as, in his words, “the nation-state of the Jewish people.” While this issue is not new in Arab-Israeli negotiations, such formulations are both new and striking, and go far beyond mutual recognition of states and of rights of self-determination. From the Palestinian point of view, recognition of Israel and the realization of a conflict ending, two-state agreement that includes an end of all claims the parties may have on each other accomplishes everything substantive in this regard. Israel is free to define itself, just as Palestine will be. The question of the Jewish character of Israel was never raised and is not reflected in its peace treaties with Egypt or Jordan. It therefore seems odd and gratuitous to ask Palestinians to enter into the debate that rages, and will no doubt continue to rage, within Israel about the nature of the Israeli state and its “Jewish character.” It also raises the question of why Israel would cede to anyone else a role in defining its identity and character. It is extremely unusual, if not unprecedented, for states to demand and for other states to accept certain specific ethnic definitions or other characterizations in their diplomatic arrangements, which are almost always regarded as internal matters not subject to external approval or even comment.

When we speak of Israel as a Jewish state, what, after all, does this really mean? The most obvious and perhaps only consensus meaning is Israel has a majority ethnic group that considers itself, and is formally classified by the state, as Jewish, and that has the means of dominating state institutions and society. True enough there is a large Palestinian minority among Israel citizens, and they occupy a complicated relationship with Israel as a “Jewish state.” They enjoy many of the rights and prerogatives of citizenship, and yet are subject to some anomalous legalized discrimination that, while certainly not unique in the world today, is nonetheless unusual in its scope and severity, especially in the context of a minority large enough to comprise approximately 20% of the whole population. The role of the Palestinian citizens of Israel has been struggled with both by mainstream Jewish Israeli society on the one hand and by the Palestinian minority on the other hand since the founding of the state. However, in spite of a very problematic relationship between this large non-Jewish minority and the state itself, Israel’s status as a Jewish state I think plainly rests primarily on the fact that it has a substantial Jewish majority of more than 75 percent.

There are, of course, other ways in which Israel has expressed itself as a Jewish state. There are the various quasi-governmental entities that enjoy a cooperative relationship with the Israeli state, but that purport to act in the name of world Jewry. There are also numerous legal and administrative Israeli provisions that reflect a special relationship between the state and Jewish religious institutions, heritage and sentiments. It appears that only a minority of Jewish Israelis are interested in a systematic expansion of the role of religious institutions in state life, and Israel is likely to remain largely secular for the foreseeable future. However, as with many other Middle Eastern societies there has been a rise in religious sentiments and an increasingly empowered religious right in Israeli political life.

As I noted already, there is a robust debate within Israeli society over the nature and validity of the “Jewish and democratic character” of Israel, and the challenges that this identity poses for the country to become also “a state of all its citizens,” or at least a state that serves all of its citizens equally as opposed to one that reflects indefensible ethnic or religious privilege. Many similar issues are dealt with by states around the world that have to contend with majority sentiments versus minority rights and contentious relationships between religious and secular institutions. Any future Palestinian state would almost certainly face analogous challenges. Indeed, every state in the Middle East contends with them to some extent or another. Yet since many Jewish Israelis cannot agree on the nature of the “Jewish character” of the Israeli state, and because this question is entirely extraneous to the question of the establishment of peace and normal diplomatic relations between Israel and a Palestinian state, it seems difficult to understand the impulse to bring this issue into the negotiations.

What, precisely, would Palestinians be acknowledging if they formally recognized Israel as a “Jewish state” that would not be accomplished if they merely recognize it as presently constituted and self-defined? Indeed Palestinians have already done so on numerous occasions, most notably PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat’s September 9, 1993 letter to Prime Minister Rabin in which he unambiguously stated, “The PLO recognizes the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security.” What can possibly be accomplished by this new and startling formulation about recognition of ?the nation-state of the Jewish people? other than adding yet another wrinkle of eminently avoidable complication?

Palestinians are concerned that if they were to explicitly recognize Israel as, in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s language, “the nation-state of the Jewish people,” they might be perceived as endorsing measures that discriminate against the Palestinian citizens of Israel. The Palestinian leadership sees these issues as an internal matter to be determined by Jewish and Arab Israelis through the political and civic processes within Israel, not as a matter of negotiations between Israel and the PLO. Moreover, Palestinians and many others view this demand as an effort to preempt the refugee issue, which is a core permanent status negotiating issue. Palestinian negotiators have long accepted that major compromises are required on their part regarding refugees and the right of return. This is probably the most politically complicated aspect of permanent status from the Palestinian point of view. Palestinians and peace require significant reciprocal Israeli steps on the most politically sensitive issues from the Israeli perspective, particularly regarding Jerusalem. When former Prime Minister Olmert first raised the issue in this manner around the time of the Annapolis meeting, many Palestinian and American officials viewed it as an effort to preemptively prejudice the refugee issue to the point that it loses its significance in bargaining and becomes, in effect, a settled matter before talks are resumed, let alone concluded. This is one reason why the demand has never been taken up or echoed by the United States.

Israel certainly has the rights to recognition and self-definition, as do all UN member states. Palestinians must have that right as well. An end of conflict agreement that establishes peace on the basis of an end to all claims upon each other would seem to put all these matters satisfactorily to rest. Some argue that Israelis continue to feel that Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular do not recognize the legitimacy of their national project. Palestinians and other Arabs certainly have the same suspicions about many Israelis. The demand that Palestinians recognize Israel as a “Jewish” state in some explicit but undefined manner seems to move closer to a scenario that requires an implausible reconciliation of national narratives rather than the more achievable goal of peace based on mutual recognition by two independent, sovereign states. I have argued many times in the past that one of the greatest advantages of a two-state peace agreement is precisely that it does not require a reconciliation of national narratives, but rather the coexistence of these narratives in bordering states through which each is individually expressed. Such an agreement hardly implies irredentism or a desire to resume conflict at some later stage. On the contrary, it puts a full stop to the conflict by creating an agreement that both sides will have a vested interest in making work.

III. Israel as not a Jewish state

Having asserted that Israel plainly is a Jewish state in one sense, I feel it necessary to assert that in another sense Israel is, at present, clearly NOT a Jewish state. It depends entirely on which version of Israel one is talking about. In other words, is this a 1948 or a 1967 problem? Israel proper, within its internationally recognized boundaries, is indeed a Jewish state as I explained above, although the nature of that Jewishness is contentious and unsettled. However, the de facto Israeli state as it now stands is neither Jewish nor democratic because of the nature of the occupation and the status of the millions of Palestinians who live under it, and who are not citizens of Israel or any other state. It seems clear that by most demographic measures that between the river and the sea already there are comparable numbers, if not more, Palestinians as there are Jewish Israelis, especially if one takes into consideration the hundreds of thousands of Israelis primarily residing outside of Israel and the occupied territories but who are still included in the statistics.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak speaking from this very podium at the Washington Institute just a few days ago told your audience, “A successful peace process ? especially with the Palestinians… is a compelling imperative for the state of Israel.” He called it, “the uppermost responsibility of any Israeli government.” As he put it, “Between the Jordan River to the east to the Mediterranean to the west, there live 11 million people: 7.5 million Israelis and 3.5 million Palestinians. And if there was only one sovereign entity on this area named Israel, it will become inevitably either non-Jewish or non- democratic. If this bloc of millions of Palestinians… can vote, it?s a binational state par excellence. If they cannot vote, it?s not a democratic state. So it?s either non-Jewish if they can vote or non-democratic if they cannot and there is no way to bypass this simple and painful reality.” I would add that since 20 percent of those 7.5 million Israelis are themselves Palestinians, if we wish to think in these broader terms, the demographic reality is even starker than his remarks suggested. You do the math.

I think, in fairness, Mr. Barak was being both courageously forthright and slightly delicate in this formulation. He was describing a present and ongoing reality as if it were a future contingency. The reality is that if we conceive of Israel as comprising the territory under its de facto control, and has been for most of its existence up to the present day, then Israel is already neither Jewish nor democratic, and that is not a future contingency but the truth as it stands. This is not even go into the details of life under occupation, and the extraordinary disparities and dichotomies that exist in the fundamental realities defining the lives of Palestinians on the one hand and Israeli settlers on the other.

My point is that Israel de jure, without the occupied territories, assuming the creation of a Palestinian state in the foreseeable future, can certainly be considered both Jewish and democratic, although it is still struggling to afford equality to a large non-Jewish minority. However, Israel de facto, including the occupied territories, assuming no creation of a Palestinian state in the foreseeable future, cannot be considered either Jewish or democratic in any meaningful sense. I’d note that the new “Masbirim” website for citizen public diplomacy is only the latest example of an official Israeli government artifact that unambiguously incorporates all of the occupied territories into its portrayal of the Israeli state. The notion that Israel includes the occupied territories is be found in representations in numerous Israeli official government documents, and is also reflected in numerous policies, not least of them the settlement building project.

The reality is that Israelis face a clear choice: they can have a Jewish and democratic state, or they can have the occupation. They cannot have both. As it stands now Israel exists on two separate registers simultaneously. On one register it is Jewish and democratic, on the other register it is neither. The choice of whether Israel will be Jewish and democratic or not into the future is entirely dependent upon the achievement of a negotiated agreement that provides for the creation of a viable, sovereign and independent Palestine, as well as an end to the conflict.

Because of these realities, the Israeli government should do everything possible not only to negotiate seriously and in good faith toward such an agreement, but also facilitate the present Palestinian Authority state and institution building program adopted by the PA government last August. Led by Pres. Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad, Palestinians are engaging in a paradigm shift about how to achieve independence, taking up the responsibilities of self-government as they continue to insist on the right of self-determination. And after all, as Fayyad has said, only Palestinians can build their state and institutions — no one is going to do it for them. Therefore, if there is to be a Palestinian state, this is an essential and unavoidable step in achieving it.

This program calls the bluff of Palestinians and Israelis alike: are either or both of them really prepared to develop a Palestinian state in the occupied territories to live alongside Israel in peace and security? For the Palestinians, it means channeling all their energies into constructive efforts designed to create the institutional, infrastructural, economic and, and above all, administrative framework of their future state under the occupation, in order to end the occupation. For the Israelis, it will mean ceding more and more attributes of sovereignty in greater and greater areas of the occupied territories to the PA as it develops these institutions, and it will mean getting out of the way of the Palestinians, both literally and figuratively, in an unprecedented manner. It asks both societies, do you mean what you have been saying for the past 20 years?

I would argue it is strongly in Israel’s interest to not prevent Palestinians from creating the essential framework of the Palestinian state that can allow Israel to keep hold of an essential nature that is both Jewish and democratic and divest itself of elements that categorically negate both of these characteristics. It could be seen as ironic, but it is also eminently logical, that a Jewish Israel requires an Arab Palestine alongside it in order to be itself and not something radically different.

Since Joseph Stack flew an airplane into the Austin headquarters of the IRS one of the main questions being asked about the incident is whether or not this should be considered an act of terrorism and Stack himself a terrorist. Many Arab and Muslim Americans, and their allies, have made the point that had Stack been of Arab or Muslim descent, there likely would not be much reticence to apply that label to him, but given his ethnicity there seems to be a much greater reluctance in many quarters to place him in that category. This is not, of course, merely a semantic argument. Especially for Arab and Muslim Americans, the question of the process by, and criteria for, which the terms “terrorist” and “terrorism” are applied to acts of violence in United States is laden with political and social significance.

Arab and Muslim Americans are concerned that all violent acts committed by individuals associated with their communities lead to unfair stigmatization because they are seen as reflective of a “threat” inherent in those communities. Even if it is understood that extremist sentiments reflect a minority, indeed a fringe, sentiment among Muslims worldwide, let alone in the United States, it is still very hard for many Americans not to assign some degree of collective blame or threat to Arabs and Muslims generally when such violent acts are committed. Majority communities, obviously, are by definition immune from this kind of stigmatization and since the white, male, Christian identity is a normative one in American society any distortions of personality or behavior are ascribed strictly to the individual and not the group. Many minorities are vulnerable to this kind of collective blame, as African-Americans and many others have been throughout American history. However, there is a particular stigma that attaches to the terms terrorist and terrorism, understood as an existential threat to our society, so the communities that have to bear this collective stigma are particularly hard hit.

The fear, of course, and a perfectly valid and natural one at that, is that the terms terrorist and terrorism have become ethnically defined, reserved largely for and casually applied to Arabs and Muslims, and only rarely applied to others, especially Christian, European Americans. Certainly in Israel, whose opinion makers, including the current prime minister, have had a huge impact on the way American society views the question of terrorism, this transformation of the terms terrorist and terrorism into simple ethnic pejoratives is well-established. Virtually any Palestinian who commits an act of violence against a Jewish Israeli, under almost any circumstances, is automatically labeled a “terrorist” by most of Israeli society, whereas the application of this term to Jews is generally reserved for only the most extreme and unavoidable cases, such as Baruch Goldstein who murdered 29 Palestinian worshipers at a mosque in Hebron in 1994. The disparity is striking and indefensible. It reflects a simplistic ethnic bias and eliminates any real hope for moral or political clarity. It is extremely troubling that the process by which terrorist and terrorism are virtually synonymous with Arab and Muslim, and only rarely and in extreme cases applied to others, is increasingly reflected in American discourse.

The generalized response of Arab and Muslim American organizations and commentators that have expressed an opinion in this instance has been to insist that Mr. Stack was indeed a terrorist, and that any reticence to label him as such is a reflection of double standards and ethnic bias. Fair enough. The very legitimate question is posed: if his name were Abdullah instead of Stack, would there be any doubt how his action would be perceived by both the society at large and the government? This is an important and reasonable question, but I’m not sure the answer is absolutely as obvious as people tend to think. In the case of the Fort Hood murderer, Maj. Hasan, there was in fact some reticence on the part of the government and some of the media to apply this label to him at first. In fact, there was a similar, although much less developed, conversation to the one we are having now about Stack about whether Hasan should be viewed primarily as a lone psycho or as a representative of a political movement. Of course there was a far greater ease and frequency with which the word terrorist was applied to Hasan and a striking reticence among many political and media figures to identify Stack in this manner. Therefore, the knee-jerk response has been to insist that Stack was as much a terrorist as Hasan, and that both should be considered and publicly labeled as such.

I’m not sure this is the wisest course of action. For purposes of combating discrimination and ensuring equity, two scenarios would serve the Arab and Muslim American objective: either all politically or socially (even in part) motivated acts of violence are to be considered “terrorism,” as in the FBI’s rather elastic definition, or we are going to reserve the term for the actions of organized conspiracies reflecting both political and operational leadership and individuals assigned to carry out the crime. But that doesn’t mean both are equally desirable objectives or that it is irrelevant which corrective to ethnic bias is accomplished.

Both Stack and Hasan seem to have been individuals with considerable emotional difficulties inflected through paranoid and extremist worldviews. Hassan was plainly influenced by “salafist-jihadist” rhetoric of the Al Qaeda variety, although he apparently had no connections to any extremist organization. That he was also mentally and emotionally unbalanced has also become very clear. In the case of Stack, his death-manifesto reflects the wave of popular outrage against the government, especially the IRS, and Wall Street, in this case mixed with strong denunciations of the Catholic Church. He was reportedly a member of the Austin “tea party” movement, although his statement incorporates both familiar tea bagger rhetoric and ultra-left sentiments. There is every indication that he too was mentally and emotionally unbalanced. Both men, then, allowed their mental and emotional difficulties to be refracted through extreme political sentiments resulting in violent actions reflecting both. It’s impossible to decide which element was determinative, and, in fact, I think impossible to really tease the two apart either, although most people with extreme sentiments don’t engage in spontaneous violence. This is the familiar pattern of the outraged lone wolf killer with social or political grievances, the psychological dynamic behind the old expression “going postal,” or that immortal euphemism, “disgruntled former employee.”

Does it make sense, however, to lump these kinds of actions into the same category as carefully planned, ideologically-motivated conspiracies by organizations, no matter how small, to carry out acts of violence and sabotage in order to pursue a broader strategy, no matter how implausible? I doubt it. It seems to me that in order to deal with both problems effectively, distinguishing between the two is essential, since while they appear to share similar characteristics because the nature of the acts seems identical and the rhetoric similarly coincidental, in fact they are produced by very different dynamics and processes. What I’m arguing is that when two different equations produce similar results it does not make sense to deal with them as if they were reflective of the same essential problem. Of course fundamental security measures that would deter or prevent any act of violence, no matter the source or motivation, are essential in combating both of these phenomena and violence by organized criminals, gangs and others. But if we are serious about dealing with the problem of political terrorism it strongly behooves us not to confuse strategic actions by ideologically motivated organizations with the intersection of emotional crisis and political extremism that seems to produce these lone wolf atrocities.

What I’m suggesting is that a case like the so-called underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who was trained and equipped by organized Al Qaeda terrorists in Yemen, reflects a fundamentally different problem than the cases of Stack or Hasan. And I’m further arguing that our society has been prone to making the mistake, especially in the cases of Arabs and Muslims, of conflating lone wolf murders with operatives of terrorist political organizations. And finally, I’m arguing that Arab and Muslim Americans should think very carefully before, in their essential and urgent quest for fairness and clarity, seeking to expand the application of this term as in the FBI’s working definition to include almost any act of violence with any political or social context whatsoever, rather than to restrict the use of the term to reflect the actions of organized conspiracies with clear political motivations and strategic aims.

It wasn’t helpful when many voices and forces in our society rushed to apply the term terrorist to Maj. Hasan after the Fort Hood massacre as it mystified the complex witches’ brew of stresses and influences in his life that drove him to this monstrous deed. It’s an oversimplification and a reductive dodge that serves a number of obvious ideological purposes, including the promotion of generalized fear and hatred of Arabs and Muslims, and is a grave detriment to clear thinking and policies. And, similarly, I don’t think it’s helpful now to try to see Mr. Stack in the same light. It’s true that Hasan was influenced by Al Qaeda’s rhetoric, and Stack seems to have been influenced by tea party and other anti-establishment sentiments as well — his gesture of flying that plane into a federal building had much more of the Turner Diaries about it than any 9/11 redux. But I don’t think it’s reasonable or helpful to see them as expressions or logical conclusions of generalized sentiments shared by large numbers of people, and both of them were obviously not acting on behalf of any larger organization or conspiracy.

The words “terrorism” and “terrorist” are highly charged, overdetermined and politically explosive. Responsible forces in our society should be working towards building a consensus that make senses about what does and does not constitute terrorism. For their own clear and perfectly reasonable reasons the FBI, much of the political right, and now Arab and Muslim American organizations are all pulling for the broadest possible definition, but I don’t think this serves our discourse, security policy or national interests very well. We would be better served by a more precise definition that distinguishes between politically-motivated acts conducted by organizations or broader conspiracies, no matter how small, on the one hand, as opposed to violent outbursts by mentally unbalanced individuals acting spontaneously and solely on their own behalf on the other. As a friend of mine put it, this is the distinction between terrorism by design and terrorism by default.

Of course it’s true that Abdulmutallab and other operatives of broader conspiracies and organizations are frequently in the grip of emotional or mental instability. It’s one of the things that makes them easy to recruit and manipulate. But the fact that they’re acting in behalf of other people who are probably not subject to abnormal emotional or mental instability, but rather are unscrupulous fanatics is, I think, a decisive distinction. A more complicated case would be Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who was acting on his own but I think could still be considered a terrorist in this context because of the sustained nature of his actions. In other words, Kaczynski reflected a conspiracy of one because of the carefully calculated and ongoing nature of his neo-Luddite bombing spree. I would argue that the most useful way of thinking about terrorism is that it reflects some kind of essentially ideological rather than emotional motivation which can be detected from elements such as its origin in larger organizations or conspiracies, or its sustained, non-spontaneous nature. That is one kind of threat facing society. Violent outbursts by mentally and emotionally unstable individuals such as Stack or Hasan seems to me, quite clearly, to be essentially another kind of threat. Conflating them confuses an issue that demands the maximum achievable clarity, and its doesn’t serve Arab or Muslim Americans any better than our fellow citizens or our society as a whole.

I’ve given a lot of talks at universities and attended plenty of academic conferences over the years, and very few of them have had the emotional and political impact on me that the conference last weekend at Rutgers University, organized by Prof. Golbarg Bashi and her able students, on Iran and the Arab World: New Horizons seems to have caused. Normally I wouldn’t think twice about these things: just go in, give your talk, be nice and leave. All in a day’s work, and no big deal. Yet I find myself, days later, haunted by this experience in a most unusual way. I think I know why, and it’s worth discussing.

The quality of many of the presentations and the general level of sophistication in the audience were exceptionally impressive. I was blown away by the virtuosity of Said Amir Arjomand’s account of the social forces and cultural trends at work in the development of Iranian politics since the revolution. Both the clips from Shirin Neshat’s visually stunning new film, “Women without Men,” and Hamid Dabashi’s brilliant contextualization and preliminary reading of this mesmerizing piece of cinema art were also extraordinary. Negar Mottahedeh’s multimedia presentation on the role of social media in the green movement and information flow about it is the first thing, ever, to actually get me excited about Facebook and Twitter, which I have heretofore used without any enthusiasm. I was also impressed with Roozbeh Shirazi’s insightful research, and many other useful presentations. There were only a couple of things that struck me as discordant notes, and they were drowned in a sea of excellence.

But that wasn’t it. That wasn’t it at all. The information, analysis and scholarship on offer was first rate, but it wasn’t anything I’d never experienced before; impressive, but not by any means unheard of. Upon reflection, I think what struck me deeply and what’s worth reflecting on was simply the spirit in the room, the ethos and attitude at work. The atmosphere was warm, welcoming, open, tolerant, curious and serious. There was room for the most rigorous scholarship and the most committed activism. People were not judging each other, and I detected few if any litmus tests. In spite of the outrage at the brutality of the Iranian government, behind it was not anger but hope. There was also a real effort to contextualize Iran in its Middle Eastern geopolitical position, and to link the green movement civil liberties campaign with the movement for Palestinian liberation, human and women’s rights movements in the Arab world, and efforts for the Iraqi and Afghan peoples to craft a better future for themselves beyond civil conflict and occupation.

The entire event was forward-looking, positive, bright and purposeful. It did not wallow in how bad things are, it looked forward, seriously, to how they are going to get better. And, in spite of the enthusiasm for the green movement, this hopefulness was not based on fantastical ideas to reshape the geo-political map, or even necessarily eliminate the Islamic Republic, but rather a serious and entirely plausible campaign to restore the civil rights and liberties of the Iranian people and lay the basis for the peaceful development over time of an open, democratic society in Iran. Another of the most striking qualities of the event and most of its participants was the deep commitment to nonviolence, and pride in the resolute refusal of the green movement in Iran to resort to any acts of violence, in contrast to the regime’s use of brutality, beatings, killings, torture and enforced show trial confessions. The moral compass of this conference was in good order, and pointing to true north.

But why should any of that have surprised me? This was, after all, in effect essentially a conference bringing together elements of the Iranian academic left in the United States and some of their allies. Aren’t all of these qualities one would expect from a healthy left-of-center orientation? The answer, of course is the key to my symptomatic surprise: I can’t imagine a similar experience, a similar ethos, a similar attitude coming out of a major meeting of the Arab academic left in the United States. I should know: this is been my natural habitat for the past couple of decades. It was precisely this contrast that was so striking to me. I was suddenly in the presence of American left academics of Middle Eastern origin who were more hopeful than angry, more purposeful than brooding, more forward-looking than backward-looking, more generous than judgmental, more serious than self-indulgent, sincerely committed to nonviolence, and interested in a political agenda tied directly to existing movements on the ground with realistic goals and attainable, limited ambitions along with a healthy appreciation of the pitfalls that may lie ahead.

This was new to me, or if it wasn’t new, it’s certainly been an extraordinarily long time, before the second intifada at least, since I had an experience even remotely similar in an Arab-American academic or activist environment. I’m not talking about Washington events hosted by organizations that perforce have to be, in a way, both more serious and more frivolous than academic or activist conferences. I’m talking about that intersection between scholars, students and grassroots activists in which I have spent so much of my time over the past two decades. I’m sure many of my readers are currently reacting with indignation to these words, feeling that I am giving well-meaning Arab events, activists and academics short shrift, being unfair, or that I simply wasn’t at thus and such uplifting, inspiring event or something like that. But it’s really not possible to argue that I don’t know what I’m talking about, given the degree of my immersion into precisely this world for so many years. Anyone who wasn’t at Rutgers is simply going to have to take my word for it, and I suppose it’s possible for people to have different experiences of the same event, but for me the contrast was not only striking, it’s proven haunting and extremely instructive.

One might say, “Oh, that’s all very well, but look at what these Iranian intellectuals and activists have to work with: the inspiring green movement. What do we have? Hamas versus Fatah, March 8 versus March 14, Qatar versus Saudi Arabia, Iraqi Shiite Islamists versus Iraqi Sunni Islamists, Mubarak versus the Muslim Brotherhood, etc.! Cut us some slack here. If we are angry, brooding and judgmental, we came by it honestly. You’re being too harsh.”

Obviously I don’t think this is a ridiculous response, or it wouldn’t have occurred to me in so much detail without a prompter. There is plainly some truth in it. But even before this event I’ve written many times in the past that I think too much of the Arab and Arab American left has lost its way both in terms of core left values (except nationalism, anti-Zionism and anti-imperialism, which can all be as much or more tribal than principled) and also in terms of the weird and unhealthy appetite to label any disagreement as treason and casually hurl terms like collaborator, neocon and Arab Zionist at all kinds of people who have proven their dedication to numerous Arab causes over many years and at a considerable cost. There seems to be an insatiable appetite to judge and divide rather than to search for common ground and agree to disagree where necessary. If someone wanted to accuse me of being part of that problem, I wouldn’t claim complete innocence, but I’m certainly happy to agree to disagree with lots of people, and to speak and work with almost anybody where we do agree on an important goal.

To me, the contrast is extremely striking insofar as these Iranian left academics and activists were precisely trying to link the green movement to other progressive and liberatory causes in the Middle East, especially in the Arab world, partly in response to the bewildering and dismaying tendency of big chunks of the Arab and Arab American left to side with the Iranian regime against the protesters. The logic no doubt is driven by what I described above, an Arab left attitude that boils down solely to nationalism, anti-Zionism and anti-imperialism, and the mistaken belief that the Iranian regime is an important force in confronting Israel and the United States on behalf of those causes. This is not only a grave error and completely incorrect, it’s a betrayal of core principles that must define any left position worth holding onto.

The contrast in attitudes is illustrated, for example, with regard to the question of Palestine. It would be entirely possible for Iranians, both in Iran and in the United States, opposed to the regime to look at its deep entanglement with the Palestinian question and therefore turn away from the Palestinian cause. At this conference, it was clear the very opposite was at work: they wanted to take the Palestinian cause back from the regime because it does not belong to them and they are only exploiting it for narrow domestic and international political purposes. By contrast, that part of the Arab left sympathetic to the Iranian regime is so in part because it buys into the idea that the regime is useful on the Palestinian issue and places that against and above the civil rights and liberties of the Iranian people. This is, essentially, the distinction between a generosity of spirit and a certain poverty of it, between a principled position and what is essentially and narrowly a selfish one.

Both before and, amazingly, in these mere few days after the conference, one keeps encountering voices from the Arab left publicly dismissive of the green movement and, in the most recent instance, dismissive of concerns raised yesterday by Sec. Clinton that Iran is becoming a military dictatorship in the hands of the Revolutionary Guards and the basij volunteer thugs. Yet the same idea, this fear and belief, is precisely what is animating the green movement and its supporters in the United States. For example, Arjomand’s entire analysis of the present political scene in Iran is predicated on the understanding that these are the forces that dominate the Iranian government, perpetrated the election fraud (a fact denied by way too many people in the Arab left), and now constitute the epicenter of power in Iran waving aside any claims by critics of the regime internal or external to the system. It is they who rigged the election (in Arjomand’s insightful analysis, a smart move by Ahmadinejad since it was the only way for him to stay in office, but a big mistake for Khamenei who created a crisis that could have been avoided by allowing a reformist candidate into office), beat and kill protesters in the street, torture dissidents, repress free speech and assembly and stage elaborate, bizarre show trials. That this regime has all the elements of not only a military dictatorship, but a fascist one at that, seemed, at the Rutgers conference, beyond reasonable debate, and so it is. Denying or dismissing these obvious facts in vain hope that the Iranian regime is actually interested in confronting Israel or ridiculous fear that the opposition represents a ?Western conspiracy? funded by ?Saudi money? or some such tomfoolery is simply unconscionable.

Obviously, there are significant segments of the Arab left that don?t fall into this trap, and they deserve credit. But far too much does. But we not only have to stop thinking about international relations in this narrow, ungenerous, narcissistic and solipsistic way, the real corrective begins much closer to home. The Arab left, and Arabs in general for that matter, have to learn to agree to disagree, to be open to debate and conversation, not to rush to judge the motivations and characters of people saying things we don?t agree with or that we don?t understand. We have to learn the crucial difference between challenging people?s ideas, even harshly, (perfectly okay) and challenging people?s motivations or personalities (unnecessary and counterproductive). Very often we treat these two very distinct behaviors as if they were synonymous, being annoyed by the first when in fact we need much more of it, and turning a blind eye to the second although it?s doing incalculable damage to our Arab-American conversation. We have to stop shunning each other, and even more importantly launching preposterous and dangerous accusations, above all labels of traitor, collaborator, Arab Zionist, or, for that matter, terrorist. From my experience at Rutgers at the weekend, the Iranians of the green movement and their supporters in the Iranian American left have a lot to teach us and we?d better start learning fast.

[NOTE: I delivered a condensed version of this talk at the excellent Iran and the Arab world conference held at Rutgers University yesterday, February 13, 2010.]

An overview of contemporary Arab attitudes towards Iran

At this important conference on Iran and the Arab world, I decided to focus on an overview of contemporary Arab attitudes towards Iran because I think that without understanding the wide range, ambivalence and complexity of these perceptions a full appreciation of the political, strategic and cultural dynamics between these societies is not possible. Obviously, it’s not going to be possible to even begin to tap the depths of this extremely charged and overdetermined relationship, but I do think we can begin to sketch the outlines of its most important features. The present range of attitudes towards Iran in the Arab world can be roughly divided along five obvious axes, and I will consider these in connection and contrast with each other. The first axis is the attitude of the pro-Western Arab states, especially the Gulf states, Jordan and Egypt. The second axis involves mainstream Sunni Arab public opinion. The third axis consists of the Sunni Islamist movements, especially the Muslim Brotherhood and analogous salafist groups throughout the Arab world. The fourth axis is made up of Iran’s allies and clients, in particular Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas and others. The fifth and final axis is the extremely complicated situation defining relations between Iran and constituencies in Iraq. Of course there are dozens, if not hundreds, of more aspects to the relationship, but these five registers of perception of Iran in the Arab world involve a significant proportion of its most significant elements.

1. Iran and the pro-Western Arab regimes

For the most part, the attitude of pro-Western Arab regimes towards Iran at present is one of anxiety. Iran is regarded as a hegemonic power with an agenda that is essentially threatening, if not to the regional order, then at least to the strategic interests of certain states. The nature of this threat is perceived differently in different parts of the Arab world. In Gulf states, the fear of direct forms of Iranian hegemony is quite pronounced. This is exacerbated by Iran’s territorial claims over Bahrain and deep suspicions that it may harbor additional territorial ambitions. Similar concerns have to do with control of the strategic waters of the Gulf, as expressed in the dispute over the proper naming of the Gulf (“Arabian” versus “Persian”). It is among the Gulf states that concern about Iran’s nuclear weapons program is greatest, both because it is seen as a potential element in an Iranian hegemonic program in the Gulf region, but also because either Gulf states have made it clear that they would feel the need individually, or the GCC collectively, for some kind of reliable deterrent of their own in the case of a demonstrated Iranian nuclear capacity. This would involve either an effort to create a Gulf Arab bomb, so to speak, or more formalized relationship with NATO or the United States or some other multilateral military alliance to extend deterrent protection to GCC states. Raghida Dergham has a very instructive article in a recent edition of al-Hayat, the Saudi-owned pan Arab newspaper, that expresses Arab concerns that, in addition to facing increased potential Iranian hegemony, Western states and others might use this increased vulnerability to “blackmail” Arab states and insist on various policy changes favorable to the West but unfavorable to Arabs.

Anxiety about Iranian ambitions and intentions has not dictated simply bad or deteriorating relations, however. Bahrain’s concerns are obvious, but a number of Gulf states have sought to maintain or develop their relations with Iran in spite of their reservations. Saudi Arabia has never closed the door on the relationship, and there has been an interesting and very suggestive tentative rapprochement with Kuwait. Qatar in particular has maintained good relations with Iran, partly motivated by its rivalry with Saudi Arabia and the sense that Iran and its allies in the region are a counterweight to Saudi influence. Gulf state anxieties about Iran tend to be linked to the degree and nature of the Shiite populations in those societies. Concern about Shiite populations in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and to some extent Kuwait, for example, do not have the same impact in the UAE or Qatar. Obviously, the degree of perceived vulnerability to Iranian internal influence within their own countries through local Shiite communities that might develop links to Iran considered unacceptable and threatening by the regimes are essential elements in this pattern of nervousness.

Other pro-Western Arab regimes concerned about Iranian influence include Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority, and possibly Yemen as well. In these cases the concern has do with the internal security and stability of these regimes, linked to the activities of Iran’s allies and clients. Egypt’s increasingly bitter confrontation with Hamas over the question of the Gaza border and its recent purported discovery of a Hezbollah cell operating in Egypt have caused the Egyptian national security establishment to believe that Iran either has or is in the process of acquiring a new strategic front on both sides of the border and into the Sinai Peninsula. In other words, Egypt currently feels it may be losing control over a crucial border area and that this is a direct threat to its national security. The fact that the main opposition group in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, is the parent organization of the de facto ruling entity in Gaza, Hamas, only exacerbates these fears. The nightmare is a scenario in which Iranian clients in Gaza and their allies in Egypt completely subvert Egyptian control over Sinai, leading to a crisis that ultimately undermines or even topples the regime itself. I’ll have more to say about the relationship between Egypt, Gaza and Iran a little later on.

Jordan has similar concerns to Egypt, although its perception of the threat of Iranian allies and clients undermining its regime is more distant than the Egyptian one. As long as the Palestinian Authority and not Hamas remains firmly in the control of the West Bank, Jordan is somewhat insulated from the direct effects of this problem. However, the prospect of an extension of Hamas rule from Gaza to the West Bank or parts of the West Bank could place the Jordanians in a very similar position to that in which the Egyptians find themselves at the present.

Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority have, of course, to deal with Iranian clients as major opposition forces and armed militias that operate their own foreign policies to the point of initiating wars. In the Lebanese case, Hezbollah is the largest and most important political party and the largest and most powerful armed force in the country, although a coalition of almost all other parties in Lebanon is sufficient to offset its power and prevent Hezbollah dominance in the country. It’s also perfectly clear that Hezbollah understands that that it is not in its interests to become the governing party in Lebanon or a dominant force. Its relationship with the non-Shiite population in Lebanon is not such that this would be strategically wise. Moreover, Lebanese history consistently demonstrates that whenever any party or force, whether internal or foreign, maneuvers itself into a dominant position, other forces unite in a coalition to suppress that dominance and restore the Lebanese “balance,” which is invariably, at best, a stability of unstable forces. Thus opinion in Lebanon is sharply divided along sectarian lines as recently demonstrated by a major Pew opinion poll: Hezbollah is deeply popular among Lebanese Shiites, but enjoys very little support among Lebanese Christians and almost no support at all among Lebanese Sunnis. The same sentiments no doubt apply to attitudes towards Iran and its considerable influence in Lebanon.

The PLO and the PA, even more starkly, are in a zero-sum competition for power with Hamas, and attitudes towards Iran among Palestinians, as in Lebanon, are almost entirely based on attitudes towards the internal power struggle. There is also a clear division between the civilian leadership in Gaza, which appears to want more independence of action such as signing the Egyptian-brokered national reconciliation agreement, and the paramilitary leadership and even more significantly the leadership in exile in Damascus, which tend to place much more emphasis on alliances with both Iran and other Muslim Brotherhood parties. In other words, there appears to be a wing of Hamas that sees itself as the political leadership of Gaza with the responsibilities that go with that governing authority, and as primarily a Palestinian organization, but at least two other wings that view the organization more in the context of regional political alliances and agendas, and they have proven dominant.

2. Mainstream Sunni Arab public opinion

It’s very difficult to sum up mainstream public opinion among Sunni Arabs regarding Iran. To some extent it depends on extremely complicated factors such as nationality, class, political orientation, religious sentiment and many other complex factors. Any effort to discuss it is by definition reductive, and possibly even a caricature, but one has to try. Since civil society and human rights organizations have already been covered by one of my colleagues on a previous panel, I will not retread that ground here.

First, there’s no doubt that many Sunni Arabs regard Iran with a great deal of admiration. It successfully carved an independent role for itself in a region that wasn’t assumed to have space for that in the last decades of the 20th century, and confronted both superpowers simultaneously and not only survived but in many ways thrived. Beyond politics, the relative success and sophistication of Iranian society is an object of admiration and envy for many if not most ordinary Arabs. Islamists and some left-wing nationalists are also intoxicated by the idea that the present Iranian regime is a “revolutionary” entity confronting Zionism and imperialism on behalf of either the Muslims or the downtrodden of the world, depending on who you’re listening to. Iran gets a good deal of sympathetic coverage on Qatar’s Al Jazeera network, which is the principle opinion maker in the contemporary Arab world, consistent praise from many Islamists (although certainly not all, and very much depending on the context as we shall see), and even many voices on the left. It’s noteworthy that there was an outpouring of support for Khamenei and Ahmadinejad from many Arab activists, both left and right, following the election fraud scandal last summer and the subsequent crackdown on the ensuing civil rights movement. Left populists like Azmi Bishara presented their audiences with a version of Ahmadinejad as an anti-imperialist hero, man of the people and beloved, popular leader, and denigrated the green movement protesters as elite, effete, westernized, bourgeois troublemakers and crybabies.

However, in other segments of Arab public opinion the protesters and the civil liberties movement in Iran have been regarded with enormous admiration. It has prompted pointed and repeated questions about why the Arabs, who have in most cases even less rights than Iranians do even under the present circumstances, have not reacted in the same way. This reflected both genuine sentiments, reinforcing a commonplace view in the Arab world that Iranians simply have a more sophisticated society than most of the Arabs do, and a certain kind of schadenfreude on the part of Arabs unsympathetic to the Iranian regime. The segment of Arab public opinion and media that is unfriendly to Iran did not disguise its glee in seeing a rival and the pillar of some of the oppositional forces in the Arab world teetering slightly and losing a great deal of its luster as protesters were beaten in the streets.

Along with this basis of admiration for Iran’s political, social, cultural and other achievements (in contrast with the widespread Arab self-perception of relative inadequacy) is a set of countervailing sentiments and indeed prejudices. First, there is a substantial body of Sunni Arab public opinion that shares the concerns and anxieties of the pro-Western regimes, not only in the Gulf but in many states. Iran’s rise as a hegemonic power has caused concern not only among Arab elites, but also among many ordinary people as well. The degree of this sentiment is impossible to measure, but there’s no question that it is substantial and expresses itself in numerous ways. In addition to concerns about Iranian hegemony, ambitions, territorial claims and nuclear program, as well as its sponsorship of armed militias in Lebanon, Iraq, the Palestinian territories and elsewhere, are deep-seated prejudices against Persians ethnically and Shiites religiously. Anti-Persian sentiment and anti-Shiite bigotry (which can be extremely vicious) either stand alone or mix with the other, more legitimate, concerns to produce a potent negative current in Arab public opinion unfavorable to Iran.

3. Sunni Islamists and the Muslim Brotherhood

Perhaps the most complex attitudes of all in the Sunni Arab world are those held by Sunni Islamists, salafists and Muslim Brotherhood parties and analogous groups. For the most part over the past few years, relations between Iran and its allies and Sunni Arab Islamists have been exceptionally poor. They found themselves on opposite sides of the war in Iraq, the contest for power in Lebanon, attitudes towards the Syrian regime, and in many other core conflicts, power struggles and disputes in the Arab world. Moreover, Sunni Islamists and Muslim Brothers tend to be among those most likely to harbor deep-seated religious bigotry against Shiites on principle, and paranoid conspiracy theories and fantasies about alleged Iranian efforts to convert large numbers of Arab Sunnis to Shiite Islam were accepted and promoted by many such individuals and organizations.

However, the hegemonic agenda of the Iranian regime and the revolutionary agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood parties finally found common cause in the Gaza war in support of Hamas, the only organization with one foot in each camp. Hamas is a core Muslim Brotherhood party, and its leadership recently made a ritual Pledge of Allegiance (ba’yah) to the new supreme guide of the mother Muslim Brotherhood party in Egypt. However, because its leadership in exile is based in Damascus and it receives direct financial, technical and other support from Iran through Syria, Hamas uniquely is also part of the pro-Iranian alliance in the Arab world. When Israel launched its assault on Gaza in December 2008, within hours pro-Iranian and Muslim Brotherhood commentators, joined by some sympathetic left-nationalists, flooded the airwaves on the Arab TV networks to insist that Egypt was primarily at fault, not Israel, and began the drumbeat of trying to use the war to undermine one of the key pro-western Arab regimes on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood opposition in Egypt.

The one thing both parties could agree on is the usefulness of a narrative that identifies the contemporary Arab world as the scene of a historic struggle between the “culture of resistance” versus the “culture of accommodation,” or as I have referred to it in shorthand, “the martyrs versus the traitors.” Arab allies of Iran and Sunni Islamists have both been using the war and all subsequent developments related to Gaza to try to promote this narrative in the hopes that it will acquire hegemonic status and define the political worldview of an entire generation of young Arabs. While it has gained a good deal of traction, it has not yet become a hegemonic narrative, although it might be reasonable to say it is currently the dominant narrative (that is to say, the most widely credited). To the extent that Sunni Islamists such as Muslim Brothers can make common cause with Iran and its allies over Hamas, Gaza and promoting the myth of the martyrs versus the traitors, Sunni Islamist antipathy towards Iran is greatly attenuated. And, to the extent that this narrative gains ground in Arab public opinion generally, it greatly enhances Iran’s credibility and appeal insofar as it successfully positions itself as a key factor in the “culture of resistance.” Understanding that this narrative is a key to its regional ambitions vis-à-vis Sunni Arab public opinion, the Iranian government has been extremely adroit at exploiting the Palestinian issue, outbidding everyone else with Holocaust denial, issuing frequent obituaries for Israel, and posing as the champions of Al Quds at every possible opportunity.

4. Iran’s allies and clients in the Arab world

Iran’s allies and clients in the Arab world are a decidedly mixed bag, even leaving the incredibly complicated set of forces in Iraq out of the picture for the moment. Perhaps the most uncomplicated relationship is with Hezbollah, an Iranian-inspired and in part created organization that does not have any obvious conflicts of interest with its sponsors. Of course, Hezbollah is also the primary representative of the largest single community in Lebanon, the Shiites, and has its domestic political responsibilities. In this regard, it is a typical Lebanese political party, split in two registers between local and national responsibilities to a constituency on the one hand, and regional and international obligations to a foreign sponsor on the other (there is no such thing as a large, significant and independent Lebanese political party in my opinion — they all have excessive entanglements with foreign powers, and Hezbollah is one of the most obvious examples). So the only real question about Iran’s relationship with Hezbollah is the extent to which that party exercises any fundamental autonomy in the relationship when it comes to the biggest picture issues, especially military and intelligence questions. There’s no doubt Iran is perfectly happy to leave internal Lebanese political calculations to the Hezbollah leadership, but there is a very real question about Iran’s role in Hezbollah’s decisions on military matters, especially with regard to Israel.

Opinion is sharply divided on this subject ranging from a traditional perspective that holds that Hezbollah’s military and intelligence wings are little more than cadres of the pasdaran, to a more nuanced view that holds that Iran has a patron-client relationship with Hezbollah but not unlimited influence even on matters of war and peace, to a most remarkable theory floated on the Internet the other day which held that Hezbollah is the dominant party in its relationship with Iran and that its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, is senior to Ahmadinejad! I think we can safely confirm that this last characterization is completely inaccurate, and, I think, also be dubious about the traditional view that Hezbollah is simply and only a creature of Iran when it comes to military matters. It seems clear that some kind of nuanced evaluation of the degree of Iranian influence over Hezbollah is required, but it’s extremely difficult to determine what its limitations might be.

A practical question that usually springs to mind is, if the United States and/or Israel attacked Iranian nuclear facilities or other targets, would Hezbollah spring into action against Israeli targets as part of a coordinated counterattack by Iran? In other words, when push comes to shove, is Hezbollah at the command of its Iranian patrons? The historical record suggests that it probably is, but at least two factors must give us pause: first, Hezbollah has no choice but to consider not only its patron’s interests but also those of its constituents and the effects of its actions on other Lebanese and its own ability to continue to function as a successful party and state-within-a-state in the south; and second, the fact that Hezbollah has been in continuous evolution since its founding in 1982 and that therefore past precedent does not necessarily dictate current relationships or future behavior.

Iran’s main ally in the Arab world is Syria, a country that welcomed the “Islamic revolution” from the outset, and has maintained and indeed expanded its strategic links with Iran under both Hafez al-Assad and his successor son Bashar. Syria has proven invaluable in providing Iran with a link to the Arab world generally, especially to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza and Damascus, and to facilitating a Sunni Islamist campaign against the American occupation in Iraq that also advanced Iranian interests. However, Syria has made it clear that it is willing to enter into a comprehensive peace agreement with Israel under the right conditions (this would almost certainly involve the return of the Golan Heights, probably some recognition of Syrian hegemony in Lebanon, and no doubt financial inducements among other things). The price that Syria would have to pay in return to Israel and the United States would almost certainly include scaling back or eliminating entirely its alliance with Iran and its support of organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah. Therefore, Iran’s alliance with Syria is threatened by Syria’s own perceptions of its interests as superseding the conditions of the alliance. Under the present circumstances there do not appear to be any reasons for believing that such a peace agreement is imminent or even likely, so the alliance with Iran remains strong, however the prospect that it could end without any change in Iranian behavior or policy means that it is at least somewhat compromised and attenuated.

Iran is frequently accused of supporting insurgent or opposition groups throughout the Arab world by governments facing these insurrections — most recently the Yemeni government, which accuses Iran of directly supporting the Houthi rebels. As frequently happens in these cases, Yemen has not been able to provide any direct evidence to back up his allegations, and most Western intelligence agencies say they don’t have any either. However, the allegation sticks because it’s consistent with Iran strategy for projecting its power by exploiting conflicts and bringing order to chaos through client and proxy groups, and because the Houthis are Zaidi Shiites with a certain degree of religious connection with the Khomeinite government in Tehran. In other words, it’s hard for many Sunni Arabs to imagine Iran passing up this opportunity even if direct evidence has not been discovered.

5. Iraq

The question of Iraq poses an exceptionally difficult problem regarding Arab attitudes towards Iran. The fact that traditionally pro-Iranian Shiite Islamist political parties came to power in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein has been a source of a great deal of concern and anxiety throughout the Sunni Arab world, including inside Iraq itself, in the Gulf and in the region at large. However, this points to the fact that there is a very large Shiite population in Iraq with decidedly pro-Iranian sympathies and political orientations. Other than Lebanon, Iraq is the Arab country in which Iran most easily finds natural and committed political allies in large numbers (Bahrain may have this potential as well). However, at the early stages of the occupation, Iraqi Shiites were split between the mainstream and traditionally pro-Iranian parties like the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution of Iraq (SCIRI), which has been the largest party in parliament, and Al-Dawa, which has had both constitutionally appointed prime ministers, on the one hand, and the insurgent movement led by Muqtada Sadr which was both anti-American and, to some extent at least, anti-Iranian. Since Sadr has both disarmed and personally relocated to Iran, he and his movement have obviously been successfully domesticated by the Iranian regime. But at the same time, there are real questions about where the traditionally pro-Iranian groups that dominate the Iraqi parliament and cabinet now find themselves in the regional context, split between a vital alliance with American forces that undergird the government and long-standing and ideological connections to Tehran.

In other words, traditionally pro-Iranian Iraqi parties now in power in Baghdad find themselves with the responsibilities of running Iraq, a country with complex ethnic and sectarian interests and that is not necessarily a natural ally of Iran but perhaps more obviously a rival. This is further complicated by the fact that the United States and many Sunni Arab nationalists and Islamists in Iraq have formed an alliance (“the awakening,” etc.) that is ostensibly aimed at Al Qaeda but is hard not to interpret as also a joint hedge against complete Shiite, and possibly Iranian-inspired, dominance in the whole country, or at least the non-Kurdish areas, through the Iraqi army and other forces following the withdrawal of American troops.

The Iranian dilemma in Iraq has been that while it is utterly delighted with the principal effects of the invasion and occupation — the removal of the despised Saddam Hussein and the acquisition of power by long-standing allies of Tehran — the overriding fact of the domineering American presence in the country is unacceptable both in terms of Iranian ambitions in Iraq and in terms of a perceived threat from large numbers of American forces being based on both the western border in Iraq and the eastern border in Afghanistan, even if they are bogged down in both cases in ongoing conflicts. Therefore, the delicate task Iran has had to pursue in Iraq has been to do as much as possible to harass the American position, making it uncomfortable and even untenable in order to promote an early US withdrawal, but without bringing about a generalized collapse of the system or a civil war that would undermine the rule of its traditional allies.

Iraq and Iran, I noted above, are probably not natural allies, and are more likely destined for some kind of renewed rivalry in the foreseeable future, but they certainly need not be mortal enemies. The development of what would appear to be more independent and Iraq-centered attitudes on the part of traditionally pro-Iranian parties in the Iraqi government can only be regarded as a healthy development. Thus far, Iran has restricted its ambitions in Iraq to supporting its allies, whether traditional or new-found, and harassing the United States in an effort to get the Americans to leave. As long as Iran continues to believe that a total breakdown or a full-scale civil war in Iraq is not in its interests, its policies in Iraq will continue to inspire anxiety but not complete panic in non-Shiite communities in that country and more generally in the Arab world.

Contemporary attitudes towards Iran among Sunni Arabs are therefore composed of a volatile mix of admiration, anxiety, envy, fear, warmth, hostility and fascination. Such an overdetermined mix of sentiments and policies itself contributes to a certain degree of volatility, laying a framework for either improved or deteriorating relations, in both cases either dramatically or subtly. A vast array of scenarios are plausible. I have tried to demonstrate the complexity of the relationship between the Arab world and Iran from the various Arab points of view, not in order to reach any half-baked conclusions or make any supercilious predictions. It’s a tall enough order to sketch out the lay of the land, not in all but only in some of its myriad complexity. I hope I’ve been able to accomplish that here today.

A hostile and no doubt completely garbled account of a talk at UCLA by Joseph Massad on David Horowitz’s website, written by one of the ignoramuses employed by Campus Watch (I will not link to this article, but you can easily find it online), has gone viral on the right wing blogosphere, leading to countless accusations that an “Islamist” has again demonstrated his typical “homophobia.” I’ve made my sharp disagreements with Massad very clear in the past, but I just can’t let this pass without noting how incredibly idiotic and offensive this garbage really is. These cretins neither know nor care that Massad is from a Christian family and is oriented quite far indeed to the left on the political spectrum, meaning that under no circumstances could he be described as an “Islamist.” As for charges of homophobia, they are, shall we say, equally ridiculous. The only thing that these reactionary bloggers have been able to demonstrate in these breathtakingly stupid postings is their own racism, ignorance and irrational hostility, a formula that increasingly holds that Arab equals Islamist by definition (I speak from experience — for at least 10 years I’ve been continuously described as an “Islamist,” a “terrorist,” and a “jihadist” in spite of the fact that I have been politically left of center, outspokenly agnostic and categorically anti-Islamist and against all reactionary religious politics for my entire adult life).

Having dispensed with this noxious rubbish, I think it is important to look at where the confusion, if you can grace it with so gentle a description, comes from. In other words, if that’s not what he says, what does he in fact say? And, what are we to make of it? In a journal article published almost 10 years ago (I well remember when it first came out) and in a more recent book, “Desiring Arabs” (University of Chicago, 2007), Massad does indeed launch an attack on gay identity and on something he calls the “Gay International.” From this it is assumed by those who are either unable or unwilling to try to follow his not terribly complicated arguments that he is replicating the standard homophobia of religiously and socially conservative reactionary leaders in the postcolonial world (in, for example, Iran, Uganda, etc.). As an intellectual exercise and political position, he is, of course, doing no such thing.

Massad’s argument essentially is that Western culture in the 19th century produced an original and unique hetero-normative binary between a “straight” sexual orientation and “deviant” ones, most notably the “gay” identity, and that the exportation of the ideology of this normative sexual binary to the non-Western world through colonialism and neocolonial practices is to be critiqued, opposed and rejected. The corollary assertion/assumption behind this argument is that there aren’t any discursive or ideological parallels to or foundations for this straight/gay binary in either pre-19th century Europe or in the premodern and traditional cultures in the non-European world, and that homophobia as an ideology and social practice is produced exclusively by this binary. In other words, fear and hatred of homosexuals is the product of the rigid categorization of people into gay and straight identities, with straight being designated normative and gay deviant. The logical extrapolation of this argument, of course, is that the gay-rights movement causes tremendous harm to people who engage in same-sex relations in the postcolonial world by reifying and re-inscribing this binary in a culturally “inappropriate” space such as the Arab world in which it supposedly never existed before colonial Western influences. There is a kind of un- or at least under- stated nostalgia in Massad’s arguments for an alleged (and, I would argue, probably imaginary) pre-colonial and pre-modern sexual episteme in the Arab world free from gay/straight binaries and therefore free from homophobia as such and free, or at least more free, of the persecution of people who practice same-sex relations.

Many people, including himself, like to suggest a strong connection between his work and that of Edward Said, but I don’t see any strong relationship at all, except insofar as Massad is one of thousands of scholars strongly influenced by some aspects of Said’s work. It’s clear to me, for example, that Said would have had some serious reservations about some of the implications of these arguments for individual and human rights, as considered in more detail below. I would argue instead that Massad’s work, especially his central idea — the critique of the “Gay International,” is far more influenced by Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and especially her groundbreaking 1986 essay, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Mohanty argued that Western feminists, and especially their project of creating the political category of “Third World women” as an object of knowledge, as well as other intellectual and activist projects, in fact completely misread the realities and the needs of women in postcolonial societies, superimposed their own inappropriate and damaging agendas on “Third World women,” and produced philosophically invalid and reductive binaries that may have suited their own agendas but did positive harm to the women they were purporting to speak on behalf of. It seems to me that Massad has taken the essential framework of Mohanty’s critique of Western feminism’s relationship with women in postcolonial societies and applied it to the Western gay-rights movement’s relationship with practitioners of same-sex relations in the postcolonial world.

Frankly, I don’t think Mohanty’s critique has faired well in the context into which Massad has translated it. His book is neither the only, nor the best, study of this subject (still one has to be impressed by the degree to which his own headshot on his Columbia University webpage looks like the gentleman on the dust jacket cover illustration). However, for people interested in Arabic literature, its extended and intelligent reading of the poetry of Abu Nawas and its evolving reception is certainly worthwhile. But I think there are at least two serious problems, one intellectual and one political, with his argument that deserve careful interrogation.

The first problem, which is essentially an academic and intellectual problem with political implications, is the very problematic, and I would say indefensible, way in which Massad positions the relationship between precolonial and postcolonial Arab sexuality, and his whole handling (or rather avoidance) of the question of the nature of modernity. The question of whether Massad is completely off base or not in his total rejection of any corollary antecedent in traditional Arab societies to the modern, Western, gay/straight binary that certainly characterizes contemporary homophobia is one that has to be resolved by historians far more expert in the subject than I. However, there would, at first glance, seem to be plenty of indications of what would, in practice, amount to homophobia and the persecution of same-sex practicing individuals in many forms of traditional Arab culture, even if analogous terms and frames of reference are not immediately obvious and there is no reduction of sexuality to a gay/straight binary.

I’d certainly agree with him that, since this is a quintessential product of modernity, it has no precise analog in either Europe before modernity, in this case the 19th century, or in precolonial non-Western societies either. How could it? But it doesn’t follow that therefore there is no basis for homophobia or repression of same-sex practitioners in traditional Arab societies or to imagine that that didn’t happen when there seems to be a great deal of evidence that it did (not only specific instances of and legal structures for such persecution, but also the existence of derogatory language that appears to predate any sustained encounter with the colonial West that might have produced it as a form of mimicry). But, as I say, how we evaluate the relationship between traditional Arab modes of sexuality and contemporary homophobia in the Middle East is really beside the point.

The reason it’s beside the point is that Massad is missing a crucial point about the nature of modernity that I think eludes many intelligent, well-meaning people: modernity is a package deal and not an à la carte menu. It seems to me that almost all contemporary identity categories have been either directly produced or completely redefined by modernity, leaving very little if any meaningful social identity categories that are not, in effect, precisely the products of modernity. Contemporary notions, both East and West, of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, ideological affiliation, etc. all seem to me to be produced or defined by modernity, that is to say by their modern context. Even well-established identity categories that obviously and deeply precede colonialism and modernity in the Middle East, such as divisions between Sunnis and Shiites (as well as other smaller Muslim denominations) or premodern tribal affiliations, have all been restructured and redefined in the context of a postcolonial Arab modernity defined first and foremost by the Arab state system. In other words, I’m arguing that certain kinds of social and political identities, including the gay and other non-normative sexual identities, are, to all intents and purposes, built into modernity in the same way that race, ethnicity, nationality, gender and other comparable political identity categories obviously are. Some of them predate modernity, but have been redefined. Others are new or have taken on new significance, for example with regard to women’s rights.

One may or may not be a fan of modernity. I’ve known many people, including some I respect highly, who dislike it intensely and wish they had been born in an earlier century. That’s fine, but it does not alter the fact that in our time modernity is pervasive, and there is nothing outside the whale (unless, of course, one were to go to the most remote parts of Amazonia or Papua New Guinea, perhaps — and even then one would have to question the ability to step outside the whale in any fundamental sense).

My own suspicion is that the last hurrah, so to speak, for premodern feudalism in the non-Western world was the war against the British launched by a Hindu-Muslim coalition in 1857 known variously as the sepoy mutiny, the great rebellion or the first Indian war of Independence (all of these seem to me to be efforts to cram these momentous events into a very small box in which its significance cannot be contained). When this rebellion against colonial rule by an impressively powerful and well-organized traditional and premodern collection of forces finally and decisively failed in India, and in similar conflicts in other parts of Asia and Africa in the 19th century including in Algeria, Southern Africa, China and elsewhere, the colonized world was faced with an unavoidable conundrum: much larger premodern social forces were simply not able to prevail against smaller but far more effective modern colonial ones.

I think this is often misunderstood as the problem of a technological disparity, whereas in fact it is a question of modern forms of social organization. The great difference on the battlefield was not rifles, cannons and railway, it was modern forms of military organization and regimented drilling. In terms of administration, again modern bureaucracy is not resistible by analogous premodern administrative structures. And on it goes. The Japanese, the only people of Asia and Africa not to have been either a colony or a semi-colony (though they did get pushed around a little bit by the United States), made a national and successful effort to modernize in a generation, and it saved them from the fate that befell everybody else. But the fact is that in colonial society after colonial society, anti-colonial forces came to understand that the most effective, and possibly the only real, tools to combat colonial rule were in fact the substantive elements of social modernity even if shrouded in the trappings of a surface layer of traditional authenticity. Indeed, nationalism as such in the colonial world is the product of precisely that class of colonial subjects educated by and interpolated into modern subjectivity.

The point here is that the modernization of the postcolonial world was an ineluctable, two-fold process: first, pre-modernity proved utterly incapable of fending off colonial rule and second, colonial subjects interpolated into modern subjectivity became the leaders of effective resistance to colonialism and the parents of national independence. It seems to me that value judgments about this apparently inescapable process which replicated itself without fail in every colonial society are less important than recognizing the logic and structure behind the process itself.

Partha Chatterjee has led the way in critiquing the intellectual foundations of postcolonial nationalism, and has suggested that there were alternatives, for example Gandhi’s vision for India. While his critique is enormously powerful and important, suggesting that postcolonial nationalism is always and by definition a derivative discourse that traps postcolonial states in an unequal relationship with the Western world (we shall see about that, perhaps in my own lifetime, at least in the case of China and possibly India), but frankly I can’t imagine what a Gandhian state would possibly have looked like. I think there’s no doubt that even if things went as well as they could, India was always going to be the product of the more conventional politicians like Nehru and the others, and so it proved. My point is that, whether we like it or not, it’s hard to argue that the postcolonial world had any choice but to either embrace modernity, of course with its own individual characteristics, or remain premodern and indefinitely, fully and directly colonized. This doesn’t mean adopting Western culture, it means adopting social and organizational principles largely developed in the West, and there is a difference — modernity is a set of structures based on social organization and modes of production and is not specific to a limited, regional or given culture, and we already see a dizzying multiplicity of ways of being modern the world over and for more than 100 years. Of course this enforced embrace of modernity is very problematic, but the alternative seems to have been continued colonization and direct subjugation, and no society chose that. And it doesn’t mean that modernity will not begin to be defined in non-Western ways as the power, influence and independence of large postcolonial states continue to develop.

I think that like a great many other intellectuals Massad misses both of these points. I think he treats modernity as if it were optional, which is wrong, or to be lamented, which is pointless. I also think he treats modernity as if it were an à la carte menu in which a society may pick and choose the items it wants for its own purposes and simply decide to avoid some other aspects that are inherent in modernity (and not, therefore, simply in Western culture) such as gay and other “problematic” socio-political identities. Hetero-normativity is no doubt unfortunate, but it’s also ubiquitous in modern societies. The way to overcome it, it seems obvious to me, is to work through the tangle of its own contradictions rather than by lamenting its deep entanglement with inescapable aspects of modernity or yearning for a long-lost and possibly fictive preferable past which cannot be recovered. It seems to me that there are certain societies not only in Europe but also to some extent parts of Latin America, South Africa, Thailand and some others that are groping towards a version of modernity that includes the identity category of homosexual but in a way that is not pejorative, discriminatory or abusive. My deep suspicion is that this is achievable, whereas eliminating gay identity or the idea of a gay-straight distinction (it need not be a strict binary) is probably not, at least in the foreseeable future.

Which brings us to the second core problem with Massad’s arguments, which is their political significance in the real world. It’s ridiculous to suggest that he’s putting forward a homophobic logic, but there are, nonetheless, too many parallels between some of the arguments he’s making, even if it is in a good faith effort to protect sexual freedom from rigid and irrational binaries, and arguments made by oppressive and repressive forces in the Arab world and beyond. He is a public intellectual, and I think needs to be sensitive to the impact his arguments are likely to have. I’m sure this was not his intention, but some of his arguments, especially if taken at face value and not properly understood in their own context — for example about the lack of any cultural analogue to the gay/straight binary in traditional or premodern Arab culture — echo those of repressive and genuinely homophobic voices in the Middle East in a way that makes me extremely uncomfortable and that should also give him some pause. He can’t be responsible for people willfully misreading his work in ways that can’t be anticipated, but he can be for ways that can be anticipated. This can be anticipated.

This problem was played out fairly dramatically in an angry exchange he had online recently with a representative of what I believe is the only gay-rights movement openly operating in the Arab world. It’s not surprising that these gay-rights activists in Beirut would have felt extremely threatened by the political implications of Massad’s arguments, because the only position that really exists politically in the contemporary Arab world that they bolster is the program of repression of same-sex practitioners. His response didn’t seem to acknowledge the problem of the likely political impact of his arguments (which is not a responsible position for a public intellectual), and his hostility to those publicly and enthusiastically adopting the gay identity and pressing for homosexual rights seems somewhat irrational to me. Massad’s arguments, and his attitude, strip the agency from those in the Arab world who have made a conscious, deliberate decision to identify as gay, and instead assigns to these legitimate choices the status of a false consciousness in a most unnecessary and ungenerous matter indeed. One could easily subscribe to most of his analysis while at the same time retaining a certain sympathy for gays and lesbians in the Arab world and for their rights not only as individuals but as a protected class.

For some reason, Massad doesn’t do this. I do not understand why, but he actually seems to oppose the political agenda of providing Arab gays and lesbians with legal protection as a class because of his opposition to the binary and the gay identity it produces. That it is far too late for any such rearguard action against a social category that is, in effect, built into modernity and has already taken root at all kinds of registers in the Arab, and indeed the global, political consciousness, doesn’t seem to occur to him. But I think ultimately this is a highly irresponsible position, and ungenerous in an inexplicable way. He seems to be so opposed to the gay identity as a socio-political category in theory that he opposes the gay rights agenda in practice. Of all of the beleaguered groups and threatened movements in the Arab world, picking on Arabs who openly identify as gay and gay-rights activists seems a very strange choice indeed.

It’s perfectly reasonable for Joseph Massad or anyone else, whether in New York, Beirut or any other place, to practice same-sex relations but decline to identify as homosexual or gay. I have no trouble understanding this, and he’s explained the rationale quite clearly. But for the life of me I cannot understand how this extends to a kind of frankly mean-spirited and politically indefensible opposition to providing legal and political protection for those who do embrace the gay and lesbian identity in the Arab world. It’s important that we don’t misunderstand Massad’s arguments or allow extreme and preposterous mischaracterizations, such as calling him an Islamist or a homophobe, to go unchallenged. That said, as I have demonstrated here, I find myself in disagreement with many of his premises, unconvinced by some of his assertions about the past in the Arab world, baffled by some of his conclusions, mystified about his apparent lack of concern about their political implications and worried about their potential consequences.

For the past couple of months I have found myself unable to watch almost anything on my hundreds of worthless channels of cable television, including news and public affairs programming. The programs don’t engage and the advertisements feel like a physical assault. There are rare exceptions, such as an occasional academic panel or political event on C-SPAN, and one or two other anomalies, but otherwise it’s pretty unbearable. So I surprised myself a bit by making sure last Friday evening to watch the first episode of another series of the Fox “reality” program (“reality TV” being an obvious oxymoron) Kitchen Nightmares, a US version of the UK Channel 4 program, Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. Both series are based on a simple premise: the foulmouthed restaurateur has five days to try to turn around the fortunes of a failing restaurant.

I’d be the first to agree with anyone who suggested that there’s too much of Gordon Ramsay in our popular culture. He’s appeared in an amazing number of television programs, and to say the least they are a mixed bag. Two five-part UK documentaries kicked off the entire Ramsay TV cottage industry: Boiling Point and Beyond Boiling Point, both of which chronicled Ramsay’s efforts to achieve that most highly elusive of culinary prizes, a third Michelin star. They were interesting, but not fascinating. The UK F-Word series (they insist it stands for food, don’t you know) struggled to find any kind of meaningful identity for its first four seasons and really wasn’t worth watching, but the recently completed fifth season, which focused on promoting local restaurants battling the challenge of the global recession, was really quite excellent. The even more recently concluded three-part UK documentary of Ramsay’s tour of India, Gordon’s Great Escape, was also very interesting and entertaining (ant and ant egg chutney in Chhatisgarh, etc.).

Both the US and UK versions of the cooking competition Hell’s Kitchen are fundamentally stupid and silly, and they make up the bulk of his television presence (there have, of course, been occasional moments of real delight, such as Ramsay’s pitch-perfect retort to an irate customer who was childishly demanding more pumpkin in his risotto, “You want more pumpkin? Right, I’m going to get a pumpkin and shove it up your ass. Would you like it whole or diced?”) Worst of all have been the absolutely dreadful UK Cookalong Live programs, recently experimented with in the United States by Fox to cringe-inducing effect, especially his completely unconvincing effort to seem friendly and sweet. Ramsay’s recent romantic scandal, combined with a limited public appetite for his limitless wrath and extraordinary penchant for cursing, have gotten his UK producers to insist on a toned-down Ramsay, which more or less works (he basically has to behave the way he would around children, swearing only occasionally), but Fox went for a warm and cuddly Gordon in their dreadful cookalong experiment and it was both revolting and actually more frightening than the chef in the midst of his most hysterical raging (one of my dearest friends once told me that the reason I like watching him is that he behaves in restaurants the way I would like to, and I think that’s about right).

But the real reason to have ever paid attention to Ramsey as a worthy and compelling presence on television were the UK Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares turnaround programs. These one-hour British mini-documentaries are the only “reality television,” if they actually really belong to that genre at all, that I have ever found compelling or interesting. The program won widespread critical acclaim and several awards, and when you watch them it’s easy to see why. The problems they tackle range from mismanagement, incompetence in the kitchen, and inexperience at various levels, to unworkable business models, and various forms of mania. Ramsay has real insights and a no-nonsense, tough-love approach, but the whole program really works only for one reason: in spite of his abusive character, willingness to humiliate people who deserve it, and incessant swearing, it’s obvious that he genuinely, passionately cares about these restaurants, their survival, and the quality of the food they serve. We’ve seen Ramsay trying to fake things many times in the past, and he’s not that good at it. The passion and commitment that he pumps into these turnaround efforts are plainly genuine, and it’s so draining that he’s made it clear that he doesn’t want to continue doing it much longer (although he seems to be such a shameless publicity hound that he will probably never voluntarily walk away from television).

The Fox version, Kitchen Nightmares, unfortunately isn’t really comparable to the British series. While it’s questionable whether the UK series even belongs to the reality TV genre, the Fox show most certainly and unfortunately does. Predictably enough, it’s a dumbed-down version with numerous serious flaws: it’s very repetitive; overly-dramatic and silly; focuses on wild swings in emotion from despair and anger to joy and reconciliation rather than the food, the management system or the business model; Ramsay’s compelling voiceover narrations from the UK series are replaced by a generic and extremely uncompelling narration from a nameless announcer, etc. In addition, the UK program focused on lots of different problems: frequently, of course, the problem was dreadful food and/or pathetic mismanagement, but sometimes there were other issues. One focused on a Scottish restaurant, La Riviera, manned by first-rate French chefs producing really excellent but somewhat pompous food that was striving unsuccessfully, not to stay open (it was being backed by a doting millionaire), but to win a Michelin star. Another restaurant, Rococo, was failing because it’s talented and formerly Michelin starred chef-owner had lost both his star and his former restaurant, and was undergoing a crisis of confidence. Thus far, all the Fox programs have focused on the same fundamental problem: complete incompetence in the kitchen and absolutely dreadful food, almost always because people simply don’t know what they’re doing.

What really sets the UK series apart from its Fox spinoff is not only the real prospect for, but the repeated realization of, failure for Ramsay and the restaurants he is attempting to save. Given the way the industry works, it’s not in the least surprising that a great many, if not most, of the restaurants involved in both series have ultimately failed or changed hands (of the 22 restaurants visited in the UK series, only eight are still operational under the same owners). Anything that happens months after he leaves cannot be placed at Ramsay’s feet. However, what the UK series allows for but the Fox series does not is the prospect of failure then and there, failure that is as much Ramsay’s responsibility as it is the owners who cannot or will not heed his advice. Some of the most memorable UK episodes involved a total meltdown of the turnaround process at precisely the point in the program at which each and every Fox episode hits its maudlin crescendo. One immediately thinks of Sue Ray, the hapless owner of Bonaparte’s who, in desperation, tried to sue Ramsay, absurdly claiming he had planted rotten food in her kitchen. Or Francesco Mattioli, the mule-headed new owner of a former Michelin-starred Italian restaurant in the Welsh countryside called the Walnut Tree Inn, who simply could not admit that anything was going wrong as his business crumbled around him. Or Rachel McNally, the infuriating, spoiled-brat Scottish owner of a vegetarian restaurant in Paris, Piccolo Teatro, who simply walked away and shut down in the middle of the turnaround project.

Fox obviously believes that American audiences simply can’t handle the prospect of failure — that the only emotions they can respond to are those involving ultimate triumph and success. Of course for any regular viewer, it kicks the heels out of the whole process because we know for certain, given the track record thus far, that the network has no intention of either allowing Ramsay to fail, or airing it if he did. Not content with the image of him as a brilliant turnaround artist, they seem intent on casting him as some sort of superhero of the restaurant industry. In a couple of UK episodes, Channel 4 did help out some of the restaurants with new equipment and other limited investments, but the Fox episodes bestow entirely new restaurants, lavishly remodeled and reequipped, on their subjects, which, along with the Ramsay buzz and free publicity, virtually ensures at least a temporary reprieve from Chapter 11. Both the US and UK versions have involved return visits by Ramsay, with UK re-visits frequently going very badly, but Fox ones being invariably and entirely positive, consisting mostly of gushing praise for Ramsay from grateful owners. The UK series makes it clear that restaurants not only can, they often or maybe even usually will, fail, with or without Ramsay’s help. The Fox series seems to suggest that it’s a foregone conclusion that when mighty mouse comes to save the day, all will be well (there were not only no revisits to the many closed restaurants, there was no indication to viewers that they had closed).

Friday evening’s episode about the Hot Potato Café reflected all of the worst qualities of the Fox version, and these are not only annoying, they do make the program ultimately difficult to swallow. However, if one can make it past all the ridiculous sentimentality, histrionic hype, dreadful production, overall cheesiness and, most annoyingly, the fact that Fox rigs the game and stacks the deck to ensure no immediate meltdown in the turnaround process so that there will always be a “happy ending” at the end of the five days, in my view there’s still a program worth watching here. The problems are interesting and some of the solutions ingenious, but the main aspect that makes it compelling, in spite of every effort by Fox, is that Ramsay’s genuine and inexplicable passion and commitment to actually turning these restaurants around manages to come through quite clearly. He’s a very powerful personality and is so committed to his craft and trade that he actually seems really to care whether or not some little restaurant is serving decent food and is going to survive. That came through again on Friday night, in spite of everything, and it salvaged an otherwise wretched mess (the program, and possibly even the restaurant as well).

Also on clear display was one of Ramsay’s best qualities: his compassion and affection for young, inexperienced but determined cooks. The cook (we cannot call her chef) at the Hot Potato Café is the 21-year-old niece of the owners, completely untrained, totally out of her depth, and not interested really in cooking at all but just helping out her family. Honing in on her grit and determination as the one thing in the restaurant he could actually work with, Ramsay built the turnaround around an effort to develop her skills and bring out her talent (looks like she definitely has some). He’s done this several times before, especially in the UK programs, mentoring a 17-year-old pot washer who suddenly found himself effectively running the vegetable station, and offering a job in one of his London restaurants to the talented young chef of Piccolo Teatro who suddenly found herself unemployed in Paris through no fault of her own.

There is no doubt that Ramsay is, as his reputation would suggest, fearsomely harsh, but his meritocracy doesn’t seem to involve any obvious biases (race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. seem to mean nothing to him, and the only thing that counts is what’s on the plate) except for age: he clearly prefers young chefs and would-be chefs, possibly because they have fewer bad habits and can be more easily trained, but also possibly because they’re in less of a position to put up a fight. Whatever the reasons are, it’s an endearing and admirable quality, and in spite of the bathos of the despair before and exultation after the turnaround from the owners, Ramsay’s bonding with and mentoring of this young woman managed to be genuinely touching.

I’ve written a lot of negative things above about the Fox Kitchen Nightmares series, and in reality I’m probably being altogether too kind to the program, which may be even worse than I’ve suggested. But it’s still the only regularly scheduled series that can get me to turn on my almost superfluous television set. It probably qualifies as something of a “guilty pleasure,” as, unlike with the British series, I can see that this is basically nonsense, I’m being had at a certain level, and the producers are trying to manipulate me and my emotions as if I had the mental capacity of a five-year-old. But somehow it still manages to seem to me to be compelling enough to watch. There is a broader question raised by all of this, which is how do we account for our enjoyment of and, more importantly, intellectual engagement with cultural artifacts that we know very well are, at a fundamental and/or formal level, “bad.” This is especially problematic with bad art (no one would possibly think that reality television is any kind of art form) and it’s a question I intend to investigate in another posting in the near future.

An Ibishblog reader asks me, “Perhaps you would consider following up on your rather remarkable discourse on Hamlet with a defense of your (dubious) preference for David Lynch’s feature Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me over the television series Twin Peaks?” I’m delighted to.

As this reader is aware, I hold the films of David Lynch in very high esteem. I’m not sure there’s another living artist in any medium whose work produces such a profound effect on me. Obviously, this puts me in a fairly small minority as most people find most Lynch films impenetrable, boring, nasty, unpleasant or simply bizarre. There is no doubt his work is extremely challenging, and it’s also extremely dark and therefore on both scores certainly not for everybody. A great many people, probably most, don’t want to be deeply challenged by the movies. They want to be entertained for an hour and a half or so, laugh and cry, and not have to think too much about it. That’s completely reasonable, and there is a vast industry that caters to this taste. Moreover, the subset of people who take film seriously as an art form also by no means unanimously approves of Lynch’s work generally. Especially his later films have many well-informed and brilliant detractors who see them as self-indulgent, vapid and tiresomely banal.

Obviously, I passionately disagree. I’m extremely impressed with a number of qualities Lynch has brought to his later work: technical mastery; outstanding attention to detail, especially sound; an exceptionally refined and in some cases even revolutionary approach to narrative techniques; and above all a profound depth of humanity. I’m not only sympathetic to Film Comment’s recent selection of Mulholland Dr. as the best film of the past decade, I suspect it’s the best, at least American, film in several decades.

Lynch’s films are so emotionally demanding I think because they reflect the work of an artist who truly embraces his own emotions and those of his characters. If his films operate in a strange way, this is because life itself is extremely strange. We create straightforward narratives in order to cope with our realities, but those are of course largely fictional and entirely arbitrary, except insofar as they serve a specific purpose in helping us accomplish our goals. But it seems to me that Lynch’s alienated and nonlinear narratives centered around totally unstable identities and shifting personae, strange as they seem at first, come much closer to the way we actually experience our lives than standard, linear, naturalistic narratives do. What’s more, his films are about shattering, tragic events which are always going to be even more alienating and destabilizing than normal life is.

In his later films, what Lynch tends to do is take an extremely simple but deeply tragic narrative and build around it a vast network of representations, associations, narrations, iterations and interconnections. The process of reading a Lynch film involves pulling that web of signification apart, and seeing both the core narrative and the complex representational superstructure working together to create a wild proliferation of meaning. It’s frequently the case with late Lynch that a film takes on a different character and yields itself to a different set of deconstructions and reconstructions with almost every viewing. For those of us who like it, it’s incredibly thrilling. For a lot of other people it would be boring, tiresome and exhausting.

I would argue that, if for nothing else, Lynch deserves an enormous amount of credit for creating what I think amounts to an original style and even genre: American film surrealism. Except for his work, surrealism in the cinema has been almost entirely a European affair, defined by a number of extraordinary artists, most notably the great Don Luis Buñuel. However, European surrealism more or less peaked with the final, extraordinary films of the early and mid-70s that capped off Buñuel’s remarkable career such as Belle du jour, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (which may have the most complicated narrative I’ve ever seen in any film), and That Obscure Object of Desire. It seems to me that in recent decades not only has Lynch shifted the epicenter of Surrealism in cinema from Europe to the United States, he’s created a new and highly original version of it.

The reader asks specifically about the relationship between Lynch’s 1990-91 television series, Twin Peaks, and the much-maligned 1992 film “prequel,” Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Twin Peaks (which I will use exclusively to refer to the TV series) was justly celebrated at the time as a major achievement. It riveted the attention of a great deal of the United States around the question “who killed Laura Palmer?” More importantly, it was probably the first broadcast TV series to bring full-blown cinematic techniques to the small screen, and it’s still frequently cited as the most accomplished television program yet made. There is no question that it had an enormous impact on both television and popular culture generally.

As the program entered its second season, Lynch came under heavy pressure from the network and his co-author Mark Frost to reveal the secret of Laura Palmer’s killer. Lynch argued that there was no obligation to the audience to resolve the question, and that it should remain a mystery until the end of the series if not beyond. Unfortunately, fairly early into the second season, the network won out, as they do, and it was revealed that Laura had been murdered by her own father (though ostensibly possessed by a malevolent demon-spirit called Bob) following years of sexual abuse at home. Predictably enough, Lynch was right. The revelation removed the central theme around which the story had been constructed, and the series veered wildly off track. It was not renewed. The collapse of Twin Peaks also occurred because Lynch plainly lost interest in it after his idea of a completely open-ended series fell by the wayside. However, he did return to direct an extraordinary two-hour final episode.

Shortly after the end of the TV show, Lynch began working on a film, ostensibly a prequel to Twin Peaks, which would tell the story of the last week of Laura Palmer’s life. Fire Walk with Me premiered at Cannes, but was roundly criticized by both critics and audiences, and considered both a financial and artistic failure. So what the reader is asking is why I am much more enthusiastic about a film most people consider badly if not fatally flawed, than I am about a television series that is generally regarded as one of the best, if not the best, ever shown on a broadcast network. The main reason for my somewhat, but increasingly less, heretical position is that I think most critics and audiences have completely misunderstood the relationship between the film and the series, and therefore totally misread both what Lynch was doing in Fire Walk with Me and what he was able to accomplish.

Although Lynch was meticulously faithful to the mythos constructed in the TV series when he made the film, introducing impressively few contradictory facts and not altering the chronology in any meaningful sense, the differences between the two are simply enormous. Most strikingly, the film is almost entirely bereft of the humor of the TV series, which typically had the look and feel of a dark, menacing parody. This hand was played openly in many ways, not least by the recurring TV soap opera, “Invitation to Love,” to which the Twin Peaks residents are deeply addicted. Their own parodic behavior, which sends up TV dramas generally, is frequently mirrored in the program by the parody of a parody that is “Invitation to Love.”

Twin Peaks has plenty of bathos, fake sentimentality, and disturbing imagery, but it rarely if ever achieves pathos, emotional power and genuine horror. Fire Walk with Me, by contrast, does achieve pathos, packs a considerable emotional wallop, and is chock-a-block with genuine horror. It’s almost as if having been forced to abandon the Laura Palmer storyline by revealing the killer, Lynch not only lost interest in the rest of season two and, indeed, the entire program, but also felt that Laura as a character and her deep story had not received their due from the television program. Behind the parody, satire, mystery, red herrings, dead ends and relentless playfulness of Twin Peaks still lay a story of the self-destruction, torture, murder and mental and emotional collapse of a young woman, and it needed telling in a manner that communicated the depth of its tragedy.

Fire Walk with Me is better seen as an antithesis, a repudiation and a corrective to Twin Peaks, rather than as a prequel or the extension of the brand into an inappropriate medium, which are the two ways it was generally received upon release. There is almost no doubt that Lynch was left angry, dissatisfied and disappointed by the way Twin Peaks played itself out on the small screen, and was turning to his more familiar medium of the big screen to address the problem.

The film announces its intention in this regard at its very outset — the opening credits run across an indistinct blur that is extremely hard to identify until the final credit caption, Lynch himself as director, at which point the camera lurches back revealing that what we have been looking at is television “snow,” and the second we realize that we’ve been looking at a TV (too closely, almost inside the set), a baseball bat smashes the set to pieces (we subsequently discover that this is the murder of Teresa Banks we first heard about in the Twin Peaks pilot). I think this gesture of opening Fire Walk with Me by ritually smashing a TV set to pieces pretty much sums up its attitude towards the medium and, to some extent at least, Twin Peaks as a program, or at least what was done to it by the industry. It’s partly Lynch venting, of course, but it’s also the clearest possible signal to the audience that this is not television and it’s not a world that’s going to be friendly to television either.

The film has two distinct parts: Chester Desmond’s investigation into Teresa Banks’ murder and his subsequent disappearance, followed by the last week in the life of Laura Palmer narrated almost entirely from her own point of view. The first part of the film, which is much shorter, plays many important roles, among which is the systematic repudiation of the very essence of Twin Peaks which is the charm, wholesomeness and rustic appeal of the town and its residents. Deer Meadow, the nearby town in which Teresa is killed, is the antithesis of the town of Twin Peaks as depicted in the TV show: the local police are crooked and utterly callous as well as hostile to the FBI, people generally are unfriendly and unhelpful, neither the people nor the town itself are attractive or pleasant, the coffee and pie are apparently nothing to write home about at best, etc. Indeed, the only real humor in Fire Walk with Me is in this opening sequence of scenes in Deer Meadow, and mostly centers around the very crude contrasts between our Twin Peaks-driven expectations and the grim realities of Deer Meadow. We are being systematically told, and indeed forced, to abandon any sentimental attachment we had to these small-town folk as a residue of the TV show.

When we suddenly shift from Deer Meadow to Twin Peaks and Laura Palmer, we ought, by now, to have gotten the point that the characters and locations may look the same (all the actors except Lara Flynn Boyle reprised their original parts), but this Twin Peaks is fundamentally different from the one we have known and loved. And so it proves. At least from Laura’s point of view, and in light of her experiences, Twin Peaks starts to look increasingly more like Deer Meadow than the charming small town with all its eccentricities and dark secrets in the television series. While Twin Peaks has multiple perspectives, the dominant one for much of the series was that of Agent Cooper, with his childlike wonder and passionate love affair with the town and its residents (he talks about buying land, and more or less moves there). The gigantic transformation Lynch has effected in Fire Walk with Me involves a shift in tone, atmosphere, perspective and, I would argue, genre as well.

It’s almost as if he is saying to the audience, “well, we had a great time with the TV show and everything, but you need to remember that fundamentally this was a very simple and tragic story about a girl who was systematically abused and then tortured and murdered by her own father. It may have gotten lost in all the fun and games in Twin Peaks, but I need to bring you all back to that starkly and harshly.” In other words, when the story of Laura Palmer lost its function as the central narrative around which the TV show, with all of its intricate subplots, was built, there was a danger that the stark tragedy at the center of Twin Peaks had not been adequately represented. The injustice Lynch apparently felt at the treatment of his program at the hands of the network I think dovetailed with his own sense of having participated in a kind of injustice to the character Laura Palmer and the core narrative of her murder, and to the audience that may have received far too sugar-coated a version of this simple but profound tragedy. I see the film as an effort to correct this failure, and I think it works brilliantly at that level.

This film was badly received and I think is still largely misunderstood because its relationship with the television series isn’t adequately appreciated. It’s a matter of opinion and taste, but I find the film infinitely more engaging than the television series, albeit very dark, difficult and emotionally challenging. Moreover, Fire Walk with Me, unlike Twin Peaks, is a central, I might even argue the central, work bridging early and later Lynch films. Whereas Twin Peaks has much more in common with the “charming small town with dark secrets” style of Blue Velvet, Fire Walk with Me is much closer in style, substance and technique to his later masterpieces Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire. For one thing, the fierce feminism of Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire finds, I think, its first expression in the way Laura Palmer’s story is told largely from her own perspective in Fire Walk with Me. No doubt Lynch was stung by widespread accusations of misogyny following the release of Blue Velvet, but beginning with Fire Walk with Me his attention has tended to focus more on understanding and representing the “woman in trouble” from a sympathetic, indeed championing, perspective.

Even more significantly, the nonlinear, fundamentally unstable narratives and characters typical of later Lynch I think are also introduced in Fire Walk with Me, at least in the way he has played them out in the three films cited above. One could argue that these elements actually are introduced in the red room scenes in Twin Peaks, including the extraordinary sequence in the Lynch-directed final episode. But I think that’s a bit of a stretch. Insofar as they represent manifestations of the Other Place — what for most of the 20th century we would have called the unconscious — there is clearly a connection. But I think the technique here is fundamentally different and the connection far more slight.

Probably the most telling sequence in Fire Walk with Me in setting up the concerns and narrative techniques of the later films is the brilliant, fascinating and bizarre scene in Gordon’s office at the FBI headquarters in Philadelphia, in which Cooper and Jeffries are represented very differently on the closed-circuit television network than they are in the direct action of the scene itself. I’m not going to try to unpack this dense, difficult scene here, suffice it to say that it introduces themes that will dominate Lynch’s later work: amnesia and aphasia; psychogenic fugue; radical alienation between different registers of perception; narrative nonlinearity and instability; and, above all, a privileging of representations of representations of other media (closed-circuit TV, broadcast TV, video, other films, digital video, 78 RPM records, camera obscura, etc.).

What I’m arguing, but not fully explicating because that would take a great deal of time, is that later Lynch is more interesting and important, although less popular, than early Lynch, and that while Twin Peaks is essentially representative of the style, techniques and concerns of early Lynch, Fire Walk with Me is the pivotal point in his career in which he shifts into a new project that is much more complex, difficult and rich. What Fire Walk with Me set in motion was still playing itself out in his last film, the self-indulgent, extravagant, maddeningly difficult and obscure, but breathtakingly brilliant and extremely exciting Inland Empire.

In these later tragedies, there is always redemption, especially for women. Perhaps one can question whether or not there is any redemption for Fred Madison in Lost Highway, but there plainly is for Diane Selwyn/Betty Elms/Rita (trust me, that’s another explanation that would take quite a bit of time) in Mulholland Dr., and especially for Nikki Grace in Inland Empire. The prototype for these uplifting sequences at the end of harrowing tragedies for heroines in later Lynch films is certainly the final sequence of Fire Walk with Me. After she is murdered by her father, her body wrapped in plastic and sent floating down the river, setting up the legendary opening sequence of Twin Peaks (“she’s dead — wrapped in plastic!”), Laura or some form of her appears sitting in a black evening gown in the Other Place (the Black Lodge/red room, or whatever it is). She is very elegantly made up and with a benevolent looking Agent Cooper standing behind her in a protective, reassuring pose. She seems dazed and confused, until startled by some flashing lights that are accompanied by the outstretched hand of what appears to be an angel (this resonates with the conversation she had earlier with Donna, and the ominous disappearance of a protecting angel overseeing a small group of children in a painting on her bedroom wall). The angel hovers above her, and she seems awed and fascinated, and increasingly engaged by the flashing lights that seem to emanate strangely from this hovering creature.

But is she really looking at a light-emanating angel? We look down on Laura from a slightly raised and slightly oblique angle as she rocks slowly back and forth, alternately laughing and weeping, with her mood steadily improving. Her eyes seemed transfixed on something ahead and slightly to the side of her, and the strangely flashing lights reflected in her face and in the background. The angel hovers in front of large red curtains typical of the red room, which immediately suggest theatricality.

I think most obvious reading of this scene is that what she’s looking at is not exactly an angel but in fact or also a television (there is a dynamic engagement in her affect that can’t really be responding to this static angel-figure) and what she’s watching is Twin Peaks, crying at her own tragedy and the grief of her friends and family, laughing at the absurdities and the eccentricities of her friends and neighbors, and probably validated by the impact that her murder had on her community. There isn’t just joy in her reactions, but great amusement and some raucous laughter. Whatever it is, it’s certainly the cream of the jest. I think it’s pretty clear that Fire Walk with Me ends where it began, with television. The closing credits scroll over a frozen close-up of Laura’s blissful face, as if the incoherent television snow of the opening credits is now filled up with her presence. The redemption here may not only be for Laura Palmer, but also for the Twin Peaks television series, and even for television itself.

Obviously Fire Walk with Me is an extremely dense and difficult film that, as I have argued, has been woefully misunderstood even by some extremely talented critics. It has to be read in the context of, and contrapuntally to, Twin Peaks, but the trap almost everyone fell into because the TV show was so good and so beloved was to completely miss Lynch’s really unsparing critique of his own work. So, as so often proves the case, I think conventional wisdom has it completely wrong: Twin Peaks is a great TV show, but it has significant limitations and defects, and is ultimately constrained by both its medium and its genre, whereas Fire Walk with Me is among the most painful, unpleasant and harrowing films I’ve ever seen, but also one of the best. Of course, to fully explain my appreciation for it would require a lengthy and detailed reading totally inappropriate for a blog posting. For those who are interested, it’s probably something I’m going to do one of these days. But for now at least I’ve done my best to answer the question the reader posed, and hopefully give people some reasons to either watch this film for the first time (although it’s certainly not for the squeamish), or reconsider it if they have failed to appreciate what it has to offer.