MANY parts of Lebanon were bombed heavily by Israeli warplanes on June 4, 1982. Two days later the Israeli army entered Lebanon through the country’s southern border. Menachem Begin was prime minister, Ariel Sharon his minister of defence.

The immediate reason for the invasion was an attempted assassination in London of the Israeli ambassador, but then, as now, the blame was placed by Begin and Sharon on the “terrorist organization” of the PLO, whose forces in South Lebanon had actually observed a ceasefire for about one full year before the invasion.

A few days later, on June 13, Beirut was under Israeli military siege, even though, as the campaign began, Israeli government spokesmen had cited the Awali River, thirty five kilometers north of the border, as their goal. Later, it was to emerge without equivocation that Sharon was trying to kill Yasser Arafat, by bombing everything around the defiant Palestinian leader. Accompanying the siege was a blockade of humanitarian aid, the cutting off of water and electricity, and a sustained aerial bombing campaign that destroyed hundreds of Beirut buildings and, by the end of the siege in late August, had killed 18,000 Palestinians and Lebanese, most of them civilians.

Lebanon had been wracked with a terrible civil war since the spring of 1975 and, although Israel had only once sent its army into Lebanon before 1982, had been sought out as an ally by the Christian right-wing militias early on. With a stronghold in East Beirut, these militias cooperated with Sharon’s forces right through the siege, which ended after a horrendous day of indiscriminate bombing on August 12, and of course the massacres of Sabra and Shatila.

Sharon’s main ally was Bashir Gemayel, the head of the Phalanges party, who was elected Lebanon’s president by the parliament on August 23. Gemayel hated the Palestinians who had unwisely entered the civil war on the side of the National Movement, a loose coalition of left-wing and Arab nationalist parties that included Amal, a forerunner of today’s Hizbollah Shi’ite movement that was to play the major role in driving out the Israelis in May 2000.

Faced with the prospect of direct Israeli vassalage after Sharon’s army had in effect brought about his election, Gemayel seems to have demurred. He was assassinated on September 14. Two days later the camp massacres began inside a security cordon provided by the Israeli army so that Bashir’s vengeful fellow-Christian extremists could do their hideous work unopposed and undistracted.

Under UN and of course US supervision, French troops had entered Beirut on August 21. They were to be joined by US and other European forces a little later, although PLO fighters began their evacuation from Lebanon on August 21. By September 1, that evacuation was over, and Arafat plus a small band of advisers and soldiers were lodged in Tunis. Meanwhile the Lebanese civil war continued until about 1990, when a concordat was fashioned together in Taif, more or less restoring the old confessional system which remains in place today. In mid-1994, Arafat - still head of the PLO — and some of those same advisers and soldiers were able to enter Gaza as part of the so-called Oslo agreements.

Earlier this year Sharon was quoted as regretting his failure to kill Arafat in Beirut. Not for want of trying though, since dozens of hiding places and headquarters were smashed into rubble with great loss of life. 1982 hardened Arabs, I think, to the notion that not only would Israel use advanced technology (planes, missiles, tanks, and helicopters) to attack civilians indiscriminately, but that neither the US nor the other Arabs would do anything at all to stop the practice even if meant targeting leaders and capital cities.

Thus ended the first full-scale contemporary attempt at military regime change by one sovereign country against another in the Middle East. I bring it up as a messy backdrop to what is occurring now. Sharon is now Israel’s prime minister, his armies and propaganda machine once again surrounding and dehumanizing Arafat and the Palestinians as “terrorists.”

It is worth recalling that the word “terrorist” began to be employed systematically by Israel to describe any Palestinian act of resistance beginning in the mid-1970s. That has been the rule ever since, especially during the first Intifada of 1987-93, eliminating the distinction between resistance and pure terror and effectively depoliticizing the reasons for armed struggle.

During the 1950s and 1960s Ariel Sharon earned his spurs, so to speak, by heading the infamous Unit 101, which killed Arab civilians and razed their houses with the approval of Ben-Gurion. He was in charge of the pacification of Gaza in 1970-71. None of this, including the 1982 campaign, ever resulted in getting rid of the Palestinian people, or in changing the map or the regime enough by military means to ensure a total Israeli victory.

The main difference between 1982 and 2002 is that the Palestinians now being victimized and besieged are in Palestinian territories that were occupied in 1967 and where they have remained despite the ravages of the occupation, the destruction of the economy, and of the whole civilian infrastructure of collective life. The main similarity is of course the disproportional means used to do it, that is, the hundreds of tanks and bulldozers used to enter towns and villages like Jenin or refugee camps like Jenin’s and Deheisheh, to kill, vandalize, prevent ambulances and first-aid workers from helping, cutting off water and electricity, etc.

All with the support of the US whose president actually went as far as calling Sharon a man of peace during the worst rampages of March and April this year. It is significant how Sharon’s intention went far beyond “rooting out terror” that his soldiers destroyed every computer and then carried off the files and hard drives from the Central Bureau of Statistics, the Ministry of Education, of Finance, of Health, cultural centres, vandalizing officers and libraries, all as a way of reducing Palestinian collective life to a pre-modern level.

I don’t want to repeat my criticisms of Arafat’s tactics or the failures of his deplorable regime during the Oslo negotiations and thereafter. I have done so at length here and elsewhere. Besides, as I write the man is quite literally hanging on to life by his teeth; his crumbling quarters in Ramallah are also still besieged while Sharon does everything possible to injure him short of actually having him killed.

What concerns me is the whole idea of regime change as an attractive prospect for individuals, ideologies and institutions that are asymmetrically more powerful than their adversaries. What kind of thinking makes it relatively easy to conceive of great military power as licensing political and social change on a scale not imagined before, and to do so with little concern for the damage on a vast scale that such change necessarily entails?

And how do the prospects of not incurring much risk of casualties for one’s own side stimulate more and still more fantasies about surgical strikes, clean war, high technology battlefields, changing the entire map, creating democracy and the like, all of it giving rise to ideas of omnipotence, wiping the slate clean, and being in ultimate control of what matters to “our” side?

During the current American campaign for regime change in Iraq, it is the people of Iraq, the vast majority of whom have paid a terrible price in poverty, malnutrition and illness as a result of ten years of sanctions, who have dropped out of sight. This is completely in keeping with US Middle East policy built as it is on two mighty pillars, the security of Israel and plentiful supplies of inexpensive oil.

The complex mosaic of traditions, religions, cultures, ethnicities, and histories that make up the Arab world — especially in Iraq — despite the existence of nation-states with sullenly despotic rulers, are lost to US and Israeli strategic planners. With a five thousand year old history, Iraq is mainly now thought of as either a “threat” to its neighbours which, in its currently weakened and besieged condition, is rank nonsense, or as a “threat” to the freedom and security of the United States, which is more nonsense. I am not going even to bother here to add my condemnations of Saddam Hussein as a dreadful person: I shall take it for granted that he certainly deserves by almost every standard to be ousted and punished. Worst of all, he is a threat to his own people.

Yet since the period before the first Gulf War, the image of Iraq as a large, prosperous and diverse Arab country has disappeared; the image that has circulated both in media and policy discourse is of a desert land peopled by brutal gangs headed by Saddam. That Iraq’s debasement now has, for example, nearly ruined the Arab book publishing industry given that Iraq provided the largest number of readers in the Arab world, that it was one of the few Arab countries with so large an educated and competent professional middle-class, that it has oil, water and fertile land, that it has always been the cultural centre of the Arab world (the Abbasid empire with its great literature, philosophy, architecture, science and medicine was an Iraqi contribution that is still the basis for Arab culture), that to other Arabs the bleeding wound of Iraqi suffering has, like the Palestinian calvary, been a source of continuing sorrow for Arabs and Muslims alike - all this is literally never mentioned.

Its vast oil reserves, however, are and, as the argument goes, if “we” took them away from Saddam and got hold of them we won’t be so dependent on Saudi oil. That too is rarely cited as a factor in the various debates racking the US Congress and the media. — Copyright 2002, Edward W. Said

To be continued

AMERICAN political system offers a vast multitude of opportunities for political engagement and participation, such as school leadership teams, community boards, precinct committees, city councils, state assemblies, state senates and a large variety of other local, state and federal leadership positions through general elections.

Without exception, all elected local, state, and national politicians, such as mayors, governors, and the presidents bring their own teams of friends and professionals for their term in office. They, in turn, bring their own people as consultants and advisers. This political patronage costs the American taxpayers a huge fortune each year.

The current estimate of Muslim-American population ranges from 6 million to 7.2 million, about 2.5-3 per cent of the total American population. Given the fact that thousands of local, state and federal public offices are available each year, about 700 Muslim-Americans ran for these offices in the 2001 general election; however, only 152 were elected.

With only a handful of exceptions in some Muslim-dominated communities — for instance, Detroit, Michigan, and Patterson, New Jersey — Muslims do not hold very many high political offices across the nation. In the history of the United States, no Muslim has ever been elected a member of Congress or Senate.

This dismal political representation is a glaring testimony to the fact that the Muslim-American population is roughly equal to the total Jewish population of the United States. While Jews have over-representation in every facet of the American government, political and economic system, Muslims are conspicuously invisible in all these crucial arenas.

In a recent political discussion with about 12 educated, voting-age Muslim-Americans in our community, it was found that none of them was a registered voter. Despite all the emphasis on elections and voting, a great majority of Muslim-Americans do not vote because they do not see any value in the process. Rather, they perceive it as a waste of time, money and other precious resources. They are not cognizant that politics and an individual’s finances are not only mutually exclusive but inevitably intertwined.

It is no wonder that most wealthy and prominent American families raise their offsprings to be politicians, because they view political leadership 1) the highest form of public service 2) to ensure and reinforce their family’s ruling status, and 3) to guard against the unwanted constituencies’ entry into local and national policymaking and decision-making processes. The Kennedys, the Rockefellers, the Gores and the Bushes instantly come to mind as recent examples.

If Muslims in general have the tendency of not participating in the electoral process, the general American public is also not supportive of Muslims’ entry into the political leadership roles. The Republican or Democratic parties reflect the public’s attitude by generally not endorsing a Muslim candidate for any visible public office such as US Senate or Congress.

It is no secret to any American that election campaigns cost a fortune, and without proper financing, it is almost impossible for a candidate to win any election.

So, Jews and other ethnic and religious groups heavily finance their candidates. American Jewry, in particular, spends billions of dollars each year to support their candidates across the nation.

Not only that, they spend hundreds of millions of dollars to oust those elected officials who do not cater to their political and economic interests. One only has to look at the recent re-election bid of Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga). Her stance against Israel has infuriated the American Jewry, who poured money and other resources in an all out effort to oust her. Consequently, she was badly trounced in the November Democratic primary elections.

On the contrary, most politically active Muslims tend to provide only lip-service to their candidates. Recently, a Muslim candidate for the New York State Assembly said in a New York City campaign meeting that he visited many Muslim communities across the nation, and raised only $3,000 out of his $150,000 projected campaign budget. He also mentioned that a Jewish group had given him a $25,000 campaign donation. One only wonders whose political and economic interests this candidate will serve when the Muslim and Jewish interests collide in the state legislature.

Muslims’ non-political behaviour combined with the general American public’s resistance to Muslim political leadership have far reaching implications for the Muslims across the nation. Alan Havesi, for example, a democratic contender for the mayor of New York City in 2001, was so convinced about the non-impact of Muslim opinion that when a prominent umbrella group of Muslim organizations invited him to discuss his plan for the city’s Muslim population, he did not even bother to acknowledge the invitation let alone attending the session.

A careful analysis of Census 2000 shows that there are about 240,000-300,000 Muslims in New York City alone. One should also remember that mayor Dinkins won the 1989 election by just 47,080 votes — a 2.6 per cent margin, becoming the city’s first African-American mayor. Four years later, in 1993, mayor Giulliani defeated Dinkins — by 53,581 votes, a 2.9 per cent margin. In other words, each Muslim vote counts.

After September 11, 2001, the general American public is ever more suspicious of the Muslim-Americans. This unfortunate situation has been exacerbated by the fact that some anti-Muslim groups are waging a sustained smear campaign in the American media to discredit Muslims, their businesses and organizations.

This Islamophobic campaign can be explained in the light of some reports in the main stream American media that indicate groups such as the American Jewish Committee have warned that “the increasingly visible American Muslim lobby posed a challenge to US-Israel relations.”

The Middle East Forum’s Daniel Pipes, one of the foremost proponents of the current smear campaign goes so far as to recommend “vigilant application of social and political pressure to ensure that Islam is not accorded special status of any kind in this country.” The “special status” Pipes refers to includes ordinary religious accommodations for Muslims in the workplace and “inclusion of Muslims in affirmative-action plans.”

While many local and state governments as well as federal government are putting together anti-terrorism commissions and committees, Muslims are being deliberately excluded from those panels, conveying an obvious message to the public that Muslims are not worthwhile partners in America’s war on terrorism and hence a justification for their exclusion.

Their concerted venomous propaganda will definitely further arouse more anti-Islam and anti-Muslim sentiments in the general public because there are not very many effective voices to counter their sustained and loud but false propaganda.

By choosing not to actively participate in the politics and elections has serious repercussions for the Muslim-Americans. A great many local, state and federal level politicians are not willing to vigorously voice Muslim causes, issues and concerns, knowing full well that most Muslims will not strongly back them with their votes or financial contributions.

The writer is the executive director of New York City-based American Educational Research Institute.

e-mail: aeri_usa@hotmail.com.