Arab American Writing and War, the AWP panel 2008

What better way to kick off the AWP conference than with talk of genocidal wars? (A mere ten minutes before, I saw the estimable Robert Bly trip a young woman's suitcase and shoot her a look that registered on the Richter scale.) Lawrence Joseph, Hayan Charara, Elmaz Abinader, Fady Joudah, Sinan Antoon and I all tried to approach this baggy monster of a topic one hydra head at a time.

Lawrence Joseph developed the critical lens that his poetry books (particularly Into It) illuminate creatively: that, to echo Paul Virilio, "in a state of permanent war, all poetry is war poetry." In a litany of historical dates and events, Joseph tried to get the audience up to speed on what history has looked like for Arabs and Arab-Americans; at the same time, he urged for us to see Arab-American poetry not as a reduction to such political history, but an assertion of the inner life of Arabs and Arab-Americans, as human beings. In a way, all of us struck that common chord.

Poet Hayan Charara brought poetry from his anthology, Inclined to Speak: Contemporary Arab American Poetry into the mix, as well as the ADC statement that "so much of what is known [about us] is wrong." And Khaled Mattawa's, that our poetic labors is to "render that image unrecognizable."

Philip Metres (can I speak about myself in the third person without looking like a jackass? probably not)...confessed feeling guilt after 9/11, argued that the Abu Ghraib photos themselves were an extension of the torture, and suggested that we can look to Arab American poetry as a counternarrative of what has transpired here and abroad:

From personal and familial anecdotes of life in war-torn nations in the Middle East, to declassified materials now available, Arab American poetry draws on a global repository of informational, cultural, and literary resources to illuminate, narrate, and give voice to Arab and Arab American experience. These works strengthen our historical memory so that, when the history of the moment is distilled to official sound bytes and images, we have an imaginative archive that obstinately refuses to efface what has happened.

Poet and memoirist Elmaz Abinader provided us with a miniature history of anthologies, journals, and websites organized around or highlighting Arab American cultural and literary production. Among them, the journals Al-Jadid, Banipal, and Mizna. (I'll post her links here).

Fady Joudah's impressionistic piece offered poetry as a transfiguration, as the complex voicing of our own complicity in power structures. As a Palestinian-American, and winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize for Earth in the Attic (2008), Joudah's formulation, "to be or not to be a victim or the descendent of victims," resonated with a complex power.

Finally, Iraqi-American poet and novelist Sinan Antoon underscored how war is a distant experience for Americans, and that the Iraq War and occupation (and the Gulf War and sanctions that preceded it in the 1990s) have been a dismantling of the cultural and political institutions of Iraq. Moreover, the new U.S. branded Iraq, for Antoon, has replicated the forms and discourses of Saddam's totalitarianism. He left us with a dizzying sense of the true losses of the war, not least of which has been Iraq's cultural patrimony and its collective memory (due to the destruction of official records and museum looting). Sobering stuff.

During the question-and-answer, someone asked whether any of us write about ice cream (and other non-political stuff). Apparently they haven't read much of what we've written. I turned to Fady: "only if it's olive oil ice cream."

Afterward, without Antoon, but with Harvey Hix, we repaired to a coffee shop, where we held forth on the various dignities and indignities. Larry Joseph was in rare form. Orientalism was tossed about like a hot potato--I suddenly worried that perhaps I had Orientalized myself. Obama came up, with pros and cons discussed. Adonis was pronounced better than Milosz. Much conversation over coffee and about coffee and cigarettes. Harvey Hix was treated to quite a show of Arab American poetical (inter)nationalism. Thanks to Hayan for sharing his photos (some of which I could never upload properly) and for all the work on the anthology and on the panel!

"Gitmo" and American Pop Culture

Yesterday, "On the Media" presented a story on how the Guantanamo Bay detention facilities (a.k.a. "Gitmo") has become a pop cultural touchstone, whose meanings continue to develop. I've already blogged on the anthology of poems by Guantanamo Bay prisoners, edited by Marc Falkoff--one of the cultural products discussed on the program. But there are a host of others, including a feature length film, a cameo in Michael Moore's latest agit-doc, memoirs, and a few songs.

Writing about this today, I am finding it hard to believe that there are still prisoners who have not been tried in a court of law, some six years after 9/11. It's hard to imagine that there isn't more outrage about indefinite detention. What will they say about us in the history books, when this chapter is written?

Here's Stephen Coffee's satirical Christian-fantasy of the Muslim detainee's conversion to Christianity in "Guantanamo":

The stars for my blanket
I lie here on the ground
The sun’s the only thing
Allowed to move around
I don’t cause no trouble
Don’t even make a sound
Could be years to go, Guantanamo
A few more years to go, Guantanamo

I fought for my country
I fought the infidel
I heard Allah calling
Like the ringing of a bell
But now I found Jesus
Right here in Christian Hell
He loves me this I know, Guantanamo
Jesus loves me this I know, Guantanamo

The blue Caribbean
It soothes me in my rage
Its tropical breezes
Find me in my cage
An endless vacation
To pay the sinner’s wage
Everybody sing Swing Low, Guantanamo
A few more years to go, Guantanamo
Everybody sing Swing Low

*Stephen R Coffee ©2004

And check out some recent poems of mine published in Coconut 11, part of a series called "Ibn Gitmo Flarf Stations." It's actually more about the culture of imperial domination that we saw in the photos of Abu Ghraib, but Abu Ghraib is "ibn gitmo,"--son of Gitmo, since apparently many of the procedures were transplanted from Gitmo. Only we didn't have the forensic evidence. Thank you, Joe Darby. Here's one from the "Ibn Gitmo Flarf Stations":

12.

So this is where you come to escape. He pointed
to my t-shirt while saying something in Arabic
sounding like "sling them" to the rottweiler
who had chewed through his leash. I smiled
at the dog. When I looked down, I found
Kathleen Turner on the other end of the leash,
smiling at me. People who go into Starbucks
do not see it's a quasi political show
of Sadomasochism that has nothing to do
with religion. I'm the centerpiece, you're
a mortice, I'm a pitbull off his leash.
All poets say: my legacy is latency.
A peculiar form of sadomasochistic sadness,
leather clad ashen and publicly.

*Philip Metres

"Books That Will Change the World" by Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit's article on "Books That Will Change the World" begins like this:

Hope is an orientation, a way of scanning the wall for cracks -- or building ladders -- rather than staring at its obdurate expanse. It's a world view, but one informed by experience and the knowledge that people have power; that the power people possess matters; that change has been made by populist movements and dedicated individuals in the past; and that it will be again.

Dissent in this country has become largely a culture of diagnosis rather than prescription, of describing what is wrong with them, rather than what is possible for us. But even in English, a robust minority tradition can be found. There are a handful of books that I think of as "the secret library of hope." None of them deny the awful things going on, but they approach them as if the future is still open to intervention rather than an inevitability. In describing how the world actually gets changed, they give us the tools to change it again.

Barack Obama and Hope

There is nothing false about hope. Yes, I can (and will) be in eternal opposition to our lamentable sadly bipartisan foreign policies in the Middle East (particularly in Israel/Palestine), and fear that even a Barack Obama presidency won't change enough.

But there is an elixir to hope, there is a beauty to believing that we are not destined to be who we have been (our shadow selves) or act the way it seems we are destined to act (our shadow selves). May there be some hope that greases some gears of change, and hope that mucks up the gears that have ground down the hopes of peoples at home and throughout the world.

Thanks to Chris Kempf for sending this along.

Mark Halperin's Falling Through the Music

Poet Mark Halperin's recent book, Falling Through the Music, brought me back in touch with a kind of subtle music that so much contemporary poetry and poet readers no longer have the ear for; it is something like listening to bees after hearing Fugazi--you sense some ringing in your ear, but you're not sure if it's in your head or out there in the field. Halperin has that sort of vocal touch. I felt similarly about his Russia poems, which have the generosity and grace of a man who could witness to lives that are often tragic, but without the hysteria and depression that I felt I would constantly careen toward as a result of such encounters.

These are two poems that didn't make the cut, about his encounters with Russia.

MURMURS

I sit where the guest sits when language turns suddenly
opaque. It’s me in the uncoupled car left
in the station as the train fades, me adrift
on voluble liquids, hushes—me at sea.

When distractions like meaning vanish, maybe you hear
murmurs the way doctors hear valves
rattle in the rush of heart’s blood, the octaves
masked off or lying below speech and tears:

Tanya’s unhappiness with Sergei, the extended complaint
that's replaced a life, places to dream about
and the despair that wears through then wears out
feeling. Without a segue, I’m in role, in accent.

Back on track, I’m in the harboring circle
of friends, pulling shoes on, doing a button,
ready for the long walk to the metro. When
will you be back? they ask. Don’t forget to call.


IN CHEKHOV

In Chekhov, everyone’s unhappy—
this one loves that one who loves
someone else. The doctor, a fixture
of the plays, is always old as Chekhov,
who died young, must have felt himself
to be. And the aging writer, who also
resembles Chekhov, chases a girl

he will abandon soon and is stuck
with the habit of drawing out small
note-books every so often, wanting
the youth he traded for fame. Moscow,
say the sisters, is where we could be
happy, knowing they will never
get there, too beautiful for happiness,

with feelings too keen, dreams,
like their upswept hair, too outdated—
their long dresses part of history.
Work, says one hero, love says another.
No one can tell you if happiness
is anything but the opposite of
irony or being unprotected.

In his final poem to Falling Through the Music, we feel Halperin's equanimity as a kind of bracing grace:

Lightness

Isn't reading like sleep, another place
to leave yourself? The way air bears you--it's
as if you'd thrown the blankets back for a taste
of bracing cold. Put the book down,
your secret life, each sober calculation.
The wind's alive. Air's erasing the horizon.

In his foreword to his Greatest Hits (2001), Halperin writes:

If you don't write the poems you're given, you wouldn't be given any poems--I don't remember who deserves credit for that, but I agree. I try to write my poems and not someone else's, those I struggle over as much as those that fall to me. I continue to be amazed when they arrive.

It's typical of Halperin's modesty and goodwill that he immediately asserts that such words are not his own; whoever authored them, Halperin midwifes them again, and offers us that simplest of the grand permissions of art: that all that is asked of us is to write the poems that we are meant to write.

I've been thinking about how, perhaps, I am just part of the humus of poetry--that great organic layer of literary soil that may feed some future poet. My books will go out of print, my poems will slip from the anthologies (if indeed they ever make it), my name will be lost to all but my descendants. But maybe I've nurtured some writers, and fed some readers, who will do their own poems and continue this strange, gratifying, and maybe utterly useless art.

"Secrets and Lies"/The Poetry Reading

At long last, here are the photos from the Secrets & Lies reading (Winter 2006) at John Carroll University, organized by the poets from my Advanced Creative Writing Workshop and photographed by Barbie Lewis. Thanks for your work, poets. In reverse order of their actual appearance:

Chris Kempf, America and love after 9/11

Sam Flores, Ave Atque Vale! the Filipino Catullus

Billy Miller, hang gliding into the future

Moria Torrington, talking love trouble and her brother

Anthony Tarescavage, ode-ing his navel and a relationship gone sour

Sean McClure, singing the praises of beer

Rhiannon Lathy, elegies to her mother and to Iraq

Dan O'Malley, regaling us with Irish family stories

Matt Galardo, the mistakes he's made

Barbie Lewis, talking back to Plath

Gregg Stovicek, his journey to God

Bethany Bowers, telling her mother's journey

Robert Kumazec ("The Falcon"), being Slovene and not apologizing

Brought to you by this Target shopping cart

Philip Metres, wishing you well

Tony Tost's "World Jelly"/Guided by Guided by Voices

Tony Tost's chapbook, World Jelly (effing press 2005), came on the heels of his prizewinning first book, Invisible Bride, and represented something of a poetic departure. Yet it's clear that this fellow Guided by Voices fan was trying to bring into poetry something that he'd admired in music--GBV frontman Robert Pollard's dizzying employment of collage and pastiche in the rock song. A one-time bassist himself for the band Dora Maar (according to his biography), Tost is "doing the collapse" (an aptly titled album by GBV), poetry style--that is, trying to figure out a way to have art methods recycle into something that he might call his own.
Apparently generated and inspired in part by the GBV Song Title Generator (the title "World Jelly" is clearly part of that)--think here of the wonderful titles by GBV: "The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory," "Hardcore UFO's," "Tractor Rape Chain," "The Official Ironman Rally Song," etc. But it also uses Pollard's own techniques, and thus the book takes a karate-chop to language and syntax, and leaves us often with beautiful shards, as in

Resist the successful statement
almost intelligently
a nail in the wall
there hang the bearings

So that is what I do

Riders finding joy in the sunlight
on the face of the earth

Attention is
the animal behind
the immediate

Asshole serpent
write this down

The book is fundamentally concerned with the desire to fend off singular meaning (alluding to Stevens), to disrupt the natural desire of the lyric "I" to control and master the field of the poem. In this way, World Jelly feels quite at home amongst the post-avant poetries of our time. The leitmotif of the book, shown in the quote above, is the "animal," which appears in most of the poems, and should be considered as the "anti-I," that physical spirit-being outside of human language, and so often entrapped by its human deployers. The animal, then, as the opposite of lyric, but that upon which the lyric depends.

Now, as a GBV fan myself, I've always wanted to bring Pollardian modes of collage-meets-pop into poetry. And Pollard himself has toyed with lyrics as poetry. But his genius, I think, is how he works to displace the egocentrism of the rock star, the front man as the embodiment and cynosure of our eyes ("I"'s). In the inside album art to one of GBV's albums, Pollard's body is shown straddling a fence, but his head is cut off. On the opposite side of the fold, there are hundreds of faces captured in bubbles, floating up. It is a visual pun--they are bubbles that can "pop"--but more importantly, they give a sense of Pollard's own aesthetics of multivocality and pastiche. In any given song (not to mention album), you can hear the ghosts of the history of rock--the Who, Genesis, the Kinks, the Beatles, etc.

Tost's book is engagingly weird, and the more I read it, the more I like it. In that way, it's like my first listenings to Bee Thousand, the genius record by GBV of 1994. Though it is not elegaic in the way that Pollard has perfected--a poetry that is disjointed and yet wrestles with fundamental psychic struggles, World Jelly certainly brings poetry closer to the pop gravitas of Pollard. For this, a salty salute to you, Tony Tost. And thanks, Scott Pierce, for bringin' it out.

Ralph DiGia, Thank You and Peace

Ralph DiGia, a dimunitive man with a great soul, one of the "few small candles" who spent his whole life trying to oppose the war machine, died this weekend in New York. (I was just a few miles away, ignorant of his fate, hobnobbing with writers in Manhattan at the AWP conference.) Here's the first obit:

Ralph DiGia, lifelong war resister and pacifist died this afternoon in New York City. Ralph had a bad fall a couple of weeks ago, broke his hip, and has had a series of serious health problems following his admission to St. Vincent's Hospital.

Ralph, 93, has been the heart and soul of War Resisters League since he came on staff shortly after the end of WWII and his release from federal prison, where he had served a term for refusing service as a conscientious objector.

An associate of A. J. Muste, Bayard Rustin, Dave Dellinger, Barbara Deming, and many others, Ralph held key posts over the years with Liberation magazine as well as being on the staffof the War Resisters League. While Ralph was not a public speaker or a writer, he played a key a role within the radical pacifist movement, and was central to many of the major antiwar actions of the past six decades.

Ralph was deeply loved by the movement, especially by those at his political home, the War Resisters League. He is survived by his wife, Karin DiGia, his children, and his two brothers.

I had the opportunity to meet and interview him at the War Resisters League a few years ago, while I was doing research for my book, Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront, Since 1941. Here's that interview.

"The Strangulation of Gaza" article in The Nation

This was sent to me by Deema Shehabi, an Arab-American poet. Thanks, Deema. So much for the end of the Gaza occupation.

The Strangulation of Gaza
by SAREE MAKDISI
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080218/makdisi
[posted online on February 1, 2008]

The people of Gaza were able to enjoy a few days of freedom last week, after demolition charges brought down the iron wall separating the impoverished Palestinian territory from Egypt, allowing hundreds of thousands to burst out of the virtual prison into which Gaza has been transformed over the past few years--the terminal stage of four decades of Israeli occupation--and to shop for desperately needed supplies in Egyptian border towns.

Gaza 's doors are slowly closing again, however. Under mounting pressure from the United States and Israel , Egypt has dispatched additional border guards armed with water cannons and electric cattle prods to try to regain control. It has already cut off the flow of supplies crossing the Suez Canal to its own border towns. For now, in effect, Suez is the new border: even if Palestinians could get out of Gaza in search of new supplies, they would have to cross the desolate expanses of the Sinai Desert and cross the canal, on the other side of which they would find the regular Egyptian army (barred from most of Sinai as a condition of the 1979 Camp David treaty with Israel) waiting for them.

Now that Gaza 's fleeting taste of freedom is beginning to fade, the grim reality facing the territory's 1.5 million people is once again looming large. "After feeling imprisoned for so long, it has been a psychological relief for Gazans to know that there is a way out," said John Ging, the local director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). "But it does not resolve their crisis by any stretch of the imagination."

Indeed, all the frenzied shopping in Egyptian border towns brought into Gaza a mere fraction of the food that UN and other relief agencies have been blocked by Israel from delivering to the people who depend on them for their very survival. As long as the border with Egypt is even partially open, Israel refuses to open its own borders with Gaza to anything other than the bare minimum of industrial fuel to keep the territory's one power plant operating at a subsistence level, and a few trucks of other supplies a day.

UNRWA has almost depleted the stocks of emergency food aid it had previously built up in Gaza . Only thirty-two truckloads of goods have been allowed to enter Gaza since Israel imposed its total closure on January 18; 250 trucks were entering every day before last June, and even that was insufficient to meet the population's needs.
On January 30 UNRWA warned that unless something changes, the daily ration that it will distribute on the 31st to 860,000 destitute refugees in Gaza will lack a protein component: the canned meat that is the only source of protein in the food parcels--which even under the best of circumstances contributes less than two-thirds of minimum daily nourishment--is being held up by Israel, and the stock of those cans inside Gaza has been exhausted. The World Food Program, which feeds another 340,000 people in Gaza , has brought in nine trucks of food aid in the past two weeks; in the seven months before that, it had been bringing in fifteen trucks a day.

Gazans have been ground into poverty by years of methodical Israeli restrictions and closures; 80 percent of the population now depends on food aid for day-to-day subsistence. With the aid, they were receiving "enough to survive, not to live," as the International Red Cross put it. Without it, they will die.

All this is supposed to be in response to Palestinian militant groups' firing of crude homemade rockets into Israel , which rarely cause any actual damage. There can be no excuse for firing rockets at civilian targets, but Israel was squeezing Gaza long before the first of those primitive projectiles was cobbled together. The first fatal rocket attack took place four years ago; Israel has been occupying Gaza for four decades.

The current squeeze on Gaza began in 1991. It was tightened with the institutionalization of the Israeli occupation enabled by the Oslo Accords of 1993. It was tightened further with the intensification of the occupation in response to the second intifada in 2000. It was tightened further still when Israel redeployed its settlers and troops from inside Gaza in 2005 and transformed the territory into what John Dugard, the UN's special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied territories, referred to as a prison, the key to which, Dugard said, Israel had "thrown away." It was tightened to the point of strangulation following the Hamas electoral victory in 2006, when Israel began restricting supplies of food and other resources into Gaza . It was tightened beyond the point of strangulation following the deposition of the Hamas-led government in June 2007. And now this.

When Israel limited commercial shipments of food--but not humanitarian relief--into Gaza in 2006, a senior government adviser, Dov Weisglass, explained that "the idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet but not to make them die of hunger."
Israel 's "diet" was taking its toll even before last week. The World Food Program warned last November that less than half of Gaza 's food-import needs were being met. Basics including wheat grain, vegetable oil, dairy products and baby milk were in short supply. Few families can afford meat. Anemia rates rocketed to almost 80 percent. UNRWA noted at about the same time that "we are seeing evidence of the stunting of children, their growth is slowing, because our ration is only 61 percent of what people should have and that has to be supplemented."

By further restricting the supply of food to an already malnourished population, Israel has clearly decided to take its "diet" a step further. If the people of Gaza remain cut off from the food aid on which their survival now depends, they will face starvation.

They are now essentially out of food; the water system is faltering (almost half the population now lacks access to safe water supplies); the sewage system has broken down and is discharging raw waste into streets and the sea; the power supply is intermittent at best; hospitals lack heat and spare parts for diagnostic machines, ventilators, incubators; dozens of lifesaving medicines are no longer available. Slowly but surely, Gaza is dying.

Patients are dying unnecessarily: cancer patients cut off from chemotherapy regimens, kidney patients cut off from dialysis treatments, premature babies cut off from blood-clotting medications. In the past few weeks, many more Palestinian parents have watched the lives of their sick children ebb slowly, quietly and (as far as the global media are concerned) invisibly away in Gaza's besieged hospitals than Israelis have been hurt--let alone actually killed--by the erratic firing of primitive homemade rockets from Gaza, about which we have heard so much. (According to the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem, these rockets have killed thirteen Israelis in the past four years, while Israeli forces have killed more than 1,000 Palestinians in the occupied territories in the past two years alone, almost half of them civilians, including some 200 children.)

Israel 's squeeze is expressly intended to punish the entire population for the firing of those rockets by militants, which ordinary civilians are powerless to stop. "We will not allow them to lead a pleasant life," said Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert when Israel cut off fuel supplies on January 18, thereby plunging Gaza into darkness. "As far as I am concerned, all of Gaza 's residents can walk and have no fuel for their cars."

Olmert's views and, more important, his policies were reaffirmed and given the legal sanction of Israel 's High Court. In what human rights organizations referred to as a "devastating" decision, on January 30 the court ruled in favor of the government's plan to further restrict supplies of fuel and electricity to Gaza . "The decision means that Israel may deliberately deprive civilians in Gaza of fuel and electricity supplies," pointed out Sari Bashi, of the Gisha human rights organization in Israel . "During wartime, the civilian population is the first and central victim of the fighting, even when efforts are made to minimize the damage," the court said. In other words, harm to the civilian population is an inevitable effect of war and therefore legally permissible.

That may be the view of Israel 's highest legal authority, but it is not how the matter is viewed by international law, which strictly regulates the way civilian populations are to be treated in time of war. "The parties to a conflict must at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants in order to spare the civilian population and civilian property," the International Red Cross points out, invoking the Geneva Conventions and other founding documents of international humanitarian law. "Neither the civilian population as a whole nor individual civilians may be attacked."

Moreover, no matter what Israel 's High Court says, what is happening in Gaza is not a war in the conventional sense: Gaza is not a state at war with the state of Israel . It is a territory militarily occupied by Israel . Even after its 2005 redeployment, Israel did not release its hold on Gaza ; it continues to control all access to the territory, as well as its airspace, territorial waters and even its population registry. Over and above all the routine prohibitions on attacks on the civilian population and other forms of collective punishment that hold true in case of war, in other words, international law also holds Israel responsible for the welfare of the Gaza population. Article 55 of the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949) specifically demands, for example, that, "to the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population; it should, in particular, bring in the necessary foodstuffs, medical stores and other articles if the resources of the occupied territory are inadequate."

Israel's methodical actions make it clear that it is systematically grinding down and now actually starving people for whose welfare it is legally accountable simply because it regards Gaza's 1.5 million men, women and children as a surplus population it would, quite simply, like to get rid of one way or the other: a sentiment made quite clear when Israel's chief Ashkenazi rabbi proposed, shortly after the current crisis began, that the entire Palestinian population of Gaza should just be removed and transferred to the Egyptian desert. "They will have a nice country, and we shall have our country and we shall live in peace," he said, without eliciting even a murmur of protest in Israel .

The overwhelming majority of Gazans are refugees or the descendants of refugees who were expelled from their homes when Palestine was destroyed and Israel was created in 1948. Like all Palestinian refugees, those of Gaza have a moral and legal right to return to the homeland from which they were expelled. Israel blocks their return for the same reason it expelled them in the first place, because their presence would undermine its already tenuous claim to Jewishness (this is the nature of the so-called "demographic problem" about which Israeli politicians openly complain). As long as the refugees live, what Israel regards as the mortal threat of their right of return lives on. But if they would somehow just go away...

" Gaza is on the threshold of becoming the first territory to be intentionally reduced to a state of abject destitution, with the knowledge, acquiescence and--some would say--encouragement of the international community," the commissioner-general of UNRWA warned recently.

The question now is whether the world will simply sit and watch, now that this unprecedented threshold is actually being crossed.
Having taken matters into their hands and destroyed the wall cutting them off from the outside world, it is most unlikely that the people of Gaza will simply submit to that fate. A hermetic closure ultimately depends not merely on Israel 's whims but on Egypt 's willingness--or ability--to cut off the Palestinians of Gaza and watch them starve. For all the US and Israeli pressure on Egypt, and for all the steps Egypt is now taking, it seems most unlikely that it would let things go that far. Not intervening to save fellow Arabs from the Israeli occupation is one thing; actually participating in their repression is quite another. The Egyptian government would have to answer not only to the people of Palestine but to its own people, and indeed to all Arabs.

Working together, Hamas and the people of Gaza have forced Egypt 's hand and made much more visible than ever before the role it had been playing all along in the Israeli occupation and strangulation of Gaza ; now that its role in assisting Israel has been revealed, it will be difficult for Egypt to go back to the status quo. Gazans have thrown Israel 's plans into disarray, because Israel 's leaders could do little more than watch with pursed lips as the people of Gaza burst out of their prison. And they have placed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and the government of Ramallah in a corner: they will have to choose between defending their people's rights and needs or confirming once and for all--as indeed they are doing--that the PA is there to serve Israel 's interests, not those of the Palestinians. In which case they too will one day be called to account.

Saree Makdisi, professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA, is the author of Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation (Norton).

The Famous Meta-Free-Phor-All on the Colbert Report of 2007