Tehran: New Israeli spy thriller is Orientalist brainwashing

Middle East Eye

On 24 June, Haaretz ran the exuberant headline: “New Israeli Spy Thriller ‘Tehran’ Is Even Better Than ‘Fauda’” - the wildly popular Netflix show that gets off on Palestinian suffering while pretending not to.

The article’s author swears that the three episodes of Tehran that she viewed “reveal a television series that is outstanding, polished and very effective by American criteria”, and that “when you watch it you will curse the screen and the broadcasting corporation, because there’s no option for binge watching”.

The series is furthermore “beautifully filmed in Athens, which suddenly looks like the capital of Iran as we imagine it” - calling to mind the sensational Orientalism of like-minded productions such as Homeland, the Beirut portions of which were filmed in Tel Aviv. 

Apple TV has purchased the new show and it is, well, pretty much exactly what you would expect from an Israeli TV show called Tehran. The storyline of the first season goes something like this: a young Mossad operative named Tamar Rabinyan, who is Iranian by birth, returns to her homeland as part of a plot to hack into Iran’s air defence system and take control of its radar so that Israel can bomb a nuclear reactor. . . .

According to Moshe Zonder, a co-creator of Tehran who also co-wrote Fauda, the new series “presents a different, pleasant side of Iran, which as far as I know, no western series has ever shown”. It’s anyone’s guess, of course, how a show about Israeli spies running around the Iranian capital constitutes presenting a pleasant side of the country.

But Zonder is sure of it, and also hopes that the series “will do something to help with the total disconnect between Israelis and Iranians”. Indeed, just imagine if the Islamic Republic were to produce a series called Tel Aviv about Iranian spies trying to blow up Israel: there’d be all sorts of de-disconnecting! READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Israel Is an Army With a Country Attached

Jacobin

A week into Israel’s summer 2006 assault on Lebanon — which killed 1,200 people, mainly civilians — Harvard Law School’s resident psychopath Alan Dershowitz surfaced on the pages of the Wall Street Journal with his latest upbeat intervention on behalf of Israeli war crimes.

The article, titled “Arithmetic of Pain,” posited the need for a “reassessment of the laws of war” in light of what Dershowitz determined to be an increasingly blurred distinction between combatants and civilians. Unfurling his concept of a “continuum of ‘civilianality,’” he explained:

"Near the most civilian end of this continuum are the pure innocents — babies, hostages and others completely uninvolved; at the more combatant end are civilians who willingly harbor terrorists, provide material resources and serve as human shields; in the middle are those who support the terrorists politically, or spiritually."

The upshot: even purely innocent Lebanese babies were merely “near” the civilian-ish end of the continuum, while Israel was entirely exempt from the whole scheme because it is a “democracy.”

As it happens, however, it is Israel that is suffering from a dearth of “civilianality” — something that is made painfully clear in a new book, An Army Like No Other: How the Israel Defense Forces Made a Nation, by Haim Bresheeth-Zabner. Recalling Prussian minister Friedrich von Schrötter’s characterization of Prussia as “not a country with an army, but an army with a country,” Bresheeth-Zabner contends that this is “even more apt regarding the relationship between Israel and the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces].”

The process was facilitated by Zionism’s embrace of the “mythical biblical Jew” and invention of an “unambiguous trait of Jewish militarism,” thanks to which two millennia of history were excised from the equation and the “new Jew became the imagined heir of genocidal Joshua, Bar Kochba, and Judas Maccabeus — a rogues gallery of militarized heroes who formed the foundation for the conquest of Palestine.”

And as the conquest of Palestine proceeds apace — with the army-with-a-state continuing its traditions of ethnic cleansing, land theft, and massacres to this day — brutal militarism remains the unifying national element. Alongside near-universal conscription is the near-universal approval among Israeli Jews for IDF-inflicted slaughter. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

Against the Loveless World: A Palestinian tale of exile and resistance

Middle East Eye

When Nahr, the thirty-something Palestinian protagonist of Susan Abulhawa’s new novel Against the Loveless World, is tried in an Israeli court, the trial is conducted entirely in Hebrew; Nahr doesn’t find out until she’s in jail what the nature of her alleged crime is.

As the trial takes place near the end of the book, the reader is already sufficiently acquainted with Nahr’s individualistic personality - and the pleasure she derives in throwing Israelis in particular for a loop by behaving in unconventional fashion - that her comportment in the courtroom doesn’t come as a great shock. She launches into a medley of Arabic songs, hoping to make her husband Bilal - himself a frequent prisoner of Israel and a model of defiance - proud, wherever he is:

"I started with ‘Yumma Mweil elHawa,’ to set the mood. The judge admonished me. I waited a while, then sang every Abdel Halim Hafez song I could think of. ‘El Hawa Hawaya’ followed by my favorite, ‘Qariatol Fingan.’ The judge was baffled, then irate, yelling at me, at the prosecutors, lawyers, bailiffs. She ordered the guards to silence me."

As she sings, Nahr - the first-person narrator of the book - summarises the function of her performance for the reader: “I colonised the coloniser’s space of authority. I made myself free in chains and held that courtroom captive to my freedom.”

It turns out that Nahr’s words are fitting beyond the immediate context, as Against the Loveless World itself constitutes a defiance of colonising narratives and a reclaiming of Palestinian space - by both Abulhawa and her characters.

A Palestinian-American writer, human rights activist and biologist, Abulhawa hails from Jerusalem and currently resides in Pennsylvania. She is the author of several books, including The Blue Between Sky and Water and her acclaimed first novel, Mornings in Jenin - about various generations of a Palestinian refugee family - which has been published in more than 30 languages and sold over a million copies worldwide. Abulhawa is also the founder of Playgrounds for Palestine, an organisation that builds recreational spaces for children under Israeli occupation.

From her writings and public appearances, Abulhawa seems - much as the fictional Nahr does - as someone who doesn’t take nonsense from anyone, regardless of the effects on personal reputation or career. Case in point: some years ago she publicly took on Alan Dershowitz, Harvard Law School’s former resident cheerleader for Israeli war crimes, at the Boston Book Festival in 2010, calmly and collectedly tearing him and his arguments to pieces. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Virus Gives Erratic El Salvador Strongman Excuse to Fill Jails

The Washington Spectator

On April 21, in the midst of El Salvador’s hard-core coronavirus lockdown, President Nayib Bukele tweeted a photo of himself seated behind a desk in an elegant office, wearing a face mask. Accompanying the photo was the following reassurance: “The rumors of my kidnapping by aliens are completely unfounded.”

As if that weren’t odd enough, the next day he updated his profile picture to the same image of him face-masked, this time with the desk photoshopped out—and replaced by a spaceship.

Granted, Bukele had already gone orbital long before the coronavirus struck—like that time he announced: “President Trump is very nice and cool, and I’m nice and cool, too … we both use Twitter a lot, so, you know, we’ll get along.” This, mind you, was after the same Trump had referred to Bukele’s country as a “shithole.”

A former advertising executive and mayor of San Salvador, Bukele assumed power in June 2019 at the age of 37, having successfully marketed his Nuevas Ideas party as a desperately needed break from ARENA and the FMLN, the two parties that have dominated contemporary Salvadoran politics since the end of the bloody civil war in 1992. It seems, though, that Bukele’s ideas aren’t so nuevas—in that phenomena like unchecked authoritarianism and power-tripping have been around for quite a while.

In addition to tweeting ad nauseam and taking selfies from the podium at the United Nations, Bukele’s presidential activities have included deploying heavily armed soldiers and police inside El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly in February and threatening to dissolve it if lawmakers didn’t cooperate on a loan he was demanding for his Territorial Control Plan. According to Bukelian fantasy, this plan will resolve the country’s gang problem—and to hell with democracy. The militarization of the Assembly was a stunt unseen even during the 12-year civil war, during which the vast majority of atrocities were committed by a U.S.-backed right-wing military and allied death squads. But, you know, new ideas.

I happened to be in San Salvador at the time of the Assembly spectacle this winter and attended a brief pro-Bukele demonstration in front of the building. Demonstrators, many of whom had been bused in from outside the capital, were given black crosses adorned with a hashtag denouncing the recalcitrant lawmakers as mierda, signified by the poop emoji. The crosses were meant to symbolize how Salvadorans were dropping dead because Bukele wasn’t getting his loan; it was not clear, however, how anyone in such a fanatically religious country had deemed it prudent to put a poop emoji on a cross. The lawmakers, for their part, were given at least a temporary reprieve when Bukele called off the siege of the Assembly, informing his followers that he had spoken with God, who had told him to be patient. READ MORE AT THE WASHINGTON SPECTATOR.

The United Arab Emirates Is One of the US’s Favorite Middle East Monarchies

Jacobin

Last week, the Associated Press reported that efforts by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to combat coronavirus had “renewed questions about mass surveillance” in the Middle Eastern federation of sheikhdoms.

Believed to have “one of the highest per capita concentrations of surveillance cameras in the world,” the UAE is well poised to use the current pandemic to eviscerate civil liberties — not that there are really any to speak of in the first place.

The slightest criticism of the government can get you imprisoned, tortured, or disappeared; talking about human rights is a particularly dangerous pastime. In a country of obscene material wealth and malls with ski slopes, ubiquitous surveillance — of both physical movement and personal communications — means that freedom of speech, expression, association, and thought are practically nonexistent luxuries.

The AP report notes that, in May, the Dubai police announced the local surveillance camera system would start checking temperatures and ensuring social distancing. An experiment for thermal helmet cameras for police officers is underway, too, while “‘disinfection gates,’ which fog chemicals on people, similarly use thermal cameras that also can record and upload their data.” And as pleasant as fogging chemicals sound, there’s more: “Nothing prevents these additional cameras and their data from being fed into wider facial recognition databases.”

Having had the misfortune to find myself in the Emirates on a smattering of occasions, I can confirm the distinctly criminalizing sensation of having security cameras pointed at you from every direction. In fact, the UAE is one of the few places on earth where a mere few minutes in the country was enough to convince me that human existence is itself one big cruel experiment. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

Friedman at 50 Friedman Units: What Did We Do to Deserve This?

FAIR

In a recent dispatch on coronavirus, three-time Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman complains that he is “stunned by the criticism that anyone talking about saving lives and jobs in the same breath is an unfeeling capitalist.” Given that Friedman has long opposed job security as an impediment to progress, innovation and national competitiveness—even lambasting the US Congress in 2004 for being “out to lunch—or, worse, obsessed with trying to keep Susie Smith’s job at the local pillow factory that is moving to the Caribbean” (how’s that for unfeeling capitalism?)—it’s not clear why he’s suddenly concerned with saving US jobs in the middle of a pandemic.

As for Friedman’s own highly remunerated job (as of 2009, his speaking fee alone was no less than $75,000), this year marks the 25th anniversary of his service as foreign affairs columnist at the Times, where he has held various posts since 1981. To put it another way, Friedman has been writing a column on international relations for more than 50 Friedman Units—to use the metric coined by blogger Atrios (5/21/06) in honor of the pundit’s penchant for declaring that “the next six months” were always the critical ones in Iraq (FAIR.org, 5/16/06).

Unlike Susie Smith, Friedman’s livelihood has never been in jeopardy, despite his myriad professional defects. These range from rhetorical incoherence and continuous self-contradiction (e.g., Iraq was “the most radical-liberal revolutionary war the US has ever launched,” even as Friedman self-defined as “a liberal on every issue other than this war”) to his tendency to imbue utterly frivolous jet-setting experiences with global political significance (e.g., that time on an Emirates Air flight from Dubai when the Pakistani passenger sporting a jacket imprinted with the word “Titanic” spontaneously evolved into a sign that Pakistan was the Titanic, or possibly the iceberg). (In the same article, Friedman cautioned that an American victory in Afghanistan was possible only if the US recognized that “Dorothy, this ain’t Kansas.”)

Then, of course, there’s the fact that he is certifiably wrong on a regular basis. (“There is never going to be any European monetary union,” he wrote on October 4, 1995, a little more than three years before the launch of the euro. “Forget it. Buy German marks. They’re all you’ll ever need.”) And yet, thanks to his relentless service as a mouthpiece for US empire and capital, he’s permitted to continue churning out his pseudo-thoughts week after week—even if, as he inexplicably joked in his 2005 ode to corporate globalization The World Is Flat, “some of my readers wish my column could be shipped off to North Korea.” READ MORE AT FAIR.

How the US media covered up the meaning of George Floyd's murder

Middle East Eye

In April 2015, I attended a protest in Baltimore, Maryland, for Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old Black man who died of a severe spinal cord injury mysteriously incurred in the back of a police van, where he had been placed for the apparent crime of running away from the cops.

Given US law enforcement’s homicidal track record vis-à-vis the country’s Black community, running seems like a rather logical reaction.

As I made my way from the subway station to the starting point of the march, I passed an alleyway containing four police cars, lights flashing, and a group of Black residents filming the scene with their mobile phone cameras.

When a fifth car arrived, a few members of the group raised their hands in sarcastic surrender - a testament to the effective criminalisation of Blackness in America, which is itself what enables the cops to kill with such regularity.

The march was entirely peaceful, although at a later point in time some protesters opted to smash up police vehicles and store windows and throw hot dog buns and rocks at the forces of law and order.

The mainstream media naturally jumped at the chance to run riot, as well, exclaiming in horror over the unspeakable “violence” - by which they of course meant the destruction of private property and not, you know, the severing of Black spinal cords.

Now, five years later, the 25 May police killing in Minneapolis of unarmed 46-year-old Black man George Floyd has triggered mass demonstrations across America and given the media another opportunity to decry looting and shore up a brutal status quo.

Granted, some aspects of the narrative have evolved in a more truthful direction - which is apparently what happens when journalists covering protests are themselves assaulted by the police.

Fox News predictably capitalised on events to sound the alarm that "parts of the nation have seen a surge in certain crimes amid protests and riots," including an “uptick in burglaries, shootings and even, in some cases, murders”. Never mind the murder that spawned the protests.

American media watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) compiled a list of the "top 16 euphemisms US headline writers used for police beating the shit out of people". 

These ranged from NBC’s “Minneapolis Officers Use More Aggressive Tactics Against Protesters as Rallies Flare Around US” to the New York Times’ “After Curfew, Protesters Are Again Met With Strong Police Response In New York City” to NPR’s "Despite Curfews and Heavy Police Presence, Protests Persist Across the Country".

Then there were all the headlines about "clashes" between protesters and police, as though militarised police and lowly humans are somehow on equal footing in battle. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Recuperating Humanity: On John Washington’s “The Dispossessed”

Los Angeles Review of Books

MANY YEARS AGO, following a hitchhiking trip through Syria and Lebanon, I returned to the United States for a visit. Upon arrival to passport control at the Newark airport, I was asked to reveal the nature of my business in Syria in particular. My response — “I have friends there” — was quickly judged to be insufficient and perhaps even blasphemous, and the questioning officer demanded: “Why do you have friends in Syria?”

How to explain to US authorities that, for several months, Syrians and Lebanese had picked my companion and me up on the side of the road, accommodated us in their homes, and fed us relentlessly? And all of this for no other reason than, well, friendliness and hospitality.

The hostility of my reception in Newark pales in comparison to the “welcome” extended many incoming visitors to the United States — such as those fleeing violence, poverty, and other catastrophic situations. In his new book The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum at the US-Mexican Border and Beyond, John Washington masterfully exposes the ruthlessness of US border policy, focusing primarily on the trajectory of a 24-year-old Salvadoran asylum seeker named Arnovis — who, unlike me, has had to deal with a lot more than a few minutes of shaming by immigration officials.

A single father facing death threats from the Barrio 18 gang and recruitment efforts by the rival MS-13, Arnovis undertakes the first of three attempts to reach the United States in 2017, a journey that will variously see him intercepted in Mexico; kidnapped and nearly killed; and detained, duped, and deported by the guardians of the American frontier.

The most traumatic experience occurs during the third attempt, when his young daughter Meybelín is taken from him at the border and the official promise of swift reunification is spontaneously forgotten: “[T]hey took me to another detention center and I asked, Where’s my daughter? And they told me, I didn’t you know had a daughter. Meybelín, I told them. Who’s Meybelín? She’s my daughter.”

Arnovis is deported alone to El Salvador, and his prolonged terror only comes to an end when, thanks in part to a rare onslaught of media coverage, the US government manages to remember who and where Meybelín is and to send her back home, as well — “home” unfortunately being a place of existential peril and other forms of terror. READ MORE AT LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS.

“It Was an Entire System that Killed Berta” — A Review of Nina Lakhani’s New Book, Who Killed Berta Cáceres?

El Faro

Four months after the June 2009 right-wing coup d’état against President Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, I interviewed coup general Romeo Vásquez at his office in the Honduran capital. An alumnus of the notorious U.S.-run School of the Americas—traditionally the go-to institution for Latin American dictators, death squad leaders, and torturers—Vásquez was your typical jovial military lecher, informing me with a wink that he would not at all mind taking a second wife.

On the subject of the coup, he had high praise for his “very democratic soldiers”—since you can’t get much more democratic than overthrowing the democratically elected president of a country and then proceeding to beat up peaceful anti-coup protesters and to shoot them in the head. In the general’s view, it was the protesters who were guilty of unspeakable crimes, such as “insulting people, dirtying walls” with graffiti, and “setting buildings on fire.” 

Indeed, following a month and a half of brutal repression by security forces, flames had briefly engulfed one of the Tegucigalpa branches of the Popeye’s fast food establishment—an event that, unlike the killing of anti-coup Hondurans, was swiftly elevated to the rank of national tragedy. After all, in a country designed to serve as a vehicle for elite enrichment and corporate profit, life is cheap.

his reality is made painfully clear in a new book by journalist Nina Lakhani, focusing on one extraordinary life cut short by the powers that be in Honduras: Who Killed Berta Cáceres? Dams, Death Squads, and an Indigenous Defender’s Battle for the Planet. Murdered in her bedroom in March 2016 at the age of 44, Berta was the cofounder of the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) and had spent much of her existence stepping on the toes of power—or, more appropriately, stomping them into the ground. The very act of asserting indigenous humanity and rights was practically seen as a criminal affront to a prevailing system of predatory capitalism predicated on the subjugation of the masses and the usurpation of land and resources. 

The last straw, apparently, was Berta’s leading role in opposing the Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam on indigenous Lenca territory—a project undertaken in a context of massive institutionalized corruption and sketchiness and without the required consultation of the local community. As Lakhani details, this community stood to lose the Gualcarque River, which it depended on not only for its critical water and plant and animal life, but for its spiritual importance. The project was backed by the Atala Zablah family, an integral component of Honduras’ ruling class, and evidence uncovered during the murder inquiry suggests it was indirectly “partially funded by the World Bank Group, which has a mandate to give socially responsible development loans to alleviate poverty.” Rarely do U.S.-backed international financial institutions miss a chance to outdo themselves in the realm of irony.

The coup against Zelaya—who despite possessing no real leftist credentials had pledged a smattering of reforms benefiting the environment and the poor—paved the way for wanton extractivism. In the aftermath of the coup, Lakhani writes, the Gualcarque River was “sold off as part of a package of dam concessions involving dozens of waterways across the country,” in a sinister auction that also saw “mines, tourist developments, biofuel projects and logging concessions… rushed through Congress with no consultation, environmental impact studies or oversight, many destined for indigenous lands.” It was not an accident that Porfirio Lobo, who assumed the presidency of Honduras via illegitimate postcoup elections, declared the country “open for business.” READ MORE AT EL FARO.

My Futile Struggle for Stillness

The New York Times

ZIPOLITE, Mexico — When in mid-March “Quedate En Casa,” or “stay at home,” became the coronavirus rallying cry for the Spanish-speaking world, I had just arrived from El Salvador to the village of Zipolite on the coast of southeastern Oaxaca State in Mexico.

My plan was to continue on to Mexico City and then, over the course of the next couple of months, to Turkey, Spain, Greece, Lebanon and Madagascar.

I left the United States upon graduating college in 2003, after the giddy launch of the war on Iraq had convinced me that America was not any place I needed to be. I began hitchhiking, inaugurating a habit of haphazard and frenetic international movement that would characterize the next 17 years.

The itinerancy was, it seemed, because of a mix of acute commitment-phobia, an aspiration to omnipresence and a deep envy of people who possess more of a culture than our soul-crushing consumerism and military slaughter-fests.

For someone with no fixed address, much less country of residence, “staying at home” was a novel and initially terrifying concept. A mandatory curfew was not imposed in Zipolite, but the local assembly voted to erect checkpoints around the village to restrict access and departures. With only a few thousand inhabitants, there were no reported coronavirus cases, but the nearby town of Pochutla was said to have between zero and three, while the number of conspiracy theories was infinite.

I was issued an identity card permitting me to travel once a week to Pochutla for groceries. The Mexican police and Marines were deployed on the beach and ordered people indoors — a strategy that, mercifully, was never enormously effective.

I rented an apartment for an unspecified period and assumed I would careen straightaway into a claustrophobia-induced nervous breakdown. A coronavirus checkpoint materialized in front of my apartment, manned by cops and volunteers who would not let me step out of or, more curiously, into the house without a face mask. A thick rope was stretched across the road.

Having been in constant motion for so long, being trapped indefinitely was quite the conundrum. I braced myself and lived in fear of whatever my mind was preparing to pull. I ran in circles around a soccer field and plotted what to do in the event of a real lockdown, which involved hiding in the woods by day and sneaking to the sea at night. In a recurring nightmare, I was deported to the United States — where I had vowed to never again set foot, partly in the interest of my own mental health. READ MORE AT THE NEW YORK TIMES.