Peeling back the truth in Iraz

An Interview by Jo-Ann Mart with Elias Khoury author of "Gates of the Sun, and editor of the cultural supplement of An Nahar, a daily newspaper in Beirut in a Greenwich Village café, near the NYU campus proves revealing. Khoury teaches at NYU each spring as a Global Distinguished professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. Associated with the secular elite in that city, An Nahar is fiercely independent, and has always editorialized against the Syrian stranglehold in Lebanon. The journalists at An Nahar are precisely the type of democrats that the U.S. should be seeking out if they really want to create democracy in that part of the world. Two of Khoury’s colleagues, popular columnist and leftist activist Samir Kassir, and publisher Gebran Tueni were both assassinated by car bombs, presumably put there by Syrian operatives. “At An Nahar we paid a price, two colleagues, friends of mine, were assassinated,” Khoury told me. “It’s not easy. Really sad and terrible. Their only crime is writing and defending freedom of speech and independence of Lebanon. But it also gives you the feeling that the separation between writing, living and dying is no more. We are also in the vanguard. This gives us a deep belief that it is worth it. Death is terrible. This absence of people you worked with and loved, but freedom is so precious, you are willing to die for it. Everybody like me, intellectuals who are still playing a part in the struggle for independence and against the dictatorship of Syria—people like us are in danger.” A graduate of the University of Paris in social history, Khoury, a fierce secularist, though a Christian by birth is still marked by his radical student days in Paris in the 1960s. A leftist and a democrat, he has been engaged with the Palestinians, since then. In addition to his journalism, Khoury is a novelist, best known for his novel, Bab al-Shams, which was recently published by U.S. publisher Archipeligo Books, under the title Gate of the Sun. It is a mammoth story about the Palestinian “Naqba,” based on stories Khoury heard from refugees in the Lebanese camps like Shatila where Palestinians have lived since leaving Israel in 1948 and 1967. The novel’s three main characters are Khalil, a young Palestinian who lives in the Shatila refugee camp while caring for his mentor, Yunes, a weathered Palestinian fighter who, before his sickness, fought alongside non-fictional characters like George Habash and Yassar Arafat and Yunes’s wife, Nahila who remained in the Israeli Galilee with their children.

Khoury has always been an outspoken advocate for the need for Israelis and Palestinians to accept each other’s painful narratives, the impact on Jews of the Nazi Holocaust and on Palestinians, of their expulsion and dispersion after Israel’s founding. Regarding the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, he believes that there must be a two-state solution based on the 1967 border and believes that for Arab and Israeli writers to come together, “Israeli writers will have to struggle with us to total retreat to the 1967 borders including East Jerusalem. This is not to be nuanced, total withdrawal and acceptance of two-state solution. With this, everything is possible; without this, nothing is…If the Israeli occupation of Palestine will continue, nothing will work. The occupation is destroying us and the occupation is destroying both communities.”
I asked him about the significance of the Hamas victory among the Palestinians. “Hamas is part of the wave of Islamists all over the Arab world. Hamas continues to have huge financial aid, especially from the Saudis.” Hamas also benefited from Fatah’s corruption and the death of the peace process.” He adds, “Fatah needs to regroup. Hamas should be in charge of the government to see what they can do. Already the Palestinians regret their vote. They didn’t think that Hamas would win.”

In asking him about the plight of secular intellectuals in the Arab world, Khoury harkened back to the U.S. role in propping up the Taliban predecessors in Afghanistan, an incredibly short-sighted strategy to dislodge the Soviets from what was then a Soviet-satellite state. “Secular intellectuals are the majority in the Arab world. We are struggling against this wave of madness in the Arab world and realize that this struggle is tough, but we are paying the highest price in the ending of the Cold War because of the U.S. diabolical alliance between the U.S. and Islamic fundamentalism in Afghanistan and we are paying the price but we are not pessimistic. It is our duty. Fundamentalists, through the aid of the Saudis and the Americans became very strong, but their cultural production is nearly zero. Most cultural production in the Arab world is secular. This gives us hope because you cannot be an historical movement if you don’t occupy the intellectual scene. Islamism is not the issue...The invasion of Iraq didn’t create change. On the contrary, it created new waves of terrorism and the problem is how to struggle against regimes of dictatorship and oligarchies.”