One Political Post Before The Chickens Come Back

An old friend of mine sent me the link to this blog post, which I think is one of the best relatively casual explanations of why Lebanon/Syria/Israel is such a convoluted subject. One of the best non-casual explanations of the subject is a book called A Peace To End All Peace by David Fromkin. Fromkin examined previously secret documents that threw light on the Treaty of Versailles and the Sykes/Picot agreement at the end of WWI which created the states of Israel, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Jordan, most of which had not actually existed in the present form up until that time. For ice tea and a cookie reading, I really recommend this blog entry. The book will need much more substantial fare but it is also fascinating reading.

Now back to our regularly scheduled drivel for a summer during which we haven't had a day under 35 C/ roughly 99 F for the past month or so. Sizzle......

Some Things You Just Can't Ignore

I don’t like politicians. I’m not at all sure that they do anything at all to benefit the rest of us, while I’m quite sure that they make sure that they and their cronies do benefit from their actions. I don’t follow the news of the G8 or other summits because I don’t believe it. I don’t believe that the governments of any countries are really going to help us keep our world in order, but on the other hand, we seem to be rather stuck with them all.

My kids arrived home from Syria seriously pissed off that a war in Lebanon and Palestine disrupted their vacations. With their reports of Syria, I would love to visit there as soon as I could feel that I’d be safe enough. This may sound pretty trivial but I daresay that there are a lot of Syrians feeling just as disgruntled and distressed, as there are Lebanese. (Given their shaky situation, Palestinians don’t get much in the way of vacations.) This isn’t so odd because vacations are part of normal life, and normal life of any variety has been violently abused. Vacationers in Lebanon are now refugees in Syria and Cyprus. And over what? Three soldiers who were kidnapped…three soldiers in an army that proudly proclaims itself to be at war with the Arab nations around it. I’m sorry, but why should Israeli soldiers be free from the same fear of imprisonment that many men in Palestine and southern Lebanon have suffered for years?

I’m not discounting the value of anyone’s life, but when was the last time that a country was allowed to carry out major bombing raids on a neighbouring sovereign state to destroy that country’s hard built infrastructure once again after a previous 20 year war during which most of it was destroyed by the same people? If a group of criminals or a political group was to kidnap personnel from the Mexican-American border, would the Americans be allowed to bomb Mexico in general into oblivion? What would have happened if the Quebec separatists had taken some Americans hostage…why is not all that important, since I can’t imagine why they would want to, though I’m sure that a reason could come up. Would the American Air Force have launched attacks on Toronto? I don’t think so.

Other than Israel, I can’t think of a single nation that has been permitted the freedom to bomb and invade its neighbours in the way that this nation has done for the past fifty or so years. Maybe there has been someone who has been given a blind eye while it reduced its neighbours to rubble, but I can’t think of one. There is a certain unfairness in the situation, an unfairness that Israel’s critics have been commenting on for years. Everyone EXCEPT Israel has been expected to conform to UN resolutions. Israel’s policies concerning its Palestinian citizens (?) such as those that encourage the sale of Palestinian properties by the shutting off of water and power and then forbidding the purchase of new property by Palestinians would be labeled “ethnic cleansing” somewhere else. As a mother who spent a fair bit of time trying to teach my children the importance of basic ethics, I find the situation astounding.

Palestine was recognized as a sovereign state a few years ago, but when Hamas was elected to the government, everyone decided that the election was a bad idea. I thought that democracy was supposed to be A Good Thing, but I guess it depends on who wins. What happened after Hamas won the Palestinian elections was that although they were the duly elected government of a recognized nation, all funds traveling to Palestine for the government were frozen by the banks. Aid was frozen, everything was frozen. Why? Because Hamas had been labeled as a “terrorist” group. But they were elected to run Palestine, so the Palestinians found themselves cut off from all services from their own government which couldn’t pay the bills, while the rest of the world just assumed that somehow things would be alright? Somehow, this doesn’t make any sense to me.

So after the elections that put Hamas in power in Palestine, they never really had a chance to do anything legitimate with the funds for the government frozen by the international banking community. This is a marvelous way of controlling who can play the government game. Simply label anyone you don’t like as a “terrorist” and let the banks do the rest. No one in the world can survive without the banks, can they? In this case, one of the aspects of the war on terror was to keep Hamas from showing that they might actually be able to run Palestine.

I don’t claim to have any solutions to this situation. For many years I got the old US party line about the “poor Israelis”….and then I met quite a few of them in Cyprus while I spent summers on the sail boat with the kids in Limassol. Word would go through the marina the second an Israeli boat came in with everyone locking up outboard motors and securing any property left on deck or on the dock. I was shocked to see that within fifteen minutes of the arrival of the boat from the Haifa Sailing School, the bathrooms were stripped of toilet paper and filthy. They thought nothing of “borrowing” someone’s bicycle without asking, or of trying to break into the soft drink machine or ice cream freezer. I’d never seen anything like it. The marina was a small community of a number of nationalities who all lived together very harmoniously and respected each other's property and rights, so this departure was fairly amazing. I’m less inclined to feel that these people are so downtrodden because of the extraordinary arrogance that I’ve witnessed personally in Cyprus and through events that have unfolded in the Middle East. But in the end, the fact remains that there are decent people everywhere in the world and somehow they must find a way to establish decency as a way of life.

I know that we are stuck with governments that somehow we must try to influence to do good, but I’m not so optimistic about our success there. On the other hand, as parents we have children that we can teach to see right and wrong and to speak out about it. We have our own voices and minds. We can switch off the television and Google the news for half an hour and see how China, India, Portugal, the UK are viewing events in the world. We can seek the information and speak, speak, speak. I suspect that each of us must simply try to do the right thing and try to get others around us to do the same. Good lord, if enough people actually try living good lives, it could turn into a movement. What would the neighbours say then?

No Place Like Home

To vast transAtlantic sighs of relief from all the fogeys, our travelers arrived in Cairo via Turkish Airlines early this morning. Their holiday didn't exactly turn out as expected but they still had an impressive list of sites visited in Syria and on their day in Istanbul. They traveled from Aleppo to, I believe, Adana, Turkey, by car and from Adana to Istanbul by air. Having had enormous input from family and friends to move from Syria, even though no one was shelling Damascus or other places in Syria, the next generation decided to decamp. The fact that if Israel began shelling Syria an American passport might be a handicap probably had its vote counted.

Now we'll probably have to live with a label as alarmists....that's okay. At this point it's really good to hear their voices ragging us. Now for the kids in Ramallah....

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

Well, what I've done is to move into my new house and try to get settled. My daughter is in New York waiting for her visa to clear so that she can find work and apply for grad school. My son just finished working here in Cairo and decided to take a cheap holiday before heading back to the US for grad school in Boston, so he and his girlfriend headed off to Syria, a country that he'd visited on a business trip a while back. He's been to Greece, Cyprus, and Lebanon, but said that Syria was truly an unappreciated jewel. We listened to stories about the landscape, the architecture, the food and the people...I was impressed. So off they flew to Damascus, where they spent a couple of days before heading north to Aleppo to visit crusader castles.

That was before Israel began bombing Lebanon again. The kids weren't even aware that the situation had gotten that hot until I sent them a message to make sure that they were okay. So now they are sitting in Aleppo waiting to see what tomorrow brings. Fortunately a young friend of ours is with the Egyptian embassy and is in touch with them. Right now, the friend is on the Lebanese border helping Egyptian refugees from Lebanon who are trying to escape the Israeli bombing. There is concern that with all the support from the US, Israel will feel safe enough to bomb infrastructure targets in Damascus tomorrow or the next day, which will make it pretty hard for the kids to make their Tuesday flight home. Other than the fact that my son suggested that most of the cab drivers report to the Syrian security police, war has simply not been part of the agenda during this visit.

So tonight my daughter and I chatted online while she waited for her boyfriend who happens to be in Ramallah in the West Bank where he's been teaching at a Quaker school. Unfortunately the school was hit by a missile earlier this month and when he came online, he could report that the Israelis were shelling Ramallah. His parents were there earlier in July, just got home in fact, and were quite horrified at the situation. They'd always thought that their son was a bit overboard on his pro-Palestinian stance, but now said that they have no way to explain to people back home just how awful things really are. His mother, who is a good friend of mine, says that it defies description and all the media is working against the information.

I have another friend in Canada who lives in a rural area and is convinced that the US is pushing to have a nuclear war in the Middle East sometime by this fall. When he wrote to me to suggest that I should come back to Canada where I might be cold but I'd be safer, I thought that he was being an alarmist. Maybe he knew something... but I sure hope not.

No Need To Warm This House

Long break from the blog from this end but we were moving to the farm last week and are still suffering the consequences. Moving has to be one of the most miserable experiences in the entire world, and I got myself through this one by telling myself that I’d just be dying in this house so I wouldn’t have to go through it again. We used the hadad’s (the iron-worker) pickup and the donkey cart along with the labour of all my grooms and as many of the neighbourhood teenagers as could be rounded up to get things out of the old house and into the new. Since it was done over the course of about three days and I was usually needed at the old house, furniture and boxes got piled willy-nilly all over the new house. The bedroom was set up almost immediately by the carpenter as everyone recognized that sleep was going to be a priority.

Mona the parrot spent the first night on a desk in the study to keep her from being harassed by the dogs, while the other parrots remained in their old cages since the painters had not finished painting the inside of the new ones. In Egypt, just as most other places, you have to choose whether you have more money or more time when you are building. Having more time than money, a lot of jobs have been rather slow in being finished. The cat and the fox also spent the initial night in their old digs as some of the plumbing for the laundry room in their garden hadn’t been completed.

The first morning in my new house….what can I say? The stove wasn’t hooked up yet, but the microwave worked so I could have my morning tea. I was up at 6 am to look out the bedroom window at the horses grazing happily in the rosy light of dawn, a rosy light that would take on more the appearance of the fires of hell as the day wore on. We have been having one of the hottest summers in some years these days, with the usual north wind barely keeping up a puff to cool us. The first order of business was getting the electrician to wire up the fans throughout the house, fans that he’d dismantled in the old place just yesterday.

As it turned out the cat, fox and parrots were much easier to move than I’d expected. Schmendrick the cat settled into his new garden happily and is pleased to find that he has a window into my bathroom and can expect scratches and cuddles there on a regular basis. Thea the fox was less impressed and promptly took off for better surroundings. The Amazons had to be captured with a bag to be moved, but the Greys could be picked up and put into cat carriers. Once they were in their new flight cages, they seemed to be rather intrigued by the similarities to the old layout, but the new things to watch and look at were okay.

The dogs have settled in very well and love having all the space to run in, if only it weren’t so hot. Most of the day they spend sleeping in the shade…or on the bed if they get the chance…and then the play starts once the sun sets. The fact that there is no grass yet in the front garden does mean that we are sweeping about a kilo of sand out of the house each morning, but what can you do?

While the dogs have been getting used to the area and the new noises, I’ve been leaving the front door open at night so that they could get out to bark instead of waking me up. Last night, however, was the last one for that practice. At about 3 am the dogs were going nuts, but inside the house rather than along the fenceline, so I hauled myself out of bed and walked into my recently almost-cleared living room to find George the donkey standing there in the middle of the room looking around with great interest. I shooed him out to find Margarita standing at the front steps and Gameela the gamoosa over by the bird cages.
The three of them were having an exploration in the cool night air. My suspicion is that the donkeys were lured by the irrestistible aroma of dry dog food, something that they love but which is not really very good for them. I used to feed the dogs outside, but right now the dog food is indoors to preserve it from donkey predation. And from now on the dogs will be shut in at night … or is it that the donkeys will be shut out?

A Change In The Tides

I find it interesting that one of the comments on my last post was a commendation on talking about something of more substance than my rather ordinary life. The fact that I write more about the day to day problems and pleasures of living here has nothing to do with the existence of problems in Egypt nor with my awareness of them. I've lived in the US, Canada, and Egypt with extended visits to Mexico, and every place I've lived has had problems. If there are humans, there are problems. We create them, expand them, expose them, and try sometimes to extinguish them, usually with little success. When I lived in the US, I was often uncomfortable with the paeans of praise for the "system" that ensured the "free" press, the benefits of living in the country that was the "leader of the free world". I could see some major glitches with the system even as a child and I found it very difficult to believe that everyone everywhere else in the world was miserable mostly because they did not live in the US. In fact, as I've grown up and had children of my own, I've seen that pretty much everyone's life is made up of a vast majority of tedium, drudgery, and worry. What we have to slog away at, what we worry about, varies from place to place, depending on our financial circumstances, but really it is all the same. Since I do believe that the good that we see and do in our lives lightens the load that we all bear, the "fluff" of non-problematic issues is actually more important than it might seem.

That in mind, I received an email today from an old friend of mine, a retired naval officer that I met as a rider in Alexandria, who is now living in Cairo. Hafez is a product of the old times in Egypt prior to the revolution, but he served in the Navy for years. The link he sent me today was to an Aramco website about the making of a movie that will hopefully become available for viewing in the near future. This was a documentary made in 1964 about the last time that the Nile flooded, the swan song before the Aswan High Dam stopped the yearly flood. I've spent time talking to friends of mine here about the Nile flood. Spending a lot of time in the countryside and villages on horseback offers a lot of time to consider some of the less pressing items in life. As I have thought about the building of pyramids with visitors here, the issue of the Nile flood has shown itself to be a vital one. The old photo of the pyramids across flooded fields shows an area that is now wall-to-wall apartment blocks in Giza. Imagine the havoc with those flooded.

Very few places in the world have had the kind of life that the Nile Valley has in the past. Summers here are hot, very hot. The season for growing grains and vegetables is actually best in the winter rather than the summer. Lettuce wilts, carrots get woody, crops such as peas and beans are crisper and fresher in the winter. Until the advent of the High Dam, there was a period from the end of June to October (essentially the summer) when the entire valley was underwater. Nowadays with the floodwaters contained by the High Dam and distributed throughout the year in irrigation, it's hard to imagine the disruption that the inundation caused. As you can read in the linked article, the final inundation was a generous one and the infrastructure of the cities of Egypt were affected by the rising waters.


When one considers the idea that an entire population of a country was essentially on holiday for four months a year, the idea of pyramid building becomes rather less preposterous. After all, people had to do something. Of course, as Egypt became more urban and industrialised, the four month holiday was more of a four month headache. One of my friends was telling me how the island of Zamalek, now a center for embassies, schools, galleries, and general sort of Egyptian yuppie culture, used to be divided into two islands during the flood period. My mind can't even begin to comprehend the chaos that would ensue if this were to happen now. Telephone lines, electrical power lines, water pipes, all of the things that we take for granted as part of our comfortable modern life, would have been at risk during the four month flood. Sometimes, it's good to realise that the good old days may have been old, but weren't necessarily good.

I Never Thought Of Myself As Subversive

Asthmatic bronchitis and travel to see kids abroad have a way of keeping a person too busy to follow up on friends and the usual internet contacts. My eye was caught today by a USA Today blog post to the effect that it was dangerous to blog in Egypt today. Whoa Nelly! I had to follow that link.

The story that followed is one that is familiar to us here without the mention of the blogging so much. Alaa Seif al-Islam and a number of other young activists, many of whom happen to blog, were arrested (kidnapped is a more descriptive word of the process) in conjunction to demonstrations in Cairo for the independent judiciary and press. These young people have been very badly treated and with the resilience of the young are willing to keep at their activities. Americans of my generation will recall similar stories with regards to demonstrations against the US government during the war in Viet Nam. Many of the young people then were also subject to some pretty rough treatment by police who were more sympathetic to the military than the demonstrators. I point this out lest people are too quick to say, "But that would never happen here!" It did and it does. Government machines work to protect themselves everywhere.

There are links in the story that am posting from to Alaa and Manal's blog from Cairo and many other blogs, including templates for protests of the treatment of the demonstrators. Do follow and read. Do not imagine for a moment that you are free of the possibility of this happening to you, no matter where you live. This can happen to anyone.