Contents
Central Theme
Editorial 2
Nigel Disney 5
Women in the Arab world
Includes:
Women and Politics in Lebanon 6
Yolla Polity Sharara
¥€ Changes in Palestinian society 16
Ehud Ein-Gil and Aryeh Finkelstein
xArabwomen 24
Magida Salman
Discussion forum
v& Zionism and its scarecrows 33
Moshe Machover and Mario Offenberg
National formation in the Arab region:
acritique of Samir Amin 60
Mohammad Ja‘far
Israel and the new order in the Middle East 87
Moshe Machover
Ideology without revolution: Jewish women in
Israel 97
Dina Hecht and Nira Yuval-Davis
Book Review:
The Palestinian Arab National Movement 118
Reply to Ja‘far 126Editorial
Critical marxist evaluation of women’s situation in the Middle East is
almost non-existent. Women have been relegated, much as they are
everywhere else, to an oblivion somewhere between the private realm
of the home and the bottom end of the labour market, while in a
growing profusion of material which purports to subject the region to
political, historical, economic and social scrutiny, the question of
women has been all but ignored by bourgeois and revolutionary
writers alike.
In attempting to reflect, express and participate in the struggles for
national and social liberation, revolutionary socialists often forget
that the struggles of the Palestinian people, of the anti-zionist forces
inside Israel, and of the labouring classes in all the countries of the
Middle East are not merely the struggles of men who happen to have
mothers, sisters, wives and daughters in tow.
In this issue of Khamsin we make an attempt to remedy these
deficiencies. The rudimentary character of our attempt implies not a
belated afterthought but rather the opening of a discussion of the
position of half the popular masses in the region. On the other hand,
we do not wish to write a token feminist history of women in the
Middle East. Articles about Israeli women or about Palestinian
women in Israel or Arab countries tell as much about the nature of
zionism and of Arab reaction as they do about women themselves.
In addition to the material on women in the Middle East, we have
included in this issue three articles dealing with topics which are also
of central importance to revolutionary socialist thinking on the
Middle East.
Zionist propaganda has erected a number of scarecrows to deter
attack by the left. One of the most effective of these is the bogus
identification of anti-zionism with anti-semitism. The article on
Zionism and its scarecrows will, we hope, arm the left in the struggle
against zionist ideology and propaganda. This article was originally
published in German in Probleme des Klassenkampfs (West Berlin,
October 1975). The need for an English translation became especially
evident recently during the debates on zionism in the British students’
movement. In the present translation we have omitted a passage
dealing with the current zionist propaganda concerning Soviet Jews,
since this topic is covered in greater detail in an article by one of the
two authors in Critique 9.
The article on National formation in the Arab region is intended asEditorial
a contribution to the task of laying down the historical and theoretical
foundations upon which a marxist evaluation of Arab nationalism
should be based. The first step must be a demystified account of the
historical origin of the Arab national formation. This article launches
the discussion, which will be resumed in one of our forthcoming issues
whose central theme will be nationalism in the Middle East.
Events in the Middle East move so fast that by the time the present
issue of Khamsin is published, much in the article on Israel and the
new order in the Middle East will have almost certainly been over-
taken by fresh developments. However, we decided to include this
article in the belief that if the analysis contained in it is correct, it may
help to throw some light not only on previous events, but also on new
developments which will have taken place between the time of writing
(May 1978) and the time of publication.
Khamsin 7
will appear January 1979
Central theme: Communist parties in the Middle East
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