Two Eagles Saved: Spun Gold for the Apologists of Israel

With a strategic victory downright impossible for either side, it is now a cliche that the war over television audiences' perception of the Palestine conflict is as important as any short-term military gains. At the beginning of the intifada, spokesmen of the Israeli state did not shirk from appearing, speaking Arabic, on Arab television screens to present their "case" (that Al Jazeera bent over backwards and made this possible, through a brave show of professionalism, is a long-overlooked fact in the Western media). Palestinians meanwhile learned a few tricks in the early days of battle: Michael Tarazi and Diana Buttu--a face it was hard to argue with--were brought out to Anglophone television viewers, instead of the regular bald, moustached party apparatchiks who were previously tasked with these missions (the re-appearance of this stereotype, in the person of Sufyan Abu Zaida, on Al Jazeera International recently, is a sad reminder of those Bad Old Days of the Palestinian image). So when an Israeli park ranger finds out that 2 endangered Golden Eagles were being "held" in Hebron, in what he later described as "cramped conditions", the mis-named Israel Defense Forces jumped at the opportunity for a media coup.

Surely, it must be a source of some consternation, not to say confusion, for the family of Gilad Shalit: If the Israeli military was willing to search the homes of innocent Palestinians in Hebron for the sake of two feathered friends, why not go look for Shalit in Gaza? Of course, the so-called Defense Forces might have taken the time to investigate what their settlers are doing to the defense-less people of Hebron (warning: You really need to prepare youself before watching this video), but about this I have not received any advice. Could it be, and in a way I hate to suggest this, that the Israeli authorities are actually more interested in scoring media points than might be healthy for a state? Or perhaps, that Israel is in need of proving, to itself for a start, what makes Israel, Israel?

The recent release of Alan Johnston paved the way for what will become EU acceptance of the Palestinian government (I have discussed this before)--the earlier one...or the emergency one... the Hamas cabinet, you know what I mean--and this left Israel badly in need of proving something to the world, at least to the Western world, and maybe the best step was to show, once again, just how "Western" Israel is in relation to the surrounding barbarians, i.e. me, my family and my mates. Now, with an ever-changing, dynamic Palestinian society, this is becoming difficult. Palestinian feminists would claim that the situation for women in Palestine is not quite equitous but, as our elections process, and the very existence of feminists suggest, we are not Saudi Arabia. Even the Alan Johnston debacle brought out the very best of Palestine: it displayed our "civil society" of trades unions and associations and school boards, where it became clear just how "modern" Palestinian society could be.

On the other hand, few issues show the differing world views of East and West as much as the treatment of animals, or animal "rights" as some would have it. In my new-old home on the Arabian Peninsula, there is much adoration for the beasts of Bedouin lore: the horse, the bird of prey and, garden space permitting, the Seluki hound, but even these here are now a novelty in the homes of the rich or trophies, with little appreciation of our relation, as humans, to these creatures. To be sure, these eagles, had they reached market, would have been the cherished living room ornaments of a harmless, pot-bellied "Lt Colonel" in the Palestinian armed services, who would have called himself "Abu Nisrain" (or "Father of the Two Eagles" in Modern Arabic--the word Nisr is actually "vulture" in Medieaval Arabic, but I digress), because our Lt Colonel friend is embarrassingly childless as of this writing, and wanted to use the eagles them to remind himself, and bemused guests working for European aid agencies, of his once-famous masculinity, which reached its peak back in the pay-as-you-go days of the Beirut Corniche.

For the now-dejected Abu Nisrain, his eagles have left his man-fantasy and gone to live in a theme-park world of Israeli nature enthusiasts, for whom nature, feathered, four-legged and scaly-skinned (and I'm not just talking about Netanyahu) fits into their Western model of nationalism. For us this is not so.

I was recently a guest--prisoner?--at the Kuwait Imax cinema where I saw the Siegfried and Roy flick. It struck me that it could have passed for a Nazi propaganda film paid for by the Las Vegas tourist board. Then I was taken back to an even more disturbing thought that has recurred to me over the years: If the European nationalists can weave a love of their surrounding "nature" into the story of their nationalism, why not us? We have no alps to worship, but there are some amazing pine forests in Greater Syria and Oman is blessed with mountain ranges, waterfalls, sand dunes, beaches... (OK, just get out of these parentheses and go to Oman). We do have our own instance of nature and natural beauty, and perhaps our lack of nationalistic pride in who we are and where we come from--literally--has resulted in a complete absence of any environmentalist movement to speak of within the Arab Homeland (I hate the phrase "Arab World" I mean, when did that one come about?). Going back in time, we can see there must have been some sense of pride in the surrounding Old Country. Everybody, or at least everybody who can still read Arabic, knows of the Taghreebit Bani Hilal and the love the refugees who were scattered to Palestine and Morocco had for the old country of Najd. Many air-conditioned shopping malls and American fast food restaurants later, the attachments with the old country are under threat, and the vast piles of rubbish left in the desert by picnicers never elicit a word of serious protest. We have hastily decided that the desert is a place of itchy sand and kept only the paternalistic politics of Bedouin life, abandoning the environment to fend for itself.

So all in all this episode has been for me, as so many others have, a multi-layered disaster. While our in-house rifts prevent us from capitalising on the safe release of Johnston, the Israelis take two golden eagles all the way to the bank. A further two of my own countrymen, however dim and misguided for trying to sell two eagles, are now to be detained in conditions which will probably make an eagle's cage seem luxurious. Lt Colonel Abu Nisrain will now be staring ever more vacuously into his child-less existence, and will probably beat his wife, who will accept her fate as a desperate soul in an increasingly lawless realm run by men with guns. Ergo, we are now less modern, and this sucks.