It should go without saying that it really does make a huge difference to go some place. For example, over the course of the last six months I went to Israel for the first time and then, because I wanted to see what an independent Arab country looked like and could barely remember my week in Morocco 15 years ago (except for the exceptional quality of the olives and the beauty of Chefchaouen), spent a week in Egypt. All I can says is: Anyone who’s spent any time in the region who did not expect us to become the enemy after going into Iraq should be considered certifiable, and anyone who has not spent time in the region but who insists on proclaiming themselves an expert on it is a shyster.
One of the major historical narratives in the Arab world is about getting rid of people like us. Maybe it’s the kind of thing you pick up on more than usual in Egypt, where the long colonial history has made people especially sensitive on the question of occupation, or perhaps the situation in Iraq has brought bad historical memories back to the forefront of conversation, so that what one hears in 2006 is quite different than what one would have heard even in 2000. Either way, it was pretty clear that the ongoing presence of U.S. troops in Iraq is acting as a kind of direct rebuke to the narrative of historical progress in the region, where despite all the things that are stagnant and not progressing, one advancement people can point to with pride is that they are no longer ruled by white, Western Christians. Or even worse, Jews. (The pervasiveness of the ambient anti-Semitism in Egypt was also a bit of a shock.) Egypt and Israel are at peace, but the idea that Israeli Jews are an imperial power in the region — a group of foreign European people who should go back where they came from — is still very much alive. (That said, on a personal level, everyone was very friendly, people told me three times a day that I look Egyptian, it’s a wonderful country, and I can’t wait to go back some day.)Another thought, on why there are so many Jewish neocons: I don’t think its about Israel. Or at least, not directly. It’s about something deeper in the Jewish spirit. More than many other groups, Jews identify with exiles. I’ve come to think of as the “next year in Jerusalem” complex — there is a kind of yearning bred in the bone, almost, from several thousand years of displacement , victims of state . A history of displacement and oppression,
