For those of us who’ve been lucky enough to work with him, Roane Carey, who is leaving The Nation after 32 years, is not simply an editor of rare sensitivity and intelligence. He is also a person of extraordinary integrity, kindness, and humility. To write for Roane is to feel protected—not just from your enemies but from your own errors, which he corrects in the gentlest fashion, since he never takes pleasure in correcting you (another rare quality). To write with Roane, as I did on a few occasions when I was the magazine’s literary editor, is to experience the true meaning of solidarity, where the assertion of ego is a distraction from the cause on which you’ve embarked together: speaking truth to power. Has another editor in American journalism demonstrated his level of commitment to racial justice, or to Palestinian freedom, or to exposing the injustices of US foreign policy? If so, I’m not aware of one.

In the offices of The Nation, that claim would seem uncontroversial. No one who has spent time at the magazine is unaware of Roane’s moral passion, his informed and humane radicalism, his dedication to stories that most of the media has overlooked, either through indifference or—as in the case of Palestine, on which he also edited two important anthologies, The Other Israel and The New Intifada—with deliberate disregard. But outside The Nation, Roane—a modest, soft-spoken Southerner who studied history at Swarthmore College—is less well-known, for the simple reason that he has never drawn attention to himself.

I don’t mean to make him sound like a saint. A dear and close friend, Roane is as complex as they come, with a salty sense of humor and a love of life and its pleasures that is anything but monastic. I think of him, rather, as a brilliant ensemble musician—a bassist in a jazz rhythm section, say, or a violist in a string quartet. All too easily overlooked by the audience, he is indispensable to the music’s power, its binding force, such that when he leaves the group, it will never sound quite the same again. After more than three decades of devoted work behind the scenes at The Nation, Roane has left not only the magazine but the country, for a new life in Barcelona. We will miss the music he helped make at The Nation, but we’re also excited to hear him solo, as an American expatriate in Spain.

On July 17, 1959, Frank O’Hara, shaken by the news of Billie Holiday’s death, wrote a poem, “The Day Lady Died.” In the last two lines, he remembers leaning against the bathroom door at the Five Spot, a jazz club in the East Village, “while she whispered a song along the keyboard / to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing.” Seldom has the power of jazz performance been conveyed with such speed and grace. Holiday and Waldron, her pianist, are having a conversation so quiet and so intimate that listening to it feels like eavesdropping. I have always loved this poem for what it reveals not only about Holiday’s stagecraft, but also about her affection for Waldron, who accompanied her from 1957 until her death. Holiday and Waldron were close friends as well as collaborators. Waldron helped her write the autobiographical ballad “Left Alone,” an account of romantic desolation that she never had the chance to record. He had known of Holiday’s addiction, but, as he put it, “Lady Day had an awful lot to forget,” and his debt to her was incalculable. She taught him the importance of a song’s lyrics: Words, as much as notes, could lend themselves to musical improvisation. The magic she worked with them rubbed off. To listen to Waldron is to feel as if he is speaking to you, and only you, because he never forgets the lyrical content of a song.1

Waldron was 33 when Lady died. He would live another 44 years, but for many jazz fans he would always remain Holiday’s accompanist. He frequently recorded her songs, spoke of their friendship in interviews, and insisted that if she had moved to Europe, as he did, she would have lived a much longer life. Waldron’s devotion to her memory reflected not only his love for her, but also the knowledge that he had been given a second chance: Four years after her death, he survived a near-fatal nervous breakdown after a heroin overdose. He experienced his survival as a rebirth, but was left with a piercing sense of life’s fragility. “When you take our life span and measure it against eternity it is only a small dot,” he wrote. “In this time we must realize, if possible, our fullest self potential.”2

Waldron used his time well, creating one of the most distinctive bodies of work in postwar music. He wrote hundreds of songs, most famously “Soul Eyes,” a lush 32-bar ballad dedicated to John Coltrane (who liked it so much that he recorded it no fewer than three times). Waldron had a big sound and loved the resonances of his instrument, but he worked almost exclusively in small-group settings, preferring their chamber-like intimacy to larger, brassier ensembles. The best way to hear him is either in a duet with one of his favorite partners (his recordings with the saxophonists Steve Lacy and Marion Brown are especially memorable) or by himself.3

Waldron was a lifelong student of classical piano—he often played sonatas for pleasure, and recorded pieces by Chopin, Brahms, Satie, and Bartók—and he brought a classical sense of form and introspection to his solo work. Two long-out-of-print solo-concert albums—The Opening and Meditations—were recently reissued, and they bear witness, in different ways, to the dark, wintry beauty of Waldron’s art. The Opening, a fiery 1970 concert at the American Cultural Center in Paris, features six original compositions, mostly based on ostinatos—vamps that Waldron plays over and again—with small but engrossing variations in tempo, dynamics, timbre, and rhythmic articulation. (One is called “Of Pigs and Panthers,” an allusion to the war back home between the police and the Black Panther Party.) Meditations, recorded two years later at a jazz club in Tokyo, is a more contemplative affair, bookended by two of Waldron’s best-known pieces on solitude, “All Alone” and “Left Alone.”4

Waldron’s style is invariably described as “brooding”—almost all of his pieces are in a minor key—but it could also be described as analytical. Most jazz pianists work to create an effect of outward motion when they improvise. Swing, after all, is a musical analogue of dance, and its aim is to make the body more expansive and supple. Waldron’s music appears to work in nearly the opposite direction, burrowing ever more deeply into its materials: He seems to be on an inward journey. In “The Blues Suite,” for example, the slow, winding song that takes up more than a third of Meditations, there’s an extraordinary moment where Waldron plays a descending figure in the lower registers of the piano; as it recedes, a sample from the Negro spiritual “Wade in the Water” rises in its wake, suggesting a shadowy recollection, or the previously erased layer of a palimpsest.5

Waldron “played every piece as if he were X-raying it,” as Edward Said once observed of Glenn Gould. He turned to music as a kind of mental exercise, a way of figuring out what he thought; his pieces were almost all “meditations.” “I want to be able to see what I am doing,” he explained, “and in order to be very clear in my mind where I am going I have to repeat it.” His search for what he called the “one note that goes for the entire piece” gives his music an almost uniquely obsessive sense of propulsion—the feeling of being in a trance.6

he son of West Indian immigrants, Malcolm Waldron was born in 1925 in Harlem and moved shortly after with his family to Jamaica, Queens. His father worked for the Long Island Rail Road and his mother was a nurse; both were middle-class strivers. They wanted, as Waldron later recalled, to “keep me off the streets” and forced him to take piano lessons from the age of 6. He was a quick study: “Fear is a great motivator,” he said.7

Waldron was drafted into the Army in 1943 and was stationed at West Point, where he worked in the equestrian services. Whenever he was on leave, he made the scene, going to the clubs on 52nd Street and in Harlem, where he heard the pianists Art Tatum and Bud Powell, both of whom would be important influences. After the war, Waldron enrolled at Queens College on the GI Bill. There, he studied composition with Karol Rathaus, an exiled Jewish Austrian composer who recoiled from the orthodoxies of both tonal music and Schoenbergian serialism. Rathaus was also an admirer of jazz and the author of an essay, “Jazzdämmerung?” (“The Twilight of Jazz?”), that accused George Gershwin and the swing-band leader Paul Whiteman of “cultural larceny” for Europeanizing black music.8

Under Rathaus’s tutelage, Waldron listened to Bach, Stravinsky, and Ravel; he also began to write his first scores. In the evenings, he received a different sort of education at the Paradiso, a Harlem club not far from Minton’s Playhouse, headquarters of the bebop movement. At the time, Waldron was playing alto saxophone, not piano: He had picked up the horn after hearing Charlie Parker, whom, like other young bop musicians, he worshipped. By his mid-20s, however, he’d returned to the piano. The saxophone, he realized, was “a very exhibitionist instrument, and you had to be extroverted, and I was very introverted.” In A Portrait of Mal Waldron, a 1997 documentary by the Belgian filmmaker Tom Van Overberghe, Waldron describes how the piano allowed him to hide, to “play very quietly and work out your changes. It’s a very beautiful instrument for a person like me.”9

In the early 1950s, Waldron paid his dues in a style of music that could hardly have been less introverted, accompanying soul-jazz bands led by the down-home saxophonists Ike Quebec and George Walker “Big Nick” Nicholas. But he was also studying the work of bebop’s most original pianist and composer, Thelonious Monk. At first, Monk’s style sounded, to Waldron, “so strange, the way he hit the piano,” but “it just grew on me,” and he became one of the few pianists to absorb Monk’s innovations—his flat-fingered attack; his way of “bending” notes by striking two adjacent keys but only releasing one; his radical use of space—without sounding like a Monk imitator.10

Waldron’s ability to combine Bud Powell’s fleet, lyrical approach to “comping”—the art of playing behind a soloist—with Monk’s more angular and idiosyncratic style made him a favorite pianist of the most sophisticated hard-bop musicians. Charles Mingus recruited him in 1954 to his Jazz Workshop and featured him on his landmark 1956 album, Pithecanthropus Erectus. The same year, Waldron was hired as the house pianist at Prestige Records, where he played on albums by Jackie McLean, John Coltrane, and other stars of the era. A young father, Waldron also had to find other work, and he supported his family by laying down tracks for Music Minus One, a maker of sing-along and play-along records. Each morning, he reported for work at Music Minus One in a suit and tie, looking more like an accountant than a musician. At night he was out gigging, sometimes with Billie Holiday; sometimes with the many reedmen who appreciated his discreet yet forceful comping; and sometimes with beatniks like Allen Ginsberg and Lenny Bruce.11

But Waldron hungered for something more than work as a sideman. A talented sheet composer, he wanted to write his own music. While he was careful to avoid the often arid contrivances of third-stream jazz, he shared its ambition to incorporate classical compositional ideas into jazz, and to move beyond the formulaic theme-solos-theme structure of hard bop. His 1959 album Impressions, a trio recording with Addison Farmer on bass and Albert “Tootie” Heath on drums, was his first great statement as a leader, revealing a probing young modernist composer and a daring improviser. Holiday’s influence can be keenly felt in his reading of Jimmy van Heusen’s “All the Way,” a song she loved, and in Waldron’s own composition, “Overseas Suite,” which was inspired by his recent European tour with her.12

But in Impressions we also hear the accompanist emerging from Lady’s shadow. In it, Waldron depends less on chord changes—the foundation of bebop improvisation—than on clusters of notes and “whatever enriches the sound.” He was somewhat more tentative than Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman, both of whom released revolutionary albums in 1959, Kind of Blue and The Shape of Jazz to Come. But Waldron was just as eager to embrace the new freedoms. As he saw it, they went hand in hand with being a black musician in the era of civil rights. The bar lines in a song were, he recalled, like “going to jail for us.” “We were talking about freedom, and getting out of jails…. So everyone wanted to escape from that.”13

Waldron cut an alluring figure for the new jazz modernism emerging in the 1950s: He was slender, with regal features, an elegant bearing, and haunting eyes. Along with Sidney Poitier and Miles Davis, he was one of the original black male sex symbols of the 1950s, a precursor of the “Black is beautiful” era. On the cover of Impressions, Waldron, wearing a suit, tie, and rain jacket, stands behind a ladder against a dark, purple-tinted backdrop. He looks backward, with a somewhat nervous expression: an image of the dissident energies gathering force at the end of the Eisenhower era.14

illie Holiday died a few months after Impressions was released. Waldron was devastated. She was his young daughter’s godmother, and “such a warm person I began to feel she was like my sister.” A year later, Waldron released Left Alone, a tribute to Holiday’s work, whose title track featured a gorgeous performance by Jackie McLean. Released from his duties as an accompanist, Waldron began over the next few years to come into his own. He played a historic two-week date at the Five Spot with one of the most exciting bands of the 1960s, a quintet led by the multi-reedman Eric Dolphy and the trumpeter Booker Little, which also featured the drummer Ed Blackwell (of the Ornette Coleman Quartet) and the bassist Richard Davis. He also contributed to some of the great civil-rights jazz albums made by the drummer Max Roach and his partner, the singer Abbey Lincoln. (Waldron wrote the music to Lincoln’s protest song “Straight Ahead,” in which she sang, with bitter eloquence: “If you got to use the back roads / Straight ahead can lead nowhere.”) He demonstrated his gifts as a composer of small-ensemble jazz on the ambitious 1961 album The Quest, which explored waltzes, ballads, bop syncopation, even 12-tone serialism. The modal composition “Warm Canto,” a miniature jewel that showcased Dolphy’s clarinet and Ron Carter’s pizzicato work on cello, looked forward to the epic tone poems Waldron would write in the 1970s. On The Quest, he also developed what the singer Jeanne Lee later described as his “orchestral way of hearing.”15

But Holiday’s death caught up with him—or rather, her habits did. Waldron had been horrified to see the Lady “treated like a criminal” rather than the victim of a disease, an experience that “broke her down.” It broke him down, too. Many Americans assumed that he must be a drug addict, simply because he was a jazz musician, and “it got to the point where if you had the name you just had to have the game, too.” In 1963, while on tour with Roach and Lincoln, he went onstage loaded on heroin, and froze. For the next six months, he was hospitalized at East Elmhurst Hospital and subjected to shock therapy and spinal taps. He could scarcely remember who he was, much less how to play piano. Yet he was grateful: The alternative was worse. And in the wake of his overdose and nervous breakdown, Waldron bit by bit began to come back to life.16

His hands trembled, and he had lost his sense of time. But he applied himself with diligence, listening to his recordings and writing out his earlier improvisations on paper. His work as a composer of sheet music would sustain him for the next two years, until he was ready to perform again. He wrote scores for Shirley Clarke’s The Cool World and Herbert Danska’s Sweet Love, Bitter (loosely inspired by Charlie Parker’s last years, and starring Dick Gregory). But there were rumors that he was dead, and Waldron wasn’t sure they were false. He was surrounded by casualties of the jazz life: Booker Little had died of kidney failure, at 23, in 1961; three years later, Eric Dolphy died, at 36, of an undiagnosed diabetic coma in a Berlin hospital, where doctors mistook him for a drug addict and left him in bed so the drugs could run their course.17

During these years, work in the New York clubs became increasingly hard to come by because, as he recalled, “the white musicians got the jobs, and the black musicians didn’t get the jobs even if they had more talent.” When Marcel Carné, the director of Le Jour Se Lève, asked him to come to Paris to write the soundtrack for his Three Bedrooms in Manhattan, an adaptation of a moody 1946 novel by Georges Simenon, he had no trouble making up his mind. “In America if you were black and a musician at the time, it was two strikes against you,” Waldron said. “In Europe…it was two strikes for you.” He found “so much respect and love” there that he “didn’t need any drugs.”18

aldron flew to Paris in 1965 and never looked back. He didn’t return to the States, even to perform, until 1975. After scoring Carné’s film, in which he also made a cameo as a barroom pianist, he bounced around France and Italy before settling, in 1967, in Munich. Two years later, he released one of his most important albums, the trio recording Free at Last, which also launched a new, Munich—based label, Editions of Contemporary Music (ECM), founded by a young German bassist, Manfred Eicher, who would become one of the great champions of the American jazz avant-garde.19

On Free at Last, we hear a musician who has emancipated himself not only from America but from the overbearing influence of his mentors, particularly Bud Powell. Waldron’s writing is simpler, stripped down to vamps of a few notes, “calls” designed to provoke improvisatory responses. Before the breakdown, he explained, he had “started out with a big tree and I tried shaving and shaving and shaving…to find the perfect toothpick, but…I was nowhere near the toothpick at that moment.” His rhythms, meanwhile, became denser and more complex, his touch harder and more percussive, more “African.” The mood of Free at Last was dark and fierce, radiating identity and purpose. Its idiosyncratic flow came from the drone-like effects that Waldron created by pounding chords with his left hand. They gave the music an expansive sense of space, as if it, too, could breathe more freely in exile.20

The jazz historian John Litweiler has characterized Waldron’s post-breakdown style as “repetition/transformation,” a phrase that may remind some of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, who were experimenting at the same time with repetitive structures in the early works of Minimalism. But Waldron arrived at his version of Minimalism on his own, through sounds and techniques specific to African-American music—above all, the plaintive, ringing sound known as a “blues cry.” An attempt to approximate the sound of a human voice with an instrument, the blues cry is a common expressive flourish in jazz, but Waldron transformed it into a structural device: He repeated it with different shadings, inflections, and intonations throughout his improvisations.21

In Free at Last and Black Glory, a thrilling 1971 trio album, there are echoes of the free-jazz pianist Cecil Taylor—for whom Waldron would later write two tributes, “Free for C.T.” and “Variations on a Theme by Cecil Taylor”—but the resemblance reflects kinship rather than influence: Waldron had not left behind hard bop to become anyone’s disciple. Waldron meant “free at last” not only from American racism, or from chord structures, but from any restrictive influences—-including the pianist he had been before his breakdown. One of the reasons that “I feel it necessary to play freer is that I believe no one is ever exactly the same as he was a moment ago,” he explained at the time. “The change from moment to moment can be and usually is very small, almost unmeasurable, but nevertheless it is there. And since I’m definitely not the same person I was five years ago, I cannot pretend that nothing has changed by playing the same old way.”22

It’s almost impossible to listen to Free at Last or any of the music that followed without thinking of the trial he had to survive to make it, just as one can hardly listen to The Quartet for the End of Time without reflecting on Olivier Messiaen’s time in a prisoner-of-war camp, or The Basement Tapes without being reminded of Dylan’s motorcycle accident. Survival is essential to its pathos, and to its consolatory power. Here is the sound of a man who has no intention of returning home, who has found not only a sanctuary, but renewal: a “second life,” he called it.23

Waldron would continue to explore his newfound freedoms in such rip-roaring anthems as “Sieg Haile” (dedicated to Haile Selassie), “La Gloire du Noir,” and “Snake Out”; but he would also do so in ballads of disarming vulnerability and, not least, in his tributes to his late employer, notably Blues for Lady Day, recorded in 1972 in Holland. His melodic phrasing on the album, particularly in the stark, chilling interpretation of “Strange Fruit,” is slow, stately, and unadorned, as if he were waiting for Holiday to join him. Few purely instrumental albums have been so effective at conjuring the absent lyrics of its songs.24

hat Waldron not only reinvented himself but produced his greatest music outside of the States, in conditions of comparative dignity and respect, challenges a widespread assumption of jazz history: that the music diminishes in power the further it is removed from its vernacular sources. In 1949, Miles Davis bid farewell to the freedoms of post-liberation Paris to return to a segregated country, because “musicians who moved over there seemed to me to lose something, an energy, an edge, that living in the States gave them.” The unspoken, nostalgie de la boue corollary of this belief is that adversity is the yeast of jazz creativity, that the comforts of expatriate life make musicians go soft. But for many jazz musicians, life abroad has meant exposure to new experiences and ideas. And more than any of his peers, Waldron embraced the perspective of exile within his music. A number of his compositions were postcards from places he had visited; his masterpiece was an ode to flight, inspired by a visit in the early 1970s to the Norwegian island city of Kristiansund, where each morning he had awakened to “watch the seagulls perform a ballet.” He captured their dance in a languid reverie, “Seagulls of Kristiansund,” built around two tone centers, E minor and A minor, recalling the French Impressionist composers he admired.25

Like Debussy and Satie, Waldron was drawn to the pentatonic scale and to East Asian aesthetics, whose minimalism and refinement of gesture struck a chord. When he came to Tokyo for the first time in 1970 to record an album, he was already big in Japan, thanks to his 1959 tribute to Billie Holiday, Left Alone, which had been enormously popular there, and he returned many times, recording dozens of albums on Japanese labels. That many of the tunes Waldron wrote in Japan have Japanese titles indicates the strength of his attachment. A “natural mystic,” as the singer Jeanne Lee described him, Waldron felt as if he had been there before, perhaps in a previous life. As it turned out, Japan’s interest in his work meant less to him than his own interest in Japan. “They think I’m here for the gigs, but I’m really here for the temples,” he once told a friend.26

Waldron was particularly impressed by Ryoanji (“Temple of the Peaceful Dragon”), a 15th-century Zen Buddhist temple in north Kyoto. Ryoanji is famous for its rock garden, a classical example of karesansui, or dry landscape. Fifteen stones of varying sizes, composed into five groups, lie on a bed of white sand, which is raked each day by monks. The stones are arranged in such a way that only 14 can be seen at once; according to a proverb, only through attaining wisdom can one see the elusive 15th stone. For some, the garden depicts a group of islands floating on an ocean; for others, a mother tiger transporting her cubs over the sea. In its understated play of sameness and difference, movement and serenity, symmetry and asymmetry, Waldron found an analogue to his own music. The garden embodied what in Japanese is called wabi-sabi, an aesthetic of refined austerity, based on the beauty of imperfection and the acceptance of transience. John Cage, who first visited Ryoanji in 1962 with Yoko Ono and the pianist David Tudor, produced a series of compositions inspired by it, as well as dozens of drawings.27

Waldron’s tribute, “The Stone Garden of Ryoanji,” on the recently reissued Meditations, was recorded in July 1972 at the Dug, a club in Tokyo. Located in the basement of an old building between two high-rises, the Dug was a sanctuary for music lovers, writers, and bohemians; it was the kind of place where, as a young woman in Haruki Murakami’s novel Norwegian Wood remarks, “They don’t make you feel embarrassed to be drinking in the afternoon.” The song begins with a simple, almost childlike theme, suggestive of Japanese folk music as filtered through Satie, but it moves into a richly involving set of blues variations, examined and observed from every conceivable angle, as if Waldron were in search of the invisible 15th stone. Its beauty comes from the rapt, almost relentless attention to melodic line that was Waldron’s signature, and because the song won’t let him go, it won’t let us go, either. Much of the music that Waldron made in Japan in the early 1970s can be heard as the expression of an impossible farewell, “forecasting my feelings about leaving this island paradise,” as he wrote of his ballad “Sayonara,” which appeared on his 1970 album Tokyo Reverie.28

 self-described “born gypsy,” Waldron was used to farewells. He spent most of his time on the road, returning now and then to Munich and Brussels, where he moved in the late 1980s. But Japan would always have a special claim on his imagination, and he went there as often as he could. He met his second wife, Hiromi, with whom he had three children, on a visit to Tokyo in the early 1980s. And in 1995, he went to Japan on an official invitation for the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was joined by the entire Waldron clan, including Hiromi’s two children from her first marriage; his first wife, Elaine; and their two adult daughters. Waldron performed in a trio with Jeanne Lee and the flutist Toru Tenda at temples, concert halls, and community centers from Tokyo to Okinawa. Lee, in her liner notes to Travellin’ in Soul-Time, the album that came out of this tour, remembers that “at one point, there were more Waldrons on the train than other passengers.”29

Like John Coltrane, who visited Japan in 1966, Waldron was overwhelmed by the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. It was not just the evidence of destruction but the story it told of resilience, atonement, and rebuilding—one for which, as another kind of survivor, he felt a great affinity. For the 50th anniversary, he composed a suite based on “The White Road,” a poem by Syo Ito, a 14-year-old survivor of Hiroshima, and on Black Rain, a novel by Masuji Ibuse about the radioactive rain that fell after the bombings. The harrowing, almost unspeakable words of the White Road/Black Rain Suite for Improvisers were sung by Lee, with whom Waldron had already made a remarkable duo album of standards, After Hours. It was one of their last performances together: She died in 2000, at 61; he died two years later, at 77.30

Not since his work with Holiday had Waldron formed such a close partnership with a singer. An heir of both Holiday and Abbey Lincoln, Lee was the finest singer to emerge from the ranks of the free-jazz movement; she had performed with everyone from Archie Shepp to John Cage, and spent much of her career as an expatriate. Like Waldron, she was a blues modernist, steeped both in African-American tradition and in contemporary new music. She understood, too, that concert music is always theater, and she and Waldron brilliantly evoked the terror of the bombings, much as he and Holiday had once evoked the terror of lynching in “Strange Fruit.”31

Perhaps the most striking words that Lee sings on Travellin’ in Soul-Time, however, belong to Waldron himself, in a vocal setting of his song “Seagulls of Kristiansund.” He imagines the birds diving into the sea from the sky, “so near, yet so high”:32

They’re wond’rously free
They live happily.
They know from the past,
a life cannot last,
So they live for today
for tomorrow they may not
Be able to dive from the sky.33

The birds know what Waldron had to learn from his near-death experience. Lee bends and stretches his words with warm, melismatic accents, at one point mimicking the sounds of seagulls. And as she sings to Waldron, one feels as if the lyrics had always been there; the story they tell is as much a self-portrait as a tone poem about a flock of seagulls. Freedom and flight were the themes that gave shape to Waldron’s style after his breakdown. An ecstatic minimalism, it spoke of survival, rebirth, and the longing for transcendence. Its means were simple, but the stakes were not. Through his hypnotic repetitions, Waldron chased down that single, elusive note, as if his life depended on it.34

Adam Shatz dedicates this essay to the memory of Geri Allen.

Time is education, even when they tell you it’s sophistication.
—Sly Stone

ou have never been to the Middle East and have no personal connection to it. Although Jewish, you have no family in Israel. Your parents are not Zionists but left-liberals of the civil rights generation; neither has gone to Israel. What sparks your interest in the Middle East is the first intifada, which breaks out when you are a teenager. You are aghast at the scenes of Israeli soldiers firing rubber bullets at demonstrators and bulldozing homes. Instinctively sympathetic to the uprising by the “children of the stones,” you set out to educate yourself about the occupation. You read Noam Chomsky, I.F. Stone and Edward Said, and later Israeli revisionist historians like Simha Flapan, Ilan Pappé and Benny Morris (who has yet to reinvent himself as an apologist for the ethnic cleansing he did so much to expose). In college, you meet left-wing Jews like yourself, as well as progressive Arabs with whom you find you have more in common than you do with the students in Hillel. You go to demonstrations against the first Gulf war and the Israeli occupation, and you rail against America’s double standards to anyone who will listen. The tirades come naturally to you. You overflow with righteous indignation; you are exasperating in your certainty.

I was that kid. I didn’t know very much about the Middle East, but I had the right attitudes, or so I thought. I also had a sense of mission and the energizing clarity that comes with it.

If you were a young leftist, it was easy to have a sense of mission during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a time of insidious propaganda and deceit about “weapons of mass destruction” and the threat that Saddam Hussein allegedly posed to “the homeland.” The American press was full of Middle East “experts” explaining “why they hate us.” These experts invariably started with the writings of Sayyid Qutb, a leader of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, who was hanged in 1966 for plotting to overthrow the Nasser regime. The roots of violent anti-Americanism could be traced to the basement of a church in Colorado in the late 1940s, where Qutb had been horrified by the sight of boys and girls dancing together. We were attacked a half-century later not because of what we had done in the Middle East, but because of who we were back home: free, open and tolerant. The New Yorker, which had distinguished itself for its opposition to the Vietnam War, was publishing Bernard Lewis on the “rage of Islam” and Jeffrey Goldberg’s dispatches from Cairo and Beirut, where everyone he met seemed to be an anti-Semite or a terrorist, or both. Reading the coverage in The New York Times, you might have concluded that the Palestinian leadership was entirely to blame for the failure of the Camp David negotiations and for the eruption of the second intifada.

One of my first articles about the Arab world was a review of a biography of Frantz Fanon for The New York Times Book Review. Shortly after I filed the piece, my editor called me to say that it was fine, except for one thing: I had referred to “Palestine,” a country that, according to the news desk, did not exist. We changed “Palestine” to “the Middle East.” It was just as well. Like most Americans, I saw the Middle East through the prism of the Israel-Palestine conflict, an error that I would discover only much later.

I felt strangely empowered by this brush with censorship. It was proof that I was expressing things, naming things, that were forbidden by the paper of record; that I was speaking truth to power. My task, I believed, was to unmask the rhetoric used to justify America’s war in Iraq, Israel’s repression in the occupied territories and other imperial misdeeds. And there was plenty of such rhetoric to keep me busy, about “humanitarian warfare,” “terrorism” and our unbreakable alliance with “the Middle East’s only democracy.”

I still stand by most of the positions that I took when I was starting out. But when I re-read the articles I published then, I find the tone jarring, the confidence unearned, the lack of humility suspect. I have the same reaction when I read a self-consciously committed journalist like Robert Fisk, who seems never to doubt his own thunderous convictions. I recently re-read Pity the Nation, his tome about the Lebanese civil war, and I was struck by how little Fisk tells us about the Lebanese, a people he has lived among since the mid-1970s. For all his emoting about the Lebanese, their voices are never allowed to interrupt his sermonizing. That I agree with parts of the sermon doesn’t mean I have the patience to sit through it. Fisk’s book, which once so impressed me, now strikes me as a wasted opportunity, unless journalism is understood as a narrowly prosecutorial endeavor, beginning and ending with the description of crimes and the naming (and shaming) of perpetrators. And yet Fisk’s example is instructive, in a cautionary way. It reminds us that immersion in the region isn’t enough: it’s how you process the experience, the traces that it leaves on the page. The Fiskian cri de coeur substitutes rage for understanding, hang-wringing for analysis.

ust to be clear: I’m not saying that one shouldn’t take positions or make political arguments in writing about the Middle East. It would be very hard not to. And part of what drives me is anger over injustice, and the hope that I might persuade readers to think more critically about American policy in the region. But developing friendships with Middle Eastern writers and traveling to the region very much changed the way that I understand my work. Two Arab writers have been particularly important in shaping my understanding. One is the former FLN leader turned historian Mohammed Harbi, whose books on the Algerian independence movement are a model of critical history, and who has patiently guided me through the maze of contemporary Algerian politics whenever I have seen him in Paris. The other is Raja Shehadeh, the founder of Al Haq, a lawyer and writer in Ramallah who has taught me what Zionism has meant—legally, politically and psychologically—for the Palestinians. Anguished and somewhat fragile, he is a man who, in spite of his understandable bitterness, has continued to dream of a future beyond the occupation, a kind of neo-Ottoman federation where Arabs and Jews would live as equals.

When I finally began to spend time in the place about which I had pontificated for so long, I discovered that I was much more interested in what the people I met had to say than in my own views. It dawned on me that I could only be a good writer on the Middle East to the extent that I was a good listener. I realized how insufficient it was to have the right attitudes; they would provide me with little more than an entree. The brash young man I was could write with a sense of mission in large part because he had never spent any time in the region; he was intoxicated by the sound of his own voice, the power that he felt it gave him.

Shortly after September 11, I interviewed V.S. Naipaul about his views on Islam for The New York Times Magazine. Much of what he said was predictably ugly, a provocation calculated to offend liberal sensibilities. “Non-fundamentalist Islam,” he told me, is “a contradiction.” September 11 had no cause other than “religious hate.” But Naipaul said something else that I will never forget: that ultimately, you have to make a choice—are you a writer, or are you a missionary? At the time, this remark struck me as glib, even dishonest. If anyone was a missionary, wasn’t it Naipaul, with his crude attacks on Muslims, his extreme Hindu nationalism and his snobbery, all of it dressed up as devotion to the noble calling of writing and art?

Still, the remark stayed with me. I couldn’t dismiss it; I have since seen its wisdom, although I am no fonder of Naipaul’s views now than I was then. Naipaul was evoking the tension between the writer, who describes things as he or she sees them, and the missionary or the advocate, who describes things as he or she wishes they might be under the influence of a party, movement or cause. The contrast is not as stark as Naipaul suggests, but it exists, and the more closely you analyze a society, the more you allow yourself to see and to hear, the more you experience this tension.

In Finding the Center, Naipaul writes that travel “became a necessary stimulus for me. It broadened my worldview; it showed me a changing world and took me out of my own colonial shell…. My uncertainty about my role withered; a role was not necessary. I recognized my own instincts as a traveler and was content to be myself, to be what I had always been, a looker. And I learned to look in my own way.” He continues:

To arrive in a place without knowing anyone there, and sometimes without an introduction; to learn how to move among strangers for the short time one could afford to be among them; to hold oneself in constant readiness for adventure or revelation; to allow oneself to be carried along, up to a point, by accidents; and consciously to follow up other impulses—that could be as creative and imaginative a procedure as the writing that came after. Travel of this sort became an intense experience for me. It used all the sides of my personality; I was always wound up…. There was always the possibility of failure—of not finding anything, not getting started on the chain of accidents and encounters. This gave a gambler’s excitement to every arrival. My luck held; perhaps I made it hold.

In this passage, Naipaul captures some of the most crucial aspects of reporting: an alert or receptive passivity; a willingness to expose oneself to unfamiliar and even unsettling experiences and people, to give up control and to get lost. This is not as easy as it sounds. That “readiness for adventure or revelation” has to be cultivated. As Walter Benjamin writes in his memoir Berlin Childhood Around 1900, “not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling.”

osing one’s way is exhilarating; but it can also be destabilizing, even frightening. You may end up asking yourself the question Bruce Chatwin made famous: What am I doing here? I remember asking myself this early one morning last summer in Jenin, when I was awakened by the call of the muezzin, my head throbbing from jet lag. I had spent the previous day interviewing a group of activists working at the Jenin Freedom Theatre, each more earnest than the last. I wondered if I would ever get closer to the truth of what had happened to Juliano Mer-Khamis, the head of the theater, who had been murdered there two years earlier. I thought of declaring defeat and leaving until a close friend of mine, a French-Moroccan woman living in Jerusalem, told me to get over myself and to press on. And I did. I needed to trust the gambler’s luck that Naipaul invoked; I needed to let go. This was not a matter of finding the story, but of allowing the story to find me.

This is the experience I’ve had almost every time I’ve reported, but the most memorable of these experiences took place in Algeria in late 2002, on one of my first long reporting trips. It happened almost by accident. I had been writing about the memory of the Algerian war of independence in contemporary France, where the controversy about torture by the French army had been reignited by an interview in Le Monde with a former FLN militant, Louisette Ighilahriz, who described her ghastly experiences in a French prison cell and her rescue by a man she knew only as “Dr. Richaud,” whom she was desperate to thank after all these years. After Ighilahriz’s interview, an even more explosive interview appeared in Le Monde with a one-eyed octogenarian general named Paul Aussaresses, who emerged from retirement to give an unapologetic account of carrying out a series of murders, disguised as suicides, of leading nationalists during the Battle of Algiers. Algeria was not my only interest in telling this story. Writing about the French-Algerian war, a story of settler colonialism, guerrilla warfare, torture and repression, was my indirect way of commenting on Israel’s response to the second intifada. Like the French during the Battle of Algiers, the Israeli government claimed that it was merely fighting “terrorism” in the occupied territories, rather than a nationalist insurgency with popular backing. The French, I noted, won the Battle of Algiers, but this turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory.

After my article on the Aussaresses affair was published, I met a group of Algerians visiting New York City, headed by one of the FLN’s historic “chiefs,” Hocine Aït-Ahmed, the longstanding leader of a Kabyle Berber opposition party. One of the Algerians at that discussion was an intense young woman named Daikha Dridi, a reporter for the Quotidien d’Oran. Daikha told me about the war between the security services and Islamic rebels that had claimed more than 100,000 lives; about the machinations of the so-called pouvoir, the dominant military-industrial clique that ruled Algeria; about the country’s still-traumatic relationship with France, its former colonial master. She urged me to visit: how, having written on France’s repression of the Algerian independence movement, could I not care about the fate of the independent Algeria? She was right. Not long after that meeting, I booked a flight to Algiers.

When I arrived there, a city I knew mostly from Gillo Pontecorvo’s film, the civil war had been over for about a year, but no one quite believed it: no one had been punished for their crimes, and attacks at fake checkpoints were still common. My editor probably expected me to write about Algeria’s history and possible future in a tone—or at least an impression, an impersonation—of authority. Authority, however, was not what I felt, walking through Algiers and in the dilapidated Kabyle town of Tizi Ouzou, where alienated young Berbers were in revolt against the central government. What I felt was the utter strangeness and futility of trying to explain Algeria, a notoriously opaque country. I was often followed, particularly when I went to Internet cafes, by the secret police. One agent, a fresh-faced man with reddish hair, saw that I was typing a message in English and asked if I was from Texas, “like President Bush.”

I stayed in a dingy hotel; the only other guests were a group of German tourists on their way to an expedition in the Sahara. I was incredibly free and incredibly alone. I’d return to my room each night too tired to even read my notes; there was so little hot water I didn’t have the relief of a decent bath. So I turned on the TV. Every night the same movie was playing on the state channel, Marcel Carné’s adaptation of the Georges Simenon novel Trois chambres à Manhattan, the story of a love affair between two French expats in New York, a depressed actor and a woman fleeing her marriage. When they’re not in bed—or driving each other to tears—they’re at a club where the house pianist is Mal Waldron, who performs with his usual sorrowful elegance. He looks as if he’s always at the club—as if the club exists so that he might play there. I would drift off to sleep as Waldron played his trance-inducing, darker-than-blue blues, a cigarette dangling from his lips.

My fixer in Algiers, Farès, was a hard-drinking man in his mid-50s whose candy factory had been burned down by Islamist insurgents. He seemed pleased to have someone like me to drive around, a Westerner who paid him well, listened to his stories and spoke passable French. He wasn’t much interested in talking about the present—it was shit, he said, though I sensed he supported the éradicateurs, the hardliners who promised to wipe out the Islamist rebels and restore security. I could understand that, even if I didn’t share his sympathies for the army: if the Islamists hadn’t destroyed his livelihood, he wouldn’t have been driving a taxi.

Farès became my guide to Algiers. Whenever we ran into people he knew, he introduced me as a friend from Tizi Ouzou, a Kabyle city. He said I could pass for a Berber; so long as I only murmured a few words in French, no one would ask any questions. He wasn’t worried about walking around with an American, but he enjoyed fooling people. We wandered through the Casbah and the slums of Bab El-Oued, where the FIS leader Ali Belhaj had preached jihad against the “impious” regime at the al-Sunna mosque; we went to nightclubs and bars pulsing with strobe lights and frequented by wealthy Algerians and Arab businessmen; we drove through the neighborhoods in the hills where the leaders of the FLN settled after independence. We ate piles of golden fried sardines at long, wooden communal tables, where men (only men) watched football on television, and told the latest jokes about “Boutef”—President Abdelaziz Bouteflika—and Khalida Messaoudi, the fetching minister of culture he was said to be sleeping with.

One day, Farès told me about a novel he was writing, about his childhood during the Battle of Algiers. It revolved around the stories of three friends—a Kabyle Berber, a Jew and a pied-noir—growing up in the Casbah. Algeria, Farès said, had lost something in 1962; the country’s radical decolonization had sapped it of the diversity that had been a great source of vitality. The Algeria he knew and loved had disappeared, and he wanted to re-create it in his novel. Farès blamed the French for causing the exodus of pieds-noirs to the métropole; Algerians and the “historic FLN,” he insisted, never wanted them to go.

rance’s ultimate responsibility for everything that had gone wrong in Algeria, I found, was about the only thing Algerians agreed on. I interviewed dozens of people, from high-ranking officials to Islamist sympathizers; from mothers of the disappeared to hardline generals; from Berber activists to human-rights campaigners. Each claimed to be a critic of le pouvoir, including those who were plainly its beneficiaries. Each expressed disappointment in the post-independence era. Each claimed unimpeachable nationalist credentials and believed that his or her views were faithful to the “historic FLN,” the leadership that had lost out to those who had “confiscated” the revolution. What no one seemed to agree on was what the Algerian nation actually was. One man, a former member of the maquis who fought in the Aurès Mountains during the independence struggle, insisted that Algeria was not an Arab country like Egypt; it had more in common with Mediterranean countries like Italy, Spain and Greece. A Kabyle activist told me, no less passionately, that Algeria was a Berber country, and that its true character had been perverted by state-led Arabization. Others told me that Algeria was profoundly Arab and Muslim in its identity, and that anyone who told me otherwise was self-hating, a victim of a colonial complex. Algerians had been having this argument for years. The feud had started before the war of independence, when “assimilated” Muslims, populists, Islamists and Communists quarreled over Algeria’s identity, and it continued after independence was achieved. To be an Algerian was, in a sense, to participate in this debate, to have a stake in it. The fact that it remained so alive and so fraught after four decades of “liberation” led me to a realization that applies with equal force to the Middle East: nothing that is solid melts into air.

Algeria had been the prism through which I understood the Israel-Palestine tragedy and, to some extent, the rise of an insurgency in Iraq. Now Algeria helped me to develop a more nuanced understanding of power and identity in the region. The Algerian story was, in part, the story of a military government that refused to hand over power to civilians; but to tell that story was barely to scratch the surface. The obsession with France and with French plots, real and imagined, also suggested to me that the French/Algerian story had never really ended with the rupture that decolonization had brought about in 1962: independence was but a new and more subtle chapter in a history of unequal relations between the two countries, the two peoples. Every morning outside the French consulate in Algiers, there was a line of Algerians requesting visas, hoping to get into the country they at once hated and needed. There was no “solution” to France’s influence over Algeria; it was too late for solutions.

Algeria made a mockery of my nostalgia for the heroic certainties of anticolonialism and cured me of my lingering Third World–ism. The problems of post-independence Algeria could not be divorced from the history of colonization, but the failures were also homegrown, and they could not all be laid at the foot of France, the native bourgeoisie or even le pouvoir. And what was le pouvoir anyway? As one friend of mine put it, “Le pouvoir, c’est nous.” Algerians deserved better than a regime that had kept itself in power by distributing rents from natural gas. They had suffered terribly, and the world had largely ignored them in the darkest hours of the civil war. I wanted to give an account of their suffering, but I had to do so with a measure of humility, without pretending that I knew more than I did—or, more to the point, more than they did. Algerians were at once impressively informed about their country and stunned by what had happened to it during the civil war. Reporting on Algeria, I was forced to own up to my own uncertainty and to make it a part of my writing. This is easier said than done: readers want to be informed, not given a lecture on the limits of knowledge. I don’t claim to have a method, but admitting to the murkiness is a start.

I wish I could say that I always adhered to the uncertainty principle and listened to my own advice, but I didn’t. Algeria changed me, but it took a while for these changes to inform my writing. And the closer I got to the Israel-Palestine conflict, the more of a missionary—a Fiskian—I became. This is, as it were, an occupational hazard, the “Jerusalem syndrome” of journalists, whatever their ideological bent.

I was reminded of this a few years ago, when a mysterious man living in Damascus was killed in a car bombing. Imad Mughniyeh was one of the founders of Hezbollah and the architect of some of its most spectacular “operations,” from the 1983 bombings in Beirut to the attacks in Argentina in the early 1990s. Sometime in the 1990s, Mughniyeh went underground, and he was never mentioned by Hezbollah again until he met his fate in February 2008.

In 2004, several years before his assassination, I spent a few weeks in Lebanon reporting on Hezbollah’s “Lebanonization” under the leadership of Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah. While Israel and its spokesmen in the press continued to denounce Hezbollah as a “terrorist” outfit, Hezbollah appeared to have evolved into a more pragmatic political organization, moderating its rhetoric and entering Lebanese politics—including the confessional system that it had excoriated in its founding manifesto. It no longer seemed fair, or accurate, to describe Hezbollah merely as a proxy of the Islamic Republic of Iran or as an unreconstructed global “terrorist” organization, as Jeffrey Goldberg had argued in an alarmist series for The New Yorker. Goldberg’s articles on Hezbollah read as if they had been written by committee at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy; he even predicted that Hezbollah, a Shiite organization, might attack the United States in solidarity with Saddam Hussein, the great persecutor of the Shiites, a modern-day Yazid.

The fact that Hezbollah is a social movement and not just a militia or a pro-Iranian proxy is widely accepted today, but at the time it was a highly controversial thesis. My article came close to being killed. A platoon of fact-checkers spent nearly half a year investigating my claims. The excerpts from my interview with Nasrallah, with whom I had met for more than an hour at the party’s headquarters in the southern suburbs, were severely cut for reasons that were never explained. I had asked Nasrallah why the movement hadn’t laid down its arms after Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000. Wasn’t Hezbollah handing Israel a pretext to attack again? Israel, he replied, has never needed a pretext to attack Lebanon. He pointed out that when Israel invaded Lebanon in order to destroy Arafat’s PLO, it claimed to be responding to the shooting of Shlomo Argov, the Israeli ambassador in London, even though the shooting was carried out by the renegade Abu Nidal, an enemy of Arafat. Nasrallah’s argument was self-serving, to be sure, but he was right about the Argov pretext, and I succeeded in getting this passage restored.

Still, in my zeal to present a corrective to Goldberg’s take on Hezbollah, I made errors of my own. When I asked Nasrallah about Mughniyeh, who Goldberg claimed was still deeply involved in Hezbollah, he played with his prayer beads and told me that Mughniyeh was no longer in the organization and that his whereabouts were unknown. I was not fooled, but I didn’t push him further; I did not want to be shown the door, and I was willing to entertain the possibility that Mughniyeh had offered his services to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Was I flattered by Nasrallah’s generosity and politeness? Was the Mughniyeh relationship simply inconvenient for the case I was building about Hezbollah’s evolution? Whatever the case, I remembered these conversations when Mughniyeh was assassinated in Damascus. After Hezbollah staged an enormous funeral procession for him, the world learned not only that he had never strayed from Hezbollah, but that he had directed the 2006 war. His image was revealed for the first time in years and is now a fixture of Hezbollah iconography. I don’t blame Nasrallah for lying to me when he denied knowledge of Mughniyeh’s activities: he was merely doing his job. But I wasn’t doing mine.

Mughniyeh was, for Hezbollah, a heroic figure in what they call “the resistance.” No word is more sacred for Hezbollah, which has sought to portray itself as a “national resistance” rather than another sectarian militia. When I started out in journalism, I was more willing to use this word without quotation marks; it seemed preferable, after all, to the alternative, “terrorism.” Today, I am more skeptical of terms like “resistance,” “armed struggle” and “solidarity.” When I read these words, I want to ask: What do they actually mean, and what do they conceal? What do the people who use these words actually do? What does the word “resistance” mean if it can describe a Sunni-based insurgency against Bashar al-Assad and the Shiite-based insurgency in Lebanon that is fighting to crush that uprising? What ambitions, what goals, lie behind floating signifiers like “resistance”? What do those who hold up its banner hope to achieve? Mouloud Feraoun, an Algerian novelist who kept an extraordinary diary of the Algerian war before he was murdered by the OAS in 1962, put it well when he stated: “Sometimes you start asking yourself about the value of words, words that no longer make any sense. What is liberty, or dignity, or independence? Where is the truth, where is the lie, where is the solution?”

A writer’s job, I believe, is to ask these questions, even when—especially when—they are inconvenient. And the answers lie in the verbs, not the nouns. They lie in the distance, sometimes the chasm, between words and deeds.

he aura of the “resistance,” of course, is not universal. I remember sitting in a cafe in Beirut with the writer Samir Kassir. He had devoted himself to Palestine but had grown increasingly alarmed by Syria’s meddling in Lebanon, and by Hezbollah’s efforts, through its television station Al-Manar, to Islamize the Palestinian struggle. Israel’s occupation, he said, was not the first, or even the second, target of “the resistance.” This was, above all, a power play inside Lebanon. I remarked that the disaster of America’s war in Iraq had only heightened the prestige of Hezbollah’s resistance model. To my surprise, he replied, “I’m less worried about the fact that America is here than that it doesn’t know what it’s doing.”

Kassir was no fan of the American war, but he was a hardheaded analyst, unwilling to take refuge in comforting ideological formulas. He was not persuaded that the presence of Syrian troops in Lebanon was an essential component in the struggle to liberate Palestine: Lebanon, he believed, deserved to breathe again, free of Syria’s corrupting influence. He made this argument in writing, over and again, and paid the ultimate price. Two years after our conversation, he was killed in a car bomb attack, most likely by pro-Syrian agents. Though I did not share all of Kassir’s analysis, I had great respect for his integrity, and I paid him tribute in these pages [see “The Principle of Hope,” July 4, 2005]. In the eyes of the blogger Asad Abu-Khalil, who calls himself “Angry Arab,” I had revealed myself to be an Orientalist for praising Kassir, an opponent of “the resistance.” This was a first: I was used to being attacked as a self-hating Jew!

Identity: you can’t get around it when you write on the Middle East. I consider myself a New Yorker first, an American second; although I have a certain private connection to Jewish culture and humor, I don’t go to temple, I don’t believe in God, and I am not a Zionist. My “Judaism,” such as it is, is not political. The trouble is that, in the Middle East, the idea of a nonpolitical or non-Zionist Judaism is virtually unintelligible. I have never written as a Jew, much less tried to prove to others that there are anti-occupation Jews like me, an effort that I find silly, if not offensive. So the question has always been: How candid should I be about something that matters to me, but not in a way that most people in the region would ever understand? Would I be opening up the possibility for serious misunderstandings? Isn’t it better just to shut up rather than shut down the conversation? After all, I’m here to report the story, not to be the story.

The problem is that sometimes, without your wanting it, you are the story: the fact of your presence is news. So while I usually keep my Jewish identity to myself, if asked whether I’m Jewish, I don’t lie. And sometimes, if I’m lucky, I can use it to my advantage. Not in the sense of opening doors, but in the sense of opening up the conversation in surprising ways. I think, for example, about the albino Palestinian woman I met in Jenin who, when she discovered I was Jewish, asked me, “Were you in the Holocaust?” and began to chuckle. Fortunately not, I replied, laughing at the absurdity of her question. This led to one of the most fascinating conversations I had in Palestine, a conversation about the oppressions of occupation, gender and, in her case, colorlessness.

I also think of the conversation I had in Nablus with Ghada, a local PFLP leader who had spent much of her adulthood in Israeli prisons. I liked her immediately. She was as playful as she was fiery, with a disarming, throaty laugh. Before we began our interview, I asked her if she had any questions about me. I usually do this—if people want to have a better sense of who I am, I want to give them the opportunity to ask. Their questions can deepen the conversation and help me to formulate my own. She paused, took a drag of her cigarette and said: “If you are Israeli, or related to Israelis, or even if you are just a Jew, I cannot speak to you. Do you understand?” Abed, my fixer, sat there waiting, nervously, while I came up with a reply. I said: “Really, you wouldn’t talk to Noam Chomsky? You wouldn’t talk to a Jewish critic of the occupation?” She replied that a French-Jewish journalist who had interviewed her recently had written that she supported a two-state settlement when, in fact, she wanted to liberate Palestine from the river to the sea. A Jew had betrayed her; how could I be trusted?

I said, a bit desperately, “If you read my work, I believe that you will see that I am progressive, and honest. Now, you can decide not to speak with me because I’m Jewish. That’s your right. I can’t force you to talk to me. But I think you’d be making a mistake not to.” She looked at Abed; he looked at her. “Because I love Abed, because I trust Abed, I will speak to you, with total frankness.” And she did. She gave me great material.

When we left her office, Abed said, “You never told me you were Jewish!” I said I assumed he knew. He said, “What you don’t understand is that for Ghada, your kind of Jew is not really a Jew.”

What did I learn from this encounter, besides the fact that in the Nablus offices of the Popular Front, I don’t quite count as a Jew? I learned that having a trusted fixer makes a huge difference. And I realized that, in some cases, you can create intimacy by showing your cards, by not being sheepish about your identity, by owning up to your discomfort. I could have lied to Ghada, but if I had lied to her, I would have shown her less respect, and showing respect, I believe, is the yeast of any successful interview.

When I started out, I didn’t have the confidence about my identity that I displayed that day with Ghada. And I had not yet learned to listen; I still took words, ideological formulas, slogans at face value. Around the time that I met Ghada, I interviewed Hussam Khader, a Fatah leader in the Balata refugee camp. Hussam, like Ghada, had spent a number of years in Israeli prisons. He told me that he was sure that in time—maybe twenty years, maybe fifty, maybe a hundred—they, the Jews, would all go back to wherever they came from, and all of Palestine would be free. A few minutes later, he spoke of his hopes for co-existence and offered, as proof, the example of his own friendships with members of the Knesset. What did Khader actually believe? Does it matter? Aren’t we all contradictory in our aspirations and beliefs—particularly if, as in Khader’s case, an ocean lies between our desires and our power to fulfill them? Doesn’t this paradox, this floating between the dream of recovering historical Palestine and the dreary and corrupt business of “peace processing” under occupation, tell you more about the Palestinian predicament than any speech, than any declaration of principles?

ords are all we have, but silences are sometimes more meaningful. In Prisoner of Love, Jean Genet writes:

if the reality of time spent among—not with—the Palestinians existed anywhere, it would survive between all the words that claim to give an account of it. They claim to give an account of it, but in fact it buries itself, slots itself exactly into the spaces, recorded there rather than in the words that serve only to blot it out. Another way of putting it: the space between the words contains more reality than does the time it takes to read them.

How do we reach the space between the words, when our only way of doing so is through words? I’m not sure, but I would suggest it is largely a matter of listening, observing and describing—with a sense of history, and without false consolations. It also requires resistance, not only to the clichés and stereotypes that are often pilloried as “Orientalist,” but also to the missionary temptation to mistake one’s hopes for realities. When the uprising in Egypt broke out, I succumbed, like many, to the latter temptation, when I wrote that Islamists and secular opponents of Mubarak appeared to have laid aside their differences in the interest of national unity. I had written about these divisions only six months before the uprising, in an article called “Mubarak’s Last Breath”; but during the early days of Tahrir Square, I allowed myself to forget just how deeply the fear and distrust run, and how easily these emotions can be manipulated by the army. I succumbed to this temptation again after Israel’s most recent war in the Gaza Strip, when I argued that Israel’s strategic position had been weakened by the emergence of a Muslim Brotherhood–led Egypt allied with Hamas and Erdogan’s Turkey. That article, which felt so good to write, could not seem more dated. Mohammed Morsi is in prison along with thousands of Muslim Brothers; Erdogan, having revealed himself to be a thug rather than a visionary Islamic democrat, is embroiled in several scandals; Hamas is scrambling to repair ties with Iran; and Israel is deepening its colonization of East Jerusalem and the West Bank and, once again, launching an offensive in Gaza—only this time without much protest from Cairo.

Edward Said was fond of quoting Raymond Williams’s argument about the struggle, in any society, between dominant, residual and emergent forces. But the Middle East severely tests the teleological assumptions, or wishes, of Williams’s formulation. “Emergent” forces like the progressive youth movements in Egypt are not destined to win, however much we admire them and hope for their success. And what about jihadi organizations like the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, a Sunni Islamist group so extreme that it was excommunicated by Ayman Zawahiri of Al Qaeda? Is ISIS, which has captured several major Iraqi cities and declared a new caliphate, an “emergent” force or a “residual” one, or some combination of the two?

The Middle East is the graveyard of predictions. Just after the uprisings, the so-called experts declared that Al Qaeda had died in Tahrir Square. But these days Tahrir Square seems moribund, while Al Qaeda is resurgent and facing competition from still more radical offshoots. A military dictatorship even harsher than Mubarak’s rule has returned to Egypt, and Assad appears to be winning in Syria, thanks not only to his horrifying tactics, but also to the fragmentation and brutality of the insurgents. Nine million Syrians have been internally displaced, and more than 2 million have gone into exile; more than 100,000 have been killed. Meanwhile, a highly sectarian government in Iraq has been fighting against an extremist insurgency. The Arab uprisings brought about an end to the political stagnation that had characterized the military dictatorships of the region during the Cold War, but except in Tunisia, they failed to deliver on their promise of establishing more democratic systems of governance. The result, for now, is a deepening sectarian struggle throughout the region and, in Syria, a vicious proxy war that has produced a Nakba on a scale that, in numbers of dead and displaced, dwarfs the Nakba of 1948. There is no obvious solution to this crisis, and it seems all but inevitable that Syria—and perhaps Iraq as well—will be dismembered under any transition.

Writing about the region, never an easy undertaking, is likely to become still more difficult. I am not sure whether the most influential current of oppositional thinking about the Middle East is equipped to deal with the changes the region is undergoing. I am referring to the critique of Orientalism that Edward Said initiated. This style of thinking was formative for me, but I fear that it has congealed into an orthodoxy; and, as George Orwell wrote, “orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.” That we are now able to have a more open conversation about Palestine, that students are mobilizing against the occupation, is welcome; but Palestine is not the Middle East, and it seems peculiar, if not myopic, to talk about Palestine as if it were insulated from the rest of the region. And while it is understandable that young American students are particularly concerned about their government’s policies in the region, these policies do not wholly determine its shape and direction. America’s power in the Middle East has weakened, though not in favor of forces that most of us would consider progressive. Today, we are witnessing a tacit alliance of Israel, the military regime in Egypt and the Gulf states—particularly Saudi Arabia—against Iran, with which the United States, in conflict with its own regional allies, is seeking rapprochement. The latest Israeli offensive in Gaza is a measure of how marginal Palestine has become to the agenda of Arab states.

ut to quote a poster I recently saw in the home of a solidarity activist, isn’t Palestine still the question? That “still,” you’ll note, qualifies the confident “the”: it suggests an anxious insistence, perhaps a fear, that Palestine might not be the only, or central, question in the contemporary Middle East—especially now that much of the region is preoccupied with other matters, like the wars in Iraq and Syria, Iran’s overture to the West and the re-emergence of military rule in Egypt. It is, of course, only natural that Palestinians would consider the question of Palestine to be the question; they experience the daily humiliations of occupation and the sorrows of exile, the ongoing and, it seems, ever-deepening results of the 1948 catastrophe. It is only natural that Arabs and Muslims, for national and religious reasons, see Palestine as a sacred cause. For them, Palestine is not just a national struggle but a metaphor for suffering and redemption, exile and return, dispossession and justice. But that does not explain why Palestine is seen on the Western left as the question, the key that opens all doors in the region, not just those to the homes from which Palestinians were driven in 1948.

“Do you know why we are so famous?” Mahmoud Darwish asks the Israeli writer Helit Yeshurun in Palestine as Metaphor. “It’s because you are our enemy. The interest in the Palestinian question flows from the interest in the Jewish question…. It’s you they’re interested in, not me!… So we have the misfortune of having an enemy, Israel, with so many sympathizers in the world, and we have the good fortune that our enemy is Israel, since Jews are the center of the world. You have given us our defeat, our weakness, our renown.” As Darwish suggests, this concern for the Palestinians is not a matter of anti-Semitism, as Israel supporters claim, so much as it is a reflection of self-absorption: the Palestinians are important to the West because, through their oppression by Israeli Jews, they have become characters in a Western narrative.

I thought of Darwish’s remark when I saw a poster in the Balata refugee camp declaring, in English, “Our existence is resistance,” as if opposition to oppression were a way of life. “A gift from our foreign guests,” the Fatah leader Hussam Khader explained to me, unable to suppress a smile.

In an essay on French opposition to the war in Algeria, Pierre Vidal-Naquet observed that for a small but influential current of French dissidents, identification with the FLN’s struggle was a kind of surrogate religion; for these so-called Third World–ists, “Algeria represented the suffering just man and thus a Christ-like figure…the symbol of a humanity to be redeemed, if not a redemptive humanity.” The most devout Third World–ists, he noted, believed that Algeria’s liberation might awaken the dormant French working class, spark a revolution in France and rescue the West from its spiritual decadence. Vidal-Naquet, a scholar of classical Greece who lost his parents in the Holocaust as well as an independent socialist who campaigned tirelessly against torture during the war, saw this faith for what it was: part of France’s conversation with itself. The Algerian struggle, he understood, was a struggle for national self-determination, not for humanity as a whole, and Algerian nationalists were themselves profoundly divided, not some unified subject of history who could replace the proletariat. Today, it seems to me, Palestinians are for the radical Western left what Algerians were for Third World–ists in Vidal-Naquet’s day: natural-born resisters, fighting not only Israel but its imperial patrons, as much on our behalf as theirs. That is the role assigned to them in the revolutionary imagination. Like the kaffiyeh worn by anti-globalization protesters, this Palestine is little more than a metaphor. Palestine is still “the question” because it holds up a mirror to us. “Too many people want to save Palestine,” one activist said to me. But it could just as well be said that too many people want to be saved by Palestine.

I understand this Palestine-centrism and have felt its gravitational pull. Israel’s occupation, now nearly a half-century old, is the longest in modern history. It is subsidized by US tax dollars and maintained by a state that claims to speak not only in the name of the Jewish people but, more obscenely, in the name of those who perished in the Holocaust. I have witnessed the occupation’s horrors firsthand: the subjugation of an entire people through a system of pervasive control and countless petty humiliations, always backed by the threat of violence; the confiscation not only of that people’s land, but of its future. I have been shamed, as well as touched, by the hospitality for which Palestinians are rightly famous. While traveling in other Arab countries, I have seen the poisonous effect that the occupation has had on the perception of the United States, the well of resentment, suspicion and rage it has bred. Still, I am not sure that the Palestinians benefit when their struggle—an anticolonial, nationalist struggle like that of Algeria, no more, no less—becomes a matter of metaphysics rather than politics; when their suffering is romanticized, even sanctified. Palestinians need friends, not missionaries or fellow travelers.

When Gershom Scholem scolded Hannah Arendt for showing no love of the Jewish people in her book on Eichmann, Arendt replied that she could not love a people, only friends. Her point was overdrawn for dramatic effect; our political positions are almost always influenced by the bonds we form. I would be the first to admit that my own hatred of the occupation has been deepened by spending time in Palestine with friends like Raja Shehadeh, a man who embodies sumud—steadfastness in the face of a system of oppression as absurd as it is cruel. But, as Arendt warned, too strong a bond with one people can lead to a contraction of empathy for others: the case of Israel illustrates this all too well. Love of a people in particular can lead us to engage in moral calculations that betray the principles we claim to hold, even to defend the indefensible. Now we are told, by some who call themselves friends of Palestine, that we shouldn’t concern ourselves too much with war crimes in Syria, unless they are committed by jihadists in the opposition; that, all things considered, perhaps Assad, the butcher of Yarmouk, deserves our “critical” support, since he is a leader of the resistance front, in the cross hairs of the West and the Gulf states. I have seen this argument made privately by one well-known champion of Palestinian rights; this person is a Quaker, but then so was Richard Nixon. According to Amal Saad Ghorayeb, writing in the Lebanese paper Al-Akhbar, support for Assad is a litmus test of support for Palestine. How different, morally, is this from saying, as Benjamin Netanyahu has done, that Israel is better off if its Arab neighbors remain dictatorships? Can Palestinian emancipation be served by such vulgar anti-imperialism?

s the regional balance of power has shifted and American dominance wanes, I have begun to worry that an all-consuming preoccupation with America and Israel leads progressive writers to become strangely incurious about the crimes for which the West can’t be blamed and the developments, such as the politicization of sectarian identity, that are shaking the region far more profoundly than the Israeli-Palestinian arena. This paradigm also leads them to belittle, or simply to overlook, what academics call “agency”: the fact that people act in this region, and are not merely acted upon by more powerful external forces. And it has increasingly been my sense that much of the work Said inspired fails to examine the lived experience of people in the region; it often relegates much of that experience to silence, as if it were unworthy of attention or politically inconvenient.

Enormously liberating when it was developed, the critique of Orientalism has often resulted in a set of taboos and restrictions that inhibit critical thinking. They pre-emptively tell us to stop noticing things that are right under our noses, particularly the profound cleavages in Middle Eastern societies—struggles over class and sect, the place of religion in politics, the relationship between men and women; struggles that are only partly related to their confrontation with the West and with Israel. Indeed, it is sometimes only in those moments of confrontation that these very divided societies achieve a fleeting sense of unity. The theoretical intricacy of academic anti-Orientalism, its hermetic and sophisticated language, sometimes conceals an attempt to wish away the region’s dizzying complexity in favor of the old, comforting logic of anticolonial struggle. Anti-Orientalism will continue to provide a set of critical tools and a moral compass, so long as it is understood as a point of departure, not a destination. Like all old maps, it has begun to yellow. It no longer quite describes the region, the up-ender of all expectations, the destroyer of all missionary dreams.

When Sy Johnson, a jazz pianist and arranger, used to visit Charles Mingus at his apartment in the East Village in the 1960s, there was always a pot of soup on the stove, and Mingus—a gourmand who once interrupted a concert to eat a steak dinner on the bandstand—was constantly tasting it. “He would say—‘Needs another carrot.’” He would chop another carrot and taste it again, only to decide it needed an onion. The pot might simmer for a month before Mingus was satisfied with the seasoning. As Johnson tells John Goodman in Mingus Speaks, a book of interviews with Mingus and friends conducted in the early 1970s, Mingus’s music was a lot like his soup: a “huge cauldron of sounds” that was “always in a state of becoming something.”

Mingus rarely left his pieces alone when he took them on the road with his Jazz Workshop, as he began calling his bands in the mid-1950s. When the Workshop played “Fables of Faubus,” a dart of sarcasm aimed at Arkansas’s segregationist governor Orval Faubus, at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the jaunty eight-minute tune swelled into a half-hour suite, punctuated by tart allusions to “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” and “God Bless America” and a bass clarinet solo of blistering intensity by Eric Dolphy. (The performance is one of five concerts included in The Jazz Workshop Concerts 1964–65, a seven-disc boxed set on Mosaic Records.) In the studio, Mingus was always splicing, dicing and overdubbing, enriching the texture of his music, increasing its density. He tinkered with titles, giving old pieces new and sometimes cryptic names: the tender portrait of a woman he loved, “Nouroog,” reappeared after their breakup as “I X Love”; “Better Get It in Your Soul,” a foot-stomping gospel tune that’s still played on jukeboxes, became “Better Get Hit in Yo’ Soul,” a message to junkies that they’d be better off with a boost from the Lord than one from the needle.

Mingus was always true to his ever-changing moods: he wanted to create music that, in his words, was “as varied as my feelings are, or the world is.” For sheer range of expression, his work has few equals in postwar American music: furious and tender, joyous and melancholy, grave and mischievous, ecstatic and introspective. It moves from the rapture of the church to the euphoria of the ballroom, from accusation to seduction, from a whisper to a growl, often by way of startling jump cuts and sudden changes in tempo. Vocal metaphors are irresistible when discussing Mingus. As Whitney Balliett remarked, music for him was “another way of talking.”

Though he wrote only a few songs with lyrics, his compositions—and his own bass playing, which revealed new dimensions of the instrument and helped liberate it from its traditional time-keeping role—were supremely vocal. He collaborated with poets in East Village coffeehouses and never hesitated to call out to his sidemen when the spirit caught him, as if he was leading a gospel choir. Each instrument in a Mingus tune evoked the voice, invariably in conversation with other voices; and each voice was an extension of his famously tempestuous personality. (“We don’t need a vocalist,” he told the trombonist Britt Woodman. “This band can have an argument with instruments.”) Philip Larkin was astonished by “how every Mingus band sounds like a great rabble of players, like some trick of Shakespearian production.” No matter how small the ensemble, he could create a sense of passionate, often combative dialogue: as one of his sidemen put it, Mingus “liked the sound of a struggle.” If his Workshop settled into a groove, he would suddenly change the time signature: he didn’t want anyone to get too comfortable. Struggle—against complacency, against the confinements of race and genre, against the record industry and the American government—inspired him; he depended on it to create. Though he dreamed of finding refuge on some “colorless island,” it wasn’t clear how he’d spend his time there. He needed something to fight against; his anger, in Geoff Dyer’s words, was “a form of energy, part of the fire sweeping through him.”

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That fire, that irrepressible energy, made Mingus somewhat unfashionable in an era of cool. So did his unabashed maximalism as a composer. The limpid impressionism of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (1959), the funky vamps of hard bop and soul jazz, and the honky-tonk expressiveness of Ornette Coleman had little in common, but all were attempts at achieving a simpler, more immediate style than bebop with its bewildering velocity and jarring dissonances. Mingus understood the appeal of the new simplicity. He had anticipated the modal improvisation of Kind of Blue in his 1956 masterpiece Pithecanthropus Erectus. In 1959, years before soul jazz musicians learned how to play gospel licks in 6/8 time, he recorded “Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting,” a master class on the music of the black church in which Mingus himself breaks into shouts and hollers.

It enraged him that Miles and the hard boppers had been given credit for his innovations. It enraged him even more when Ornette blew into town with his plastic yellow saxophone, pianoless quartet and ideology of collective improvisation, launching the free jazz revolution and attracting nearly as many imitators as Charlie Parker. Ornette and his followers, Mingus complained to Goodman, were like surgeons who couldn’t retrace their steps: “if I’m a surgeon, am I going to cut you open ‘by heart,’ just free-form it, you know?… I’m not avant-garde, no. I don’t throw rocks and stones, I don’t throw my paint.” Still, Mingus knew a good idea when he heard one. His 1960 session Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus features a pianoless quartet that ventured even further from Mingus’s melodies than Coleman did from his, as if Mingus were bent on proving that he was more modern than the avant-garde. Whatever moved Mingus ended up in his music, whether it was the mariachi he heard on his trips to brothels south of the border and included in Tijuana Moods, recorded in 1957, or the experimental tape music of his 1962 self-portrait “Passions of a Man,” in which he overdubbed himself mumbling in an unintelligible made-up language while his band invoked half-remembered fragments of other Mingus compositions, taking us deep inside the funhouse of his unconscious.

Mingus wasn’t afraid of the new, but he didn’t see why it should come at the expense of the past, as the slogans of the avant-garde seemed to imply. He was a rebel in defense of tradition. In his liner notes to Mingus Dynasty (1959)—on the cover of which he appeared in Chinese imperial robes, with a Fu Manchu mustache—he grumbled, “ten to fifteen year cycles in jazz are camouflages for insecure musicians who hide behind the current style.” (“Camouflage” was the ultimate insult for Mingus, for whom art was nothing without self-exposure.) Just as “sham copies” had dishonored Parker’s genius, so young jazz musicians were now “hanging on to a few of the rhythmic phrases Coleman has been able to create.” In 1959, the year Coleman announced The Shape of Jazz to Come, Mingus called one of his records Blues & Roots: black music, as he saw it, was a continuum, a bottomless source of renewal; you couldn’t move into the future without a thorough knowledge of the past. “Those eras in the history of jazz, like Dixieland,” he told Goodman, “are the same and as important as classical music styles are.” Gospel and blues, the New Orleans polyphony of Jelly Roll Morton and the urbane sophistication of the Duke Ellington Orchestra, the stride piano of James P. Johnson and the dazzling harmonizations of Art Tatum: all went into the Mingus cauldron, seasoned with dashes of circus music, obscure pop tunes, B-movie scores, flamenco, scraps of Mozart and Richard Strauss. To listen to Mingus is to hear the black American musical tradition talking to itself. Jazz had always been an art of quotation and allusion, a palimpsest of commentaries on other musicians’ interpretations of the same material. But with Mingus, who came into his own as jazz reached middle age, it acquired a more acute sense of historicity, even if his own work—a one-man genre he called “Mingus music,” as expansive and restless as the man himself—seemed to defy periodization.

Mingus’s reverence for the tradition—and his mockery of free jazz musicians as unschooled dilettantes—made it easy to mistake him for a conservative: a “black Stan Kenton,” in the dismissive phrase of Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones), the high priest of black nationalist jazz critics. In fact, Mingus’s music was precisely the kind of vernacular modernism that Baraka had championed in his 1963 study Blues People, as well as a textbook illustration of his argument that black musical styles, however superficially divergent, were joined at the hip by a blues impulse that Baraka called “the changing same.” Like Baraka, Mingus viewed music as a surrogate church for black Americans. “James Brown was their church,” he told Goodman, “but they got a church in jazz, too. As long as there’s the blues.” Blues feeling saturates Mingus’s work: as Sy Johnson notes, “it’s always got its feet in the dirt.” His music immerses us in the blues rituals of black American life, while at the same time depicting them from a warm and playful distance.

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Mingus spent nearly as much time talking about his music as he did performing it, as if he were running a permanent anti-establishment campaign. He regularly fired off letters to jazz magazines, jousting over reviews of his work. “Critics! How did they get here? I know. It’s Freudian,” he wrote. “I even know one who can hear. I mean he can actually hear the difference between a major triad and A minor…. And this man works while musicians who just play music are scuffling to pay rent or have their wives bury them in dirt with the few dollars the American Federation of Musicians calls insurance.” He even wrote to Eisenhower, demanding unemployment benefits for jazz musicians. Onstage, he was always sounding off about music, about racism, about the corruptions of the record industry—and about the audience, who learned that the twinkle in his eye could suddenly turn into a glare. “You don’t want to see your ugly selves,” he told one audience. “So you come to me, you sit in the front row, as noisy as can be. I listen to your millions of conversations, sometimes pulling them all up and putting them together and writing a symphony. But you never hear that symphony…. You’re here because jazz has publicity, jazz is popular, the word jazz, and you like to associate yourself with this sort of thing. But it doesn’t make you a connoisseur of the art because you follow it around. You’re dilettantes of style.”

These harangues weren’t prepared, but they were standards of the show. So were his outfits—a Mexican sombrero and serape one night, a kimono and headband the next. From the mid-1950s through the ’60s, a Mingus happening was as much a part of Village bohemia as Lenny Bruce’s stand-up or Norman Mailer’s drunken provocations. When Mingus came onstage, you never knew what he might do, except that he wouldn’t ignore you. If you applauded before a piece ended—or, worse, talked during the set—he might turn up at your table with a cleaver, kick your drink to the floor or smash his bass. (“I’m sorry but I’m neurotic,” he apologized after one such stunt. “My only defense is that I know it.”) But unlike Miles, Mingus never turned his back to the audience, even if he had an unusual way of engaging it. Members of the Workshop—some called it the Sweatshop—weren’t immune from his onstage antics. If he was disappointed with your playing, he might fire you in the middle of a set; if he was really disappointed, he’d fire the whole band, including himself. As Nat Hentoff wrote, “this huge cauldron of emotions at the center of a band can be taxing to a sideman.” It could also result in serious injury. Jimmy Knepper, Mingus’s longtime trombonist, lost an octave of range when Mingus punched him in the mouth and capped one of his teeth. When Knepper filed suit, Mingus sent him a package with a bag of heroin inside and no return address, then called the cops on him. Knepper eventually forgave him; everyone did. In the words of Bobby Jones, a white tenor saxophonist who played with Mingus in the early 1970s and was a frequent target of his screaming fits, “he’s the easiest person in the world to love.”

Mingus’s defenders often romanticized his outbursts as an expression of existential authenticity. Mingus, they said, wasn’t angry; he was misunderstood. One critic who misunderstood him, John S. Wilson of The New York Times, received a response from Mingus in the countercultural magazine Changes: “The title of this article should read ‘John Ass Wilson is full of shit.’ You stay away from my job and I’ll stay away from yours.” Wilson came back to hear him—with a newly grown beard. Mingus was a son of a bitch, but it was hard for critics to hate a man who called one of his pieces—an ingenious reworking of “All the Things You Are,” the Jerome Kern standard—“All the Things You Could Be By Now if Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother.” Mingus loved words as much as they did, and they recognized a kindred spirit.

In 1971, Mingus published his long-anticipated memoir, Beneath the Underdog, which he’d been writing on and off since the mid-1950s. (Jason Epstein considered publishing it at Random House, until Mingus insisted on white binding with gold letters so that it would look like the Bible.) Beneath the Underdog caused a splash for its lurid tales of pimping and group sex. Here, it seemed, was proof that jazz really was orgasm, as Mailer, a Mingus fan, had proposed in his 1957 essay “The White Negro.” But much of the memoir was fabricated in order to play on white fantasies about black sexuality. Mingus was never a pimp and was sexually rather shy as a young man. He was married four times, and by his own account in Mingus Speaks he much preferred monogamy. Still, Beneath the Underdog is interesting for other reasons, not least as a jazz bildungsroman. It opens with a boast that is also a confession: “In other words, I am three.” Like Philip Roth’s Portnoy, he’s talking to his psychiatrist, who deciphers the identities of Mingus One, Two and Three: “The man who watches and waits, the man who attacks because he’s afraid, and the man who wants to trust and love but retreats each time he finds himself betrayed.” Mingus’s psychiatrist, Dr. Edmund Pollock, contributed liner notes to The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (“Mr. Mingus is not yet complete…. Hopefully the integration in society will keep pace with his”); it was the only time Mingus ever paid him for his services. The three Minguses never quite became one, but music allowed them to co-exist in a state of controlled turbulence. Mingus, who had himself committed to a mental hospital more than once, needed art to tame his demons—particularly the demons of race.

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No one in jazz went deeper than Mingus in his exploration of black Americana, or protested racism more fervently. Yet his relationship to black identity was anything but relaxed: it gave his music its stormy weather. Born in 1922 in the Arizona border town of Nogales, he grew up in a middle-class family in Watts, an ethnically mixed section of Los Angeles then on its way to becoming a black ghetto. His father, a former noncommissioned officer in the Army who worked in the post office, was a light-skinned biracial man with blue eyes; he looked down on darker-skinned blacks and warned his son not to play with “them little black nigger yaps.” Mingus’s mother, the daughter of a black woman from the West Indies and a Chinese man from Hong Kong, died five months after he was born: Mingus, who was raised by his stepmother, was always aware of “the chill of death”—the name of a Straussian tone poem he wrote when he was 17.

He first learned that he was black—at least by American definitions—when a group of Mexican kids assaulted him, calling him “nigger.” Among his black peers, however, “he was a kind of mongrel…not light enough to belong to the almost-white elite and not dark enough to belong with the beautiful elegant blacks,” he writes in his memoir. “There really was no skin color exactly like his.” (The book’s original title was Memoirs of a Half-Schitt-Colored Nigger.) His closest friends were “other mongrels”—Japanese, Mexicans, Jews, Greeks—and he sometimes passed as Latino. His first intellectual mentor was a beatnik painter named Farwell Taylor, whom he met on a trip to San Francisco in 1939. Taylor, a part–Native American refugee from Oklahoma, introduced him to modern art and Russian novels, Hinduism and Theosophy and The Interpretation of Dreams, which inspired his composition “Precognition.” (It was in San Francisco that Mingus had his first—and last—taste of heroin, which made him sick; he was one of the few jazz musicians of his generation who never got hooked.) Mingus would always be most at home in integrated settings like the interracial bohemia he helped pioneer in the East Village of the mid-1950s. Three of his four wives were strawberry blonds with college educations, WASPish families and the practical skills he lacked.

Mingus’s connection to blackness came mainly through music: first the gospel he heard as a boy in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and then—his single greatest influence—the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Yet his early ambition was to be a classical composer. He learned solfège and played cello in the Los Angeles Junior Philharmonic. Then his friend, the saxophonist Buddy Collette, told him that if he planned to make a living as a musician, “you gotta play a Negro instrument. You can’t slap a cello, so you gotta learn to slap that bass, Charlie!” Mingus approached the bass with his usual ferocious diligence: he took lessons with a former bassist from the New York Philharmonic, and taped his index and middle fingers together in order to increase the dexterity of his ring finger.

By his late teens, Mingus was a star on Central Avenue, a strip of nightclubs in Watts where the best jazz musicians from the East Coast came to play. He sat in with everyone from Art Tatum to Louis Armstrong and wrote his first pieces for big band, strongly influenced by Ellington. Duke was his hero; he even adopted the stage name Baron Mingus. Yet he continued to pursue his education in classical music. He studied composition and theory at LA City College, took private lessons with an African-American acquaintance of Arnold Schoenberg, and wrote his first orchestral compositions. He hadn’t given up on his dream of becoming a composer, and he never did. Mingus’s involvement with jazz was, in part, a long-running quarrel with the limitations of jazz.

Mingus’s confidence that he was cut out for something larger nearly caused him to miss out on the bebop revolution, led by self-assertive black musicians intent on establishing jazz as a high art form rather than nightclub entertainment. Bop was a rebellion against the swing Mingus loved: its thorny syncopation, challenging dissonances and chord substitutions were designed to make it difficult, if not impossible, to dance to. He was unimpressed by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie when they came to Central Avenue in 1945. His own ideas about harmony, as he saw it, were more intricate, his compositions more sophisticated. He resented the idea that if he didn’t become a bopper he’d soon be a has-been—but he also knew it was true. He resisted fate until he arrived in New York in 1951 and his employer, the white vibraphonist Red Norvo, told him he couldn’t appear with the band on television because he was black. After a brief stint in the Ellington Orchestra that came to an abrupt end when he got into a knife fight onstage with Ellington’s trombonist Juan Tizol (a fight that, for once, he didn’t provoke), Mingus joined Parker’s band. He came to love Parker’s music and became a brilliant, if still reluctant, bopper. With Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie and Bud Powell, they made a classic record, Jazz at Massey Hall. Mingus and his second wife, Celia, produced it on Debut Records, the label they established with Roach after Bob Weinstock at Prestige offered to record Mingus for $10, a free lunch and a line of coke. Mingus wasn’t suited to run a business, but that never stopped him from trying—or from railing against men like Weinstock.

Mingus was second to no one in his admiration of Parker, who, as he wrote later, achieved “a primitive, mystic, supra-mind communication that I’d only heard in the late Beethoven quartets, and, even more, in Stravinsky.” But Mingus didn’t want to be a slave to bebop. He wanted to be known as a composer, not as a bass-slapping jazz man. In 1953, he set up the Jazz Composers Workshop, a revolving ensemble of musicians from both jazz and classical backgrounds who performed his early compositions, somewhat earnest jazz-meets-classical experiments that prefigured “Third Stream” music. But the results left him dissatisfied. Jazz musicians added their own inflections even when they played fully notated passages, while classical musicians couldn’t improvise or capture the blues feeling he wanted. “Tired modern paintings” was Miles Davis’s verdict on his new music. The insult stung.

* * *

Mingus’s disappointment led him away from the Third Stream and back to the traditions of the blues and the church. He wanted to recapture the sounds of his childhood, especially the “dirty timbres” close to the human voice that had been concealed by the finesse of so much modern jazz. His music became increasingly complex, yet he ceased to be a “pencil composer”; he relied instead on “mental score paper.” His sidemen were expected to do the same: Mingus sat down at the piano and taught them his music note by note, without scores or charts, so that, as he explained, “it would be in their ears, rather than on paper, so they’d play the compositional parts with as much spontaneity and soul as they’d play a solo.” Mingus chose musicians who could not only play his compositions but complete them in the heat of performance: the composed parts should sound improvised, the improvised parts composed. The newly conceived Jazz Workshop—“Composers” was dropped from its title—would dramatize the struggle between structure and improvisation, between collective discipline and individual spontaneity. Mingus would be its director, like Orson Welles in the Mercury Theatre or John Cassavetes, whose film Shadows (1959) he later scored.

The Workshop’s breakthrough came in 1956, when it recorded Pithecanthropus Erectus, which launched Mingus’s career as Ellington’s heir. In the title track—a tone poem about the first man to stand upright, who brings about his own downfall when he refuses to free his slaves—the alto saxophonist Jackie McLean and the tenor saxophonist J.R. Monterose moaned, testified and shrieked together in the upper registers of their horns. The piece had civil rights echoes, but it was also a Hegelian allegory about the composer and his sidemen. By encouraging his musicians to forget about chord changes (“all notes are right,” he told McLean), Mingus extended new freedoms—or, more precisely, restored old ones. As Martin Williams wrote, Mingus had revived “the semi-improvised ensemble style, the thrilling collective spontaneity that has been missing in jazz since Dixieland.” He used that spontaneity, moreover, to achieve a variety of expressive effects, from the picturesque humor of “A Foggy Day (In San Francisco),”  with its symphony of whistles and police sirens, to the intense yearning of “Love Chant,” a fourteen-minute modal work structured around a simple, hypnotic figure performed by the brooding pianist Mal Waldron.

Shortly after Pithecanthropus Erectus, Mingus met his “heartbeat”: Dannie Richmond, a gaunt, fastidiously dressed former tenor player whom Mingus taught to play drums with the elastic sense of time his music required. (“We find a beat that’s in the air, and just take it out of the air when we want it,” Richmond explained.) Richmond never left his side. Mingus took him to Tijuana to sample the mariachi bands, tequila and whores, a demimonde he attempted to re-create in Tijuana Moods, recorded for RCA Victor in 1957. It was the first in a string of classic records made over the next six years, including Blues & Roots, Mingus Ah Um, Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus and—his most fully realized work yet—The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, a grand, bustling, propulsive piece of “ethnic folk-dance music” for reeds, brass and flamenco guitar that looked back to the Ellington Orchestra and forward to the incendiary free-blowing of Coltrane’s Ascension.

Works of gut-bucket modernism, reverberating with earthy sophistication and wit, Mingus’s great records always were, as their titles often suggested, advertisements for himself. He was using music to establish his lineage, often by way of striking musical “portraits” like his slow, noir eulogy for Lester Young, “Goodbye Porkpie Hat.” He also used it to settle old scores. Mingus paid tribute to Charlie Parker in pieces like “Bird Calls,” but he also gave one of his most audacious projects, a recording of orchestral works he’d written in his teens, the title Pre-Bird, as if he were digging for treasures the beboppers had hidden away. Mingus, who was late to Parker’s table and felt that his imitators had condescended to the older styles he loved, continued to nurse a grudge against him. (“I should have come before [Parker] because I had this whole new thing that had the weight and had to do with waltzes and religious music,” he told Goodman. “But instead they completely ignored me and I had to go play Bird’s music.”)

As his fame grew, so did his urge to make himself heard: like Mailer, he wanted to impose his tumultuous, overbearing personality on the dramas of postwar American life. He was too shambolic, and too light-skinned, to become a symbol of militant negritude like Miles or Coltrane, but he made news by organizing the Newport Rebels’ counter-festival, a 1960 protest against the Newport Jazz Festival for underpaying black musicians. He wrote a “Prayer for Passive Resistance” in honor of the sit-ins down South; he wrote a blues ditty called “Oh Lord Don’t Let Them Drop That Atomic Bomb on Me” and sang it himself, doing his best Ray Charles impression. But his signal achievement as a political composer was “Meditations on Integration,” the centerpiece of the Mosaic boxed set, which includes three performances of the piece. A nearly half-hour suite in multiple sections, shifting between written and improvised passages, it powerfully fuses the confessional and epic dimensions of Mingus’s music.

* * *

“Meditations” was premiered in April 1964 at a civil rights benefit at New York City’s Town Hall, by one of the finest bands Mingus ever assembled. Along with Richmond on drums, it featured the pianist Jaki Byard, a musician of wit, invention and unerring blues feeling, as well versed as Mingus in old-school styles like stride piano; and the horn section of tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan, trumpeter Johnny Coles and multi-reedist Eric Dolphy, who grew up with Mingus in Los Angeles. Dolphy, who alternates between flute and bass clarinet on “Meditations,” died in Europe that summer of undiagnosed diabetes, at 36. Mingus retitled “Meditations” “Praying With Eric” when the Town Hall concert was first released by Charles Mingus Enterprises, a mail-order distribution company he set up in fall 1964 with his manager and future wife Sue Graham Ungaro, a writer he’d met at the Five Spot a few days after Dolphy died. In Mingus’s mind, “Meditations” belonged as much to Dolphy as it did to him. “Eric Dolphy explained to me that there was something similar to the concentration camps once in Germany now down South,” he said at Town Hall, “and the only difference between the electric barbed wire is that they don’t have gas chambers and hot stoves to cook us in yet. So I wrote a piece called ‘Meditations’ as to how to get some wire cutters before someone gets some guns to us.”

Nowhere is Mingus’s emotional range on such brilliant display as in “Meditations.” Integration had been his own struggle since his childhood in Watts. The destruction of segregation was unfinished business, and it was violent. The more extreme, cacophonous parts of his piece should sound like “organized chaos,” he told the Workshop. He asked them to reimagine the sounds that the slave ships must have made during the Middle Passage; he spoke to them as if they were actors. “You’re…like a minister in church or a Jewish rabbi,” he told the trumpeter Bobby Bryant in Monterey. “Everybody’s shouting at you. You have to chant to them and put them back in condition.” In the Town Hall performance, Mingus exploits almost every possible combination in his sextet. In the first ten minutes alone, the full sextet gives way to ruminative unaccompanied piano; then to a somber duet for piano and bowed bass; then back to unaccompanied piano; and finally to a sorrowful adagio passage for piano, bass and Dolphy’s flute, before the horn section erupts again with volcanic force.

When the Workshop set off for Holland after the Town Hall concert, Dolphy told Mingus that he planned to stay in Europe rather than return to the United States with the group. Mingus pleaded with him not to; he even wrote a tune called “So Long, Eric,” hoping that Dolphy might change his mind. In late June, Dolphy died. Mingus was crushed. “One thing that can still make Mingus cry is thinking about Eric,” the jazz historian Dan Morgenstern told Goodman. Mingus turned in some of his most relaxed, lyrical playing in the Workshop’s concerts in Monterey in 1964 and 1965 and in Minneapolis in May 1965 (the last three discs of the Mosaic set), and his new horn section, consisting of the alto saxophonist Charles McPherson and the trumpeter Lonnie Hillyer, was magnificent in the medleys of Ellington and Parker tunes. But without Dolphy, there is a slight falling off in urgency, and in the performance of “Meditations” in Monterey, he is conspicuous by his absence.

The bands on the Mosaic set never went into the studio. Mingus’s relationship with the major labels, always stormy at best, had never been worse. Months before the Workshop went on tour, Impulse! Records, for which he’d just made his majestic The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, reneged on its promise to increase his weekly retainer fee because of poor sales. Mingus refused to bend and burned his last bridge. Bob Thiele, his producer, arrived at work to find a knife stabbed into his chair, with a note: “Where the fuck is my money? Mingus.” (Thiele was lucky; Mingus once showed up at the accounting department of Columbia Records with a helmet and shotgun.) By the time Mingus began his European tour, he was so fed up with the industry that he instructed his audiences not to buy any of his records on Columbia, Atlantic and Impulse! (He made an exception for RCA Victor, “the only company for some reason that pays the royalties properly. I imagine it’s because they make enough money from the atomic bomb that they don’t have to worry about cheating jazz musicians.”) The 1964–65 concerts were released by Charles Mingus Enterprises, but not in their entirety: the company shut down in 1966, leaving a lot of great music to languish in the vaults for nearly four decades. It has been restored to glorious effect by Mosaic in cooperation with his widow Sue. The mike breaks are nearly as delicious as the music, with Mingus joking about how much he’s stolen from Ellington, or telling a woman in the audience that she’s dropped her pearls. For once, he seems at peace with himself.

* * *

In fact, he was coming apart: Dolphy’s loss hit Mingus harder than even he understood, and after the show in Minneapolis his demons returned with a vengeance. Dannie Richmond stood by him, but Jaki Byard quit the Workshop after Mingus threatened him with an ax during a set at the Village Vanguard. For the next five years, Mingus was sunk in gloom. The young people who’d followed him at the Five Spot had moved on to the wilder shores of free jazz and rock, and he felt abandoned. He stopped recording and hardly touched his bass. He became a photographer, wandering around the Village on a bicycle with a dozen cameras strapped to his chest. The amphetamines and diet pills he relied on to keep his spirits up and his weight down didn’t seem to work anymore: he grew fatter and more depressed. He kept tear-gas bombs and shotguns in his studio, fired holes into the ceiling, and spoke of plots against him by the government and the mob. He pissed into juice bottles rather than the toilet, in case the authorities were investigating his urine for signs of drug use. The owner of his flat, which was an illegal sublet, tried to evict him. When Mingus withheld his rent in protest, the police came to kick him out. “I hope the Communists blow you people up,” he said as they took him away, his eyes welling with tears.

Mingus’s disintegration and eviction are depicted, in vivid and often depressing detail, in Thomas Reichman’s 1966 documentary Mingus. Reichman told Goodman that when they first met, Mingus suggested that they have lunch at a steakhouse. Three years ago, he’d ordered three lamb chops there but had only gotten two; now he wanted to return for the third. Reichman loved the idea and showed up at Mingus’s place with his crew. But Mingus led them instead to his lawyer’s office, where Sue had been writing up a contract designed to deprive Reichman of the rights to his own film. Reichman broke down crying. When he saw Mingus later that day, Mingus had shaved off all his hair and painted his head blue. “Man, I’m really sorry,” he said. “Let’s go have some Chinese food. I look like Buddha.” In Reichman’s film, Mingus played himself as a black musician persecuted by White America. “I pledge allegiance to the flag, the white flag,” he says, “not because I have to, but just for the hell of it…. I pledge allegiance so that one day they will look to their promises to the victims they call citizens. Not just the black ghettos but the white ghettos and the Japanese ghettos, the Chinese ghettos, all the ghettos of the world.” He winks at the camera, pipe in mouth. “Oh, I pledge allegiance all right, I could pledge a whole lot of allegiances.” It was a star turn, and it was nearly his last.

Mingus made a comeback in the early 1970s, when Goodman, then a writer for Playboy, began interviewing him and the people who knew him best, for a book that never came together until now. He’d been restored to something like health, in no small part thanks to Sue. As things turned out, Mingus had only a few more years left—he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in 1977 and died two years later in Cuernavaca, where he drank iguana blood as part of an experimental treatment—but they were mostly good ones. Beneath the Underdog was finally published, and Mingus got his first Grammy nomination—for his liner notes, not his music. He finally moved in with Sue, who had kept a separate apartment after they married, and mellowed a bit, though the rages never quite subsided and he remained as irascible as ever. In her memoir Tonight at Noon (2002), Sue remembers being “mesmerized by his excesses,” but she also knew how to hold them in check and to keep him in line. He renewed his friendships with Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary and turned up at benefits for the Black Panthers, where he was received as an elder statesman of Village bohemia. He recorded a late masterpiece, Let My Children Hear Music (1972), an album of eloquent, sometimes ravishing orchestral compositions, and wrote a score for Elio Petri’s Todo Modo (1976). And Mingus’s children were finally hearing his music. The most original jazz composers of the 1970s—Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, Julius Hemphill—were his heirs in their excavation of older jazz styles, and in their attempts to infuse advanced composition with blues and roots feeling. Mingus also had a growing following among adventurous pop artists like Tom Waits, Captain Beefheart and Joni Mitchell, who collaborated with him on an album of his tunes—his last session—and visited him in Mexico just before his death. He made more money than he ever had on tour and spent it on beautiful cars, Cuban cigars and cocaine.

Yet he continued to feel underappreciated and unfulfilled. He complained at garrulous length to Goodman about the avant-garde, sore as ever about being overshadowed in the eyes of the critical establishment. He was still striving and struggling, even from the wheelchair to which he was confined in his last few years. “I still haven’t written the music I want to write,” he told Goodman; he had three, four symphonies in him. A part of him had always felt that jazz had been a detour, and an imposed one at that. Although he had done more than anyone other than Ellington and Monk to set jazz on an equal footing with European art music, jazz was the music that he’d been forced to play when the doors to the concert hall were shut: even the word reminded him of that original exclusion. Jazz, he told Goodman, “is just one little stupid language hanging out there as a sign of unfair employment. Jazz means ‘nigger.’”

“My identity is mixed together with Beethoven, Bach and Brahms,” he told Sue; it pained him somewhat to be described as a jazz musician. In Beneath the Underdog, he reprinted a touching letter he wrote from Bellevue mental hospital to Nat Hentoff in 1958. He’d been listening to the Juilliard String Quartet’s recording of Bartok, marveling at how they could “transform in a second a listener’s soul and make it throb with love and beauty—just by following the scratches of a pen on a scroll.” It reminded him of his “original goal,” he said, but “a thing called ‘jazz’” took him far off his path, and he didn’t know if he’d ever get back.

Selected Discography

Mingus at the Bohemia (Debut, 1955)
Pithecanthropus Erectus (Atlantic, 1956)
The Clown (Atlantic, 1957)
Mingus Ah Um (Columbia, 1959)
Mingus Dynasty (Columbia, 1959)
Blues & Roots (Atlantic, 1960)
Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus (Candid, 1960)
Pre-Bird (Mercury, 1960)
Oh Yeah (Atlantic, 1960)
Tijuana Moods (RCA Victor, 1962)
The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (Impulse!, 1963)
Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus (Impulse!, 1963)
Mingus Plays Piano (Impulse!, 1963)
The Great Concert of Charles Mingus (America, 1964)
Let My Children Hear Music (Columbia, 1972)
Mingus at Antibes (Atlantic, 1976)
At UCLA 1965 (Sunny Side, 2006)
Cornell 1964 (Blue Note, 2007)

In January 2004 Sheik Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Secretary-General of Hezbollah, presided over a major prisoner exchange with Israel, in which the Lebanese guerrilla movement and political party secured the release of more than 400 Arab prisoners in return for the bodies of three Israeli soldiers and an Israeli businessman and alleged spy, Elhanan Tannenbaum, whom Hezbollah had kidnapped. Moments before the exchange was sealed, Ariel Sharon withheld three Lebanese detainees, one of whom, Samir Kuntar, had killed a family of three in the Israeli town of Nahariya in 1979. Nasrallah, having failed to release Kuntar and the two other men, declared that Hezbollah would “reserve the right” to capture Israeli soldiers until the men were freed.

On July 12 Nasrallah launched the most daring assault of his tenure as Hezbollah’s leader: the capture of two Israeli soldiers in a raid that left eight other Israeli soldiers dead. He called the attack “Operation Truthful Promise.”

Nasrallah is not a man who minces words. Still, questions linger as to the timing and location of Operation Truthful Promise, which detonated Israel’s most ruthless assault on Lebanon since the 1982 invasion. Although Hezbollah’s operation was apparently planned five months in advance, it occurred amid the Israeli siege in Gaza, which followed the capture of an Israeli soldier by Palestinian guerrillas and was inevitably interpreted as a gesture of solidarity with the Gazans, particularly the Hamas leadership, dozens of whose members were recently abducted by Israel. What is more, Hezbollah did not strike in the occupied Shebaa Farms, a sliver of land in the Golan Heights, as it usually does, but inside Israel, a violation of international law that Israel–despite its own numerous violations of Lebanese territorial sovereignty–could invoke as a casus belli. In other words, Hezbollah undertook an audacious act of brinksmanship that was bound, if not designed, to escalate tensions with Israel.

It is, of course, possible that Nasrallah regards the Jewish state as a paper tiger, and did not expect it to seize upon Hezbollah’s raid as a pretext to pulverize his movement and to scrap the “rules of the game” that have governed the low-intensity conflict that Hezbollah and Israel have waged along the border since the latter’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000. But this is to underestimate Nasrallah, a shrewd, calculating man who, as a careful reader of history, is fully aware of how Israel has responded in the past to cross-border attacks. Indeed, when I spoke to him at his (now leveled) headquarters in Beirut in October 2003, Nasrallah–sitting near a photograph of his son Hadi, who was killed in a clash with Israeli soldiers in 1997–seemed in no mood to ignite a war that would bring Israeli troops back to Lebanon. “When you get something by paying such a precious price, you are more keen on safeguarding it,” he told me. “We will not accept anyone coming and squandering it. We are the sons of this soil, the sons of this country. We have no other place to go.”

If Nasrallah knew that Operation Truthful Promise might provide the Israelis with an excuse to invade Lebanon, something that could–and, briefly, did–make Hezbollah the target of Lebanese rage (even, evidently, among some of his Shiite followers), what does he hope to achieve and what is his endgame? Why risk the future of his movement, which has a significant bloc in Lebanon’s Parliament, a seat in the Cabinet and a vast network of social services and enterprises (the party is Lebanon’s second-largest employer)? The devastation of Lebanon, and of Hezbollah strongholds formerly occupied by Israel, would seem a rather high price to pay for a few prisoners, particularly if Hezbollah ends up sharing the blame for the destruction of the country’s tourism industry, the oxygen of its economy.

Nasrallah’s objectives most likely lie elsewhere. Since the 2000 Israeli withdrawal (“the first Arab victory in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict,” as Nasrallah often notes), Hezbollah has faced mounting pressure, from the West but also at home, to lay down its arms and become a purely political organization–a fate the party dreads, since it prides itself on being a vanguard of Islamic resistance to American and Israeli ambitions in the Middle East. This pressure dramatically intensified with UN Security Council Resolution 1559 (2004), which called for the disbanding of all Lebanese militias, and with the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon last year. By conducting a raid that was likely to provoke a brutal Israeli reprisal, Nasrallah may have gambled that the fury of the Lebanese would soon turn from Hezbollah to the Jewish state, thereby providing a justification for “the national resistance” as Lebanon’s only deterrent against Israel. So far, Israel (with the full support of the Bush Administration) has played right into his hands, inflicting more than 300 casualties, nearly all of them civilians, and pounding the civilian infrastructure, eliciting sympathy for Hezbollah even among some Lebanese Christians. By striking at Israel’s Army during its most destructive campaign in Palestine since 2002’s “Operation Defensive Shield,” Nasrallah must have known that he would earn praise throughout the Muslim world for coming to the aid of Palestinians abandoned by the region’s authoritarian governments, a number of which have pointedly chastised Nasrallah’s “adventurism.” And by bloodying Israel’s nose, Hezbollah could once again bolster its aura in the wider Arab world as a redoubtable “resistance” force, a model it seeks to promote regionally, especially in Palestine, where Nasrallah is a folk hero, and in Iraq, where Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the radical Shiite Mahdi Army, has proclaimed himself a follower of Hezbollah and has threatened to renew attacks against US forces in solidarity with the Lebanese.

Operation Truthful Promise was also, in part, a service rendered to Hezbollah’s patrons in Damascus and Tehran, whether or not Bashar al-Assad and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were consulted beforehand. The Syrian President warned former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, in their last meeting before Hariri’s assassination, that if he pushed for Syria’s withdrawal Assad would “break” Lebanon. With Hezbollah’s raid, Assad may have found a way to get Israel to break Lebanon for him–a wish that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz were more than happy to fulfill. Damascus may be facing renewed threats, but Assad can now bask in Nasrallah’s glow without directly engaging the Israeli military, which, as he knows, is divided on whether to depose him (since the only realistic alternative to the secular Baath regime is the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood); Lebanese anger has been redirected from Syria back to Israel; Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora looks on helplessly as the Israelis strafe his country; and the West has been warned that Lebanon will remain fractured, volatile and incapable of controlling its borders unless Syria’s interests (particularly in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights) are taken into account. President Ahmadinejad, for his part, can thank Nasrallah for diverting attention from the controversy over Iran’s nuclear program, and for burnishing the Islamic republic’s reputation as a staunch defender of Palestinian rights–and, not least, of Muslim Jerusalem–in a region whose other (largely Sunni Arab) governments have compromised with the enemy. And the spectacular display of Hezbollah’s Iranian-made weaponry, which have reached further into Israel than even the Israelis feared, and of the group’s sophistication in deploying them, have reminded Israel and the United States of the “surprises” (Nasrallah’s word) in store in the event of an attack on Iran.

Nasrallah is under no illusions that his small guerrilla movement can defeat the Israeli Army. But he can lose militarily and still score a political victory, particularly if the Israelis continue visiting suffering on Lebanon, whose government, as they well know, is powerless to control Hezbollah. Nasrallah, whom the Israelis attempted to assassinate on July 19 with a twenty-three-ton bomb attack on an alleged Hezbollah bunker, is doubtless aware that he may share the fate of his predecessor, Abbas Musawi, who was killed in an Israeli helicopter gunship attack in 1992. But Hezbollah outlived Musawi and grew exponentially, thanks in part to its followers’ passion for martyrdom. To some, Nasrallah’s raid may look like a death wish. But it is almost impossible to defeat someone who has no fear of death.

On the morning of Thursday, June 2, the Lebanese journalist Samir Kassir left his apartment for the offices of the daily Al-Nahar in downtown Beirut. Kassir’s editorials, which appeared in Al-Nahar each Friday, were models of lucidity and passion, expressing the hopes shared by many Lebanese for freedom from Syrian domination. His writing not only captured the popular mood in Lebanon; it inspired people to take chances they would not have otherwise risked.

Kassir never made it to work: When he got into his car, a bomb placed under it exploded. In killing him, Kassir’s assassins silenced one of the leading progressives in the Middle East, and one of its bravest voices: an unflagging advocate of democracy, an opponent of Arab dictatorships and of Western double standards, a champion of Palestinian rights who was also a scathing critic of anti-Semitism.

Born in 1960 in Beirut to a Palestinian father of Greek Orthodox confession and a Syrian mother, Kassir taught history at St. Joseph’s University in Beirut. A fully bearded, dashing man of considerable charm and wit who bore more than a passing resemblance to the Italian cinéaste Nanni Moretti, he cut a glamorous profile. His charisma was more than matched by his mind. Equally at home in the newsroom and in the archives, in Arabic and in French, he wrote for Le Monde diplomatique and La Revue d’études palestiniennes and published several important works of scholarship in French, including a massive history of his native city and a study of the Lebanese civil war.

Independence seemed to come naturally to Kassir, who never shied away from a cause merely because it was unpopular. In the late 1990s he led a lonely crusade against the French Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy, who had been making inroads into otherwise progressive Arab intellectual circles; four years ago, he helped prevent the pernicious Institute for Historical Review, a Garaudy-affiliated revisionist group based in the United States, from holding a conference in Beirut. At even greater personal risk, Kassir protested what he called Syria’s “mafia-type protectorate” over Lebanon, campaigning tirelessly for independence and railing against a security apparatus most of his colleagues were too timorous to name. Kassir’s open defiance of Damascus brought him unwanted attention from the pro-Syrian security establishment, which harassed him with menacing phone calls, briefly confiscated his passport on the spurious grounds that he was an “influential agent of the Palestinian Authority” and tailed him in unmarked police cars.

Yet Kassir was not “anti-Syrian,” as the American press glibly described him. In fact, he was a supporter and publisher of Syria’s secular dissidents, who shared his contempt for the Assad regime and who drew hope from the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon two months after the February 14 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The desire to extinguish this hope may have figured in the plot to kill Kassir, who was scheduled to make a speech in Damascus in mid-June, and who had recently dared to suggest that the end of the Assad dynasty might be closer than anyone could imagine.

Kassir stood apart in other ways from the anti-Syrian movement that he helped spawn. He understood that restoring–or, rather, establishing–Lebanon’s sovereignty was not simply a matter of driving out Syrian troops and intelligence services or, contrary to the Americans, of demilitarizing Hezbollah. (Although Kassir despised the party for its assassinations of Lebanese leftists in the 1980s, and for the “cult of death” it had spread among the children of Lebanon and Palestine, he told me that he would oppose any “aggressive policy against Hezbollah” by the US government.) Kassir espoused both these goals, but he viewed Lebanese independence as only a prelude to the struggle for popular sovereignty, secularism and democracy. With its extraordinary diversity, its history of constitutional politics, its rich intellectual and literary tradition, its magnificent port city, its longstanding openness to the West, Lebanon had the potential to become a “laboratory for modernity,” he argued, but only if it broke with the ways of the past and challenged the entrenched privileges of the country’s political elite.

And so, as elated–and, indeed, startled–as he was by the success of the Independence Intifada (“We can at last speak freely,” he said the night before his death), he was disheartened that some of the movement’s leaders had fallen back on old habits as soon as the Syrians departed, bickering over the spoils of power, playing the old game of confessional politics that led to the civil war thirty years ago–and that allowed Damascus to present itself as a peace broker. Nor did he hesitate to raise his voice against this trend. Having led the call for the repatriation of Christian General Michel Aoun, who had fled to France after mounting a failed uprising against the Syrians in 1990, Kassir was planning to criticize Aoun in his next column for cozying up to the intelligence services upon his return to Lebanon, thus dividing the opposition. Returning to business as usual would only leave Lebanon vulnerable once again to the designs of bigger powers.

The Movement of the Democratic Left that Kassir helped found was an alliance of Lebanese progressives, many of them former Communists who had come to recognize that Israeli expansionism and American imperialism, although obstacles to Arab progress, had become alibis for autocracies that refused to reform. The creation of democratic, accountable institutions and the establishment of the rule of law, Kassir underscored, are vital aims in themselves; for what was the point of overthrowing colonialism if not to put something better in its place? Some of his critics complained that, with his focus on Lebanese-Syrian relations, he had abandoned the cause of Palestine. Rather, as a Lebanese citizen, he understood that his first obligation was to liberate his own country–a lesson lost not only on his peers in the pan-Arab camp, who have long dreamed that the liberation of Palestine would spark a revolution in their own countries, but on our own liberal-hawk missionaries.

At the same time, Kassir understood that Lebanon’s predicament could not be separated from regional struggles over land and capital, faith and power. The Lebanese could not afford to be provincial, the curse of small countries. With the Saudis building mosques in Beirut (and turning seaside resorts into a holiday harem); the Iranians arming Hezbollah and funding its schools and hospitals; Israel and Hezbollah trading fire on the border; the United States vying for influence with France, Lebanon’s former colonial master; hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees in wretched camps, still awaiting their fate; and, not least, the Lebanese fractured into more than a dozen clans, many connected by religion and ethnicity to groups beyond the country’s borders–with this intricate web of forces, Lebanon held up a mirror to the wider Arab world. The political and intellectual stagnation of that world, what he called the “Arab malaise,” was the subject of his last book, Considérations sur le malheur arabe. In Kassir’s view, the region had succumbed to this malaise not only because the West had overtaken it but because the Arabs had failed to modernize, instead taking consolation in false solutions like pan-Arabism and Islamism.

Predictably, Kassir was accused of being an “Arab pessimist” who had lost faith in his own society. In fact, he was animated by a quality seldom found in the Middle East: hope. “If a liberal Middle East were not possible,” he told Michael Young, the opinion editor of the Beirut Daily Star, in an interview with Reason, “things would be unbearable for secular people like us.” But “for it to be possible,”

the liberal West must also be liberal in the Middle East: It must abandon its support for dictatorships, even those considered as moderates and allies. Look what happened with Libya: Once Muammar al-Qadaffi renounced his nuclear ambitions, Bush and Blair acclaimed him. What a message when you are calling for democracy in the Middle East!… Most importantly, the West must accept that the strategic importance of the Middle East must not justify denying its peoples the rights to self-determination, and that means, particularly, the Palestinians.

Kassir’s murder went almost unnoticed by the American left, in large part because few here had even heard of him. But there was perhaps a less innocent reason: Kassir’s cause converged inconveniently with the anti-Syrian agenda of the American government, which promptly turned up the heat on Damascus after his death. (Imagine the outcry from the left if a man of his stature had been cut down by American or Israeli arms.) It was his misfortune to incur the wrath of a state vilified by the United States; this deprived him of the sympathy to which he was entitled. No such parochial calculation deterred the Palestinian left–or Syrian dissidents, who have made it plain they do not wish to be rescued from Baathism by the American military–from paying tribute to Kassir, whom they recognized as a kindred spirit.

In Lebanon he has ascended, if that is the word, to the status of “the martyr Kassir.” Yet Kassir was an unusual kind of martyr in today’s Middle East, a staunch secularist who wanted to live in a free country, not to die for one. In a region driven increasingly by a politics of death and sacrifice, he stood for a vision of peaceful reform, progressive social change and democratic secularism–the values of any left worthy of the name. The day after Kassir’s murder, hundreds of journalists poured into Martyrs’ Square in downtown Beirut to observe an hour of silence. Many raised black pens to the sky, visually evoking the adage that the pen is mightier than the sword. It is not. But to wield the pen rather than the sword in the face of mortal threats requires uncommon courage. This Samir Kassir had in abundance. His death is a terrible blow not only to his family and friends but to Lebanon, Syria and the cause of Arab freedom.

When Marx wrote, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it,” he was not only taking a swipe at philosophers. He was slighting interpretation itself, as if thinking were an idle affair compared to action, where real men make their mark on the world. In fact, the act of interpretation is always an act, sometimes a veritable event, and, in rare instances, a harbinger of far-reaching changes. Maxime Rodinson, the distinguished scholar of the Arab and Muslim world who died at age 89 in Marseille on May 23, and Jacques Derrida, the philosopher of deconstruction who died at age 74 in Paris on October 8, were two of the most inspired interpreters of our time.

At first glimpse, Rodinson and Derrida would appear to have little in common. Rodinson was a student of Islamic history, Derrida of Western philosophy. Rodinson wrote to unveil the secrets of a world dimly understood by Europeans, Derrida to expose the hidden contradictions and incoherencies of what seemed most transparent about the canons of Western thought. The director of studies in the “historical ethnography of the Near East” at the prestigious École des Hautes Études in Paris, Rodinson was a proud heir of the tradition of Orientalist scholarship despite his sharp political differences with some of its practitioners; though universally admired in his field, he was hardly known outside it. Derrida, by contrast, was a glamorous maverick who attracted an international following for an idea that few could understand and that he himself seemed wary to spell out. Deconstruction’s air of enigma only enhanced its appeal, as it “disseminated” (a favorite Derrida verb) into fields as disparate as architecture, theology, political theory, musicology, history, film and, of course, literary criticism, where it was even more influential than in Derrida’s own discipline, which has resisted deconstruction as if it were a virus in philosophy’s hard drive.

Where Rodinson was a fervent rationalist in the Enlightenment mold, Derrida relentlessly questioned the universality of Western reason, and at times displayed a streak of Jewish mysticism. While Rodinson wrote in a prose of impeccable lucidity, Derrida cultivated a style that was highly metaphoric, elusive, gnomic, teeming with paradox and wordplay, at times opaque to the point of self-parody (“Therefore we will be incoherent, but without systematically resigning ourselves to incoherence”). In their approach to ideas they could hardly have been more different.

And yet there were deeper affinities. Both were left-wing, cosmopolitan Jews whose intellectual adventures–whose very identities–were shaped by what Derrida called “the passion of writing,” which, in his view, defined a “certain Judaism,” diasporic, itinerant, self-questioning, rooted in a fierce attachment to the Book rather than to the Land. (Isaac Deutscher would have described both men as “non-Jewish Jews,” rebels against the constraints of religious tribalism.) Both were in love with language–Rodinson spoke thirty languages, including Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish and ancient Ethiopian; Derrida wrote about literature and poetry as often as he did about philosophy–and both were practitioners of exegesis, influenced, if only distantly, by the traditions of Talmudic scholarship. And as writers and citizens, both men sought to bridge the gap–without eliding the differences and tensions, in the name of some pious liberalism–between Arab and Jew, and between the intricate formations of culture and politics that we lazily call “East” and “West.” The critique of Western ethnocentrism to which Rodinson contributed so formidably went hand in hand with the critique of Western metaphysics for which Derrida became renowned, as the philosopher himself acknowledged. Their projects were part of a long-overdue humbling of the West in the age of decolonization, a humbling that strengthened the foundations of the Enlightenment by holding it up to its own universalist standards.

“Maxime Rodinson is dead, but his work is not,” the Algerian historian Mohammed Harbi wrote in an obituary in Le Monde. Indeed, if the French have pursued a far-sighted, balanced policy in the Middle East, it is partly because men like Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin have listened to the sober wisdom of Rodinson and protégés like Gilles Kepel and Olivier Roy, rather than to the purring assurances of Fouad Ajami and Bernard Lewis.

Rodinson was born in 1915 in Marseille, the son of Russian-Polish working-class immigrants. Rodinson’s parents were Communists, and he, too, joined the party as a young man. Yet it was not revolutionary Russia, the land of his parents, that captured his imagination but the Middle East. After studying at the École des Langues Orientales in Paris, Rodinson landed a job at the French Institute in Damascus–a haven, in 1940, from the gathering flames of French anti-Semitism. Eight years later he returned to France an orphan, his parents having been deported to Auschwitz by the Vichy authorities.

The murder of his parents did not, however, lead Rodinson to embrace Zionism, whose support among Jews had swiftly grown after the Holocaust, and whose triumph would ultimately lead to the expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinian Arabs–the Palestinian Nakba, or “catastrophe.” If anything, the creation of Israel made him feel “a special duty” toward the people it had dispossessed: “I prefer to link myself to Judaism in this manner rather than others.” As he put it:

I would be the last to minimize the atrocity of Auschwitz, where my father and mother perished. But don’t the tears of others count? Must I turn a blind eye to the tears caused by those who call themselves–and are to some degree–my congeners, even if they too are survivors of Auschwitz?… I am not saying…that it has attained the dimensions of Auschwitz, but many Jews have made many tears flow in the land of Palestine.”

Vilified by his detractors as an uncritical apologist for the Arabs, he was nothing of the kind. “I have never subscribed to all the political attitudes, tactics, and strategies of the Arabs,” he once said. “Arab intellectuals are well aware of this, and some of them have accused me…of being anti-Arab, anti-Islam, and even guilty of a crypto-Zionism all the more dangerous for its subtlety. The parallel between the apologetic methods (both defensive and offensive) of Zionism and those of the extreme forms of Arab nationalism, or of any nationalism for that matter, is striking.”

Rodinson’s experience in the Communist Party, with which he broke over Stalinism in 1958, left him with a horror of dogma and led him to renounce “the narrow subordination of efforts at lucidity to the exigencies of mobilization, even for just causes.” From then on, he was a free man, and in the following decade Rodinson published some of the seminal texts in Middle Eastern studies, including Mohammed (1961), a biography still banned in parts of the Arab world for approaching the Prophet’s life from a sociological perspective, and Islam and Capitalism (1966), a study of the economic decline of Muslim societies. Although he remained an independent (or, as he quipped, “agnostic”) Marxist, he appreciated the powerful role that religion played in the Arab world at a time when many European leftist observers of the region preferred to see it as a form of false consciousness that would melt into air once the Arab masses awakened to their “true” class interests.

After the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Rodinson distinguished himself as a leading champion of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, publishing a major article in Jean-Paul Sartre’s journal, Les Temps modernes, under the title “Israël, fait colonial,” and establishing the Groupe de Recherches et d’Actions pour la Palestine with his colleague Jacques Berque, the renowned scholar of the Maghreb. The bravery of Rodinson’s position at the time can hardly be overstated, and not only because he was Jewish. In 1967, owing in large part to guilt over the Holocaust, Israel still enjoyed the unconditional support of much of the European left, including Sartre. By contrast, as Rodinson sadly observed in an interview with a PLO-affiliated journal, pro-Palestinian sentiment in the West tended to be confined to the anti-Semitic right and the Maoist fringes of the left: “Are these the milieux that you want to win over?” Thus did he urge the Palestinians to take their case to liberal Europeans and not “simply write off people who, at a given moment, have expressed sentiments of sympathy towards Israel and the Israeli people.” He also warned, presciently but with less success, that “in the ardor of the ideological struggle against Zionism, those Arabs most influenced by a Muslim religious orientation would seize upon the old religious and popular prejudices against the Jews in general” and further tarnish the reputation of a just cause in the West. “The question is whether the Arabs want to continue to accord Zionism such valuable assistance.”

Though unwavering in his support of Palestinian rights, Rodinson made no secret of his disagreements with the PLO; and because he offered his counsel as a friend, he earned the trust and respect of his interlocutors. To be sure, the Palestinian people have suffered no shortage of friends since the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, when liberal opinion in the West began to turn overwhelmingly against the occupation and in favor of a Palestinian state. But, like the Kurds, they have had few friends who have spoken to them as honestly as Rodinson did. He sought to disabuse his contacts in the PLO of their most dangerous illusions, starting with the idea that Israel’s Jews could be driven out by guerrilla warfare, as the colons had been in Algeria. While he regarded Israel as a colonial-settler state, the creation of the state was now a fact, and “the time for questioning its wisdom is past. A tree must be judged by its fruits.” Israeli Jews were an ethno-national community, not, as he remarked in a 1969 speech before the Egyptian Popular Assembly, “a heterogeneous collection of gangs of occupiers who could be sent back where they came from with the greatest of ease.” As such, Israeli Jews had collective rights which Palestinians would have to honor in order to secure a just and lasting peace: “If there are two or more ethnic groups in the same country, and if the danger of the domination of one by the other is to be avoided, then both these groups must be represented as distinct communities at the political level, and each must be accorded the right to defend its interests and aspirations.”

While speaking frankly to his Palestinian friends, Rodinson never forgot on whose side lay the preponderance of power–and therefore responsibility. Israel, he stressed, could not turn its back on its neighbors and pretend that it was a part of Europe, nor could it forever postpone a reckoning with the injustices it had committed against the Palestinian people. Until Israel faced these facts, all its paeans to peace would ring hollow in the Arab world:

Instead of simply demanding, as it has done for 20 years, that the Arabs accept its presence as a fait accompli, it could offer, in the name of fairness, to compensate for the injustice that has been done…. The Jewish state is no longer a dream built on a 2,000 year old myth; it is a national fact, build on a few decades of hard work and suffering. But the only chance it has of gaining the acceptance it so craves from its neighbors is by adopting a language of conciliation and compromise…. Could there be some hope that these people, who declare themselves to be builders and planters above all else, might choose this path to survival?

Like Rodinson, Jacques Derrida was profoundly troubled by what he described as “the disastrous and suicidal policies of Israel–and of a certain Zionism.” This sense of torment, of being at odds with so many of his fellow Jews, meant that “I have a hard time saying ‘we.'” Yet, “in spite of all this and all the problems I have with my own ‘Jewishness,’ I will never deny it…. This tortured ‘we,'” he added, “is at the heart of all that is most disquieting in my thought.”

Unlike Rodinson, Derrida came from the Muslim world, a native of El Biar in French colonial Algeria. The Egyptian-Jewish writer Edmund Jabès, he would later write, “teaches us that roots speak, that words want to grow, and that poetic discourse takes root in a wound.” Derrida’s poetic discourse grew out of the wound of his traumatic exile from Algeria, which he left for Paris at age 19 to attend the École Normale Supérieure. The link between an author’s work and his biography is, to be sure, complex, and sometimes tenuous, and Derrida long shied away from discussing his personal life, and from even having his picture taken. But in his last years he finally began to speak of his Algerian childhood, of being a Jew in a colonial society, and acknowledged that “my own life and desires are inscribed in all of my writing.”

The son of a salesman, he was born Jackie Derrida (he later adopted a “correct” French version of his name) in 1930. The Derridas were Spanish Sephardim who fled to Algeria during the Inquisition. (In his work Derrida expressed a special kinship with Marrand, a fourteenth-century Jew who practiced his religion in secret.) Neither European settlers nor Muslims, they were a people-in-between, raising suspicions on both sides of the progressively hardening native-settler divide. The predicament of Algeria’s Jews, who numbered more than 100,000 by the mid-twentieth century, had been further complicated by the 1870 Crémieux Decrees, which granted them French citizenship–a reform that elicited furious protests from anti-Semitic pieds noirs, while driving a wedge between Jewish Algerians and the disenfranchised Muslim majority, with whom they had enjoyed peaceful relations for centuries.

“I took part in an extraordinary transformation of French Judaism in Algeria,” Derrida recalled in a recent interview. “My great-grandparents were still very close to the Arabs by language, customs, etc. After the Crémieux Decrees…the next generation became bourgeois: although she was married almost secretly in the backyard of the mayor of Algiers because of the pogroms during the Dreyfus Affair, my grandmother raised her daughters as if they were bourgeois Parisians, with the good manners of the 16th arrondissement.” By the time Derrida was born, the family spoke neither Ladino nor Arabic but French, having passionately assimilated the language of their colonizers. “That is why,” he explained, “there is in my writing a somewhat violent, not to say perverse, way of treating this language. Because of love…I only have one language, and at the same time this language does not belong to me.”

The renaissance of French-Algerian Judaism came to a sudden end in 1940, with the rise of Vichy. Goaded by anti-Semitic pieds noirs, the Vichy authorities in Algeria annulled the Crémieux Decrees, and within a year Derrida was expelled from school. “French culture is not made for little Jews,” his teacher informed him. Abandoned by the European community, the Derridas received comfort from their Muslim neighbors, who, unlike many colonized peoples and to their lasting credit, refused to ally themselves with the Axis powers against their colonial masters; Derrida never forgot this experience, which gave him a more nuanced, less fatalistic perspective on Arab-Jewish relations than that of many of his co-religionists in France.

Away from school, the young man developed a passion for philosophy, partly in rebellion against the synagogue he attended with his parents:

There were aspects of Judaism I loved–the music, for instance. Nonetheless, I started resisting religion as a young adolescent, not in the name of atheism, but because…religion as it was practiced in my family…struck me as thoughtless, just blind repetitions…. Then when I was 13, I read Nietzsche for the first time, and though I didn’t understand him completely, he made a big impression on me. The diary I kept then was filled with quotations from Nietzsche and Rousseau, who was my other god at the time.

After the Allies landed in Algiers, Derrida resumed his education, and the Crémieux Decrees were restored. Yet life in French Algeria was never the same again. Having contributed to the defeat of fascism as soldiers in De Gaulle’s Free French Forces, Algeria’s Muslims began to rebel against the French occupation of their own country. The first clashes took place on V-Day, 1945, when dozens of Europeans died in pro-independence demonstrations. With help from pied noir “ultras,” the French Army proceeded to slaughter tens of thousands of Muslims in the towns of Sétif and Guelma–“the first serious outbursts heralding the Algerian war” that broke out nine years later, as Derrida recalled. Following the 1945 massacres, Algerian politics increasingly hinged on a zero-sum struggle between settlers and natives–on what Derrida famously called a “binary opposition.”

Where did Jews like the Derridas fit into this equation? After all, they had benefited from assimilation, only to be cruelly betrayed by Algeria’s French population; and though they were “natives,” not colons, they were not Muslims, and they had come to identify fervently with French republicanism. Apart from a tiny minority of Algerian-Jewish radicals who joined the FLN, most Jews either sided with the European community or adopted an impossible position of neutrality. When Algeria achieved independence in 1962, Derrida’s family joined the general exodus of Jews to France.

Derrida was already in Paris, making a name for himself as a daring interpreter of Husserl and Heidegger. Still, it is more than possible that his suspicion of binary oppositions (between writing and speech, philosophy and literature, self and other, and, much to the chagrin of his colleagues in philosophy, sense and nonsense) arose from his family’s liminal status in colonial Algeria. It is also likely that Derrida’s sensitivity to the contradictions of even the most stable systems arose from having witnessed, in his youth, the transformation of an entire way of life that had once seemed eternal. What, in a 1966 lecture at Johns Hopkins, he would call “play”–code for the subtle shifts and realignments that subvert every structure, whether of thought, language, government or economy–had exposed the instability of Algérie Française and would ultimately trigger a “rupture” of historic proportions.

That now famous talk was titled “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” and it amounted to a direct and insouciant challenge to the eminent anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose theory of “structuralism” had cast a spell over French historians, sociologists, literary critics and philosophers with its vision of self-regulating, perfectly articulated structures of language, custom and politics. As Derrida pointed out, structuralism could explain brilliantly why systems survived, but not why they changed. Because they emphasized structure at the expense of play, Lévi-Strauss and his disciples could only “conceive of the origin of a new structure on the model of catastrophe.” The idea of a structure with a center, he argued, merely “expresses the force of a desire.” For Derrida, nothing in life is stable, nothing is impervious to the subversions of play–not political systems, not language, not meaning itself.

Derrida took play seriously; it was a synonym, really, for the unexpected reversals of history with which he was intimately acquainted. Even at his most somber, this spirit infused Derrida’s work, whether he was writing on Plato, Heidegger, Stéphane Mallarmé, Freud, Artaud or the American Declaration of Independence. In his writing he developed a voice as original as Jean-Luc Godard’s–alternately inspired and maddening, animated by a similarly Joycean predilection for puns and collages of association, and a melancholy fascination with specters of the past that haunt the present, or “traces,” as Derrida called them. The two men also shared an interest in the French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, whose ruminations on the dialectic of Self and Other figure prominently in Godard’s latest film, Notre Musique, a beautifully fractured meditation on the wars in Bosnia and Israel-Palestine.

Derrida’s undisguised delight in play led him to be accused of the sins of “relativism” and “nihilism.” In fact, he had a high regard for truth and for the protocols of scholarship. If he sought to shake the certainties of philosophy, it was not out of a sense of nihilism, or even anarchist mischief, but rather a principled distrust of orthodoxies. Humility about the limits of our knowledge is among the central lessons one draws from Derrida, who, by all accounts, was a deeply modest, generous and fragile man, haunted throughout his life by a sense of his own mortality. In a touching interview published a few months before his death from pancreatic cancer, Derrida told Jean Birnbaum of Le Monde that “to do philosophy is to learn how to die…. I believe in this truth without having surrendered to it…. I haven’t learned to accept death.”

Another charge that stalked Derrida throughout his career was that he was an enemy of the Enlightenment, indeed of reason itself, and that deconstruction was a sinister anti-Western doctrine. It is true, of course, that Derrida lambasted the philosophical tradition for having marginalized “women, children, animals and slaves.” In a 1974 essay, he notoriously described metaphysics as a “white mythology which reassembles and reflects the culture of the West,” a mythology “the white man takes…for the universal form of…Reason.” Deconstruction was, he proudly declared, “a gesture of distrust with respect to Eurocentrism,” as well as to “phallogocentrism.”

Not surprisingly, feminist and post-colonial literary critics drew inspiration from Derrida’s critique of “white mythologies.” More often than not, however, they overlooked the profound tribute his work paid to the Western canon; his distrust was that of a lover, not a prosecutor. As Derrida pointed out, “even when [deconstruction] is directed against something European, it is European…. Since the Enlightenment, Europe has always criticized itself, and in this perfectible heritage, there is a chance for the future.” In an age of uncontested American dominance, he said in one of his last interviews, Europe “has responsibilities to assume, for the future of humanity, for that of international law–that is my faith, my belief.” Among these responsibilities, he argued, was the creation of a European army independent of NATO, “neither offensive nor defensive nor preventive,” that “would intervene without delay in the service of resolutions finally respected by a new UN (for example, in all urgency, in Israel, but also elsewhere).”

In his political commitments, he displayed the same rigorous skepticism that defined his writing. While he spoke out on behalf of the oppressed–Czechs under Stalinism, South Africans under apartheid, Palestinians under occupation, Algerians under military rule–he kept his distance from political parties and never glorified “revolutionary” states or exalted political violence, unlike many French intellectuals of his generation, notably his colleague and rival Michel Foucault. And, as he affirmed his fundamental attachment to the ideals of the Enlightenment late in his career, he came around to the view that some things could not be deconstructed, among them friendship, justice and–though he was not a believer–the “name of God,” a metaphor for “the unconditional,” and for the promise of redemption. As he explained: “We are by nature messianic. We cannot not be, because we exist in a state of expecting something to happen. Even if we’re in a state of hopelessness, a sense of expectation is an integral part of our relationship to time.”

This sense of expectation, he said, was not faith-based, and

does not belong to any determined religion. The conflict with Iraq involved numerous religious elements, from all sides–from the Christian side as well as from the Muslim side. What I call messianicity without messianism is a call, a promise of an independent future for what is to come, and which comes like every messiah in the shape of peace and justice, a promise independent of religion, that is to say universal. A promise independent of the three religions when they oppose each other, since in fact it is a war between three Abrahamic religions. A promise beyond the Abrahamic religions, universal, without relation to revelations or to the history of religions.”

Amen, Jackie, and adieu.

Three decades ago Winston Churchill’s grandson asked Ariel Sharon how Israel should deal with the Palestinians. “We’ll make a pastrami sandwich out of them,” he replied. “We’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank, so that in twenty-five years’ time, neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.”

Mission accomplished. On April 14 in Washington, Sharon unwrapped his pastrami sandwich and received George W. Bush’s seal of approval. Bush supported Israel’s retention of several large Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and said that Palestinian refugees should be resettled in a “Palestinian state”–however notional that “state” might be. In return Sharon promised to evacuate 7,500 Jewish settlers from Gaza as part of a “disengagement” plan that will leave Gaza to Israel’s tender mercies, and to remove “certain military installations and settlements” from the West Bank. On his flight back to Israel, Sharon and his colleagues uncorked a bottle of champagne. The celebrations were capped a few days later by an Israeli missile strike killing Hamas leader Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi. Like the assassination of Sheik Ahmed Yassin weeks earlier, Rantisi’s killing drew no criticism from the United States, just a decorous call for “restraint.”

In hailing Sharon’s “bold and courageous decision,” Bush was not exactly breaking new ground. Like Bush, President Clinton argued that Israel should not be expected to withdraw to the 1967 borders and that most Palestinian refugees should eventually resettle in a Palestinian state rather than in Israel. But Palestinian and Israeli negotiators did discuss exchanging parts of the West Bank for commensurate parts of Israel proper. The effect of Bush’s speech is to remove large settlement blocs from the negotiating table, thus condoning Israel’s unilateral land grabs. Similarly, the Palestinian refugee question has always been considered a final-status issue, to be resolved in negotiations and not by Israeli and US fiat.

Reaction from our erstwhile European allies was swift and furious. “The European Union will not recognize any change to the pre-1967 borders other than those arrived at by agreement between the parties,” said EU spokesman Brian Cowen, the Irish foreign minister. Presidential hopeful John Kerry, on the other hand, showed a disappointing deference to the Israel lobby, praising the Bush-Sharon plan and repeating the shibboleth that “Israel has no partner.” He also vigorously defended the assassination of Rantisi, which is all but certain to be followed by others: Determined to prove that Israel is not leaving Gaza in the face of resistance, as it did in southern Lebanon in May 2000, Sharon has vowed to continue his assassination campaign.

At the same time, Sharon is trying to present himself as a man of peace, prepared to make “painful concessions.” That is where the Gaza plan comes in. Far from representing a withdrawal, the “disengagement” is an extension of war by other means. If the plan goes forward, Gaza will be “demilitarized and devoid of armaments,” and it will have no airport or seaport without Israel’s approval. Israel “reserves” the right to cut off Gaza’s supply lines and to invade at any time, and “will continue to maintain a military presence” along the Egyptian border, thus isolating Gaza from its only Arab neighbor.

The aim of the Gaza plan is to eliminate Israel’s responsibility for its 1.3 million inhabitants while strengthening its grip on the West Bank. Israel plans to annex roughly 55 percent of the West Bank, leaving the rest as bantustans surrounded by Israel’s “separation” wall and connected by roads, bridges and tunnels. This is the future Palestinian “state” to which Bush proposes that millions of refugees be relocated. As Akiva Elder of Ha’aretz notes, “the political, military and economic aspects of the plan…are amazingly similar to the homelands” in apartheid South Africa.

Sharon may be toasting his agreement with the Bush Administration, but his pastrami sandwich is a recipe for continued warfare. In the short term, the effect will be to strengthen the hard-liners in the Palestinian community, who argue that only violent resistance will end the occupation. Even if Hamas’s retaliatory capacity has diminished over the past year, the killings of Yassin and Rantisi will eventually spark considerable blowback against Israel, and against its American patrons. More troubling still, the long-term effect of Sharon’s sandwich is to further undermine the prospects for a just peace based on two sovereign states. A true friend of Israel would pressure Sharon to restart negotiations with the Palestinians and to end Israel’s thirty-seven-year occupation. In this sense, Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery is right: Bush is “the most anti-Israeli American president there ever was, because the Sharon-Bush plan is blocking the way to Israeli-Palestinian peace, our only hope for a normal life.”

At the beginning of Philip Roth’s raucous 1993 novel Operation Shylock, the narrator–a novelist named Philip Roth–receives a call from a friend in Israel, the novelist and Holocaust survivor Aharon Appelfeld. A man who calls himself “Philip Roth” and describes himself as “an ardent Diasporist,” Appelfeld tells him, has just met with Lech Walesa in Gdansk, urging Ashkenazi Jews in Israel to return to their European countries of origin, including (a Jewish joke if ever there was one) Poland. Translating from an article in an Israeli newspaper, Appelfeld quotes “Roth” as saying:

The so-called normalization of the Jew was a tragic illusion from the start. But when this normalization is expected to flourish in the very heart of Islam, it is worse than tragic-it is suicidal. Horrendous as Hitler was for us, he lasted a mere twelve years, and what is twelve years to the Jew? The time has come to return to Europe that was for centuries, and remains to this day, the most authentic Jewish homeland there has ever been, the birthplace of rabbinic Judaism, Hasidic Judaism, Jewish secularism, socialism-and on and on. The birthplace, of course, of Zionism too. But Zionism has outlived its historical function. The time has come to renew in the European diaspora our preeminent spiritual and cultural role.

“What swell ideas I have,” Roth the novelist says to Appelfeld. “Going to make lots of new pals for me in the Zionist homeland.” ” ‘Anyone who reads this in the Zionist homeland,’ said Aharon, ‘will only think, “Another crazy Jew.”‘”

The Roth impersonator’s radical proposal is, of course, played for laughs. Israel is a fact of life, and though many of its Jewish citizens have immigrated to Europe and America, fleeing Palestinian suicide bombers and Israel’s orthodox religious establishment, most Israeli Jews of European origin are in no hurry to return to their former homes, least of all Poland, where a half-century ago they were nearly exterminated by the Nazis. (Just imagine the slogan: Next year in Warsaw!) Roth’s imposter is obviously a freak, a demagogue, peddling another crazy solution to the Jewish question to anyone who cares to listen. But, as Roth knows, “crazy” solutions to that insoluble question have been implemented before, most notably Theodor Herzl’s project to resettle millions of Jews in a homeland most of them had never seen in two thousand years; a homeland that, moreover, was now home to another people. “The construction of a counterlife was at its very core,” Roth’s alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, once observed of Herzl’s Zionism. “It was a species of fabulous utopianism, a manifesto for human transformation as extreme–and, at the outset, as implausible–as any ever conceived.”

Although Roth’s impersonator in Operation Shylock is depicted as a crackpot, Roth–who mischievously subtitles the novel “a confession”–cannot quite shake the shadow of his doppelganger. Soon after landing in Israel, in pursuit of the man who has stolen his identity, he begins impersonating his impersonator, with manic brilliance: “Better to be marginal neurotics, anxious assimilationists, and everything else the Zionists despise, better to lose the state than to lose your moral being by unleashing a nuclear war. Better Irving Berlin than Ariel Sharon. Better Irving Berlin than the Wailing Wall. Better Irving Berlin than Holy Jerusalem! What does owning Jerusalem, of all places, have to do with being Jews in 1988?”

This is, in fact, a question on the minds of many secular, progressive Jews in 2004, when the security of Jews in Israel and the diaspora-not to mention the human rights and national aspirations of the Palestinian people under Israeli occupation-have fallen hostage to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s vision of a Greater Israel, a super-armed bunker state, governed by right-wing ideologues and ruling an archipelago of Palestinian ghettos surrounded by a barbed wire “security” fence.

Contrary to what the Jewish establishment would have us believe, to raise this question is not to call for driving the Jews of Israel into the sea, or, for that matter, back to Europe. The question today is not whether Jews will remain in Israel-Palestine, but where (within the 1967 borders or in a Greater Israel?) and on what terms (in an increasingly theocratic state in which Palestinians remain second-class citizens, or in a democracy based on Arab-Jewish equality?) they will do so. But the impersonator’s critique of Zionism-of its romantic attachment to the soil, its glorification of military might and undisguised contempt for the gentle values of the diaspora, its oppressive treatment of Palestine’s indigenous inhabitants-contains flashes of undeniable insight. The Zionist solution to the Jewish question has created a whole new set of problems, which it has so far proved incapable of solving. As with the fool in King Lear, there is wisdom in his lunacy.

Like Roth’s impersonator, Jewish critics of Zionism and Israel have been treated by the Jewish establishment as, at best, innocent oddballs, naïve about the ever-present danger of another Holocaust, and too soft to inflict the brutalities necessary for the preservation of “Jewish democracy” in the Arab world-a “tough neighborhood,” as Thomas Friedman constantly reminds us. At worst, such critics have stood accused of being irresponsible, crazy and “self-hating,” if not downright disloyal.

I prefer to see them, however, as heirs to a prophetic Jewish tradition of moral criticism, and to the secular, cosmopolitan ideals of the Enlightenment, grounded in a commitment to human equality and solidarity. By opposing the injustices committed in their name, they have shown that there is another way of honoring the memory of Jews who perished in the pogroms and concentration camps of Europe, and that a concern for the fate of the Jews need not come at the expense of the Palestinian people. This book, a collection of writings by Jewish dissidents, pays tribute to a tradition of which few Jews–and even fewer non-Jews–are aware. This is no accident. The Jewish establishment and Israel lobby have done their best to suppress the dissident tradition, and, where they have failed, to vilify it. In these efforts they have enjoyed lamentable success. Today most non-Jews take it for granted that to be Jewish is to support Israel unconditionally. In the Arab world, which has experienced an alarming increase in anti-semitism since the outbreak of the second intifada–perhaps Sharon’s most impressive achievement–Jewish critics of Israel are a curiosity. “Are there other Jews like you?” a wide-eyed Palestinian woman once asked me in Lebanon, as if I were an exotic bird. The confusion of Judaism and Israel–a confusion that has placed Jews abroad at increasing risk amid Sharon’s ruthless campaign of repression in the Occupied Territories-has been consciously sown by the Israeli government, which seeks to equate all criticism of Israel with anti-semitism.

As I have indicated, Jews themselves have not been immune to such criticisms-a cause of understandable anguish on their part. The title of this book, Prophets Outcast, borrowed from the historian Isaac Deutscher, himself a great Jewish dissident, is meant to underscore the terrible price these remarkably prescient men and women have paid for speaking out. Far greater, however, is the price the world has paid for ignoring their warnings. Over the last century, these writers have predicted with uncanny precision the steady deterioration of Arab-Jewish relations under Zionism, the seemingly inexorable drift toward territorial expansionism and theocratic fanaticism in Israel, and the consequent erosion of Jewish ethics. Their dream of Arab-Jewish fraternity, either in the form of two sovereign states or in a single binational state, lost out, tragically, to Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s vision of an “Iron Wall” between Israel and the Arab world. Jabotinsky’s vision has recently found physical expression in Sharon’s “security” fence, an apartheid wall that, by cruelly disrupting the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, will only breed more insecurity for the Jews it purportedly protects.

But prophetic words, valuable though they are, are not the only legacy of these Jewish dissidents. The rise of a radical protest movement in Israel, where young men and women are refusing to serve in the Occupied Territories, is a homage to their influence. The revival of binationalism among progressive Jews and Palestinians is another, although, for now, a binational state in Israel-Palestine remains a distant dream. It is my hope that Prophets Outcast will contribute, in some small way, to rescuing this noble Jewish tradition from what Edward Thompson, the great historian of the English working-class, called “the condescension of posterity.”

I began editing this book a year ago, in a state of despair over the situation in Israel-Palestine. There was open talk of “transfer,” Israeli code for expelling Palestinians from their land, in Sharon’s cabinet, one of whose members, Housing Minister Effi Eitam–a racist, right-wing zealot who heads the National Religious Party–was describing Palestinians as a “cancer.” The Bush administration, backed by the Israel lobby and Christian evangelicals, was giving its full support to Sharon, with a few minor quibbles. The Jewish establishment, meanwhile, was practicing a form of McCarthyism against critics of Israeli policy. Roger Cukierman, the leader of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France and a prominent Likudnik, remarked that when Sharon visited France shortly after September 11, “I told him it was essential to get a Minister of Propaganda, like Goebbels.” To express sympathy for “the other side” in this climate was to court accusations of “being with the terrorists,” even if you were Deputy of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who was booed at a pro-Israel rally for expressing a few kind words about the suffering of ordinary Palestinians.

You might wonder why I have chosen to speak out on the subject of Israel. I am an American Jew, not an Israeli. Some readers are probably grumbling, Who are you to judge Israel? You don’t live there. Point taken. But I find it more than a bit curious that Israel’s supporters welcome the solidarity of American Jews who don’t live there either. And so the question can be thrown back at them: Who are you to praise Israel? The fact is, as a Jew and as an American, you are involved in the debate over Israel-Palestine whether you like it or not. The American Jewish establishment and the Israel lobby both claim to speak in your name. Israel, for its part, defines itself not just as a Jewish state, but as the state of the Jewish people, whose demographic majority must be maintained by whatever means necessary, including transfer, which nearly half of Israeli Jews have said they would support. And each year, over $3 billion in American tax dollars flow to Israel, which provides such useful services to our government as training in counter-insurgency and “interrogation” methods to the troops in Iraq. If you don’t want to be a party to all this-if you believe that it is rotten for everyone involved, Israelis, Palestinians and Americans-you have no choice but to speak out.

Like most American Jews, I had a Zionist education. In the Sunday school I attended at a Reform Synagogue in Massachusetts, we read about the “birth” of Israel, but not about the expulsion of Palestinians; Zion, after all, had been a barren country, waiting to be rediscovered by hardy Jewish pioneers, “a land without people for a people without land.” We were told of the glories of Israeli democracy–but not of its peculiar limitations: for instance, the ways in which it denies equal rights to Palestinian citizens of Israel (the “Israeli Arabs”), in effect turning them into internal exiles. We were told of Arab terrorism, which was real enough, but never of what provoked it. We were told that not only the Arabs but the goyim could never be trusted, and that the only conceivable reason someone would have for faulting Israel was animosity toward the Jews. We were taught to think of ourselves as eternal victims, despite the obvious affluence of our suburban surroundings.

I never quite came to think of myself in these terms, being the son of liberal, assimilated Jews who’d marched in civil rights protests, opposed the Vietnam War, and detested ethnic tribalism, no matter who practiced it. My own brand of Zionism, insofar as I had one, was based on the worship not of Herzl and Ben-Gurion, but of Woody Allen, Franz Kafka and Bob Dylan. As a teenage leftist and reader of The Nation, I didn’t think “their country, right or wrong” was much of an improvement over “my country, right or wrong.” In any event, my causes were putting a stop to American intervention in Central America and ending Reagan’s “constructive engagement” with South Africa. The mystical romance of “the land of Israel” and singing Ha Tikva never did much for me. Still, the indoctrination had its effects. When the first intifada erupted in December 1987, my first impulse, as a nice Jewish boy, was to defend Israel. The Arabs, after all, were “terrorists,” I mindlessly told my high school history teacher, a left-wing Vietnam veteran who’d become my mentor. Yet I felt ill at ease in my views–or rather, in my half-digested prejudices. The televised images of Israeli soldiers shooting Palestinian children for throwing stones and harassing old women at checkpoints reminded me of pictures I’d seen of the Soweto uprising. And what did I know of “the Arabs”? The only real Arab I knew was my Lebanese friend Jackie, whom our classmates taunted as a “Puerto Rican Jew”–a Semite, like me. My history teacher gently admonished me to read up on the subject.

I followed his advice–and discovered, with a mounting sense of outrage, followed soon thereafter by sorrow–that I had been fed a series of nationalist myths. To my delight, however, I discovered that some of the most eloquent critics of Israel were Jews like Isaac Deutscher, Simha Flapan, Avi Shlaim, Noam Chomsky, IF Stone, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Amira Hass and Gidon Levy. Their work corroborated the findings of Palestinian writers and historians like Edward Said, Rashid and Walid Khalidi and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, whom I also came to admire. Yet these Jewish critics were not romantic fellow-travelers, cheerleaders of another people’s movement. They wrote as Jewish humanists, with an anguished understanding of how the question of Palestine fit into the narrative of Jewish history. While insisting on the essentially colonial nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a struggle between a settler-nationalism and an indigenous one, they also recognized that this was no run-of-the-mill colonial war. They had, in other words, a sense of the tragic. Deutscher, a Polish-Jewish Marxist, captured it best, in a brilliant parable:

A man once jumped from the top floor of a burning house in which many members of his family had already perished. He managed to save his life; but as he was falling he hit a person standing down below and broke that person’s legs and arms. The jumping man had no choice; yet to the man with the broken limbs he was the cause of his misfortune…. A rational relationship between Israelis and Arabs might have been possible if Israel had at least attempted to establish it, if the man who threw himself down from the burning house had tried to make friends with the innocent victim of his jump and to compensate him. This did not happen. Israel never even recognized the Arab grievance. From the outset Zionism worked toward the creation of a purely Jewish state and was glad to rid the country of its Arab inhabitants.

Unlike Israel’s champions, Jews like Deutscher seemed to share my view of the world. They were secular, cosmopolitan, tolerant of diversity and appalled by social injustice. Most were on the left, and many were socialists.

Around the time that I discovered Deutscher’s book The Non-Jewish Jew in my father’s library, my liberal parents were finding their sympathies for Israel sorely tested by the growth of settlements, the repression of the intifada, and by the rise of the radical religious parties in Israel, with their power to define who (and what) is and is not Jewish. A year into the first intifada, they stopped giving money to the local Jewish Federation, concerned that their donations were going to support the creation of more settlements. The federation wouldn’t let them off without a fight. First there were the calls to the home, then there were visits from “representatives.” Finally a man from the federation showed up at my father’s office, accompanied by an Israeli general on an American tour. They proceeded to tell my father he had no right to criticize Israel, no right to ask how his money was being used-and no right to stop giving. My father showed them to the door.

“Who have you been talking to?” they asked him on their way out.

He had been talking to his son.

I can anticipate the protests of some readers. Isn’t Israel a democracy–in fact the region’s only democracy? Indeed it is–for Jews. As the sociologist Baruch Kimmerling notes, Israel’s democracy, for all its vitality, remains a Herrenvolk democracy, based on blood rather than citizenship. Today, democracies are judged not only by the freedoms they extend to their citizens but, more crucially, by the exceptions they make. It is revealing that those who praise Israel as the “only democracy in the Middle East”-a line most American politicians have committed to memory-have no wish to extend full citizenship rights to the Arabs within its 1967 borders (a fifth of Israel’s population and rapidly growing), much less to Palestinians under occupation. In fact, the call for Israel to become a “state of all its citizens,” raised by the Arab Knesset member Azmi Bishara, is considered tantamount to a call for “the destruction of Israel.”

But isn’t Israel a sanctuary for the Jewish people, a guarantee that Jews will always have a place to go if there is another outbreak of virulent Jew hatred? There is no denying that Israel once provided a refuge for Hitler’s victims, a “Jewish hospital in which Jews could begin to recover from the devastation of that horror,” as Roth’s impersonator puts it. Leaving aside the question as to why this sanctuary should come at the expense of the Palestinians, who played no role in the Holocaust, it is by no means clear today that the existence of a Jewish ethno-state in the Middle East makes Jews safer today, or whether it actually exposes them to greater dangers. What is clear is that, as the Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery recently observed, Israel under Sharon has become a “laboratory for the growing of the anti-Semitic virus.”

But haven’t the Palestinians committed vile acts of terror? Do they not share some of the blame for the current impasse? Have they not been terribly misled?

The answer to all these questions is yes. Since their expulsion and dispersion in 1948, the Palestinians have suffered a terrible ordeal and, much like the Jews, they have been in many ways hardened, not ennobled, by the experience. As Frantz Fanon once pointed out, “the native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor.” Some Palestinians have found an awful and quite literally self-destructive way of achieving this “dream” in the suicide bomb. The Palestinians have not enjoyed the visionary leadership of a Mandela-but then who has, besides the South Africans? Neither the suicide bomb nor Arafat’s leadership is the principal obstacle to peace, contrary to the claims of the Jewish establishment and of a distressing number of self-described liberals. The main roadblock is the Israeli government’s effort to pursue what Kimmerling calls “politicide,” an organized campaign of land confiscation, harassment and violence whose ultimate goal is to destroy the Palestinian will to achieve self-determination. The infernal logic at work today should be obvious by now: Sharon’s campaign of politicide fosters terror, and terror reinforces Sharon. The primary responsibility for breaking the current cycle lies with Israel, the vastly more powerful party.

What, then, is to be done?

The writers in Prophets Outcast do not speak with one voice. They form a polyphonic ensemble of Zionists, anti-Zionists, and non-Zionists, as well as anarchists, liberals and Marxists. Some espouse a two-state solution, others a binational Arab-Jewish state. What they do share is a commitment to genuine, peaceful coexistence between the Arabs and Jews of Israel-Palestine. As the Syrian poet Adonis, an Arab dissident who is a spiritual cousin of these prophets outcast, once said to me, “Israelis and Palestinians must find a way to live together. Whether it is in two states, one state or a federation, is up to them. But they must find a way to live together.” Prophets Outcast does not propose a political framework for resolving the conflict. This is, in form as well as spirit, a Jewish book–a book of questions rather than answers. Readers in search of a unified critique will have to look elsewhere. The emphasis here is on exemplary, individual acts of moral protest, not on ideological rectitude. As Hannah Arendt observed, “in the darkest of times…illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and works, will kindle under almost all such circumstances and shed over the time span that was given them on earth.” For too long, the Jewish left has been splintered into sectarian camps that have wasted precious energy on quarrels with little echo in the real world. This is no time for petty feuds over doctrinal purity, but for organized resistance to the Occupation, both in solidarity with the Palestinian people and out of concern for Jewish security. The narcissism of small differences is a luxury we can scarcely afford.

At 5:20 on the morning of March 22, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Palestinian Hamas, was leaving a mosque in the Gaza Strip when he was killed in an Israeli helicopter gunship attack–a “targeted” assassination that left nine others dead and caused several serious injuries. A half-blind quadriplegic in his late 60s, Yassin was in his wheelchair when he died; his body will be added to the trail of thousands of Palestinian and Arab corpses that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (who is reported to have personally supervised the Gaza hit) has piled up since the 1950s, when he conducted brutal raids against Arab villagers across Israel’s border. The attack–condemned by the entire world apart from the United States–is yet another reminder of Sharon’s disregard not only of Arab life but of the lives of his fellow Israelis, many of whom are likely to perish in the “earthquake” of revenge Hamas has promised in retaliation.

Sheik Yassin, to be sure, was not a man of peace. His group has killed hundreds of Israeli civilians in suicide attacks since the mid-1990s. But Yassin, along with Ismail Abu Shanab, who was assassinated last year, represented the more moderate current within Hamas; although Yassin refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Jewish state, he had spoken favorably of a “hundred-year truce” with it and had indicated that violent resistance would cease once Israel withdrew to its 1967 borders. Now that Yassin is dead, the only men left standing are the hard-liners, led by Dr. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, the sheik’s successor in Gaza. Some “friends” of Israel–a curious term for those who cheer Israel on as it marches down the road to self-destruction–will doubtless observe that Yassin would not himself have flinched from a comparable attack on Israelis. But that is precisely the point. Under Sharon’s leadership, Israel is increasingly behaving like a rogue state, heedless of international legal norms and contemptuous of civilian life. With its indiscriminate raids, the government has chosen the path of escalation, putting its own citizens in jeopardy.

The Yassin assassination, a turning point in a conflict that grows uglier by the day, appears to be a calculated and deeply cynical move by Sharon, “the champion of violent solutions,” in the words of Israeli historian Avi Shlaim. Contrary to official claims, the intention is not to fight terror but to exploit it politically. The Yassin killing comes on the heels of Sharon’s February 2 announcement that he intends to withdraw Israeli troops from Gaza in one to two years and to evacuate Gaza’s 7,500 Jewish settlers. Sharon’s deepest fear is that the Gaza withdrawal will be perceived as a victory for Hamas and Islamic Jihad, much as Ehud Barak’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000 was hailed as a triumph for the Shiite guerrilla organization Hezbollah. To avert such an outcome, Sharon appears determined to decapitate Hamas’s leadership–Israel has vowed to carry out more such attacks–and to make Gaza bleed. The recent twin suicide bombings by Hamas and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in the Israeli port city of Ashdod, in which ten Israelis were killed–which followed the killing of twenty-six Palestinians in Gaza over two weeks of Israeli incursions–was the perfect pretext to launch the army’s offensive. There may be another reason as well: The day after Yassin’s assassination, Oded Granot, the chief Arab affairs correspondent for Israel’s government-owned Channel 1 News, reported that Hamas and Yasir Arafat’s Fatah had been on the verge of signing a cooperation agreement that would have led to joint control of Gaza’s security apparatus in the wake of an Israeli pullout. The Israelis feared that if this were to occur, Washington would call a halt to the assassination of Hamas leaders. So the killing of Yassin may have been designed as much to pre-empt these developments as to avenge the Ashdod bombing.

If Yassin’s assassination triggers an earthquake of revenge, Sharon is willing to pay the price–indeed, it might even shore up his popularity among Israel’s battered, frightened citizens. A wave of suicide attacks would bolster Sharon’s efforts to frame the conflict as a war against Islamic terrorists rather than one between occupier and occupied–and to continue with the project most dear to him, the colonization of the West Bank (where he wants to transfer the Gaza settlers) and the creation of a 400-mile wall that carves up Palestinian land into an archipelago of prisonlike cantons, divided from one another and cut off from their natural resources.

There may be another casualty of the assassination: the remarkable flowering of nonviolent resistance to Israel’s wall. Over the past six weeks Palestinians, led by older veterans from the first intifada, and Israeli activists have joined in protests in villages near the wall, facing ferocious assaults from the Israeli army–an attempt, it would seem, to transform nonviolent resistance into rioting and to discourage wider participation. From Sharon’s vantage point, nothing could be more menacing than the emergence of a nonviolent movement of civil disobedience, particularly one in which Jews and Arabs work together.

Yassin’s killing can only reinforce the intercommunal, religious dimension of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with repercussions that are profoundly alarming not only for Israelis and Palestinians but for those beyond the region. As veteran Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery put it, “This is the beginning of a new chapter…. It moves the conflict from the level of solvable national conflict to the level of religious conflict, which by its very nature is insoluble.” Yassin was a revered cleric throughout the Muslim world, and his death has enraged millions not only against Israel but against Washington, its indispensable patron; in Iraq, the pre-eminent Shiite leader Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani condemned the assassination as “an ugly crime against the Palestinian people” and protesters in Mosul chanted, “Do not worry, Palestine. Iraq will avenge the assassination of Sheik Yassin.” Hamas has indicated for the first time that it also holds America directly responsible for the killing of its leaders. It is also worth recalling that when Israel killed Hezbollah leader Sheik Abbas Musawi in a similar helicopter gunship attack, revenge came not in Israel but in Argentina, where Shiite militants bombed the Israeli Embassy, killing twenty-nine. The US government must not merely urge “restraint”–its timorous response to Yassin’s killing–but prevent its Israeli ally from leading the region into catastrophe.

BARDS OF BAGHDAD

New York City

Sinan Antoon did more to enlighten us about what was lost in Baghdad than many other writings, simply because he went into the heart of the matter–what it was like to live in Baghdad before the 1991 war, and the one of 2003 [“Dead Poets Society,” May 26]. The voice of the poet speaks Life, and that is what moves us.

It was particularly relevant to our evening of mourning and protest for the destruction of the cultural heritage of Iraq, at the Poetry Showcase, an exhibition of the 1,750 poetry titles published in the United States in 2002. Esther Allen, chair of the Pen American Center translation committee, remarked that only 108 of them were translations, a reflection of the American lack of interest in other cultures. Marc Van de Mieroop, of Columbia University, spoke of the erasure of Iraq’s 10,000-year-old history, and Elias Khoury, a Lebanese novelist teaching at NYU, presented a history of Iraqi poetry and read a selection that included Badr Shakir As-Sayyab, Abdul Wahab Al-Bayati, Nazik Al-Malaika, Buland Al-Haidari, Saadi Youssef, Lamia Abbas Amara, Sargon Boulus, Fadil Al-Azzawi, Sadiq Al-Sayigh, Yusef Al-Sayigh, Hisham Shafiq, Sinan Antoon and Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Charles Bernstein read from Armand Schwerner’s “Tablets,” a fictional translation of the Sumerian tablets, Bernard Suleyman Radfar, a poet of Jewish Iranian descent, read his work in Aramaic and played the oud, the Persian instrument Arabs have adopted as the closest to the human voice. A video of the event is available at the library of Poet’s House.

CECILIA VICUÑA

Fitzwilliam, NH

Sinan Antoon’s meditation on Baghdad culture was very moving. I assume the translations of the poems he cited were his own, or he would have identified the translators. Readers interested in English translations of poems by Muzaffar al-Nawwab and Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri, translated by various hands, can find them in Modern Poetry in Translation’s Iraqi Poetry Today, edited by Saadi Simawe.

J. KATES

THE GOOD ARAB?

Mason, Mich.

Thank you for Adam Shatz’s “Native Informant” [April 28], on Fouad Ajami–a man actually lauded by some for being a spokesperson for the “good Arabs.” Ajami likes to think of himself as a representative of progressive-thinking Arabs, but in reality he represents his own interests. “Whatever Way the Wind Blows” should be the name of his next book.

SHERRI MUZHER

Amman, Jordan

“Ajami” in Arabic means “foreigner,” a non-Arab. Although he was not true to his native land, he was true to his name. He and his ilk are under constant pressure to prove their loyalty to their new masters by denigrating their own people. I am very happy he is no longer one of us.

OMAR I. NASHASHIBI

Ewing, NJ

I was a student of Fouad Ajami’s at Princeton in 1976 and came away from the experience with mixed impressions. Ajami was brilliant at making the complex history and politics of the Middle East accessible, which I, a naïve 19-year-old African-American woman, particularly appreciated. Ajami talked about the war in his homeland with a lucidity and pathos that was deeply affecting. I was equally moved by his elucidation of Edward Said’s writings about the Palestinians. However, I was alienated and confused by his comments about America, which seemed to imply little concern for or understanding of the relationship between the dynamics of oppression within the United States and the politics of the Middle East. Also, I can’t recall him ever talking about the ambivalent, ambiguous role of American Jews as model minorities and as supporters–and critics–of Israeli policies that helped thwart Palestinian self-determination. My impression persists that Ajami was entranced with American wealth and power in a way that made its elites the focus of his policy analysis. His lack of interest in the connections between liberation movements would leave him with little alternative but to cling to a John Wayne vision of Pax Americana.

KIM PEARSON

Cambridge, Mass.

Adam Shatz exaggerates Ajami’s importance and succumbs to the unbecoming game of ethnic profiling. His view of Ajami appears to stand on two assumptions: that an individual professor can determine US policy and that a person’s ethnicity determines his politics and psychology. The first assumption is simply romantic. The US government employs legions of Middle East “experts” and acts on its understanding (or misunderstanding) of US interests. Many Middle East experts make appearances on TV and may have had lunch with Cheney, Rice and Wolfowitz. It is naïve to imagine that such meetings can explain turns in US policy. Ajami is singled out for an extensive profile because of his Arab origins, which leads to the second assumption.

Shatz describes Ajami’s “treacherous” thinking as directly determined by his ethnicity. Such analysis is the intellectual equivalent of ethnic profiling. Shatz suggests an Arab could not think as Ajami does unless he suffers from a psychological pathology, that an Arab intellectual must completely agree with Edward Said or risk being branded a “native informant.” Ethno-pop psychology is a dangerous game: Using Shatz’s model, one could argue that any Jew who disagrees with Ariel Sharon is also a “native informant” and that all Jews should think alike because they are Jews.

AVI MATALON

SHATZ REPLIES

New York City

I don’t know what piece Avi Matalon was reading. It couldn’t have been mine. Nowhere do I argue that Ajami has shaped, much less “determined,” US foreign policy. What I do argue is that he has played an unusually prominent role in shaping American perceptions of the Middle East, through his prolific writings and ubiquitous television appearances; that he has influenced the thinking of key officials in the Bush Administration (a fact that Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, among others, readily concede in speeches and interviews) and that his ethnicity has made him highly attractive to the US government in its efforts to promote policies that are deeply unpopular in the region. Nowhere do I charge Ajami with treason, or suggest that his intellectual trajectory was “directly determined by his ethnicity.” Rather, I offer a complex and, I believe, deeply sad account of Ajami’s long journey from pan-Arabism to neoconservatism. I relate his evolution to a number of causes, both political (a growing sense of alienation from the Arab nationalist camp; bitter conflict between Palestinians and Shiites in southern Lebanon, Ajami’s native land) and personal (the anxieties of being an émigré in America; the seductions of acceptance by those in power).

To Arab nationalists Ajami’s career may be a clear-cut story of treachery, but that is not the story I tell. Far from suggesting that “an Arab intellectual must completely agree with Edward Said,” whatever that means, I honor his contribution to the debate, praising his first book, The Arab Predicament, as “one of the most probing and subtle books ever written in English on the region,” and faulting the book’s Arab nationalist critics for their “ideological rigidity.” However, the Ajami of today, unlike Jewish critics of Sharon, is not a dissident but rather a loyal spokesman for US and Israeli bellicosity, an outlook that finds virtually no echo even among the staunchest Arab critics of repressive dictatorships in the region. As for Matalon’s last charge, that Jewish dissidents could be considered “native informants” if one adopted my criteria, he might have a point if Noam Chomsky and Uri Avnery were advising the Arab League to wage a “humanitarian war” to liberate Palestine, serving as high-paid consultants to Egyptian state television and vacationing in the south of France with George Habash.

ADAM SHATZ

THE POINTE IS…

New York City

I will not address Diane Rafferty’s comments on performances in her March 3 “One Step Removed,” on the New York City Ballet, the School of American Ballet (SAB) and my book on Balanchine technique, as there will always be a variety of opinion on matters of artistic taste and judgment. There are, however, some errors of fact. Balanchine did not expect, much less require, his company dancers to take regular school classes in addition to his; he did expect us to do what we needed in order to dance well, but each dancer had to decide what that was (class, practice, swimming, Pilates, working out, etc.). I was one of the few company dancers who regularly took class at SAB; anecdotes from that experience are in my book. The Russians at SAB taught the old, pre-Vaganova Russian School; Vaganova did not emerge as an important teacher until after their time as students. I taught at SAB under Balanchine’s direct supervision from the early 1960s almost until he died. In the early years I more often taught younger girls and boys, in the later years generally the most advanced girls; I also taught company class through those years. Despite the statement attributed to him in Muriel Stuart’s book, he no longer wanted SAB to teach based precisely on that book and its drawings.

And there are some misunderstandings of technical details I might have cleared up had Rafferty discussed them with me. The text of my book precisely describes fifth position; apparent overcrossing in some photographs is a matter of camera angle. The technique is taught differently in some respects to very advanced dancers; the book is explicit on this. The use of the heel in jumps–taking off and landing–is the most important example. The book explains in detail that heel contact with the floor is valuable when taking off. It likewise explains that it is never good to fall down on the heel when landing. Even after reviewing specific details, she might well disagree, but it would be a disagreement with what I actually wrote and teach.

Finally, we need to understand Mr. B’s use of “unalterable.” Turnout, extension, pointe work, turning, jumping–they’ll always be central to classical ballet. But the details of what Balanchine wanted in class from very advanced students and professional dancers steadily evolved over the years I worked for him. Rafferty cites Suzanne Farrell’s unprecedented facility off-balance. One wouldn’t try to incorporate that in beginning or intermediate classes, but Mr. B did in his teaching and helped me incorporate it in mine.

SUKI SCHORER

RAFFERTY REPLIES

New York City

There are no “errors of fact” or “misunderstandings of technical details” in my article, except one, which Suki Schorer neglects: Corps member Alina Dronova, whom I praise, studied, after leaving her home country of Ukraine, at LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts, the school that was the inspiration for the movie and television show Fame–a fact generously pointed out to me by Michelle Mathesius, chair of the school’s dance department. Dronova went on to serve as an apprentice at City Ballet, studying at the School of American Ballet, at which Schorer is a teacher. As we went to press, I had only the information from the New York City press office that Dronova had “just arrived from Ukraine.” I apologize for the misleading statement.

DIANE RAFFERTY

Writing may be fighting, as Ishmael Reed famously opined, but most writers know the difference. There are, of course, some who blur the line. Take, for instance, Stanley Crouch, one of the great pugilists of American cultural criticism. More than a decade ago, Crouch lost his job at The Village Voice after knocking out a young writer half his size who had the nerve to suggest that rap was better than Coltrane. During another writerly brawl, he punched a jazz critic whom even pacifists considered a deserving target.

At 57, Crouch prefers to settle his differences peaceably, but his work shows no signs of mellowing. Writing in the April issue of JazzTimes under the headline “Putting the White Man in Charge,” he accused white jazz critics of promoting white musicians over superior black ones, in order to “make themselves feel more comfortable about evaluating an art from which they feel substantially alienated.” A provocative cocktail of gruff insight and rhetorical overkill, the column was 100-proof Crouch. His white editors apparently agreed, advertising the column as his “most incendiary yet.”

As it turned out, it was too incendiary even for them: A few weeks later, the magazine sent Crouch a brief e-mail terminating his contract. Not that the decision had anything to do with The Column. As the magazine’s editor, Christopher Porter, explained to the Voice, Crouch’s contributions had grown “tedious, generally alternating betweeen vitriolic rants and celebrations of his buddies.” It’s nice to hear that standards are being upheld at JazzTimes, but don’t expect them to be applied across the board–if they were, the magazine would have to suspend publication immediately.

Whether or not white jazz critics have a race problem, the ones at JazzTimes evidently do. The fact that Crouch is at the center of this farce–a tragedy it is not–contains delicious ironies. A black nationalist in his youth, he traded in his dashikis for a suit in the late 1970s, and made his career lambasting the excesses of Afrocentrism. He called Spike Lee a “fascist” (the two recently made up, thanks to Crouch’s puff piece on Bamboozled) and excoriated Toni Morrison for writing “maudlin ideological commercials.” If there was any black writer he defined himself against, it was Amiri Baraka, whom he still refers to sneeringly as LeRoi Jones, the name on his birth certificate. Indeed, Crouch’s celebration of jazz as the anthemic expression of American democracy is in large measure an attack on Baraka’s view of jazz as a coded form of racial protest. Yet Crouch’s recent diatribe carried surprising echoes of Baraka’s forty-year-old Downbeat essay “Jazz and the White Critic,” down to the rhetorical use of the singular “White Man.” I guess old habits die hard. Then again, intellectual consistency has always run a distant second to getting a reaction for Crouch, a provocateur and trickster at heart.

So is there any merit to his argument? Indeed there is. The search for the great white hope is as much a tradition in jazz as it is in boxing. (The romance of black authenticity, in which writers white and black are both complicit, is another.) And Crouch’s depiction of white jazz critics tracks with my own experience. The typical jazz critic is a white man in his 50s who feels underappreciated by the publishing world, a state of affairs he mistakenly blames on jazz’s marginality–or on more prominent critics like Crouch–rather than on the quality of his prose. Whether white critics are campaigning on behalf of white musicians at the expense of black ones is another matter. Francis Davis, a gifted critic whom Crouch pillories for championing white trumpeter Dave Douglas, has sung the praises of countless black musicians–just not the ones in Crouch’s Rolodex. As for Davis’s enthusiasm for Douglas, it has more to do with taste than race–which doesn’t make it any less debatable.

There is racial friction within jazz today–how could there not be?–but it’s mostly a turf war among critics. (Among players, the racial lines are murkier than ever.) The music they’re battling to define is at once more respectable and more peripheral in the wider culture. There are plenty of fine young jazz players, but little in the way of genuine innovation. Overpraise provides a measure of compensation for critics deprived of the experience of living in more vital times. Crouch is no less guilty of this, even if his darlings–Wynton Marsalis and other musicians affiliated with Jazz at Lincoln Center, which Crouch advises–are black. Marsalis may be a fine trumpeter, but he is no Miles Davis, just as Douglas is no Chet Baker.

The real scandal in jazz criticism isn’t race–it’s bad writing. Jazz, which arose at the same time as that other revolutionary twentieth-century art, film, has failed to generate a comparable body of criticism. Most jazz magazines are only slightly more readable than airline glossies, and serve roughly the same purpose. Whatever one thinks of Crouch’s views, he is one of the few jazz critics worthy of the name. And this, sadly, is another reason why he no longer belongs in the pages of JazzTimes.

Nina Simone, who died at the age of 70 in late April at her home in the south of France, was the Pasionaria of American song in the civil rights era. A defiant humanist, she gave stirring expression to an experience that most white Americans could scarcely imagine, and that few black artists of her time had dared to put into words.

Simone was more than a protest singer, however. She had one of the most astonishing voices in postwar American music–impossibly deep yet unmistakably feminine, lacerating in its intensity yet also capable of disarming tenderness. To listen to her voice was to feel almost hijacked by its power. She radiated a brash, sly sexuality. “What you’re wantin’ for your man,” she sang in “Blues for Mama,” is “what he’s wantin’ too.” In another one of her remarkable blues, she asked, “Do I Move You?” It was, of course, a rhetorical question: “The answer better be yes!” A gifted composer, Simone drew on everything from jazz, blues and folk to European cabaret and Bach fugues, long before record executives came up with the term “crossover.”

Simone’s best songs had the dramatic breadth of musical theater. “Four Women,” a harrowing dirge from 1965, recounted the bitter tales of a quartet of black women of varying hues (black, tan, yellow, brown) with the succinct, unsentimental force of Weill and Brecht, in whose work Simone was steeped. Introducing “Mississippi Goddam,” her fiery response to Medgar Evers’s assassination, to a New York audience in 1964, she said: “This is a show tune, but the show hasn’t been written for it yet.”

Simone was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon on February 21, 1933, into a poor family in Tryon, North Carolina. Her mother, an ordained minister, led the church choir. Gospel infused Simone’s sound, whether she was railing against “Mr. Backlash” or pleading with her lover to put “a little sugar in my bowl.” Like her friend James Baldwin, another preacher’s child, she expressed herself with an almost prophetic authority; her voice seemed to be lit by a sacred flame. “I have never believed in the separation of gospel music and the blues,” she told a writer in 1969. “Negro music has always crossed all those lines.”

The color line was an implacable fact of life in Tryon. When, at the age of 10, Simone gave her first piano recital at the town library, a group of whites forced her parents to give up their seats in the front row. In 1950 she left the Jim Crow South for New York, where she studied classical piano at the Juilliard School of Music. Four years later, while working as a singer-pianist at a bar in Atlantic City, she adopted the stage name Nina Simone, after Simone Signoret. Bethlehem Records signed her in 1957; two years later, her heartbreaking version of Gershwin’s “I Loves You Porgy” sold over a million records.

It was in the mid-1960s, when she was recording for Philips, that Simone truly came into her own as the griot of the civil rights movement. While continuing to sing Gershwin and Weill, she became increasingly adventurous in her choice of material, putting her indelible stamp on Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s “I Put a Spell on You,” Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” and Jacques Brel’s “Ne Me Quitte Pas.” She also began to write her own songs, many of which became Movement favorites. These were not merely passionate denunciations of injustice; like the comic routines of Dick Gregory and the speeches of Malcolm X, they heralded the birth of the new black sensibility–uncompromising, ironic, salty. “You don’t have to live next to me, just give me my equality!” she declared in “Mississippi Goddam.” Brotherly love wasn’t on her agenda: “Oh this whole country’s full of lies/Y’all gonna die and die like flies,/I don’t trust you anymore/When you keep on saying ‘Go slow, go slow!'” The Movement naturally revered her, and H. Rap Brown proclaimed her “the singer of the Black Revolution.”

Simone’s close identification with the Black Power movement cost her dearly. Record companies seemed suddenly less eager to work with her, and in the early 1970s she decided it was time to leave the country for good. France, where she had many adoring fans, welcomed her as it had welcomed other black artists who found American racism intolerable. There was to be no second act, but the first act of Simone’s career shone brightly enough. She put a spell on us, and we are still hers.

Late last August, at a reunion of Korean War veterans in San Antonio, Texas, Dick Cheney tried to assuage concerns that a unilateral, pre-emptive war against Iraq might “cause even greater troubles in that part of the world.” He cited a well-known Arab authority: “As for the reaction of the Arab street, the Middle East expert Professor Fouad Ajami predicts that after liberation in Basra and Baghdad, the streets are sure to erupt in joy.” As the bombs fell over Baghdad, just before American troops began to encounter fierce Iraqi resistance, Ajami could scarcely conceal his glee. “We are now coming into acquisition of Iraq,” he announced on CBS News the morning of March 22. “It’s an amazing performance.”

If Hollywood ever makes a film about Gulf War II, a supporting role should be reserved for Ajami, the director of Middle East Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. His is a classic American success story. Born in 1945 to Shiite parents in the remote southern Lebanese village of Arnoun and now a proud naturalized American, Ajami has become the most politically influential Arab intellectual of his generation in the United States. Condoleezza Rice often summons him to the White House for advice, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, a friend and former colleague, has paid tribute to him in several recent speeches on Iraq. Although he has produced little scholarly work of value, Ajami is a regular guest on CBS News, Charlie Rose and the NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, and a frequent contributor to the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. His ideas are also widely recycled by acolytes like Thomas Friedman and Judith Miller of the Times.

Ajami’s unique role in American political life has been to unpack the unfathomable mysteries of the Arab and Muslim world and to help sell America’s wars in the region. A diminutive, balding man with a dramatic beard, stylish clothes and a charming, almost flirtatious manner, he has played his part brilliantly. On television, he radiates above-the-frayness, speaking with the wry, jaded authority that men in power admire, especially in men who have risen from humble roots. Unlike the other Arabs, he appears to have no ax to grind. He is one of us; he is the good Arab.

Ajami’s admirers paint him as a courageous gadfly who has risen above the tribal hatreds of the Arabs, a Middle Eastern Spinoza whose honesty has earned him the scorn of his brethren. Commentary editor-at-large Norman Podhoretz, one of his many right-wing American Jewish fans, writes that Ajami “has been virtually alone in telling the truth about the attitude toward Israel of the people from whom he stems.” The people from whom Ajami “stems” are, of course, the Arabs, and Ajami’s ethnicity is not incidental to his celebrity. It lends him an air of authority not enjoyed by non-Arab polemicists like Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes.

But Ajami is no gadfly. He is, in fact, entirely a creature of the American establishment. His once-luminous writing, increasingly a blend of Naipaulean clichés about Muslim pathologies and Churchillian rhetoric about the burdens of empire, is saturated with hostility toward Sunni Arabs in general (save for pro-Western Gulf Arabs, toward whom he is notably indulgent), and to Palestinians in particular. He invites comparison with Henry Kissinger, another émigré intellectual to achieve extraordinary prominence as a champion of American empire. Like Kissinger, Ajami has a suave television demeanor, a gravitas-lending accent, an instinctive solicitude for the imperatives of power and a cool disdain for the weak. And just as Kissinger cozied up to Nelson Rockefeller and Nixon, so has Ajami attached himself to such powerful patrons as Laurence Tisch, former chairman of CBS; Mort Zuckerman, the owner of US News & World Report; Martin Peretz, a co-owner of The New Republic; and Leslie Gelb, head of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Despite his training in political science, Ajami often sounds like a pop psychologist in his writing about the Arab world or, as he variously calls it, “the world of Araby,” “that Arab world” and “those Arab lands.” According to Ajami, that world is “gripped in a poisonous rage” and “wedded to a worldview of victimology,” bad habits reinforced by its leaders, “megalomaniacs who never tell their people what can and cannot be had in the world of nations.” There is, to be sure, a grain of truth in Ajami’s grim assessment. Progressive Arab thinkers from Sadeq al-Azm to Adonis have issued equally bleak indictments of Arab political culture, lambasting the dearth of self-criticism and the constant search for external scapegoats. Unlike these writers, however, Ajami has little sympathy for the people of the region, unless they happen to live within the borders of “rogue states” like Iraq, in which case they must be “liberated” by American force. The corrupt regimes that rule the Arab world, he has suggested, are more or less faithful reflections of the “Arab psyche”: “Despots always work with a culture’s yearnings…. After all, a hadith, a saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, maintains ‘You will get the rulers you deserve.'” His own taste in regimes runs to monarchies like Kuwait. The Jews of Israel, it seems, are not just the only people in the region who enjoy the fruits of democracy; they are the only ones who deserve them.

Once upon a time, Ajami was an articulate and judicious critic both of Arab society and of the West, a defender of Palestinian rights and an advocate of decent government in the Arab world. Though he remains a shrewd guide to the hypocrisies of Arab leaders, his views on foreign policy now scarcely diverge from those of pro-Israel hawks in the Bush Administration. “Since the Gulf War, Fouad has taken leave of his analytic perspective to play to his elite constituency,” said Augustus Richard Norton, a Middle East scholar at Boston University. “It’s very unfortunate because he could have made an astonishingly important contribution.”

Seeking to understand the causes of Ajami’s transformation, I spoke to more than two dozen of his friends and acquaintances over the past several months. (Ajami did not return my phone calls or e-mails.) These men and women depicted a man at once ambitious and insecure, torn between his irascible intellectual independence and his even stronger desire to belong to something larger than himself. On the one hand, he is an intellectual dandy who, as Sayres Rudy, a former student, puts it, “doesn’t like groups and thinks people who join them are mediocre.” On the other, as a Shiite among Sunnis, and as an émigré in America, he has always felt the outsider’s anxiety to please, and has adjusted his convictions to fit his surroundings. As a young man eager to assimilate into the urbane Sunni world of Muslim Beirut, he embraced pan-Arabism. Received with open arms by the American Jewish establishment in New York and Washington, he became an ardent Zionist. An informal adviser to both Bush administrations, he is now a cheerleader for the American empire.

The man from Arnoun appears to be living the American dream. He has a prestigious job and the ear of the President. Yet the price of power has been higher in his case than in Kissinger’s. Kissinger, after all, is a figure of renown among the self-appointed leaders of “the people from whom he stems” and a frequent speaker at Jewish charity galas, whereas Ajami is a man almost entirely deserted by his people, a pariah at what should be his hour of triumph. In Arnoun, a family friend told me, “Fouad is a black sheep because of his staunch support for the Israelis.” Although he frequently travels to Tel Aviv and the Persian Gulf, he almost never goes to Lebanon. In becoming an American, he has become, as he himself has confessed, “a stranger in the Arab world.”

Up From Lebanon

This is an immigrant’s tale.

It begins in Arnoun, a rocky hamlet in the south of Lebanon where Fouad al-Ajami was born on September 19, 1945. A prosperous tobacco-growing Shiite family, the Ajamis had come to Arnoun from Iran in the 1850s. (Their name, Arabic for “Persian,” gave away their origins.)

When Ajami was 4, he moved with his family to Beirut, settling in the largely Armenian northeastern quarter, a neighborhood thick with orange orchards, pine trees and strawberry fields. As members of the rural Shiite minority, the country’s “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” the Ajamis stood apart from the city’s dominant groups, the Sunni Muslims and the Maronite Christians. “We were strangers to Beirut,” he has written. “We wanted to pass undetected in the modern world of Beirut, to partake of its ways.” For the young “Shia assimilé,” as he has described himself, “anything Persian, anything Shia, was anathema…. speaking Persianized Arabic was a threat to something unresolved in my identity.” He tried desperately, but with little success, to pass among his Sunni peers. In the predominantly Sunni schools he attended, “Fouad was taunted for being a Shiite, and for being short,” one friend told me. “That left him with a lasting sense of bitterness toward the Sunnis.”

In the 1950s, Arab nationalism appeared to hold out the promise of transcending the schisms between Sunnis and Shiites, and the confessional divisions separating Muslims and Christians. Like his classmates, Ajami fell under the spell of Arab nationalism’s charismatic spokesman, the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. At the same time, he was falling under the spell of American culture, which offered relief from the “ancestral prohibitions and phobias” of his “cramped land.” Watching John Wayne films, he “picked up American slang and a romance for the distant power casting its shadow across us.” On July 15, 1958, the day after the bloody overthrow of the Iraqi monarchy by nationalist army officers, Ajami’s two loves had their first of many clashes, when President Eisenhower sent the US Marines to Beirut to contain the spread of radical Arab nationalism. In their initial confrontation, Ajami chose Egypt’s leader, defying his parents and hopping on a Damascus-bound bus for one of Nasser’s mass rallies.

Ajami arrived in the United States in the fall of 1963, just before he turned 18. He did his graduate work at the University of Washington, where he wrote his dissertation on international relations and world government. At the University of Washington, Ajami gravitated toward progressive Arab circles. Like his Arab peers, he was shaken by the humiliating defeat of the Arab countries in the 1967 war with Israel, and he was heartened by the emergence of the PLO. While steering clear of radicalism, he often expressed horror at Israel’s brutal reprisal attacks against southern Lebanese villages in response to PLO raids.

In 1973 Ajami joined Princeton’s political science department, commuting to work from his apartment in New York. He made a name for himself there as a vocal supporter of Palestinian self-determination. One friend remembers him as “a fairly typical advocate of Third World positions.” Yet he was also acutely aware of the failings of Third World states, which he unsparingly diagnosed in “The Fate of Nonalignment,” a brilliant 1980/81 essay in Foreign Affairs. In 1980, when Johns Hopkins offered him a position as director of Middle East Studies at SAIS, a Washington-based graduate program, he took it.

Ajami’s Predicament

A year after arriving at SAIS, Ajami published his first and still best book, The Arab Predicament. An anatomy of the intellectual and political crisis that swept the Arab world following its defeat by Israel in the 1967 war, it is one of the most probing and subtle books ever written in English on the region. Ranging gracefully across political theory, literature and poetry, Ajami draws an elegant, often moving portrait of Arab intellectuals in their anguished efforts to put together a world that had come apart at the seams. The book did not offer a bold or original argument; like Isaiah Berlin’s Russian Thinkers, it provided an interpretive survey–respectful even when critical–of other people’s ideas. It was the book of a man who had grown disillusioned with Nasser, whose millenarian dream of restoring the “Arab nation” had run up against the hard fact that the “divisions of the Arab world were real, not contrived points on a map or a colonial trick.” But pan-Arabism was not the only temptation to which the intellectuals had succumbed. There was radical socialism, and the Guevarist fantasies of the Palestinian revolution. There was Islamic fundamentalism, with its romance of authenticity and its embittered rejection of the West. And then there was the search for Western patronage, the way of Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, who forgot his own world and ended up being devoured by it.

Ajami’s ambivalent chapter on Sadat makes for especially fascinating reading today. He praised Sadat for breaking with Nasserism and making peace with Israel, and perhaps saw something of himself in the “self-defined peasant from the dusty small village” who had “traveled far beyond the bounds of his world.” But he also saw in Sadat’s story the tragic parable of a man who had become more comfortable with Western admirers than with his own people. When Sadat spoke nostalgically of his village–as Ajami now speaks of Arnoun–he was pandering to the West. Arabs, a people of the cities, would not be “taken in by the myth of the village.” Sadat’s “American connection,” Ajami suggested, gave him “a sense of psychological mobility,” lifting some of the burdens imposed by his cramped world. And as his dependence on his American patrons deepened, “he became indifferent to the sensibilities of his own world.”

Sadat was one example of the trap of seeking the West’s approval, and losing touch with one’s roots; V.S. Naipaul was another. Naipaul, Ajami suggested in an incisive 1981 New York Times review of Among the Believers, exemplified the “dilemma of a gifted author led by his obsessive feelings regarding the people he is writing about to a difficult intellectual and moral bind.” Third World exiles like Naipaul, Ajami wrote, “have a tendency to…look at their own countries and similar ones with a critical eye,” yet “these same men usually approach the civilization of the West with awe and leave it unexamined.” Ajami preferred the humane, nonjudgmental work of Polish travel writer Ryszard Kapucinski: “His eye for human folly is as sharp as V.S. Naipaul. His sympathy and sorrow, however, are far deeper.”

The Arab Predicament was infused with sympathy and sorrow, but these qualities were ignored by the book’s Arab critics in the West, who–displaying the ideological rigidity that is an unfortunate hallmark of exile politics–accused him of papering over the injustices of imperialism and “blaming the victim.” To an extent, this was a fair criticism. Ajami paid little attention to imperialism, and even less to Israel’s provocative role in the region. What is more, his argument that “the wounds that mattered were self-inflicted” endeared him to those who wanted to distract attention from Palestine. Doors flew open. On the recommendation of Bernard Lewis, the distinguished British Orientalist at Princeton and a strong supporter of Israel, Ajami became the first Arab to win the MacArthur “genius” prize in 1982, and in 1983 he became a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. The New Republic began to publish lengthy essays by Ajami, models of the form that offer a tantalizing glimpse of the career he might have had in a less polarized intellectual climate. Pro-Israel intellectual circles groomed him as a rival to Edward Said, holding up his book as a corrective to Orientalism, Said’s classic study of how the West imagined the East in the age of empire.

In fact, Ajami shared some of Said’s anger about the Middle East. The Israelis, he wrote in an eloquent New York Times op-ed after the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, “came with a great delusion: that if you could pound men and women hard enough, if you could bring them to their knees, you could make peace with them.” He urged the United States to withdraw from Lebanon in 1984, and he advised it to open talks with the Iranian government. Throughout the 1980s, Ajami maintained a critical attitude toward America’s interventions in the Middle East, stressing the limits of America’s ability to influence or shape a “tormented world” it scarcely understood. “Our arguments dovetailed,” says Said. “There was an unspoken assumption that we shared the same kind of politics.”

But just below the surface there were profound differences of opinion. Hisham Milhem, a Lebanese journalist who knows both men well, explained their differences to me by contrasting their views on Joseph Conrad. “Edward and Fouad are both crazy about Conrad, but they see in him very different things. Edward sees the critic of empire, especially in Heart of Darkness. Fouad, on the other hand, admires the Polish exile in Western Europe who made a conscious break with the old country.”

Yet the old world had as much of a grip on Ajami as it did on Said. In southern Lebanon, Palestinian guerrillas had set up a state within a state. They often behaved thuggishly toward the Shiites, alienating their natural allies and recklessly exposing them to Israel’s merciless reprisals. By the time Israeli tanks rolled into Lebanon in 1982, relations between the two communities had so deteriorated that some Shiites greeted the invaders with rice and flowers. Like many Shiites, Ajami was fed up with the Palestinians, whose revolution had brought ruin to Lebanon. Arnoun itself had not been unscathed: A nearby Crusader castle, the majestic Beaufort, was now the scene of intense fighting.

In late May 1985, Ajami–now identifying himself as a Shiite from southern Lebanon–sparred with Said on the MacNeil Lehrer Report over the war between the PLO and Shiite Amal militia, then raging in Beirut’s refugee camps. A few months later, they came to verbal blows again, when Ajami was invited to speak at a Harvard conference on Islam and Muslim politics organized by Israeli-American academic Nadav Safran. After the Harvard Crimson revealed that the conference had been partly funded by the CIA, Ajami, at the urging of Said and the late Pakistani writer Eqbal Ahmad, joined a wave of speakers who were withdrawing from the conference. But Ajami, who was a protégé and friend of Safran, immediately regretted his decision. He wrote a blistering letter to Said and Ahmad a few weeks later, accusing them of “bringing the conflicts of the Middle East to this country” while “I have tried to go beyond them…. Therefore, my friends, this is the parting of ways. I hope never to encounter you again, and we must cease communication. Yours sincerely, Fouad Ajami.”

The Tribal Turn

By now, the “Shia assimilé” had fervently embraced his Shiite identity. Like Sadat, he began to rhapsodize about his “dusty village” in wistful tones. The Vanished Imam, his 1986 encomium to Musa al-Sadr, the Iranian cleric who led the Amal militia before mysteriously disappearing on a 1978 visit to Libya, offers important clues into Ajami’s thinking of the time. A work of lyrical nationalist mythology, The Vanished Imam also provides a thinly veiled political memoir, recounting Ajami’s disillusionment with Palestinians, Arabs and the left, and his conversion to old-fashioned tribal politics.

The marginalized Shiites had found a home in Amal, and a spiritual leader in Sadr, a “big man” who is explicitly compared to Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and credited with a far larger role than he actually played in Shiite politics. Writing of Sadr, Ajami might have been describing himself. Sadr is an Ajam–a Persian–with “an outsider’s eagerness to please.” He is “suspicious of grand schemes,” blessed with “a strong sense of pragmatism, of things that can and cannot be,” thanks to which virtue he “came to be seen as an enemy of everything ‘progressive.'” “Tired of the polemics,” he alone is courageous enough to stand up to the Palestinians, warning them not to “seek a ‘substitute homeland,’ watan badil, in Lebanon.” Unlike the Palestinians, Ajami tells us repeatedly, the Shiites are realists, not dreamers; reformers, not revolutionaries. Throughout the book, a stark dichotomy is also drawn between Shiite and Arab nationalism, although, as one of his Shiite critics pointed out in a caustic review in the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, “allegiance to Arab nationalist ideals…was paramount” in Sadr’s circles. The Shiites of Ajami’s imagination seem fundamentally different from other Arabs: a community that shares America’s aversion to the Palestinians, a “model minority” worthy of the West’s sympathy.

The Shiite critic of the Palestinians cut an especially attractive profile in the eyes of the American media. Most American viewers of CBS News, which made him a high-paid consultant in 1985, had no idea that he was almost completely out of step with the community for which he claimed to speak. By the time The Vanished Imam appeared, the Shiites, under the leadership of a new group, Hezbollah, had launched a battle to liberate Lebanon from Israeli control. Israeli soldiers were now greeted with grenades and explosives, rather than rice and flowers, and Arnoun became a hotbed of Hezbollah support. Yet Ajami displayed little enthusiasm for this Shiite struggle. He was also oddly silent about the behavior of the Israelis, who, from the 1982 invasion onward, had killed far more Shiites than either Arafat (“the Flying Dutchman of the Palestinian movement”) or Hafez al-Assad (Syria’s “cruel enforcer”). The Shiites, he suggested, were “beneficiaries of Israel’s Lebanon war.”

In the Promised Land

By the mid-1980s, the Middle Eastern country closest to Ajami’s heart was not Lebanon but Israel. He returned from his trips to the Jewish state boasting of traveling to the occupied territories under the guard of the Israel Defense Forces and of being received at the home of Teddy Kollek, then Jerusalem’s mayor. The Israelis earned his admiration because they had something the Palestinians notably lacked: power. They were also tough-minded realists, who understood “what can and cannot be had in the world of nations.” The Palestinians, by contrast, were romantics who imagined themselves to be “exempt from the historical laws of gravity.”

In 1986, Ajami had praised Musa al-Sadr as a realist for telling the Palestinians to fight Israel in the occupied territories, rather than in Lebanon. But when the Palestinians did exactly that, in the first intifada of 1987-93, it no longer seemed realistic to Ajami, who then advised them to swallow the bitter pill of defeat and pay for their bad choices. While Israeli troops shot down children armed only with stones, Ajami told the Palestinians they should give up on the idea of a sovereign state (“a phantom”), even in the West Bank and Gaza. When the PLO announced its support for a two-state solution at a 1988 conference in Algiers, Ajami called the declaration “hollow,” its concessions to Israel inadequate. On the eve of the Madrid talks in the fall of 1991 he wrote, “It is far too late to introduce a new nation between Israel and Jordan.” Nor should the American government embark on the “fool’s errand” of pressuring Israel to make peace. Under Ajami’s direction, the Middle East program of SAIS became a bastion of pro-Israel opinion. An increasing number of Israeli and pro-Israel academics, many of them New Republic contributors, were invited as guest lecturers. “Rabbi Ajami,” as many people around SAIS referred to him, was also receiving significant support from a Jewish family foundation in Baltimore, which picked up the tab for the trips his students took to the Middle East every summer. Back in Lebanon, Ajami’s growing reputation as an apologist for Israel reportedly placed considerable strains on family members in Arnoun.

‘The Saudi Way’

Ajami also developed close ties during the 1980s to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, which made him–as he often and proudly pointed out–the only Arab who traveled both to the Persian Gulf countries and to Israel. In 1985 he became an external examiner in the political science department at Kuwait University; he said “the place seemed vibrant and open to me.” His major patrons, however, were Saudi. He has traveled to Riyadh many times to raise money for his program, sometimes taking along friends like Martin Peretz; he has also vacationed in Prince Bandar’s home in Aspen. Saudi hospitality–and Saudi Arabia’s lavish support for SAIS–bred gratitude. At one meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations, Ajami told a group that, as one participant recalls, “the Saudi system was a lot stronger than we thought, that it was a system worth defending, and that it had nothing to apologize for.” Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, he faithfully echoed the Saudi line. “Rage against the West does not come naturally to the gulf Arabs,” he wrote in 1990. “No great tales of betrayal are told by the Arabs of the desert. These are Palestinian, Lebanese and North African tales.”

This may explain why Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 aroused greater outrage in Ajami than any act of aggression in the recent history of the Middle East. Neither Israel’s invasion of Lebanon nor the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre had caused him comparable consternation. Nor, for that matter, had Saddam’s slaughter of the Kurds in Halabja in 1988. This is understandable, of course; we all react more emotionally when the victims are friends. But we don’t all become publicists for war, as Ajami did that fateful summer, consummating his conversion to Pax Americana. What was remarkable was not only his fervent advocacy; it was his cavalier disregard for truth, his lurid rhetoric and his religious embrace of American power. In Foreign Affairs, Ajami, who knew better, described Iraq, the cradle of Mesopotamian civilization, a major publisher of Arabic literature and a center of the plastic arts, as “a brittle land…with little claim to culture and books and grand ideas.” It was, in other words, a wasteland, led by a man who “conjures up Adolf Hitler.”

Months before the war began, the Shiite from Arnoun, now writing as an American, in the royal “we,” declared that US troops “will have to stay in the Gulf and on a much larger scale,” since “we have tangible interests in that land. We stand sentry there in blazing clear daylight.” After the Gulf War, Ajami’s cachet soared. In the early 1990s Harvard offered him a chair (“he turned it down because we expected him to be around and to work very hard,” a professor told me), and the Council on Foreign Relations added him to its prestigious board of advisers last year. “The Gulf War was the crucible of change,” says Augustus Richard Norton. “This immigrant from Arnoun, this man nobody had heard of from a place no one had heard of, had reached the peak of power. This was a true immigrant success story, one of those moments that make an immigrant grateful for America. And I think it implanted a deep sense of patriotism that wasn’t present before.”

And, as Ajami once wrote of Sadat, “outside approval gave him the courage to defy” the Arabs, especially when it came to Israel. On June 3, 1992, hardly a year after Gulf War I, Ajami spoke at a pro-Israel fundraiser. Kissinger, the keynote speaker, described Arabs as congenital liars. Ajami chimed in, expressing his doubts that democracy would ever work in the Arab world, and recounting a visit to a Bedouin village where he “insisted on only one thing: that I be spared the ceremony of eating with a Bedouin.”

Since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, Ajami has been a consistent critic of the peace process–from the right. He sang the praises of each of Israel’s leaders, from the Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu, with his “filial devotion [to] the land he had agreed to relinquish,” to Labor leader Ehud Barak, “an exemplary soldier.” The Palestinians, he wrote, should be grateful to such men for “rescuing” them from defeat, and to Zionism for generously offering them “the possibility of their own national political revival.” (True to form, the Palestinians showed “no gratitude.”) A year before the destruction of Jenin, he proclaimed that “Israel is existentially through with the siege that had defined its history.” Ajami’s Likudnik conversion was sealed by telling revisions of arguments he had made earlier in his career. Where he had once argued that the 1982 invasion of Lebanon aimed to “undermine those in the Arab world who want some form of compromise,” he now called it a response to “the challenge of Palestinian terror.”

Did Ajami really believe all this? In a stray but revealing comment on Sadat in The New Republic, he left room for doubt. Sadat, he said, was “a son of the soil, who had the fellah’s ability to look into the soul of powerful outsiders, to divine how he could get around them even as he gave them what they desired.” Writing on politics, the man from Arnoun gave them what they desired. Writing on literature and poetry, he gave expression to the aesthete, the soulful elegist, even, at times, to the Arab. In his 1998 book, The Dream Palace of the Arabs, one senses, for the first time in years, Ajami’s sympathy for the world he left behind, although there is something furtive, something ghostly about his affection, as if he were writing about a lover he has taught himself to spurn. On rare occasions, Ajami revealed this side of himself to his students, whisking them into his office. Once the door was firmly shut, he would recite the poetry of Nizar Qabbani and Adonis in Arabic, caressing each and every line. As he read, Sayres Rudy told me, “I could swear his heart was breaking.”

Ajami’s Solitude

September 11 exposed a major intelligence failure on Ajami’s part. With his obsessive focus on the menace of Saddam and the treachery of Arafat, he had missed the big story. Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers hailed from what he had repeatedly called the “benign political order” of Saudi Arabia; the “Saudi way” he had praised had come undone. Yet the few criticisms that Ajami directed at his patrons in the weeks and months after September 11 were curiously muted, particularly in contrast to the rage of most American commentators. Ajami’s venues in the American media, however, were willing to forgive his softness toward the Saudis. America was going to war with Muslims, and a trusted native informant was needed.

Other forces were working in Ajami’s favor. For George W. Bush and the hawks in his entourage, Afghanistan was merely a prelude to the war they really wanted to fight–the war against Saddam that Ajami had been spoiling for since the end of Gulf War I. As a publicist for Gulf War II, Ajami has abandoned his longstanding emphasis on the limits of American influence in that “tormented region.” The war is being sold as the first step in an American plan to effect democratic regime change across the region, and Ajami has stayed on message. We now find him writing in Foreign Affairs that “the driving motivation of a new American endeavor in Iraq and in neighboring Arab lands should be modernizing the Arab world.” The opinion of the Arab street, where Iraq is recruiting thousands of new jihadists, is of no concern to him. “We have to live with this anti-Americanism,” he sighed recently on CBS. “It’s the congenital condition of the Arab world, and we have to discount a good deal of it as we press on with the task of liberating the Iraqis.”

In fairness, Ajami has not completely discarded his wariness about American intervention. For there remains one country where American pressure will come to naught, and that is Israel, where it would “be hubris” to ask anything more of the Israelis, victims of “Arafat’s war.” To those who suggest that the Iraq campaign is doomed without an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement, he says, “We can’t hold our war hostage to Arafat’s campaign of terror.”

Fortunately, George W. Bush understands this. Ajami has commended Bush for staking out the “high moral ground” and for “putting Iran on notice” in his Axis of Evil speech. Above all, the President should not allow himself to be deterred by multilateralists like Secretary of State Colin Powell, “an unhappy, reluctant soldier, at heart a pessimist about American power.” Unilateralism, Ajami says, is nothing to be ashamed of. It may make us hated in the “hostile landscape” of the Arab world, but, as he recently explained on the NewsHour, “it’s the fate of a great power to stand sentry in that kind of a world.”

It is no accident that the “sentry’s solitude” has become the idée fixe of Ajami’s writing in recent years. For it is a theme that resonates powerfully in his own life. Like the empire he serves, Ajami is more influential, and more isolated, than he has ever been. In recent years he has felt a need to defend this choice in heroic terms. “All a man can betray is his conscience,” he solemnly writes in The Dream Palace of the Arabs, citing a passage from Conrad. “The solitude Conrad chose is loathed by politicized men and women.”

It is a breathtakingly disingenuous remark. Ajami may be “a stranger in the Arab world,” but he can hardly claim to be a stranger to its politics. That is why he is quoted, and courted, by Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz. What Ajami abhors in “politicized men and women” is conviction itself. A leftist in the 1970s, a Shiite nationalist in the 1980s, an apologist for the Saudis in the 1990s, a critic-turned-lover of Israel, a skeptic-turned-enthusiast of American empire, he has observed no consistent principle in his career other than deference to power. His vaunted intellectual independence is a clever fiction. The only thing that makes him worth reading is his prose style, and even that has suffered of late. As Ajami observed of Naipaul more than twenty years ago, “he has become more and more predictable, too, with serious cost to his great gift as a writer,” blinded by the “assumption that only men who live in remote, dark places are ‘denied a clear vision of the world.'” Like Naipaul, Ajami has forgotten that “darkness is not only there but here as well.”

Since the September 11 attacks, it’s become a cliché to say that the left is divided over American foreign policy. But “divided” doesn’t begin to capture the diversity of opinion about the war in Afghanistan and the war on terror–or, for that matter, the inner conflicts that have racked many people on the left. Standing outside my apartment on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn on September 11, I saw the towers on fire. As shaken and horrified as I was, I knew two things: (1) the American government–my government, for better or for worse–would respond; and (2) that despite my fear that the response would be disproportionate, I wasn’t going to be attending any peace rallies, at least not yet.

Since then, the fog of war has grown thicker and thicker. On some days, I’m sympathetic to Noam Chomsky’s critique of the war on terrorism as an arrogant war of empire. On other days, I remember the view from Flatbush Avenue on September 11, and I’m gripped by the sense that anti-imperialism is a woefully incomplete guide to today’s situation. I never saw the Soviets, the Cubans, the Sandinistas, the ANC or the PLO as enemies. Al Qaeda is another matter altogether.

Curious whether others shared my own ambivalence, I undertook an informal investigation of left-wing opinion on American foreign policy since 9/11. I spoke to a range of left intellectuals, from social democrats who were convinced that Afghanistan was a necessary and just war, to anti-imperialists who believed that it was a nasty war of retribution. More important, I spoke with people, arguably the left majority, who fell somewhere in between, in that sea of uncertainty that is the post-9/11 condition. They weren’t ecstatic about the war in Afghanistan, but they couldn’t bring themselves to oppose it either. The question that has vexed them is where to draw the line between self-defense and imperial aggrandizement.

Some of the people I interviewed opposed going to war in October because they feared a bloody quagmire and didn’t trust the Bush Administration, but changed their minds a month later when the Taliban unexpectedly fell. Others went in the opposite direction, coming out against the war only after US bombing began to inflict heavy civilian casualties. A few people supported targeted strikes against Al Qaeda training bases, but not the overthrow of the Taliban–not because of any sympathy for the regime but because the Bush Administration might be emboldened to overthrow other governments. Others argued, in contrast, that we shouldn’t be bombing Afghanistan unless we were willing to send in ground troops. Some said that a struggle against radical Islam is necessary, but that we should be waging it in Saudi Arabia, not in Afghanistan. And many of the people who cautiously supported the Afghan intervention passionately assailed the war on terror as a new cold war, a danger to both American democracy and security.

To be honest, I’ve held a number of these positions myself. There may not be thirteen ways of looking at “America’s new war,” as CNN almost instantly (and vaguely) named it, but there are certainly more than two.

Reading the left press, however, you wouldn’t necessarily know this. Since September 11, the debate on the left has been framed by the extremes of pro- and antiwar opinion–that is, if you can call it a debate. It’s more like a shouting match, with accusations of treason of one kind or another being flung by both sides.

New Left Review editor Tariq Ali sneers at supporters of the war, including his ex-friend Christopher Hitchens, as “the new empire loyalists,” while Hitchens excoriates opponents of the war on terror as “Ramadanistas.” In “Can There Be a Decent Left?”, an essay in the spring Dissent, Michael Walzer–who lent his signature to “What We’re Fighting For,” a prowar manifesto sponsored by the center-right Institute for American Values–accused the antiwar left of expressing “barely concealed glee that the imperial state had finally gotten what it deserved.” (When I asked him to say whom he had in mind, he said: “I’m not going to do that. Virtually everyone who read it knew exactly what I was talking about.”)

The debate reflects sharp disagreements not only about the war on terror but about America’s enormously expanded role in the world. Radical anti-imperialists ground their claims in the sordid history of US involvement in Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, Chile, East Timor and Nicaragua. As the left-wing war historian Gabriel Kolko puts it: “Everyone–Americans and those people who are the objects of their efforts–would be far better off if the United States did nothing, closed its bases overseas, withdrew its fleets everywhere and allowed the rest of the world to find its own way without American weapons and troops.” Left interventionists, by contrast, invoke the recent history of the Balkans, where they argue American military intervention helped create the conditions for Slobodan Milosevic’s downfall and for the democratization of Serbia; they also point out that in post-cold war geopolitics, there are worse things than the expansion of NATO–ethnic cleansing and genocide, for instance. “I think it should have occurred to a lot of people that there are many places in the world where American intervention would be considered desirable,” says Hitchens. One camp inclines toward automatic hostility to any American military intervention; the other veers toward an embrace of American expansionism.

The prowar left and the antiwar left have both tended to view the conflict through ideologically tinted prisms. Reflexive anti-Americanism is one such prism. As Don Guttenplan, a London-based correspondent for The Nation, observes, for a small but vocal section of American radicals, “there is only one imperialism, and if it isn’t American it’s not imperialism.” In the past decade this theology of American evil has assumed increasingly twisted forms, including, in some cases, a creeping sympathy for Serbian nationalism. It has also produced a highly selective solicitude for the oppressed: “Muslim grievances” are to be heeded when they emanate from Palestine, but ignored or even repudiated when they arise in Bosnia or Kosovo. This has damaged the left’s moral standing and widened the chasm with human rights activists, who should be our natural allies.

The MIT linguist and prolific essayist Noam Chomsky has emerged as a favorite target of those keen on exposing the left’s anti-Americanism. Although Chomsky denounced the attacks, emphasizing that “nothing can justify such crimes,” he seemed irritable in the interviews he gave just after September 11, as if he couldn’t quite connect to the emotional reality of American suffering. He wasted little time on the attacks themselves before launching into a wooden recitation of atrocities carried out by the American government and its allies. In a clumsy analogy, Chomsky likened the attacks to Clinton’s bombing of the Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan (wrongly suspected of manufacturing biological weapons), which resulted in one direct casualty. According to Chomsky, because the destruction of the plant placed tens of thousands of Sudanese at risk of malaria and other lethal diseases, it was “morally worse” than 9/11.

Much of what Chomsky said–his argument that the United States should treat the attacks as a crime, rather than an act of war, and that it should apprehend the terrorists and bring them before an international court rather than declare war on Afghanistan–was echoed by more centrist thinkers, including the British military historian Michael Howard in Foreign Affairs and Stanley Hoffmann in The New York Review of Books. The problem was not so much Chomsky’s opposition to US retaliation as the weirdly dispassionate tone of his reaction to the carnage at Ground Zero, but, as Todd Gitlin points out, “in an interview undertaken just after September 11, the tone was the position.”

“There’s a humbling insight into the US pretension of occupying the moral high ground in Chomsky’s work,” international legal scholar and Nation editorial board member Richard Falk reflects. “Part of what he’s saying is true. Objectively viewed, the United States isn’t the victim but in many contexts, including its response to terrorism, the perpetrator.” But, adds Falk, he’s “so preoccupied with the evils of US imperialism that it completely occupies all the political and moral space, and therefore it’s not possible for him to acknowledge that even without intending to do so, some US military interventions may actually have a beneficial effect.”

Instead of taking “an either/or view” of American military intervention, Falk argues, “we should look with as much care as possible at the case where the interventionary claim is being made, and consider the effects of intervening and not intervening.” As his own writings on Afghanistan illustrate, however, it’s not always easy to make these calls. Falk changed his position on Afghanistan several times before arriving at the conclusion that the war was “just and necessary,” despite the use of tactics like cluster bombs that he believes were “in clear violation of the laws of war.”

Falk has been widely chastised for his vacillations. “Will the old Falk please stand up? We need you, Richard!” the antiwar lawyer Peter Weiss wrote in a letter to The Nation. “He wanted to be vindicated, he didn’t want to be right,” says Hitchens, from the other end of the spectrum. And yet one could argue that it was the opposite–that Falk was trying to stake out a principled position, one attentive both to the delicate balance between human rights and domestic security, and to the rapid changes on the ground in Afghanistan. In doing so, he spoke for many people on the left, though unlike some of us he expressed his uncertainty and ambivalence, and was not afraid to admit that he had been mistaken.

While Falk did not evaluate the war through the distorting prism of anti-Americanism, he also avoided the misleading view of many prowar liberals, for whom America’s struggle against Al Qaeda and Israel’s war with Palestinian suicide bombers are one and the same. “America’s crime, its real crime, is to be America herself,” Paul Berman wrote in The American Prospect shortly after the attacks. “The crime is to exude the dynamism of an ever-changing liberal culture. America is like Israel in that respect, only fifty times larger and infinitely richer and more powerful.” The implication of Berman’s argument is that no change in Middle East policy could stem the tide of Arab anger, directed as it is not against specific American or Israeli policies but against “our” way of life. Though rarely cited explicitly, Israel shapes and even defines the foreign policy views of a small but influential group of American liberals. It’s one reason Berman and like-minded social democrats at the journal Dissent may support a war against Iraq. Saddam Hussein has not attacked us, but, as Ann Snitow, a member of the Dissent editorial board, reminded me, “Who is ‘us’? Is it New York or Tel Aviv? The ‘us’ slides around.”

Unlike most Americans, leftists didn’t have to ask the question “Why do they hate us?”–and not because of any glee that the chickens had come home to roost. The left press had spent the better part of the past two decades critiquing American policies that have fanned anger and resentment in the Arab and Muslim world.

Yet the attacks also placed the left on the defensive. Although bin Laden represents a grisly perversion of anti-imperialism, the atrocities posed a challenge to the sentimental Third Worldism that has been a cornerstone of the radical left since the Vietnam era. “A lot of us came up in the period when the most imperialist actions were coming from the West,” says Robin D.G. Kelley, a professor of Africana Studies at New York University. “I think anyone who supports some blind Third World unity has to think again now.”

The atrocities also exposed an intelligence failure on the left. For years, progressive writers had referred to terrorism in scare quotes, largely because security hawks and Israel lobbyists cynically applied the term to acts of indiscriminate violence by national liberation movements, and never to those by states. And while many feminists were decrying the Taliban long before President Bush discovered what a burqa was, some left-wing scholars had presented a sanitized image of Islamic fundamentalists as authentic populists, even as a potentially democratizing force in the Arab world. The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? was the title of one highly praised study. Guess what the answer was.

“This war is a real crisis for the left,” says Katha Pollitt, “in that finally there is an enemy who has attacked us, as opposed to any enemy that’s in our heads, and one that’s completely unsympathetic to the goals of the left.”

There was also confusion and disagreement about how to combat this new enemy, stateless and elusive as it is. “There are numerous ways of dealing with terrorism, and the military option is not the only one or necessarily even the best one,” says Eric Foner, an American historian at Columbia University. “It wasn’t Western intervention, it wasn’t Western bomber jets…which went and got rid of Khomeini,” Tariq Ali observes. “It was biology: He died. And after he died, it opened up conflicts in that society. And it was the Iranians, without the help of bomber jets, who voted out the hard-line clerics.”

But Iran is a nation-state whose ambitions do not extend beyond the region; Al Qaeda is a shadowy network of cells dispersed, in clandestine fashion, throughout the world and inspired by an implacable vision of a war to the death with “Crusaders and Zionists.” As Ali notes, nonmilitary policies like police work and spying may prove ideally suited to tracking down Al Qaeda terrorists and preventing future attacks: Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, was apprehended by traditional police methods. And yet there are some settings in which police methods can hardly be expected to work, like Afghanistan. “Which was the court where these guys could be summoned?” asks Todd Gitlin. “Were subpoenas to be dropped at the mouths of the caves of Tora Bora?” What’s more, the call for “police work” rather than war sounded somewhat disingenuous, coming as it did from some of the same people who used to call for the abolition of the CIA, an organization to which much of the policing would presumably be entrusted. A noisy debate over the reform of the CIA rocked mainstream and conservative circles after 9/11, but, as the investigative journalist Ken Silverstein notes, the left didn’t participate. “Whatever the solutions are, it’s a reasonable debate,” says Silverstein. “But it wasn’t a debate that was vibrant on the left. When people on the left hear the words Pentagon or CIA, they immediately go into the mode of, ‘Oh, they’re big, bad organizations and that’s all I need to know.'”

When it comes to military action, moreover, the left has been similarly hard pressed to develop an informed critique that transcends pacifist platitudes. “What we should be learning from the last couple of decades,” Barbara Ehrenreich reflects, “is that there’s a variety of forms of [military] intervention.” Once the war in Afghanistan began and it became clear that America would rely once again on high-altitude bombing–and the assistance of ruthless local proxies–a number of left-liberal writers who supported the intervention called for ground troops. The cultural critic Ellen Willis was among them. “There’s no such thing as a war without consequences for yourself,” she says. “The idea that some people in the military have that America should never have any casualties is ridiculous.”

But ridiculous to whom? Given the mercurial realities of American electoral politics, and given the “lessons” of Vietnam, keeping American casualties to a minimum makes perfect sense to both the American government and the American military, not to mention the American people.

When I mentioned this problem to Willis, she said: “I think it’s incumbent on people to say what they think…. If you’re going to be a critic, be a critic of those things that you’re really critical of, and support the things that you can support.” It’s a reasonable argument, but it may also be a touch naïve. As Pollitt reflects, “A fundamental problem with intellectuals is that they think they’re much more powerful than they are, and they find these middle paths.”

The war on terror, though far more controversial than the war in Afghanistan, has found some impassioned liberal supporters, particularly the circle around Dissent, the magazine Walzer edits. Dissent emerged during the cold war as a journal of the social democratic left, and it has long maintained commitments to social justice and labor rights. But historically it has been identified (albeit critically) with American foreign policy, in opposition to Communism and to Third World and especially Arab militancy–a threat to Israel, the journal’s special object of concern. Communism is dead, but Arab militancy is perceived as more virulent than ever. A new enemy, together with a new war that, like the cold war, not all leftists support, gave Dissent a renewed sense of purpose at a time when it seemed rudderless. The journal has thus devoted much of its critical energy since 9/11 to castigating the sins of the left. At Dissent‘s first editorial board meeting after the attacks, the liveliest topic of conversation was reportedly Chomsky, whom Walzer appears to regard as an even greater menace to society than Osama himself.

The bellicosity of Christopher Hitchens is more surprising. It’s true that Hitchens also supported American military interventions in the Balkans and in Haiti. Even so, it’s hard not to be taken aback by his zealous embrace of the war on terrorism, his conditional support for a pre-emptive strike against Iraq and by the ferocious invective he has poured on antiwar critics. Hitchens, a self-described “root-and-branch anti-Zionist,” once disdained the very notion of a foreign policy premised on antiterrorism. In an essay published in The Nation on December 5, 1981, he wrote about The New Republic: “The cult of ‘anti-terrorism'”–notice the quotes–“has taken a sturdy hold on that once-proud magazine, and has spilled over from gung-ho attitudes on Israel to a pastiche of Reaganism in general–at least in the area of foreign policy.”

It’s true that the world, and not just Hitchens, has changed since 1981. When Reaganites referred to “terrorism” in those days, they meant violent resistance of any kind by radical nationalists, whether the PLO, the ANC or Central American insurgents. And while this violence was sometimes directed at innocent civilians, it often wasn’t–it merited the quotes around it in a way that Al Qaeda’s religiously inspired and vastly more lethal attacks do not. Even so, the war against terror seems to have taken a sturdy hold on the left’s most gifted polemicist, and has spilled over from gung-ho attitudes on American power into a pastiche of Bushism–at least in the area of foreign policy.

In the first couple of weeks after 9/11, as radicals flashed peace buttons and denounced America’s war before a shot was fired, Hitchens’s voice was a tonic. You didn’t have to agree with his overheated (and now overused) analogy between radical Islam and fascism to appreciate his candor about the evil that occurred on September 11, and about the need to prevent similar attacks in the future. In the bombers of Manhattan, he declared, “we have met an enemy, and…he is not us, but someone else.” While radicals noted that the United States had armed and trained Islamic militants in Afghanistan throughout the 1980s, as if “blowback” were reason enough not to do anything about them now, Hitchens asked the obvious question: “Does this not double or triple our responsibility to remove them from power?”

“All that made sense to me,” Guttenplan says of Hitchens’s early responses to 9/11. “What didn’t make sense to me was saying we’re getting on the bus with George Bush.” Which, in effect, is what Hitchens has been saying for the past several months. “There may be some stupid and…self-righteous ways of being in favor of this war or of the Bush foreign policy, but there is no intelligent and no principled way of being against it,” Hitchens thundered in a recent debate with Tariq Ali. At that debate, Hitchens traced the war back to February 14, 1989, when Khomeini declared a fatwa against his friend the novelist Salman Rushdie. Never mind that the radical Shiites of Iran are sworn enemies of the Sunni fundamentalists of Al Qaeda. For Hitchens, the war on terror is a religious war, or rather an anticlerical war–even though it is led by a born-again Christian. In a fairly laudatory assessment of Bush’s first year in office, published last January in the British Observer, Hitchens praised the President for knowing his place (“He has not sought to outgrow his limited stature…. In general, he has eschewed the temptations of posturing or grandstanding”) and for his tolerant stance vis-à-vis the Muslim world (“he was, if anything, too immaculate in his deference to Muslim sensitivities at home and abroad”). The contrast with his verbal assaults on the Chomsky left, whom Hitchens calls “soft on crime and soft on fascism,” is stark and telling.

Hitchens’s enthusiasm for the war on terror has led him to adopt some strange positions. You would think that, as a longstanding champion of Palestinian rights, he would be disturbed by Rumsfeld’s cavalier talk of the “so-called occupied territories” and Bush’s crude ultimatum to the Palestinians to either vote out Arafat or continue living under occupation. But Hitchens told me that while he objects to “that whole tone of voice,” he prefers Bush’s “tough love” to the “patronization” of Clinton’s peace negotiators. Nor is he troubled by the mounting civilian toll exacted by America’s crusade in Afghanistan. “I don’t think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged,” he says. What about the use of cluster bombs?

If you’re actually certain that you’re hitting only a concentration of enemy troops…then it’s pretty good because those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else. And if they’re bearing a Koran over their heart, it’ll go straight through that, too. So they won’t be able to say, ‘Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and guess what, the missile stopped halfway through.’ No way, ’cause it’ll go straight through that as well. They’ll be dead, in other words.

“It pains me to hear that,” says Edward Said, a friend of many years. “He’s gone back to nineteenth-century gunboat diplomacy–go hit the wogs.”

Wars tend to spread beyond their original objectives, and the war in Afghanistan is no exception. Hardly had the Taliban collapsed when a new war was declared, a war on terror with a long list of enemies (almost none of them related to Al Qaeda) and no obvious endgame. Not without reason, our European allies increasingly see this war as a naked effort to remap the world in US interests. The war’s collateral effects now include widespread violations of civil liberties at home, an aggressive foreign policy and an emboldened unilateralism.

As it turns out, the more persuasive analysis on the left of these collateral effects belongs not to Hitchens but to Chomsky. While Hitchens was outlining his support for a war on “Islamo-fascism,” Chomsky was predicting that the terrorist threat would be invoked to justify further adventures, just as it was during the Reagan Administration. And the second war against terrorism is staffed by some of the same people who led the first one. John Negroponte, Reagan’s ambassador to Honduras and the point man of our Central American wars, is our ambassador to the United Nations. Reagan’s special envoy to the Middle East, Donald Rumsfeld, is Defense Secretary. One can differ with Chomsky on Afghanistan and still see much of value in his critique of the war on terrorism. “I don’t believe that we’re ideologically committed to do evil,” says playwright Tony Kushner. “On the other hand, what Chomsky says about the globalization of the war is absolutely true. It’s the beginning of an unapologetic imperium, and that’s quite frightening.”

Chomsky’s framework for understanding US foreign policy is appealing because it appears to see through the fog, while allowing those who accept it to feel like they’re on the side of history’s angels. His world is an orderly, logical one in which everything is foretold. The shape events assume may be unexpected, but the events themselves are the predictable outcome of this or that American policy. Applied to Vietnam, East Timor and Palestine, Chomsky’s analysis of American imperialism has demonstrated uncommon prophetic powers. Applied to Cambodia and the Balkans, it has prevented him from comprehending evil that has not been plotted from Washington.

Unlike Chomsky, Hitchens has an acute sense of the contingency, and the ironies, of history. But he now talks about global politics as though it were a great chessboard, which the United States could master provided it learned the rules of the game.

Despite their strengths, since September 11 both these paradigms have proved to be unreliable compasses. Chomsky’s jaundiced perspective on American power makes it virtually impossible to contemplate the possibility of just American military interventions, either for self-defense or to prevent genocide. Hitchens’s intoxicated embrace of American power has left him less and less capable of drawing the line between humanitarian intervention and rogue-state adventurism. What the left needs to cultivate is an intelligent synthesis, one that recognizes that the United States has a role to play in the world while also warning of the dangers of an imperial foreign policy.

Even where a growing consensus is apparent, as in the case of Iraq, such a synthesis remains elusive. Why does the left oppose war on Iraq? Do we oppose it because the US government’s reasons for going to war are always deceitful, or because the United States has no right to unseat foreign governments that haven’t attacked us first, or because this war is ill-timed and is likely to backfire? Do we oppose it because it’s unilateral and illegal under international law, or because the American government has failed to put forward a coherent vision of Iraq after Saddam? As with Afghanistan, there are more than two ways to be for or against an intervention in Iraq. Like the war on terror, the debate on the left over the uses of American force has no end in sight.

In November 1999 the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish made his first appearance in Beirut since fleeing Lebanon during the 1982 Israeli invasion. The great poet’s visit to the city he once called home was nearly as charged with symbolism as Yasir Arafat’s return to Palestine, and it seemed to herald a new chapter in Lebanese-Palestinian relations. Addressing a conference on Jerusalem at the American University in West Beirut, Darwish extended an olive branch to his audience: “People of Lebanon, allow us to love you. And if you do not allow us, I will say it and then leave: I love you.” A few days later, Darwish received an icy reply from one of Lebanon’s most venerable journalists, Ghassan Tueni, on the front page of An-Naharr, a leading Lebanese daily. “Some love kills,” wrote Tueni, quoting the Arab proverb min al-hubb ma qatal.

Almost three years later, the hopes for a thaw in relations raised by Darwish’s visit are finally being realized. Lebanese hostility to the Palestinians–who are widely resented for their role in the civil war and who comprise a large number of the country’s destitute refugees–has all but evaporated, thanks to one man: Ariel Sharon. Since Sharon launched his war on Arafat and the Palestinian Authority in late March, Beirut has seen a wave of pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Tens of thousands of Lebanese, from radical Shiite supporters of Hezbollah to right-wing Christian Phalangists, have poured into the streets to denounce what many here refer to as Israel’s “reoccupation” of the West Bank. On the radio, in newspapers, in cafes and in taxis, there is little talk of anything besides Palestine, while George W. Bush’s decision to give the green light to Sharon’s invasion has raised anti-American anger to a fever pitch. The Daily Star, a moderate English-language daily, ran a front-page editorial titled “America has worked hard to make itself hated,” a sentiment increasingly shared by most Lebanese. In Cairo or Damascus this would hardly be worth noting, but in Lebanon the Palestinian Spring amounts to a sea change in attitudes, and virtually everyone in Beirut seems to be talking about it.

Some of the demonstrations have provoked confrontations with the police, notably the rally on April 2, when protesters surrounded the American Embassy. These clashes were dutifully noted by a US media obsessed by the mythical “Arab street.” But what has captured the Lebanese imagination is the spontaneous explosion of grassroots youth activism on a scale not seen here in three decades. “The spectacle of mass demonstrations, of waving Palestinian flags and all that, is really reminiscent of the early 1970s,” Muhammad Ali Khalidi, a young, soft-spoken Palestinian philosopher, told me in his office at the American University. According to Khalidi, the Saudi peace initiative, presented here at the Arab summit in late March, is fast losing whatever support it might have enjoyed among Lebanese youth, who object most strenuously to the Arab leaders’ apparent willingness to compromise on the “right of return” of Palestinian refugees. “For my students,” he said, “the spectacle of these Arab leaders sitting around the table offering the sweetest deal possible to the Israelis at a time when they’re wreaking havoc in the occupied territories seems like a complete betrayal.”

In early April about a hundred men and women, many of them students too young to remember the PLO’s involvement in the war, staged a sit-down in the middle of Martyr’s Square, a stone’s throw from the UN building, the Prime Minister’s office and the Parliament. Huddled beneath a makeshift tent lined with drawings by Palestinian refugee children, they have handed out leaflets, distributed petitions and collected funds for the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, the local branch of the Red Cross. On April 6 an oud player performed a selection of Darwish poems set to haunting Marcel Khalife songs, as drivers honked their horns in support.

The next day on Bliss Street, a busy commercial strip just across from the American University, dozens of students gathered in front of Hardee’s. Dressed in jeans, sneakers and kaffiyehs (the trademark Palestinian scarf ) and waving Palestinian flags, the students railed against Arab regimes for their complacency in the face of Israel’s siege and excoriated the Lebanese government for its recent crackdown on Palestinian guerrillas seeking to fire rockets from the border. A group of soldiers with machine guns stood by. The demonstration dispersed peacefully, and most of the protesters put down their flags, picked up their knapsacks and ambled back to their leafy, palm tree­lined campus overlooking the Mediterranean.

It would be easy, of course, to dismiss all this as radical chic, Lebanese-style. Beirut is notorious for being a city of appearances, of mirrors reflecting shifting poses rather than fixed positions. (The kaffiyeh, noted one street seller doing a very brisk business, “has become like a uniform” for fashion-conscious Lebanese.) “Hardee’s?” one Lebanese friend of mine said, evidently amused by the protest venue. “You mean the place those kids eat at every other day?” Nevertheless, the intense passions ignited by Sharon’s war represent a sharp break with the recent past, extending even to Christians who once loathed the Palestinians. Indeed, the Phalange Party, which sided with Israel against the PLO during the war and massacred thousands of Palestinians, sent a representative to the April 10 demonstration in Martyr’s Square, which drew more than 6,000 people. At Saint Joseph’s University in Achrafiye, an affluent, heavily Christian neighborhood, I spotted several students sporting kaffiyehs.

“This would have been unimaginable a few years ago,” Joëlle Touma, the Beirut correspondent for the French daily Libération, observed as we strolled through the campus. According to Touma, the turning point came when Israeli tanks surrounded the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. The images of Israeli soldiers firing at the church, broadcast repeatedly on Al Jazeera, have profoundly shaken Christians. By invading Bethlehem, Sharon has succeeded, ironically enough, in uniting the country’s still dangerously fragmented polity around the very cause that heightened religious tensions during the war.

The Lebanese-Palestinian reconciliation is the latest twist in a long, ambivalent relationship. In 1969 the Lebanese government caved in to pressure from the Arab League and invited Palestinian fedayeen (guerrillas) to launch attacks against Israel from southern Lebanon. Although many Lebanese Muslims and Christians favored giving support to the Palestinian armed struggle–a fact conveniently forgotten by the many Lebanese who blame the Palestinians for dragging their country into a ruinous war with Israel–the Cairo accord grew increasingly unpopular as guerrilla raids exposed Lebanese civilians to brutally disproportionate Israeli reprisals. (Israel’s retaliatory strikes took the lives of 880 civilians from 1968 to 1974.) In September 1970, after its members were massacred in the thousands and ruthlessly evicted from Jordan by King Hussein, the PLO settled in Lebanon, where it soon found itself playing a major, and increasingly divisive, role in the civil war. The rift was sealed in 1982, when Israeli troops led by then­Defense Minister Ariel Sharon invaded Lebanon with the aim of crushing the PLO. By the end of Operation Peace for Galilee, which leveled much of the city, some 19,000 people, mostly Lebanese civilians, lay dead, killed in their homes by cluster and phosphorous bombs. Although the PLO fought bravely, most Lebanese breathed a sigh of relief when Arafat and his fighters boarded ships bound for Athens on a one-way ticket out of Lebanon.

The current escalation has many Lebanese worried that the conflict could once again spill across the border into Lebanon, although there is no shortage of people who hope for such an outcome. The Lebanese government has arrested Palestinian guerrillas on the border with great fanfare, but it refuses to curb Hezbollah’s efforts to drive Israeli soldiers out of the disputed Shebaa Farms. Since early April, Hezbollah has repeatedly fired at Israeli positions in the farms, which it claims are Lebanese but which most Lebanese consider Syrian. Although Hezbollah is widely admired for liberating southern Lebanon from Israeli control and for its work among the poor, many Lebanese resent it for doing Syria’s bidding in Shebaa in Lebanon’s name and thereby inviting Israeli reprisals on Lebanese soil, if not a wider war. Still, there is little doubt that Israel’s offensive has temporarily strengthened the hand of Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, a shrewd politician who has parlayed his support in poor Shiite areas and his Syrian connections into an influential foothold in Lebanese politics.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian movement’s return to armed resistance has raised its stature among the Lebanese, many of whom felt that Arafat made humiliating concessions at Oslo. Lebanese demonstrators have paid endless homage to the “heroes at Jenin,” the 200 tenacious Palestinian fighters who defended the refugee camp from Israeli troops over a fierce twelve-day battle in which several hundred Palestinians may have perished, including an untold number of civilians crushed to death under Israeli bulldozers. “The second intifada has made people here much more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause,” Khalidi told me. “As a Palestinian, I used to get comments from Lebanese asking me, basically, ‘why can’t you people get your act together and kick the Israelis out the way the Lebanese resistance did in southern Lebanon?'”

For the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians scattered throughout refugee camps in Lebanon–a bleak, wretched world apart in which few Lebanese bother to set foot–Lebanese cheerleading is welcomed with more than a grain of cynicism. “When we [the PLO] were in Lebanon, there was little sympathy for us,” Muhammed Abou Roudeina said in his cramped but immaculate apartment on a narrow, dusty street of the Shatila camp. “Now that we’re out, there is. They claim we were the spark of the civil war, but there was hatred between them before we came here.” Roudeina was 6 when his father, his sister, his sister’s husband and eight other relatives were murdered in the September 1982 massacres, in which Israeli-backed Phalangists methodically killed between 800 and 3,000 civilians over thirty hours, while Sharon’s troops stood guard, lighting the camp entrance at night.

Sitting on a small couch beside a picture of the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and nervously chain-smoking, Roudeina, now a plaintiff in the war crimes suit against Ariel Sharon under way in Belgium, spoke about the invasion of Ramallah, Jenin and other Palestinian towns in a tone of bitter, weary familiarity. The smells of sewage and of fried onions wafted through the room as he showed me a photograph of his family: a stack of corpses piled up outside the door of his apartment. I asked him whether he expected to return to his family’s village in Haifa, a town he has never seen. “Absolutely,” he said without flinching. He paused to reflect, lighting another cigarette. “But there are 3 million of us. Where would we all go? I don’t understand.”

No one has suffered more during the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than the refugees, most of whom crossed the northern border into Lebanon during the 1948 war as a result of forcible expulsion, threats of violence and panic created by massacres like Deir Yassin. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the Lebanese government naturalized between 30,000 and 50,000 Christian refugees, condemning the Muslim majority to the camps. (Reliable figures are hard to come by, but most analysts estimate them at 200,000–about half the Lebanese government figure.) The Sabra and Shatila camps provide shelter to thousands of refugees, who live off United Nations assistance alongside a growing majority of non-Palestinian immigrants–Syrians, Gypsies, Bedouins, Africans, Sri Lankans. Deprived of most civil rights, the Palestinian refugees face harsh restrictions on their freedom of movement and on their ability to obtain work permits, and they are barred from a number of professions, including medicine, engineering and law. In March 2001 the Lebanese Parliament passed a law that effectively prevents Palestinian refugees from purchasing land in Lebanon.

The Lebanese government continues to insist on repatriation, fearing that a massive influx of Palestinians would upset the fragile sectarian balance, inflating the Muslim majority and possibly provoking another civil war. This position echoes, of course, Israel’s claim that allowing the refugees to settle within Israel would “instantly change the character of our state.” Not that most Palestinians want to become Lebanese. Many of the refugees, including Roudeina, say they would reject Lebanese citizenship even if it were offered to them, since doing so would mean relinquishing their territorial claims. Still, they resent the Lebanese government for failing to make their lives more tolerable. “The Lebanese are not helping us to live a normal life,” said Roudeina, who pointed out that his Syrian neighbors in Shatila “have the right not only to be naturalized but to work here in every kind of job–lawyers, doctors, you name it. For us, it’s the worst kind of slavery. We don’t differentiate between our [Arab] leaders and the Israelis anymore.” Trapped between a state that dispossessed them and a state that wants to get rid of them, people like Roudeina stand to become the biggest losers of the “peace process,” if it ever re-emerges from the rubble of Jenin. And so, as the Lebanese raise their voices on behalf of West Bank Palestinians for the first time in years, the Palestinians of Lebanon continue to wait to go home, tired of living in what Mahmoud Darwish, at the end of the 1982 siege of Beirut, called “a country of words.”

On April 26, French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin announced the creation of a memorial for the soldiers who died during France’s bloody war against the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), which ended in humiliating defeat and the loss of the empire’s most prized possession. It was among the most savage of colonial wars: Of the 1.7 million French soldiers who served in Algeria from 1954 to 1962, 30,000 never returned; between 300,000 and a million Algerians were killed, and hundreds of thousands were placed in concentration camps, where torture was routine. Until two years ago, when it finally acknowledged having fought a war in Algeria, the French government referred to the conflict as les événements—the events.

In case there were any doubts as to what these young men died defending, there was Paul Aussaresses, an 83-year-old general wearing an eye patch and the cross of the Legion of Honor. In an interview with Le Monde last November, Aussaresses confessed, without a note of remorse, to torturing and executing Algerian militants. Even so, no one, certainly not Jospin, was prepared for the incendiary memoir that Aussaresses was to publish ten days later.

The book, Special Services, Algeria 1955-1957, has riveted the French, stirring long-suppressed memories of the “war without a name” and generating calls for an official declaration of repentance and judicial action against its author. It is a remarkable document, both for what it reveals of France’s crimes in Algeria and for what it reveals of the miscarriage of justice that took place after the war.

When Aussaresses arrived in Algeria in 1955, he was a hero, having carried out a series of daring intelligence missions across enemy lines for de Gaulle’s Free French forces. In Algeria, he quickly acquired a mastery of the very tactics that he had feared would be applied to him had he been caught by the Gestapo. Electrodes to the eyes and testicles, half-drownings, beatings—he stopped at nothing in his efforts to get his suspects to crack. After torturing and killing his first Arab, he writes with a disturbing detachment that calls to mind Camus’s Mersault: “I thought of nothing. I had no regrets over his death—if I had any regrets, it was because he did not talk.”

Aussaresses’s book sheds light on some of the most important unresolved mysteries of the war, notably the deaths of Larbi Ben M’Hidi, an FLN leader, and of Ali Boumendjel, a prominent Algerian attorney. The French have always maintained that both men committed suicide. In fact, Aussaresses meticulously arranged their deaths—and, one suspects, many others—to look as if they were suicides. Boumendjel, he reports, was thrown from a rooftop after having been tortured for forty-three days. Aussaresses drove Ben M’Hidi to a farm outside Algiers, where the prisoner was strangled to death.

The historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, an early opponent of the war, told Le Monde, “One must take this book for what it is, the memoirs of an assassin.” True enough. But Aussaresses was not alone. He was no more a rogue agent than the Vichy collaborators Maurice Papon and René Bousquet were—or than Bob Kerrey and his men were in the jungle of Vietnam. Aussaresses is well aware of this fact. In torturing and executing suspects, he says he was simply employing the “special powers” that he had been granted in 1956 by the government of Socialist Prime Minister Guy Mollet, with the support of the Communist Party. According to Aussaresses, François Mitterrand, Mollet’s justice minister, had “an emissary…in the person of the judge Jean Berard, who covered for us…. I had the best possible relationship with him and I never hid anything from him.”

Aussaresses’s book has inspired widespread revulsion; 56 percent of the French have expressed support for an official apology and legal action against officers who ordered torture. Prime Minister Jospin, who insists that torture was “an aberration,” has firmly rejected the idea of a parliamentary inquiry, proposing further “scientific research” by historians. President Jacques Chirac, who served in Algeria and says he is “horrified” by the book, has initiated proceedings to strip the general of his uniform.

Unfortunately, nothing more is likely to come of the indignation roused by Aussaresses’s book. There is a ten-year statute of limitations on war crimes in France, and the broader definition of “crimes against humanity” applies only to abuses committed since 1994. The generals of Algeria also enjoy the protection of amnesties granted in 1962 and 1968. In mid-May, a French court threw out a suit against Aussaresses for “crimes against humanity” by the International Federation for Human Rights. The general’s actions, the court opined, are “in all likelihood covered by the amnesty of July 31, 1968.” It will require extraordinary audacity for any French politician to challenge these legal obstacles. Meanwhile, Paul Aussaresses can talk about his crimes, which are also France’s crimes, without fear of punishment. His freedom is a grim reminder that when nations fail to settle their accounts with torture, it is torturers who have the last laugh.