Barbara Walters chats with Forward Syria
Swaying between art and seduction
Discussing monetary policy with the man in charge
Where the earth screams in horror
08/03/2010 - Issue 42
A journalist’s eye over the Middle East
by Helena Cobban
It makes me feel quite old today to realize that I made my first visit to Syria 40 years ago! It was the spring of 1970, and I was doing the ‘gap half-year’ that students entering Oxford and Cambridge Universities were ‘subjected’ to. A one-month visit the next spring to where my elder sister, Mary, and her husband were living and working in Beirut, saw me travel with them around most of Lebanon—and also to Damascus and Palmyra.
Palmyra was amazing. We stayed somewhere near the vast complex of necropolises and woke in the wee hours to go and see the sun rise over them.
Damascus was also amazing, but in a different way. I had never seen anything like Souq al-Hammidieh before—and I still love wondering around it, today. But you still had a strong sense that this was a country at war.
Four years later I had finished my studies at Oxford and was eager to proceed with my plan of becoming a writer by taking the well-trodden path of starting out as a foreign correspondent. I arrived in Beirut in August 1974 and had just started getting my foot in the door of the journalism community there when the civil war started in April 1975. I have to confess that wars can be very good indeed for the careers of journalists—those who aren’t killed or wounded in them.
As for me, by the time I was 23 I was getting bylined articles onto the front pages of the London Sunday Times and the Christian Science Monitor, an excellent daily newspaper published out of Boston, Massachusetts. I also met and married a Lebanese man. We pretty quickly had two children, Tarek and Leila.
Though the marriage lasted only a few years, I found the experience of living through a civil war as part of the society that was being torn apart by it to be a very important one. My husband was—still is—a Greek Catholic (Melkite).
He had relatives living on both sides of the ‘Green Line’ that divided Beirut so cruelly in those years. He also had relatives in their home town of Marjayoun in south Lebanon, which was under Israeli occupation from 1978 through 2000—and in Zahleh and Damascus, as well.
I stayed in Beirut, rising to become Mideast correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor and traveling to many other Arab countries in that role. By 1981, however, the stress of living in Beirut had become too much, and my marriage was falling apart. I took the children back to England for a while, then got an offer from Harvard University to go to their Center For International Affairs and write a book about the PLO.
In my career as a researcher and writer, I have published two books on Syria’s still deeply conflicted relationship with Israel.
The second was a study of the intriguing negotiations the two governments carried out between 1991 and 1996. That was a period when considerable progress was made toward defining what the whole region can look like once Israel’s occupation of the Golan is ended and there is real peace among all the parties.
Thus far, however, every single Israeli government since 1996 has stepped back from the brink of committing to a complete end of the occupation of Golan.
I’ve been writing an English-language blog called Just World News for more than seven years now. Through my blogging I have come into contact with numerous other bloggers and writers who, like me, are willing to challenge the tight grip that pro-Zionist discourse suppression organizations have been able to maintain on most of the US mainstream media.
Phil Weiss, a prominent blogger, and others, have even developed a whole theory about the relationship of ‘progressive’ Americans to the Palestine Question. They note that for many years now, the vast majority of Americans who were progressives on every other political issue—sometimes, even quite radically so—would be notably un-progressive on Palestine. Phil calls them PEP’s—‘Progressive Except for Palestine.’ But now, we are all noticing that increasing numbers of progressives in the US have started to include Palestine among the issues regarding which they seek justice. We call these folks PIP’s—‘Progressive Including Palestine.’
It is very clear to me that in recent years, and especially since the assault that Israel unleashed against Gaza’s people in December 2008, there has been a huge increase in the number of PEPs who have become PIPs—and this is the case particularly among younger Americans, including younger Jewish Americans.
I am still concerned about Syria, though—and especially at this point, about the difficult doldrums in which US-Syrian relations still seem to be mired. I am now part of a new initiative led by the Carter Center and Search for Common Ground, which is aiming to improve the relationship between our countries. I came to Damascus in early June in connection with this project. My hope is that through it, we can find a way to normalize relations between our countries. Yes, of course there are several tough problems to be sorted out between the two countries. But that is precisely what diplomacy is for, and what diplomats should be doing. The present impasse does not serve the true interests of the American people at all well.
So on this occasion, as on every visit to Damascus, I took a couple of hours to wander around the Old City. I was glad to see that despite the many changes the whole city has seen in the past 40 years, most of the Old City remains charmingly, if sometimes chaotically, the same.
Helena Cobban is a veteran writer, researcher, and program organizer on global affairs. She was a regular contributor to The Christian Science Monitor and The Sunday Times of London and since 2003 has published Just World News, a lively blog on international issues in addition to authoring eight books on world politics, the US, and the Middle East.
