Abir Dandis, the mother of the two girls who were murdered in the Negev town of Al-Fura’a last week, couldn't find a police officer to listen to her warnings, neither in Arad nor in Ma’ale Adumim. Both police stations operate in areas where Israel wants to gather the Bedouin into permanent communities, against their will, in order to clear more land for Jewish communities. The dismissive treatment Dandis received shows how the Bedouin are considered simply to be lawbreakers by their very nature. But as a resident of the West Bank asking for help for her daughters, whose father was Israeli, Dandis faced the legal-bureaucratic maze created by the Oslo Accords.

The Palestinian police is not allowed to arrest Israeli civilians. It must hand suspects over to the Israel Police. The Palestinian police complain that in cases of Israelis suspected of committing crimes against Palestinian residents, the Israel Police tend not to investigate or prosecute them.

In addition, the town of Al-Azaria, where Dandis lives, is in Area B, under Palestinian civilian authority and Israeli security authority. According to the testimony of Palestinian residents, neither the IDF nor the Israel Police has any interest in internal Palestinian crime even though they have both the authority and the obligation to act in Area B.

The Palestinian police are limited in what it can do in Area B. Bringing in reinforcements or carrying weapons in emergency situations requires coordination with, and obtaining permission from, the IDF. If Dandis fears that the man who murdered her daughters is going to attack her as well, she has plenty of reason to fear that she will not receive appropriate, immediate police protection from either the Israelis or the Palestinians.

Dandis told Jack Khoury of Haaretz that the Ma’ale Adumim police referred her to the Palestinian Civil Affairs Coordination and Liaison Committee. Theoretically, this committee (which is subordinate to the Civil Affairs Ministry) is the logical place to go for such matters. Its parallel agency in Israel is the Civilian Liaison Committee (which is part of the Coordination and Liaison Administration - a part of the Civil Administration under the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories).

In their meetings, they are supposed to discuss matters such as settlers’ complaints about the high volume of the loudspeakers at mosques or Palestinians’ complaints about attacks by settlers. But the Palestinians see the Liaison Committee as a place to submit requests for permission to travel to Israel, and get the impression that its clerks do not have much power when faced with their Israeli counterparts. In any case, the coordination process is cumbersome and long.

The Palestinian police has a family welfare unit, and activists in Palestinian women’s organizations say that in recent years, its performance has improved. But, as stated, it has no authority over Israeli civilians and residents. Several non-governmental women’s groups also operate in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and women in similar situations approach them for help. The manager of one such organization told Haaretz that Dandis also fell victim to this confusing duplication of procedures and laws. Had Dandis approached her, she said, she would have referred her to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which has expertise in navigating Israel’s laws and authorities.

John Kerry revealed his long-awaited plan for peace in the Middle East on Sunday, hinging on a $4bn (£2.6bn) investment in the Palestinian private sector.

The US secretary of state, speaking at the World Economic Forum on the Jordanian shores of the Dead Sea, told an audience including Israeli president Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that an independent Palestinian economy is essential to achieving a sustainable peace.

Speaking under the conference banner "Breaking the Impasse", Kerry announced a plan that he promised would be "bigger, bolder and more ambitious" than anything since the Oslo accords, more than 20 years ago.

Tony Blair is to lead a group of private sector leaders in devising a plan to release the Palestinian economy from its dependence on international donors. The initial findings of Blair's taskforce, Kerry boasted, were "stunning", predicting a 50% increase in Palestinian GDP over three years, a cut of two-thirds in unemployment rates and almost double the Palestinian median wage. Currently, 40% of the Palestinian economy is supplied by donor aid.

Kerry assured Abbas that the economic plan was not a substitute for a political solution, which remains the US's "top priority".

Peres, who had taken the stage just minutes before, also issued a personal plea to his Palestinian counterpart to return to the negotiations.

"Let me say to my dear friend President Abbas," Peres said, "Should we really dance around the table? Lets sit together. You'll be surprised how much can be achieved in open, direct and organised meetings."

Thick locks hug the front gates of shuttered shops, now covered in graffiti and dust from lack of use. Only a handful of customers pass along the dimly lit road, sometimes stopping to check the ripeness of fruits and vegetables, or ordering meat in near-empty butcher shops.

“All the shops are closed. I’m the only one open. This used to be the best place,” said 64-year-old Mustafa Sunocret, selling vegetables out of a small storefront in the marketplace near his family’s home in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.

Amidst the brightly coloured scarves, clothes and carpets, ceramic pottery and religious souvenirs filling the shops of Jerusalem’s historic Old City, Palestinian merchants are struggling to keep their businesses alive.

Faced with worsening health problems, Sunocret told IPS that he cannot work outside of the Old City, even as the cost of maintaining his shop, with high electricity, water and municipal tax bills to pay, weighs on him.

“I only have this shop,” he said. “There is no other work. I’m tired.”

Abed Ajloni, the owner of an antiques shop in the Old City, owes the Jerusalem municipality 250,000 Israeli shekels (68,300 U.S. dollars) in taxes. He told IPS that almost every day, the city’s tax collectors come into the Old City, accompanied by Israeli police and soldiers, to pressure people there to pay.

“It feels like they’re coming again to occupy the city, with the soldiers and police,” Ajloni, who has owned the same shop for 35 years, told IPS. “But where can I go? What can I do? All my life I was in this place.”

He added, “Does Jerusalem belong to us, or to someone else? Who’s responsible for Jerusalem? Who?”

Illegal annexation

Israel occupied East Jerusalem, including the Old City, in 1967. In July 1980, it passed a law stating that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel”. But Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and subsequent application of Israeli laws over the entire city remain unrecognised by the international community.

Under international law, East Jerusalem is considered occupied territory – along with the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Syrian Golan Heights – and Palestinian residents of the city are protected under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Jerusalem has historically been the economic, political and cultural centre of life for the entire Palestinian population. But after decades languishing under destructive Israeli policies meant to isolate the city from the rest of the Occupied Territories and a lack of municipal services and investment, East Jerusalem has slipped into a state of poverty and neglect.

“After some 45 years of occupation, Arab Jerusalemites suffer from political and cultural schizophrenia, simultaneously connected with and isolated from their two hinterlands: Ramallah and the West Bank to their east, West Jerusalem and Israel to the west,” the International Crisis Group recently wrote.

Israeli restrictions on planning and building, home demolitions, lack of investment in education and jobs, construction of an eight-foot-high separation barrier between and around Palestinian neighbourhoods and the creation of a permit system to enter Jerusalem have all contributed to the city’s isolation.

Formal Palestinian political groups have also been banned from the city, and between 2001-2009, Israel closed an estimated 26 organisations, including the former Palestinian Liberation Organisation headquarters in Jerusalem, the Orient House and the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce.

Extreme poverty

Israel’s policies have also led to higher prices for basic goods and services and forced many Palestinian business owners to close shop and move to Ramallah or other Palestinian neighbourhoods on the other side of the wall. Many Palestinian Jerusalemites also prefer to do their shopping in the West Bank, or in West Jerusalem, where prices are lower.

While Palestinians constitute 39 percent of the city’s population today, almost 80 percent of East Jerusalem residents, including 85 percent of children, live below the poverty line.

“How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t control your resources? How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t have any control of your borders?” said Zakaria Odeh, director of the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem, of “this kind of fragmentation, checkpoints, closure”.

“Without freedom of movement of goods and human beings, how could you develop an economy?” he asked.

“You can’t talk about independent economy in Jerusalem or the West Bank or in all of Palestine without a political solution. We don’t have a Palestinian economy; we have economic activities. That’s all we have,” Odeh told IPS.

Israel’s separation barrier alone, according to a new report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD), has caused a direct loss of over one billion dollars to Palestinians in Jerusalem, and continues to incur 200 million dollars per year in lost opportunities.

Israel’s severing and control over the Jerusalem-Jericho road – the historical trade route that connected Jerusalem to the rest of the West Bank and Middle East – has also contributed to the city’s economic downturn.

Separation of Jerusalem from West Bank

Before the First Intifada (Arabic for “uprising”) began in the late 1980s, East Jerusalem contributed approximately 14 to 15 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the Occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). By 2000, that number had dropped to less than eight percent; in 2010, the East Jerusalem economy, compared to the rest of the OPT, was estimated at only seven percent.

“Economic separation resulted in the contraction in the relative size of the East Jerusalem economy, its detachment from the remaining OPT and the gradual redirection of East Jerusalem employment towards the Israeli labour market,” the U.N. report found.

Decades ago, Israel adopted a policy to maintain a so-called “demographic balance” in Jerusalem and attempt to limit Palestinian residents of the city to 26.5 percent or less of the total population.

To maintain this composition, Israel built numerous Jewish-Israeli settlements inside and in a ring around Jerusalem and changed the municipal boundaries to encompass Jewish neighbourhoods while excluding Palestinian ones.

It is now estimated that 90,000 Palestinians holding Jerusalem residency rights live on the other side of the separation barrier and must cross through Israeli checkpoints in order to reach Jerusalem for school, medical treatment, work, and other services.

“Israel is using all kinds of tools to push the Palestinians to leave; sometimes they are visible, and sometimes invisible tools,” explained Ziad al-Hammouri, director of the Jerusalem Centre for Social and Economic Rights (JCSER).

Al-Hammouri told IPS that at least 25 percent of the 1,000 Palestinian shops in the Old City were closed in recent years as a result of high municipal taxes and a lack of customers. “Taxation is an invisible tool…as dangerous as revoking ID cards and demolishing houses,” he said. “Israel will use this as pressure and as a tool in the future to confiscate these shops and properties.”

London - In 1982, an unusual sight appeared on the Mediterranean horizon. Like the death ship in Star Wars, a World War II battleship threatened the Lebanese shore. US naval spokesmen claimed the USS New Jersey was the most fearsome artillery platform on the high seas. The Reagan administration had re-commissioned her and a few other seagoing dinosaurs to pursue gunboat diplomacy from Nicaragua to Iran. The New Jersey's advance propaganda impressed the Lebanese, who had already endured seven years of civil war, Syrian occupation and two Israeli invasions. The sixteen-inch guns aboard the New Jersey, the Navy said, would send payloads the size of Volkswagens to clear areas big as football fields. Why a Volkswagen rather than a small Ford was never explained, anymore than whether the football referred to was the kind the Lebanese or the Americans played. A Marine officer I knew pointed at the summit of Mount Lebanon above Beirut one day. He told me that, if the New Jersey fired at that mountain, it wouldn't be there anymore. It seemed an extravagant claim, but most of us were willing to believe him ­ until the New Jersey actually fired.

When the New Jersey unleashed its Volkswagens on December 14, 1983, from a mile away we saw flames shoot out of its muzzles. What we didn't see was much destruction ­ not by Lebanese standards anyway. A few houses in the Druze hills of the Shouf were demolished. Hundreds of people, mostly Shiites and Druze, died. The summit of Mount Lebanon remained intact. There were no flying Volkswagens, no football fields. The Lebanese, faced with a bluff called, lost their fear of the New Jersey and, indeed, of the United States. They continued blowing up American embassies and military barracks. By February 1984, the New Jersey killed a Syrian army general while covering the "redeployment" of the Marines from Beirut. The Marines were ordered to abandon Lebanon and the French, British and Italian allies that Secretary of State George Schultz had conned into joining them in Lebanon as the so-called Multi-National Force. US spokesmen insisted that redeployment did not mean retreat. It looked like retreat to us in Lebanon, especially when the fleet and the Marines next redeployed to the United States. The New Jersey was mothballed in 1991, the year the US threw Iraq out of Kuwait and invited the Syrians to end the war by assuming control of most of Lebanon.

The biggest military mistake the Americans made in Lebanon was to use the New Jersey. As a threat, she caused fear. In reality, she caused a bit of damage. I won't go into the political mistakes, which were so many that the Reaganite Mideast specialists almost make George W. Bush's neo-cons look competent (I said, almost). An army can frighten people with a devastating weapon, until it uses it. Israel has used its weapons so often in Lebanon that the Lebanese don't care. They are suffering, but they are standing up to the displacement of a half million people and the loss of many hundreds of men, women and children. "The resistance isn't playing the role of victim," Azmi Bishara, a Palestinian Arab Member of the Israeli Knesset wrote in Al Ahram Weekly. "It didn't ask for international sympathy with the victims but for solidarity among freedom-seeking peoples." So, what other tricks can Israel perform that are not old-hat to the Lebanese? Bombardment? The Israelis have been bombing Lebanon since the late 1960s. Invasion? They played that card in 1978 and 1982 and left a thousand soldiers dead on the field before they withdrew in 2000. What's left in the arsenal? Occupation, again? The Lebanese realized sometime in 1983 that Israeli soldiers on Lebanese soil were not ferocious warriors so much as targets. Israel could give them more targets, like the eight or nine Israeli soldiers who died on Wednesday in the small Shiite border village of Bint Jbeil (a place that made shoes until Israel occupied and nearly emptied it in 1978). Israeli propaganda, except in the United States where there isn't any other kind, doesn't work its old magic. In 1982, a few people may have believed that Ariel Sharon sent his troops into Lebanon to avenge the wounding of Israel's ambassador to Britain, but no one is falling for the ruse that the current devastation is an operation to rescue two captured Israeli solders. The planners are having such problems with that slender pretext that, unusually, they have yet to give this mission a name. The operation that dare not speak its name has yet to join its immediate predecessors, Operation Accountability in 1993 and Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996, in the list of creatively branded onslaughts. How about calling this one Operation Infinite Repetition?

Operation Cover-Up might do, given that the soldiers scurrying into Lebanon and being shot by Hizballah today are trying to make up for the incompetence of officers who let three men under their command be captured by Hamas and Hizballah. Where is the American taxpayer's money going if officers cannot keep their troops from abduction by young guerrillas whom they watch day and night with the most sophisticated technological eavesdropping devices that American-Israeli genius can produce? If the army had not been so careless, they would not now be bombing the hell out of Gaza and Lebanon ­ unless, of course, the politicians wanted to bomb the hell out of Gaza and Lebanon anyway. If so, what better excuse than a few missing in action?

The prescient Mideast scholar Patrick Seale wrote in the Saudi-owned newspaper Al Hayat on July 21, "By their cross-border raids and the capture of three Israeli soldiers, Hizballah and Hamas humiliated the Israeli army and dented its deterrent capacity. In Israeli eyes, this cannot go unpunished." But who should be punished and who should be approached with an offer to save the soldiers' lives? Perhaps punish the high command for its negligence. Maybe approach Hamas and Hizballah for a trade of the kind Israel and its adversaries have made often ­ the last time in 2004, when a foolish, allegedly retired Israeli army major allowed himself to be taken in Beirut and Israel freed 400 prisoners to get him back. Israel knows it can pick up another 400 anytime it wants, so what's the problem? At the moment, it holds almost 10,000 Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners and detainees. Using the 2004 ratio as a guide, the quick release of 1,200 detainees would do the trick without costing a single life.

Prime Minister Ehud Ohlmert has come clean with added objectives for Operation Untitled. On July 15, his spokeswoman Miri Eisen told Agence France Presse, "The Prime Minister is prepared to finish our operations in Lebanon if Hezbollah releases our two soldiers, stops its rocket fire and if the Lebanese Government decides to implement UN Security Council resolution 1559." The resolution requires the disarmament of all militias in Lebanon. That means Hizballah, because the other militias disarmed under Syrian pressure years ago. Hizballah claimed however that its armed wing was a resistance movement ­ the only one capable of protecting south Lebanon from Israeli attack ­ and not a militia. On July 21, another spokesman added a new Israeli shopping item, "One of the conditions for a ceasefire is that Hezbollah no longer receives arms supplies from Iran and Syria once it is enforced." As Operation Save the High Command annihilated Lebanon's post-war infrastructure ­ the airport, roads, bridges, army bases, clinics, telecommunications networks and lots of houses ­ without achieving anything, Ohlmert added a new condition: a NATO force in south Lebanon to stop Hizballah from hitting Israel. How about a force in north Israel to protect Lebanon?

This will go on and on. When Operation Get-Even ends, the respite may last a year or so. There will be other crises, other kidnappings by both sides, other murders, other wars. And it will not stop until Israel makes peace on terms that the Palestinians and Israel's neighbors have said they will accept: enforcement of UN Security Council Resolution 242 and the end of Israeli land confiscations in the West Bank. If you think the land grab is over, ask the Palestinians whose property is fenced off and seized for the Israeli settlers almost daily. If you think Israel is content to leave the natives alone to get along with it, ask the Bedouin of the Negev desert (who serve in the Israeli army and have been loyal citizens) about the creative deployment of the Monsanto-manufactured herbicide Roundup Ready to destroy their crops so they will abandon their ancestral lands once and for all. Goat by goat, dunum by dunum, the old Zionist adage went, the settlers redeem the land. As the Arabs lost their goats and their dunums of land, they got bullets and bombs.

Charles Glass was ABC News Chief Middle East Correspondent from 1983 to 1993 and was kidnapped by Hizballah in 1987.

From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East
by Bernard Lewis
[from the September 13, 2004 issue]

I have witnessed what Bernard Lewis, and later Samuel Huntington, designated the "clash of civilizations" between Christendom and Islam up close in at least two wars. One was the Lebanese civil war that erupted in the spring of 1975, pitting universal values and tolerance against sectarianism and fanaticism.

The other took place in Bosnia, where the adherents of pluralism and equality battled racists and ethnic cleansers. Both wars fit the clash paradigm, but not as Lewis and Huntington fashioned it. In Lebanon and Bosnia, the partisans of equality and democracy were nominally Muslim--their opponents defiantly Christian.

The schema of civilizational collision that Professor Lewis posited in his landmark September 1990 Atlantic Monthly contribution, "The Roots of Muslim Rage," omits both Lebanon and Bosnia. Republished here alongside fifty other essays on Islam, history and politics, Lewis's best-known polemic cites conflicts that undermine his contention that enlightened Christendom is locked in a near-eternal battle with the dark forces of Islam. The reason, he writes, for the global Christian-Muslim tension is that "for [non-Muslim] misbelievers to rule over true believers is blasphemous and unnatural, since it leads to the corruption of religion and morality in society.... This may help us to understand the current troubles in such diverse places as Ethiopian Eritrea, Indian Kashmir, Chinese Sinkiang, and Yugoslav Kosovo, in all of which Muslim populations are ruled by non-Muslim governments." Alas, his conceptual framework prevents any understanding of the lands he mentions. In "Ethiopian" Eritrea, a secular liberation front headed by a Christian named Isaias Afewerki achieved independence from then-Marxist Ethiopia after thirty years of struggle. When I covered that war, the guerrillas never mentioned religion as relevant to their demand for independence. The operative fact was that Eritrea had been an Italian colony from 1889. At the end of the Second World War, the Allies awarded Italy's former colony to the Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, without consulting its inhabitants. Most Eritreans--Muslim, Christian and animist--rejected absorption into Haile Selassie's Amharic empire and, later, the Marxist terror state of the Dergue, which overthrew him. By the end, Eritrean Marxists were battling fellow Marxists from Addis Ababa. As for Yugoslav Kosovo, Muslims sought independence from Belgrade not as adherents of Islam but as Albanians fearful of annihilation. Kosovo's Serb minority had--and justifiably still has--the same fear. The Albanians who persecute them today are Muslim and Christian, believer and atheist. Sinkiang's struggle for freedom bears a greater resemblance to Buddhist Tibet's than to Kashmir's. And the Kashmiris have suffered almost as much from the depredations of their Muslim neighbors in Pakistan as from their Hindu overlords in New Delhi.

Lewis's insistence that "for misbelievers to rule over true believers is blasphemous" does not explain why millions of Muslims--many of them devout--have chosen to live under nonbelievers in France, Germany, Britain and the United States. Their migration stems more from poverty, insecurity and oppression in the countries they left than from any desire to expand the realm of Muslim rule. If anything, Muslim émigrés came west to avoid life under contemporary Muslim dictators. Lewis himself points out that, in centuries past, dissident Christians and Jews sought similar tolerance under the Ottoman banner, far from the religious despots of Christian Europe. They were no more taking sides in a millennial boxing match than are the majority of today's Muslim expatriates in the West. In pre-partition India, most of the Muslim ulema--the community of jurists and scholars--opposed the establishment of Muslim Pakistan, and they knew a united India would have left all the country's Muslims under Hindu rule. Crusades and jihads are less common than battles between states in alliance with monarchs of other religions. Christian Britain fought in the Crimea alongside Muslim Turkey against Christian Russia and its Muslim levies. Syria and Egypt sent troops to help the United States expel Iraq from Kuwait in 1991.

Despite his misbegotten forays into contemporary political discussion--the latest being his passionate advocacy of the American invasion of Iraq--Bernard Lewis remains the Grand Old Man of Oriental Letters. Emily Yoffe, writing in Slate three years ago, spoke for her fellow mesmerized Lewisites, "When he is gone, there will be no one with his depth and breadth to pick up his mantle." Lewis, she claimed, was "one-stop shopping for baffled Westerners needing a coherent worldview to explain our current situation." Coherent or not, he was required reading for those of us taking courses in Middle East studies at American universities in the 1960s and '70s. (He moved from London's School of Oriental and African Studies to Princeton in 1974. Some teachers may still require his works, although I hope they include correctives like Edward Said, Albert Hourani, David Hirst and Tom Segev.) Another assigned writer from the old Orientalist school was Sir Hamilton (H.A.R.) Gibb, Lewis's mentor during his undergraduate years at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Lewis recalls in the introduction to From Babel to Dragomans that Gibb asked him in 1937, four years after he began to study the Middle East, "Don't you think it's time you saw the place?" On the evidence of these essays, originally published between the 1950s and last year, he should visit the place again. He might also read some of its writers, like Naguib Mahfouz or Adonis or David Grossman, who have not been dead for several centuries.

In "On Occidentalism and Orientalism" (one of two previously unpublished pieces in this jumbled collection), Lewis defends his craft as Orientalist, a term of academic opprobrium since Edward Said published Orientalism in 1978. Answering Said's charges, he writes, "We may first look at this curious word, 'orientalist.' The word was created, as are so many, by analogy, after the model of such earlier terms as Latinist, Hellenist or Hebraist. A Latinist was one who studied Latin texts, a Hellenist one who studied Greek texts and so on. I am not aware that there has been any objection on the part of the Latins or the Hellenes to being studied in this way nor to having the studies so designated." Lewis came to history as a linguist, having learned ancient Hebrew in England in preparation for his bar mitzvah before graduating to the modern Hebrew then taking root in Palestine's Zionist colonies. Next came Aramaic, Arabic, Turkish, Greek and Latin. As philologist, he does not distinguish between dead and living languages--between biblical and contemporary Hebrew, or between Homeric Greek and modern Greek. If the Latins and Hellenes do not object to his investigations, and to the generalizations he bases on them, the reason is that they no longer exist. Arabs, Turks and Israelis do. Using the pathologist's scalpel to diagnose the living, he is surprised when the patient screams.

Lewis's contribution to general knowledge comes from his pointillist and endearing discoveries in the study of Islamic and Ottoman history--like the relative unimportance Muslim chroniclers attached to their defeat by the French at Tours in AD 732, called by Christians a "turning point in the struggle between Christendom and Islam," and the reminiscences of an Iraqi priest on a tour of Spanish America in the seventeenth century. A scholar has to dig to find these gems, and Lewis is fortunate to read them in the languages of their authors. The civilian ideologues in the Pentagon who sit at his feet, however, are less interested in his thoughts on Fatimids and Safavids than in the name he gave to their view of the world. For the new guardians of Manifest Destiny, his "clash of civilizations" has a twofold appeal. First, it is simple, like Fukuyama's "end of history," an advertising slogan that obscures the product it's selling. Second, it provides the powerful with academic legitimacy for wars they would pursue anyway. By setting contemporary conflicts, like those between the United States and Middle Eastern actors, within an age-old contest rooted in primordial hatred, it prescribes as much as it describes. The public is encouraged to view war as inevitable, if not desirable. If Lewis had challenged the assumptions on which Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz waged war, they would have invited some other court academic to articulate their prejudices. There are countless takers in academe willing to assume that role. When Ahmad Chalabi passed on to the Washington junta Iraqi defectors with Arabian Nights tales of Saddam Hussein's illegal weapons, their ears were open. When Chalabi later accused Washington's hawks of misgoverning Iraq, they raided his house and threatened him with arrest. It is a fair bet that Lewis would be dropped from the White House guest list if he counseled nonintervention in Middle East affairs, although that is exactly what he was recommending in 1957, when he stumbled across the clash-of-civilizations talisman.

It was in 1957 that Lewis first declared, to a Middle East conference at Johns Hopkins University, "We shall be better able to understand this situation if we view the present discontents of the Middle East not as a conflict between states or nations, but as a clash between civilizations." Then, his view did not imply open warfare. "What action should the Western states take in the present Middle East situation?" he asked. "My own answer would be: as little as possible." Even then, there were more obvious clashes in the Middle East, as elsewhere, than any between civilizations. The world from which imperial Europe was gradually and reluctantly withdrawing pitted rich against poor, modernizers against traditionalists, socialists against royalists, imperialists against anticolonialists, and Western oil companies against hungry indigènes. In 1957 the United States, in particular, was more popular in the Arab world than it is today. It had just forced the British, French and Israelis to withdraw from Egypt. It had yet to invade any Arab state. Although it had overthrown a popular Iranian prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, for the crime of nationalizing his country's oil resources, it had yet to arouse the hostility of Muslim zealots. In fact, the United States was fundamentalist Islam's greatest benefactor. It used the mosque to offset the secularizing appeal of the "godless" Soviet Union and local socialists. Lewis's clash was undetectable to Washington's foreign policy elite in 1957, except as it applied to monolithic Communism. The Christendom-Islam split found an audience among American cold warriors only when they lost their Soviet nemesis and Lewis resuscitated the notion in The Atlantic Monthly in 1990. What better opiate than an enemy in the form of another civilization that had always resisted the West? Lewis wrote, repeating his theme of thirty-three years before, "This is no less than a clash of civilizations--the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both." This was no new enemy, it was an adversary culled from antiquity.

Still, Lewis remained cautious about launching a violent crusade: "It is crucially important that we on our side should not be provoked into an equally historic but also equally irrational reaction against that rival." By December 2001, in the aftermath of the apocalyptic September 11 atrocities, he was urging war: "A military action carefully designed so as neither to suffer casualties nor to inflict them on the enemy may be seen as a noble example of civilized compassion. It does not, however, carry much conviction among regimes where such qualms are not shared or even understood. They would attribute such restraint to reasons other than compassion, and draw the appropriate inference...of fear and irresolution." Within a year, in the Wall Street Journal, Lewis was calling for an invasion to depose Saddam Hussein: "The crucial question here is not how or by whom Saddam is removed, but what comes in his place." What came in his place were chaos, a costly American occupation and insecurity on a scale the Iraqis had never before experienced. Plus more than 10,000 dead and counting.

Muslim anger with the West is, on Lewis's reading, somehow unique in the modern world. "Globalization," he wrote in a November 2001 New Yorker piece that is not included here, "has become a major theme in the Arab media, and it is almost always raised in connection with American economic penetration." In fact, globalization is a "major theme" everywhere, "raised in connection with American economic penetration" in Paris as often as in Cairo, in Caracas as much as in Kuala Lumpur. There is nothing uniquely Muslim about it. The same New Yorker essay accuses Muslims of selective opposition to "imperialist aggression" and of a "muted response" to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Yet tens of thousands of Muslims joined the jihad against Soviet occupation, compared with the small number of foreign Muslims who fought against, say, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. "Ironically," Lewis continues, "it was the United States, in the end, that was left to orchestrate an Islamic response to Soviet imperialism in Afghanistan." What is ironic about the capitalist superpower organizing a response to an invasion by its Communist rival? After all, America had the experience of using the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood against the secular Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, and backing the extreme Wahhabi Saudi royal family against democratic reformers in the oil kingdom.

Lewis's evident sympathy for Israel renders him impervious to any Arab interpretation of events. He condemns those in the West who occasionally fall for Arab propaganda and complains of double standards. His prime example of both is the comparative reaction, as he sees it, to two massacres in 1982--the Syrian Army's assault on the city of Hama and the killings in the Beirut refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila by Israeli-backed Christian Phalangists. He writes:

The troubles in Hama began with an uprising headed by the radical group the Muslim Brothers in 1982. The government responded swiftly. Troops were sent, supported by armor, artillery, and aircraft, and within a very short time they had reduced a large part of the city to rubble. The number killed was estimated, by Amnesty International, at somewhere between ten thousand and twenty-five thousand. The action...did not prevent the United States from subsequently courting [Syrian President Hafez al-] Assad.

He goes on:

The massacre of seven hundred to eight hundred Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Shatila that same year was carried out by Lebanese militiamen, led by a Lebanese commander who subsequently became a minister in the Syrian-sponsored Lebanese government, and it was seen as a reprisal for the assassination of the Lebanese President[-elect] Bashir Gemayel. Ariel Sharon, who at the time commanded the Israeli forces in Lebanon, was reprimanded by an Israeli commission of inquiry for not having foreseen and prevented the massacre, and was forced to resign from his position as Minister of Defense.

Lewis proceeds to decry the West for condemning Sharon. "It is understandable," he writes, "that the Palestinians and other Arabs should lay sole blame for the massacre on Sharon. What is puzzling is that Europeans and Americans should do the same. Some even wanted to try Sharon for crimes against humanity." What are the real differences between the two massacres? In Hama, the Muslim Brothers launched a revolt that, had it succeeded, would have led to the overthrow of the regime and the establishment of a Sunni Muslim fundamentalist republic in Damascus. The Brothers murdered Baath Party and municipal officials, and they called for pogroms against the Alawite minority, whose military elite governs the country. The army responded to the Islamic resistance much as the American armed forces did in Falluja, albeit with greater ferocity. The Hama assault produced thousands of civilian casualties, many of which could have been avoided.

Fewer people died in Sabra and Shatila, as Lewis observes, but the entire population was unarmed and undefended following the evacuation of PLO forces from Lebanon. Sharon had given his word to Philip Habib, President Reagan's envoy, that he would not invade West Beirut or attack the refugee camps. He did both. His forces delivered the Christian militias, who had a history of massacring unarmed Palestinians, to the gates of the camps and protected them while they butchered men, women and children. If the United States expressed anger at Sharon, it was because he destroyed American credibility in the Middle East. His invasion of West Beirut and the massacres he oversaw forced the United States to return the Marines, who had supervised the departure of the PLO's fighters, to Beirut to protect the camps. There, they succumbed to the biggest suicide bombing of the time. Some Americans may have courted Assad after Hama, but the US Treasury subsidized Israel's occupation of Lebanon, the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights despite Sabra and Shatila. Americans had reason to demand legal behavior from a state on their payroll. Moreover, Israel's Kahan Commission did not reprimand Sharon "for not having foreseen and prevented the massacre." It held him "indirectly responsible" for everything that happened. He may have resigned as defense minister, but he remained in the Cabinet. He is now prime minister, and George Bush refers to him as "a man of peace." There are double standards, but not those Lewis claims to detect.

While neglecting to explain in his introduction why the order of essays jumps from 2003 to 1978 to 1972 and back to 1993, Lewis litters this book with errors and contradictions. The contradictions are perhaps inevitable in diverse works spanning fifty years, but they make for difficult reading. Take a few examples. In a 1972 essay, "An Interpretation of Fatimid History," Lewis writes that the Fatimid caliphate in Cairo sent missionaries to the eastern Islamic world to win converts to Shiite Islam. He counts the creation of the office of the "Chief Missionary" in Cairo as a breakthrough, establishing "something previously unknown to Islam--an institutional church." This interesting insight is then contradicted elsewhere in the volume in an undated and "previously unpublished paper" titled "From Pilgrims to Tourists": "Muslims did not engage in organized missionary activity." Were there missionaries or not? There certainly are now, making Islam the fastest-expanding religion in the world.

Another 1972 essays says, "In a very real sense modern Hebrew is a reincarnation of Yiddish--the same soul in a new lexical body." This assertion, while not necessarily of political import, is at variance with the history of modern Hebrew. Those who performed the miracle of reviving a language nearly three millennia dead did so with the explicit objective of displacing Yiddish and all it represented in Jewish consciousness--the culture of exile, the authenticity of the Diaspora experience and the character of the "Yid," so detested by early Zionists like Zeev Jabotinsky. Hebrew contributed to the creation of a new man free of the ghetto in Theodor Herzl's "old-new" land. David Gruen of Plonsk was one of many who, in an act of secular baptism, abandoned his Yiddish name for the prouder Hebrew Ben-Gurion. There is no mention, let alone comparison, of the Yiddish literature of writers like Isaac Bashevis Singer with the modern Hebrew works of A.B. Yehoshua and Amos Kenan or with Arab Hebrew writers like Salman Natour, Emil Habibi and Sayed Kashua. Yet if modern Hebrew is the reincarnation of Yiddish, he must show a relationship rather than what the Hebrew pioneers claim to have achieved, a rupture. Lewis could be making an original argument, but it is no more than a statement that is at best contentious and at worst plain wrong.

Similarly, he says of music in the Middle East that only the cities of Turkey and Israel are on the "international concert circuit." He writes, "Elsewhere in the Middle East, those who compose, perform or even listen to Western music are still relatively few." Although hardly a matter of political significance, this is nonetheless false and, like his statement on modern Hebrew, asserted without evidence. My own memories of packed houses for the Cairo Opera, symphonies in Beirut and at the Baalbek Festival and auditions for the Damascus Conservatory lead me to the opposite conclusion. Classical music lovers are no fewer in the Middle East than they are in America's Midwest: a minority, but of a respectable size. The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, established by Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim, includes talented young classical musicians from the Arab world and Israel. Lewis's East, even when it comes to music, is not the East as it is but as he imagines it should be--a place where terror is endemic and irrational--if it is to remain in polar, violent opposition to his West.

Writing of the Medieval Assassins in "Religion and Murder in the Middle East," Lewis quotes a thirteenth-century Persian poet's words: "By one single warrior on foot a king may be stricken with terror, though he own more than a hundred thousand horsemen." From that, he concludes, "that expresses, vividly and simply, the self-perception of the political assassin, or, as we might say nowadays, of the terrorist." He equates the Assassins with modern Islamic terrorists and locates them in the same countries, Syria and Iran. (Never mind that the Syrian and Iranian governments both detest Osama bin Laden, and that Al Qaeda has long based its operations in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and other countries where the Assassins never worked.) There is a significant difference between the political assassin, who terrorizes leaders, and the terrorist, who frightens the general population. Sir Steven Runciman, in his History of the Crusades, noted that the Assassins killed far fewer people than did the Crusaders or the Muslim princes they battled. They raided no towns, sacked no villages and planted no bombs in public places. Runciman regarded them as more humane than the political leaders who murdered tens of thousands to achieve their ends. Assassination by the Ismaili brethren of Syria and Iran distinguished itself from terror in that it was focused, deliberate and harmless to innocent civilians. (Israel's "targeted assassinations," like those by the United States in Iraq, often cause more innocent deaths than those of the putative "targets.") Crusader and Muslim kings were terrified of them, but the general populations were not. Contemporary suicide bombers, in contrast, frighten everyone.

The book's title, From Babel to Dragomans, derives from one of the more interesting essays in this collection, a 1998 lecture on language, interpreters and translators in the Middle East from biblical times. Out of linguistic confusion emerged those who interpret one people, its culture and its worldview to another. The dragoman, translator, begins in Genesis as the Hebrew melitz; "more often it means something like intercessor or advocate or even ambassador." Melitz was translated into Aramaic, the lingua franca of Greater Syria by the time of Christ, as meturgeman. In Arabic, this was turjuman and the Turkish dragoman. The Ottoman dragoman became a broker and fixer for Europeans traveling or trading in the Ottoman Empire. Many grew rich. The Ottomans appointed Jews and later Christians, whose children studied abroad and learned European languages, to perform this delicate task until the Turks could do it themselves. Lewis is at his best here, making apposite observations about the development of this necessary bridge among cultures. He may see himself as a kind of dragoman--hence his choice of title. But, as nineteenth-century Western travelers like Alexander Kinglake in Eothen and Mark Twain in Innocents Abroad noted, the dragoman usually forswore an accurate translation in favor of what he believed his employers wanted to hear.

The first thing they do is cover your eyes. They make you strip to make sure you're not carrying anything. They replace your clothes with uniforms that are not clothes at all. They chain you by hand and foot. They drag you away and leave you on your own. They interrogate you. They say you are going to die if you won't talk. They feed you - you're not much good to them if you starve to death.

It sounds like Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to which the United States military is deporting men it has captured in Afghanistan. But it was Lebanon in the 1980s. The Hezbollah, Lebanon's Shi'ite Muslim Party of God, kidnapped foreigners between 1982 and 1989 at the behest of their Iranian benefactors.

I remember the drill - the blindfold, chains, solitude and loneliness. I was there for two months in 1987. It was a bad time, and it seemed unlikely to me then that I would one day see photographs of my countrymen treating Muslim prisoners much as I was treated.

I thought the Eighth Amendment to the US constitution prohibited "cruel and unusual punishments". I'm looking at the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments that Americans regard as sacred, and read the words "nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted". Full stop. It does not say that only American passport-holders, legal residents of the United States and members of the Senate who take contributions from corporations that violate the law are exempt from government torments.

It makes clear that no category of human being is excluded from America's obligation to refrain from cruel and unusual punishments. Amendment VIII means suspects; it means enemies; it means criminals; it means prisoners of war; it means - and the term is as new to me and you as it undoubtedly is to the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld - "illegal" combatants.

Who is illegal and who is legal, by the way, has always been for the courts of the United States to decide, not the Department of Defence. As for international law, the Geneva Conventions say that "captured combatants or civilians" have certain rights - including to correspond with their families - without any distinction between "legal" and "illegal" combatants.

I wonder now whether some mullah in Tehran said, when a score of Americans and Europeans were illegally held against their will in Lebanon: "Obviously, anyone would be concerned if people were suggesting that treatment was not proper."

That is what Rumsfeld said on television the other day. Rumsfeld's concern for the Muslims chained like Caliban on America's Caribbean base seems to match what Tehran's mullahs felt for us. The mullahs, at least, knew that holding American, French, British and German captives in Lebanon during the 1980s was so shameful that they never admitted it. Rumsfeld seems proud. His is not some secret operation, like the CIA's Phoenix programme of assassinations and torture in Vietnam. It's out in the open.

If Rumsfeld has not read the constitution to which he has taken an oath, if he does not see the cruelty in the treatment of those men in Cuba, he could at least admit that tying men up, blocking their sight, cutting them off from their families and flying them around the world is unusual.

"The fact is that treatment is proper," Rumsfeld insisted. "There is no doubt in my mind that it is humane and appropriate and consistent with the Geneva Conventions for the most part." For the most part? Which part? The shackles? The blindfold goggles? The six-by-eight-foot cages? At least Hezbollah put me in a normal-sized room.

It wasn't much of a room, bare but for a paper-thin mattress on the floor, with a sheet of steel to seal the window. I never saw daylight, but they did turn the electric lights off at night so I could sleep. The men in Guantanamo enjoy no such luxury: arc lights are left on all night so the US marine guards can keep an eye on them.

I'm not sure why. Where are they going to go? We are told they don't even know where they are. If they manage to clear the fences and minefields, the Cubans on the other side have said they'll hand them back to the US.

During the 62 days I spent alone in that room in Beirut, all I could do was sit for hours and hours, thinking, praying, hoping. Some friends of mine did that for five years. It was mistreatment, cruel and unusual. The Hezbollah interrogators justified it. The Israeli army, they said, kept Lebanese inmates of Khiam prison, in south Lebanon, under worse conditions.

(When international observers at last went into Khiam after Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, they confirmed that the interrogation rooms and cells were much, much worse than anything I had experienced as a hostage.) The Israelis' brutality to their prisoners no more justified what the Hezbollah did to its hostages in Lebanon than the Hezbollah's actions excuse what the US is doing in Cuba.

An American may some day be arrested or kidnapped by those whose sympathies lie with the Camp X-Ray detainees. What will his captors say when he pleads that his conditions violate international law? Will their answer be to play for him videotapes of the X-Ray detainees and of Rumsfeld's press conferences?

Britain, as it has done with every US action in every battle or bombardment for the past 20 years, justified Camp X-Ray. A government spokesman was quoted as saying, after a British delegation toured the camp last Friday: "There were no gags, no goggles, no earmuffs and no shackles while the detainees were in their cells."

Why would anyone need to shackle and blind them in their cells? The Hezbollah let its hostages remove their blindfolds when they were alone in their locked rooms. When a guard or interrogator entered, however, the blindfold had to come on quickly. The Hezbollahi, realising that they might be held accountable in court for their crimes, did not want us to identify them. It was a sensible precaution. Perhaps Rumsfeld should wear a hood over his head so no one will recognise him.