Contemporary Middle East

Alejandro Montanaro Armendariz Contemporary Middle East Nikolas Kosmatopoulos FINAL EXAM I’m totally disagreed with this text, it’s not easy to talk about this theme because the Middle Eastern situation is quite difficult to understand if you don’t what is exactly happening. In our ‘western world’ we are use to hear about how Arabs live and how they are but this is only a cliché of what the media transform to get the attention of the people. The Orientalism is a European invention to produce orient, a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes. For example, we can see that in the Arab exhibition of Paris on 1889 shown in the book ‘Colonizing Egypt’ of Timothy Mitchell; he showed the expression about how was represented ‘El Cairo’ as an old city, trying to keep the attention of the European society. But we need to understand why it’s like that and how it really is. And not just for that exhibition, almost, we are used to see what ‘Hollywood’ shows us, and it is another example of ‘external reality’. In our ‘western world’, it’s normal to say that an Arab is a terrorist and that’s just another example of orientalism. But why do we say that they are terrorists? This expression began with the ‘Arabs revolts’, when Palestinians were fighting against the Israelis to demand their territory back. Israel and United States had good treatments. That’s why they decided to create the name of ‘terrorist’ and not ‘guerrilla’, to demonstrate what the Arabs are and to ‘attract the hate of the world’. But why do United States have good treatments with Israel and wanted that the Arab countries will be the ‘bad team’? All had begun with the American interest on entering to the Middle East. Middle Eastern countries have a lot of Oil and that meant power.

To understand more about the American-Israeli relation is important to understand the history of the Palestinian-Israeli war because it has a lot of years, it’s not recently. This war had started because of the ‘Zionism’ that could have different meaning depending in which part of the history you are. The ideas of Zionism are the return of the land of Israel to the Jews. This is an important part because for Israelis the Zionism is a National liberation movement with a strong socialist past and more recent liberal tendencies that entered its ancient homeland, but for Palestinians will be a colonialist movement that penetrated the Palestinian homeland by force, with the wish to colonize the country and to penetrate to the Arab world. Actually, Zionism was a national movement that used colonialist tools. They were displacing all the habitants like it was in United States, New Zealand and Australia when it was the British colonization. The colonization is an important part of history and it explains why the countries conquer the others. Besides the expansion of the territory there is also an important meaning of having the resources of that places. Another important part of knowing how the Middle Eastern countries work is the religion. And this is important because their politics are based on religion as we noticed with the Israeli-Palestinian, the clash of Jewish and Muslim and as we know of the Lebanon separation of seats in the Parliament. The religion was also important when the sciences were introduced in those countries. The crash of religion against science was the beginning of the development of those countries. We need to change our perspective of the Middle East and have much interest to know more about it.